Why Changes were made in 4e

[thecasualoblivion]

After all this talk of why changes were made, allow me to re-introduce my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. I freely admit I have nothing more than circumstantial evidence and this has some very serious holes in it. But, in my mind, I think that there is a very strong, single element that informs almost all the changes made with 4e.

The RPGA.

You can also look at things in the opposite direction. That 3E, with its wide spread of system mastery and infinite possibilities served RPGA badly. From what I've heard about 3E era RPGA, it was set up for the hardcore convention audience. Players in 3E were free to build crippled failures or world smashers, and its hard for a standard format to accommodate both. Again, from what I've heard, 3E RPGA tended to try to challenge the world smashers. In addition, spellcasters were more free to stack up on world/battle changing "campaign smasher" spells due to the effective nerf placed on simple blasting spells, which were too useful to ignore in AD&D. 3E also contained a much larger variety of those types of spells.

From that viewpoint, better serving the RPGA is more of a side goal, simply correcting something the previous edition didn't do well. Its hard to argue that 4E hasn't led to an explosion of RPGA play in casual FLGS and home formats.

 

[thedungeondelver]

4Ed is made of people!

Or,

"YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!"

 

[ProfessorCirno]

You can also look at things in the opposite direction. That 3E, with its wide spread of system mastery and infinite possibilities served RPGA badly. From what I've heard about 3E era RPGA, it was set up for the hardcore convention audience. Players in 3E were free to build crippled failures or world smashers, and its hard for a standard format to accommodate both. Again, from what I've heard, 3E RPGA tended to try to challenge the world smashers. In addition, spellcasters were more free to stack up on world/battle changing "campaign smasher" spells due to the effective nerf placed on simple blasting spells, which were too useful to ignore in AD&D. 3E also contained a much larger variety of those types of spells.

From that viewpoint, better serving the RPGA is more of a side goal, simply correcting something the previous edition didn't do well. Its hard to argue that 4E hasn't led to an explosion of RPGA play in casual FLGS and home formats.

What?

RPGA was more or less in the dumps even before 3e came around. 3e wasn't really anti-RPGA. it was more "RPGA doesn't really matter at this point"

 

[thecasualoblivion]

What?

RPGA was more or less in the dumps even before 3e came around. 3e wasn't really anti-RPGA. it was more "RPGA doesn't really matter at this point"

D&D was in the dumps before 3e came around. I don't know that the RPGA being in the dumps at the time means anything, though I'm curious where that information comes from.

I wouldn't say 3E was anti-RPGA, as doing so would mean that it was intentional. I would say that the design of 3E(particularly the wide disparity of power levels available in character creation) had the unintended side effect of not really serving an organized shared campaign well. Think of the outcomes of a well optimized party of Cleric/Druid/Rogue/Wizard vs. badly optimized Bard/Samurai/Monk/Hexblade.

 

[Hussar]

Actually TCO, I'd have to disagree. One of Ryan Dancey's stated goals was to see the RPGA get going really, really strongly. WOTC threw a LOT of weight behind the RPGA during the 3e era, and Living Greyhawk certainly proved that a living campaign could be very big.

ProfC has a point I think. TSR just didn't really care too much about the RPGA towards the end. Not a lot of effort was being spent on growing organized play and it was all pretty much a grassroots sort of thing. 3e managed to get the RPGA much better organized and grew their numbers pretty significantly.

I don't think 3e served the RPGA badly really. The RPGA jumped up in numbers pretty well throughout the run. Like I said earlier, 150k RPGA members is hardly anything to sniff at.

I agree with Dancy at the end of the day. A healthy RPGA means a constant stream of revenue for WOTC. It's basically tying the MMO subscription model to tabletop gaming. Free to play, but, you pay for the extras is a model that is working quite well for a number of online games. If they can grow the RPGA to say, half a million (a very big growth I admit), selling the next rulebook becomes a breeze.

And, I wonder as well, what proportion of the DDI are RPGA members? That could also generate a regular stream of income as well.

If they do hit the half a million members mark, I imagine that you will not see a new edition for a VERY long time.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Hussar, I think you could be on the money wrt the RPGA and D&D4e but given you experience with VTTs, do think that WoTC could have also being envisioning expanding RPGA to an online campaign using a custom VTT and DM tools?
Would such ultiities make much of a difference, given that WoTC could leverage its own artwork and maps and so forth for release to the VTT?

 

[billd91]

Well, I've already disagreed on the MMO thing. But, I'll leave that to people who actually know anything about coding to argue. Again, considering that every edition has been turned into a CRPG, which means it was possible, I'll certainly agree that its possible to do it with 4e. I'm only disagreeing with the idea that it's somehow easier. I don't know, and I highly, highly suspect that many of those claiming that it's easier don't have any idea either.

The very things you cited that would make 4e easier to deal with in an organized play structure also serve to make the game easier to code. The removal of ambiguities and vagueness makes the rules easier to adjudicate algorithmically.

I test software for a living and I have to say that, from my perspective, the limited scope of the 4e powers as a body of work would be a lot easier to write into a set of code specifications, test cases, and expectations than any other edition.

 

[AllisterH]

The very things you cited that would make 4e easier to deal with in an organized play structure also serve to make the game easier to code. The removal of ambiguities and vagueness makes the rules easier to adjudicate algorithmically.

I test software for a living and I have to say that, from my perspective, the limited scope of the 4e powers as a body of work would be a lot easier to write into a set of code specifications, test cases, and expectations than any other edition.

That's not actually true about what the original point was.

Once again, REAL time is not the same thing as TURN BASED which is what the original claim was.

The claim was that 4e is best suited for a real time MMORPG. I believe (and others with experience in actually coding turn based games) do NOT believe this is true.

In fact, 4e is perhaps the worst edition to code for a real time game.

Furthermore, if WOTC was designing this for the computer, why would they design it so the combat system is better suited for Disgaea than World of Warcraft?

That was one part of the argument/discussion

Personally, I disagree with the belief that previous editions are hard to code the martial classes are bloody easy and I think only 25% of the spell list in the PHB can't be coded properly - half of those would have to be limited in some form but could still be coded (polymorph for example would be limited to only a few forms)

Illusion and Charm Schools might lose 80% of their spells but most other schools aren't losing more than 10% (Transmutation might be half and half since it contains a lot of polymorph effects)

 

[billd91]

That's not actually true about what the original point was.

Once again, REAL time is not the same thing as TURN BASED which is what the original claim was.

The claim was that 4e is best suited for a real time MMORPG. I believe (and others with experience in actually coding turn based games) do NOT believe this is true.

Hussar's point was broad enough to include CRPGs and not just real-time ones. He's the one who brought in every other edition of D&D being made into one.
But my point about the powers being easier to draw up into program specs would stand with either turn-based or real-time. Turn based would be the easier of the two, no doubt, but translating 4e into a real-time MMO would benefit from the powers' tight format as well.

 

[AllisterH]

Hussar's point was broad enough to include CRPGs and not just real-time ones. He's the one who brought in every other edition of D&D being made into one.
But my point about the powers being easier to draw up into program specs would stand with either turn-based or real-time. Turn based would be the easier of the two, no doubt, but translating 4e into a real-time MMO would benefit from the powers' tight format as well.

Again, though, what good is if the format is clear if the power can't be expressed in a suitable real time fashion?

I agree, a 4e turnbased grid based game a la Disgaea would be perfect. But a real time interpretation of 4e's rules? It would be the worse implementation of a D&D game system EVER.

I honestly don't think I'm expressing how badly WHAT the powers actually do (and not just the clear format) means for trying to translate to real time.