Quote from: BedrockBrendan;537897The point is the made 4e for the guys who reluctantly played D&D despite not being satisfied by it.

And with his answer, he basically acknowledged the validity of that point.

I would like to point out that I believe, that as long as the participants all had some degree of creativity and imagination, you could do ANIME! with LBB OD&D.

The 1d6 for all weapon damage would help facilitate that, for example.

"I wish the Rolling Stones would incorporate rap into their sound so that they would remain relevant to today's music consumers"

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537882The date, most of all. These are, for what its worth, recent additions to D&D.

Stop this half-troll shit.

QuoteMostly though its the fact that they break from traditional D&D aesthetics and take D&D in new directions, often in a more cinematic or anime direction.

Why do you think it is a positive for D&D to be more like movies?  Better yet, what was wrong with 4e that you feel compelled to care about 5e?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;537901Yes, but why change it if you are satisfied with the mehanics? You yourself spoke of 4e as the D&D you had evisioned all along. You can call it dogmatic but it is really just a matter of going to D&D because we expect certain things from it (realy this is just more empty rhetoric and a non argument---right up there with "fear of the new", "progress or die" and "people who don't
Ike 4e are haters who can't read or never tried it"). I play all kinds of rpgs, rarely play D&D these days, but when I play Dungeons and Dragons I go to that system because it has stuff I expect and like. It is the same reason I go to cthulu or any other system. Not only were the changes 4e introduced counter to my expectations of D&D, they were the opposite of what i want in any rpg. So I don't see how my dislike of it is related to dogma at all.

3E was a big success. Taking a succesful product and completely revamping its core elements doesn't seem smart for an rpg company. Clearly in this case it was a bad idea.

I was speaking more in regards to my days as a 2E and 3E player and DM. I didn't play/run those games reluctantly, and I woudn't say I was unsatisfied with them(not even at the height of my frustrations with 3E, as it took the announcement of a new edition for me to give up on 3E). I did however, modify both 2E and 3E heavily(both in the opposite direction from "traditional" D&D) when I ran them as did the other DMs when I was on the players' side. I never held "traditional" D&D sacred.

As for you and 3E, from what I've seen you take a very narrow view of 3E focusing almost exclusively on either the core books alone or viewing 3E specifically through a traditional lens while ignoring all of 3E's divergence from that tradition, all of which bears no resemblance whatsoever with my experience of 3E.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537908I

As for you and 3E, from what I've seen you take a very narrow view of 3E focusing almost exclusively on either the core books alone or viewing 3E specifically through a traditional lens while ignoring all of 3E's divergence from that tradition, all of which bears no resemblance whatsoever with my experience of 3E.

i don't think you have been paying much attention then. My point is the core books of D&D have traditional been the default, standard D&D flavor, but the supplements and ad ons are where these alternative flavors get layered on. And regarding 3e I have said many,many times it got too anime at times for me due to all the multi classing and prestige classes (though mostly from splat book material being added in). In the end I paired down our 3e game to only the core books.

I get that 3e can handle some newer ideas. And 2e at the time was doing all kinds of crazy stuff too (some of it very good imo). Even 1e had some wild elements if you read the original dmg. This is why I said the OP is railing against a fantasy, D&D has always absorbed current trends in fantasy. It just tends to absorb them through its supplemental material, leaving the core generic D&D style fantasy.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537908I was speaking more in regards to my days as a 2E and 3E player and DM. I didn't play/run those games reluctantly, and I woudn't say I was unsatisfied with them(not even at the height of my frustrations with 3E, as it took the announcement of a new edition for me to give up on 3E). I did however, modify both 2E and 3E heavily(both in the opposite direction from "traditional" D&D) when I ran them as did the other DMs when I was on the players' side. I never held "traditional" D&D sacred.
 3E.

Again though, if you were running it differently to suit your tastes, clearly you weren't satisfied with the core game. You had to modify it to enjoy it.

But we are speaking in very general terms so lets get concrete. How did you alter 2e and 3e, what specific flavor and mechanic elements did you add to bring the game up to your taste?

Quote from: Planet Algol;537906"I wish the Rolling Stones would incorporate rap into their sound so that they would remain relevant to today's music consumers"

If the Rolling Stones could go disco and Aerosmith could rap with Run-DMC, why not?  Or how about the Rolling Stones doing regae?.  Of course Kiss also tried their hands at disco.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;537909i don't think you have been paying much attention then. My point is the core books of D&D have traditional been the default, standard D&D flavor, but the supplements and ad ons are where these alternative flavors get layered on. And regarding 3e I have said many,many times it got too anime at times for me due to all the multi classing and prestige classes (though mostly from splat book material being added in). In the end I paired down our 3e game to only the core books.

I get that 3e can handle some newer ideas. And 2e at the time was doing all kinds of crazy stuff too (some of it very good imo). Even 1e had some wild elements if you read the original dmg. This is why I said the OP is railing against a fantasy, D&D has always absorbed current trends in fantasy. It just tends to absorb them through its supplemental material, leaving the core generic D&D style fantasy.

Its better if its built into the game. Our cinematic anime 2E was primarily supported by giving everybody rings of jumping or boots of flying while making healing effectively infinite(it wasn't infinite, but we never ran out) while running the game in the style of draining 50-75% of the party's HP every battle. It was fun(more fun than what we ran in 3E to be honest), but it was a bit half-assed, especially compared to 4E. We mostly stuck with it because the other options were worse.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537795For the sake of this discussion, focusing on the aesthetics side of things, I'd call modern D&D 4E, non-core-only 3.5E, Eberron, and to a lesser extent Pathfinder as Pathfinder is more of a halfway compromise between traditional D&D and splat heavy 3.5E.

Quote from: B.T.;537856But what makes them modern?

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537882The date, most of all. These are, for what its worth, recent additions to D&D.

Mostly though its the fact that they break from traditional D&D aesthetics and take D&D in new directions, often in a more cinematic or anime direction.

Quote from: Drohem;537884What is the date?  2005?  You mentioned non-core 3.5 D&D so I assume you mean sometime after the 3.5 D&D release.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537890Its a relative date, as it predated 3.5E in my experience. Groups I gamed with during the 3.0 era(when I played D&D that is, the 3.0 years were my White Wolf period) were using 3E mutliclassing, Prestige Classes, and in particular monsters as PCs rules(Half Dragons especially) to play games almost completely unrecognizable compared to the traditional D&D experience.

I single out 3.5E supplements as they were where this was really codified.

WTF? :confused:

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537914Its better if its built into the game. Our cinematic anime 2E was primarily supported by giving everybody rings of jumping or boots of flying while making healing effectively infinite(it wasn't infinite, but we never ran out) while running the game in the style of draining 50-75% of the party's HP every battle. It was fun(more fun than what we ran in 3E to be honest), but it was a bit half-assed, especially compared to 4E. We mostly stuck with it because the other options were worse.

The problem with that approach is it forces every D&D game to be run as an anime cinematic game (and not every table runs d&d that way or wants it to be run that way). Much better to have a supplemental book for cinematic anime D&D (especially that combo because while Cinematic D&D is somewhat popular, anime D&D isn't.

Quote from: Planet Algol;537905I would like to point out that I believe, that as long as the participants all had some degree of creativity and imagination, you could do ANIME! with LBB OD&D.

In the late 1980s, I ran a short Aura Battler Dunbine campaign using AD&D with the Aura Battlers basically giant "semi-intelligent magic powered armor". It worked just fine. Of course, I doubt Aura Battler Dunbine qualifies as "real anime" these days since it was a circa 1983 TV series.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;537914Its better if its built into the game. Our cinematic anime 2E was primarily supported by giving everybody rings of jumping or boots of flying while making healing effectively infinite(it wasn't infinite, but we never ran out) while running the game in the style of draining 50-75% of the party's HP every battle. It was fun(more fun than what we ran in 3E to be honest), but it was a bit half-assed, especially compared to 4E. We mostly stuck with it because the other options were worse.

Cinematic anime 2e.

Loser.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;537897The point is the made 4e for the guys who reluctantly played D&D despite not being satisfied by it.

That's been my conclusion, combined with the flaws of 3.x namely balance issues because they removed all the limits on magic users which were in place in every iteration previous and the result is 4e.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;537911Again though, if you were running it differently to suit your tastes, clearly you weren't satisfied with the core game. You had to modify it to enjoy it.

But we are speaking in very general terms so lets get concrete. How did you alter 2e and 3e, what specific flavor and mechanic elements did you add to bring the game up to your taste?

I wouldn't call that unsatisfied. It was more a case of "game is ok, but if we add X it'll be better". I and pretty much everyone I gamed with during the 2E era fully embraced the story/campaign aspects of 2E and the 2E embrace of trilogy-style High Fantasy. We wanted anime on top of that, not necessarily in place of it.

As I've said before, with 2E the biggest thing we did was to make healing effectively infinite and ramp up the violence to extreme levels. The end result bore a striking resemblance to what 4E accomplished with healing surges. We added some flavor with the jumping and flying items, and did some small things with the magic system, but otherwise the game wasn't as different as you'd expect.

3E was completely different. The effectiveness of save or die, battlefield control magic, and all around "I win" buttons combined with monster HP inflation made the epic HP grinding we did in 2E almost impossible to achieve. Its hard to explain what we did to change 3E, since I was never satisfied with the changes we made and scrapped them and started over every time we started a new campaign. The other DM's kind of focused on what we called "DM candy", where the DM and player would work together to add some sort of superpowers on top of the high powered nuclear by the book 3E we were running. Ignoring level adjustments, giving permanent 240ft fly speed, Half-Celestials with full Sorcerer casting, ect. It was high powered progress into gods style 3E, ramped up to 11. A lot of my criticisms of 3E's unbalance comes from these games, as I wasn't a fan of "DM Candy" and tended to run CharOp quality "DM Candy"-free Wizard/Cleric/Druids who were more or less legal in Living Greyhawk and curbstomp the game with them despite their lack of free templates and superpowers.

I was actually more by the book(more so than any 3E DM I was involved with) and tried to run a much lower powered game(with mixed results), and focused on cutting out what I didn't agree with while taking unrelated existing 3E rules and bolting them onto different classes for a different purpose. Mostly cut and paste stuff using existing rules, with the goal of reducing rocket tag and "I win" button dominance, while elevating the lower powered(non-spellcasting) side of the game. As I said before, I was never happy with the results and rewrote the game with every fresh campaign.