The State of D&D: Present
- Thread starter Greg Tito
- Start date
Speaking of Old School Renaissance, here's a great article by James Maliszewski in 2009 (at The Escapist of course) on A History of the Old School Revival [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/days-of-high-adventure/6412-Full-Circle-A-History-of-the-Old-School-Revival] with a lot of great links to related sites. The whole Days of High Adventure series is a good read for all classic and new pen-and-paper and tabletop fans alike.
Another special mention: Retro Clones [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/days-of-high-adventure/6415-Retro-clones]
Another special mention: Retro Clones [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/days-of-high-adventure/6415-Retro-clones]
Personally, I could have forgiven the majority of the rules changes brought about in 4E(though I never really got into miniatures play). But I think that R.A. Salvatore touched on what bothered me most about the new edition. The new WotC had no respect for what came before. They weren't building upon a legacy; nor were they mending long neglected flaws. They were just changing things. While specific changes to the crunch can be argued for or rationalized, the jarring, often nonsensical alterations of some of the game worlds(specifically, the Forgotten Realms) reminded me of a television exec making disastrous changes to an existing show he just inherited either to make his mark or to intentionally make it crash and burn so that he could start a new project.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't sit down with a group to play the game if offered, but that group would have to get me up to speed, because I'm not spending any money on the D&D 4E(aside from the original core books I bought at launch). I've got Castles & Crusades and FATE for now. I might get around to trying Pathfinder one of these days.
Anyway, my own personal feelings aside, this article series is coming along quite nicely. A fair treatment overall. Oh, and since you're doing this anyway, how about making this a regular thing. Not D&D specifically, but just overall coverage of the PnP world. If they all got treated like this series, it would be a great thing to read.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't sit down with a group to play the game if offered, but that group would have to get me up to speed, because I'm not spending any money on the D&D 4E(aside from the original core books I bought at launch). I've got Castles & Crusades and FATE for now. I might get around to trying Pathfinder one of these days.
Anyway, my own personal feelings aside, this article series is coming along quite nicely. A fair treatment overall. Oh, and since you're doing this anyway, how about making this a regular thing. Not D&D specifically, but just overall coverage of the PnP world. If they all got treated like this series, it would be a great thing to read.
Such an odd thing, pleasing D&D fans -- thinking about from another's perspective, I can understand why getting feedback out of me would be a *****, too. My principle complaint about 3rd edition is that any realistic problem can be solved by a wizard. My principle complaint about 4th is that it's a crackerjack combat system and NOTHING ELSE. I actually rejoiced when they started printing the race books -- actual setting! And so cheap to own!
I see it in many games -- pleasing Legend of the Five Rings fans is a *****, too, because half of them are anime fans who love Naruto and Bleach, and half of them are of the '70's action flick pedigree and want stuff like Yojimbo and the Seven Samurai.
How does one strike the balance?
I see it in many games -- pleasing Legend of the Five Rings fans is a *****, too, because half of them are anime fans who love Naruto and Bleach, and half of them are of the '70's action flick pedigree and want stuff like Yojimbo and the Seven Samurai.
How does one strike the balance?
I think this article really summed it up and gave great insight by quoting a lot of folks in the business. I think the Old School Renaissance should be embraced by curious tabletop gamers and just experience all of them to see where the logic was going. 3rd edition definitely had the issue of "wizard spells trump skills" and generally got crazy with all the feats, and 4th edition is an extremely competent combat system that doesn't differ in feel as you progress in level or play as different classes. Knowing the history and flavor of the editions would be fun for customizing the feel of a game by picking the best edition for the job.
One of my friends had a group that went from 3 to 3.5 to 4 and hastily to Pathfinder. He said that if he wanted grid-based combat that demanded use of figures he had Descent: Journeys in the Dark for that, which he felt did it better. He doesn't see much point in combining roleplaying stuff and boardgaming stuff into a single product inferior to his favorites of each genre.
I was a fan of 4th edition until I realized that my group wasn't actually roleplaying anymore; we were instead playing a miniatures game. After they, we went back to Mutants and Masterminds (and DC adventures) and Pathfinder, both games strike a good balance of combat and roleplaying.
I enjoyed 4e a lot while we played it, and it is true that the game system is very 'game-y' and doesn't encourage roleplaying all that much. That being said, neither does 3.5. D&D has always been the system we played when we wanted to throw dices and abuse game mechanics... all 4e did for us was make the system much more balanced and added the combat grid - which as wargamers, we enjoyed.
If I want to play a roleplaying game however, there are much better system than D&D - no matter what the edition - out there. But if I have to go back to D&D, let it be 4e.
I'm a bit disappointed that this article doesn't have more solid numbers (I understand it's not the writer's fault, but I would still have loved to see some sales number)... I always believed that 4e was a good selling system, but that's all anecdotal evidences.
If I want to play a roleplaying game however, there are much better system than D&D - no matter what the edition - out there. But if I have to go back to D&D, let it be 4e.
I'm a bit disappointed that this article doesn't have more solid numbers (I understand it's not the writer's fault, but I would still have loved to see some sales number)... I always believed that 4e was a good selling system, but that's all anecdotal evidences.
I guess I just don't understand why 4E is so "bad for roleplay". I've played 3.5, 4, and Neverwinter Nights multiplayer(which is 3.5-based but performs in a radically different fashion), and all of those games only provide as good of roleplay as the DM/s can provide. There is absolutely nothing about 4E, including the grid, that actually restricts RP when compared to 3.5. I have never experienced the feeling some people in this thread have mentioned; that 4E makes you feel like you're just playing a board game as opposed to a roleplaying game. But I guess I'm not surprised. People have been hating on 4E since before it was released, as the article points out--an incredibly biased, negative article, at that. One way or another, D&D and tabletop gaming at large will survive.
Called it.
Predictably one sided, focusing quotes from detractors and rivals, and a guy who got fired. I'm sure it will be great chum for the 4e hate brigade, but you should have declared your clear bias instead of pretending to be an observer.
And yeah, anybody who thinks that 4e detracts from roleplaying clearly isn't very good at it.
Predictably one sided, focusing quotes from detractors and rivals, and a guy who got fired. I'm sure it will be great chum for the 4e hate brigade, but you should have declared your clear bias instead of pretending to be an observer.
And yeah, anybody who thinks that 4e detracts from roleplaying clearly isn't very good at it.
I don't know much about 4E or 3.5 D&D, all I know is my brother and I got that Starter Box and had no clue what to do with the game after we went through the included adventure...
What bugs me about this article is that Wizards honestly seems to believe that their target audience is MMO players. I'm a tabletop gamer who grew up during that renaissance that the D20 system sparked off, and I can honestly say that while there is some overlap between MMO gamers and tabletop gamers, it's very much not a 1:1 ratio. Tabletop gaming takes a different mindset than videogaming does, and frankly, the kind of people that enjoy D&D are more likely to be hardcore strategy gamers than hardcore MMO players, if they play videogames at all[footnote]For that matter, they're more likely to play historical FPS games than MMOs. Maybe it's just my local tabletop community, but in my experience they tend to be more into games that have something to do with military history than games that are made by Blizzard.[/footnote]. It's no wonder the old audience got angry when 4E came out; it was aimed at a completely different demographic.
Ak, okay then, not just my imagination. I was bothered by the over-emphasis on the importance of the OSR movement relative to WotC, Paizo and other professional business models. There are no companies or publishers...no monolithic entities at all....publishing OSR content, just a handful of guys (myself included) who are in turn supported by the dollars and interest of a few hundred other internet people who like what the OSR offers. I'm pretty sure that any given 4E or Pathfinder book deals with sales figures in the thousands or tens of thousands; I'm 100% sure that all but the most noteworthy OSR books like Swords & Wizardry Complete and Labyrinth Lord are looking at numbers in the low 100's (and that the aforementioned S&W and LL may fall in somewhere around a few thousand copies sold to date, just my speculation based on what I can gather from both Frog God Games and Goblinoid Games' sites). I at least partially base this on other known sales figures, including those of my own OSR books.*happyelf said:
Don't get me wrong: I think that the OSR movement is important, but I don't think it is more than fractionally as relevant as it seems; its just one shard of the much bigger issue which is the fragmented base caused by the 4E/Pathfinder split.
Put another way, if you had ten gamers in a room, 5 of them will like D&D 4E and 5 of them will like Pathfinder or 3.5, while a missing eleventh guy is off on the internet posting about how much modern games suck while buying OSR stuff. Then there's all the other gamers out there playing Runequest, FATE, Burning Wheel and not caring about all this D&D flak.
*One huge plus of OSR sales for online PDFs: OSR people buy their books, they don't pirate them.
Well, I can roleplay even in chess. The problem is, rules of chess don't provide mechanisms for roleplaying.happyelf said:
And no, I don't hate 4E for that. It's a a solid tactical combat game, and it's great at what it does.
And now that WotC has sacked the guy behind Tome of Battle, Red hand of doom, complete arcane and other great 3.5 books (and now that Monte Cook is apparently in control of the new edition) I fear that they will never produce a good game again.
I hope Richard Baker gets picked up by Paizo. Can you imagine a Tome of battle like book in pathfinder? That would be a dream come true.
I hope Richard Baker gets picked up by Paizo. Can you imagine a Tome of battle like book in pathfinder? That would be a dream come true.
I definitely think that 4e can be fun, but it just feels less serious to me that 3.5 or Pathfinder. I think my main problem is that the daily/encounter power system in 4e, while certainly balanced, seems a little unrealistic (in a game with elves and dragons, yes, I know) in the sense that the uses of the "encounter" powers is essentially unlimited. whereas in 3.5/Pathfinder, pretty much all class abilities and spells tend to be daily allotments (except in the Tome of Battle, but let's not go there). This gives the player the freedom to meter out their powerful attacks from fight to fight, or save them up and just go nuts in one of the fights, or somewhere in between. For example, as a wizard, you could use your magic very conservatively, instead using a ranged weapon for much of the fights and probably being one of the least useful members of the party, but when you get to the last room of the dungeon and start dropping fireballs and cone of colds every round I know I, personally, get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction from my foresight and general damage-spewing awesomeness.
All that being said, any game with a good DM and good players can be fun, and if people like playing 4e more that other versions, I'm definitely not going to discourage them from taking up D&D. As someone who is in the process of teaching 3.5e to three new players with no PnP RPG experience, I can certainly see the value of a system that's faster to pick up and get playing.
All that being said, any game with a good DM and good players can be fun, and if people like playing 4e more that other versions, I'm definitely not going to discourage them from taking up D&D. As someone who is in the process of teaching 3.5e to three new players with no PnP RPG experience, I can certainly see the value of a system that's faster to pick up and get playing.
D&D will never again be a homogenous whole and every time they release a new edition the D&D community gets a little more fractured. Nobody is at fault. If you give people greater choice it stands to reason that people will have different preferences when it comes to that widened selection of choice. The shortest route for WoTC to rebuild goodwill with the D&D community would be offer their complete back catalogue of printed products all the way from 1st to 4th via a print on demand service. The advent of .PDFs has for a large part made the forced obsolescence marketing strategy itself obsolete. At this point they're only robbing themselves the chance to sell a glossy rulebook to guy who is willing to print them out himself on office paper.
Guess we read a different article. Seems balanced to me, including as it does the design talent behind 4E, major 3PPs like Paizo and Green Ronin as well as the hobbyist OSR. As for "fired" WotC employees, that does seem to account for most of the major players if you keep track of these things. Those who are still at WotC generally don't talk about things. Was he just supposed to sing the praises of 4E? Whatever your choice in games / editions it's obvious that 4E did not make everyone happy by a long shot. No new edition ever has, but 4E left a wider swath of annoyed gamers than any previous release. And, as Tito points out, they had alternatives thanks to the OGL. I'm curious to see the next part myself, presumably the future of D&D...happyelf said:
I never thought I'd see the day when "more freedom to create and do whatever you want" was a bad thing.GrayJester said:
I remember that was actually one of my main complaints back in my early teens reading 3.5 rulebooks. It tried to stifle my creativity at times with rules and ick. No, I don't actually have examples, I just remember a feeling, and that's why it was so difficult for me to ever get into it.
4th Edition really opened the door to me.
But maybe that's just because I used to play with other DMs, and they'd call me out on any rule tweaks. Oh, well.