Eryops wrote:Equal footing. I know this is something that WotC has worked hard to address, but I liked having unbalanced parties. I've never played a 3.5 game that went past level 10, so never saw the widening gap between spellcasters and fighters.
Spells (or I should say non-combat spells) are greatly reduced, and take away from non-combat roleplaying opportunities.
JasonZavoda wrote:There are some things you can't unexperience. You can't watch the Lord of the Rings and only after that read the book and have the same experience, because the imagination of the man who made the movie has now replaced your own. Every character has now been colored and painted and filled in with some actor, the actions dictated by some other mind, the grandeur limited to CGI and special effects. But if you read the book first the characters are perfect because your imagination creates the perfect character, the greatest heroes, the most terrible villains, the most enchanting beauty. The words on the page, simple black scrawls on white, draw from the depth of your mind and soul an entire world, perfectly fitted and entirely your own.The simplicity of 1e allows the imagination to expand to fill in the contours of the game. The generalized characters, fighter, thief, mage, cleric, are vague, their powers uncomplicated especially at the start, forcing the players to use their imagination to expand them, to learn, to adapt, to think in order to overcome obstacles and challenges. And combat was not the focus of the game, roleplaying was. Not diceless shared story telling, or acting, but roleplaying as a group, not a tactical combat unit. But start a player out with 4e and they have missed this oportunity to experience the simple, straightforward game, the roleplaying game that created legendary experiences and draws people back across time to the days which stirred their imagination. Someone experienced in 1e can play 4e and expand upon it. Someone who has started with 4e is never going to be able to go back and with a fresh and unexperienced eye see what their own imagination can do, what tracks they can carve in the wilderness, what it is to start out weak and gain strength, to fear your characters death with every stroke of a sword. 4e as D&D is a bastardization of a roleplaying game, a misbegotten descendant of the original experience. It will probably become a fine boardgame, but it is an overpowered munchkin-candy nauseus feast of an RPG.
Badmike wrote:I see where you are coming from Jason. But this is a problem with society and imagination and not limited to just RPGs. Case in point I'm watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my grandson the other night. Everything that was so cool back in 1984 seems somehow cheap and lame in 2008...I can see the tiny production value flaws that now elude me due to CGI (remember most of the Star Wars stuff was initially done with models!!!). This is the same reason I simply cannot watch the original Star Trek TV show anymore...it just looks cheap and fake. Now, take a kid that was born in 1981 and was raised on ST:TNG or the second Star Wars trilogy. If even I have a hard time dealing with it, they are going to be absolutely turned off because their initial experience was light years ahead. The older stuff is actually an inferior product to them, the same way a once scare inducing flick like Creature from the Black Lagoon passed for comedy to me back in the day.Somewhere along the way, as with your LOTR example, imagination was co-opted by technology. But it was the same throughout history. I'm sure a kid in the 1930s thought pulp heroes like Doc Savage and The Spider were the ultimate...then came the Saturday morning serials.....then the full length movies....now movies that can with computer technology perfect replicate almost anything imaginable. Tell a kid he can read a 1930 Doc Savage pulp, or go see The Dark Knight, and there is going to be only one logical decision. The written word is more and more taking a back seat to the cinema experience, so much so I'm beginning to think even comics in the graphic novel format will not be able to survive much longer. Games, sports, comics, etc adapt or die. I know of a few companies that still put out pulp reprints, but they have very short print runs and I'm sure they cater to the 60+ age group. If WOTC or some other company still put out 1E, I'm sure some diehards would still purchase it, but to say their sales would be 1/1000th of what they are would be pushing it. It would cater to the 40+ age group and be seen as incrediblly "uncool" by the legions of young fans who were initially attracted to 3E and now 4E.I guess what we are bemoaning is progress, which is unstoppable. In the last few years I've gamely been adopting a "Adapt or Die" attitude, mostly because I don't want to end up like a lot of the curmudgeonly, befuddled senior citizens I know who can't work a cellphone, computer or anything more complicated than a calculator. The same with gaming. Not everything new is all bad....personally, we would have killed for Dwarven Forge products, or the painted rubber WOTC minis, or a CD-Rom Core Rules (we used to fantasize about the last one constantly!) when we were playing in the late 70s/early 80s. Kids nowadays are never going to have the same game experiences we had, just like it's unimaginable to think about our parents being able to buy comics for 5 cents each, or walking a mile home from school, or having to raise chickens for food. While kids are never going to have that wonder of hearing The Who's "Quadrophenia" or even the Clash's "London Calling" cold out of the album, they have their Radiohead and Coldplay and Arctic Monkeys and really don't notice the difference. The same with gaming..for them, their experiences are as authentic in their way as ours were. The genie isn't going back in this bottle. We can bemoan their lack of appreciation of a "true" roleplaying experience but I can say they probably don't care.Mike B.
JasonZavoda wrote:The difference is between a handfolded blade and a massproduced carbon steel brittle bladed knife. If I am going to teach someone anything, math, music or blacksmithing, I start with the basics. Even though the student may want to sit down at a piano and somehow just want to know how to play, they are best off, no matter what raw talent they may possess, learning what the keys do, learning scales and fingering. Mario Lanza was one of the three best tenors who ever lived, but never had his voice trained and suffered for it and could never sing the music he wanted to sing before the kind of audience he desired.Well few are such masters at any craft, and few are the skilled DMs who can bring roleplaying to life, or write adventures that have outlived them and will outlive us all, but they practiced and played in an early game without the buzzers, bells and superpowers being pawned off on players and DMs alike today.4e is like deep frying a Mars bar. You can do it, but the result isn't something most people want to add to their normal diet. Maybe 1e is like having a salad, but a good DM can make that one hell of a salad.As for the printed word, well the Norse had the idea that written words were magic and they were onto a secret that stares everyone in the face and most ignore. The individual imagnation is more powerful, more enthralling, than any visual effect the screen can ever produce. Perhaps the test of imagination is to be exposed to these eye-popping spectacles of sound and sight and still retain your own particular creativity, but I consider that pretty much child abuse. Turn off the TV, turn of the computer and video game and pick up a book. Children need to read, first and foremost, and the children who do read will conquer the world, like those with sight among a kingdom of the blind. 1e calls to the imagination, it is a siren call to the heart of our dreams. It is a living tale of adventure, of daring, of good versus evil, of struggle and glory and gold, shared among a group of friends. It is walking into the pages of a book.4e is sitting in front of a video game fighting for the next power-up, striving to be a demi-god as quickly as possible, and then... maybe 4.5e will have come out.. How quickly boring it all seems, how easy to be given what isn't earned, to jump those basics, those early days, to miss the irreplaceable childhood of these characters, to never to be hurt, but to be healed so easily, to never to face the unknown, the risk of charcter death with only a plain sword or single spell at hand. And what an empty experience 4e becomes, like those Star Wars remakes, filled with spectacle and lacking character. Close your eyes and think about those first Star Wars pictures, how much of the dialogue do you remember, how stirring were those classic plotlines ( taking from other amazing stories) how powerful was the Force before it was merely mitochondria. Honestly, your lack of faith disturbs me...4e is a plague, a pestilence, a sign of decay in the basic fabric of society. It is an oversugared tooth rotting desert of an RPG that looks quite delicious in appropriate moderation and perhaps with an altered formula to make it the tactical fantasy boardgame it cries out to be, but it is so far from AD&D that only the veneer is a dim reminder. 1e is quality, a 30 year blade folded over and over again. Those who wield it properly will shatter 4e, cut through it like the slightly moldy cheese that it is. AD&D won't make anymore money for WOTC or anyone else, except through adventues because it is complete. It waits for the individual DM to wield the blade with their own style. As for 4e I enjoy a good bit of cheese and will certainly cut away the moldy bits where necessary, but cheese is cheese and I wouldn't want to live on it, or try to wield it as weapon, I'd rather have a pointed stick, or a nice 30 year blade like AD&D.
Badmike wrote:I cannot match your wordplay Jason nor would I try. I would just say the very same speech could have been made in 1977 by Papa Squad Leader to a bunch of young, punk ass kids who had started playing that newfangled D&D. Just substitute "wargames" for 1E and "D&D" for 4E and you have his schtick down pat.To veteran wargamers, everything about this newfangled "D&D" was wrong. Rules? It had no rules, at least not the pages upon pages of rules their beloved Tractics and Guadalcanal and Third Reich and of course Squad Leader had; Gameboard? Negative, this crazy game happened "in the mind", while their's happened on orderly rows of hexes on carefully illustrated wooden boars; Dice? What the hell were these oddly shaped creatures, when orderly six sided dice were all that was needed to move tanks or roman legions across the board. The worst was the premise. Make believe fantasy sword and sorcery based on those tossers Robert Howard, Jack Vance, and HP Lovecraft????? Their world was the historical background of the Civil War, Punic War, WWI, with names like Grant & Lee, Hitler and Patton, George Washington, Hannibal....with heroes such as these to portray, what need to "roll up" an individual who at best was morally challenged (looting companions dead bodies after a foray into someone's castle failed) at worst absolutely criminal (Need some information? Let's torture the orc!!!). Every arguement against 4E could have been made be these same personages against 1E, and we never cared. They were square, fogeys, not hip, out of touch, and clearly in the way of progress.....D&D was going to steamroll them like the German blitzkrieg they so lovingly re-inacted again and again.Papa Squad Leader...imagine a 300 lb high school senior who would have then been called "eccentric", now just "wacko", holding court over the lunchroom every day. Inevitably a game of Squad Leader would be in progress, with Papa Squad Leader (as he was referred to) holding court, his mind a complete encylopedic storage shed of every single Squad Leader rule, variation and tactic. He would gladly teach novices the ropes, and take challenges against all comers (he never lost though). Imagine his feelings when another game began making the rounds of the lunch room, first in the white box, then in the Holmes Box, and finally in the classic 1E covered AD&D rulebooks. Jason, I bet I heard your speech word for word from the good Papa at what the world was coming to when perfectly intelligent young man forsook wargamming in favor of this crazy no rules pretend game.....the sugary treat rotting in the middle of the tooth being one D&D, and the mad professor being one E. Gary Gygax, who was undoubtedly cursed to the heavens for corrupting so many promising young men away from wargaming..... And I must confess that I will never play 4E (as I never played 3E for that matter), but then again my game since 1987 has been 2E, and I have suffered the slings and arrows from the faithful from abandoning 1E like a millionaire drops his faithful wife for the trophy version. There is a lot of good, old stuff; and there is a lot of bad, old crap. In my experience playing 1E wasn't any magical portal to the land of unique and original adventures; we had plenty of memorable times slogging away whith 2E.During these discussions I always think of one of my favorite Dana Carvey characters, the Grumpy Old Man, who gave scathing reviews of modern life ("These new fangled shavers? We used to run a rusty tin can across our faces and cut it to pieces and WE LIKED IT!!!"). I also admit to loving cellphones, computers, digital cameras, HD TV, pre-painted minis, Dming from my lap top while using the core rules CD Rom, Online gaming with Skype, and any sort of Star Trek sans that old worthless ham Bill Shatner. Nostalgia is great though.Mike B.
JasonZavoda wrote:Too bad you never had one of those campaigns that took you into the story. I was lucky enough to be part of a couple, sometimes as a player, sometimes as a DM.
Badmike wrote:I never said we didn't have memorable campaigns; I meant to say the great campaigns happened in every edition or game we used, from 1E to 2E to early Call of Cthulhu to CoC 5th edition to Villains and Vigilantes to Metamorphosis Alpha. Every memorable and magical campaign is not D&D oriented; the best RPG experience I ever had in my life was running a Call of Cthulhu game using Masks of Nyarlathotep, with a couple of veteran gamers and two guys who had never played CoC, one who had never played an RPG period. 1E is just a rules system, a means to a destination. Any DM worth his salt, and likewise players, can make a campaign memorable using whatever system comes to hand, be it Castles & Crusades, Mutants and Masterminds, or even 4E. Unless the system is completely broken, someone is having fun playing it, and when we demean it by saying it's "Not" something we are the ones imposing the limits, not the system itself. Imagination and wonder is not limited to any one rules or games system. Gaming is not the exclusive provence of the old timer who used chipped polyhedral dice. Use of metal miniatures instead of plastic doesn't convey any mystical ability to have a incredible gaming experience. 1E is a tool, as is 2E, 3E, and perhaps even 4E. Two of the best campaigns I ever had were with 2nd edition rules. One was an Undermountain campaign where I only used the core rulebooks, Volo's Guide to Waterdeep, City System boxed set, and the Ruins of Undermountain boxed set. It encompassed almost three years, 15-20 different gamers and maybe 40 different characters, ending only when the core group had finally done battle with and destroyed the beholder slavers on the 3rd level. Along the way there were lizardmen characters; halfling and gnome thieves with vampire lord arch enemies (never take a dump in a vampire's resting place); a goblin captive that became a thief who rose to 8th level with a high stat of 12; a ale loving female fighter who stole the hearts of half the party while drinking the other half under the table; the only triple class character I've ever DM'd that became name level; a small nameless tavern and inn the players stopped at before each Undermountain delve that served the best fish and shrimp soup the party had ever eaten ("For luck" they'd say as they dipped their steaming loaves of bread into the soup); and a classic battle across the dock district of Waterdeep against a persistent arch enemy and his minions (no, not the 1 hp kind) that destroyed half the party, half the district, and got the party exiled to Undermountain until they cleaned out the Beholder slavers and whoever was behind them. Yes there was a lot of fun and memories, and it wasn't any less "real" because it wasn't 1E.No set of rules is more powerful than the ideas and images and imaginings in your own head. To say there wasn't a speck of good gaming after 1987 that didn't use 1E rules is the height of arrogance and ego. Different is not bad; new is not bad; and a able artist using the materials at hand can create a masterpiece. When we start down the path of saying there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to game, the walls come down, and we become as hidebound as anyone who ever turned up their nose to D&D because it didn't haved a board. My experiences behind the screen will never be anyone elses, and vice versa. I don't know if I enjoyed a "purer" gaming experience but I know we had enough fun to tell tales of it 10, 20 and sometimes 30 years after. I can hate the message (4E) but hope the messenger (those that DM and play) achieve something akin to what I experienced the first time a stalwart named "Conan" and his pals stepped into Quasqueton back in 1978...Just a long winded way of saying that yes, gamers will have fun playing 4E, and they won't give you or me a bit of though while they are hacking through hordes of kobold minions. Our choice is to ignore them and their games and heroically struggle on, or learn to adapt and perhaps gain something there. Both have their cheerleaders. On the best of days, I'm stuck between Yeats: That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations - at their song....An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing(Sailing to Byzantium)and Tennyson:Though much is taken, much abides; and thoughWe are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (Ulysses)To adapt, or to soldier on....those old poet dudes sure knew human nature. Mike B.
JasonZavoda wrote:4e is not a good framework for an RPG and though a true artist of the craft may try to shape it, in the end they will have worked with cheese and the result will smell whatever they create with it.Perhaps some bright eyed youngster rolling his first dice to hit in Pyramid of Shadows will one day grow up to collect D&D....and become entranced by 1E....and make enough money on stock options to buy the rights to AD&D and republish the system. Even 4E may have it's uses someday....Though I doubt this is the deathnell for WOTC it may be the deathnell of published D&D. What horror will lurch from the mire of that companies greed as the next edition I don't even try to imagine.Bah, 1E and 2E will live on whatever is done. Most of us were ready to concede there was to be no new D&D ever when Lorraine the Bitch Queen rode the company belly up in the late 90's and nothing was published for months. That we got a few years reprieve from WOTC is more than I expected. I think this edition, despite early ennui, won't tank. If it does, I still have 25+ years of goodness to work with in creating my own worlds, campaigns, and adventures. Screw 'em.The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deepMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends.'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
JasonZavoda wrote:4e is not a good framework for an RPG and though a true artist of the craft may try to shape it, in the end they will have worked with cheese and the result will smell whatever they create with it.
Though I doubt this is the deathnell for WOTC it may be the deathnell of published D&D. What horror will lurch from the mire of that companies greed as the next edition I don't even try to imagine.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deepMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends.'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
deimos3428 wrote:4E is one thing. But frickin' poetry? C'mon guys, try to maintain a little bit of civility here.
flying_purple_monkfish wrote:I suppose i'm odd in that I expect you know.. not to DIE in the first session rping. It leaves a sour taste in a lot of roleplayers mouths having to roll up a new character only hours into a campaign. First level characters were just fankly crap... they could be killed by a sodding house cat for goodness sake! A hero should be heroic. 4th ed addressed this but they've gone a slightly different direction. It's more epic heroics than some normal guys with swords... which you know, if fine. It's no worse than a superheroes game or something and fits the fantasy genre after all. The long combat should be easily dealt with by a gm, right? We never really noticed a problem with it but then, the group I rp with have always been all about the tactics. I like the emphasis on group play rather than individual success.Perhaps 4th ed isn't the edition for a real uphill struggle but that doesn't make it automatically bad does it? Sometimes you don't want to struggle to reach 3rd level (hell in Dark sun characters start at 3rd level due to the harshness of the setting!)If you want to play a wizard who wont be killed by a light breeze, the play 4th ed. If however you want to have that slow arduous climb then play 1st or even 2nd ed. That said, no matter what the edition we've managed to mess up the gms plans. 1st ed we managed to no die by refusing to go anywhere without a buddy (hahahah) and AD&D we managed to bipass combat with careful use of Silence, mass invisability and two sodding thieves! We were an odd party, two thiefs and one illusionist.. as a result we needed to be tactical. 3rd ed we escaped a green dragon (killer gm) by breaking a window and legging it while he ate the rest of the party (oops)The point is, with decent players and a good gm you can do practically anything with any system. If you want to rp in 4th ed there is nothing stopping you. Though some homebrew ideas for the skill system would be nice, I always liked having characters with really random skills.
flying_purple_monkfish wrote:the no background thing was a trait in 3rd ed as well.. it always irritated me. I remember pissing a fair few people off by creating characters who were characters rather than stats hahaha. They couldn't understand why I wanted to play an illusionist when obviously I should be an envoker and get FIREBALL whooo. Bah I say, BAH.. it didn't fit the concept. I think with a bit of tinkering, we might be able to customise 4th ed.. .just tinker with those special attack abilities and give players a bit of choice to customise. But nah, it's nothing new. 3rd ed had the same problem. Who cares about background, buy skills because they're useful and pick a class because it gets super cool when you combine it with this kit/prestigue class. Alas, the power gamer seems to be attracted to D&D more than most other rpgs in my experience.
flying_purple_monkfish wrote:D&D just isn't the system if you want actual role play
deimos3428 wrote:Git the rope, we got ourselfs a heathen..
