4rries .... Dafuq?!

[wotmaniac]

I happen to have accidentally run across this .... and, apparently, this is a commonly-expressed sentiment, and has been since the beginning of 4e:

The second biggest advances of 4e is the fact that you can easily reflavor things. (the first is balance).

Since when is reflavoring your shit all of a sudden goddamned revolutionary?! I've been doing that shit since I started back in '94.

Somebody, please explain this to me.


(hey -- WTF is up with my url tag?)

[John Magnum]

My guess is that the tag hates the exclamation mark.

[squirrelloid]

Reflavoring as an explicitly endorsed by the developer thing goes back to at least 1987 (its in SW d6 1st edition), but probably even older than that. Admittedly, AD+D 1st is very much not okay with reflavoring, but they weren't the only game in town.

My knowledge of early 80s non-D+D is kind of limited. I'm positive Toon must encourage reflavoring though, and we can probably push this back to ~1980.

[wotmaniac]

Reflavoring as an explicitly endorsed by the developer thing goes back to at least 1987 (its in SW d6 1st edition), but probably even older than that. Admittedly, AD+D 1st is very much not okay with reflavoring, but they weren't the only game in town.

My knowledge of early 80s non-D+D is kind of limited. I'm positive Toon must encourage reflavoring though, and we can probably push this back to ~1980.

... further emphasizing the idiocy of 4rries?

My guess is that the tag hates the exclamation mark.

I figured as much; I just don't know how to get around it (I'm sure there's a way .... probably related to HTML or some such)

[PhoneLobster]

4E clearly invented reflavoring as MMOs prior to 4E had at best mere pallet swapped sprites.

[Koumei]

4E invented "shouting at people to just change the flavour of stuff if it's not in the game yet". When the game dropped, people had some real questions that needed answering:

• Where are the Monks?
• And if I wanted to play a Druid...?
• How the fuck am I supposed to play a Necromancer?
• I liked Bards. And Gnomes. Would you be so kind as to explain this shit?
• Where the fucking fuck is...

Given the game, designers and fanbase were going out of its way to tell you to "stop fucking around with shitty old editions you stupid 3aboo WIZARD EDITION LOL grognards, start playing BEST EDITION", it had a fucking lot to answer for. Not only in regards to "Okay so we dump our old game that we liked and start afresh, I want X" but also in the sense of "Fine, we'll do as you say and convert our game to 4. How the fuck can we represent anything anyone was ever playing?"

The automatic answer was "A Monk is a 2WF Ranger who just wields his fists! Pretend the magic swords are fists or weeaboo blades! A Druid is just a Cleric of plants or a Feylock! Reflavour the powers to be more tree themed! A Necromancer is just a Wizard, Cleric or Warlock, reflavour them! No you can't have a fucking pet skeleton, that breaks the game. PRETEND ALL THE OTHER PCs ARE YOUR SKELETONS!"

Some people did take the piss, explaining that you could refluff things as completely retarded concepts, or indeed "Sure, X options actually suck dick, so just play (a Laser Cleric or whatever) and reflavour it as (the thing that sucks)!" in an effort to show how stupid it was. And this is justified.

Actually, maybe it's not that 4E is the first game that made such a big deal out of telling you to reflavour everything, more that it's the first game where it was so necessary.

[CapnTthePirateG]

To build on this: if you were a necromancer, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide 1 square. If you were a cleric, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide one square.

So because the system is so bland, you can refluff it however you want.

[OgreBattle]

I happen to have accidentally run across this .... and, apparently, this is a commonly-expressed sentiment, and has been since the beginning of 4e:

The second biggest advances of 4e is the fact that you can easily reflavor things. (the first is balance).

Since when is reflavoring your shit all of a sudden goddamned revolutionary?! I've been doing that shit since I started back in '94.

Somebody, please explain this to me.

It's because mechanically, a magic missile used the same layout as a ranger's fast arrow shooting, and spraying a rainbow from your hands had the same "1once per encounter" format as "make a guy stab himself"

Because fluff (and some keywords) was the only thing distinguishing mechanical effects from one another, reflavoring became easier to cross.

ex: I had a Bladesinger/Rogue. One of my at-wills is Magic Missile. Because MM is an at-will power, I just said "that is my super accurate, never-miss Shuriken throw". I've used it a handful of times to kill near-dead guys trying to escape. I then picked a bunch of illusion and mind-affecting spells, grabbed iron-cohort and said 'this is my shadow clone' and said "I am a Ninja".

It's kind of like how in M:tG you can have a "deal 2 damage" card, but one is flavored as a bolt of lightning, and the other a swarm of bees



So in that way, the presentation of 4e is more like M:tG


3e on the other hand tends to use "rules as physics", and 3ggots get mad over Bo9S because it introduces a system for non-magical maneuvers that goes against their sense of 'reality'.

[...You Lost Me]

To be fair that's a 4 mana versus 1 mana--the cards are significantly different.

Also the second one looks old as hell, so maybe that's why.

[Sigil]

I figured as much; I just don't know how to get around it (I'm sure there's a way .... probably related to HTML or some such)

just use another url that goes the same place, I've taken the liberty of creating http://tinyurl.com/cu8qpku for you.

[squirrelloid]

To be fair that's a 4 mana versus 1 mana--the cards are significantly different.

Also the second one looks old as hell, so maybe that's why.

The *second one* looks old as hell? They both look pretty new.

That said, Shock is definitely the older card, I remember it (with a different picture), and it was definitely back when land actually had the tap symbol on them and text, rather than just a big mana symbol.

[name_here]

That's a recent printing of shock, while Bee Swarm looks like it dates back a decade or so.

[hogarth]

Since when is reflavoring your shit all of a sudden goddamned revolutionary?! I've been doing that shit since I started back in '94.

Champions/HERO required you to make up your own flavour circa 1981.

[Voss]

To build on this: if you were a necromancer, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide 1 square. If you were a cleric, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide one square.

So because the system is so bland, you can refluff it however you want.

I think I vaguely remember a paragraph in the 4e DMG about how if you wanted to play an evil cleric (gasp, shock) and the DM let you then you should change change your cleric powers to deal necrotic damage rather than laser radiant damage and any thunder/lightning whatever other damage powers you get to fire or something. Because EVIL! But really as a DM you shouldn't be allowing evil pcs. Because heroes or something.

As a possibly coincidental side effect, this made you suck. Fire resistance was more common than anything, and pretty much all undead are necrotic resistant and radiant vulnerable, so... fuck you.

Which is an interesting point in general about 'reflavoring' shit in 4e. Done carelessly, you can fuck yourself, done well, it is a straight power boost.

[Whipstitch]

That said, Shock is definitely the older card.

Nope. Bee Swarm is a Portal card and predates Shock.

Anyway, MTG is an interesting comparison since they faced a lot of the same issues, but the extent to which it palette swaps things depends on what era of the game you're talking about. That's because back in the day the general "feel" of what each color should be wasn't very well codified beyond obvious stuff like art style and what little mechanical differences were set in stone often hurt game balance more than it helped. For example, Black and Blue were apparently the only colors clever enough to realize that the game is played with fucking cards and were therefore better than you, since they had a near monopoly on deck, graveyard and draw manipulation. Meanwhile green had to make due with big (read:overpriced) critters, red got most of the direct damage and white got whatever the fuck they thought law was supposed to represent (Spoiler alert: That meant Balance, Wrath of God, and bupkis.) That didn't work terribly well and these days they try to avoid just re-flavoring shit willy-nilly and try to work with some role and flavor protection in mind--they talk openly in dev diaries about color wheels and a card feeling "too red to be green" and shit like that. Now, to what extent they have succeeded in that area is another debate entirely, but at the very least one must say that the mission statement they're using doesn't jibe well with the 4urry "Slap a scimitar and laurels on it and call it a Druid" approach to world-building.

[OgreBattle]

To build on this: if you were a necromancer, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide 1 square. If you were a cleric, you'd do 2d6+stat damage and slide one square.

So because the system is so bland, you can refluff it however you want.

I think I vaguely remember a paragraph in the 4e DMG about how if you wanted to play an evil cleric (gasp, shock) and the DM let you then you should change change your cleric powers to deal necrotic damage rather than laser radiant damage and any thunder/lightning whatever other damage powers you get to fire or something. Because EVIL!

Yep, that's WotC for ya:

[...You Lost Me]

I thought the bolded text was from wayyyyy back when.

I'll bet mistersinister knows. I'll speak his name three times and maybe he'll post here.

[squirrelloid]

That said, Shock is definitely the older card.

Nope. Bee Swarm is a Portal card and predates Shock.

... allow me to correct myself, Portal isn't even a real set! (ffs).

No wonder I didn't recognize Bee Swarm, it never had a legitimate release.

[K]

Is "3ggots" the accepted term for 3e fans?

Is so, even the terms that 4urries use suck ass and don't work.

[Koumei]

No, the accepted/standard term for 3E fans is 3aboo. As in "weeaboo".

Hilariously, 3E fans mostly accepted the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic. Complaints mostly came in flavours of "It didn't go far enough" and "It's too Asian, you don't need to make Fighters Chinese to make them cool". Okay at first there was some "It's stronger than a Fighter, it's broken!" talk.

But seriously, 3E fans liked it. That's the main reason why we're called 3aboo.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I always heard that the derogatory for 3e fans was '3tards.'

I am kind of shocked that the derogatory for 4e fans was not '4ons.'

[virgil]

Damn you people and seeing the 3E community do stuff like like the Weeaboo Fightan Magic book, as opposed to calling it totally OP because it's better than the fighter, nerf Vow of Poverty because of all the awesome-ness it gives monks, and then jizz all over their Pathfinder books for bringing Balance (to the Force).

[erik]

Since when is reflavoring your shit all of a sudden goddamned revolutionary?! I've been doing that shit since I started back in '94.

Somebody, please explain this to me.

Well, perhaps not revolutionary, but 4e really made reflavoring their own. I mean, for all the fuckers who were sad that there weren't monks? You could just take a fighter and make his powers with whatever stupid weapon it required just be on a monk weapon or something stupid or do it with any other class really.

All class powers are so incredibly bland that you can do it with anything. Give the monk all the wizard powers and call them monk power names. Nobody'd be the wiser.


And on the other topic, yeah, 3tards is the one I've seen the most.

[Josh_Kablack]

I think you meant:



Mirage was a real release.

But it was before Mearls was running D&D so it cost (3) more for not being a color the designers wanted you to play.

[wotmaniac]

All class powers are so incredibly bland that you can do it with anything. Give the monk all the wizard powers and call them monk power names. Nobody'd be the wiser.

(and to all the others that have made this same point)

Now I get it. .... this makes me both happy and sad -- sad because 4e is actually a thing; happy that I never actually wasted my time.

Though, in light of this, here's what I've got to say: in order to reflavor something, it has to have some sort of flavor to begin with -- adding flavor where there previously was none is just simply flavoring.
If I played 4e, I'd probably be pretty pissed-off that WotC actually expected me to do a very significant portion of their work for them without a paycheck.
Fuck you, pay me.
Or better yet, close goddammit.