Quote from: TavisIf an OD&D DM exercises no creative adjucation, combat is a pretty flavorless affair.

You must not have played the same OD&D I did.

Even quite recently (to remove the whole "I was 12" factor) when we dusted off the red-book last GenCon, we ended up trying to overcome the deadly combination of goblin bow-men on an elevated balcony, plus a fiendish and unholy field of magical UNLIGHT (i.e. Darkness spell for which we had no Light counter left) that made crossing the intervening space a horrific and groping process.

All but one of us died, but the elf managed to escape, mangled and bleeding, with the magic sword that would ensure our village's eventual victory.  Our sacrifices were not in vain.  It was glorious, and all by the strict and unyielding letter of the rules.

Flavorless?  Not in my book.

Quote from: RPGPunditIn this game, as it is presented, you cannot play in a world where the dangerousness of monsters or the value of treasures are based on things that make sense in the world and its history.  So essentially, you cannot play a campaign of world-exploration, which used to be one of the foremost styles of D&D play.

Assuming you strictly adhered to the system as it may be presented. (I say may, since I haven't read nearly as much about 4e as you, or frankly anyone-only what I get here in topics-and have no idea what the system really is.)

so, is it explicitly mentioned in one of these secret preview versions everyone else apparently is privy to that you can't...you know...just ignore most of the mandatory-minimum XP rules and encounter matrices and just wing it like when you were 14?  

Will kids not play in your game or think you're uncool?  i know the online canonistas would shit themselves, but really...who cares.

Quote from: TonyLBUnlimited possibilities begets lack of focus.  Wise constraints give people the freedom to apply themselves to the same project with confidence.

Hah! Slavery is Freedom, eh comrade?

Fuck's sake, it used to be that the "focus" of a game was what the motherfucking GAME MASTER got to choose, not some self-absorbed Game Designer thinking that he has a fucking right to dictate from on high how the game will be played.

In other words: Old D&D could play a game without random treasure, new D&D cannot play a game with random treasure (not without changing the fundamental structure of the system).  It is thus at least 50% less broad in scope than the old game.

But that's what you fuckers want, isn't it? To make it into a despicable hack n' slash only-mechanics-matter game because that's what you always wanted to pretend that D&D was all about. You despised the fact that D&D used to be just as capable of handling epic campaigns and themes, if not usually much better at it, than any of your fucking cunt storygames.
So this is your revenge: Wizards has handed over control of the D&D game to a group of people who have always despised it, and would like nothing better than its being shunted into irrelevance so that their claims that its just "rollplaying" can finally be true.

QuoteFor example, a game that limits players to making characters that are (1) fighter, (2) magic user, (3) cleric or (4) thief has a different focus than one that lets people combine subclasses (fighter-3/herbalist-2/shadowpoet-2).  If the goal is to get a party of characters who can meet at a tavern and go on a fantasy adventure, some people might argue that limiting the possibilities of character creation helps people to get on the same page.

That's apples and oranges: one set of "options" arguably disrupts the emulation of genre (by creating characters who aren't really anything other than a collection of min-maxed stat choices), while the other (that things like monster or treasure should be based on the realities of the game world, and not some kind of gamist GM-restrictive "Balance" concept) is something that is directly essential to emulation of genre.

In any case, the first is never as serious a case as the second: you can certainly turn the world around and find roundabout ways to justify that wizards aren't wizards and thieves aren't just thieves anymore. Plenty of game worlds can accommodate that.  No game world can accommodate the suspension of disbelief required to imagine that for some motherfucking reason if you go into any dungeon anywhere in the world when you're level 1 you'll face level 1 monsters, and go into the same dungeon at level 30 and you'll face level 30 monsters; and on top of that all the treasure in the entire game world is always divided into little parcels of 500gp (etc.) that you are "destined" to get over the course of your character level.

RPGPundit

Quote from: kregmosierso, is it explicitly mentioned in one of these secret preview versions everyone else apparently is privy to that you can't...you know...just ignore most of the mandatory-minimum XP rules and encounter matrices and just wing it like when you were 14?

Careful that's perilously close to logic, and we won't tolerate that sort of tomfoolery around here!

Quote from: TonyLBY'know ... if the new edition drives out one GM with twenty years of past play in them for every kid it recruits with twenty years of future play in them ... I'm actually okay with that.

I think it's likely to do no such thing, FWIW ... but if it did, that turnover wouldn't bug me.  Would it bug other folks?

Except, you lying motherfucker, you know that any "kid" it might recruit will end up being a castrated non-GM, little more than a monopoly banker, restricted by the whims of the game designers.

So of course you won't shed a tear at old-school GMs disappearing, they are a "bad influence", aren't they? They might teach some of the youngsters that the GM should be the supreme authority at the table, or show them how random charts can be fun...

RPGPundit

Quote from: estarNo I am saying that it is more likely that the Kid it recruits will DM it and go blah and abandon the game more often than prior versions.

Obviously. 4e, following Forgist influences, will be 1/3rd the game (at most) that any other edition ever was.  There'll be no point in ever playing more than one campaign of it, its all pre-fab.

This game will have all the expected initial sales of a D&D game, but it will begin to hemorrhage players MUCH faster than previous editions did.  In the end, it will be like the dying days of TSR all over again; which is of course exactly what the Swine are hoping.

RPGPundit

Seriously why the vitriol Pundit? I don't see his post saying anything like that? Maybe you're correct-and this is a big maybe-that 4e is Monopoly with extra dice, but I don't see how anyone would think the Hobby would benefit from the sort of bile you're spewing.

Quote from: Serious PaulAssuming you strictly adhered to the system as it may be presented. (I say may, since I haven't read nearly as much about 4e as you, or frankly anyone-only what I get here in topics-and have no idea what the system really is.)

Like I said in my blog entry, the whole claim that "these tight-regulations are just for beginners, and you can just ignore them otherwise" is ringing more and more hollow every time, when these things are clearly essential parts of the entire system.

Yes, you could find a way to house rule them in a way that didn't utterly fuck up the game; but really, at every step of the previews they're showing more and more stuff that you'd need to houserule yourself, what's the point? Why the fuck would I want to go so far as having to write up my own treasure tables, because the fuckheads designing 4e decided that having random treasure tables was badwrongfun?

RPGPundit

Quote from: Serious PaulSeriously why the vitriol Pundit? I don't see his post saying anything like that? Maybe you're correct-and this is a big maybe-that 4e is Monopoly with extra dice, but I don't see how anyone would think the Hobby would benefit from the sort of bile you're spewing.

Because we all know who TonyLB is, and why he's here.

RPGPundit

I think you have a valid point, assuming everything you've said about the game is true.

Quote from: RPGPunditBecause we all know who TonyLB is, and why he's here.

Uhm, sorry I missed all that. I have no idea who he is, or why he's here. But that's all off topic, so I'll save it for some other day. Maybe when we have some beers or something when I visit Uruguay?

Quote from: TonyLBYou must not have played the same OD&D I did.

I love D&D, so I'm always looking to play it with new groups. That means I've played a ton of bad D&D of all editions.

Back in the day, a bad D&D game featured a ton of argument over rules calls. From AD&D onward, there's been a movement to reduce the degree of freedom the DM has in making rules calls. Gygax explicitly cited the need to standardize so you can have consistency in organized play under different GMs, which I think is also a driving motivation behind the 4e design.

Reducing DM latitude has the effect of reducing that kind of rules argument. It also has some of the undesirable effects folks are talking about. Having more rules slows things down - the AD&D Keep on the Borderlands I played at Gen Con rocked because relatively simplistic combat resolution could cover so much more territory than 3e.

Reducing DM latitude also means that, as a player, you've got some guarantee that things will work a certain way. The last bad 2E game I played in was characterized by ad-hoc judgements that  meant the DM's favorites always rocked out, while those on his shit-list always fell on their face. A 3E game with that guy would have sucked less because there'd be fewer cases where the lack of rules meant the outcome was up to his whim.

I'm not disagreeing that preventing bad exercises of DM judgement also acts to hobble good DMs. I'm just saying that 4e's further move in that direction is part of a process that's been happening within D&D since its inception.

Quote from: RPGPunditExcept, you lying motherfucker, you know that any "kid" it might recruit will end up being a castrated non-GM, little more than a monopoly banker, restricted by the whims of the game designers.

Uh ... no.  I'm pretty sure that castration hasn't made it into any of the early info-releases.  Not to say that it won't be part of the game ... we really won't know until release.  But I'd be surprised.

Quote from: RPGPunditSo of course you won't shed a tear at old-school GMs disappearing, they are a "bad influence", aren't they? They might teach some of the youngsters that the GM should be the supreme authority at the table, or show them how random charts can be fun...

No, I don't think they're a "bad influence."  But I think that railing how stuff for kids must be bad because it isn't the same as it was when you were a kid is fundamentally ... well ... a geezer argument.  Kids want different things than we would want for them.  Searching for those different things, they're going to create a hobby (hopefully a vibrant, growing hobby) that isn't the same as ours was.  That's the way life is.

I think old-school GMs have a lot of wisdom, and I hope that they'll get a chance to convey it.  But, realistically?  Asking your elders for advice is not an act that many kids cotton to these days.  And they sure aren't going to sit still for some old guy to tell them how they should discard their music/comics/RPGs in favor of the versions popular several decades earlier.

The only wrong roleplaying games are the ones where everyone isn't having fun, or where one player is getting screwed over so the others can have fun.