Why won't you switch?

[Geron Raveneye]

Come on guys, give the "is it reasonable" discussion a rest and let people go back describing WHY they will (most likely) not change (from the current point of view). It has been such a nice and peaceful thread before.

 

[nutluck]

I likely won't it is still early to say for sure one way or the other yet. But so far other than stuff that makes me go meh and I could care less about which is maybe a third of the stuff about 4 e so far. But other than that of the stuff I care about i am split about 70/30 on disliking what I have been reading about 4e and what appears to be the general design goal.

For those that like it, glad for them. But for me i don't care for it. I was kinda hyped about 4e at first cause i thought 3e needed work still, just sadly they changed some of the stuff I liked for in my oppinion what seems to be for the worse and left in stuff I don't like.

At this point barring a lot of the information just being taken completely wrong it would take the DI to blow me away and offer up a easy way to find online games for me to invest in 4e. A very good DI with access to a couple of steady online games a week to use up my free time would be something that could get me to buy 4e even if I don't like the game much.

 

[Fenes]

I am cautiously optimistic with regards to the rules of 4E, but I will not change to the fluff of it. I've already been picking and choosing what bits of the assorted metaplots in FR I use in my heavily customised campaign, so I see no reason to switch to a new setting (such as 4E FR).

ut whether or not I switch to 4E even in part depends entirely on my players. We haven't switched to 3.5 from 3.0 since no one wanted to.

 

[Shadeydm]

Greyhawk is being "killed off" because hardly anyone likes it.

Provide evidence of this claim, or retract it because it's a dishonest statement.

 

[Ahnehnois]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I could say more, but I've been doing fine with my heavily houseruled 3.5 game, so why blow it up and start over?

 

[Michael Morris]

It could also be:

"They got rid of my favorite magazines. That's part of the REASON I loved the game. I don't think I'll like it as much now, the experience has soured me, and I don't really NEED the next edition. So I'm not going."

Why read malice where there could be none?

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" - Napoleon Bonaparte.

The 3e design team had one major advantage over the 4e one - they had a guy that had been there since near to the game's beginning - Skip Williams. Now this is a guess - but I'm thinking Skip helped keep Monte and Bruce in check with some of the wilder changes that were proposed and dismissed (and now lost to the mists of time).

4e is all new faces. There is no old guard at all on the design team - the oldest face among them only stretches back to right around the acquisition of TSR by WotC. The leads are all new. The previews have shown us the result of that approach, an edition without any respect whatsoever for what has come before it.

Yes, 3e broke backwards compatibility - rules wise. But, for the most part, fluff was unchanged. Look at FR late 2e to 3e - except for Bane's reappearance there was hardly a bump - fluff wise it was a smooth transition. Greyhawk came back into the core in real force for the first time since 1e, again as a reassurance. The rules where new, but the setting familiar. There's a reason for this - and the WotC D&D team doesn't have to look to me for an explanation as to why doing it this way is a good idea. They need only go up to whatever floor Magic is dev'ed on and talk to Mark Rosewater.

To explain, let me use an example from my Hollywood days - sitcoms. (I haven't mentioned I wrote for "Roseanne" in months.) People turn into television much for the same reason they play games. They want to be entertained and they want to be comforted. Sitcoms, like all television shows, are all about being different each week without really being all that different. Each week has a different story but the characters, setting, tone and pacing are always the same.

As a show ages, it starts using up most of the obvious areas of story. As such, the writers have to start veering slightly farther away from the original base of the show. How do they do that? They take one of the elements listed above and change it. Perhaps they add in a new character. Maybe they take the cast to a new setting. Perhaps they try changing the tone or pacing. The key is that when they do this they need to keep all the other elements constant. If the gang goes on vacation, you have to keep the same group of characters that the audience knows and have the general tone and pacing stay the same. Likewise, if a new character gets added, you tend to bring the new character to the old setting.

Why? Because the audience is grounded in the familiar. They'll accept new elements but only when surrounded by familiar ones. Magic is very similar. Each year we take you to a new world, but we look at the new world through the normal Magic lens. Red has direct damage, blue has counterspells and black has discard. Note that when Time Spiral block radically changed up how the colors worked (by either dipping into things the color used to do or exploring things the colors could do but never has done) we made sure to do it in the most known setting we have - Dominaria.

Original Article

This blurb shines a light on the one thing that makes me the most uneasy about 4e. Change the rules? Fine, 3e did that, but it stuck to a mostly familiar setting. Change the setting? Ok, 2e did that, but it didn't change the rules all that much from 1e (even today 1e and 2e books are used pretty much interchangably ruleswise). Change both at the same time!? This is an extraordinarily bad idea. I don't know if it will doom 4e, it likely won't, but it is very off-putting.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Replace grapple with just about any other major issue and it's the same - Save or Die, Level draining, 15 minute adventuring day etc. These are all things we've talked about and have been talking about, round and round, for years. How is them saying, "Hey, this sucks" a bad thing?

It's not objective, and it's not falsifiable. It's an opinion statement, and it's presented as if it's something "everyone knows."

Not everyone knows it. Plenty of people don't have these issues that WotC so graciously has decided to "fix." When they say "it sucks," it can really sound like they're saying "It's bad, and if you like it, you have bad taste, because what's REALLY good is what's coming up in a few months!"

If they said something more objective -- like "The grapple rules are pretty complex, and we're going to simplify them," it may go over better. It's more specific, it gives us more information, and it allows us to use our own judgment about whether or not we're interested in their fix. "Ah, I've got no problem with the complexity, I don't need that!" or "Ah! That's been annoying me for so long! I'm glad they made it simpler!"

Saying "These rules are bad and we will make them better," isn't saying much, and it isn't an opinion everyone shares. Those two things are a deadly combination: if you're saying something people are going to dispute, ground it in concrete information. If you're giving your opinion only, don't state it categorically.

 

[Psion]

Actually, they have, just like they explained the lack of bard and monk: they want more time and effort put into them to make them more distinct and they only have a limited amount of space in the core rules.

Actually they have, but that's not the real why.

WotC has stated (and I believe to be the real why) is they have removed traditional "core elements" to reserve for later volume to strengthen the idea that the PHB II, MM II, DMG II are "core" books, because "core" books sell better.

It's marketing.

 

[Fenes]

One thing that does put me off 4E is all the "it's cool" marketing. "Awesome" "cool" "greatest" and similar adjectives just rub me the wrong way.

 

[Hussar]

It's not objective, and it's not falsifiable. It's an opinion statement, and it's presented as if it's something "everyone knows."

How many threads are there in the rules forum devoted entirely to grappling? I did a quick and dirty Google search and came up with 18 THOUSAND hits. I doubt that the WOTC site is any better. I imagine that WOTC also keeps track of the queries sent to their customer service as well. At what point can you say, "Hey, a whole bunch of people have problems with this, so, this sucks"?

Is it totally qualitative? Perhaps not. But, at a certain point, you should be able to stop and say, hey, this sucks if enough people say so.

Having participated in far and away too many edition war threads, I've realized that people will defend ANY rule. No matter what. I've seen people defend 1e initiative rules and those require a 20 page ADDICT document to explain! You can talk about fruit roll ups all you like, but, at the end of the day, the numbers really have to carry it.

Yes, you may not have had a problem with X. But, you can probably bet that if the WOTC marketing team is allowing people to say, X sucks, then probably they know that there are a hell of a lot of people who agree with that.