Arguments in favor of 4th Edition

[Fuchs]

Of course it begs the question: Can I let myself be forced away by a friend if it would be beneficial to me? If getting feared means I can move 6 squares outside my turn, can I have a friend scare me?

[Psychic Robot]

No, no, no, they have that clause in the DMG that doesn't let you use your powers creatively.

[Fuchs]

Which adds even more "just don't think about it" rulings.

[Crissa]

The scaring and running away is a dumb thing meant to represent poorly the Warcraft fear effect without canceling their next action.

As it is, who cares?

-Crissa

[crazysamaritan]

Bullshit. You don't get to play that fucking "What is the meaning of mechanics?" shit around here.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned Skill Challenges again. It was wrong of me, and I apologize.

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Are you aware that XP is a measure of how powerful a character is?
That all characters who have earned [x] XP are supposed to have roughly the same power level?
If character 'A' has twice as much XP as character 'B', then character 'A' has more power than character 'B' does.

Actually it's level that tells how powerful a character is. Xp represents the learning and experience that leads to the next level.

Right; XP determines level. Now here’s the same thing, restated:
Are you aware that GP is a measure of how powerful a character is?
That all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level?
If character 'A' has twice as much GP as character 'B', then character 'A' has more power than character 'B' does.

horseshit like wealth-is-competence.

This “horseshit” has been around since the original game. I expect it will leave around the time the class-system gives way to point-system.

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Can I summarize this as "4e is so balanced it's sterile"?

No, please don't. 4E is not balanced. It's more balanced than 3rd Edition but its neutering of player power and interaction only resulted in a modest improvement.

Okay, what about, "4e has reduced same-level power variables"?

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1) Combat lasts too long.
it's going quickly enough for me.

The problem is that there are just too many things to keep track of in combat and it takes so many hits to down a monster.

So we have two subjective issues here:
A) Too much information to keep track of in combat
B) Monsters have so many hit points, they take too many hits before they die.

Do I understand correctly?

2) Tactics are minimal.
I don't see the support for this at all. Positioning is a significant aspect of the 4e battlefield. Deciding between the use of an encounter or daily is a serious choice. When to use an Action Point is also a tactical consideration. Which enemy the fighter should target is also important

4E is basically a game of focused fire and stunlocks.
4E has only very basic tactics, and there just aren't any counters to those tactics. There is no way to counter focusing fire or combat healing. So it pretty much means you can use the same tactic over and over again and win. Which by definition means that the game is tactically weak.
Now granted, 3E tactics weren't all that in depth either, but at the very least you had options like dispelling magic and the combats were faster.

Ah, you’re confusing Strategy with Tactics. Strategy; the overall plan of action for an engagement. Tactics; round-by-round decision-making made to carry out the strategy.

Yes, D&D is a very strategically weak game. You focus fire on one enemy, and attempt to minimize the actions of the rest of the enemies, until you can focus fire on them in turn.

3) There are very few options in how you're allowed to overcome obstacles.
But the DMG encourages the DM to support any idea that the player has in any conflict, as well as offering rules for how to adjudicate the situation. If a player wants to "swing on a chandelier and shove the orc into the brazier", then the DM has a guide in the DMG on how to reward that player with her creativity.

That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat. Even if you do get to occasionally invent cinematic moves, it's still not finding alternate solutions to problems, you're just adding some extra flavor to hack and slash.

Which isn't bad, but it still doesn't mean that you're solving problems by any means other than kicking the door down.

So, you’re complaining that there’s no rules for non-combat, long-term, problem-solving? I would call “non-combat, long-term, problem-solving” simply Role-play. Which means, to me, that you’re complaining the game lacks rule/restrictions on role-play.

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They didn't even introduce their own points in favour, all they did was say "Tell us why you think it's bad", then try (unsuccessfully) to prove those points wrong or downplay the importance.

Er, because "convincing" you that 'X' is true, when you already believe 'X' is true, is useless. I have to know what 'X' you think is false.

I don't know if you think 4e is bad because you dislike the genre, or if you don't understand how the rules work. The first means there's no point in arguing, because not everyone enjoys the same genres. The second means there's something I can accomplish.

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As previously noted, enemies of level 1-5 are considered to have unenchanted equipment. Enemies of level 6-10 are considered to have +1 Magic equipment, but player characters only get non-magical equipment when they loot them. You can't come up with an in-game reason for that, because it doesn't make any sense

Page 187 of the DMG says: "You can think of {the magic item threshold} as representing feats you're not bothering to choose, low level magic items, or the NPC's intrinsic power".

So, in my 4e game, the magic item threshold represents the NPC's intrinsic power, per option 3 in the DMG, and therefore I don't have any of this nonsense about disappearing magic items. I'd recommend that approach.

I use all three, in varying amounts. Instead of tracking how much X arrows and armour, and such, I just hand players the gold they would have got from selling it. Cuts out the “how much are you carrying” book-keeping

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No, no, no, they have that clause in the DMG that doesn't let you use your powers creatively.

Page 225 in the DMG, right?

Of course it begs the question: Can I let myself be forced away by a friend if it would be beneficial to me? If getting feared means I can move 6 squares outside my turn, can I have a friend scare me?

Targeting rules are on Page 57 of the PHB.

"Positioning Strike" targets One creature, so that would work.
I don't know where "Compel the Craven" is.

[Username17]

Then I'm apparently a complete idiot. Bored

I don't care to read it over-and-over again, when "too hard" or "too easy" are subjective terms. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't give a difficulty rating, compared to other jigsaw puzzles. Is the puzzle too hard, or too easy?

Then I'm apparently a complete idiot. Bored

I don't care to read it over-and-over again, when "too hard" or "too easy" are subjective terms. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't give a difficulty rating, compared to other jigsaw puzzles. Is the puzzle too hard, or too easy?

What fuckery is this?

You don't care to read the fucking math that made WotC itself decide that Skill Challenges didn't work properly, but you do care to copypasta your own bullshit about how you aren't going to read the refutations of your urine recycling mouth breather arguments about your fucking feelings so that we have to read it more than once? Fuck you.

If I beat the shit out of you, would there be anything left?

Look, Skill Challenges do not work. At all. We have responded to you at length about how and why they don't work from many different angles. And your response is not only the intellectually vacuous one of "I haven't really looked at it but it feels OK to me...." but you're even copy pasting your own shitty responses about how you're too lazy to understand why you are wrong.

GTFO! Seriously, if that's the level you're going to argue at, you fucking lose. At life. Your asshattery buck passing was directly refuted last page, we don't accept or respect you repeating it verbatim on the next page as if it was a new revelation rather than a brutally ravaged and frankly no longer appetizing prostitute.

Get a new argument or die in a fire. I am done pretending that there is a single intellectually honest bone in your body, you just crossed a fucking line.

-Username17

[Roy]

[crazysamaritan]

You don't care to read the fucking math that made WotC itself decide that Skill Challenges didn't work properly, but you do care to copypasta your own bullshit about how you aren't going to read the refutations of your urine recycling mouth breather arguments about your fucking feelings so that we have to read it more than once? Fuck you.

I was trying to use a word processor to compile the post, by grabbing all of the stuff I'd said which hadn't been responded to. I couldn't read it very well in a word document, so I thought I'd done it right. That's why the post got edited 3 times; I was fixing the mistakes I made in the word processor.

Again, I'm sorry for mentioning a point that I lost.

[Doom]

>>Right; XP determines level. Now here’s the same thing, restated:
Are you aware that GP is a measure of how powerful a character is?
That all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level?
If character 'A' has twice as much GP as character 'B', then character 'A' has more power than character 'B' does.
<<

You keep mentioning this over and over and over again, and it's gibberish.

Just because there's a correlation does not make things 1:1, or a perfect correlation in any event.

Let's try it with height and weight, two concepts with reasonable statistical correlation.

Are you aware that weight is a measure of how tall a person is? (so far, so good, but past this point is where the logic goes wiggy...) That all people of the same weight have roughly the same height?
If character A weighs twice as much as character B, then character A must be taller, right?

Well, no, of course not. Even thought weight can be used a measure of height, it's a pretty dubious one, and, gee whiz, we have actual height (in, say, inches) to use instead. Compare to say, 'intelligence', where we're forced to use, say, scores on tests, to measure it. Anyway, back to the point:

Doubling experience points does not indicate double power, or even necessarily more power. Whether you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, WFRP, or DnD4.0, a character with, say, 80 EP is not necessarily measurably more powerful than a character with 40 EP.

So why do you repeat this over and over again? Is it part of your argument?

[Parthenon]

Right; XP determines level. Now here’s the same thing, restated:
Are you aware that GP is a measure of how powerful a character is?
That all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level?
If character 'A' has twice as much GP as character 'B', then character 'A' has more power than character 'B' does.

horseshit like wealth-is-competence.

This “horseshit” has been around since the original game. I expect it will leave around the time the class-system gives way to point-system.

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So your argument is that xp -> level and level -> power so xp -> power? Wait, are you really saying that if you need 1000xp for level 2 and 3000xp for level 3, then a character with 2999xp is more powerful than one with 1001xp?

What actually happens is that if you know you have 36544xp then you convert that to the level to find out what power you have. The amount of xp you have doesn't give any indication of how much power you have.

Even if you had a point here and not correlation/causality fuckup, the issue of having GP == power is bad. Its perfectly reasonable to complain that 4e hasn't done anything about it and in some ways has fucked it up worse.

Its like having some plumbers replace your boiler. If some of the pipes attached to the old boiler leaked before, and they are still leaking, in some places worse, then you'd be right to complain. Its a similar situation.

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Can I summarize this as "4e is so balanced it's sterile"?

No, please don't. 4E is not balanced. It's more balanced than 3rd Edition but its neutering of player power and interaction only resulted in a modest improvement.

Okay, what about, "4e has reduced same-level power variables"?

As in, 4e has a smaller RNG within each level? A smaller range of attack bonuses and a smaller range of defences and so on within each level? Errr.... not really. An example: the basic idea behind Striker/Defender is that Strikers do a considerably larger amount of damage than Defenders, so if the variability was reduced then all Strikers would do a similar amount of damage and all Defenders would do a similar amount of damage, both of which are very different.

However, it can be easily shown that non-Strikers can easily do more damage than Strikers, which proves your point wrong. It also proves that the game is not balanced to its own measuring points and standards since the classes don't meet the balance standpoints set.

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2) Tactics are minimal.
...

4E is basically a game of focused fire and stunlocks.
4E has only very basic tactics, and there just aren't any counters to those tactics. There is no way to counter focusing fire or combat healing. So it pretty much means you can use the same tactic over and over again and win. Which by definition means that the game is tactically weak.
Now granted, 3E tactics weren't all that in depth either, but at the very least you had options like dispelling magic and the combats were faster.

Ah, you’re confusing Strategy with Tactics. Strategy; the overall plan of action for an engagement. Tactics; round-by-round decision-making made to carry out the strategy.

Yes, D&D is a very strategically weak game. You focus fire on one enemy, and attempt to minimize the actions of the rest of the enemies, until you can focus fire on them in turn.

Is this another case of you redefining standard terminology to change someone else's meaning? Maybe I'm weird and I'd like others to give their views, but a lot of people think of strategy/tactics in terms of the military so you should either use those definitions or use qualifiers such as "encounter strategy" or "turn-by-turn tactics (TTT)", because otherwise
- strategy is whether or not to have a battle and which way to go through the dungeon
- tactics is your decisions within an engagement.
Trying to use game theory is probably useless unless you explain it in more depth because there aren't that many people who understand game theory and if 4e has its "special" definitions of strategy and tactics then it is stupid.

4e is strategically weak because there are fewer OOC choices and the PCs are much more forced along a set path meaning less chance for strategy.

4e is tactically weak because there are fewer tactics available and fewer that work well.

Round by round choices may have slightly more options, but this does not change the fact that as a whole 4e is strategically and tactically weak.

This may be wrong if everyone else uses the same definitions as crazysamaritan. In which case I apologise profusely and shall endeavour to use the definition that is most widely understood.

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3) There are very few options in how you're allowed to overcome obstacles.
... a guide in the DMG on how to reward that player with her creativity.

That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat. Even if you do get to occasionally invent cinematic moves, it's still not finding alternate solutions to problems, you're just adding some extra flavor to hack and slash.

So, you’re complaining that there’s no rules for non-combat, long-term, problem-solving? I would call “non-combat, long-term, problem-solving” simply Role-play. Which means, to me, that you’re complaining the game lacks rule/restrictions on role-play.

Errr.... no. RC specifically complained that "That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat.". That means that they are complaining that there is no room for in-combat problem-solving.

The game does have problems with rules/restrictions on role-play, but thats a separate point entirely from the point your evading.

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I don't know if you think 4e is bad because you dislike the genre, or if you don't understand how the rules work. The first means there's no point in arguing, because not everyone enjoys the same genres. The second means there's something I can accomplish.

Stop. Right. There.

There are other options:

- The rules don't have anything to do with the genre. For example if the genre is a hack and slash encouraging melee combat and most of the rules are about line of sight, firearms and troop movement.

- The rules are straight out bad. Like the skill challenges.

- The rules don't meet what was promised and actively screw you over if you follow the suggestions. Like trying to use a mixed melee and ranged group.

Trying to simplify it down to "you wouldn't like it anyway" or "you're wrong and don't understand it" is stupid and makes you look an idiot.

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As previously noted, enemies of level 1-5 are considered to have unenchanted equipment. Enemies of level 6-10 are considered to have +1 Magic equipment, but player characters only get non-magical equipment when they loot them. You can't come up with an in-game reason for that, because it doesn't make any sense

Page 187 of the DMG says: "You can think of {the magic item threshold} as representing feats you're not bothering to choose, low level magic items, or the NPC's intrinsic power".

I use all three, in varying amounts. Instead of tracking how much X arrows and armour, and such, I just hand players the gold they would have got from selling it. Cuts out the “how much are you carrying” book-keeping

...

EBD means that you can have basic weapons and the effect can be of +1 weapons, right? Since it isn't like you have to state where bonuses come from and so on.

So the having +1 weapons is useless, confusing and immersion-breaking. And your evading the point. Ignoring the evasion, what you're doing is even worse. You convert the monsters directly into gold. WTF?

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Your points and refutations are wrong, misleading or just evading the point.

[CatharzGodfoot]

>>Right; XP determines level. Now here’s the same thing, restated:
Are you aware that GP is a measure of how powerful a character is?
That all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level?
If character 'A' has twice as much GP as character 'B', then character 'A' has more power than character 'B' does.
<<

You keep mentioning this over and over and over again, and it's gibberish.

Just because there's a correlation does not make things 1:1, or a perfect correlation in any event.

Let's try it with height and weight, two concepts with reasonable statistical correlation.

Are you aware that weight is a measure of how tall a person is? (so far, so good, but past this point is where the logic goes wiggy...) That all people of the same weight have roughly the same height?
If character A weighs twice as much as character B, then character A must be taller, right?

That's not a very good example. The equivalently structured argument for the RPG would be 'Are you aware that wealth is a measure of what level a character is?'. That doesn't really have any bearing on the question of character power. If you wanted to deal with character power, a better analogy would be 'A person's weight [wealth] and height [level] are measures of how big [powerful] that person is'.

[RandomCasualty2]

The 4E equipment system is really not bad. It does what you actually want a fantasy RPG to do (assuming you're trying to tell stories similar to fantasy novels and movies). The protagonists don't loot dozens of suits of chainmail, magic or otherwise, to sell it at market, and it is nice that the game system is finally consistent with that playstyle.

So, the mechanics to encourage that sort of playstyle don't make looting your foes worth much in general, unless they're carrying a special weapon that's significant enough to actually stand out in a description. Because in fantasy stories, nobody really bothers to loot minor magical baubles.

And this ends up speeding up the game anyway, because I don't want to waste my time at the end of the night where people are adding up money from how many piddly suits of minor armor they looted and how much it sells for. That's just not fun to me and it's a waste of time that could be spent gaming. Yet the 3.5 loot system encourages people to do just that.

And really the 3.5 system didn't do a good job simulatng fantasy novels at all. It was pure christmas tree syndrome and even worse it encouraged people to take literally everything that wasn't nailed down. If you had a portable hole, even taking suits of armor was fair game. And then there was the long ass time it took to sell off that bullshit.

[Crissa]

RC, there is one problem, though. Since the equipment the foes have literally dissolves, you lose the stories about the mercenary bands who go home, sell all the stuff for a really nice house or bath at the inn or whatever they want. You get to tea party any sort of looting instead.

I actually liked hauling back scrap in Mech Commander, hoping I didn't blow up all the really nice stuff while I was dealing with a limited time frame to get the recycled tin-cans redeemed at the mech bay.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Mundane equipment doesn't go away; hell, most monsters do in fact have mundane equipment. So you're not in fact discouraging X-Mas tree looting, all you're doing is making it take longer.

4E looting has four major problems you can't deny:

1) It makes the PCs look like complete wimps when they need to be blinged up in order to compete but the enemies don't.

2) If you want to give an enemy some magical gear, either you fudge the stats on the monster or they become overpowered--especially at higher levels.

3) The buy/sell paradigm is completely fucking ridiculous, even for D&D, explicitly designed to cheat players who dare to try to get what they want.

4) As I noted, it doesn't solve the problem of PCs stripping down castles and getting money off of it. Yes, the entire process takes much longer than it used to especially with the deflation of mundane equipment and the inflation of magical equipment, but you still have the same issue of people digging up corpses and trying to get the gold from their breastplates.

The only reason why this doesn't look like a problem in 4E is because the game flat-out refuses to give you the price of most goods and services that don't railroad you to a dungeon. As you might have known, I came up with an embarrassingly simple money loop:

Forge a tiny suit of golden armor.

Use the Enchant Magic Item ritual to resize it to being gargantuan.

Melt down the new armor, pocket your cash, have a new suit of golden armor commissioned.

Though there are a couple of problems with this. One, there's no price listed for gold, only gold coins. Two, there's no game mechanic for crafting anything that's not magical fighting equipment. This is a laughably simple money loop anyone with a brain can exploit, but you still can't do it. Not because the loophole is closed, not because the rules are well-designed, but because the rules are in such a flux that I don't know WHAT the fuck I can do.

See, that is in a nutshell how the economy is 'balanced' in the game. Don't actually make rules that are impossible to break, just stop players from going off the rails. Oh, your party rogue pocketed a solid gold idol from the natives and wants to sell it for cash? Well, he CAN'T! Because there isn't a price listed for gold in this game, nyeh nyeh.

The core problem with this is that you shouldn't be able to put a price tag on power in the first place. When you do this, either the game ends up breaking when the players go off of the rails (3E) or the players are Stopped By A Mysterious Force when they try to give their game world a fucking moment's thought to it. 4E designers realized the problem with this and went for Stopped By A Mysterious Force, which is fucking retarded. If you're going to have to rely on that, just fucking ask the players not to break the economy. It's just as simulation breaking as the former and takes a lot less mental contortions.

[CatharzGodfoot]

In a fantasy world, the value of gold should be highly variable. I can only hope that 4e gold pieces are a modern-style currency, where gold is used simply because it's cheap and doesn't corrode.

[Psychic Robot]

To summarize: 4e says "fuck you" to anyone trying to go outside of the "kill, loot, and repeat" game mentality.

[crazysamaritan]

So your argument is that xp -> level and level -> power so xp -> power? Wait, are you really saying that if you need 1000xp for level 2 and 3000xp for level 3, then a character with 2999xp is more powerful than one with 1001xp?

If I meant to say that, I would have phrased it this way: "The more XP your character has, the more powerful it is."
Which is provably untrue. I instead phrased it this way: "all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level"

Even if you had a point here and not correlation/causality fuckup, the issue of having GP == power is bad. Its perfectly reasonable to complain that 4e hasn't done anything about it and in some ways has fucked it up worse.

Actually, the reason I bring it up is because 4e handles it better than previous editions. The parcel system allows for the XP and GP available to character to increase at a set amount. The gold doesn't increase at the same rate as the XP (more's the pity), but in this case, characters who earn gold through adventuring tend to be of equal power levels. Which is a large change from previous editions, where one adventuring party could have twice the gold as another party, which translates to a higher power level.

In 1st, the fact that wealth contributed to a character's power level was demonstrated by characters being able to exchange gold pieces for experience points.

Doubling experience points does not indicate double power, or even necessarily more power. Whether you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, WFRP, or DnD4.0, a character with, say, 80 EP is not necessarily measurably more powerful than a character with 40 EP.

Once you've gotten to 3rd level, every time you double the XP, you go up at least one level. So the rare corner case exists for characters of under 1875 xp, where doubling the XP does not always increase the character's level. However, the purchase price of items are always over half the amount needed to buy the next level'd item.

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No, please don't. 4E is not balanced. It's more balanced than 3rd Edition but its neutering of player power and interaction only resulted in a modest improvement.

Okay, what about, "4e has reduced same-level power variables"?

As in, 4e has a smaller RNG within each level? A smaller range of attack bonuses and a smaller range of defences and so on within each level? Errr.... not really. An example: the basic idea behind Striker/Defender is that Strikers do a considerably larger amount of damage than Defenders, so if the variability was reduced then all Strikers would do a similar amount of damage and all Defenders would do a similar amount of damage, both of which are very different.

However, it can be easily shown that non-Strikers can easily do more damage than Strikers, which proves your point wrong. It also proves that the game is not balanced to its own measuring points and standards since the classes don't meet the balance standpoints set.

Let's narrow this focus, and go over attacks first.
A fifth level character is using an attack against a monster, and she has to hit a target number of 20.
In 3rd edition, what is the range of bonuses characters could have?
In 4th edition, what is the range of bonuses characters could have?
For both editions, let's assume the player put at least a 16 in the relevant Attribute.

I've yet to hear of a system that was "perfectly balanced". Even Chess and Go, games that are hundreds of years old, people debate the power of going first over going second. So balance is a continuum, not a state of existence. All we can do is compare aspects of different systems to see if the method one system does offers players has fewer "trap" options than another system.

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4E is basically a game of focused fire and stunlocks.
4E has only very basic tactics, and there just aren't any counters to those tactics. There is no way to counter focusing fire or combat healing. So it pretty much means you can use the same tactic over and over again and win. Which by definition means that the game is tactically weak.
Now granted, 3E tactics weren't all that in depth either, but at the very least you had options like dispelling magic and the combats were faster.

Ah, you’re confusing Strategy with Tactics. Strategy; the overall plan of action for an engagement. Tactics; round-by-round decision-making made to carry out the strategy.

Yes, D&D is a very strategically weak game. You focus fire on one enemy, and attempt to minimize the actions of the rest of the enemies, until you can focus fire on them in turn.

Is this another case of you redefining standard terminology to change someone else's meaning?

I don't think so: I use wikipedia's terminology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_tactics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_strategy

Strategy being "larger in perspective than military tactics which is the disposition and maneuver of units on a particular sea or battlefield."
Tactics change based on terrain and reaction to the enemy.
Strategy is the overall plan of action, encompassing multiple locations and numbers.

Important quote:
--'battle drills' which try to promote automatic responses to given situations,--
The decision to train in one battle drill over another is a strategy, because it is applied over multiple locations. The decision to implement a given drill during combat is tactics.

While PCs tend to be in small numbers, if you assume each XP came from slaying a standard monster, by tenth level, they've eliminated a small city's worth of inhabitants.

4e is strategically weak because there are fewer OOC choices and the PCs are much more forced along a set path meaning less chance for strategy.

4e is tactically weak because there are fewer tactics available and fewer that work well.

Round by round choices may have slightly more options, but this does not change the fact that as a whole 4e is strategically and tactically weak.

Round-by-round choices is where the tactics come in. You don't decide "frank goes -here-, Bob goes +here+, and I'll lay down suppressive fire over ^here^" until you're there. Tactical decision-making occurs during combat. Surprise rounds and ongoing engagements.

The military has suppressive fire, and shoot-to-kill. The D&D equivalent of stunlock and focused fire. Those tactics work in real life.

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That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat. Even if you do get to occasionally invent cinematic moves, it's still not finding alternate solutions to problems, you're just adding some extra flavor to hack and slash.

So, you’re complaining that there’s no rules for non-combat, long-term, problem-solving?

RC specifically complained that "That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat.". That means that they are complaining that there is no room for in-combat problem-solving.

I'm sorry, can you give me some examples? I can't think of any problem-solving that can be done in-combat that isn't placed there by the DM.
I can think of disabling traps, turning traps against the monsters, turning a combat into a truce, and turning two groups of enemies against each other. I can't think of a problem that PCs can solve during combat that isn't created by the DM, instead of the players.
Charm Person has been toned down, so that you can't auto-end combats with it, if that's what you're after. But the idea of making enemies your allies is still available, just more challenging.

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I don't know if you think 4e is bad because you dislike the genre, or if you don't understand how the rules work. The first means there's no point in arguing, because not everyone enjoys the same genres. The second means there's something I can accomplish.

Stop. Right. There.

There are other options:

- The rules don't have anything to do with the genre. For example if the genre is a hack and slash encouraging melee combat and most of the rules are about line of sight, firearms and troop movement.

- The rules are straight out bad. Like the skill challenges.

- The rules don't meet what was promised and actively screw you over if you follow the suggestions. Like trying to use a mixed melee and ranged group.

Trying to simplify it down to "you wouldn't like it anyway" or "you're wrong and don't understand it" is stupid and makes you look an idiot.

Your first suggestion is that rules support one genre, and the flavour is of another. I already know one poster who feels that 4e supports Greek Fantasy Role-play, but not as well as Exalted, so he doesn't play 4e.

The third suggestion would mean that there isn't something I can do. There is something that I can learn, which is not the same. I'm not changing other people's perceptions when I learn things, I'm changing my own. There's nothing to this board's benefit when I learn something new, so I'm not accomplishing anything by being here.

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Page 187 of the DMG says: "You can think of {the magic item threshold} as representing feats you're not bothering to choose, low level magic items, or the NPC's intrinsic power".

I use all three, in varying amounts. Instead of tracking how much X arrows and armour, and such, I just hand players the gold they would have got from selling it. Cuts out the “how much are you carrying” book-keeping

...

EBD means that you can have basic weapons and the effect can be of +1 weapons, right? Since it isn't like you have to state where bonuses come from and so on.

So the having +1 weapons is useless, confusing and immersion-breaking. And your evading the point. Ignoring the evasion, what you're doing is even worse. You convert the monsters directly into gold. WTF?

No. Instead of asking my players to go through the process of haggling the General Store to sell their kobold, or medusa, or elven arrows, or the were-wolf, hydra, hellhound hides, and make them calculate their various weight capacities, volume storage, and general decay process, I assume the benefits the players can obtain from those into the treasure item parcel.

The 4E equipment system is really not bad. It does what you actually want a fantasy RPG to do (assuming you're trying to tell stories similar to fantasy novels and movies).
[...]
Because in fantasy stories, nobody really bothers to loot minor magical baubles.

And this ends up speeding up the game anyway, because I don't want to waste my time at the end of the night where people are adding up money from how many piddly suits of minor armor they looted and how much it sells for. That's just not fun to me and it's a waste of time that could be spent gaming.

Thank you, RandomCasualty2

Since the equipment the foes have literally dissolves, you lose the stories about the mercenary bands who go home, sell all the stuff for a really nice house or bath at the inn or whatever they want. You get to tea party any sort of looting instead.

Does "tea party" mean, roughly speaking, "abstracted into the treasure parcel"?

Dealing with these in a separate post...

4E looting has four major problems you can't deny:

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Your points and refutations are wrong, misleading or just evading the point.

Thank you for the critique on my debating skills. I wish there was enough information to learn from.

[crazysamaritan]

Dealing with these in a separate post...

4E looting has four major problems you can't deny:

1) It makes the PCs look like complete wimps when they need to be blinged up in order to compete but the enemies don't.

If "blinged up" means needing three items, then yes. Much better than 3rd, where magic item dependency was all over the place. Can't comment on 2nd, never having read the DMG.

2) If you want to give an enemy some magical gear, either you fudge the stats on the monster or they become overpowered--especially at higher levels.

I need someone to provide me with the math on this one. The only magical gear I would give an enemy is an item that I want the PCs to loot.

3) The buy/sell paradigm is completely fucking ridiculous, even for D&D, explicitly designed to cheat players who dare to try to get what they want.

Are you trying to sell a level 6 item to get another level 6 item, or are you trying to trade in several level 5 items, for gold/residiuum after getting higher-level replacements for all of them?

4) As I noted, it doesn't solve the problem of PCs stripping down castles and getting money off of it. Yes, the entire process takes much longer than it used to especially with the deflation of mundane equipment and the inflation of magical equipment, but you still have the same issue of people digging up corpses and trying to get the gold from their breastplates.

Taking longer means new DMs can notice it before Players abuse it. Avoiding the issue, or "Stopped By A Mysterious Force" as you put it, means the game does not expect this to be a normal part of the party's activities. Be on the lookout for a sourcebook detailing rules/ideas on how to implement a "Merchants and Mercenaries" style of play.

The core game is catering to the lowest common denominator; potential new players.
There are going to be many aspects that they won't know everything about, so the rules (such as for "Economy") have been written as introduction first, advanced play later (in a different book).

[Username17]

Actually, the reason I bring it up is because 4e handles it better than previous editions. The parcel system allows for the XP and GP available to character to increase at a set amount. The gold doesn't increase at the same rate as the XP (more's the pity), but in this case, characters who earn gold through adventuring tend to be of equal power levels. Which is a large change from previous editions, where one adventuring party could have twice the gold as another party, which translates to a higher power level.

Wrong. In 3e D&D, sending gold to gain power was badly done and poorly thought out. But the rules for gaining gold were very reasonable. Gold was an actual object in the world that you could interact with. The magic item economy was shit and bad for the game, but the wealth accumulation stuff was fine - getting money felt like a real action that a character might actually take in the world. Hell, in 2e AD&D the wealth accumulation rules were even better. There was no bullshit Diablo magic item economy and the collection of gold pieces to subsequently spend on maintaining your own kingdom was properly immersive and fairly functional.

Enter 4e D&D, where the magic item economy is still bullshit like in 3e, except that now the rules for picking up wealth aggressively and specifically don't make any god damn sense. They kept the part that was shitty and they took away the parts that were any good at all. The current wealth accumulation rules have no place in a role playing game at all. There shouldn't even fucking be magic items, you should just get enhancement bonuses automagically and be able to get some minor selectable magic powers as you level. If you're going to turn magic items into non-interactable computer sprites, they shouldn't fucking be "items" in the supposed world. That they are is a pathetic insult.

Once you've gotten to 3rd level, every time you double the XP, you go up at least one level.

Not if you're talking D&D math, and we are. 1000 XP doubles to 2000 XP. It doubles again to 3000 XP. At high levels you can double that XP many times without gaining any measurable ability at all.

Tactics/Strategy crap baleted

What the fuck is your point? Are you just being an Oxygen Thief?

4e D&D is strategically and tactically weak. Actual fights can usually just be mathhammered, because there is nothing to do in combats and things require enough iterations to reach conclusions that most of the time it just reaches average results anyway.

Charm Person has been toned down, so that you can't auto-end combats with it, if that's what you're after. But the idea of making enemies your allies is still available, just more challenging.

More challenging? There aren't rules for it any more. That makes it magical teaparty, not "moar challenge."

No. Instead of asking my players to go through the process of haggling the General Store to sell their kobold, or medusa, or elven arrows, or the were-wolf, hydra, hellhound hides, and make them calculate their various weight capacities, volume storage, and general decay process, I assume the benefits the players can obtain from those into the treasure item parcel.

This is exactly why the 4e treasure system is so infuriating and anti-immersive. If I'm just going to get direct power ups without dealing in real wealth at all, don't fuck with me by pretending that there's some real items of real value being traded behind the scenes, because there fucking aren't any!

Does "tea party" mean, roughly speaking

Magical Teaparty is the roleplaying game that you play when you are 4. You have a tea set and a stuffed bear, and maybe some friends. You all pretend to be spacemen and fairy princesses and do whatever your imaginations come up with. Frankly, this RPG is pretty sweet, since play is very fast and it is extremely easy to port to any genre you desire or to make hybrid genres in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, action resolution is pretty clunky, since if two or more players can't agree on the results of a specific action there is no in-game way to determine the outcome. Literally we have no way to extrapolate from the rules what dice we should roll or what the generated numbers would mean.

So this game has advantages and disadvantages. But one of the plus sides is that it is fucking free and I don't have to spend over a hundred dollars on a stack of 300+ page books to be told how to play it. So every subsystem that 4e D&D - or any game - relegates to magical teaparty is a strong incentive for me to not want to own or read their books. Being as that is a subsystem that I can literally have a four year old tell me how to run better in less time for less money.

-Username17

[Roy]

To summarize: 4e says "fuck you" to anyone trying to go outside of the "kill, loot, and repeat" game mentality.

Full fucking stop. Now, I'm for smiting 4.Fail as much as the next guy, but let's not start lying by pretending this is new.

3.5, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, and anything earlier do the exact same fucking thing. Those last few may expect you to throw it away on bullshit like houses instead of things you actually care about, but as the DM is actively encouraged to start fucking with you if you don't, kill and loot.

[Parthenon]

If I meant to say that, I would have phrased it this way: "The more XP your character has, the more powerful it is."
Which is provably untrue. I instead phrased it this way: "all characters who have earned [x] GP are supposed to have roughly the same power level"

True, you did accept Leress's correction of your xp == power but without stating that you realise you were wrong. Sorry for misunderstanding you when you last tried to evade the fact that you were wrong.

Try it this way. gp == power is bad because some DMs will allow all the players to be elves in a long running campaign and spend 100 years making money with the good intention of empowering players by helping them achieve their goals, some DMs will allow buying and selling at reasonable rates and others will allow you to use the rules to make huge amounts of money, all of which break the system.

In short, it is too easy for one group to have [x]gp and be at a power level of [A] and a different group to have [x]gp and be at a power level of [ B]. If the system is based on both the groups being at [A] then it is too easily broken.

3e was trying to get away from that mindset, but towards the end with MIC and with 4e, WotC is going back to the gp == power way of play. Which is a really bad idea and should be removed as much as possible.

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[quote="CS']

Even if you had a point here and not correlation/causality fuckup, the issue of having GP == power is bad. Its perfectly reasonable to complain that 4e hasn't done anything about it and in some ways has fucked it up worse.

Actually, the reason I bring it up is because 4e handles it better than previous editions.
[/quote]

True, in 4e you don't have to piss about with NPCs working out their wealth and calculating what equipment they have. Thats good. If they did the same with PCs it would be brilliant. 4e could be brilliant.

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Okay, what about, "4e has reduced same-level power variables"?

As in, 4e has a smaller RNG within each level? A smaller range of attack bonuses and a smaller range of defences and so on within each level? Errr.... not really.

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However, it can be easily shown that non-Strikers can easily do more damage than Strikers, which proves your point wrong. It also proves that the game is not balanced to its own measuring points and standards since the classes don't meet the balance standpoints set.

Let's narrow this focus, and go over attacks first.
A fifth level character is using an attack against a monster, and she has to hit a target number of 20.
In 3rd edition, what is the range of bonuses characters could have?
In 4th edition, what is the range of bonuses characters could have?
For both editions, let's assume the player put at least a 16 in the relevant Attribute.

I've yet to hear of a system that was "perfectly balanced". Even Chess and Go, games that are hundreds of years old, people debate the power of going first over going second. So balance is a continuum, not a state of existence. All we can do is compare aspects of different systems to see if the method one system does offers players has fewer "trap" options than another system.

Actually, I'm not all that sure about this. I haven't looked enough at 4e to know how much the range is at each level. You might be right that 4e has a smaller range.

However, your last point is bullshit. If your classes directly contradict your design goals then you have failed. If your classes are supposed to be balanced with their roles and they aren't then they are broken in an easily fixable way; which means the designers should be fired and new designers who can actually create reasonable design goals and achieve them should be hired.

But thats getting away from the first point in this sequence of dialogue:

4e is sterile compared to the huge weirdness possible with 3.x rules. I invite you to look into what Frank and Keith have done, such as The Wish and The Word, and Balor Mining, and so on. Those power loops were bad for the game, but they were FUN to read about.

Can I summarize this as "4e is so balanced it's sterile"?

The original statement was that the rules are sterile, and the argument at the moment is that the range of the RNG at each level is smaller than 3.5. Which is a shitty argument. IF you were to argue the benefits of 4e by having this and how it is better than 3e and other RPGs in general then that would be a good standpoint. Please do that instead of arguing that it is reasonable for the designers to completely ignore their design goals and make bad classes.

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[quote='CS"]

Is this another case of you redefining standard terminology to change someone else's meaning?

I don't think so: I use wikipedia's terminology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_tactics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_strategy

Strategy being "larger in perspective than military tactics which is the disposition and maneuver of units on a particular sea or battlefield."
Tactics change based on terrain and reaction to the enemy.
Strategy is the overall plan of action, encompassing multiple locations and numbers.

Important quote:
... [one that actually argues my point:
decision to train outside of combat == strategy
decision to use one response == tactics ] ...
--'battle drills' which try to promote automatic responses to given situations,--
The decision to train in one battle drill over another is a strategy, because it is applied over multiple locations. The decision to implement a given drill during combat is tactics.
[/quote]
Sorry, I think we differ on how best to define Strategy. Lets try this step by step.
1: Go to Wikipedia
2: In the search box type in "strategy"
3: Read the first two paragraphs:

A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. The word strategy has military connotations, because it derives from the Greek word for army.[1]

Strategy is different from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.

So, by reasonable usage of the terms, you are talking bullshit about Strategy within an encounter.

Oh shit, I just used the term "reasonable usage" and meant it. Next I'll be talking about "terms and conditions".

The military has suppressive fire, and shoot-to-kill. The D&D equivalent of stunlock and focused fire. Those tactics work in real life.

You realise you just referred to stunlock and focused fire as tactics? A couple of posts back you said:

Yes, D&D is a very strategically weak game. You focus fire on one enemy, and attempt to minimize the actions of the rest of the enemies, until you can focus fire on them in turn.

Here you referred to stunlock and focus fire as strategy.

DON'T CONFUZZLE THE TERMS WHEN YOU ARE BASING YOUR ARGUMENTS ON THE DEFINITIONS OF THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

Oh shit, I just did it. Oh well.

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RC specifically complained that "That's still solving a problem via straight up kick down the door style combat.". That means that they are complaining that there is no room for in-combat problem-solving.

I'm sorry, can you give me some examples? I can't think of any problem-solving that can be done in-combat that isn't placed there by the DM.
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Well, I can't think of any offhand, but that still doesn't solve the problem that you were ignoring his point. I just wanted to bring attention to the fact that you were ignoring it.

I'm sure other posters will give you in combat problem solving examples.

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There are other options:

- The rules don't have anything to do with the genre. For example if the genre is a hack and slash encouraging melee combat and most of the rules are about line of sight, firearms and troop movement.

- The rules are straight out bad. Like the skill challenges.

- The rules don't meet what was promised and actively screw you over if you follow the suggestions. Like trying to use a mixed melee and ranged group.

Your first suggestion is that rules support one genre, and the flavour is of another. I already know one poster who feels that 4e supports Greek Fantasy Role-play, but not as well as Exalted, so he doesn't play 4e.

The third suggestion would mean that there isn't something I can do. There is something that I can learn, which is not the same. I'm not changing other people's perceptions when I learn things, I'm changing my own. There's nothing to this board's benefit when I learn something new, so I'm not accomplishing anything by being here.

Firstly, my main issue was that you were splitting the problem into two solutions, both of benefit to your position which is a bad argument.

Secondly, we want you to have good arguments for 4e. We want to have continuous discussion about the benefits and negatives of 3.5 compared to 4e. But your not giving us good arguments. We're shooting down the bad arguments in the hope that you have good ones.

Thirdly, the first option is where you want to have the sub-genre of heroic fantasy where you start off as peasants and become heroes. However 4e doesn't allow you to start off as beggars who can't read or write. This makes it a system unable to deal with parts of the genre.

Finally, the third has a benefit to the gaming community as a whole. If more people understand where the bad rules and systems are and why they are bad, then they will be less likely in the future to accept bad designers.

If you or anyone else reading it understands more about what is wrong about 4e then it is more likely that errata will improve the game.

If you are in this discussion with the intention of never changing your mind then you are an idiot and should go the fuck away. But if you want to change our minds with good reasons and well explained solutions to the problems we see then please, continue.

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EBD means that you can have basic weapons and the effect can be of +1 weapons, right? Since it isn't like you have to state where bonuses come from and so on.

So the having +1 weapons is useless, confusing and immersion-breaking. And your evading the point. Ignoring the evasion, what you're doing is even worse. You convert the monsters directly into gold. WTF?

No. Instead of asking my players to go through the process of haggling the General Store to sell their kobold, or medusa, or elven arrows, or the were-wolf, hydra, hellhound hides, and make them calculate their various weight capacities, volume storage, and general decay process, I assume the benefits the players can obtain from those into the treasure item parcel.

No. Earlier in the thread Frank used an example encounter with magical weapons that the PCs would probably like to have. However in 4e upon killing the enemies the weapons turn mundane and in your case, turn magically into gold.

Why can't you loot the bodies in general? Why can't you remove their scalps and wear them? What happens to the magic?

And that's still ignoring the fact of: Why have magic items and not make the magic inherent to the creatures? That would solve the issue of magic items disappearing.

[Roy]

This is for the 4.Fails:



Because the term needs proper illustration.

[MartinHarper]

Why can't you remove their scalps and wear them?

You can, but only under "actions the rules don't cover".
Does 3e have rules for scalping monsters?

Why have magic items and not make the magic inherent to the creatures? That would solve the issue of magic items disappearing.

That's one of the options mentioned in the 4e DMG, and it's the option I use.

[Username17]

Does 3e have rules for scalping monsters?

Oddly enough, yes. I don't regard it as much of a selling point, but there are in fact rules for transforming fallen monster skins into clothes.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Why have magic items and not make the magic inherent to the creatures? That would solve the issue of magic items disappearing.

That's one of the options mentioned in the 4e DMG, and it's the option I use.

Except it doesn't explain why they have any items at all. Or why they aren't using the items that they carry. Or why adventurers go around killing inherently magic creatures and pulling magic swords out of their guts.

He means, why not make all the stupid bullshit bonuses provided by items inherent to the PCs and get rid of bullshit magic items that have no reason to be found at exactly 1 per monster on monsters that don't use them.