Quote from: Windjammer;305255I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned enlightened criticism of WotC' R&D department for Dungeons & Dragons hit a new level when Melan first drafted his "tyranny of fun" tirade as a response to Mike Mearls' remakening of the Rust Monster (with Jeff Rients' much later tale of two 4Es scoring a close second - Arius Claudius, anyone?).

However, no matter how much Melan refined his position in later posts, there remained a blind spot as far as identifying the target group of aforementioned design philosophy is concerned.

Or here again


This, I think, can be improved upon by squarely identifying said people with the RPGA players (not RPGA DMs, in my experience, by the way) - as has been said in posts displaying evidence here, and then here and finally here. An awful lot of design in 4th edition doesn't make sense until you adjust yourself to the fact that this design accomodates Organized Play formats.

However, with the release of Monster Manual II for 4th edition, the evidence in support of this claim has reached a new level. For now the very game element which triggered the complaint of WotC R&D propagating uniformisation for the sake of standardized play - the rust monster - has itself demonstrably become nothing else but the codification of a RPGA ruling.

Let's take this one step at a time. First, the new rust monster, with the relevant bits excerpted.


"Residuum", in 4E, is magical dust which performs the in-game duty of currency when creating magical items (PHB, p. 300). The creation of magic items, in turn, I should add, is now a "ritual" i.e. any PC can perform the creation of a magic item, no matter how powerful, as long as he dishes out measly 175 gp for the exercise and the desired magic item's cost quantified in "residuum". The ritual, I should add, consumes 1 hour of in-game time and so cannot be performed - for instance - right after slaying a rust monster in case the module is timed in such a way that two or three more combat encounters are already in cue.

Now, no matter how much you may dislike this new commodification of the creation of magic items (nothing new to 3E, I may say, with crystals in the Magic Item Compendium), pay attention to how this interacts with the rust monster.

In principle, a rust monster no longer destroys your magic item. It puts your access to said item out of control for the duration of... well until you (or someone else in the game world) can perform said enchant item ritual... which is usually.... at the end of a session when the DM allocates the 1 hour the ritual consumes (plus the optional hike back to town, which can be hand waved too). So: a rust monster puts your item access on hold for the duration of the remainder of the session.

And what does that remind us of? Why, of the RPGA's customary method of dealing with sundered weapons, of course! See, if you had a nasty RPGA DM who would use Sunder on your treasured magic sword, you could - at the end of the session - dish out half the gp cost of this magic sword to retrieve it back onto your Magic Item Logsheet. Hurray! ...because losing treasured magic items for which those RPGA whiners worked really hard would lose the RPGA its treasured player stock. Which they can't let happen. And that's why everyone in 4E, you see, and I mean everyone ever playing this game, be it at conventions or at home with friends you trust, is now subject to the same ruling. And, oh, that nasty rule that you had to pay half your item's gp cost to get it back? They got rid of that too!

And to top it off, lo' and behold this gem of design culture, a mini-design essay that accompanies the new rust monster, which reads like a post lifted straight from EnWorld back in 2006.

Quote from: Cranewings;309181I just wish there were additional degrees of it. I feel like if one person has the high ground and a spear, the person he is fighting should be damn near helpless. The +1 doesn't cut it. Neither does an attack of opportunity.

Quote from: hgjs;309855Is there a good term for this kind of absurd overcorrection?  It's a common trend I see in houserules, to identify a phenomenon but over-amplify it to the point where the houserule makes the game less like the source material (whether stories or real life).

Quote from: hgjs;309855Is there a good term for this kind of absurd overcorrection?  It's a common trend I see in houserules, to identify a phenomenon but over-amplify it to the point where the houserule makes the game less like the source material (whether stories or real life).

Quote from: RPGPundit;305365FUCK. It has no resemblance to D&D; its not the same game even a tiny little bit.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Doom;309950Oh god, I can't help myself, I have to insert the utterly retarded trite response of "But then you must not think D&D 3.0 was Dungeons and Dragons, either."

Sorry, something about seeing that response a jillion times just forced me to do that, sort of like when you hear "Our Father," the next four words just come up automatically.

Quote from: J Arcane;310006:rolleyes:

Yeah, 'cause 4e and 3e are totally the same game in every meaningful respect.

Quote from: J Arcane;310006:rolleyes:

Yeah, 'cause 4e and 3e are totally the same game in every meaningful respect.

Quote from: Aos;310032It's worth about 8 billion posts, so far as i can tell.

Quote from: StormBringer;310013Well, they did use the same at-will/encounter/daily power structure from 3.x when designing 4e.

Wait, I have a feeling this is going to get to the point where these similarities boil down to 'they are both called D&D' and 'they both have combat'.

Quote from: counterspin;310058The traditional encounter power from 3.5 is the barbarian rage, though all of the stat boosting spells and various other buffs were realistically encounter length.  Heck, the rage even requires a rest to recover from it.

Quote from: StormBringer;310013Well, they did use the same at-will/encounter/daily power structure from 3.x when designing 4e.

Wait, I have a feeling this is going to get to the point where these similarities boil down to 'they are both called D&D' and 'they both have combat'.

Quote from: J ArcaneI dunno about that. "Daily" powers have been in D&D for far longer than 3e, and "at-will" is just a fancy terminology for "shit I can do whenever I want". "Encounter" powers are new as far as I know, though I suppose there may be some shit in one of the sourcebooks I dunno about.