BRIEF historical background/refresher: The game was first rewritten in 1989, but not much was changed. They clarified the rules and consolidated all the material that had been accumulating since the game's inception. 3rd Edition came out in 2000, and 3.5 ed. came out in 2003. 3rd Edition (and 3.5) was pretty successful, but I think it had run it's course. It sort of became MtG in the end, getting this prestige class power, that feat, and this magic item to get a combo going. And there was so much material out there that the combinations were out of control. If you didn't want to play like that, but had a table that did, it probably wouldn't be much fun for you (being the weakest). Even if you did play like that, someone at the table would likely be much better than you at min-maxing, and it still might not be much fun for you. But I digress, the edition was out of control and needed a reboot. 4th edition to the rescue. 4th ed. came out in 2008. They modeled this one after the wildly successful MMORPGs, trying to capture what people enjoyed on the computer. However this edition contained much fewer viable combinations of races, classes and "prestige" classes. WotC seemed to be trying to reign in the excesses of 3rd edition. But they tweaked and updated the game regularly to try to get the game they wanted, in fact there have to be thousands of erratas to the original players book. Of course the min-maxxers were up to the challenge - when Wizards closed a loophole, they just found another one. Other players were just annoyed by all the changes. I'm not sure if you can call 4th Edition a complete failure, but it came out just three and a half years ago and we're already talking about a replacement.
If you played any of those editions, I invite you to discuss what worked for you and what didn't work for you in each. Was 4th Ed. a failure? What went wrong?
My table top RPG days are in the past, and maybe that's the real problem Wizards faces, i.e. fewer young players and old players who just aren't interested anymore. For me, I don't know what an RPG experience can be anymore. But I am pretty sure it can't live up to what it should be in my mind. I do know this, it doesn't have a lot to do with the rules (other than the whole table being comfortable with them).
For me, it's about telling a compelling story, a story that the players actively participate in and shape. And that's a tough task for the gamemaster, not many can hack it. Fewer can hack it with their own stories/adventures instead of published material. But really I came to realize that rolling dice wasn't telling the story. So why do you do so much of that in a table top RPG? Why do we have volumes of rules, most of which are dedicated to combat?
But even if I could get past that, I'm sitting at a table of 5 or 6 or more people all with potentially vastly different expectations for the experience. And different motives for even being there. How do you satisfy these people with different playing styles? And how much WORK for a gamemaster might that entail? It's supposed to be fun...
Believe it or not, just writing this makes me want to play again, remembering what I liked about RPGs and what made them satisfying. But then I remember how the game goes in practice, and I'll pass :) I didn't stop playing because of any rules, I stopped playing because it could never live up to my expectations.
My advice to Wizards? Don't make it too complicated, and write adventures again. It's about the story. Write a compelling story. And good luck, because ironically now that the game isn't as stygmatized, it's market is only shrinking.
What would you do in a fresh edition?
4th edition was a tactical minis game. Did we need another one of those? Was that an improvement over 3.5? No.
ReplyDeletePlay Pathfinder (3.75e) and you'll never need another game again. At least, not another modern D&D game.
D&D 4th edition was based on video games. That's not my opinion...they said that. We've left the realm of imagination and entered the realm of customization. That's fine as far as it goes, but it isn't role-playing. It's not imagination.
At least with 3.5e you could do something min/max related and benefit from it. In 4e, the best you could do by min/maxing was keep up with the status quo and give yourself a 50/50 chance of being effecting. Yeah, that's real wish fulfillment, good job, WotC.
4e should be the evolotion of fantasy fulfillment...but it only did that at the basest most concrete level. And, hey, I'm not judging if that's your thing. But we had that with AD&D (some people call it 1st edition, but that's not really accurate); nothing since has improved on that aspect of the tabletop RPG. On a creative level, the fewer rules, the more wishes get fulfilled.
Everyone I game with hated 4th Edition, even after giving it multiple tries. But nothing about its failure gratifies me, not in the slightest. Corporate WotC (Hasbro) has always been about Ivy League guys in suits with MBA's making the ultimate decisions about GAMES. That model can only work for so long. To paraphrase some American guy who was important, you can exploit a lot of the people a lot of the time...but not forever.
The best thing I can say about 4e is that I spent exactly $0.00 on it. I spent literally hundreds of dollars on every edition (including "Basic") prior to that. I'm not an edition snob. But I can recognize a scam when it's presented as such.
My local groups--after a long hiatus--are just getting back into RPG's. One of those groups is using 3.5. Another is using Pathfinder/3.75. Another is using *Harn*. 4e has become meaningless to everyone I game with, and that is multiple players across multiple groups and DM's who have been gaming for years. Some of us having been gaming for 25+ years, others 5+. It's a consensus across a broad range of ages and D&D experience.
If it wasn't for that, I'd think "Fine, I'm the old fogey, don't listen to me." But that's obviously not the case. Also the fact that we are even talking about 5.0 this soon tells me that WotC is either mis-managed, or they know that their fans are idolatrous minions who will buy whatever they churn out.
Neither of those options are particularly appealing.
This isn't 1979. We have *sooo* many options for RPGs now, we really have no reason to be beholden to Hasbro for our gaming needs. There comes a time when you can't blame them anymore, you can only blame yourself.
P.S. My comments are only gratifying if they are at least as long as the OP, so take them for what you will.
P.P.S. Time stamp is after 1:30 a.m. in Missouri.
JC nailed it right on, look at the web sites dedicated to bringing role players together, the ratio of pathfinder to 4th edition is something like 15 to 1. They tried to turn D&D into a computer game, the mistake being that an actual computer game will win out every time.
ReplyDeleteTable top role playing requires a fair and balanced combat system, but that is only the basest part, you need the ability to create interesting characters who can interact with the shared world of storytelling even when there is no combat going on. 4th edition completely neglected that aspect, and hence almost nobody plays it. If 4th edition is your game, I feel you are probably better off just playing WarHammer. I am hopeful that wizards have learned their lesson and 5th edition will be a pretty good game, but until I know it is, I will be sticking with Savage Worlds, GURPS, and actual computer games.
As far as the authors original point, I used to be in his group, but since he moved on so have I. I did not take the same lessons from that failure that he did, the lessons I took is that gamers with a compatible style is far more important a factor than I previously thought. We had several conflicting play styles there and it ended up with nobody being happy. I prefer the storytelling and the role playing aspect to gaming, and I despise the min/maxing powergaming aspect as it just makes the non-story portion of the game too complex to enjoy. That was not to be found in the nerdy friday group, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist elsewhere. I know this because I have played with groups that do that before, and I am confident I will do so again. I also know that I really don't enjoy board games at all because there is no element of story. If I am going to play a storyless game, I would rather it be simple fast and fun, not so complex you need to play it a hundred times to even be able to begin to enjoy it as opposed to struggling to remember the rules. Again it's all about finding compatible playing styles.
When 4.0 came out I gave Jeremy grief about poopoo-ing it so quickly. Jeremy, I was wrong, you were right.
ReplyDeleteIn my defense, Jeremy also poopoo-ed 3.5 when it came out because the combat chapters had pictures of figs on squares.
I feel like a hypocrite commenting because when all is said and done, I really think I am a role playing hack.
ReplyDeleteI was the first to bolt from the NF RPG group, and I was kind of an asshole doing it. In hindsight I can now see that playing RPGs in general and D&D in particular weekly for about 7 years straight (2002-2009?) got really stale for me.
I used the excuse of not liking LFR, and LFR really did have problems, and I think 4th ed really relied too much on LFR to market the game. There is no personal narrative in LFR. Players are teleported across the Forgotten Realms continent with no explanation on why they ended up in Waterdeep instead of Cormyr. There's and old saying, the map is not the territory. Without a personal narrative, the build becomes the character.
Now there are things I really liked about 4E. This was the most successful attempt I have seen of balancing magic users for the rest of the party. I liked how in early levels in combat everyone at the table got to attempt something. I liked the idea of skill challenges (the implementation of skill challenges left a lot to be desired however, skill challenges became the RPG equivalent of eating your vegetables).
I "can" play RPG's again but feel no burning desire too. And the restrictions that I'd want to impose to insure that RPG's don't become stale once again, realistically means I won't be role playing anytime in the foreseeable future.
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DeleteThat balance though was at the cost of fun, it didn't really matter what archtype/class you played, they all played pretty much the same.
ReplyDeleteWell I don't think it's a lot of fun to turn the combat over the the 15th level wizard because he can handle everything solo either.
ReplyDeletehe can't handle everything solo darren. he needs you to stand in front of him to delay them for a couple rounds. meat shield.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is a difficult assignment to have the archetypes balanced, and yet different enough to be interesting and uniquely useful to the group. So far all editions of D&D have failed at that.
ReplyDeleteI must be the sole hold out who really enjoyed LFR and 4th Edition. It is a bit ironic to me because I feel like I was one of the people saying that this wasn't "D&D" out of the gate. I devoured 4th ed. because I really enjoy RPGing and it seemed like this was the way we were going to go. I pretty much missed the boat on 3.5. Only really played one campaign worth of that.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I identified all of the issues that 4E had out of the gate. The "game" was building characters. Just like MTG. Your character was your deck. Building a deck WAS MTG to me. Playing a distant secondary element that simply validated the first part.
4E was the same thing. Build a character, get the combos, and break the game into your favor. The best part was that WotC seemed to be really into supporting this LFR "campaign" and so you had an environment to match yourself against. It gave you a baseline of how good you were at designing a good mix of characters with appropriate combinations to achieve the goals set out by LFR. I found this very satisfying. I think I'm pretty easy to please. Yes, you were teleported all around the place, but I didn't find that different than most games I played. When you travel in an RPG you don't sit around for the same amount of time that you actually travel until you would reach your destination. You blaze through weeks, months, years of time, if that's what the game calls for. I just lumped travel in LFR into the same 'this scene too boring for the film' box that all the rest of that kind of stuff went into.
To me it is up to you to make your character interesting. Typically I rely on one or two quirks about a character to allow me to enjoy pretending. I didn't feel like 4E prevented me from doing this.
To me where 4E really fell down was when it came to creativity and imagination. Ok, so my 1st level druid can turn into a bunch of tiny insects that act as a swarm, but... errr... I can't transform and crawl through a tiny tunnel? Why? Because that power wasn't defined within the 'hard rules' of the power. The 'swarm' part is just 'fluff' and does not apply to any other undefined capabilities outlined in the 'crunch' rules that define what the power can do.
This was just awful for most people. I accepted it grudgingly, but really only because it was a foundational element of the entire game. You pull that out and it all falls apart.
I think of myself as being able to enjoy min/max gaming as much as story/character driven gaming. Doing both is the most fun generally, but I'll take NasCrag over 4E's min/maxing any day.
I really wanted 4thEd to work. I loved the motivation they said they had for the design. I loved some of the mechanisms they were trying. I loved the fact they were trying to make combat faster and highlight the Role part of the game over the roll.
ReplyDeleteI really did. I hyped myself to it... but the sad truth is that they fucked it up.
They didn't provide good mechanisms/tools to support the outside of combat environment. As said by many, it was a computer game port to a board game… and it eventually (very quickly) felt that way.
So... much like Mike said in the second post. For all you early naysayers you were right, I was wrong... but I also feel that what made it wrong was not something you could see on paper, you had to play it to understand it (at least in my case).
As Mike mentions in the original post... everybody comes to the game with many and different expectations.
For me, and I realize now, the most important was to get my friends around the table and NOT play. That was the most fun of it, when we got sidetracked and talked about something else OTHER than the game. When we got to truly interact, and share and have fun.
The story, the characters, those were great too... getting back to make some progress was fun too, but , to me, that was secondary and more of a vehicle.
I realize about this now that we don't do it anymore. Now we play board games and those are fun as an intellectual excercise... but they require concentration, and you have to move fast, and people have to think their next move and there is not time to talk, too busy. If you talk nobody listens, if someone talks you can't listen.
I miss RPGing... because I miss part of what made NF’s so fun.
I look forward to read about 5th edition.
I've never known you to be so depressing before.
ReplyDeleteit's because Ryan tested more liberal than Juan did on the political spectrum
ReplyDeleteThat's cause Ryan is a 14th level straight classed "Bleeding Heart" and Juan took a few levels in conservative for the tax benefits ;-)
ReplyDeleteDude, he's got an MBA. He's closet fascist.
Deletedoesn't an mba make him more of a card carrying capitalist?
DeleteThere is something inherently positive about playing RPG's... the other players are happy that you do well. Your success is their success. You plan the next move with the rest of the players, and you (normally) enjoy that as much as the actual implementation.
ReplyDeleteWith board games it's the opposite, their success is your DOOM. You are going to be annoyed at the other players if they take longer to think a move, not only because that is going to hurt you, but also because you don't participate in the planning and it is taking time of your own playing (fun).
More than the winning/losing obvious difference, this fundamental shift in the mechanics of the ‘fun’, IMO has a palpable effect on the social dynamics of the session.
I had not thought of it that way, but Juan is correct. Those games played at NF are simply way too difficult and consume way to much gray matter to be an enjoyable social experience. So that's a long winded +1
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to me I was almost as far right on personal freedom issues as I was left on economic issues, and the economic issues didn't touch on things like balancing the budget (which I believe is considered to somehow be a right wing viewpoint that I happen to agree with).
ReplyDeleteSo calling me a liberal is about as misleading as calling me a conservative based upon my libertarian leanings. :P
I'm a libertarian socialist.
Also I agree with what Juan said.
ReplyDeleteWe work to a common and mutual goal in an RPG and we work at directly opposed and confrontational goals when we play most other games. I think that's why Dixit was so refreshing it makes the opposition and confrontation opaque.
It's no fun watching your friends have a choice to make that screws you or another friend out of achieving a goal and they decision leads to equally positive results for them and they pick you. :)
I was thinking about RPGs, since we have started Harnmaster in CoMo. I was going to (and may still) turn this into a blog post...
ReplyDelete5 things I love about RPGs
Character progression
Exploring new worlds
Group dynamics
Teamwork
Rolling dice
5 Things I Hate about RPGs
Lack of preparation by the GM/other players
Side discussion that derails the gaming
Selfish characters (not team oriented)
Random character generation (vs. building your character)
Character limits (i.e. this game ends at level 20)
I find myself playing RPGs on the computer, because the character development is becoming more expansive with player choices impacting the outcomes in the game.
I agree with the earlier points that the best thing about RPGs live is the interaction between players while they are in character.
I definitely agree that the right players with similar attitudes about the game make all the difference in a fun experience.
need a post on cooperative board games, and board games where you are sort of doing your own thing with minimal player interaction - like Race for the Galaxy.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with Tim on all of his comments about RPGs, except for two:
ReplyDelete1) Selfish characters
These are fine. Having a L/E or C/E type in the party spices things up.
To be specific, what I don't like is selfish players (at all) or selfish characters that derail the team [i.e., the game] over and over again under the pretext of role-playing.
Basically, I don't want your character development to ruin other people's fun.
[Incidentally, if I'm a L/G paladin and one of my party members kills a helpless prisoner, I'm still having fun. Probably a whole lot of it, in fact.]
2) I sort of hated random char-gen for awhile, too. But I love Warhammer FRPG and it's random. The initial stuff is just the starting point in that game. Once it starts, you can take your character pretty much wherever you want. Hopefully that's true of any campaign or any system.
Also, building characters has the disadvantage that you can possibly "break" the game. Either that or the game and building and development process has to come with a lot of restrictions to ensure balance...I'm not sure that's necessarily more free.
Like what Ryan was saying--"Here, you have such-and-such skills, but you can only use them in the proscribed manner."
Random also forces people to play outside of type and try new things. Constructed always allows you to remain in your comfort zone.
Incidentally, Tim and I made characters in Harn, which is a wacky 70's throwback style of char gen. A lot of people I know have this philosophy: Either give me choices or, if you're going to make it random, make it COMPLETELY RANDOM.
Harn accomplishes that.
All I really need is to be able to like my character and for it to have some quality (preferably redeeming) that other characters don't have, and something to make it memorable. Random can accomplish that just as well as construction, but random has the advantage of possibly doing it in ways I didn't imagine.
Can someone please find Juan a cooperative board game. You know the type some grade schools are using :) He perfectly described why I won't board game with my husband, I don't think it's good for my marriage to so actively campaign for my spouse to LOSE, to go down in a spiral of DEFEAT and to soundly TROMP him. See. It brings out the worst.
ReplyDeleteLike
DeleteBy the way, Mike, I still don't want to see photos of tactical deployment of minis in my RP game, it's not encouraging. In the case of 3.5, the game is still good DESPITE being tactically heavy, but I'd prefer it didn't rely on that stuff.
ReplyDeletePathfinder is awesome, but it retains 95% of that. At least it makes combat maneuvers 5x easier to resolve, that speeds up combat.
First, I agree 110% that the game never lived up to its promise.
ReplyDeleteAs for the question, "I came to realize that rolling dice wasn't telling the story. So why do you do so much of that in a table top RPG? Why do we have volumes of rules, most of which are dedicated to combat?"
The explanation is actually quite simple. D&D was invented by war gamers. Chain Mail was a tactical tabletop war game. E. Gary et al, it seems, got tired of pushing Prussians and Hussars and the Old Guard around the table. They wanted to push elves and dwarfs around the table! They also wanted magic and they wanted the tactics to be "squad level". Fire team level really. Thus they realized one could play act the character's personality etc, and the tactical scenarios became adventures and so forth.
So, in reality, D&D was a tactical tabletop game from the beginning. Thus, the fact that it never strayed far from its origins is not wholly surprising, whatever the designers may have promised.
As far as role playing is concerned, I always found it IRONIC that the socially retarded were so attracted to games based entirely upon social interaction. The expectation issue can be managed somewhat by the GM, but even then you have to contend with each player's mood at the moment, the quality of the scenario and the guy who keeps blurting out one-liners and movie quotes (hint, hint). So yeah, except for possibly the best circumstances, the paradigm is destined to fail.
On the other hand, another group of nerds at an organization called "BioWare" continues to create rather excellent, albeit digital, fantasy role-playing opportunities.
Double Like. What server are you on lately? Are you still a cyber nomad?
DeleteI got a new ISP and resolved my connection issues with Kaiburr Chrystal. I have my Jedi Guardian up to 35, which is a minor miracle for me. Usually, my toon-ahol-ism takes over at about 22 and I make up two or three new ones...
DeletePenny Arcade has something to say about this too.
ReplyDeletehttp://penny-arcade.com/2012/01/11
You guys seen this? http://www.hulu.com/watch/235709/the-dungeon-masters
ReplyDeleteI know... it was in the Penny Arcade article. I couldn't stop watching it. It is a 1'28" train wreck.
DeleteYeah, it was painful.
DeleteAlthough 27:29 is pretty funny. At least she is self-aware.
DeleteI know all those people... by different names and maybe fatter. In some ways it hits too close to home.
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely nowhere near the amount of experience it seems you all have with AD&D. I never got beyond 3.0, and I haven't done much of any tabletop RP since the demise of the good ol' World of Darkness.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I did want to at least comment that even after taking the nostalgia glasses off, I can still remember why I got into tabletop RP anyway: getting wrapped up in a good story. I started with the discovery of the black, blue, and red boxed D&D in grade school during recess. Much later in the digital realm it was the Planescape: Torments of the world that kept me interested in the RPG. For me both involved great story. Sure, in the tabletop realm a good DM goes a long ways towards making a game more enjoyable, but to me the old stand-alone box sets had enough story to captivate my young mind all on their own.
All of this is to echo Mike's words: "Don't make it too complicated, and write adventures again. It's about the story. Write a compelling story."
But I also recognize that others play a tabletop RP for different reasons. Story may only be a small element to some, with a much more avid interest in rolling dice and crunching numbers. People play for different reasons. But it's tough for me to imagine all but the most hard-core dice-rolling booty-grubbing players playing without the presence of at least a decent story hook.
In that sense, I more or less agree with Mike that gently placing a compelling fantasy universe (replete with intriguing plot hooks that DMs can run with) over a reasonable mechanics system is fine by me. But also realize that folks play these sorts of games for different reasons.
Going the route of quality storyline arcs but with general "accessible to many" mechanics does potentially endanger the genre a bit to the threat of generics and mundanity (going digital again, Diablo 3 anyone?), especially to those who want complicated mechanics and difficult challenges. But even so, that damage should in theory be minimal as the DM often has just as much to contribute to the difficulty of the game as the mechanics. Why not make the mechanics friendly and let DMs adjust the difficulty with the tools available to them?