What would WotC need to do to win back the disenchanted?

[Obryn]

These discussions are crazy, to me.

Over half the time, they're not even about the game - they're about ethics, insults (implied or imagined), and philosophy.

-O

 

[Kobold Boots]

This tactician we are talking about is it in-game Conan or out-of-game Kasparov player? An in-game Conan doesn't know what power the fighter is going to use next, the Kasparov might know and have been trying to get away from the fighter, but the fighter has an in-built "sticky" power. There is no way to offset a power once he is in range but hope to interrupt it or hope the fighter misses the attack.

Ok, so lets say we don't live in a player vs. character vacuum and your in game tactician actually got his tactical experience by seeing fighters actually fight. Logically that's the best way to eventually learn strategy.. be in the field, learn tactics and develop strategies...

Then your master strategist has seen fighters fight, knows what fighters do and can plan ahead when the tide of battle turns. The point of strategy is not to be in a situation where you're tactically compromised.

Thing is, it aint about the DM able to change the power based on his whim. The game has a philosophy of letting the player acquire all the powers RAW and changing a power to fit the DM's view will either hurt the balance or frustrate the player.

As a DM you can't change the power on the fly. That's something for a game table discussion before or after the game with the group. Within the game situation you have an option to do any number of things to offset the power long enough to tell a good story. Need more enemies.. there's another group of minions.. etc. Oh what's leading the minions..

Have you read what Come and Get it power does btw? The range is 15 feet radius centred from the fighter which affect all enemies around him.

Let's see it from an in-game perspective. Evil Conan and his lackeys are fighting this fighter. The fighter then shouts at them and everyone in that 15 feet radius area will immediately move towards the fighter. The moment they get close, the fighter then whacks them.

Now, if you were to roleplay Evil Conan as a guy who doesn't want to engage with this fighter but prefer to let his lackeys do the job instead, why are you suddenly moving towards this fighter?

Mechanics are dictating the npcs actions without you roleplaying it. An auto fail Will check, in 3.5 terms.

Ok, so now I'm going to get all realistic and stuff, bear with me. If I'm in a real hand to hand fight, I know that my opponent has a circle of reach equal to his full reach plus whatever I give him as his opponent. If I walk into his space, he has more he can do.

If i'm using a sword, I now extend that reach to the full distance of the arm plus his weapon, plus whatever I give him as his opponent. So the combat lives and breathes in a circle if I engage him. I want to stay at the limits of his reach if I can, therefore I'm going to move in a circle around him preferably opposite his strong side to avoid crushing strikes.

If we're using polearms, reach changes again.

So here's the deal. I'm not a military mastermind. I'm a guy who's taken some martial arts and I get it. I know that if I get in range of a guys reach and he knows how to use his weapon I'm potentially screwed. If I know what I'm talking about I may be able to tell if the guy has a particular fighting style that favors sweeps and whether or not he's fast. If that's the case I give him the respect of additional reach based on his stance and where his weight is distributed...

Back to the game. Your tactical/strategic mastermind is going to be better than I am, so he's going to know that fighters fight, he's going to know the tricks of the battlefield and how a taunt can work. He's going to know that the fighter's reach could well be 15 ft. and he's going to react accordingly... which means ranged combat against the front line and attempts to flank that front line until it's wise to close inside basic melee range, making the taunt useless. Then he's forced to mark stuff and hope for penalties if a combatant peels off.

So as to the "Hey come here" effect.. how to explain it.. I've done that previously. Maybe there's a statement about the mother's of the enemy that just annoys the enemy.. maybe there's a feud.. maybe there's a focus that makes sense.. or maybe he's just awesome and people want to kill him for honor's sake. Maybe it's a magic effect. Any way you look at it, fighters have trained themselves to know what to do to taunt things if they have the power. Hell you could say it's a result of party tactics as the power is pretty useless until you're in a group (cause if you're alone you're getting stuck just because.)

So to those who say that the tactical strategic guy shouldn't be pulled, I agree with you. I say the tactical strategist wouldn't be inside 15 ft if he was a strategist. DMs need to know their players and play the enemies appropriately. If he's pulled you failed. That's ok.

Personal note: I botch an encounter at least once a game because I don't think about something the players can do. So I'm with you, but blaming the game or the powers is just lame unless there's a real power imbalance.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

To answer the OP, I don't have set conditions for WotC to win me back, as such. They don't exist to cater to me (clearly...) so why would I arrange my thinking as if they could or should? I certainly didn't stop buying WotC materials because of some snooty idea that I needed to protest some percieved general business incompetence or corporate policies or the like. I stopped buying WotC materials for ONE reason - I was no longer interested in and no longer needed anything they were actually selling. That will change when they start selling something I AM interested in.

That pretty much means they either have to start selling materials that directly support or work with 1E/2E, or more likely (since I have already have all the materials I particularly want/need for those editions) create and release ANOTHER version of D&D that ratchets down the flailing "cool factor" of their more recent efforts. Well... that's not really accurate but it's all the more effort I care to put in right now in encapsulating why _I_ don't care for what they're dealing to use for _MY_ campaigns.

 

[bagger245]

So to those who say that the tactical strategic guy shouldn't be pulled, I agree with you. I say the tactical strategist wouldn't be inside 15 ft if he was a strategist. DMs need to know their players and play the enemies appropriately. If he's pulled you failed. That's ok.

Personal note: I botch an encounter at least once a game because I don't think about something the players can do. So I'm with you, but blaming the game or the powers is just lame unless there's a real power imbalance.

Agreed with all your points and yeah if the guy was a strategist he wouldn't be in that range in the first place. Of course you have to take into account the other player who plays the fighter who tactically makes sure that the strategist is within range to pull of the power in the first place.

Not blaming the game at all, just pointing out that there is a disassociation between mechanics and fluff. Why the strategist goes forth to the fighter to get whacked can have many explanation.

Anyway not wanting to derail, sticking to the thread topic, I am a WOTC customer and currently play 4e. But I don't see myself buying anymore future books due to DDI. I am more of a pre 3rd edition player, so I can understand most people here who wants the old pdfs back.

I was initially excited that Essentials was going back to a more classic structure of the classes and contemplated on making it my main fantasy rpg. But then I realized the gameplay will still be the same even if they changed Magic Missile to autohit, remove fighter's daily powers etc. So it is not good enough to lure me, what more those folks at Grognardia.

 

[Kobold Boots]

Anyway not wanting to derail, sticking to the thread topic, I am a WOTC customer and currently play 4e. But I don't see myself buying anymore future books due to DDI. I am more of a pre 3rd edition player, so I can understand most people here who wants the old pdfs back.

I was initially excited that Essentials was going back to a more classic structure of the classes and contemplated on making it my main fantasy rpg. But then I realized the gameplay will still be the same even if they changed Magic Missile to autohit, remove fighter's daily powers etc. So it is not good enough to lure me, what more those folks at Grognardia.

Appreciate being pulled back to the point of the thread, thank you.

So honestly, I'm torn about Essentials too. Here's why.

1. It might be 3rd edition again. I have that stuff.
2. It might be 2nd edition again. I have that stuff.
3. Calling anything "players option" scares the bloody hell out of me.

But really the thing that gets me is this. With the 3.X OGL the D&D system was as open as it was ever going to get. Then they go with 4.X and close it up. The result of that OGL was a crap load of cool games which is awesome for the gamer but scary for a business that runs on IP.

So what do they do? They start restricting and start rehashing to try and gain back some control because they're scared. So you end up with a non-open product that alienates people who are committed to the product because of the actions of the OGL and years of investment in 2nd and 3rd ed.. (1E notwithstanding).

So WoTC had the chance to really do something special by not being afraid of the market and leading it forward.. but as long as there are other people with essentially the same game AND a good amount of the older gamer crowd, it seems like they're just interested in fixing stuff we may already have.

AND.. the people scanning books aren't going to go away. This looks like a losing business model simply because they went too far, too fast potentially with the wrong ideas.

Time will tell. Personally I'm still in my honeymoon phase with 4E.

 

[Shazman]

Personally, I do not think there's much they can do to get people back. After what they did to the Forgotten Realms, I think it's pretty clear they'd rather destroy all that came before than ask what their players actually want.

That pretty much sums up WotC's way of doing things. They definitely believe in a scorched earth, fire the audience mentality. Maybe they will fire too many and learn their lesson.

 

[Obryn]

That pretty much sums up WotC's way of doing things. They definitely believe in a scorched earth, fire the audience mentality. Maybe they will fire too many and learn their lesson.

Case in point.

-O

 

[Shazman]

4e is unabashedly gamist first... yet you believe the mechanics don't come before the "story"?

IMO, anytime you have mechanics that cause me or my players to have to struggle to come up with "what just happened" in a narrative fashion that doesn't strain versimilitude... the mechanics have definitely come first and the story, well that's basically been left up to you to figure out a way to construct around the mechanics.

That is so true. One of the worst things about 4E is how extremely gamist it is. It would be a much better game if they dialed down the gamism and put some more realism back in the game.

 

[Beginning of the End]

There are three ways WotC could get my money:

(1) Start producing D&D again. You can call that snark if you like, but 4th Edition doesn't play like previous editions of the game and was specifically designed to work in fundamentally different ways from previous editions. It wasn't designed to be the same game and it isn't. For better or for worse.

(2) Produce something completely different from D&D. I play Exalted and Fading Suns and Heavy Gear and 3:16 and Shock: Social Science Fiction and a lot of other games. So while nothing is likely to scratch my D&D itch except for D&D, I'm more than willing to look at other stuff from WotC.

(3) Sell PDFs. I'm part of a group that's introduced nearly three dozen people to OD&D over the past 14 months. A lot of these people would have bought OD&D PDFs if they were available. But they're not.

#1 is improbable. #2 seems unlikely given their current corporate methodology (D&D Gamma World). But there's absolutely no rational reason for #3 not to happen. It's essentially free money for them at this point. They don't even have to pay for hosting in order to get a monthly check. And there's no risk of encouraging piracy (which is in any case) because all of those products have already been pirated.

Anyway, the short version is: Make products I want to buy.

They aren't doing that right now.

 

[Beginning of the End]

So if I'd suggested you were thrown off, you'd come up with a different argument. Note that an 80' cliff can't do massive damage, and yet when I worked for mountain rescue I saw some people who'd fallen 80'. Very few were in a condition to jump up and go chasing after their attackers. Yet it's routinely survivable for moderate level PCs. Guess what that does to any sense of verisimilitude I might find in D&D.

You seem to confusing "verisimilitude" and "realism".

Is it not realistic for a human being to jump off an 80' cliff and then go chasing after their attackers? Sure.

Nor is it realistic when Hercules or the Incredible Hulk do it. But when Hercules or the Incredible Hulk or a 12th-level barbarian do it, that doesn't violate the versimilitude of the fictional setting in which they exist.

12th-level barbarians are, according to every measure afforded us by the rules, tough motherfrakkers who can just do that sort of thing.

The real key here is the lack of struggle in explaining what happened. "The barbarian jumped off the cliff and survived." There's no confusion here. The rules are directly associated with the game world. Now, if you don't like the game world which the rules are describing that's certainly problematic, but it's a different problem than dissociated rules that require a struggle to figure out what happened in the game world based on the mechanical outcome of the rule system.