Drunken Review: 4e DMG 2

[tussock]

On the math of 4e, and why it needed such a delicate hand.

Code: Select all

Hit rate - Damage - 4e Damage.
   80%   -    0.8   -   0.9
   60%   -    0.6   -   0.53
   40%   -    0.4   -   0.29

In D&D until 4e, if you hit half as often, you do half as much average damage per turn, so fights last around twice as long. In 4e, if you hit half as often, you do under a third as much average damage per turn, so fights take over three times as long. It's 50% more sensitive to changes in your hit rate, +2 in 4e like +3 in any other edition.

Sure, those steps in code there are +4 AC, but that's exactly what an Elite Soldier has, and it's also what you were falling behind the curve by over your career before that patches came out. The relative difference between the predominantly basic monsters at low level and the common Elite/Solo Soldiers at high level was 40%, which drove the fights from 7 rounds out to 20+ (where the monster got three times as much damage as expected, because it's not on the death spiral at all).

Furthermore, old edition characters got to hit way over 95% of the time with primary attacks anyway. So giving them an extra -8 relative hit chance was eventually still 95% hits and damage.

[Username17]

Tussock, I really have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Your damage over time falls at the same rate in 4e as it does in any other edition. If you hit with an attack half as often, it will take you twice as many rounds of spamming that attack to end the fight. In any edition ever made. In any edition that can be made.

The issue with 4e is that player characters do considerably more damage in the first four rounds than they do in rounds after that. So if your hit rate drops, the extra rounds of combat will be made up with rounds of spamming at-wills and the number of turns will increase considerably. But I can't reconcile that reality with your chart. Like, at all.

-Username17

[Whatever]

Tussock, I really have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Your damage over time falls at the same rate in 4e as it does in any other edition. If you hit with an attack half as often, it will take you twice as many rounds of spamming that attack to end the fight. In any edition ever made. In any edition that can be made.

Weren't 20s automatic criticals in 4e? Or is that 5e? Either way, if you go from hitting on 19 or 20 to only hitting on 20, your damage only drops by 1/3 (assuming crits are a flat double damage).

And didn't some attacks do damage even when they missed? That would also cut into the additional time required when your miss rate increases.

[Sigil]

4e had 20s as auto criticals, and a critical simply did maximum possible damage, or double damage with some specific weapons.

[Whatever]

Well, the point still holds. If 20s autohit and do increased damage, then your damage over time will fall at a (very slightly) decreasing rate as compared to the fall in your hit rate.

[Wiseman]

The first campaign arc is really pretty stupid. It starts with the characters being humble villagers and then magic rays from an an exploding planar breach turn them into player character adventurers wearing heavy armor and reading from spell books and shit.

Okay I read that and laughed so hard. Who the hell came up with that?! That's like the dumbest way I've ever heard of to start a campaign.

[erik]

The first campaign arc is really pretty stupid. It starts with the characters being humble villagers and then magic rays from an an exploding planar breach turn them into player character adventurers wearing heavy armor and reading from spell books and shit.

Okay I read that and laughed so hard. Who the hell came up with that?! That's like the dumbest way I've ever heard of to start a campaign.

[Lago PARANOIA]

virgil, I am laughing my ass off right now. I know Frank mentioned it in the review, but that picture is just perfect.

[tussock]

But I can't reconcile that reality with your chart. Like, at all.

Assumed x for at-will, 2x encounter, 3x daily. Use 1 daily, 4 encounter powers, and the rest at-will, and needs 8x or more to win.

Many have worse or better at-wills, and maybe free hits for various things, but they're somewhere near it.

80%: 3x+2x+2x+2x = 4 hits; * 5/4 = 5 rounds; for 9 damage. = 90% of 10.
60%: 2.5x+2x+2x+1x+1x = 5 hits; * 5/3 = 8 rounds; for 8.5 damage. = 53% of 16.
40%: 2.5x+2x+1x+1x+1x+1x = 6 hits; * 5/2 = 15 rounds; for 8.5 damage. = 28% of 30.

"of" being what you'd get for a constant 2x damage like a classic damage-guy. I know, showing my work is never my strong suit. Also assumes level 10+, and probably some other stuff I don't know enough about.

[Username17]

In a few months, his prediction about Czechia will likely turn out wrong. There's something where we can point and say he's objectively wrong. If you want more, you'll need to dig into the threads of arguments (F vs K crops up a lot) and pick a side.

So I've been in Greece for a week, but while I was gone, the Czech Republic had a police coup. As in: four hundred police officers dressed in balaclavas stormed the Prime Minister's office and forced his resignation.

I have no doubt that he was corrupt, and I rather imagine that whatever shakes itself out of the current constitutional crisis will keep calling itself "The Czech Republic", but the government just got toppled by an armed paramilitary uprising. Good times.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Yeah, they have a new president, who apparently doesn't like the guys that just got arrested (and there's nothing fishy about that), and suddenly they don't have a government so you could very well be right.

I tried to start a conversation about that and figure out wtf was going on in the Political News thread, but tussock is being so brain-cripplingly wrong and stupid there that he has annexed the discussion.

[Judging__Eagle]

I'd say that the 3e answer to "mass combat" wasn't HoB.

Heroes of Battle was how to run "military campaigns"; in that, the battle mat was a place to plan out tactical combat encounters.

Really, this is just more of WoTC trying to throw things at the wall to see what sticks, and since they never made a fully functional game there wasn't anything players could actuall get their teeth into and use; aside from a few "formation" type special abilities that could make "grunt lever" troops a competitive edge against large groups of monsters.

Even then, for large scale mobs, the PHB2.. or DMG2 has a "mob template" that was awesome at turning 1 HD or less creatures, into fearsome swarms, even killing the 'swarm', didn't kill all of the monsters, who as 1-5 HD anythings against 4 CR 10 PCs weren't going to pose any sort of challenge if they couldn't have arbitrary powers, like "free from anything but reflex saves; finally a fire-ball easy monster; and with no AC, power attack (with a reach weapon of course; the to-hit of a gang of troglodytes, or warforged, is "they get you within their radius, and auto-damage you, 5d6+Damage mods, Plus natural abilities ).

Bleh, anyway, I think that the Mini HB was a more concrete attempt at showing actual rules for a wargame; even if that wargame was heavily related to the DDM game. :/

[Voss]

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.

I'm going to quibble with you here. Minions aren't bad as a concept, or even unfitting with D&D- it was their specific implementation that was fucked. Minions can function, and function well, if they are given a range of minion appropriate things- even if this is level based. I can't see any issue at all with Giant Rat (the D&D assumption of large cat/small dog Giant Rats) being minions, even from level one- you stab/blast that with something, and it goes away. And at higher levels, trash stuff like goblins and kobolds are perfectly acceptable minion material- in genre, in fact, this is largely exactly what they are in books/movies/whatever. Sword sweep or spell flash, and they're toast.

The real problem with the 4e implementation was that things were minions and not minions simultaneously. Kobold dragonshields, slingers and minions were indistinguishable unless the DM gratuitously hung labels on them for player convenience (or the party asked for detailed gear descriptions every time and the DM always described them as out-of-the-box). This got even worse when it came to ogre and cyclops minions, which aren't even coherent with the hp bloat of paragon tier.

I don't thing many people would have batted an eye at kobold minions (especially folks used to 1d4 hit point kobolds), or even a larger range of shit creatures as minions. Its perfectly in keeping with the genre and D&D itself (from fighter sweep attacks, great cleave, fireball and all sorts of shit) just to obliterate crappy opposition. But when the shit creatures walk around with real creatures of the same type, and little kids with slingshots can wipe out half the ogre war party*, the entire system goes out the window.

For minions to work it really needed a list of things that are always minions, and everything else could never be minions.

*not that non-combatant NPCs can actually make attacks in 4e, but that is another issue.

[Whipstitch]

*not that non-combatant NPCs can actually make attacks in 4e, but that is another issue.

It actually isn't another issue, they're intimately tied together. The minions issues ties into the fact that the 4e design team firmly believed two things:

1. Math is haaaard.

2. Things that aren't in combat don't really exist. (Which, in practice, means the designers acted like anything that happened unobserved didn't have to make sense.)


Because, seriously, most of the crap we're talking about is much better handled with character scaling than with just giving things a single hitpoint and hoping everything works out OK. That's because giving kobolds multiple hitpoints and giving orc barbarians a high enough strength mod to one shot them anyway still has advantages in that it is still possible to have fights between goblins and kobolds that are more than just rocket launcher tag depending on how you jiggered the math. The 4e guys didn't do that though, because again, math is haaard.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I've been informed that I should be nicer to the people behind the DDI vaporware, because the head honcho behind the thing committed murder-suicide.

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-mur ... ons-online
That's literal. The guy literally committed murder-suicide. Holy shit.

Okay, so I'll have to come up with a new 17. But that doesn't excuse the other shit that went on in the system.

Gotta throw up some hate, gotta throw up some hate... oh, yeah. Here's a good one. Frank even mentioned it in his review. How about the constant magic item shuffling the game expected you to do? This is technically above and beyond the magic item acquisition and resource management system since it applied to divine boons and artifacts, but still.

What the fuck were they thinking, making it so the grandmaster training faded with no replacement after a few levels? Idiots.

[ScottS]

Not refuting any of the above points, but this is my quick list of why the math in 4e was badong:

1. Monster damage didn't scale up fast enough. The original MM chart had monsters gaining 0.5 damage per level, while PCs were gaining 4-6hp per level. So PCs went from dropping in 2-3 hits at 1st level, to being able to take 10 hits "as level -> infinity" (I don't have the chart now but I think it got up to 7 hits to drop by level 30). They later upped it to +1 dmg/lvl for monsters instead of +0.5, but that still wasn't enough to preserve the tension of level 1 play all the way through (i.e. it should have been +2 dmg/lvl to maintain the 2.5 hits-to-drop ratio).

2. Solos and minions weren't scaled properly. If a solo was supposed to equal 5 standards, the damage output of a solo should have been something like triple standard (because if standards die 1/round, the standards are getting in 5+4+3+2+1=15 swings over their existence, while the solo is only getting in 5 swings). Their original solution to this problem was to have solos be Voltron and split into 5 standards when you attacked them. At the very end, they may have fixed this by giving all solos multiattacks, but I didn't get a good look at Monster Vault so I don't know.

Similarly, minions were too weak because autodamage existed and was easy to get. There was also no formula for how much damage a minion of level X was supposed to do. When I ran 4e, I wound up 12:1 minions to standard instead of 4:1, which empirically worked OK (the shaky calculation was that 4 minions were "equal" to a standard for just 1 round, but the average standard survives for 3 rounds while the minions all get obliterated in round 1 by someone with a lightning weapon or whatever).

3. Rider effects weren't included in the balancing mechanic. Other editions are of course guilty of this, but the fact that they didn't have "combo tags" to tell you that, for example, ghouls work really well with gel.cubes and should therefore have an higher effective CR, was just RPG designers being lazy as usual. This probably broke down the worst whenever monsters had at-will crowd control (daze, immobilize etc.).

[sake]

5.) Errata policy.

I think I could have lived with their Errata policy under different terms. I mean it could have represented a concept shift from the game rules being these hard and fast, almost never changing things written on paper, to a living, ever evolving document.

The problem was that would have required a proper digital delivery system that allowed people to access (and download) the "One True Version of the Rules" and easily update it from time to time. While wotc instead killed digital downloads early on, plus as far I could remember none of the pdfs were never actually updated with the errata anyway.

Also, the insane amounts of errata would been far more tolerable if at any point they used it to also improve under powered feats/powers/classes and fix broken math. But they didn't, ever.

Hit bonuses not scaling right? Let's just throw in some new feats that were so poorly thought out that they'll take a couple more rounds of newer band aid feats to get things to actually work even close to as well as simply fixing the math in the errata would have.

Whoops, we took out level based damage scaling during beta without actually testing higher level play, and now characters do piddly squat? Lets just stick some new items in our next book for that instead of sticking something in the errata. Oh and just for the hell of it, let's make the melee version take the same slot as a magic shield and make the caster version an implement that only one caster in the current version of the game can actually use. we'll just make a feat to fix that later too.

Some classes are just flat out failing at their roles? Dragon needed more content anyway. We'll just write a class supplement with new powers and band aid feats to buff the class, it wouldn't make us any money to actually fix their under powered class features in the errata.

[Corsair114]

Some classes are just flat out failing at their roles? Dragon needed more content anyway. We'll just write a class supplement with new powers and band aid feats to buff the class, it wouldn't make us any money to actually fix their under powered class features in the errata.

That pretty much ruined any enjoyment my brother and I could get out of 4E. He loved the Assault Swordmage (haul ass around the map, mark the dude in back, charge a frontliner, and tele-attack the dude who just range-attacked your buddy? Cool!) but it was just fucking terrible, even after Arcane Power came out. Never had DDI, maybe that would have made it better enough to not be the butt-monkey class (at least outside the Psionics), but I doubt it.

Erm, sorry for the derail.

[sake]

Never had DDI, maybe that would have made it better enough to .

I could be remembering wrong, but assault Swordmages got very little improvements. Almost all support for the class focused on the Shielding version of the class. Which, granted, started out in far worse shape than Assault did, but by the time all the support for the class came out, they were far and away the only true version of the Swordmage to play. Hell, one of the later paragon paths just outright gave them a better version of Assault's main unique gimmick. After a while, the only time I'd see Assault sword mages used in build threads were in various hybrid builds.

It's actually little impressive how much effort they put into refusing to learn how bloody important basic attacks were (to classes that didn't have Ranger or Fighter in their names) and even after the bandaid feat for MBA's,they continued that trend by not understanding just how much better it was for a class who could get a 'counts as a MBA' power with their actual class/power keywords instead of using the generic attack. And still beyond that they never even made a ranged version for non dex archers. The closest you could get required two feats, had stat reqs, a god req, paragon level and still was limited to shortbows and just cha or wis characters.

All right up until Essentials... at which point, Melee basic attacks suddenly became the most important thing in the world. So much so that they had to be protected from the grubby hands of any non essential or non str based types. So the general purpose band aid feat was just flat out deleted and the characters that needed it to function were left flapping in the wind.

[Corsair114]

Never had DDI, maybe that would have made it better enough to .

I could be remembering wrong, but assault Swordmages got very little improvements. Almost all support for the class focused on the Shielding version of the class. Which, granted, started out in far worse shape than Assault did, but by the time all the support for the class came out, they were far and away the only true version of the Swordmage to play. Hell, one of the later paragon paths just outright gave them a better version of Assault's main unique gimmick. After a while, the only time I'd see Assault sword mages used in build threads were in various hybrid builds.

It's actually little impressive how much effort they put into refusing to learn how bloody important basic attacks were (to classes that didn't have Ranger or Fighter in their names) and even after the bandaid feat for MBA's,they continued that trend by not understanding just how much better it was for a class who could get a 'counts as a MBA' power with their actual class/power keywords instead of using the generic attack. And still beyond that they never even made a ranged version for non dex archers. The closest you could get required two feats, had stat reqs, a god req, paragon level and still was limited to shortbows and just cha or wis characters.

All right up until Essentials... at which point, Melee basic attacks suddenly became the most important thing in the world. So much so that they had to be protected from the grubby hands of any non essential or non str based types. So the general purpose band aid feat was just flat out deleted and the characters that needed it to function were left flapping in the wind.

I'm... I think I'm gonna have to take a look at those essentials books. Y'know, kinda like the way one watches a car accident. Or casually reads through a RIFTS book.

Maaan, they had the basis for a pretty cool table-top strategy game, and something they could have spun into a Tactics-style videogame, yet it's like they were hellbent on succeeding at failing with 4th Edition.

[ishy]

Thing I remember most from essentials:

In the first regular phb you had a feat which IIRC gave you:
lvl 0-9 : nothing
lvl 10-19: +1 feat bonus to fort/ref/will
lvl 20-30: +2 feat bonus to fort/ref/will

In essentials you had one:
lvl 0-9 : +1 feat bonus to fort/ref/will
lvl 10-19: +2 feat bonus to fort/ref/will
lvl 20-30: +3 feat bonus to fort/ref/will

And another feat in regular phb:
Use any one stat for Melee Basic attacks
Errata when essentials came out, to only give you half of your stat on damage!

Essential feat:
what the other feat did with errata.

Nerfs for free and buffs if you buy the book + slightly reprinted bullshit really soured a lot of people.

[sake]

And another feat in regular phb:
Use any one stat for Melee Basic attacks
Errata when essentials came out, to only give you half of your stat on damage!

Oh right, I forgot the half damage thing. I knew they had done something to the feat but blocked out exactly what it was. Frankly, deleting it would have been less insulting. Another fun change I recall from Essentials was how it handled those damned bracers that classes all wanted because of how poorly damage scaled. The version that affected any sort of melee attack, that the older classes needed? Those were retconed as being Uncommon. The version that was just for basic attacks, which was every attack the Essential classes did, those were Common. [/b]

[Lago PARANOIA]

As mentioned earlier and elsewhere, 4E DMG II was clearly when the edition was in panic mode. I doubt that a lot of the authors personally felt existential threats to their careers, but the manual gives off a feeling of desperation to it. They clearly wanted to just coast on making Martial Power 3s and DMGs 4.

One of 4E D&D's many, many problems that I didn't even put on the Top Twenty Bullshit Aspects to 4E D&D was explicitly designing the game to be a shovelware engine. The more I think about it, the more I have trouble coming up with 4E D&D material that was not explicitly designed to be shovelware or be really easy to churn out more material. Themes, feat taxes, new and exciting kinds of magical items, Martial Rituals, soforth. The only exceptions that I can think of are the rare campaign setting books and the endless revisions to skill challenges. Even the errata system got into the act.

Though curiously, one thing that the game didn't decide to slather onto game material were classes. I found that weird but I have a hypothesis for that: they probably (correctly, in my opinion) thought that they could get more mileage out of releasing expansion material that echoed across all previous material rather than just releasing new classes and never looking back.

The obvious objection to that observation is that there was nothing stopping them from doing both, but I'm not so sure. Classplosions and expansion option shovelware have the Gnome Problem. People will get angry if you show certain slates of classes favoritism with expansion material while neglecting the less popular ones, but releasing shit for the Assault Swordmage and O-Assassin is a waste of space. Well, a bigger waste of space than usual. This is probably why 4E D&D stopped releasing completely non-intersecting classes after the PHBIII and made all new classes be some sort of permutation of existing ones.

Now, 3E D&D, especially 3.5E D&D, had shovelware problems as well. But they also had a lot of books that were NOT shovelware; Book of Nine Swords, Epic Level Handbook, Miniatures Handbook, Stronghold Builder's Guide, Psionics Handbook, etc.. You may (and should) disagree on the quality but those books weren't explicitly set up to continually bilk customers of their money for little effort. I consider Stormwrack and Sandstorm to be Shovelware, not so much Frostburn.

[Username17]

But the real answer is because 4th edition is designed to be fast to write and to generate a lot of material that they can sell for money.

Context.

-Username17

[ishy]

This is probably why 4E D&D stopped releasing completely non-intersecting classes after the PHBIII and made all new classes be some sort of permutation of existing ones.

What about the vampire?
The vampire was not a permutation on anything was it?