D&D Essentials: Ask me anything.

[Zinegata]

I'd say doom.

They're not fooling anyone with the new Red Box.

[ScottS]

In my group, no one has bought any of the new product besides the RC (which looks somewhat useful for what it is). Red Box getting into Walmart is some kind of victory, I guess, but I haven't checked on whether it's moving (it's taking up a small section of the CCG shelves). People that already had long-term DDI subscriptions are using the new CB, but bitching about the loss of functionality and the fact they can't switch back to old-CB (which got semi-crippled by the rarity rules in the last patch).

[sake]

I am genuinely surprised the old CB hasn't been hacked and had fan made Dark Sun and Essentials updates made for it by now.

On the other hand, I am not at all surprised that they updated the stats for even more races and there still isn't a fucking int/con race or a wis/cha choice that isn't a weird race of schizophrenic telepaths with lots of setting specific baggage, a shitty racial power, and almost no feat support.

[duo31]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... genumber=1

This application unencrypts the local database that came with the character builder, and manages multiple XML files for you so it loads old and new content in parallel. Works pretty well, as far as I can see. The thread also has links to xml coding work for most of the Darksun-Essentials content to re-add it to the working CB.

[Smeelbo]

While the local RPGA players/customers have enthusiastly adopted Essentials, sales of pre-Essentials 4E hard covers have dropped to ZERO. Nada. Zip. Zilch. None. On the other hand, the Essentials stuff has done okay, especially the non-version specific stuff, like miniatures and tile sets, and Gamma World is doing okay, even the booster packs.

PathFinder continues to generate steady sales, and I expect to do well with both Bestiary II and Ultimate Magic. Me, I am personally done with 4E, Essentials or not. I am not even willing to run anything for the store anymore (I have plenty of volunteers now), and not at all interested in playing. A quick glance at Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom evaporated what little interest I may have had in Essentials.

All in all, 4E has proven a waste of my time and money.

The sad thing is, if it weren't for PathFinder, I wouldn't have any games to play in.

Smeelbo

[Zinegata]

A friend of mine just let me try the CB last weekend. It was godawfully slow.

What the hell were they thinking, making the page reload after every little tweak in your character?

[JonSetanta]

I used the yarrr version in the only time I played 4e.

[sake]

Awesome, thanks, Duo.

[ScottS]

Red Box is off the shelves at my local Walmart (i.e. not temporarily sold out, but rather gone from the place it had in the CCG aisle and replaced with MtG cards). I suppose there's a chance it was moved to toys/games (didn't check yet), but I'm guessing it was either a "limited run" or else just wasn't selling.

[Krakatoa]

While I love the core idea of Essentials (4E system with classes built flavor-down instead of mechanics-up as in the PHBs) I think the Red Box itself is just not really a good value if you're already into the hobby. I already think Dungeons and Dragons is, at it's core, hampered by the restrictiveness of character classes, in any edition, so I can't see paying money for a set with fewer options.

For people who are just starting to get into DnD well there's already rampant piracy for people who choose that route, and you can get the full Essentials books new or used PHBs from Amazon for about the same price as the Red Box.

The only real reason to use it is if you're completely new to the hobby and need your hand held.

[Psychic Robot]

Remember when 4e was rambling about "no more neener effects" like critical immunity and spell resistance and miss chance? Well, the Essentials MM has displacer beasts with a 50% miss chance. (If you roll an odd number on your attack roll, you automatically miss.)

[fectin]

Remember when 4e was rambling about "no more neener effects" like critical immunity and spell resistance and miss chance? Well, the Essentials MM has displacer beasts with a 50% miss chance. (If you roll an odd number on your attack roll, you automatically miss.)

Same as the Warlords CCG. (I forget if that was ethereal or astral though, one missed on odds, the other evens.)

[Krakatoa]

Remember when 4e was rambling about "no more neener effects" like critical immunity and spell resistance and miss chance? Well, the Essentials MM has displacer beasts with a 50% miss chance. (If you roll an odd number on your attack roll, you automatically miss.)

On the one hand, stuff like this is the kind of things grogs complained should have been in the game so it sounds like a case of Wizards just listening to the whiners. On the other, I really don't understand why they insists on picking the criticism of 4E they listen to seemingly at random.

[fectin]

You're charitable to assume they did it out of responsiveness to complaints.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Remember when 4e was rambling about "no more neener effects" like critical immunity and spell resistance and miss chance?

Personally I think this was a bad decision to go that route in the first place. Yes, there were a lot of stupid effects like critical immunity--which just slows the game down without really altering tactics--but there are appropriate 'fuck you' abilities like spell resistance for monsters to have.

Why should they have kept these kind of monsters? In addition to it reducing the amount of ways they have to diversify monsters (and let's be frank, even 3E had a lot of repeats), it leads to bland combat spam if 'I waste it with my crossbow!' where a character's strongest tactic combo is the one that's always 100% the best one to use. This is aggravated by feats like Burn Everything, in which it encourages people to stick to one element/tactic.

Not knowing exactly how the mechanic works, I do feel that the 50% miss chance thing is rather stupid. A 50% miss chance to projectiles or melee or targeted attacks would be fine (if 3E/4E didn't encourage hyperspecialization to the point that it does), but a universal 50% miss chance is just lame padding.

PathFinder continues to generate steady sales, and I expect to do well with both Bestiary II and Ultimate Magic. Me, I am personally done with 4E, Essentials or not. I am not even willing to run anything for the store anymore (I have plenty of volunteers now), and not at all interested in playing. A quick glance at Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom evaporated what little interest I may have had in Essentials.

The latest batch of pre-Essentials errata permanently killed off my interest in 4.5E. They took what was positively the WORST subsystem in that game and made it even more awful through stealth errata. Yes, more awful than rituals. More awful than multiclassing. More awful than SKILL CHALLENGES. The treasure system. I was and (still am) willing to play a game of 4.0E even with all of my previous complaints and when my group meets up again next semester I wouldn't even mind running a pre-Essentials game, but that blob of shit is so repulsive to me that I am pretty much done with 4.5E or whatever they're calling it.

I would have been in all honestly less offended to get a picture of goatse for errata than that awful common/uncommon/rare garbage. It's pretty obvious that the game designers have no clue what they're doing and any improvement only comes because they're being hand-held by the fanbase.

[Krakatoa]

You're charitable to assume they did it out of responsiveness to complaints.

Mayhap, but it's not charity that makes me assume it's being changed due to complaints, but pessimism. Any rules alterations should be the result of playtests, not because a subset of fans didn't like it. (Running the playtests because of fan complaints is a different story, of course.)

It's pretty obvious that the game designers have no clue what they're doing and any improvement only comes because they're being hand-held by the fanbase.

Ah, see, here we have a perfect example of just the sort of whinging fan I'm talking about!

Thank you, Lago, for your timely demonstration of this fecund trend in internet gaming criticism.

[Maxus]

Eh, that's just Lago. And partially the atmosphere here, which encourages ever-more-graphic ways to say something. It's hyperbole, but it helps get the point across and it can be fun.

Go search for "Anatomy of Failed Design: Exalted" by FatR for a good example of the vitriol. Or Franks "Giant Crabs" thread.

Then go suck a barrel of cocks.

[Username17]

Dude, Krakatoa is just a fucking Tone Troll and is unworthy of serious debate. Does he take issue with any of Lago's complaints? No. He attacks Lago for being close minded in general. Close minded apparently meaning "doesn't like stuff that Krakatoa likes".

It's pathetic.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Ahhh. I've had him on ignore since after five of his posts so I haven't been paying attention to him. But I was curious about his reaction to Lago's pretty graphic response to 4.5.

Mea culpa.

He can still go suck the barrel of cocks.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Ah, see, here we have a perfect example of just the sort of whinging fan I'm talking about!

I'm dead serious. Since 4E started, there has been no good 4E change that wasn't been kicked around the errata boards for some time. And oftentimes they just flat-out ignore it; were you around for the Barbarian Playtest? People complained about shit like Hurricane of Blades months in advance and not only did they publish it nearly as-is but actually change the wording--so they actually looked at the power at least twice and thought it was okay despite the open playtest. Even though it's by far the most damaging single-target power in the game. It took some time after the PHB2 was released for them to fix it, meanwhile the Errata boards were screaming like raped apes all the while.

Or how about James Wyatt going on record that if he had to do 4E all over again, he would completely overhaul the ritual and magical item system? Not to mention that he said in the same article that they paid too much attention to the character optimization boards. Now while I complain about the excessive errata that 4E employs (both in scope and content), the fact remains that a lot of the shit is extremely obvious and they should have caught it ahead of time. But the current WotC strategy seems to be 'sell books, let the CharOP boards sort them out', which is fucking fucked up.

It's my sincere opinion that WotC's current policy for balancing and expanding their rules is lazy and deceptive. And after WotC crowned themselves kings of incompetence by making the worse system in the game even worse than it already was and forcing people who didn't want to use Essentials material to play with an utterly sundered game, I don't see why the design team should get the smallest ounce of respect. I mean, why should 'we can't fix magical items, so it's now the DM's responsibility to balance them' not be viewed as the bathetic and simpering cop-out that it is? I have never seen such naked contempt for the audience and I own the Psionics handbooks.

[Zinegata]

Not to mention that he said in the same article that they paid too much attention to the character optimization boards.

Wait, what?

They committed a bloody full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign on the CharOp board before 4e came out as part of that idiotic Gleemax initiative. By the time 4e was being tested the actual CharOp people were gone and had moved elsewhere - notably Brillant Gameologist - or simply disappeared (i.e. the WoTC Caelic - who was a pretty cool guy).

Meaning that Wyatt was actually just getting feedback from the 4rrie posse (The "4E Avengers" retards) who dominated the D&D forums during that time. A posse which included folks like Titanium Dragon.

So if Wyatt was listening to TD's crew, then no wonder 4E was so fucked up.

[shadzar]

So if Wyatt was listening to TD's crew, then no wonder 4E was so fucked up.

they were pretty much listening to anyone willing to kiss WotC employees ass, and ignoring anyone with any negative view of the game or disliked anything about it.

i think i recall an arugement/discussion about who were they listening to feedback from between me and muddbunny or wolfstar as well Gamer_Zer0 and the tone of the responses was...

"if your on the bandwagon, then they are hearing what you say, but if you prefer sticking with an older edition, you have nothing to add that could be constructive fedback as it dosnt pertain to the new edition." ~ paraphrased

[FatR]

They committed a bloody full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign on the CharOp board before 4e came out as part of that idiotic Gleemax initiative.

Out of morbid curiosity, can anyone tell what was that Gleemax initiative?

[Username17]

They committed a bloody full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign on the CharOp board before 4e came out as part of that idiotic Gleemax initiative.

Out of morbid curiosity, can anyone tell what was that Gleemax initiative?

Gleemax was a programming group that was associated with WotC during the death throes of 3.5 and most of 4e. They wanted to create a social network type thing for nerds. The initiative was to center around the forums and branch out into all kinds of other stuff. Virtual Table Top. Games & books bazaars. Player registries. Tournament formats. Persistent game worlds. Blah blah blah.

But it never went anywhere. Like, seriously complete top to bottom vapor ware. Even the forums didn't really work that well. But for a while your WotC forum account was your Gleemax Account because it was supposed to do a lot of other things it never actually did.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

So if Wyatt was listening to TD's crew, then no wonder 4E was so fucked up.

You didn't notice? Here's a fun experiment: open up a copy of the latest errata and then go to the errata boards. Note that the vast majority of the errata boards isn't discussing, but proposing errata. Glance between them for the similarities and then tell me that the staff didn't listen to these silly geese for their balancing fixes.

Three reasons come to mind as to why they did this:

1) They were trying to do a higher-powered game and were aware of the ramifications of the powers, but after listening to the Errata board kiddies whine their heads off they backed down and issued blanket nerfs.

2) They were trying to do a low-powered game with little power creep, but they're so lazy/incompetent that they have to foster off the board to the CharOp/Errata jokers who will them get the stuff they missed.

3) The bait and switch is intentional. Release 'overpowered' board, bask in sales, then a few months later nerf the shit out of it and then reveal your next book. See: the Cleric/Warpriest debacle.