Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;965903Really?  With a few exceptions the ones I've run into were pretty cool.  I mean sure - they tend to prefer Pathfinder - but I can't remember any of them being jerks/pretentious about it.

The guys behind both the Pathfinder Society and the Adventurer's Guild are total jerks to anyone not in their Organized Play groups around where I live.

Quote from: jeff37923;965915The guys behind both the Pathfinder Society and the Adventurer's Guild are total jerks to anyone not in their Organized Play groups around where I live.

That sucks.  Though I mostly interact with them at Cons.  Plus - I think that a store owner is heavily involved around here - so he has reasons to keep people happy.  Or it could just be classic 'Midwestern Nice' .

Quote from: jeff37923;965773I know he wasn't the owner, just an employee. However, you'd think that anyone working there would have enough presence of mind to not talk a customer out of a sale.

Ypu'd be VERY surprised how often this happens across the board. Art, media, games, retail, you name it theres at least one jerk out there who has to ruin things.

The thing to keep in mind is that these slugs are a rarity. Sometimes it REALLY doesnt feel that way. But they are overall the exception, not the norm.

Quilting store? check (by the owner.)
Knitting store? check (by the owner.)
Book store? check (by the owner.)
Department store? check twice.
Restaurant? check.
Movie store? check (by the owner.)
Artists? check, check, check, check ad nausium.
Publishers? check and check

and so on. That is though over a span of decades and several states.

And a little secret. Ever notice how in some game shops the floor staff REALLY push Warhammer? And yet all but ignore older players? That is a company policy and the staff has to be in your face pushing the product or they risk losing their job. (They will lose it anyhow but they dont know that. The other company policy is to come up with an excuse to get rid of staff before they have worked a certain amount of time. joy huh?)

They arent being rude on purpose (usally). They are just under the GW gun.

Quote from: cranebump;965727That's certainly what it seemed like to me. I know I didn't bother with pogs before 4E.

My first D&D thing was that Easy to Master Black Box with Zanzer Tem's dungeon. Had some minis and whatever you call those paper minis that you fold into triangles. I used minis to a point in 2nd Edition (had a collection of I think Ral Partha minis), but didn't really get into them until 3rd Edition what with the pre-painted stuff. Now I got plastic bins brimming with them and Dwarven Forge tiles because my kids just love them.

Quote from: antiochcow;965942My first D&D thing was that Easy to Master Black Box with Zanzer Tem's dungeon. Had some minis and whatever you call those paper minis that you fold into triangles. I used minis to a point in 2nd Edition (had a collection of I think Ral Partha minis), but didn't really get into them until 3rd Edition what with the pre-painted stuff. Now I got plastic bins brimming with them and Dwarven Forge tiles because my kids just love them.

My players like the visuals, so we use some form of them. But I just won't buy a ton of the actuals because I'm neither a painter, nor collector of such things (and have pared down a great deal on "stuff" of late). I now just use beads and buttons and other tokens, so much so that I started introducing each session as another installment of "Button Quest.":-)

Quote from: Batman;965865I guess the point is that even when the devs started the roll out of the edition through playtests you knew that the direction of the game wasn't something you were going to waste your time on. The hype and all that was plain as day to see in the form of free material. You had the option to argue for or against certain things and there was some give and take in that regard. I wish there was a Damage on a Miss for Reaper-style characters and I'm sure there are people who wish Paladins were required to be Lawful Good by default. Neither side got exactly what they wanted but I think the majority feel it's close enough.

I'm not convinced that's true, but it's also beside my point. Which is simply that the big compromise that is 5e didn't involve some of us in the negotiations in any meaningful sense. Which is fine, but it also means that "at least we knew what we were getting" is worth less than nothing to us, when free intro pdfs are possible with or without public playtesting.

Quote from: Voros;965909That seems like common sense. You can't start design without clear idea of what you want to achieve. You'd use surveying to track how successful you are in achieving that goal but to try and design a game based purely on player feedback would be a fool's errand as the amount of signal to noise and people claiming they want things they don't actually want, etc would produce a trainwreck of a game.

Oh, I wouldn't argue that any game should be designed by public forum; in fact that's kinda my point. This contrast between 4e's 100% dev-directed development and 5e's pseudo-democratic development often comes up in these sorts of threads, and while it seems to be a great marketing strategy to get fans engaged and excited about the eventual product, it's also a meaningless contrast for the purpose of a game's general form. From where I'm sitting I'd rather have a crack dev team give us a new and refined 4e, or a carefully rethought 3e, than an edition that has nothing that interests me, no matter how much public input may have made it into the dev process.

After all, no edition had much if any public playtesting until 5e, and surely that doesn't change much at all about how fans feel about them.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;965880Once a brand is established, you really can't change it too much, or you fail to fulfill basic consumer expectations

True, and I'll add an important detail: Once a brand is established, you really can't change it too much at one time, or you fail to fulfill basic consumer expectations.

We see this in games, and in other aspects of life, though it's hard to quantify: People in general have a desire for the familiar, obviously varying from person to person, so we tend not to like dramatic change all at once. (Unless self-interest is involved, of course.) But we also want novelty, so we can accept a lot of change over a sufficiently long period of time. See Apple, with all of its iThis and iThat, how Coke went from a health tonic to a paint-stripping treat, and how various aspects of D&D have changed dramatically from OD&D to 5e. If D&D is still around in for its 100th birthday, it may look very much like 4e and be universally accepted as 'what D&D is,' for all we know.

More likely it'll be an actual [VR] MMORPG by then, though.

Quote from: Tequila Sunrise;966065Oh, I wouldn't argue that any game should be designed by public forum; in fact that's kinda my point. This contrast between 4e's 100% dev-directed development and 5e's pseudo-democratic development often comes up in these sorts of threads, and while it seems to be a great marketing strategy to get fans engaged and excited about the eventual product, it's also a meaningless contrast for the purpose of a game's general form. From where I'm sitting I'd rather have a crack dev team give us a new and refined 4e, or a carefully rethought 3e, than an edition that has nothing that interests me, no matter how much public input may have made it into the dev process.

I'm not sure a carefully rethought 3e would look much different from 5e. The good ideas from 3e are still there; the bad ideas are mostly gone.

QuoteAfter all, no edition had much if any public playtesting until 5e, and surely that doesn't change much at all about how fans feel about them.

AD&D 1e had incomprehensible systems in it. 2e was laden down with ill-thought, almost completely untested ideas, especially as the supplements expanded. 3rd edition was riddled with game-breaking problems because so few people had tested the game. Somehow, in the development of 4e, they'd managed to overlook what might happen if you don't have all damn day to play a game, and somehow missed that its design would shock and horrify half the potential customers.  Comprehensive testing & refinement is an essential part of good product design, and it really shows with 5e.

As cool as some of the stuff in the old editions is, it's really hard for me to go play anything except 0e or Basic. 4e's only game-killing design problem is everything takes too friggin' long, which can be fixed with quick hacks to monster HP and damage. But I wouldn't run it. I'd gladly run BECMI.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;966123As cool as some of the stuff in the old editions is, it's really hard for me to go play anything except 0e or Basic. 4e's only game-killing design problem is everything takes too friggin' long, which can be fixed with quick hacks to monster HP and damage. But I wouldn't run it. I'd gladly run BECMI.

I found that most of our 4e combats takes about as long as our 3e combats. We're currently running Anauroch: Empire of Shade, a 3.5 adventure, and the party is approx. 15th level (two 16 lv. chars and 2 14 lv. chars) yet combat runs about 30 to 45 min depending on what they're facing. This past week they were able to fight through just 2 1/2 encounters. Now the enemies were Beholders and Phaerimms (floating conical magical monsters who cast spells) but still, in a game that was about 4 hours long it makes it feel that combat took up the majority of the time. 4e's combats take us roughly the same time. 5e, by contrast, doesn't take as much time but I haven't had the opportunity to play in higher level games except for a Tomb of Horror's 5e game where the PCs were 10th level.

Quote from: Tequila Sunrise;966065From where I'm sitting I'd rather have a crack dev team give us a new and refined 4e

This is a very valid point. What would 4e evolve into if they were to refine it? What changes would you like to see, aside from better math that is? Personally I'd love to see more variations on classes. Instead of pegging them each into a single-defined role I thought it would be far better to change their role based on in-class options provided. For example a Paladin in 4e is simply a Defender that can kinda branch into a Leader or Striker role but they're always a Defender. I'd love to have it so they could fit either of those 3 roles better and simply lose the Defender roll altogether. Same with the Wizard, which is almost always a "Controller" in D&D but I'd love to have a sort of Abjurer-style Wizard who wears mage armor and "defends" like a Fighter.

Roles have always been prevalent in D&D, even without being defined with specific features that 4e did. But I've always found that to be rather inflexible as a system. 4e, as it's very much power based, would be an excellent platform to allow more variation in terms of what each class can do to provide different play styles.  

Quote from: Tequila Sunrise;966065a carefully rethought 3e

Isn't that what Pathfinder is? :rolleyes: But again I agree. 3e is pretty bloated with loads of issues that can't simply be patched. I give credit to Paizo for trying but their house ruled 3.5 isn't much better mechanically speaking. Having played 5e though I think that's the best we can get from a "rethought" 3e honestly. It has all the tell-tale signs of 3e such as how multiclassing works and lower numbers earlier on (3e unfortuanatley ramps those numbers up exponentially to ridiculous heights) and has a lot of leeway when it comes to character creation and customization (class skills, backgrounds, feats, sub-paths for classes). When looking at them side-by-side I really can't see what 3e does "better" than 5e? Prestige Classes were just different options players picked to give their character more mechanical depth and power, usually with little regard to the setting as a whole. It doesn't matter that Greyhawk doesn't have Red Wizards or Harpers because *poof* now they're there! By doing away with most of these options, it kept players from being ridiculous power-wise.

Isn't the "refined 4E" 13th AGE?

Quote from: cranebump;966146Isn't the "refined 4E" 13th AGE?

   Nah, it's more of a hybrid of 3E, 4E, gonzo 1E, and narrative gaming. Heinsoo was the driving force of 4E, but Tweet doesn't seem to care for it, so while the system has recognizable 4E DNA, it's not a direct successor.

   I stand by my opinion that 4E was a generally good game that a) needed a bit more polishing and playtesting, b) suffered from the fact that even key members of the design team didn't quite 'get' it or were trying to make it something it wasn't, and c) went too far afield from traditional D&D and generally zigged where the market and the broader environment zagged.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;9661232e was laden down with ill-thought, almost completely untested ideas, especially as the supplements expanded.

I found the core rules of 2e quite solid. What was ill-thought out?

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;966152Nah, it's more of a hybrid of 3E, 4E, gonzo 1E, and narrative gaming. Heinsoo was the driving force of 4E, but Tweet doesn't seem to care for it, so while the system has recognizable 4E DNA, it's not a direct successor.

I haven't played 13A yet but I've heard good things. It's a system that I think my group wouldn't mind delving into if there's enough likeness to D&D in terms of mechanics.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;966152I stand by my opinion that 4E was a generally good game that a) needed a bit more polishing and playtesting, b) suffered from the fact that even key members of the design team didn't quite 'get' it or were trying to make it something it wasn't, and c) went too far afield from traditional D&D and generally zigged where the market and the broader environment zagged.

Oh definitely. I think had they thought of the Essentials line FIRST with martials getting just Encounter-based abilities and then later, introducing Martials with Daily powers and making Rituals more accessible in Combat and better maths....I dunno I think the game might have been better received. That and not messing with the Forgotten Realms so much. The changes were overly unnecessary.