OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I know it's hindsight and all, but what never ceases to amaze me about 4E D&D is how the game designers clearly had sustainability in mind as a design goal but then did everything they could to destroy it's longevity. They:

[*] Made the vision of skill challenges so narrow that even if the math did work and there were enough skills and the framework less full of fail and etc., people would still get sick of them after a few years.
[*] Put classes on such a strict schedule of advancement that every level 1 - 30 journey feels the same. Even when 4E D&D tried experimenting with different resource management schemes (i.e. the psionic classes) you still advanced in the same way.
[*] Steadfastly refused to have a standard campaign setting. Shit happens all over the place in adventure paths, new items and feats and races get released all of the time, and no one sees any connection. The adventure paths had some legitimately cool ideas in them (i.e. what if your low-level Dark Sun characters came across a hidden source of fresh water; what if your mid-level characters fought a personification of evil so hard that it erased the vice of jealousy forever) but no one gave a fuck because they weren't connected to the broader metaplot.
[*] Related to the above, released no hardcover books unlike 5E and Pathfinder. These are in my opinion important to have long-term loyalty to a brand because it gives people an idea of what's supposed to happen in the zero to hero journey of D&D. You start out as nobodies and then have interconnected adventures that make you a somebody. What's more, you have a frame of reference to talk to other people about. As much as I rag upon 5E D&D for being unoriginal and a step back, they did get basic brand loyalty shit right. Acerak is the super-lich in 5E D&D, not Szass Tam. Tiamat is the Fight A God of 5E D&D, not Orcus. Giants are the signature enemy faction of 5E D&D, not dragons and orcs.

4E D&D wasn't just designed as a shovelware engine, it was designed as a shovelware engine that was supposed to last for a long time.

[maglag]

[*] Steadfastly refused to have a standard campaign setting. Shit happens all over the place in adventure paths, new items and feats and races get released all of the time, and no one sees any connection. The adventure paths had some legitimately cool ideas in them (i.e. what if your low-level Dark Sun characters came across a hidden source of fresh water; what if your mid-level characters fought a personification of evil so hard that it erased the vice of jealousy forever) but no one gave a fuck because they weren't connected to the broader metaplot.

Weren't previous editions just as guilty of that though? There was Dragonlance and Eberron and Forgotten Realms and none of those were actually in the first core books and didn't really mix in between that well and there was no "connected to the broader metaplot" either as far as I remember.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem has existed for a long time, yes, but 4E D&D was explicitly designed to be an everlasting shovelware engine where (and this is the important part) fans would gleefully make repeat orders. By not having a good or even any setting, they missed out on a huge opportunity to build a brand that would have people shelling out money for the PHB4 or even Eberron's Master Guide or whatever the fuck simply because they wanted to see what happens next.

To put things in perspective: people were complaining for the longest time throughout 4E D&D to Make Forgotten Realms Great Again. There's no such movement going from 4E D&D -> 5E D&D. Not because Forgotten Realms fixed its shit in the meantime, but because 4E so spectacularly failed to make people give a shit about any of its setting elements.

[maglag]

Now that you mention it, 4e did try to focus on Forgotten Realms, not only advancing the timeline 94 years and changing a bunch of stuff but also making it RPGA's one and only living campaign between 2008 and 2011 (when Neverwinter Nights got added).

Then in 2012 Ed himself announced the Sundering and that novels and adventures will be released in a staggered, overlapping fashion, and the collective results of players in their adventures can be submitted to WotC, and will influence the stories in the novels. Yeah it was in preparation for 5e, but techically still 4e.

So they did try to make Forgotten Realms take center stage, they just failed miserably.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Did the people who wrote for 4E D&D even play their own game?

I know the Pathfinder, 3E, and even 5E people play their own game. When you ask Jeremy Crawford about rules minutae (such as the very rare instance in which you can use Infernal Calling for a CR11 fiend, including the book it was depicted) he knows. I might think he's stupid, but I don't doubt he's invested into his own work.

But everything about 4E D&D, whether we're talking about needing Rules Compendium in ADDITION to two PHBs in order to play Essentials or encouraging 1d6+40 damage builds or the entire ritual system or (most notably) skill challenges shows a complete failure to engage with their product. Hell, even the Character Creator product shows a lack of engagement with their work, because by 2010 that thing was an unusably slow piece of shit if you're playing with all of the expansion material and have less than 8GB of RAM on your computer.

Like, the ancient Red Dragon is a pretty glaring example, but even at low level they must have had the experience of literally missing with all 3 of their daily powers, having a 1-in-2 chance of that happening with SOMEONE in a combat with a 5-person party, and realizing the math was fucked. Did no one catch how playing with a low-level party that had no leaders in it was an instant lose condition?

[Username17]

When I publicly took Mike Mearls to task for admitting that every time he "ran a skill challenge" he made something up on the spot and didn't bother trying to actually use the rules that were in any of the books he was charging money for - he complained that I was against innovation rather than denying it. It's very clear that they never bothered to playtest their ramblings in their in-house games. All that crap in the DMG2 got trotted out maybe once before publication, and even those playthroughs were heavily fudged.

The fact that Skill Challenges did not work at all was very obvious to anyone who mathhammered the fucking things - but the nonfunctionality was equally obvious if you just played through them ten times without fudging. Despite literally dozens of Skill Challenge overhauls, that literally never happened with the in-house play groups for any of the versions.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

That Mike Mearls is still with 5th Edition despite having been checked out of D&D for at least a decade shows that there's no justice in this world.

Maybe the Zak S thing will finally bring him down.

[Dogbert]

Maybe the Zak S thing will finally bring him down.

If 5E's miscarriage didn't bring the hammer down on him, nothing will.

[Whipstitch]

I rather doubt 5e is failing so miserably that Mearls can't shift the blame to the damage done by 4e and rpgs being niche to begin with. Yes, the trickle of product they release is kinda sad, but they're obviously not spending very much and there wasn't anything about the rollout that has me thinking that Hasbro expected more than a trickle. It's a low ambition edition, both mechanically and from a marketing standpoint, and that makes it non-threatening and easy for groups to settle upon compared to creaky old 3.x or Pathfinder's fiddly bullshit.

[EightWave]

I think the real problem is that Hasbro is a toy company. Their corporate culture is set up to deal with Star Wars figurines, Nerf guns, Fortnight Monopoly, and fuck you, put tape on your face.

From the perspective of a toy company, the handling of D&D makes perfect sense: we've got a product, here's the production schedule and art budget, we gave it to some focus groups and the target audience liked it. All systems go!

[GnomeWorks]

fuck you, put tape on your face.

fucking wat

[Lago PARANOIA]

So who's the worst game designer who worked on 4th Edition? I'm thinking either Andy Collins or Mike Mearls.

[erik]

I’m inclined to say Andy Collins, but this is a hard choice.

[Username17]

So who's the worst game designer who worked on 4th Edition? I'm thinking either Andy Collins or Mike Mearls.

I'm going to say Joseph Batten.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

As awful as that was, I don't think Joseph Batten really affected the design direction of 4E D&D. His death certainly didn't help with the forum conversions or the rollout of DDI, but if Wizards was halfway competent they could've recovered from that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's a real problem and it makes even positive changes a difficult sell for new editions. Shadowrun 4 had a substantial contingent of people who refused to adopt because Variable Target Numbers got removed, and 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons had a substantial contingent of people who refused to adopt because THAC0 went away. Because gaming groups operate by consensus, they are inherently resistant to change. And that makes a lot of change for change's sake that happened in 4th edition a terrible idea from a marketing standpoint.

This observation makes me wonder the extent of which 5E D&D's resiliency is just through conflict aversion.

When you compare 4E D&D to 5E D&D, you're struck by not how little the game innovated mechanically, but also conceptually. Except for the Tortle, there's no new races. There's no new setting. There's no new advancement paradigm -- 3E had epic levels, 4E had paragon paths/epic destinies. There's no new enemy faction. There isn't even anything in the way of new classes, unless you want to count the Mystic from Unearthed Arcana.

I think it goes beyond just laziness and ineptitude of the 5E game designers, who, for all of their faults, are modestly less incompetent than the 4E designers. They're simply scared shitless of changing, adding, or removing anything significant from the game.

[Username17]

Except for the Tortle, there's no new races. There's no new setting.

That's a weird statement. Because of course, Tortles are not a new race. Here's me ranting about them in 2014.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, so 5E D&D literally has no new ideas to it.

[Username17]

Okay, so 5E D&D literally has no new ideas to it.

I wouldn't quite say that.

Sylvan Despoilers. Though they dwell in the wilds, ettercaps have no desire to live in harmony with nature. A forest infested with ettercaps transforms into a gloomy place, choked with webs and infested with giant spiders, giant insects, and other sinister predators. Creatures that wander too far into such a wood are soon lost in a maze of webs that dangle with the bones and lost treasures of the ettercaps' victims.

Enemies of the Fey. Ettercaps are natural enemies of fey creatures. The foul creatures set web snares to catch sprites and pixies, which they hungrily devour, and will encase a dryad's tree in webbing in a vain attempt to trap the dryad. Otherwise timid fey will sometimes approach outsiders for help in dealing with an ettercap infestation, being ill-equipped to deal with the malevolent creatures themselves.

That's 137 words devoted to the weird 5e idea of monsters "terraforming" areas to turn them into dungeon environments. It was unnecessary, didn't go anywhere, and was kind of dumb, but it was in fact different.

"Ettercaps create dominion like priests in Dominions 4 and those dominion candles make the area more like Murkwood from The Hobbit!" wouldn't have been my take on Ettercaps, so it's certainly an idea.

-Username17

[Orca]

That sounds more like ettercaps going around laying lots of webs (& imagined consequences of that) than like their magic creating webs and darkness automatically.

[deaddmwalking]

That sounds more like ettercaps going around laying lots of webs (& imagined consequences of that) than like their magic creating webs and darkness automatically.

In the case of Ettercaps, the rise of giant insects doesn't follow from their ability to create webs. And in the case of Legendary Monsters:

Regional Effects
The mere presence of a legendary creature can have strange and wondrous effects on its environment, as noted in this section. Regional effects end abruptly or dissipate over time when the legendary creature dies.

That seems like an explicitly supernatural effect.

[Usamimi]

So who's the worst game designer who worked on 4th Edition? I'm thinking either Andy Collins or Mike Mearls.

Mike Mearls.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I never noticed that the penalty damage for ignoring a mark isn't as much as a striker's damage. That's hilarious. That's awful.

---

I never really understood the difference between controller and defender. Like, yeah I get that one's melee and one's ranged, but is a ranged defender or melee controller really a different role? It's just various effects to prevent or redistribute damage.

I remembered that as 4E D&D went on, the design discipline of the game collapsed enough that you started to see interesting builds arise outside of the role paradigm. For example, we had Defenders that deliberately forced people to trigger their marks and OAs for striker-level damage at the cost of 'defending'. Or leaders who didn't take their own actions and instead just duplicated/recycled actions of other party members. Or summoners who threw on enough extra chaff on the battlefield to waste attacks while still carefully controlling their own action and hp resources.

That's some sad shit, how your system became more interesting as the game circled the drain and people stopped giving a fuck about adhering so strictly to Noonan's vision.

[saithorthepyro]

From what I can tell, Noonan's vision failed because even by aping MMO's they couldn't figure out how they worked well enough to make the roles necessary ones like how actual MMO's do it.


Actually on the worst designer thing, could anyone give me a quick rundown of the main designers and how good/bad (or just shade of bad) they were since I wasn't on the internet when this entire thing went down and I am curious in case their names pop up again.

[Mistwell]

I guess you guys missed the new Ravnica setting and new races in it?

Centaur, Loxodon, Minotaur, Simic Hybrid, Vedalken?