*D&D 4ed*

[K]

Ps. Expect epic Rogues to learn rituals so that they can cast Arcane Lock on things. It resets the DC on a lock...which can then be lower than the DC of an epic lock.

[Ice9]

Man, that's just depressing. It seems like 4E is designed for DMs that ignored what 3E characters could do completely, made an adventure for LotR-style characters, and then whined when the PCs were able to do things like fly up cliffs or get through a damn door.

I'd play it in a one-shot game, or at a convention, but probably not as a campaign - it lacks anything for the characters to aspire to. Why struggle up through the levels to become a mighty Demigod ... if what that means is some extra uses of an encounter power?

Knock is especially egregious, given that the difference between trained and untrained is only +5, so taking 20 gives you the same results in 1/5 the time without the component cost.

[shau]

This seems really sad. I have only just skimmed so far, but the slow level advancement is really getting to me. I mean, at first level a cleric can use Avenging Fire to hit a guy and then set him on fire. Kinda like alchemist's fire but it does a constant five damage. At fifteenth level the cleric gets Holy Spark, he does basically the same thing but the damage is lightning and it does ten damage a round. To be fair, it can also hurt the monster's teammates if they are dumb enough to stand next to the guy who is spitting lightning everywhere, but seriously, you are going up 15 levels just to turn a five into a ten. And this is a daily power.

Any legitimately good stuff here. I haven't read a lot, but it looks like the cleric can automatically daze one of his opponents if he can hit with a weapon. This game might revolve around Tekken juggling the enemies to death.

[K]

This seems really sad. I have only just skimmed so far, but the slow level advancement is really getting to me. I mean, at first level a cleric can use Avenging Fire to hit a guy and then set him on fire. Kinda like alchemist's fire but it does a constant five damage. At fifteenth level the cleric gets Holy Spark, he does basically the same thing but the damage is lightning and it does ten damage a round. To be fair, it can also hurt the monster's teammates if they are dumb enough to stand next to the guy who is spitting lightning everywhere, but seriously, you are going up 15 levels just to turn a five into a ten. And this is a daily power.

Any legitimately good stuff here. I haven't read a lot, but it looks like the cleric can automatically daze one of his opponents if he can hit with a weapon. This game might revolve around Tekken juggling the enemies to death.

As far as I can tell, it's all about Tekken Juggling while layering ongoing damage. Save or mostly dies still rule.

Since there is no way to increase stats except by leveling, damage from powers is always really small.

[fbmf]

But just a warning; FBMF doesn't take too kindly to potentially site-endangering links posted publicly. And for good reason, in instances like this.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
No, I do not. Don't do it again.
[/TGFBS]

[virgil]

I don't think you can really Tekken juggle anything that's outside the minion range, because PCs just don't have the damage output to do that. Heck, being helpless only gives your opponents combat advantage (+2 to-hit) and a coup-de-grace allows a successful attack auto-crit (death is only if that one attack exceeds half their max health).

You could seriously have that black dragon tied up and unconscious, and the entire party is still going to take three or four rounds of wailing at it before it dies.

[RandomCasualty2]

For that matter, the difference between a Paragon and an Epic tier Guardian Shield is basically nothing as far as effects go: all you get is a frankly bullshit increase in range. But the difference in "cost" is tremendous. It's seriously 3 million gp, enough to purchase another Epic tier magic item to swap out with when your Guardian Shield is used up for the day.

Argh. This system makes me angry. So angry.

Yeah, the magic item power curve is horrible. The epic items are only slightly better for way, way more gold. In fact, ti seems the best thing you can do with that stuff is melt it down for the 1/5th cost and buy a bunch of stuff you actually care about. The expensive magic items don't really do anything worth mentioning from what I've seen. It seems they have sort of reduced magic item dependency because you honestly don't need the high level magic. You could pretty much hand out any non plus item, even an epic one, and it doesn't seem like it would break your game at all.

As far as tekken juggling, That seems like it very well may be par for the course with solos and elites. Since combats last a while and all the juggles are at least encounter powers, you can't really keep doing it to lock someone for the entire battle, but certainly, stuff that denies enemies turns is still in there. It just seems that these powers are more spread out now, instead of being the sole province of the wizard like in 3.5.

Though for what it's worth, all the tekken juggles seem to require that you hit your opponent and they tend to do not so much damage, so they're not even as powerful as something like solid fog in 3.5.

I mean, at first level a cleric can use Avenging Fire to hit a guy and then set him on fire. Kinda like alchemist's fire but it does a constant five damage. At fifteenth level the cleric gets Holy Spark, he does basically the same thing but the damage is lightning and it does ten damage a round. To be fair, it can also hurt the monster's teammates if they are dumb enough to stand next to the guy who is spitting lightning everywhere, but seriously, you are going up 15 levels just to turn a five into a ten. And this is a daily power.

Yeah, I look at some of the slow power advancement and wonder how you're expected to kill monsters, since while your powers don't gain much damage, the monster's hp is increasing... alot. A soldier monster is gaining 10 hp per level. Assuming you're supposed to kill it in 5 hits, that means your average damage has to go up by at least 2 points each level or you're falling behind. It seriously doesn't look like it's going up that much on your best daily powers, let alone your average damage. At 1st level, a daily power like brute strike is going to take away about half a monster's hp. At 30th level, you're just not going to find a power that's going to cut a monsters hp in half. It's Everquest syndrome all over again, where you actually get worse comparatively as you level.

In 3.5, damage just exploded to the point that you were killing almost everything in one shot. 4E seems to have reversed this problem where hit points explode and damage values just stay the same.

I'm going to wait to actually try the game a bit before I put the ultimate nail in the coffin for it. But at first glance, it just doesn't seem like it was very well designed.

[virgil]

Hmm, apparently starting equipment for players that start at higher levels is whatever standard nonmagical adventuring gear you want, one item of Level +1, one of Level, one of Level -1, and gold pieces equal to the value of one item of Level -1.

[Psychic Robot]

I can understand them expanding the "sweet spot," but this is just pathetic. Characters just don't do anything outside of damage. Even WoW has sheeping.

[RandomCasualty2]

Also has anyone else noticed that not too many things are immune to sleep anymore? You can totally cast sleep on a spectre, a skeleton, or a flesh golem now.

[Cielingcat]

So is Sleep still amazing?

[RandomCasualty2]

So is Sleep still amazing?

Not really. It's actually not bad though compared to the higher level spells, since sleep is one of the few spells that can make people actually unconscious (and thus vulnerable to a combined CDG nuke by your entire party).

The problem is that for sleep to work, you have to hit him with the spell, and he has to fail his save. Unless those two things happen, you can't knock out anyone.

But compared to the higher level stuff, sleep (a 1st level daily) is surprisingly good.

[Calibron]

I can understand them expanding the "sweet spot," but this is just pathetic. Characters just don't do anything outside of damage. Even WoW has sheeping.

It has more than sheeping actually. A friend of mine used to play a high level frost mage and apparently there are a lot of tactical decisions to be made in WoW for many of the classes. I played a warlock for a few days, before I realized this game was a gigantic waste of time, and even in those few levels I was getting a lot out of inflicting status effects and other debuffs, more so than I did by just throwing down a fear and hoping I could shadow bolt them to death before it wore off.

No 4ED is shaping up to be significantly less interesting and diverse than WoW.

Way to go WotC.

[Harlune]

It has more than sheeping actually. A friend of mine used to play a high level frost mage and apparently there are a lot of tactical decisions to be made in WoW for many of the classes.

In PVP maybe, in high level PVE raids (where many mobs are immune to sheep and pretty much ALL are immune to the various frost effects) a frost spec mage basicly just uses his damn frost bolt spell all the time.

Not counting a few contrived, gimmick boss strategies, the tactical decisions are limited to just managing your aggro (which for a mage is limited to your Stop Casting Spells ability and your aggro dunp, Improved Stop Casting Spells- I mean, 'Invisiblity' ), and if you want to just spam frost bolt or try a frost bolt/arcane blast rotation to boost your dps by a whole .0005pts.

Yeah... I'm rather saddened that they fixed the 'fighter playing a different game than the caster' problem, not by making the fighter's game not suck, but by making everyone play the fighter's game so everyone sucks now. And that new multiclassing makes even 2E dualclassing seem good.

Sigh... ignore me, I'm just butthurt over the wizard being turned into an Arcane Archer in a robe, since the main reason I ever play a wizard is for the flight, teleporting across the world, knock, invisibility, and conjure up food/horses/cottages/gold/women spells I could give a crap about actually killing monsters

[the_unthinkable]

4th edition may be balanced and it may be easy to deal with anything it has to offer, but it leaves little to aspire to and imaginatively leaves a lot of the cool stuff out.

[K]

4th edition may be balanced and it may be easy to deal with anything it has to offer, but it leaves little to aspire to and imaginatively leaves a lot of the cool stuff out.

Yeh, I was really impressed by just how many stories CAN'T be told anymore.

That and the fact that the rules are really shoddy. For example, while Immortals don't age, Undead and Constructs do. Vampires don't even have a claim to be being immortal anymore since they have no life-saving abilities and they age. The Rakshasa, however, are now humanoids who get a DM fiat reincarnation ability. WTF?

[PhoneLobster]

At some point I'm going to have a closer look at the rules before declaring them utterly retarded. But on my not even complete skim I'm already confronted with this.

1) Shame on you WOTC art department. You fucking suck.

2) Do you notice how the DMG twice in the first 30 pages or intro goes out of its way to divide gamers up into arbitrary categories and insult them all? There is some glimpse into the mindset of the designers there, and it is NOT pretty.

3) A real scary glimpse into the mindset of the designers is the fucking "Puzzle" section. Yes, they will tell you in detail how every kind of player they imagine exists sucks but fucking mangled and poorly modified, non mechanical, game halting, entirely gratuitous, RIDDLES they endorse whole heartedly without a single warning or reservation. Hell they'll tell you to just grind the game to a halt to force the players to do a CROSSWORD or cold decode an alphabet substitution code.

They come remarkably close to endorsing that you force the players to do some Sudoku before you let them continue to play actual 4th edition.

Bloodly hell.

[virgil]

And not just that, they have a sidebar that says how to deal with players that think their level 25 wizard with an 26 Int should be able to solve it, by allowing them to make an Intelligence check. Of course, because it's supposed to be a hard puzzle and the player's level 25, the book tells you to make it a DC 32 Intelligence check.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

1) Shame on you WOTC art department. You fucking suck.

It's hard to imagine anything worse than Crabapple. Is there any artist you would rate below him in 4e?

3) A real scary glimpse into the mindset of the designers is the fucking "Puzzle" section. Yes, they will tell you in detail how every kind of player they imagine exists sucks but fucking mangled and poorly modified, non mechanical, game halting, entirely gratuitous, RIDDLES they endorse whole heartedly without a single warning or reservation. Hell they'll tell you to just grind the game to a halt to force the players to do a CROSSWORD or cold decode an alphabet substitution code.

Years ago I attended Gen Con, and a seminar hosted by Tracy Hickman. I was unimpressed with his books, but he had some interesting advice concerning puzzles in-game. When confronted with a game halting puzzle, he advised to have your character say something along the following lines:

"The great fortress of the Lich King has bested many a great adventurer over the years....and it has been so with us. Lets find our fortune elsewhere." Then you have your characters leave the dungeon. He said this would help the Dm realize that roadblock puzzles were not fun. Also, it would usually force the Dm into having the characters find a lost key or cipher of some sort on their way out of the dungeon.

[Talisman]

Not an endorsement of 4e, but I would like to say that, handled properly, puzzles are awesome. Riddles, say, or simple ciphers. Not frikkin' crossword puzzles or seek-and-find.

Handled properly and used sparingly...and have a way around them if the party gets pissed off.

[Koumei]

They come remarkably close to endorsing that you force the players to do some Sudoku before you let them continue to play actual 4th edition.

Until the players realise that Sudoku is more fun than 4E.

I can only really remember using one puzzle. And it was really just a big game of puns:

The stairs to (goal) are hidden, disguised as a statue. However, there are many statues, and touching the wrong one will force a Fort save against being turned into a statue (thank you, "Wizard of Oz" cartoon series). Activating the correct one will turn everyone back to normal.

The stairs are hidden by the statue of a medusa: it's the only thing that won't turn you to stone, and also, she stares. Others include "a bowl of lettuce, cucumber and capsicum, oddly mixed up" (green salad mixed up = green Slaad), a man holding a swarm of bees in his hand (bee-holder) and other stupid word-plays.

The players have never failed it, other than one player who decided her idiot character (Int 3 on a good day) would decide "This one is it!" and keep hitting the statue until he failed a Fort save.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

They come remarkably close to endorsing that you force the players to do some Sudoku before you let them continue to play actual 4th edition.

Since I can totally bust out some Sudoku, I can get down with this approach to the game. Of course, if 4e really sucks, I might prefer to go back to the Sudoku....

[JonSetanta]

Years ago I attended Gen Con, and a seminar hosted by Tracy Hickman. I was unimpressed with his books, but he had some interesting advice concerning puzzles in-game. When confronted with a game halting puzzle, he advised to have your character say something along the following lines:

"The great fortress of the Lich King has bested many a great adventurer over the years....and it has been so with us. Lets find our fortune elsewhere." Then you have your characters leave the dungeon. He said this would help the Dm realize that roadblock puzzles were not fun. Also, it would usually force the Dm into having the characters find a lost key or cipher of some sort on their way out of the dungeon.

You too, huh?
My brother and some friends did that a few too many times and as a result none of us included puzzles in the sessions afterward (with a rotating DM title)
In fact, we didn't like doing it and we didn't like having it done to us.
And I quote, the friend of my brother;

"No. I'm not going in there. We'll all die."
And his Half-Orc Barbarian walked back to town for a drink.

The stairs are hidden by the statue of a medusa: it's the only thing that won't turn you to stone, and also, she stares. Others include "a bowl of lettuce, cucumber and capsicum, oddly mixed up" (green salad mixed up = green Slaad), a man holding a swarm of bees in his hand (bee-holder) and other stupid word-plays.
.

I would have never passed any of those. Wordplay falls dead before the power of my synesthetic image-thinking retardation.

But the Oz cartoon was fantastic. Very sad when it went.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Having only read a few pages of the PHB, I see they've made point-buy more complicated, just in case somebody wants to introduce the game to new players. This completely negates the good they did by souping up their default array. Also, the fact that the Standard Array is the first chargen method presented probably says volumes about the design philosophy of the new edition.

[RandomCasualty2]

And not just that, they have a sidebar that says how to deal with players that think their level 25 wizard with an 26 Int should be able to solve it, by allowing them to make an Intelligence check. Of course, because it's supposed to be a hard puzzle and the player's level 25, the book tells you to make it a DC 32 Intelligence check.

I loved including riddles in my games. I found they were fun for people to solve. The whole int check thing is a lame excuse to get away from actually solving the puzzle.

It's nice to occasionally have mysteries and stuff the PCs solve without just rolling a dice and declaring the encounter over.