Dungeons & Dragons/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• This troper was up in arms after seeing the announcement for Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. But after I came to consider that I hadn't played D&D for nearly a year by that point, and hadn't DMed in about two, thanks to my growing frustration with creating adventures past 13th level, that my opinion shifted to more "wait and see." And then I picked up the preview books describing changes to the assumptions of the setting, which kicked off a great storm of world revamping and creative growth, and then got a chance to play with the quick-start rules and found it so much easier to use that my opinion did a complete 180.
  • I was also rather concerned about a lot of the changes, and then I played some and discovered that the new Fighter rules and special abilities make me into the ultimate tank with much more ease than before.
    • Nobody ever doubted that
  • I originally thought the Primordials in the new generic campaign setting were a cheesy Exalted ripoff. Then I started thinking of them as more like the Giants of Norse Mythology, powerful and chaotic elemental beings that are in opposition to the gods. They suddenly became much cooler, as I am a bit of a Norse mythology fan.
    • The dragonborn seemed like a cheesy, "here, you can play a dragon character" addition to the game, until our group started exploring the potential backgrounds in each of the races. With bonuses to Charisma, History checks, and a background involving a long-lost empire, the dragonborn sound less tossed-in, and a lot more like a race inspired by Persian/Arabic backgrounds, and even nods to Islam and Zoroastrianism. With that, my view of the dragonborn turned from "Why did we need this?" to "There is but one god, and Bahamut is his prophet."
      • Reading this Fridge Brilliance entry inspired me to realize WHY they changed the death and dying rules the way they did. (Aside from Rule of Fun). D&D became more popular and more "mainstream" over the years. Therefore, trends in gaming changed from the "Let's simulate an adventure." to a "Let's be the perfect action hero who recovers and prevails during fights!", so D&D changed to suit the new audiences demands. Pity that's what annoys me so much.
        • I'd say that the reason is closer to "dying and creating a new character every session cuts down on the roleplay and makes fighting the only thing worth concentrating on." Why bother with real roleplaying if the personality you so painstakingly created, and the in-character friendships and contacts you've worked so hard to form, could be taken away at any second? Also, death is no longer a certainty in 4.0, as fate plays a part in whether a resurrection even works. This means that death has more impact and balance; it's more nebulous. There's no longer a sort of "resurrection hump" to cross, before which you're basically screwed and after which death is a mere annoyance. You should give 4.0 a fair chance; despite being flawed, it circumvents a lot of things in 3.5 that were plain nonsense.
        • That just plays right into the "dumbing it down" argument. If you're smart about how you build and play your characters, you won't die very often in anything outside of the Tomb of Horrors. On the other hand, you would have to be downright retarded to lose a character in 4th ed. Now a valid argument would be that 4th ed lets you get back in the fight faster. If that's what you want, 4th ed really is the better game.
    • This troper's particular original point of contention was that 4E seems to be trying to enforce a 'level cap', MMORPG style, as if to discourage epic-level play. But later, I realised that pretty much everyone will admit that at epic levels in previous editions of D&D (and many other games), balance is an absolute joke in so many ways, combat takes forever to resolve, and gameplay itself becomes absolutely ridiculous. They're trying to encourage players to take their time leveling, or even be more willing to retire characters that become powerful enough and roll new ones. It's not something you have to agree with or like by any means (most of my friends don't like the idea) but they did that for a reason.
  • This pales in comparison to the other examples here, but the 4th ed. Monster Manual 2 has a foe called the Human Gladiator. His Well-Placed Kick dazes and slows its target.
• A bit of Forgotten Realms fluff related fridge brilliance; a lot of people complained about them killing Mystra in 4e, after it had been established that Mystra is needed for magic to function. A lot of people also mentioned that Mystra had died more than once before, and asked what made this time so special. It occured to me that there were two constants for when Mystra died; 1: magic started going completely haywire, and 2: someone stepped up and became a new Mystra before things got out of hand. What makes this time different is that the second one didn't happen. No one took over, so magic just went out of control. But where as everyone had expected a complete collapse, instead you got the spellplague.
  • Even better: magic did completely collapse. The Realms has always been an extremely high-magic world, with a wide array of spellcasters, uses for magic, and a lot of high-power spellcasters. The Weave itself is designed to be an interface, because mortals cannot safely access raw magic without burning their brains out. When Mystra died and the Weave collapsed, it led to the rest of the magic in Realmspace also collapsing. What spellcasters use for magic now is merely remnants, fragments of the former power that magic held. And this also fits in perfectly with how powerful magic had been as compared to how powerful magic is now.
• I figured for a bit that the bard would forever be made of weak sauce when it occured to me everyone thinks bards are terrible so when it comes to attack I'm low priority.-Doomboy911
• In pathfinder I was wondering how a bard could cast spells while maintaining bardic performance. Then I looked over the bard class's description closer and relaised that they made it so all bard spells have verbalk components and these components depend on perform.
• Tabletop-related, I didn't know why one of fast usage options for Hamete's dice server was 4D6-L until I learned how to make a D&D character.
• A lot of people think it's silly that the slaadi, the embodiments of Chaotic Neutral in the same way demons personify Chaotic Evil, look like humanoid frogs. The usual response is that, if they embody pure chaos, they could look like anything, so why shouldn't they look like frogs? But after some research I found that in Egyptian mythology, the chaos before creation was inhabited by primal gods, some of whom looked like, you guessed it, frogs. For bonus points, Pathfinder wasn't able to use slaadi due to copyright reasons, so their role of Chaotic Neutral exemplars was filled with the proteans, who, like some other primal Egyptian gods, look like snakes.