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[Roleplaying] 4e D&D
Sep. 23rd, 2008 09:11 amThere's a scene in Waynes World in which Garth, presented with an unusual new technological device, cries "We fear change" and smashes it with a hammer. I've never seen a better depiction of the reality of the geek mindset. That quintessence de geek; that deciding that this is your thing and it's the best and change can only, only make things worse.
I've seen this a lot. The new Dr. Who was never going to be as good as the Tom Baker era. The new Battlestar Galactica could never live up to its illustrious 80's predecessor. The d20 system would kill gaming. The Star Wars prequels were not going to be as good as the original trilogy.
Okay, poor example there.
I'd seen and read a lot about 4th ed D&D before I played it and the most repeated criticism was that it was a re-writing to appeal to the WoW generation. The structure of the game had been redesigned so that all party members could act in every scene - no more first-level wizards casting their one spell and having to wait until tomorrow to do it again. As a concept I could see the point, so I was curious enough to play the demo at GenCon.
When the designers of Magic: The Gathering sat down to create their game in the early 1990's, they did some quite impressive number-crunching to make the game balance fairly; they worked out how powerful each card should be and how frequent each card should be based upon its power. They even did the sums on how fast someone would increase the overall power of their pack by buying boosters and additional full packs. Mathematically speaking, it was as fair as they could make it in order to make the real test of the game one of skill. Then they promptly undid all this when the game was successful and they rushed out all kinds of booster packs with wildly over- or underpowered cards to satisfy demands. The same happened with the original V:TM; a core game built around game balance and RP experience being swallowed by book after book of ridiculous superpowers.
The D&D 4e combat system feels very like these early iterations of those games. It's obvious that the combat system has been designed with an eye to the large raid groups from MMORPGs and the fact that everyone has a role within those groups at all times, and it's obvious that a massive amount of time and effort has been expended in making each class and race balance completely so nobody ever feels left out. In short, the combat rules are a brilliantly designed small-unit skirmish system.
However, it loses several things in the process. Firstly, where 3.5 combat was a solid generic skirmish system which could be ported relatively easily to pretty much any non-gunpower small unit milieu, D&D 4e will, as far as I can see, only work within the generic fantasoworld that the game designers have built it around. Magic is such an integral part of the system and the races that I'm not sure whether the system could be used to, say, run a short fight between two crews of vikings - as 3.5 could do easily - unless a few of those vikings happened to be half-dragon sorcerors. By expanding the roles of the character classes, the designers have simultaneously reduced the scope of the game. One of the strengths of D&D, and a major reason I think it has maintained such market dominance, is that it was highly flexible to genre. 4e is much less so. I think this will give it much more mass-market appeal to a generation of gamers raised getting aggro from mobs, but there's going to be a collective outcry of "We fear change!" from the people who remember the original 1970's booklets.
Secondly, something it loses as a result of this redesign of focus is any real sense of immediate threat; a recent edition of KODT ran a statistical analysis of one 1st lvl fighter vs. some goblins, and how many goblins that fighter might expect to kill before being brought down himself - the results were something like:
1e - 2 goblins
2e - 4 goblins
3e - 7 goblins
4e - 17 goblins.
If anything, it's the goblins I feel sorry for; they've gone from being terrible creatures of the night which Germanic peasants lit fires against in the depths of winter to being so much wheat before the scythe in a little under 300 years.
This power escalation in the game design means that during play there seemed no fear or danger to my character and, as a result, little enough drama. At no point whatsoever did I feel my character any any sort of danger of even taking much damage, never mind actual death, and whilst I'm usually a big fan of immediate and total gratification in all ways I can see this just getting boring after a while. All the game really needs now is respawn points to overcome the minimal possibility of death and the WoW experience will have been fully recreated.
Finally, the strict maths of character progress and power increase and the structuring the the game encounter system around that have changed the dynamic of the game considerably. The computer game Oblivion (itself very much a product of the D&D playing generation) uses a system whereby the monsters your character meets automatically scale in power to always be a threat to you, no matter how weak or tough your character may be - so a skeleton met at 1st or 10th level will always be, relatively speaking, as tough. 4e scales encounters in a similar way to this which does start to beg the question - what's the point in having power levels at all? If a 1st level fighter can kill 17 goblins and a 10th level fighter can kill 17 giants which are specifically designed to be of equal relative toughness with the same ease, then it seems to me that something of the magic (and the point) of getting your level has been lost along with some of the mystery - if I know I'm mathematically as powerful as 17 goblins, then an encounter with 5 of them isn't going to worry me much as a lot of luck has vanished from the system.
It might sound like I'm criticising the game; I'm not. The design work is brilliant and the engine ticks over like a well-oiled machine. However, I think the design decisions made to try and attract a new market from different media will alienate a lot of the traditional gaming market. Not necessarily a bad thing, as the people within the trad gaming market will follow one of two routes - they'll either buy the game or launch lengthy screeds on the internet about how D&D is a rubbish game and only luzrs play it and Dogs in the Vineyard is so much better and how the 3 people who ever bothered playing it would agree (a conversation I have actually had, being cornered and lectured at in the bar at Dragonmeet).
That would have happened anyway, whatever design decisions were made within the game.
This said, it's probably not a game I'll run as I'm not sure it matches my style of thinking or play. However, with luck it will attract the new market it has been designed to appeal to. After all, what's the RP community without a new generation of n00bs for fatbeards to belittle and alienate to make sure they won't stick around?
I've seen this a lot. The new Dr. Who was never going to be as good as the Tom Baker era. The new Battlestar Galactica could never live up to its illustrious 80's predecessor. The d20 system would kill gaming. The Star Wars prequels were not going to be as good as the original trilogy.
Okay, poor example there.
I'd seen and read a lot about 4th ed D&D before I played it and the most repeated criticism was that it was a re-writing to appeal to the WoW generation. The structure of the game had been redesigned so that all party members could act in every scene - no more first-level wizards casting their one spell and having to wait until tomorrow to do it again. As a concept I could see the point, so I was curious enough to play the demo at GenCon.
When the designers of Magic: The Gathering sat down to create their game in the early 1990's, they did some quite impressive number-crunching to make the game balance fairly; they worked out how powerful each card should be and how frequent each card should be based upon its power. They even did the sums on how fast someone would increase the overall power of their pack by buying boosters and additional full packs. Mathematically speaking, it was as fair as they could make it in order to make the real test of the game one of skill. Then they promptly undid all this when the game was successful and they rushed out all kinds of booster packs with wildly over- or underpowered cards to satisfy demands. The same happened with the original V:TM; a core game built around game balance and RP experience being swallowed by book after book of ridiculous superpowers.
The D&D 4e combat system feels very like these early iterations of those games. It's obvious that the combat system has been designed with an eye to the large raid groups from MMORPGs and the fact that everyone has a role within those groups at all times, and it's obvious that a massive amount of time and effort has been expended in making each class and race balance completely so nobody ever feels left out. In short, the combat rules are a brilliantly designed small-unit skirmish system.
However, it loses several things in the process. Firstly, where 3.5 combat was a solid generic skirmish system which could be ported relatively easily to pretty much any non-gunpower small unit milieu, D&D 4e will, as far as I can see, only work within the generic fantasoworld that the game designers have built it around. Magic is such an integral part of the system and the races that I'm not sure whether the system could be used to, say, run a short fight between two crews of vikings - as 3.5 could do easily - unless a few of those vikings happened to be half-dragon sorcerors. By expanding the roles of the character classes, the designers have simultaneously reduced the scope of the game. One of the strengths of D&D, and a major reason I think it has maintained such market dominance, is that it was highly flexible to genre. 4e is much less so. I think this will give it much more mass-market appeal to a generation of gamers raised getting aggro from mobs, but there's going to be a collective outcry of "We fear change!" from the people who remember the original 1970's booklets.
Secondly, something it loses as a result of this redesign of focus is any real sense of immediate threat; a recent edition of KODT ran a statistical analysis of one 1st lvl fighter vs. some goblins, and how many goblins that fighter might expect to kill before being brought down himself - the results were something like:
1e - 2 goblins
2e - 4 goblins
3e - 7 goblins
4e - 17 goblins.
If anything, it's the goblins I feel sorry for; they've gone from being terrible creatures of the night which Germanic peasants lit fires against in the depths of winter to being so much wheat before the scythe in a little under 300 years.
This power escalation in the game design means that during play there seemed no fear or danger to my character and, as a result, little enough drama. At no point whatsoever did I feel my character any any sort of danger of even taking much damage, never mind actual death, and whilst I'm usually a big fan of immediate and total gratification in all ways I can see this just getting boring after a while. All the game really needs now is respawn points to overcome the minimal possibility of death and the WoW experience will have been fully recreated.
Finally, the strict maths of character progress and power increase and the structuring the the game encounter system around that have changed the dynamic of the game considerably. The computer game Oblivion (itself very much a product of the D&D playing generation) uses a system whereby the monsters your character meets automatically scale in power to always be a threat to you, no matter how weak or tough your character may be - so a skeleton met at 1st or 10th level will always be, relatively speaking, as tough. 4e scales encounters in a similar way to this which does start to beg the question - what's the point in having power levels at all? If a 1st level fighter can kill 17 goblins and a 10th level fighter can kill 17 giants which are specifically designed to be of equal relative toughness with the same ease, then it seems to me that something of the magic (and the point) of getting your level has been lost along with some of the mystery - if I know I'm mathematically as powerful as 17 goblins, then an encounter with 5 of them isn't going to worry me much as a lot of luck has vanished from the system.
It might sound like I'm criticising the game; I'm not. The design work is brilliant and the engine ticks over like a well-oiled machine. However, I think the design decisions made to try and attract a new market from different media will alienate a lot of the traditional gaming market. Not necessarily a bad thing, as the people within the trad gaming market will follow one of two routes - they'll either buy the game or launch lengthy screeds on the internet about how D&D is a rubbish game and only luzrs play it and Dogs in the Vineyard is so much better and how the 3 people who ever bothered playing it would agree (a conversation I have actually had, being cornered and lectured at in the bar at Dragonmeet).
That would have happened anyway, whatever design decisions were made within the game.
This said, it's probably not a game I'll run as I'm not sure it matches my style of thinking or play. However, with luck it will attract the new market it has been designed to appeal to. After all, what's the RP community without a new generation of n00bs for fatbeards to belittle and alienate to make sure they won't stick around?
