fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2307 ]

[ SECRET POST #2307 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2307 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 06 pages, 101 secrets from Secret Submission Post #330.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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09. http://i.imgur.com/fuohw4e.png

Well 2.5 was the last good edition anyway, so you're both wrong.

Well, personally, I don't think this should be a secret, because you're entirely right. That kind of edition-wars bullshit is so dumb - like you say, at least acknowledge that it's a subjective choice. I mean, none of the editions of D&D are perfect - it's not like 3.X is some perfect game system descended from the god, it has plenty of flaws. But more than that, people need to acknowledge that different games produce different styles of play that are enjoyable in different ways, and 4th is as valid a style as any other. Agh, dammit, now you got me all worked up.

But yeah. I'm definitely right in there with you on this one, and there's plenty of places out there on the Internet where this is pretty much the received, conventional wisdom, so you're not alone at all.

While I do agree that everyone is going to like what they like and your friend should let people at least try 4e, I have to say I do agree with your friend about the board-gamey feel. In fact, my husband and I were discussing this not long ago about how we love the 4e board games (like Ravenloft) because the system seems more fit to play as a board game than a roleplaying game.
At any rate, next time he brings it up, maybe you should just be polite and say you'd rather not discuss 4e as you feel he is just bashing on your system of choice, and you wouldn't do that to Pathfinder around him.

OP here - My friend takes that tack himself. Suffice to say, I disagree. Those games are a massive simplification of the system, and the comparison only considers the combat side of the game anyways.

As to politely talking to the guy - I've considered it, but most of the time it's during a conversation with a third party. Needless to say, that would up the awkward quotient to turn the discussion into a heart-to-heart about respecting other people's preferences. :P I'm sure I will at some point, but I'm sure you know how it can be hard to start a conversation like that.

Does he respect your preferences during conversations with YOU? If so, then why do you feel a need to make him adopt your opinions rather than his own during conversations with a third party?

"I would give you my honest opinion about this product, but my friend over there feels differently than I do, so I won't give you any advice about your purchase, even though this is your first RPG and I have loads of knowledge and experience to offer. Enjoy!"

All I'm saying is he can give his honest opinion without resorting to what's in the fandom basically perjoratives.

If you were complaining about him starting arguments with you or ragging on you for your game choice, I'd be behind you 100%. But when you complain about him expressing his genuine opinions about 4e to customers and other gamers? No. If he's advising customers about game purchases, he shouldn't have to censor what he tells them so as not to hurt your feelings. Describing the different tone and play-style between editions is not "partisan nonsense" -- it's important information for someone making a purchase. It's like if he were trying to sell them a car, and pointed out the documented reliability issues of a particular make of vehicle that happened to be what you drove, or explaining that an automatic transmission doesn't offer experienced drivers the same level of control and finesse that a standard does. It's not a personal attack, and there's nothing "intellectually dishonest" about him trying to provide people with the benefit of his experience.

Mostly what I'm hearing is you assuming that his complaints about 4e simply boil down to "They changed it, now it sucks" or personal taste rather than a genuine conviction that it's a worse game than the previous version in a number of ways. You say he publishes Pathfinder stuff and therefore he has a "horse in the race," rather than assuming that he publishes the Pathfinder stuff because he finds 4e substantively lacking. I know gamer geeks can be snobs about their favorite systems (Don't get me started on the New World of Darkness...), but it seems like you're being just as unfair to him as you're accusing him of being to you. From what you've said, at least he doesn't malign your motives for supporting the edition you do.

tl;dr: Stop interpreting his conversations with other people as personal attacks against YOU, and stop assuming that your opinions are an "informed decision" while his are "partisan nonsense."

You can have an informed opinion about the game that results in you disliking it that doesn't require you to call it dumbed-down or boardgamey.

And re: "informed decision"; I meant with that that I have play experience - lots! - both with his preferred game and mine, whereas he doesn't have play experience with 4e. I didn't mean to insinuate that my preferences are inherently better or anything. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

What if his informed opinion IS that it's overly-simplified and feels like a board game, though? Having played a bit of 4e myself, it felt more like an MMO to me than a board game, but that may be because my DM hated using miniatures or terrain maps. I also felt restricted by the lack of character options (though that may have been because fewer supplements were out yet at the time), so I can see where the criticisms of it being overly-streamlined and too simple come from.

Is it the opinions he has, or the way he phrases them, that bothers you? If he avoided using those words, but still told people that he considered it to be an objectively inferior game because it offered fewer customization options and forced combat into a more linear mode (or whatever, but phrased more objectively), would you still feel offended?

Yeah, it's mostly the way he phrases it. There's ways to say "This game doesn't offer a robust enough out-of-combat experience in my opinion" that don't rely on saying it's just a board game or whatever.

Have you been to a gaming store where someone does what you're saying is "good" for the customer? It's uncomfortable as hell.

I went into a store to see if I could snag some used 4e books, not because I was all YAY 4E IS THE BEST AND I CAN'T WAIT TO RUN A GAME but because a friend of mine was GMing a game and HE decided to do 4e. Rather than argue with him, because he was just starting out and wanted an easier system to do it with, I went along with the 4e with the idea in my mind that I'd beg for Pathfinder later on.

I'm wandering around the (admittedly tiny) shelf of a gaming store I found through a Google search (I'd just moved recently so I didn't know anything in the area). The older gentleman running the store saw me doing this and came over to ask if I needed help. I told him I was hoping to find some used 4e books.

And fast forward to a half hour later of me uncomfortably acting like he's making the most amazing observations and criticisms about how 4e is shit (yeah, it is in a lot of ways) and how if I'm new I should try Pathfinder (I'm not new, thanks, and I told you so several times, but you're too busy raging about 4e), and giving me a run-down of how shitty and corporate the company's gotten since TSR was bought out (yeah, whatever).

I know 4e is a shit system, but even if I WAS a new player, I don't need to hear about it if that's what I -want to buy-. If I came in there saying "I'm not sure what I want", by all means, campaign away (but without all the rage and curse words, thanks). But if I come in there knowing what I want, point me in the direction and keep your opinions to yourself. I'm sorry, but if I walk into a store and tell the shopkeep that I really want oranges, and they proceed to rant at me about how awful orange growers are and that I should buy bananas because they're much better, I'm going to leave and find a place that'll let me buy my oranges without getting in my face.

As far as the game is concerned, I feel like 4e, while being "D&D Lite", is a great way to platform people into "real" D&D (such as Pathfinder or possibly wherever they're going with 5e). It teaches the basics and gets people used to playing while everything they can do is on pre-printed, easy to use cards that don't send people rummaging through their stack of books to figure out what spell to cast next. That's what purpose it's serving in the game I'm in now, where nearly everyone is brand spanking new to gaming and still get confused over simple things, but once we've been playing this for a year and a half and everyone's getting used to what shape of die is what side, THEN we can introduce fun, more in-depth systems.

And honestly, if the OP's friend is talking to a new player and telling them to BUY Pathfinder core books, guh.

And I do agree it's a little strange that the OP is getting hurt about him talking to customers about how much 4e sucks, but it might have something to do with the fact that they start off talking about how he says that to THEM, and then tosses in the customers. It might be a case of "he complains to me and belittles my choices constantly and now he's talking to a customer with the same arguments and it brings back those hurt feelings tangentially in me". I dunno, I can't really get behind that one, it's kinda weird. Sorry, OP.

But compared to some of the other editions, the combat is simplified and same-y, and as a player of several different D&D editions including 3.5, 4, and Pathfinder, I find that 4 is really just concentrated on doing battle and killing all the dudes. I found it really limiting in letting me feel like I'm developing a three-dimensional character!

Which basically translates to "play whatever edition you like best". We stick with Pathfinder and homebrew these days.

Well, I mean, I could say the same about pre-4e Martial characters - I can only hit it with my sword, I only ever do one thing, etc., etc. It's samey! The structure of 4e let stuff that traditionally wasn't varied be varied.

Combat focus is a more a matter campaign or DM. Frex, my pathfinder game was almost all about combat, whereas my current 4e game is very heavily focused on RP and investigation - I've gone whole sessions without a combat in sight.

So, yeah. "Play whatever edition you like best". But framing it like 4e is just a combat-focused, simplified board game isn't a fair assessment. :/

You can play a game in any system in which you never touch your dice and spend the entire session on character interactions, if you have a DM prefers and is good at running roleplaying encounters -- but that doesn't mean that's what the system you're playing lends itself to or is focused on. 4e stripped down a lot of the non-combat skills and focused a lot more on stuff you do in combat, so looking at the system itself, the rules are a lot more focused on combat, and that speaks to how the game developers are expecting a "typical" session to be played.

A great GM can run a fun adventure in any system (possibly even F.A.T.A.L., though science has yet to confirm this), but that's a reflection on the GM, not on the game.

Oh, lord, F.A.T.A.L. :P

Agreed. Though this is one of those places where the subjectivity of the matter comes into play - I /prefer/ the stripped-down out-of-combat specifically because I think crunchy rules get in the way in roleplay encounters - I only want heavy rules in combat. The way people talk about it - especially things like "dumbed down" or "boardgamey" - imply that the system is inherently inferior if you're concerned with roleplaying. For my style of game, though, it's perfect, and that isn't for a lack of interest in the RP side. That's why those things grate on my nerves so much. If someone doesn't like the game, fine, but they don't need to insinuate I'm only there to roll dice and kill stuff, y'know?

AYRT

I can certainly see how fewer rules for out-of-combat interactions can give a group more freedom to roleplay without the dice getting in the way. But what I was getting at was more the way the game is written and designed, more than the groups that play it or the GMs that run it. In practice, fewer rules for social interactions and what-have-you may allow a group more elbowroom, but what it tells me about the game designers is that they didn't think those kinds of encounters were important or would happen frequently in the "typical" session or adventure. I mean, that's what they do: they write rules to adjudicate in-game events that enable players to determine the outcome of their characters' actions, regardless of the real-life skill level of the people playing those characters. What situations the game developers decide to create rules for, and how they write about those situations in describing those rules, tells you a lot about what they expect an average game to look like -- and D&D has never placed huge amounts of emphasis on social interaction, and 4e, in my experience, did even less. It doesn't reflect on the people who choose to play it, because I've played D&D games where we never touched the dice all session, but it does reflect on the game itself.

Op, it kind of sounds like you're objecting to the fact that he's talking to other people, in conversations you're not involved in [possibly even in his shop from how you phrased some things], and expressing his opinion about 4 ed. Which, in turn, makes it sound like you think he shouldn't express it simply because you happen to be nearby during this location which...is honestly not really cool, imo.

The rthing is just...well. It's his opinion and he's allowed to express that in conversations he has. You don't have to agree with it, you don't have to like it, you don't even have to like where/when he expresses it - but you do need to respect that he's allowed to it.

Not if the opinion that he has is wrong, unfounded, simplistic, and insulting. Like, if he's doing the fairly typical "4th edition is just dumb babby MMO shit that only babbies play" edition war stuff, that's... not necessarily an opinion you "just have to respect", I don't think. Because it's wrong and unfounded and simplistic. If he's making grounded, specific critiques, certainly, I think that's reasonable and you have to respect that. But I don't think you have to respect his right to bloviate with whatever empty, unfounded memes about how only idiots play 4th edition and it's not REAL D&D for no adequately identified reason. I think OP is perfectly right to be bothered by it if the guy makes a habit of letting loose with those kinds of opinions.

[I'm the OP] - Most of the time, when I hear this sort of thing I'm directly involved in the conversation - RPG discussions usually involve me as a matter of course. Even when I'm not, though, it gets on my nerves because, like I said, there's ways he can phrase it that don't involve the dumb edition war shit.

I hate 4e solely because they killed off my two favourite Forgotten Realms goddesses. Sure, there's apparently signs they're going to bring back Mystra, but I cannot forgive them for killing Eilistraee, and for that matter the rest of the Drow pantheon - like Drow don't deserve some choice in who they worship.

Oh, I also hate what they did to Aasimar and tieflings too.
The idea that celestials, devils and demons could actually breed with mortal races was cool. Only they couldn't let them keep doing that anymore. Yes I'm butthurt over it.

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