D&D 4E Am I crazy? I've just gotten a hankering to play 4e again...

[shroomofinsanity]

I most definitely incorporated SC's into my combats from the very start. I recall a fight where the PC's were fighting off low level demons, but had to also decide who was spending their turn trying to shut down a magical stone that was going to summon a balor (the party were 4th level at the time).

This kept combat fresh as they couldn't just use the most efficient actions each turn, and it was extremely dramatic as it came down to a final roll of the cleric using their heal skill to finally seal the dark energies of the stone after the wizard had used arcana to discover the magical wound in the stone, and the fighter had used athletics to move it away from the oncoming horde. It wasn't a terribly hard skill challenge but the players loved it.

On the topic of using them for infiltration, I also ran one for the rogue to get through a drow prison. The other characters had a psychic link to him and used their various knowledge skills to assist him and/or distract the guards. it let the rogue feel special, while not leaving out the other pc's at the table. I try and use them in my 5e games(not trying to further any edition war, I have been running 5e since its release), but the system doesn't feel as ready made to use them as 4e was.

I would like to hear all your thoughts on the success/failure of the various monster roles(brute,soldier,skirmisher,lurker,controller) and the special tags (elite, solo) and how well they worked for your tables? I personally found encounter creation to be the fastest and most balanced, since I rarely needed to read a whole statblock in the heat of the moment if the encounter was on the fly. I just needed to check the type of monster, and know what kind of abilities its kit contained. I really wish other editions of the game had this, just to help the DM's like myself that like to keep things more freeform and adapt to player decisions in the moment.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I most definitely incorporated SC's into my combats from the very start. I recall a fight where the PC's were fighting off low level demons, but had to also decide who was spending their turn trying to shut down a magical stone that was going to summon a balor (the party were 4th level at the time).

This kept combat fresh as they couldn't just use the most efficient actions each turn, and it was extremely dramatic as it came down to a final roll of the cleric using their heal skill to finally seal the dark energies of the stone after the wizard had used arcana to discover the magical wound in the stone, and the fighter had used athletics to move it away from the oncoming horde. It wasn't a terribly hard skill challenge but the players loved it.

On the topic of using them for infiltration, I also ran one for the rogue to get through a drow prison. The other characters had a psychic link to him and used their various knowledge skills to assist him and/or distract the guards. it let the rogue feel special, while not leaving out the other pc's at the table. I try and use them in my 5e games(not trying to further any edition war, I have been running 5e since its release), but the system doesn't feel as ready made to use them as 4e was.

I would like to hear all your thoughts on the success/failure of the various monster roles(brute,soldier,skirmisher,lurker,controller) and the special tags (elite, solo) and how well they worked for your tables? I personally found encounter creation to be the fastest and most balanced, since I rarely needed to read a whole statblock in the heat of the moment if the encounter was on the fly. I just needed to check the type of monster, and know what kind of abilities its kit contained. I really wish other editions of the game had this, just to help the DM's like myself that like to keep things more freeform and adapt to player decisions in the moment.

Love the SC during combat. I feel like I did that at least once, but it wasn't a regular thing.

Also, the monster roles was great. Really helped delineate what type of monster would work against what type of party. Did add a layer of complexity beyond just CR though.

 

[shroomofinsanity]

Well, I've never put alot of stock into CR anyway, and those roles were awesome. If I had a striker heavy party, I knew stacking a couple soldiers to hold the line and a brute to smash them would make them think on their feet. Or I could also just match them with a team of skirmishers and play a cat and mouse encounter with both sides chasing each other around the map. My only real complaint(and 5e gives me the tool to fix it) is the solo monster vs the party and the unbalanced action economy. When I run 4e again, I am wholesale stealing legendary actions and lair actions from 5e, as that is one of my favorite ideas from that system.

Using SC's during combat was amazing. I really recommend it. It can add cinematic coolness to a fight almost for free. I would use at least one in every major boss encounter. Either using it to find and exploit a weak spot, or using it to transition to a 2nd phase of a fight QTE style, it was great.

Ok, real quick aside, was I the only person to notice that the 5e warlock must have been designed by the one person left that loved 4e? It is essentially 4e as a class: focus on main at-will(EB). picking your subclass from level 1, having your spell slots recharge off a short rest(encounter powers), mystic arcanums as daily powers, and the invocations are essentially more like 4e feat progression than anything else. I love it to death, but I find it extremely interesting. I actually use it to bring people into trying 4e. They express how much they can customize a warlock and enjoying the playstyle, and I tell them that right over here is any entire edition that does exactly that...

 

[chuckdee]

4e was not as bad as people make it out to be- it was one of my most used versions in practice. Before I play 5e, I'd play another game, as it seems to emulate a lot of games I like better for that. If I want to play something more crunchy and tactical, 4e is exactly what I want to play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I most definitely incorporated SC's into my combats from the very start. I recall a fight where the PC's were fighting off low level demons, but had to also decide who was spending their turn trying to shut down a magical stone that was going to summon a balor (the party were 4th level at the time).

This kept combat fresh as they couldn't just use the most efficient actions each turn, and it was extremely dramatic as it came down to a final roll of the cleric using their heal skill to finally seal the dark energies of the stone after the wizard had used arcana to discover the magical wound in the stone, and the fighter had used athletics to move it away from the oncoming horde. It wasn't a terribly hard skill challenge but the players loved it.

On the topic of using them for infiltration, I also ran one for the rogue to get through a drow prison. The other characters had a psychic link to him and used their various knowledge skills to assist him and/or distract the guards. it let the rogue feel special, while not leaving out the other pc's at the table. I try and use them in my 5e games(not trying to further any edition war, I have been running 5e since its release), but the system doesn't feel as ready made to use them as 4e was.

I would like to hear all your thoughts on the success/failure of the various monster roles(brute,soldier,skirmisher,lurker,controller) and the special tags (elite, solo) and how well they worked for your tables? I personally found encounter creation to be the fastest and most balanced, since I rarely needed to read a whole statblock in the heat of the moment if the encounter was on the fly. I just needed to check the type of monster, and know what kind of abilities its kit contained. I really wish other editions of the game had this, just to help the DM's like myself that like to keep things more freeform and adapt to player decisions in the moment.

I thought the various monster roles were OK. Some tend to work better than others. brutes are usually OK, soldiers tend to be grindy, skirmishers are OK, just kind of generic. Lurkers are problematic because the strict action economy and the way it balances encounters don't make 'jump out and say boo! and then run hide again' a very effective strategy. Later lurkers tended to be better, some of the early ones are just big fail. Controllers are OK, but some of them are a bit extreme (I recall a lizard man shaman that basically immobilized the whole party for the entire encounter, kind of a bummer). You missed Artillery, which I thought was a pretty strong role.

The monster types (minion, standard, elite, and solo) are a cool concept. elite and solo certainly suggest 'mini-boss' and 'big boss'. Solos definitely had problems in terms of action denial and often could get tactically a bit boring, but they got a lot better over time, and even most of the early ones can be used effectively if you don't take 'solo' too literally. Elites can have the same sorts of issues sometimes, and some types of builds like an elite soldier are inherently rather problematic. Minions are another cool concept, but you do have to wrap your head around the whole 'story centered' idea of monsters in 4e. Personally I relied on them heavily, and made them a lot of fun.

You can create some with a death threshold above 1 point if you want, which can be a good idea for high level play (IE it takes 10 damage to auto-toast an epic minion or something like that). It just lets them stick around and not just get dusted instantly in high level play.

 

[shroomofinsanity]

I can't believe that I forgot Artillery, my brain just lumped them in with skirmisher for some reason. But they were fairly integral to most balanced encounters.

I did want to touch on minions a bit more. They I feel serve such an important niche in the combat, and should have been brought directly into 5e also. They let all those burning hands and other AOE characters that chance to feel really cool, without having to downplay the other characters or make the AoE character feel too strong. They also opened up an entire avenue to explore mid fight reinforcements to the villain side without dropping potentially full hp monsters on a hurt or strung out party. I do like your idea of playing with the "1 hit" rule for higher level play, but what I did came from wargame influence I think. Higher level minions essentially had 2 or 3 "wounds" that needed to be depleted to kill them. critical hits would automatically count as double still giving them effectiveness, and not feeling "wasted" on a 1 hp nobody. This also let minions i used later on to have bloodied mechanics if they survived a hit, since the system played so very heavily with that honestly, very cool and instantly understandable mechanic. I also tended to modify the ooze monsters that split, to make them less annoying, by having them break into some number of minions depending on character level, party composition, etc....

Ok, so I did not expect to write all that on minions, moving on to an associated topic, I adored the default monsters groups presented in the MM's which can set up an entire story for a type of monster and who/what they hung out with. They also tended to have a tactics session for each and every monster type. I think it is was more effective than the 2 or 3 paragraphs modern monsters tend to get, since it gets right to the bones of how these things lived, fought, and got you into the designer's head, especially for some of the more complex stat blocks on display, knowing when and how they used their various tools.

Oh, and I have made so much use in other games of the bloodied, or more precisely, the "bloodied breath" sub mechanic you see on most dragons, where their recharge power immediately recharges and the monster uses it. I like it as a way to keep monsters wily and threatening even when the players have figured out the monster's behaviors.

All this talk, I really need to pull out the old books, track down the ones that have been lost over time, and really start running it again.

 

[Garthanos]

I can't believe that I forgot Artillery, my brain just lumped them in with skirmisher for some reason. But they were fairly integral to most balanced encounters.

I did want to touch on minions a bit more. They I feel serve such an important niche in the combat, and should have been brought directly into 5e also. They let all those burning hands and other AOE characters that chance to feel really cool, without having to downplay the other characters or make the AoE character feel too strong. T

5e undermined the ability of heroes to take down the hoards massively especially for martial types... My 4e fighter can cut solidly into minions and swarms (swarms of Orcs and Demonlings and others). My 4e monk can rush into a crowd of minions and theoretically take out 14 minions at level one in one round. Your 4e Dragonborn can mow 9 down with a breath weapon attack.
My level 5 fighter can kill any and all minions that land next to him for the entire battle with a reflexive strike as part of rain of steel


In comparison 5e heroes feel kind of small.

 

[shroomofinsanity]

4e characters can do some of the most cinematic and cool things just built into their kit. Let's not forget when a ranger first reaches level 15 and unlocks one of the most eye opening abilities in gaming... In fact when a ranger in my party that was just picking powers as he went along reached level 15 was looking through the power options, and stopped, looked at me and asked if it was written correctly? I nodded, and he freaked out, seeing that he got to attack until he misses once a day. I made sure to give him a big monster right after that he just got to shred. The whole table flipped out.

Or let's talk about how at level 1, a sorcerer can just throw 6d6 at something if they want to. or how druids can just live in their animal form essentially, with all kinds of cool powers and abilities that no normal animal can do. Yes if you want to, you can find every way to stack modifiers, and squeeze out every point of damage possible, and I had a player or two that loved that. But as long as have the buy in that every character can do cool stuff and are ok with moving people all over the map, then its just so cool.

5e heroes are a step back towards less dramatic play and more starting off barely above average and ending up very competent/universe breaking(if you're the right kind of caster). It is a system that can be adapted to several types of play, where I would say that 4e has a very pointed style it is trying to evoke, and plays much worse if you try and drag it too far away from that.

Also they took some real cool leaps in the fluff, like finally making the metallic dragons elemental instead of all alloys of the same metals. It's a little thing, but making the core 5 all periodic elements just seemed so clean to me. ( I am aware that adamantine is not an actual metal, but it essentially a periodic metal in the dnd universe.) Oh, and having disenchanting magic items turn into a way to help make other magic items or be able to fuel other magic things.

 

[Garthanos]

5e heroes are a step back towards less dramatic play and more starting off barely above average and ending up very competent/universe breaking(if you're the right kind of caster). It is a system that can be adapted to several types of play, where I would say that 4e has a very pointed style it is trying to evoke, and plays much worse if you try and drag it too far away from that.

Thing is try and give 5e that 4e drama it isn't happening... and no starting everyone level 5 does not bring it home the awesome does not kick in (maybe for casters it might I think I will just doubt it there too). Further the poetry of 4e powers is another example of something missing in 5e too. 5e is dry and utilitarian. Even their spells have less zing.

My sword mage for instance

I can have one battle a day or 10 and not worry about a given class outshining any other.

 

[NotAYakk]

"Slay army".