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Quinn2win
Nov 9, 2011

Foolish child of man...
After reading all this,
do you still not understand?

quote:


I think it says something that the only role played by the Fighter in this ad is suggesting spells for the Magic User to cast.

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ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette
I've only been on Twitter for a month or two. Good for getting info from the horses' mouths, plenty of updates and explanations from Mearls and other Next designers. I've even seen Mearls make on the spot rules for Next - for OSR people.

While it's been a great source of info on Next (and everything else), the general sentiment seems between neutral to positive. It's mostly lacking in the many, many valid criticisms you see around here -that thing about the xp chart is great. Basically I'm saying goons should get on Twitter. Wotc doesn't read most forums but they do see tweets.

Mikan
Sep 5, 2007

by Radium

Twitter is a great place to talk about Next if you want to get yelled at, blocked, or reported for making jokes or being even slightly critical. I still have people mad at me for being negative about Next after the all day playtest thing. The #dndnext hashtag is even more of an echo chamber than G+.

Here's an article about Gith because after endless revisions of D&D we're still supposed to see this as fresh and exciting. The poll options are particularly skewed in this one.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Mikan posted:

Here's an article about Gith because after endless revisions of D&D we're still supposed to see this as fresh and exciting. The poll options are particularly skewed in this one.

Even after all these years, I just don't get the deal with Gith. They've always been the iconic 'too generic to get any use out of, but keep coming back anyway' D&D race for me.

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

ProfessorProf posted:

I think it says something that the only role played by the Fighter in this ad is suggesting spells for the Magic User to cast.

Well, part of that was that TSR didn't want to give the impression that the game was overly violent. This *was* the 80s, comic books were still for kids, and the D&D "satanic panic" was in full swing. I vaguely recall from a Bill Willingham interview there was some controversy over even showing the fighter with his sword drawn -- actually hitting something with it would have been right out.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

OtspIII posted:

Even after all these years, I just don't get the deal with Gith. They've always been the iconic 'too generic to get any use out of, but keep coming back anyway' D&D race for me.

Actually, back in the 3.5e era, their Design & Development articles covered this in their two-part Monsters with Traction discussion, where "traction" refers to the staying power of a concept. Monsters, races and classes without traction are difficult to reference, because they're so completely generic that you can't remember them, even while you can remember the incredibly cool options and the incredibly goofy ones.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

ProfessorProf posted:

I think it says something that the only role played by the Fighter in this ad is suggesting spells for the Magic User to cast.
I suspect they didn't want to show the fighter actually hacking anything. Exhibit A:



Give a fighter a magic sword and he's just too swole for dragons to even bother putting up a fight.

Now that I think of it, fighting dragons in Basic (and maybe AD&D, I'm really not sure) often didn't go how you'd expect once you reached high level. The dragon's breath attack was based on its current hit points, so it got its opening salvo and then your awesome fighter could cut it down to size, especially with the BECMI combat rules. Fighter vs. Dragon could be very much like in Chainmail, with the dragon incinerating multiple lesser targets until a super-fighter outright whalloped its rear end. I can't really speak with authority; I only played in two low-level Basic campaigns.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Halloween Jack posted:

Now that I think of it, fighting dragons in Basic (and maybe AD&D, I'm really not sure) often didn't go how you'd expect once you reached high level. The dragon's breath attack was based on its current hit points, so it got its opening salvo and then your awesome fighter could cut it down to size, especially with the BECMI combat rules. Fighter vs. Dragon could be very much like in Chainmail, with the dragon incinerating multiple lesser targets until a super-fighter outright whalloped its rear end. I can't really speak with authority; I only played in two low-level Basic campaigns.

BECMI Dragons are hilariously rocket-taggy. An average red dragon has 45hp, so if he wins initiative he can potentially hit the whole party for 45 damage/22 if you save. In my B/X game my level 7 cleric has 23hp (CON penalty) and our level 7 magic user has I think 24hp (CON bonus), so if either of us fail our save (or if the dragon rolls well on hit points) we just outright die. If the party wins initiative they need to just go crazy on the dragon in hopes of getting its HP low enough that the breath weapon isn't even worth it any more.

I actually like this system a lot. It makes it so that even lowish level characters can take on a dragon, but you NEED some way to make sure that you can all get a surprise round or something off on it. Charging a dragon head-on is a coin-flip to see if you get a TPK or not, so dragons become weird organic pre-fight puzzles. I don't like that Next is a game of rocket tag with each and every monster, but I do think that one big iconic tag-rocket is a good thing for a game.

Incidentally, when you see people complain that a dragon in 4e can't even kill a first level fighter in one hit with a breath weapon, this is what they're talking about. Dragons just play a very different role mechanically.

Wales Grey
Jun 20, 2012

ProfessorProf posted:

I think it says something that the only role played by the Fighter in this ad is suggesting spells for the Magic User to cast.

This may actually be the first appearance of the Warlord! See how swiftly the party reacts to danger? How the Grimslade takes action immediately after the Warlord yells at the him to "DO THE MAGIC NOW WIZARD"?

Judas Iscaredycat
Mar 14, 2013

OtspIII posted:

Even after all these years, I just don't get the deal with Gith. They've always been the iconic 'too generic to get any use out of, but keep coming back anyway' D&D race for me.

I never liked that the Gith backstory turned the Illithids from a mysterious otherwordly threat to existence to a bunch of former tyrants all hiding and worrying about getting wiped out by yet another couple of the same "warrior cultures" you see almost ad nauseam in fantasy.

It doesn't help that the Githyanki's silver swords interacted with that whole "astral projecting vs. actually being there" nonsense, making it even more convoluted. There was, of course, no 'silver swords are stupid' option in the poll.

ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette

Mikan posted:

Twitter is a great place to talk about Next if you want to get yelled at, blocked, or reported for making jokes or being even slightly critical. I still have people mad at me for being negative about Next after the all day playtest thing.

That's what you get for crushing the hope and anticipation of D&D fans everywhere with the harsh reality of 36d20 rats. ;)

Which they did eventually fix with swarm rules that simplify combat and follow their design goals of quick combat. Haha not really. The same fight today is just 16d20. No swarm rules.

Twitter itself doesn't seem too defensive now, even with major flareups like the warlord thing it seems like people have settled in.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy
So I realize that 16d20 instead of 18d20 was just a simple math mistake, but I really wanna believe now that two of the eighteen rats were like "y'know what, gently caress it. We've got better places to be than D&D Next".

ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette

Jonny Angel posted:

So I realize that 16d20 instead of 18d20 was just a simple math mistake, but I really wanna believe now that two of the eighteen rats were like "y'know what, gently caress it. We've got better places to be than D&D Next".

That is literally what happened. They took out 2 rats. Actually 3 - it went from 18 to 15, but I included the dire rat.

Brother Entropy
Dec 27, 2009

OtspIII posted:

Even after all these years, I just don't get the deal with Gith. They've always been the iconic 'too generic to get any use out of, but keep coming back anyway' D&D race for me.

I've always been fond of the Gith because they're one of the few B-list D&D races that's actually somewhat unique to D&D and usually help introduce stuff(martial arts, psionics, space pirates, the Elemental Chaos) that keeps things a little varied and not so much a straight LOTR-like. They do tend to be a little too dry and mysterious as far as individual githzerai personalities go, though.

(that said I still couldn't read that entire article because I didn't see anything in there I hadn't already seen before)

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

ritorix posted:

I've only been on Twitter for a month or two. Good for getting info from the horses' mouths, plenty of updates and explanations from Mearls and other Next designers. I've even seen Mearls make on the spot rules for Next - for OSR people.

While it's been a great source of info on Next (and everything else), the general sentiment seems between neutral to positive. It's mostly lacking in the many, many valid criticisms you see around here -that thing about the xp chart is great. Basically I'm saying goons should get on Twitter. Wotc doesn't read most forums but they do see tweets.

The general problem is that a lot of people just don't care enough about Next to do that. I mean yeah, we have our 5e bitch thread and RPG.net has threads for whenever new articles come out, but people who dislike Next for the most part just find it bad in a bland and boring way. I haven't seen a whole lot of super inflamed 4e fans taking the approach 3e fans did. For the most part people seem content to rail against it in their own forums then go back to shrugging and ignoring it otherwise. Meanwhile a lot of the 5e fans have been super, super fans about it, and are more or less drowning out any sort of criticism, or forums like ENWorld are staunchly uneven with moderation to push out 4e fans who are critical of it (while keeping any 3e or OSR fans who are), which just causes more apathy.

And of course you have the note that 4e fans have been rather vocal about what they want, and so far they've been mostly utterly ignored, had a few verbal bones that never materialized into material at best, or, in the case of warlords, were outright told to get out.

Personally speaking I stopped bothering on Twitter when the Warlord stuff went down. That was essentially my point where my apathy towards 5e grew to the degree where following or commenting on Twitter wasn't worth my time. I have fun games to play.

ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette
The worst part is we have, what, another year or two of this until it goes to print and inevitably does terrible. We see it coming a long way off but nothing will convince the designers otherwise. Next is the Windows 8 of RPGs.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Jim Sterling, who I guess is a fat, British dude who talks about video games, wrote an article recently about how the best thing video game companies who do poo poo like always-online SimCity that doesn't work or [INSERT lovely THING VIDEO GAME COMPANY DID HERE] can do is to simply stay silent and ignore their critics/news sites and eventually people will just stop caring and they can move onto the next thing. And he's pretty much right, all a company has to do is stay mum about stuff and eventually the fanbase/community will start telling people upset by it "shut up and get over it already, Jesus" and that'll be that. Just dodge the issue long enough and you never have to deal with anything you don't want to.

So I imagine trying to be really vocal and in-WotC's-face about stuff like this would have roughly the same effect. Mearls reads the RPGnet threads on Next, that's not just supposition, we know that for certain. He's aware of the criticism being leveled at it over there, which means he has every opportunity to address it either directly or indirectly. But I imagine he'd rather just let it burn itself out than go to the hassle, and by and large it seems to be working.

goldjas
Feb 22, 2009

I HATE ALL FORMS OF FUN AND ENTERTAINMENT. I HATE BEAUTY. I AM GOLDJAS.

Kai Tave posted:

Jim Sterling, who I guess is a fat, British dude who talks about video games, wrote an article recently about how the best thing video game companies who do poo poo like always-online SimCity that doesn't work or [INSERT lovely THING VIDEO GAME COMPANY DID HERE] can do is to simply stay silent and ignore their critics/news sites and eventually people will just stop caring and they can move onto the next thing. And he's pretty much right, all a company has to do is stay mum about stuff and eventually the fanbase/community will start telling people upset by it "shut up and get over it already, Jesus" and that'll be that. Just dodge the issue long enough and you never have to deal with anything you don't want to.

So I imagine trying to be really vocal and in-WotC's-face about stuff like this would have roughly the same effect. Mearls reads the RPGnet threads on Next, that's not just supposition, we know that for certain. He's aware of the criticism being leveled at it over there, which means he has every opportunity to address it either directly or indirectly. But I imagine he'd rather just let it burn itself out than go to the hassle, and by and large it seems to be working.

The problem about this is it causes people like me to just not buy their games. Next will probably sell at least somewhat on brand name, but I do legit want them to get their act together and make a decent game. Interestingly enough there's been a lot of talk about monster design recently, my favorite thing about 4th edition, and my least favorite thing about the 5th edition playtests (I'll take good monster design any day if it means I have to deal with vancian casting again).

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

goldjas posted:

The problem about this is it causes people like me to just not buy their games.

EA just put out a game that legitimately did not, maybe still doesn't work (I'm not keeping up with the SimCity debacle, maybe they got their poo poo straightened out). Like, you pay them $50/$60 and get a product that doesn't work, not "is missing some features," not "has a lovely ending," but "you just wasted your money" doesn't work. They then proceeded to respond to the outcry this generated with copious amounts of spin, lies, and bullshit, and now they've moved on to "keep quiet and wait until it all blows over."

People are still going to buy EA games though. This isn't going to put them out of business. Whatever metrics are in play at EA, they've decided that the money they're making is worth more than the effort it would take to properly address things like selling games that are crippled on launch.

And I'm guessing that the same thought processes are in play at WotC right now; they don't care if 4E fans buy in or not because they're banking on returning lapsed AD&D/3.X customers plus a percentage of 4E fans who'll buy in anyway and counting on that to outweigh any fragmentation in their customer base this edition change causes. Whether that's an accurate assessment or not is going to have to wait until the game actually drops, but they might be right.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Kai Tave posted:

EA just put out a game that legitimately did not, maybe still doesn't work (I'm not keeping up with the SimCity debacle, maybe they got their poo poo straightened out). Like, you pay them $50/$60 and get a product that doesn't work, not "is missing some features," not "has a lovely ending," but "you just wasted your money" doesn't work. They then proceeded to respond to the outcry this generated with copious amounts of spin, lies, and bullshit, and now they've moved on to "keep quiet and wait until it all blows over."

People are still going to buy EA games though. This isn't going to put them out of business. Whatever metrics are in play at EA, they've decided that the money they're making is worth more than the effort it would take to properly address things like selling games that are crippled on launch.

And I'm guessing that the same thought processes are in play at WotC right now; they don't care if 4E fans buy in or not because they're banking on returning lapsed AD&D/3.X customers plus a percentage of 4E fans who'll buy in anyway and counting on that to outweigh any fragmentation in their customer base this edition change causes. Whether that's an accurate assessment or not is going to have to wait until the game actually drops, but they might be right.
I think your EA comparison is pretty apt right up until the part about WotC "banking" on lapsed customers.

EA can afford to do a lovely job on a legacy brand game and not give a gently caress because they have a bunch of other successful properties, most notably their sports licenses. WotC can afford to do a lovely job on their legacy brand game because they have Magic.

SimCity's failure wasn't a big deal for EA, but what did it mean for the people who worked on it and for the future of the franchise?

I don't think anyone at WotC who has a good grasp of the situation thinks Next is well-positioned right now. More likely they're saying "gently caress the core game as long as the novels and board games still sell."

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I think somebody at WotC's D&D department is thinking that Next is going to be some big draw to lapsed AD&D/3.X players who've since stopped playing or moved on to clones. That somebody might not even be Mearls, I honestly have no idea how much cynicism is in play on his end. I'm not going to try and play Nate Silver by going "but they're wrong, Next is going to fail horribly" because who even loving knows? But what I know for certain is that WotC doesn't care about and isn't going to be moved by 4E fans (or B/X fans, or fans of AD&D/3.X who look at Next and don't see what they want out of a new edition) saying "well I'm not going to buy this." Whatever the circumstances of the decision were, they've decided that's an outcome they're fine with.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Oh, I'm sure there's somebody in a basement at Virgin who thinks they should make another Dune RTS, but he's an inmate, not placed in charge of his own asylum.

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


By all appearances Next is being developed by the same dumb change-hating grog fans they're trying to re-court (and have long since been lost to Pathfinder, since the "we're the real D&D wink wink" thing has been a major part of PF's promotion). The mere fact that they're working in the industry doesn't give them protection against holding regressive opinions. The only reason they're getting away with it is because... yeah, WotC doesn't really care. D&D-the-game is a tiny blip on their budget at best, and the only time we'll see actual competent people willing to advance the brand is in three or four years when Next comes out, flops, and someone at WotC or Hasbro notices and tries to salvage it. Or kills it. Doesn't really matter sadly, since the brand's mostly worth it for the marketing and licensing.

I mean I don't really want to malign developers I haven't met, but what we've seen so far is just... bad game design? Objectively bad. I mean you can't really argue that it's not actively regressive when Next's big push is "back to the old ways!" :psyduck:

goldjas
Feb 22, 2009

I HATE ALL FORMS OF FUN AND ENTERTAINMENT. I HATE BEAUTY. I AM GOLDJAS.
I don't know if I'd call it objectively bad so much as just objectively worse then something already out there. 4e for instance(monster design, class balance, 7 defenses 6 of which you roll yourself and 1 of which is rolled against instead of 4 defenses that are all just rolled against, etc.). Then when it tries to do things that you can't really compare to 4e (Theatre of Mind battle system, skill system ) it does it objectively worse then some other games though (Dungeon World, 13th Age respectively).

It just feels like it's trying to be 2nd (if even that) best at a bunch of stuff and I don't really understand why.

Then there are things that I just straight up don't like in any system like gritty low level combat (I prefer higher levels to be when the game gets hard and for lower levels to be easier), or vancian casting(I have never once seen it balanced correctly in any game system ever) but I do realize that that's just personal taste and not a thing I should really hold against the game, but I will.

ImpactVector
Feb 24, 2007

HAHAHAHA FOOLS!!
I AM SO SMART!

Uh oh. What did he do now?

Nap Ghost

goldjas posted:

I don't know if I'd call it objectively bad so much as just objectively worse then something already out there.
Not to jump on you but those XP tables were pretty objectively bad. And while I haven't looked at a packet in a long rear end time (:effort:), what I'm gathering 2nd hand is that a lot of the underlying math is in a similar state.

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE
So it turns out that giving Elves blanket immunity to Charm and Sleep effects is pretty strong.

I'm guessing nobody thought about what happens when you use enemies that rely on a Charm effect against an all-Elf team that includes a Wizard who knows Sleep. :shepface:

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



goldjas posted:

I don't know if I'd call it objectively bad so much as just objectively worse then something already out there.

Despite "worse than similar things" being a pretty good definition of "bad", there are some really bad parts in Next.

Bad like "this doesn't do what it's supposed to" levels of bad as well as less-bad bad stuff like "when you look at the xp tables they make no sense whatsoever, but I guess you gain xp and go up a level so they're at least functioning".

There's also a lot of stuff where I just plain can't figure out what's going on, but I don't know if that counts as bad, exactly. It might, or I might have missed something important. The XP awards for monsters are still all over the place, for example.

Vire
Nov 4, 2005

Like a Bosh
I can tell you at least for myself I have become completely apathetic about DnD for the first time in my life since I started playing pen and paper games. I am not sure how many people feel the same way and I doubt we will ever know because wizards never releases their sales figures. All I can do at this point is to not buy any DnD products from here on out, since as others have pointed out its not worth trying to improve the game by giving criticism when everyone else uses bad faith arguments and the people in charge are even less reasonable then the angry nerds who defend it.

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

Rexides posted:

D&D is about people who go through various levels of power throughout their career. The problem is that after a certain level, there is a camp who insists that only magic can keep powering up and not-magic should just keep headlocking ogres forever.

If a wizard can wiz a dragon then a brawler should be able to brawl it just as well.

You're not characterizing the argument entirely fairly. While I don't doubt there's 3e CharOp Grognards who don't like the idea that a late game non-caster can be viable without relying on a spiked chain and a prestige class that was removed from the game, the OSR people (who Next was initially trying to pander to) don't like 4e because even at the Heroic tier everyone plays like a 1e High-Level adventurer, from HP totals to damage/round. These people had the same problem with 3e, which is why the OSR started in the first place. If what you're going for is pulp fantasy, having Rangers machine-gun shooting Orcs and Fighters suplexing dragons isn't what you're going to use or like.

Initially I was excited for NEXT because it sounded like they were going back a bit to more basic D&D while keeping a few of the 3e conventions and simplifying the rules, but looking at the latest packet, it's Fisher Price 3.5, and the complexity they removed was in all the wrong areas. The game's too bloated to appeal to the OSR people, it's not complicated enough for the Pathfinder people, and it's not fun enough for the 4e people. It's a roleplaying game made by accountants.

D&D next is a game without an audience. People who want to play classical, low-power D&D have OSIRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry and other games available to them. People who want to play high-power games with incredibly dense rules have Pathfinder. (Or just 3rd ed. There's certainly enough content to last an eternity there) People who want to play the board-gamey epic fantasy games that 4e allows have the existing fourth edition stuff. (though, judging by Wizards' hurried exit from that game, probably mostly in the form of illicit PDF scans) There is not a lot of cross-over here - there's three flavors of D&D that people like and they are all being catered to. So who is D&D next for?

If there's one thing we can hope for, maybe Wizards will dump the license on the market for cheap after Next turns out to be a massive financial failure.

Mirthless fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Apr 25, 2013

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



ImpactVector posted:

Not to jump on you but those XP tables were pretty objectively bad.

I'm not in a place where I can check this right now, but weren't those XP tables a straight cut and paste from a previous edition?

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Vire posted:

I can tell you at least for myself I have become completely apathetic about DnD for the first time in my life since I started playing pen and paper games. I am not sure how many people feel the same way and I doubt we will ever know because wizards never releases their sales figures. All I can do at this point is to not buy any DnD products from here on out, since as others have pointed out its not worth trying to improve the game by giving criticism when everyone else uses bad faith arguments and the people in charge are even less reasonable then the angry nerds who defend it.

I'm with you on this. I was real excited back at the start, myself, but following this thread is pretty much the only D&D Next-watching I do at this point. I even would have been okay with (well, a little disappointed with, but ultimately accepting of) a game that more or less ignored 4e and was just them fixing all the fundamentally broken poo poo that was wrong with 3e, but it looks like they're actively resisting even doing that. All I want is a 3e with an actually-streamlined core, no way to play with people's save-numbers, and competitive fighters. :(

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Mirthless posted:

You're not characterizing the argument entirely fairly. While I don't doubt there's 3e CharOp Grognards who don't like the idea that a late game non-caster can be viable without relying on a spiked chain and a prestige class that was removed from the game, the OSR people (who Next was initially trying to pander to) don't like 4e because even at the Heroic tier everyone plays like a 1e High-Level adventurer, from HP totals to damage/round. These people had the same problem with 3e, which is why the OSR started in the first place. If what you're going for is pulp fantasy, having Rangers machine-gun shooting Orcs and Fighters suplexing dragons isn't what you're going to use or like.

You're not characterizing 4E entirely fairly. 1st level 4E characters don't play like high level AD&D characters, do not have their hit point totals and don't pump out huge damage/round. You're not machine gunning orcs in 4E, definitely not like you did in AD&D with a decently optimized archer fighter, and suplexing dragons is pretty drat pulp considering the times Conan tackled a giant or strangled a monstrous snake.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

OtspIII posted:

I'm with you on this. I was real excited back at the start, myself, but following this thread is pretty much the only D&D Next-watching I do at this point. I even would have been okay with (well, a little disappointed with, but ultimately accepting of) a game that more or less ignored 4e and was just them fixing all the fundamentally broken poo poo that was wrong with 3e, but it looks like they're actively resisting even doing that. All I want is a 3e with an actually-streamlined core, no way to play with people's save-numbers, and competitive fighters. :(

FantasyCraft is probably the closest you're going to get to an actually fixed 3E (well maybe Trailblazer but I have less experience with that) but streamlined it is not. I'm not sure you could make a streamlined 3.X really, I think that would basically be a modded AD&D2E or something along those lines.

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

PeterWeller posted:

You're not characterizing 4E entirely fairly. 1st level 4E characters don't play like high level AD&D characters, do not have their hit point totals and don't pump out huge damage/round. You're not machine gunning orcs in 4E, definitely not like you did in AD&D with a decently optimized archer fighter, and suplexing dragons is pretty drat pulp considering the times Conan tackled a giant or strangled a monstrous snake.

1. A first level adventurer of every class except Wizard plays like a 5th or 6th level AD&D character. Between attack bonus, damage dealt, etc. An optimized Archer fighter wouldn't have the attacks to machinegun orcs until what, level 9? 10? With haste on? That's almost a year at the table in 2e. Most games never lasted long enough to get that far. Rangers are able to do things in the first five levels that Rangers and ranged Fighters in 2e couldn't do until they got HLAs. So are Fighters. You are really underestimating how wide the difference between 1e/2e and 4e is.
2. Conan almost dies in nearly every story he is in. In probably the most well known Conan story he spends a full page having a life and death battle with a spider the size of a small dog. The other threatening enemies he runs into in this situation he bypasses by poisoning them to death. Conan was a very powerful character, especially late in his career, but he wasn't Epic Fantasy powerful. You can certainly give a 4e game pulp stylings, but the characters are going to be epic fantasy transplants. It's Legolas in Hyboria.

I never said 4e was a bad game. I said that there is a group of people who don't like it for legitimate reasons. Just like there is people who don't like 2e or Basic for legitimate reasons.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

Mirthless posted:

If there's one thing we can hope for, maybe Wizards will dump the license on the market for cheap after Next turns out to be a massive financial failure.
Name recognition is probably the most valuable thing about D&D from Hasbro's point of view. Their dream scenario would be for someone in Hollywood to do a Transformers with it so they can set up a whole new line of toys, so I'd be surprised if they ever let go of it completely.

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

Payndz posted:

Name recognition is probably the most valuable thing about D&D from Hasbro's point of view. Their dream scenario would be for someone in Hollywood to do a Transformers with it so they can set up a whole new line of toys, so I'd be surprised if they ever let go of it completely.

I don't know, both D&D movies failed, they haven't made a good D&D game in a while (surprise me, Neverwinter) and the brand recognition mostly exists among 40-somethings (too late for the nostalgia wave imo) and a lot of the game's few remaining players are either bleeding over to other games or don't think the D&D brand is worth actually paying money for. Battletech, Mechwarrior and Shadowrun used to be names that meant something too, though admittedly never on the level of D&D.

Mirthless fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Apr 25, 2013

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
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Mirthless posted:

the board-gamey epic fantasy games that 4e allows have the existing fourth edition stuff. (though, judging by Wizards' hurried exit from that game, probably mostly in the form of illicit PDF scans)
Hey now, don't be like that :(
Also, the (limited) numbers available indicate that 4E did very well financially. Well, by RPG terms.

Mendrian
Jan 6, 2013

Mirthless posted:

I don't know, both D&D movies failed, they haven't made a good D&D game in a while (surprise me, Neverwinter) and the brand recognition mostly exists among 40-somethings (too late for the nostalgia wave imo) and a lot of the game's few remaining players are either bleeding over to other games or don't think the D&D brand is worth actually paying money for. Battletech, Mechwarrior and Shadowrun used to be names that meant something too, though admittedly never on the level of D&D.

Yeah. D&D's 'name recognition' mostly exists among non-gamers who mistake D&D for roleplaying in general. It also has obvious recognition among gamers though I'm not sure either one of those things is something you can monetize. There's the novels, I guess?

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



Mirthless posted:

1. A first level adventurer of every class except Wizard plays like a 5th or 6th level AD&D character. Between attack bonus, damage dealt, etc. An optimized Archer fighter wouldn't have the attacks to machinegun orcs until what, level 9? 10? With haste on? That's almost a year at the table in 2e. Most games never lasted long enough to get that far. Rangers are able to do things in the first five levels that Rangers and ranged Fighters in 2e couldn't do until they got HLAs. So are Fighters. You are really underestimating how wide the difference between 1e/2e and 4e is.

4e orcs have 46 hit points, AC 17, and attack at +8 for 1d12+3 damage, and have the ability to heal themselves once per encounter for 11hp while still making an attack.

Explain to me exactly how a 1st level Fighter is "machine gunning" them.

Edit: A regular first level AD&D fighter has a good chance at killing an orc in one attack. The 4e fighter can't do that at first level.

Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Apr 25, 2013

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Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

Splicer posted:

Hey now, don't be like that :(
Also, the (limited) numbers available indicate that 4E did very well financially. Well, by RPG terms.

Haha. I don't doubt it did alright, though some concrete numbers would be nice. But anecdotally, I don't know anyone besides myself and the guy who ran RPGA events who paid for his 4e books. Everyone else at our RPGA table either used the store's books, stole the store's books, or just printed out PDFs and put them in a three ring binder. What I'm saying is that tabletop gamers are awful people. :smith:

Truth be told, I'd like 4e a lot better if they'd gotten around to finishing their online tabletop. I'd like to see them just forget about D&D Next, finish the original concepts of 4e, and continue putting out 4e material. They carved their own niche, I wish they would have stuck with it. I got the feeling early that Wizards didn't like 4e and were probably having buyer's remorse because the sales or profits weren't as good as when they were non-stop milking 3rd edition material. After the first year I really felt like they had given up.

AlphaDog posted:

4e orcs have 46 hit points, AC 17, and attack at +8 for 1d12+3 damage, and have the ability to heal themselves once per encounter for 11hp while still making an attack.

Explain to me exactly how a 1st level Fighter is "machine gunning" them.

Would you prefer Goblins or Kobolds? You're zeroing in on this one thing when I am trying to explain the viewpoint of a player that prefers the older editions of the games.

I like both games. I loved 4e when it came out. I am not saying it is a bad game. I am saying there are people who don't like it and they have legitimate reasons for that. Relax.


quote:

Edit: A regular first level AD&D fighter has a good chance at killing an orc in one attack. The 4e fighter can't do that at first level.

The Orc also has a good chance of killing the fighter. Also, minions exist in 4e and they don't in 2e. There is stylistic differences in the kind of games the two editions create. Neither is better or worse, just different. If someone likes one or not the other, that is not something that necessarily deserves ridicule, unless they're being a shithead about it's perceived superiority.

Mirthless fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Apr 25, 2013

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