Quote from: EstarAnother factor mitigating the decline of 4e is how well the community is sustained around living Forgotten Realms. The system can be utterly boring to a individual gamer but they will still come and play as long as they get to hang out with people they like.

Very, Very good point.
Communities in general (this one included) become more synergistic (for a while) the longer one spends in it.  I would imagine the living Forgotten Realms community would be a sustaining factor, as would other succesful living campaigns.

Again, not how I play, but I'd be blind not to see the appeal.

Quote from: estar;366561Another factor mitigating the decline of 4e is how well the community is sustained around living Forgotten Realms.  The system can be utterly boring to a individual gamer but they will still come and play as long as they get to hang out with people they like.

The use of an organized play support system for a particular RPG rules set seems to be part of the current popular business model for the RPG industry.

Quote from: jeff37923;366559Because it works for you?

The answer seems obvious to me. What works for me may not neccessarily work for you and vice versa. It doesn't need any more thought than that because it is a matter of personal taste.

I will remember to just tell people that their dislike of 4e is a matter of personal taste from here on out.

Quote from: jeff37923;366568The use of an organized play support system for a particular RPG rules set seems to be part of the current popular business model for the RPG industry.

Gah. Guys, I have pointed this out before. WotC has zero full-time employees dedicated to LFR. None; and they've taken steps recently to reduce the amount of time Chris Tulach is spending on the campaign. It's really not a priority for them.

Quote from: jeff37923;366568The use of an organized play support system for a particular RPG rules set seems to be part of the current popular business model for the RPG industry.

And one that will doom it to a niche. You need do both. Support the "anything goes" home tabletop AND the living campaign. The two will reinforce the other. Unfortunately the living crowd will be your loudest "squeaky wheels" because among other things they are your most social savvy gamers.

Quote from: Thanlis;366572Gah. Guys, I have pointed this out before. WotC has zero full-time employees dedicated to LFR. None; and they've taken steps recently to reduce the amount of time Chris Tulach is spending on the campaign. It's really not a priority for them.

Administering it may not be their priority but where you think most of their feedback comes from? From my own experience in LARP and Living campaign the people involved in cons and living campaigns are among your best organized, most social savvy gamers in the hobby. They know how to make their voices heard and do so. Only distributors, and game store owners exceed their influence.

But given recent news it may be that they realize they been listening to the living crowd a bit too much and changing directions. I think that the D&D Essentials line may be part of this change in direction.

Quote from: Thanlis;366572Gah. Guys, I have pointed this out before. WotC has zero full-time employees dedicated to LFR. None; and they've taken steps recently to reduce the amount of time Chris Tulach is spending on the campaign. It's really not a priority for them.

I question the assumptions here.

Just because WotC does not have any full-time employees working on their organized play stuff does not mean that it is not a priority for them. If it wasn't a priority, then it would not exist at all.

Likewise, I am seeing Mongoose Publishing start both a Living Traveller and a Living Glorantha while Paizo has their own Pathfinder Society. It looks like a trend to me.

Quote from: estar;366573And one that will doom it to a niche. You need do both. Support the "anything goes" home tabletop AND the living campaign. The two will reinforce the other. Unfortunately the living crowd will be your loudest "squeaky wheels" because among other things they are your most social savvy gamers.

I agree. I think that listening to the RPGA crowd for feedback is what caused a lot of the things that turn me off of 4E to come into being with that version of D&D.

Organized Play has more to do with a greater trend towards social networking than anything else. It's based on the idea that the more people you know.. the more people you know. (Which seems stupidly obvious, but here's the explanation anyway). It's not "the industry" doing this to you, it's a natural evolution of networking that the "industry" (lol) is taking complete advantage of, because they have clever consultants.

Previously, I tried to explain how at different times in your life you are likely to have different social circles: as kids we have friends, friends from school, etc. In college we have people that live in the same dorm, classmates.. but as adults, usually it's a much smaller social circle-  (and less time to boot).
(Also, this is why the military is the exception- you live in such close proximity, that tons of gaming goes on in the military).

 Pointing this out seemed to cause a furious uproar last time I did it, but maybe it's because it was me pointing it out.

So let's say you STILL manage to put together the campaign group, and it's probably one of those fairly isolated ones that doesn't intermingle a lot or game in public (and you might even have factors of gamer stigma working against you, I guess). But you did it! Go you.

How do you put it together? Well, in this case, it can really only come together if you can get your friends involved. You might try recruiting, but that can be a lot more risky.  Maybe you had to game with your spouse or kids. My oldest son plays and he's hilarious. Hey, why not?

So lets say you DO get the gang together, and it all works out. You had to leap three hurdles and convince the one friend who hadn't played in years but you managed to get them all in the same room with character sheets. You are gaming at last.
 
Then you put together a campaign and one guy has to leave for a while (let's say, he's gone for 3 weeks... or 3 months..or he can only show up to one game out of four); now you have a group that has continuity problems.

Or even more likely- someone gets a new job, or a schedule changes, or someone moves away. It happens.

Often when one person leaves- or even a character dies.. game groups can even break up. (I know I'll get shouted down for saying that. Go ahead. I'll just link the OSR blogs that say the same thing).

So your'e back to square one, but now the pool is smaller. And in a party-based social game that (by it's nature) grows more social when you have more than 3 players.. that's not good.  

That's where organized gaming comes in- because first of all- it gives you the excuse to meet new people, often in public. Often enough you will form new friendships out of this. (Re-widen s the adult social circle). And if one guy has to leave, that's ok, there are other people. And what about the guy who left? Well, if it's a widely networked campaign.. he might still be playing in another group across the continent somehwre, and maybe he comes back, or maybe he sees you at a convention sometimes.. groups intermingle and reunite.

Knowing and gaming with the same group of people over a period of years is cool because you can really go into depth, it's true. But often enough, it can also get you into a rut, or force you to deal with people who are irritating, but happen to be your only gaming group, (plus they are your friends). Plus it locks you into a bit of a commitment. "We can't play without Joe's cleric!" -- if you want to take a week off, it can be a bit of a guilty thing.

But having access to the network of people and making the game experience both public, and casual makes the experience more social, and less stigmatized. It can also be a bit less personal (although Estar brings up the possibility that the opposite is true.."they will still come and play as long as they get to hang out with people they like."

Really, both are true.

Quote from: jeff37923;366575I question the assumptions here.

Just because WotC does not have any full-time employees working on their organized play stuff does not mean that it is not a priority for them. If it wasn't a priority, then it would not exist at all.

New LFR adventures are released, in theory, every week. Last week, two adventures were due out, but they didn't show up on the download site. This is kind of unfortunate if you've scheduled those adventures to be played at a con. Not fatal, since you can often get them directly from your regional admin, but it's annoying.

After some discussion, one of the global admins explained that he'd in fact released the adventures to WotC IT on time, but that they hadn't uploaded them. We're talking two zip files here. This week, on release day, the adventures once again didn't show up. They finally made it into the system yesterday. It took someone at WotC over a week to upload two files.

This is not uncommon, unfortunately. The players expect a week or two slippage on any given adventure, because this happens all the time.

So... sure, it's a priority, but it's not a very high priority.

This has all been very interesting, and some very keen points made. There haven't been a lot of specific examples of the role-play vs. gameist/powers disconnect in 4E, however, and I thought I'd provide an example from a recent game I ran.

Right now the power mechanics in 4E seem (to me) to be the top problem in relating what the character as a set of rules and actions is vs. what the character as a virtual person in a fantasy world is. In my 4E games I emphasize to my players the importance of reading what the power descriptions are like (and sometimes they are a bit vague) vs. just focusing on the stat block....the action as described in terms of a combat action. When they actively pay attention to the intent of the power, some very interesting results arise.

The example comes to a character, a shaman, that my wife plays. By focusing on the "descriptive portion" of the text and not the power block, her character at first level appears to be able to do the following (all quoted from the PHB2):
Call Spirit Companion: "Your soul reaches out to your spirit friend, which faithfully appears at your side."
Healing Spirit: "You call to the spirits on behalf of a wounded ally, closing wounds and filling your ally with vigor."
Speak With Spirits: "You commune with the spirits, letting them guide your words and actions."
Spirit's Fangs: "When an enemy drops its guard, your spirit companion leaps on it, claws and fangs bared."
Haunting Spirits: "Howling spirits appear around your foe, distracting it from your ally's attack."
Protecting Strike: "Roaring echoes from ancient caves and hollows accompany your spirit companion's attack, infusing your allies with vitality."
Twin Panthers: "Two panther spirits leap on your foes, and the panthers channel their predatory instincts through your spirit companion so that it menaces nearby enemies."
Cleansing Wind of the North: "You call on the spirits of the frigid north to bite into your enemies and to carry away your allies' ills."

   Taken by themselves, even as brief as they are the descriptive portion of the powers paints some interestingly evocative pictures. Leaving them divorced from the mechanics, you can develop some interesting results. For example, in the most recent scenario the players encountered a series of summoning stones in an abandoned temple. Each stone summoned an elemental, which I described as a spirit of the elements. The player jumped on this, and asked if she could commune with the spirit (which was incomprehensible to the players when it spoke) with her ability to speak with the spirits.
   Now, reading how the power itself works left me with this: the power itself is simply granting you a bonus to your next skill check based on your Wisdom modifier. The intent of the power is to give the player a slight boost. However, the flavor text is indicating that much more, from a role-play perspective, should be going on. What to do? The mechanical approach suggests that I simply state no, she can't use this power to speak to the elemental because its not specifically intended to convey other information. Alternatively, I could infer that the power lets her speak to "personal" spirits only and at best they may give her a boost to a diplomacy check to negotiate with the spirit. This would probably fulfill the design intent of the power, maybe. Unfortunately, the descriptive text explicitly leaves "what" and "who" the spirits she is communing with are. I didn't really want to force the character to be limited according to the power mechanic, especially when the effect of the text implies otherwise. So what I did was let her make an insight roll, modified by the power bonus, and based on that success she was able to begin speaking with the "elemental spirit," which in the end benefited my storyline anyway by getting the info the entity had out in to the players' hands.

Anyway, each of the powers described above are very sparse, but leave massive room for interpretation/extrapolation until you then read the power block. The best solution to blending the power mechanics with the role play process I have found is to get players to look at their abilities as having two components: the descriptive component, which is not only a summary of how the power seems to look, but an effective description of what the power does even in a non-combat situation, and the actual power mechanic, which is how the power default in a combat encounter. By taking this approach, I have often gotten players to think outside of the box in the 4E games, and this has led to some interesting power uses in a context that encourages role play while avoiding the static combat-based only uses of the powers themselves.

Of course, the problem with the power mechanics is that they don't make anything clear as to their use other than as combat abilities. The number of times I have seen players wrestle with odd problems such as how to cut down a rope tied up high (to release a candelabra, perhaps) who don't even consider that they could eldritch blast or magic missle the rope in to oblivion is fairly common. Yet, there's no reason they couldn't take such actions; the rules certainly don't forbid them, but the power descriptions seem so specific that the idea of extrapolating outside of the combat turn for their use appears forbidden, even if it isn't.

Anyway, just wanted to share  a bit with my actual play experiences about at least one component of the 4E mechanics that causes many of the problems for people. My hope right now is that with the looming Essentials set that WotC tries to integrate a bit more contextual use for powers, or provide more flavor text that helps people to see the versatility of the power mechanics in something other than a rigid combat setup. Well, except for all those highly-specific combat powers (i.e. most exploits) that it's hard to imagine being used in non-combat ways simply because activating them effectively starts a combat round. Ah well....

Quote from: Jeff

Quote from: Originally Posted by estarAnd one that will doom it to a niche. You need do both. Support the "anything goes" home tabletop AND the living campaign. The two will reinforce the other. Unfortunately the living crowd will be your loudest "squeaky wheels" because among other things they are your most social savvy gamers.

I agree. I think that listening to the RPGA crowd for feedback is what caused a lot of the things that turn me off of 4E to come into being with that version of D&D.

Count me in here as well for both assumptions.  If anything is going to push this industry forward, it is the community aspect.  However, this means the community model will be the most supported in future rule changes.

Quote from: camazotz;366583Anyway, just wanted to share  a bit with my actual play experiences about at least one component of the 4E mechanics that causes many of the problems for people. My hope right now is that with the looming Essentials set that WotC tries to integrate a bit more contextual use for powers, or provide more flavor text that helps people to see the versatility of the power mechanics in something other than a rigid combat setup.

Well said. The only thing I will add is that since 4e is an exception based rule system these issues can be fixed with out having to come out with a 4.5. You just need a bunch of new classes and/or a new bag of powers. A warrior instead of a fighter, a mage instead of a wizards, priest not cleric, thief not rouge and so on.

However the exception based system is a pain for the table-top DM because there is quite a bit that goes into a 4e class. You need not only the class but the the entire bag of powers that go with it. Sure you can reuse powers but it still a lot of work compared to what you had to do for older editions including 3.X.

Quote from: camazotz;366583Anyway, each of the powers described above are very sparse, but leave massive room for interpretation/extrapolation until you then read the power block. The best solution to blending the power mechanics with the role play process I have found is to get players to look at their abilities as having two components: the descriptive component, which is not only a summary of how the power seems to look, but an effective description of what the power does even in a non-combat situation, and the actual power mechanic, which is how the power default in a combat encounter. By taking this approach, I have often gotten players to think outside of the box in the 4E games, and this has led to some interesting power uses in a context that encourages role play while avoiding the static combat-based only uses of the powers themselves.

Of course, the problem with the power mechanics is that they don't make anything clear as to their use other than as combat abilities. The number of times I have seen players wrestle with odd problems such as how to cut down a rope tied up high (to release a candelabra, perhaps) who don't even consider that they could eldritch blast or magic missle the rope in to oblivion is fairly common. Yet, there's no reason they couldn't take such actions; the rules certainly don't forbid them, but the power descriptions seem so specific that the idea of extrapolating outside of the combat turn for their use appears forbidden, even if it isn't.

1. Super-cool story. Thank you.
2. I love the technique. Also thank you.
3. Yeah. If I could make one change in the presentation of 4e, it'd be moving page 42 from the DMG to page... probably 15 or so of the PHB. The first ten pages are all about roleplaying, which is as it should be, but stunts should be the first mechanic players are introduced to. As is, it's left for the DM to explain 'em, which is a significant issue.

Quote from: estar;366574Administering it may not be their priority but where you think most of their feedback comes from? From my own experience in LARP and Living campaign the people involved in cons and living campaigns are among your best organized, most social savvy gamers in the hobby. They know how to make their voices heard and do so. Only distributors, and game store owners exceed their influence.

But given recent news it may be that they realize they been listening to the living crowd a bit too much and changing directions. I think that the D&D Essentials line may be part of this change in direction.

I don't really believe that they have that kind of influence to change things. The thing that they do is organize lots and lots of gaming, in such a way that anyone who wants to have a look..can have a look. Games that take place in isolation suffer from the "tree falls in the forest" syndrome- is this gaming actually taking place? Well.. if it happens behind closed doors in your house..nobody will ever really know. Everyone wants to know how it went, was there feedback, did they buy the book and never use it? Which parts were the most useful?

So if there are non-organized not-RPGA ways to publicize and present this information, I'm sure everyone (Wotc or not..) would love to see it, because theory is bullshit once you have observed data.  

Personally, I don't like the Standardized (very formulaic) method that many (most?) RPGA Judges have been using to DM adventures since AD&D2e (Raven's Bluff) and still use today. But luckily, when LFR came out and LG ended, they lifted that requirement. The old standard was "nobody deviates from what was written."

The new guideline for 4E is called DM Empowerment (which is shorthand for allowing the DM to make changes and adjustments to the adventures as he sees fit) and it was pretty controversial to allow this, (apparently mind-blowing to some of the the people who came in during the 3E days).

They are also letting DMs write their own adventures. I am running an entire Underdark all-drow campaign (somewhat subversively) under the banner of LFR.

So you can have the best of both words.. if you WANT them.

Quote from: jeff37923;366575I agree. I think that listening to the RPGA crowd for feedback is what caused a lot of the things that turn me off of 4E to come into being with that version of D&D.

For better or for worse, that is the exact feedback channel that has been most valued since AD&D 1st.  I think Uncle Gary had a really good ear for which ideas to take seriously and which to discard from that channel.  After that, however, the designers seemed to be making a game for the convention goers more or less exclusively, not realizing that the most vocal (or easiest to solicit feedback) were not necessarily indicative of the majority of customers.