Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 6657127" data-attributes="member: 957">I don't claim he did.  But I was called a h4ter and scared of change for disagreeing.  I'm pleased to see that you and he take issue with that faction of the 4e fanbase.4E was AWESOME at being what it was supposed to be.  It had a great design team.OK.   If you think the challenges with long term success are summed up in what you said here, you are not assessing without bias.Did I say "failed"?    I probably did somewhere along the way, but context is important.  It failed at being competitive with other options for my play style.  It failed at being something WotC elected to stick with.  It failed to revolutionize the number of people playing TTRPGs through bringing waves of fans from other media.  It failed at avoiding a meaningful degree of fanbase burnout.It was far and away removed from "failed" at delivering an awesome experience for a certain niche segment of the industry, it was a massive success at that.Being called h4ter for not liking it got old about a day after 4E came out.  Tony is still throwing that around non-stop and still preaching the delusion of conspiracy.  If you want to be critical of blind undending criticism, you might want to start on your own side of the fence.  I'm not saying that this is your obligations by any means.  But if you want you indignation to seem fair, you might want to start there.Blind uneding criticism is bad.  Refusing to acknowledge, accept and adapt to considered and thoughtful criticism is also bad.  There was a moment in time when the 4E fan, just maybe, could have embraced input and bettered the longevity of 4E.   They did quite the opposite.I'm not even going there.  While *I* love GURPS, it ain't ever going to be the system for the masses.  I was simply making the poitn that taking about Heroquest doesn't change anything.Mostly yes.  But some no.Yes. It is beyond question an RPG.  Period  full stopI find the "all D&D is D&D" just as absurd and thoughtless as "4E is not an RPG".   The differences between OD&D and 3E are vast. They are hugely different games.  And 4E is a whole other animal yet.They are all fantasy RPGs.  But so is WHF, GURPS fantasy, HERO, MERP, and on and on and on.  Some of those games have vastly more in common with certain versions of D&D than some versions of D&D do with each other.  And yet you see 4E fans trying to insist that "all D&D is D&D" as a means of tsk tsking people for not liking their chosen flavor.  It is a dumb position.Now, beyond that, you get into the whole "simulation / gamist" thing.  It is easy for me to see how the gamist aspects make it that much more awesome AS AN RPG for some people.  And it is also easy for em to see how it sucks out the very heart of what playing an RPG means to some people.  To them, it really ISN'T a "good" RPG and far enough from it that simply saying it isn't does not is an adequate way to describe their position.I can roleplay chess.  Back in the long ago I had a group of friends that actually DID roleplay MtG games by narrating a story around the game as it went.  These ARE NOT RPGs.  These ARE NOT fair analogies to 4E.  On a scale of 1 to 1,000 they may be 2s and 4E (to an anti-gamist person) is a 970.  But if they are real strict about it anything below at 980 isn't good enough for them.  That doesn't speak well of them as open minded.  I'm not holding that up for praise.  But it isn't some crime either.  And ranting about them rather than considering why they feel that way may be the less constructive approach.  Maybe year 8 is the year you start trying to understand why they feel that way.   Hell, I don't even agree with the people who reject 4E as an RPG.  I think that is stupid.  But it is stupid that doesn't hurt them.   Refusing to consider them as part of the marketplace DID hurt WotC and 4E fans.Lastly, more directly personally, I've had multiple conversations with pemerton about the difference between "being" a character and running a character while having the powers of an author to change the world around you.To me this is a very important issue.  I have flat out said that if a player has powers that the character does not have, then I do not consider that to be roleplaying.  You may roleplay for two hours and then use the power of an author for 30 seconds and then roleplay for another two hours after that.  But once you have changed the world you have impacted everything subsequent and you have not interacted with the environment as a person within it.I have NOTHING negative to say about this alternative game.  But I don't count it as roleplaying anymore then I count narrating MtG as roleplaying.  And, again, obviously you are expressing roleplaying in the two hours before and after, the context is the thing.I don't claim that 4E makes this happen.  But elements of it do push in that direct (back to: does the narrative inform the rules or do the rules inform the narrative).  You can play 4E not this way and you can play 3E as this way.  But in the case of 4E you are at least cutting against the grain when you don't.   I think that is in part why Pemerton loves it.  The grains goes with his taste.  Adn ti makes it reasonable that people not wanting that may not grok why it doesn't work for them, it just doesn't.    And thus it is fair for them to express that it doesn't deliver the same experience they expect from an RPG.</blockquote>

Verification