Monte Cook Back to Work

[Josh_Kablack]

You like the swordaxe? I guess it takes all kinds.

I never said I liked it - because my personal opinion is irrelevant.

I said that "sword axes are conceptually stupid" is not a condemnation of design skills. The argument that a given weapon is impossible and therefore conceptually stupid can be made for such things as Keyblades, Gunblades, Bat'Leth's, Batarangs, Web-Shooters, Psi-Blades, and Light Sabers - none of which are viable in the real world, but all of which have featured in fantasy works that have significant followings who find such implausible weapons to be one of the enjoyable fantastic elements of the relevant settings.

A designer trying to add similar crazy weapons into his own setting or game is just emulating the source material - and if you're going to condemn a designer for that, then you probably aren't interested in playing a fantasy game anymore. And in that case, you might want to take up fencing or kendo or join the SCA or competitive trap-shooting or any one of a number of hobbies where the real-world functionality of weapons matters more.

[Yep]

Even 4E would have been about 10 times better with a serious and strict play testing regime.

So would any game, and it's easy to say that after the fact. Just look at 3E; they had to release an entire updated edition to fix things that should have been noticed in anything like playtesting. And they still rereleased a game where some classes are better by default and where Challenge Rating was a complete joke. This isn't rare, either, the perfectly tested RPG will never be made.

No. Really. Totally would have. Pointing out that Skill Challenges don't work, the math is all funky, fights are padded sumo and the players find all the options depressingly boring is EXACTLY what play testing is for.

Skill challenges are borked, RAW, the math can be bad at higher levels, and the initial fights were silly because of less damage/more HP on monster side. These have been fixed, though not satisfactorily in some cases (feat taxes and bloat are a retarded holdover from 3E), but then you go off the rails and claim that all players find all options boring. Good job!

I don't expect anything perfect from 5E, when it shows up, but I hope that Monte Cook has as little to do with it as possible. His good ideas are good, his bad ideas are more numerous and actively penalize people for making choices that sound good on the surface. This is a game; punishing people who don't understand the system enough is retarded design philosophy.

[Swordslinger]

No, K was right. Monte has plenty of decent ideas, and plenty of terrible ideas, too. What I'm skeptical about is K's comment that good playtesting and editing can turn lead into gold. I mean, it doesn't sound impossible, but it would certainly be the exception, not the rule.

I don't think you can do good things with Monte's ideas because they're flawed at the core. Mearls ideas tend to be good concepts, but he doesn't account for all kinds of possibilities.

Mearl's main problem is that he's lazy, evident by him trying to publish shit like Iron Heroes that's unfinished. Monte's main problem is that he just sucks. About all Monte can do is write decent flavor text.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This isn't rare, either, the perfectly tested RPG will never be made.

Hello, unexcluded middle, how I missed you.

Look, there's some crap that's not really going to be noticed the first go-round. But there's some stuff that's so blatantly obviously broken that it's obvious that they didn't even try. I can forgive 3E D&D multiclassing because it doesn't really start to fuck itself over until around level 6 and in a hazy sort of way Fighter 6 and Bard 6 and Cleric 6 and (Blaster) Wizard 6 are all in the same ballpark. I could also forgive 4E D&D's stupid treasure parcel rules because they aren't that broken with just material from the basic rules. I can forgive 3E D&D feats not performing as advertised because they were a totally experimental system; I can also forgive 4E D&D using its stupid At-Will/Encounter/Daily system because non-grognards really loved Book of Nine Swords.

However, some of the shit the game(s) pushed should've been obvious from the very start. It should have been obvious that blaster spells in 3E D&D do not do enough even with minimal playtesting, since I realized that in my very first game of actual D&D when alongside a sorcerer. It should have been obvious that skill challenges just plain do not goddamn work just by running the advertised encounter in Keep on the Shadowfell. It should have been obvious that the paradigm of 'all-leader party' tore the game in half or that Starlocks are even more nonfunctional than monks or that 4E defenders just plain don't work without DM derping or that people were pissed off at not being able to even start to really multiclass until level 10 or so just from a couple of playtests.

but then you go off the rails and claim that all players find all options boring. Good job!

It's an oversimplification, but yes, at low levels of 4E D&D the options were all boring. Several reasons why.

1.) The weapons didn't actually do anything. Oh, sure, there is/was some crap like Nimble Blade, but the weapons feel homogenous and the choices got pared down even further. And yes, it really is that big of a deal. People, and not just SCA wankers, really get off to comparing weapons and debating whether a greataxe or a scythe is more awesome and all that jazz. And people get sad when they're told that at 1st-3rd level their weapon choices basically are: Greataxe, Bastard Sword, Glaive, or Spiked Chain and that anything else is shooting themselves in the foot. People get mad when they find out that they don't get any control with a glaive out of the box, they can't use any ranged weapon other than a fucking Javelin (if that), that after level 3 they shouldn't use anything but a +3 Proficiency Weapon, and that small characters (halflings) can't use half of the goddamn equipment in the PHB. The fact that no one apparently expressed bewilderment or disappointment after people found out that only Rangers can fight with two weapons showed me that they just plain didn't do playtesting or didn't care.

2.) Not having multiclassing right out of the gate. I jumped the gun about a year ago and said that hybrid classing would be the final nail in 4E D&D's coffin but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it'd be. Regardless that kind of thing would've been really helpful to have in the basic rulebooks. People are not willing to wait more than 5-6 game sessions to play a Fighter / Wizard, they're sure as hell not going to wait 50. When people don't get to play an archetype that was at least nominally supported for 20+ years after a reasonable length of time that pisses people off. And that's if you could even multiclass. Wizard/Anything sure as hell didn't work out of the core rules unless you were a warlock and then who even gives a shit?

3.) Racial segregation. People are willing to put up with hearing that half-orcs can't be wizards but no one but no one likes hearing that only elves can be wizards or only dragonborn can be paladin. That half-ogre thing from Savage Species was incredibly damaging to to the product line's reputation--not because it broke the game but because it monopolized everyone's attention. Andy Collins especially should have remembered that, but he didn't.

4.) The PC roles didn't have any meaning at low level other than 'if you don't have a healbitch then you're fucked'. The difference in damage between a 1st-level rogue or ranger and an out-of-the-gate fighter is seriously about 5 or 6. When 1st-level monsters average 40 hit points and come in packs of 5 or more. The 'controller' role (wizard) is doubly laughable because their spells actually didn't do much in the way of status effects except for sleep maybe and they burned out on them really damn fast. You have to be a mental midget to not notice that a paladin did only about 10 points of damage, tops, to a single enemy in heroic tier when monsters were running around with 80 of them (or MORE) and coming in packs of 5. Or not have done any real playtesting.

5.) Skill shaving. We all know that the skill system of 3E D&D didn't really work, even at low level. However, 4E took peoples' three biggest problems with it (cross-class skills make you fall behind, no one likes playing a retard fighter that can only ride a horsie and climb, no one likes having to watch someone do all of the out-of-combat stuff while they stick thumbs up their ass) and either not fixed it or made it worse. Not only that, people get offended when they're told that there's no skill for building a wagon or sailing a ship. The only fix 4E D&D made was by eliminating skill scaling. And that's before we get into the fail of skill challenges.

They're all minor issues to be sure, but they were peoples' first introduction to the system. When you're playing a lizardman with breasts for a fighter (instead of an elf, like you really wanted but the stats suck) with a longsword because axes suck cock even with the damage expression this low and after you burn through an encounter power that did like 4 extra hit points of damage you spam Tide of Iron which mocks you at how useless it is at this point in the game and then when you FINALLY get a critical hit it does a whopping 1 extra damage because you already rolled a seven before hearing that it's just maximized and then some jackass tells you that you'll never be able to use even Magic Missile... you kind of get pissed off.

[Lago PARANOIA]

An honest playtest system would've really revealed all of those flaws and quickly. Unfortunately they changed too much shit at the last minute so even if they did playtest it they would've had to discard all of their old data. And by that point some of the crap like padded sumo and role meaninglessness could not have been fixed short of vast rewrites.

But the skills (not the challenge)/racial segregation/skill shaving/weapon table/multiclassing problem could've been fixed in a week by amateurs. But they just didn't care.

[PhoneLobster]

So would any game, and it's easy to say that after the fact. Just look at 3E; they had to release an entire updated edition to fix things that should have been noticed in anything like playtesting. And they still rereleased a game where some classes are better by default and where Challenge Rating was a complete joke. This isn't rare, either, the perfectly tested RPG will never be made.

Lago covered the rest but this requires some correction.

So. No, you are just flat out wrong across much of that statement.

1) 3E D&D was, to my knowledge, the most extensively play tested RPG ever designed. I am quiet sure the technique was still lacking, and as I understand it the playtesting was somewhat chaotic, but it was the best we've seen in RPG design so... yeah. WTF man?

2) 3.5 E was NOT released to fix things that "should have been noticed in play testing". It was released to scam some extra book sales and let, was it Andy Collins? it was some crazy asshole anyway, dick around with 3.0, most of it's rather limited "fixes" ranged from unnecessary, to bad, to just plain puzzling.

3) They did indeed release a game where there were still problems. But a great deal of OTHER problems were fixed or avoided and all in all it was a massive step forward from the prior edition in almost all respects. We sure as hell expected more from 4E or even 3.5E than was delivered but 3.0E delivered pretty much everything one might have hoped for considering the era and the history of D&D up to that stage. And a large part of the reason for that was almost certainly the contribution of extensive play testing.

4) The PERFECTLY tested RPG WILL indeed NEVER be made. But that's a totally stupid statement to make and is NOT an argument against play testing nor even an argument allowing you to claim that 4E would not have benefited from play testing or that 3E did not benefit from play testing. The impossibility of perfection is no excuse to fail to strive for adequacy, nor is it an argument against the existence of the adequate.

So there.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Anyway, Frank is absolutely right when he says that the low levels of the game are what most people play and that it's most important to get the playtesting right at this phase of the game.

4E D&D's middle levels play a lot better than the low ones. At the current state of the metagame, a (hybrid) multiclassed character can actually feel like a multiclass character, roles actually mean something again, moderately optimized parties can shave the average combat time down to a much more reasonable 3-4 rounds, people have enough powers not to feel like they're doing the same old shit, and characters have enough shit going for them so they actually feel like a team rather than a blob of stats. I've ran a game that had a warlord, an ardent, a runepriest, a scout, and a battlemind in it and those guys were vicious. It didn't feel anything like stereotypical 4E D&D, they cornered those poor monsters and shredded them to pieces. 2-round combats were the norm if I was running something about their levels.

But you know what? Even though I have had an overall positive experience running mid-level 4E D&D the vast majority of the games that get played are at level 1-3 and that's when the edition is at its worst. I'd rather have a product where only the first 25% of the game was any good than have a product where 50% of the game was any good and 25% of the terribleness was at the start. And since the low levels are generally the easiest parts of the game to playtest there was no excuse for the game turning out so bad.

[Yep]

Look, there's some crap that's not really going to be noticed the first go-round. But there's some stuff that's so blatantly obviously broken that it's obvious that they didn't even try. I can forgive 3E D&D multiclassing because it doesn't really start to fuck itself over until around level 6 and in a hazy sort of way Fighter 6 and Bard 6 and Cleric 6 and (Blaster) Wizard 6 are all in the same ballpark. I could also forgive 4E D&D's stupid treasure parcel rules because they aren't that broken with just material from the basic rules. I can forgive 3E D&D feats not performing as advertised because they were a totally experimental system; I can also forgive 4E D&D using its stupid At-Will/Encounter/Daily system because non-grognards really loved Book of Nine Swords.

.

Bo9S was the best attempt to try and balance martials vs. casters, with the flaw that 3E casters would always be better because Save or Die and Save or Suck spells. Also the A/E/D system is good because it doesn't prevent casters from being cool at the same time as not preventing martials from being cool. This is a game; we don't need stupid fantasy literature focusing around one or the other determining who should innately be cooler.

However, some of the shit the game(s) pushed should've been obvious from the very start. It should have been obvious that blaster spells in 3E D&D do not do enough even with minimal playtesting, since I realized that in my very first game of actual D&D when alongside a sorcerer. It should have been obvious that skill challenges just plain do not goddamn work just by running the advertised encounter in Keep on the Shadowfell. It should have been obvious that the paradigm of 'all-leader party' tore the game in half or that Starlocks are even more nonfunctional than monks or that 4E defenders just plain don't work without DM derping or that people were pissed off at not being able to even start to really multiclass until level 10 or so just from a couple of playtests.

Defenders in 4E work better than defenders pre-4E; there's actually punishment attached to violating their various marks, opposed to "you might take a single attack" from 3E.

It's an oversimplification, but yes, at low levels of 4E D&D the options were all boring. Several reasons why.

Oh, wow, this should be absolutely precious. Maybe to people used to playing casters the options were boring because you couldn't cast Sleep and dominate an encounter, but no, the options aren't boring overall for the majority of people who actually play the game.

1.) The weapons didn't actually do anything. Oh, sure, there is/was some crap like Nimble Blade, but the weapons feel homogenous and the choices got pared down even further. And yes, it really is that big of a deal. People, and not just SCA wankers, really get off to comparing weapons and debating whether a greataxe or a scythe is more awesome and all that jazz. And people get sad when they're told that at 1st-3rd level their weapon choices basically are: Greataxe, Bastard Sword, Glaive, or Spiked Chain and that anything else is shooting themselves in the foot. People get mad when they find out that they don't get any control with a glaive out of the box, they can't use any ranged weapon other than a fucking Javelin (if that), that after level 3 they shouldn't use anything but a +3 Proficiency Weapon, and that small characters (halflings) can't use half of the goddamn equipment in the PHB. The fact that no one apparently expressed bewilderment or disappointment after people found out that only Rangers can fight with two weapons showed me that they just plain didn't do playtesting or didn't care.

So... you're talking about 3E here, right? Because every single problem you mention is worse in 3E than 4E. Also damn, you really do have a problem with Class As Identity, don't you? Your character sheet may say Ranger; your character can say anything they like. Classes in D&D, since 2E introduced splatbook bloat, have not been identity; they've been different ways of classifying very, very slightly different methods of murdering orcs and taking their valuables.

2.) Not having multiclassing right out of the gate. I jumped the gun about a year ago and said that hybrid classing would be the final nail in 4E D&D's coffin but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it'd be. Regardless that kind of thing would've been really helpful to have in the basic rulebooks. People are not willing to wait more than 5-6 game sessions to play a Fighter / Wizard, they're sure as hell not going to wait 50. When people don't get to play an archetype that was at least nominally supported for 20+ years after a reasonable length of time that pisses people off. And that's if you could even multiclass. Wizard/Anything sure as hell didn't work out of the core rules unless you were a warlock and then who even gives a shit?

This is only a slight problem and moreso for people who wanted 4E to be 3E, in which case they wouldn't be happy anyway. Shit, 3E multiclass was just as bad, if not worse, because unless you planned it out ahead of time you were more inept because of Arcane Spell Failure % and other reasons. I don't get this bitch at all.

3.) Racial segregation. People are willing to put up with hearing that half-orcs can't be wizards but no one but no one likes hearing that only elves can be wizards or only dragonborn can be paladin. That half-ogre thing from Savage Species was incredibly damaging to to the product line's reputation--not because it broke the game but because it monopolized everyone's attention. Andy Collins especially should have remembered that, but he didn't.

Wait, what? What are you even saying here? There are no AD&D-esque racial restrictions; the only restrictions are in stats and that's only for minmaxxers to worry about, anyway.

4.) The PC roles didn't have any meaning at low level other than 'if you don't have a healbitch then you're fucked'. The difference in damage between a 1st-level rogue or ranger and an out-of-the-gate fighter is seriously about 5 or 6. When 1st-level monsters average 40 hit points and come in packs of 5 or more. The 'controller' role (wizard) is doubly laughable because their spells actually didn't do much in the way of status effects except for sleep maybe and they burned out on them really damn fast. You have to be a mental midget to not notice that a paladin did only about 10 points of damage, tops, to a single enemy in heroic tier when monsters were running around with 80 of them (or MORE) and coming in packs of 5. Or not have done any real playtesting.

Have... you ever actually played 4E? Like, played it, and not 'played' it with a bunch of other people bent on hating it? I mean, I have a Paladin in an ongoing Pathfinder 4E conversion and he's got +10 static to damage at level 7, because half of that is just his primary stat and that alone means that at level 1 he had an above average of doing 10 points of damage with a longsword. I mean, come on, you don't like 4E, I get that. You don't need to make things up.

5.) Skill shaving. We all know that the skill system of 3E D&D didn't really work, even at low level. However, 4E took peoples' three biggest problems with it (cross-class skills make you fall behind, no one likes playing a retard fighter that can only ride a horsie and climb, no one likes having to watch someone do all of the out-of-combat stuff while they stick thumbs up their ass) and either not fixed it or made it worse. Not only that, people get offended when they're told that there's no skill for building a wagon or sailing a ship. The only fix 4E D&D made was by eliminating skill scaling. And that's before we get into the fail of skill challenges.

Actually, I really like 4E's skill system, though I would prefer ranks still. The problem with 3E is a Rogue had like 9 skills to perform like a real rogue, and so on. There were way, way too many idiotic skills in 3E, also static skill modifiers, as present in the epic level handbook, were just mind-numbingly retarded and just made people aim for those targets because THE RULES SAY I CAN TURN PEOPLE INTO ALLIES AT X DIPLOMACY.

They're all minor issues to be sure, but they were peoples' first introduction to the system. When you're playing a lizardman with breasts for a fighter (instead of an elf, like you really wanted but the stats suck) with a longsword because axes suck cock even with the damage expression this low and after you burn through an encounter power that did like 4 extra hit points of damage you spam Tide of Iron which mocks you at how useless it is at this point in the game and then when you FINALLY get a critical hit it does a whopping 1 extra damage because you already rolled a seven before hearing that it's just maximized and then some jackass tells you that you'll never be able to use even Magic Missile... you kind of get pissed off.

All of your "you get pissed off" scenarios assume that you're used to playing a caster in 3E, though. Or that you expect every game to work like 3E, which is itself kinda silly. D&D is its own system, if you expect it to never change you'll be like shadzar, arguing that THAC0 is perfectly logical and should never ever ever ever be improved upon because you're used to THAC0.

[Psychic Robot]

looks like you just committed the yep fallacy lago

[K]

All of your "you get pissed off" scenarios assume that you're used to playing a caster in 3E, though. Or that you expect every game to work like 3E, which is itself kinda silly. D&D is its own system, if you expect it to never change you'll be like shadzar, arguing that THAC0 is perfectly logical and should never ever ever ever be improved upon because you're used to THAC0.

Yes, expecting that playing 4e is be as fun as 3e is kind of silly.

4e fails to produce a fun evening of play on it's own merits, so comparing it to 3e just muddles the criticism and makes it seem like 3e is responsible for making 4e not fun.

[Username17]

Even 4E would have been about 10 times better with a serious and strict play testing regime.

So would any game, and it's easy to say that after the fact. Just look at 3E; they had to release an entire updated edition to fix things that should have been noticed in anything like playtesting.

First: No they didn't. Any of the "fixes" in 3.5 could have been made without making a new edition out of it. 3.5 was a money grab from the beginning.

Second: 3.5 wasn't a fix for anything important. Frankly, it isn't an overall net fix. Some shit gets moved around, but while 3e has a bunch of playtesters, 3.5 does not. And that is why Andy Collins' revised rules of charging are such a clusterfuck. They don't work at all, which would have been noticed in like five minutes had it been subjected to any playtesters at all. Furthermore, the revised charging rules aren't in there because the charge rules were broken or that people were unhappy with them - but merely because Andy Collins decided that they needed to be more rigidly defined into squares rather than vector based like the original. They end up way more complicated and Ride By Attack no longer does anything at all.

3rd edition is by far the best playtested game of any edition, which is why it is also the most popular in history. It's completely playable and actually pretty balanced for several levels. Which is more than you can say for any other edition before or since.

-Username17

[Psychic Robot]

quote tags

[Bihlbo]

I'll totally agree that 3.5 was a money grab and little else. It should have been a collection of house rules used as a cohesive whole, such as the Conan, Midnight, or M&M stuff.

That said, I would have used much of it, because I do prefer it. I hated that in 3e if you were playing a character who fights with two weapons, you had to come up with a darn good reason not to take one level of ranger. It was just stupid not to - sort of like it was built so that only rangers use two weapons. Also, the skills list in 3e and 3.5 is just ridiculous. No one's going to convince anyone that the skill point you spent on Profession is worth the same as the one you spent on Spot, or hell, even Knowledge (local). Getting rid of nonsense like Innuendo was an excellent idea.

Who cares if it's popular or playtested well? D&D sucks. AD&D did, 3rd edition did, the 3.5 re-launch did, 4th edition did, and now Essentials does too. You have to cram the whole mess of any edition into a box it doesn't fit just to make the game fun. 4e isn't a worse mess of a game, IMO, it's just much harder to cram than the others because the designers don't want you to do that anymore. And so, those of us who are used to ripping out the pages and using them for stuffing in our box-o-fun keep cutting our hands on 4e's metal bits and it seems like a worse game.

Honestly, it's just differently terrible.

[tussock]

I hated that in 3e if you were playing a character who fights with two weapons, you had to come up with a darn good reason not to take one level of ranger. It was just stupid not to - sort of like it was built so that only rangers use two weapons.

Two weapons is Ranger-style, like fighting unarmed and stunning people is Monk-style, despite the generally crappy feat alternatives for both. In AD&D it was just a Ranger trick, in 3.0 it's usually a Ranger trick but can be done otherwise (like so you can wear mithral plate, as a Cleric or Paladin with Fighter dip, or pure Fighter).

Who cares if it's popular or playtested well? D&D sucks.

Bah humbug. Mentzer Basic/Expert/+++ was huge for a very long time, because it was a fix for a fix for a fix for the white box original, with 11 years of playtesting under it's belt. Forgiving the clunky stuff it added (like levels past 14, detailed encumbrance, custom wrestling rules, detailed initiative) without all that playtesting, the core is really solid.

I think if 4dventure had been 3ev3, and 4ssentials had been 3ev4, with as few new subsystems as possible, it would've been a very good game. Polish a turd long enough and it gets really shiny. Instead they started with all new meanings for everything, new scales, new caps, new races, new class structure, whole new spell structure with radically altered effects, took out all the fight-shorteners, ... so now they're just fumbling around like it's 1979 all over again.

[Bihlbo]

... so now they're just fumbling around like it's 1979 all over again.

It's better to be fumbling around like it's 2000 all over again? You can't tell me that a game that inspires people to write documents so massive they call it a Tome just to polish its confusing, squishy turd is a solid game by itself. Sure, it's a good structure of a game, but to make it do what you want a game to do and to prevent it from doing what you want a game not to do you have to take some power tools to it.

I really don't see why writing a few hundred pages of changes for 4e wouldn't accomplish the same thing, so it's hard to be convinced that it's worse. Just bad in a different way.

And probably most unfortunate for everyone, bad in a way that prevents people from legally writing those massive books of fixes. WotC could have done adequate testing, and could have let fans and professionals alike test and revise to improve the game, and instead they decide to go with celebrity makeovers every year, hoping this year the handsome jock with all the money finally asks them out to the prom.

Maybe you think the fat chick who never stops talking about ponies is less annoying than the overdone chick who can't add, but I say they both look the same bent over a chair.

[Username17]

It's better to be fumbling around like it's 2000 all over again? You can't tell me that a game that inspires people to write documents so massive they call it a Tome just to polish its confusing, squishy turd is a solid game by itself. Sure, it's a good structure of a game, but to make it do what you want a game to do and to prevent it from doing what you want a game not to do you have to take some power tools to it.

I really don't see why writing a few hundred pages of changes for 4e wouldn't accomplish the same thing, so it's hard to be convinced that it's worse. Just bad in a different way.

Because 4e's core system is boring. For 3e you have to rewrite the high level effects of various skills because they aren't balanced. For 4e, it doesn't matter whether the effects are balanced because I would rather play Cartman's version of Roshamboh than to interact with the skill system in any way. 3e's skill system has a lot of problems. 4e's skill system doesn't have any good points to start fixing from.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

squishy turds, fat chicks, power tools, etc.

I think you can take your overwrought analogies and shove them up your ass.

The point is that it's easier to iterate on good ideas that are not well-balanced or well-implemented than it is to iterate on bad ideas that aren't very interesting or entertaining. Other than broadly-stated conceptual goals, there's little from 4e worth saving or revising.

[hogarth]

Even 4E would have been about 10 times better with a serious and strict play testing regime.

So would any game, and it's easy to say that after the fact. Just look at 3E; they had to release an entire updated edition to fix things that should have been noticed in anything like playtesting. And they still rereleased a game where some classes are better by default and where Challenge Rating was a complete joke.

What he said.

Does anyone have an example of a game where the second edition fixed most of the problems with the first edition (while keeping new problems to a minimum)? I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm just wondering if anyone has an actual game to point to.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Defenders in 4E work better than defenders pre-4E; there's actually punishment attached to violating their various marks, opposed to "you might take a single attack" from 3E.

Focus, Yep, we're talking about peoples' first impressions to the game.

1.) One of the defenders in the game blatantly do not work as advertised out of the box. It doesn't even pass a sniff test: a paladin does like from 3 to 7 damage. To enemies with 40 hit points out of the box. Secondly, the loss of reach kicked the 'tank' role in the nuts so hard that even with the fighter's class features it's a wash.

2.) The defender role did and does not work with common configurations of play. Even if you could establish a ZoC and get enemies focusing your attacks on you as a fighter... so the fuck what? A level 4 fighter has like 48 hit points and 1 point of AC over a ranger who has 43 hit points. 2 points of AC and 10 hit points over a rogue or warlord who has 38. This difference can eventually make it worth having a fighter over a DPR-multiplier... for a five-encounter workday. Otherwise you're just pissing in the wind and would've been better off with another class.

The fighter only appear(ed) to actually worked because they have high DPR simultaneously with high durability. Which made them unbalanced.

Maybe to people used to playing casters the options were boring because you couldn't cast Sleep and dominate an encounter, but no, the options aren't boring overall for the majority of people who actually play the game.

Dissatisfaction with a product is multifaceted, but when we're talking about a game and something that has only a fraction of the customerbase as before it's pretty safe to say that other people found the game boring. People sure as hell didn't not find it uninteresting as people are willing to put up with frustration as long as the end result is fun.

So... you're talking about 3E here, right? Because every single problem you mention is worse in 3E than 4E.

That's wrong. The weapon system just plain works better in 3.0E D&D. There are facets of it that 3E D&D may do marginally worse than 4E D&D on, but taken as a whole it's a shit sandwich. People don't like axes and hammers being by-and-large a low level hosejob. People don't like the weapons being kludged together. People don't like having to use javelins when (cross)bows are way cooler. Etc..

Also damn, you really do have a problem with Class As Identity, don't you? Your character sheet may say Ranger; your character can say anything they like.

This is only a slight problem and moreso for people who wanted 4E to be 3E, in which case they wouldn't be happy anyway. Shit, 3E multiclass was just as bad, if not worse, because unless you planned it out ahead of time you were more inept because of Arcane Spell Failure % and other reasons. I don't get this bitch at all.

Who gives a shit? People new to the game (which was everybody) don't have much patience for trying to tweak and fudge a paradigm and mechanics to fit the character concept they like. If the average newcomer to the table wants to play a wizard/ranger, they want that shit NOW. They don't want to have to trawl through splatbooks and carefully put together a package and then have to come up with a super-special explanation for quirks of their character.

Now granted if all you have are labels and buzzwords people will notice that there's nothing behind the class, so it's not a substitute. People do and did complain about how multiclassing breaks down really quickly and how the fighter-style classes had nothing going for them--but people don't notice that kind of thing out of the gate. People eventually notice that even a 10% arcane spell failure chance is too risky and makes most of the classic matchups unplayable.

But you know what people will realize right away? A cut in options. People DO notice that they can't even advance in the direction of being a wizard/ranger without some convoluted process they won't complete in less than 4 months. And will get pissed off right away. Especially if that functionality used to be available.

Wait, what? What are you even saying here? There are no AD&D-esque racial restrictions; the only restrictions are in stats and that's only for minmaxxers to worry about, anyway.

No, it is a problem. People may not crunch the numbers to notice that elves had a bunch of advantages that made them the slightly-favored master race for low-level wizards WRT core races, but everyone notices higher and lower numbers. People are willing to take a hit to effectiveness for roleplaying reasons, but trust me, it is a thing that rankles people. Saying that it's just something only min-maxxers care about is tin-eared because it affects a large amount of roleplay and it's something anyone can notice.

Have... you ever actually played 4E? Like, played it, and not 'played' it with a bunch of other people bent on hating it?

What are you, some kind of a fuck? Only douchebags say that someone not enjoying the product didn't 'play' it the right way when they didn't even know how the person used it. I bought the core rule books, I got four other people, and I played several games of it while I was out at sea. I was a cleric for most of those games because no one else wanted to play one. How the fuck else was I supposed to play it?

I mean, I have a Paladin in an ongoing Pathfinder 4E conversion and he's got +10 static to damage at level 7, because half of that is just his primary stat and that alone means that at level 1 he had an above average of doing 10 points of damage with a longsword. I mean, come on, you don't like 4E, I get that. You don't need to make things up.

God, you're a moron.

1.) When I first played 4E D&D in June 2008 none of that shit was available.

2.) MOST PEOPLE PLAY D&D AT LEVEL 1. It's something I don't particularly like, but what are you going to do? It's important for a game to be functional then and there. What the hell are you talking about 'I have a paladin that blah blah blah at level 7'?

There were way, way too many idiotic skills in 3E, also static skill modifiers,

Which doesn't matter to peoples' first impressions. The 3E D&D skill system doesn't work even at low levels due to RNG problems but 4E D&D's skill system has the exact same RNG problems (even at low level) and gave less functionality.

[A Man In Black]

Does anyone have an example of a game where the second edition fixed most of the problems with the first edition (while keeping new problems to a minimum)? I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm just wondering if anyone has an actual game to point to.

Street Fighter II Turbo.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Mutants and Masterminds 2E closed a lot of the weirder loops of 1E and boosted a lot of underpowered options. Granted the power system is still a vanilla kludge of 'I Blast 10 it!' with no real tactical options or decisions but being only able to 'break' a power system by having an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules and even then only by about 25% extra effectiveness is a huge selling point. I still don't like it, the character differences are so meaningless that it feels like Magic Tea Party, but people like that out of Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited so I guess it succeeded.

No one likes MnM 3E though.

[Seerow]

2.) The defender role did and does not work with common configurations of play. Even if you could establish a ZoC and get enemies focusing your attacks on you as a fighter... so the fuck what? A level 4 fighter has like 48 hit points and 1 point of AC over a ranger who has 43 hit points. 2 points of AC and 10 hit points over a rogue or warlord who has 38. This difference can eventually make it worth having a fighter over a DPR-multiplier... for a five-encounter workday. Otherwise you're just pissing in the wind and would've been better off with another class.

My experience with 4e indicated a bigger difference than that. I don't remember exact numbers since it was like 2-3 years ago, but I remember my Warden having like 50% more hit points than anyone else at level 1, and while that initial lead petered off to a lower percentage as time went on, at level 4 it's hardly only a 5 HP difference.

Also: Gear matters. The nice thing with Defender's isn't so much just their staying power, but also their efficiency in taking advantage of healing powers. Having 25% more hit points means 25% higher healing surge values. You typically have a higher base Healing Surge number, and you probably have a higher con for more healing surges.

If you also take feats that improve HSV and Hit Points, or that one necklace that lets you spend an extra healing surge any time you get healed, it adds up to the Defender being a lot more durable. It's not so much about the fact that the unaided defender has a significantly longer time to live (the extra hit points and AC probably translates into about 2 more attacks), it's that it's far more efficient on group resources for him to be hit than anyone else. The Controller gets hit, it's eating up one of his 6 healing surges. The Defender gets hit 2-3 times before a single healing surge is needed, and he has twice as many of them.

If you look at it from the daily perspective, the Defender probably has a total hit points of 2 or even 3 times larger than others if built right, before even considering powers that you have access to to reduce your damage taken, heal yourself without a healing surge, etc.

I mean really, you complain about 4e being boring: How much more boring would it be if the defender could literally sit there and take attacks for the entire combat without any support? How boring would having a healer role be if the heals were never needed? To reemphasize the point in case it got lost in the rambling above: Defenders may only stay up a bit longer than other characters, but they have a substantially better ability to recover from the beating and stay in the fight in the long term.

Maybe you never played a campaign where days lasted long enough or damage incoming was high enough that that was an issue, but we did pretty frequently have to stop cause the Wizard ran out of healing surges until he learned that in 4e he couldn't sit at the front lines with us like a retard. Hell we had a couple scenarios where the entire party ran dry or close to it on surges. So management of that resource is a key part of what the defender role -does-. It'd be nice if more of the effects were innate rather than being feats/items you have to grab, but at least they are there.

[Hieronymous Rex]

The fact that no one apparently expressed bewilderment or disappointment after people found out that only Rangers can fight with two weapons showed me that they just plain didn't do playtesting or didn't care.

I'm making a new thread about this.

Mentzer Basic/Expert/+++ was huge for a very long time, because it was a fix for a fix for a fix for the white box original, with 11 years of playtesting under it's belt.

To nitpick, the "white box" was a the sixth printing; the first printing of OD&D was in a brown box.

[Swordslinger]

The point is that it's easier to iterate on good ideas that are not well-balanced or well-implemented than it is to iterate on bad ideas that aren't very interesting or entertaining. Other than broadly-stated conceptual goals, there's little from 4e worth saving or revising.

It's funny because I feel much the same about 3E.

Most of the spell list is garbage with some spells that are just uber broken, Combat is too deadly, resurrection is too common, the spellcaster favoritism is just plain disgusting, fighters are boring to play, NPC creation is way too tedious, the bonus accumulation system created excessive divergence in all aspects of the game, Temporary ability score modification led to a crazy amount of recalculation whenever you involved it, magic items are boring and just based on stacking small bonuses.

What good concepts came out of 3E that aren't in 4E? Split-Level Multiclassing is the only one that comes to mind. Of course, it would have been nice if that actually worked, but thanks to the vancian crap, you couldn't actually multi any kind of caster effectively, so I can't even give 3E many points for that.

The skill system was terrible, The spell system was terrible, The combat was too deadly and the monsters were pretty bland. 3E was great before you started to master it, then you realized how many holes there were.

[Kaelik]

I love how every single time Sword Slinger talks about 3e he further reinforces the fact that he doesn't actually know anything about 3e.

It's like he's afraid that we will forget his previous ignorance, and suddenly start respecting his opinion, and he wants to make sure that doesn't happen.