TRPG General Chat

12:22 AM

@MarkWells It's definitely a core part of my personal Fate blend.

@MarkWells And, to be clear, 4e has all the same problems that all of D&D has which led me to walk away from it eight years ago and I probably won't ever look back at any version of the franchise or its imitators. But it's amusing/bemusing to see how much 5e seems to have refused to incorporate lessons from 4e.

trogdor

yeah

Mark Wells

@BESW I think some of that is just D&D not sharing your goals. For example, precise control over the pacing and challenge level of encounters is not something I care about. And on the other hand, having your character steadily growing in power on various numerical scales is not something you or I care about but the mainstream D&D community seems very interested in it.

BESW

I mean... I haven't said anywhere in the above conversation that the problems D&D has are inherently wrong, just that they're problems I have with it.

Elements like a focus on violence as a primary problem-solving tool, and linear/cumulative development, which are very much about a particular playstyle, aren't things I can criticize other people for enjoying (though a lot of the hate vs 4e is exactly that "not my playstyle so it's bad" attitude so I can see where people might think I'm indulging in the same).

On the other hand, I think an argument can be made that the franchise's dedication to other elements such as bioessentialism, exoticism, and looting of cultural sites, isn't just a problem of mismatched play goals.

I didn't mention those parts above though.

(And then there's the problems with Wizards of the Coast as a company, which I wasn't as aware of when I left D&D but are now absolutely a larger obstacle to my considering a return than anything in the game itself.)

trogdor

12:39 AM

I think I've honestly finally lost any of the remaining want to ever go back to 4e

there are a lot of other games I can get the same thing I was getting out of it from

XD

I don't know exactly when this happened but thinking on it now it doesn't seem to register as anything I want anymore

I would still choose it over 5e though

if that was somehow the only choice I was given

BESW

Yeah, same? I totally remember that surge we got from tinkering with the system we'd mastered so well, but... eh, now.

I can't tell anybody else how to do their own mental calculus about interacting with Wizards, but it's pretty clear for me, and the only Wizards-related stuff I share now is the work done to make it a better space and empower marginalized people within it.

BESW

1:09 AM

So yeah, 4e did a lot of cool work to show me how I could give my players epic battles in which they were vastly outnumbered but still emerged heroic, because that's the kind of story we were telling.

And now, thanks in large part to the schema it built for me, I have the confidence to expand on those ideas in systems like Fate and Lady Blackbird.

eg, Fate's 'anything is a character' fractal approach to design

Mark Wells

@BESW Thanks. That provides some insight, I think.

BESW

I'm glad!

It always felt a bit weird to me when D&D 3.5 went "yeah, your characters based on epic heroes like Conan, Legolas, and Fafnir? they should really just run away when they're significantly outnumbered." The mechanics don't fit the narratives the game is clearly referencing, and "balance" isn't a reason: balance is the game making a statement about the kind of story it's telling, not the other way around.

In comparison, 4e was a lightning bolt from the heavens because it uncoupled power-level mechanics from the diegesis.

That unlocked my brain so that I could explore other ways to interface rules, mechanics, narrative, diegesis, and table-level needs and policies.

And it makes me sad/amused that 5e has walked back on so many of the really cool problem-solving tools 4e incorporated.

Not because I had any interest in playing 5e, but because it's the giant in the room and so many people are using it to define their understandstanding of what TRPGs are capable of.

(Naturally I'd rather if there weren't any single game or franchise that dominated the hobby like D&D does, but that's not a reasonable short-term goal.)

trogdor

1:30 AM

yeah I hope at some point people realize there are a looooot of other Tabletop RPG options available for them to try out

Mark Wells

As someone who actually likes D&D, I agree that its dominance is unhealthy for the larger scene, and probably for itself. 5e is annoyingly risk-averse, probably inevitably, given Wizards' market position.

BESW

Yeah, it's understandable but no less annoying. And it's still nothing compared to the stuff Wizards gets up to as an employer.

Oct 30 at 5:45, by BESW

I mean, of all the problems with Wizards of the Coast, D&D is not my primary concern. Of all the problems with D&D, 5e's particular issues are not my primary concern. And of all 5e's particular issues, poorly edited copy-paste from previous editions is not my primary concern.

trogdor

I mean, to be perfectly honest all those things are enough for me not to mess with the system,.... the other problems they have are bigger but I don't even need them to disengage with D&D XD

BESW

Aye. At the time, it was mostly the complexity, cost (in time and brain as well as money), and lack of support for narrative arcs or nuanced non-combat scenes, which led me to look for non-D&D options.

Hot RPG Questions

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Q: Does the Halfling deity Brandobaris have any known offspring?

I'm writing an adventure that features an Emyprean, who for story purposes would ideally be an offspring of Brandobaris. I'd like to know if there are any offspring of Brandobaris referenced in any of the Forgotten Realms lore. The answer need not be limited to 5th edition- if there are reference...

BESW

1:47 AM

A big draw for Fate in particular at the beginning was the combination of the fudge dice curve (small modifiers produce big effects, making character competence always more important than the randomness of the dice) and the fate point system (magically creating a flow of crisis/victory or drama/catharsis across the course of a single session, or even a single scene).

Compare D&D, where the d20 reflects character competency over time rather than per roll; and the main scene/session pacing mechanism is nested races of attrition for diegetic resources.

Bardic Wizard

@HotRPGQuestions umm. This brings up so many more questions, starting with “can we change this?”

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