Quote from: Marleycat;524081I guess you don't have to warn them, but I like being honest with people I game with, I expect the same in return, but you're spot on about being consistent, nothing worse than an inconsistent GM.

No dishonesty involved. If the PCs have never encountered a troll and haven't heard anything about trolls then all they know about trolls is rumour and suposition.

To be honest though my monsters are usually totally created including appearance name etc etc As I have posted before I dislike the conveyerbelt of Humanoids created to fill the "always fighting orcs" base requirement.

Much prefer to take an idea from a book, say the "flat heads" from Ambercrombie's the blade itself series or a picture of a faerie by Brian Froud or a demon from a Chris Achilos sketch and just stat it up.

Quote from: ggroy;523879- Mearls' complete repudiation of the 4E style roles for classes.  (Wonder whose idea it was originally for the 4E roles?)

If I were to guess (and again, completely guessing here, do not take this for some kind of insider knowledge) I would say it was Heinsoo, the guy who doesn't actually work there anymore.
And (again, just speculation on my part) I'm guessing also that he was seen as largely responsible for the fiasco that was 4e.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;524084If I were to guess (and again, completely guessing here, do not take this for some kind of insider knowledge) I would say it was Heinsoo, the guy who doesn't actually work there anymore.
And (again, just speculation on my part) I'm guessing also that he was seen as largely responsible for the fiasco that was 4e.

RPGPundit

Scapegoated?

Quote from: jibbajibba;524083No dishonesty involved. If the PCs have never encountered a troll and haven't heard anything about trolls then all they know about trolls is rumour and suposition.

To be honest though my monsters are usually totally created including appearance name etc etc As I have posted before I dislike the conveyerbelt of Humanoids created to fill the "always fighting orcs" base requirement.

Much prefer to take an idea from a book, say the "flat heads" from Ambercrombie's the blade itself series or a picture of a faerie by Brian Froud or a demon from a Chris Achilos sketch and just stat it up.

That's why I love the Hacklopedia of Beasts the info in isn't completely correct or at least a part of it, you can photocopy it and give to players as total truth unless they totally bust an awesome monster lore roll or fought it before. All without having to make stuff up yourself, I bet it wouldn't be much work to use it in Dnd game since player's don't need statblocks.

Andy Collins's role always seems to be forgotten in this story. I wonder why.

He got the sack too, you know?

Quote from: Benoist;524116Andy Collins's role always seems to be forgotten in this story. I wonder why.

He got the sack too, you know?

This article asserts Andy Collins was not calling the shots on the design of 4E.

http://www.examiner.com/rpg-in-national/was-andy-collins-a-casualty-of-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons

The article references a quote by Andy Collins himself, purportedly from a Facebook conversation:

QuoteIn fact, I was a member of the 4E design team (led by Rob Heinsoo, and chosen by Bill Slavicsek), and didn't assume a management role until the game was complete. Not to diminish my impact on the final product--for folks who don't care for the game, I'm certainly on the short list of "people to blame," but I certainly wasn't calling the shots on 4E design (at best, I was third in line on that).

(I have not been able to find the original source of this Andy Collins quote).

Quote from: ggroy;524125http://www.examiner.com/rpg-in-national/was-andy-collins-a-casualty-of-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons

Hm. I see. I have a very hard time believing this. This feels like a round in the edition wars from a 4e defender, to me (the blog post I mean), whereas Andy Collins signifying that he didn't call the shots of 4e could be seen as a way for him to wash his hands off of it after the fact.

I'm not convinced.

Perhaps.

More generally, I still haven't been able to figure out what exactly Andy Collins was doing during his time at WotC.

I always portrayed the guy as a kind of Skip Williams, a sort of really mechanical/math/fairness inclined/type dude, but I don't remember off hand what his exact hat or hats was/were in the 3E days.

Thanks in any case for bringing that piece up earlier. I didn't know about it.

Quote from: Benoist;524133I always portrayed the guy as a kind of Skip Williams, a sort of really mechanical/math/fairness inclined/type dude, but I don't remember off hand what his exact hat or hats was/were in the 3E days.

With the exception of the head guys (ie. Mearls now, Heinsoo/Slavicsek previously, etc ...), many of the "hats" at WotC seem to be nebulous or undefined titles.

I guess that the general lesson is still the usual one: "Success has many fathers, failure is orphan".

Quote from: ggroy;524132More generally, I still haven't been able to figure out what exactly Andy Collins was doing during his time at WotC.

Saying stuff like this, I imagine.

QuoteCollins believed players have a short attention span, and were, perhaps, "less likely [to be] interested in reading the rules of the game before playing." "I'm not just talking about younger players now, but anybody. We've been working to adapt to that, the changing expectations of the new gamer."

Quote"Designing new editions is the work of younger, more energetic folks," said Collins.

:rolleyes:

Quote from: RPGPundit;524084

QuoteMearls' complete repudiation of the 4E style roles for classes. (Wonder whose idea it was originally for the 4E roles?)

If I were to guess (and again, completely guessing here, do not take this for some kind of insider knowledge) I would say it was Heinsoo, the guy who doesn't actually work there anymore.
And (again, just speculation on my part) I'm guessing also that he was seen as largely responsible for the fiasco that was 4e.

RPGPundit

He's the obvious nomination as official lead designer. However, Heinsoo is on record that, though he led the design team in the pioneering early years (2005-2006), Mearls took over the rudder the closer the thing went towards release. You can read this up in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, the only published record to date of the early 4e design process.

Even before Heinsoo was let go, Mearls took the lead post from him. All this was happening in early 2009. People really shouldn't forget how much and how early Mearls claimed 4e for himself. For instance, at release time Mearls led the design on the 4E Monster Manual, which was the biggest cluster fuck of the release apart from skill challenges (another thing he'd soon claim for himself, by rewriting it rather incompetently many times over) - it got all the numbers wrong, and he made the key call to not have any lore entries in the book.

I've with morbid fascination followed Mearls' dis-entangling of his design persona from 4E. This 'I don't like roles' is the latest instance to add to an impressive pile up which I have a hard time to take at face value.

Even so, we gotta be fair. It seems that the roles-codification wasn't the creation of Mearls, or Heinsoo, but of Dave Noonan, who wrote the earliest 4e playtest document, and blooged about roles extensively. Within the design team, next to Wyatt, Noonan was the person most adamant about bringing WoW into 4th edition. He's very explicit that roles come from WoW in his blog run, while he also tries to make a case (rather unpersuasively) that roles can be read back into pre-WoW D&D.

I don't mean to rehearse the roles-arguments, but let's just say the actual design history behind 4th edition is very poorly documented, making it possible for all sorts of people to say they didn't have much to do with it.

My own guess is that the key calls were made by Heinsoo, Slavicsek, and Noonan (in this order), with Mearls writing himself more and more into it as design went along.

Quote from: jeff37923;524099Scapegoated?

No, "scapegoated" implied he didn't actually DESERVE the blame.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Black Vulmea;524168Saying stuff like this, I imagine.


:rolleyes:

Boy, that article just showed how far out in left field that whole group was. It just solidifies my opinion that 4e was a overreaction to 3e but I didn't know for sure until reading that pile of steaming crap that it was really a generational backlash against classic Dnd in general.