Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;971387Isn't it ironic that the most successful third party support product for 3e was exactly in this tradition?

Yup!

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;971387Isn't it ironic that the most successful third party support product for 3e was exactly in this tradition?

I think 3e tried to talk a good game - 'back to the dungeon!' - but I don't believe for a moment it really changed the prevailing approach to roleplaying games.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;971563I think 3e tried to talk a good game - 'back to the dungeon!' - but I don't believe for a moment it really changed the prevailing approach to roleplaying games.

They moved away from some of the hard railroading you see in 1990s stuff, where often both the scene setup and its outcome are pre-determined. But at best you get a linear series of site-based adventures, with some choice in how to explore the site.

I found this frustrating when I ran a Pathfinder AP 2013-15 (Curse of the Crimson Throne), but for my current AP-based game mashing up a couple different APs and adding in other adventures and stuff helps a lot to make it non-linear, the PCs can ignore things, do them out of order, etc.  It's not a true sandbox like my Wilderlands game, but it doesn't have the straitjacket feel of a linear AP.

WoTC actually got worse with 4e. Where 3e dungeons allowed some exploration, their 4e dungeons turned into nothing but linked series of combat encounters, with monsters' start positions pre-set and a "fights to the death" universal assumption. These are really no better than 1990s scene railroads.

Most people are not aware that D&D 4E started life as a Virtual Tabletop App, but the lead designer had a series of personal tragedies so the App never manifested. So they had to take what they had of the design and "physicalize" it. That led to some odd design outcomes.

Quote from: Telarus;971687Most people are not aware that D&D 4E started life as a Virtual Tabletop App, but the lead designer had a series of personal tragedies

You mean he shot his girlfriend then himself? I guess that's a series.

She was a fellow 4e VTT designer, if I recall right.

I knew of the tragedy and that it affected 4e development but this is the first I've heard that an interruption in the electronic game development led to its being re-purposed as a TT game. I thought rather that the intention from the start was to make a game that appealed to video game tastes and was amenable to VTT adaptation--but that's not quite the same thing.

Re: OP, the term can either be understood in the context of certain discourses, specifically surrounding the Forge/"indie" movement circa 2001-2010, or in a more broadly historical manner.

Yeah, it was all very unfortunate. I read an article, that I can no longer find on the Wayback Machine, that went over how the 4E rules were specifically designed to allow automation in a 3D Virtual Tabletop. I found an old preview of the alpha they had mocked up in 2008: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/screenshot%20DDI%20Dungeon%20PR.JPG

I imagine having the computer do all that "sliding" and aura type battlefied control effects for you would have been sweet. Then it had to be converted to tabletop w/ figurines. Then another group came out with a 2D map&token VTT, but it was not well received. Probably because they were trying to implement a design that had already been drifted _away_ from VTT. I didn't play 4E much...