What was the biggest "down the drain" moment in the history of traditional gaming?

What was the biggest "down the drain" moment in the history of traditional gaming?

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kotaku.com/5032443/xbox-developer-dead-in-murder-suicide
theangrygm.com/in-with-the-old-transparency-design-rationales-and-monster-building/
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You, bumping the "What would a game based on Korean mythology be like?" thread off this board.

Lorraine Williams.

I notice you didn't bother posting in that thread at any time from page 2-11.

If it was such a good thread how come it's dead?

The murder-suicide of the official D&D 4E virtual tabletop developer team.

reeely mak uyo thnk

Wizards of the coast baught the rights to dnd

This.

What happened?

Age of Sigmar

underrated post

Killing WHFB.

Confrontation Age of Ragnarok

They said they were going to make a thing. And they sort of made it. But they never finished it and eventually it got pulled from the web, never to be completed. Basically the same story as a lot of indie projects, except this was fucking WOTC making it.

You forgot to mention that there was an actual murder-suicide.

kotaku.com/5032443/xbox-developer-dead-in-murder-suicide

It shows just how little WotC knew then about capitalizing a digital platform, and how hard Hasbro starved budgets with low expected RoI -- one dude was so essential that him losing his shit pretty much wrecked the whole thing. Too bad Hasbro didn't see that selling 1s and 0s has a much faster, cheaper production life than selling actual plastic toys, and scales like a motherfucker.

killing off whfb

yeah, this was hugely crippling to Best Edition

What were the digital tools even supposed to have had that would have been so groundbreaking?

If I recall correctly, it was going to basically be roll20 with built in chargen, 100% made specifically for 4E.

In 2008 that would have been groundbreaking.

How did it negatively affect 5e?

>5E
>best edition

lelz

> Delusionals 4fags are still delusional

As opposed to what? 3.x aka, my scaling falls apart with anything with over 6HD or bigger than large. And I don't see how anyone can read the pile of fuck that is 4e's magic item rules and call it best anything. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for terrible design, people bitch at 3.x for ivory tower design but 4e had mandatory choices with it's feat taxes to keep up with monster scaling, and such a limited palette of abilities. It was awful. Face it 5e is not good, because D&D can't be good, by the time you fixed it it wouldn't be D&D anymore, but it's the best we've got.

5e d&d forgetting literally all the good game design lessons learned from 4e and going back to the "throw shit at the wall and see if it works" camp of game design.

They quite literally flushed every single good idea 4e ever had down the drain for the sake of appealing to raging grognards. It is, by far, the most depressing thing I have ever witnessed.

Well, that's fucked up.

I'd propose Fantasy Flight Games losing access to the WH40k licence to be pretty shit. No official update to the Only War and Dark Heresy 2 way of advancement for Deathwatch, Rogue Trader and Black Crusade makes me sad.

They didn't want it anymore now that they have Star Wars.

Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax telling people they were allowed to "act" like the characters they were running during their wargame.

>such a limited palette of abilities.

Nigga

what

4E's magic item rules were a little wonky, but no worse than any of the earlier editions

And combat was actually fun, unlike every other version of D&D

>They quite literally flushed every single good idea 4e ever had down the drain

4e never had any good ideas.

The only thing it cared about was balance. Not world-building, not verisimillitude, not anything but game balance. Game balance is overrated to begin with, so throwing out everything that made D&D interesting in the first place in favor of it isn't even in spitting distance of "a good idea".

>4e never had any good ideas.
>[Well designed games are] overrated to begin with

Strongly consider suicide. 4e was one of the best games to GM, ever, because of how well they designed the game.

Right into another boring, paint-by-numbers encounter

>[Retarded grognardery intensifies]

> neckbeards bitch literally non-stop about 3e/Pathfinder being unbalanced
> "Game balance is overrated to begin with"
W e w l a d
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Let me guess, you just suggest that everyone use GURPS for everything.

...

games workshop

God no, I recommend playing a wide range games. But D&D is what it is, there's no point trying to make it be something else.

In the context of their stated goals 4e magic item system may be the greatest failure in the history of game design outside of shit like FATAL. They stated they wanted to make the characters be defined less by their gear, but then went and factored the enchantment bonus of weapons and armour into the scaling for monster stat progression so in you didn't have appropriately leveled item you fell behind and had no hope of keeping up. They then put a shared limit on item daily power uses and finite number of items you could bind, making any item with a daily power worthless,not that any of the item daily powers were any good anyway. In short they did the absolute reverse of what they stated they intended to do, they made you utterly dependent on getting appropriate magic items to stay relevant, while simultaneously making them less interesting by limiting the interesting effects they could have. It was an utter failure of design.

Sure, but it didn't wreck the whole system.

As someone who has only played D&D for a few years, I've always wondered if 4e would have done better if it were marketed as "D&D Tactics" as opposed to the next edition of D&D. I've never played 4th ed so I apologize if that sounds retarded, but that was the impression I got.

I had a similar hope for it when I saw it on the horizon. The whole edition change just encouraged me to jump ship to GURPS. I haven't looked back

Robotech miniature kickstarter

I like 5th edition, though I don't have experience as a DM. I actually started out Veeky Forums games with GURPS. It was a clown shoes Supers game, but it was a lot of fun. I liked playing around with their early character creation program for shits and giggles too.

Newer GURPS has certainly streamlined things. Chargen is still the beast with ten backs, but it's manageable.

I find 5e very beer and pretzels. You can use the 99c app to make a character and play in ten minutes. Best thing to grace DND in years.

Okay, I haven't looked into GURPS for awhile. It wouldn't hurt to check it out. Is it decent to run as a first time DM or should I go the beer and pretzels route first?

It was just what I think of as 4e's biggest mistake, and it ties into it's core scaling which was kind of fucked. It had a litany of other failings which I don't want to go into in detail because I just can't be arsed, and I acknowledge that it did try to fix the problems with 3.x, I just think it failed on every conceivable level. The only thing I really liked about it were the push/pull and slide mechanics which seem inconsequential on paper, but made combat much more tactical. If I could've just had that, and dispensed with vancian casting rather than turning everything into vancian casting it might have been more into it. Oh and fighter that could learn to use ranged weapons, and ranged weapons without weirdly gimped ranges.

Very relevant article.

theangrygm.com/in-with-the-old-transparency-design-rationales-and-monster-building/

Some of us would argue that Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition was the most depressing thing ever.

Stale bait

Seemed far more like a proper game than 3rd edition, which just seemed to be endless stream of numbers and terms in small font.

The Great Shitstorms in Gaming:

--the Satanic scare of the early 80's DnD

--Arrival of Magic the Gathering. yes, it was actually quite a WTF moment for gaming

--TSR goes to wizards, but that turned out...good. unless you hate OGL.

--4th ed DnD, and all the piss that caused. fuck, it's the whole reason for PF.

--THE END OF WARHAMMER FANTASY. please understand how huge this is!


i'd also mention a lot of kickstarter fails may start to form the next big shitstorm, the anti-kickstarter movement...
but i haven't noticed anyone getting titan-scale ubersperg about how shit behind most Veeky Forums kickstarters are.

>5e is not good because 3.5e and 4e were not good

No, 5e is not good, because it's burdened with the same D&D baggage as 3.5 and 4e. It's quite good within those constraints, but those constraints hold it back.

A festering pile of shit rolling over and dying on its own over the course of several years does not count as down the drain famalaramalamadingdong

I've heard that Privateer Press has ruined Warmahordes somehow. What are the details?

I think WOTC should continue to market it under the name 'chainmail'.

FACE