Thank you for the laughs.

Re: this post and your wish list at the end of it: haven’t you just described 4e? I’m not trying to be snarky, and I’m an unabashed 4e fan, but really: if that’s what you want, it seems you already have that. (And that’s why I’m not interested at all in 5e).

I also wanted to say, from reading the various angry responses to this article that, if you feel that this article is a personal attack on you or if you are offended by Lizard calling people (or, more importantly, you) a crybaby idiot or moron, then yes, this article is about YOU. Those of us that have never done any of the things Lizard wrote about in this article will, strangely enough, not feel as if this article is a personal attack on us.

Also, just as a plug since I have seen Lizard have to post multiple times in responses (sometimes it is multiple times to the same poster, which is sad), this article is not about SWTOR (check the release date =P) and can pretty much be applied to almost any gaming forums whining posts.

Thanks for the great article Lizard.

Its the new way of winning arguments on the internetz. Post once and never post again, because if you dont read the reply, you won the argument

Other than that, great article. I dont understand how so many people cant seem to wrap their heads around this. Must be some sort of self entitlement of the gaming generation thats crept up the last 10 years or so. Most older people i know that have been playing since the start (and im talking Philips G7000 era gaming) have a whole different take on things. We know that it takes time to fix things, we know that games will never be released bug-free, and we also appreciate when developers take the effort to fix games as fast as possible.

Am I making any sense?

I also strongly agree you can “degrid” easier than you can “grid”; I suppose we could have stat blocks which contain basic stats, and attacks or powers which might be tagged as being useful only if you’re using specific modules, or even varied levels of defined special abilities — for example, you could have a very basic “Trip” attack (“Target is knocked over, -2 to attack rolls and defenses, stand as a move action”), with more details if you want to use those modules (“Target is knocked prone, -2 to melee attack rolls and -4 to ranged attacks with thrown weapons and bows other than crossbows, cannot use slings, standing consumes 10′ of total movement, -2 to AC and Reflex defense except vs. area or burst attacks.”).

The issue with monsters is just one of those things I never noticed consciously before. I think back on all the AD&D 1e/2e games I played, and with a handful of occasional exceptions, our encounters were “10 orcs” or “2 medusae” or “1 dragon”. The most common variant would be “10 orcs and a blackguard leading them” or “1 dragon and 2 ogre guards”. As I said, there is a feedback effect. Spells had exact ranges, but (as someone on Critical Hits noted), the in-play reality tended to be more based on abstractions of “near”, “far”, “really far” rather than exact feet. The ranges for bows were such that, if you could see it, you could hit it. Until the grid became the default, and gridless became an option, few abilities relied on exact positioning, and those that did (like a thief’s backstab) often generated disagreements, which led to people at least using markers on a chess board to keep track of things.

Obstacles on the battlefield become more important with a grid, not just for cover or LOS, but distance… if I have a move of 30 feet and I need to use 15 feet of it to dodge around a statue, it’s important. This rarely happens in gridless combat because it’s hard to be 100% sure that there isn’t a straight-line path; as I note, the position of objects tends to be virtual/relative, and in anything but the simplest combats, it’s hard to have a consistent mental map which definitively states you have to detour around a particular object and it will cost you exactly 10 feet of movement, or whatever. It’s even more rare for the mental map to be detailed enough to note that Fred has to run around the statue, but Charlie doesn’t; it tends to be an all or nothing thing, with the statue blocking everyone’s path or no one’s. (The flip side, of course, is that you can be more dynamic with your narrative when objects and distances are fuzzy, and this is the advantage to it for many players. There isn’t a right answer.)

Also – this might seem really strange, but am I the only one getting a kind of apocalyptic, make it or break it vibe from the way that Wizards’ is approaching this? Like Hasbro gave them an ultimatum that if they don’t bring all the D&D players back with this edition that they’ll kill the brand. I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been watching too much 2012 stuff (and the Muppets)…