Quote from: Shazbot79;412569I suspect that WotC won't begin work on 5th edition until the numbers are in on Essentials at the very least.

Maybe 5E design and development is already in progress, where 4E Essentials is the prototype at the moment?

The next 5E prototype we will see, will most likely be the "Heroes of Shadow" book.

For example, if one starts off with a generic Martial class, how does one modify it to have "shadow power" elements.  If they're able to pull something like that off without being broken, then it wouldn't be surprising if they did the same thing with the other powers (ie. primal, elemental, psionic, divine, etc ...).

So something like the barbarian could be a martial fighter slayer, with "primal" power stuff modifying it.  A warden could be a martial fighter knight, with "primal" power stuff modifying it.

Quote from: ggroy;412572The next 5E prototype we will see, will most likely be the "Heroes of Shadow" book.

For example, if one starts off with a generic Martial class, how does one modify it to have "shadow power" elements.  If they're able to pull something like that off without being broken, then it wouldn't be surprising if they did the same thing with the other powers (ie. primal, elemental, psionic, divine, etc ...).

So something like the barbarian could be a martial fighter slayer, with "primal" power stuff modifying it.  A warden could be a martial fighter knight, with "primal" power stuff modifying it.

I think that the Heroes of Shadow book is just dark-themed builds for essentials classes...

Like a Shadow Pact build for Hexblades, Necromancy school for Mages, Darkness Domain for Warpriests, etc.

The Essentials stuff is actually pretty easy to mix and match...it wouldn't be terribly difficult for me to combine a Slayer and a Cavalier to get an Avenger.

Quote from: Bobloblah;412518Do you also think the moon is made of green cheese?  Seanchai seemed to imply that these two went together in another thread...

If you're using Essentials only, you're using only Essentials builds. If I said you could only use character classes out of one of the 3e sourcebooks, would we suddenly not be playing 3e?

Seanchai

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;412530I can't imagine that the "DM vs. PCs" relationship was all that rare back then. The game seemed to encourage it, I don't give a shit how much history gets revised.

Male teens are going to make any game adversarial.

Quote from: Settembrini;412491Are you guys stupid? If you could read, you would have seen that the underlying problem is the tactical illusionism of 4e coupled to its obesity scooter difficulty level philosophy.

I told everyone back in 2007. But that does not matter. What matters now is that some people are too stupid to read.

Quote from: Settembrini;412493Meanwhile, on a cosmic level, WotC fails miserably. And there cannot be any excuse for that: DDI. This is the Death Spiral already in action for 4e. There can be no doubt about it.

Gosh, I had forgotten how fun this guy can get.

I'm cool with Doomsaying. Doomsayers have been wrong about everything, ever, since the dawn of time. Sett is no exception, but he's thrice as crazy.

On a cosmic level, the WotC executives are earning big fat cash while you masturbate looking at your old RIFTS books and trying to force a poorly-understood philosophy in your insane theories about whatis the One True Way of Gaming, so you look as an informed person instead of a deranged mongrel throwing feces and shouting to the people passing by, from the cave you live in. You are far more pretentious than anything ever produced by the Forge, WW, or, I don't know, anyone ever.

On a business level, where most people lives, WotC are doing a bang - up job, given they are profitable, and that is the point of it. Actually, if they get to publish a 5th edition of D&D, it would be an even stronger sign of how well they're doing.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;412530As I've said over and over, I found it was amazingly easy as a 4e DM to wipe out a party of PCs. I was never the kind of "Killer DM" that is lampooned regularly in Knights of the Dinner Table, but I also seem to be tougher on PCs than a lot of more modern DMs.

Pseudoephedrine (I think it was him) told many times that his first 4e games were almost TPKs. Many of the critics against the game have been thrown by people without atual play experience.

Quote from: Imperator;412603On a cosmic level, the WotC executives are earning big fat cash while you masturbate looking at your old RIFTS books and trying to force a poorly-understood philosophy in your insane theories about whatis the One True Way of Gaming

On a cosmic level, Lehman Brothers executives were earning big fat cash while we masturbate looking at our old BASIC COMMON SENSE books and trying to force a poorly-understood philosophy in our insane theories about what is the One True Way of Investing (like: lending money to people that cannot pay you back is not smart). It didn't ended well.

On a related note, I would like to know what TSR executives who derided doomsayers are thinking now.

Quote from: Reckall;412611On a cosmic level, Lehman Brothers executives were earning big fat cash while we masturbate looking at our old BASIC COMMON SENSE books and trying to force a poorly-understood philosophy in our insane theories about what is the One True Way of Investing (like: lending money to people that cannot pay you back is not smart). It didn't ended well.

On a related note, I would like to know what TSR executives who derided doomsayers are thinking now.

I don't think that is a valid comparison. You are comparing a criminal activity (lying about your accountability) with not pleasing a sector of the fandom. For fuck's sake.

And again, I have yet to hear a comprehensive and accurate, no wild especulation, about what went wrong in TSR and why it was acquired by WotC.

Seriously, I've been hearing about the death of D&D since I started in this hobby. It won't happen. If WotC launched the 5th ed, and it was just a smear of shit on towel paper, and angry fans rampaged through the WotC offices and killed everyone, it wouldn't be the end of D&D.

So the Death Spiral Prophecies of Sett are unadulterated bullshit. As usual. While he moans and bitches, the rest of the world keeps playing and having fun.

Quote from: Imperator;412616I don't think that is a valid comparison. You are comparing a criminal activity (lying about your accountability)

Cite?

Lehman went down due to it's overexposure to the subprime market. I.e. mismanagement & idiocy, not criminal activity.

Quotewith not pleasing a sector of the fandom. For fuck's sake.

I guess that fans of Lehman who saw where Lehman was going were not pleased, too. Not that this kind of situations stops executives from writing "fat checks" for themselves. Or things to go bad, for what matters.

QuoteAnd again, I have yet to hear a comprehensive and accurate, no wild especulation, about what went wrong in TSR and why it was acquired by WotC.

http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539628p1.html

Quote from: Reckall;412631http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539628p1.html

Bad article, IMO. Some parts are lumped together that shouldn't (FR and DragonLance leading to Birthright and Darksun vs. White Wolf in the same paragraph), and some bias shows up there that really shouldn't ("Unfortunately, the 2nd Edition rules annoyed almost as many players as they pleased, mostly because the amount of revision and correction was not that extensive and might have been"). Bad summary.

Quote from: Seanchai;412595If you're using Essentials only, you're using only Essentials builds. If I said you could only use character classes out of one of the 3e sourcebooks, would we suddenly not be playing 3e?

Seanchai

As I recall, the conversation was about people switching to Essentials only, and whether or not it constituted a new edition. I mentioned that I have seen a surprising number of people saying that they were going to drop 4E and play Essentials only, and that many of these felt it was a new stealth edition, to which you replied that you could find people saying the moon is green cheese. Lo and behold, one of the people switching is on this board. Does Shazbot consider it a new edition? Who knows. Who cares? He seems to be treating as such.

Would it be a new edition if it had different versions of the classes and a bunch of subtle rule changes, many of which were culled from errata, plus no longer required me to buy the previous rulebooks to play? Sounds like 3.5 to me...and Essentials, for that matter; not so much like a sourcebook.

While we're on this topic, if 3.0 had DDI, with all the 3.5 changes in as errata, then 3.5 was actually released as Essentials 3.0...would it have been a new edition?

Ultimately, I don't even particularly care if Essentials is a new edition; I'm more interested in playing it than 4E.

Quote from: Bobloblah;412634Would it be a new edition if it had different versions of the classes and a bunch of subtle rule changes, many of which were culled from errata, plus no longer required me to buy the previous rulebooks to play? Sounds like 3.5 to me...and Essentials, for that matter; not so much like a sourcebook.

QF-freakin'-T.

Back to the Op, I certainly felt the 4tigue, the fights just get sooooo tedious after a while. Now that we've switched to clunky, minimalist AD&D, my players are all saying how much they don't like 4e, and were only playing it because they thought it was what I wanted to run...which was odd, because at the time, I was running it because that's what I thought they all wanted to play.

Quote from: Bobloblah;412634As I recall, the conversation was about people switching to Essentials only, and whether or not it constituted a new edition.

I could have sworn it was about whether or not Essentials counted as 4e when weighing which was selling more, 4e or Pathfinder...

Quote from: Bobloblah;412634I mentioned that I have seen a surprising number of people saying that they were going to drop 4E and play Essentials only, and that many of these felt it was a new stealth edition....

Which is analogous in 3.5 terms to saying, "I'm just running the game with the core books from now on."

Quote from: Bobloblah;412634Would it be a new edition if it had different versions of the classes and a bunch of subtle rule changes, many of which were culled from errata, plus no longer required me to buy the previous rulebooks to play? Sounds like 3.5 to me...

That's odd. I thought 3.5 made some rather substantial changes. I'd have thought that, along with WotC saying, "Hey, here's a new edition," which made it a new edition.

Quote from: Bobloblah;412634Ultimately, I don't even particularly care if Essentials is a new edition; I'm more interested in playing it than 4E.

As I told Benoist, surprise! If you ever get around to buying and/or playing it, you'll be purchasing or playing 4e. Essentials matters only as a label, as a means of getting people to try 4e without the baggage the name 4e has tied to it. Kind of like what Microsoft did with Vista.

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;412645I could have sworn it was about whether or not Essentials counted as 4e when weighing which was selling more, 4e or Pathfinder...

Considering I was responding to you, I am of course referring to the conversation you and I were actually having during our little back and forth - as opposed to the conversation someone else was having.

Quote from: Seanchai;412645Which is analogous in 3.5 terms to saying, "I'm just running the game with the core books from now on."

Except, of course, that the core books are different books than the Essentials books. But hey, whatever.

Quote from: Seanchai;412645That's odd. I thought 3.5 made some rather substantial changes. I'd have thought that, along with WotC saying, "Hey, here's a new edition," which made it a new edition.

...and if the criteria is whether or not WoTC calls it a new edition, the discussion is pretty much pointless.  As I mentioned before, they learned their lesson with 3.5, and will not call something a new edition, regardless of what it is, until they have no choice.

Quote from: Seanchai;412645As I told Benoist, surprise! If you ever get around to buying and/or playing it, you'll be purchasing or playing 4e. Essentials matters only as a label, as a means of getting people to try 4e without the baggage the name 4e has tied to it. Kind of like what Microsoft did with Vista.

Seanchai

Again, it seems that there are a lot of people out there who disagree with you, and I'm not sure why I should believe you, instead.  As for the Vista comment, are you referring to Vista vs Win7? Win7 is obviously built on top of the Vista infrastructure, but there are plenty of changes to go around.

Quote from: Reckall;412536Yup, but "enthusiastic" reviews like this one came out a little bit earlier.

And one didn't even need to read it all. It only took gems like...

"At first glance there are a couple rule changes that will seem silly. The one that crawled up my craw the first session was the fact that diagonal movement counts as just one square. The idea that you could move faster diagonally than you could straight or side to side is retarded. But by the second session I didn't care. Why? No one EVER had to recount a movement"

...to understand that 4E was going to be the "Showgirls" of gaming: something so bad that they choose to blare its retardedness as the selling point.

BTW, almost every 4E debate I read is about the rules, but I seldom find someone criticizing the fluff - which is so retarded that it actually wanders in those territories that make the rules look smart. Cue the FR 4E.

At least you can tell from the post that the author has a functional understanding of the product he's reviewing; we've never seen anything of the sort from Settembrini.  his only purpose is to deride people and attempt to sound informed by using made up terminology whose meaning is only known to him.

That said, I know there were a shit ton of people who decided that 4e was the Jesus game based on the tidbit previews that were released as well.  The sour note they set the tone with kept me from trying out 4e for nearly a year.