I hate to be asking this, but can we get an ignore feature? I’d like to have a constructive discussion in the 4e forums but lately they’ve all gotten derailed and sidetracked by an extreme minority of posters who are so vocal and argumentative that it’s been tough to filter them out. I want to continue coming to Paizo.com where I get good ideas for games (and then buy products from the Paizo store), but these past few weeks have been exceedingly unpleasant to do so.
vance wrote:
No one's upset about criticism of 4e, it's just that you're VERY clearly not looking to play the game so the only thing you're doing is complaining about it. Everyone here but you realizes that 4e isn't the right game for you so we're just not understanding why you come back time after time to complain. You've made no effort to discuss. You complain about the game, and when people try to show you how we (and apparently WotC) understand the game you argue. There's been no discussion with you yet. No one's giving 4e a free pass, that's yet another of your blatant misunderstanding of what people are saying.
vance wrote: Actually, a lot of them HAVE been useful for me, in terms of seeing what people ARE getting out of 4E, what direction they want new material to go, etc.. as a designer/writer (albiet an 'amateur' one), the threads really have proven invaluable in that regard. Then why the constant complaining and baiting people into arguments? The tone of your discussion really takes an argumentative posture, and you really don't seem to be making any effort to actually understand what people (including WotC) are saying. You THINK that you are, which just makes this all the more difficult because you're refusing to believe that you are, in any way, contributing to the problem. Does that make sense? I wish we could take this discussion offline (ie private messages). You remind me of me about 10 years ago.
Vance, please just stop and actually read something before you fire off these posts. They make you sound trollish or stupid and I honestly don't think that's your objective here. vance wrote: Is that what we're now being forced into? "If you don't like 4E, shut up and get the hell out?" That's effectively what you're arguing, though you may not realize it. How is that going to be productive in the least? The constant refrain to anyone who dares question the 'obvious greatness' of 4E seems to be 'sod off and die'. That's not what I said. I asked: What are you getting out of these discussions? Please, please, please read and understand. Just once. Really, I've been practically begging you to uncloud your mind here and REALLY understand what someone's saying. Just once.
It hasn't affected me at all. I live in NYC and don't directly spend money on gas, food prices are the same, the NYC housing market is still growing, and I work for a company that's not drastically affected by the economic downturn so my salary continues to go up. If anything, now's the time when I'm going to start thinking about shovelling money into investments while they're all cheap.
tadkil wrote:
I'm in complete agreement with you. I just took this discussion to the next step and basically asked the question: If 4e isn't for you, what are you getting out of posting here? I'm not begrudging anyone their style of play (just the tendency to come to this forum and do nothing but argue and complain). I played D&D without dice all throughout high school. I love that style of play and wished that I had people in NYC that were into it, too. I definitely wouldn't use 4e for that kind of game. It's just not geared for it. It's a totally apples to oranges comparison and seems to be making people angry. I thought 2nd edition sucked. I didn't play it. I went from the BECMI boxed set rules to 3rd edition. It's okay if you skip an edition that doesn't fit your style. I want to discuss and explore 4e, not defend it.
vance wrote:
Are you intentionally misreading posts in order to have something to argue about? It's not a fallacy. It's a game. This isn't a logical puzzle to be solved, it's a game. It's not a simulation of anything, it's a game. It's not a complete description of your character's life, it's a tabletop roleplaying game. 4e provides a lot of rules that apply to the characters on the battle map. Most of the rest is up to the DM. Not sure why you're having such a difficult time handling that. vance wrote:
It's not a circle. You're stuck in a mode of thinking that you seem to be unwilling or unable to break out of, and you're completely failing to even recognize that. You seem to think that 4e needs to bend to your style of play, when clearly that's not ever going to happen.
vance wrote:
No, and no one's ever going to say that you're running your games the wrong way, but maybe this is the wrong place to have these kinds of discussions and that's why you're feeling attacked at times. You've admitted that 4e is going to be very difficult to use to run the kinds of games that you want to run. I think you've been very clear over the past few weeks that you're going in a different direction than 4e is going. That's fine. There are other rulesets and other games out there that are going to fit your style of play very nicely. On the other hand, WotC has been very upfront about the style of play they're writing rules for. I think people are coming here because they want to explore that style of play, the new rules, and (at least for now) see what direction WotC wants to take this thing. It may be time to just admit that you're not going to play 4e because it's not the kind of game you want to run. That's totally fine.
vance wrote:
And I'm saying that a system DOES exist. It's the DM. It's just as consistent as stats. If you don't write things down, yeah you're going to forget them, but that goes for stats as well as DM fiat.
doppelganger wrote:
You guys are funny :) The point remains that there are better uses of a DM's time than statting up NPCs that won't be seen in combat. 4e recognizes this and accounts for it. The 20 minutes that I previously might have used to stat up an NPC (actually, I never would have spent that time on something that's not going to have a direct impact on the game) is something that I'd rather use to flesh out the NPC from a story perspective. The game takes care of itself pretty nicely as long as the DM is willing to make a decision.
vance wrote:
Let me use an example to demonstrate my point: Writing down "Angus is the best smith in town" and trying to get my girlfriend's shirt off takes the same amount of time as statting up a 3.5 NPC, totaling skill ranks, applying ability modifiers, and calculating final modifiers. And when my game needs an NPC who knows how to make armor, I write "Angus knows how to make armor, too" and break out the Barry White, whereas you're adding a level to Angus, giving him more skill ranks, picking a feat, adding one to his STR score, and recalculating all his bonuses. And at the end of the day, we both have Angus the smith who does exactly what our game needs him to do, they're both exactly as internally consistent, they look exactly the same to the players, and I was done in 8 seconds. It's definitely a matter of priorities. I'll take a fun weekend with my girlfriend over statting up NPCs and monsters ten times out of ten and I have a rule system that lets me.
veector wrote:
You're right. I understand the desire to have hard-and-fast rules for things like this but the reality of most games is that "this effect ends at the end of the encounter" is more accurate and useful than "this effect ends after 3 minutes of game time." I promise you that when the size of your group grows, the "3 minutes" is going to lead to more arguments, breaks in verisimilitude (someone will argue that the long conversation that a player has with a captured monster took 1 round = 6 seconds), and overall dragging of the game than the "encounter" duration. You just need that one powergaming rules lawyer to drag the entire night down. If you're looking for detail of the level that you're talking about, maybe 4th edition isn't your game. It's more of a recreational hobby than a simulation engine. I would have had problems with this when I was younger and took the hobby more seriously, but these days I want to get together with my friends, play a hassle-free game, and head home in time to hang out with my girlfriend. Like I said, I definitely understand where you're coming from, I just don't take D&D that seriously after 25 years of playing. 4e is perfect for me because it's streamlined, extremely powerful, and I can spend my weekends drinking with Brazilian girls instead of statting up NPCs.
Per-encounter martial encounters make sense from the standpoint of "it's difficult to pull the same trick twice" during lethal melee combat. In my experience, you can only get away with a trick once per fight before it catches on. From a game standpoint, I don't have the time to get worked up over whether or not per-encounter powers make sense in my fantasy roleplaying game featuring seething pits of evil right outside of town, wizards, raise dead spells, magic item shops, acid breathing dragons, and giants. At the end of the day, the game ends, I go home to my girlfriend, and real life starts.
I've got 10 hours of tribal tattoos on my left arm, both shoulders, and all down my back. It's three different tattoos all done in roughly the same style and they blend together (the third went in between the first two and connected them). They're very nicely hidden by short-sleeved work shirts so none are the wiser at my jobs.
veector wrote: but basing a game mechanic on something that has nothing to do with the way the real world works breaks the suspension of disbelief for me. You are aware that we're discussion a fantasy roleplaying game here, right? If you threw out everything that didn't work the way the real world works, you'd have a very slim set of tools to work with. "Duration: encounter" works just fine from a game standpoint. It's just a formalization of what we've been doing for decades anyway.
Arnim Thayer wrote: So the focus of 4E players is in the role of adventurers. I get that. What about support people such as the scribe and the bowyer and the innkeeper and etc.? Do they no longer exist? As a DM, I like fleshing out my community. But not everyone has class levels. How do you show this? And what about the player that decides to "settle down" and build an inn? Is that it? The motif of the edition is "if the PCs aren't going to fight them, they don't need stats." Seriously, though, statting up the bartender (unless he's an ex-adventurer or something like that) is an exercise in pure DM nerdology (and I use that word affectionately). Why not spend the 5 minutes you would have spent statting up Chet the Blacksmith and write an extra paragraph that makes him a more interesting character? Give him a personality hook, a visual cue, or a secret backstory instead. Something that could springboard an adventure or make him memorable. Fourth edition is just codifying what busy DMs have known for years ... if it's not going to interact with the PCs, you don't need to make it up. To counter the inevitable argument of "how do I know if Chet the Blacksmith is capable of such-and-such?", the answer is "you're the DM. Make a decision."
Tatterdemalion wrote:
You caught me before I edited my post. You're right. You're not going to have Sam Gamgee in 4e. That style of play never resonated with me or with anyone else I gamed with, so it's not really a net loss to me. I realize that there ARE, in fact, gamers out there who take a more realistic approach to their gaming and 4e is probably not their game, although they certainly seem to have a lot to say about it.
Tatterdemalion wrote:
It was also like this in 3e. And 2nd edition. And 1st edition. And the basic rule set. It's been codified into the rules since the introduction of "Normal Man" into the monster list back in about 1975. PCs have ALWAYS been a cut above everyone else in the core rules. I'll definitely concede that, in 4th edition, the PCs start off orders of magnitude more powerful than "normal people." That's pretty clear. It's a larger jump between "PC and NPC" than ever before (excepting the Marvel Super Heroes Game, of course :))
jocundthejolly wrote: How can a 1st level character be an 'accomplished battle leader?' A 1st level character, isn't an accomplished anything. While I'm at it, the first paragraph is a great example of the poor quality of the writing in the PHB. In previous editions of D&D, 1st level characters were a cut above the rest. The DMG used to say that a 1st level fighter was the equivalent of an NCO-style sergeant. Warlords being an accomplished battle leader at 1st level is not really out-of-context for the game as it's been played for the past 30 years, and it gets even more appropriate given the power level at 1st level. I'll give you that it could be written better. You can skip all the text and still know how to play the game.
Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:
Golarion has enough people in it's population centers to justify just about anything you want. There's really no reason for there to be more, from a game perspective, except in a few rare occasions. If every city is a metropolis it makes these massive population centers feel a little less special. Golarion cities feel like there could be a dungeon right outside of them, so they really have lots of room to do whatever you want with them. That's just my opinion. I'm not saying that I think it's the only way. I'm just looking to run a good game and I don't think that the magnitude of the population centers (in either direction) is really going to stand in the way of that. I think a lot of it comes down to the kind of games you want to run.
JohnBiles wrote: (The known world in general is underpopulated) Compared to real world population numbers, I'm sure it is. We all have things that we nerd about and medieval demographics isn't my thing so I'll happily defer to someone who's into that. For a 4e POL-style adventure setting, maybe the numbers are a little high. The numbers themselves aren't really all that important. What's important is that there's lots of room to adventure, even in civilized areas like Thyatis and Alphatia. There needs to be room for ruins, dungeons, hidden temples, orc tribes, giants, and dragons. I think the "sweet spot" in population levels is relatively close to Golarion levels. I think Korvosa has only about 18,000 people and it's the 2nd biggest city in the region. Specularum itself has about 3 times that with Darokin City and Thyatis City exceeding that number by an order of magnitude. That's my thought. I'm not a historian, I'm just thinking about running good games.
Snorter wrote: That's my memories of Mystara, in all its stupid goofyness, and I don't recall ever stopping to wonder how many pecks of barley are in a bushel (or is it the other way round?), or how many pairs of pants the local peasantry will wear out in their downtrodden short lives, because it was simply irrelevant to us. Anyone who wanted that sort of realism wouldn't have been playing Mystara, or indeed, D&D, at all, they'd have been playing Harn, or Chivalry and Sorcery, or some other chin-stroking game of resource-management. I think Mystara (via the companion and masters sets and the Voyage of the Princess Ark articles) had the most sophisticated resource-management system of any D&D setting (including Birthright). Bruce Heard was a maniac for that stuff and was really good at coming up with these kinds of mechanics. On the Mystara Mailing List, he also iterated through a number of spreadsheets to help support this style of play (he had a few version of a dominion management sheet and another one for the pricing of buildings).
Mystara's wackiness actually fits in well with 4e and some of its conceits. It's not difficult to fit most of the Known World countries into a POL framework (Thyatis and Alphatia being notable exceptions, but if you drop their population figures down by a factor of 5 or so it's more manageable), which would allow for adjacent cultures to undergo very different development tracks. At this point, my "project plan" for Mystara 4e is to create a few 4e adventures set in iconic Mystaran locations (Threshold, Isle of Dread, etc) and wait to see what the Forgotten Realms campaign setting is like so that I have a template for the rest of the project. I'd really like to do some things to show why Mystara is a viable setting for 4e's cinematic style of play. Earthshaker HAS to be in there somewhere!
Michael Donovan wrote:
It looks like I'll be DMing our first 4e campaign. I'm really looking forward to the tactical options that open up in 4e. Third edition was starting to show its warts and our whole group is looking to move to the new edition. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I run episodic campaigns with no connections between the adventures, I'm just saying that I don't really want to think about to whom the local villagers sell their chickens.
Michael Donovan wrote: POL is doomed in that it cannot be permanent - though it may be repeated. It is but a single phase in the civilization building/destruction cycle of the campaign world. Yeah. You're totally right in that it doesn't stand up to any kind of logical analysis. I used to think hard about my D&D campaign settings, but now I've got a job that takes up a lot of my mental energy, a girlfriend that takes up the rest, and my hobbies get whatever's left over. I think 4e really boils down to the encounter being the unit of currency. The game is set up to maximize the possibilities for encounters. Character creation (ie, pre-encounter prep) has been pared down and campaign detail (ie, between-encounter material) has been deemphasized to spend more time in the actual encounters. We're winding down our last 3.5 campaign and I'm excited about jumping into 4e with both feet.
The Red Death wrote: Mystara has a very old school feel. Its blatant fantasy, rich colors, almost caricatural societies, give it a sort of paradoxical authenticity that's kind of hard to explain. This has a lot to do with the actual product design, providing the "right" information for you to run games and "see" what type of people/places the authors were talking about. I agree that the Gazetteer lines were awesome. I don't think they've been topped yet, from a pure RPG-support perspective. It is such a vibrant setting.
The Red Death wrote:
I would LOVE to see a professionally done 4e Mystara sourcebook. Even if they changed the world around (like they did with Forgotten Realms), there would still be enough cool stuff in there to run the setting however you wanted, given how much detail there is in previously published products. Some settings are like that.
Horus wrote:
My thoughts on these were to use the Dragonborn pretty much as written in the 4e rules ... rare wandering mercenaries. If I needed a Dragonborn homeland, I was thinking the Wyrmsteeth Range which is described as being riddled with dragon lairs. For Tieflings, well, their flavor text basically hinges on them being former humans who allowed their empire to fall into devil worship and was wiped out because of it. That sounds very closely aligned to Mystara's Nithian empire, which was wiped out by the Immortals for following the teachings of Thanatos (or some other evil Immortal). That sounds close enough for me.
WelbyBumpus wrote:
Actually that works out quite nicely. One of the longterm effects of the draining of the Radiance was a reduction in the amount of magic in the world. Wizards might get less powerful.
Horus wrote: Where do you plan on setting your 4E game? When I first read about the POL concept, I immediately thought of Mystara. It's early incarnation was a very POL-style setting although it eventually went in a wildly different direction. However, it's very detailed with lots of strong ideas from TSR products and the fan community alike. It's also broad enough that you can have just about any style of adventure that you like.
vance wrote:
No, the whole point of posting was to point out that you largely brought this on yourself. I'm not a victim of anything. You came here to a forum that had largely quieted down and starting flinging around wild, inaccurate, emotional statements and then shouted down anyone that disagreed with you. Someone then called you out for that behavior and now you're acting like there's no connection between these two events and that you're the victim of internet drama. I apologize if this is offending you, but you're coming here and stirring the pot. You're doing so under a wafer-thin veil of having a discussion, but your discussion points are always loaded. I'm trying to be civil here. You've got some valid ideas and some valid points, and a quick read through the history of the boards might present some effective ways to present them (and would also help review which ones have been discussed before, which ones are new, and which ones have been driven into the ground).
KaeYoss wrote:
Fair enough. I figured you had a reason for your stance. If Paizo had (likely correctly) decided that the magazines were not the way of the future for them, would you have as negative a feeling towards them as you have towards WotC? Looking at it another way, did WotC do Paizo a favor?
KaeYoss wrote: That would be relevant if Paizo said "well, those magazines don't make us enough money, so we're sorry but we have to cancel". But they didn't. wizards said: "We don't want them to publish those magazines" and pulled the plug. It's not as if wizards runs any risk of losing money if the magazines tank. They get paid for their license and Paizo is taking all the risks. I don't know if you've listened to the number of podcasts where Paizo employees have said that, once they got over the initial shock and confusion about what to do once the Dragon and Dungeon licenses weren't renewed (they also talk repeatedly about how accommodating WotC was and how WotC let them finish out the Savage Tide), they realized that they were in better shape. They realized that the magazine business was in decline and found Pathfinder as a way to build a consistently growing revenue stream and they could do it exactly how they wanted to do it. Go ahead and ask Paizo whether they'd rather be doing Pathfinder or Dungeon Magazine. Now, before you dismiss this as irrelevant, really think about it. You definitely seem like a smart person, so I know you'll be able to look at the situation critically. WotC isn't a bunch of evil jerks, they're probably English Lit majors trying to run a business (not picking on English Lit majors, just saying that it doesn't really prepare you for the realities of the corporate world). When viewed from that lens, a lot of the things we've seen are probably attributable to the fact that these guys are in WAY over their heads. They managed to develop and push out a surprisingly streamlined and elegant game (again, think about it before you post and put aside your feelings for WotC as a company and all the little mistakes you think they made and really look at the 4e GAME) even though a lot of their other projects have fallen a little flat (I'm looking at YOU DDI). If your concern is REALLY for Paizo, I think you'll have to admit that they're much better off now. They've said so repeatedly in podcasts and I think they have the best insight into their own business. They've got an extremely loyal fanbase, enough products to justify their own existence, and they basically get to write D&D stuff ALL DAY. Their happiness shows in their work, both the printed work and their online presence.
Charles Evans 25 wrote:
I think, at the end of the day, they knew they were working on D&D, which isn't really ever going to be trendy or fashionable. I think it's pretty clear that they were shooting for the most playable game they could create. I don't see much that tries to be trendy.
vance wrote:
Reading your posts makes me feel like I got in a Delorean that came standard with a flux capacitor and went back in time to April.
Tharen the Damned wrote:
You're right. I believe that the next adventure from WotC is coming out soon, so we'll see whether they start getting better or not. I hope they do.
Tharen the Damned wrote:
I recognize that they have access to freelancers, however WotC has a pretty bad track record when it comes to their adventure writing skills. I don't think they could take a Logue document and edit it down to an adventure as tight as Paizo's. I also don't think they've got the skillset to manage the coordination of 18 consecutive adventures. Even Paizo realized that 12 was too many and cut their APs down to 6.
vance wrote:
I think a lot of people ceded the point months ago and that's why you're not getting much traction talking about it. We've had this discussion, right here on this messageboard, probably a dozen times by now. It's a divisive issue because of the connotations attached to WoW (again, this was all months ago) and people kind of dropped it because the discussion never ended up anywhere other than in all caps with the occasional timeout issued by Paizo. Which then launched huge arguments about censorship. Which led to more timeouts. Which led to discussions about board policy and caused Paizo staffers to spend more time moderating messageboards than writing D&D adventures. This is just a road that most of us have been down before and it doesn't lead anywhere productive.
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