What will happen to 4th edition?

[AbdulAlhazred]

[h=1]Novice Power [Multiclass Encounter][/h]Prerequisite: Any class-specific multiclass feat, 4th level
Benefit: You can swap one encounter attack power you know for one encounter attack power of the same level or lower from the class you multiclassed into.
Note: If you have no encounter attack powers, this feat grants no benefit to you.

That's funny because I see the multiclass feats refer to ... "encounter power", "attack power" and "level"... which is making a differentiation based on type of power (not referencing power in a generic way.) and that is why they can't be used with some of the E-classes because they don't meet the specific power requirements the feats reference...



Dude read what you wrote... SKILL power feat... it's already non-generic. And the reserve maneuver specifically references an encounter attack power... again not generic... It's different only in the way it's being categorized there is no generic reference to just powers...

Are you being deliberately obtuse or what? The point is that powers can be referred to in a generic sense, not that you refer to "any power in the entire game" as a rule (though there are game elements that DO actually do this, though generally there are hooks, like conditions which reference them through the action rules, so you are Stunned and you thus cannot use actions and the action rules enable ALL POWER USE). Now, 5e can also do THAT, but it CANNOT do the very 2 examples you just gave. You cannot create anything like a power swap in 5e, its impossible. You can make a class feature of one class that allows access to a spell or ability of another class, but it all has to be VERY SPECIFIC to the two classes in question. The 5e bard is a good example (and arguable a good example of what is wrong with 5e's approach to this).

So again, the fact that a given feat talks about levels and types of powers is NOT what we're talking about here. What we are talking about here is that Novice Power and Skill Power, and etc DO NOT REFER TO A CLASS AT ALL. So they will work for absolutely any character (at least one that is built in the standard PHB1 classic 4e style, and often even with E-classes).

How do you know? How would the system I described add more complexity to characters? How is it not as or more elegant than the power system? It's universal base would be 5e's skill system which is the same for every character... And I disagree with your point about their being no added complexity to swapping powers out. It's a new power with new rules that must be learned and applied and that is more complexity.

Because it would simply graft on another element to the character. You could very easily say in 5e "OK, everyone gets 'skill tricks'" or something. Its an added element to the character. You can't trade some other thing for it because every single class has different things and nothing universally in common, unless you start having classes trade out hit dice and things like that, which I'd say is probably more complicated than a 4e straight power swap. The problem is 5e classes have basically nothing in common. Nothing is certainly GUARANTEED to be in common beyond very basic core stuff like hit dice. So you cannot write rules that span various classes. Even when classes DO have things 'in common' they aren't exactly equivalent. A spell slot for one caster class is not really equivalent to one of another class for instance, and its ENTIRELY possible that a 'caster' will be released tomorrow that doesn't use slots at all. In 4e even Psionic PCs can follow the power swap rules. Its a pretty powerful capability.

So now we're talking about some hypothetical power system as opposed to the actual one 4e uses? Because in 4e the classification of powers is core to the power system...

I'm not following you. In 4e as in any other game there are usage rules for powers. At least in 4e they are highly regular and easy to understand, and again that facilitates the use of rules across classes because we can talk about an encounter power in every class and its roughly the same thing. This is utterly untrue of 5e. I never claimed that 'classification' isn't a core aspect, only that other sorts of things, anything that is in the body of the power block, is secondary to a discussion of the power system as a whole. Again, 5e has many more rules than 4e here, so what are you getting at?

Wait so 3e fighter gets feats... 4e fighter gets feats and powers... but the 3e fighter is just as fiddly as the 4e one... that doesn't compute.

Have you played a 3e fighter? They are darned fiddly with all their full attacks and move+attack and all the various things their feats do and all the ways this combines with multi-attacks. Yes, the 3e fighter is at least as 'fiddly' IMHO as any 4e fighter.

And you should understand your views on the rules being obtuse and poorly thought out aren't shared universally (this is what I mean when I say you state opinion as if it were a fact)... I'd even be hesitant to call them a majority in those playing 5e... so I can accept you find them hard to parse and understand but that doesn't make them universally hard to read, understand and apply.

So, if everyone in the world doesn't accept my statements then they are unfacts and I shouldn't be saying them? That's ridiculous. Does this rule also apply to you? If so we can stop even talking now because you've just excluded all discussion. Its not like my statements don't reflect the views of a large number of people and beyond that the wording of what is actually written in the book IS a fact. You can't get around that, and its a fact beyond any rational dispute that the 5e rules DO NOT explain skills and tool proficiencies completely. There are multiple interpretations of that whole subsystem that are equally plausible. I was just in 30 page long discussion of this topic on rpg.net. I assure you I have my facts straight there.

Ok, so in 5e I could do it that way or let NPC's roll... how is that not more flexibility?

You can do that in 4e as well. The rules flat out state that everything is potentially up to the DM. The point isn't what you CAN do, its what the rules provide for you to use. You can always just say in any RPG discussion "but I can just do that, nothing stops me". Well, duh! Why buy a rulebook at all?

So basically doesn't matter because I can house rule it... well then if it doesn't matter which edition it is because "hey we can houserule" I'm going to go with 5e simmply because I don't like the alot of the base assumptions in 4e

Again, see above, you're not grasping the point of the whole discussion here or you're just being obtuse.

And I don't think 4e is a bad game... perhaps bad for what I and many others expect of D&D... but not a bad game in and of itself.




Only powers are not in 4e... hello psionics, hello essentials. Different powers have different keywords, sources, levels, pre-requisites, usage times, etc. the only thing they all share in common is (just like class features in 5e) they've all been grouped under one heading. The fat that you're not convinced doesn';t make it any less true.

OK, so write the Novice Power and Skill Power feats for me in 5e. Do it. Lets see you reference entire subsystems in a generic way when they don't exist. That's the whole point. You keep trying to twist it, but you just can't. The fact that Essentials classes often break a lot of 4e is JUST PROOF, and even then you note that they still use powers and still adhere to most of the conventions of the other classes because if they didn't the whole game would stop being compatible. That's proof enough of the effect of universal mechanics.

My point was why create an article and adventure addressing that type of play if there is little demand for it. Personally I thought the rules were pretty clever but to each his own.

They are OK rules, and I'm not sure I could do better, but they did seem like they had some problems from what I heard. If I wanted to play that way I might use them, though I might also just use level 1 PCs and scale the threats a bit.

Eh, people wanted change and voiced their dissatisfaction with it... same as you're expressing your dissatisfaction with 5e, the thing is I don't take it personal in the least and if there are enough people who don't like 5e then it should be replaced.

I don't have an issue with the actual gripes with 4e, and I have some of my own too. However if you were to go over to the WotC forums and say go back to the 2010 era threads on General Discussion, or even just read some of the stuff HERE where moderation is fairly strict you'll see that it was far beyond any reasonable critiques of one game vs another. It was vicious and unrelenting tearing down of what other people liked to play. Practically every thread was filled with it and 99% of them were just derailed in 5 posts by people who had no other reason to be there except to threadcrap.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Without meaning, like in any text-based format.



Your date, not mine.

Oh, you were referring to chess' recent 500 years of stability. Gotcha. Like I said, favorably comparing D&D to chess' modern stability requires quite a bit of faith and optimism.

Oh, and if you find my thoughts meaningless due to semantics, perhaps you should stop reading them. I'm sure you don't need that kind of confusion and stress in your life.

 

[billd91]

Ok, my question is, with 3,5 being so successful, why did WoTC put out a completely different version of D&D in the form of 4E? Why did 4E tank? Was it because it had almost nothing in common with previous editions?

That is something that I think you'd need to be a WotC insider to know. At this point, there are plenty of insiders who are now outsiders, but if anybody's posted anything authoritative on this subject, I have yet to hear about it. I saw a post from Scott Rouse that implied there were decisions he found vexing but I don't know if he ever aired them. I'd love to hear what he has to say and, maybe when 5e's a few years out the door and more old hands have been laid off (I shouldn't quip like that but it is WotC's track record and I expect there will be some long knives coming out this winter), there will be a good time to do an insider-fueled post-mortem on the 4e development, licensing, and marketing process.

Until that day arrives we're stuck with conjecture and there has been plenty of conjecture. A few I remember thinking or reading about:

• Licensing - they wanted to move away from the OGL and one of the more effective ways to do that would be to come up with a game significantly incompatible with the OGL version
  
• Biased Feedback - a lot of feedback on the game's balance had been coming through their RPGA-based sources and the Living Greyhawk campaign. Given the style of gaming an organized play campaign tends to default to (lots of combat and other fairly objectively DMed tasks), that provided a biased source of feedback on what the market wanted. And that, certainly, is what 4e provided - a lot of combat-oriented abilities and a lot of fairly objectively-defined elements for a DM to administer while running a game.
  
• Designer Preferences - presumably, all game designers put a lot of their personal preferences into the games they work on. For example, 3e's explicitness of rules and DCs for skill checks is probably part of Skip Williams's influence on the game - he being a well-known proponent of giving the players thorough information about what they need to succeed so they can make informed choices. But then you have Andy Collins with 3.5 and a tightening of the game via combat-oriented balance. And then Rob Heinsoo for 4e. They were probably all designing a version of D&D they wanted to play. And, of course, the question comes back - was it a version most other D&D players wanted to play?
  
• Targeting a different market - coveting the MMO market, they may have decided to go with a less messy and more objectively measurable approach to the game than traditional D&D. I'd argue 3e had already moved in this direction - but perhaps they thought a more radical step in this direction would make the game more attractive to the MMO market which is densely populated with people keeping a careful eye on comparative DPS and other metrics.
  
• Valuation of innovation over history - germane to this particularly thread, regardless of the above issues, it may just be that the design team decided to try to be different, hoping that breaking with the traditional game would create a bigger success.
  
• Corporate expectations - they were under pressure to bring more revenue in to the D&D brand from Hasbro and they had saturated the 3e market. Creating a less compatible game would encourage players to buy more stuff anew and boost revenue.

I don't know how or if any of these factors actually work to create 4e and its track record. They all strike me as interesting hypotheses that could have some explanatory power, but I expect the full reality is complex and probably messy.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Ok, my question is, with 3,5 being so successful, why did WoTC put out a completely different version of D&D in the form of 4E?

3.5 wasn't that successful. It haemoherraged players and market share after the initial books. 3.5 is the second shortest lived version of D&D ever (beating only 3.0). Pathfinder has already lasted longer than 3.5 did.

Why did 4E tank?

It didn't tank. It was just unable to reverse a falling trend. In part due to where the money was going to come from, the tools rather than the books, never materialising.

That said, there is a huge correlation in 4e between Books By Mike Mearls and problems. 4e's biggest initial problem was the excrable Keep on the Shadowfell being the free adventure designed to showcase what it could do. By Mike Mearls and someone else. Its second biggest was the Monster Math not working - who was the lead name on the MM1? (Its third biggest involves a murder/suicide derailing the DDI tools).

And then there was Essentials.

 

[Bluenose]

My basic reaction when I saw Mongoose Traveller was "wow, that's pretty much verbatim right out of the original rules with material from Mercenary, etc added on and all polished a little bit". The same thing is pretty much true of T5 from what I can see (without being so vastly wealthy that I can afford to pay $108 for a copy!!!). I guess T5 goes a good bit further in adding new stuff to the game and making some embellishments to the original rules, but in either game it appears you could take old CT characters and basically just run them. You can probably use your old starships too.

It's got a lot of things that wouldn't be out of place, but there's a lot of it that appeared later in the edition. The task resolution system is pure DGP, rather than being part of the original black box, and a lot of other material comes from later supplements. Or in a few cases, MegaTraveller.

Traveller is an odd game because it is both quite general in terms of its mechanics, you COULD use it for a lot of things, but at the same time it is really narrow in its application. All the material outside of the base mechanics is focused on one very niche sort of Sci-Fi universe and even with all the follow-on material the game fundamentally has never broadened its scope of play at all.

I'd say that's not really uncommon for RPGs in general, so I wouldn't regard Traveller as "odd" in that sense.

 

[sgtscott658]

Unsuccessful? I have no info on market share or some such stuff but Pathfinder seems to be doing very well, so well, WoTC decided to come out with another edition. Where I play, everybody likes 3.5/ pathfinder just about. Personally I am running a 5E game but I think my players would prefer 3.5 or Pathfinder due to the richness and detail of the 3.5 edition.

As for conjecture, I would say 4E came out to combat the OGL and hope people would stick with the official D&D producer but when some of us saw 4E, it had no resemblance what so ever to past editions, nothing familiar what so ever. It was a different game system entirely to me and I think many others. The only thing that was familiar was the D&D logo

Perhaps if WoTC did not treat its employees like crap, I would be a bit more sympathetic and supportive but I dont see that happening at all.

3.5 wasn't that successful. It haemoherraged players and market share after the initial books. 3.5 is the second shortest lived version of D&D ever (beating only 3.0). Pathfinder has already lasted longer than 3.5 did.



It didn't tank. It was just unable to reverse a falling trend. In part due to where the money was going to come from, the tools rather than the books, never materialising.

That said, there is a huge correlation in 4e between Books By Mike Mearls and problems. 4e's biggest initial problem was the excrable Keep on the Shadowfell being the free adventure designed to showcase what it could do. By Mike Mearls and someone else. Its second biggest was the Monster Math not working - who was the lead name on the MM1? (Its third biggest involves a murder/suicide derailing the DDI tools).

And then there was Essentials.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ok, my question is, with 3,5 being so successful, why did WoTC put out a completely different version of D&D in the form of 4E? Why did 4E tank? Was it because it had almost nothing in common with previous editions?

Its so difficult to say that it even 'tanked'. Clearly there was a huge expectation built up by the D&D product group back in the 2006-07 time frame when they started to contemplate a new edition. To say that 4e 'tanked', we don't know. I've read that the PHB,DMG,MM were the largest selling RPG books in history. They printed a LOT of them and sold out of the first print run, and we know they charted high on Amazon, etc for a good while, and then some of the PF books eclipsed them after about 2 years.

So, we can say that there were huge expectations internally and high bars set for the success of 4e business-wise, and then WotC created a strong competitor in Paizo. I mean they REALLY WORKED at creating and strengthening Paizo. First they give them name-recognition as the distributor of their magazines, so everyone knew the brand, and then they cut them off of their revenue source. At the same time they licensed their existing game for free, irrevocably no less, and failed to provide a good license for 4e! Then on top of that they released a whole bunch of hungry game designers in a staff cutback. Even as they were doing that they were underachieving on every goal they had set for the community. Its hard to see how you could run a business more terribly than the D&D group in many respects.

This is against the backdrop of replacing a game that was very popular and while starting to age was obviously still being played and enjoyed. 3.5 wasn't really at the point yet of being dead, and WotC was taking a risk by trying to kill it off early so they could avoid the long tail of low sales figures that happens late-edition (which helped kill TSR in the 2e days). Coupled with the excellent way they built up Paizo (is Hasbro secretly an investor, I hope so) it didn't make 4e's run all that easy. Oh, and then the economy tanked.

I guess the question is really, had WotC released verbatim what we now call 5e under the conditions that they released 4e how would it have faired? I think there would have been a storm of "you changed XYZ! Heathen SCUM!!!!" all over the place and Paizo would still be there picking up the slack.

And really, its not like 4e doesn't have its faults. Maybe in terms of being the right game at the right time it has more than say 5e does today, but who knows?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's got a lot of things that wouldn't be out of place, but there's a lot of it that appeared later in the edition. The task resolution system is pure DGP, rather than being part of the original black box, and a lot of other material comes from later supplements. Or in a few cases, MegaTraveller.



I'd say that's not really uncommon for RPGs in general, so I wouldn't regard Traveller as "odd" in that sense.

Its odd in that it is such a generalized system. RQ's system, for instance, has been used in a LOT of games (though it is rather dated now) and even has a 'generic' incarnation in BRP. Traveller always FELT like a general-purpose system that could handle anything that BRP could. Certainly you could do cyberpunk/steampunk, nano-tech/transhumanist ala Eclipse Phase (frankly I just used Traveller's rules, much cleaner), sci-fi 'space horror', straight up horror, detective stories, etc. Heck, a lot of those you don't even need any real new material for, all the RULES you need to play in say 1930's New York exist already, you just need setting material and adventures. Yet oddly, of all the early successful RPG developers, GDW alone made no attempt to extend their product line out of its one niche. They could have at the very least provided some supplements on using Traveller in other classic sci-fi settings like say Asimovian Galactic Empire, Known Space, etc.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I'm sorry I must have missed where this was declared a thread where only positive things could be posted about 4e... he general question seems to be what will happen to 4e... I answered that question and replied to the assertions of another poster... In what way is that thread crapping? You want a 4e lovefest go create a thread for it and make sure you indicate that only positive opinions of 4e are welcome.

Strawman much? You know, I remember AbdulAlhazrad telling me something about edition warriors that seemed pretty paranoid back in the 3e-4e era. But you've got me half convinced that my faith in humanity was misplaced and that AbdulAlhazrad had a point. So kudos to you! Keep up that rage-on, keep seeking out those threads discussing things that you know you don't like so that you can pee in others' Cheerios for the lulz! If only all fans were as unfaltering as edition warriors as you are, what would ENworld be like?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Strawman much? You know, I remember AbdulAlhazrad telling me something about edition warriors that seemed pretty paranoid back in the 3e-4e era. But you've got me half convinced that my faith in humanity was misplaced and that AbdulAlhazrad had a point. So kudos to you! Keep up that rage-on, keep seeking out those threads discussing things that you know you don't like so that you can pee in others' Cheerios for the lulz! If only all fans were as unfaltering as edition warriors as you are, what would ENworld be like?

In all fairness Imaro is pretty tame, the general tenor of what we used to call the 'h4ters' back in those days was pretty low. I think its fine to say you didn't like something. OTOH I think there is a certain level at which you can say objectively 4e has some nice characteristics as a set of rules. I think, to also address something that someone else set up the page a bit, that the 4e designers DID go out of their way in some fashion to break from earlier editions. Not so much in terms of rules per-se, but in terms of things like what powers they wrote. I mean yeah, there's a fireball power in 4e, but it is a rotten spell and MOST of the other really classic go-to wizard spells either don't exist at all, are given oddly different names, or just work in a way that is different enough to be weird. I don't see why they couldn't have hewed closer to the original class in at least that way. There are other things as well, but suffice it to say even where they could have made 4e feel more like classic D&D they often didn't, and for no really articulable reasons. I mean it wouldn't really have hurt to have a mule and other classic gear in the PHB would it?