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So, let's take bets: what do you think the chances are that WotC will eventually give up on calling it "D&D Next" and just start calling it 5e as everyone else is already doing?
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I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Book #4 in the series, Chosen, will be coming out September 2013 in the US and UK. For updates, check my blog!
Has anybody tried soy Ice cream? Tastes rather weird.
Yes, tried Soy Pistachio ice cream once. It is the worst thing in the world. The second worst thing is hot Coca Cola, which I had the misfortune to taste at about the same time due to leaving it in a car. During the summer. In Israel.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Saph
So, let's take bets: what do you think the chances are that WotC will eventually give up on calling it "D&D Next" and just start calling it 5e as everyone else is already doing?
None at all. They are very stubborn about this sort of thing.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JaronK
Frankly, a Wizard can suck even more than a Fighter could ever dream of sucking. A Fighter can stab himself to death, but only a Wizard could Plane Shift to some horrible far realm to be tortured for an eternity of insanity.
So, let's take bets: what do you think the chances are that WotC will eventually give up on calling it "D&D Next" and just start calling it 5e as everyone else is already doing?
Likewise, what do you think the chances are that a few years from now, most of the internet will remember 4E as having a "4.5" edition just as how people tend to call the old Skills&Powers books "2.5"?
For that matter, what are the odds that 5E will have a 5.5 eventually?
Likewise, what do you think the chances are that a few years from now, most of the internet will remember 4E as having a "4.5" edition just as how people tend to call the old Skills&Powers books "2.5"?
For that matter, what are the odds that 5E will have a 5.5 eventually?
They've been calling essentials 4.5 almost since the second it was announced, so that's 100%. And I give 90% odds on a 5.5e coming out before 2020. I'd give a 20% shot at it coming out by 2015.
__________________
If my text is blue, I'm being sarcastic. No, really. Don't bite my head off for saying the Fighter is way overpowered, or how Wizards need more spells per day to keep up.
You know, I don't think I've ever asked you. Why do you care so desperately about the 3.5/4e edition wars? Everyone got into it at least a little, all those years ago. But you wrote more about it and talked longer about it and started more arguments about it than anyone else. I remember one period of a good few months where you put something Edition-War-related in literally every single post you wrote, no matter how unrelated the topic might have been.
Over the years, most of the Edition Warriors drifted away. They picked their system and stuck with it, or they learned to like both, or they decided they didn't like either, or they just got sick of arguing. They all drifted away, one by one . . . except you. You're still trying to convince 3.5 players of why they should be playing 4e instead, even though you have to know that virtually no-one cares anymore. Why do you still do it? I'm genuinely curious.
The short answer is that there are still 3.x Players trashing 4e on empirically unsupportable grounds. No, not you or Kurald Galain (mostly ) but every so often the call of "4e is so much like WoW" or "everything in 4e plays the same" rekindles that old flame. No, I don't post to "prove" anyone wrong, mind you, but rather to keep new players from shying away from 4e for the wrong reasons.
Long Answer
Spoiler
I started playing AD&D (2nd Edition) as a kid. It's not a great system, but it was all I knew at the time. I ran games for my friends and we didn't pay much attention to the rules. When 3.0 came out, we were excited because Feats looked like a good way to design characters who were, well, heroic -- they could do awesome things according to the rules. Needless to say the early promise of 3e was never fulfilled for me, but I was playing other systems and so I just put D&D on the shelf.
Later, in college, I hauled out my 3e books to try to run a few games. In the intervening years I learned a lot about how rules work and, indeed, that good rules can make a game better and bad rules can make it worse. Rules are the backbone of any RPG and while you can just "house rule" around them, it was usually better to just use a system that did what you wanted it to do. At the time this knowledge was still in its infancy, but picking up 3e after all those years did a lot to rekindle it. I saw a lot of pointless rules (e.g. Profession Skills) and a lot of badly written rules (e.g. Grappling) all of which I tried to deal with on the fly. As a DM this was a burden because I needed to make the game make sense for my Players and the books I had paid for weren't helping. The real shock was when I had to deal with a munchkin who ran a 3.0 mid-level Wizard loaded up with scrolls and such -- he trivialized the adventure until another Wizard fried him to a pulp. I swore off running 3e at that point -- the rules didn't work for my Players, and they sure as hell didn't work for me.
A couple of years after that I was invited into a 3.5 game. I was in the middle of a RPG famine and, while I thought 3.0 was silly (and had the same opinion of 3.5 via the SRD) I figured I'd give it a shot. I rolled in with Twitch, a Human Fighter/Rogue and spent much of the early building time chuckling about the sillier points of 3.5: taking Rogue 1 for the skill points and later Fighter 1 for weapons and such seemed like laughable metagaming to my mind raised on the "Class is Life" that was AD&D; managing skill points and modifiers based on a Take 20 check or for synergies rather than what my character should know. To many veteran 3.x Players I'm sure this seems trivial but as I had been leaning towards the more rules-light games up to then it caused me to approach the whole "character building" in 3.x as an absurd mini-game. Still, it was a great campaign thanks to the RP and storytelling of the DM but towards the end (i.e. mid-level play) my humor turned darker.
This was the game with the novice Player (she had only ever played Diablo before) who decided to play a rather greedy Cleric. It was good fun but she had no idea how to deal with a prepared caster. Well, she liked having pets so I took a crack at the Monster Manual and realized that Celestial Bison were ludicrously good for combat (it was just Twitch, a kobold Sorcerer, a halfling pistol rogue, and the Cleric) and that Celestial Monkies were ideal for trap springing. In fact, Rogues are terrible for trap-springing as most traps target flatfoot AC rather than Reflex and my foot-pad soon took to hauling around a suit of heavy armor in case he was on "trap finding" duty. Having failed as a traditional thief, I had hoped Twitch might still be a good brawler yet as we increasingly faced foes with magic (e.g. Flight and Hold Person) and the undead I began to realize that Twitch didn't stand a chance in these sorts of fights. He was neither Fighter nor Rogue and the Cleric was both.
In the very last sessions of that campaign Twitch spent most of the fights sidelined. In one he was gazed at by an Umber Hulk and simply could not make a Will Save (Fighters and Rogues being awful at such) while in the final one I managed to carve up two minions before getting Held (and saved from being Couped by the mercy of the DM) and later Confused. During this the n00b Cleric was flying around, smiting enemies and basically holding her own against the assembled foes. It made the campaign bittersweet, and yet these moments were not the fault of the DM -- they were the fault of the system. 3.x privileges magic over mundane to such a degree that the most mundane of classes cannot function on the same battlefield as a caster once you hit levels 5-8; indeed, the DM (an experienced fellow) said he would not run a game past LV 8 because he could not handle the power levels.
I had sworn off 3.x at the point (or thought I had -- I later played a heavily homebrewed 3.5 game that was a disaster due to the DM, not the system) and went back to playing other games. Mostly, this meant taking up Indie RPGs like Bliss Stage and Mountain Witch -- games where the rules are simple, clear, and functional. Bliss Stage, for example, purports to be a game of high drama roleplaying and has rules that deliver on that promise. Here I really understood the value of rules not just to create a game, but to create a specific game, with specific gameplay and themes. You saw this to a lesser extent in some of the older systems but usually the core themes and mechanics were obscured and polluted by a crust of "realism" or ancillary concerns that were bolted onto the system for no real reason. Shadowrun, for example, purports to be a game of cloak & dagger intrigue in which high-powered criminals fight a shadow war for powers that be; the mechanics (pre-SR4) are exclusively concerned with killing things and blowing them up. While this experience was revelatory to me, there was not yet an example of this principle of design being applied to any mass-market game.
Then came 4e. Now, I mostly skipped out on the fanfare and I probably would have ignored it were it not for the fact that I was invited to play in a game of it. This was with a new DM who was new to roleplaying in fact, but because it was game, and I rarely turn down a game, I accepted. He passed onto me the 4e Core books and I read them over and delighted. Gone were the clunky wordings of 3.x and instead there was a streamlined system that did what it said. It helped, of course, that Classes were Strong again (a fact I missed from AD&D) but more importantly the various metagame features of 3.x I so disliked were gone. Thieves were good at thieving; Fighters were good at fighting; and everyone could contribute to the battle. The more I read about the rules the more excited I became -- this was a system I could play without constantly clarifying and amending rules; it was a system I could use.
I played the heck out of 4e in the following years -- primarily as a Player but later I got back into my familiar DM's chair and really stretched my wings. I introduced new gamers to RPGs with it, and was able to refine my storytelling abilities while the system basically ran itself. I didn't need to spend hours stating up NPCs (or making a library of them), nor did I need to agonize over the make-up of every Encounter (the rules told me how to do that). When the rules didn't work quite as I liked them I was able to tweak them, yes, but that was the exception and not the rule.
When the Edition Warz broke, I first came in on the side of 4e, defending it against nonsensical complaint such as "it's just like WoW." Over time, I became curious as to why people would cling so fervently to what -- IMHO -- is a strictly inferior system by any measure of mechanical elegance you wish to use. As was once said, the designers of 4e had "done the math" of game design and produced a coherent system that facilitated a party of adventures going into dungeons and slaying dragons. A debater at heart, I engaged in a Socratic inquiry on these forums to better understand the 3.x proponents -- was there something in 3.x I had missed? After lengthy discussions I learned what held the fascination of many 3.x Fans: flavoring aside, they mostly enjoyed the intricacy of multiclassing and feat-chains, not to mention the raw power of certain classes. Neither mechanical complicatedness nor raw power held my fascination, so as the Warz died down, I moved on.
This does not mean I gave up liking 4e, nor believing that it is strictly superior to 3e from a systems perspective. Rather, I felt I had learned all I could about what drove people to continue with 3.x and knew that further questioning was unlikely to give me greater enlightenment. However, there persisted threads in which folks would gather to bash 4e. Mostly, I wouldn't bother to enter those threads unless the OP was asking as to whether they should play 4e or not -- as a fervent supporter of 4e, I think everyone should at least give it a try. There I would do my best to simply refute the false and highlight the good of 4e. Even here, I usually only swoop in when I feel a particularly egregious point is being made regarding 3.x or 4e.
I can't help but wonder whether it is true that "virtually no-one cares" about the Edition Warz when a simple scan through these thread show countless folks decrying the ruin that 4e made of D&D and crowing about the success of Pathfinder and how 5e had better look like it if it has any chance of surviving. I do not dispute that I am still an Edition Warrior -- I believe that WotC introduced a radically new and sorely needed paradigm of Big RPG design with 4e -- but I do wonder whether I am really the only one left around here.
I can't help but wonder whether it is true that "virtually no-one cares" about the Edition Warz when a simple scan through these thread show countless folks decrying the ruin that 4e made of D&D and crowing about the success of Pathfinder and how 5e had better look like it if it has any chance of surviving. I do not dispute that I am still an Edition Warrior -- I believe that WotC introduced a radically new and sorely needed paradigm of Big RPG design with 4e -- but I do wonder whether I am really the only one left around here.
I've always been a fence sitter with the edition wars. I personally prefer playing 3e, because I do enjoy the mechanical complexity, but I saw a lot of design goals in 4e I agree with that I really wish had been a core part of 3e. Having 4e style monster design in 3e alone would have made 3e a much more enjoyable experience to me. The healing model (healing surges, healing surge value, and second wind mechanics primarily) I really liked, as well as making sure everyone has level appropriate abilities (even if I may disagree on the specifics of what they determined as level appropriate at higher level)
I like the complexity of 3.5, but I really can't play it without a ton of house rules. At the least I need to do quite a bit of banning, or at least discouraging (ie 'hey guy you probably don't want to play that Monk unless you'd rather be playing your iphone game than actually play D&D with us'). 4e I can play without house rules, and pretty much enjoy it as is (with the exception of some things like skill challenges). I probably wouldn't play 4e outside of the 5-15 range, but that's a wide enough range to cover a solid campaign.
__________________
If my text is blue, I'm being sarcastic. No, really. Don't bite my head off for saying the Fighter is way overpowered, or how Wizards need more spells per day to keep up.
I can't help but wonder whether it is true that "virtually no-one cares" about the Edition Warz when a simple scan through these thread show countless folks decrying the ruin that 4e made of D&D and crowing about the success of Pathfinder and how 5e had better look like it if it has any chance of surviving. I do not dispute that I am still an Edition Warrior -- I believe that WotC introduced a radically new and sorely needed paradigm of Big RPG design with 4e -- but I do wonder whether I am really the only one left around here.
I'm in the much the same boat as you, if not for the "it's WoW/everything is the same/Not an RPG" types of complaints, I wouldn't get involved at all. I've been around the same road so many times on most of those points though that even those don't trigger my "Someone is wrong on the internet" response as much anymore.
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Thanks to Elrond for the Vash avatar.
The short answer is that there are still 3.x Players trashing 4e on empirically unsupportable grounds.
And lots of 4e players trash 3.x on stupid and prejudiced grounds, too. So what?
{{scrubbed}}
__________________
I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Book #4 in the series, Chosen, will be coming out September 2013 in the US and UK. For updates, check my blog!
Last edited by Mark Hall : 05-04-2012 at 11:42 PM.
Way I see it, it’s because this is the internet. New people arrive to D&D, to the world wide web, and then to the intersection of such every day, and they may not know about the edition war. Thus the entire thing kicks up again when someone decries the new’s guy’s edition of choice, without realising that battle has already been fought a hundred times.
Not quite a vicious cycle, but nerveless this long-running flame war keeps going because there’s always fuel for the fire.
Spoiler
(Also personally, I prefer pathfinder to 4th ed but I don’t mind 4th either. For one, the mechanical-fluff interplay of the monk works perfectly, and they are now the mobile fist-fighting wuxian they were always meant to be. Also I like the ideas behind some of their classes, like the seeker. It’s just that I wish you could decrease stats in point-buy so that you could take advantage of a race with bonuses in stuff you don’t need and thus play against type. It’s very bad at that.)
So, let's take bets: what do you think the chances are that WotC will eventually give up on calling it "D&D Next" and just start calling it 5e as everyone else is already doing?
None. In all likelihood it won't launch as ''Next'', but since they can't call it ''D&D 20XX Core Set'' they will just call it ''Dungeons & Dragons''. Or maybe they'll flip out completely on their obsession with the design of the punctuation and call it ''&mpersand''...
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Cloak and dagger intrigue is supported by the Shadowrun rules just fine. I think in most systems, combat will take up the most rule space, because just like combat IRL, combat is one of the most dynamic events that can take place.
But of course, I would argue that Shadowrun doesn't consider itself a cloak and dagger game how you describe. That is only one aspect of what it can be, and depending on the campaign, even a tiny one. But if you want to run a C&D campaign in SR, it will do so pretty well.
As for 4e, all the classes felt samey to me. Completely subjective. But to use SR as an example (SR3 specifically), mages, deckers, riggers, samurai...they all have some specialized rules, and play quite differently. I like it. Is it easy? No. Is it good game design? I doubt it. But I like it. A lot. At first I thought it was nostalgia, but having recently gone back to playing SR3, I realize that I genuinely enjoy the ruleset.
You can't just tell me that the classes are different. This needs to be supported by the ruleset.
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I tire that not a day goes by where someone doesn't bash 3E complaining about the imbalance of it all, shouting Tiers, and whining about Gate, Natural Spell, and/or Fighters can't fly, or just say "Monk". I don't care for 4E, but I don't feel the necessity to go onto 4E Forums (here and other sites) to complain about it.
When asked I will share my reasons for disliking 4E, but otherwise I ignore 4E stuff. I'm too busy dealing with people who have 3E derangement syndrome.
That is a very well thought out post and I can't disagree with anything you said. However, my complaints with 4th edition are purely based on role-playing concerns. If you are directly opposed to a game that simulates a fictional reality and don't care about making a narrative character to fit alongside the mechanical one, and your game revolves around exploring dungeons and killing the monsters within, then yes, 4E is an objectively superior game.
However, that simplistic style of play, and a focus on mechanics over story and RP is, for myself at least, very boring and certainly not the main draw of a game. While 4E does the parts of the game I care least about slightly better, it did so at the cost of the almost complete removal of all the parts of the game I liked best.
Here I really understood the value of rules not just to create a game, but to create a specific game, with specific gameplay and themes. You saw this to a lesser extent in some of the older systems but usually the core themes and mechanics were obscured and polluted by a crust of "realism" or ancillary concerns that were bolted onto the system for no real reason.
I always like your posts because you get it. I may not enjoy D&D 4th edition but that's because it's designed to create an experience that I am not so interested in. Of course I didn't make a move to learn the above lesson myself until after I was already disheartened and frustrated with the end of the D&D 4th edition campaign I was running.
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Attempting to say controversial things that everyone will agree with.
The short answer is that there are still 3.x Players trashing 4e on empirically unsupportable grounds. No, not you or Kurald Galain (mostly ) but every so often the call of "4e is so much like WoW" or "everything in 4e plays the same" rekindles that old flame. No, I don't post to "prove" anyone wrong, mind you, but rather to keep new players from shying away from 4e for the wrong reasons.
Long Answer
Spoiler
I started playing AD&D (2nd Edition) as a kid. It's not a great system, but it was all I knew at the time. I ran games for my friends and we didn't pay much attention to the rules. When 3.0 came out, we were excited because Feats looked like a good way to design characters who were, well, heroic -- they could do awesome things according to the rules. Needless to say the early promise of 3e was never fulfilled for me, but I was playing other systems and so I just put D&D on the shelf.
Later, in college, I hauled out my 3e books to try to run a few games. In the intervening years I learned a lot about how rules work and, indeed, that good rules can make a game better and bad rules can make it worse. Rules are the backbone of any RPG and while you can just "house rule" around them, it was usually better to just use a system that did what you wanted it to do. At the time this knowledge was still in its infancy, but picking up 3e after all those years did a lot to rekindle it. I saw a lot of pointless rules (e.g. Profession Skills) and a lot of badly written rules (e.g. Grappling) all of which I tried to deal with on the fly. As a DM this was a burden because I needed to make the game make sense for my Players and the books I had paid for weren't helping. The real shock was when I had to deal with a munchkin who ran a 3.0 mid-level Wizard loaded up with scrolls and such -- he trivialized the adventure until another Wizard fried him to a pulp. I swore off running 3e at that point -- the rules didn't work for my Players, and they sure as hell didn't work for me.
A couple of years after that I was invited into a 3.5 game. I was in the middle of a RPG famine and, while I thought 3.0 was silly (and had the same opinion of 3.5 via the SRD) I figured I'd give it a shot. I rolled in with Twitch, a Human Fighter/Rogue and spent much of the early building time chuckling about the sillier points of 3.5: taking Rogue 1 for the skill points and later Fighter 1 for weapons and such seemed like laughable metagaming to my mind raised on the "Class is Life" that was AD&D; managing skill points and modifiers based on a Take 20 check or for synergies rather than what my character should know. To many veteran 3.x Players I'm sure this seems trivial but as I had been leaning towards the more rules-light games up to then it caused me to approach the whole "character building" in 3.x as an absurd mini-game. Still, it was a great campaign thanks to the RP and storytelling of the DM but towards the end (i.e. mid-level play) my humor turned darker.
This was the game with the novice Player (she had only ever played Diablo before) who decided to play a rather greedy Cleric. It was good fun but she had no idea how to deal with a prepared caster. Well, she liked having pets so I took a crack at the Monster Manual and realized that Celestial Bison were ludicrously good for combat (it was just Twitch, a kobold Sorcerer, a halfling pistol rogue, and the Cleric) and that Celestial Monkies were ideal for trap springing. In fact, Rogues are terrible for trap-springing as most traps target flatfoot AC rather than Reflex and my foot-pad soon took to hauling around a suit of heavy armor in case he was on "trap finding" duty. Having failed as a traditional thief, I had hoped Twitch might still be a good brawler yet as we increasingly faced foes with magic (e.g. Flight and Hold Person) and the undead I began to realize that Twitch didn't stand a chance in these sorts of fights. He was neither Fighter nor Rogue and the Cleric was both.
In the very last sessions of that campaign Twitch spent most of the fights sidelined. In one he was gazed at by an Umber Hulk and simply could not make a Will Save (Fighters and Rogues being awful at such) while in the final one I managed to carve up two minions before getting Held (and saved from being Couped by the mercy of the DM) and later Confused. During this the n00b Cleric was flying around, smiting enemies and basically holding her own against the assembled foes. It made the campaign bittersweet, and yet these moments were not the fault of the DM -- they were the fault of the system. 3.x privileges magic over mundane to such a degree that the most mundane of classes cannot function on the same battlefield as a caster once you hit levels 5-8; indeed, the DM (an experienced fellow) said he would not run a game past LV 8 because he could not handle the power levels.
I had sworn off 3.x at the point (or thought I had -- I later played a heavily homebrewed 3.5 game that was a disaster due to the DM, not the system) and went back to playing other games. Mostly, this meant taking up Indie RPGs like Bliss Stage and Mountain Witch -- games where the rules are simple, clear, and functional. Bliss Stage, for example, purports to be a game of high drama roleplaying and has rules that deliver on that promise. Here I really understood the value of rules not just to create a game, but to create a specific game, with specific gameplay and themes. You saw this to a lesser extent in some of the older systems but usually the core themes and mechanics were obscured and polluted by a crust of "realism" or ancillary concerns that were bolted onto the system for no real reason. Shadowrun, for example, purports to be a game of cloak & dagger intrigue in which high-powered criminals fight a shadow war for powers that be; the mechanics (pre-SR4) are exclusively concerned with killing things and blowing them up. While this experience was revelatory to me, there was not yet an example of this principle of design being applied to any mass-market game.
Then came 4e. Now, I mostly skipped out on the fanfare and I probably would have ignored it were it not for the fact that I was invited to play in a game of it. This was with a new DM who was new to roleplaying in fact, but because it was game, and I rarely turn down a game, I accepted. He passed onto me the 4e Core books and I read them over and delighted. Gone were the clunky wordings of 3.x and instead there was a streamlined system that did what it said. It helped, of course, that Classes were Strong again (a fact I missed from AD&D) but more importantly the various metagame features of 3.x I so disliked were gone. Thieves were good at thieving; Fighters were good at fighting; and everyone could contribute to the battle. The more I read about the rules the more excited I became -- this was a system I could play without constantly clarifying and amending rules; it was a system I could use.
I played the heck out of 4e in the following years -- primarily as a Player but later I got back into my familiar DM's chair and really stretched my wings. I introduced new gamers to RPGs with it, and was able to refine my storytelling abilities while the system basically ran itself. I didn't need to spend hours stating up NPCs (or making a library of them), nor did I need to agonize over the make-up of every Encounter (the rules told me how to do that). When the rules didn't work quite as I liked them I was able to tweak them, yes, but that was the exception and not the rule.
When the Edition Warz broke, I first came in on the side of 4e, defending it against nonsensical complaint such as "it's just like WoW." Over time, I became curious as to why people would cling so fervently to what -- IMHO -- is a strictly inferior system by any measure of mechanical elegance you wish to use. As was once said, the designers of 4e had "done the math" of game design and produced a coherent system that facilitated a party of adventures going into dungeons and slaying dragons. A debater at heart, I engaged in a Socratic inquiry on these forums to better understand the 3.x proponents -- was there something in 3.x I had missed? After lengthy discussions I learned what held the fascination of many 3.x Fans: flavoring aside, they mostly enjoyed the intricacy of multiclassing and feat-chains, not to mention the raw power of certain classes. Neither mechanical complicatedness nor raw power held my fascination, so as the Warz died down, I moved on.
This does not mean I gave up liking 4e, nor believing that it is strictly superior to 3e from a systems perspective. Rather, I felt I had learned all I could about what drove people to continue with 3.x and knew that further questioning was unlikely to give me greater enlightenment. However, there persisted threads in which folks would gather to bash 4e. Mostly, I wouldn't bother to enter those threads unless the OP was asking as to whether they should play 4e or not -- as a fervent supporter of 4e, I think everyone should at least give it a try. There I would do my best to simply refute the false and highlight the good of 4e. Even here, I usually only swoop in when I feel a particularly egregious point is being made regarding 3.x or 4e.
I can't help but wonder whether it is true that "virtually no-one cares" about the Edition Warz when a simple scan through these thread show countless folks decrying the ruin that 4e made of D&D and crowing about the success of Pathfinder and how 5e had better look like it if it has any chance of surviving. I do not dispute that I am still an Edition Warrior -- I believe that WotC introduced a radically new and sorely needed paradigm of Big RPG design with 4e -- but I do wonder whether I am really the only one left around here.
I play many, many games. I can point to every game I own and name the design flaws it has (at least, the ones I've found so far), and I can discuss the successful elements as well. D&D was not my first game.
However, I meet all sorts of players (in person or online) who somehow equate their fond memories with the systemic integrity of 3.x., as though a criticism of 3.x is somehow a criticism of them or an attempt to retroactively take away their fun.
I really am happy for those folks who don't encounter 3.x's flaws, but their success doesn't make those flaws go away. I'm not attacking D&D3.Saph. I can't take your game away from you. I'm not even going to try. I wouldn't want to. That's yours, and power to you. Have fun in the way best suited to your group and your needs.
And that's what it really comes down to. Meeting needs and wants. Throughout my gaming experiences (both as a personal hobby and as a professional "get paid real money-dollars" career), I've met all sorts of folks who never really understood that you could, in fact, evaluate a system. You could, in fact, evaluate your needs. And you could, in fact, realize that maybe the system and your needs didn't match. And that that was perfectly fine.
I love Exalted. There are people I will not play Exalted with. It's the wrong fit. That doesn't mean I don't want to play something else with them or Exalted with someone else. It doesn't mean I had any less fun with the people I did play it with. And the knowledge that high-end Exalted possesses mechanical flaws doesn't bother us, because it's never been a problem -- but I'm not going to deny the existence of real flaws, and I'm not going to be mad that those are deal breakers for someone else. But I sure am glad I know about them, just in case.
I've also met a great number of folks who were frustrated by a system and couldn't figure out why, because they didn't know what to look for or how to even begin looking or even that they should have been looking. Sometimes, it's good to help folks understand that.
But in a discussion about D&D5e, comparisons to previous editions are a thing that is going to happen. Having a rational discussion about the realities of those systems can be a positive thing. Evaluating positives and negatives of previous systems in an open format is a good thing if 5e really is going to involve player feedback (...it's a big if, but hey, we're all into the fantasy vibe, eh?). Even if 5e isn't going to be influenced by player feedback, people talking about the intricacies of how we play games and how games influence us is a positive thing. It helps us better understand our games. It helps us better express what we want from them. It helps us be better customers, and someday, better game designers of our own. Over the years, I've gained a great deal of my understanding from listening to and talking with other players. So if someone else hears what I have to say and learns something from it, then it's worth saying. And if I listen to what someone else has to say and learn something from it, hey, that's a win in my book.
Do I believe that 4e is a fundamentally better game system than 3.x? Yes. Every time I tried to play 3.x, I ended up unhappy because of the mechanics. I make no secret of that. But rather than just saying, "3.x sucks!" I try to understand why, exactly, I dislike specific mechanics, and what those mechanics were attempting to accomplish. I want to learn what other people like about the mechanics that I dislike, and why. I love game design and all sorts of related subjects. A greater understanding has helped me enjoy my hobby all the more.
Do I believe that no one can have fun with 3.x? Good Lord, no I do not. If you enjoy it, go enjoy it. I'm not going to stop you.
Short version: I enjoy games and I enjoy learning about games. I'm not out to fight anyone. I am out to learn. If others learn from me, that's fine by me. If others feel like I'm attacking their fun, believe me, I'm not. I just want to know why you're having fun and I want to do so in a clear and honest way.
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Also, Oracle_Hunter? You're a tough act to follow. Very nice post.
__________________ "Inveniam viam aut faciam -- I will either find a way, or I shall make one."
I had issues with 3.5- mostly related to imbalance issues (when I DMed it was almost entirely low-magic campaigns) and overcomplications.
4e fixed everything I hated about it. Unfortunately, it had it's own issues, mostly related to overly long battles and choice paralysis, which I won't bore you with.
Nowadays, if I run d20, I run pathfinder (homebrewed for low magic settings) or Saga- in my mind, the best d20 system would incorporate the class/level/abilities and feat choice system of saga and the action economy/defences/BAB/simplified attack and skill system of 4e. But I doubt I'll see that any time soon.
Right now I'm running Savage Worlds. I'll think I'll stick with this for a while.
Great post Oracle Hunter. Captures a lot of what I liked (and disliked) about 4e. I wish I could just upvote or +1 or rep you or whatever but since we don't do that here, I'll just leave this post of approval.
You mean he's concerned about what the audience wants and tries to give it to them. Which is what he should be doing.
Then why did he create an article about sexism then? Was he trying to bring attention to the fact that the industry draws women in a degrading fashion (Most of the time)?
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Any time I make a statement be sure to add "This is my opinion" in front of it as I may sometimes forget to do so myself.
Then why did he create an article about sexism then? Was he trying to bring attention to the fact that the industry draws women in a degrading fashion (Most of the time)?
Because he was discussing what sexism is, and how it varies depending on who you ask. Thus leading to his question about what the reader wants to see.
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Thanks to Elrond for the Vash avatar.
He just misses the point completely. "I will do what makes more money"
Well, yes. It's his job.
D&D isn't in business to be an engine of social change. It makes a product, and if people like that product, they pay money for it. If you do not like that product, then do not pay money for it.
I am not sure why producing a product which appeals to your chosen market is a bad thing. Nor am I sure why making money doing something you enjoy is a bad thing, either.
What, exactly, is he supposed to "get?"
__________________ "Inveniam viam aut faciam -- I will either find a way, or I shall make one."
I really don't get why HE brings it up. I get that its his job. I won't blame him for it. But why bring it up at all? Why write an article about sexism If all he says at the end amounts to "I draw women in degrading outfits because it sells better".
Was he trying to bring attention to that?
__________________
Any time I make a statement be sure to add "This is my opinion" in front of it as I may sometimes forget to do so myself.
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Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Now your playing with Playtests!
) but every so often the call of "4e is so much like WoW" or "everything in 4e plays the same" rekindles that old flame. No, I don't post to "prove" anyone wrong, mind you, but rather to keep new players from shying away from 4e for the wrong reasons. 
Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
