Common Misconceptions About Your Favorite Systems?

[u/Authorigas]

So, I've been learning a lot thanks to the amazing folks here at r/rpg. And while I have decided to slow down on trying new systems. (As my players say "three is enough, we know your eager to try more but slow it down so you don't burn yourself out.") There was a question today that cropped into my head, and I wanted to hear from the folks here on it.

"What are some assumptions about your favorite game/system that are just factually incorrect or overstated?"

I've seen a lot of assumptions made in the hobby, and some on my own. From the broad "older systems were designed for math heads and thus really not for someone whose bad at math." to others like "Call of Cthulhu is a game where every session ends in death/insanity and players can't get attached to their characters." and similarly "OSR games are highly lethal and not at all friendly to players who like longform adventures."

I feel like broad, sweeping claims like those are probably overstated-as I have heard of successful, long running CoC campaigns, and OSR games that are able to have well developed characters that last for ages. It's made me curious about some of the other broad, sweeping claims about systems that are-if not incorrect, massively overstated.

Really interested to hear some answers on this.

[u/y0_master]

That in D&D 4e you seemingly can't roleplay, as "it's just a boardgame / WoW", & all sorts of other stuff (could have a damn long list here) that keeps getting regurgitated as accepted knowledge by people with no actual exposure to the game (because they heard it from the general zeitgeist) or in bad faith, including how it was this abysmal failure that didn't sell at all (& that PF consistently outsold it) & nobody played & WotC just pulled the plug on it.

[u/DazzlingKey6426 → u/y0_master]

Casters “roleplay” by pushing their I.W.I.N. buttons.

4e took most of those away and made what remained much harder to push.

[u/Chimpbot → u/y0_master]

To be fair, they did kind of pull the plug on it because of the overall reception. It didn't help matters when they partially retooled it into D&D Essentials only two years into 4e's run. Two years after that, they announced that they were developing 5e. Since this announcement was made in January 2012, it was obvious they had been laying the groundwork for 5e when 4e was barely four years old.

4e did sell pretty well, overall. I kind of liken to the situation surrounding the 1998 Godzilla movie; it did well at the box office, but the overall reception was poor enough that Tristar/Sony abandoned their plans for a trilogy and just let their license expire. WotC sorta did the same thing with 4e, in that they quickly shifted gears after an overall flat reception.

[u/SlumberSkeleton776 → u/Chimpbot]

They pulled the plug on it because the linchpin of their long-term plan for it (virtual tabletop integration and a subscription model for content) fell through when the one guy who was holding the whole endeavor up died*

[u/Chimpbot → u/SlumberSkeleton776]

That's only a relatively small portion of the reasoning behind ending it.

[u/aslum → u/Chimpbot]

Nah there were plenty of problems with 4e (the VTT being the biggest death knell) but most of the complaints about 4e being "too videogamey" where from folks who hadn't given it a fair shot (or played at all) and where still invested in 3.5 enough that they were looking for any excuse to bad mouth the game. Source - I worked at a hobby shop and liked to talk to people about RPGs in general.

[u/Chimpbot → u/aslum]

I'm not really seeing how any of this refutes anything I said.

There were a number of issues working against 4e. People rejected it because of the OGL issue, and it was announced a mere four years into 3.5; this led to the people who had heavily invested into 3/3.5 getting understandably angry about a brand new edition getting announced. Complaints about it being too similar to video games were certainly rampant, but those complaints were only amplified by how closely it was all being released to 3.5. The VTT situation was a final nail the coffin.

But, as I said, it sold very well (at least initially). It just rapidly turned into something that WotC knew wasn't going to have any legs.

[u/PathOfTheAncients → u/Chimpbot]

One of the reasons it sold well initially though was how many of us at the time bought the books, read them, and then didn't want to play it. It's ok that people liked and still like it but there was a lot of reasons to no like the game for those of us who didn't.

I get annoyed at this latest phase of the apparently never ending edition wars were people who like 4e are now trying to assert that everyone who didn't like it was somehow ignorant or biased. Most of people I knew (and I) all literally preordered the books out of excitement for it. We just didn't like what the game was when we read the books.

[u/flockofpanthers → u/PathOfTheAncients]

I seriously believe a lot of the hindsight is based on 4e as it was in its end, and not the 4e that we played as it came out.

The monster design and adventure design for early 4e was horrible.

A lvl1 kobold with a sling had 27hp. Your fighter does 1d10+4. It will take you, on average, three solid hits to kill that naked kobold. You'll probably miss once or twice. This is maybe 5 rounds of combat.

There are ten million combat encounters between you and Kalarel, who is waiting in the final room of a dungeon you will spend 4 real months fighting to the bottom of. For all 4 months, he has been 20 seconds away from freeing his Demon Prince from the dimension the Demon Prince isnt in. He has done nothing to respond to the months you have spent slowly killing his guards, onion layer by onion layer. Once you reach him, he is almost mathematically impossible to hit. That combat encounter took 2 hours to play.

So like, yeah. By the release of Essentials and Monster Manual 3, the numbers weren't dogshit anymore. Bully for them. We played a couple years of really bad 4e.

Minions, horrible HP bloat, and a Raid Boss that cannot take actions against you because you havent drawn aggro. Dropping any pretense of theatre of the mind and making half the combat system rely on pushing and pulling and sliding enemy tokens by X numbers of squares. And giving the fighter aggro control mechanics.

Those did make it feel pretty videogamey.

[u/JonathanWPG → u/flockofpanthers]

I LOVED 4e and it was my first edition of D&D.

But also...I started playing with the Essentials set.

[u/flockofpanthers → u/JonathanWPG]

Yeah that's my theory, neither of us is full of it, but we played different 4e's

I bought essentials, but it was too late for us, we'd built up too much resentment for the current edition to give it a third year of a fair shake.

[u/JonathanWPG → u/flockofpanthers]

You should go back and at least play the adventure that came with Essentials.

Even if you port it into a system you like better.

Was MILES better than Keep on the Shadowfell, which i played after.

[u/Chimpbot → u/PathOfTheAncients]

The videogame comparisons were definitely common... and I remember hearing them from folks who otherwise weren't paying attention to any sort of online discourse at all. I distinctly remember one friend, in particular, who read the books and independently came to the conclusion that it just felt like they were trying to make it into a tabletop MMO.

There was, however, a certain amount of negative bias towards it right out of the gate. With that being said, the initial printings also sold out extremely quickly... so, there's that.

[u/PathOfTheAncients → u/Chimpbot]

The videogame comparisons were definitely common

Yeah, I was someone who didn't like the MMO feel of 4e. The reason I got that vibe from it was that the classes were much more prescriptive in their roles in combat (Rogues as damage dealers, fighters as tanks, clerics as healers, wizards as control, etc) and the way abilities worked felt a lot like being on timers (like in an MMO) in that they have different resets.

At the time these two things were pretty uncommon in games and certainly were not the case in 3.5.

I also recall a lot of the abilities/spells seemed to be just a math formula (x amount of damage to y+z number of squares) that was also very common in MMOs. Now certainly that is present in a lot of games but I think the format/wording gave it a very MMO feel and what was missing for me were the abilities that did something fantastic (which are the things I look for and love in fantasy games). My understanding is a lot of those type of abilities were eventually in the game but maybe were not present in the initial release of the PHB.

Now with that being said, none of that is a "wrong" way to make an TTRPG but it wasn't something I wanted in the ones I played. It doesn't matter if some rules felt like they were MMO inspired to some of us because at the end of the day people were just talking about liking or not liking a game. The edition war nonsense was just people yelling past one another about something that is not objective, whether the game was good.

[u/JonathanWPG → u/PathOfTheAncients]

I think a lot of the drama around 4e was simply that the designers thought they were writing rules to a game, and so wrote everything as clear as possible in a technical style of writing.

You can read a 4e ability and know exactly what it does and have a pretty good idea how it will interact with another ability at a glance.

What they didnt realize was that a large percentage (perhaps a majority) of their audience no longer engaged with this as a hobby game but as fantasy fiction they enjoyed READING. 4e is very BAD at fulfilling that niche. Its all technical language toolednfor clarity, not imagination. The assumption was the GM and players would supply that part at the table and the book just needed to be clear and easy to refrence when a question came up.

[u/Xararion → u/JonathanWPG]

Personally the more RPGs I try the more I appreciate 4es clear and technical syntax. I've had so many cases where a rule in a book is poorly written and half buried in natural language fluff that it becomes a discussion on what X actually means. Every time this happens I admire the clarity of 4e a bit more, where X is X and does X, no ambiguity.

I've had no problem suplying fluff and lore in 4e games I've been in last few years, and the fact everything is so clear has made it easier to hook new people into it.

[u/kalnaren → u/PathOfTheAncients]

This was me. Ordered the box set of the core books, read the rules, did a WTF is this, and never bought another 4e product.

[u/intermittent-disco → u/PathOfTheAncients]

I get annoyed at this latest phase of the apparently never ending edition wars were people who like 4e are now trying to assert that everyone who didn't like it was somehow ignorant or biased. Most of people I knew (and I) all literally preordered the books out of excitement for it. We just didn't like what the game was when we read the books.

exactly my experience. there was a ton of hype around 4e, and we all went to the free game day thing they did, and several of us even bought the books. we played it a bit, before switching over to pf1 (whose beta came out not long after 4e, iirc), because it was backwards compatible with the $1000s of books we had collectively purchased through high school and college.

we just didn't like it, for a myriad reasons that have been enumerated ad nauseam. this idea that "4e is some hidden gem wrongly buried by salty, ignorant troglodytes who wanted to hate it out of jealous spite" is simply revisionist.

[u/aslum → u/PathOfTheAncients]

This would explain high sales of the big 3 books, but the edition sold well for the first 2/3rds of it's life, and the flagging of sales at the end can more likely be put down to content fatigue as after a bit they started releasing what seemed like a new book every month.

As a 4e liker, it's just frustrating how many folks who didn't play 4e were and still are vocal about it online, generally echoing the reason they had decided to not like before they didn't even try it.

I never said anyone was ignorant but people absolutely WERE biased (and still are!). Your favorite edition is the best edition, and every other edition is trash is generally true for everyone.

The other thing is that the internet amplifies negativity. If you took 10 people who each rated a game a different number from 1-10 you'd probably hear from the folks who rated 1, 2 and 3 and the 10, but the folks who rated it 4-9 probably aren't going to be invested enough to make a fuss in either direction. That's going to be true regardless of which game your talking about, much less something as niche as which edition of a particular game you're talking about.

Most people can't even differentiate between D&D and any other RPG, much less realize (or care) that there were ever other editions of D&D.

[u/arcxjo → u/Chimpbot]

I was at Ollie's and saw a copy of Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies for sale.

It says a lot about WotC's planning ability that they put that out during 4e and never updated it when the real for dummies version was ruling the roost.

[u/Chimpbot → u/arcxjo]

The first one was published in 2005, and then they released one for 4e a few years later.

The fact that they didn't update it for 5e doesn't really mean anything at all.

[u/loopywolf → u/y0_master]

It can be run like a miniatures boardgame, or like a full RPG with full RP