Drunken Review: 4e DMG 2

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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

I sometimes use an actual computer game to simulate RPG mass combats. You can do a lot with a scenario editor. Of course, D&D doesn't always map well to Age of Wonders or whatever you are using. And you can either accept that inconsistency or deliberately limit what's in your setting to make it closer. Both of those solutions can be unappealing.
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Post by Username17 »

The Final Chapter begins...

Chapter 6: Paragon Campaigns

Having just written up full campaign arcs that went from Heroic to Paragon to Epic, the book is now going to tell us what they think Paragon play is actually supposed to entail. This probably should have come earlier in the book. Maybe even the beginning, but certainly not the end. It's hard to say whether things meet the design specifications if you don't say what those specifications are until the end. But whatever, it's here now and we'll talk about it.

The idea is that in Heroic play you go into kiddie dungeons and fight basic mobs, and at Paragon "bold horizons unfold". I am totally and completely on board with that sentiment. Unfortunately, as was discussed in chapter two, at least one of the "bold horizons" they are fond of in 4e is "the Orcs are naked and eyeless now", which is more pitiful than bold. This chapter is split into three sections, and two of them are about Sigil, which is not encouraging.

See, I would welcome "plane hopping" as a declaration of "Paragon Tier". That would make sense, because you are now moving between different universes and can sandbox around like in the time machine example from Chapter 5. Also, I like Sigil. At least, I like a number of versions of Sigil that have been produced (most explicitly the one in Planescape: Torment, which is pretty awesome). But the defining concept of Sigil is that it opens up planar adventures to low level characters. Sigil has no-violence zones in which you are allowed to talk to and interact with big hoodoo demons and angels, but they aren't allowed to kill you with a word. Sigil has portals all over it, such that characters who have no actual abilities to go anywhere or do anything remarkably superheroric can nonetheless have a portal appear that can take them to any other world. High level stuff exists in Sigil, and high level planar adventures also exist. But Sigil was literally created in order to facilitate low level planar adventure, meaning that putting it in as the Paragon Tier example setting is... not encouraging.

But anyway, the first of the three sections is about what Paragon Tier means to the authors. This is... very schizophrenic. Here's a bit I really like: they say that only characters who are Paragon will have the abilities to participate in campaigns built around high level stuff. And heck, I might as well give you their actual list.
DMG2 wrote:• high-level politics.
• grand-scale military engagements.
• sustained adventures in the Underdark or similarly hostile locations.
• world-hopping adventure.
• alternate realities.
• time travel.
Frankly, that sounds awesome. Except for the Underdark thing, which I still don't even understand as a cutoff, because apparently ordinary Dwarves and Drow simply live there and you can honest to goodness play them at first level. But while I really like the sentiment, allow me to remind the gentle reader of what actually happens when you turn Paragon tier:
  • • You get +1 to all your ability scores.
    • You get a new "feat" and are allowed to pick of the Paragon list. Such as Plate Armor Specialization... that gives you +1 to your AC while wearing Plate Armor.
    • You get to select a Paragon Path and get the starting Paragon Class Features. So for example as a Rogue you could become a "Dagger Master", which means that you would then have the ability to reroll an attack or damage roll with a dagger attack instead of acting twice, and you score a critical hit with dagger attacks on three whole numbers on the d20.
    • You get a another attack that can be used once per combat. This brings your total attacks you can use before you fall back to your at-will spam from 3 to 4. The Daggermaster gets an encounter attack that is actually a bonus attack that triggers when he gets a critical hit, which on average now happens by around turn 7 of an encounter (and being a triggered bonus attack, it does not actually increase the number of rounds before you are spamming your at-will attacks).
That is, admittedly, more than happens at levels 2-10. But I'm not actually seeing the part where any of these changes let you lead armies, travel through time, or engage in high level politics. You get some various sundry +1s of d20 rolls and you get slightly better at stabbing people with a knife. None of that is actually particularly envelope pushing. Indeed, right after they write down that list of cool things that supposedly "only" can be dealt with by heroes with Paragon Tier abilities, they walk it back:
DMG2 wrote:This is not to say that you can't run these types of campaigns with PCs who have not yet attained the paragon tier.
This is the kind of scenario thing that can only be drowned away with sweet and medium proof drinks.

So we've established then, that Paragon isn't really an actual thing, so much as a state of mind. There's no actual game mechanical support for characters being able to influence the world any more spectacularly in Paragon than they can in Heroic, but the book strongly suggests that you magic tea party up some more expansive feeling adventures in order to provide the illusion that characters had progressed into more world affecting and world traveling heroes by becoming Paragon. This is best exemplified by the statement in "Gaining Influence" that when characters turn Paragon level, "they attract the attention of top local leaders." Characters don't get better diplomancy scores or have followers or anything. It's just that like in a video game, the doors to the council chambers are open when you're 11th level instead of being closed like they were at 10th level. And the NPCs inside will talk to you instead of having the default response of "I'm too busy with council matters" or "Welcome to Corneria" or whatever.

There's some discussion of how to run a game where one character is a lord and the other characters aren't. Or where multiple characters have powerbases. And this is welcome, but it's all in the ivory tower speculative discussion level, because 4th edition D&D characters still don't have any abilities to actually do these things. This is the DMG2, and it would have been totally the right book to put in rules or even guidelines for running a business or controlling a thieve's guild or being mayor, archmage, bishop, or count. But it doesn't.

There's some discussion of how to run a game where the characters are involved in big wars. This would also be welcome, except that their suggestion for doing it in-game is "why don't you run it as a Skill Challenge?" And of course, the answer to that is "because Skill Challenges are the most non-functional mechanic ever written for Dungeons & Dragons, including the ones that couldn't be linguistically parsed in the first place, and I do not want to run this, or anything, as a Skill Challenge because that would give me cancer."

Image

There's a bit on the Underdark. This is pretty hard to take seriously, because I still can't see how this is different from a low level zone. We are told that Dwarves might be "ungenerous and suspicious", but can't Elves or Tieflings be that way too? Dwarves are a fucking player character race. This segues directly into a discussion about how you can have areas that are as inhospitable as the Underdark on the surface, and gives examples of cursed lands, hordelands (by which they mean "Central Asia", kingdoms of evil, undead armies (by which they mean "areas post-zombie apocalypse"), and streets of anarchy (by which they mean "Paris during the terror"). But really this seems to be fairly thin gruel. There's basically two sections back to back about how in Paragon play you could be doing basically exactly what you were doing in Heroic play but have it require a physically longer walk to get back to a town where you can buy stuff. That's... hard to take seriously. What makes it even harder to take seriously is how they chin scratch about how hard it would be to have enough food when town is a long walk back and you are constantly having to fight and kill the local wildlife. Problem Solved.

Image

There is a section on world hopping. This is a big disappointment going in, because the presentation isn't "now the players have a bigger sandbox", it's "now you can run disjointed, episodic adventures that don't even pretend to have any continuity because they happen on different worlds". I like Sliders as a concept as much as the next guy, but I don't regard a lack of continuity as being a new mightier vista in any real sense. They further split this into a section on hopping between parallel worlds and a section on hopping between time junctures. The time travel section is mostly just admonishing you that you should write some time travel rules and decide if and how paradoxes are resolved. I like Chronotrigger a lot, but there isn't any meat here. It's basically just a frank admission that making time travel games is kind of hard followed by telling the reader that the authors of the book do not have any intention of doing any of that work for you. And that's the whole section.

So to recap, the authors believe that Paragon play should open up new backgrounds for adventures that are largely inconsequential palette swaps. Also, they believe that palette swapping NPCs from mayor to baron is enough to make the players feel important. They also suggest opening up political, warfare, and management minigames, but don't actually have any of those in this book or anywhere else in this edition. And finally, they suggest that the primary advantage of more "sandboxy" forms of travel is that you can make things even more episodic and less consequential than 4e encounters already were. Sigh.

After that, we get into a description of Sigil. It's 24 pages and covers a lot of ground in a modestly superficial fashion. It has lists of NPCs that include people you haven't given a shit about for a long time like Kylie the tout. While it does do sufficient amounts of Lady of Pain wanking to identify this as Sigil discussion, it doesn't really go into the part of Sigil that was really fun: the Factions. The only ones that get a writeup are the Sons of Mercy, which comes with a disclaimer that they don't have any official power and are limitedly effective.

All in all, I find Sigil rather hard to take seriously as an iconic Paragon location. There's explicitly no powerbase worth rising up in or even taking over. The Sigil Advisory Council as written is basically just the highschool spirit committee, and rising to the top of it would just let you pick the theme for prom. You can buy high level stuff here, and you can find portals to various other dimensions that you could have higher level adventures in - but you could just as easily buy low level stuff here and find portals that took you to low level adventures on equally distant worlds.

There's a 12 page adventure at the end of the book. It introduces Sigil, and you fight Paragon tier monsters, and you get paid in epic currency (astral diamond). But the paragon tier monsters don't really do anything amazingly special. We're talking about undead dudes and giant spiders with, get this, bigger numbers. Also the adventure is fundamentally "protect the food caravan", which is I'm pretty sure the generic 1st level introductory adventure. I don't remember exactly how many times I've done "protect the caravan" as a way to get characters to together (both as a player and as a DM), but it's a lot. It's a "first adventure" that is cliche almost to the point of "you meet in a tavern" and slightly more cliche than "villain makes unreasonable demands in town square". It really doesn't bring the "Paragon is different" vibe they should have been reaching for.

And that's the book. The book says it wants you to be running organizations, fighting wars, playing politics, and sandboxing bigger locations. And this is the actual "Dungeon Master's Guide 2", so the place you'd expect to find the rules for all that stuff would be... in this book. But they aren't here. More than anything, this book seems like a 222 page pitch for making a DMG2 rather than the actual DMG2 itself. The one really rule-centric chapter is chapter 3 which was their last chance to fix Skill Challenges and they blew it on reprinting bullshit web articles on how Skill Challenges could be made more complicated in various stupid, useless ways.

The book was a failure. A failure because they didn't even try to move the rules forward. And that's the whole book.

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Post by OgreBattle »

Is there any quick fix to make 4e paced more like Chrono Trigger?
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:Is there any quick fix to make 4e paced more like Chrono Trigger?
Magical Teaparty and extensive note taking by the DM. There is nothing in the actual 4e game mechanics that would do absolutely anything ChronoTriggerish. Any time travel and effects on future or past events would be pure MTP. Even the ability to travel through time in the first place would be pure MTP, because there aren't any character abilities, items, locations, rituals, skill uses, or artifacts in the game that would do anything of the sort.

Even this book's suggestion "maybe you could make an artifact" to facilitate time travel is odd, considering that such a device is way outside the guidelines of what an artifact does as described in this actual book. Seriously, the example of a Paragon tier artifact in this book is the Cup of Al Akbar - it slightly accelerates the rate at which you recover from diseases. Or the Emblem of Ossandrya, which gives you a +1 named bonus to saving throws and lets you reroll an attack roll or skill check once per day. Feel the power!

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Post by Ted the Flayer »

Ug, Planescape would have been awesome if it wasn't for the people that played it. I have never seen a more uptight and arrogant group as Planescape fans.

They treated anyone who didn't use the settings like they were "clueless", forgetting that in the campaign setting boxed set the clueless weren't liked because they were highly dangerous (as a prime has to be incredibly powerful to get to sigil), and a prime wizard is capable of nuking a neighborhood out of a misunderstanding.

Loved the setting, REALLY loved the artwork, hated their fans. Also, it's hilarious how casually they use the word "berk"...
Prak Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.
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Post by fectin »

I liked Torment; Planescape in general never really grabbed me.

Overall, the setting seems basically like an inn at a major crossroads, which you may not take over, by fiat. Sure, it's a great place to hang out between adventures, and being in the middle of everything means that adventure can find you easily. It's even cool that it's so well described. At the end of the day though, it's a place where you spend your downtime, not an adventure setting.
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Post by Red_Rob »

So they wrote a whole book suggesting you do things for which there are no rules in this edition, and at no point did they think that would be a problem?
Simplified Tome Armor.

Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.

Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.

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Post by Username17 »

Red_Rob wrote:So they wrote a whole book suggesting you do things for which there are no rules in this edition, and at no point did they think that would be a problem?
Pretty much, yeah. Now for Robin Laws, it genuinely wasn't a problem. He was paid a pile of money in order to get a one-time gig to write some abstract DMing advice for a system he barely looked at and didn't particularly like.
Robin Laws, 2009 wrote:I have been messing with skill challenges in my own game in an attempt to make them more suspenseful and am still not 100% happy with the results.
He said that while plugging the upcoming DMG2, which you'll recall is actually a book whose nominal purpose is to provide the DM tools to make Skill Challenges workable (having already backed off the original idea, which was to fix Skill Challenges outright).

For the other authors, it's less excusable. Collins, Wyatt, Slavicsek, and Mearls were all 4th edition authors who supposedly knew 4th edition mechanics and had visions of what they wanted 4th edition D&D to do and be. Now it's entirely possible that given that the DMG2 came out and less than a year later Andy Collins was out on his ass and the other authors had moved up the conga line of power that they didn't regard the book crashing and burning as being a problem, in that if they actually knew that doing a half ass job that failed up and down the street would result in a motherfucking promotion, they might just do that on purpose.

Of course, you'll also remember that 4e was founded on the idea of continual output of paid content and extreme verbosity. From the base classes that take a day to write and 12,000 words of actual text in the book to the bottomless demand for new monsters (a quarter page to give a troglodyte a club instead of a spear, repeatable for every monster type with every weapon, at a quarter page a piece), it's designed to fill up lots of page space without using up a lot of conceptual space. Because that way you can write more expansion material and charge people for it. If the DMG2 designers were still in the "shovelware" mentality that the game system had originally been written in, maybe they were actually intentionally making demands for subsystems and campaign information that they could then fill down the pipe with later books and more D&D Insider articles.

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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Ah, yes, the DMG2.

The fact that the book didn't even try to address the massive pile of fucking shit that was treasure parcels -- and in fact made it that much shittier -- was what made me give up all hope of the edition. I mean, I still played in and ran campaigns past that point but it was in the same spirit as watching Star Trek: Voyager or Dragonball Z. And of course the errata onslaught turned me from just being in despair of the edition to actually hating it. But that was the turning point.

The treasure system of 4E D&D is seriously only slightly worse than the Skill Challenge system. Think about that for a second and then kill yourself.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Antariuk »

Thanks for the review.
I bought a cracked, cheap copy of the DMG2 like 2 years ago because I heard there was some interesting advise on story rewards in it. I never really read the damn thing, has been sitting on my shelf ever since - now I know I can let it sit there without missing much :)
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Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Ah, yes, the DMG2.

The treasure system of 4E D&D is seriously only slightly worse than the Skill Challenge system. Think about that for a second and then kill yourself.
I wouldn't say that 4e's treasure system is worse than the skill challenge system. I mean, it's really, really bad, and indeed probably the worst item system I have ever seen in any game. It's fiddly, gives counterintuitive results, is basically impossible to handle fairly, is totally incoherent about how it works, cannot handle the players going off and getting part time jobs, the items themselves are both boring to have and frustrating to not have, and the system takes a giant dump on setting verisimilitude right out of the gate. It's awful. I'm not sure you could have a worse item system if you decided in advance that you were going to make the item system as bad as possible.

But the Skill Challenge system is worse. I mean, yes, the item system is insulting on pretty much every level. You fight a group of Yuan-Ti who demonstrably have glowing magic poison bows, and when they are dead all of those things vanish like you were playing a fucking computer game and one player in the party gets a pair of magic boots (!), while everyone else gets the shaft. The boots themselves are placed by the DM using guidelines he pulled out of his sphincter because the guidelines that exist are incomplete and contradictory. And this doesn't even serve some sort of arcane balance goal, because those boots can be transmogrified into gauntlets or a halberd by the player at a loss of 5 item levels if it turns out that the DM guessed wrong about what the player really wanted (or didn't care, because the DM is not obligated to hand out the heart's desire of you or anyone else, but they can if they want to). Meanwhile, you actually can't just tell magic items to go fuck themselves, because team monster scales faster than the PCs do, and they need magic item bonuses.

And this still doesn't matter as much as Skill Challenges, because casual players don't know or care whether frost swords are better than flaming burst swords. Simply put: the rules for treasure acquisition can just be a pile of donkey dicks and it has a profoundly limited ability to make the game shittier. On the flip side, Skill Challenges are the rules for doing, well, everything. Want to train a guard bear? Skill Challenge. Want to sneak into the castle? Skill Challenge. Want to seal the gateway and win the adventure? Skill Challenge. Want to woo the princess? Skill Challenge.

The fact that the Skill Challenge rules are an impenetrable wall of shit really matters. Because that's the rules for basically everything in the game that isn't running through a series of grindy but not terribly difficult tactical minigames. The Skill Challenge system is exploration, diplomacy, kingdom management, crafting, warfare, and everything else that makes it a role playing game rather than a poorly done Final Fantasy Tactics conversion to Table Top.

Without a working set of Skill Challenge rules, the entire game is nothing but fights and cut scenes. And that's worse than the fact that players don't get magic axes good enough to keep up with the numbers on team monster while getting what axes they do get in a manner which is fundamentally unfair, intellectually insulting, impossible to adjudicate and yet somehow very definitely your DM's fault when the problems inevitably come to light. Because making the game slightly shittier just doesn't compare in the slightest to reducing the entire game to a crappy board game where nothing matters.

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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So. If you were going to rank the subsystems, design policies, or aspects of 4E D&D by shittiness in a top ten format, how would you do it?

Here's my list.

1.) Skill challenges.
2.) The entire monster and NPC system, from PC/NPC transparency to bonus scaling to monster creation to monster roles to lack of guidelines to health/damage asymmetry to EVERYTHING.
3.) Magic item acquisition.
4.) Humping of page forty two.
5.) Errata policy.
6.) Bonus acquisition.
7.) Ridiculous amounts of fluff padding. Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium has about half as many items as the Adventurer's Vault and is about as many pages.
8.) Role protection fail.
9.) The basic structure of the class and level system and the resource management mechanics.
10.) Rituals and assorted bullshit like alchemy and martial rituals.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Seriously, I'm starting to actually get angry at how intensely shitty and 4E D&D was mismanaged at almost every level. Even the things that I think was sort of okay like the artwork and making Dragon/Dungeon respectable and the adventure paths barely rose above 'decent'.

Okay, gotta calm down. Deep breaths, deep breaths...
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by infected slut princess »

4e was so bad it basically caused the D&D brand to die.

1. Removal of ability to tell wide variety of really cool and epic fantasy stories
2. Math failure on so many levels
3. Making everything suck
4. Lack of cool abilities.
5. Retarded daily/at-will/encounter power system
6. Magic item system
7. Death and Dying rules
8. Skill challenges
9. Resulted in Pathfinder
10. Resulted in 5e
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Post by RobbyPants »

infected slut princess wrote:4e was so bad it basically caused the D&D brand to die.

...

9. Resulted in Pathfinder
10. Resulted in 5e
That should say a lot, right there. I wonder if PF ever gets brought up in Hasbro meetings, and if so, what they think that means for their brand. I'm hoping the take-home message for them isn't "the OGL was a bad idea".
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Post by ishy »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Seriously, I'm starting to actually get angry at how intensely shitty and 4E D&D was mismanaged at almost every level. Even the things that I think was sort of okay like the artwork and making Dragon/Dungeon respectable and the adventure paths barely rose above 'decent'.

Okay, gotta calm down. Deep breaths, deep breaths...
Making Dragon/Dungeon respectable is quite a feat imho. Whenever either got brought up during 3.x in my personal anecdotal experience, the general response was: "fuck that shit, not worth even looking at".
While in 4e it was mostly accepted.

Though everyone I know dropped out of 4e fast to play 3e again.
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Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So. If you were going to rank the subsystems, design policies, or aspects of 4E D&D by shittiness in a top ten format, how would you do it?
1. Skill Challenges.
  • The effort to create a unified mechanic for dealing with non-combat problems is understandable, and certainly popular at the time. The idea that they could simply shit one out in twenty minutes and release it without ever playtesting it or mathhammering it is incomprehensible.
2. "Monsters Don't Exist"
  • Nothing good ever came from the "revelation" that monsters "did not exist" outside of combat. All that did was to encourage the authors to rip every immersive detail from the entire monster manual.
3. Everything is Core.
  • Even those assholes dropped this concept less than 2 years into 4e's lifespan, but this was a tragedy. I understand that "Core Rulebooks" sell more than supplements, but trying to set up a system where some musings about a monster type by your C team that your A team never even saw was a "core rule" was incapable of ending well.
4. Yearly Base Books
  • The goal of putting out a new set of basic core books in a year's time and another set of basic core books a year after that is obvious from a money-grubbing standpoint, but nothing good came of that. It meant that the designers held things back so that things could be "saved for the PHB 2" or "saved for the DMG 3" or some shit. Over and above the fact that the designers were assclowns, the fact that they had to make a new set of corer than core books in a year's time meant that they were deliberately making crippleware. Even a good designer would produce a bad product if the mission statement was to create an incomplete work.
5. The Item System
  • Much has been said about how shitty this subsystem was, but I don't think it will ever be enough. Everything was wrong with this subsystem.
6. The Math
  • Everyone likes it when the math works, so it's unsurprising that they used "the math just works" as a rallying cry and a selling point. However, 4e's level-scaling math was a catastrofail. From ice that gets slipperier as you go up in level to the game's general inability to accept different levels of optimization, this was a litany of horror and stupid.
7. Minions
  • I can see why Rob Heinsoo thought they were a good idea, he'd used the same rule in Feng Shui (where it works quite well). Players also love them... for a while. But this rule has no place in a campaign game, and even less of a place in a game with level scaling. D&D is both of those things, and people sour on minions quick when they realize that yesterday's boss monster is literally being cleared out by caltrops today. The basic stupidity of the system is also harshly exposed by DoT effects and nuisance damage - two things that Hit Point based games absolutely love using. Minions would have a place in a game that was all one-shots, but in a game like D&D it just shits on verisimilitude for little benefit.
8. "Exception Based Design"
  • Look, I know that "exception based design" is an actual thing that is actually a perfectly decent idea, but I'm talking about EBD as the thing that Mike Mearls apparently thought it was - which was a license to dump all the rules for a monster into the monster's writeup and ignore everything else in the game. This was a stupid fucking design system. It gave us the need for a quarter page writeup to switch a monster from using an ax to using a sword, and it gave us five different abilities called "Evil Eye" that did radically different things.
9. Everyone is Vancian
  • I'll actually defend Vancian casting from time to time. I think it has a place in the game. But it's a pain in the ass, and not everyone wants to do it. Making every class fiddle with daily powers was a terrible mistake. The idea that they actually scrapped a working system with eight classes where three of them got plundered to make the Book of Nine Swords makes this design decision even more offensive and terrible.
10.Eight Classes
  • The class structure they came out with was a war crime. Every class had twelve to fourteen thousand words dedicated to the writeup itself, and it was heavily weighted towards Paragon options that you weren't even going to see for months of play. That's a hundred thousand words dedicated to just eight classes that each support just 2-3 "builds" with as little as one supported weapon each. The whole book and no one could fight with a lance or crossbow, no small character could use any reach weapon, and there wasn't even an option to play a sneaky guy with a hammer. With only about 20 "builds" supported, that might have been OK for a computer game launch, but for a TTRPG, it was disaster.
Sure, the errata cycle was terribad, but I don't even know if that was part of the original design or simply the mad flailings of people who knew they were on a high speed train to fail town and were trying to divert using whatever desperate measures came to mind moment to moment.

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Post by Whipstitch »

The only good thing about #2 is that my old group was made up of mostly Shadowrun and Vampire players, so the whole notion that NPCs lacked weird sensory powers and social skills was declared anathema on the spot. This was handy given that many of us were rather mathematically impaired, so we never had to go through that tiresome process of disproving "The Math Just Works" before the game was binned.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Here's one that we're forgetting

Any race, any class

This was a big deal in their marketing campaign - the idea that you could play any race because there were no stat penalties. But then they made it so every 'build' needed two stats, races gave +2 to two stats, and you needed your stats high to deal with the math.

Lying liars.
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Post by nockermensch »

#8 also is "exactly as 1 and 2e did". They regressed something that was widely considered an improvement.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

You know what? The problem with a top 10 list is that there are more than ten problems with 4E D&D. I could come up with 10 more things that really pissed me off about the edition really easily.

I also realize that a top 10 list is inherently flawed because it implies that number 19 was not as bad as number 1 or even number 11. But whatever.

11, 12, 13. The Mere Implementation of 4.5E D&D
  • 4E was obviously heading down the tubes by 2010. So I don't blame them for throwing a Hail Mary. However Essentials, hereby referred to 4.5E because that pisses off 4Erries, did so many goddamn things wrong that they could be their own thread. The fail was so fucking strong that I can easily make them into three separate list items
.

11. The 4.5E Magical Item Changes.
  • I totally forgot about this until I started appending this list; regardless, while it's still not bad enough to dislodge the fail of skill challenges from number 1, it should make the magic item system number two if I was ranking these properly. The Magical Item Change was so retarded that everyone completely fucking ignored the whole thing.

    Why? The reclassification of magical items as common/uncommon/rare was done half-assed to existing items. There were literally hundreds of magical items already existing before 4.5E came out. In order to fit them into the 4.5E structure that required some intern to release a new errata document that exhaustively retrofitted everything. As the 4.5E design staff couldn't find their dick even if Lorena Babbitt decided to force feed it to them, this didn't happen. Everything was reclassified as 'uncommon' until further notice. That was completely unworkable, of course, since players couldn't unilaterally force uncommon items into the game and entire builds were completely dependent on the acquisition of certain items.

    The other thing is that while magical item dailies were one of the worst ideas ever, they were baked into the system at this point. Trying to pretend that magical item dailies didn't really count against other magical item dailies just encouraged people to load up on barrels of Dice of Auspicious Fortune and Stones of Power. The standard 4Errie reaction to that is and was 'your DM should smack you if you try that!'. Thanks, bitches, your edition is soooooo balanced.

    So all this backwards compatibility crap did was break the game and leave it broken until everyone just sort of pretended that it didn't exist anymore. Seriously, if you look at 4E character builds on the Character Optimization, they just straight-up act like 4.5E didn't just take a huge hookworm-infested, lactose intolerant diarrhea dump all over the game. And maybe that's for the best.
12. The Brand Spanking-my-ass New Essentials classes.
  • The 4.5E classes were redesigned so that they'd be simpler to play. Or at least that was the idea. 4.5E would eliminate many of your options such as replacing all of your encounter powers with fucking Combined Strike and lock you onto rails even harder than 4.0E did. This would attract a new playerbase full of casuals and lapsed players and revive the whole product line! And maybe save Mearls and Wyatt's jobs! :nuts:
    Note, Mearls and Wyatt did not get fired, proving that Yahweh is a Pathfinder fanboy
    .

    To begin with, that shows a remarkable amount of tone-deafness to the complaints of the system. If you ask non-4Erries the biggest problems with 4E classes people will tell you that the resource management scheme locks them into scripting and movespam and that the classes don't get cool shit. Guys, doing this only made the problem worse. The only people who were marginally satisfied with the new 4.5E classes who weren't already in the 4E bubble were grognard furniture chewers who whined that the 4E Fighter was too complex.

    Secondly, that project and backwards compatibility were designed to fall right on its fucking ass in many ways. I'll just give two of the big ones. One reason was because 4.5E classes still counted as their 4.0E counterpart and 4.5E classes still got access to class-specific expansion material. Like feats. If you're making an EZ Mode beginner class, it kind of defeats the whole fucking purpose if at level 1 people still have to hunt through dozens of cleric feats, don't you think?

    The other reason why it failed was the same reason why Pathfinder Wizard nerfs failed. 4.5E made the basic chassis of classes like the Slayer and Scout stronger but still allowed for it to plunder class options as mentioned above. This had the hilarious effect of making supposedly EZ Mode classes Expert Mode classes.

    Thirdly, while this is just churlish, whose fucking idea was it to retroactively rename the classes in order to distinguish 4.0E classes from 4.5E ones? No one wants to call a wizard an arcanist. Go fuck yourself.
13. The Mere Existence of the Rules Compendium.
  • The fact that you need a separate 250+ page book just so people can play the game correctly should be ample evidence that your game sucks. You'd think that they would be nice enough to include errata into this bastard, but nope. If you want to play 4.5E D&D you need about 350 pages of extra materials not in the fucking rulebooks in order to do so.

    God, I hate this fucking edition.
14. Feat Taxes.
  • The Feat Tax is one of the most poisonous game concepts ever. Yes, 3E D&D had this as well but it was only a mockingbird's splatter pellet compared to the valley range of bullshit that 4E D&D indulged in. If you were for example a motherfucking Swordmage or Barbarian almost all of your heroic tier feats would be feat taxes. This got so bad that even diehard fans started complaining about it.

    That's one of the things that really pissed me off about the edition in conjunction with the errata policy and why I get more butthurt than usual talking about errata. Nerfs were free and mandatory. Buffs required you to spend several hours trawling through character catalogs.
15. Tschotske Bloat
  • Related to the above, 4E D&D got so desperate for people to pay attention to it in its last two years of existence that they went all-in on power creep that wasn't cynical feat taxes. Because even 4Erries have standards. Note: standards may suddenly go away if Mike Mearls asks unctuously enough. Only instead of power creep that, you know, was fair like redoing the advancement charts or releasing a new set of armor they stuffed the power creep into out-of-the-way sections -- mostly, but not exclusively in the magical item catalogs. I like building characters, I have spent literally hundreds of hours thumbing through books and character builders, but I sure as fuck don't like having to scan every single fucking entry in exist hunting for miscellaneous bonuses.
16. The GSL.
  • I don't know whether this was was decision by Hasbro suits or by the game developers. Regardless, though, it was tobacco spit in the eye of developers. I pretty much blame Pathfinder gaining market dominance on the GSL.
17. The DDI fuckery.
  • The entire thing ended up being fucking vaporware. Which is too bad, because a lot of it looked as rad as hell. But we didn't even get a fraction what was promised in the Monster Manual.

    The only barely quality thing we got out of the whole shenanigan was the 4E D&D character builder. But oh yeah, they changed it after the October 2010 update to only work if you have a DDI subscription. And even then it lacks and lacked a lot of basic functionality. For example, you can't employ search terms through magic item descriptions. For something that's literally rehashed XML that is inexcusable.
18. Points of Light/Nentir Vale.
  • I hate points of light. It is some immensely lazy shit. Whoever made that editorial decision should have been blacklisted from the industry.

    I simply cannot even fathom why the hell the developers let the game hit the shelves without packaging it with a decent campaign setting. The campaign setting is the most important part of a TTRPG. It's the reason why Shadowrun has survived to a 4th Edition, they're the one redeeming quality of GURPs universally-agreed upon, and they even allow Exalted not to be classfied as Shock Porn TTRPGs that belongs on the portion of the shelf where we shamefully store Racial Holy War and FATAL. I mean, Noonan did because he thought that a profitable MMORPG didn't really need a good campaign setting, Collins was too busy furiously masturbating to orc-on-human interracial pornography and/or his greatsword-wielding dwarven fighter, and Mearls is the laziest grifter imaginable, but didn't anyone realize what a monstrously horrible idea this was?

    This wouldn't have been so bad if not for:
19. Nuking the Forgotten Realms IP.
  • I don't really care much for Forgotten Realms, but it was 3E D&D's moneymaker setting. Even moreso than Nooberron. In lieu of providing their own campaign setting, 4E D&D should have been placing this setting on a pedestal. But because the game developers had the reverse Midas touch, this failed miserably. The sheer scale of the implosion of the IP cannot be understated. 3rd Edition D&D had 28 FR sourcebooks over its seven years of existence. 4th Edition D&D had two over four, both of them in its first year. No one really talks about it because no one really talks about 4th Edition D&D, but I simply cannot imagine a bigger campaign setting debacle than 4E D&D's handling. Seriously, we're talking a level of mishandling a cash cow that reaches Megaman Battle Network or One Piece levels.

    Back before TvTropes became a pedophile MRA wasteland, the 4E Forgotten Realms was so awful that it had a whole page dedicated to its fail. They had more than this at one point before Fast Eddie got a case of the Hugbox but I wasn't able to get all of them.

    You know what? For hate's sake For old time's sake, let's look at the list one more time.
    The Fourth Edition Forgotten Realms of Dungeons and Dragons could demolish a house with this trope. These are just a few of the changes devoted to the new edition change:
    • Tyr (God of Justice) kills his best friend Helm (God of Guardians) over an arranged marriage with the Goddess Of Luck Tymora. An arranged marriage organized by the Goddess of Love, Sune.
    • The previously unknown "split" world of Abier swapped out the vast majority of the Earth analogue nations, as well as many of the less detailed regions. The existence of this split had one throw-away line in the last sourcebook published before the new Campaign Setting. Fans are pissed.
    • What wasn't removed was destroyed by the Spellplague, which supposedly ignored high-magic areas - except for Thay (partially destroyed), a nation of mages; Silverymoon, a nation guarded by a powerful magic field called a mythal; Waterdeep, a city full of mages on top of a mythal created by the Netherese on top of a magic dungeon... The list goes on.
    • The worst is the death of Mystra, the Goddess of Magic. Acknowledged as the most powerful goddess, who knew all spells before they were cast, she was in her home plane with her most devoted servant... and she was killed by her two greatest enemies after TURNING HER BACK ON THEM. Her death, despite having nothing to do with the Planes, manages to completely rearrange them; it also results in the death of her main servant Azuth and the flinging of her other servants, including a God of Prophecy, into the Astral Plane. Oh, but her enemies manage to escape unharmed. This also manages to trigger the previously mentioned Spellplague.
    God, I miss the old TvTropes. :gross:
20. Yanking Gamebook PDFs.
  • Seriously, what the hell? Did this actually deter any pirates? As far as I know all it did was force pirates to wait a few extra days and increased the proliferation of Touhou pornography.

    Pathfinder not only sells gamebook PDFs but allow cheerfully allows people to post the entire fucking thing on their wiki. And they still beat the pants off of 4E D&D in sales back when they were still competing.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sat Jun 15, 2013 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by ishy »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Seriously, we're talking a level of mishandling a cash cow that reaches Megaman Battle Network or One Piece levels.
Could you elaborate on these two? (perhaps in a different thread)

I'd add power design to list. Every single class with their own unique powers, and yet everyone has the exact same powers. Even the 4e designers later admitted that it was fucked that if you described the function of a power, you could not guess the name or which class it belonged to.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

ishy wrote:Could you elaborate on these two? (perhaps in a different thread)
There's not much to say about these two properties. One Piece is a license to print money. The manga often outsells its next top-two weekly competitors combined. It is the most profitable and widely circulated mango of all time. The 4Kidz translation was so terrible that it completely buried the property in English-speaking countries -- even though Bleach, FMA, and Naruto are and were licenses to print money.

Same deal for MMBN4. The game sold several hundred-thousand copies in the first couple of months based on MMBN3. But was so awful (including a glitch that could break your cartridge just from using a promoted feature) that it torpedo'd the franchise. Quoting the hilarious Let's Play:
EpeeEm wrote: You thought the game was monotonous before? How about when you've already done everything already? I want to note this as a Fuckup, because this is just a fundamentally horrible game design decision. Who at Capcom actually thought that doing everything over, even if they thought the game was passable or even decent, was something gamers would enjoy?

Most likely, it was done out of pure laziness to try and make an easy profit from a cheaply-produced game. Considering how this game did so badly, I want to call this a Fuckup for business decisions as well:

For background comparison's sake, MMBN3 was originally released on Dec. 6, 2002. It recieved a remade version, Black, on Mar. 28, 2003. These were released as MMBN3 White and Blue in the U.S., respectively. By the end of 2003, the original version had sold 535,836 units in Japan, while Black sold 168,946 units. Wikipedia only had info for Japan, okay?

Both versions of MMBN4 were released in Japan on Dec. 14, 2003. In Capcom's fiscal report for that year, the game sold 535,836 for that year. In half a month. People were anticipating the game like hell, obviously. It sold an additional 393,014 units over the course of 2004. So yes, half of December outsold the entire following year. Doubtlessly, some gamers had caught wind of how terrible the game was by then following the initial rush.

Now let's look at MMBN5. Released Dec. 9, 2004, Team ProtoMan sold 255,061 units by the end of the year, less than half of what MMBN4 had in even less time. Over 2005, Team ProtoMan sold 211,099 units total. Team Colonel, released On Feb. 24 2005, sold a mere 194,472 units total.

As you can see, after MMBN4, Capcom received an enormous cut in their sales. Tallying up the total sales of MMBN5 yields 660,632 units sold by the end of 2005. That's not a hell of a lot more than MMBN4 sold in the first month. MMBN4's total sales tally up to 928,850. Capcom sold roughly 33% less overall, on the game they put MORE effort into.

Capcom, my business education is limited to a high school Financial Management single-semester class, but something tells me you fucked yourselves on that one.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Wiseman »

What's this about Tvtropes and pedophiles?
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Post by DSMatticus »

Wiseman wrote:What's this about Tvtropes and pedophiles?
Deja vu... Check out this youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/CrazyGoggs
The panty shot one especially is creepy and hilarious.

Basically, TVTropes was kind of fun and hilarious for awhile, and then they adopted a HUGBOX operating style in which you aren't supposed to say bad things about anything. Now they deliberately go out of their way to avoid saying negative things and keep everything neutral or positive, which makes them boring.

Beyond that, their refusal to adopt negative stances about certain things is wildly inappropriate, because those things are actually terrible. And it has caused them to become home to no small number of people who are terrible, like "men's rights" types (which in practice means "fuck women's rights" types) and pedophiles.

So they simultaneously neutered their witty commentary and welcomed in a bunch of scum-of-the-earth-types.
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