The Fearless DM

No, seriously, check it out. 

I find the bile and resentment about 4e mostly idiotic, because - for one thing- it’s mostly just noise (and a lot of it is just vicious and stupid when it doesn’t have to be). The real problems in D&D4 are almost impossible to talk about because they are always overwhelmed with the shrieking of people who are engaged in a pointless cultural struggle. Usually this is about resentment because they are mad at the domination of whatever company is involved, or (more likely, less discussed) that D&D represents the majority of the hobby and not (favorite game or genre). The bottom line is—it’s impossible to actual discuss without the stupid shrieking getting in the way. They can’t get past it. And the thing about that is that shriekers eventually burn themselves out, ask any AD&D player.

But these three questions look carefully chosen:

1. Player Skill over PC skill. Baker admits that the bias was made in favor of PC skill so sthat less charismatic players could play charismatic characters. But then he points out the terrible flaw: many players don’t care what they say or do. They just roll a dice and say “I diplomicize the guy”.

The way I try to handle this is “ok, you have to tell me what you are trying to do/say first” (which, that seems obvious, but people have bad habits.) Also, players try and do an end run from time to time because by the time you get to a description of “the guards are wary of any trickery..” someone throws down a dice and says “I got a 32 on my bluff check..”.

I mean, I will allow trickery. I love trickery. But you have to tell me what you are actually trying to do or say. And don’t roll a thing until I call for it.

But he points it out. This is a thing that takes people out of the game. It has a simple (human DM, not D&D rules) solution, but it is a real design problem. 

The real solution is screw that non-charismatic player. If he wants to be good at diplomacy, he better speak up. In the process, he might improve in real life.

2. MMO Design. I found this one the least interesting. This is a favorite amongst stupid people. “It’s an MMO on paper!”. Over time this has been reduced to talking about character roles in a party.  But at least they addressed it.

By the way, I notice WoW’s prominence has really faded. It’s now free up to level 20, and people are using it almost as like a social platform. This is also certainly true of my favorite MMO (the iconoclastic Guild Wars). Oh, it’s still huge, but it isn’t as culturally significant.

And as WoW draws down in popularity, the criticisms should too. I suspect people are just looking for some hook to hang their resentment on, with that one.

3. What’s the Single Biggest Lesson… I have to agree with this one- they made powers too disorganized and redundant. Addendum: Some of the ones that aren’t redundant should be. This becomes abundantly obvious by the time PHB2 came out. I actually got the 4E playtest books (these are black photocopies spine-bound books) as an LFR admin and I remember my first reaction at 4E’s power structures was just bewilderment. It wasn’t until I used the character builder for the first time (GenCon 2008 when it was in beta) that it became very clear how it was supposed to work. Once you are “in” the game, powers seem like a no-brainer, but when you are new, or trying to build a character from scratch its probably overwhelming. Titling and descriptive text seems to have gotten some peoples goats as well. (Am I the only person in the world who saw flavor text as suggestive and malleable and tried to use it creatively? That can’t be the case..) Essentials solves some of those problems (but then they made the absolutely douchy decision to disallow non-optimized essentials builds in the builder- no tiefling rogues or halfling wizards— showing that someone at WOTC still hasn’t learned a damn thing about letting people make their own choices).

Also here’s how they screwed themselves with Essentials: They tied a much needed  beginner builds  to their revised errata book so that it successfully infuriated everyone. Also, the Hexblade is obviously not a warlock, it’s an alternate swordmage. 

So maybe they are talking about a new edition (or as has been suggested ‘a new  Advanced D&D’ quasi edition. Either way, it was an interesting read.