I kept seeing, up to last week’s Wizard’s post on monsters ‘how in 3.5 it was just so much harder to…’
To which I answer:
We GET it, OK! Leave 3.5 alone and let 4e live on it’s own merits.
And that seemed very relevant to me. The game should stand on its own merits. When Wizards talks about 4e, they should talk about what makes it fun, interesting, and good ... not what makes it more fun, more interesting, and better than 3.5.
In the USA 2004 presidential election, John Kerry's main message was (or appeared to be) "I'm not George Bush, I'm a better candidate than George Bush, I'll be a better president than George Bush." Voters basically had the choice between George Bush and "not George Bush." It got old. It wasn't informative. It had no lasting power. And, as history shows, it wasn't enough to sway enough moderate voters to gain a win for Kerry.
So now we have 3.5 and "not 3.5/better than 3.5." We get it. You've been telling us the flaws in 3.5 for about two years now. Now tell us why 4e is great without comparing it to the game we've been playing for 8 years. Tell me why I should play 4e without telling me why I shouldn't be playing 3.5. Don't succumb to Hollywood's problem ("well, this movie is like MovieX, but with drummers instead of cheerleaders," or "this movie is like MovieY, but with Irish guys in Boston instead of mobsters in Los Angeles," thus movies greenlighted from major studios tend to be derivative). Sell me on 4e for being 4e.
Yes, I've already started to build an opinion on 4e ... based on one playtest, one 1st-level game, and all the "compared to 3.5..." marketing. I can set all that aside if you can just tell me why I should play this game.
P.S. And if you're going to make Dungeons & Dragons commercials for TV, maybe you could show a dungeon. Or a dragon. Or perhaps people playing a game of D&D*. Instead of A beholder waiting for a bus, at a coffee shop, and so on. Because if you want non-gamers to give D&D a look, you might actually want to show them that it's fun to play this game. With dungeons. And dragons.
* You know, like this old D&D commercial. Look, they're actually playing D&D! And the characters are in a dungeon! Fighting a dragon!
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Comments
4e is a good game for swift-moving action reminiscent of video games and wuxia films. Since many of the mechanics really play into movement, combat in the game is very mobile and really relates to the terrain.
The game's mechanics for experience and monster types are really set up to put fire teams of PCs against fire teams of monsters. At-will powers and powers that are renewed every encounter mean that that player characters will probably not run out of cool stuff to do in a fight; I think this makes players feel more effective.
Widgets in the Dungeon Master's Guide make the creation of new creatures, and augmenting existing creatures to better challenge the players, incredibly easy and in-line with the Monster Manual's roster of critters.
Personally, I'm starting to see I don't like 4e as much as some other systems (like, say, Mutants and Masterminds), but for cinematic fantasy, it's a great system.
(Except the skill challenge system, but that's avoidable.)
Basically, it relies *too heavily* on the dice.
That said, I really like 4e's video-game/movie feel, but it definitely isn't low-fantasy, medieval, and grimy. That need is going to have to fit into another game, which I think is good really. The best comparison I can think of is; "Werewolf; the Apocalypse" and "Call of Cthulhu" are both technically horror games in which PCs discover a very lethal secret world filled with weird monsters, but the PCs and what they can do are very different.
(Since when were Gnomes gay and Tieflings Russian?)
D&D 4/e is quickly approaching SJ's Toon.
I guess I prefer the roleplaying aspect of RPGs over the roll-playing part. When a game system gets in the way of having fun (read: repeatedly rolling dice isn't fun for me), it's time to get rid of the game system.
D&D needs to get back to its roots of fantastic fantasy exercising the mind, not the wrist. Pandering to the rules rapists ("look at my level 1 econo-mage tiefling war-cleric! I get eleventy billion natural talent effects per day that are area effect and passive!") has just killed the game for all but the most mindless players.
All IMHO, of course.
What's really funny is that contrary to the 3.0 D&D Core books who did refer to 'previous editions of this game' the 4e core books don't seem to do it at all...
That should have transpired all over the ad campaigns.
Microsoft was smart enough to nab Red vs. Blue for the later Halo games.
-E
Priority 2: Gen Con.
Priority 3: Come back from Gen Con and sleep.
Priority 4: Do some gaming. :)
I'll be one of the GMs of the MegaDrow adventure.
I'll also DM 4 Pathfinder Society scenarios on Thursday and Friday.
Saturday I'll co-host a 2 hour GM-Fu panel on prepping and I'll be a panelist at a RPG Blogger thing.
Sunday... I'll probably be dead...
Anyhow, I think that 4E's main benefits are for DM's and designers - for players it's harder to accidentally screw your character design up (or "accidentally" not min/max as much as the next guy) and it can have a more easily changing and interesting battlefield. You also get to act more times with less delay between actions.
For DM's and designers, the math changes make it a piece of cake to scale and modify things, have a much better idea how much something will challenge folks, and avoid accidentally creating broken (easy or hard) encounters. I can setup 4E games and modify the difficulty of encounters on the fly at a skill level "out of the box" on par with my 8th year of 3e. I'm not sure how things will grow from there, but I see this as a particular boon for new DMs in particular.
I think the big things 4E sacrificed were some aspects of its sense of realism and a higher level of complexity. As a math and rules kind of guy, I expected the latter to bother me more, but I'm sure it'll bother me in 8 years when I'm ready for the next edition, or whatever.
I wasn't sure what the point of your comment was... regarding how you turned one guts THAC0 thing around on him. Unless it wasn't specifically in response to my (Justaguy) comment about the 3e hate at the time... but I tihnk it was. I'd in no way meant to imply that it couldn't be turned around, just hat it wasn't all fuzzy bunnies and kittens when 3e came down the pike. There was venom tossed around at the time. And, IIRC, wasn't one of the selling points "4E Doesn't have THAC0!"... i.e. "THAC0 sucks, do it our way!". I seem to remember that being on a shirt a friend got from that 3e launch seminar at gencon, which I admit I skipped cause at the time I didn't care about 3e. I mean, I agree THAC0 sucked, but that's just as condescending as anything I've seen from 4E... it's just that people who agree with the statement, or are making it, don't see it as anything other than "Yay us!".
Hmm. I'm not sure this has a point now that I look at it... ah well. *wanders off*
I think it was, too. :)
{I'd in no way meant to imply that it couldn't be turned around,}
I didn't think you were. :)
{just hat it wasn't all fuzzy bunnies and kittens when 3e came down the pike.}
Right. :)
{And, IIRC, wasn't one of the selling points "4E Doesn't have THAC0!"... i.e. "THAC0 sucks, do it our way!". I seem to remember that being on a shirt a friend got from that 3e launch seminar at gencon, which I admit I skipped cause at the time I didn't care about 3e.}
I still have that shirt and was trying to find a pic online so I could reference it. But yes, the t-shirt given out for free at the seminar that announced 3e had some compare-to-previous-edition stuff on it (obliquely ... it had a checkbox for whether or not it was in 3e, and THAC0 was checked "no," as was "rules you don't use anyway" and "multiclassing level limits"). So if you consider the back of a t-shirt a "selling point of 3e" then sure ... but even so, most of the stuff on that t-shirt were examples of things you could do with 3e that weren't in the core rules for 2e.
In other words, there's a real difference between:
* you can do all this extra stuff that you couldn't do before
and
* what you were doing has problems/didn't work/wasn't fun and now we've fixed it.
Ick.
Mike
However, what there is no getting around, is what they've done to the Realms. They did it for their own convenience, nothing more nothing less. If you've been following what's going on.. they're still making the same editing mistakes and contradicting their own canon... sea port cities miles from the coast line!
You make some very good points, as did ChattyDM. I suppose it's just natural that everyone's trying to compare the two systems. Wizards is trying with every ounce of their power to get people to switch over, so I imagine that's why they're trying so hard to make it look all shiny and new in comparison.
The games are so different in so many ways that they could even go as far as introducing it as a completely independent game. We fear change! They should realize that. Standalone, 4e is indeed shaping up to be a fine game. I think they're making big mistakes with all this comparison.
-Storyteller