First thoughts on D&D 4th edition

[Flyerfan1991]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Well I'm in your demographic, and I don't have enough money to replace the vast numbers of new gamers that WOTC hopes to attract. Are you willing to buy D&D books at $100+ a book, or whatever it would take to make say SJ Games market share as profitable as WOTC's? Besides if the industry giant doesn't work to attract new gamers, there eventually won't be any tabletop gaming, at all.

Well, call me skeptical, but I somehow doubt that 4E is going to attract hordes of young gamers. While I'd like to see a renaissance in PNP RPGs, I haven't seen one that will make kids put down the WoW and pick up D&D yet. I've been waiting to see one in boardgaming for years, and I haven't seen it yet, and that includes the Eurogames of the 90's and the Fantasy Flight Games of the 2000's.

--Mike L.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyerfan1991

Well, call me skeptical, but I somehow doubt that 4E is going to attract hordes of young gamers.

I'm not talking about hordes, merely the status quo. There will always be more discretionary spending by young gamers, than older ones. WoTC has the youth market, they'd be foolish to abandon it. Even if they chose to, I don't see how they could compete with the publishers that already market to an older demographic, like SJGames, Hero Games, or KenzerCo. Even if D&D 4e instead was aimed at GURPS/HERO type gamers, I doubt that I'd stop playing GURPS. If it was marketed for Old School D&D fans it would have to compete with Hackmaster.

When they released 3.0 they were able to get a bunch of kids to play D&D (even with competition from video games, music, et cetera). Most of those kids (now mid 20 somethings) are probably no longer playing D&D. They hope to get a equivalent number of new kids, into gaming now.

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Flyerfan1991

The teens still have to get the money from somewhere; if they don't have a job, there's the bank of mom and dad. If money is tight for mom and dad, it'll be tight for the kids too.

--Mike L.

My budget for gaming is much higher now than when I was a middle-schooler/teenager. My *time budget* is much smaller. Back then, I just had to be a good student in the East Lansing Public School system. Nowadays, I have a lot more things to juggle in my life.

That said, the *percentage* of my income spent on gaming has gone *way way* down. When I was a teenager, I could buy a gaming supplement with each pass over my father's lawn with the lawn mower. That and Jolly Ranchers Fire Stix were about all that I actually purchased.

Oh, and I still mow the lawn, but it's *my* lawn, so there's nobody paying me to do it...

-P.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

When they released 3.0 they were able to get a bunch of kids to play D&D (even with competition from video games, music, et cetera). Most of those kids (now mid 20 somethings) are probably no longer playing D&D. They hope to get a equivalent number of new kids, into gaming now.

Humans are a renewable resource. They're just doing resource management.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Um, No. Mostly, what they're saying is that a serious effort was made to get rid of the fun-killing aspects of 3e.

"Serious" is not the way to describe the effort to get rid of aspects of 3e (and earlier versions). "Genocidal" might be closer. Evidence that the authors of 4e had done more than casually skim any previous version of the game is rather thin.

At least I've had the actual PHB in my hands for about 6 hours now. The amount of carryover from previous editions is amazingly low and I tend to doubt that many of these reinvented wheels were worth the trouble.

Things other people have not commented on.

Bizarrely, if anyone out there has said that he wanted a low-magic version of D&D they may have finally gotten it. 85,000 GP for a Ring of Invisibility that makes you unseen for 6 seconds per day ought to keep people from becoming dependent on their items.

Well, except maybe armor and weapons. Some of those look pretty desirable.

The names! The names! Oh, the horror! We already have trouble with some players kepping track of their 3.5 Class, Race and Feat powers and 4e and its' rather meager index isn't going to help us much. Any character sheet utility that comes along is going to have to note the page number of the book that items came from.

Slower advancement. However much it's denied the pace of advancement seems to have been deliberately reined in to try and stretch out the "sweet spot".

A lure for a horde (or lesser number) of new teenage gamers? No, not happening. I played 3.5 in one room last Saturday while the house's teenagers did Xbox in the next one and this book isn't going to change that.

I did sort of get the feeling somebody _thought_ he was writing a successor to blue box Basic D&D. The game does have something like that game's level of resolution. It just takes many more dead trees to get there. Generally, the PHB is just "thick" while not being at all "meaty".

The "magic system" such as it is just ain't gonna cut it for any sort of general fantasy roleplying.

There is going to be a steep learning curve involved in making decent characters. Too many pages of class powers to sort through in deciding what you want. This looks like a game of great potential complexity (especially for something that delivers such limited results out of combat).

I can also see critical hits or several other situations taking a long time to figure out if everyone who has a power or something triggered by a crit decides to use his kewl power. Just generally I think there are too many conditional abilities.

Eh, I'm not seeing a lot of early adopters in my gaming circle and if many of my face-to-face friends asked my opinion I'd tell them that I did not believe that they would like the game.

[rosignol]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Um, No. Mostly, what they're saying is that a serious effort was made to get rid of the fun-killing aspects of 3e.

That seems strange to me.

The 'fun' of D&D was never the mechanics, it was the 'get together with friends' part.

If anything, the mechanics got in the way more often than not. As a system, D&D was a mess that got by on novelty. AD&D got by on being more detailed. AD&D2 was an attempt to clean up the mechanics, and D&D3/3.5 standardized and streamlined things while discarding a tremendous amount of cruft (and then supplementitis set in...).

Now there's D&D4, which throws out a lot of the bad stuff, but chucks a lot of good stuff along with it. I don't really know what to think of it. It looks like an attempt to make a P&P RPG more like a MMORPG, which seems like the wrong approach. It is a mistake to try to do things on paper that computers can do better. The point of a P&P game should be to let you do the things that computers can't do better, not to try to re-create the MMORPG experience on paper.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Bruno

*long post*

You know that being all reasonable is cheating, don't you? :)

Yeah, I may have overreacted. I don't play much online, so my knowledge of them is a bit thin.

We'll just have to remember that many of these arguments were made about 3.0 - accusations of dumbing down, power-gaming, and lack of portability were rife. And yet I think that 3.5 was a far far better system than the earlier editions. I have Dungeons&Dragons Rules Cyclopedia as a (legally bought) PDF, and if you haven't read it for a while, let me tell you that the mechanics were horrible.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by rosignol

That seems strange to me.

The 'fun' of D&D was never the mechanics, it was the 'get together with friends' part.

If anything, the mechanics got in the way more often than not.

And fixing that was a design goal of 4e. Whether it worked is uncertain, but you have designer comments like "creating a monster in 3e was like doing boring homework" so the intent was pretty clear.

[rlbeaver]

I played through the first few encounters of Keep on the Shadowfell on Saturday. It was a one-shot to test the new rules out. The players were fans of GURPS, Savage Worlds, D&D 3.5 , or White Wolf Stuff.

Initial interactions were along the lines of "This is not D&D anymore" or "Let's zone and do that encounter again" jokes. After a few minutes though, the discussions turned to how we could help aide one another in various situations that did not just encompass combat (i.e. gathering information, dealing with difficult tavern patrons, etc.)

By the time we finished (about 5 hours), we all asked, "When are we going to play again?" It was a lot of fun.

I felt the influence of D&D 3.5 because there is a lot of the 3.5 rules of combat in it, flanking, attacks of opportunity, etc. It just seemed easier, and to some extent, made me think of older D&Ds in speed.

I think using MMORPG terminology is unfortunate, as people with get stuck on that link. Once playing, I really didn't notice the system as much.

The only "complaint" was that some of the social/craft/profession skills were gone, "They took out the role play aspect out!" When we pointed out that now you "get to roleplay those things" and the irony that it wasn't just a series of rolls or "roll play", there was the "oh...yeah, that's cool."

In then end, it was fun, and that's all that really matters. YMMV.

[Flyerfan1991]

Originally Posted by Pmandrekar

My budget for gaming is much higher now than when I was a middle-schooler/teenager. My *time budget* is much smaller. Back then, I just had to be a good student in the East Lansing Public School system. Nowadays, I have a lot more things to juggle in my life.

That said, the *percentage* of my income spent on gaming has gone *way way* down. When I was a teenager, I could buy a gaming supplement with each pass over my father's lawn with the lawn mower. That and Jolly Ranchers Fire Stix were about all that I actually purchased.

Oh, and I still mow the lawn, but it's *my* lawn, so there's nobody paying me to do it...

-P.

Look on the bright side: you could be paying somebody to mow it for you.

In my case, I blew a lot of my spare money in high school on cassettes and SF/F books; twas a sad day when a mass market paperback went up in price from $2.95 to $3.50.

--Mike L.