Okay, guess what the "4" is for ... • Page 7 • Collecting General • The Acaeum

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Okay, guess what the "4" is for ...
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Deadlord
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 12:37 pm

Other than that, it's OK.

If you hit a Rowsdower, you get to keep it.

FormCritic
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 12:39 pm

Deadlord39 wrote:It sucks.
I see absolutely no shred of realism whatsoever, similar to 3Eeek. I am sure the three-bladed cleavers and double-headed greataxes will persist, as will many other ridiculous items such as spiked armor. Min/maxing will definitely remain; they even described it in the cheesy rendition of their version of a game session setup.
I've never understood the concept of automatically gaining stat points with level advancement. In my system, you can gain points through training and/or practicing. You don't just hack down a monster and say "Wow, I am MUCH smarter now!". And the ability for any class to add a stat point to any stat is absurd. So Dolt the Barbarian can blithely chop through hordes of orcs, then decide he wants to be more charismatic. Poof! There goes Dolt, one step closer to becoming Dolt Juan, hacking down more orcs.
4E, so far, seems like the usual pathetic attempt that many companies attempt when they want to increase sales, but not alter their product or target consumer. I expected no less from WotC. Maybe by 12E they'll have it close enough to Final Fantasy to satisfy themselves.

Your main objections are to double-bladed weapons, spiked armor and an increase to ability scores of one per every four levels?

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

copycat
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 12:46 pm

I hear WotC has committed gnomicide

There will be no gnomes in the first PHB.

This has depressed me and angered me.

Those who can, don't. Those who should not, do.

Deadlord
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 12:56 pm

Along with the video-game aspect and mentality of it. And the pressure to powergame. And the ridiculous feats. And the overpowered class abilities. And the overpowered magical items. And the half pseuoddragon/ half mind flayer arcanist/gladiator/treehugger characters.
Now that I think about it, you're right, it just sucks. Period.

If you hit a Rowsdower, you get to keep it.

FormCritic
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:08 pm

serleran wrote:I hear WotC has committed gnomicide There will be no gnomes in the first PHB. This has depressed me and angered me.

Imagine how the gnomes feel!

Someone liked playing a gnome?

Although....I do know of one hillarious AD&D game session where everyone played a gnome illusionist/samurai and they all launched a master plan to take over the Keep on the Borderlands. :lol:

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

JohnGaunt
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:18 pm

Deadlord39 wrote:Along with the video-game aspect and mentality of it. And the pressure to powergame. And the ridiculous feats. And the overpowered class abilities. And the overpowered magical items. And the half pseuoddragon/ half mind flayer arcanist/gladiator/treehugger characters.
Now that I think about it, you're right, it just sucks. Period.

For a moment, forget old-school D&D and AD&D. Pretend that the only Dungeons and Dragons that you ever played was 3e.

(I've never played 3e; I've only flipped through the books, read about it, and talked with people about it. BTW, Deadlord has summed up my impression of 3e, but that's beside the point.)

If 3e were not named "Dungeons and Dragons", would it stack up well against other RPGs? 3e has lots of WotC books, 3rd-party books, an OGL, numerous players, and gaming miniatures. WotC/Hasbro has the money and the manpower to continue producing and supporting still more. Surely a solid system and setting exists in there somewhere.

4e sounds like an improvement over 3e; 4e is embracing the Internet while simplifying the game. Is that bad? If one prefers 3e, then 4e as has been officially described should be better, correct?

copycat
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:19 pm

Gnome is my favorite race, other than certain monsters (like goblins and kobolds, though I really like nilbogs a great deal, and xvarts and boggles, too) and it vexes me utterly that I wouldn't be able to play that race. What happens, for example, if I wanted to upgrade my current 3.5 PC (played on the Necromancer Games forum in a play-by-post) to 4e? I can't. My PC just suddenly dies because his race no longer exists. Its like the shift from 1e Forgotten Realms to 2e Forgotten Realms when all the assassins and cavaliers upped and disappeared. So, yes... I really like playing gnomes (my current C&C PC is one, too) because they are untraditional and different... and they have some pretty cool abilities like speaking with back-attacking giant shrews.

Those who can, don't. Those who should not, do.

g026r
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:25 pm

serleran wrote:I hear WotC has committed gnomicide There will be no gnomes in the first PHB. This has depressed me and angered me.

So they have confirmed the gnomes are the ones being cut then? Though they were the ones that I suspected would go missing, that's still a pity.

I personally feel that sticking all the planetouched races into a separate sourcebook and leaving the gnomes in the core would have made more sense than sticking one planetouched race in the core and moving the gnomes to a section of a new sourcebook. (That is, if WotC does follow through on their promise to detail the cut race in a future sourcebook.) :cry:

Contrarian
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 3:21 pm

Badmike wrote:I don't feel like signing into the site to see the content; could you summarize a little about what these changes are going to be?

Demi-human abilities improve with class level. Fighters have special attack & defense abilities that depend on which weapons & armor they're using.

I found a blog that's tracking some of the announced changes:

http://d20.jonnydigital.com/

deimos3428
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 3:43 pm

JohnGaunt wrote:For a moment, forget old-school D&D and AD&D. Pretend that the only Dungeons and Dragons that you ever played was 3e.

Ok. Scary, but ok.

JohnGaunt wrote:4e sounds like an improvement over 3e; 4e is embracing the Internet while simplifying the game. Is that bad? If one prefers 3e, then 4e as has been officially described should be better, correct?

...and the moment's over. You're asking quite a lot of 1E players to forget all they know and accept an argument that has already been thoroughly disproven twice.

WotC (and TSR before them, to be fair) already tried to convince us that newer is better...and then proceeded to rake in the dough on substandard junk. They certainly make it sound good, but it isn't. (Some of 2E wasn't bad, but it was obvious that the marketing dept. was running the show near the end.)

I don't doubt that the 3E folks will suffer on this one, but for those of us who have already been through this, remember the old adage:

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But three times? What are you, stupid?"

nn
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 4:01 pm

In summary:

FOURTH EDITION

'Better' designed mechanics than 4E but better designed from the sucky munchkin spiked armour tiefling half dragon crap point of view

Improved revenue stream for Hasbro by sticking a big frickin hook to a 10$-a-month internet subscription thingy.

jasonw1239
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 4:30 pm

The prominence of the online component that is being featured in 4e seems to be the "holy grail" of business to all companies that have an online division.
Every time that I have had the "pleasure" to sit in a meeting with telecom marketers/developers and owners of software companies one of the hot topics over the last ten years has been how to create a subscription model.
The idea of a steady stream of monthly income has become the focus of many business models, particularly of many companies that have failed from startup.
The danger of the online component "focus" is that once a company has a well established subscriber base they have a tendency to become paralyzed with fear of change. A mindset seeps in that if it is good enough to hold existing customers then it is good enough to attract new. Accompanying that mindset is a fear to make decisions to change any existing service in case you do something that causes your existing subscribers to cancel.
Blech... I just don't see the online bits of 4e doing anything useful for the hobby of RPG'ing.

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Deadlord
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 4:39 pm

What the hell is the point? Do they really think they can compete with WoW? I've never even seen it, but I can promise you D&D won't even touch it.
The online piece will be a disaster, a complete failure. More so if they make it a subscription basis. They are WAY too late in the game.

If you hit a Rowsdower, you get to keep it.

JohnGaunt
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 5:01 pm

deimos3428 wrote:"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But three times? What are you, stupid?"

The rules have changed every 3 to 5 years. Someone has been buying new books with each edition.

I never suffered through the Edition Wars for 3.x, so this is all new to me. When 3.0 and 3.5 arrived, what percentage of players were upgraders, newbies, and refuseniks?

Castles & Crusades is an alternative that did not exist before, so maybe it can capture market share in 2008. Will C&C become collectible?

Deadlord39 wrote:The online piece will be a disaster, a complete failure. More so if they make it a subscription basis. They are WAY too late in the game.

We don't know what the online portion of D&D is besides vaporware. If it is free utilities and character storage, hey, sign me up. If I must pay to generate a dungeon or join a 4e tabletop, then no way.

sauromatian
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 5:21 pm

JohnGaunt wrote:I never suffered through the Edition Wars for 3.x, so this is all new to me. When 3.0 and 3.5 arrived, what percentage of players were upgraders, newbies, and refuseniks?

When 3.0 appeared, there were a few groups, like the local RPGA, which wanted to stick with 2ed, don't know how far they got with it. A lot of the casual 2ed players I knew at the time were graduating college & deemed it a good time to abandon the game. However to gamers in general 3.0 resurrected something they had once thought dead, so many, many more came to play D&D than left.

3.5 was something easy to ignore. The game had already become a little fragmented what with the minis game & a broadening array of OGL interpretations. I used my 3.0 PHB thoughout, & never noticed a difference.

Ak'Ptui
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 6:06 pm

Deadlord39 wrote:What the hell is the point? Do they really think they can compete with WoW? I've never even seen it, but I can promise you D&D won't even touch it.
The online piece will be a disaster, a complete failure. More so if they make it a subscription basis. They are WAY too late in the game.

Truer words have never been spoken. Why would someone between 15 - 25 years of age sit around a virtualized gaming table to role play is the first question? If the online component is going to be closer to something like a WoW or GW then the question is why is it going to be any different (better) than those games? Plus DiabloIII may be making an appearance if rumors are to be believed. They think they are going to compete for people's online time with a game whose only differentiator is a D&D ruleset and moniker? All those feats, skills, class options that may work well in a tabletop campaign are totally irrelevant in a good CRPG or MMORPG. You just need a small subset of balanced skills/classes, and then it is all about the character build and the drops! Hammerdins anyone?

The whole online gaming component just sounds ill conceived. :roll:

Cheers!

Improv
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 6:36 pm

Deadlord39 wrote:What the hell is the point? Do they really think they can compete with WoW? I've never even seen it, but I can promise you D&D won't even touch it.
The online piece will be a disaster, a complete failure. More so if they make it a subscription basis. They are WAY too late in the game.

Hold on there already is a D&D WoW equivalent.

http://www.ddo.com/

and in Europe

http://www.ddo-europe.com/

So I don't believe WotC is trying to compete directly with WoW with the new online tools. Nor do Ibelieve they are trying to build another WoW asit already exists!

Rather if they are trying to keep the younger generation they must include an online experience. And you can still integrate the computer into the table experience. Just get me one of those Microsoft Surface computers and I will show you how. :wink:

"... and may I remind you that this ain't the end. I can still kick some ass." - Tom Petty

Ak'Ptui
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Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 8:06 pm

improvstone wrote:Hold on there already is a D&D WoW equivalent.

http://www.ddo.com/

Exactly! It's one of many alternative flavours to WoW ...it has its following I guess. Point being those who want something like that are playing it already. Releasing something similar with 4E rules as an extension of the tabletop version is not by itself going to change the appeal of D&D for anyone else.

Which leaves the idea of what they are calling a "virtual game table" to attract new and old to the game. I take that to mean something of a more genuine D&D experience with a DM, players, and an adventure tied with online avatars and chat. I just don't see that kind of paradigm catching on with the younger set when they have so many other online options. Plus anyone can do that now with Neverwinter Nights, so again releasing it as some sort of 4E new experience is not going to increase the appeal more than what it already is.

They can focus on making 4E a great tabletop RPG to the extent that's possible, but I agree with Deadlord if they try going online it's going to be half-assed at best. The D&D brand is irrelevant to a succesful online experience.

Cheers!

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