D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[Zaukrie]

The MM had almost no good monsters (it had one lawful good celestial charger horse).

It had no neutral monsters because the new terminology for neutral alignment was unaligned.

A quick control f search of my PDF of the 4e MM1 shows 186 entries of unaligned. .

4e, particularly early, on focused on the MMs being for game stats of monsters you would fight, and it turned a bunch of normally good things in prior editions (angels, metallic dragons, fey, demihumans) into any alignment/unaligned things that could be potential default adversaries.

The change to angels being servants of any god, not just good ones was great, imo.

I love 4e. I would happily play a new, improved, version of it. There were issues, but it was infinitely more interesting in combat than 5e.

 

[Undrave]

And a fireball can be used in place of a a bunch of fighters with swords and bows, and yet that's free.

Here is 4e's Fireball:

wizard attack 5
Fireball
Daily ✦ arcane, evocation, fire, implement
Standard Action
area burst 3 within 20 squares

Target: each creature within the burst
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 4d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage.
Miss: Half damage.

(Area Burst 3 means a 7 by 7 square, btw, with its origin points within 100 feet)

It used to only do 3D6 and Essential buffed it, btw. I guess it didn't feel iconic enough.

A 4e Fighter at that level can get the stance Rain of Steel which provides the following benefit:

Effect: Until this stance ends, any enemy that starts its turn adjacent to you takes 1[W] damage, but only if you're able to make opportunity attacks.

Or powers such as Agonizing Assault that can Daze and Immobilize a target, Dizzying Blow, a reliable power (meaning it's not expended if you miss) that can immobilize a target until they make a save, or Crushing Foot, which always knocks prone the target regardless of hit or miss and also happens to have the Invigorating keyword (meaning that when you hit, if you are trained in Endurance, you gain temp HP!).

They have different impacts but can all contribute to the combat, and are relatiely well balanced to one another.

And who said anything about pumping them out? In every other edition, you had a limited number of spells you could prepare or cast. Why couldn't knock be a 1/day spell?

I mean that the cost isn't insignificant to curtail their uses at low level. It's just a different version of spell slots, using gold as a ressource instead. Usually spread ovr the course of an adventure rather than specifically a day. It's just a different type of limitation. It's not any or less arbitrary than 'X slot of level Y per day'.

...And the fact that you consider a good NPC to not be useful is exactly the problem here. And, honestly, says a lot more about 4e than you think it does, and not in a good way.

It's also very limiting in another bad way--what if you wanted to have a good creature turn bad? Or if you had an evil party who wanted to collect shiny dragon scales? Sorry, no stats for you just because the alignment says Good?

There's only so much room in a book. You gotta shoot for what is the most generically useful. A Dragon NPC is not very common, but the book does include a number of Human monster stat blocks you can use, among other humanoids. Evil party are a rarity and usually discouraged in the DMG. And a good creature turn bad is a specific scenario. This was the start of the edition and they wanted to have as many different types of enemies to cover all 30 level of play. Don't forget that 4e Monster came in multiple flavor with multiple levels. You didn't have 'A' Goblin, you had like ten different variations to populate your Goblin Tribe!

 

[jgsugden]

I saw some people in this forum asking for 4e be released as a SRD to Creative Commons like 5e (and possibly 3.5e). Do not get me wrong, I liked 4e, but I think it was very combat oriented and did a bad service to other game pillars. And most powers were, quite frankly, more of the same. Even so, I think many of its flaws could be reworked, specially now we have many good ideas we could port from 5e backwards.

So, if you are not a 4e hater, how would you rework it?...

If you do too much, it stops being 4E and becomes another game.

To me, the 4E system is a very strong system - but not one that works well to support the variance found in a D&D fantasy setting. It works better when the enemies you face are more limited in variance. The mechanics just don't support a wide range of ideas in enemies. To that end, the way fixed 4E and made great use of it was to use it for more modern settings. I found that a port of it worked very well for a Dead-West style game, a modern spy game, and a 1920s Call of Cthulhu style game. When most of the enemies were either humanoid or human like, the system just worked better.

 

[Zaukrie]

If you do too much, it stops being 4E and becomes another game.

To me, the 4E system is a very strong system - but not one that works well to support the variance found in a D&D fantasy setting. It works better when the enemies you face are more limited in variance. The mechanics just don't support a wide range of ideas in enemies. To that end, the way fixed 4E and made great use of it was to use it for more modern settings. I found that a port of it worked very well for a Dead-West style game, a modern spy game, and a 1920s Call of Cthulhu style game. When most of the enemies were either humanoid or human like, the system just worked better.

I, um, had a very different experience than you I guess. I find 4e monsters to be the most diverse in the history of the game. 5e is just bags of hit points that do the same things, just with different names.

 

[jgsugden]

I, um, had a very different experience than you I guess. I find 4e monsters to be the most diverse in the history of the game. 5e is just bags of hit points that do the same things, just with different names.

And what you say of 5E is what I find to be true of 4E. And I tried - hard - to create greater diversity. 4E monsters were generally built on a very similar core with a few random abilities that were less definitional and more incidental.

I have a very clear recollection from about 6 months into the 4E era when the group of PCs were wading through a room of foes, slaughtering minions and pushing on to the big boss ... when one of them commented they were going to kill the orc on the right. Another player said, "You mean the hobgoblin? We're fighting hobgoblins, right?" They argued back and forth for a few seconds then turned to me. I had a confused look on my face, apparently, because a third player said, "I'm pretty sure he didn't say what we were fighting, just that they were shadowy brutes."

It wasn't that people were confused or made assumptions - it was that most of us never even noted that we'd failed to discuss what type of monster it was. It was just - interchangeable. That was the moment I realized that 4E would never be the D&D I'd known for so long.

 

[Aldarc]

None of this would need to change with bounded accuracy.

IMHO, bounded accuracy would negatively alter the tone of 4e's gameplay. 5e wants goblins to remain a threat when you are mid-level; however, 4e doesn't want goblins to remain a threat when you are paragon tier.

 

[hojulation]

2) Reduce hit points and up damage all around to make combat faster.

3) Use clocks instead of skill challenges.

4) Replace filler combats with clocks/skill challenges.

5) Be explicit in the text, advice, and modules that the full combat rules are only meant for the big, important fights, not each and every single pointless fight.

These would be a must for me.

I got back into D&D after a 10 year hiatus during the tail end of 4E and the long combats eventually took their toll on my group. Luckily D&D Next was right around the corner and the combats seemed extremely fast in comparison.

Other comments about supporting the other pillars are right on. Anything that wasn't combat was treated like a skill challenge, and that entire system fell flat for me. The clocks idea is really smart though. I love that system in Blades in the Dark and think it would work well in 4E (or any version of D&D really).

 

[James Gasik]

IMHO, bounded accuracy would negatively alter the tone of 4e's gameplay. 5e wants goblins to remain a threat when you are mid-level; however, 4e doesn't want goblins to remain a threat when you are paragon tier.

Except you can totally boost goblins in level as a DM if you want to, it's fairly simple.

 

[Aldarc]

Except you can totally boost goblins in level as a DM if you want to, it's fairly simple.

Agreed. I suppose that one could try to combine bounded accuracy with PF2 style proficiency tiers, though I'm not sure how. I think the bottom line, of sorts, is that 4e (and even 3e) is designed around a different sort of fantasy than 5e.

 

[James Gasik]

Agreed. I suppose that one could try to combine bounded accuracy with PF2 style proficiency tiers, though I'm not sure how. I think the bottom line, of sorts, is that 4e (and even 3e) is designed around a different sort of fantasy than 5e.

I once ran an adventure in 4e where the players entered the Feywild and had to deal with the Goblins there, the weakest of which were level 11 Minions. They were surprised to fight Goblins, and wondered why they were so tough, but what I told them was, they were in the realm of an Archfey who did not want them there, so the very land was trying to kill them with harsh weather, and sapping their strength, so it wasn't just a case of the Goblins being stronger, but they were actually weakened (without me nerfing their abilities or anything).

It turned out fairly well, though I will admit, by this point in the campaign (I'd started them at level 1, and now, a year and a half later, they were level 12) I was starting to see a problem with challenging the group.

Their abilities synergized well, and there were a few encounter and Daily powers I was starting to dread, because they tended to turn the difficulty of what I was hoping would be tough battles inside out. Having already played a level 22 character in Scales of War, I knew this wasn't going to get any better over time.

Too many high level creatures basically had to have "cheater powers" to represent a threat, such as immunity to conditions and other abilities specifically designed to counter the players. I put my game on hiatus while I tried to brainstorm a better way to handle this (daze is a common debuff on player powers. If I use an enemy immune to daze, in my mind, at least, it's basically punishing a player for not taking another power, and it's not like they can just change powers willy nilly).

Unfortunately, WotC threw in the towel and removed all the online tools before I could get back to it, so that was the end of that game.

That's a very important change that I think needs to be made to not just 4e, but every version of D&D; not enough testing is done with high level play, and the "solution" seems to always be "just let monsters ignore player abilities", either through immunities, "I just save at this time" effects, or special abilities that completely neuter characters, like debilitating auras, huge AoE's that inflict negative status effects, off turn actions, multiple actions, and even negative status effects delivered by regular old attacks.

A lot of times, it can feel like the player is actively being punished for being given new abilities, which kind of confuses me. If your game can't handle giving someone a once per fight ability to give an enemy vulnerability to damage (one of the party Cleric's big "solo killer" powers), why did you give it to them in the first place?