Quote from: Windjammer;374919This, exactly this. It's a 50/50 die roll beyond your control. Sure, your party's "leader" (warlord/cleric/Divine Power paladin build) can (a) boost your saves to avoid getting conditioned in the first place or (b) remove conditions on his turn. But when your PC is not a leader himself there's nothing he can do beyond investing in certain feats alongside (a). Thank god they pushed condition-removing spells and (more importantly) scrolls out of everyone's reach in combat.

Sounds like 4e is saying you need a leader in your party (or two) otherwise you just need to suck it up and take the effects.  Man who would have thought to make combat tense by making it deadly and having things that just frustrate your ability to act.

Quote from: The Shaman;375126My five-year-old and three-year-old are more tolerant of adversity in game-play than Morrus' players, it would seem.

QFT.  Avoiding or overcoming setbacks should be part of any game.

Quote from: Melan;375143(Candyland is one of those games looked down upon by the Forg^H^H^H Eurogamer set, right?)

Of course it is.  It's a boardgame that has sold well for decades and that children enjoy.  Therefore it is evil and clearly the worst-designed game in the world.

Eurogamers loathe popular, fun games about interesting subjects that anyone could play.  They only like unpopular games for the intellectual elites that combine the fun of math with the fascinating world of farming, like Puerto Rico and Agricola.

Quote from: jgants;374981* Stunned rarely ever comes up (I think it happened once, maybe twice the whole campaign).  And when it does, it stuns like one guy for maybe one round and its a power the monster can only use once.
* Immobilized is almost never a problem.  Even when it comes up, people are already in position and no longer need to move.
* Being knocked prone is barely an inconvenience.
* Slowed is not even worth tracking it has so little effect on the game.
* I have yet to even get to a creature with dominate or petrify (there's, what, a handful in all of MM1&2?)

I'm in three 4e games, technically. One is D&D Encounters. One of the others is a Paragon-level one and the other Heroic.

Stunned is by far the worst, but I've rarely encountered it. Dominate follows up Stunned as the most annoying, but it has also been rare for us.

Dazed happens fairly frequently, but you still get an action and a free Save against the condition. We, too, basically ignore Immobilized and Slowed when they do befall us as we're usually where we want to be or can teleport about.

I'd be curious to see how many monsters out there inflict status conditions and what they are. I wonder if there's an easy way to look that up...

Seanchai

Quote from: jgants;375364Eurogamers loathe popular, fun games about interesting subjects that anyone could play.  They only like unpopular games for the intellectual elites that combine the fun of math with the fascinating world of farming, like Puerto Rico and Agricola.

We don't always agree, you and I, but that is some funny shit right there.  

Quote from: StormBringer;375264Let me ask again:
Do you lose XP if you don't feel like talking in your funny voice this week?
Rough day at work, and you aren't quite the flamboyant Bard tonight is counted as a 'loss'?
Where is the challenge in having your Dwarf say "Aye, lad!" in a thick Scottish accent all the time?

Lots of DMs award good role-playing with xp.
If the result of you not being the flamboyant bard is that the table doesn't have as much fun as they did the week before hasn't everyone lost?
You say that but remembering to differentiate between a Glaswegian slur and the relatively clipped tones of a shopkeeper from Edinburgh can be quite a challenge

Now the real roleplay challenge is when you are prepared to make a sacrifice that is in character that results in the death of your PC. I don't mean the wishy-washy don't worry we will get you ressed in the next town death I mean the 'never coming back from it, no chance end off..' death. To take a PC with 4 or 5 years of history and fight the unbeatable foe so the rest of the party can get to safety, even though you know there is no way you are getting out of there (of course its heroic roleplayign as opposed to the cowardly sort I tend to prefer )

This thread is linked to from TVTropes.

Quote from: B.T.;387153This thread is linked to from TVTropes.

Link?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StopHavingFunGuys

From the reference section on RPGs:

QuoteA perfect example of what happens when you mix this with Fan Dumb is shown here

where "this" references the entry and "here" links to the current thread. The juxtaposition of "StopHavingFun" with "FanDumb" is then diagnosed as "Narm", sc. "a moment that is supposed to be serious, but due to either over-sappiness, poor execution, excessive Melodrama, or the sheer absurdity of the situation, the drama is lost to the point of becoming unintentionally funny."

The next reference is to James Raggi's famous "I hate Fun" post,

QuoteDo you want to have fun playing RPGs? James Raggi considers you inferior. "Inferior" is perhaps too nice a word; "the scum of the earth" is a more accurate way of putting it. He even put up an followup to the article insulting anybody who was linked to it from this wiki.

Could be that the reference was penned by someone who got the cold shoulder and/or middle finger by Raggi.

Hah!

Ironically, the article's discussion of Super Smash Bros. players as an example is a sterling analogy for the design and player philosophy that lead to 4e in the first place.

QuoteA special mention must be given to those who play Super Smash Bros. As a Mascot Fighter, the gameplay revels in chaos and unpredictability; Items spawn all over the place, the very shape of the stage can change, and some areas of some stages can even hurt you. Naturally, some gamers, especially those who play in tournaments, want to lessen this to remove the luck factor, but, like everything, some take this way, way too far. For example, in Melee, rather than playing in the labyrinthine Temple, or the frequently shifting Brinstar Depths, the type of gamer described here plays only in the static Battlefield, or the completely featureless Final Destination, with no items, to remove all the luck factors. The sheer number of options available (and passed over by this type of player) really polarizes the series' fandom. Not really a problem, to each his own right? Sadly, wrong. You can't go into any Smash discussion without flame wars about how the game is to be played properly with some people claiming that items and certain stages are for noobs and using them automatically proves that the player isn't as good as the tournament players. To them, anyone who doesn't play like them only care about some Flanderized  notion of playing for fun and don't play the game like it's supposed to be more effectively played.

As described so wonderfully by this comic: http://legendaryfrog.deviantart.com/art/Hardcorez-75608753

Christ, even threads about 4e are now popping up as tropes that started with video games.

Quote from: CRKrueger;387214Christ, even threads about 4e are now popping up as tropes that started with video games.

...and the circle is now complete.

Heh. There's a link to James Raggi's "I hate fun" rant, too.
This website is like a manual of how to think like an ENWorld/RPGnet-bot. Very informative.

No accident; the same clash of game design philosophies and priorities is not exclusive to RPGs - in the last few years, they have also cropped up in discussions of computer games. The perfect case study is the hyper-convenient and heavily fun-influenced Deus Ex: Invisible War, which was a significant departure from the significantly more open-ended Deus Ex. From the idea of "immersive simulation", design has progressed to a focused experience, and new games are extensively focus groupped to see how they conform to buyer expectations.

Unlike RPGs, some of this change is due to the costs of producing a time unit of gameplay, which has seen a significant increase since the late 90s, but the underlying ideas of positive reinforcement and assumed user friendliness are basically identical. Take a look at a game discussion board and you will see a lot of references to "short attention span consoletards" vs. "aging, nostalgic PC gamers". TVTropes is a site mostly written by the former, while the TTLG forums are a base for people who prefer complex simulation games, typically with a late 90s aesthetic. In a large subset of game players, the supposed "advances" of gaming has produced alienation, dissatisfaction, a sense of artificial constraints and a search for alternative gaming opportunities.

It is interesting to watch how, absent a supply of suitable commercial products, the second set has turned to modding to produce their own entertainment. Fan missions for the Thief games number over 800, from small levels to complex multi-mission campaigns that could as well be full games (here are some screenshots from one of them I built). Players for these levels number in the hundreds or thousands despite the fact that the technology is now more than 10 years old and has severe editor limitations.

Deus Ex mods are less common, but include mini-campaigns such as DX: Zodiac, Redsun 2020 and The Nameless Mod, a total conversion with several hours of recorded dialogue, a branching story and a strongly freeform approach to problem-solving. DX: TNM surpasses original DX in the openness and scope of gameplay, and despite its really weird premise, has garnered favourable critical and customer attention from magazine coverage to a Mod of the Year award.

The most ambitious project here is probably the recently released The Dark Mod, a Doom 3 total conversion to recreate and advance the ideas of the earlier Thief games, which were abandoned for Thief 3: Deadly Shadows for commercial/design-related reasons. In that sense, TDM is the equivalent of a "simulacrum game" like OSRIC - a mod platform to build your own levels. Check out mine: URL.

"ADD Consoletards" vs. "Roleplayers LOLZ"
L33t vs. N00b
Hardcore (those with no life) vs. Casual (those with no skill)
Nerfs vs. "Balance"

Thank you WotC.  Making the first MMOG on paper now means we get to engage in all these wonderful debates as well as GNS.

It's interesting though, these video game conflicts have been around since UO and EQ for the most part.  I've never seen them really applied to tabletop games until 3.5 with extreme character building and of course, 4e.