Quote from: Fheredin on June 25, 2023, 04:47:16 PM

• 4E was conceived as a way for WotC to buck the OGL, which immediately soured a fair amount of influencer opinion and kicked off Pathfinder. 4E was destined to never see enough development to compare well to 3.5. This is probably the heart of the reason 4E failed.
• 4E was sufficiently different and the D&D fanbase had become sufficiently immature that it was destined to upset the fanbase if it were released as a mainline D&D product. It should really have been marketed as something like D&D Tactics 1E, which would have in turn given the designers the freedom to actually make a good game.
• 4E is painfully slow with very long initiative cycles (owing to D&D's generally sluggish action economy, with turns involving many actions and often several rolls) and released right at the beginning of the reign of the Smartphone at the Game Table. In retrospect, releasing 4E in 2008 proved to be the very worst time imaginable to try to market a slow game.

• Yes, ditching the OGL was a big blunder (maybe THE blunder). But there's no such thing as "influencer" in 2008 the way we think of it today. On the places where people would gather to discuss the game like enworld or rpgnet the reception was mixed initially. The consensus formed rapidly but it was organic, IMO. Nobody told me not to like 4e - I had made that determination by the time I went online to see what others thought and found the edition wars raging.
• I don't see how critique of 4e was due to some lack of maturity in the audience. People grumbled about 3e and 3.5 but they generally understood the through-line and why it was "D&D". 4e was baffling to those same people.
• The tactical miniature battle line existed and yet it failed to ever catch on, so I have reason to doubt your speculation. D&D isn't traditionally a tactics game like 4e is.
• The game is very slow, but not because of the action economy. It's slow because the bloated HP pools and its fundamental goals. The tactical nature of the game demands lengthy combats with complex interactions and lots of thought put into each move. Tactics and speed don't tend to mix. If a combat is resolved in a round or two, most wouldn't describe it as tactical. For the 4e design team, a 1 or 2 round combat would no doubt look like a bug rather than a feature.

Quote from: Fheredin on June 25, 2023, 04:47:16 PM
I think we would have radically different opinions if 3.X and 4E had swapped places in time and relations with the OGL. If 4E had launched roughly in the early 2000s with the OGL beside it, the market could have supported a slow and ponderous game and people would have loved homebrewing At Will/ Encounter/ Daily powers. You would have had an even bigger smash hit than 3.5; OGL brewers would quickly learn how to make the game go faster by dropping actions, thus making more room for roleplay-time. Both of 4Es big faults would evaporate.

I've written at length elsewhere in this thread or another about the reasons 4e failed so I won't belabor the point too much but there are other major faults in 4e that cannot be resolved without rewriting it to be a different game even at the conceptual level. 4e is, at its root, a tactical battle game. To resolve its issues, it needs to be rethought.

Quote from: Fheredin on June 25, 2023, 04:47:16 PM
Alas, that's not the universe we live in. 4E sucks because Steve Jobs introduced smartphones, which punished slow games.

Where in this coming from? Do you have some firsthand experience to share, or statistics? The iPhone did not influence culture or technology at RPG gaming tables for a while. The iPad wasn't out until 4e was de facto dead. This isn't a form factor thing.

Are you asserting a cultural change dropping people's attention spans? Why would an older demographic reject 4e if they had their normal attention span, unaffected by the iPhone? Why would a younger demographic accept it by comparison? Why blame the iPhone for shorter attention spans instead of something like video games or pop music or something? Why were college students and kids also rejecting 4e in many cases if they couldn't afford or have access to the iPhone?

The people who tended to hate 4e continued to play Pathfinder happily for years beyond the death of 4e. PF is not a fast game. Why didn't PF suffer the same business failure if it was rooted in speed of play? The speed of 3.5 and PF were major critiques of those editions. 4e doubled down on the issue. I've said it before and I'll say it again: 4e was a victim of the memes most prominent among online messageboards at the time regarding what was "wrong" with 3.5. The designers essentially doubled down on things people hated that were actually killing 3.5 campaigns while intentionally cutting or curtailing the stuff people loved. "Balance" or LFQW are illusory issues that 4e was designed to solve from the ground up. Pathfinder is imbalanced, slow, built on LFQW, and packed to the gills with splat content and it was beloved.

The only reason I care about 4e at this point is that I can sense this yearning need by designers to resurrect the 4e design ethos, repackage it, and present it to the RPG scene again. The idea is that 4e was a brilliant design dealt a bad hand by the business and marketing teams. No - it's really not that good of a game. ICON or Lancer seem to be modern continuations of the 4e design ethos. I enjoyed ICON well enough, but it's a tactical battle game first and an RPG a distant second.

4e had like 2 or 3 good or at least salvageable ideas, but they still needed to be totally reworked from the ground up to make them fit into what most people expect in an RPG. Healing surges are a bad rule with a decent underlying principle - that healing should be limited by something other than the charges in your wand of Cure Light Wounds. Minions should have been an early hint to the designers that their game was taking too long to finish combats and was too fiddly, but people DO like the idea of one-hit kills. The solutions didn't need to come in these particular forms. If you think there's more to 4e than these handful of mechanics, or the design as a whole needs to be revisited, then you should actually make that case. Most people don't they just say it's a misunderstood gem. It seems to me like another meme. It's better to explain what was so great about 4e and what other game(s) put these ideas into practice properly if it's such a gem.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 25, 2023, 02:01:12 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 25, 2023, 11:48:47 AM

Quote from: Multichoice Decision on June 24, 2023, 12:13:54 AM
I mean to say:
Immersion requires plausibility, and neither extreme between daily infinite arrows checks nor critically fletched individual arrows are going to fly.

So I'm once again going on the record: after recent research into the term "immersion" as it applies to TTRPGs, there is no such a thing. You can get immersed reading a book or watching a movie, but playing TTRPGs includes rolling dice and table-talk, which makes any attempt at immersion literally impossible. Henceforth, let the notion of "TTRPG immersion" be considered utter poppycock and worthy of nothing but derision.

Well except that lots of folks have actually experienced it, myself included, which means there's something wrong with whatever research you're citing.

But that is dependent on each person subjective preferences and not related to any game concrete quality. That's Theory of Games point, and it makes sense. Some people become immersed in books, others can't get immersed even if actually going through the situation with their flesh.

Which is to say: bringing immersion as a factor or condition in conversations about TTRPGs is pointless.

In fairness, there might really be a problem with "character immersion" as understood in the sense of trying to emulate a different personality than your own. The lived experience issue can apply in a game where you could roleplay as an alien or changeling or shapeshifting dragon in a fantasy world.

At best, you can only ever work with a caricaturecharacter built upon fictional stereotypes, or at worst you really believe yourself to be exactly like the image of that idealized personality in your own head. It's not without opportunities to think about going through circumstances or situations in in general that you don't normally go through as a real person, but that can only ever happen in the player's head, not the "characters" head which is just a mirage for the player anyway. This is why someone trying to roleplay someone better than themselves IRL is also violating "lived experience" but from a different angle, they're upset with their actual lived experience.

If caricaturescharacter (which need stereotypes to avoid lived experience) are not allowed to be utilized for roleplaying, then all you could do with the game at all is open doors, kill monsters, and gather loot, and all player decisions are focused strictly on min-maxing the character elements and features from the consequences of those decisions. There'd be no point adding flavour or fluff or lore with any amount of depth and detail: The dungeon is just there, the fighter will go in for the gold that dungeon just happens to have within, and the monsters will attack anything that isn't of it's own kind or whomever tries to take the gold, all of it "just because" with no rationale, a purist playstyle which is the "gamist" descriptor, or at least the Dungeon! boardgame. Edit: Or you play a character as a copy of yourself, which is known as being boring.

Whether or not the players murder hobo the non-monsters once back in town doesn't make that much of a difference under those circumstances, though doing so would be the result of players who want to keep playing as fictional adventurers but are still bored with the lack of more complex story elements, and don't know how to ask for something different. Others stopped playing, thinking that was all that there was to the game, and it would never be different because of the only stickler referee available in their area who never put in that kind of work.

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EDIT:
After some more pondering, I'd introduce five different terms for different states of roleplay, terms as flavorfully chosen as possible:

Exonous:** When the character is merely a costume for the sake of the setting's fiction; it doesn't have to be faithful to real world peoples, since there are peoples in the game that aren't real. There's no player obsession for it.

Automaton: When the character has no relation to the setting, or inner relevance; less a fighter gaining gold and more machine accumulating colorful rocks because other beings are accumulating colorful rocks.

Doppelganger: A direct copy of the player's own self with no other embellishments; it will be an honest representation, but as a step above the automaton it will also lack any drive to be memorable or unique.

Phantasm: A caricature of the player's own self which lends itself to bastardization or aberration; a wishful idealization by which no effort will ever be made to achieve. Not a mere costume as with the caricature, but the conceit of a truer existing body.

Revenant: The inverse of the phantasm, this is a counter-exaggeration or caricature of the player's own self, deliberately created as a means to vent frustrations against the setting merely for the thrill of theatrical disdain.

I'd also say that a valid caricaturecharacter employs proper use of "stereotypes", since any character is already composed of several, considered here non-exhaustively: each attribute by score, background (name, sex, origin, profession and skill set, kingdom), personality type, religious worship, alignment, class, subclass, goals and achievements, and so on.

[Had to change some words, I'm going with "character" for the label of acceptable standard because it's good enough.]
**[Decided to put in a little more effort than Mark Rosewater is doing, it's a little bit of a fancier word for "outer-mind" but it'll do better for now.]