Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
yup its a long time DM thing perhaps...
D&D 4E What was the big difference between 4e and "essentials"?
yup its a long time DM thing perhaps...
Tony Vargas
Legend
So an adventure with a long 'hunt' - litteral to corner a monster, or figurative to uncover the perpetrator in some mystery scenario - culminating in a climactic battle with the quary? Sounds like it'd be really problematic in most editions of D&D. Mysteries get trivialized by a little divination, litteral 'hunts' with the addition of some travel/stealth magic on top of that - if the party is too low level for those resources, then the investgation or hunt is most likely conducted by one or a few of the players with the PCs that have the right skills engaging with the DM for a long while - and then the sole encounter of the day, with a single enemy, gets 'Nova'd for a lovely one-round anti-climax. You could easily have half your players all but sit out such a scenario.
4e makes that kind of scenario easy. The skill challenge structure gives you a framework to gauge the difficulty of the 'hunt' and step through it while keeping everyone involved, Solos make a meaningful combat challenge for a whole party at the final confrontation, and single-encounter-days only modestly decreases the difficulty of the encounter without exacerbating any class-balance issues.
But, substitute in a Standard and it'll be nothing, make the KotSf mistake and sub an overleveled elite and it'll be a PitA for all involved. But follow the encounter guidelines for a really tough Solo fight (single-encounter day) and it should be awesome.
Last edited:
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
So... I saw earlier today someone say in this thread - or maybe it was the other "essence of 4e thread", I'm not sure - something along the line of "creating a good combat was super easy in 4e"
Alas, I can't find this statement anymore, so I can't quote it, or even re-read it to be sure I got it right... so I'll just have to stick with that paraphrase.
This really doesn't match my impression of 4e. It's a very tactical game, and with some thought and effort I'm sure a GM could have a fantastic battle. But given it's many moving parts and highly tactical nature, it seems to be that a fair amount of work would be necessary to get a good result, unless the GM has a very high level os system mastery.
... but maybe I'm wrong?
Alas, I can't find this statement anymore, so I can't quote it, or even re-read it to be sure I got it right... so I'll just have to stick with that paraphrase.
This really doesn't match my impression of 4e. It's a very tactical game, and with some thought and effort I'm sure a GM could have a fantastic battle. But given it's many moving parts and highly tactical nature, it seems to be that a fair amount of work would be necessary to get a good result, unless the GM has a very high level os system mastery.
... but maybe I'm wrong?
Jester David
Hero
Encounter building was easy. The system worked much like the 5e system where each monster was worth a certain amount of xp and you added together the numbers to make a total. The difference is that groups larger than the baseline didn't increase the budget
Each monster statblock was given a role in combat, so you could easy slot those into templates given in the DMG to build certain encounter groups. The rules told you to use a mix of monsters, with one monster needed per PC of the same level. So for a 5-person party you could throw in a soldier, couple strikers, a brute, and an artillery. (Using off-level monsters was trickier and required math, as the numbers didn't match.
The tricky bit was having three to five different monsters on the board, that all had different powers, which you had to read and know how to use before the battle.
As mentioned, very quickly on, WotC realised that having the various types of a monster synergize well together made this easy. And effectively designed the monster entries as encounter groups. Prior to this, they tended to have the monsters at a few different level bands, which made designing, say, an orc encounter harder. So just using a group of monsters at the same level tended to synergize.
DMs looking to go that extra mile could compare the abilities of different monsters, doing things like pairing a monster with a push ability with one that dealt damage in an area.
Now, this is all just the baseline. You were encouraged to think of terrain and the encounter area as well. That was harder, but no harder than 3e or 5e.
Ted Serious
First Post
4e was simplified easy mode D&D for players and DM. Compared to 3e or Pathfinder.
As opposed to 5e which is simplified easy mode for players and God Mode for the DM.
Tony Vargas
Legend
4e was very easy to run, in general, not just in the sense of creating combats, which was quite simple.
I was struck both by the ease of creating a combat (4 combat, in fact, in a matter of minutes), and the ease of 're-skinning' monsters the first time I had occassion to run an impromptu pickup game at a convention. I didn't have a DMG on me, but I did happen to have a MM, I vaguely remembered the gist of the encounter building guidelines - an equal number of standard monsters of the same level is a basic combat. Solos are equivalent to 5 monsters, Elites to 2, minions 1/4. I flipped through the MM for elementals (that was the theme of the mini-adventure I had in mind, a 2-bit ToEE), didn't find anything around the level I needed (4th - the level of a few characters one of the players had on hand). I did quickly find firebats, a young black dragon, and spectres. I re-skinned the spectres as air elementals, simply dropping the necrotic keyword from their attacks, and the black dragon as a water elemental (can't, almost 10 years later remember what I used for the earth elemental, pretty sure it was Elite + minions).
Monsters were easy to run, too, they had everything they could do spelled out in a stat-block, typically a quarter-page, so there was rarely any need to look anything up - they got easier when the stat block format changed, grouping like actions under headings. And, PCs were easier to deal with, too, because you could just look at the power they were using and fairly easily tell what it did, relatively little interpretation needed, and what they did was rarely out of line (and, until Essentials, swiftly errata'd when it was), so there wasn't this need to completely understand everything every PC might be able to do when throwing together an encounter.
The pitfall was that it was also easy to just fall into a rut.
Last edited:
It was probably me over the in "essence of 4e" thread.
And I stand by it. Compared to previous editions of D&D it was very easy to throw together an encounter using the monster books and/or even to create a monster on the fly using the tables in the books (which I would have copies of at the table for the relevant levels of my table's PCs so I didn't have to fumble with the actual books). The encounter building math worked better than 3e (and I would argue than 5e) mostly by virtue of the fact that player resources were mostly per encounter instead of per day - modulo a daily power they would likely be hitting every encounter at basically full strength, so it was pretty easy to judge what the stats needed to be. You probably did need a bit of system mastery to make it work (or a head for algebra, I suppose) but all of the pieces were laid out on the table with nothing obscured and that made it easy to work with. (Also all of the creature's spell-like attacks were laid out in a nice format that didn't require me to find the appropriate spell in the PHB when I needed to figure out damage or whatnot, which is a giant step backward in 5e IMO).
Of course 13th age took all of these pieces parts of encounter building and simplified them ever further, so 4e doesn't look quite as elegant to me as it did when we were playing it. Still, it was easier to run an improvised battle in 4e than it ever was in 3e.
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
Thank you for the reply!
Huh. That is a very interesting point. And really important I think. Of course this design would make encounter building easier (and also would require a rethink of the "short rest vs long rest classes" balance of 5e (which is a pet peeve of mine). So it looks like a huge plus. On the other hand, it makes smaller fights, random encounters etc less meaningful because if you easily defeat the 7 goblins but had to use 3 spells and lost 20 hp... well there was a cost to that little fight, it had meaning, it impact the rest of your day.
Do these little fights have value? Maybe?
That would be nice indeed!
I've been trying to be upfront about my lack of experience and non hostile. I ask because I want to know. Of course, when someone starts saying things that are nonsense, then being perfectly civil is more challenging - I'm only human :/
