K wrote:
I can't justify that an actual Demigod only gets a few uses of a power only marginally better than the one he got at 1st level, or that GP = magic items and if you find a gold mine your wealth levels don't increase. That's just lame, and I'll just play Neverwinter Nights if I don't want to play an tabletop RPG.
Yeah, the flavor text that they associate with 4E is just stupid. I mean, the powers may not seem terrible if they didn't try to pass it off as your character being a demigod.
But that's just a setting problem, and it can be fixed by positing a certain culture (the Wish Economy) or just taking things to their logical conclusion (planar travellers = Sigil).
well I have a problem when the rules create "setting problems", because that basically means that I can't tell the stories I want to tell without doing weird shit. Having god wizards that rule over everything is fine if I'm running Dark Sun, but maybe I'd like fighters to have more of a real role in power? In 3.5 that's pretty much impossible, because the rules effectively dictate that high level spellcasters control everything.
Harlune wrote:
But what we want when we say want class balance are fighters who are made of awesome to go with our mages made of awesome, what 4E gave us instead are fighters that are still made of suck and mages who are also made of suck... also clerics with their healing nerfed, because lord knows, it was their healing that was overpowered .
I don't really think that'd be at all possible without just turning the game into rocket tag. Because really awesome is relative. Wizards are awesome if you look at pure destructive power, but catch one by surprise and watch him drop in one round, or fail a save and die, and he appears not so awesome.
I personally like to think that awesome characters are strong both offensively and defensively. The hulk can punch hard, but he also needs to be able to soak attacks too. And that's one thing that 3.5 just didn't really give us. A legendary hero shouldn't be an eggshell with a hammer.
But just because you're balancing offense/defense doesn't mean that fighters have to be bland and boring, they can still have interesting jump attacks and sword counters and stuff like that. It just means that people don't die in one shot (at least not meaningful people).
The D&D fighter should be doing crazy Hercules and Xena crap like getting a dragon in a headlock, deflecting a fireball with a sword, throwing a freaking boulder fifty feet into air to take out a flying creature. or getting swallowed by a giant monster only to just rip his way out of the creature's chest. And at really high levels the fighter won't need a pussified resurrection spell, because he'll just march right into the underworld and punch a god in the face till it agrees to brings his friend back to life. Y'know stuff that is made of awesome. And really, in 3ed there were prc's that could do that stuff, those just need to be distilled and added to the base fighter instead.
odd that you mention Hercules and Xena, because really I was thinking of that when K mentioned the demigod thing. Really, the shitty demigod seems to reflect hercules and Xena almost perfectly, where Ares comes down and he's basically not tossing lightning bolts or doing anything meaningful, he just melees you, and if your good enough at melee, you can whip his ass. That seems exactly like 4E to me really.
I mean there's no way a character in 3.5 could ever melee a god like that. First, because gods don't melee, they just toss spells, and second because the god's bonuses are so ridiculously high, that you simply can't win.
With 4Es system of lame demigods though, it's actually possible to do a hercules and Xena thing where you can actually beat up Ares, instead of him coming down and slapping you with a DC 35 finger of death and you rolling up a new character.
Actually 4E is great for a fighter's campaign. The thing that it loses is that wizards are entirely just evocation based. Which is great for Final Fantasy but not so great for D&D. There aren't any confounding economy destroying paradoxes, but the wizard can't do anything interesting at all either.
Frank points out I think the most damning thing about 4E though, at least in my mind, and that's namely that the math isn't right. Instead of being offensively weighted, it's defensively weighted, such that it turns into longer and longer matches of padded sumo as you gain levels. And that just sucks. While I very much dislike rocket launcher tag, it is at least preferable to padded sumo. Spending an hour or more on each fight is just wrong and sawing away at something after you've burned all your main attacks just sucks. That just makes for boring gameplay.
While rocket launcher tag can be unfair and annoying, at the very least it doesn't bore the hell out of you.