will 4.0 succeed?

[Gallo22]

Will it suceed? Only time will tell...

Either way it does not affect me.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

See, I don't see that. I see it being moved from A and being put on B. I foresee high level games being downright unmanageable. If you think chargen is bad now, making a new character for an existing game at 15th level means how many at will powers, per encounter powers and how many daily powers? I foresee casual gamers being swamped at anything beyond 7th level and DMs of epic level games being increadibly bogged down in work trying to take into account all the powers every player has.

I do not.

- It is okay for character creation to be complex. Still, the complexity in 4E looks manageable - the excerpts on tiers or higher levels did contain a table of the number and levels of powers for each character level. And you still don't have to cope with handling skill points (which might or might not be a feature. I didn't mind skill point shuffling in 3E - I'd just always preferred to have more of them, and there were adventure design concerns related to them.
- NPC and monster generation is easy. Use the baseline, and design 1-5 special abilties to make the monster unique. This can be harder then just picking a feat, but it's definitely more interesting then that.
- Less bonus types, less bonus sources that interact with each other.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Deleted. My comments were pretty off topic and only covered stuff that's been hashed over plenty of times.

 

[AllisterH]

re: DDI

I've been a off and on again member of MTGO since the original free Beta when Leaping Lizards ran it. People here think WOTC screwed up DDI? Heh, I suggest you mosey on up to the MTGO forums and ask them what they think of WOTC's general treatment of MTGO. From the v2 screwups to even the recent v3 brouhaha, WOTC can't catch a break,

WOTC has ALWAYS gotten bad press in the internet. I honestly don't know of a company that gets as much heat from its fans as WOTC does.

Yet, you know what's funny, MTGO increases steadily each year in numbers and now accounts for something like 20% of WOTC's MTG revenue.

I think the comparison is relatively similar in that people complain about the price AND the fact that you can get something cheaper (FREE!) online all the time yet, it is successful.

I think the same thing will happen with DDI. It will be panned orribly by most people on the web and yet it will be a steady income growth.

It should be noted as well that we as fans of D&D should hope that DDI does well as this actually ensures D&D RPG products. WOTC has NEVER needed D&D the RPG for its bottom line. It's got MTG, novels and the DDM line for that.

 

[Dragonblade]

Why would I change when I find 3.0/3.5 meets both your two simple reasons as listed abouve? 3.0/3.5 is flat out fun on both sides of the screen for me and EASY to DM for me.

Let me rephrase. "Fun" is of course subjective. But generally speaking, I think the VAST majority of players don't find the following fun at all:

Rolling a 1 for your HP when you level up.
Having to level down your PC simply because a monster TOUCHED you.
Having to sit out the entirety of a two hour combat because you failed a save in the first round.
Having to sit through an hour of combat before you can take another turn because each person's turn takes 20 minutes because of all the iterative attacks involved.
Losing magical gear you slogged through 20 levels to get with the casting of a single spell (Disjunction), or because a monster (Rust Monster, Black Pudding, etc.) touched you (again!).
Spending 45 minutes calculating all the parties buffs and stackable bonuses, only to have a bad guy drop a Dispel Magic or a Disjunction in the first round and then it takes an hour to recalculate everything.

And for DMs, I think the vast majority don't find the following fun at all:

Having players Wind Walk through an entire dungeon you spent hours creating.
Having players Scry-Buff-Teleport into the BBEG's headquarters and cutting him down in his sleep, thus prematurely ending a campaign you spent months building up.
Wanting to use a vampire as a classic villain only to end up with a near TPK and a party that is now about 10 levels too low for the rest of your epic campaign.
Having players who prefer to simply create a new character from scratch (and thus throw away pages of campaign backstory and history) because losing Con or a level just sucks too much.
Spending hours painstakingly advancing a monster or NPC only to see it die in one round.

And last but most importantly, having to create house rules or fudge die rolls to prevent any of the above from happening because the system is just fundamentally broken.

4e will be a success because it fixes these issues and thus will be easier and more fun to play than 3.x was for the vast majority of players and DMs.

 

[billd91]

Another way to see it is to say that if you change a system long enough, it might become actually a lot better then it's original form, and that this was the goal of the game in the first place, and is the most important thing.
Or that D&D 4 is a typical example of trying to create a system that is just simply better in many ways, even if some of the changes might feel extreme...

The danger here, if we can use any examples, is making changes to too much of the game's intangibles - particularly its identity and the identity of D&D players. That's something Coca-Cola learned when they came out with New Coke, a version that did better in taste tests but messed with people's identity as Coke (not Pepsi) drinkers.
I don't think there's been anything equivalent to the cola wars between tabletop and online mmorpgs, but whatever there is, any movement of 4e toward the mmorpg (and I think there's some detectable shift) runs the risk of losing tabletop players on identity issues alone.

On whether 4e will be a success:
I think 4e will successfully win over more players than will stick with 3.x, but it will not be an overwhelming majority in the short term. I would expect no more than 65%. I expect a higher proportion will buy at least the 4e PH even if they don't adopt the system, thus being a bigger sales success in the short term than an actually implemented game system.

I think 4e will have no significant success at winning over mmorpg players in the long run. Some, of course, will give it a whirl because the hobbies are reasonably similar. But the long slide of more gamers heading to the mmorpg model will continue.

I also think 4e will have no significant success at bringing in old 1e/2e players.

 

[DaveMage]

Ok, let's take a look at these...

Let me rephrase. "Fun" is of course subjective. But generally speaking, I think the VAST majority of players don't find the following fun at all:

Rolling a 1 for your HP when you level up.

Agreed. That sucks. I houserule a reroll on a '1', but I agree it would be better to have something nicer in the core rules. I'm considering 1/2 hit die + half. (For example if you have a d8 hit die, you'd get d4+4.)

Having to level down your PC simply because a monster TOUCHED you.

Nah, this is old school! I like this. Makes undead scary. (Besides, that's what Restoration is for.)

Having to sit out the entirety of a two hour combat because you failed a save in the first round.

I've never had this happen, but I'd imagine it would be annoying.

Having to sit through an hour of combat before you can take another turn because each person's turn takes 20 minutes because of all the iterative attacks involved.

If each person's turn is taking 20 minutes, it's not the game's fault. The DM should consider a time limit on turns.

Losing magical gear you slogged through 20 levels to get with the casting of a single spell (Disjunction), or because a monster (Rust Monster, Black Pudding, etc.) touched you (again!).

Gear can be replaced. That's what adventures are for. Perhaps characters afraid of losing their gear should take up jobs as farmers.

Spending 45 minutes calculating all the parties buffs and stackable bonuses, only to have a bad guy drop a Dispel Magic or a Disjunction in the first round and then it takes an hour to recalculate everything.

Yeah, this can be a pain at high levels. But, a little prep time beforehand can fix this issue (similar to preparing a barbarian's rage scores & abilities vs. when not raging.)

And for DMs, I think the vast majority don't find the following fun at all:

Having players Wind Walk through an entire dungeon you spent hours creating.

It's never happened IME. If they go ethereal, they are likely to meet ethereal monsters IMC.

Having players Scry-Buff-Teleport into the BBEG's headquarters and cutting him down in his sleep, thus prematurely ending a campaign you spent months building up.

If the BBEG allows this to happen, he's a sucky BBEG.

Wanting to use a vampire as a classic villain only to end up with a near TPK and a party that is now about 10 levels too low for the rest of your epic campaign.

Restoration is your friend.

Having players who prefer to simply create a new character from scratch (and thus throw away pages of campaign backstory and history) because losing Con or a level just sucks too much.

What do you have against using Restoration?

Spending hours painstakingly advancing a monster or NPC only to see it die in one round.

That's been the greatest flaw of WotC's stewardship of 3.5. They never created a program that would help you generate such monsters/NPCs quickly. The time it takes to do manually *is* a very big pain. Fortunately, that why 3pp adventures are extremely helpful.

And last but most importantly, having to create house rules or fudge die rolls to prevent any of the above from happening because the system is just fundamentally broken.

4e will be a success because it fixes these issues and thus will be easier and more fun to play than 3.x was for the vast majority of players and DMs.

Within a few months, it is very likely that someone will find ways to break 4E in similar fashion. Heck, IIRC, they've already figured out a 1st level fighter can heal for up to 104 points of damage/day.

The bottom line is, I find a lot of the things you think of as "un-fun" to be quite enjoyable. And since many of the things you mention have been in every iteration of D&D since the start, I'm guessing there are a few others who find them fun as well.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The danger here, if we can use any examples, is making changes to too much of the game's intangibles - particularly its identity and the identity of D&D players. That's something Coca-Cola learned when they came out with New Coke, a version that did better in taste tests but messed with people's identity as Coke (not Pepsi) drinkers.
I don't think there's been anything equivalent to the cola wars between tabletop and online mmorpgs, but whatever there is, any movement of 4e toward the mmorpg (and I think there's some detectable shift) runs the risk of losing tabletop players on identity issues alone.

On whether 4e will be a success:
I think 4e will successfully win over more players than will stick with 3.x, but it will not be an overwhelming majority in the short term. I would expect no more than 65%. I expect a higher proportion will buy at least the 4e PH even if they don't adopt the system, thus being a bigger sales success in the short term than an actually implemented game system.

I think 4e will have no significant success at winning over mmorpg players in the long run. Some, of course, will give it a whirl because the hobbies are reasonably similar. But the long slide of more gamers heading to the mmorpg model will continue.

I also think 4e will have no significant success at bringing in old 1e/2e players.

I've seen the "New Coke" example very often now, and I really have never heard before the whole 4E talk about it. Must have been before my time.

Anyway, the analogy is flawed. if Cola already had 3 or 4 different established "default" variations before New Coke appeared, it might work better.
People have started D&D with different editions. There are lot of "old-schoolers" that started with OD&D, but there are also a lot of people (like me) that started with D&D 3E. The other guys in my group are older and have experience with previous editions, and from all I know, they would never go back to anything before 3E, but all are very interested in 4E.

That's why I believe that there either is no core to D&D, or it is so small to be almost meaningless. People don't necessarily like D&D for the D&D-specific things, but for reasons that exist purely for gameplay reasons.
We don't play Shadowrun any more, not because we hate the world, but because the mechanics don't provide what we want. Character Advancement is to slow, gameplay is unsatisfying (boring) and unbalanced for non-reflex boosted characters. So, you see, we're giving up a perfectly good setting just because the mechanics don't work for us - and the mechanics capture the setting very well!
Changing "thematic" elements in D&D will probably never stop us from playing it.
Introducing things that don't make sense on a rules as physics level always hurts a bit, but if in the end, the game play is still better, I think I can live with that a lot better then with a mechanic that just hurts the playability...

I know there are people out there for which the thematics like the "D&D Bildungsroman of low levels, the Great Wheel or 9 alignments might matter. But these are not the only one. I will not take any bets on whose in the majority, but just in case the "thematics" are the majority now - maybe that's the reason why the hobby is not bigger? Maybe if more was focused on playability and game balance, there would just be even more people that would come interested and like the game in the long run.

Oh, and off course, I find the Feywild and Shadowfell a lot more interesting then the Astral Plane or the Shadow Plane ever where. Or the idea of Devils actually being fallen angels, in a conflict with the gods instead of the demons. (Who are in conflict with the whole creation!)

On the other hand, my group (before my time) stopped playing Torg, despite loving the system and the world, because they didn't feel capable of creating good adventures for the system themselves. We're playing D&D now with a lot of published modules, and this also applies for non D&D games. (Warhammer, Das Schwarze Auge, being the most recent examples)
So maybe another focus should be ensuring that (good) adventure support continues to exist?

On the gripping hand ( ), other people stop playing simply because they do not find a (suitable) group. Maybe also something needs to be done to hold groups together, or help finding them?

 

[Jhaelen]

3.0/3.5 is flat out fun on both sides of the screen for me and EASY to DM for me.

Good for you! No reason to switch then, YET.

Me and my players, we're still having fun playing 3E. However, it's not as fun as it was when we started the campaign. Effective party level is now 12.5. We've already had several extremely long combats. Also, prep time has definitely increased for me.
I expect things to get worse over time and I can imagine eventually we might reach a point when we no longer have fun.

Then we'll have several options:
1. starting over at Level 1 in 3E and playing as long as it's fun,
2. returning to an older edition of D&D,
3. playing a different RPG system,
4. stop playing RPGs altogether,
or:
5. switching to 4E.

My current guess: It's either 1. or 5.
If it's 1. I have my doubts we'd start over at level 1 for a third time. Then it's either 3. or 5.

Since I like what I've seen so far about 4E, I'll probably try to convince my players to choose option 5.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Within a few months, it is very likely that someone will find ways to break 4E in similar fashion. Heck, IIRC, they've already figured out a 1st level fighter can heal for up to 104 points of damage/day.

104 is a number. A 3E Level 8 Fighter can have an attack bonus of +18 (+8 BAB, +2 Melee Weapon Mastery, +1 Weapon Focus, +5 STR, +2 enhancement). A 3E Cleric can heal 500 hp per day. (2 Wands of Cure Light Wounds, average healing). So what? Is that broken? Is that what the designers wanted it to be? Is it balanced?
I think the 104 hps of healing are intended. The +18 attack or the 500 points of healing might have been, too. (I am less sure about that, though...)