PolterGhost
First Post
You know, it's a sad thing when I really haven't played many RPGs, and yet I like them so much. I blame D&D for this, since the shiny covers of the original three books graced the shelves of a now-defunct gaming shop. It was a wondrous thing looking at all of the races and classes and powers, but when our group got to playing it was so crunchy that it just felt that it wasn't worth our time.
This was D&D 4e. We didn't realize we needed a battle map, so we used graph paper and drew on that. We had troubles wrapping our heads around the vast number of powers and keywords and magic items and such since there was just so many that all looked like they were torn from a basic template and had flavor text thrown on top of it. Monsters were interesting, but they had such large stat blocks that they constantly needed to be referenced and bookmarked. Just our starting powers at first level were suffocating us with extra rules tossed about here and there, to such a point that we spent a good hour before the first session just writing them down on notecards.
As an aside, 4e wasn't my FIRST foray into D&D (Neverwinter Nights was, at least until it refused to work on my computer. At that point, I pretty much learned the D&D rules by what I learned reading the NWN manual and from what friends at school told me.)
After two sessions (one of them cut short because of a DM mistake using rules to 'level down' monsters in the MM) we never looked back on 4e again. We moved on to Exalted, a White Wolf game, which had just about as much crunch but didn't rely on 'powers per level' or 'encounter and daily powers', nor did it require a constant battle map to be updated. After a few games of that, someone brought up the idea of him DMing a 3.5 game in Eberron. I decided to join as a Wizard to fill up the ranks of the party (alongside a Ranger, a Bard, a Rogue, a Paladin, and a Ninja), picked up a bunch of books, and relearned D&D from there.
I was hooked. I had control over my character again without the stats taking control, our use of a battle map made encounters feel much less confining (and the implementation of longer ranges on spells and weapon attacks as well as using the 3:2 approach for diagonal movement made things feel more real), and resource management went down to a level that I was more familiar with from 8 and 16-bit era dungeon crawler CRPGs. I didn't feel like I was playing a dumbed-down World of Warcraft (a game that I loathed an hour in because of the combat system, the distance between areas, and the builds of classes, but I digress.) But, the system, as I learned after playing with a variety of DMs and acting as one myself, was not perfect. In fact, it carried significant flaws, ones so scathing that I found Castles and Crusades a much better implementation of 3e rules (It was by the guy who made D&D, how bad could it be?) Of course, C&C wasn't perfect (and in fact had horrible tables for equipment that I sneered at), so we continued with 3e since it was much more familiar to us (and because one of our gamers was all "But I don't want to learn something different.")
Later on, we jumped ship to Warhammer 40k's Dark Heresy, which every session involves a life and death struggle of some sort against beasts and demons much more menacing than anything any man has ever faced. It was a simple system that was very reminiscent of 3e, with skills and feats that players could buy and a bunch of classes with varying degrees of prowess, but also was light enough on the rules that you didn't require a battle map to play nor did you need to memorize 30-50 pages of combat nor need to look up stats and encounter powers on a Level 4 Goblin Berzerker any time you wanted to use one. You had a couple weapons, maybe some special powers, a slew of straightforward skills, and your own ingenuity to run your character off of.
Looking at other systems, I realize that I like deep combat mechanics, especially if they manage to stay entrancing despite being extremely simple in presentation. In Dark Heresy, there's maybe about 10 whole pages that matter concerning combat and the things that come up the most, and maybe another 5 pages for fringe cases. Exalted manages to provide about the same experience (though don't ask me about how massive battles work. I know it's supposed to be as if each unit of troops acts as a single character, but managing that while also managing formations and the penalties and bonuses involved in that is a task that I'd rather not undertake.)
Reading through the old D&D books (back when they made a distinction between D&D and Advanced D&D) I find relics of what seemed to be a much better era, where monsters had a few basic statistics that they operated from, where spellcasting abilities were extremely limited and extremely potent, where it seemed like the company producing the game made balancing it simple by simply not bogging down the system with half-a-dozen ways to make a basic attack and making battle maps entirely optional (I cannot say the same about the Unarmed Combat tables in the 2e Player's Handbook. I dunno what Gary and his friends were smoking when they made that, but...)
Upon my own perceptions involving 4e, all I can seem to see is a system that loves having combat encounters and loves having them on a battle map, where creativity and on-the-fly thinking is replaced with dozens of powers of all sorts for every class and massive stat blocks for monsters, where any part of the game seems to have paragraphs of extraneous rules (so my Sleep spell doesn't put the enemy to sleep unless they fail a die roll on a 45% chance? So I need to pay for rituals and they work differently than a normal power? So the Fighter is more of a tank than an actual, well, fighter? Moving provokes an opportunity attack as well as casting an area effect spell, but standing up from being knocked down doesn't (why did I bother taking a power to knock them down in the first place if they can just freely get back up?) What is the point of having so many defences on a character, but only having one that can be directly boosted through basic equipment (and how come that defence is the one that is rarely ever used in lieu of Reflex, Fortitude, and Will? Why do I have such huge abilities at first level when the average is 10? What does HP mean to me when I don't know what an 'average' HP value is? How come it feels like damage just doesn't scale with such large values of HP and that combats drag on forever?)
I guess what I'm getting at is, is there any reason for me to ever go back to 4e?* What makes 4e a great game system that should make me want to play it more than, say, playing as an Elf Fighter/Mage?
*I used the Gamers Seeking Gamers portion of this forum to get into a 4e game online using Maptool. Either the DM sucked (every other encounter felt like the world was going to kill us. "OH HEY LOOK RANDOM ELVES ATTACK US IN THE DESERT BECAUSE THEY'RE PROTECTING THIS MAGIC OASIS." "OH LOOK, GIANT FROG PEOPLE HATE US BECAUSE WE'RE HERE." "OH LOOK AT THAT, THE GOBLINS SET UP A TRAP FOR US EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER KNEW WE WERE COMING AND DON'T KNOW IF WE'RE FRIEND OR FOE." "OH LOOK, WE OPENED A DOOR AND GIANT MUSHROOM PEOPLE WANT OUR BLOOD.") or the system just still didn't ride well with me.
This was D&D 4e. We didn't realize we needed a battle map, so we used graph paper and drew on that. We had troubles wrapping our heads around the vast number of powers and keywords and magic items and such since there was just so many that all looked like they were torn from a basic template and had flavor text thrown on top of it. Monsters were interesting, but they had such large stat blocks that they constantly needed to be referenced and bookmarked. Just our starting powers at first level were suffocating us with extra rules tossed about here and there, to such a point that we spent a good hour before the first session just writing them down on notecards.
As an aside, 4e wasn't my FIRST foray into D&D (Neverwinter Nights was, at least until it refused to work on my computer. At that point, I pretty much learned the D&D rules by what I learned reading the NWN manual and from what friends at school told me.)
After two sessions (one of them cut short because of a DM mistake using rules to 'level down' monsters in the MM) we never looked back on 4e again. We moved on to Exalted, a White Wolf game, which had just about as much crunch but didn't rely on 'powers per level' or 'encounter and daily powers', nor did it require a constant battle map to be updated. After a few games of that, someone brought up the idea of him DMing a 3.5 game in Eberron. I decided to join as a Wizard to fill up the ranks of the party (alongside a Ranger, a Bard, a Rogue, a Paladin, and a Ninja), picked up a bunch of books, and relearned D&D from there.
I was hooked. I had control over my character again without the stats taking control, our use of a battle map made encounters feel much less confining (and the implementation of longer ranges on spells and weapon attacks as well as using the 3:2 approach for diagonal movement made things feel more real), and resource management went down to a level that I was more familiar with from 8 and 16-bit era dungeon crawler CRPGs. I didn't feel like I was playing a dumbed-down World of Warcraft (a game that I loathed an hour in because of the combat system, the distance between areas, and the builds of classes, but I digress.) But, the system, as I learned after playing with a variety of DMs and acting as one myself, was not perfect. In fact, it carried significant flaws, ones so scathing that I found Castles and Crusades a much better implementation of 3e rules (It was by the guy who made D&D, how bad could it be?) Of course, C&C wasn't perfect (and in fact had horrible tables for equipment that I sneered at), so we continued with 3e since it was much more familiar to us (and because one of our gamers was all "But I don't want to learn something different.")
Later on, we jumped ship to Warhammer 40k's Dark Heresy, which every session involves a life and death struggle of some sort against beasts and demons much more menacing than anything any man has ever faced. It was a simple system that was very reminiscent of 3e, with skills and feats that players could buy and a bunch of classes with varying degrees of prowess, but also was light enough on the rules that you didn't require a battle map to play nor did you need to memorize 30-50 pages of combat nor need to look up stats and encounter powers on a Level 4 Goblin Berzerker any time you wanted to use one. You had a couple weapons, maybe some special powers, a slew of straightforward skills, and your own ingenuity to run your character off of.
Looking at other systems, I realize that I like deep combat mechanics, especially if they manage to stay entrancing despite being extremely simple in presentation. In Dark Heresy, there's maybe about 10 whole pages that matter concerning combat and the things that come up the most, and maybe another 5 pages for fringe cases. Exalted manages to provide about the same experience (though don't ask me about how massive battles work. I know it's supposed to be as if each unit of troops acts as a single character, but managing that while also managing formations and the penalties and bonuses involved in that is a task that I'd rather not undertake.)
Reading through the old D&D books (back when they made a distinction between D&D and Advanced D&D) I find relics of what seemed to be a much better era, where monsters had a few basic statistics that they operated from, where spellcasting abilities were extremely limited and extremely potent, where it seemed like the company producing the game made balancing it simple by simply not bogging down the system with half-a-dozen ways to make a basic attack and making battle maps entirely optional (I cannot say the same about the Unarmed Combat tables in the 2e Player's Handbook. I dunno what Gary and his friends were smoking when they made that, but...)
Upon my own perceptions involving 4e, all I can seem to see is a system that loves having combat encounters and loves having them on a battle map, where creativity and on-the-fly thinking is replaced with dozens of powers of all sorts for every class and massive stat blocks for monsters, where any part of the game seems to have paragraphs of extraneous rules (so my Sleep spell doesn't put the enemy to sleep unless they fail a die roll on a 45% chance? So I need to pay for rituals and they work differently than a normal power? So the Fighter is more of a tank than an actual, well, fighter? Moving provokes an opportunity attack as well as casting an area effect spell, but standing up from being knocked down doesn't (why did I bother taking a power to knock them down in the first place if they can just freely get back up?) What is the point of having so many defences on a character, but only having one that can be directly boosted through basic equipment (and how come that defence is the one that is rarely ever used in lieu of Reflex, Fortitude, and Will? Why do I have such huge abilities at first level when the average is 10? What does HP mean to me when I don't know what an 'average' HP value is? How come it feels like damage just doesn't scale with such large values of HP and that combats drag on forever?)
I guess what I'm getting at is, is there any reason for me to ever go back to 4e?* What makes 4e a great game system that should make me want to play it more than, say, playing as an Elf Fighter/Mage?
*I used the Gamers Seeking Gamers portion of this forum to get into a 4e game online using Maptool. Either the DM sucked (every other encounter felt like the world was going to kill us. "OH HEY LOOK RANDOM ELVES ATTACK US IN THE DESERT BECAUSE THEY'RE PROTECTING THIS MAGIC OASIS." "OH LOOK, GIANT FROG PEOPLE HATE US BECAUSE WE'RE HERE." "OH LOOK AT THAT, THE GOBLINS SET UP A TRAP FOR US EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER KNEW WE WERE COMING AND DON'T KNOW IF WE'RE FRIEND OR FOE." "OH LOOK, WE OPENED A DOOR AND GIANT MUSHROOM PEOPLE WANT OUR BLOOD.") or the system just still didn't ride well with me.
