Why did 4E D&D's classplosion fail?

[Lago PARANOIA]

One of the most baffling things about 4E D&D was that they constructed the game from the ground-up to be a shovelware engine for mechanical content, yet when it came time to deliver the goods they didn't produce appreciably more content than 3E D&D. This is especially conspicuous in the case of classes. If you have a locked-on-rails system as 4E D&D, a system in which your class determines most everything about how you interact with the game, and a demand for content generation you'd think there'd be a huge fucking classplosion, right? Well, they tried, but like everything about 4E D&D it failed. And why's that?

[*] The biggest reason why the classplosion failed is because a classplosion clashes with how people play D&D, especially 4E D&D with 30 levels instead of 20. If you're playing a videogame like Diablo where you can beat it in a few dozen hours, a classplosion makes sense to generate interest. However, people play their D&D characters over months, if not years. And the longer they play the characters, the more they tend to become attached to them. What's more, the vast majority of D&D campaigns require you to start at level 1. That shit gets old real fast, even if you're interested in trying out a new character. There are ways around that.
[*] A close second with how the classplosion failed is because 4E D&D characters are BORING. The powers are small-scale '[3W] + a slide 1' shit, classes get their powers and big upgrades at the same schedule, soforth. Now, 4E D&D did experiment with different class structures near the end of the game, most notably the Essentials and Psionic classes, but it was still largely the same old shit. There were no two classes that played as differently in 4E D&D as the 3E D&D wizard played from the Artificer. A lot of 4Erries will try to nitpick you here by claiming that there's such a BIIIIIIG difference between the Ranger, Warden, and Seeker. The Warden is a defender with encounter-long control effects, derp.
[*] 4E classes are an all-in kind of deal. 3E D&D's solution was heavily, heavily flawed with multiclassing, gestalt classing, and prestige classing but it at least let people have a taste of what classes like Warlock and Warblade would be like without requiring you to make a full commitment. You could eventually hybrid-class, but because 4E D&D didn't use a uniform stat system for its powers this was like hitting your head with a hammer. Do you know how many classes use Constitution AND Charisma as their primary stats? It's fewer than you think!
[*] In addition to how 4E D&D characters are constructed in a boring fashion, the new classes themselves are pretty boring! And I'm aware that the Wizard/Fighter/Thief/Cleric classes have such intense memetic power than even people who've never heard of D&D identify with the archetypes, but it's like they didn't even try. Even late in its lifespan, 3E D&D gave us the Dread Necromancer, the Artificer, the Warlock, and the Warblade. The efficacy of those classes were certainly all over the place and there was still plenty of stupid crap like the Duskblade and Scout, but it shows that it's not impossible to make new classes people want to play. But almost all of 4E D&D's new classes were absolute turkeys! Seriously, the only class 4E D&D introduced that people still want to play is the Warlord, and that character came out in the first PHB. The Swordmage is a distant second, every other new class had no memetic impact.

[OgreBattle]

4e was intended to be paired with a virtual tabletop that got cancelled because the project lead or programmer or so murdered somebody and killed himself yeah?

I think one of the reasons they didn't do classsplosion as you suggest is... they kinda realized how similar a lot of the powers would be, or they figured a new list of at will, encounter, dailies from lvl 1-30 would require 'rigorous playtesting' so it was deemed too much time without actually doing the shovelware thing.

Might as well bring this up... "4e was too much like an MMORPG" criticism is off because WoW and FFXI warriors n' casters used different unique power schedules like rage, TP, skillchains, etc. The ways 4e was bad was unique to 4e.

What D&D5e did with Fighter superiority dice maneuvers (encounter powers) and action surge (daily) was a smoother implementation of 4e concepts, in a way that loops back on 'core gameplay mechanics' stuff like "do another standard action" rather than being put in a separate box.

Going on a "improving 5e" tangent... making battlemaster fighter the core 'martial' mechanic would've been nice. Have a way to refresh superiority dice mid-combat, like Bo9S ('do a basic attack or nothing without using superiority dice that round') so...
- Rogue uses superiority dice for cunning gambit talent actions
- Monk has superiority dice as their ki pool... really monk is just a fighter or rogue archtype...

[Username17]

4e classes are ridiculously limited. If you want to play a character described but you want to use a spear instead of a sword or be slightly more weighted to offense or defense or buffs or curses or whatever that normally requires at least a new "build." So obviously 4e needed a Classsplosion. It needed a Classplosion in the PHB!

The reason none was forthcoming has nothing to do with need and everything to do with the fact that Andy Collins had convinced the entire team not only that eight classes per book was "enough" but that more than eight classes was "too much." Remember that when they were doing Orcus they straight up thought that adding the Warlock meant they had to subtract the Swashbuckler. And then when that failed spectacularly, they decided to double down and release Essentials books with only four classes.

The lack of Classplosion wasn't because they didn't think of doing one or that it was too technically difficult or even because they were lazy. There was a conscious and explicit decision in WotC R&D that Classplosions were bad and they put strict content limits in place to keep classplosions from happening.

It's not because there was something about 4e that would have made classplosions hard, it's that there was something about Wizards of the Coast design management guidelines that made classplosions literally impossible if you didn't want to get fired.

-Username17

[pragma]

re: memetic impact --

I agree with your general point. The warlord is definitely highhest in demand. However, I still remember the invoker fondly. The pitch: "Demigod who is strongly implied to also be an asshole" led to a few very fun play sessions. Also, there were some wild (for 4e) powers in the invoker list. I was particularly amused by the one where you insist that everyone grovel, and they are punished if they don't fall down and worship you. (Though explaining it at the table was a nightmare.)

re: 5e fighters

Giving all fighters the sentinel feat for free would also go a long way towards making their tactical positioning minigame more fun. You could probably come up with some class-by-class riders on opportunity attacks to further diversify tactical choices.

[Yesterday's Hero]

Invokers are basically favored souls but moar, IMHO. Divine controllers with battlefield control and multi target damage.

I think that the reason 4e’s memetic impact was close to null is because very few people played the game after the PHB (the book that has the warlord) came out.

So maybe people were reading the books but no one was actually playing and creating stories and anecdotes that created said memes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem I was trying to get at is that even if WotC went all-in with producing 50 new classes per year, the limitations of the 4E D&D system would've made it fruitless anyway. It took us only 30 new classes until we got stupid bullshit like the Ardent and the Binder. Can you imagine how ineffably lame things would be if we got to 300 new classes?

I mean, there's the off chance that in their quest to produce new content WotC would've opened up their minds a bit and experimented with classes that... gasp... had five daily attack powers at level 5! Maybe. But four years after 4E D&D came out we were still getting stupid bullshit classes like the Vampire and Assassin class. Andy Collins is indeed extremely lazy and stubborn, but a classplosion for 4E D&D was a doomed endeavor to begin with.

Honestly, I think a classplosion is a doomed endeavor for most D&D games. The thing about classes like the Warlock and the Dread Necromancer is that they came fairly late in 3E D&D's lifespan, long after people had enough time to level up their characters and play the D&D videos and get tired of wizard and sorcerer. I think it's telling that there are exactly zero 3.0E-unique D&D classes that had any kind of memetic staying power, except for maybe the Shugenja.

[Foxwarrior]

I think actually what 4e wanted was a powersplosion, not a classplosion. All the classes differ only in a couple of passives and what powers they have access to, so basically making new classes only serves to bore the optimizers. I'm actually a bit confused as to why they had class power lists at all since ability score dependencies already limit you plenty. Maybe if I hadn't given up on 4e after one semester I would have experimented with that and found out why.

That said, they should have figured out that diverse resource management systems are good for many-player tactical minis combat: you need some complexity that only one player is keeping track of to keep the loudest tactical player from just telling everyone else what to do.

If I was going to make a classplosion game for some reason (maybe some sort of army battles game with customization? Probably not a TTRPG unless someone else hired me to (I am accepting offers)), I think I'd be tempted to have classplosion and powersplosion happen independently. With new power lists being put out, and new classes being put out, and then letting players mix and match as much as is practical.

[souran]

terested in trying out a new character. There are ways around that.
[*] A close second with how the classplosion failed is because 4E D&D characters are BORING. The powers are small-scale '[3W] + a slide 1' shit, classes get their powers and big upgrades at the same schedule, soforth. Now, 4E D&D did experiment with different class structures near the end of the game, most notably the Essentials and Psionic classes, but it was still largely the same old shit. There were no two classes that played as differently in 4E D&D as the 3E D&D wizard played from the Artificer. A lot of 4Erries will try to nitpick you here by claiming that there's such a BIIIIIIG difference between the Ranger, Warden, and Seeker. The Warden is a defender with encounter-long control effects, derp.

Not to get in the way of your epic rant, but stuff like this makes me chuckle. I understand why a lot of people had experiences like this and I also understand why lots of people didn't find this to be the case at all and that 4E classes were really varied at the table. Those boring pushes and pulls can be awesome when everybody is using them to move people around with a purpose, like setting them up to get ganked by another player.

I have found that peoples actual enjoyment of the table top play of 4e was basically proportional to how involved they were in miniatures and hex-and-counter wargaming. If you had multiple warhammer armies, owned well worn copies of squad leader or panzer blitz, and thought that fire emblem was a better rpg series than final fantasy in 2008 then most of the crap people hate on 4e about was stuff that you either liked or didn't care about.

The real failure was always not realizing that its not 1979 or even 1989 and the ven diagram of wargamers and roleplayers is not a perfect circle anymore. My wife loves to play rpgs. When I tell her I talk with people about wargames on the internet she thinks I mean risk and battleship and she hates both of those .

I wish I could find a link to the article but I was reading somebodies takeaway from 4E and they basically said that it was like if somebody converted Rules Cyclopdiea D&D to 3rd edition. They pointed out that RC D&D had rules for levels 1-36, that fighter characters got limited time use powers associated with weapon mastery, and the game was carved up into distinct power segments. I never played BECMI D&D but I certiantly feel like 4e is a distinctly different design branch that just doesn't appeal to a particularly wide audience.

I guess what I am getting at is that I don't think that the issue is the mechanics of 4e. 90% of the game mechanics are identical to 3rd edition. The game sucked because nobody ever stopped and said
"hey, wait a minute the fucking WORST part of D&D, regardless of edition is when the DM decides that you need to spend an hour with squares and minis to fight 1 ogre and 2 orcs." Even if the math was perfect and skill challenges worked fine, and there was a classsplosion, it wouldn't have mattered because they still built to cater exclusively to the tastes of 20% of their playerbase. That was obviously stupid and I'm in the 20%.

Also, pulling an Apple and kicking all the 3rd party vendors out of your sandbox box (because you have convinced your corporate bosses that everybody making products for your game is somehow worse than everybody making competing games) and deciding to screw over the few 3rd parties that were going to try and work with your new licensing by making sure that they wouldn't receive the rules in time to b able to have new product for the biggest industry trade show of the year was just straight dickery.

[jt]

4E would've worked a lot better if they pooled the powers by power source and gave everyone different mechanics that interact with their powers. The fighter hits people with a martial power and marks them, the rogue hits people with a martial power and sneak attacks them, the warlord hits people with a martial power and then so do his friends. Why is everything made of disconnected bits of hyper-specific microcontent if you're not going to enable a combinatoric dumpster dive explosion?

But honestly, "4E would've worked a lot better if" a fucking lot of things. This isn't even in my top three problems with the game.

edit: Actually I guess the lack of classplosion is in my #3 problem with the game, behind the presentation driving away a bunch of players and the math being garbage.

[Emerald]

I have found that peoples actual enjoyment of the table top play of 4e was basically proportional to how involved they were in miniatures and hex-and-counter wargaming. If you had multiple warhammer armies, owned well worn copies of squad leader or panzer blitz, and thought that fire emblem was a better rpg series than final fantasy in 2008 then most of the crap people hate on 4e about was stuff that you either liked or didn't care about.

The real failure was always not realizing that its not 1979 or even 1989 and the ven diagram of wargamers and roleplayers is not a perfect circle anymore. My wife loves to play rpgs. When I tell her I talk with people about wargames on the internet she thinks I mean risk and battleship and she hates both of those .

I don't think being a big wargaming buff really correlates with liking 4e. I mean, sure, 4e's got the grid focus and fiddliness down pat, but even its strongest powers tend to pale in comparison (in terms of power, flavor, or both) to the flashier Warhammer magic or 40K psyker powers; its short power ranges and small battlegrids can't handle siege weapons and other long-range wargame staples; the removal of independent summons, followers, and similar means that its combats are tiny skirmishes at best; for all its emphasis of "exciting terrain" you rarely get battles with even as much terrain variety as a "defend this ruined fortress" or a "flush enemy forces out of this forest" scenario; and so on and so forth.

All the stuff that draws people to wargames (or at least not the super-historically-accurate ones, I don't know much about those) is pretty much the opposite of what 4e does, as far as I can tell. Of all the D&D players I've known who have been into wargames, none of them have been fans of 4e, partly because 4e just does all those things worse than an actual wargame and partly because if they wanted a wargame with RPG elements they'd just talk in funny voices when moving their Warhammer miniatures.

The one guy in my current group who played 4e before joining us and actually liked it was someone who'd never wargamed at all and had liked it for its board-game-y-ness more than its wargame-y-ness, but quickly realized that he preferred RPGs as RPGs and board games as board games and never the twain shall meet.

I wish I could find a link to the article but I was reading somebodies takeaway from 4E and they basically said that it was like if somebody converted Rules Cyclopdiea D&D to 3rd edition. They pointed out that RC D&D had rules for levels 1-36, that fighter characters got limited time use powers associated with weapon mastery, and the game was carved up into distinct power segments. I never played BECMI D&D but I certiantly feel like 4e is a distinctly different design branch that just doesn't appeal to a particularly wide audience.

Eh, I agree there are superficial similarities, but 4e is probably the farthest from a 3e-ified RC that you could possibly get. RC is heavily focused on the overland/exploration, follower, and domain rules that AD&D relaxed, 3e de-emphasized, and 4e entirely ditched; RC combat is less tactical and grid-based than AD&D, even with Weapon Mastery taken into account; the game actually changes as you level in RC, while 4e is mostly a numbers treadmill; and so on.

Heck, RC doesn't actually include the Immortals set so it doesn't really have an equivalent to 4e epic rules (fluff-wise, at least), but even if it did, Immortals rules expand your non-combat capabilities by a huge amount (as much as or more so than your combat capabilities) whereas the selling point of Epic Destinies was always the "Once per day, when you die..." abilities, so even superficially they have basically nothing in common.

If anything, RC D&D feels so unexpectedly similar to 3e to someone looking back at it--in terms of the generalized skill system, the standardized rules, and suchlike--that it's more believable as having been a product of a Pathfinder-style "Screw 4e, I'm making my own 3e-alike" game made by OSR fans instead of Paizo than as a game with any sort of resemblance to 4e.

4E would've worked a lot better if they pooled the powers by power source and gave everyone different mechanics that interact with their powers. The fighter hits people with a martial power and marks them, the rogue hits people with a martial power and sneak attacks them, the warlord hits people with a martial power and then so do his friends. Why is everything made of disconnected bits of hyper-specific microcontent if you're not going to enable a combinatoric dumpster dive explosion?

In my group's very brief attempt to "fix" 4e for our tastes when we gave it a try and were underwhelmed, we figured powers should be divided into power source, role, and class lists. A paladin could take Divine powers (shared with Clerics), Defender powers (shared with Fighters) [and possibly Leader powers to a limited extent, if you want to formalize secondary roles], and Paladin powers (unique to that class). Having two shared lists instead of just one reduces the "sorcerers and wizards and wu jen have basically the same spell list" problem and reduces duplication of role-centric powers, and keeping unique class lists gives you a place to put the equivalent of paladin Special Mount spells, rogue [Ambush] feats, cleric domains, etc. instead of shoving everything into the class chassis or watering them down to feats.

And of course that would have made a classplosion even easier, if you don't need to write up 30 levels of powers or even come up with a handful of class features that are awesome enough to justify a Swordmage's existence when the mere fact that it gets Defender powers where a Sorcerer gets Striker powers does most of the heavy lifting there.

[maglag]

One of the most baffling things about 4E D&D was that they constructed the game from the ground-up to be a shovelware engine for mechanical content, yet when it came time to deliver the goods they didn't produce appreciably more content than 3E D&D. This is especially conspicuous in the case of classes. If you have a locked-on-rails system as 4E D&D, a system in which your class determines most everything about how you interact with the game, and a demand for content generation you'd think there'd be a huge fucking classplosion, right? Well, they tried, but like everything about 4E D&D it failed. And why's that?

[*] The biggest reason why the classplosion failed is because a classplosion clashes with how people play D&D, especially 4E D&D with 30 levels instead of 20.

Do notice that by the time of Essentials, even wotc themselves had basically given up on the whole 30 levels paradigm since there was basically no new "paragon/epic tier" stuff. Seems like most 4rries played mostly on the first ten levels.

A close second with how the classplosion failed is because 4E D&D characters are BORING. The powers are small-scale '[3W] + a slide 1' shit, classes get their powers and big upgrades at the same schedule, soforth. Now, 4E D&D did experiment with different class structures near the end of the game, most notably the Essentials and Psionic classes, but it was still largely the same old shit. There were no two classes that played as differently in 4E D&D as the 3E D&D wizard played from the Artificer. A lot of 4Erries will try to nitpick you here by claiming that there's such a BIIIIIIG difference between the Ranger, Warden, and Seeker. The Warden is a defender with encounter-long control effects, derp.

Also do notice that there was a bizarro power creep after Essentials came out in that new classes were actively weaker besides being just if not more boring. The last stuff like binder, sentinel, and vampire (yeah there was a 4e vampire class) were actively hated even by most 4rries.

Basically Essentials was an attempt to attract those that loved 3e and hated 4e (look, magic missile auto-hits now, please buy the new edition!), but it ended up some worst scenario where it pleased neither said 3e fans neither the 4rries and everything came crashing down.

[Chamomile]

I love wargaming. I hate 4e. Sample size of one and all, but one of my biggest complaints about 4e is that it was a bad wargame, and while it would be greatly improved by having the entire party consolidated into one player's skirmish team, it would still be a monstrous slog and strictly limited to very small-scale combats.

If you wanted to sell me on an RPG where the standard battle was between large armies of 50+ troops each and was a 2-3 hour wargame, I'd be down for a Game of Thrones-style narrative where each cataclysmic confrontation changes significantly the course of the narrative. But also you'd better have usable mechanics for a red wedding, because I am perfectly capable of speaking in character while playing Risk Legacy and the only reason I'm not capable of doing that while playing Warhammer is because I can't afford Warhammer.

I'd also be down for the RPGs we have, where the standard battle is a small skirmish between raiding parties of 4-6 people on one side and 1-20 on the other, and they take 30-45 minutes. Because then we can have personal confrontations where each individual mini on the battlefield can develop a personality and take specific actions (even if goblins #2 and #3 are just occupying different places on the stock goblin personality spectrum of "bloodthirsty" to "cowardly"), and the whole thing wraps itself up quickly enough that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

I am not down for an RPG where I spend 3 hours on any given 6 vs 6 combat, even if it's just some random guards or something. Something that lenghty should either have epic scale to match or else be a climactic confrontation, and option B requires that you have smaller, faster confrontations that can build up to the endgame. I am totally down for the fate of the universe to come down to assorted Avengers personally punching Thanos in the face, but that scene also involved giant armies of mooks for a reason. Being able to run a final showdown that comes down to like three people wailing on one big purple guy is great for storytelling because it means everything comes down to a very personal confrontation, but that can't be the only fight in your four-hour story session.

[OgreBattle]

The hit point bloat did obscure a lot of differentiation between classes. Like in FFXiV I see the dps classes play quite differently but in a bloated battle it sucks that machinist's bullets and black mage's astral fire stacks are just a dance routine I repeat over and over to whittle HP's.

I have found that peoples actual enjoyment of the table top play of 4e was basically proportional to how involved they were in miniatures and hex-and-counter wargaming. If you had multiple warhammer armies, owned well worn copies of squad leader or panzer blitz, and thought that fire emblem was a better rpg series than final fantasy in 2008 then most of the crap people hate on 4e about was stuff that you either liked or didn't care about.

I liked Mordheim and Necromunda and FFT, but felt those games had more impact per action than most 4e encounter designs even though Mordheim, Necromunda, and FFT warriors don't make limited resource decisions. Tactics Ogre's PSP 2.0 added some movement powers that felt like they were from 4e and were cool though.

A paladin could take Divine powers (shared with Clerics), Defender powers (shared with Fighters) [and possibly Leader powers to a limited extent, if you want to formalize secondary roles], and Paladin powers (unique to that class)

I liked the weirdly built stuff like bladesinger 'encounter as dailies' because it re-used powers with different class features, but you had to cut enemy HP's or my unique power schedule still poofed out at the same time and we're whittling with at-wills.
Different agile assassin sword enemies using differently named and slightly different agile sword assassin powers was also uneeded.

Different powers ending at beginning or end of a turn was also annoying and discussed here often.
Forced movement not provoking OA's was not fitting, it definitely should so murder pinball is how you do Crono Trigger team tech attacks.

I think you can take that another step, the powers aren't differentiated between role but the class has abilities that interact with powers on a role basis. You also don't need every single thing your character does to be only one role.

So fireball is fireball, but then you've got metamagics, class abilities, that make fireball better suited for roles. The fireball leaves a persistant pillar of flame, leaves persistent scorched earth, is focused into an implosion on one target for big damage, wreaths an ally in a flame shield, etc.

Here's an old thread on 'things we liked in 4e': http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53 ... highlight=

[Username17]

Of my real world friends who liked 4e, pretty much all of them are avid board gamers who are bad at math and optimization. The people who really played it seemed to mostly play ridiculously fast and loose with the rules and spend most of the game being a rock band or farming chickens or something that superficially 4e had no rules to interact with at all.

Now obviously 4e's fanbase was much smaller than 3e's. But from what I saw, the people who liked 3e simply found 3e to be too "skill intensive" and just wanted to fuck around. As such, I don't think it's even reasonable to say that 3e is a better game than 4e - 4e appears to be a bad version of Munchhausen or Feng Shui.

-Username17

[souran]

I am not down for an RPG where I spend 3 hours on any given 6 vs 6 combat, even if it's just some random guards or something. Something that lenghty should either have epic scale to match or else be a climactic confrontation, and option B requires that you have smaller, faster confrontations that can build up to the endgame. I am totally down for the fate of the universe to come down to assorted Avengers personally punching Thanos in the face, but that scene also involved giant armies of mooks for a reason. Being able to run a final showdown that comes down to like three people wailing on one big purple guy is great for storytelling because it means everything comes down to a very personal confrontation, but that can't be the only fight in your four-hour story session.

This is the second biggest reason why I stopped playing 4e. After playing in all the tiers of play of the game it became very clear that due to the time it takes to run an encounter, every encounter needed to be long enough, complex enough, and have the possibility of failure or defeat to be worth the set up time.

It is unacceptable design for a game labeled D&D to require an hour and half to fight the 2 guards at the back door of the villains lair. Especially when the 2 guards alone are not a serious challenge for the PCs. In 4e this would have to be rewritten and planned out so that the combat was something like "the 2 guards at the back door, the 4 guards in the guardroom down the first hall, and the wandering dark knight patrol making rounds" and this one combat is now going to be 50-75% of a 4 hour session.

Now, that combat itself can be really fun. My 4e experience was basically as a multi-player version of x-com. That said, my wife bought me x-com for the xbox and after I got to play it twice she wanted me to return it to the store and get it on my laptop because she couldn't stand it. Playing out some of the fights from "Revenge of the Giants" as the DM with two of my friends playing 3 heroes each was a ton of fun. I also see why to a lot of people that isn't really D&D.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Not to get in the way of your epic rant, but stuff like this makes me chuckle. I understand why a lot of people had experiences like this and I also understand why lots of people didn't find this to be the case at all and that 4E classes were really varied at the table. Those boring pushes and pulls can be awesome when everybody is using them to move people around with a purpose, like setting them up to get ganked by another player.

I'm sorry for ripping into you like this, but seriously? Your anecdotal response of to my claim that 4E D&D powers are boring fills me with contempt. Y'all motherfuckers deserve 5E D&D and for Mike Mearls to shit in your mouth for the next decade.

Seriously, what am I even supposed to say to this?
Me: Every class no matter how diverse or divergent the fluff was did the same old [2W] + Slide 2 shit. And they wanted us to believe that a classplosion with these creative restrains would actually help the brand?
4Erry: But the 2W + Slide 2 shit was fun!

It's just such a proud, pig-ignorant lack of engagement with the possibilities of TTRPGs or just creative writing in general. I seriously have less contempt for the Benoist shitheads than these people. Benoist is a delusional, hypocritical crybaby but at least he's not a goddamn philistine.

[jt]

Into The Breach is super fun and largely built out of 2 damage + push 1 type abilities. You can easily build a great game on those mechanics, 4E just fails at it because it fails at most things.

And 4E doesn't even have mechanical constraints limiting you to that sort of thing. They just had a massive lack of imagination, probably fueled by needing to shit out 100 powers per class.

[Username17]

Into The Breach is super fun and largely built out of 2 damage + push 1 type abilities. You can easily build a great game on those mechanics, 4E just fails at it because it fails at most things.

And 4E doesn't even have mechanical constraints limiting you to that sort of thing. They just had a massive lack of imagination, probably fueled by needing to shit out 100 powers per class.

Having actually made a 4e class, I can say unequivocally that making 100 powers where all of them fit into a very narrow list of possibilities is much harder than writing powers that actually do things. The editorial control required to keep powers from doing anything interesting, powerful, or useful is significant and the fact that WotC maintained that for years had to have been conscious.

If you just tell writers to go "make powers" until they fill up a list, then you end up with Exalted or Mage. You get a bunch of powers that are all over the place: some are "good" and some are "bad" but also some are narrow and some are broad. I mean, mostly internet pixels will be spilled on he fact that the spell that shoots lightning out of your fingers does massively less damage than the spell that shoots lightning out of the nearby electrical socket - but really you got spells that are only ever useful in one specific part of one specific adventure and you got spells that have obvious and broad appeal. Without strong editorial control you'd get spells that do shit you don't care about like "slow minions of Jubilex" and you'd get spells you could build an empire out of like "cause elite enemies to permanently join team player."

WotC for whatever reason decided that they needed to harshly enforce a paradigm where powers all sucked. They even bragged about it - like when they said they'd successfully talked Rob Heinsoo out of "craziness" like spells that did 6d12 damage [Note: factually power damage grew so slowly in the release version that the higher levels were unplayable].

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Souran, have you played bloodbowl? It’s all about positionals with movement halting auras, blocking, dodging: http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~chz/bloodbo ... l#Sequence

I was looking at the rules and it seems like a really solid base for a grid battle rpg. A lot of ‘real’ and ‘fiction’ sword combat involves locking blades glaring at one another. Their mechanics for knockdown and then fouling downed players looks a look like a ‘break guard get in a solid weapon blow’ mechanic such as in sekiro

[souran]

Souran, have you played bloodbowl? It’s all about positionals with movement halting auras, blocking, dodging: http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~chz/bloodbo ... l#Sequence

I was looking at the rules and it seems like a really solid base for a grid battle rpg. A lot of ‘real’ and ‘fiction’ sword combat involves locking blades glaring at one another. Their mechanics for knockdown and then fouling downed players looks a look like a ‘break guard get in a solid weapon blow’ mechanic such as in sekiro

I played blood bowl back in the 90s when I was playing basically every single game that GW was producing. I have not actually played anything produced by GW in a decade even though I can't help myself from reading 40K and building lists.

However, games with ZOC, and the ability to take actions that move enemy pieces and change the terrain etc. are really interesting and nuanced even if "all the powers look the same"

[Lago PARANOIA]

Into The Breach is super fun and largely built out of 2 damage + push 1 type abilities. You can easily build a great game on those mechanics, 4E just fails at it because it fails at most things.

My emphasis. Are you shitting me up the ass? I don't disagree that you had fun, but Into the Breach is a fucking video game. It's okay for video games to have narrow and strictly defined powers, because they're fucking video games.

You know what? Why am I even engaging with this point like it represents a serious thought. I'm going to just recycle a previous post.

4Erry: But the 2W + Slide 2 shit was fun!

It's just such a proud, pig-ignorant lack of engagement with the possibilities of TTRPGs or just creative writing in general. I seriously have less contempt for the Benoist shitheads than these people. Benoist is a delusional, hypocritical crybaby but at least he's not a goddamn philistine.

[Username17]

D&D5e doesn't allow forced movement to trigger OA's... though 'voluntary movement' via illusions and fear still trigger: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions ... -of-my-rea

D&D4e had that specific rule too but... that just strikes me as bad design. You organically get "warlord team attacks" when you have forced movement trigger opportunity attacks.

I note this in my heartbreaker

Truly a surprising thing about 4e is how severely they nerfed zones of control. Like, if your intention was to make roles like the "Defender" mean something and also your idea of a core power was "basic damage plus push" shouldn't your game just inherently have pretty strong zones of control?

But not only did we get the Attacks of Opportunity for Forced Movement taken away, but reach weapons didn't generate attacks of opportunity even for enemies that went through their attack range. It was so fucking weird.

A 4e-like game where characters were just inherently pretty good at beating the shit out of people who ignored the stickiness of their zone of control would be a lot more tolerable. The utility of shoving enemies around would be obvious rather than mysterious.

-Username17

[jt]

A similar unforced error is handing out forced movement like candy at a parade, and then not having default bonus damage for smacking things into each other.

Say you have 1d6 for pushing into a wall, 1d6 to both for bonking enemies together. Now even if your level 1 Barbarian's only special feature is 1[W]+Push 3, he'll have an interesting tactical choice almost every single round. Buddy him up with a fighter who's entire shtick is "Has more Attacks of Opportunity than you," and now you're trying to set up situations where you can skim enemies through the fighter's zone of control and into a wall.

Let's assume you have actual rules for using skill checks as part of a move - how far does my move action take me if I balance across this ice, jump over this table, swing with this vine, or squeeze through this gap? Say you let people avoid the 1d6 damage from being pushed into an object if they can skill check through that object. Now you've looped in more relevance for skills and made it so people naturally need to consider their enemy's capabilities as part of pushing.

[WiserOdin032402]

That sounds inherently fun and engaging, but would require a lot of legwork on the DMs part to set up interesting rooms to brawl in.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think so - in a 'standard room' you're going to have walls. It becomes a question of the players finding ways to position themselves to take advantage of the existing terrain.