Why I'm done with 4e

[Obryn]

Quite honestly, if person can't have fun playing 4e, there is something seriously wrong with them.

Sigh.

As soon as you make it about the person and not about the game, you're definitely part of the problem.

-O

 

[Piratecat]

Play the games you enjoy!

No need to have anyone here affirm your preferences. Not every game is for every player. Find the game that suits you, not the other way around. I'm happily running 4e for my dungeon-bashy D&D game, and Call of Cthulhu for my roleplay-heavy rules-light game. It works out well!!

-O

I couldn't agree more. I'm running two 4e games and loving them, and I'm playing in a 3.5 game and loving that as well. On the edges I'm playing or running great games of Skulduggery, MnM, and 1e AD&D. Never feel you have to justify your choice, just play what you find fun.

The danger in these sorts of threads is that your experiences are surely very different than other peoples'. Generalizing will always cause people who haven't experienced your problems to disagree with you.

I do agree with one thing mentioned above. Whether it's 4e, 3e or something else, I'm of the opinion that playing a game you're determined to dislike usually makes it intrinsically harder to enjoy. I ran into that with Vampire: the Masquerade when I first played it. It took me some time before I appreciated the game on its own merits.

 

[Wepwawet]

Edit: Blah blah (enough with the unnecessary posts )
Sorry, I was trying to edit my post, but I accidentally wrote a new one...

* Vancian magic.

This is the one thing that made me happy to move on to 4E, never looking back again.

When I DMed 3.5 my game had the entire system heavily house ruled (Unearthed Arcana FTW)

 

[Piratecat]

Quite honestly, if you can't understand that each person's fun is his own matter, there is something seriously wrong with you

It's been dealt with by moderators. Let it lie, please.

 

[Hussar]

I couldn't agree more. I'm running two 4e games and loving them, and I'm playing in a 3.5 game and loving that as well. On the edges I'm playing or running great games of Skulduggery, MnM, and 1e AD&D. Never feel you have to justify your choice, just play what you find fun.
/snip

You get to play in 3 games at once?

I hate you.

 

[Obryn]

The danger in these sorts of threads is that your experiences are surely very different than other peoples'. Generalizing will always cause people who haven't experienced your problems to disagree with you.

I also think that folks who post on RPG messageboards - whether it's a result of fan culture, the interwebs, or human nature - have a problem categorizing something as "A good thing that's well-made, and which others may enjoy for legitimate reasons, but which does not fit my tastes."

Even worse, there's sometimes a tendency to extrapolate a bit too far - to claim there's something wrong with a person who likes or dislikes something. That somehow a person's preference of a game system (or movie, or series of books) puts their deep-seated character flaws on display. (Like, say, enjoying minions means that you're such a failure and so impotent in real life that you need your character to be enormously badass to compensate. Or that enjoying rules-light games means you're just not smart enough to play with the big kids in a rules-heavy game.) It's a crummy line of argument, which turns what could be a nice discussion about the merits and flaws of a game system into an ad-hominem discussion of the merits and flaws of a person.

-O

 

[Fifth Element]

This really, at the end of the day no matter which edition you play they all contain the phrase: "The orcs notice you, roll for initiative"

Yes! "Roll for initiative" is one of the greatest phrases in the English language.

 

[Shazman]

I've been a player in a 4e campaign since the release of the edition. Prior to that, I DM'd and played extensively in a series of 3.x campaigns. I have tried to adapt to the new system (for the sake of my friend who DMs it), but I can't keep playing 4e; the game itself is driving me crazy.

I don't think 3.x is perfect. High-level encounters, for instance, can be very complicated. But 3.x is superior to 4e in these ways:

* The rules are in the background. The rules are not constantly superimposing themselves on my in-game experience. Example: 4e marking.

* High level of player creativity in character design. This only increased as new 3.x materials were released. 4e suffers from "sameyness" from the PHB onward.

* Vancian magic. I prefer it. It's part of D&D's core identity. 3e honors it (while giving some options for other paths); 4e pays lip service to it (for wizards, anyway) but essentially reinvents the magic system, to its detriment.

* 4e has a very artificial feel. The labels/roles are a big part of that; striker, artillery, leader, minion ... where is the mystery and wonder? The rules encourage metagame thinking and take me out of the game-world and into wargamer mode.

Unfortunately, I don't see how I can ignore these problems. With 3.x's bloat issues (particularly for prestige classes), the solution was simply to exercise DM control and exclude the material you didn't want. 4e's problems are inherent. You can't play 4e without being smacked in the face with design issues every single session.

As a side comment, while I agree that 4e is certainly easier for a newbie to grasp due to its simplicity, if my first exposure to D&D was 4e I'd probably say to myself after a few sessions, "why not play WoW instead?" IMO, Wizards forgot why people play D&D in the first place.

I want to play a game of D&D that emphasizes a blend of role-playing, story-telling, exploration, adventure, and yes, exciting combat. I would venture a guess that most of the folks on this forum want the same, though arguably in different proportions. So I want a game system that allows me to do that with minimal intrusiveness. I don't want to feel like I'm playing a boardgame or MMO. For these reasons, I'm starting a pathfinder campaign.

Good for you. You aren't the first to become disillusioned with 4E and switch to something you like better, and you most certainly won't be the last.

 

[malraux]

Edition War?

[grabs chair and readies it uncertainly]




Not to be too critical Soraios, but is there anything in general you want to discuss about your change of rules, or did you just want to announce it?

 

[Ariosto]

The D&D brand name has been applied to games so different that someone can easily be enthusiastic about one and find others thoroughly disappointing. It's sort of strange to me that some people should have stuck with 2e and 3e when 4e is the kind of game they really like -- but I'm sure there's plenty of strangeness from each perspective.

Some things are matters of degree, so that a really old hand might say of 3e some of what a 3e fan says of 4e. It's a matter not just of "the trees" but of "the forest". Talk about the new games is strange and stranger to my ears because it's increasingly devoted to concerns, and in jargon, that have more in common with computer games.

What "detailed tactical combat rules" meant back when FRP was a spin-off from historical gaming might seem as bizarre to the video-game set as their concept does to "grognards". Ditto a lot of other things.

I don't know about WoW, but 4e definitely does not feel to me like The Fantasy Trip: Melee, or DragonQuest. It's not just a matter of squares instead of hexes -- the whole fundamental set of premises is different. Nor does it feel to me like any other RPG of which I can think offhand in terms of character generation. The amount of attention to combat factors reminds me most of Champions, which however has the context of a lot of rules for all sorts of things.

Those games came out almost 30 years ago. They were popular about the same time as Chaosium's RuneQuest, which I think at least one designer of 3e mentioned as an influence. The game certainly evoked for me a sense of "flashback" to a 1980s ethos -- but at least as much a GURPS or a Hero System (4th ed.) as an AD&D one. What I've seen of the late 2e Players Option books seems like a precursor.

From what I gather of stagnation of salaries in the field, my guess is that younger folks -- with a different set of formative adventure-game experiences -- led the design and development of 4e.