# With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?



## wingsandsword (Jul 14, 2014)

A thought.

I'd long heard it said, before 4e, that when people talked about 1e, they would say something like: 

*"In my game, there's this dungeon. . ." *where the game was reputedly focused on huge, sprawling dungeon crawls, with fiendish traps and sometimes nonsensical dungeon ecologies.  To this day, vast dungeon crawling seems to be referred to as a sort of retro-1e feel.

Then, for 2e, the stereotype was that people would say:

*"In my game, the setting is. . ."* where 2e was known for its focus on big, vast, lush settings.  This was the age that gave us Forgotten Realms becoming so truly vast, that gave us Planescape, and in my experience at least a lot of monumentally large homebrew settings that had buckets of backstory and lore, so much that most campaigns would never get to use most of it.  In later edition eras, it still seems like bringing back 2e settings is popular and evocative of that 1990's gaming era.

Then, for 3e, the stereotype seemed to be something like:

*"In my game, we've got this feat/prestige class. . ."* where 3e was known for its huge amount of very modular rules "crunch" where it seemed like every single setting, official or homebrew, in that era was known (and somewhat defined) by its feats and prestige classes.  Every homebrew setting game I joined, the DM had a few classes and feats that were unique to their setting.  Every official setting, the book (or Dragon article) was sure to have a couple of each.  The popularity of these elements really helped fuel the spread of d20 gaming it certainly seems.

So, with 5e dawning, and 4e about to go into the history books of D&D lore, what will it be known for?  What was unique to it, what was the aspect of it that set it apart from prior and future editions?


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## Knightfall (Jul 14, 2014)

Points of Light.

And more specifically, Nentir Vale and the its world, Nerath.


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## the Jester (Jul 14, 2014)

Tight math, tactical depth and controversy.


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## TarionzCousin (Jul 14, 2014)

Edition Wars, of which I hope this thread remains free. 

For me, 4E brought out the tactical side of D&D. When I remember the 4E games I played, what stands out the most are how players resolved the tactical combat situations.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Jul 14, 2014)

the Jester said:


> Tight math, tactical depth and controversy.



Yup.

Game balance, swashbuckling adventure, and nerdrage!


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## Obryn (Jul 14, 2014)

Game design? 

Hopefully if nothing else, its legacy will be that Fighters (and other weapon-using characters) can do awesome stuff, too.


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## Minigiant (Jul 14, 2014)

"Yeah. I can get that to work"

4e will be known for "eventually" creating a system that allowed for many type of character archetypes found in herioc fantasy dungeoneering either by default or with a little work by the DM in a mostly balanced manner. Many sacrifices and sacred bbq was made to do this however.

But it would be known as the edition where you can have you can have golden minotaurs with laser eyes weilding soul drinking grappling hooks as players and monsters and have the least amount of fear about allowing it.


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## Rod Staffwand (Jul 14, 2014)

In my game, we fought this one battle on the back of a great wyrm gold dragon with all these demons flying at us from all sides and, oh yeah, we were flying through all the planes in succession--the Shadowfell, the Feywild, the Elemental Chaos, all of them--each with different effects and terrain. It was frickin' crazy, man, people were pulling out all of these awesome moves and combos. I mean the fighter was just killing it! People were dropping and getting back up thanks to the bard and warlord. So we get done killing all these demons. We'd spent most of our dailies and encounters. And you know who shows up? Frickin' ORCUS, man! We're were all like "Dude! That's ORCUS!" So we have our dragon run for it and Orcus starts chasing us. Our wizard was using her knowledge of the planes to guide the dragon, while our bard was shouting encouragement, our rogue was throwing stuff at the demon lord to distract him--everyone was doing anything they could think of. We finally got far enough away to catch our breath, heal up a bit, gain our encounters back, and hit a milestone--AP, baby! So then we said, "Screw Orcus!" and we had that dragon turn and fight! Man, it was EPIC!

Or something like that.


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## kmack (Jul 14, 2014)

I think it'll be remembered (by DM's at least) for the ease with which a ref could improvise at the table. For the first time in my experience (which started with BECMI and 1st Ed AD&D), I could run a creature entirely from its stat block without having to cross-reference any other ability.

I think those who enjoyed tactical miniatures combat will remember it for its fairly clean and usually fun rules supporting tabletop play, and those who didn't will remember it for forcing them to use the minis against their will.

I think it'll be remembered for digressing from canon, probably further than many players enjoyed (elves were suddenly Eladrin, Ethereal and Astral planes gone, etc.) many things that didn't "feel like D&D."

I think it'll be remembered by third-party content creators as an edition that threatened their businesses by removing a license they relied on.

In all, a mixed bag that did a some things right and other things not-so-well. It seems to me that its lasting impact will have arisen from both the positives and the negatives: An emphasis on streamlined, table-ready rules systems (which seems evident in the 5E design) arising from some of the things they did well, a rekindled respect for the 40 years of canon that underpin the system (which I'm also feeling in 5E) arising from reactions to their attempt to rewrite it, and (hopefully) a renewed respect for the importance of third-party content creators to the ecosystem as a whole (I imagine we won't really know how this has gone until the licensing terms are released in the new year.) arising from seeing a restrictive license push so many small businesses into the arms of a competitor.

That's my guess, anyway.


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## Thaumaturge (Jul 14, 2014)

As someone's first, and most beloved, edition.

Thaumaturge.


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## Remathilis (Jul 14, 2014)

Sadly, it will probably be remembered for all the wrong reasons. 

If I have to say something nice at its eulogy, it would be that it will be remembered to for trying to do the impossible: bring D&D to a new style of gamer. It tried to remove the image of D&D as that game played in the late 70's by college kids and that had weird books with cartoony-art and 20 different polearms. It tried to remove the "nerd" stereotype by appealing to card-players, board gamers, and video-gamers. It tried to make the rules emulate the best new ideas in table-top, miniature, ccg, and mmo games. It tried to take back the success of Warcraft and other games IT grandfathered. It really tried to make itself "new", "improved" and "not your father's D&D". 

It just lost a little too much of itself in the process.


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## Olgar Shiverstone (Jul 14, 2014)

Encounters.  

4E is all about complex interactive environments where traps, skills, and creatures all combine to create memorable and challenging encounters. It probably does large, set piece encounter design better than any prior edition, and the mechanics are optimized via AEDU to enable exciting encounters where PCs can do something exciting every round.


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## Henry (Jul 14, 2014)

*4. "In my game, there's this cool encounter..."* to follow the OP's structure and setup. Olgar has it best here. There were all sorts of components designed to help DM's craft cool encounters, and listening to people like Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade, it seems this aspect inspired new players the most.


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## Ratskinner (Jul 14, 2014)

Olgar Shiverstone said:


> Encounters.
> 
> 4E is all about complex interactive environments where traps, skills, and creatures all combine to create memorable and challenging encounters. It probably does large, set piece encounter design better than any prior edition, and the mechanics are optimized via AEDU to enable exciting encounters where PCs can do something exciting every round.



This.


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## Dungeoneer (Jul 14, 2014)

Henry said:


> *4. "In my game, there's this cool encounter..."* to follow the OP's structure and setup. Olgar has it best here. There were all sorts of components designed to help DM's craft cool encounters, and listening to people like Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade, it seems this aspect inspired new players the most.



Yup, this.


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## thewok (Jul 14, 2014)

Fourth Edition will be remembered for many things, and whether these are positives or negatives depends entirely on your personal point of view.  For me, these are all positives:

* Bringing non-magical characters up to the level of magical characters.
* At-will spells so a wizard is never reduced to using a crossbow or throwing darts (unless he really wants to do so).
* A focus on ease of DM preparation and improvisation.  I wanted to DM in 3E, but I was always too overwhelmed by the CRs and what not that I was afraid I'd never be able to challenge the party without killing them.
* Universality of skills and amounts of skills between classes, especially the lack of any restricted skills. (This is one of my major problems with 3E and Pathfinder).
* Removal of class-based attack bonuses.
* A focus on making interesting encounters not just with monsters, but also with different terrain types, hazards and traps as integral parts of those encounters.
* Removal of mechanical implications of alignment, which is a very subjective thing, as evidenced by numerous threads on numerous message boards and newsgroups over the years.
* Addition of the Dragonborn and Tiefling.  Yes, I know these aren't the originals, but, for me, these are the iconic versions of the races.
* A version of the Bard that I not only found not useless, but that I'd actually play.  Then the Skald came, and I liked that one even more.
* A cosmology that I liked and will be keeping, regardless of 5E's return to the Great Wheel.
* Introduction of other great classes (and new takes on older classes): Warlock (and the Hexblade subclass), Invoker, Bladesinger, Swordmage, Warlord, and all the Druid types.
* No level adjustments on races.
* No penalties on Racial ability score adjustments.

There are others, and I'm sure that, given enough time to properly think about it, I could come up with a dozen more or so good points from 4E.  These are the big ones for me, though.  The one thing that I really didn't care for in 4E was the need for more and more magic items.  That was easily fixed with inherent bonuses, though.

Oh.  Also the apparent need to set up a map and minis for every encounter.  This was not actually a thing, but enough people thought it was a necessity that it became a thing.  4E worked well without maps, but the presentation of the powers made it appears as if maps were required for everything.


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## Raith5 (Jul 14, 2014)

Agree with the tone of this thread, but I have never got the idea that 4e is all about the grid and miniatures. I have used them ever since basic D&D for most encounters.

But 4e is certainly for me about mechanics for everything and everyone. In particular, the way 4e gave PCs powers and mechanics to really shape combats really empowered players compared to other editions. I just loved seeing my DM's monsters being pushed over cliffs, monsters being stopped in their tracks by the fighter, stunning Vecna, being successful in difficult skill challenges.


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## billd91 (Jul 14, 2014)

Some people will remember 4e for positive reasons, but some will also remember it as the New Coke of D&D - a major investment in a new direction by the company that misread the market.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 14, 2014)

I'll remember 4e as the edition where everyone was effectively a spell caster, the edition of non-sensical purely "gamist" rules (fighters have techniques that can only be used once a day? How in the world does that make sense), the edition where simply swinging a weapon was never the right choice - instead it was better to use the twisted lotus ninja decapitaiton strike power.

The world will remember 4e as the edition that did so poorly it was cancelled a full year before its replacement was released.  No other edition of D&D has that black eye, and hopefully it will never happen again.

let's refrain from the edition warring please - Plane Sailing, ENWorld Admin


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## was (Jul 14, 2014)

Healing Surges, Encounter Powers and the Mega-Edition Wars


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## Zardnaar (Jul 14, 2014)

Michael Morris said:


> I'll remember 4e as the edition where everyone was effectively a spell caster, the edition of non-sensical purely "gamist" rules (fighters have techniques that can only be used once a day? How in the world does that make sense), the edition where simply swinging a weapon was never the right choice - instead it was better to use the twisted lotus ninja decapitaiton strike power.
> 
> The world will remember 4e as the edition that did so poorly it was cancelled a full year before its replacement was released.  No other edition of D&D has that black eye, and hopefully it will never happen again.




2 years before 5E. I do not think iot will be remembered for anything good. On life support 2 years in, replacement announced 3.5 years in and DOA for 2 years until the next edition. Depending on how 5E turns out it could also be blamed for the beginning of the end.


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## Cadence (Jul 14, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> 2 years before 5E. I do not think iot will be remembered for anything good. On life support 2 years in, replacement announced 3.5 years in and DOA for 2 years until the next edition. Depending on how 5E turns out it could also be blamed for the beginning of the end.





Giving some inspiration and playtested ideas to 13th Age ;-)


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 14, 2014)

Division, primarily. 

That, and the hubris of designing a game without consulting the fan base comprehensively enough during play testing, and assuming that mechanical innovation was more important than narrative play.


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## The Human Target (Jul 14, 2014)

Innovation to some, pure white hate for others.

I'm amazed it took as long as it did for threadcrappers to show up.


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## Raduin711 (Jul 14, 2014)

It will be remembered until the end of your next turn.


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## Der-Rage (Jul 14, 2014)

If nothing else 4E will be remembered as the edition that gave us the Gnome and his Badger, Francis.


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## KirayaTiDrekan (Jul 14, 2014)

I agree with those who say that 4E will be remembered for its Encounters.

Intricate, tactically deep set-piece encounters with interesting environments and plenty of options for every character during combat.

Heck, the in-store play program was even called D&D Encounters.

And yes, 4E will also be remembered for controversy and changing too much, too fast.


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## The Human Target (Jul 14, 2014)

Raduin711 said:


> It will be remembered until the end of your next turn.




Now that made me laugh.


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## Ichneumon (Jul 14, 2014)

I find it amusing that a D&D edition often derided as "video-gamey" should be so unamenable to being used to create actual video games with. The recent Neverwinter MMO uses some 4e concepts, but its combat system doesn't resemble 4e's to any significant degree.

In my opinion, 4e will be remembered as a D&D ahead of its time, with a mechanically brilliant and forward-looking game engine kneecapped by a few unfortunate events and decisions. The sky was the limit on the digital offerings until WotC were forced to take the development in-house. The combat system was a thing of beauty, but poor monster math (at first) made it hard to appreciate. Also, the AEDU format was no universal template for PCs, something realised by Essentials.

It's also regarded as the "Edition War" version, which I put down to it being the first to really stand up and challenge D&D's traditions. 3e kind of did this, but far more politely. With 4e, every rule and element had to justify its existence, without coasting in on nostalgia. Some concepts, like saving throws, were completely redefined. Many people found 4e's new-broom approach too aggressive for their liking.

However, 4e's commitment to balance and tightly integrated mechanics persuade me to make a bold prediction. Every edition of D&D released from now on will be remembered as an attempt to _provide 4e in a more presentable package_.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 14, 2014)

The Human Target said:


> Innovation to some, pure white hate for others.
> 
> I'm amazed it took as long as it did for threadcrappers to show up.




There is no ‘pure white hate’ or threadcrapping on this thread. The OP asked what 4e would be remembered for - people are entitled to express their thoughts on the matter.


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## pemerton (Jul 14, 2014)

As an episode in RPG design and publishing, I'll remember 4e for endless threads full of threads about "dissociated mechanics" and "how does it make sense that a fighter can only use his best move once per day" (answer - he can try and use it as many times per day as he likes - but the game doesn't model all those attempts the same way, and the game also stipulates that not all of those attempts will be successful).

As an RPG that I played, I'll remember it for giving me my best campaign, and my best GMing experiences, to date - and I've run some other campaigns that I've been pretty pleased with!


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## pemerton (Jul 14, 2014)

Ichneumon said:


> I find it amusing that a D&D edition often derided as "video-gamey" should be so unamenable to being used to create actual video games with.



I've never understood this. I don't play "videogames" or MMOs but have friends who do, and I've watched over their shoulders from time-to-time. Playing them doesn't look much like playing 4e to me.

In mechanical terms, I think 4e is distinguished by a willingness to embrace flagrantly metagame action-resolution mechanics, perfecting ideas that Gygax began to articulate in his DMG (hit points as a victory/momentum marker; saving throws as "fortune-in-the-middle"; the action economy as a gameplay abstraction; etc). For me, this created characters and NPCs/monsters who are among the most memorable I've seen at the table in over 30 years of RPGing.


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## DonAdam (Jul 14, 2014)

4th edition can virtually guarantee an epic boss monster fight.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I've never understood this. I don't play "videogames" or MMOs but have friends who do, and I've watched over their shoulders from time-to-time. Playing them doesn't look much like playing 4e to me.




The only videogames 4E resembles are turn-based tactical games (and then only in combat), which it is rarely compared to. Final Fantasy Tactics would be a somewhat fair comparison. WoW or the like would be ludicrous and empty.



pemerton said:


> In mechanical terms, I think 4e is distinguished by a willingness to embrace flagrantly metagame action-resolution mechanics, perfecting ideas that Gygax began to articulate in his DMG (hit points as a victory/momentum marker; saving throws as "fortune-in-the-middle"; the action economy as a gameplay abstraction; etc). For me, this created characters and NPCs/monsters who are among the most memorable I've seen at the table in over 30 years of RPGing.




The big deals for my groups were:

1) Every PC is good in a fight. This was a huge change, totally awesome, and ensured 4E's popularity with my group.

2) Every PC has skills and they actually work, even for non-specialists. Plus the innate bonus ensured no-one becomes totally irrelevant. This was also a huge change - it actually felt like 4E was the first D&D with an actual skill system to us.

For me, as a DM:

3) The return to writing an adventure (including monsters etc.) in four hours. That was gigantic and ensured my love.


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## Umbran (Jul 14, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> The OP asked what 4e would be remembered for - people are entitled to express their thoughts on the matter.





Yeah, be careful with that word, "entitled".  As in any social arena, there are some strings attached to your entitlements.

Folks can have opinions, and state them.  But we expect opinions to be presented with a modicum of respect, and a couple of posts so far have been a tad lacking.  Let us avoid using the thread as a venue to vent - while venting can be healthy, that really only holds among close friends, not on internet forums.  

I'd suggest making sure thoughts are targeted as constructive criticism, rather than saying, "that sucked".


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## Raith5 (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> The only videogames 4E resembles are turn-based tactical games (and then only in combat), which it is rarely compared to. Final Fantasy Tactics would be a somewhat fair comparison. WoW or the like would be ludicrous and empty..




But I think these turn based games also capture earlier editions well - there are a hold slew of popular computer games based on 1e, 2e and 3e and licensed by TSR.

I have liked and played quite a few fantasy computer games and dabbled in MMOs. Personally I dont see a rpg being compared to computer game like Skyrim, Dragon Age or The Witcher as being a slight. These computer games were great experiences IMO and sold millions of copies each. Unfortunately the comparison falls flat because of the essential part of RPGs: sitting down with friends and working as a team was not a part of these experiences. I think 4e took teamwork up to a new level in the history of D&D, rather than took it out.


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## Quickleaf (Jul 14, 2014)

I definitely concur with what you guys said [MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION] and [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION].

*4e will be remembered for... fun dynamic combat encounters which could be created fairly easily by the DM.*

For me personally, I'm all over skill challenges. Despite their many implementation flaws, that mechanic inspired so many awesome scenarios once I finally *grokked* it... Carving Thru Trolls, Breaking the Hag's Curse, Navigating Dragon Mountain, Escaping the Collapsing Mine, and on, and on...


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## pemerton (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Every PC is good in a fight. This was a huge change, totally awesome, and ensured 4E's popularity with my group.



For me, this on its own is not crucial. I have run FRPGs where some PCs are combat specialists and others are not. And you could achieve the goal of making every PC good in a fight simply by giving them all comparable expected damage, which probably wouldn't make for a good game.

For me, and relating to my comment upthread about "memorable characters", what really matters is that characters have flair. They stand out - from the scenery, and from one another. And so players can make their mark. In a social game, based around hanging out with the same group of people for hour after hour, this is important. 4e delivers it.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

pemerton said:


> For me, this on its own is not crucial. I have run FRPGs where some PCs are combat specialists and others are not. And you could achieve the goal of making every PC good in a fight simply by giving them all comparable expected damage, which probably wouldn't make for a good game.
> 
> For me, and relating to my comment upthread about "memorable characters", what really matters is that characters have flair. They stand out - from the scenery, and from one another. And so players can make their mark. In a social game, based around hanging out with the same group of people for hour after hour, this is important. 4e delivers it.




It's important to PLAYERS though, that when the game _says_ "U R A DANGEROUS KILLAR!", as Rogues, for example, have always been described by D&D, that it's actually _true_. 4E was the first edition where it was, I would say. Certainly my player who has been playing Thieves/Rogues in D&D for 20-odd years felt so.

Also in a social game where a session can easily be 50%+ combat (true in any edition, if rarer in some), it's important that no player have to be scrabbling to find anything useful they can do, merely because of the class they chose.

Same for non-combat actually, again 4E did better than previous editions (though had issues).


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## pemerton (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Same for non-combat actually, again 4E did better than previous editions (though had issues).



I agree completely with this. In my view it's the only version of D&D with workable non-combat rules. And I find them more than workable - they're actually quite good, in my opinion.



Ruin Explorer said:


> It's important to PLAYERS though, that when the game _says_ "U R A DANGEROUS KILLAR!", as Rogues, for example, have always been described by D&D, that it's actually _true_.



No dissent on that score either. Flavour text is no substitute for mechanics: in a game based around the mechanical resolution of players' action declarations the touchstone must be "show, don't tell".


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## fjw70 (Jul 14, 2014)

For me 4e will first and foremost be remembered for great times with friends (people that became friends through 4e).


4e will also (and unfortunately) be remembered as an example of internet immaturity.


As I play 5e over the coming years 4e will be remembered as a major influence on that edition as well.


Finally 4e will be remembered as an edition I continue to make memories with for years to come.


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## Will Doyle (Jul 14, 2014)

I'd say "powers".


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## amerigoV (Jul 14, 2014)

4e will be remembered by my group as the edition that proved they could not work together as a team. It was not the edition's fault


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

Oh, another one for me:

4) 4E will be remembered as the first RPG in decades which caused non-RPGers seeing us playing it to ask if they could play, too.

In part I think this was actually because it was visually obviously more of a "game" (with the map, markers and so on), but it was also because we were clearly having fun and not having to constantly refer to rulebooks (indeed we often don't have any obvious rulebooks at the table in 4E, unlike any other edition), because damn, big fat D&D rulebooks scare the BEJEEZUS out of a lot of non-RPGers (this is one thing I worry about with 5E, where they apparently want us to carry nearly 1000 pages of A4 hardback around with us by default - let us pray that the digital offerings don't suck and arrive quickly!).

Oh and another:

5) 4E was the first edition where ALL my players felt like they understood and controlled their own characters and levelling, and where I could say "Okay, you level up!", and fully reasonably expect to see all the PCs completely and sensibly level'd up by next game session, rather than 75-50% of the players turning up with non-level'd PCs at the beginning of the session, because they couldn't figure it out, or didn't feel confident in their decisions, or whatever.

ANOTHER!

6) 4E was the first edition where ALL my players were frequently as rules-savvy as I was. I'm not talking some BS about "optimizing" or whatever, here, I'm talking about genuinely, fully understanding how initiative, combat rounds, attacks, powers, conditions, skills and so on actually work. In 2/3E, I'd always have to work with them on this - some of them would never figure certain things out, and I'd be the only person at the table with a completely solid grasp on the general game rules, most of the time.

With 4E, though, the general rules seem to have been much easier to grasp, and I found that players who previously ran a mile from rulebooks were doing things like correcting me on what "Concealed" meant, or how such-and-such a Condition actually worked (in polite, helpful ways), and I actually found this was tremendous, and really sped up play at certain times.

MOAR!

7) One bad thing I will remember 4E for amplifying from 3.XE (though we've yet to see a 3E-style "loop") and/or bringing from other RPGs, though, was the "I INTERRUPT THIS ACTION TO BRING YOU BREAKING NEWS OF SEVERAL EXTRA ACTIONS I AM CAUSING TO HAPPEN!". Towards the late-middle of the Heroic Tier, we'd got 4E running at such a speed that few encounters took more than 45 minutes, and some even down to 30! Nice, given the tactical complexity and improvising and so on.

Then we hit the end of Heroic and the beginning of Paragon, and we acquired a new PC who was a Shaman who granted extra attacks to party members in a way such as to make a Warlord jealous. Plus a multitude of ways in which various PCs could use their previously-rarely-used Minor Actions!

That slowed things up back to 60+ minutes! Darn it! The ruling that each PC could only be granted 1 extra attack/round helped, but just made the damn Shaman think harder!

And more!

8) Yet despite that, 4E is also the first edition where, all the PCs are well past level 10 to 12, yet everyone keeps wanting to play them, rather than just the single-class Mage! This was something quite characteristic of our 2E and 3E games - when everyone got past 10 or so, interest rapidly declined for all but the Mages/Wizards, and everyone started talking about rolling new PCs or trying other RPGs (we did get higher, I think to an average of 15, once, but it was a bit of a struggle). I cannot help but feel the fact that non-caster PCs had less and less influence on the result of the game beyond magic item use was a factor there.

I could go on about the causes of this for pages, but suffice to say, at the core of it is good rules design (imperfect, as noted in 7, but good), which has prevented people feeling left out or like they're getting special treatment or whatever, and rather has had everyone feeling empowered and powerful and involved.



amerigoV said:


> 4e will be remembered by my group as the edition that proved they could not work together as a team. It was not the edition's fault




It certainly tends to separate the team players and cooperators from the "self-made superhero"-types, gameplay-wise. I was surprised to find my players worked together really well (the players who hold them together both naturally picked Leaders, too, which was interesting), though it did take them a couple of sessions to get it. I note that the one player I know who really disliked 4E, but who had really liked D&D previously, had always played the kind of Mage/Wizard who was ready for everything, had a million spells known and a million scrolls prepared, and a dozen long-duration buffs for himself, and could basically solo everything (or believed he could - it wasn't entirely unjustified either in 2/3E) and was very dismayed to find this was no longer really viable, and even where it was viable, it was no longer solely his purview. He did play a few games as a Controller of some kind, but he always seemed to be working *around* the party rather than with it.


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## Emerikol (Jul 14, 2014)

The Negative:
The root cause of our industries greatest civil war.  A divided playerbase that may never be united again despite 5e's best attempts.  

The Positive:
Some people who never felt the game really reached out to their playstyle got some love.  The game will exist and can't be undone so those people will always have at minimum one edition they can enjoy with friends.


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## FireLance (Jul 14, 2014)

At least for me:

1. Balance
2. Simple and Transparent Math
3. Flexibility
4. Martial Power
5. Epic Destinies
6. Healing Surges
7. Skill Challenges
8. Feat-Based Multiclassing
9. Marking
10. Themes
11. Encounter Powers
12. The Warlord

For elaboration, see here.


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## cavalier973 (Jul 14, 2014)

It was the edition that launched the careers of Omin, Binwin, and Jim Darkmagic.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> The Negative:
> The root cause of our industries greatest civil war.  A divided playerbase that may never be united again despite 5e's best attempts.




To be fair, none of that could have happened without the OGL or without Paizo, so the seeds were sown long before 4E existed. One could even argue that, however 4E's _rules_ were, the very fact that 4E had the restrictive and unhelpful GSL rather than the OGL would have caused Paizo to create a breakaway game and the sheer popularity of their APs would have split the fanbase. I knew a number of 3.XE DMs who had bought shedloads of Paizo stuff to run, and weren't about to ditch that because some new edition!

The only way to avoid it would have been to have a more OGL-like license for 4E AND to have actively encouraged Paizo to write for it (or outright paid them!), or to have had rules designed to be explicitly backwards-compatible with 3.XE (which would have basically have meant Pathfinder!).

That said, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm pretty sure WotC believed they could just outgun Paizo/PF, and didn't really get how popular their stuff was. Of course they opened the door extra-wide with negative marketing and so! LE SIGH! 



Emerikol said:


> The Positive:
> Some people who never felt the game really reached out to their playstyle got some love.  The game will exist and can't be undone so those people will always have at minimum one edition they can enjoy with friends.




Yep, and from WotC's perspective, they started to get my steady $$$ again, which, had they gone with a less ambitious/risky design, they probably would not have (I suspect we'd be playing some kind of alternative d20 FRPG, though I can't say which). As long as they keep the DDI up, they'll probably keep getting their small monthly donation!


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## BryonD (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> To be fair, none of that could have happened without the OGL or without Paizo, so the seeds were sown long before 4E existed.



I completely disagree with this.
There was great discontent within the fan base well before PF was announced.  And while WotC's slowness in working with 3PPs led directly to Paizo going another direction.  They would not have gone the route they selected had a market not been there.

If the OGL and Paizo had not existed then history would have been very different.

But it would have been a different history that still included people not playing a game they did not like.
4E was responsible for its own fate.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

BryonD said:


> I completely disagree with this.
> There was great discontent within the fan base well before PF was announced.  And while WotC's slowness in working with 3PPs led directly to Paizo going another direction.  They would not have gone the route they selected had a market not been there.
> 
> If the OGL and Paizo had not existed then history would have been very different.
> ...




I'm not really seeing a great deal of *actual* disagreement here, ByronD.  

You seem to merely be re-iterating what I'm saying but then adding a line blaming 4E as if it was a person, rather than a product, which was marketed. < shrug >


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## Gargoyle (Jul 14, 2014)

4th for me was good, bad and ugly, all IMO of course:

Good:

Roles encouraged teamwork in combat.
Monster creation was simple and elegant.
Encounters were fun to design, run and play.
Tactical gameplay was well done.


Bad:

Powers for every class took it too far.
Theater of the mind gameplay not supported.
Feats were poorly implemented and there were too many of them.
Took too long to create a character.

Ugly:

Healing surges were clunky.
Warlord non-magical healing.  Fun class, but the narrative had to be changed to match the mechanics, when the mechanics should support the narrative.
Multiclassing.  Ugh.
Electronic tools were disappointing, and the online only character generator.

Essentials fixed a lot of problems I had with the game, but it was disappointing that such fixes felt necessary.

I had a lot of fun with 4e, and was somewhat of a fanboy of it for a while.  But over time I realized that the flaws many people saw immediately were real and that WotC went in some very wrong directions with it.  Much happier with the direction of 5e.


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## Dungeoneer (Jul 14, 2014)

4e was the edition where when the table ran into a rules issue, I as the DM felt very comfortable coming up with a resolution off the top of my head. And then when we looked it up later, my resolution was often the one in the book. Once you grok'd the system, it was incredibly logical.


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## BryonD (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I'm not really seeing a great deal of *actual* disagreement here, ByronD.
> 
> You seem to merely be re-iterating what I'm saying but then adding a line blaming 4E as if it was a person, rather than a product, which was marketed. < shrug >




You said the divided fan base could not have happened without OGL or Paizo.  
There were people who loved 4E and played it.  There were people who were not going to play it.
The divide comes with or without OGL or Paizo.  The nature of how that divide played out is another matter altogether.  But not the divide itself.

If you don't like my short-hand personification of 4E then feel free to revise that to address the people who laid out the plan.


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## Emerikol (Jul 14, 2014)

BryonD said:


> You said the divided fan base could not have happened without OGL or Paizo.
> There were people who loved 4E and played it.  There were people who were not going to play it.
> The divide comes with or without OGL or Paizo.  The nature of how that divide played out is another matter altogether.  But not the divide itself.
> 
> If you don't like my short-hand personification of 4E then feel free to revise that to address the people who laid out the plan.




I agree with you Byron.  

If someone made it to 4e and loved 4e and pretty much thought pre-4e were poor sets of rules and are a long time D&D player, then they've already demonstrated the personality that makes them someone who will play even what they don't like.  That personality trait though was not common in the 3e people who hated 4e.  The 4e people assumed all those 3e people would compromise just like they'd been doing all those years but guess what they didn't.  Many of them weren't going to whether Pathfinder existed or not.  They had 3e.


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## jadrax (Jul 14, 2014)

amerigoV said:


> 4e will be remembered by my group as the edition that proved they could not work together as a team. It was not the edition's fault




Yeah, I think had a very similar experience to that when I first ran it.


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## TwoSix (Jul 14, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I agree with you Byron.
> 
> If someone made it to 4e and loved 4e and pretty much thought pre-4e were poor sets of rules and are a long time D&D player, then they've already demonstrated the personality that makes you someone who will play even what you don't like.  That personality trait though was not common in the 3e people who hated 4e.  The 4e people assumed all those 3e people would compromise just like they'd been doing all those years but guess what they didn't.  Many of them weren't going to whether Pathfinder existed or not.  They had 3e.



Yea, that's not a bad observation.  I think 4e attracted a pretty high percentage of mechanically inclined players, as well as novelty seeking players.
Those, I think, tend to be players who look at a system more holistically, and can find ways to play to keep them entertained despite problems with the system.  I certainly do this when I play PF, mostly by playing casters. 

Also, I do think one hidden barrier to indie games (lumping in 4e as a game with indie aims, despite some conflicts in the rules) as opposed to trad games is that indie games require a greater amount of player buy-in to generate an enjoyable session.  Players who aren't quite on board or have opposing aims often bring indie games to a screeching halt.  Trad rpgs can usually gloss over these distinctions by brunt of DM rulings.


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## Emerikol (Jul 14, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> Yea, that's not a bad observation.  I think 4e attracted a pretty high percentage of mechanically inclined players, as well as novelty seeking players.
> Those, I think, tend to be players who look at a system more holistically, and can find ways to play to keep them entertained despite problems with the system.  I certainly do this when I play PF, mostly by playing casters.
> 
> Also, I do think one hidden barrier to indie games (lumping in 4e as a game with indie aims, despite some conflicts in the rules) as opposed to trad games is that indie games require a greater amount of player buy-in to generate an enjoyable session.  Players who aren't quite on board or have opposing aims often bring indie games to a screeching halt.  Trad rpgs can usually gloss over these distinctions by brunt of DM rulings.




Good observations.  

It kind of fits with my own impression that the big fight between editions is over people who actually play the fighter class in the pre-4e way vs those who wanted the fighter to be as appealing to them as the wizard class.


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## Campbell (Jul 14, 2014)

I think the legacy of 4e can already be seen in games like Marvel Heroic Role Play, Edge of the Empire, Post God Machine World of Darkness games, 13th Age, and even Numenera. 4e took the indie movement's most important idea to traditional RPGs - that games should be designed for a particular focused experience and that the mechanics should encourage the sort of play you are looking for - and brought it to the mainstream for a time. The new development we have seen in mainstream tabletop RPGs in the last few years is evidence enough of that. All these games have different focuses, but they are all the result of a vastly more rigorous design process and much more transparent mechanics than existed prior to 4e's release.

The other area where I see 4e having a beneficial impact is making strides towards changing the culture of mainstream role playing groups. 4e matched its transparency of rules with a call for more transparency within individual gaming groups. It encouraged players to take more of a stake in the games they play and to communicate what they want out of play. It also encouraged all players to take responsibility for the collective experience of the group.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

BryonD said:


> You said the divided fan base could not have happened without OGL or Paizo.
> There were people who loved 4E and played it. There were people who were not going to play it. The divide comes with or without OGL or Paizo. The nature of how that divide played out is another matter altogether.  But not the divide itself.




Sure there would have been _some_ kind of division, just like every edition. That's not the point, though.

There wouldn't have been the _same_ kind of division, not the one Emerikol called rather dramatically "our industries greatest civil war".

You can see this pretty easily by imagining a different 4E, AND no Paizo AND no OGL (and thus little/no OSR, which was significantly enabled by the OGL). Whatever it's form, there would have been a division, period, for sure.

Let's envision a 4E that was incompatible with 3.XE products in the way 3.XE was with 1/2E ones. Very basic design concept changes. However, it's inoffensive in terms of ability design and so on (akin to Essentials, perhaps, but even less risky, with no treasure packages, fixed monsters and so on - the details don't matter). No matter how inoffensive it is, there will be a division. It will be missing stuff some people want, and have stuff some people do not (you and Emerikol are showing this very clearly with 5E!).

Without Paizo, the OSR movement, and the OGL (which is responsible in large part for the former two), that division will be there, but it will be limited. Furthermore, with the lack of an in-print alternative D&D (in the form of PF and OSR games), people who reject it for a year or three will be very likely to try it again after a few years, and may revise their opinion.

Now add those three back in to the picture. Paizo eager to leverage the division, seeing their chance at the big time. OGL to help them do it, nasty GSL from 4E discouraging 3PP in general. OSR providing other opportunities to D&D.

Even though this 4E is far less inherently divisive, the division will be vastly larger than any previous edition, because of the OGL existing, and because Paizo, let's be real, very much want to use this (as is completely reasonable business practice, to be clear!), esp. as the GSL and incompatibility are causing problems for them, and because the OSR stuff is providing further alternatives for specialist tastes.

It would still be "our industries greatest civil war". Smaller? Yeah, maybe. Maybe bigger, because maybe this 4E has less stickiness, less reason to play it over PF!

I'll be honest, I think failing to accept the huge role the OGL, and resulting Paizo and OSR situations (and to a lesser extent d20 FRPG in general situation) played in the "civil war" is a real blindspot/oversight, a big one. 

Of course maybe you're not doing that, it's unclear.



BryonD said:


> If you don't like my short-hand personification of 4E then feel free to revise that to address the people who laid out the plan.




That makes zero sense to me. You are responsible for what you post, not WotC.


----------



## Emerikol (Jul 14, 2014)

I'm for diversification.  Even though cola is incredibly popular some people do like sprite and/or mountain dew.  

I just wish there was some recognition that it's about taste and not about "good" rules versus "bad" rules.  If fun is the sole goal of any game designed for entertainment, then 4e was a lot worse game for me than 3e was despite any other features of either.   Do I consider any roleplaying game perfect?  No.  Could I suggest things for improvement in any game?  Yes.  That includes the ones I like better.  

My personal opinion is that D&D for traditions sake if nothing else should have stayed with it's core constituency.  I also think that other fantasy games needed to be made that went in vastly different directions.  Wotc could do it or some other company.  I welcome a 4e style pathfinder game because I don't see how D&D can make everyone happy and we will only have constant turmoil as first one side and then the other tries to "control" the direction of the game.


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## jodyjohnson (Jul 14, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> Took too long to create a character.




As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to *print* a character.

I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them.  What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.


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## TerraDave (Jul 14, 2014)

*"In my game, we had this encounter..."*


_Now I will read the thread and see how many ninjaed me. _


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 14, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I just wish there was some recognition that it's about taste and not about "good" rules versus "bad" rules.




Taste _absolutely is _a factor but there also needs to be recognition that, once you've accounted for that, some sets of rules achieve their stated goals, some do not, and some fail at their goals but perhaps semi-accidentally succeed at creating something else cool. 4E's rules largely succeeded at their goal (maybe 75-80%), but it wasn't as popular a goal as expected! Not sure 3E's rules did as well at their various stated goals, but they were more popular despite that (albeit for complex reasons)!



jodyjohnson said:


> As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to *print* a character.
> 
> I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them.  What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.




This is on your print drivers, not 4E! If have better print drivers, or print to PDF then print that, you'll get better results!


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## TerraDave (Jul 14, 2014)

Olgar Shiverstone said:


> Encounters.
> 
> 4E is all about complex interactive environments where traps, skills, and creatures all combine to create memorable and challenging encounters. ....






Henry said:


> *4. "In my game, there's this cool encounter..."* ....








MasqueradingVampire said:


> I agree with those who say that 4E will be remembered for its Encounters.
> 
> Intricate, tactically deep set-piece encounters with interesting environments and plenty of options for every character during combat.
> 
> ...






Quickleaf said:


> I definitely concur with what you guys said [MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION] and [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION].
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Kinda what I expected. But I still wanted to post it. 



Raith5 said:


> Agree with the tone of this thread, but I have never got the idea that 4e is all about the grid and miniatures. I have used them ever since basic D&D for most encounters.
> 
> But 4e is certainly for me about mechanics for everything and everyone. In particular, the way 4e gave PCs powers and mechanics to really shape combats really empowered players compared to other editions. I just loved seeing my DM's monsters being pushed over cliffs, monsters being stopped in their tracks by the fighter, stunning Vecna, being successful in difficult skill challenges.




Yep. Stuff you do in an encounter. 

It was a very logical approach coming out of 3E. We had a lot of good ones in our game. But not every encounter needs to be a big explosive deal, and not every thing the PCs do needs to be a big explosive encounter.


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## Dungeoneer (Jul 14, 2014)

jodyjohnson said:


> As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to *print* a character.
> 
> I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them.  What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.



Apparently you never got bogged down sifting through lists of hundreds of feats, like I did!


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## Dungeoneer (Jul 14, 2014)

TerraDave said:


> It was a very logical approach coming out of 3E. We had a lot of good ones in our game. But not every encounter needs to be a big explosive deal, and not every thing the PCs do needs to be a big explosive encounter.



Agree with this. 4e could have used a way to hand-wave less consequential encounters.

When EVERY encounter has to be laid out on a grid and takes 4+ minutes to play you have a recipe for long, drawn-out sessions. I ditched 'random encounter' tables very quickly once I started running 4e.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 14, 2014)

Dungeoneer said:


> Apparently you never got bogged down sifting through lists of hundreds of feats, like I did!




This.  But also choosing powers, paragon paths, skills, etc, became difficult and time consuming.

Part of it is that with the DNDInsider subscription, we had easy and cheap access to far more options than in any earlier edition, including many new classes and races, and yes, even more feats.  Too many officially endorsed yet unplaytested options delivered right to my players, without very much ability for me to limit what they could choose from made for some long character creation sessions, especially when everything from the online Dragon and Dungeon magazines were considered "official".  

IMO it wasn't easy to limit options.  It's funny and sad that as of 2/27/14, one of the known issues with the Character Builder is "Campaign Settings Editor is not implemented".


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## BryonD (Jul 14, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Sure there would have been _some_ kind of division, just like every edition. That's not the point, though.
> 
> There wouldn't have been the _same_ kind of division, not the one Emerikol called rather dramatically "our industries greatest civil war".



Ok, mea culpa for focusing on "the division" and not "civil war".

However...



> You can see this pretty easily by imagining a different 4E, AND no Paizo AND no OGL (and thus little/no OSR, which was significantly enabled by the OGL). Whatever it's form, there would have been a division, period, for sure.
> 
> Let's envision a 4E that was incompatible with 3.XE products in the way 3.XE was with 1/2E ones. Very basic design concept changes. However, it's inoffensive in terms of ability design and so on (akin to Essentials, perhaps, but even less risky, with no treasure packages, fixed monsters and so on - the details don't matter). No matter how inoffensive it is, there will be a division. It will be missing stuff some people want, and have stuff some people do not (you and Emerikol are showing this very clearly with 5E!).
> 
> Without Paizo, the OSR movement, and the OGL (which is responsible in large part for the former two), that division will be there, but it will be limited. Furthermore, with the lack of an in-print alternative D&D (in the form of PF and OSR games), people who reject it for a year or three will be very likely to try it again after a few years, and may revise their opinion.



Here I strongly disagree with you (again).

4E disenfranchised a very substantial portion of the fanbase.  A divide "like any other edition" fails to come close to expressing the portion of fans that were lost from the start.
There was plenty of vocal comments to that effect at the time.  And the 4E response was a combination of (a) players are destined to come around and (b) players who leave will be replaced many times over with fans pulled into the TTRPG hobby.

You are back to (a) with the addition that it didn't happen because the OGL was there to create a relief valve.
I still consider it more than a stretch of reasonable to assume people would play a game they don't like.
You don't even have to go further than this thread to see the opposite: people saying they liked 4E but as time went by they found a lot of the complaints were true.  And 4E did continue to lose fanbase as time went by.
So I consider the presumption that any meaningful number of the people who disliked it would revise their opinion to be simple wishful thinking.
There is certainly no evidence that makes it a reasonable presumption.

And even in your hopeful scenario, you have a huge chunk of fans milling around lost in the gaming wilderness for "a year or three" before they give in.  That is what is known in market terms as "demand".  The OGL DID make an easy path of least resistance and thus reality happened.  But in this alternate no-Paizo no-OGL universe, the demand would still exist.  Maybe someone at White Wolf or someone at Steve Jackson would take heed and give the masses what they want.  Maybe some company that doesn't exist because Paizo beat them to it would have.  May twenty different options would have absorbed the demand in pieces.  We will never know.  But any of these presumptions are more reasonable than "people will give up and play a game they don't like".

Yes, the OGL most certainly played a key role in how the "civil war" played out once the divide existed.  It seems we easily and obviously agree on that.  Some alternate universe scenarios may have not had the same civil war feel.  But some of them did.  And with the number of people pushed out of the D&D brand, the potential that something very similar would have happened is quite real.


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## Truename (Jul 14, 2014)

Definitely encounters.

In my game (1-30 just finished last month) we had this encounter where the heroes were in a pocket dimension and could change gravity with a minor action Arcana check. (This was inspired by WotBS, but I changed it up some.) There was a large ballroom with floating motes in it, and the party was hard pressed by a particular baddie. So they changed gravity to knock him around a corner, then the druid changed it again to fail 100 feet onto his head, weapon pointing down, making an Acrobatics check to transfer his falling damage onto the baddie. Splat.  There was also much throwing ropes around the floating motes and using them to change trajectory mid-air...

Many levels later, the party was trying to destroy a huge magical weapon emplacement, guarded by runes representing each school of magic. They could either destroy the runes, or stand next to them to control their effect. Each one could do something devastating (teleport, throw up a barrier, fireball, etc.). Meanwhile, an endless stream of devils is coming through a portal, and the weapon is guarded behind a magical barrier...

In the very first campaign we ran (Scales of War), there was this encounter inside a dwarven mine, a huge room with stairway running up around the outside edge, and an endless stream of orcs coming out of doorways along the stairway. The heroes had to get to the top and figure out a control panel that would fill the room with scalding water and stop the orcs. They did that, but then some of the orcs pushed two of the characters off the platform. They fell into the scalding water and kept trying to get out, but were pushed back into the water. The heroes prevailed, but the two characters were boiled to death...

Good times. 4e will definitely be remembered in my group for its amazing set pieces. For me, it was the first edition where combat was truly _fun_ in its own right, and I've played every edition since AD&D.


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## Vael (Jul 14, 2014)

I'll remember 4e as the edition that made me a DM. My first effort at DMing 3.5 was a nightmare, and while I'm now more experienced and can handle Pathfinder and 3.5; it was 4e's ease-of-use that got me there.

I'll remember it as the edition that one of my most bad-ass characters was a bard. I had so many tricks up my sleeve, I could contribute as a spellcaster and melee combatant. The ongoing joke was that I could cast "Assassin", as I could grant so many attacks to him. (Oh and kudos to 13th Age on continuing that trend, their bards rock)

I'll remember it as the edition of my gaming group. Only two of us had played previous editions, 4e was the start for the rest. Which means I'll remember it for awhile, 'cause we're going to keep playing it.


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## GrumpyGamer (Jul 14, 2014)

A bit narrowed in focus, but for me I will remember 4e for a return to Dark Sun and the awesome Ashes of Athas campaign.


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## n00bdragon (Jul 14, 2014)

*In my game, there was this one fight...*

For me 4e will always be remembered as the edition where my party was fighting a beholder on the edge of a pit full of lava. The beholder was hovering just over the edge of the pit to keep pesky melee types off his back. Then, the fighter says "Screw it, I jump at him." He makes the athletics check to reach the beholder and does a bull rush mid air, knocking the beholder prone. Well, when a flying creature goes prone they fall so the beholder and the fighter fall ten feet into the lava pit and by now the table is cracking up except for the wizard player, who is furtively checking his sheet. I start rolling lava damage for both of them and figure that if the fighter is on top of the large size beholder (who probably won't sink immediately) he will take the lesser of the two damage rolls. Turns out even with that he's still badly burned, but conscious enough to take an action point and leap to a wall on the edge of the pit from which he can start to climb up. I let the wizard player know it's his turn and that the beholder (who is a big fat solo end boss type) is now bloodied. He calmly steps up to the edge of the pit and says "Thunder Wave". I let him know about the saving throw for pushing someone into damaging terrain and he's okay with that. I roll it and the beholder fails and is now subject to 10 squares of forced movement while half submerged in a boiling lake of lava. No one at the table has any breath anymore, not even the wizard and all of our sides are officially in orbit. I barely heard the wizard gasp, "It's just like a slip 'n slide, except you _die_."

It couldn't have happened in any other edition.


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## TwoSix (Jul 14, 2014)

n00bdragon said:


> *In my game, there was this one fight...*
> 
> For me 4e will always be remembered as the edition where my party was fighting a beholder on the edge of a pit full of lava. The beholder was hovering just over the edge of the pit to keep pesky melee types off his back. Then, the fighter says "Screw it, I jump at him." He makes the athletics check to reach the beholder and does a bull rush mid air, knocking the beholder prone. Well, when a flying creature goes prone they fall so the beholder and the fighter fall ten feet into the lava pit and by now the table is cracking up except for the wizard player, who is furtively checking his sheet. I start rolling lava damage for both of them and figure that if the fighter is on top of the large size beholder (who probably won't sink immediately) he will take the lesser of the two damage rolls. Turns out even with that he's still badly burned, but conscious enough to take an action point and leap to a wall on the edge of the pit from which he can start to climb up. I let the wizard player know it's his turn and that the beholder (who is a big fat solo end boss type) is now bloodied. He calmly steps up to the edge of the pit and says "Thunder Wave". I let him know about the saving throw for pushing someone into damaging terrain and he's okay with that. I roll it and the beholder fails and is now subject to 10 squares of forced movement while half submerged in a boiling lake of lava. No one at the table has any breath anymore, not even the wizard and all of our sides are officially in orbit. I barely heard the wizard gasp, "It's just like a slip 'n slide, except you _die_."
> 
> It couldn't have happened in any other edition.



I am heartily impressed with the _Slip 'n Die (tm)_!


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## Emerikol (Jul 14, 2014)

I liken the dislike for 3e as the West Virginia coal miners strike that hit in 1920.   Not insignificant by any means but nothing to compare to the 1860's civil war which is where I put the 4e conflict.

Paizo was an outcome not a catalyst.  Sure we know better now because Pathfinder did so well.  If not for that I'm sure many would be arguing that there had been no divide at all.   Any attempt by us to say otherwise would just be our anecdotal feelings.   There would still have been a divide though.  

I do think that 4e hit a perfect storm in the sense that people's reasons for disliking that edition are not unified.  Martial healing, AEDU, dissociative mechanics, lack of narrative mechanical unity, slowness of combat, and so forth were all probably major contributors but not everyone agreed on all of those things.  5e seems to have split the difference on a few of them.


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## stinkomandx (Jul 14, 2014)

For my table, 4th Edition had a lot in common with 3rd Edition in a few regards:

1. A simple, fun low-key story through early-tier play
2. An amazing, high-adventure campaign throughout middle-tier play
3. A slog through endless circumstantial effects and "WAIT! I had +1 on that roll. Wait, no, +3." through high-tier play.

At the very least it was the monsters getting constantly debuffed and stun-locked into oblivion in 4e rather than the players.


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## Anastrace (Jul 14, 2014)

Pretty cool class balance between casters/non casters. 
Nifty powers
Points of Light

Poor Multiclassing

Really good adaptation to other settings. (It works really good for settings like Amethyst or Modern, really, really well actually)

edit: 16:49. 7/14/2014: I will say as far editions go, mechanically I'm platform agnostic. Mechanics really don't change much as far as the campaigns go, though it did add a couple races to our campaign. Which was pretty popular. Tieflings especially, though the dragonborn weren't too far behind. Still our groups did like 4e quite a bit, quick poll I just did said they liked it more than 1e/2e, but lower than pathfinder and 3e/3.5e. That bears out with my experience, since I was a heavy multiclasser. Though I loved playing Amethyst.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 14, 2014)

*The Edition War*

As in any other war, the history books are being written by the victors.  4e will be remembered as that time WotC made the 'mistake' of deviating from 'Real D&D.'


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## Michael Morris (Jul 14, 2014)

I bought 4 of the 4e books and ran a game for 2 months in it.  I tried to like it, honestly.

But my players disliked the system and how mind-numbingly slow the combats where compared to 3e. I told them it would get better once they learned the system, but that never happened.

What finally broke me is when I did the math of how many powers would have to be written to insure every class had at least 2 powers / color at each level.  It was just, overwhelming.  I could move away from colored alignment, but the work was already done in 3e and I saw no compelling reason to abandon that work and storytelling history in the setting.

As it stands I'm still unsure of using 5e.  There are things I want to do with my game that may not mesh well with the system.  At the moment, I'm in a wait and see mode - I'll at least get the core books but beyond that I dunno.


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## Greg K (Jul 14, 2014)

For myself as a non 4e player, here is what I will remember (sticking to what I find to be positives)
1. Removing Level Drain
2. Removing 3e XP costs
3. One time constitution score to hit points rather than con modifier per level
4. Removing most non-biological aspects of race  and making them feats
5. Elf/Eladrin split
6. non-spell casting rangers as core
7. Fighters getting cool things to do in core (even I prefer the maneuver system from the Book of Iron Might for 3e)
8. Warlord (in concept)
9. Fighter, Rogue, and Ranger Builds
10. Heroic Tier Multi-classing
11 Healing Surges and Second Wind (although I would preferred Healing Surges being 1+Con Modifier rather than the base being based upon class).
12. Disease Track.
13. Magic Missile needing a to hit roll (before Essentials ruined this)
14. The Feywild


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## DaveMage (Jul 15, 2014)

4e will be remembered by me as the edition that broke me of the need to be a D&D RPG completest.   
It will be remembered by me as the edition that had the worst marketing in D&D history.
It will be remembered by me as the edition that changed things for the benefit of the authors rather than the fans (see 4E Forgotten Realms).
It will be remembered by me as the edition that expected you to buy more than three core books to play the core game.
It will be remembered by me as the edition that, try as they may, even Necromancer Games couldn't support.
It will be remembered by me as the edition that had less content per page (and more whitespace) and yet continued to raise the price for products.
It will be remembered by me the edition that made EN World a very difficult place to visit for about 4 years.

However, since I don't want to be all negative (ha!), it did add one concept (which has been brought to 5E as well) that I like: the idea that a creature can be "unaligned".

Goodbye, 4E - and HUGE kudos to WotC for the 5E rollout.  Everything is better this time around.


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## Greg K (Jul 15, 2014)

DaveMage said:


> Goodbye, 4E - and HUGE kudos to WotC for the 5E rollout.  Everything is better this time around.




To each their own. While neither 4e or 5e is my favorite edition and I think both have some good points, 4e had some classes that I would want to play or run for (based upon the 5e playtest and basic set).


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## Kannik (Jul 15, 2014)

Some of the things I will remember 4e for:

*Exciting encounters!  *To parrot what others have said, many fun amazing moments were had in service of the adventure as we went along:  knocking opponents off towers, dazing the big bad and causing his prime buff to fail (and thusly get thoroughly ganked), rituals around the edges of intense combats, dragon-riding knights of Bahamut driving a lance into the body-splitting psionicist, bonus actions that swing the tide of battle, and the controller making the DM (like me!) saying “You do _what_ now?”

*Empowering DMs for awesomeness!  *In one of the first 4e adventures I ran, the big bad wrapped his chain whip around one of the PCs, pulled him in and body slammed him against his spikes, for damage and a knock prone.  Rather than the players, as they’d done in 3e, going “Wait, how did he do that?  Did he grapple?  I get a +4 against that! Etc!” instead there were cheers of wonder for that neat trick.   Letting the adversaries be constructed to suit the adventure, separate from any PC rules/etc, made it easy and fun for a DM to prep a game, and also allowed for that nifty creativity.  

*Empowering PCs for flavourful excellence! * Each class was given licence to do cool things (tm), and do them often.  Even PCs that did similar things (same roles) did them differently, making it easy to create an interesting story/style to RP alongside the action (and bleeding into the non-encounter portion of the game).  Add to this the ease of re-skinning powers/classes, and it’s golden – like my Dwarven Runecaster (reskinned artificer), steeped in the lore of the FR mythos.  

*Being willing to eat sacred cows!  *While I don’t think every change turned out to be good ones or necessary, some were quite nifty, and I will remember the 4e team being willing to not be bound by previous editions.

*A return to 1e roots:  crafting/non adventuring skills!*  4e removed most mechanical support for anything that wasn’t part of the adventuring skillset.  While this gives great freedom, it wasn’t spelled out that it was intended to have that freedom, and a little mechanical nudge helps, so I wasn't a full fan of this one (hence my Trades & Professions supplement).

*A return to 1e roots:  Hit Points!  *If you read what the 1e PHB has to say on hit points on p34 (including the delightful “it is ridiculous to assume” wording), 4e took it to heart in its mechanics, both with the (perhaps poorly named) healing surges, martial “healing”, and more.  And while what HP represented also didn’t change in 2e or 3e, 4e was the first to expand and play with what could be done in that framework to bring about new options.  

*A return to 1e roots:  game design! * Similarly, reading Gygax’s statements on p9 of the 1e DMG about what the philosophy of the D&D ruleset was, and 4e plied along that path.

*A great effort to create balance in the force!  *Not every character was the same yet there was a great push to allow everyone to be an integral part of the action across the boards and across all levels.   

*Skill challenges!  *I lucked out – the first example I read about skill challenges (done at a pre-4e event by Chris Perkins, IIRC) set the tone in my mind on how to use them, which may well have been much better than how they were executed in the DMG and (especially) in the encounters modules.  Because of that they worked out very organically and fun in my games, and the players usually didn’t know they were in something called a skill challenge (I used it mostly as a narrative framework rather than a metagame obstacle).  

*Battles of speed or not speed!  *In my high level campaign, battles took just as long under 4e as they did under 3e;  but low level battles often also took about that long.  If the battle was narratively interesting, it wasn’t an issue.  If not, it could feel like a schlog and it took some time for me to alter how I ran them to get ‘em moving along more quickly.  

*Amazing stories and fabulous adventures and sweet RP and tense dungeoneering! *Just like every other edition of D&D I’ve played.  

*Many characters I wanted to play!  *And still might!  

*The edition war that went nuclear!  *When I started gaming 20+ years ago, the lament of most D&D players was how they were ostracized, ridiculed, harassed, teased, belittled, dismissed, and shunned for their like of this hobby.  With the intense dislike by some of 4e and the ensuing edition war sniping and hyperbole, I learned that gamers can be just as petty, mean spirited, and myopic as the “jocks” they decried.

peace,

Kannik


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## pemerton (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> If someone made it to 4e and loved 4e and pretty much thought pre-4e were poor sets of rules and are a long time D&D player, then they've already demonstrated the personality that makes them someone who will play even what they don't like.



This is too simplistic, I think. You are assuming (i) that 4e is a huge departure from earlier versions of D&D, whereas for many of those who like it this is not true, and (ii) that 4e players migrated from a 3E that they didn't like, whereas that is also not universally true.

For instance, I don't think B/X is a poor set of rules. I think it's a great set of rules, though I personally haven't played it very much for a long time. And I think that 4e does a better job of capturing the spirit of B/X than 3E.

Also, I didn't play in any steady D&D campaigns between 1997 and 2009, although I used a lot of D&D material in the Rolemaster campaign that I ran. I started running D&D again in 2009 because 4e looked like a game I really wanted to play. (Whereas 3E didn't - I ran a couple of test sessions just for fun, when it came out, but it was never a game I was going to play in any serious way, because it doesn't provide any sort of play experience that I am looking for.)



Kannik said:


> *A return to 1e roots:  crafting/non adventuring skills!*  4e removed most mechanical support for anything that wasn’t part of the adventuring skillset.  While this gives great freedom, it wasn’t spelled out that it was intended to have that freedom, and a little mechanical nudge helps, so I wasn't a full fan of this one (hence my Trades & Professions supplement).
> 
> *A return to 1e roots:  Hit Points!  *If you read what the 1e PHB has to say on hit points on p34 (including the delightful “it is ridiculous to assume” wording), 4e took it to heart in its mechanics, both with the (perhaps poorly named) healing surges, martial “healing”, and more.  And while what HP represented also didn’t change in 2e or 3e, 4e was the first to expand and play with what could be done in that framework to bring about new options.
> 
> *A return to 1e roots:  game design! * Similarly, reading Gygax’s statements on p9 of the 1e DMG about what the philosophy of the D&D ruleset was, and 4e plied along that path.



This is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind when I say that it is too simplistic just to say that 4e departed from what D&D had been up until that point.


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## sabrinathecat (Jul 15, 2014)

What will 4E be remembered for?

Having an excellent system ganked by marketing execs who listened to internet trolls. The consequent redesign and rewrite of basic mechanical principles flubbing and making a mess.

Extremely poor proof-reading. With the errata an post-publishing changes to rules, it was like the video games that you buy only to find that they are so buggy that the company has already released the first major patch. "Close Blurst 3" well, is it a blast or a burst? WTF are we supposed to make of that.

A brilliant system that was abandoned after an inordinately short run.

Some of the most inconsistant and disappointing support. (Some races and classes got support, some were simply abandoned after initial publication).

The shift from an excellent downloadable character builder program to a horrible on-line only builder.

A WotC board reformat that seemed designed to drive people away be being counter-intuitive, difficult to navigate, and just plain ugly.

4E is the Colin Baker of D&D formats: abandoned too soon, unfairly picked on, poorly supported, and overall inconsistent oversight.
I like 4E. I wish it had been recognized by more people for its brilliance, balance, and sterling mechanics.

Almost everyone I've talked to is going to stick with 4E no matter what. There are just so many options left to explore.


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## pemerton (Jul 15, 2014)

TerraDave said:


> not every encounter needs to be a big explosive deal, and not every thing the PCs do needs to be a big explosive encounter.





Dungeoneer said:


> Agree with this. 4e could have used a way to hand-wave less consequential encounters.



Well, there is a way - say yes. (And perhaps tax them a healing surge on the way through  - maybe they get an attack roll against the appropriate DC to see whether or not they lose one.)

A lot of social encounters get handled this way - a single Diplomacy check, or free-form (ie the GM says "yes" or "no" as appropriate). Why not combat?

I'll concede that there is a D&D tradition of not doing it this way. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad tradition, but I am curious as to why D&D does it that way. What point do combat encounters that are _not_ "big, explosive deals", but that are nevertheless resolved using more than a single hand-wave or die roll, serve? The question is not rhetorical - I'm not implying that there is no point. I'm just wondering what exactly the point is.



Gargoyle said:


> Warlord non-magical healing.  Fun class, but the narrative had to be changed to match the mechanics, when the mechanics should support the narrative.



The mechanics do support the narrative.

The narrative is that of an inspiring friend and ally, who speaks a word of encouragement that enable the hero to go on. The mechanic is that the player spends a healing surge, increases the number in the "hit points" column, and hence is able to have his/her PC go on.

I'm not seeing the problem.


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## pemerton (Jul 15, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> I do think one hidden barrier to indie games (lumping in 4e as a game with indie aims, despite some conflicts in the rules) as opposed to trad games is that indie games require a greater amount of player buy-in to generate an enjoyable session.  Players who aren't quite on board or have opposing aims often bring indie games to a screeching halt.  Trad rpgs can usually gloss over these distinctions by brunt of DM rulings.





Campbell said:


> 4e matched its transparency of rules with a call for more transparency within individual gaming groups. It encouraged players to take more of a stake in the games they play and to communicate what they want out of play. It also encouraged all players to take responsibility for the collective experience of the group.



I agree with these two comments. I think there is a further dimension to this.

My experience may be atypical, but back in the days when I used to play with a wider range of groups and gamers (mid-to-late 80s and even moreso through the 90s), I frequently encountered a new player who had come into the hobby ready to really engage - to build and play a PC to the hilt, to push the game forward, to play out this guy's heroic destiny. But then the player was crushed. Sometimes by 1st level hit points. Sometimes by domineering GMing, whether exercising control over PC build, or action resolution, or via GM PCs, or any of the hundreds of other devices that seemed to be irrationally popular at least at that point in time. Sometimes by mechanics that left them unable to make their mark on the game, either because the PC they built wasn't the hero they had hoped to build, but instead semi-effectual at best, or because the action resolution mechanics weren't up to the job, or because the GM fudged to override the player's input in favour of his/her own conception of "what's good for the story".

4e takes those approaches to RPGing and stops them dead in their tracks. Players' PCs are competent from the get go. The action resolution rules work, and they give the players a clear role in deciding what happens. The GM is told what his/her role is, and both the rules and the guidelines of the game reinforce that role. (Essentials backpedalled in some of its wording here - a retrograde step in my opinion.)

It's not just that it makes transparent demands on players. It expressly sets out to establish circumstances of play in which the players can _meet_ those demands. Which, at least in my experience, most are very eager to do.



Campbell said:


> I think the legacy of 4e can already be seen in games like Marvel Heroic Role Play, Edge of the Empire, Post God Machine World of Darkness games, 13th Age, and even Numenera. 4e took the indie movement's most important idea to traditional RPGs - that games should be designed for a particular focused experience and that the mechanics should encourage the sort of play you are looking for - and brought it to the mainstream for a time.



I agree with this. It's what I had in mind when, on another thread something like 6 months to a year ago, I posted that the Forge had largely succeeded as a cultural movement.


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## Emerikol (Jul 15, 2014)

pemerton said:


> This is too simplistic, I think. You are assuming (i) that 4e is a huge departure from earlier versions of D&D, whereas for many of those who like it this is not true, and (ii) that 4e players migrated from a 3E that they didn't like, whereas that is also not universally true.
> 
> For instance, I don't think B/X is a poor set of rules. I think it's a great set of rules, though I personally haven't played it very much for a long time. And I think that 4e does a better job of capturing the spirit of B/X than 3E.
> 
> ...




Well I can't argue with someone who doesn't see what I see.  Obviously whatever it is about D&D you like it's not the same thing as what I identify as D&D.

Since you are self-identifying as someone who really didn't play D&D most of that time my original point did not include you.   There are though many 4e people who despise pre-4e who were still playing it.  

Personally, and this is probably because I consider the game the mechanics and not the fluff, I see tons of things all versions of D&D but 4e have in common.  The Vancian wizard was pretty darn close all the way through.   AEDU was a huge departure.   The simple fighter as an option was possible all the way through though in 3e it was possible to expand beyond that concept you didn't have to do so.  There were many passive feats you could take and pretty much play the simple fighter.   With 4e you only had a fighter that used a resource mechanic.  A resource mechanic that I could have seen as viable for some classes but not for martial classes.  Maybe Paladins and Rangers could have used it.  That would have been an incremental change.   They turned the entire healing system upside down.  Surges, martial healing, magic that couldn't heal beyond your surges, and so forth.  Those are major changes.   The healing system for the most part had not changed prior to 4e.  The quantity of healing perhaps but not the fundamental system.

So those things are what I consider a games identity.  The actual mechanical structures.  I realize some of you have some other viewpoint on what makes D&D D&D.  For me the rules are always what make a game.


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## BryonD (Jul 15, 2014)

pemerton said:


> This is too simplistic, I think. You are assuming (i) that 4e is a huge departure from earlier versions of D&D, whereas for many of those who like it this is not true, and (ii) that 4e players migrated from a 3E that they didn't like, whereas that is also not universally true.



This is where, IMO, you fail to recognize and respect the diversity of play styles that other prior editions supported.

Your statements regarding "for many" are completely fair and accurate.  But the point you are calling "too simplistic" is equally fair and accurate.  Based on how the market played out, one could easily argue that the "many" who see it the other way is much larger than the "many" you are hanging your argument on.

These things don't need to be remotely "universally" true to be a critically important factor for a very large number of people.

I would tend to agree that in the big picture 4E was not a "a huge huge departure".  But in key areas it was a big enough departure to be devastating to the value.  I don't see respect for the idea that other people found things very important that were different than your tastes.


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## Dungeoneer (Jul 15, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Well, there is a way - say yes. (And perhaps tax them a healing surge on the way through  - maybe they get an attack roll against the appropriate DC to see whether or not they lose one.)
> 
> A lot of social encounters get handled this way - a single Diplomacy check, or free-form (ie the GM says "yes" or "no" as appropriate). Why not combat?
> 
> I'll concede that there is a D&D tradition of not doing it this way. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad tradition, but I am curious as to why D&D does it that way. What point do combat encounters that are _not_ "big, explosive deals", but that are nevertheless resolved using more than a single hand-wave or die roll, serve? The question is not rhetorical - I'm not implying that there is no point. I'm just wondering what exactly the point is.



I'm thinking of, yes, 13th Age's approach. You can sketch out a 13th Age battlefield on the back of a napkin, or use salt shakers and spoons. You could have a combat where one player is chasing a monster several blocks away from where other players are battling some thugs. All this is possible not because 13th Age has some crazy voodoo ruleset but because it gives you the option to NOT use a grid. Relative positioning is good enough to run an encounter.

I just think a 'lite' version of the combat rules that let you not use a grid and abstract forced movement would have been an extremely useful tool.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The mechanics do support the narrative.
> 
> The narrative is that of an inspiring friend and ally, who speaks a word of encouragement that enable the hero to go on. The mechanic is that the player spends a healing surge, increases the number in the "hit points" column, and hence is able to have his/her PC go on.
> 
> I'm not seeing the problem.




DMs narrative:  "The orc cuts you across the chest with his black blade.  At the sight of your blood, the horde howls with excitement."
Warlord's mechanic:  "Buck up camper!"  (hit points return to max)
DM's narrative: "Uh..you feel better, turns out it was just a scratch...again."

This has been debated a great deal, and I know there are other ways to rationalize the warlord's powers, but my issue is that it IS a rationalization.

When you are magically healed, the narrative continues, it isn't retconned.  

Like I said though, all IMO.  I know many people have no problem with it, and there are other ways to handle the narrative.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Personally, and this is probably because I consider the game the mechanics and not the fluff, I see tons of things all versions of D&D but 4e have in common.  The Vancian wizard was pretty darn close all the way through.   AEDU was a huge departure.




Whereas to me there is a vast difference between the 1e "No automatic spells after first level" and the 3E "Two free spells.level".



> The simple fighter as an option was possible all the way through




It turned up in Essentials, but this is actual gameplay and one I'm happy to concede.



> They turned the entire healing system upside down.  Surges, martial healing, magic that couldn't heal beyond your surges, and so forth.




The entire healing system had been _shattered_ by 3E and 4E rebuilt it.  The Wand of Cure Light Wounds being readily available was a complete gamechanger.



> The healing system for the most part had not changed prior to 4e.  The quantity of healing perhaps but not the fundamental system.




The idea that you could go into every fight at full HP (and indeed not to do so was simply bad logistics after about second level) wasn't a change?



> So those things are what I consider a games identity.  The actual mechanical structures.  I realize some of you have some other viewpoint on what makes D&D D&D.  For me the rules are always what make a game.




To me how the structures work are more important than that they look vaguely like each other.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

BryonD said:


> This is where, IMO, you fail to recognize and respect the diversity of play styles that other prior editions supported.




Supported? I think it's very hard to suggest that, mechanically, previous editions "supported" many play styles.

I think the issue with 4E is absolutely not what you claim, that is "supported" fewer play styles than say, 3E or 1E (2E is more complicated), but rather the issue is that 4E made it extremely clear what it did actively support and expect, and it was indeed the first edition of D&D that was _actually transparent_ about that.

This discussion has been had at some length and is why people sometimes refer to 4E being kind of "indie" - it's that transparency on what it does actually, actively support.

I don't believe that you can make any kind of good case that,* mechanically*, 4E *supported* less of a "diversity" of play styles than previous editions (particularly 3.XE/PF, which is the most relevant). However, you can make a very good case, a very easy case, that 4E said what it did actively, intentionally, mechanically support.

With 1/2/3E, the issue was not that they strongly *mechanically supported* a wide diversity of play styles. They did not. What they did do, however, especially 1/2E, is avoid directly telling you what it was that they did support (in part because in those pre-90s days the concept of "play style" was poorly developed), which lead to people using them for a wide variety of games and not really minding that they didn't actually mechanically support X or Y play style well.

3E continued this - it was a bit more transparent and had more of a playstyle in mind, a somewhat confused one in which a desire to encourage rules-mastery sat side-by-side with encouraging the DM to just make up PRCs with no good guidelines, but one nonetheless.

Whereas 4E, being post-90s, post-Forge, post-Indie, post-OSR (to a large extent), very much knew what play style it wanted to support and was very open and clear about it.

Mechanically, though, it's no more narrow in support than any other edition. It undoubtedly supports DIFFERENT play styles mechanically to 3E (which supported different play styles to 2E, and so on), but less? Objectively less? You're not going to be able to demonstrate that, I'd suggest.

All that said, it's fine to object to 4E as not supporting your play style. It's just not really impressive to claim it supported "less diversity". No. It was merely more transparent about it's support, and people reacted against that very strongly. Ironically enough, 5E is somewhat similar to 4E in this - it's fairly transparent about the default play style (not as transparent, but closer than previous editions), which is precisely why it's catching so much flak on certain issues!


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## Emerikol (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Whereas to me there is a vast difference between the 1e "No automatic spells after first level" and the 3E "Two free spells.level".



Not to me.  Especially not compared to AEDU.




Neonchameleon said:


> The entire healing system had been _shattered_ by 3E and 4E rebuilt it.  The Wand of Cure Light Wounds being readily available was a complete gamechanger.



Yes but wands of cure light wounds have been around from the beginning in one form or another.  Yes 3e introduced magic mart and easy item creation.  That was the big change.   The healing system though was not changed.   External factors like the availability of magic items was what changed things.  If a DM changed the availability of magic items without touching the healing system, then all of your issues would go away.  So it's not the healing system.  I agree that easy magic item creation was an issue in 3e and I'm glad 5e dropped it.




Neonchameleon said:


> The idea that you could go into every fight at full HP (and indeed not to do so was simply bad logistics after about second level) wasn't a change?



You confuse "system" with practical usage.  Plenty of groups did not use cure light wounds wands.  The healing system didn't change as a result.  I agree that access to magic items was an issue in 3e.   The healing system though was the same one (mostly) from all prior editions.   The magic item creation system was what was new.  It should have been presented as far more optional than it was.




Neonchameleon said:


> To me how the structures work are more important than that they look vaguely like each other.



Of course.  Being a 4e person, the outcome is all that matters.  How you get there is of no concern.  That is why we "war" because for me that is not acceptable.  And I use the "we" part in the loosest sense.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> DMs narrative:  "The orc cuts you across the chest with his black blade.  At the sight of your blood, the horde howls with excitement."
> Warlord's mechanic:  "Buck up camper!"  (hit points return to max)
> DM's narrative: "Uh..you feel better, turns out it was just a scratch...again."
> 
> ...




So why even make this post? Genuine question.

All you've done is give a transparently bad example, claimed it involved "retcon" and "rationalization", then admitted that there are "other ways to handle the narrative", suggesting that you understand your example is extremely weak. You are creating your own problems here, and you that "other ways" suggests that you are completely aware that you are creating your own problem! If you didn't insist on narrating HP in that very specific and somewhat "meat point"-ish way, you wouldn't have had the problem.

So I'm asking: what are you even trying to communicate here, beyond the fact that you can set up a straw man and knock it down?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Of course.  Being a 4e person, the outcome is all that matters.  How you get there is of no concern.  That is why we "war" because for me that is not acceptable.  And I use the "we" part in the loosest sense.




For you the process matters and the outcome doesn't.  For me the outcome matters and if the process leads to a different outcome then you fix the process.  Yes, we do have enough of a basis we're never going to agree


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## Emerikol (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Mechanically, though, it's no more narrow in support than any other edition. It undoubtedly supports DIFFERENT play styles mechanically to 3E (which supported different play styles to 2E, and so on), but less? Objectively less? You're not going to be able to demonstrate that, I'd suggest.




My evidence is that during 3e everyone was playing D&D.   When 4e arrived, half the playerbase left D&D because of playstyle issues.   A war erupted because of these playstyle issues and here we are.  

I realize that there were two reactions to 4e:  "Finally", "OMG what where they thinking".   

I dislike most indie games for the same reasons I dislike 4e.  It might appear that there are countless games out there with one approach and D&D is just behind the times.   The problem is that D&D is pretty much the size of an air craft carrier next to a fleet of tug boats when it comes to market penetration.  Sure most of the people really happy with core D&D were playing it prior to 4e.  The indie companies were trying to peel away people with variant approaches.   It's not like it's a technological advance.  Indie is no better than anything else.  It's just another flavor.

Wotc made the grave mistake of thinking that the number of indie games indicates a pent up desire amongst the D&D playerbase for those types of approaches.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> External factors like the availability of magic items was what changed things.  If a DM changed the availability of magic items without touching the healing system, then all of your issues would go away.  So it's not the healing system.  I agree that easy magic item creation was an issue in 3e and I'm glad 5e dropped it.




You are objectively wrong to call that an "external factor". In 3E, the availability of magic items is absolutely not an "external factor" to the PCs, RAW, because the primary mode of magic item access (certainly wands) is via Feats, not via "magic mart" or them dropping from monsters or the like.

The very fact that it was not "external" is precisely why this was a real issue. If it wasn't wands of CLW (which were merely the optimal way to do it), there were other ways to create large amounts of healing items of various descriptions very efficiently and in player control in 3.XE.

It would only be an external factor if the DMG had merely advised dropping wands of CLW like they were candy. It did not. What 3E did was put the power in the hands of the players when it came to accessing magic items, to a greater degree than any other edition (including 4E, which puts magic items largely back to being an "external factor", albeit with suggested guidelines and so on - but explicitly allows for you to ignore those and provides mechanical support for doing so, and indeed for removing magic items from the game _entirely_).

To change this, the DM has to remove access to all those Feats, to edit the classes which get them as part of their natural progression, and or to drastically re-cost all magic items. That's a big deal, not a little one.

So 3E did change the _de facto_ healing system. It just changed in a way that didn't concern you as much, because whilst it was a massive change, it merely meant tons and tons more magic healing, rather than _other_ forms of healing.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> My evidence is that during 3e everyone was playing D&D.   When 4e arrived, half the playerbase left D&D because of playstyle issues.   A war erupted because of these playstyle issues and here we are.




That's terrible "evidence".

By the end of 3.5E, it's numbers were massively down. The later books were not good sellers. OSR games and alternative FRPGs were growing in popularity. 4E was already dealing with a divided market. 4E's marketing was terrible. Paizo capitalized on that. QED.



Emerikol said:


> I realize that there were two reactions to 4e:  "Finally", "OMG what where they thinking".




No. There was an entire continuum of reactions, which you want to break down into two. That's completely false. I never thought "finally" about 4E. 



Emerikol said:


> I dislike most indie games for the same reasons I dislike 4e.  It might appear that there are countless games out there with one approach and D&D is just behind the times.   The problem is that D&D is pretty much the size of an air craft carrier next to a fleet of tug boats when it comes to market penetration.  Sure most of the people really happy with core D&D were playing it prior to 4e.  The indie companies were trying to peel away people with variant approaches.   It's not like it's a technological advance.  Indie is no better than anything else.  It's just another flavor.
> 
> Wotc made the grave mistake of thinking that the number of indie games indicates a pent up desire amongst the D&D playerbase for those types of approaches.




I think you've profoundly and utterly missed the point, which is that 4E didn't support "less diversity" overall, it just:

A) Arguably a different main play style from 3E.

and

B) Explained this fact in detail right up front!

The second point meant that 4E "forced the issue" in a way no previous edition did.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> So why even make this post? Genuine question.
> 
> All you've done is give a transparently bad example, claimed it involved "retcon", then admitted that there are "other ways to handle the narrative", suggesting that you understand your example is extremely weak. You are creating your own problem, and you that "other ways" suggests that you are completely aware that you are creating your own problem!
> 
> What are you even trying to communicate here, beyond the fact that you can set up a straw man and knock it down?




Because for me, this isn't an argument. I'm not trying to "win".  I was responding to his post with more detail about my opinion.  I'm not trying to change his opinion or even disagree with him, so I acknowledged there are other viewpoints.  Sorry if I didn't communicate that, but that's what I was going for. 

I know these forums have become a debate club for some people, but I don't care about that; I'm not going to go down a checklist of logical fallacies to make sure I "win".  I see the point of intelligent discussion, and I really do try to think about what I post, but I refuse to spend the time and effort to post a perfect argument to support all my opinions.  And I try not to be critical of the opinion's of others, even when I believe they are flat out wrong, because I don't have the time for it, and would prefer just discussing D&D, rather than arguing about it. I'm a casual poster here, bordering on being a lurker, because I don't care for the confrontations.  Some people thrive on it, I don't.

Back to the topic:

I disagree that I "created my own problem."  I don't like non-magical healing because I can't describe wounds (something that DM's are encouraged to do) and then retroactively undescribe them without my suspension of disbelief suffering.  It's just a minor nitpick I have, because I really do love the warlord class and the teamwork it created.  My workaround when running 4e was to infer that their abilities were indeed magical.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 15, 2014)

Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> I disagree that I "created my own problem."  I don't like non-magical healing because I can't describe wounds (something that DM's are encouraged to do) and then retroactively undescribe them without my suspension of disbelief suffering.  It's just a minor nitpick I have, because I really do love the warlord class and the teamwork it created.  My workaround when running 4e was to infer that their abilities were indeed magical.




Where in 4E are DMs encouraged to describe HP solely in terms of physical wounds, though, that's my question? This is why I say "creating your own problems".



TrippyHippy said:


> Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!




The precise same could be said of 3E. Literally just replace the 4 with a 3.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> The precise same could be said of 3E. Literally just replace the 4 with a 3.




I can’t see anybody else arguing about 3E here.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I can’t see anybody else arguing about 3E here.




Might want to think about that a bit, Trippy. There's a reason, and it isn't that it wasn't divisive.


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## SkidAce (Jul 15, 2014)

I got halfway through the thread.../sigh.

Its my opinion that the OP wasn't asking for "It will be remembered for da suck" or rules etc.

They were asking about the adventure style etc (re: the examples of the other editions in the OP.)

So;

I have to agree with a few other posters who answered in the spirit of the OP, 4E will be remembered for Encounter Design.  Set pieces, with terrain, and monsters etc.


That's a good thing to be remembered for I think.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Might want to think about that a bit, Trippy. There's a reason, and it isn't that it wasn't divisive.




The only people who claim 3E was divisive are advocates of 4E…who are now arguing the same thing about 5E and/or arguing about the legacy of 4E. The common factor in all three arguments is 4E. 

It was a divisive edition, and on the evidence of this thread will always be.


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## TerraDave (Jul 15, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Well, there is a way - say yes. (And perhaps tax them a healing surge on the way through  - maybe they get an attack roll against the appropriate DC to see whether or not they lose one.)
> 
> A lot of social encounters get handled this way - a single Diplomacy check, or free-form (ie the GM says "yes" or "no" as appropriate). Why not combat?
> 
> I'll concede that there is a D&D tradition of not doing it this way. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad tradition, but I am curious as to why D&D does it that way. What point do combat encounters that are _not_ "big, explosive deals", but that are nevertheless resolved using more than a single hand-wave or die roll, serve? The question is not rhetorical - I'm not implying that there is no point. I'm just wondering what exactly the point is.




There is a few things. One is just pacing. In some ways an RPG is more like a story then a board game or a sporting event. In any movie or book, there are big moments and smaller ones, and one of the jobs of the smaller ones is to make the bigger ones more exciting. In practice, one big fight after another can start to feel pretty repetitive, especially in a long running campaign, even of the fights are awesome. Then there is play style. For example, there are situations where you may have lots of "medium sized" encounters, or at least that possibility. This includes a lot of  traditional dungeons--and 4E is a so-so match for that. Sandbox play, where there is a wide variance in what could be faced again doesn't fit great. That fact that fights can really chew up time, also can have a big impact on play style, for example it may inhibit the use of allies or henchmen one level, and dictate the nature of the whole campaign on the other 

In terms of mechanics, no, I don't want to say for 3 orcs we use one system, and for 8 another. And 4E does scale, just not quite enough. PCs have enough encounter based resources to sort of set a floor on what is interesting, higher then in other editions. 

I did run a long running 4E game (last session sunday). By taking a more traditional approach to exploration (with traps and tricks outside of encounters), somewhat fewer fights, mixing in more straight forward fights, and placing limits on resting in certain situations to evoke a more traditional "dungeon-crawl" feel, I was pretty happy with it.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> My evidence is that during 3e everyone was playing D&D.




Between 2004 and 2007 D&D was hemorrhaging popularity.  (DDO/Dungeons and Dragons Online included to explain a couple of  irregularities in the Dungeons and Dragons search that aren't in the  D&D one).  People weren't just playing 3e.  They were walking away  from it in droves.  Then 4e launched, causing an upsurge in interest -  but after a few months it settled down.  And the rot stopped.  Between  January 2004 and December 2007 D&D lost just over 50% of its  popularity, dropping from 100 to 48 on Google Trends in just 4 years.   In the _five_ years from January 2009 to December 2013, the drop was less than 25% - dropping from 47 to 37.

During 3e _the people still playing D&D _were  playing 3e.  But the retention rates were bad.  People were walking  away.  During 4e the unhappy had somewhere to go and generally stayed.



> When  4e arrived, half the playerbase left D&D because of playstyle  issues.   A war erupted because of these playstyle issues and here we  are.




Not what the closest to objective data we have says in the absence of WotC releasing raw sales numbers.  _Before_ 4e arrived, half the playerbase left D&D in a four year period.  _After_  4e arrived people stopped leaving anything like as fast.  A war erupted  because people who were used to D&D not catering to them and would  otherwise have left the hobby stayed.



> I realize that there were two reactions to 4e:  "Finally", "OMG what where they thinking".




And the OMG crowd had Pathfinder.  The Finally crowd would have given up on D&D otherwise.  And did.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Where in 4E are DMs encouraged to describe HP solely in terms of physical wounds, though, that's my question? This is why I say "creating your own problems".
> 
> 
> 
> The precise same could be said of 3E. Literally just replace the 4 with a 3.




It doesn't.  However, where does it say never do it?  Furthermore, I believe I've seen examples of such dialogue in earlier editions, but I'm at work and can't quote anything.

When a player character can heal someone up to full hit points with a few words of encouragement, the only way to avoid the situation of describing a gruesome wound and then having them heal it in a way that defies suspension of disbelief is to never describe such a wound.  You must talk around it.  I think it's fun to describe combat, and sometimes I like to describe a nasty wound.  Sometimes losing hit points, especially a lot of hit points, is a wound, not fatigue, or narrowly dodging something, or luck running out, but a gushing wound.  But non-magical healing makes that problematic.  The mechanic works against the narrative that I sometimes choose, and I don't like that.  I could choose another narrative, but I feel that I shouldn't have to in this case.


----------



## TrippyHippy (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Between 2004 and 2007 D&D was hemorrhaging popularity.  (DDO/Dungeons and Dragons Online included to explain a couple of  irregularities in the Dungeons and Dragons search that aren't in the  D&D one).  People weren't just playing 3e.  They were walking away  from it in droves.  Then 4e launched, causing an upsurge in interest -  but after a few months it settled down.  And the rot stopped.  Between  January 2004 and December 2007 D&D lost just over 50% of its  popularity, dropping from 100 to 48 on Google Trends in just 4 years.   In the _five_ years from January 2009 to December 2013, the drop was less than 25% - dropping from 47 to 37.
> 
> During 3e _the people still playing D&D _were  playing 3e.  But the retention rates were bad.  People were walking  away.  During 4e the unhappy had somewhere to go and generally stayed.
> 
> ...




That chart in the link is referring to online trends - i.e. people searching for information about the game online and/or media reports, not sales numbers. Moreover, it’s trend relates to a highpoint in 2004-5.  3.5 edition came out in 2003, let alone 3E in 2000, and presumably had a ‘spike’ of interest at the point it was released too. The release of 4E hardly altered the declining trend - certainly in any long term way.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> It doesn't.  However, where does it say never do it?  Furthermore, I believe I've seen examples of such dialogue in earlier editions, but I'm at work and can't quote anything.




It definitely says not to in 1e.



> When a player character can heal someone up to full hit points with a few words of encouragement, the only way to avoid the situation of describing a gruesome wound and then having them heal it in a way that defies suspension of disbelief is to never describe such a wound.




If someone is on _one single hit point_ they are still fully as physically capable as if they were on all their hit points.  You should never have a PC on one hit point with a gruesome wound because a gruesome wound would impede them.  If you want to shrug and go for action movie wounds, fine.  But then you can have action movie healing.

The mechanics do not support gruesome wounds when you have hit points.  So complaining they don't is something I see as not a problem.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> That chart in the link is referring to online  trends - i.e. people searching for information about the game online  and/or media reports, not sales numbers. Moreover, it’s trend relates to  a highpoint in 2004-5.  3.5 edition came out in 2003, let alone 3E in  2000, and presumably had a ‘spike’ of interest at the point it was  released too.




This is why the numbers I quoted for the 4E  era start six months after it was released - for parity.  The  "highpoint" you cite is merely the oldest Google Trends offered me.  As  close to effective parity as we can get.  (And we don't know that that  was the highpoint - I believe that 6 months earlier, round the release  of 3.5 will have been higher)

And yes, I believe that the interest in 3.0 was much _much_ higher with the OGL and with no World of Warcraft.  It too lost a lot of interest over the course of the edition.



> The release of 4E hardly altered the declining trend - certainly in any long term way.




3.5 lost more than 50% in four years.  4E lost less than 25% in  five.  It didn't reverse the trend, but I'd call that a meaningful  change.


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## Umbran (Jul 15, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!




Actually, I think the microcosm of this thread rather demonstrates the opposite.  This has nothing to do with games.  It has to do with the human need to have an Us vs Them.  A need to be *right* when everyone else is wrong.

There is not a soul posting here that is so weak of will that the mere existence of a book detailing a way to pretend to be an elf overwhelms their better nature, and *forces* them to act like jerks.  We all *choose* to behave this way, and treat each other badly.  When given a perfect excuse to walk away from the old conflict, we do not.  We choose to continue to take potshots at the games and each other.  *YOU* choose to do this, alongside everyone else.

Don't blame the books.  The books lack any force of will.  It is the *people* who do this.  Wonderfully creative, and unfortunately flawed people.


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## stinkomandx (Jul 15, 2014)

I'm glad there's finally a thread on the Internet for debating OGL ramifications, Pathfinder's origins, and the realism of martial healing. But as much as inciting those debates is something 4e will be woefully known for, I miss the first half of this thread. 4e wasn't everything I wanted it to be, but DANG folks. There's *no benefit to your life *to repeatedly arguing with folks who believe something was good that you don't. No one's going to change their mind, it's just a huge waste of time raining on others' parades.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> It definitely says not to in 1e.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




So clerics don't really heal?  They just remove fatigue?  Not in my game.  And who says you can't be heroic while gravely wounded?  Ignoring a serious injury while pushing yourself to your limits is heroic.  Hit points are an abstraction, I know that.  But that's a good thing, I can describe it any way I want.  Saying that I can't describe a massive loss of hit points as a wound is just as silly as saying that hit points always represent blood spilled.


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## Minigiant (Jul 15, 2014)

Man. Those 4e set piece battles were GREAT when they got going.

The hobgoblin captain says "Kill them all!"
The fighter pounds one bugbear into the ground and pushes the other into poison vines.
The goblins rush the wizard who freezes half to the floor with a blast of cold. 
One goblin escapes the icy terrain and bashes the mage over the head.
The warlord flies forward and guts this sneak and shouts "Get up. Its just a bump on the head"
The warlock covers the fighters flank with a dread invocation which causes a black mist of raw magic hunger to lash at any goblins who attempt an ambush. She then curses those visible with infernal words.
And suddenly the rogue leaps out the mist, chucks daggers at every enemy in front of the fighter, the quickly draws a crossbow and fires a shot into the hobgoblin captain's gut with a slick taunt, slowing him.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> So clerics don't really heal?  They just remove fatigue?  Not in my game.




They do heal.  But unless someone goes below 0hp it's scratches and scrapes.  Many RPGs have actual wounds - including GURPS and Storyteller, and even Fate.  D&D hit points were designed for swashbuckling.



> And who says you can't be heroic while gravely wounded?  Ignoring a serious injury while pushing yourself to your limits is heroic.




But you aren't pushing yourself.  You're just behaving as you did before, unimpeded.



> Saying that I can't describe a massive loss of hit points as a wound is just as silly as saying that hit points always represent blood spilled.




I'm not saying that.  I'm saying you can't represent it as a _grievous _wound if it doesn't actually slow the person receiving it.  A gash to the cheek an inch from your eye, sure.  A shattered hand?  Nope.  Nor a stab through the guts.  Either that or you can go all out with the action movie physics - at which point martial healing should also work.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> It doesn't.  However, where does it say never do it?  Furthermore, I believe I've seen examples of such dialogue in earlier editions, but I'm at work and can't quote anything.
> 
> When a player character can heal someone up to full hit points with a few words of encouragement, the only way to avoid the situation of describing a gruesome wound and then having them heal it in a way that defies suspension of disbelief is to never describe such a wound.  You must talk around it.  I think it's fun to describe combat, and sometimes I like to describe a nasty wound.  Sometimes losing hit points, especially a lot of hit points, is a wound, not fatigue, or narrowly dodging something, or luck running out, but a gushing wound.  But non-magical healing makes that problematic.  The mechanic works against the narrative that I sometimes choose, and I don't like that.  I could choose another narrative, but I feel that I shouldn't have to in this case.




Describing a gruesome wound using hit points defies suspension of disbelief.  

Quick anecdote.  I've had a pretty bad year and a half (extraordinarily bad for most people but this is just pretty bad for me) with sports related injuries.  These put me on the shelf for certain activities in some way, shape, or form for 14 out of those 18 months.  In order:

1)  5th metacarpal fracture with partial ligament tear of the right hand.  6 weeks, I pushed the recovery time, reinjured, then 4 more weeks.

2)  Traumatic left patellar (kneecap) bone bruise.  Brutal injury but only 3 weeks.

3)  High grade 2 (more than partial tear - could have had surgery) left ankle sprain.  4.5 weeks.  I again pushed the recovery time but both of my ankles are toast so it doesn't really matter at this point.

4)  Disgusting dislocation of my index finger on my right hand.  Horrible volar plate injury that will never, ever, ever be right again.  The rest of my life I'm going to deal with terrible pain and some lack of grip strength, dexterity, and flexion with that finger/knuckle infrastructure.  This has been a hellish injury that was ongoing for 6 months before I could do much of anything with that hand.  9 months later and I'm using it with a resignation of its diminished capacity (and terrible pain).  This is the infamous "turf toe" injury (but on my hand) that has ended many a football players' career (Deion Sanders being the prime...time...example).

5)  Horrible Illiac Crest (vertically ascending part of hip) bone bruise with a crushing damage to the soft tissue across the front of it.  The infamous "hip pointer."  This was only 2 weeks (I pushed it) but it was worse than number 2 above.

6)  Weird small shoulder fracture on the stem of my left acromion bone right where it meets the clavicle.  5 weeks.


Any sort of "gruesome wound" is not remotely modeled by HPs.  Not even in the same universe.  Certainly none of the above would be modeled by hit points and these are probably relatively minor compared to what you have in mind.  The actor's capacity isn't even remotely inhibited let alone outright nullified by any HP loss except the loss of the last one.  A death spiral mechanic on top of them or some kind of condition/injury track sufficiently does the job, but those aren't terribly fun.  So we have hit points.  And we each do with them as we may to tell our stories as we might.  So narrate the resolution of your action declarations as you will but its not very tenable to tell folks that this or that mechanic ON TOP OF or INTERFACING WITH hit points reduce your ability to model "gruesome wounds."  Hit points do all the work themselves to make it problematic for you.  They don't need any help.  Just look at it with squinted eyes, or outright avert your eyes, the same way we've always done.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> It doesn't.  However, where does it say never do it?  Furthermore, I believe I've seen examples of such dialogue in earlier editions, but I'm at work and can't quote anything.




It describes what HP are and they are explicitly not "meat points", nor representative of serious wounds in all cases. There's a reason 50% HP is called "Bloodied" in 4E. It rather strongly implies that north of that, you are not "bloodied".

With your example, the attack you insisted on describing as a bleeding gash was healed to full in a single Warlord shout - which is unlikely to be more than 33% of a character's HP - so you were making someone "Bloodied" when the game was indicating that they weren't.

I get that you don't enjoy this kind of argument and I don't mean to force it on you, but you're blaming 4E for a decision you made re: describing HP loss. HP as meat is not a D&D default. People frequently quote 1E and the like which makes it clear HP are NOT meat.



Gargoyle said:


> When a player character can heal someone up to full hit points with a few words of encouragement, the only way to avoid the situation of describing a gruesome wound and then having them heal it in a way that defies suspension of disbelief is to never describe such a wound.  You must talk around it.  I think it's fun to describe combat, and sometimes I like to describe a nasty wound.  Sometimes losing hit points, especially a lot of hit points, is a wound, not fatigue, or narrowly dodging something, or luck running out, but a gushing wound.  But non-magical healing makes that problematic.  The mechanic works against the narrative that I sometimes choose, and I don't like that.  I could choose another narrative, but I feel that I shouldn't have to in this case.




This is true, but that's_ your decision_, and 4E didn't go with HP as meat, nor does 5E (by default), nor, importantly, did earlier editions. If you feel a deep need to describe HP loss as "gruesome wounds", which, mysteriously, have no effect whatsoever on combat performance, do not ever bleed, get infected or the like, that's on you, not on D&D, which I do not think has ever actually encouraged you to do that.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

To put things into perspective, I'm not sure that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] even suffered any broken bones there.  A competitive marathon will take a _month_ for the athlete to recover from.  Gruesome wounds?  Not even close.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> They do heal.  But unless someone goes below 0hp it's scratches and scrapes.  Many RPGs have actual wounds - including GURPS and Storyteller, and even Fate.  D&D hit points were designed for swashbuckling.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Sorry, didn't mean to imply you did.  

This is not a bad point, even with just magical healing I'm not one to describe people getting eviscerated or limbs lopped off.  Perhaps my definition of "grievous wounds" isn't really that grievous, I just like to describe some blood now and then, so in that sense it could work for either type of healing.  Martial healing is still a stretch for me, but I'll take that viewpoint into account.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> To put things into perspective, I'm not sure that  @_*Manbearcat*_  even suffered any broken bones there.  A competitive marathon will take a _month_ for the athlete to recover from.  Gruesome wounds?  Not even close.




2 minor fractures but nothing to write home about.  A "grueseome wound" would be akin to what I saw when I was 18.  One of my friends took an 88 mile an hour fastball to the left eye.  Broken nose and utterly crushed orbital socket with all kinds of complications (including his freaking eyeball basically being out of socket).  That right there.  That is the kind of injury you would expect if someone hit you in the face with a flail, morningstar, or warhammer in real combat.  You're not doing anything after that.  You're done.  HP do not have that narrative capacity within them.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 15, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> 2 minor fractures but nothing to write home about.  A "grueseome wound" would be akin to what I saw when I was 18.  One of my friends took an 88 mile an hour fastball to the left eye.  Broken nose and utterly crushed orbital socket with all kinds of complications (including his freaking eyeball basically being out of socket).  That right there.  That is the kind of injury you would expect if someone hit you in the face with a flail, morningstar, or warhammer in real combat.  You're not doing anything after that.  You're done.  HP do not have that narrative capacity within them.




offtopic - Anyone note that the X-ray attacks in Mortal Kombat 9, and the previews of Mortal Kombat X, are fatal (or at least fight ending) in their own right - yet the combatants keep on fighting?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> Sorry, didn't mean to imply you did.
> 
> This  is not a bad point, even with just magical healing I'm not one to  describe people getting eviscerated or limbs lopped off.  Perhaps my  definition of "grievous wounds" isn't really that grievous, I just like  to describe some blood now and then, so in that sense it could work for  either type of healing.  Martial healing is still a stretch for me, but  I'll take that viewpoint into account.




Describing blood  is fine.  James Bond sometimes bleeds - and carries on with no magical  healing.  Raiders of the Lost Ark has a seriously beaten up Indy - and  no magical healing  But Indy also recovers a bit between scenes  without magic.

Also there's one class that gives martial healing to others (and in my retroclone Warlord there's a non-healing option).  I like the Warlord but there's nothing wrong with banning it


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## Ratskinner (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> If someone is on _one single hit point_ they are still fully as physically capable as if they were on all their hit points.  You should never have a PC on one hit point with a gruesome wound because a gruesome wound would impede them.  If you want to shrug and go for action movie wounds, fine.  But then you can have action movie healing.
> 
> The mechanics do not support gruesome wounds when you have hit points.  So complaining they don't is something I see as not a problem.




Absotively posilutely. 

Of course, then you've got the problem of casting _Cure Critical Wounds_ on people who aren't actually y'know critically wounded. (At least in traditional DND.) In any case, the HP and healing spells system has always been a nightmare of inconsistency. Locking yourself into a narrative by actually specifying wounds is discouraged.


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## Remathilis (Jul 15, 2014)

Michael Morris said:


> offtopic - Anyone note that the X-ray attacks in Mortal Kombat 9, and the previews of Mortal Kombat X, are fatal (or at least fight ending) in their own right - yet the combatants keep on fighting?




Mortal Kombat characters can all jump twice their height, be punched through ceilings/floors into other arenas, and gush blood in violent sprays from the simplest punch. 

Not the best example of "gritty, realistic" combat.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> It describes what HP are and they are explicitly not "meat points", nor representative of serious wounds in all cases. There's a reason 50% HP is called "Bloodied" in 4E. It rather strongly implies that north of that, you are not "bloodied".
> 
> With your example, the attack you insisted on describing as a bleeding gash was healed to full in a single Warlord shout - which is unlikely to be more than 33% of a character's HP - so you were making someone "Bloodied" when the game was indicating that they weren't.




Even the term bloodied implies that hp are indeed, meat, at least sometimes, but of course that's just the name of it and it has no effect by itself.  Regarding effectiveness of warlord healing, I honestly don't remember.  Perhaps I'm thinking of low levels.



> I get that you don't enjoy this kind of argument and I don't mean to force it on you,




I do appreciate your concern, and you're not forcing anything on me;  I like the discussion, I just wanted to be clear that I'm not here to argue my viewpoint at all.  I just find the topic interesting and don't mind defending my viewpoint as long as I have the time and feel like I have something to contribute.  I don't expect everyone to agree with me...indeed, it seems I'm in the minority and that's ok.  I'm perhaps not the best communicator, so I'm certain the fault is more on my side, therefore: Epic Lurker.



> but you're blaming 4E for a decision you made re: describing HP loss. HP as meat is not a D&D default. People frequently quote 1E and the like which makes it clear HP are NOT meat.




While HP as meat is clearly not correct, HP as "never meat" is also something that is clearly incorrect, even the existence of the term "bloodied" implies this.  I'm not sure anyone here is saying that hit points are never wounds, but some seem to be against ever describing hit point damage as wounds more deep than scratches and bruises.   Maybe that's the way I should do it to accommodate non-magical healing.  But it seems less exciting and more of a stretch of the imagination to me.  I'll think about it.



> This is true, but that's_ your decision_, and 4E didn't go with HP as meat, nor does 5E (by default), nor, importantly, did earlier editions. If you feel a deep need to describe HP loss as "gruesome wounds", which, mysteriously, have no effect whatsoever on combat performance, do not ever bleed, get infected or the like, that's on you, not on D&D, which I do not think has ever actually encouraged you to do that.
> 
> <snip>




And here we have an example of me not communicating well.  My definition of gruesome may not be as gruesome as I've implied, and it's not really that big a deal different.  Neonchameleon had a good point about that as do you, and I concede that.


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## Gargoyle (Jul 15, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Describing blood  is fine.  James Bond sometimes bleeds - and carries on with no magical  healing.  Raiders of the Lost Ark has a seriously beaten up Indy - and  no magical healing  But Indy also recovers a bit between scenes  without magic.
> 
> 
> Also there's one class that gives martial healing to others (and in my retroclone Warlord there's a non-healing option).  I like the Warlord but there's nothing wrong with banning it




I did like the Warlord, and if it's in 5e I'll allow it if someone wants to play one.  I can get over my quibbles.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 15, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> Even the term bloodied implies that hp are indeed, meat, at least sometimes, but of course that's just the name of it and it has no effect by itself.  Regarding effectiveness of warlord healing, I honestly don't remember.  Perhaps I'm thinking of low levels.




HP are usually _partially_ actual injuries, but minor ones. Bruises, scratches, scrapes, shallow cuts, punctures that hit nothing of any importance and aren't very wide/deep. Stuff adrenaline and after-battle care could take care of. The Warlord doesn't close the minor cut, but he does make it irrelevant (and most of what that HP loss indicated wasn't the cut).



Gargoyle said:


> While HP as meat is clearly not correct, HP as "never meat" is also something that is clearly incorrect, even the existence of the term "bloodied" implies this.  I'm not sure anyone here is saying that hit points are never wounds, but some seem to be against ever describing hit point damage as wounds more deep than scratches and bruises.   Maybe that's the way I should do it to accommodate non-magical healing.  But it seems less exciting and more of a stretch of the imagination to me.  I'll think about it.




No-one is saying "never" (I hope!  ). Just "_not much_ meat". Personally I go with at least 1hp of any hit on a PC is definitely actual injury (puncture, bruise, shallow cut, etc.). If a hit straight-up _kills_, I go as gory as I like, PC or enemy. Heads and limbs are no object!



Gargoyle said:


> And here we have an example of me not communicating well.  My definition of gruesome may not be as gruesome as I've implied, and it's not really that big a deal different.  Neonchameleon had a good point about that as do you, and I concede that.




Hats off to you, frankly!


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## Emerikol (Jul 15, 2014)

The only problem is that prior to 4e people described things however they liked.  And plenty of people did it all different sorts of ways.  There were plenty of grievous wounds my heroes heroically ignored in all those editions.  Nothing smashed me in the fact that this was wrong.

It doesn't matter one bit and you can drone on all day about it if you want if other people played different or the rules said this or that.  Apparently those same rules were vague enough to be interpreted in widely different ways.   4e absolutely slammed the door on that style of game.  They should have realized they were on dangerous ground but they didn't.

This is a 4e thread though so that is all I will comment on this subjection.


As for umbran's comments, I would just say that I mind not a bit if people attack an inanimate object like a game.  I may disagree and I will defend my side but I don't consider it an attack upon me personally.  I see it as an attack upon an inanimate object that I happen to like and others don't like.  No one is breaking down my door and trying to force me to do anything.

The key is not to stop arguing.  Because guess what... enworld would be a ghost town without the debate.  So would the D&D boards.  The debate drives these forums and makes them interesting.   Yes on occasion someone goes too far but that is the exception in my opinion.   I've found that arguing my position and defending it has sharpened by understanding of games a lot.  I'm far more aware of my preferences than I was prior to engaging.  So I consider a person who presents decent arguments and gives reasonable responses to questions and yes counter arguments, to be someone I respect and like.  I have many on these and other boards that I never agree with but that I do respect.   One quick example would be MechaPilot.  She rarely agrees except on the broader concerns of inclusivity but I still feel like a conversation is possible and fruitful.

The people I can't get anything worthwhile out of in a discussion I tend to just block.


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## BryonD (Jul 15, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> HP are usually _partially_ actual injuries, but minor ones. Bruises, scratches, scrapes, shallow cuts, punctures that hit nothing of any importance and aren't very wide/deep. Stuff adrenaline and after-battle care could take care of. The Warlord doesn't close the minor cut, but he does make it irrelevant (and most of what that HP loss indicated wasn't the cut).
> 
> No-one is saying "never" (I hope!  ). Just "_not much_ meat". Personally I go with at least 1hp of any hit on a PC is definitely actual injury (puncture, bruise, shallow cut, etc.). If a hit straight-up _kills_, I go as gory as I like, PC or enemy. Heads and limbs are no object!



There have definitely been people saying "all HP damage above 0 is abstract".    But I'm certainly ok with just because people say something doesn't mean everyone on the same side of the debate agrees with every specific item.

I agree with you here.  Except that, for me, the Warlord goes much too far in making the cut irrelevant. Temp HP would be a far better solution for me.  I'd even be OK with some system of capped healing (never above 50%, for example, though not meant to exclude other ideas).  If a fighter with 100 HP was hit 10 times for a total of 57 damage, would you limit the Warlord to healing only 47, leaving the 1 HP/ hit as actual injury?


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## Remathilis (Jul 15, 2014)

All threads go to pot whenever hp or alignment is brought into it.


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## Minigiant (Jul 15, 2014)

Can we go back to talking about all those cool boss fights and teamwork combos and complex noncombat montages.

There they were. Like a dozen orc grunts, some priests and the chief. We failed the skill challenge to avoid a fight. So I said something foul about the chief's mama involving apple saice, a bed, and a bag then roll initiative. The rogue garroted one of the casters. The wizard corralled the grunts with a ball of fire while I shouted for a charge. All on one of the one eyed priests, killing him...


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## fjw70 (Jul 15, 2014)

4e was flexible enough to handle meat points.  Just look at healing surges as the meat points and only allow a few surges to be recovered with a week's rest. 


There are a lot of things WotC could have done to make 4e more flexible and accommodating to multiple play styles but they did. Oh well.


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## cavalier973 (Jul 15, 2014)

In my opinion, hit point damage represents a mix of physical wounds and psychological damage (lowered morale, etc.).  When the character gets hit, he doesn't just suffer physical pain, but he also suffers some morale loss.  The warlord doesn't "shout his wounds closed", but he does get the character to over come the morale loss of seeing his own blood dripping out of his chest.

In 4e, there is the "Bloodied" condition, which implies (or, at least, I infer) that the first half of a character's hit points are all morale.  When the character has lost half his hit points, at that point he is no longer able to prevent being physically harmed.  Some monsters can bloody a character with one blow (and vice versa); they can cause physical damage in the first blow.  Some times, though, it takes a while to wear the opponent down enough to draw blood.  Again, that's what I infer from reading the rules.


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## wingsandsword (Jul 15, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!




More like 6+ years, but yes, 4e was vastly divisive, and practically schismatic in what it did to the player base.  Yes, this entire thread can be seen as a microcosm of it.  I started posting to ENWorld less and less as those edition wars got hotter and hotter and it became increasingly clear that they would go on forever with no resolve, like an internet version of the Blood War.

I realized the divisions went way beyond internet message boards when I was on active duty in the Army.  Find other gamers on post, and if you said you played D&D, there was always this awkward "whose side are you on" moment where they asked if you played 4e or 3.5.  Most players I met played 3.5, but the ones I met who played 4e would always refuse to play 3.5 and would trash talk it.  

I won't switch from 3.5 to 5e, I like 3.5 too much, but I like 5e a lot more and I just might buy some 5e books to at least be conversant in this edition.  I'm seriously considering the core books, and if they do a "Manual of the Planes 5e" with the great wheel restored and discussing its role in the various D&D settings (like a Great Wheel Eberron) I'm inclined strongly to look at it. 

5e, to me, is at least an edition that I can work with.  It's not going to displace my favorite, but it's at least one that doesn't feel like it's actively chasing me away from D&D the way 4e did.


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## Ichneumon (Jul 16, 2014)

Hit points are fractally illogical, but they work.


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## pemerton (Jul 16, 2014)

Gargoyle said:


> I don't like non-magical healing because I can't describe wounds (something that DM's are encouraged to do) and then retroactively undescribe them without my suspension of disbelief suffering.



As I think you realise, one possible solution is to not describe wounds. But I don't think it's the only solution, which is good for you because you want to narrate wouds. I'll explain shortly.



Gargoyle said:


> DMs narrative:  "The orc cuts you across the chest with his black blade.  At the sight of your blood, the horde howls with excitement."
> Warlord's mechanic:  "Buck up camper!"  (hit points return to max)
> DM's narrative: "Uh..you feel better, turns out it was just a scratch...again."





Gargoyle said:


> who says you can't be heroic while gravely wounded?  Ignoring a serious injury while pushing yourself to your limits is heroic.  Hit points are an abstraction, I know that.  But that's a good thing, I can describe it any way I want.  Saying that I can't describe a massive loss of hit points as a wound is just as silly as saying that hit points always represent blood spilled.



The DM's error, in your example, is in his/her second statement.

Given that you like a game in which some hit point loss reflects wouding, and in which heroic characters can push on despite their wounds, why retcon the wound into a scratch? Why not narrate the warlord's healing along the following lines?:

"Spurred on by your valiant comrade, you ignore the pain and the blood and hurl yourself back into the fray!"

No retconning required. That's roughly how we handle it in my game. (I should add - I think we're on the same page that we're talking here about cuts and bruises, not evisceration or maiming.)

(For a technical analysis: the hit point _loss_ due to the orc's attack indicates a wound; but the hit points themselves aren't a wound tracker. They're a resilience/monentum tracker. When the warlord restores momentum with an inspiring wound, the hit points go back up, but that doesn't change the fact that a wound was suffered and is still there.)



TerraDave said:


> There is a few things. One is just pacing. In some ways an RPG is more like a story then a board game or a sporting event. In any movie or book, there are big moments and smaller ones, and one of the jobs of the smaller ones is to make the bigger ones more exciting.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> In terms of mechanics, no, I don't want to say for 3 orcs we use one system, and for 8 another.



Thanks for the reply. The pacing bit I get, but not the mechanics bit. People use a variety of mecanics for social resolution (skill roll, skill challenge, free form = say yes/no, etc). Gygax in his DMG endorses multiple mechanics for finding secret doors (roll 1d6, describe twidding of knobs and manipulation of sconces, etc). But D&D has never really embraced multiple mechanic for resolving combat. I don't see why not - it solves so many problems! (4e comes close - minions and solos can be seen as variant combat resolution mechanics, but they are disguised as monster builds.)


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## pemerton (Jul 16, 2014)

wingsandsword said:


> I started posting to ENWorld less and less as those edition wars got hotter and hotter and it became increasingly clear that they would go on forever with no resolve, like an internet version of the Blood War.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> 5e, to me, is at least an edition that I can work with.  It's not going to displace my favorite, but it's at least one that doesn't feel like it's actively chasing me away from D&D the way 4e did.





TrippyHippy said:


> Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!



All published RPGs are divisive, in the trivial sense that they divide the total population of RPGers into two groups - those who play the game in question, and those who don't. The oddity for me is why, given all the RPGs in the world that people don't play, so many non-4e players felt (and still seem to feel) compelled to explain not only that they don't play, but why they don't play, and why those who do play are making some sort of suboptimal aesthetic judgement (eg sacrificing "simulation" for "gamism").

Here's another way to look at it: for the edition wars to stop, either one side has to stop posting their attacks upon 4e, or the other side has to stop playing 4e and posting about it. It seems to me that only one of those states of affairs is a reasonable one to expect. (And I don't see any parallel, however metaphorical, to the Blood War. Me playing a game I enjoy, and posting about it, is not an attack upon anyone else.)



Emerikol said:


> My evidence is that during 3e everyone was playing D&D.



I don't understand this evidence. I wasn't playing 3E, and I'm someone. I just didn't bomb every RPG forum on the internet with the reasons why I don't care for 3E.


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## Pentegarn (Jul 16, 2014)

What will 4e be remembered for? Only time will tell what the majority of individuals remember it for. But for now, it can't be answered except by the individual.

For me and the groups I play with, we already refer to 4e as WoW: The Gathering.  That pretty much sums it up for us.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 16, 2014)

pemerton said:


> All published RPGs are divisive, in the trivial sense that they divide the total population of RPGers into two groups - those who play the game in question, and those who don't. The oddity for me is why, given all the RPGs in the world that people don't play, so many non-4e players felt (and still seem to feel) compelled to explain not only that they don't play, but why they don't play, and why those who do play are making some sort of suboptimal aesthetic judgement (eg sacrificing "simulation" for "gamism").
> 
> Here's another way to look at it: for the edition wars to stop, either one side has to stop posting their attacks upon 4e, or the other side has to stop playing 4e and posting about it. It seems to me that only one of those states of affairs is a reasonable one to expect. (And I don't see any parallel, however metaphorical, to the Blood War. Me playing a game I enjoy, and posting about it, is not an attack upon anyone else.)
> 
> I don't understand this evidence. I wasn't playing 3E, and I'm someone. I just didn't bomb every RPG forum on the internet with the reasons why I don't care for 3E.




I could quite easily post a raft of criticism about 3E too - but it wouldn’t create a whole massive thread of people defending it as if I’d insulted them personally, and who doggedly argue even about whether the game was divisive or not! Nobody here is posting ‘attacks’ - it’s simply criticism of a game. That’s all.

Moreover the edition wars have been resolved. 5E resolved it. All debates now are merely echoes of the past.


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## Obryn (Jul 16, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I could quite easily post a raft of criticism about 3E too - but it wouldn’t create a whole massive thread of people defending it as if I’d insulted them personally



Hahaha, stick around a bit.


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## Minigiant (Jul 16, 2014)

One other thing 4e will be known for is opening showing us all that D&D fandom is huge but he all don't like the same things and many of us dislike certain D&D tropes. 

That D&D is a real fan source like sports fan who hate and love different players. Go to any team site when a starter is traded. 4e showed us all that we are a real fan base, and a big one.


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## wingsandsword (Jul 16, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The oddity for me is why, given all the RPGs in the world that people don't play, so many non-4e players felt (and still seem to feel) compelled to explain not only that they don't play, but why they don't play, and why those who do play are making some sort of suboptimal aesthetic judgement (eg sacrificing "simulation" for "gamism").




Because it wasn't just another RPG, it was _D&D_.

Throughout the history of D&D, as new editions have come out, the general consensus of the D&D player base has been, over time, to migrate to the new edition.

OD&D gave way to AD&D, which gave way to AD&D 2e, which gave way to D&D 3e, which gave way to D&D 3.5.  Yeah, you'd get some holdouts to older editions, but the substantial majority switched over without a lot of fuss.  Some sooner, some later, but most all of them in time.

In the pre-release marketing materials for 4e, WotC not only acknowledged this, they admitted were COUNTING on it, they pretty much assumed that no matter how they changed D&D, the broad consensus of the D&D player base would adopt it over time because it was D&D.  The metaphor they used was to a long-running rock band that put out an album with a really different sound, that the fans of the band would still buy the new album and listen to it.  The problem with that metaphor that WotC built 4e on was that that a music album is maybe $15, and is mostly a passive experience of listening, while a new D&D edition is hundreds (or thousands) of dollars worth of buy-in over years, and hundreds of hours of interactive gaming over those years.  

4e was such a radical shift, that while it held the name D&D, it didn't look, feel or play the same to many/most players.  Whereas previous editions built incrementally on each other (1e to 2e, 3e to 3.5e) or at least tried to retain much of the overall feel even if the mechanics changed (2e to 3e), 4e wasn't an incremental change and it didn't try to retain any of the prior feel of D&D, instead being a completely unrelated game with the "Dungeons and Dragons" name attached.  Even if the game was well balanced, well written, and could be enjoyable to play, the divergence in play style as well as the complete jettisoning of around 3 decades of accumulated D&D meta-setting like the Great Wheel meant that if not for the "D&D" name on it, you wouldn't even think it was the same game.

The cultural presumption of adopting the new edition was shattered.  If you look back at old threads from circa 2008 the 4e adopters were befuddled as to why people weren't switching over and wanted explanations as to why they wouldn't automatically adopt the new edition of D&D (a lot of early Edition War threads really did start with 4e adopters questioning why 3e players weren't switching, like the automatic presumption was that all D&D players would move over).

*That's* why people explain it, because when the Edition Wars broke out, it was largely over the presumption that the new edition of D&D replaces the old one, and people move over to the new edition, and that position has framed the view of 4e for a lot of people since then.  Adherents to 3.x D&D who reject the radical changes that came with 4e felt both spurned by the process, and excluded from D&D by the changes to the game they love taking a direction away.  

There you go, a lot of the root of the edition wars and why they are framed as more than just a dislike of one RPG over another.


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## SteveC (Jul 16, 2014)

For me, 4E will be remembered as that On Brief Shining Moment where Martial characters had a seat at the same table as everyone else.

I was just going through my binder of 4E characters, and I discovered that I never actually played a wizard in that edition! For me, that's really saying something: I like complex characters who can do a lot of different things in all parts of the game. The fact that my most memorable character in 4E was a rogue, is... extraordinary.

I suspect that later on in the 5E life cycle that fair time may come again...


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## pemerton (Jul 16, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I could quite easily post a raft of criticism about 3E too - but it wouldn’t create a whole massive thread of people defending it as if I’d insulted them personally



Look at the post just above yours. I've never heard of anyone entering thread after thread about 3E to explain that it's not really an RPG at all.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

BryonD said:


> There have definitely been people saying "all HP damage above 0 is abstract".    But I'm certainly ok with just because people say something doesn't mean everyone on the same side of the debate agrees with every specific item.




Abstract surely isn't the same as "never meat". Why do you think it is?



BryonD said:


> I agree with you here.  Except that, for me, the Warlord goes much too far in making the cut irrelevant. Temp HP would be a far better solution for me.  I'd even be OK with some system of capped healing (never above 50%, for example, though not meant to exclude other ideas).  If a fighter with 100 HP was hit 10 times for a total of 57 damage, would you limit the Warlord to healing only 47, leaving the 1 HP/ hit as actual injury?




I think THP are a pretty annoying mechanic in every edition so I avoid them. The latter suggestion is a fine optional rule, but needlessly fiddly for normal play, imho.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

SteveC said:


> For me, 4E will be remembered as that On Brief Shining Moment where Martial characters had a seat at the same table as everyone else.
> 
> I was just going through my binder of 4E characters, and I discovered that I never actually played a wizard in that edition! For me, that's really saying something: I like complex characters who can do a lot of different things in all parts of the game. The fact that my most memorable character in 4E was a rogue, is... extraordinary.
> 
> *I suspect that later on in the 5E life cycle that fair time may come again...*




Yep. It did in 3.5E, just shortly before the end. I expect it to come sooner in 5E.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 16, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Look at the post just above yours. I've never heard of anyone entering thread after thread about 3E to explain that it's not really an RPG at all.




I don’t think 3E was a RPG at all. I think it was a botched marketing scheme. 

Seriously, I think 3E was an attempt to consolidate the gaming community by looking at the games that it had been competing with and integrate these influences into it’s own game. The major influence, via Jonathan Tweet’s stewardship, was RuneQuest/BRP based games although a lot of others can be cited too. Hence we saw a fully integrated skill system, multi-classing galore and the notion of a universal system that could be fitted to all genres (the D20 system and the OGL). There was also a business model founded on, yes, selling lots of miniatures and core rules books, while getting other companies to produce the less profitable things, like adventure modules. 

And it worked at first, but started to fall apart a bit on the grounds that a) the integration of new subsystems became convoluted, so that game as a whole felt a lot more complicated than previous editions, and b) independent publishers didn’t quite do what they were expected and started finding loopholes in the OGL contract to start producing alternative core rules and such. Some other game designers, players and companies always resented the notion of a one-size-fits-all universal system, anyway. 

Now we could see all this as a big corporate melt down, but it is worth remembering that - for a short time at least - 3rd Edition actually did bring a lot of D&D players back into the fold, and it was a unifying thing. The d20 drive actually got new gaming companies and products up and running, and even some websites like ENWorld lest we forget. Prior to 3rd Edition, D&D had been struggling for a few years as had the RPG hobby in totality. People were all doom and gloom - it was a dying hobby we were told (the biggest RPG success story of the 90s was the World of Darkness, which is possibly symbolic of the way gamers felt.…). Then 3E came along and got everything buzzing again. 

How does this compare to 4E? Well again, I think 4E was a product of it’s time - but this time it was influenced by factors such as the growing ‘Indie’ movement, as well as MMOs such as World of Warcraft. There was also the sense that the game had become very bloated with subsystems and that gameplay design should be more structured and specific in its goals. These were fairly noble sentiments, but a lot of it was rushed through in it’s marketing and play testing and did not seem to give two hoots about the game’s past legacy at all - ‘killing off sacred cows’, etc. There was also knee-jerk reaction about PDF support and the whole OGL aspect of the game, which had an impact on lots of game companies beyond Wizards. It brought to a head much of the underlying tensions in the RPG community that had existed for a while - the whole 3E/4E ‘War’’ was preceded somewhat by the bitter arguments circulating 'Indie vs Traditional' game design before, while the dropping sales around the time of the 2007-8 crash was also raising consternation. 

So, I don’t think 4E was evil and I don’t view it with hate. I think, like 3E, it was a product of it’s time. Thankfully however, it’s time is done. Long live 5E!


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## pemerton (Jul 16, 2014)

wingsandsword said:


> 4e was such a radical shift, that while it held the name D&D, it didn't look, feel or play the same to many/most players.  Whereas previous editions built incrementally on each other (1e to 2e, 3e to 3.5e) or at least tried to retain much of the overall feel even if the mechanics changed (2e to 3e), 4e wasn't an incremental change and it didn't try to retain any of the prior feel of D&D, instead being a completely unrelated game with the "Dungeons and Dragons" name attached.



This is utterly contentious. Both the many/most - no reliable public polling has been done, and there is no evidence I'm aware of that suggests that 4e players were/are less than half the total player base, let alone significantly less.

That 3E was an "incremental change", and that 4e "didn't try to retain any of the prior feel of D&D" is likewise contentious - I know I'm not the only player who returned to D&D for 4e because it did a better job than any earlier edition of capturing the prior feel of D&D. (Whereas 3E is a dramatic change from classic D&D, in my view.)

TL;DR: the explanation for the "edition wars" isn't that those who dislike 4e were right.


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## Minigiant (Jul 16, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I don’t think 3E was a RPG at all. I think it was a botched marketing scheme.





Wait a sec. Make 3e in a way that in the later days fans are constantly complaining. Then make 4e with the solutions turned up to eleven and inflexible. Then make 5e. It'll like they are not being perfect on purpose.

Those sneaky guys are trying to get my money.


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## cavalier973 (Jul 16, 2014)

World of Warcraft is just Dungeons and Dragons in digital format.  If you're not playing Rogue, you're not playing a CRPG.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> as well as MMOs such as World of Warcraft.




Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.

Everything else you say makes sense (even if I don't agree 100%), so it stands out to me.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 16, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.
> 
> Everything else you say makes sense (even if I don't agree 100%), so it stands out to me.




First of all, I think there was a genuine interest in Wizards at the time to be able to integrate all the tabletop experience into a seamless connection with online gaming. I think there was even a plan to set up their own WoW style online D&D game, which you could play with tabletop characters and vice versa. It was abandoned, however, when other issues (technical and economic) arose. 

Secondly, and this is in no way intended as a dig about anything, the whole game was driven by a need to be more _visually_ involving. It wanted the tabletop to look busier with battle mats, miniatures and other things like cards and such. 3E had been moving this way anyway, but 4E pushed it right to the forefront. The whole game wanted the players to be thinking in these terms. The recent 5E expression of a ‘theatre of the mind’ was pushed back in favour of providing something that was more explicitly a ‘game’ to the casual player.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> First of all, I think there was a genuine interest in Wizards at the time to be able to integrate all the tabletop experience into a seamless connection with online gaming. I think there was even a plan to set up their own WoW style online D&D game, which you could play with tabletop characters and vice versa. It was abandoned, however, when other issues (technical and economic) arose.




That doesn't seem accurate. 

The proposed VTT (which I was very interested in for playing with friends in other countries) didn't share any features unique to or originating with MMOs, nor even ones which are associated with MMOs beyond other games, and most of it's features weren't found in MMOs at all. It was basically somewhat akin to NWN in DM-run mode (the Bioware version of NWN), only with a persistent character between modules (which I believe NWN1 allowed), and turn-based, rather than real-time with pausing. It didn't have a "persistent world", or any "massive" elements.

This is why I say _canard_ - there was nothing in the proposed VTT which was "WoW-style". It was not a "WoW-style online game" on any level that I can see, and I am in no way being willfully blind or the like. On the contrary, I am straining to see similarities.

I presume you were misinformed on this, and think that, perhaps, they were shooting for something akin to the current Cryptic NWN, which is most assuredly a "WoW-style online game". That was not true though.

Also, if we're talking about the same thing, and I think we are, it was not cancelled for "technical and economic" reasons, unless we're talking in the most ridiculous euphemisms possible. It was cancelled because the lead developer and driving force behind it and the DDI in general killed his wife and then himself:

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-murder-suicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online

  

That's a big part of why the DDI stuff ended up with another company entirely in 4E (5E's digital stuff is with yet a third company).

Anyway, there's nothing "WoW-style" about what they were describing, unless you would, for example, describe all other VTTs as "WoW-style online games" (which would be fairly ludicrous). They hoped for a more polished, streamlined and branded experience than other VTTs, to be sure, but it was just a big fancy VTT they were aiming for.



TrippyHippy said:


> Secondly, and this is in no way intended as a dig about anything, the whole game was driven by a need to be more _visually_ involving. It wanted the tabletop to look busier with battle mats, miniatures and other things like cards and such. 3E had been moving this way anyway, but 4E pushed it right to the forefront. The whole game wanted the players to be thinking in these terms. The recent 5E expression of a ‘theatre of the mind’ was pushed back in favour of providing something that was more explicitly a ‘game’ to the casual player.




This is certainly broadly true, but has seemingly nothing to do with WoW or being "WoW-style", so I'm curious at seeing it connected to that.

They didn't want it just more _visually_ appealing, either - they wanted a more _tactile_ experience (which again, WoW is absolutely not), and put a strong initial focus on miniatures, on cards to hold, on maps, and so on - stronger, I agree, than even 3.XE had been. There's no way the 4E tactical combat system could really work well without maps of some kind, in fact (I've seen interesting variants that avoid them, but they are rather different). 

"The whole game" is a very inaccurate overstatement, though. Certainly that wasn't the case, because there were no attempts to apply the same visual and tactile stuff to skills, to rituals, to skill challenges (which could have actually benefited from some success/failure counters or the like!) or anything of that sort, and frankly, that's a huge part of "the game" - often I've had 4E sessions where 90%+ of the session is those things.

"The whole of combat", though, I would agree with.

So 4E definitely attempted to move D&D to a default of a more visual and tactile focus in combat. It wasn't the first edition to do that - 3E was and good god did I kick my little lets in the air and scream when I realized a battlemap was basically required for 3E play if a lot of abilities were going to work right, but with 4E I'd got over that, and 4E actually did a good thing here by not half-arsing it. 3.XE was in an awful middle-ground place, where TotM wasn't really viable for complicated fights, or when certain classes got involved in the mix, but the game didn't use the map enough to make the map actually fun - it was just a hurdle. Whereas 4E's abilities, terrain hazards, and general design ethos did make the map fun, and not just a hurdle.

TLDR: 4E did want to make the table busier, to sell minis, maybe to sell cards (they gave up on that so fast I've never been sure if they were serious), and because they thought it appealed, I think, to a newly-recognised potential audience of people who didn't play RPGs, but did play fairly complicated boardgames. But none of that has anything to do with WoW. It has a lot more to do with Settlers of Catan.*

* = My experience is that they were dead right on this. I know a lot of people who will play any number of complicated Euro/German-style board games, deck-builders like Dominion and even the bloody complicated Game of Thrones boardgame (which once lead to me shouting "I WILL BREAK YOU!" at my wife - I banned myself from ever playing House Greyjoy again after that!), and most of those people had no interest in RPGs when seeing them played, and little in hearing them described (some were long-ex-RPG-players, too, and not keen to return), but when they saw D&D 4E, or even better, played it, they got it, and they engaged with it.


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## Emerikol (Jul 16, 2014)

I guess I need to explain my point "everyone was playing D&D".

I did not mean that every living human on the planet was playing D&D.  I meant that people who wanted a D&D esq game were largely playing D&D.  Wotc owned the D&D rpg market.   Even if you were clinging to 1e or 2e, you were still playing a D&D game.

Nowadays, lots of people are playing a D&Desq game and not playing D&D.  (I'm using D&D in the legal sense here and not the conceptual sense).  OSR and Pathfinder have lots of players.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I guess I need to explain my point "everyone was playing D&D".
> 
> I did not mean that every living human on the planet was playing D&D.  I meant that people who wanted a D&D esq game were largely playing D&D.  Wotc owned the D&D rpg market.   Even if you were clinging to 1e or 2e, you were still playing a D&D game.
> 
> Nowadays, lots of people are playing a D&Desq game and not playing D&D.  (I'm using D&D in the legal sense here and not the conceptual sense).  OSR and Pathfinder have lots of players.




You know this is the point I've been making, too, right?

But it's not right to say "During 3E, everyone was playing D&D", unless by 3E, you mean strictly 3E and NOT 3.5E (so 2000-2003). Castles & Crusades was 2004. OSRIC appeared in 2006. Labyrinth Lord in 2007. Basic Fantasy, 2007. Swords and Wizardry, 2008 (so developed before 4E was released). 

There were tons of more amateur stuff out there too. As soon as people realized that the OGL effectively allowed them to re-create older editions of D&D, but tidy them up and modernize them a bit, OSR stuff spread rapidly.

HackMaster, too, was 2001, and certainly ate some of 3.XE's audience, and is clearly a D&D-esque game in the way you're using the term.

So the divisions, the cracks, go way back. People started playing D&D-esque games as a direct alternative to playing WotC D&D long before 4E came out.


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## Emerikol (Jul 16, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> You know this is the point I've been making, too, right?
> 
> But it's not right to say "During 3E, everyone was playing D&D", unless by 3E, you mean strictly 3E and NOT 3.5E (so 2000-2003). Castles & Crusades was 2004. OSRIC appeared in 2006. Labyrinth Lord in 2007. Basic Fantasy, 2007. Swords and Wizardry, 2008 (so developed before 4E was released).
> 
> ...




I think my only argument is magnitude.  I think 4e forced a lot of players to look at these other options.  Some people no doubt tried them prior to 4e.  C&C is very obviously targeting the pre-3e crowd and it definitely got some adherents in those days.   I'm just saying that 4e turned it into a stampede instead of a trickle.


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## TwoSix (Jul 16, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.



I tend to believe it simply because I think the people designing 4e weren't stupid.  WoW was a phenomenon in the period where 4e was being designed (2005-2007), to the point where it was recognized even outside the nerdosphere, and into general pop culture.  

Considering that WoW's fundamental identity is inherited from D&D (with Warhammer influences), why wouldn't they try to do some cross-pollination?  

I'd say the bigger mistake was in not borrowing MORE from WoW, say, by having character stats be visible and persistent on DDi.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I think my only argument is magnitude.  I think 4e forced a lot of players to look at these other options.  Some people no doubt tried them prior to 4e.  C&C is very obviously targeting the pre-3e crowd and it definitely got some adherents in those days.   I'm just saying that 4e turned it into a stampede instead of a trickle.




I think "forced" is emotive and silly, but I will agree with "encouraged"! 

I mean, what I was that, pre-4E, before anyone knew jack about 4E, OSR was already big (though rarely called that, back then). People went on and on and on and on about C&C and OSRIC and LL before 4E was really even a thing to the point where I was just mentally shutting down whenever I came across them in a thread (not because I disliked them, but I did find the constant discussion very dull!).

What surprised me, in fact, was the 4E was like "Shove OSR!" in it's design, and went in the precise opposite direction, considering OSR seemed to be popular.

So then add in the godawful early marketing of 4E, which was basically "Your old game was crap, play our game, you dumbass!", and which was of course ESPECIALLY insulting to anyone with OSR leanings, and the fact that 4E's design, however good or bad, is very transparently not OSR-ish, not "traditional" in appearance, and so on, and yep, certainly lots more people are looking at OSR. Trickle to flood or stream to river? Hardly matters, but it happened.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 16, 2014)

TwoSix said:


> Considering that WoW's fundamental identity is inherited from D&D (with Warhammer influences), why wouldn't they try to do some cross-pollination?




Sure, but no-one can ever seem to find any real evidence that they did. Just vague sweeping stuff like "WoW is visual and 4E was more visual..." (pretty much everything got more visual in that period, though) or "WoW is online and the VTT was online" or "WoW has roles and 4E has roles" (well, sure, but they're different ones, and ones D&D has always had on some level) - etc...

Whereas 3.XE has an actual goddamn Warcraft sourcebooks! Why didn't 4E have anything like that?


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## Emerikol (Jul 16, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I think "forced" is emotive and silly, but I will agree with "encouraged"!




I guess I should have added "if they wanted to continue playing the same kind of game they had played."  The rest of your post I'm pretty much in agreement with.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Abstract surely isn't the same as "never meat". Why do you think it is?



I quoted you and other people and now you are just chasing the language in circles.



> I think THP are a pretty annoying mechanic in every edition so I avoid them. The latter suggestion is a fine optional rule, but needlessly fiddly for normal play, imho.



Fair enough.  I've never had any issue with them and find the valuable.  Again, it is easy to see how these types of differences have huge impacts on the play style preference.

You didn't answer my other question: " If a fighter with 100 HP was hit 10 times for a total of 57 damage, would you limit the Warlord to healing only 47, leaving the 1 HP/ hit as actual injury?"


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

pemerton said:


> That 3E was an "incremental change", and that 4e "didn't try to retain any of the prior feel of D&D" is likewise contentious - I know I'm not the only player who returned to D&D for 4e because it did a better job than any earlier edition of capturing the prior feel of D&D. (Whereas 3E is a dramatic change from classic D&D, in my view.)



For the record  (    )  I agree that 3E was a highly dramatic change.
I don't know that I buy 4E being any closer to prior editions.  But they are both so radically different that there is no way I could argue with someone saying it felt that way to them.

But, either way, 3E was a huge change.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> That doesn’t seem accurate. ….




Forgive me if I don’t quote all your post back to you, as it was quite long. I did read it all though. 

I don’t really feel comfortable discussing the tragedy surrounding former a WotC employee, and I’m not sure how appropriate it would be. However, my point is that if the game was clearly projected to be profitable and doable as an compatible and integrated electronic online game, they would have done so. There was certainly a drive to do so, going on the articles and interviews that came out around the release of 4E. 

I’m not sure about the technical differences between WoW and other online games - I don’t play any of them and have little interest in online gaming - but I was just holding up WoW as an obvious example of the type of online game that WotC was influenced by, among many influences, when designing 4E. That’s not a controversial point stating whether it was right or wrong to do so, btw, just that it had a degree of influence over certain aspects like Roles and at-will powers, etc. 

I’d certainly add the ’tangible’ aspect to the ‘visible’ aspect I highlighted before - they were both brought in as design goals to appeal to casual gamers. My point here, however, is that D&D _isn’t_ a miniatures battle game, nor is it a german-style board game or an MMO. It’s D&D. The game shouldn’t have to change itself to attempt to capture a market based on appealing to fans on these other games. It should stand alone as a classic in it’s own right - with the fundamentals in place of what made it a unique, visionary experience to many people the first time they played it.

From my experience, the thing that always appealed to me - and has kept me in the hobby for 30 years or so now - was the whole ’theatre of the mind’ aspect. The idea of playing in a shared, interactive fantasy _without_ the need for visual, tactile or tabletop representation of any kind. Having a game called D&D that focussed on such things was a detraction from the central appeal to me. I say that with the understanding that that is the appeal of a lot of other RPG fans too - and that is why there was dissent.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> So the divisions, the cracks, go way back. People started playing D&D-esque games as a direct alternative to playing WotC D&D long before 4E came out.



That is certainly very true so far as "Dungeons and Dragons" (TM) goes.
But D20 as a system was so dominate that it was common to hear complaints about stagnation and lack of innovation in the marketplace.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Regarding WoW:

I saw a handful of things in 4E that made me think they took inspiration from WoW.  But none of them were bad because of that.  As a matter of fact, I thought they did a good job and pulling in some fitting pieces.  And certainly there was not nearly enough that I ever thought 4E was videogamey.  I didn't agree with that position.

Of course, I don't like 4E as a play experience but respect that many people do.
I also respect that 4E did feel videogamey to a lot of people.

I don't have links anymore or anything.  So I will preemptively concede lack of proof.  But there were comments from WotC, or at least unofficially from staff, that they wanted to attract WoW players.  This did not mean they wanted video game players to feel at home playing a table top version of a video game.  They saw more than an order of magnitude more people "pretending to be an elf" in cyberspace and thought they should be able to get a large share of them to pretend to be an elf around a table.  This tied into the idea that losing existing fans would not be a problem because they would pull in 5 to 10 new players for every one they lost.


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## Zardnaar (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Regarding WoW:
> 
> I saw a handful of things in 4E that made me think they took inspiration from WoW.  But none of them were bad because of that.  As a matter of fact, I thought they did a good job and pulling in some fitting pieces.  And certainly there was not nearly enough that I ever thought 4E was videogamey.  I didn't agree with that position.
> 
> ...




Failing to attract those new players in signifigant numbers and losing your old fans is a bit of an own goal though.

 I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.


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## Nagol (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Regarding WoW:
> 
> I saw a handful of things in 4E that made me think they took inspiration from WoW.  But none of them were bad because of that.  As a matter of fact, I thought they did a good job and pulling in some fitting pieces.  And certainly there was not nearly enough that I ever thought 4E was videogamey.  I didn't agree with that position.
> 
> ...




Here's one from Andy Collins found here:


> ...When we were all playing 1st and 2nd Edition, we didn't cut our teeth on MMOs or console gaming or Facebook or any of those things. At best, maybe we had experience playing Monopoly or games like that, Risk, so that D&D was a totally foreign thing. That's just not true anymore.
> 
> People today, the young kids today, are coming into exposure from D&D after having playing games that have very similar themes, often have very similar mechanics ... they understand the concepts of the game. So in some ways they are much more advanced as potential game players. But in other ways, they are also coming from a background that is short attention span, perhaps, less likely interested in reading the rules of the game before playing.
> 
> And I'm not just talking about younger players now, but anybody. I know when I jump into a new console game, for instance, the last thing I want to do is read the book. I want to start playing. And that's a relatively new development in game playing and game learning. And we've been working to adapt to that, the changing expectations of the new gamer.


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## Nergal Pendragon (Jul 17, 2014)

The OP asked what 4E will be remembered for. The thing is, I don't think what was actually true about the edition matters; it's more what people see.

So, based on this thread and similar arguments across the internet, I will say it will probably be remembered for three things:



Division - It doesn't matter what the reality is, the simple truth is that there is a very, very visible division within the community that started when the edition was announced and simply did not die; it still remains, even to this day, and by all appearances is just as strong as when it started.
Failure - WotC dropped support after... how long? 3.5 years? It doesn't matter what reality is; a lot of people are most likely to see that simply as a failure of the system.
Pathfinder - Pathfinder really, really owes its existence to 4E. There's pretty much no questioning that. If 4E had been better handled, likely Paizo would never have made Pathfinder.

So, no matter what really occurred, I think those are the items it will be remembered for.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Nergal Pendragon said:


> If 4E had been better handled, likely Paizo would never have made Pathfinder.



It depends on what you are looking at.
If WotC had handled their 3PP policy better (even just communicating it better, not necessarily doing something different in the end), then Paizo may have not pulled the trigger on Pathfinder.
But even then, if 4E was what 4E was, then there was going to be a vast pent-up demand in the marketplace.  Without PF, there would be some other game or group of games that would be blamed for how things ended up for 4E.


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## Nergal Pendragon (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> It depends on what you are looking at.
> If WotC had handled their 3PP policy better (even just communicating it better, not necessarily doing something different in the end), then Paizo may have not pulled the trigger on Pathfinder.
> But even then, if 4E was what 4E was, then there was going to be a vast pent-up demand in the marketplace.  Without PF, there would be some other game or group of games that would be blamed for how things ended up for 4E.




I'm looking at perceptions of the entire outcome. So I don't think it actually matters what WotC could have handled better in reality, only that there is a perception they mishandled it and Pathfinder resulted from that mishandling.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> It depends on what you are looking at.
> If WotC had handled their 3PP policy better (even just communicating it better, not necessarily doing something different in the end), then Paizo may have not pulled the trigger on Pathfinder.
> But even then, if 4E was what 4E was, then there was going to be a vast pent-up demand in the marketplace.  Without PF, there would be some other game or group of games that would be blamed for how things ended up for 4E.




I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.


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## billd91 (Jul 17, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.




That came to my mind too. 

That and City of Heroes. A friend of mine was adapting it into a tabletop game and it has some elements startlingly like 4e's role-oriented powers.


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## Nagol (Jul 17, 2014)

billd91 said:


> That came to my mind too.
> 
> That and City of Heroes. A friend of mine was adapting it into a tabletop game and it has some elements startlingly like 4e's role-oriented powers.




A lot of MMOs do.  It comes from having defined similar roles for combat.  Many MMOs have settled on the holy trinity (as it is called) Tank, Striker, Healer.  A few have tried adding other roles -- buffer, debuffer, damage soak, etc.  But almost everyone has the main three.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.



Maybe not.  They certainly had a huge advantage the way things played out.  
You remove Paizo from the equation but leave the demand, something will happen.  As I said, it may not have even been one single game.

But, yes, they were in a great spot for this.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 17, 2014)

> I think THP are a pretty annoying mechanic in every edition so I avoid  them. The latter suggestion is a fine optional rule, but needlessly  fiddly for normal play, imho.






BryonD said:


> Fair enough.  I've never had any issue with them and find the valuable.  Again, it is easy to see how these types of differences have huge impacts on the play style preference.
> 
> You didn't answer my other question: " If a fighter with 100 HP was hit 10 times for a total of 57 damage, would you limit the Warlord to healing only 47, leaving the 1 HP/ hit as actual injury?"




The problem with temporary hit points as a core healing mechanic for a class is two-fold:

1)  It is less tactically engaging than "filling HP buckets" and therefore not very mentally rewarding from a "playing a game" perspective.  There are very few to no decision-points.  It is always optimal to proactively apply temporary hit points immediately so unforeseen, potentially lethal, burst damage is mitigated.  There is no opportunity cost of choice and there is no extrapolating several "moves" into the future to maximize your group's capacity for survival.  Just press the temp HP buttan and do whatever else it is you do.  Healing is tactically engaging (thus rewarding) because there is opportunity cost of choice and you're faced with multiple, critical decision-points throughout the course of a conflict.  Temp HP subverts that paradigm entirely.

2)  Reactive healing, assuming it is sufficient to the task, is better because you are always in a position to respond to true urgency (not just proactively attempting to mitigate forecasted urgency - which may never come to pass), typically due to spike damage, wherever it might be.  Filling HP buckets as they're depleted ensures you're never in a situation where you've deployed precious resources as a contingency to protect against burst damage that may never come.  Its more efficient and it stacks so you're always ready.

More fun.  More function.


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## pemerton (Jul 17, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.





billd91 said:


> That came to my mind too.



More advanced in the sense that it has rules for creating and playing characters, for scene framing, for non-combat resolution (the most sophisticated of any edition of D&D), plus a rich and evocative default background which is tightly integrated with a number of these mechanical elements.

Ie it's an RPG, not a skirmish game.


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## pemerton (Jul 17, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> From my experience, the thing that always appealed to me - and has kept me in the hobby for 30 years or so now - was the whole ’theatre of the mind’ aspect. The idea of playing in a shared, interactive fantasy _without_ the need for visual, tactile or tabletop representation of any kind.



The GM in D&D has generally always needed visual, tabletop representation - world maps, dungeon maps etc. The game's movement rules, for instance, all presuppose the existence of such things. So did it's combat rules, which have always delineated movement in terms of distance on a map, not in terms of abstract "zones" or positioning. (This remains true of 5e; 13th Age is one D&D ruleset that dispenses with the need for maps in combat.)

4e opens up these things to the players; it doesn't introduce them into a game where they were previously absent.


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## pickin_grinnin (Jul 17, 2014)

Ultimately, for me, it was the edition that tried to lure MMO / video game players into tabletop roleplaying, with predictably disastrous results (when all was said and done).


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 17, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The GM in D&D has generally always needed visual, tabletop representation - world maps, dungeon maps etc. The game's movement rules, for instance, all presuppose the existence of such things. So did it's combat rules, which have always delineated movement in terms of distance on a map, not in terms of abstract "zones" or positioning. (This remains true of 5e; 13th Age is one D&D ruleset that dispenses with the need for maps in combat.)
> 
> 4e opens up these things to the players; it doesn't introduce them into a game where they were previously absent.




Not true. In previous editions to 3E there wasn’t a _need_ for miniatures or any other visual/tactile representation. From Basic D&D: 



> “Your campaign group *might like to* use miniature figures to represent all characters and monsters, especially in combat encounters.”




Many groups chose not to - and certainly that was my experience when I first encountered the game. DMs may have scribbled some maps and stuff down, and in our group we generally nominated the order in which the party would walk, but we didn’t have miniatures and there was nothing in the rules that actually needed them to operate the game. Other groups I played with later literally played the game from armchairs without even a tabletop present!

In 3e the ‘attacks of opportunity’ rules, and the like, became more strident, but again this was controversial at the time, and many groups ignored them (indeed considering the wide variety of d20 products that didn’t use miniatures - it’s quite evident). 

4E, however, made it pretty made the miniatures based rules central and integral to the game. Some have argued that this took the game back to it’s 1970s war-game roots - but again that is missing the point. D&D was an evolution away from miniatures-based war-games. It created a new genre of game - due to it’s ‘theatre of the mind’  aspect - and that is what people felt they lost in recent editions.


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## Bawylie (Jul 17, 2014)

It's not "Theatre of the Mind" when the measurements are laid out in inches. Or fictional feet. Really anything precise like that. 1 inch = 10 ft. 1 square = 5 ft. All of that is concrete - it requires a tableau - which may be in your mind. But that's no different, functionally, than maps w/minis. 

Where precise distances, measurements, & positioning are required, you are playing on a grid.


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## pemerton (Jul 17, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Not true. In previous editions to 3E there wasn’t a _need_ for miniatures or any other visual/tactile representation.



I agree you never needed miniatures. You needed maps. (As a GM, I use to mark the PCs' location on the map using pencil - or sometimes just rely on memory.)

4e doesn't literally need minis - at my table we generally use tokens, for instance, and I have also run encounters where the position of combatants is marked using pen, or where I have simply tracked range bands with no need to track precise location (because diagonal movement is treated as linear, so range bands are sufficient). Examples of the latter have included archery duels on plains, and closing with a small boat along a canal (where all that mattered was either distance from the boat, or being on the boat).


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 17, 2014)

Bawylie said:


> It's not "Theatre of the Mind" when the measurements are laid out in inches. Or fictional feet. Really anything precise like that. 1 inch = 10 ft. 1 square = 5 ft. All of that is concrete - it requires a tableau - which may be in your mind. But that's no different, functionally, than maps w/minis.
> 
> Where precise distances, measurements, & positioning are required, you are playing on a grid.




Not necessarily. A GM can describe something being 80 yards away, say, when a player is shooting a bow and then adjusting the chances to hit based upon it’s range. That’s all in the mind. It doesn’t _require_ some sort of grid. You could suggest that it’s a lot easier to manage things with maps, grids and miniatures and maybe more fun that way - and I’m not knocking the idea at all - but it’s not something that would cause the system (pre-3E, at least) to break down as such if you were to forego them.


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## The Black Ranger (Jul 17, 2014)

What I believe 4th edition will be remembered for:

1: The removal of a lot of long time game designers.
2: Trying to tell gamers what they want.
3: Total destruction of the Forgotten Realms.
4: Boring combat that became a massive "grind fest".
5: The same people over and over again who would defend 4th edition with any straw they could grasp.
6: Gleemax (shutters).
7: Rented access to materials (DDI).
8: Wizards of the Coast deleting most negative threads on their website if they began to reach a sufficiant page count. 
9: Healing Surges.
10: Lots and lots of "WTF followed by head scratching" moments.
11: Pushing, sliding, and pulling.
12: Nonmagical powers of domination "Come and get it".
13: Largest edition war in history.
14: Wizards of the Coast proving they are an inapt company.
15: The worst adventures ever.
16: The removal of PDFs because the fear of pirating.
17: etc etc etc...


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 17, 2014)

Nagol said:


> A lot of MMOs do.  It comes from having defined similar roles for combat.  Many MMOs have settled on the holy trinity (as it is called) Tank, Striker, Healer.  A few have tried adding other roles -- buffer, debuffer, damage soak, etc.  But almost everyone has the main three.




Tank,* DPS* (earlier "Damage Dealer", then "Damage", then just DPS), Healer. Striker is a strictly D&D term.

And it's not really a matter of "adding other roles" - on the contrary, there were more roles in earlier MMOs (fr'ex "CC" i.e. Crowd Control being there until TBC-era WoW), but most post-WoW MMOs stick with the WoW-based "Holy Trinity" (WoW got it from EQ, but it wasn't a trinity then).

Also, roles were an emergent property of EQ, not designed in intentionally, but that's a long discussion.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> The problem with temporary hit points as a core healing mechanic for a class is two-fold:
> 
> 1)  It is less tactically engaging than "filling HP buckets" and therefore not very mentally rewarding from a "playing a game" perspective.  There are very few to no decision-points.  It is always optimal to proactively apply temporary hit points immediately so unforeseen, potentially lethal, burst damage is mitigated.  There is no opportunity cost of choice and there is no extrapolating several "moves" into the future to maximize your group's capacity for survival.  Just press the temp HP buttan and do whatever else it is you do.  Healing is tactically engaging (thus rewarding) because there is opportunity cost of choice and you're faced with multiple, critical decision-points throughout the course of a conflict.  Temp HP subverts that paradigm entirely.
> 
> ...




I think both of you are missing the point that the THP comment was one thing and the question about not healing those last 10 HP was another.
I'll note that your comments are 100% about tactics and mechanics and completely omit any consideration of narrative.
You talk to me about games with no narrative expectations and you will get different answers from me.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> I think both of you are missing the point that the THP comment was one thing and the question about not healing those last 10 HP was another.
> 
> I'll note that your comments are 100% about tactics and mechanics and completely omit any consideration of narrative.




You are wrong to think that, and wrong to assert my comments are purely about that (if that you is intended to singular, you may want to watch your grammar).

_As I said in my post_, the "last 10HP" thing is fiddly as hell. That's _not just_ a mechanical assessment. You seem to think it has some immense narrative value that makes it worth tracking. I don't think it does. I think it's the sort of tiny issue that certain eccentrics (I mean that in a nice way) might focus on, but that will never come up in 98% of groups. I think it hurts the narrative more to burden the game with dozens of fiddly little rules (which IME often take focus off the narrative), so my instinct is to avoid them. If I was playing with such an eccentric, and he was polite, I might track it (or, rather, he could), but never otherwise.


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## Nagol (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Tank,* DPS* (earlier "Damage Dealer", then "Damage", then just DPS), Healer. Striker is a strictly D&D term.
> 
> And it's not really a matter of "adding other roles" - on the contrary, there were more roles in earlier MMOs (fr'ex "CC" i.e. Crowd Control being there until TBC-era WoW), but most post-WoW MMOs stick with the WoW-based "Holy Trinity" (WoW got it from EQ, but it wasn't a trinity then).
> 
> Also, roles were an emergent property of EQ, not designed in intentionally, but that's a long discussion.




I knew I was getting one wrong!  The roles reflect the ablative/attrition nature of most "tough" combat in MMOs.  They were an emergent property of early MMOs, sure but they've been adopted as a desigphilosophy pretty heavily and even by the player bases of MMOs that tried to eschew it.  The reason other roles haven't really caught on is that no other capabilities provided to characters have managed to be more effective for success than hit point and target management.   Some MMOs (like _The Secret World_) have designed some of the boss fights such that there are different operational roles like "spotter" or "collector" which don't rely on hit point management, but in the end these large set piece battles require incoming damage to be directed and negated and outgoing damage to be sufficiently large so the other side drops before the human team does.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> You are wrong to think that, and wrong to assert my comments are purely about that (if that you is intended to singular, you may want to watch your grammar).
> 
> _As I said in my post_, the "last 10HP" thing is fiddly as hell. That's _not just_ a mechanical assessment. You seem to think it has some immense narrative value that makes it worth tracking. I don't think it does. I think it's the sort of tiny issue that certain eccentrics (I mean that in a nice way) might focus on, but that will never come up in 98% of groups. I think it hurts the narrative more to burden the game with dozens of fiddly little rules (which IME often take focus off the narrative), so my instinct is to avoid them. If I was playing with such an eccentric, and he was polite, I might track it (or, rather, he could), but never otherwise.




Ok

You specifically said you treated at least 1 HP from each hit as real meat.
I was wondering if you really meant it.

Edit: I agree it is quite fiddly an "eccentric" to track that level.  It is why I asked.  I certainly see no merit to it.  But, I avoid healing systems that create this situation.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Ok
> 
> You specifically said you treated at least 1 HP from each hit as real meat.
> I was wondering if you really meant it.
> ...




I do indeed mean it - but that doesn't mean I track it independently, solely for the purpose of Warlord heals (I don't have a Warlord in any of my 4E groups so that'd be particularly bizarre). It's something that it's easy to assume is dealt with by bandaging and so-on in downtime/short rests/long rests, because it's such a minor component.

No healing system I'm aware of in any game "creates" this situation, so that must be easy to avoid!  Unfortunately certain people (not systems, people), feel the need, consciously or unconsciously, to complicate game X or Y, and pretty much any game's injury/damage system is open to some kind of question if stared at hard enough.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I do indeed mean it - but that doesn't mean I track it independently, solely for the purpose of Warlord heals (I don't have a Warlord in any of my 4E groups so that'd be particularly bizarre). It's something that it's easy to assume is dealt with by bandaging and so-on in downtime/short rests/long rests, because it's such a minor component.
> 
> No healing system I'm aware of in any game "creates" this situation, so that must be easy to avoid!  Unfortunately certain people (not systems, people), decide that they want to complicate game X or Y, and pretty much any game's injury/damage system is open to some kind of question if stared at hard enough.




I'd say the 4E-style systems "create" the situation where someone ends up saying "I treat at least 1 HP of every wound as meat".  (or whatever your exact wording was).

When you create a system where all wounds can just vanish you create these implicit narrative conflicts.  

I readily admit that people use HP in a lot of different ways.  And some people say some things about 3E (and prior) HP/ healing systems that I don't endorse.  But the system doesn't put you in a box where a statement about how much is meat, or the like, comes back to not be true.  

If you have HP that are assumed to need some healing over time or some other source of healing (typically magic) then you don't have to care if the HP are meat or abstract because you can consider that they all heal at the same rate.

I've described it before but look at a 5 HP L1 wizard and a 100 HP L9 Fighter both on the receiving end of identical sword hits for 9 points.  The wizard is run through, the fighter deflects it with little thought.  A lucky roll for CLW by a L1 cleric will bring the run through wizard back to full recovery, but can only heal a scratch on the fighter.  But it doesn't matter because the abstract "hero aura" of the L9 fighter that his mass of HP includes lost the same 9 HP as the wizard.  So the healing energy goes to the flesh of the wizard, and the same amount goes to the "karma" of the fighter.

This takes a lot of "thinking" and writing to describe in words.  But, the thing is, I've been doing it this way since 1E.  And I can recall fun debates over the nature of HP, but it never required thinking.  The idea that takes several sentences to express is obvious.  I never stared at it at all.  At least not in play, the HP debates for the fun of the debate were unrelated to at table experience.

It is only when you start saying everything heals for free that you start getting into "staring at it too hard" statements like "1 HP / wound is real" that you then have to turn around and say "except I don't actually do that."


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## Hussar (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> I think both of you are missing the point that the THP comment was one thing and the question about not healing those last 10 HP was another.
> I'll note that your comments are 100% about tactics and mechanics and completely omit any consideration of narrative.
> You talk to me about games with no narrative expectations and you will get different answers from me.




DnD combat is abstract. What does a single attack and damage roll actually represent if the system is abstract?  It's ridiculous to think that a tiger will always swing it's paws twice and bite once every six seconds. 

So, how many times did that tiger actually hit you when he hits for ten damage?  Using the system, prove your answer. 

So why would every hit have to represent a single meat point?  It's an abstract system from front to back. You could be hit ten times in a combat and not actually been physically impacted ten times or you might have been impacted more than ten times. 

Since we cannot actually make that determination using the rules, there is actually nothing supporting your idea that every hit must do physical effects.


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## Nagol (Jul 17, 2014)

Hussar said:


> DnD combat is abstract. What does a single attack and damage roll actually represent if the system is abstract?  It's ridiculous to think that a tiger will always swing it's paws twice and bite once every six seconds.
> 
> So, how many times did that tiger actually hit you when he hits for ten damage?  Using the system, prove your answer.
> 
> ...




The primary reason to want a "hit" to contain a meat point is so riders like poison, disease etc. have an plausible vector.

If hp loss is described as "you nimbly dodge the arrow, but the realisation this is now combat washes over you.  Take 3 hp." it is hard to visualise how "Oh and roll a saving throw vs. poison please" can be rationalised.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Hussar said:


> So, how many times did that tiger actually hit you when he hits for ten damage?  Using the system, prove your answer.
> 
> So why would every hit have to represent a single meat point?  It's an abstract system from front to back. You could be hit ten times in a combat and not actually been physically impacted ten times or you might have been impacted more than ten times.



I agree with you.  Ruin is the one who said he treated 1 HP from every hit as meat.  
My point is that this is a bad thing.
You are agreeing with me and showing problems with the statement that he made.


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Nagol said:


> The primary reason to want a "hit" to contain a meat point is so riders like poison, disease etc. have an plausible vector.



To me, the primary reason is that some sense of recovery/healing creates a much more satisfying narrative experience.  I don't need it to be anywhere near realistic.  But I strongly desire it to be present in the narrative and reflected in the mechanical model of that narrative.

The poison thing is also true, but this really isn't the main reason to me.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 17, 2014)

BryonD said:


> I think both of you are missing the point that the THP comment was one thing and the question about not healing those last 10 HP was another.
> 
> I was speaking generally about why it was objectionable.  I'm pretty sure you (and others) hold that you desire inspiration/moralizing being solely relagated to granting Temp HP and never touch "filling HP buckets."  That is why I posted that.
> 
> ...


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## BryonD (Jul 17, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> Further, you may or may not care about it so much (I'm not sure).  But gamist concerns are important when you're...playing a game, whether it be a TTRPG or a contact sport.



I agree completely.  
Again, I readily acknowledge that there is a group of people who love the way the 4E HP system works.

My point is that there are things that approach does well and things that approach does poorly.
It is completely legitimate to be concerned with the things that it does poorly.

One of the things 4E will be remembered for is telling a lot of people that their concerns over this (and many other things) didn't count.

None of that contradicts the value the game brought to people with different perspectives.  It is just a shame that 4E didn't reach out to a larger audience.


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## thewok (Jul 17, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Tank,* DPS* (earlier "Damage Dealer", then "Damage", then just DPS), Healer. Striker is a strictly D&D term.
> 
> And it's not really a matter of "adding other roles" - on the contrary, there were more roles in earlier MMOs (fr'ex "CC" i.e. Crowd Control being there until TBC-era WoW), but most post-WoW MMOs stick with the WoW-based "Holy Trinity" (WoW got it from EQ, but it wasn't a trinity then).



I first heard of the Holy Trinity in EQ.  It was tank, healer and support.  Specifically, the Holy Trinity was Warrior, Cleric and Shaman.  Out of a six-man group, those were they ultimate three classes with which to start.  The warrior and cleric for obvious reasons, and the shaman for hastes and slows.  Then, the other three roles could be all DPS, or you could add a bard or ranger for pulling or an enchanter for CC on huge groups.

That was the original Holy Trinity.  It wasn't meant to be the only roles in the game so much as the basis of the ultimate or most optimal groups.

If it were me, I'd remove "DPS" as part of the Trinity and put support back in its rightful place.  Then, I'd make damage purely a function of fulfilling your main role in combat.


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## Nagol (Jul 17, 2014)

thewok said:


> I first heard of the Holy Trinity in EQ.  It was tank, healer and support.  Specifically, the Holy Trinity was Warrior, Cleric and Shaman.  Out of a six-man group, those were they ultimate three classes with which to start.  The warrior and cleric for obvious reasons, and the shaman for hastes and slows.  Then, the other three roles could be all DPS, or you could add a bard or ranger for pulling or an enchanter for CC on huge groups.
> 
> That was the original Holy Trinity.  It wasn't meant to be the only roles in the game so much as the basis of the ultimate or most optimal groups.
> 
> If it were me, I'd remove "DPS" as part of the Trinity and put support back in its rightful place.  Then, I'd make damage purely a function of fulfilling your main role in combat.




Support was yanked because both the designers and the player bases did not like the effect of mes-locks, stun-locks and the like.  Games kept reducing the effectiveness of combat control powers until they became nice-to-have as opposed absolutely essential.

If it were up to me, I'd increase the range of possible situations so not everything revolves around target and hp control.  My solution can be infinitely more difficult though especially since the player base are now trained to expect it.


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## Minigiant (Jul 17, 2014)

"That's it?" - Many D&D fans.

People forget WHY 4e was the way it was.

2e and 3e expanded the fan base a lot. But many were disappointed by what D&D offered.

They expected long dragon fights, fancy trap, political matches, dynamic encounters, mage duels, and epic clashes.

So when the internet age hit full swing all you saw was complaining. 

4e  will be remembered as an attempt to quell this. The first full attempt via mechanics.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 17, 2014)

thewok said:


> I first heard of the Holy Trinity in EQ.  It was tank, healer and support.
> 
> Specifically, the Holy Trinity was Warrior, Cleric and Shaman.  Out of a six-man group, those were they ultimate three classes with which to start.  The warrior and cleric for obvious reasons, and the shaman for hastes and slows.  Then, the other three roles could be all DPS, or you could add a bard or ranger for pulling or an enchanter for CC on huge groups.
> 
> ...




Indeed, but that's the *second* Holy Trinity in EQ. The *first* was Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter (Tank, Healer, CC).


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 17, 2014)

Zardnaar said:


> Failing to attract those new players in  signifigant numbers and losing your old fans is a bit of an own goal  though.




Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable.  If we look at Google Trends  in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5  more than half the D&D searches dropped off.  In the _five_ years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.



> I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.




Given that D&D is and has always been a hacked tabletop wargame  right the way back to the brown box, I'm not sure what point this is  meant to raise.  Other than that it's a more modern wargame.



Savage Wombat said:


> I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.




Indeed.



TrippyHippy said:


> Not true. In previous editions to 3E there wasn’t a _need_ for miniatures or any other visual/tactile representation.




They just measured distances in inches.  And wanted exact measurements.



> In  3e the ‘attacks of opportunity’ rules, and the like, became more  strident, but again this was controversial at the time, and many groups  ignored them (indeed considering the wide variety of d20 products that  didn’t use miniatures - it’s quite evident).




The 3.5 rules on the other hand explicitly require a grid.  A pattern that was followed by 4E.



Nagol said:


> I knew I was getting one wrong!  The roles reflect  the ablative/attrition nature of most "tough" combat in MMOs.




Tank/DPS/Support?  What does that remind me of?  Ah, yes.   Fighter/Wizard (as battlefield artillery)/Cleric.  The three classes in  the Brown Box.  2E is very explicit about having roles - with there  being four.  These were not MMO things.  They were things MMOs borrowed  from D&D.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 18, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> They just measured distances in inches.  And wanted exact measurements.




I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here (or why!). Prior to 3E there was no requirement to use miniatures - as stated before.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2014)

Sorry to pick on a post that was otherwise full of truth, but:



Neonchameleon said:


> Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable.  If we look at Google Trends  in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5  more than half the D&D searches dropped off.  In the _five_ years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.



 Hold on.  Aren't D&D searches are going to go up after the announcement of Next?  I sense a confounding factor in your comparison.

Y'know, looking at the data, I see no meaningful correlation with editions, announced or released, and am seeing spikes around news articles.  I don't think you're measuring ongoing interest in D&D by D&Ders, here, but curiosity about D&D among 'outsiders' who see it mentioned in the news but don't know what it is, so google it.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I’m not what you are trying to argue here (or why!). Prior to 3E there was no requirement to use miniatures - as stated before.



 There was no /requirement/ to use minis in any ed.  The assumption - explicit or implicit - that you'd use miniatures was in every ed though, from 0D&D, which called itself a miniatures wargame, to AD&D, which, in the wargame tradition, used inches for movement, ranges & areas, to 3e with it's grid templates and horizontal movement rules, to 4e with it's square fireballs.  

5e is the first edition to make a point of pretending that you're not supposed to use miniatures - even though it has no rules to facilitate "TotM" (the way 13A does, for just one instance of many), and still gives movement, range, and area in feet, rounded to 5' and 10' increments, just like 'gird-dependent' 3e.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 18, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> There was no /requirement/ to use minis in any ed.  The assumption - explicit or implicit - that you'd use miniatures was in every ed though, from 0D&D, which called itself a miniatures wargame, to AD&D, which, in the wargame tradition, used inches for movement, ranges & areas, to 3e with it's grid templates and horizontal movement rules, to 4e with it's square fireballs.
> 
> 5e is the first edition to make a point of pretending that you're not supposed to use miniatures - even though it has no rules to facilitate "TotM" (the way 13A does, for just one instance of many), and still gives movement, range, and area in feet, rounded to 5' and 10' increments, just like 'gird-dependent' 3e.




No - it’s not true. There was some _suggestions_ of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts.  If you picked up a Basic D&D set (or advanced D&D to follow) in the 1980s, as I did, you generally didn’t play with miniatures as a norm (and no miniatures or grid was provided!) and it made no difference to the rules of the game, whatsoever. 

Some gamers would bring in some cool painted miniatures to represent PCs or monsters occasionally, and we’d all go ‘ooh’ as they were plonked in the middle of the table, but they’d never be _used_ in any way in terms of measuring ranges or the like. We used no grids at all, and the scribbled maps the DM would show us on scraps of paper, sometimes, would usually be too small for the miniatures to fit on, let alone move them around*. If you wanted to formally use them in a tactical situation, you’d play Warhammer instead.

Oh, and 5E does have rules to simulate ‘Theatre of the Mind’ - as written, all of them are.

* Actually, what I recall is that the DM didn’t do maps at all, and one of the players actually had to draw a map of the dungeon as we explored it in order to not get lost!


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> No - it’s not true. There was some _suggestions_ of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts.  If you played without miniatures it made no difference to the rules of the game whatsoever (and none were provided!).



 It's true you can run any game 'TotM' if you really want to - I've done it with games more 'grid' (actually hex) dependent than any ed of D&D.  You don't have to change the rules to do it, you're just keeping track of relative movement, positioning, range and area in your head.

Some games have specific rules to facilitate that.  13th Age is an example (though it /also/ has minis rules, IIRC).  There are others.  None of them are editions of D&D, though.  When a game gives you movement, ranges, areas, and the like in feet (like 3e or 5e) or in a scale - like inches (0D&D, AD&D) or squares (4e) - it's giving you tools to run with the game on a surface using miniatures (or tokens or what-ever).  That surface may be a sheet of paper with X's and O's on it, or it may be a bare tabletop, newfangled (invented in the 80s!) battlemat, or sandtable or whatever, but the expectation of a game using that level of precision is that you will use that level of precision, somehow.  

TotM /can/ do that, but it's not idea for it.  Ironically, games that use feet or inches are a just little harder to run TotM than those that use less granular scales, like squares or hexes.

Games that facilitate 'TotM' handle range, positioning, movement & area in a less precise, more relative way.  So you might have 'zones' or 'areas' and characters can go from one zone to another by moving, and attacks with range span so many 'areas.'  Or relative position could be reduced to a few adjectives - adjacent, close, far.  These  games are specifically designed to be played without a surface and work well in that mode.  When used with a surface and minis, such rules are a little less appealing, because it becomes obvious you can move your miniature with more freedom and position it more precisely than the rules allow, and they go from feeling 'lite' to feeling 'restrictive.'

I expect 5e to come up with some sort of decent TotM-fascilitating rules, eventually, once it's promised modularity appears.  Until then, it's no more or less a miniatures game than prior eds.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 18, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I expect 5e to come up with some sort of decent TotM-fascilitating rules, eventually, once it's promised modularity appears.  Until then, it's no more or less a miniatures game than prior eds.




It’s certainly less of a miniatures game than 4E, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous. 

Moreover, there seems to be disconnect over what ’Theatre of the Mind’ actually is, and it’s one of the great myths that the ‘Indie’ movement perpetuated in the last decade. You don’t need _any_ extra _rules_ to facilitate theatre of the mind - people already naturally have an imagination. You just need to create the framework to allow players to engage in the creative imagination of a shared narrative. That’s precisely what you are given with 5th Edition D&D. 

The more rules you add, particularly if they pertain to distracting things like grid movement and tactical miniatures play, means the less time you’re players can actually engage with their own ‘theatre of the mind’.


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## Umbran (Jul 18, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Given that 3.5 haemoherraged fans and 4e seemed to stop the rot this is questionable.  If we look at Google Trends  in the four years starting six months after the release of D&D 3.5  more than half the D&D searches dropped off.  In the _five_ years starting six months after the release of 4e, the drop off was around 25%.




To steal an adage from Richard Feynman - The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.  

Yes, that's what was happening with Google searches.  

The question, of course, is _why?_  You rather blithely imply that these numbers reflect the rate at which people were outright leaving the game, and, by extension, the drop off was due to some characteristic(s) of the games in question.

Isn't that just a big hairy guess, though?  How do you defend that as anything other than having data say what you want it to say?

I mean, how do you know it is of people leaving?  Why couldn't it just as easily be read as saying that searches dropped off because people had gotten caught up on each new edition's changes, and simply didn't *need* to search any more?  It would then make sense that searches for 3.5e would drop off much faster, because it was less of a departure from the previous ruleset, and thus easier to catch up on.  They're still playing, they just didn't need the web to tell them as much.  

Or, more specifically, they don't need *Google* to tell them as much - if they find sources they bookmark, they no longer need Google.  So, maybe 3.5e had more *bookmarkable* sources that folks could reliably return to for information, leading to a faster drop-off of searches?  Maybe it is about the websites, not about the games themselves.

Or, we could take this as a critique upon the games - in general, 4e requires more external input for people to understand than 3.5e does!

Or, we could note that 4e was released in 2008.  Completely unrelated to the release, the years following it were economically disastrous for many people - in tough times, folks may tend turn to inexpensive forms of entertainment - maybe there were more 4e searches because cruising the internet for stuff about RPGs is a heck of a lot cheaper than most other ways to spend your time and keep your mind engaged, and 4e had the "benefit" of being the new kid on the block at the time.

Any of those, of course, would be just more big hairy guesses.  All are consistent with the data, but only our *feelings*, not data, tell us one is more probably true than the other.

The point being that plausible story doesn't equal truth.


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## Hussar (Jul 18, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> No - it’s not true. There was some _suggestions_ of using miniatures, but nothing rules wise that had you referring to miniature use before third edition with the possible exception of the very first edition in 1974, which still had the assumption of itself being a war-game of sorts.  If you picked up a Basic D&D set (or advanced D&D to follow) in the 1980s, as I did, you generally didn’t play with miniatures as a norm (and no miniatures or grid was provided!) and it made no difference to the rules of the game, whatsoever.
> 
> /snip




Huh. I must have imagined those flanking diagrams in AdnD. 

How did you determine shield effectiveness if you were so vague about positioning?  Never mind things like space requirements in order to use certain weapons. 

I think it's true that lots of people ignored the rules for minis in AdnD. But the rules were there.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 18, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Huh. I must have imagined those flanking diagrams in AdnD.
> 
> How did you determine shield effectiveness if you were so vague about positioning?  Never mind things like space requirements in order to use certain weapons.
> 
> I think it's true that lots of people ignored the rules for minis in AdnD. But the rules were there.




Flanking diagrams in the Dungeon Master’s Guide perhaps? The book with a plethora of ideas and rules that you _could_ incorporate into your game if you wanted? Good for you - I’d imagine you’ll probably get more of the same sort of thing in the coming DMG too. But they weren’t in the basic game though - and I have a copy in front of me. 

How did we use any of the games rules without referring to battle maps and positioning? We described it and role-played it out. Novel concept it may be to some.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 18, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Flanking diagrams in the Dungeon Master’s Guide perhaps? The book with a plethora of ideas and rules that you _could_ incorporate into your game if you wanted? Good for you - I’d imagine you’ll probably get more of the same sort of thing in the coming DMG too. But they weren’t in the basic game though - and I have a copy in front of me.
> 
> How did we use any of the games rules without referring to battle maps and positioning? We described it and role-played it out. Novel concept it may be to some.




Given that AD&D and basic D&D are both literally and legally different games (and there's even a court case to prove it) I fail to see how your point here is relevant.  If you want to say that basic D&D was a better game because it didn't do things like this, that's up to you.


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## TrippyHippy (Jul 18, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Given that AD&D and basic D&D are both literally and legally different games (and there's even a court case to prove it) I fail to see how your point here is relevant.  If you want to say that basic D&D was a better game because it didn't do things like this, that's up to you.




I didn’t, at any point, say basic D&D was better than anything, but it _was_ D&D and yes, every rule in the DMG was presented as an option - it was why it was called a ‘Guide'! 

What a pointless comment for you to post.


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## billd91 (Jul 18, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Huh. I must have imagined those flanking diagrams in AdnD.
> 
> How did you determine shield effectiveness if you were so vague about positioning?  Never mind things like space requirements in order to use certain weapons.
> 
> I think it's true that lots of people ignored the rules for minis in AdnD. But the rules were there.




You certainly didn't need miniatures for any of that. You only needed to say that you wanted to get around the target's flank and the DM only needed to say, on his turn, he turns to follow your movements (meaning he was not able to get to that flank). Of course that's when the other PCs moved into the flanks so *somebody* got a lower AC to hit.

1e was certainly based on miniature terminology and that probably made the transition from basic to advanced easier for a lot of people. 2e, however, pretty much disposed of it. Spells aren't listed with ranges and areas of effect in inches, they're in non-scale terms. You could still play with minis and a grid, but I would still estimate that the majority of players, just like in 1e, didn't play with them and if they did, it wasn't to the same degree of detail that they did in 3e and 4e. I suspect the Players Option book on Combat and Tactics got the game on the road toward mini-based combat.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 18, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> 5e is certainly less of a miniatures game than 4E, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.



 It certainly is in the sense that it has fewer and poorer rules for using miniatures.  That's /also/ something that could be addressed should WotC ever come through with the promised modularity.

In the implied sense of being more suited to TotM, though, not so much.  4e assumes a 5' grid and minis or tokens of some kind.  5e assumes precise measurements & geometric areas given in feet.  I've run both TotM.   5e is a bit easier because there's fewer forced movement effects (fewer, not none), and because low hps and AC make the combats faster (one way or another).  4e is a bit easier because of the lower granularity and the fact areas are all just cubes of a few different sizes.  




> Moreover, there seems to be disconnect over what ’Theatre of the Mind’ actually is, and it’s one of the great myths that the ‘Indie’ movement perpetuated in the last decade. You don’t need _any_ extra _rules_ to facilitate theatre of the mind - people already naturally have an imagination. You just need to create the framework to allow players to engage in the creative imagination of a shared narrative. That’s precisely what you are given with 5th Edition D&D.



 It's funny how we're arguing over some things we're basically in agreement on.

Yes, you don't /need/ specific rules to facilitate TotM.  In that sense, 5e can definitely be played TotM - see, I'm agreeing with you.   In that sense, necessarily, all versions of D&D can be played in that mode.  Some - those with more granular measurements, more varied and geometrically precise areas, more opportunities to make positioning matter, and so forth - are a little harder than others.  

But, while you don't need them, rules that facilitate TotM, do, tautologicaly, facilitate TotM, they make it easier for the DM to track all that positioning and such in his head.  If a game is /intended/ to be run that way, it should really provide such rules.  It's not like they're 'rules heavy' or complicated or anything.  They're generally 'lighter' than D&D's traditional range/area and movement/positioning rules, for that matter.  



> The more rules you add, particularly if they pertain to distracting things like grid movement and tactical miniatures play, means the less time you’re players can actually engage with their own ‘theatre of the mind’.



 Then, if 5e were really trying to be all 'TotM' it wouldn't have movement and range moves precise down to a granularity of 1', nor would it use a wide variety of exact geometric areas down the same granularity.  It would eschew those in favor of a more 'rules lite' TotM-facilitating system.  

Why it didn't is obvious:  D&D had never done that before - because it's never fully escaped it's roots as a miniatures wargame - and 5e is all about capturing the feel of past editions of 'real D&D.'


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## Herschel (Aug 5, 2014)

DaveMage said:


> 4e will be remembered by me as the edition that broke me of the need to be a D&D RPG completest.
> It will be remembered by me as the edition that had the worst marketing in D&D history.
> It will be remembered by me as the edition that changed things for the benefit of the authors rather than the fans (see 4E Forgotten Realms).
> It will be remembered by me as the edition that expected you to buy more than three core books to play the core game.
> ...




I'll remember you as the person who admitted never actually reading it yet constantly posting as if you were an "expert" on it extolling utter fabrications and inaccuracies as parts of the game. It reads rather funny you claiming others made this a hard place to come.


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## DaveMage (Aug 5, 2014)

Herschel said:


> I'll remember you as the person who admitted never actually reading it yet constantly posting as if you were an "expert" on it extolling utter fabrications and inaccuracies as parts of the game. It reads rather funny you claiming others made this a hard place to come.




Wow. 

Pot/kettle.  But that aside - 

1. I've never claimed to be an expert.
2. What fabrications/innaccuracies are you referring to?  (Or are you just mad that I never liked 4E?)


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## Herschel (Aug 6, 2014)

You talked about things you didn't like in play, etc. yet admitted you didn't actually play it. It's like saying you dislike Aerosmith and critique how Joey Kramer is a poor drummer and their songs are structured so poorly without ever listening to an album. 

You complain about Edition Wars, et you were at the very heart of the Edition Wars, more cause than affected. I have no issue with honest, informed critiques, tastes are subjective, but I will call out hyperbolic rants of fabrications. 

I didn't like the math bloat of 3E or 4E, for example, MOAR NUMB3RS!!! is, IMO, a waste of time and makes things harder to keep working smoothly and also leads to too large of inequities. 4E was far better at keeping it in line than 3E, but later the splat options did start to open some loopholes.


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## DaveMage (Aug 6, 2014)

I think you may have mis-read my posts.

I've never said I disliked things *in play* because I never played it.  I certainly gave opinions on changes in 4E I didn't like, but I didn't need to play it to know that I hated what they did to the Realms, the Great Wheel, alignment, "core" books, etc.  (And, certainly, the marketing for 4E annoyed me beyond belief.)

Also, I said EN World was a very difficult place to visit (though I did not explain why).  You inferred that it had something to do with other posters and/or inciting edition wars.  But the reason I felt that way was because half of us were playing a different game - so we no longer had a common game to discuss - unlike during 2002-2007 when we were all pretty much playing the same thing.

Anyway, it really doesn't matter anymore.  I have no bad feelings toward 5E - in fact, I think they are doing a great job with the roll-out, and the game looks like it will be a great middle ground between 1E/2E and 3E/4E.  (Actually, it seems like it would have been a more natural system progression after 2E than 3E was.)


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## Umbran (Aug 6, 2014)

Herschel said:


> I'll remember you as the person who...





And everyone else will remember you as the guy who got the thread closed, if you aren't careful.

Really - *DON'T MAKE IT PERSONAL*.

I keep typing that in big letters, but so many people seem to ignore this advice.  Would bringing out the banhammer help you remember it?  Because I'll do that, if you want.

Or anyone else?  You think you need a reminder to not get personal, or not get into edition warring?  We can provide it.  Speak up now.

More seriously - folks, please.  Don't leave your good sense behind.  Be good to each other.  If you can't be good, then at least leave each other alone, please.


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## CrypticSplicer (Aug 12, 2014)

I'll always remember 4e as the edition that most encouraged teamwork and party tactics. Tactical leaders like the warlord more than doubled the effectiveness of entire parties. Everyone got to feel awesome! My friends and I made some of the craziest teams that we brought to conventions. We once made a team of pixies, halflings, and gnomes and called them Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Another time we all made construct characters that "came from the future" and called ourselves Skynet. We always knocked our foes unconscious, unless they were human. We killed all those wankers. Any one of them could be one of John Conner's forefathers!

We could have made all those parties in other editions, but we never did before 4e because only 4e encouraged party synergy so much.


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## kerouac (Aug 12, 2014)

I've been playing with a core group of the same guys since our freshmen year of college (2001), and before that I played with the same group of friends since 4th grade. Sure, a couple of folks have come or gone over the years, but we were always 2E players until 4E came out and that's when we made the jump...

You can imagine our shock. 

For our group it ended up working out pretty well because we all played Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Risk, Axis & Allies, etc and had pretty tactical minds. The biggest downside is we lost some of that fast pace and imagination that we used to have. It was still a lot of fun and there are some great memories, but it didn't feel like OUR D&D.

With the Playtest and research into 5E so far, it feels more familiar. Our two newest players might have a bit of an adjustment because they started at 4E and for them it was a great entry into a larger roleplaying world.


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## Manbearcat (Aug 12, 2014)

I've thought on this a bit more and I think if I had to abstract all of the things that I appreciate about 4e into a eulogy it would be:

In 6 years, untold hours, and over 70 levels of play, I've never had a bad session, hell a bad 1/2 hour, running games with this ruleset.  I've never prepped so little and had so much consistent fun with D&D.  The basic conflict resolution systems are crunchy but intuitive to the point of almost being rules-lite in their core functionality.  Its the only D&D ruleset I've run that kept on giving...where I've wanted to run more and more games the longer I've played.  Its the only D&D ruleset that has progressed and gained a greater sense of itself and its capabilities as it aged, rather than suffered through the inevitable cycle of subtraction by addition.  

Never a chore.  Always a pleasure.  4e - I tip my 40 to your memory.


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