D&D 4E Let's Talk About 4E On Its Own Terms [+]

[EternalDungeonMaster]

One thing I liked about DMing 4E was that I basically didn't need to know what the players exact powers or spells were. I mean, you pick up some stuff over time, but most of the time you can just let yourself and your NPCs get surprised, while you use the NPC uglier tricks to surprise them. There is rarely a power that nullifies an encounter, but there is almost always a power that let the players swing things their way, maybe turning the environment or tactical positioning to favor them for a bit.

Very much this. Over a 7-year-long 4e campaign I never cared specifically what a character could do like I have to with 5e. At any given level, a PC's powers were horizontally broad, which makes for a fun time running a character, but rarely vertically broad, which would make for OP PCs.

That sort of sums of 4e nicely: PCs had a wide variety of interesting and meaningful things they could do, but rarely could break things.

There were, of course, exceptions. For example, when Divine Power came out there were some busted combos that did significant healing without consuming healing surges. But for the most part, our group found the character options to be engaging and not game breaking.

Other groups may have had different experiences, I'm only speaking anecdotally from my time as a 4e DM.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Other groups may have had different experiences, I'm only speaking anecdotally from my time as a 4e DM.

I hadn't thought about it, but I agree that was my experience as a player for sure

 

[Staffan]

Rolemaster is an interesting beast. They apparently found the Monk concept so difficult to capture in a single class that there are three of them- Monk, Warrior Monk, and High Warrior Monk!

The difference is that the Monk is a semi-caster similar to the paladin and ranger, while the Warrior monk is purely martial (with a dash of supernatural via various "adrenal maneuvers"). I believe the High Warrior Monk was basically a patch class because of poor satisfaction with the Warrior Monk.
In RMSS, there was a Martial Arts Companion which added two more monk classes: Taoist Monk and Zen Monk. The Zen monk used Mentalism instead of Essence (in D&D4 terms, approximately the same as using the psionic power source instead of arcane, except that power sources had some actual rules baggage). I'm not quite sure what the Taoist monk's deal was – I think it was slightly more nature-flavored than the regular monk but otherwise similar.

It should also be noted that the main reason the Rolemaster monk is a semi-caster is that Rolemaster basically doesn't have "special abilities" in the D&D sense. Everything is either a skill or a spell. So in D&D it's totally kosher to give a monk the ability to reduce or ignore fall damage, or to make ridiculous jumps, but in Rolemaster that has to be a spell.

 

[pemerton]

I remembered that Rolemaster monks were semi-spellcasters with spell lists similar to paladins and rangers and that Rolemaster had an essence, channeling, mentalism split of their magic. I had used their three type split to contextualize 3e D&D psionics easily when the 3.0 psionics book came out. Looking back I see that monks were not directly tied to the mentalism category but to essence magic. Given the 2e D&D psionics descriptions as internal power I can see tying D&D monk ki powers to psionics instead of to divine magic (as 2e did) or its own thing.

In any case I did like the second hand 4e psionics lore I picked up on big picture 4e psionics being a developed world antibody reaction to unnatural intrusion that does not rely upon other power sources.

Rolemaster is an interesting beast. They apparently found the Monk concept so difficult to capture in a single class that there are three of them- Monk, Warrior Monk, and High Warrior Monk!

Warrior Monks don't use magic, just Adrenal Moves. High Warrior Monks are more highly tuned Warrior Monks, from RMC.

Monks are, in Spell Law, Semi Essence users. But in Character Law there is discussion of the Charltonian vs Amthorian debate (ie Coleman Charlton vs Terry Amthor) - I can't remember who takes which view, but it flags the alternative of having Monks be Mentalism and Bards be Essence.

Nightblades (RMC) are Semi Mentalism users in the neighbourhood of Monks (they're ninja-types). In RMSS they are rebadged as Magents.

 

[Staffan]

Warrior Monks don't use magic, just Adrenal Moves. High Warrior Monks are more highly tuned Warrior Monks, from RMC.

Monks are, in Spell Law, Semi Essence users. But in Character Law there is discussion of the Charltonian vs Amthorian debate (ie Coleman Charlton vs Terry Amthor) - I can't remember who takes which view, but it flags the alternative of having Monks be Mentalism and Bards be Essence.

Nightblades (RMC) are Semi Mentalism users in the neighbourhood of Monks (they're ninja-types). In RMSS they are rebadged as Magents.

TBH, I think the main reason RM monks are Essence-users is that Essence is pretty much incompatible with using armor, and monks are supposed to be unarmored, so Essence it is. You can dress it up beyond that, but that's the core of it.

 

[pemerton]

TBH, I think the main reason RM monks are Essence-users is that Essence is pretty much incompatible with using armor, and monks are supposed to be unarmored, so Essence it is. You can dress it up beyond that, but that's the core of it.

Yes. That is the reason given in Character Law for the Charltonian view (I looked it up): because Essence doesn't use armour or carry much metal (due to penalties), a semi-Essence user would tend to use barehanded martial arts.

 

[Staffan]

Yes. That is the reason given in Character Law for the Charltonian view (I looked it up): because Essence doesn't use armour or carry much metal (due to penalties), a semi-Essence user would tend to use barehanded martial arts.

My guess is that the Doylist reason probably goes in the other direction: Monks don't wear armor, so they should be Essence users. Rolemaster does have D&D roots, after all. But as a Watsonian explanation, having Essence semi-casters use martial arts works fine too.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

My guess is that the Doylist reason probably goes in the other direction: Monks don't wear armor, so they should be Essence users. Rolemaster does have D&D roots, after all. But as a Watsonian explanation, having Essence semi-casters use martial arts works fine too.

Understand that threads drift, this is the internet after all

but, while I love 4e, never played Rolemaster. Wondering if a new thread about Rolemaster may serve fans of that system better? (Easier to find via search perhaps)

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Sadly, mechanically speaking, I'm not a fan of the augment mechanic and point system. I mean, it looks okay, but I guess when it comes to 4e, I prefer to have a lot of options and well, Psionic classes (except the monk) just have less powers than the others. It looks like they would just use the same power over and over again, just with some variation to them. But since I never actually had a player playing one in my games, I'm just going with my feeling on this one. Maybe in game they are not so bad. I definitely would love to have one one day since now I love the lore about them... but looks like my players still prefer to stick with more classic classes... ah well, guess I'll use them as NPC then...

Psionics was one of the few disappointments I had with 4e (besides the Monk which is great). Augment might have been ok, but unlike other 4e powers you have to be very careful with the design. And they screwed up the at wills, at least with the Psion. I forget the names maybe Mind Thrust and Dishearten, were so efficient and good that you would almost never use anything else.

They weren't necessarily strictly OP, but boring.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I thought that, at the very least, the Aegis of Assault was quite useful and made a very interesting and fairly effective form of defense. The other two aegis WORK for certain types of build but they're less effective overall IME. Swordmage certainly didn't seem ineffective or way off role to me. Seeker is not actually a bad CLASS at its core, but it suffers from an awkward paradigm and the powers it got were pretty lackluster. There was a bit of help in Dragon IIRC, but they never published a PP2 which could have given it all the support it needed, and a better suite of powers.

The Assault Swordmage was good and fun. Shielding Swordmage and Swarm Druid were, however, in dire need of errata as they came out before the MM3 and so before monster damage scaling was massively buffed. Before the MM3 they were both fine but after it they couldn't keep up.

I won't try to defend the psionic classes though, I think they were all ill-advised, but certainly FAR from terrible or non-functional. The Ardent never got played in any of our games, so I am not totally familiar with the issues there, though I understand there were those who questioned its class defender mechanic. Fair enough, the psion and the runepriest also can be criticized for flaws in their design as well. I don't think psionics in general really worked that well in 4e, lol. AND this is squarely on the fact that they tried to diverge from A/E/D/U and graft in an enhancement/power point system. Sorry, you always butcher the system when you do stuff like that to it.

The problem with power point systems is they get spamtastic. Ardents and Battleminds used to each always spam the same ability with lower level enhancement because it was above the curve.

I would, however, take the Binder out behind the woodshed and do what was necessary, that class just bit. I mean, it IS still pretty playable, its just strictly inferior to other flavors of warlock.

It actually isn't quite that bad. The Binder has a few advantages over other warlocks:

• No need for curse tracking.
• Boons that trigger either when you kill or when an enemy dies next to you. And are pretty good (the one that can slide anyone is fun, and invisibility is always good). So more shenanigans than a regular warlock
• Extra stuff at level 4 (a resistance and either darkvision or skill bonuses)
• Two solid at wills that target different stats and both have riders (unlike Eldritch Blast). Two out of the three subclasses of binder have multi-target close burst at wills.

My problem with the Binder is twofold; firstly the lock-in of the encounter powers (which of course means no immediate powers) and secondly that they are really missing Eldritch Strike or equivalent. I used to give a DM fits with my feylock who'd Eyebite to make himself invisible to their victim of choice and then walk into melee and Eldritch Strike if they tried to move or ranged attack (and if they tried a melee attack they were trying to attack an invisible character).

The Bladesinger is obviously the final 'questionable one' as it AGAIN tries to rework the A/E/D/U system and reaps the consequences. And yet again, up to a point it does work in a science-experimenty kind of way. The Vampire OTOH proves that you CAN monkey with some parts of the system, if you're clever, and not end up with a bad result, but it DOES NOT mess with A/E/D/U! Are we seeing a theme here?

The Bladesinger could easily be made badly but I found to be fine. Meanwhile the Vampire had ... issues.

But you missed possibly the two worst performing classes out; the two Assassins. The Shroud mechanic was just plain bad as the monsters were often dead before it reaped the rewards and the OG powers were weak. And the Executioner was lacking in general. With the eSassin, the Binder, and the Vampire all in one book I think the conclusion is that Heroes of Shadow was bad.

I'm also pro-Essentials and think that they'd almost mined out the AEDU seam anyway.