Major Design Choices of 4e D&D

[TavishArtair]

You know, one of the things that video games do really well is reward you for expending the least amount of effort for the maximum reward. You often get bonus points or tchotchkies in many games if you can defeat an enemy or a level or whatever with a minimal expenditure of health, ammunition, or moves.

Table top RPGs should really embrace that paradigm.

This is really an adventure design element. For instance, if you are on a quest to discover and foil the plot to sacrifice the virginal Priestess Prettytits to summon the Dread Doomers into the world, you could have a timetable. Discovering it early lets you strike before the ritual even begins. More delays, and you might only burst in at the apex of the ritual, where Herald Hottotrot has appeared in a flaming ring. So you'd have to fight him then. And depending on how the fight goes you may have to stop them from actually stabbing Priestess Prettytits to death, and if you do, you successfully get the Favor of Priestess Prettytits, redeemable for one free grab, or whatever, and if you don't, there's a demon army you have to stave off while you seal the portal. It's pretty easily done, and helps a lot with varying degrees of success available to stop the adventure from hinging tooo much on any one single point.

[Roy]

The worst that can be said about win spells is that ending the encounter in one round is 'boring'. Well, so is flailing for piddly shit. The difference is that takes a lot more than one round.

Yeah, though flailing around at least gives everyone on your team the sense that they're contributing something, where as the I win spells tend to just make everyone else feel "Why am I even here?"

No, it makes everyone feel ineffectual. And against the competent stuff, the first win spell won't work, and the second probably won't either. You have to keep trying, or better yet use some teamwork with weakening effects first. So as long as you're playing the Same Game as everyone else, you're fine and doing things this way portrays a foe that is actually dangerous and will seriously fuck you up if you're not on the ball, not some padded sumo beast with over 9,000 HP, and a DPS around 15.

Next you'll tell me DKP is an excellent system for PnP games, am I right?

[RandomCasualty2]

No, it makes everyone feel ineffectual. And against the competent stuff, the first win spell won't work, and the second probably won't either. You have to keep trying, or better yet use some teamwork with weakening effects first. So as long as you're playing the Same Game as everyone else, you're fine and doing things this way portrays a foe that is actually dangerous and will seriously fuck you up if you're not on the ball, not some padded sumo beast with over 9,000 HP, and a DPS around 15.

Yeah the general consensus is that 4E battles are just plain boring.

Rocket launcher tag was an issue, but they went way way too far in trying to solve it.

[Neckbeard]

Like RC said, it may be boring buts its sure having an impact. I don't like one shot wins either but that doesn't mean people get to make bad arguments.

I wasn't making an argument, I was making a statement. I haven't played a lot of high level 3rd Ed games where casting "I win" spells happens. I still have been in more boring 3e fights than I have in 4e.

[Draco_Argentum]

I wasn't making an argument, I was making a statement. I haven't played a lot of high level 3rd Ed games where casting "I win" spells happens. I still have been in more boring 3e fights than I have in 4e.

You played level 0 D&D exclusively? Sleep is level one.

[RandomCasualty2]

I wasn't making an argument, I was making a statement. I haven't played a lot of high level 3rd Ed games where casting "I win" spells happens. I still have been in more boring 3e fights than I have in 4e.

You played level 0 D&D exclusively? Sleep is level one.

They were probably like one group that I played in who had their wizards memorize 2 magic missiles at 1st level.

[Username17]

It's technically possible for 4e players to play paladins who fight with daggers and who max dex and intelligence. But if people were claiming 40 round padded sumo matches, I'd call shenanigans on that too.

-Username17

[Neckbeard]

You played level 0 D&D exclusively? Sleep is level one.

Sleep is hardly an "I win" spell on the scale that other, higher level spells are. It affects 4 HD of creatures. Even at low levels, I've never seen a situation where a single casting of sleep ended the entire fight. Maybe you've just been given easy fights in your groups?

Most of my 3e games have been in the level 3-10 range. Sleep becomes useless pretty quickly.

[Murtak]

You played level 0 D&D exclusively? Sleep is level one.

Sleep is hardly an "I win" spell on the scale that other, higher level spells are. It affects 4 HD of creatures. Even at low levels, I've never seen a situation where a single casting of sleep ended the entire fight.

Level 1
Sleep ends many fights, even supposedly tough fights. A single crit by any high-strength character kills any player character. Obscuring Mist can end a fight against archers. Charm Person can end a fight damn fast. Color Spray ends fights pretty well too.

Level 3
Web ends many fights. Hold Person ends up being a save-or-die spell damn often. Blindness or Glitterdust make melees cry.

Level 5
Stinking Cloud is a damn brutal spells for many levels to come. So is Slow.

Bottom line: As far as I can tell the lower levels are even more deadly than the mid levels.

[ubernoob]

You played level 0 D&D exclusively? Sleep is level one.

Sleep is hardly an "I win" spell on the scale that other, higher level spells are. It affects 4 HD of creatures. Even at low levels, I've never seen a situation where a single casting of sleep ended the entire fight. Maybe you've just been given easy fights in your groups?

Most of my 3e games have been in the level 3-10 range. Sleep becomes useless pretty quickly.

4 of these:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/orc.htm
is a CR 3 encounter, which is supposed to be hard.

[Doom]

Indeed, Sleep isn't an "I win" spell against high level encounters...but as a level 1 spell, it's an "I win" against level 1 encounters, which sure beats MM at that level.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

And yet a lot of people had trouble figuring that out even in 2e, when Sleep didn't have a save.

[Roy]

4 HD goes a lot further than you think. At level 1, that's good enough for any and every routine encounter (are there any level 1 creatures that even have more than 2 HD?). It also completely handles most of the harder encounters and takes a huge bite out of the ones it can't. It's not until level 4 encounters and higher you start regularly seeing > 4 HD at a time in the total encounter, much less on a single enemy. And at level 1, that's a boss battle. At 2 it's a serious battle. At 3 you don't care anymore because you have Glitterdust/Web/etc. Though you can still use it to take decent bites out of the encounter for another 2 levels or so until you start regularly seeing single enemies with 5 or more HD (and are therefore immune). By then you have Slow, and more Glitterdusts and Webs.

Hell, at low levels nearly everything is at least a save or lose. Even 'sword to the face' will regularly at least incap almost any enemy or PC in one shot, if not kill outright. At higher levels the RLT actually occurs less frequently because fewer things are capable of keeping up, and you have more means of ensuring your own survivability. Of course this is a problem because 'sword to the face' is basically ignorable now. Sucks to be you Fighter boy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

All roles are equal, but some roles are more equal than others.

This isn't just bad game design which makes the striker role entirely pointless (though there is that) but simply that the game is set up in such a way so that some roles are better than others.

For example, right now, there are four roles and five expected people to a party. ... okay. But also getting into classes, here is the role breakdown of published/preview classes. I am including monk and assassin because they have enough material for 30 levels of play--the monk in particular had a greater breadth of options than the paladin had at first and that's just fucking sad. But whatever.

Leader: Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Shaman, Warlord
Defender: Fighter, Paladin, Swordmage, Warden
Striker: Assassin, Avenger, Barbarian, Monk, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock
Controller: Wizard, Druid, Invoker

Let's be honest with ourselves. You need to have a leader. Unless you're going for something cheesy like five wizards or five melee rangers, it's the only role that is 'have this role or fuck off'. You can run a game of five clerics. You can't run a game of five rogues. So leader will be the first slot.

So anyway, judging by the ratio, here's how a five-party team should be constructed, in order of descending importance.

Leader, Striker, Striker, Defender, Controller.

That doesn't seem too bad. There is a repeating role but that's more because you have only four roles but five expected slots--which is in itself a failure of role design, but whatever. That's like complaining that there's a gender imbalance in a team of seven people.

But let's expand our party roster some more to accomodate 8 people. Which is generally agreed to be the maximize size of a gaming group anyone can handle with any degree of control.

Leader, Striker, Striker, Defender, Controller--> Leader, Defender, Striker

You get that? So we can see that the Controller role is the least important of all of them and that the Striker is the most important.

A nice little quote from Mike Mearls is my crowning proof for this assertion: http://questinggm.blogspot.com/2008/12/ ... s-and.html

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The creation of or enhancements to an existing PC archetype should be made into a new class altogether whenever possible.

This was already reaching a ridiculous extent in the Player's Handbook II. How does the sorcerer functionally differ from the wizard and warlock? What is the difference in special effects between a shaman and a cleric? What is the thematic separation between an avenger and a paladin?

Player's Handbook III seems to be going along with this ludicrous design concept. For example, the upcoming Seeker role. What does the Seeker do? It's a Primal-sourced controller. That uses crossbows and thrown weapons to create environmental effects that hinder opponents. Due to the way that the druid is set up you can't really just have a 'thrown weapon druid' variant. So you need a new class. And besides, classes mean more material, which means more money!



I can to an extent understand why they did this. After the fiasco of the beastmaster ranger and the paladin WotC has been extremely wary of releasing classes that have variants that diverge meaningfully from each other. Of course what's really to blame is the game's stupid fetishization of concepts like 'powers not feats', 'stats are everything!', 'races are everything!', and 'everyone should be married to what's in their right hand!'.

As an aside, can I mention how much I hate this idea? The cool thing about prestige classes was that if your paladin decided midstream that they wanted to pursue the art of the Dark Sword or learn to transform into a giant spider they could jump ship and do that. Of course 3E did this in a profoundly stupid way what with its combination of empty levels, sword-hating, caster-level non-stacking, and ridiculous prerequisites. But hey, the attempt was there.

This is impossible with 4E's rigidly defined class structure; another reason why I hate this edition. But if you hold those precepts clear then yes, whenever you come up with a new idea for a character concept it should be its own separate class.

[Starmaker]

zOMG Abyssal genasi!

I wonder if they ever heard of conceptual space.

[Username17]

zOMG Abyssal genasi!

I wonder if they ever heard of conceptual space.

Awesome. So we took the Tieflings out and turned them into Draeni so that we could... put Tieflings back in as the Abyssal Planetouched Genasi. Gotcha.

Couldn't we have just had player character hobgoblins or Sahuagin in the basic book if we just wanted a generic race of evil-looking monster people? It's not like Warlocks are good or Tieflings make acceptable Inferlocks anyway, having the generic evil-looking PC race be any of the ones already described in the decades of D&D fiction would have been fine. Fuck, we could have had playable Drow in the basic book, I don't even care.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, Abyssal genasi are just there to fill a quota. They're not actually there to entertain players or enrich the game.

This is exactly what happens when you have such a narrowly-focused, inflexible game but also have orders to produce a large amount of extra material on a schedule. You write even MORE narrowly focused material.

[RandomCasualty2]

Awesome. So we took the Tieflings out and turned them into Draeni so that we could... put Tieflings back in as the Abyssal Planetouched Genasi. Gotcha.

Couldn't we have just had player character hobgoblins or Sahuagin in the basic book if we just wanted a generic race of evil-looking monster people? It's not like Warlocks are good or Tieflings make acceptable Inferlocks anyway, having the generic evil-looking PC race be any of the ones already described in the decades of D&D fiction would have been fine. Fuck, we could have had playable Drow in the basic book, I don't even care.

Yeah, I think 4E just tries to create new stuff for the sake of creating new stuff. The dragonborn and tieflings especially annoyed me, since they expected every campaign world to adopt them just for 4E, for god knows what reason. And naturally everyone in the world just knows they're a PC race and lets them into towns now, besides the fact that one looks like a lizardman and the other looks like a devil and actually is the product of infernal power. But apparently there's no racism or anything, because everyone in Forgotten Realms got the magical broadcast saying these races are okay.

[souran]

Yeah, I think 4E just tries to create new stuff for the sake of creating new stuff. The dragonborn and tieflings especially annoyed me, since they expected every campaign world to adopt them just for 4E, for god knows what reason. And naturally everyone in the world just knows they're a PC race and lets them into towns now, besides the fact that one looks like a lizardman and the other looks like a devil and actually is the product of infernal power. But apparently there's no racism or anything, because everyone in Forgotten Realms got the magical broadcast saying these races are okay.

Actually what better time to introduce new races to games than at an edition switch? Honestly when else would you do it? D&D has had dragon/humanoids for a long time. Granted most of them were specific to a particular camaign setting.

In the default campaign setting these races have always existed and so there is no logical reason for them not to be accepted.

As for existing campigns, remember that every edition has gotten to pretty much do whatever they wanted to existing settings and let the logic come later. Honestly, your telling me that adding dragonborn to FR makes any less sense than adding sorcerors who by the games very definiation couldn't have existed with mystra's weave or whatever. Or better yet, the "time of troubles" where one of the godly avatars was created by killing all the assassisns in the whole world (which was used as the reason why there was no longer an assassin class) this was somehow less stupid?

Not every D&D game has to be a kitchen sink game with every single thing from everywhere always allowed. Even with no other sourcebooks there are 5 other races in the first PHB if you decide that dragonborn and tieflings are thematically stupid and don't fit yoru game. Perhaps your players could play those?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Not every D&D game has to be a kitchen sink game with every single thing from everywhere always allowed. Even with no other sourcebooks there are 5 other races in the first PHB if you decide that dragonborn and tieflings are thematically stupid and don't fit yoru game. Perhaps your players could play those?

In 4E D&D classes are designed under the assumption that there is a perfect master race to fill them, so this is a non-starter.

[souran]

In 4E D&D classes are designed under the assumption that there is a perfect master race to fill them, so this is a non-starter.

Every race except humans and half elves have a class which they synergize best with. However, You really don't need to be the "best race" to make an effective character in 4e.

Honestly, the game still functions without maximum optimization.

4e doesn't "presume" anything except a party of 5 players.

There are things to complain about in 4e but to say that having a specific race or not having another in any particular rulebook is a problem is bitchin just to be bitchin.

Because if the inclusion of dragon born and tieflings stirs your pot so much then I can only imagine what the publishing of oriental adventures did. MOST of the new races presented in that were unsuitable for a typical themed dnd game and only 2 were even used in the books default setting.

[Doom]

Of course, Oriental Adventures wasn't 'core', so it's another non-starter.

[souran]

"Core" was never meant to become this magical sacred descriptor that somehow meant "more balanced" or "the way the game is supposed to be played" It was only supposed to indicate the minimum materials neccessary to make the additional suppliments function.

Everybody associated with it has said that the "core only snobbery" and the mystique of the core rulebooks was unintentional and basically stupid.


If you were playing a game with far east traditions and cultures oriental adventures would be more "core" than the phb.

Heck, you probably wouldn't have used the core races. I know I didn't let people play elves in Rokugan.....

Anyway, it doesn't matter, NOTHING in 4e is core and everything is core.

The idea that races are mandatory or even that certain races are mandatory is stupid. The whole "race" ruleset is self contained. You can make everybody human (or elf or dragonborn) or whatever and the game still works.

There is nobody holding a gun to your head and saying that your ongoing Realms game better fucking including Dragonborn right now. If you don't like them don't use them. However, complaing about there existance is stupid.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Every race except humans and half elves have a class which they synergize best with. However, You really don't need to be the "best race" to make an effective character in 4e.

Yes, you do.

If you want to be a sword and board push-fighter, you either be a dragonborn or you fuck off and go home. If you want to be a pit-fighter ranger you be a half-orc, a shifter, or a goliath or you fuck off and go home. If you want to be a blaster wizard you are a genasi or you fuck off and go home. If you want to be a glaive tripper wizard you are a genasi or you fuck off and go home. If you want to be a Cold Sorcerer you are a dragonborn or you fuck off and go home. If you want to be a Feycharger you are an eladrin or you fuck off and go home.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Not optimizing in 4e means that your already long and boring combats become even more so. That's an option, but it's not a good one.