D&D 4E What was the big difference between 4e and "essentials"?

[MwaO]

4e was not a game that easily supported the stories I liked to tell, and I had to change my GMing style to match the system. And with that added learning curve, I never got to a point of comfort where I could work around the system's assumptions. I was never in my comfort zone.

The system doesn't really have a lot of assumptions. I wrote into a 4e Organized Play, a pure roleplaying encounter. Not a skill challenge. Just letting the PCs interact with NPCs and letting them mull what was going on. Each time I ran it, I was asked if the PCs were in a skill challenge and I responded, "If you're in a skill challenge, I'll let you know."

I think a lot of early 4e adventures really encouraged the idea that every routine set of checks should just be replaced by a single skill challenge, and then no more skill checks for the rest of the adventure. But that's not actually inherent to the system. Skill challenges are just there for the DM to say, "Hey, I want a meaningful, important set of roleplaying that involves the whole party and has a lot of skill checks. How do I get everyone involved rather than just one particular PC dominating all the action? What's the benefit of success? If they fail, what's the cool outcome that happens? And let me decide this in advance rather than on the fly."

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The cost of rituals over time went exponentially towards zero as you gained levels above the cost of the ritual. If you're finding 10000 gold per adventure and a ritual costs 100 gold, it isn't a big deal to cast it a few times.

That really depends on the character, the player, and how the DM handles the global (and local) economy. Two literal pounds of gold is still a lot of money, even if you have a whole bin full of coins back in Duckburg.

It's trivial to pick-up a feat, but that's trading a combat feat for a non-combat feat. That was generally too high of a price for most players.
(Which is another difference between Essentials and vanilla 4e... I don't think Rituals were in Essentials.)

Another difference was that Essentials came out near the end of the product cycle, which meant there were a ton of feats from other sources already available. I remember taking Ritual Caster on my Paladin, back in the day, because I'd already chosen the one or two feats that were useful and I didn't feel like multiclassing. Had that campaign taken place three years later, I probably would have gone with something else.

 

[MwaO]

That really depends on the character, the player, and how the DM handles the global (and local) economy. Two literal pounds of gold is still a lot of money, even if you have a whole bin full of coins back in Duckburg.

In 3e or 5e, maybe. In 4e, if you're in a game where magic item stores are infrequent or unavailable, rituals tend to be one of the more useful ways to get rid of excess gold. Simply because you'll have that +1 sword you no longer use and you'll turn it into residuum and there's nowhere to spend it other than powering rituals...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Others have sort of said this, but just to be clear- 4e is really designed for a group of heroic (the regular meaning, not the 4e levels 1-10) adventurers. That means that they are all minimally competent at basic adventuring tasks- you never need to roll for whether or not you can ride a horse, for example, though taming an animal would be more involved.

I know that was their intent, but the execution was incredibly uneven. It's hard to feel like a minimally competent adventurer when you can't even beat a level 1 goblin, unless that goblin has been explicitly tagged as being trivial to kill; or when you spend a feat, 35gp, and a healing surge to fail to open a locked door.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The system doesn't really have a lot of assumptions.

Sure it does. It assumes some fidelity to the heroic fantasy genre, it assumes a party of relative equals...
...already we're into uncharted territory...

I wrote into a 4e Organized Play, a pure roleplaying encounter. Not a skill challenge. Just letting the PCs interact with NPCs and letting them mull what was going on. Each time I ran it, I was asked if the PCs were in a skill challenge and I responded, "If you're in a skill challenge, I'll let you know."

While that works well, I've also had occassion to keep a Skill Challenge 'behind the screen,' and let players feel their way through it - gives that 'exploration' vibe that more traditional styles go for.

 

[Jester David]

The system doesn't really have a lot of assumptions. I wrote into a 4e Organized Play, a pure roleplaying encounter. Not a skill challenge. Just letting the PCs interact with NPCs and letting them mull what was going on. Each time I ran it, I was asked if the PCs were in a skill challenge and I responded, "If you're in a skill challenge, I'll let you know."

I think a lot of early 4e adventures really encouraged the idea that every routine set of checks should just be replaced by a single skill challenge, and then no more skill checks for the rest of the adventure. But that's not actually inherent to the system. Skill challenges are just there for the DM to say, "Hey, I want a meaningful, important set of roleplaying that involves the whole party and has a lot of skill checks. How do I get everyone involved rather than just one particular PC dominating all the action? What's the benefit of success? If they fail, what's the cool outcome that happens? And let me decide this in advance rather than on the fly."

I always liked investigation-type modules. That was my jam. The monster hunts or finding the killer.

Skill Challenges worked okay for those, but they were new and I used them poorly at the time, having them all in a single scene rather than spacing them out as two or three challenges over the course of the entire adventure. There was a steep Skill Challenge learning curve.
(But, really, it's a rookie DM mistake to gate clues to a mystery behind skill checks in the first place. A better way is checks revealing more inflammation. But that runs the risk of a natural 20 revealing too much.)

The catch with my preferred adventure style is that monster hunts tend to lead to a single battle with the monster. And single battles with a non-boss didn't work well in 4e, where there was no attrition sapping Daily powers and not enough attacks going out to remotely challenge the players. And even an elite a couple levels higher than the PCs was obliterated before a full round passed.
I had some pretty disappointing climaxes until I learned to dump my style and instead include a couple set-piece fights with mooks, terrain, and funky effects.

 

[MoutonRustique]

I always liked investigation-type modules. That was my jam. The monster hunts or finding the killer. [...]

The catch with my preferred adventure style is that monster hunts tend to lead to a single battle with the monster. And single battles with a non-boss didn't work well in 4e, where there was no attrition sapping Daily powers and not enough attacks going out to remotely challenge the players. And even an elite a couple levels higher than the PCs was obliterated before a full round passed.
I had some pretty disappointing climaxes until I learned to dump my style and instead include a couple set-piece fights with mooks, terrain, and funky effects.

Why not change the monster into a encounter-worthy solo : such as a the "monster by pieces" approach, or the "worldbreaker" approach ?

Something "Monster Hunter"(tm) could work beautifully!

If you feel a real need for attrition, the hunt itself can be made arduous - rigors of the road, difficult trails, poisonous spiders in your boots in the morning, a snapping turtle takes a chunk from your calf, a moose bull charges a character around the bend, loose rocks fall from thunder, a sudden downpour followed by cold winds, etc, etc.

Have a look at THIS sublime gem of an idea - or THIS one (that is just one of all those beautiful things that did not get a full exploration from the early abandonment of the edition)

 

[Jester David]

Why not change the monster into a encounter-worthy solo : such as a the "monster by pieces" approach, or the "worldbreaker" approach ?

Something "Monster Hunter"(tm) could work beautifully!

If you feel a real need for attrition, the hunt itself can be made arduous - rigors of the road, difficult trails, poisonous spiders in your boots in the morning, a snapping turtle takes a chunk from your calf, a moose bull charges a character around the bend, loose rocks fall from thunder, a sudden downpour followed by cold winds, etc, etc.

Have a look at THIS sublime gem of an idea - or THIS one (that is just one of all those beautiful things that did not get a full exploration from the early abandonment of the edition)

These were problems I was having back in spring/summer 2009. And the campaign itself fell apart in November 2010 for unrelated reasons.

 

[MwaO]

I always liked investigation-type modules. That was my jam. The monster hunts or finding the killer.

Mine was setting up a moral challenge. PCs would get to decide the fate of the world going forward and I wanted to make the players really feel all the ethical dilemmas of the choice. Had them interact with various recently dead NPCs who had small requests to make of them. Seeing if they'd ignore, listen or blindly act on the requests. Or maybe even try to steal from them. There wasn't a right answer — it was just to get them to think about the next choice in the adventure.

Literally had one table tell me X was the emotional choice and Y the intellectual choice and another table tell me Y was the emotional choice and X the intellectual one. Worked really well.

The catch with my preferred adventure style is that monster hunts tend to lead to a single battle with the monster. And single battles with a non-boss didn't work well in 4e, where there was no attrition sapping Daily powers and not enough attacks going out to remotely challenge the players. And even an elite a couple levels higher than the PCs was obliterated before a full round passed.
I had some pretty disappointing climaxes until I learned to dump my style and instead include a couple set-piece fights with mooks, terrain, and funky effects.

Single bosses in 4e need to be Solos and they work better with more modern math. Give them a 2-3 turns per round, let them slowly slough off conditions, and give them things to do if they can't attack.

 

[Jester David]

Single bosses in 4e need to be Solos and they work better with more modern math. Give them a 2-3 turns per round, let them slowly slough off conditions, and give them things to do if they can't attack.

That makes sense now, but the condition shaking off wasn’t added to 4e until the summer of 2010, with the MM3.
Solo design came a long way over that edition...