Search results

Yep. If someone's typical D&D experience involves games that are a ton of exploration, puzzle solving, and negotiation with NPCs, with occasional long, cinematic, tactical combats than 4e is for them! As many have pointed out, there was a lot of bad 4e adventure design that was little more...

Fair enough on good faith from a historical standpoint. I agree with you that the umbrella moved and WotC wasn't great about explicitly laying this out. That said, internet forums were talking about this shift and pretty much did lay it out explicitly within the first year (or less?). The...

I don't think you are playing 4e in good faith here. I think your original point was that you prefer simulationist rules because it 's easier for you to understand what's possible and not possible from the ruleset. Fair enough. However, 4e rules help create play that emulates genre...

What were some of the 4e adventures that really got what 4e was good at? Many of the early adventures seemed to ignore every piece of advice in the DMG and DMG2 for some reason... EN World's Zeitgeist is an awesome example of playing to 4e's strengths. Adventure #2 is 100 pages and only...

I was cleaning out my rpg books in storage to sell a bunch of 3e, and ended up reading 4e material. I forgot how many outstanding products came out in the last 1/3 of the run! I consider 4e pretty well done overall, but * monster vault, monster vault nentir, and dark sun creature catalog --...

My 2cents. As someone who liked the 4e Warlord, I am on board with a 5e version and would love to see fan-made versions. As far as healing is concerned, I have no problem with having Warlord healing work mechanically the same as magical healing and just fluffing it differently. That...

This is my biggest problem with the 5e Fighter. If we had gated higher level maneuvers, I think we could have had a fighter that 'complex' types liked well enough. I find the 5e Fighter really interesting because it seems to have adopted all the big design characteristics that people who...

I'm genuinely interested in this topic. If this thread produced some ideas of what these could be, the thread would be 1000 times more interesting and useful. Most of the distinct non-combat martial abilities I've seen are very low level and not that interesting. Like - "You can request...

So there is no longer really any debate, right? BryonD and a group of others prefers setting DCs independent of PCs (presumably ahead of time)based on world building principles and playing a ‘the world is what the world is’ type of exploration-led game. The ideal in this style would be having...

Thanks for these. It’s always nice to talk concrete examples vs. generalities. I do see some difference in what you are describing in some of the examples. Maybe I just object to the terminology. “Objective DC” and “Subjective DC” don’t get to the heart of the matter for me and also seem...

Oh boy. This is not really what the conversation was about. I hope we're not going to have 20 pages of debate on whether sandbox/exploration style play has ever existed. I don't even like sandbox/exploration style play anymore but I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist. Like someone up...

This is where I'm at as well. Most of this DC discussion has been about playstyle. I think arguing over 'subjective' and 'objective' is just clouding the real discussion point. (Again, taking away the notion that you assign level DCs to fiction regardless of fiction which is both...

I can see the more robustness aspect, definitely. The 'calibrating threats' is an issue of playstyle. If you are 'scene framing' in 3e or 2e (or playing many types of published modules) you are also calibrating threats. This does make some sense to me. The character examples somehow...

Isn't the Hard DC based on the fiction though, not on when the DM things is dramatic? I haven't looked at my 4e books in a while so maybe what you say is true. I also don't recall being able to spend HS proactively as a resource (only as a penalty after the fact) but again I haven't looked...

Thanks for the well thought out response. I get the distinction a bit better now, but not sure I get how it applies to 4e. The Doom Pool is MHRP seems like a good case of DCs changing on the fly in the service of narrative/pacing. I imagine when to use Fate points in Fate would also be...

This is a really great point. It is lazy and not interesting. But it doesn't change the premise that these slimes are DIFFERENT slimes, right? The higher level slimes are tougher slimes. This DC conversation has been interesting for me, because I came into it thinking there actually...

Agreed but I see both sides putting up these horrible extreme strawmen. In the social skills vs. free form you often get: Pro social skills emphasis: It's all 'mother may I' and only how well you can persuade the DM (or sleep with them) Pro free form emphasis: It's all "I diplomacize the...

Yep, those are design options not some kind of mutating hazard that morphs IN GAME to challenge PCs. Should 4e have been more explicit about this? Sounds like Yes. But if one interpretation leads to nonsense, and the other to a coherent system, why would you choose the former?

I agree and I think there are probably some mechanical reasons for the spread as well. For instance, ability to add a bunch of bonuses from various sources (powers, etc.) and still not overwhelm the 'base' modifier. I'm not even sold that subjective and objective DCs give you widely...

If you are arguing that 4e should have explained itself better, I'm not going to fight you there. It should have. I wish it did. But shouldn't people have an "ahh hah" moment as soon as someone explains how it is suppose to work (or if 'suppose to' is a loaded phase, 'how it would work...