The Campaign Builder's Guild

Yeah, they are wonderful, in such a horribly dark way. red is better..

And i blame crazy thread on gravity, its most likely its fault
from
EE

Quote from: SteerpikeThere is an over-the-top feel to it, definitely, and I'd agree that humor is an element of that.  I do love the orks - the comic relief of the world, really.  In fact I've got a 2000 point army of the little greenskins.

*Thread spins out of control*

Perhaps "*Thread actually starts moving in a useful, cooperative direction*" would be slightly more on target.

[blockquote=My Friend Steerpike]All of this is somewhat tangential to the point at hand. Elemental_Elf was trying to say that wargames can entail very rich storytelling experiences because of their detailed fluff (some of the offshoot games from Games Workshop, such as Inquisitor or Mordhiem, especially exemplify this). Obviously not all wargamers are going to enjoy the story aspect, but then again a lot of DnD players don't, either. Your criticism around 4E as a wargame in denial seems to be that its a wargame that has pretensions of being more than a wargame, of being a role-playing game, which you associate, I think, with an emphasis on storytelling. You're not saying that wargames are bad, but you were saying that they were essentially hack and slash affairs without an emphasis on story.

Your retort to Elemental_Elf didn't really acknowledge that wargames aren't incompatible with detailed storytellig - in fact, Warhammer 40K has better fluff/story than basic 4E, I would argue. So, at least from my perspective, 4E's problem isn't that it's too much like a wargame (since if it was too much like a wargame it could still have a great storytelling element, as in Warhammer). It's problem, I think you'll agree, is that it emphasizes hack and slash or combat over storytelling - even if it' possible to play a 4E game and still tell a good story, 4E seems prejudiced towards a low-story, high-combat, low-thought, high-dice-roll sort of game. Where we part company is the wargame element - I don't feel that wargames automatically entail combat>story, and would cite Warhammer 40K as evidence.

I don't want to be too argumentative - I think our feelings on 4E are pretty similar. I'd just like to dispute the idea that what makes 4E low-story, high die-roll is necessarily a similarity to wargames, unless in fact you choose to completely separate the fluff/setting/"backstory" elements from wargaming, which I don't. And I also don't think that the 40K backstory is "absurdly" morbid. [/blockquote]

Christmas, crunch and fluff need to be treated seperately.  Always.  It's like Gammar structure and story content, a piece of writing has both, but they must be looked at very differently and independently, though a critic can and should point out if the structural choices made are a good match for the type/genre of written work.  Of Course wargames are not 'incompatable' with Backstory Fluff, I can write a 50 page backstory for a game system that uses 2 dead batteries for miniatures and a d6 for combat resolution.

The question at hand actually has nothing to do with 'backstory/fluff', it deals with a corrollary of Vreeg's Rule One of Setting design, "Make sure the system you choose for  a setting matches the type of game you want to play, or the game will eventually match the system".  It's not that a wargame or 4e are incompatible with Fluff, it is that  (at different levels), their rule sytems are inimical to roleplaying.  When EE says,

 
[blockquote=EE]"Warhammer doesn't pretend to be anything other than an absurdly morbid war game with a horribly traumatic back-story. That's fine. 4E however is a Wargame in denial, pretending to be a table top, that's the problem. Warhammer also has some very good fluff and puts a lot of detail into there back story, which is more than 4E can say. But I'm not saying Wargames are bad, I'm saying that War games in denial are bad, that 4E is bad because it is a war game in denial, pretending to be a Table Top, and in that it is a failure.
7a) The thing is, 4E is limiting in terms of game play, not fluff (the fluff issue is more the arbitrary and unneeded changes) in that it is designed around a singular style of gaming, one where everything is built upon how it relies upon combat. This is more limiting than say, White Wolf's games."[/blockquote]

He is saying the toolset included in 4e has moved closer to the toolset you'd find in a wargame, and further away from the toolset you'd find in a game that might engender roleplaying.

or, that is my take.

Much clearer, thank you Vreeg.  I agree that 4E's rules resemble a wargame's rules more than a roleplaying game's, even if 4E doesn't necessarily holistically resemble a wargame per se.

Thank you Vreeg, that is a very good clarification.  

yeah, my deal about 4E i that it resembles a wargame in-terms of design more than than say, a table top.  Does that make Wargames bad?  certainly not.  It doesn't make 4E a good table top through . If 4E was designed as a war game openly, i think it would be a better game.  Would it be a good wargame?  I can't honestly say, i don't know it well enough comapered but hey...
from
EE

Hm, this thread is fast becoming ANOTHER reason for me not to bother checking out 4e...

Quote from: EvilElitestIf 4E was designed as a war game openly, i think it would be a better game.

There might be some truth to this in that 4E was intentionally designed to 'play nicer' with the D&D minis game. The original intent was to make the systems very similar so that people could go between both games with minimal instruction (at least when compared to the huge difference between 3.x and the 3E D&D minis game).

It is deliciously ironic that mere months after the official release of 4E, WotC decided to pull the plug on the entire minis game. I wonder how different 4E would have been if they had not been forced to merge the two games to the extent that they did.

Kindling- I think the game itself can merit to that lol

E-Elf
1) Yeah, its partly that but I think it really boils down to lazyness.  WotC knew there was a balance issue, and wanted to solve it with mimimal work.  So they do this kinda crop out, because they just make it a combat game and cut out Everything else, in a way to avoid the arguments.  Simplify aligniment to avoid those arguments, cut out back story to avoid those dicussions, simply ignore world consistency ect ect ect.  But your right, in the end, it actually would make a great supplement for the minies.  Your totally right when you say that 3E miniture game doesn't make much sense compared to the actual 3E game, and you could say 4E, if it wasn't a table top, it could be a fin way to make the minature game a legitimate game on its own.
2) Yeah, that is a bit of an irony there, i'm kinda confused why they did that
from
EE