D&D 4E Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?

the biggest thing 4e needed was about a year more in development [...] And the second biggest thing it needed was for Keep on the Shadowfell to be good rather than terrible.

Yeah. :( I believe it's widely accepted, if not outright factually known, that 4e launched a year earlier than originally planned.

And while I don't find Keep on the Shadowfell quite as hateful as the 4e-haters did, it's pretty uninspiring. Just imagine if they had come out of the gate with Madness at Gardmore Abbey, or even Reavers of Harkenwold.

Also the 3rd thing 4e needed was to happen to be launched just at the time that "watch people play RPGs on YouTube" became a thing.
 

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Vaalingrade

Legend
Like I've said, I'm not a fan of dailies at all and would have rather we went entirely to encounter-based design, but what I feel is a fair critique of some daily powers if you're using them is that some could only be maximized by ideal conditions and some where just good all the time. So sometimes it was just better to blow one on a lower tier fight because that's the one where you would get to feel badass and you knew, for example that most fights wouldn't feature so many delicious minions to disem- and then reembowel.
 

Yeah. :( I believe it's widely accepted, if not outright factually known, that 4e launched a year earlier than originally planned.
That's a slightly garbled game of telephone I think.

4e was given two years of development time - but ten months in they realised they'd gone off in completely the wrong direction and started again from scratch and still launched on time. (I believe that the only salvageable parts of Codename Orcus were the Book of 9 Swords and the condition track - and everything used condition tracks). Which meant that starting from scratch again they had only 14 months including printing and shipping.
And while I don't find Keep on the Shadowfell quite as hateful as the 4e-haters did, it's pretty uninspiring. Just imagine if they had come out of the gate with Madness at Gardmore Abbey, or even Reavers of Harkenwold.
If KotS were actively hateful it would have been an improvement. Before the PCs reach the keep it's fine. (Not great but adequate enough). However the keep itself is just 17 combat encounters in a row, most of which are in more or less empty rooms with nothing to interact with. It's not my observation but I agree with whoever said that the only real way to salvage the adventure is drop an asteroid on the keep itself.
Also the 3rd thing 4e needed was to happen to be launched just at the time that "watch people play RPGs on YouTube" became a thing.
They tried with Acquisitions Inc.

It also needed to not have the tools derailed by the lead developer's murder-suicide.
 

I think that was also the sales pitch for 5e, right?

I'll get my Edition Warrior red card on my way out.
Oh FFS. In terms of choice and variety the 5e PHB is probably the best PHB in history (in part because it borrowed both subclasses and the conception of many of the classes from what had been developed through 4e) - and if we're comparing the 5e PHB to fully developed 4e then the 4e PHB can't match the choice and variety of the whole of 3.5 combined and neither can the 3.0 PHB match the whole of 2e combined.
 


heretic888

Explorer
I've been running a 4E solo game with my 5 year old son and the house rule we've been using is you can use one big thing --- action point, daily, or item power --- per encounter but they all refresh with a short rest, similar to how Channel Divinity powers function. Its worked like a charm so far and effectively made the game 100% encounter-based.
 


You are told by some people who like 5e that you should just stop complaining there - but not told that by everyone.

And you sound exactly like them. With the main difference being that they do not want new work put in on something they don't care about but you want to actively unmake an already existing sunk cost. And in a game that has twice as many classes as 5e and was producing more than half a dozen new classes every year at the time the Slayer came out.
Well, I am 'complaining' but really as a contrast, not so much because I had some goal of complaining about some 5e thing. Heck, I WROTE MY OWN GAME, so I can just go do what I want ;). But I would say that, while 4e has a goodly number of classes, a large fraction of them seem kind of redundant to me. Like, all the e-classes for one! I mean, the post-essentials era is RIFE with stuff that barely rises to the rank of 'class', or is effectively just a build, like the Witch. It also contains a lot of dubious experimentation, much like late 3.5 material does. In fact, in my ACTUAL play of 4e, I think classes outside of PHB1 and 2 were ALMOST never even contemplated. There were a smattering of e-class characters that a couple players experimented with, a Slayer we made to be a "visiting player" PC, a psion that a guy dropped in and played for a few sessions (we weren't charops enough for him, lol) and that was about it, really.
Nobody ever played a PHB3 class, except the one psion. Nobody played an HoS class, or a HotFW class that I can remember either. There was a mage, a slayer, a knight, a sentinel, and I think a thief. Otherwise it was actually pretty heavily PHB1. We did have an Invoker, a Warden, a couple Barbarians, a Druid, a Shaman, and a Sorcerer that I can recall. Possibly I have forgotten some, but there were numerous fighters, wizards, rogues, warlocks, rangers, clerics, and paladins. Oh, there were a couple bards, and at least 2 warlords. Oh, and one each Artificer and Swordmage.

So in terms of classes that are really needed to play 4e... I think even amongst those mentioned above some are fairly redundant, like the e-classes, and honestly the invoker and the warden, while quite interesting, are somewhat thematically redundant. I do think that HotEC's version of the sorcerer, the Elementalist, was thematically a good idea, though perhaps a bit simplistic. Still, I thought the idea of a ranger-level simplicity 'spell blaster' was probably pretty good. The Vampire, though nobody played one in my campaigns before they wrapped up, was also pretty cool and I've played around with it in other games. Blackguard, Necromancer, both good concepts. Oh, we did have a Esassin, which was a bit of an odd class, but seemed pretty solid.

And honestly, there are definite areas where 4e design proved awkward over time, but no more so than any other edition, and less than some.
We then have two questions:
  1. Was the number of classes being deliberately kept down?
    1. In 4e? No. There were 23 classes before Essentials (8 in the PHB 1, 8 in the PHB 2, 6 in the PHB 3, plus the shroud-Assassin).
There was also the Swordmage and Artificer, making 25. ALL of those are pretty solid, though I think about 5 of the 6 PHB3 ones are fairly unneeded (the monk being the exception). Actually the Seeker is a good concept, though it needs more love to make it really on a par with the others.
    1. In 5e? Yes. There have been precisely two splatbooks and one new class (the Artificer) since the PHB. This is a deliberate strategy
  1. Is there a significant group that would be served by adding this new class?
    1. For the Slayer in 4e, in my experience, yes. As mentioned two people at my main table. And so what if it was because they had thirty years experience of pre-4e D&D each. That doesn't make them not people or not interested.
    2. For the Warlord in 5e? Again yes. Something better than the piss-poor warlordesque abilities the Battlemaster got would be a start. (I've said in other posts what it would need for me for 5e to scratch at least some of the Warlord itch - but it isn't there right now).
    3. For the Cancer Mage from the 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness? Show me that people actually are demanding it as more than a meme and we'll talk.
I don't know about Cancer Mages... lol. I think 5e could use a few more classes, but as I said above, there's a bunch in 4e that are just cruft, at least TO ME. But 'class' means a bit different thing in each game, so we should be careful how we look at that.
 

I will say BLATANT foreshadowing of fight difficulties and ease are I suppose another DM side tool
I would put it in the 'genre' bucket. So, in a superhero movie/comic you KNOW when the big fight is, and even the characters know! It seems pretty natural to translate that into the idiom of D&D in 4e (though not obviously in most other editions). As a story game things are less passive, the bad guy isn't some room you happen to stumble on at a certain point in the crawl, its a character, an opponent who is active in the story line. You MAY only meet them face-to-face once, but you will know when that sort of thing is coming. Now, a GM might still change things up and drop the old PLOT TWIST! on you where the REALLY tough fight is the NEXT one and you're going to do it tapped out. That's cool though, this is when 4e's deep thematics and keywording can come into play. Like "OK, I already blew my daily, so I BREAK MY MAGIC BAD GUY KILLING SWORD ON HIS HEAD!"
 

If I had my way Healing Surges would be the ONLY daily ressources in the game. It being a sort of measure of daily stamina works great. But then Wizards wouldn't be able to leverage that structure to break the game and the Wizard Fans would whine it's not D&D.

But you'd need to spend at least 1 to get the benefit of a short rest, even if you're at full HP.
You are welcome to play Heroes of Myth and Legend, where power points ARE basically the only resource (you do have hit points, but PPs act like 4e HS, so fundamentally its all PPs all the way down). You can create amplified "daily like" effects with them too, so its all kind of in there. I admit, the formula is a bit of a tweak vs 4e and I'm not 100% sure it generates all of the same pacing, but it seemed worth a try!
 

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