Good things in 4e

[ModelCitizen]

I assume it went something like this:

DR in 3.0 was a standin for 2e's "only harmed by weapons of +X or greater enchantment." Since spells are magic they got to bypass it, just like in 2e. Then 3.5 decided to make DR small and bypassed by random crap like cold iron, but they forgot to re-examine how DR interacts with spells.

Now that you mention it, yeah, that rule doesn't make much sense.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Having both energy resistance (tells you what damage won't make it through) and damage reduction (tells you what damage will make it through) is nice in a game full of bullshit damage types like 3e. But, yeah, the spell exemption is a fuckup.

[shau]

Going back to good things in 4E, I rather liked the wisdom cleric I played right when Divine Power came out. It let me do something other than kill things, Astral Sign was good enough that I did not mind it was 90 percent of the actions I took, dailies were powerful enough to swing a combat the rare times they were used, and there were enough small power ups at each level that it felt satisfying when your level increased, if not always exciting. I really think the first splat book that came along really helped 4e classes. The difference between having 4 options for every archetype instead of two and feats you actually gave a damn about really helped things along.

Then WOTC dropped enough nerfs that I could not trust anything printed in any of my books to be right and I pretty much lost any desire to find another gaming group.

[CatharzGodfoot]

...Astral Sign was good enough that I did not mind it was 90 percent of the actions I took...

Do you normally find that performing the same action over and over again in game is satisfying as long as the action feels powerful?

[Whatever]

...Astral Sign was good enough that I did not mind it was 90 percent of the actions I took...

Do you normally find that performing the same action over and over again in game is satisfying as long as the action feels powerful?

I waste it with my crossbow!

[Ice9]

...Astral Sign was good enough that I did not mind it was 90 percent of the actions I took...

Do you normally find that performing the same action over and over again in game is satisfying as long as the action feels powerful?

Actually, this in an interesting point. Hypothetically speaking, that shouldn't matter, and I wouldn't expect to be satisfied with too small a set of actions no matter how useful they were.

In practice, I've found that it does count for something. I recently played, in a short 3E game, a warrior type that almost always just did normal attacks. But those normal attacks did a lot of damage, knocked enemies back and down, and I got AoOs on anybody that so much as breathed funny. Still hypothetically boring, but I found myself enjoying it. Of course, it was 3E, so fights lasted 1-3 rounds, and it was a mini-series rather than an extended campaign, so I may well have gotten bored of it in time. But I think the potency definitely did extend how long it stayed entertaining.

I mean, ask people whether they'd rather play a super-effective flask Rogue or a poorly built pure-blaster Wizard. The Wizard unquestionably has more options, even if none of those options compare to the Rogue's normal attacks. But I doubt everyone would beeline for it.

[RobG]

I think there is a simple difference between spamming the same spell and the same melee attack and that's the rolling.

It may not be a big deal to some but rolling to hit and damage and maybe a critical too keeps me more interested than saying 'I cast Glitterdust' ad nauseum, even if its a damn good spell

[OgreBattle]

Themes n' backgrounds, that's what I really enjoy about 4e, though with backgrounds if every class could just choose from any skills you could do away with it.

But yeah, themes, they add a lot of style to character concepts.

I like the idea of variety for martial maneuvers and I'm fine with the powers system. But I'd prefer riders to melee basic attacks, it just feels better that way. Functionally you get the same thing, but the route you take there matters (it matters a ton to some people).

Essentials made Stances that add on to basic attacks, but I prefer how the Bladesinger adds riders to landing basic attacks.
There's also a little less decision paralysis involved. If you miss, you miss, only if you hit do you choose what rider to add on.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What I do like about 4th Edition D&D is that they tested a lot of ideas that sounded good at the time but are actually bad in retrospect. And that kind of thing is pretty valuable information. For example:

[*] No Self Buffs are actually more unbalanced than Self or Party-Wide Buffs.
[*] Standardizing class and ability gain is actually pretty boring.
[*] Healing in combat is way overrated.
[*] Stat asymmetry can still fuck you over even if the class and level system is agnostic towards it.
[*] If you have an effect that will obviate combat (such as Intimidate) most people will just plain choose not to use it.
[*] Keywords need to be taken to their full conclusion to get any use out of them.
[*] Even though it's a cost-savings at the time, in the long run dissociative mechanics will use up more writing than it saves.
[*] Even if you expect most groups to come up with their own stupid fantasy heartbreaker setting on the fly, it still really pays to have your own setting available.
[*] Too much errata is worse than no errata at all.
[*] Classplosion doesn't work. The saturation limit is reached pretty quickly and worse people will just plain not give new classes a second look if they feel that they're going to be left hanging.
[*] Segregating splatbooks by expected tactical build is a really bad idea for marketing.
[*] You need some other kind of minigame aside from combat because even stalwart fans will get burnt out pretty quickly. See: Gabe.
[*] 30 levels of advancement is just too goddamn long. Yes, the instinct is to artificially extend the length of the game in hopes that the good times will keep rolling forever, but seriously, a lot of people actually get frustrated if too much time goes between getting to the content they supposedly pay for.

[Username17]

Classplosion doesn't work. The saturation limit is reached pretty quickly and worse people will just plain not give new classes a second look if they feel that they're going to be left hanging.

I disagree. 4e promised a classplosion and then did not deliver. Instead they did this weird shitty thing with a "buildsplosion", where they kept offering completely different versions of the same few classes that were supposed to be quasi-transparent. Why is the Slayer a "Fighter" and not a stand alone class? It doesn't really get anything for being nominally a Fighter, but it is one anyway. The end result was that there was a lot of confusion, a lot of trap options, and people were understandable trepidatious about venturing out into actual new classes.

If anything, 4e showed that making class variants was a bad idea. Sure, it sounds good, because it's more variety. But making a new Fighter variant makes "Fighter" look a lot more supported than it really is. And that is going to make any really new content look hamstrung and anemic by comparison - even if the number of "real" options is the same or more for the new class.

It's something the hobby should have learned from the Spell Compendium and the Dread Necromancer. The Spell Compendium added a bunch of options to Wizards and Clerics and made the game worse, but the Dread Necromancer was a stand alone class that made the game better. But when 4e did the same thing for Rogues and Assassins, it really showed that it was a generalizable principle.

-Username17

[Windjammer]

I cannot disagree with this more. If the powers are easier to read compared to 3.5, it's because they don't do anything at all interesting or complicated. The format itself is specifically designed to cause either a migraine or a narcoleptic attack after reading 5 or 10 powers, from my experience.

I'm not talking about the powers themselves, merely the format.

Absolutely. The format is terrible, and the only reason that it's not ten times as terrible is because the powers are ultra-simplified as a rule. Reading pages and pages of powers with little to no related fluff is terribad.

Since actively running and playing in 4E games again, I gotta say I ended up revising my opinion on this.

I still think the 4E books are terrible to get you in the mood for the game. Suppose you got room for an upcoming campaign and still want to decide on a ruleset. In the corner to the left: Dark Heresy. Lavishly illustrated 400 page core book. In the corner to the right: 4E PHB. Cue noise coming out of deflating balloon.

But once the game is up and running (as in my own case right now), the 4E books are brilliant! The way it works for me is as follows. I supply all the non-mechanical stuff from elsewhere. We play in Eberron, so I use all the 3.x Eberron books. I also integrate stuff from elsewhere, like the recent Omens of War (for Warhammer fantasy), or historical references, like Zamoyski's Rites of Peace and Schroeder's Transformation of European Politics, up to the histories of the MI5 and MI6. That's a lot of background information, and as regards the latter four items, I'm frankly glad these aren't written by fantasy RPG writers who have no skill in writing anything as interesting as that.

In that manner, 4E to me harkens back to OD&D (an edition I have never played, and was too young to experience it when it came out). OD&D books are extremely boring to read, they give you a skeleton of a rule set and no campaign world or PC class background etc worth speaking of. You're meant to pick up that stuff from elsewhere or make it up from scratch.

If you look at the 4E books, they work under that assumption. (I'd add they work only under that assumption.) What makes 4E rather bizarre, however, is that unlike OD&D its PHB does this for over 300 pages. And it then gives you multiple 160-page supplements which do that again. And again. So instead of a small base set on which to graft your own campaigns, we got (say) a thousand pages with powers and magical items which are completely without campaign context.

As I said in another thread, I'm currently re-reading Earthdawn and it's the complete opposite. Everything in it is deeply intertwined with setting. A lot of stuff is explicitly written from a character of that setting.

While Earthdawn makes it easier to immerse oneself in the game when reading it, it makes it harder to use that ruleset for one's own campaign world. Since, personally, I'm not too fond of making up my own rules but like grafting non-mechanical campaign elements, 4E is for me a rather good solution. And, somewhat bizarrely, the bland presentation of the rules elements work in favour of that set-up. That even applies to the bland monster manuals, which I love for ease of use. (There's a simple trick to run MM1 monsters out of the book - add their level to their damage output. That aligns them with the recent "Monster Manual Update" series WotC has put out.)

[hogarth]

The format is terrible, and the only reason that it's not ten times as terrible is because the powers are ultra-simplified as a rule. Reading pages and pages of powers with little to no related fluff is terribad.

Since actively running and playing in 4E games again, I gotta say I ended up revising my opinion on this.
[etc.]

If your goal is to have the PHB act as a reference book, like a dictionary of PC abilities, then dry is good. But as I noted:
(a) (almost) nobody picks up a dictionary for the first time and starts reading
(b) if the point is to be a dictionary, then they're wasting a bunch of space; one line per power would be sufficient.

As it is, you have something that's neither fish nor fowl.

[tussock]

4e: We heard you liked levelling, so we put some levels in your levels.

So. Good. In 4e. Hmm. As in, you take the best bits from every edition and 4e gives you ... something you might use.

Flavour-wise I'd take the Astral Sea, folding spelljammer into the astral and combining the Gith Pirates with the Githyanki, especially if you totally go crazy with it; that's cool. Pigs in spaaaaace!

Could almost say the same for the Elemental Chaos as a slightly more tightly weaved version of the old inner planes: but more random pockets and pathways with looser borders would do, no Demons. Maybe even the Faerie if they hadn't given it such a copyfucked name. Underworld trumps the nerfshadow any day. The lots of nothing setting isn't one, as I'm quite capable of not having a campaign setting all on my own.

Mechanics-wise, no.

• Per-round duration saves are madness which gets worse.
• Every battle is the same battle forever and that is completely fucked up.
• Marking?!? etc. So much fucking pointless +2 for 1 round bullshit.
• Push and pull and slide mechanics are incredibly bland.
• Their "never inconvenience the player" conditions basically don't matter.
• They killed the magic! Sleep does nothing.
• Lockstep advancement on a treadmill seriously dilutes the whole point (which is to clearly notice your own improvement).
• Mooks are a display that your level scale doesn't allow characters to beat on lower level monsters properly, and people basically hate them for it.
• Skill challenges. Which is to say, everything outside combat being worse than having no rules at all.
• Almost everything about the monsters is fucked. Stats that do nothing. Totally arbitrary numbers that don't even fucking work (IT'S MATH!, ONE EQUATION!). Fucking post-modern non-descriptions. Gods-damned walls of repetitive brain-tearing table-jargon with even more roll-every-round timers.
• Fighter spells, because I forget how to trip people now I've just done it. Which is more like flavour they didn't provide, but still.

Just dumbing the whole thing down again, ick. The thing about Orcs being pig-headed Evil orange-blue personifications of lust, gluttony, and mindless rage is you're not just murdering people with a slightly different culture. Gnolls want to take you prisoner so they can fatten you up and eat you while your friends watch, because you'll cry and panic and beg them not to, and that's very funny to them. They're monsters.

the 5e team's taking the new PHB1 races and classes over to make more people convert, but I can't find a damn thing in those books that's useful for a D&D game, mechanically.

People talk about quick monster/NPC builds but it's crap slow compared to Basic or AD&D. People talk about less option paralysis for Wizards, but they can't do anything, because 4e characters never do anything. People talk about wonderful options for the Fighter, but they aren't doing anything either, especially not when it comes to killing monsters! Yes fighters can advance the plot in the same ways as everyone else, which is that they wait for the DM to please advance it for them.


Striker, Striker, Striker, Leader: Win. Yeh, that sure "fixed" the balance problems. Yes, it removes some of the problems that 3e introduced (by removing magic from the game), but it made other new problems to 3rd edition worse, and bought in a lot more! Like needing all that +x crap to compete while removing the spells that gave it to you for "free", or complex tracking of all the conditional stuff that doesn't even let you get on and win any more.

Will anyone play the damn thing once 5e comes out? Seems like if they turned off DDI half of them couldn't play 4e now.

Not looking for things it did better than other editions, just things that you enjoyed about it.

Well, OK, ignore all that, I enjoyed being correct about how fucked up it was going to be based only on their early previews. I enjoyed that people put up mathematical proofs of the failure of their skill system inside a week. I enjoy that a lot of the house rules mention doubling and halving various numbers, and giving PCs various things for free, and not using the first monster manual at all, but especially not solos and elites. I've also enjoyed fixing it, because it can't be fixed: the trick is to use as little of it as possible.

[Username17]

Per-round duration saves are madness which gets worse.

I disagree about this sentence in that rant. Rolling a die every round to see if an effect ends is a better mechanic than marking off rounds until the effect ends. People just can't be asked to keep track of four round durations, they forget to advance the counter and they forget that they've advanced the counter.

Having one round durations that last until the beginning of your next turn and one round durations that last until the end of your next turn, and durations that last until the end of your opponent's next turn and so on and so forth is shit. Obviously, things should end at the same part of a turn. Every time.

Now 4e fell down hard by having every effect have a 55% chance of ending each turn unless someone was cheating (playing an Orbizard), in which case they did not end. And they did the thing where the one round durations had several meaningfully different lengths that had to be remembered. But the basic setup of moving from a turn ticker to a 1/turn die roll is a good idea.

-Username17

[ishy]

I actually like the marking mechanic. It actually gives some tactical options.
I'm not too sold on the basic is -2 hit and only if you're a defender class you get an attack from it.
But I do like the basic idea.

And you know, not everyone dislikes fighter spells, just look at any primarily 3.5 forum and how popular Tome of Battle is.
Though I would have prefered it if we had some better manoeuvres, everyone can do, still in the game, like for example grappling.

[Username17]

Marking is not a mechanic. It is a bullshit tiny status effect. Saying you like Marking is like saying you like the "mechanics" of, say, dazzled or sickened from 3rd edition.

For fuck's sake, it is a conditional -2 penalty to attacks. Even if it triggered every round for eight rounds straight, it would still have a 43% chance of never making a difference.

-Username17

[ishy]

Good thing I actually said in my post that I disliked the -2 penalty then, ey?
But I guess I should have said the idea behind the mechanics.

[Vnonymous]

Good thing I actually said in my post that I disliked the -2 penalty then, ey?
But I guess I should have said the idea behind the mechanics.

But that's all that anyone with a brain likes about 4e. Grand sounding ideas that were completely fucked by their incompetent implementation.

[tussock]

Per-round duration saves are madness which gets worse.

I disagree about this sentence in that rant. Rolling a die every round to see if an effect ends is a better mechanic than marking off rounds until the effect ends. People just can't be asked to keep track of four round durations, they forget to advance the counter and they forget that they've advanced the counter.

People also forget to roll all those saves for various reasons, in part because it's so disconnected from what you're otherwise doing; there's no action use, it's delayed gratification, everyone has unique effect stacks to remember because of individually variable durations, you can't plan anything around the uncertainty, .... Plus all what you pointed out.

Madness. 4-round duration spells tied to unique initiative counts are worse in some ways, but that's not many things. There's 1-round/level stuff when you're under 7th level (which is a unique 3e stupidity), but even that's mostly interesting: strong buffs, summons, or ongoing damage; something happening when you count down the duration. 4e uses that damnable "(save ends)" mechanic for half the book.

'Course, I did fix up the standard 3e durations to something practical many years ago now. 1 minute (combat), 1 turn (room), 1 hour (zone), the half-day stuff, plus curses.


AFAICT, the whole duration thing arose from nerfing Hold Person late in 3rd edition, as presumably some DMs were using it rather a lot and yet never killing anyone with it. Douchebags. If I hit anyone with Hold Person they'll get more saving throws alright, they'll just be Fortitude saves, as they count down their hit points (speaking of adding being easier than subtracting and new editions).

[OgreBattle]

Now 4e fell down hard by having every effect have a 55% chance of ending each turn unless someone was cheating (playing an Orbizard), in which case they did not end. And they did the thing where the one round durations had several meaningfully different lengths that had to be remembered. But the basic setup of moving from a turn ticker to a 1/turn die roll is a good idea.

For a long while I thought it was FORT/REF/WILL dependent, like a perpetual attack against me until I rolled a relevant save. I spent some time looking for the rules that said that. Finding out it's just a flat 55% was kinda disappointing.

How would you have made it work?

But I guess I should have said the idea behind the mechanics.

Yeah, I'm fine with the mechanics though. -2 penalty to hit anyone but you, and you get to whack them if they attack others.
I thought it was the combo of "-2 and the fighter stabs you" that made it what it is.

D&D's always featured +2's and -2's here and there, I don't really get what's bullshit about marking.

[tussock]

To be specific about it I'll compare it to AD&D.

In 1st edition any monster leaving a melee (which it might do by randomised morale failure or DM choice) faces a full round of extra attacks at +4 or +6 to hit (depending on how you read it). You're "in melee" arbitrarily, but basically because you or the monster made a melee attack, or "closed to melee range". You cannot walk past a Fighter in one round, because entering melee ends your turn (unless you charge, which also ends your turn). If you entered melee from the North, you leave to the North, no passing through.

In 4th edition any monster passing through leaving a threatened area faces a slap with a wet bus ticket, which Fighters get +2 on if they attacked the monster on their previous turn, unless someone else who has marks also attacked it afterward. Monsters have no real need to stop anywhere near you though, and can normally avoid any free attacks you supposedly get when you chase them back to the Wizard by taking a single free 5' step.

4e Modules keep telling the DM that the big melee hitters in each fight all attack the Defender, even though that's stupid, because marking can't function without that constant DM fudging and cooperation. It's a fiddly, constantly variable design that doesn't even do what it says it does, because the monsters can trivially ignore it.

[ishy]

Monsters have no real need to stop anywhere near you though, and can normally avoid any free attacks you supposedly get when you chase them back to the Wizard by taking a single free 5' step.

Now that is just not true. If a monster takes a 5' step a fighter can still smack them if they have them marked. And they can add on things like knocking their target prone and stuff on their attacks if they spend resources (like feats, class features etc) on it. Though I'm don't remember how many of those were available in core.

[ModelCitizen]

In 1st edition any monster leaving a melee (which it might do by randomised morale failure or DM choice) faces a full round of extra attacks at +4 or +6 to hit (depending on how you read it). You're "in melee" arbitrarily, but basically because you or the monster made a melee attack, or "closed to melee range". You cannot walk past a Fighter in one round, because entering melee ends your turn (unless you charge, which also ends your turn). If you entered melee from the North, you leave to the North, no passing through.

In 4th edition any monster passing through leaving a threatened area faces a slap with a wet bus ticket...

Every version of "attacks of opportunity" has been built on the same faulty design (including AD&D's unnamed free attack on targets leaving melee). AoOs exist to stop actions and instead they do HP damage. That works if the creature dies or there's some kludge in place to let you indirectly stop the action (Concentration checks, tripping on AoOs, whatever), but the basic mechanic doesn't do what it was designed to do.

4e didn't invent the problem, it just made it worse by taking all the kludges away and making everyone fight with pads on. I think I'd prefer an AoO mechanic that was just "roll some kind of check, if you hit the target's turn ends." Faster, simpler, impossible to game for free damage, less likely to be fucked up by later writers.

[tussock]

@ishy: quite right, doh!

AoOs exist to stop actions and instead they do HP damage.

In 3e the AoO is not meant to stop anything. Things that damage might stop are given ways to avoid the AoO, and it doesn't stop most things anyway. The point of it is to slap people for running about like idiots and doing stupid things in the melee, without actually preventing them doing so, especially not if they're PCs.

AD&D has rules to stop the monsters running past the front line and make melee a bit sticky. Those rules are absolute and they work. Newer editions have a pale shadow of those rules; monsters can run about as they please and the front line can't do much about it unless the GM cooperates. The reason for this change is to make it easier for the PCs to run around and act like idiots, because players like that sort of thing.

If anything what they need is a fixed rule to stop the monsters fucking about, then give most PC classes an exemption to it when they're playing their shtick.

[nockermensch]

If anything what they need is a fixed rule to stop the monsters fucking about, then give most PC classes an exemption to it when they're playing their shtick.

But then, there could be "skirmisher" monsters whose shtick is exactly "hard to pin down"

I keep having ideas that a decent d20 combat system should have some general high level opposed mechanics that work like BAB vs. AC. Stealth vs. Perception would be one of these, and uh... "Tankness" vs. "Slipperiness" another. Kind of how Tumble works, but using some kind of scaling DCs to avoid making things trivial past lvl 5 or so.