Are people still mad about . . .

[diaglo]

my hat of d02 still know no limits

 

[Aeolius]

I wouldn't say I'm mad, but I remain bewildered and exasperated that WotC stopped selling the PDFs of the TSR-era material.

They're waiting for the iPad

 

[Celebrim]

Full disclosure: I'm not a huge fan of D&D 4e, but I keep hearing comments like yours.

Was their marketing really like that?

That is my impression of their online marketing. A typical piece would be:

1) Designer explains why 3e sucked, giving some example of play experience you never suffered from.
2) Designer makes unfounded claim about how some mechanical change in 4e will fix the problem, even when said problem to the extent it existed was attributable to encounter design, adventure design, or other DM choices.

Those are indeed strong claims. Do you have any examples?

Linking to past flame wars, some of which got locked, and calling out individuals specifically is probably not a good idea.

 

[Scribble]

4) The ludicrous statements of some 4e defenders concerning what 4e would be like - I remember alot of arguments about how great the Skill Challenge system was going to be - and the absolute faith that they had in a product they'd never seen.

You're still angry about random forum posts over a year later? Really?

Talk about holding a grudge! I can't even remember most of the posts I read or was in over a year ago.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Was their marketing really like that?

Partly. In retrospect, I feel that they were trying to be funny, and trying to point to 4e as an "evolution" rather than a revision, but it backfired.

I just searched for "cloudwatching" and found the original post by Davd Noonan. I find no "dissing the fans of their past product." The post was about how 4e was coming, and that the varied reactions to it (good, bad, inbetween) were not changing its schedule.

That is a blog post that completely ticked me off on first reading and which, on later reading, made me realize I had totally (1) overreacted, and (2) missed the point.

Those are indeed strong claims. Do you have any examples?

LOL. Although the benchmarks have moved, there are still people on EN World and elsewhere with this attitude, IMHO.

Of course, it isn't limited to just 4e.

Prior to the advent of 4e, if you brought up the same problems the 4e designers did about 3e, you were imagining it. Likewise, if you enjoy an earlier version of the game, it is all nostalgia and rose-coloured glasses. Mind, if you enjoy an earlier version of the game, your comments about 3e and 4e are likely to be just as irrational.

I think that gamers tend to be defensive about their hobby, and tend to see any criticism as a form of attack, whether justified or not. And, while I am not going to point to examples, I am sure that they are easy enough to find.

I am sure that some of my own posts could be used as examples.

(Which is not something I am proud of.)


RC

 

[Shazman]

You'd have to list the things I've been fired up about. Almost by definition, if the things I'm no longer fired up about, I've forgotten that I ever really was fired up about it, but the things I'm most likely to remember are precisely those things that still raise a certain amount of passion with me.

Things I know I'm still 'fired up' about...

1) Killing the print editions of Dragon and Dungeon.

2) Completely dissing their own past products in their marketing of 4e. Related note, completely dissing the fans of their past products (anyone remember 'Cloudwatching'?)

3) Printing a 4e of a game which is utterly incompatible with the prior three editions of the game to the extent that is fundamentally a different game.

4) The ludicrous statements of some 4e defenders concerning what 4e would be like - I remember alot of arguments about how great the Skill Challenge system was going to be - and the absolute faith that they had in a product they'd never seen.

It was going to be out of the box a rules light, stream-lined, flexible, narrativist, minature optional system with very fast but still cinematic combat resolution but that also made resolving complex situations with skills as natural and as important as combat, and if you didn't believe that then you were a mental defective. And the skill challenge system was going to let you use any skill at any time, and it was going to make everyone in the party to contribute all the time to everything, and if you couldn't see the beauty of the coming system you shouldn't disagree with the people that did, because you hadn't seen the rules. If there was anything which you didn't understand from the previews, that was ok because it was going to be the best written edition of D&D ever with the most compelling fluff, the best DM advice, and in fact the DM advice would be impossible for anyone to read the rulebooks and be a bad DM or design a bad encounter. Because of course, there are no past issues that were the result of bad DMing, because everyone knows a good game system can't be run badly. And the rules would be such that it would prevent rules lawyers from being pricks. And the math would be fixed so that everything would just work with no need for DM input, because the designers said so. And the modules were going to be the best ever written for D&D ever, so that you'd totally forget about all that badwrongfun of earlier editions, which let's face it, sucked. And, it was also at the same time going to change nothing about how you played D&D because it was going to be the same game, and an even smaller change than between 3e and 2e, and heck, even if it didn't support playing D&D the same way then that was ok because D&D was always badwrongfun anyway.

5) The entirely pointless and contridictory new alignment non-system, and the other trashing of old fluff just for the sake of trashing it.

Yeah, what he said.

 

[Aeolius]

Yeah, what he said.

Seconded.

 

[diaglo]

yeah, the Dungeon and Dragon magazine license recall along with other license recalls were a deal breaker for me.

i haven't bought a product from WotC since feb 2006.

 

[ferratus]

1) Designer explains why 3e sucked, giving some example of play experience you never suffered from.

With all due respect, I think you took it more personally than intended. Also, I must have had a different play experience than you, because most of what they said sucked seemed to suck in my own games.

I don't know if I would have chosen the same solutions if I was designing my own edition of D&D that they did, but certainly I agreed on the problem.

If I was designing the new edition and I said: "Why would anyone think that dealing with all the minute details of a monster required slavish devotion to rigid formulas was necessary to make custom monsters for your adventures? We've come up with the superior design philosophy of breaking a monster into object oriented components that determine how a monster interacts with the PC's. Rather than worrying about the idea that monsters of a particular type (such as humanoid) must all have the same type of hit dice or feat slots, we simply have you swap out an attack, utility, or defense component with another.

Would you view that paragraph as me being insulting to people who prefer the 3e way of doing things, or would you see it as expressing my excitement for what I genuinely feel is a better way to do things? Sure, I'm not particularly being gentle on the people that designed the monster rules, but I don't think that is the same as being insulting.

The only thing I would think of as out and out insulting would be the infamous "bullet to the head" podcast where they were getting rid of various setting flavor elements that they didn't like. Not the "bullet to the head" comments specifically, but the mocking tone "we're from the plane of neutral good". I however don't think it was particularly malicious or in the spirit of trying to tear down the work of others, they were just having fun at the expense of something they didn't like.

 

[Janx]

I became happier once I found where the ignore button was. Only one person in it, but all the threads I was cranky in got instantly more pleasant to discuss alternative viewpoints.