The Official "4e Critique and Rebuttal" Thread

[lighttigersoul]

It's not effective because the health-damage asymmetry in 4E encourages monsters to completely ignore the defender and dogpile the squishiest-looking party member they can reach.

Attacking the squishies is typically ALWAYS the best strategy, regardless of the damage output of the monsters or the HP of any member of the encounter. That said, have you looked at the latest monster math? Combining this oversight with your views on things like treasure parcels and class balance I doubt you've even read the books, let alone play tested a single concept you're touting as broken.

Monsters do more damage (Making the Defender more critical!), have less HP (Making punishing mechanics more effective!), and some are even more accurate (Hey, that -2 to attacks seems a bit better now!)

Yes, some defenders are trickier to obviate than others (the Fighter) but there are ways around that (ready actions to charge past when the Fighter does something on their turn). The only reason why monsters don't do that is if the defender has some other trick to keep monsters from going past them, the defender is the juiciest target in of itself (like old-style tempest fighters), or the DM is humoring the defender.

Each defender is different. The Fight does more damage, is 'stickier,' but has lower AC. This makes his marks a tougher choice since his AC will be on par with his teammates after a mark, but the threat of getting nailed with a big fuck-off sword is enough to keep DMs checking their plans.

The Paladins will usually have better AC than their parties, making them harder to hit even with a mark, but their damage is autohit and doesn't require adjacency. And built well, a Paladin can mark a large group and do some significant mark damage.

This is exactly why low-level 4E is really lethal (well, it would be if healing wasn't so overpowered), especially for extended workdays. A melee-heavy monster party can turn even the defender into chunky salsa--which is also why CharOP guides for defenders tell you NOT to draw all of the heat.

'It's too easy because healing is broken!'

'It's too lethal because monsters do too much damage!'

These are pretty much mutually exclusive. Either the healing is broken and the damage doesn't matter, or the monsters are broken and the healing doesn't matter.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Beyond being false, your argument is 'if you play with more players than intended, the system doesn't work!'

To put it really simply, imagine you have a 4-person party. They do 20 DPR each and the DM sends out four 80-hp monsters to fight them. This means that the party will take them down in 4 rounds.

If you add another party member that does 20 DPR, the DM compensates by adding another monster. Team PC still beats Team Monster in the same number of rounds, so the fifth wheel didn't really affect the difficulty.

But now imagine that the party added a sixth member that only added 10 DPR. The DM adds a sixth monster, such that Team Monster has 480 hit points to chew through now. It now takes five rounds to take out Team Monster instead of four. The addition of the suboptimal party member increased the difficulty; he did not contribute just by being there.

Now of course battles are a bit more complicated than this. Which is why leaders and controllers are more resistant to the 'useless fifth wheel' treatment than strikers. But does this happen in 4E? Why, yes, it does. An optimized striker will seriously do 2.5x the damage of an unoptimized one. The utility a well-oiled Battle Captain or Bravura Infernal Strategist provides over a Shaman is huge. Etc..

You could of course make the case that the utility gap still isn't as intense as it was in 3E, but it's still really really bad, so bad that 4E fans have no reason to claim that 4E is balanced and it fixed the numbers.

Thankfully, the rules have a section on advice on scaling up the difficulty for parties that need it.

Scaling up difficulty for parties only works for parties that are uniformly overpowered. If you have team members that are noticeably behind the others then jacking up the difficulty only screws them over.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That said, have you looked at the latest monster math?

No and I don't give a shit. The June (I believe) errata and the magical item system errata pissed me off so much that I refuse to purchase any more 4E D&D products. And of course unless someone gives me the Monster Manual I and II with updated numbers for free I'm not just going to pretend that some houserule buried on the website fixes everything.

But anyway, back to the HDA. The HDA is so intense in this edition that regardless of what the defender is doing the monsters are just flat-out encouraged to ignore defender marks and swarm a squishy anyway. This is of course helped along by the fact that generally defenders, even those with good marks, can only take care of one melee monster at a time and those things come in packs. Yes, it will cause individual monsters to go down faster but it will ALSO increase the amount of pain Team Monster inflicts on Team PC.

'It's too easy because healing is broken!'

'It's too lethal because monsters do too much damage!'

These are pretty much mutually exclusive. Either the healing is broken and the damage doesn't matter, or the monsters are broken and the healing doesn't matter.

Or maybe it's because you're missing a third factor--the fact that the healing of leaders scales such that at low levels the monsters can turn you to chunky salsa if they decide to gangbang a party member but when the hp they receive from class features/healing surge increases/magical items/powers scales so quickly that it becomes overpowered.

[Roxolan]

Beyond being false, your argument is 'if you play with more players than intended, the system doesn't work!'

To put it really simply, imagine you have a 4-person party. They do 20 DPR each and the DM sends out four 80-hp monsters to fight them. This means that the party will take them down in 4 rounds.

If you add another party member that does 20 DPR, the DM compensates by adding another monster. Team PC still beats Team Monster in the same number of rounds, so the fifth wheel didn't really affect the difficulty.

But now imagine that the party added a sixth member that only added 10 DPR. The DM adds a sixth monster, such that Team Monster has 480 hit points to chew through now. It now takes five rounds to take out Team Monster instead of four. The addition of the suboptimal party member increased the difficulty; he did not contribute just by being there.

Contributing =/= having an equal or better power level than the party average. It is inevitable that some party members will be worse than the party average so using that as your benchmark is stupid. "Contributing meaningfully" means that the same encounter is beaten significantly easier/faster with your help. 3E monks (and eventually all non-casters) don't contribute meaningfully. Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.

[lighttigersoul]

To put it really simply, imagine you have a 4-person party. They do 20 DPR each and the DM sends out four 80-hp monsters to fight them. This means that the party will take them down in 4 rounds.

If you add another party member that does 20 DPR, the DM compensates by adding another monster. Team PC still beats Team Monster in the same number of rounds, so the fifth wheel didn't really affect the difficulty.

But now imagine that the party added a sixth member that only added 10 DPR. The DM adds a sixth monster, such that Team Monster has 480 hit points to chew through now. It now takes five rounds to take out Team Monster instead of four. The addition of the suboptimal party member increased the difficulty; he did not contribute just by being there.

Now of course battles are a bit more complicated than this. Which is why leaders and controllers are more resistant to the 'useless fifth wheel' treatment than strikers. But does this happen in 4E? Why, yes, it does. An optimized striker will seriously do 2.5x the damage of an unoptimized one. The utility a well-oiled Battle Captain or Bravura Infernal Strategist provides over a Shaman is huge. Etc..

You could of course make the case that the utility gap still isn't as intense as it was in 3E, but it's still really really bad, so bad that 4E fans have no reason to claim that 4E is balanced and it fixed the numbers.

Your model admittedly is not accurate, and yet you hold it as valid.

The utility gap also isn't 'really, really bad' except in a small number of corner cases. Exceptions to prove the rule and all of that. Now, admitted, there are some builds that are brutally optimized to deal as much damage as possible. They're usually strikers. This doesn't break the system, though, as that is the striker's job rules as written and intended.

A brutally optimized cleric can heal like no other class in the game. Guess what. That's his job.

A brutally optimized warlord can grant so many free attacks with ridiculous bonuses that that brutally optimized striker is EVEN BETTER. But, again, that's his job.

Scaling up difficulty for parties only works for parties that are uniformly overpowered. If you have team members that are noticeably behind the others then jacking up the difficulty only screws them over.

Only if you're not following the guidelines. The rules are quite specific that you add more monsters of roles that are appropriate (Oh, I forgot, you think monster roles are a joke.) at level or level + 1. This doesn't make the encounter auto-screw less optimal character UNLESS you are sending them into a situation that would beat them with on level encounters. In an encounter with standard expectations for terrain it only provides more targets, which is more difficult, but not impossibly so. Oddly, tactics are important in a tactical RPG.

More importantly, if you have a ridiculous striker, throw in more elites for them to burn their damage on.

Ridiculous controller? More minions.

Amazing Defender? Brutes were built to be their foe.

Amazing leader? Add more monsters of any role.

Oddly, all of this is available in the DMG.

[Kaelik]

Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.

Um.... if by contrived, you mean "any situation at all" that would be true. But in reality, that is not the case.

[lighttigersoul]

Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.

Um.... if by contrived, you mean "any situation at all" that would be true. But in reality, that is not the case.

Contrived scenario: A party of melee combatants and a wizard face a swarm of high flying enemies.

Not contrived: A single flying monster and a ground pack facing the same group. The second one gives the wizard something special for him specifically, and doesn't completely obviate the other characters. And how you design on the ground can make it more interesting for each of those characters.

[Doom]

More importantly, if you have a ridiculous striker, throw in more elites for them to burn their damage on.

Ridiculous controller? More minions.

Amazing Defender? Brutes were built to be their foe.

Amazing leader? Add more monsters of any role.

So, basically be a jerk. And more minions? Seriously? No way, can't be serious, this isn't 2008, anyone that's played the game knows better.

[Roxolan]

By "contrived scenario" I mean something like an optimized party built to abuse a loophole and stunlock all monsters or something. I'm sure the Char-Op forums at WotC have found something like that. Yeah, if you add a warlock to that party he probably won't be able to contribute meaningfully.

In any normal party though, you can contribute meaningfully whatever your class.

[lighttigersoul]

More importantly, if you have a ridiculous striker, throw in more elites for them to burn their damage on.

Ridiculous controller? More minions.

Amazing Defender? Brutes were built to be their foe.

Amazing leader? Add more monsters of any role.

So, basically be a jerk. And more minions? Seriously? No way, can't be serious, this isn't 2008, anyone that's played the game knows better.

No, I didn't say 'rocks fall, everybody dies,' I said tailor the encounter to your party so everyone has something to do that is interesting. And yes, minions, because they soak up Controller actions fairly efficiently. I guess if you don't like minions you could toss a pile of level - 1 skirmishers to similar effect.

[Winnah]

More importantly, if you have a ridiculous striker, throw in more elites for them to burn their damage on.

Ridiculous controller? More minions.

Amazing Defender? Brutes were built to be their foe.

Amazing leader? Add more monsters of any role.

Oddly, all of this is available in the DMG.

Encounter budgeting is also in the DMG. How can you add monsters without throwing that out of balance?

Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.

Experience tells me otherwise. Unless you mean that a meaningful contribution does not have to be equal or particularly useful.

[lighttigersoul]

Encounter budgeting is also in the DMG. How can you add monsters without throwing that out of balance?

Jumping into the conclusion of a line of discussion without acknowledging the topic make you feel intelligent?

The suggestions in the DMG that I am talking about are if the standard Level encounter budget is too easy for your party. It explains making challenges up to Level + 4 for both challenge and variance. So, system as intended.

[Koumei]

Contrived scenario: A party of melee combatants and a wizard face a swarm of high flying enemies.

How on earth is "a group of harpies attack, dropping rocks" contrived? It happens in stories all the time, and I put it to you that such a thing is less contrived than "Yeah, one harpy and a cluster of bandersnatches attack all at once, just so the wizard has his own special target and the fighters can still all feel good in the pants."

What, do monsters gather up in club rooms to arrange these things for player convenience before they go to attack them?

[Kaelik]

Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.

Um.... if by contrived, you mean "any situation at all" that would be true. But in reality, that is not the case.

Contrived scenario: A party of melee combatants and a wizard face a swarm of high flying enemies.

Not contrived: A single flying monster and a ground pack facing the same group. The second one gives the wizard something special for him specifically, and doesn't completely obviate the other characters. And how you design on the ground can make it more interesting for each of those characters.

You are insane. A pack of flyers is not contrived at all. People that fly usually go together. Mixes are contrived. Raptorans hunt with other Raptorans, and Goblins with other Goblins. Goblins with a Raptoran is weird.

[Novembermike]

Contrived scenario: A party of melee combatants and a wizard face a swarm of high flying enemies.

How on earth is "a group of harpies attack, dropping rocks" contrived? It happens in stories all the time, and I put it to you that such a thing is less contrived than "Yeah, one harpy and a cluster of bandersnatches attack all at once, just so the wizard has his own special target and the fighters can still all feel good in the pants."

What, do monsters gather up in club rooms to arrange these things for player convenience before they go to attack them?

Pretty much the only reason to have an encounter like that in a story is to force the protagonist to run. Either the protagonist can deal with it, can run from it or thyey are willing to capture him without killing him. If you seriously put an encounter like that in when the players can't deal with it in some way that's just bad encounter design.

Which I'd probably include under "contrived".

[Avoraciopoctules]

Flying around and dropping rocks on things sounds pretty tiring. Couldn't the PCs try and hold out until the harpies ran out of energy/rocks? Melee peeps could have shields, and if so, they can contribute by defending against the projectiles.

[Novembermike]

Really, the reasonable response is to try and get under cover somehow. The wizard and anyone with a bow can take a few potshots if they want, but unless there's a particularly large contingent of ranged attackers you aren't designing the encounter to be "beaten".

EDIT: In any system.

[Darwinism]

Contrived scenario: A party of melee combatants and a wizard face a swarm of high flying enemies.

How on earth is "a group of harpies attack, dropping rocks" contrived? It happens in stories all the time, and I put it to you that such a thing is less contrived than "Yeah, one harpy and a cluster of bandersnatches attack all at once, just so the wizard has his own special target and the fighters can still all feel good in the pants."

What, do monsters gather up in club rooms to arrange these things for player convenience before they go to attack them?

Nope, that's what the DM is for!

Seriously it's not hard to understand that the role of a DM isn't to arbitrarily fuck his party with monsters they're completely unsuited to engage; it's his role to provide the best challenge for his party given their relative powers.

[Novembermike]

Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.

[Darwinism]

But anyway, back to the HDA. The HDA is so intense in this edition that regardless of what the defender is doing the monsters are just flat-out encouraged to ignore defender marks and swarm a squishy anyway. This is of course helped along by the fact that generally defenders, even those with good marks, can only take care of one melee monster at a time and those things come in packs. Yes, it will cause individual monsters to go down faster but it will ALSO increase the amount of pain Team Monster inflicts on Team PC.

Hey Lago I know you're not interested in changing your mind but Health/Damage Asymmetry still doesn't exist in 4E no matter how much you want it to; players have effective hitpoint totals that surpass most monsters though not by immense amounts and both sides deal roughly equal levels of damage. Player HP is linked to recovery methods, though, so that there is actually some perceived threat to the players rather than giving them health totals similar to monsters. But there's no limit on how many healing surges you can spend; if you've got the potions or Leaders or other items to trigger then you can use every single surge you've got in one combat.

[LR]

Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.

Your solution to melee characters having no powers that work on flying archers is to metagame the problem away? You are seriously basing the story around the limitations of the game instead of the world that game supposedly represents. So, if Trevor wants to play a Barbarian in a party full of Mages and Archers, he's actually restricting the stories that can be told. Not because he's a selfish jerk (even though his actions are indistinguishable from one), but because the game does not actually support Barbarian/Archer parties. You don't see that as a problem?

[Koumei]

...the fuck, November? It's not fucking "impossible" in any good system. When a group of harpies with rocks attack, the fighter-types either use bows, leap up to fight them each round (or jump atop one, grab her by the brain and force her to fly at the rest as a sort of mount) or throw each other at them. Meanwhile the rhiefy type also does the jumping, or uses a bow/ninja stars/acid flasks, or pretends to be a wizard for a bit, or uses a grappling hook, while the casters use blasty spells or mind control or summon a hurricane/lightning storm.

It would need to be the shittiest of game systems where "THE ENEMIES ARE FLYING" is actually the MC screwing everyone, game over.

Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.

I can only assume that you're pointing out how "In 4E, the monsters don't actually exist out of combat, they spring into existence for the fight, with no connection to the world, then exist to get killed" and are using sarcasm and satire here. Because that does come across as a pretty good highlight of part of the stupidity of the assumed setting and the monster design, yes.

If you're seriously saying "Monsters only exist when the MC says they do, so they really should exist in a way that suits the party perfectly! Just because the sign says 'Warning: a continent-sized dragon lives over there' doesn't mean there should be one until the PCs are high enough level - if they go there at level 5 then there's only a bright red lizard about a foot long" then you are dangerously retarded and should go have a lie down. Because that describes an awful game design and world design that makes no fucking sense and would be terrible to play in.

The fact is that the monsters need to have some sensical reason to be there and to be attacking in such a group.

Also, I thank all of you trolls who suddenly sprang in - my ignore list is growing in surges. I can't wait until I hit the 50 mark, I'll throw a party.

[Novembermike]

...the fuck, November? It's not fucking "impossible" in any good system. When a group of harpies with rocks attack, the fighter-types either use bows, leap up to fight them each round (or jump atop one, grab her by the brain and force her to fly at the rest as a sort of mount) or throw each other at them. Meanwhile the rhiefy type also does the jumping, or uses a bow/ninja stars/acid flasks, or pretends to be a wizard for a bit, or uses a grappling hook, while the casters use blasty spells or mind control or summon a hurricane/lightning storm.

It would need to be the shittiest of game systems where "THE ENEMIES ARE FLYING" is actually the MC screwing everyone, game over.

If the players can actually deal with the harpies dropping rocks on the player, why would you put the encounter in? It's not particularly interesting (the wizard has some options, but everyone else just pulls out their secondary weapon and starts doing basic attacks), it doesn't seem like it would do a particularly good job of moving the story along (running forces them somewhere, fighting just keeps them where they were with some bodies around them and a little less health).

All those things you talked about are possible, but they generally require that the DM be playing like shit. If the harpies are just flying 100+ feet above the ground and dropping rocks, nobody is going to be jumping up to grab them by the brains.

This is also based around the concept that an encounter built around an extreme (all enemies are flying) without the players having a natural counter to it (all players are archers) then its difficulty is going to be a out of line with the difficulty if its parts.

I also said the word "impossible", so are those just scare quotes or what?

Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.

I can only assume that you're pointing out how "In 4E, the monsters don't actually exist out of combat, they spring into existence for the fight, with no connection to the world, then exist to get killed" and are using sarcasm and satire here. Because that does come across as a pretty good highlight of part of the stupidity of the assumed setting and the monster design, yes.

If you're seriously saying "Monsters only exist when the MC says they do, so they really should exist in a way that suits the party perfectly! Just because the sign says 'Warning: a continent-sized dragon lives over there' doesn't mean there should be one until the PCs are high enough level - if they go there at level 5 then there's only a bright red lizard about a foot long" then you are dangerously retarded and should go have a lie down. Because that describes an awful game design and world design that makes no fucking sense and would be terrible to play in.

The fact is that the monsters need to have some sensical reason to be there and to be attacking in such a group.

Also, I thank all of you trolls who suddenly sprang in - my ignore list is growing in surges. I can't wait until I hit the 50 mark, I'll throw a party.

The monsters do need a sensible reason to be there, but that's largely related to worldbuilding, not system design.

Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.

Your solution to melee characters having no powers that work on flying archers is to metagame the problem away? You are seriously basing the story around the limitations of the game instead of the world that game supposedly represents. So, if Trevor wants to play a Barbarian in a party full of Mages and Archers, he's actually restricting the stories that can be told. Not because he's a selfish jerk (even though his actions are indistinguishable from one), but because the game does not actually support Barbarian/Archer parties. You don't see that as a problem?

I'm sorry, where did i say that? Of course it's ok to have an encounter with all flying enemies if the party is 80% archers.

Fuck, now the page is messed up for me. Did I break the table or something?

[LR]

You have a superfluous /quote tag.

[Novembermike]

You have a superfluous /quote tag.

Thanks, although I'm kind of sad the forum software can't deal with that.