Who has ruined Dungeons and Dragons (and tabletop games by extension) harder, Lorraine Williams or this man?

I know that everyone is talking about how all the new interests in the hobby from Matt Mercer's live streams are leading to a "renaissance" in the gaming scene, but does anyone else feel like this is going to be a really bad thing in the long run?

Lorraine: Actively hates the hobby and the gamers, tries arbitrarily to fuck everything over.
Cook: Badwrongfun.

Too bad they would have never taken the first step without Arneson and his assistant Gygax.

Dude, I lived through the horrendous "Gray Goo"/"Scorched Earth" nonsense that 3e brought in.

How could it be a really bad thing? Its a foregone conclusion that it won't be worse than Everything Is D20 faggotry.

How can d&d be ruined when 5e is the best it's ever been?

>How is D&D ruined when 5e is more popular than ever?
>How is gaming ruined when Call of Duty is more popular than ever?

Use your brain

Every single edition of D&D can be a Call of Duty comparison.

Call of Dungeons: Dragon Warfare

This is fun, but you need to stop ignoring the elephant in the room that is 4e. It's like comparing neighborhood bullies to ISIS.

One thing some people don't know about TSR during Lorraine's tenure was that they sent out a lot of cease-and-desist letters when people tried to publish homebrew adventures. At one point they even threatened to sue a man for using the word "dwarves" in his homebrew, as they considered it to infringe on a similar product. Wizards created the OGL to settle this so that they could focus on minting money with MtG and PokemonCG, which is part of why we can post things instead of emailing it around via listservs. TSR had become dangerously toxic, and the chilling effects threatened the hobby more than a bunch of weeaboos looking to act out in much the same way as the mock satanist rpgers had done a generation before.

but 4e did nothing wrong.

Ditching all the sacred cow baggage from previous editions was the best possible move, the only ones that disagreed were the muh 3.5 is the only game grognards, and trying to please that crowd gets you the shambling mass that is Pathfinder.

I didn't say popular, I said best

4e was a flawed turn-based combat videogame. While it did bring good changes, most of it was gangrenous trash and wasn't meant for tabletop nor roleplaying.

Literally the only problem with 4E was that it used the D&D name for something that was highly dissimilar from previous versions

>flawed
as 3.5 was too
>turn-based combat
*stare*
>videogame
Unless you do shit like in PTU where you do crunch normally done by computers, you don't call TTRPGs videogames.

4e did plenty wrong, it listened to people who started with 3.pf and saw all the flaws that system had. Naturally those people wanted them gone and to enjoy a better RPG.
What they did not know was that there were editions before 3.pf which didn't have many of its issues.
So for example, idiots complain about caster supremacy in 3.pf, 4e works to solve that. Does it try using to return to a system that was tested and worked fine at containing them? Nah, it goes its own way and makes up a bunch of new mechanics, it deserves all the hate it gets, because I'm trying to play DnD.
Since it's way easier to convince people to play with rules that exist instead of homebrewing your fixes, I can't just get everyone to play ADnD but with some changes, which was exactly what 4e should've been and failed miserably at.

>Does it try using to return to a system that was tested and worked fine at containing them?
Grampa, your old system didn't work fine, it was just in an era before nerds had the internet with which to easily point out the issues.

Casters were frequently of similar power as 3e in AD&D. In many cases they didn't allow saves.

>Of course Veeky Forums considers Grand Autist Arneson to be the real innovator
That fat asshole just sat in the corner bitching about how nobody could keep up with him while writing increasingly incomprehensible notes on scratch paper.

They were balanced around needing more effort to get the ball rolling. 4e makes them balanced instead of allowing a stronger but riskier character choice to exist.

Oh, and the main distinction being: Initiative. A lot of people FUCKIN HATE AD&D style inits, but the way casters can be fucked up by inits was the balancing factor.

See, many people hated and hate the inits minigame... but that was what kept casters in line

Simply accept alle ditions are their own thing and move on.

>it was just in an era before the nerds who got driven out of the local gaming scene for being shitty people had the internet with which to band together and make the world a worse place
Fixed the typos.

There are unambiguously more and less risky chars in 4e.

Although I like AD&D, the way the game tends to weigh on casters for mirror image adn stoneskin and die almost immediately without them just isn't good game design and I don't mind new eds not being based off that.

Also, the forced movement and role minigame in 4e is extremely fun.

We all know that 3aboos are shit, that doesn't make the stuff that came before magically better.

>Marc Miller
Hahaha! Yeah, no, I wouldn't have wanted the world's most popular RPG to force you to do 50 pages of random life event rolls which could result in your PC dying before even finishing chargen.

Traveller kind of works for space opera, but it would have been a death knell for fantasy roleplaying.

Not even gonna lie, I'd play a fantasy CoD.

>They were balanced around needing more effort to get the ball rolling. 4e makes them balanced instead of allowing a stronger but riskier character choice to exist.

'You get to kick the other players in the balls later' is not balanced by 'You get kicked by the other players in the balls now'. It ignores the fact that RPGs don't all start at 1 and go to 20. A game that starts at 1 and goes to 3 should be as fine as one that starts at 18 and goes to 20 balance-wise.

That is a form of balance, or averaging, around long-term investment, in the same way that investing in a law degree will eventually get you more power than investing in becoming a military operator. But it's not a guarantee, nothing in life or character advancement should be. You could die as a 2nd level wizard in the same way you could become a low-paid country lawyer. Or you might go from lawyer to president of the USA.

This wasn't even by accident; Gygax specifically designed it this way. Same with different XP tables for different classes; it was a way to modulate the power level. Initiative segments; interruptable spellcasting; hideously difficult ways to make magic items. All these balancing mechanisms were jettisoned out the window by the idiots who designed 3E.

>That is a form of balance, or averaging, around long-term investment, in the same way that investing in a law degree will eventually get you more power than investing in becoming a military operator. But it's not a guarantee, nothing in life or character advancement should be. You could die as a 2nd level wizard in the same way you could become a low-paid country lawyer. Or you might go from lawyer to president of the USA.

The issue there is that it only works if you assume a game will go from 1-20. Most games don't (Heck, most don't even go to 10). A game should be balanced no matter which levels you start or finish at.

What makes it a video game? Or heck, not for roleplaying.

>This wasn't even by accident; Gygax specifically designed it this way. Same with different XP tables for different classes; it was a way to modulate the power level. Initiative segments; interruptable spellcasting; hideously difficult ways to make magic items. All these balancing mechanisms were jettisoned out the window by the idiots who designed 3E.
Actually, Gygax just didn't understand why people would want to play anything that isn't a human fighter, so he made all other choices worse. Just listen to Tim Kask

I.e. it's a good game, but not a good D&D game. Happens a lot everywhere.

What would fantasy CoD entail? A non-complicated setting with clear black-and-white morals drawn mainly on political lines that allows one to go shooting with no consequences...I dunno, sounds like a dungeon crawl of some sort with more hoorah.

>and tabletop games by extension
grt troll, m8

multiplayer involves being dragons shooting other dragons with breath weapons, obviously

Nah, a dragon is your kill streak reward. Better hope someone on your team has a staff of destruction to bring it down.

ITT: Retards don't understand older editions of D&D, bitch about them.

>implying casters were easy to level up
>implying casters had universal access to their spell lists at all times
>implying spells weren't more and more likely to be resisted as characters leveled up
>implying the game is supposed to be about "le epic story" and not dungeon crawling
>implying the game wasn't designed around having adventuring parties filled with characters of different levels
>implying that hit point bloat existed nearly as badly as it does in modern editions

>implying the game is supposed to be about "le epic story" and not dungeon crawling
if that was all that D&D is, D&D wouldn't remain popular. it may be good enough for you but it would become boring for most anyone else rather quickly

This.

>implying the game is supposed to be about "le epic story" and not dungeon crawling

Wait, isn't the complaint about 4e that it's bad at stories rather than just doing murderhobos in dungeons?

Williams was worse, but honestly, the d20 open license did far more damage than either of them. The OGL was what propagated the d20 system into hundreds of other games, which flooded the market with low quality shit, making it difficult for other games to emerge and gain market share, and depressing the industry for several years.

More damaging than that, it created a generation of gamers who came up when basically every game you could find used the same system. The system, like all systems, has numerous flaws and limitations, and this generation, because they were exposed to little else, has largely assimilated those flaws and limitations into their own play style, which has created various systemic issues that you still find in the hobby today. And that generation was extremely resistant to experimentation, and has become frequently hostile toward innovations and changes in the community, because they were conditioned to expect the hobby would always conform to the same mechanics and behaviors, regardless of whether they were appropriate for what was being done.

I mean, a lot of people like the d20 system, and that's fine. I don't hate it myself. But no matter what system you're talking about, it isn't going to be the best fit for every game, and the OGL basically created a whole generation of gamers who do not really understand that.

Mearls, yes.

Every time the hobby sees an influx of players, whether they come in from Vampire or anime, from the broader appeal of 4th edition or the fans of YouTuber shows, it is going to have both positive and negative results. And, in a few years, most of the new players it brought in will have left, and the hobby will not have changed in any earth shattering way. There will be some new games and new players that stayed with us, some of them good, some of them bad.

>when people forget that clerics have to petition their gods for whatever cheese spell combination they're run across
>when people forget that that means that the GM has unlimited veto power over the cleric's spell list on a daily basis

I'd play the fuck outta that

Yeah... Have to agree with this dude here. Most of the people I know who play D&D, they stick to 3E because it's the first one they played, and basically refuse other shit because it's what they know and think it's the best.

And because they think that learning any other system will be as big a pain in the ass.
You forgot that part.

Not even comparable. They had their spells, that was it, what they didn't have was the million and five other options that could be layer on top, or 3.5's vast library of ridiculous spells.

There's nothing really magical about it. Old school D&D has a solid, easy to run base, that manages to present almost none of 3e's glaring issues.

Yeah. That I think is pretty safe to call one of the major failings for 4e's release. If I had to put names to the main causes of failure I'd go with:

>Very devoted 3e fanbase.
It made any change away from 3e and it's design a very, very risky move. Not undealable but it wasn't going to be easy. 3e had been about for a staggeringly long time for an RPG so many people had only known it. It's the reason sacred cows have become such a major part of game design parlance and killing so many of them at once, while understandable, was the first 'Not my D&D' stop.

>Death of the Open Licence.
The open licence was a terrible idea. It came from some good places but the implementation was terrible, giving WOTC basically zero creative control or ability to pull products they didn't approve of. There was no way in hell it could survive to the next edition but taking away something people had with them for so many years got massive backlash.

Worst of all for them, it's lack of control allowed Paizo to just release Pathfinder to give the people who wanted more 3e exactly that under a new name. This gave birth to an alternative to 4e that had serious inertia as people playing 3e were basically already playing it. Convincing people to not change something is easier than convincing them to change.

>or 3.5's vast library of ridiculous spells.
They had that, have you not seen the Wizard's/Priest's Spell Compendium series of books?

>Very poorly handled marketing.
4e's marketing was not very well handled as it focused more on 'Suddenly, things will change for the better' rather than 'This is the same D&D you've always loved with an updated edition'. It banked more on the fact that the 3e fanbase knew the flaws of it's own system and were willing to joke about with them than it did on brand loyalty. With Pathfinder being able to steal brand loyalty out from under them, this led to people to not engaging with marketing (Or if they did, in bad ways. Basically no one used Gnomes in games but dammit they were in the 3e handbook so they were D&D!)

>Murder-Suicide makes everything worse.
4e's design was rather tied into the modern idea that computers could help you do stuff better. A lot of tools were advertised to help make stuff easier and simpler for GMs and players. Then they were unable to deliver on them when the developer working on the killed himself and his wife.

>Could have used a little more baking for the monsters.
4e's developers were working with a completely new system and completely new monster design but were still working with some 3e ideas. In 3e it was fine for a monster to just be HP and damage, that's what a lot of big brute monsters like giants were. However, 4e's higher focus on the complexity of a character didn't mesh well with that. Monsters had too much HP and too few abilities. They didn't use immediate actions well or have on-death effects for minions yet.

It didn't make the game unable to be played but it led to a dullness in initial monsters when they really needed a running start to get people interested after the other issues. If it was the only D&D on the block, it would have been able to afford a slow build up but with Paizo in the running it cost them badly.

>3e had been about for a staggeringly long time for an RPG so many people had only known it.
8 years is not 'a staggeringly long time'. 2e was out for 11 years, 1e was out for somewhere between 10 and 12 depending on when you start counting, BECMI was out for 12, Classic Traveller was out for 10...

Short answer: WotC marketing, with some help from Monte Cook

Long answer: Tabletop games are shit now, but not because of the actual games. There are tons and tons of good games out there. No, tabletop is shit because its playerbase is shit, and it's playerbase is shit because 3.5 was too fucking popular.

But, 3.5 became popular largely because of its business model, not because of Monte Cook's shitty design philosophy. 3.5 was cheap/inexpensive, and all the necessary information could be found online thanks to the OGL. At the same time, 3.5 had a very healthy line of preset adventure paths, and those are a new DM's best friend.

In the end, you're left with a potent combination of a really popular product that dominates the market, with a shitty design whose presence can still be felt 10 years after the product was discontinued.

>4e was a flawed turn-based combat videogame
Agreed, introducing turn-based combat to D&D was unforgivable. It's been years and my immersion STILL hasn't recovered. I may never be immersed in a verisimilitudinous roleplaying ~experience~ ever again... damn you to hell, 4e!

They had their own library of ridiculous spells, but the difference is that these were explicitly put in at GM whim; there wasn't even a mechanic for finding them randomly in the core books, and players don't get agency in choosing spells in AD&D.

They also didn't have shit like greater shivering touch, or the celerity spells.

>and players don't get agency in choosing spells in AD&D.
Well, they kind of do. They get one spell on level-up (assumed to be from research they've been doing suddenly coagulating into a new spell), but they only get to choose that if they're okay with making the learning roll (and possibly getting no spells at all that level if they fail) otherwise they get a GM-determined spell they're guaranteed to learn.

>and it's playerbase is shit because 3.5 was too fucking popular.
>my secret club reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

uh-huh.

I think he's referring more to the mindset and expectations 3.5 created.

The popularity is fine. It's just that all those people 3.5 brought in either...
>only want to play 3.P and nothing else
>still play other RPGs with the bad habits they got from 3.5
It's a fucking mess.

Got it in one.

Mind you, at the same time shadowrun's longest was 7 years between 3e and 4e, World of Darkness got a new game line every year or two, Call of Cthulhu had a new version pop out every couple of years and Runequest was generally 3 years (Excluding the gap between 3e and the Mongoose version).

D&D has really long editions.

Speaking of long editions, SLA Industries probably takes the cake. Given that 1.1 is just an errata'd version of 1.0 with some new fluff stories and art, and Redux is just 1.0 with 1.1's stories, AND it's still getting new releases you could argue that it's been one edition for 24 years.

Ah, it's been a while. Regardless, you didn't have free reign through the splats.

ITT: Captain Hindsight and his sidekick Cynical Lad tear apart a massively popular game that's 15 years old.

Gee whiz guys, tell us some more about how the edition that got millions of people into role-playing games isn't perfect and can't accommodate your particular playstyle!

I'd be willing to bet most of you weren't even old enough to read in the year 2000. But please, do continue to act like 60-yr-old men shitting on a scapegoat because things today aren't like, "the good ol' days"

The edition that got millions of people into role-playing left them with terrible taste, bad habits, and an inability to play any RPG that isn't 3.P.

t. an user who is eternally regretful that he started tabletop with 3.5

>Actually, Gygax just didn't understand why people would want to play anything that isn't a human fighter, so he made all other choices worse. Just listen to Tim Kask
And yet his group was made up of like 8 wizard PCs.

Gygax was the one who ruined RPGs

>Turn based combat
It's fucking d&d it's all turn based you moron

Next you're going to complain about how it made everyone into classes even though everyone naturally did that.

In 2e nobody looked at the guy who rolled 16 strength, 12 dex, and 14 con and said "okay you're gonna sit in the back with a bow" you threw on the heaviest armor you could, grabbed a longsword, and became the party's tank.

Don't speak badly of the dead, user. Not even in jest.

What if the dead fuck up?

Ghosts are assholes so I still wouldn't risk it.

Ditto.

MONTE COOK THREAD?

>Then they were unable to deliver on them when the developer working on the killed himself and his wife.
Wow, is that really what happened? I always wondered why they dropped the ball so hard on all the online shit they had talked about. It seemed to kill a lot of momentum for that whole edition.

>8 years is not 'a staggeringly long time'.
It is a long time though in the life of a game. Keep in mind that every couple of years, an entire new generation of kids hits the age that they start getting into gaming, and that's where most new players come from. Some of those players might be around for the next 40 years, but that is still the generation they arrived in, and it still shapes their perspective.

Yeah, thought I was slightly mistaken there. It was himself and his ex-wife.

Unfortunately, people who are in the sort of mood to get involved in murder suicide are not great at commenting or leaving documentation so even when they did get access to his work, it took forever to get anyone else working on it.

You know, I don't really play D&D but I feel like it should be noted, to my knowledge, that "editions" are not a natural thing.

They've never been something the public has cried out for. They're a marketing invention. An excuse to keep pushing out published works for consumption in a game system that is naturally inclined towards an unprofitable buy for life model.

Editions came out of an accident in an IP fight between Gygax and TSR where it made sense to just reboot the whole franchise to stamp a new companies ownership on the new fresh version of not Gygax D&D. Then in another fight. Then companies noticed that the public was going along with these mega-reboots and slated them to happen every couple of years. Except we've only gone through around 5 in all that time.

There was never any guarantee that the public would actually put up with this forever. That people actually like having their books, and world's and communities thrown into the trash every couple of years for the sake of a constant revenue stream for some company.

>They've never been something the public has cried out for. They're a marketing invention. An excuse to keep pushing out published works for consumption in a game system that is naturally inclined towards an unprofitable buy for life model.

Eh, editions have a lot of uses once a game has gone on for several years. It prevents games becoming utterly arcane due to more errata than original word count and allows for more dramatic core mechanic improvements than errata or optional rules would allow.

To be honest, Gary Gygax ruined D&D, but hey, that's just my vote. I hate it.

Its actually the perfect product from a marketing stand point.
People like novelty nostalgia and sex so naturally a shiny new version of their favourite book with tits on the cover is a gold mine.

>I hate D&D 3.x
>Pathfinder is da best!
Poor child. You are all the same, whining and hating instead of enjoying some games.

>>But the normies are ruining it all!
There is no "normies". You are not special. None of you.

>when people complain that high level AD&D wizards were much much stronger than high level fighters
>when people forget that a high level fighter worth his salt ought to have a castle, an army and a full set of magical gear and armour while a wizard has a few wands and scroll because he spent all his money on spell components

/thread

Gary Gygax after he had a fall-off with Dave Arneson

It all started back then.

This.

It's especially ridiculous where I live, since 3.X was barely published and skipped by the RPG scene, BUT as the years passed new kids who come into the hobby and know it from the internet only heard about 3.X and 3.PF as the "superior games", so despite NEVER PLAYING they come at table and start pushing 3.X

That's the higher tier of pathological damage done by 3.X to not just D&D, but tabletop RPG in general

... how is any of this related with OP's post?

Rolled 4, 3 = 7 (2d6)

Me

>Old school D&D has a solid, easy to run base
How many pages are your houserules? Or are they so internalized at this point you don't even realize they aren't the written ones?

It may not have had the same glaring issues as 3e, but glaring issues it had.

Same as 3.PF. In D&D combat was a fail state, that's why most of XP came from gold. WotC thought that combat was the main thing.

And lets not enter the whole dungeon crawl subject...

A horizontal balance as you describe is SHIT. Balance should be vertical.

>Old school D&D has a solid, easy to run base
ONLY if you play modern games that sell themselves as "oldschool D&D experience". The actual, real deal is as much a clusterfuck as 3e. If not bigger, but that depends if you cound first edition of AD&D as "oldschool" or not. Either way, 0D&D wasn't easy to run nor was it solid base.