The shocking story of one man's quest to become the Greatest Game Master on Earth and another's quest to deal with his World of Warfare addiction. A graphic novel series and webcomic by Jason Thompson and Victor Hao
Edition Wars, Part 2
4 Comments
sigh, thank you for putting this up. this is the reason I am giving up on D&D entirely
But your campaign sounded so good! I’m sorry I missed it.
Sadly is that Essentials caused more confusion… as 4th and Esssentials are compatiable and both use the same rules (as the Essentials rule books are pretty much the up to date rules.)
Treating them as separate is more a gamer/tribe thing than what actually exists.
I understand what they were trying to do with Essentials — to appeal to more casual gamers, I think, as well as to eliminate some of the ‘every class plays the same’ feeling that existed in basic 4e — but although the ‘crunch overload’ of some of the 4e books had been intimidating, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Essentials books because there was just so much less stuff in them (even up to & including the bigger font size). There just wasn’t a feeling of value. (And the softbound, smaller books were harder to refer to during play — less info on the page, and they don’t stay open as easily.)
Of course, I realize that the simpler character options probably made things a lot simpler for newbie gamers who might be overwhelmed by so many choices in the original 4e books, but from my perspective as a guy who plays a lot of RPGs and likes a lot of weird character options, the simplification was AWFUL! -_- If they keep going this route in 5e, I hope they actually split off the ‘simple D&D’ and ‘complicated D&D’ into two separate brands, like Basic & Advanced in the ’80s. Anyway, I wish ‘em luck…
4 Comments
sigh, thank you for putting this up. this is the reason I am giving up on D&D entirely
But your campaign sounded so good! I’m sorry I missed it.
Sadly is that Essentials caused more confusion… as 4th and Esssentials are compatiable and both use the same rules (as the Essentials rule books are pretty much the up to date rules.)
Treating them as separate is more a gamer/tribe thing than what actually exists.
I understand what they were trying to do with Essentials — to appeal to more casual gamers, I think, as well as to eliminate some of the ‘every class plays the same’ feeling that existed in basic 4e — but although the ‘crunch overload’ of some of the 4e books had been intimidating, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Essentials books because there was just so much less stuff in them (even up to & including the bigger font size). There just wasn’t a feeling of value. (And the softbound, smaller books were harder to refer to during play — less info on the page, and they don’t stay open as easily.)
Of course, I realize that the simpler character options probably made things a lot simpler for newbie gamers who might be overwhelmed by so many choices in the original 4e books, but from my perspective as a guy who plays a lot of RPGs and likes a lot of weird character options, the simplification was AWFUL! -_- If they keep going this route in 5e, I hope they actually split off the ‘simple D&D’ and ‘complicated D&D’ into two separate brands, like Basic & Advanced in the ’80s. Anyway, I wish ‘em luck…