What is the essence of 4E?

[Sadras]

It does put those problems in perspective.

Another perspective, you are harping on problems 4e had in its first year and had fixed before its second ended. Depending on the fix for proof of a problem.

4e is a dead system, no amount of criticism, even if it were valid will help it improve.

5e encounter guidelines are more complicated to use than 3e or 4e and produce less dependable results. It has had twice as long to fix them but no effort has been made.

Perhaps you should get your own house in order before criticising the past state of another.

It seems clear you are a very determined 5e booster and are trying to tar Pathfinder 2e with the same brush as 4e. That also looks like the objective of the thread starter.

It's pointless 5e has clinched it's success, it has the D&D name and has returned to the D&D traditions, it didn't need to be as good as Pathfinder to beat Pathfinder in the market. It just needed to be half as bad as AD&D.
Pathfinder 2e does need to be better than Pathfinder and it already looks to be on track.

It will also be much better than 5e.
Not by design or necessity just by default.

I wonder who this sock puppet is.

 

[Manbearcat]

It’s not enough “vomit a pile of words all over the screen while wandering aimlessly for a thought” to be me!

 

[Sadras]

It’s not enough “vomit a pile of words all over the screen while wandering aimlessly for a thought” to be me!

I remember when someone's pile of words included half a dictionary....amazing how some person's vocabulary has evolved.

 

[Manbearcat]

Do you mean my words per post have decreased or my posts include less arcane language? There are a reason for both of those things. My vocabulary hasn’t evolved (organically) so much as I’ve worked very diligently to talk and write differently. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes I revert (but usually in person where I don’t have time to agonize over communicating more “accessibly and pithy”).

Anyway, away from the essence of my posting and back to the essence of 4e...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Another perspective, you are harping on problems 4e had in its first year and had fixed before its second ended. Depending on the fix for proof of a problem.

A problem that 4E had in its first year, even if it was fixed by the end of the second, can still be an essential aspect of the game to someone who stopped playing it in the intervening period. This whole thread is a matter of perspectives and opinions.

 

[Garthanos]

Fun ewar thread this is... Thought that was against rules

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's what I was getting at, though. Because numbers scaled so quickly with level, a high-Paragon party against a low-Paragon encounter could very possibly get through it without spending any healing surges at all. Instead of spending 3-4 rounds, where you make attacks with 50% accuracy, against enemies who hit back with 50% accuracy; you spend 2-3 rounds, where you make attacks with 80% accuracy, against enemies who hit back with 20% accuracy. And it will still take at least half an hour to run through the combat, because you still have to make decisions that are tactically sound, because a hit against you could cost you a healing surge.

I would say there's just no question that GM who is insisting on this sort of encounter is playing 4e sub-optimally. Why not have an encounter with slightly higher level enemies? Or create some minions of the correct level (a minion of level+8 is IIRC the same XP as its standard equivalent). So if you have a level 12 encounter and a bunch of level 20 PCs, minionize the standards, and bulk it up with some level 20 standards, or a level 20 elite, or something. Now you have a more fun encounter.

Alternatively simply brush it off. Throw a low complexity SC to see if the PCs suffer any damage at all, which should run in 5 minutes (it is going to play a lot like a trivial 1e encounter, toss a couple dice, eyeball it, call it good).

It just doesn't seem like a reasonable use of time at the table, given how long it would take, and how little attrition it would cause. You could cause more attrition in less time by using at-level encounters, which would also probably be more dramatically satisfying.

Exactly. Seeing how easy it is to relevel things there's little reason not to just increase the level of monsters in this situation if you need to run it with 'the same monsters', and you don't think that dramatically it makes more sense for them to just be trivial and basically run away after a couple hits (the SC above basically).

To contrast, I will say that just about every single rule in third edition makes sense to me. For every design decision that they made, I can understand why they did it. Most of it's just because they were trying to bring order to the patchwork kludge which was AD&D, and they didn't have enough design experience to see where it might break down. (To be fair, at the time, nobody had that experience. Third edition was revolutionary in many ways.)

3e was a pretty significant redesign of D&D, yes. I think it was idiosyncratic for early 2000's RPG design, but it wasn't in any sense ground breaking. MUCH of 3e draws on Rolemaster actually, though it hews closer to AD&D in terms of some specifics like spells. RM is a late 70's design itself. Games like GURPS and various others did all the things 3e did at least a decade earlier. Revolutionary games at that time were things like Sorcerer (which was a late 90's game).

I don't disagree though, 3e is basically a way to take late 2e's unstable and unworkable mass of kits and special rules subsystems, MCing, dual classing, and various other bits and parts, and weld it together into a fairly consistent whole. 3e IS consistent, it pares the mechanics down to largely d20s and roll high with a standard ability bonus, etc. Feats rationalize various sorts of class features and kit-based 'stuff'. The problem is it is heedless of the actual overall effects of its own rules. It has no concept of what sort of game it is, and its parts don't come together cohesively. Full casters are massively stronger than in AD&D, non-casters get utterly boned, the class system effectively ceases to exist, but no alternative mechanism of making things work together replaces it. Its a hot mess really.

Of course, just because certain pitfalls were real in any given edition, that doesn't mean everyone encountered them (or found them problematic, if they did). To me, healing surges were a solution to a problem that I never experienced in the first place; which also means that, to me, the solution was worse than the problem it was trying to fix. Likewise, with the segregated rules for monster creation, it was a solution to a problem that I never experienced.

HS were just genius though as a pacing mechanism. Let the PCs go into each fight at 'full power', but ALSO be weakened. At the same time divorce healing from being a burden on one type of character, and yet don't just give it away to everyone in a way that negates resource management. Its actually HARDER to manage your HS and hit points in 4e in a tough tactical game than it is to manage the stock of CLWs, potions, and (assuming your players decide to be strategic) wands that make up 3e's single large pool of 'extra hit points'.

Nothing in 3e is possible in terms of encounter pacing that works at all like the 4e version. The monsters come in hard on round 1, the PCs are knocked back! On round 2 they regroup, heals are dispensed, the monsters try to keep the party off its game, but on round 3 its the PCs turn, the weaker bad guys are down now, its the turning point, and round 4 is over the hump, pump out a daily if you're still not sure of victory, and then clean it up on round 5. It works like clockwork too!

I guess that's just one of the inherent difficulties in creating a new edition, is that everyone had a different experience with the previous edition. They kind of just had to play the numbers, and try to fix the biggest problems that affected the most people.

Yeah, that's very true, which is why I roll my eyes at the people who can't say a good thing about 4e, its silly. I don't see the point. I'm not a 5e fan. I don't see it as some big departure, but as more of a throwback to some mix of 3e and 2e basically. I didn't see the slightest point in diverging from the direction that 4e was going in. I want to see MORE of it! As cool as 4e is, its only 50% of the way to the game I wanted to see.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Just a question because it has been a while for me - did terrain powers and the like not feature into the encounter design for difficulty? From your example the XP budget is completely filled up by monsters.

Nope! Traps have an XP value, they're really just a variant on a monster in effect, so those would count. However, you can make the terrain as gnarly as you want, it has no XP 'budget' (how would you calculate such a thing, its just not really possible). Likewise terrain powers don't technically belong to a 'side', so they lack any XP cost. Obviously a GM can place them in such a way, and put conditions on their use, which virtually make them gifts to one side or the other, but such is life! I'd also note that DMG2 provides for Monster Themes, which also have no XP cost, yet they definitely tend to increase the potency of monsters, at least slightly.

You can do even more radical stuff, like have skill challenges, or checks of whatever sort (hazardous terrain is a basic one) that suck up actions and force the players to make choices about what to prioritize. Again, there's nothing really in the XP budget here, though I guess you COULD in theory give an SC a sort of budget (one at-level standard monster worth of XP per complexity level).

The XP budget in 4e is a solid concept, but it isn't the last word on how tough an encounter is. I would say that if you are a GM who wants to just make stupid hard, but technically 'fair' encounters this way, you can. OTOH I think its more useful as a technique to make things really interesting when you get to the sort of thing I'm discussing here, a capstone encounter.

This I very much don't agree with. There were quite a few 4e threads/posts here on Enworld stating that whatever you think your party can do, double it and then some. I'm specifically speaking from paragon upwards. The monsters were generally weaker in MM1 and MM2. I remember using SlyFlourish's table to increase monster baseline stats because our table found them too easy and presumably others - considering the comments on Enworld.

I think a lot of people did, but did they really give these really evocative and narratively important monsters all the sorts of tools they should have to succeed with? Mostly the complaints I saw were when people stuck a level 25 solo dragon into its 'lair' which was just basically a slightly fancy standard encounter space, and then it didn't pop.

And I agree that high level PCs are very resourceful and tough, but as a guy who DMed high level AD&D for 20 years, that's nuthin'! If you think running 4e Orcus as a capstone is a tough chore to get right, try 2e Orcus vs a 20th level party! That stuff will be ALL over the map, and probably end badly one way or the other on round 2 (and still take 3 hours to play out).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"Don't reply. Replying to threads about 4e never ends well, as they always descend into an edition war."

"Quiet brain. I know what I'm doing. This is a thread about the essence of 4e. I played two campaigns and ran it for pretty much two years. I have a good idea what it's essence is."

"Don't do it! Any comment on 4e that isn't unequivocally positive causers am immediate fanboy response. And you can't help but respond back."

"I can handle it. I'm not going to get baited this time...."


Stupid brain... always has to be right.
I'm out. Enjoy your recreation of the e-battle of 2010.

Now we're on the same page!

 

[Sadras]

The XP budget in 4e is a solid concept ... (snip)...

And I agree that high level PCs are very resourceful and tough, but as a guy who DMed high level AD&D for 20 years, that's nuthin'! If you think running 4e Orcus as a capstone is a tough chore to get right, try 2e Orcus vs a 20th level party! That stuff will be ALL over the map, and probably end badly one way or the other on round 2 (and still take 3 hours to play out).

20 years of high level play is impressive.

I remember the one and only time I DMed high level 2e, I experienced your ALL over the map comment.
As a burnt out DM coming out of 3.5e I absolutely loved the simplicity of the encounter design in 4e and the minion opponent was a great concept.