Caffeinated Otter

@caffeinatedOtter

he/him

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedOtter12/30/2023, 3:48 PM

I feel like "the mechanical design of D&D 4e classes strongly dictated role in a way 3.x didn't" can't help but be disingenuous, because it's comparing, y'know, basically the 4e PHB against the entire fucking broken end-of-edition OGL ecosystem

An apples-to-apples PHB comparison absolutely isn't going to let you build your wild out-there off-model Strength-based wizard in 3.5 either

Which reduces that argument to "we were making excuses for hating it for just not being 3.5 at that 'see what the DM will stupidly allow us to get away with' point in its life cycle"

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Scree @Screemonster12/30/2023, 3:56 PM

I've never actually played 4 or 5e but from what I've heard 4e is actually really good at the one thing D&D is actually designed to do in the first place - that being tactical, tile-based combat and dungeon crawls, and explicitly not faffing around noble courts doing diplomacy any more than absolutely necessary.

Makes me wonder if all the other nonsense that crept into 3.5 was just down to people going "but I know D&D, it's the system I'm used to, can't we homebrew D&D to do this" before it got to the point where it became a meme.

Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedOtter12/30/2023, 4:21 PM

The two things about D&D are

each new edition is a corporate-compromise snapshot of the brand owner's reactions to a continuous, ongoing, complicated conversation between the prevailing edition, the fans, the game's entire (itself long and complicated) history, fashionable trends in game design, and its own corporate strategising
no edition has ever actually been more than a dungeon-tackling combat engine which it also happens to be possible to roleplay around the edges of, in order to contextualise the combat more than the average Warhammer miniatures fight

Personally, 4e seemed like a brave and pretty thorough attempt to take 3.5's overcomplicated stack of historical cruft, rationalise and systematise it; it struck me as taking heavy and deliberate design inspiration from board gaming in the way it presented itself, wherever else they took ideas from.

It would be interesting, but way out of my expertise, to discuss the chicken-and-egg on "but you can just homebrew D&D for that" and 3.5's third party scene, which was down to to the novel OGL "you can charge money for explicitly D&D material, and we won't sue you" thing. The proliferation of "haha now you can build Strength wizards" stuff explicitly contrary to the core design obviously had a strong effect on the way D&D's fanbase view D&D's design — including the validity of D&D itself having strong opinions on its own design!

Ultimately, I think 5e's decision to roll back and rebase on the OGL carcass of 3.5 is down to shifts in top-down corporate strategy and the soft power of the particular collection of designers it ended up with — D&D's a weird fucking phenomenon.

Scree @Screemonster12/30/2023, 5:37 PM

Yeah, and the disappearance of a whole ton of other systems when everything got buried in OGL (why would you publish your own systems when you could make bank just churning out a supplement for D&D?) meant that there's a massive gap in game design experience even as the things that D&D is good at are getting obsoleted by the rise of CRPGs and MMOs.

Hell, even D&D-inspired games have come a long way in the last 20 years or so, not just in terms of graphics or the like but in core concepts like "how do we handle multiclassing, do you need multiple characters if you want to do several jobs?", "what should the penalty for dying be" and "what do we do if a player just decides to haul off and fight other players just because they can" and the like. There's been a ton of innovation that I just... didn't see in tabletops while 3.5 was king, though that may be just because I fell out of the scene thanks to little details like "graduating" and "oh shit I have to actually get a job now" and "my new job means I have to move and I don't have gamer housemates any more".

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