The State of D&D: Present

[Akisa]

I miss playing 2nd edition. Now it's mostly; "You meet in a tavern and get hired to clear a cave of some goblins, you arrive in the cave and combat begins. the goblins are dead you get "X" amount of gold. Good game everyone. Anyone else wanna DM?"

Yeah that's still true for a lot of D&D games, regardless of editions.

 

[snow]

Outside of combat, the mechanics of skill challenges are, for lack of a better word, ass.
4e played without skill challenges, where interactions are mostly free-form with an occasional die roll, functions IMO better than accumulating points for success or failure (regardless of how well it's masked; the mechanic itself is retarded).

I can't help but agree with you there. I've read some of the snippets on how to include skill challenges in roleplay, something with an example where a party had to convince a duke or king or something via diplomacy checks... I'm a DM for 4e and my party and I are usually a group of freeform roleplayers ((IE, no rules or dice what so ever))that ended up trying out d&d. So I found it troublesome to include a skill challenge in an rp situation when the player characters ended up saying something that I found the NPC in question would respond well or poorly against.

I guess my group has a different outlook over the system as a whole. We tend to rp without any sort of system or stats so it's harder for us to picture the common complaint of "4e minimizes rp" that people tend to make. My biggest worry about the system when it came to the group was the fear that including dice to a group of freeform rpers would end up ruining the experience for them, but now they're level 6, and are eagerly waiting the next chapter I have in store for them whenever I get around to writing it. D:

 

[Alex_P]

The quote paints R.A. Salvatore as a guy with a distinct lack of imagination (supposedly D&D4's target audience, if you accept the sketchy paraphrase of Mearls in the "Future" article).

He doesn't get tieflings? They've been around -- and popular -- in D&D for over 15 years, through several editions and, by my count, at least four major D&D-based video games. Where has he been all this time?

He's terribly confused by the renaming of one elf flavor to "eladrin" to allow a further embellishment of the preexisting magic-elf/forest-elf split? (Shall we go back to "hobbits" and "magic-users", then?)

Dude could at least have the decency to get it right and ***** about dragonborn. :/

-- Alex

 

[toapat]

He's terribly confused by the renaming of one elf flavor to "eladrin" to allow a further embellishment of the preexisting magic-elf/forest-elf split? (Shall we go back to "hobbits" and "magic-users", then?)

Eladrin are celestials from 2nd-3.5 eds, the quote from salvatore is about how this pair of races from some old material he was given, which were very different back then, are now the same race? you have to take a doubltake there.

 

[Sabrestar]

To be qucite fucking honest, apart from the starting spark, D&D has by now made more influence towards the "bad" side, the one emphasising on stats and combat, than on the good side, the one focusing on story, on characters, and on non-combat, non-dice interaction.

No need for the shield, I honestly think you're absolutely right. D&D has always been more combat-centric. Excellent GMs (and I had a couple in college) made some great stories come out of it, but it's still heavy on the fighting. Combat was always my least favourite part of any game, perhaps because my characters tended to be streetwise/intellectual types with Strength as their dump stat. But that's what I wanted to play, and what I had the most fun playing.

I rarely played any D&D system. What I did play was lots of old WoD, a few D&D3 one-offs, and a wide swath of other d20-based (and hence OGL) games. There was lots of character interaction in the WoD games we played, especially during LARP sessions (quit your snickering! We had a lot of acting majors in our group and it made the sessions excellent). Best of all that I can remember, was actually none of these, but a LotR campaign using a system I didn't recognise and never really understood - because I didn't need to. We slouched comfortably in sofas in the GM's living room, hardly ever rolling dice except on the few occasions when she told us to, and storytelling a wonderful adventure (and oh, how I loved playing that silly hobbit...)

I haven't touched D&D4, and I don't plan to. Not because of anything in the rules because I don't know the rules. What I do know is that many of my most fun experiences came from games (like Mutants and Masterminds) that wouldn't have existed without the OGL. It may have its warts, but I'll stick with that. I want to tell stories, and I'll go with whatever system lets me do that best at any given moment. If it's D&D, fine. If it's d20 Modern, fine. M&M, sure. Free-form madness? Great. As long as enough outlets exist that everyone can find something they want to play, I don't think it really matters what happens to D&D.