D&D 4E The WotC designers will be bashing 4e once 5e is announced . . .
- Thread starter Shortman McLeod
- Start date
Thurbane
First Post
It's a standard sales policy...Shortman McLeod said:. . . and, for one, am already looking forward to the doublethink that will ensue.
Seriously, for years now (literally) we've been giving 3.5 a group hug. And now suddenly out comes this long list of things that "don't work".
"Our existing product is great, just awesome, best in it's field...unfortunately, though, it doesn't meet the needs of todays demanding consumer. Which is why we have launched all new, all improved brand Widgets, now with Super Duper Technology! If you'd all form an orderly que to throw our existing products in the recycle bin and rush out to buy our new line, that's would be fantastic!"
Thurbane
First Post
[Satire alert]
Coming soon... CHESS 2.0...
For hundreds of years you played chess, and it as great. But let's face it,nowadays it's a bit old and boring.
We are breathing new life into Chess with CHESS 2.0! All of our market research has gone into refining and improving Chess, so that it will be a more fun and challenging game for all of you Chess fans!
CHESS 2.0 will feature an integrated online service to allow you to play with friends overseas, and also include a virtual CHESS 2.0 board software package, so you won't need to drag those bulky boards and pieces along to your games.
Sadly though, our research shows that the only way to make CHESS 2.0 all it can be was to make it totally incompatible with Chess 1.0. If you want to continue to play Chess 1.0, thats just super, and we wish you the best of luck, but we'll not be offering you any further support or products in the future.
We will have available a Chess 1.0 Stategems Compendium available for sale just before CHESS 2.0 is released, however.
Coming soon... CHESS 2.0...
For hundreds of years you played chess, and it as great. But let's face it,nowadays it's a bit old and boring.
We are breathing new life into Chess with CHESS 2.0! All of our market research has gone into refining and improving Chess, so that it will be a more fun and challenging game for all of you Chess fans!
CHESS 2.0 will feature an integrated online service to allow you to play with friends overseas, and also include a virtual CHESS 2.0 board software package, so you won't need to drag those bulky boards and pieces along to your games.
Sadly though, our research shows that the only way to make CHESS 2.0 all it can be was to make it totally incompatible with Chess 1.0. If you want to continue to play Chess 1.0, thats just super, and we wish you the best of luck, but we'll not be offering you any further support or products in the future.
We will have available a Chess 1.0 Stategems Compendium available for sale just before CHESS 2.0 is released, however.
FireLance
Legend
Geron Raveneye
Explorer
Nifft said:
Nothing wrong with progress, if it is indeed progress, and not simply change.
There's been a lot of change in 3.X that didn't turn out to be progress but simply patchwork to fix imagined problems, or problems that didn't really exist before "progress" created them.Example: Polymorph spells.
The 3E versions were pretty good, and if you actually read through it once, they were easy to use as well. The one limitation that should not have been just implied but written out was that the caster can transform himself/target into anything he is familiar with, as it is in the Shapechange spell. That would have reduced this "can't force monster designers to check every monster for Polymorph brokenness" argument and the "players reach for obscure monster handbooks for broken monsters to transform into" complaint to smoke and hot air. The revisions after Tome & Blood got more and more silly, ending in a line of polymorph spells that are all utility and no flavour.
Example: Scry & Teleport
Comes up a lot in the current discussions about "game breaker" spell combos. Apart from the fact that nearly everybody of power who lives in a world where Scry is around for millenia already should routinely have scrying or teleporting countermeasures installed, the basic problem is that the risk for "Death by Mishap" has been reduced to nothing, which makes it easy to abuse Teleport whenever you can. This was done because "dying from one unlucky die roll is NO FUN!" to the wizard player, so the death chance was eliminated. So in order to make teleporting less (ab)useful, it got a reduced range slapped on.
There's a handful more of those "problems" that were created by patching up imagined problems that could have been very easily dealt with if they really existed, which led to more patches, etc. And all was called "progress", while in the end it was only change.
Personally, I'm lamenting that the current "progress" seems to aim D&D in an even more combat-centric direction, with the roles of characters being hardcoded around combat roles, the abilities and niches of monsters built on how useful they will be in a combat situation. And mostly because the percieved "problem" is that the current edition carries too much fluff and flexibility on all sides which causes characters and monsters to have too much useless baggage where combat is concerned.
I'd aim for a solution that makes all other situations in D&D games equally important to combat, but that's just me, and I'm just going from my current impressions, so I could easily be mistaken, too. Just looks to me like another "problem" that they try to fix that will cause even more problems in the long run, because a good many gaming groups are NOT focussed around combat, and will find it even harder to bring the game outside that scope with more narrowed monster roles and combat-defined character abilities.
On the other hand, folks like Firebeetle won't be complaining about a bard who is "useless" in combat anymore. If he's still useful in other situations remains to be seen.
(Edit to get my foot out of my mouth again
)
Last edited:
Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
I have never played AD&D or earlier editions, but from what I saw in the rules then, there seemed never be to be much rules that went beyond Combat. The only change is that the rules try to balance everyones combat abilities better. And it appears to be that D&D 4 will also include more advanced (and hopefully balanced) social rules, which _is_ a change, and will (if the rules work out) also make non-combat situations more interesting and important for the game.Geron Raveneye said:Nothing wrong with progress, if it is indeed progress, and not simply change.
Example: Polymorph spells.
The 3E versions were pretty good, and if you actually read through it once, they were easy to use as well. The one limitation that should not have been just implied but written out was that the caster can transform himself/target into anything he is familiar with, as it is in the Shapechange spell. That would have reduced this "can't force monster designers to check every monster for Polymorph brokenness" argument and the "players reach for obscure monster handbooks for broken monsters to transform into" complaint to smoke and hot air. The revisions after Tome & Blood got more and more silly, ending in a line of polymorph spells that are all utility and no flavour.
Example: Scry & Teleport
Comes up a lot in the current discussions about "game breaker" spell combos. Apart from the fact that nearly everybody of power who lives in a world where Scry is around for millenia already should routinely have scrying or teleporting countermeasures installed, the basic problem is that the risk for "Death by Mishap" has been reduced to nothing, which makes it easy to abuse Teleport whenever you can. This was done because "dying from one unlucky die roll is NO FUN!" to the wizard player, so the death chance was eliminated. So in order to make teleporting less (ab)useful, it got a reduced range slapped on.
There's a handful more of those "problems" that were created by patching up imagined problems that could have been very easily dealt with if they really existed, which led to more patches, etc. And all was called "progress", while in the end it was only change.
Personally, I'm lamenting that the current "progress" seems to aim D&D in an even more combat-centric direction, with the roles of characters being hardcoded around combat roles, the abilities and niches of monsters built on how useful they will be in a combat situation. And mostly because the percieved "problem" is that the current edition carries too much fluff and flexibility on all sides which causes characters and monsters to have too much useless baggage where combat is concerned.
I'd aim for a solution that makes all other situations in D&D games equally important to combat, but that's just me, and I'm just going from my current impressions, so I could easily be mistaken, too. Just looks to me like another "problem" that they try to fix that will cause even more problems in the long run, because a good many gaming groups are NOT focussed around combat, and will find it even harder to bring the game outside that scope with more narrowed monster roles and combat-defined character abilities.
On the other hand, folks like Firebeetle won't be complaining about a bard who is "useless" in combat anymore. If he's still useful in other situations remains to be seen.
(Edit to get my foot out of my mouth again
I also think the problem of too much flexibility or fluff is more seen in regard to monsters (at least those monsters you will only meaningful interact with in combat), not player characters. (The only flexibility for characters change might be to a different granularity of skills, if indeed they adopt the Saga skill system))
Counterspin
First Post
Change is not progress, but I view SWSE and Bo9S as progress, and since those are the touchstones that keep cropping up, along with things that I agree are poorly done, vancian magic, grappling, shallower power curve, etc. I feel pretty confident that 4e will be progress, which is why I look forward to it. The scarce previews are all we have, and what I've heard sounds good.
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