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PA Comic: Wednesday, Jan 11, 2012 - The Way Forward
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It really depends on the scale of stuff your group buys.
When the group I was DMing for when from 3.5 to 4e we just bought the 3 core rulebooks and I got the campaign setting book. That was it. We also have a DDI sub that my Dad and I shared so that we could use the software. My Dad got the PDFs at some stage, but they are pretty cheap, so we'd print some stuff out too. That's not too much really. However, we had a huge amount of 3.5 rulebooks and campaign books and things like that, so Dad and I were a little sad that we essentially just shelved them as they weren't really applicable to 4e (at least not without a ton of work converting the setting rules and whatnot to 4e), but really not a big deal.
Now a group that a friend of mine plays in, they had a huge amount of 3.5 stuff. Each player had a rulebook, and addon books for their classes, and they had a huge amount of the extra setting source books and stuff like that, and they promptly ended up with the same sort of setup when they eventually went to 4e. I've already heard from him about 5e, and he's actually kinda sad that if they wanted to go to 5e when it's released they will have spent so much on 4e stuff and had it last for a good while less than their 3.5 stuff lasted them. I pointed out they could just stick with 4e, but they like running with the current ruleset because it is the one that will keep being updated by WotC official stuff.
Each to their own really, and I doubt that I personally will ever spend astronomical amounts on D&D stuff, but I can understand if some people ever feel a little bitter about the edition they have spent so much money on no longer recieving updates, especially when it's only been out for a few years.
For me it's both, plus the fact that there are just more interesting games coming out. Eclipse Phase is worth more of my time and money than D&D. So is Colonial Gothic. So were a lot of the WoD2 games (R.I.P. WW. Nevah Forget). WotC doesn't really want to innovate with D&D, and I'm really not blaming them for that. Innovation creates threads like the one we're in, by and large. Too much of it and they will start to lose market support.
Little known fact: For people pre-infected with the "hobby strain" of any particular purchasing virus the the savings throw to resist making a new a new purchase is made = poison, paralysis, or death.
Gold plated stamp holders? Don't mid if I do.
"You can be yodeling bear without spending a dime if you get lucky." -> reVerse
"In the grim darkness of the future, we will all be nurses catering to the whims of terrible old people." -> Hacksaw
"In fact, our whole society will be oriented around caring for one very decrepit, very old man on total life support." -> SKFM
I mean, the first time I met a non-white person was when this Vietnamese kid tried to break my legs but that was entirely fair because he was a centreback, not because he was a subhuman beast in some zoo ->yotes
I wouldn't say that Wizards has done a zero percent job with their online resources
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/blank.aspx?x=dnd/4dnd/gwsheet
this is pretty much as perfect a character sheet you can get for Gamma World, and it's free.
What. No.
All editions of D&D are focused on combat.
4th edition just made combat more balanced and harder to instantly shut down with Broken Ability X.
When 4th came out I decided to learn from my mistake and be more open-minded, despite early warning signs. Truth is I don't like it at all. I don't like miniatures and I don't like needing a physical map.
I liked original better than 1st Edition AD&D, I like 2nd better than both, and 3rd better than all the predecessors. I don't really consider 3.5 that different from 3.0, and I still play 3.0 because I'm cheap and my fellow players that I know don't really seriously min/max in a kind of way that exploits all the alleged faults in the 3.0 rules.
Now, 2nd Edition had some computerized tools that were pretty good for the time, but it should have gotten a lot better, even back then. Their biggest use was looking things up very quickly, which you can do just as well with an indexed pdf today. But I never felt I needed help making a character. Now, in 4th edition, which I do play sometimes so I don't lose my gaming friends, I was offered the use of character generation software and turned it down. I said, "No no, if I'm going to learn how to do this and accept it then I have to do it the hard way to learn how it works, at least once." After a while I produced a 1st level character that they "audited" for me and tore apart - I had completely gotten it all wrong, though they only knew that because they used the software. I felt pretty bad about that since I have been a DM since I was 9 years old, and I'm reasonably sure I'm not retarded. I say when it gets so complicated that you need software it's more like the US Federal Tax Code than a game. Take your TurboTax and shove it.
Nowadays I play White Wolf and 3.0 in good ol' Faerun with my wife. We don't go to cons and don't spend all of our time and money on miniatures. We just play the game.
Making the software web-based isn't all bad if done right. In fact it's brilliant, if done right. Stay away from crap like Flash and Silverlight so it can work on Windows, Mac, Linux, and tablets both Android and iPad and you've got something there. Not everyone's going to buy an MS Surface, but how about a projector, suspended above the table, pointing down?
Anyway, 4th ed sucks. If I wanted to play World of Warcraft I would get on my computer and do so. 4th ed feels like a computer game, which frankly is a step in the wrong direction. But love or hate 4th ed, it just feels way too soon for 5th ed.
Then why, exactly, would you play any edition of Dungeons and Dragons. A game that descended from tabletop wargames.
Hahahahahah you see 4e is WoW because... why.
Tell me why 4e's a video game.
Hint: You can't because it's not and saying so is retarded.
Well, no. It's because people are poor and don't want to not have things they could have but can't because they can't afford them. I think that's a human issue that isn't going away.
I mean, who wouldn't download a car?
I thought the same thing.
Then I realized something.
3.5 lasted 5 years. 3rd lasted 3.
If 4th lasts through 2013 it will have lasted as long as 3.5 did.
Frankly, I think the goal of making everyone happy is rather futile. There are some people who will simply never accept that 3.5 had horrible flaws that rendered it virtually unplayable at higher levels - casters simply go off the rails. Worse, at low levels, there are pretty good odds of you dying horribly through no fault of your own, and even at high levels save or sucks are rampant. Pathfinder fixes none of these issues at all. If you're someone who actually understands the game, mechanically, and LIKES having mechanics, then 3.x is not for you, because you just can't enjoy it anymore due to the fact that you know the system is broken. It causes problems even in groups without powergamers at all, too.
4th edition fixed those problems, and indeed is a much improved play experience. The downside is that high level 4th edition combat takes a long time unless you have players who are actually dedicated to making the game run fast. You can, in fact, have it run incredibly quickly. But most people don't because they simply aren't all johnny on the spot. If you institute, say, a 1 minute-per-turn rule, 4th works fine. But if you don't (and in my experience virtually no group does this) it becomes bogged down over time. And relying on people to self moderate is always a problem; look at how bad 3rd ended up.
I think the real problem is that there is no entry level RPG. 3.x's rules have always been a mess, and while 4th edition is certainly better in many regards, making a new character is still something a new player has to be walked through in my experience. Worse, 4th didn't actually do away with trap choices (there are still ways to make an entirely worthless wizard, for example), making it all the harder for a new player (though this has never not been true of D&D).
I think that a true entry level game would probably be best served by fewer choices at first level, and 1 choice every level up. Or maybe not even HAVE levels. I don't really know.
But I do know that the complexity of D&D drives people away. 4th is simpler than 3rd, and its still intimidating.
Incidentally, regarding the poster who had trouble making a first level 4th edition character: Its no harder than it was in previous editions. You pick:
Your race
Your class
Your ability scores
Your class "path"
Your trained skills (small list) - simpler than 3rd
Your feat (two if you're human)
Two at-will powers (three if you're human)
An encounter power
A daily power
100 gp worth of items
This is pretty much the same list as 3rd edition, except instead of powers, you picked spells. There were easier to build classes, such as the fighter, but on the downside all of the easy to build classes were awful, whereas building something like, say, a wizard, sorcerer, or cleric, was actually worse because the spell list (effectively the power list) was several times larger and had no real guidance.
If you had this much trouble with a 4th edition character, chances are good you were doing it wrong in 3rd edition as well, or you simply don't remember when you had trouble making a 3rd edition character because the last "first time" you did it was a decade ago.
And yes, the idea that 4th edition is suddenly a "miniatures game" is just plain old stupid - did you ever even read the 3rd edition manuals? Don't you remember all those pictures in the PHB showing what squares cones covered? Don't you remember attacks of opportunity?
The fact that you didn't play with minis back in 3rd edition didn't mean the game didn't act as though you were using them, because, let's be honest here - it did. The game was based on 5 foot squares. The only edition in which minis weren't "really" necessary was 2nd edition. Every other edition has assumed their use.
4th is no more combat centric than any other edition was; its just that because the combat is actually interesting now, I suspect a lot of people pay more attention to it. But every edition has been the same way, and 3rd certainly was no exception.
Statistical studies indicate that poverty is actually a direct corrolary to willingness to pirate software, music and movies. In particular, a study by a U. of Delaware professor of Criminology notes that while personal income has a direct relationship to willingness to pirate, the willingness actually increases with personal income, rather than the standard relationship normally found in criminological studies (which normally suggests that poverty increases the likelihood of theft). The survey done for the study used the student population as a focus group.
So yea, poverty may be a motivating factor for some people but it doesn't seem to be a motivating factor for most.
I would like to point out that the Dungeon Masters movie did NOT do an adequate representation of everyone in the movie. I'm Jake Penton, one of the actors in that documentary. The elf chic and I were dating at the time of filming (and no, I'm not the guy in black makeup). The director was requesting her to put on makeup every time to film her, despite her saying that it may display her in a negative light. He wanted to portray Dungeon Masters as these recluses living in their own fantasy world. After filming for a while, he saw that that wasn't the case, and instead of changing his film, he decided to change the subjects.