The Gaming Den

Dominicius wrote:But D&D has always been about the combat. It has the most material and rules written for it in all of the edition.

Nope. I'm pretty sure spells have had the most material and rules written for them in most editions.

virgil wrote:How did 3E do so well? Why does it seem to be impossible for them to recreate that improvement on the game?

Well first, lets remember there was a huge gap between 2E getting released and 3E getting released. Like close to 20 years if I recall. 2E had been out a long time and people were ready for a new edition.

When 3.5 came out, a lot of people weren't ready for it and complained. Especially given the low level of changes to it that warranted more so an errata document than a full new edition. When 4E came out, a great many people were not ready for that level of change and didn't want to change rules yet again. 4E made this even worse by having continuous levels of errata, indicating that most of it wasn't even playtested.

When Essentials came out, most of the people had lost interest because they didn't want yet another rules edition. It wasn't so much that the Essentials product was bad, because it wasn't, it was more so that by this time people just did not see any good reason to fork over more cash. Once again, Essentials just didn't change that much, and turned out to be little more than a 4.5.

Each successive edition is declining because people don't want to be buying a new rules set every 4 years. It's a cow that's been overmilked.

What they really need to do is put D&D on a shelf and not touch it a while. People have barely even gotten used to 4E and they're shoving 5E down everyone's throat.

Even if 5E turns out to be the best game in the world, I just don't see it doing well in terms of sales. People aren't ready for a new edition and based on Monte and Mearls articles, you can tell they're just grasping at straws. They have no idea what they're doing and are just tossing shit at the wall and hoping it'll stick. It would have been fine to start that shit around when Essentials came out where they're looking to move forward, but it's not the kind of discussions for writing a new edition. It tells me the edition is nothing more than a cash cow and some idea of someone in management. It's not the result of the team actually having good ideas they want to implement.

Monkeys with typewriters is not a good marketing point for a new edition.

Swordslinger wrote:
Well first, lets remember there was a huge gap between 2E getting released and 3E getting released. Like close to 20 years if I recall. 2E had been out a long time and people were ready for a new edition.

That's not necessarily true. 2E came out in the late 80s/early 90s, although it was rather more like AD&D 1.5E than a truly edition. But the Player's Option books came out in the mid 90s. And those were really pretty different. But I'd say people were ready for a new edition.

However, 4E was probably released at a fairly opportune time, given WotC's rapid rate of splatbook publishing. As evidence I'll note the really high preorder sales for 4E. Had 4E been better, or at least not such a radical departure from past editions, I suspect it would have been greeted with far more lasting popular acclaim.

hogarth wrote:

Dominicius wrote:But D&D has always been about the combat. It has the most material and rules written for it in all of the edition.

Nope. I'm pretty sure spells have had the most material and rules written for them in most editions.

oh lord yes the do.. and MOST of those did NOT have anything to do with combat. the spell compendiums are half about combat, and those from 2e were only about half the spells ever wrote for the game.. so you ahve to figure that if percentages remain true then combat want the forefront of spell usage.

Swordslinger wrote:

virgil wrote:How did 3E do so well? Why does it seem to be impossible for them to recreate that improvement on the game?

Well first, lets remember there was a huge gap between 2E getting released and 3E getting released. Like close to 20 years if I recall. 2E had been out a long time and people were ready for a new edition.

2nd came out in 1989, 3rd in 200.. 11 years between initial releases.

the problems had with 2nd for MANY have been gone over MANY times, but burnout on the too many campaign worlds was a big one, and inability to support all the worlds was another. you got people hooked on rvenloft and went 8 months before releasing game material for it... then you kind of lose customers.

the only advantage really had by 3rd in this regard was cutting the number of campaign worlds

excessive bloat and the game spread too thin was the problem with 2nd, where people wouldnt just say "hey we dont need these worlds, we can create stuff ourselves." and those that did say that, pretty much stopped buying splats all together.

I guess this is the most appropriate thread in which to post a link to a thread about why people suck Mearls's cock with ranch dressing.

Good god, such..hard headed people who "actually" think Pathfinder is a balanced game...(sighs)

Then there's that "Zombie_Babies" poster....but I can grant, make it sound like they're in the right. Which I can't say is good for discussion in that case, as lies being all too misleading for giving good advice on future design in RPG's.

I wonder why 4rries even assume that their game actually has that "balance" they wank on. Even though divergence in damage output between optimized and non optimized builds is like 200-300% (Lago can correct me if my opinion is completely outdated), despite 100 pages of errata, even though non-errataed game was broken into an infinite damage loop before it was even released, even though the orbizard was there for most of edition's life, and even though intended high-level opponents/obstacles are even more helpless before PCs than they were in 3.5. Is it because the only people left on 4E train are WotC zombies, who buy hype noncritically?

I think it is more that nobody actually really wants 100% balance. And that what 4th gives is generally good enough. But the balance in 3.5 is a real crapshoot.

But then again, nobody plays 3.5 raw anyway.

ishy wrote: But then again, nobody plays 3.5 raw anyway.

That's the real issue with why 4E fans think 4E is better. There are plenty of groups that play 4E RAW, while almost all 3E games tend to have some house rules.

ishy wrote:I think it is more that nobody actually really wants 100% balance. And that what 4th gives is generally good enough. But the balance in 3.5 is a real crapshoot.

But then again, nobody plays 3.5 raw anyway.

Nobody is actively opposed to balance. Some people may not particularly care though. Others may. And yet others will desperately search for something that 4E did better than 3E in order to defend it. And balance in 4E is hands down better than in 3E. It's not even close. It just so happens that 4E sacrificed about 90% of what made DnD fun in order to get there. And that's what everyone is complaining about - not everyone being of equal power but the cutting of everything that did not fit into a very narrow template.

Sorry I was unclear in my wording. I meant that most people don't care about 100% balanced. As long as it is close enough. Yeah the closer you get to the 100% mark the better. But time is better spend on different things than getting it from 98% to 99%.

And yeah 4e is a different game than 3e. I find 3e to be more fun too but that is because of many different reasons. I would love for 3e to have better balance than it has.

And Swordslinger I haven't met anyone who plays 4e raw either though. Most people I know don't actually keep up with the errata. Not to mention tossing out the skill challenges / magic item systems etc.

98%? I wish. If your weakest party member pulls more than half the weight of your strongest one your RPG is either exceptionally well-balanced or you put deliberate effort into party balance. In 3E it's actually hard to get to the 50% spot. Not hard as in "if you don't watch out you end up at 50%" but hard as in "you have to actually work hard to have the weakest member reach that 50%".

My rule of thumb is, if the power levels of PCs built without collaboration are within an order of magnitude of each other the game is balanced. Comparatively speaking that is.

I haven't met anyone in the last two years who even knows what 4e RAW is. The convoluted relationship of 4e rules to Essentials rules and Insider rules to Book rules to Errata documents is so lengthy and perplexing that every single person I know has either given up on trying to follow it or given up on 4e entirely.

-Username17

FatR wrote:I wonder why 4rries even assume that their game actually has that "balance" they wank on.

Because Mearls told them it does. Just like he told them the math 'just works'. It's the same reason Mac fans actually believe the Mac 'just works' and never has any errors or viruses (the latter is sort of true: while it's even more vulnerable than Windows, holy fuck, nobody cares enough to write a virus for it because that'd affect what, ten people in the world?) It's the same reason WW fans believe WoD has less rules and is a much simpler, easier-to-understand game than all the others.

Because they actually believe marketing, when most people in the world have stopped doing that long ago.

FrankTrollman wrote:I haven't met anyone in the last two years who even knows what 4e RAW is. The convoluted relationship of 4e rules to Essentials rules and Insider rules to Book rules to Errata documents is so lengthy and perplexing that every single person I know has either given up on trying to follow it or given up on 4e entirely.

That's true. Original 4E is a convoluted mess of crap. I consider Essentials to be the 4E RAW right now. 4.0 is unbelievably fucked up. The original 4E errata is over 100 pages last I checked and most of those are actual rules changes and not just clarifications/error correction.

ishy wrote:Sorry I was unclear in my wording. I meant that most people don't care about 100% balanced. As long as it is close enough. Yeah the closer you get to the 100% mark the better. But time is better spend on different things than getting it from 98% to 99%.

Ironically shrinking the playing field makes a game less "balanced." The more a game narrows its focus the more differences within that focus matter. A 3e build can oneshot anything it can stand next to and still not make the game unplayable (some people do play uberchargers and Tome scythe samurai in actual functioning games) but 4e Blade Cascade optimization was a huge screaming deal.

To put it another way the first thing everybody learns about 3e optimization is that monks suck balls. Not that martials suck balls, people get hung up on monks specifically. There's no good way to quantify the difference between a barbarian and a cleric. But people can quantify the difference between a barbarian and a monk. Both classes do the same simple thing and the barbarian does it better. People care more about that difference even though the difference is smaller.

Ironically shrinking the playing field makes a game less "balanced." The more a game narrows its focus the more differences within that focus matter. A 3e build can oneshot anything it can stand next to and still not make the game unplayable (some people do play uberchargers and Tome scythe samurai in actual functioning games) but 4e Blade Cascade optimization was a huge screaming deal.

That's true. In - for example - Mage, it's not hard to make a character that does massive physical damage, enough to "red mist" most things. But since "killing things in personal combat" is just a small part of what characters can do, it's not like being good at it brings the game to a standstill.