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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Nah, I had the goofy two-weapon fighting Fighter build- Snapping Tetsudo allows you to use two shields, and there were shields that could be used as weapons.

It was pure flavor since I had few Powers that could use both weapons in the first place. That I ended up being really tanky is a more a testament to how good the 4e Fighter base package is I think than the choices I made, lol.

Yeah, I was just spitballing how to make such a thing even more ridonculous. BRV, and then Hybrid to Warden...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The point is to make different classes feel different in practice. Some people like that sort of thing. If you look at World of Warcraft, for example, Rogues play very different from Warriors - not just because they have different powers, but because Rogues are primarily based on Energy (a rapidly regenerating power source) and Combo points (points you get from using certain powers and then spend on strong "finisher" attacks), while Warriors are based on Rage (power that accumulates when they make basic attacks as well as when they get attacked).

And they also play very differently in 4e. If you attempt to play a 4e rogue like a fighter (I mean short of some massive deliberate customization that might partly change this) you will get your arse handed to you in 5 seconds. Nor are they very similar OOC, as the rogue is a stealthy, streetwise, at least criminal-adjacent, gal with thieving abilities and pretty good ranged combat. Fighters lack ALL of that OOTB, and some of it is not really possible for them to acquire (ranged combat, short of MCing or Hybrid). EVEN IF you created a dex build fighter with thievery, stealth, streetwise, etc. it would, at best, require a bunch of feats and you'd still lack the striker feature and have the hit points, armor class, and defender features of a fighter. Yes, you could theoretically pass for a rogue OOC, with some work, but I'd call that a FEATURE of 4e, not a bug!

Granting, you are obviously of a different opinion than myself, that's fine, but I just said that it bugged me and that HONESTLY I found the 13a classes more 'samey' due to the lack of tactical combat options than the 4e ones, myself. Having a random different power system for each class didn't fix any of that, not at all. It just made the game a lot harder to both run and play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that was also a neat feature of D&D 4. That the core package for your class usually gave you enough to be competent at whatever role it was supposed to fulfill, and you couldn't go horribly wrong unless you made choices that were basically already called out as bad in the class description (like, say, pick a low strength for a character class that listed primary attribute as strength).
There was still a lot you could do to tweak your build to be more effective, more deadly, more utilitarian or more tanky, but you were pretty solid even if you did a few things off the beaten path, so to speak.
(Which made "mandatory math" feats like the Expertise feats annoying, it wasn't all sunshine and roses. And of course, character optimizers found really excessively good builds, too, but they usually do).
It's not that builds didn't matter, but a lot of the important (tactical) decision-making would happen at the game table, not at home.

The other aspect of this, which I pointed out in my last post, is that customization of characters in 4e can be pretty deep. Class is a substantive thing, but not a big mechanical barrier since the other classes have the same underlying 'language', so 4e MCing works, but you could never implement that in 5e or 13a, certainly not without a lot more work that would have to be tweaked for each new class you add. Same with feats, most of them work for everyone, because things are all described in the same way.

The RESULT of this, is a lot of ability to create themed characters and such. For example you can have an entire party of 'Secret Agent' characters who are experts in stealth, surveillance, using light gear and concealed weapons, etc. They can be ANY class and all still have all the core features required to operate together as a team doing whatever such teams might do in a given campaign. You can have the sneaky stealth Wizard, the sneaky stealth Cleric, Ranger, Warlord, Fighter, etc. etc. etc. Each one will still retain its core class feature based unique combat role, as well as certain unique non-combat capabilities and play differently. The Wizard will probably be the terrain bypassing enabler, the rogue maybe a sniper/scout type, the fighter a black-clad stealth heavy, etc. It works GREAT!

Heck, with reflavoring you can go FAR FAR down that path with 4e due to the flexibility of this core base system. I recall once there was a guy who made all the characters from Return of the Jedi as level 1 4e PCs, just with their gear and abilities reflavored. It was GOOD too! I mean the whole thing obviously worked well, it wasn't even really a kludge. Not to say that would work for every genre or milieu, but realistically any likely D&D-esque fantasy trope milieu that wants steep power curves will work with 4e, more-or-less.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

At least for the early classes. The longer the game went on, the less robust newer classes were. Some barely functioned at all (looking at you, Ardent!), others had flaws in their design (certain Defenders lacking good melee basic options), and still others were a hot mess (Swordmage, Seeker) that were almost better at performing a different role than the one they were given.

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.

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.

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. 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?

 

[Eric V]

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.

With respect, I think the 4e Monk is far more than not non-functional; it is the best version of the class in all editions of the game, IMO.

 

[Staffan]

And they also play very differently in 4e. If you attempt to play a 4e rogue like a fighter (I mean short of some massive deliberate customization that might partly change this) you will get your arse handed to you in 5 seconds. Nor are they very similar OOC, as the rogue is a stealthy, streetwise, at least criminal-adjacent, gal with thieving abilities and pretty good ranged combat. Fighters lack ALL of that OOTB, and some of it is not really possible for them to acquire (ranged combat, short of MCing or Hybrid). EVEN IF you created a dex build fighter with thievery, stealth, streetwise, etc. it would, at best, require a bunch of feats and you'd still lack the striker feature and have the hit points, armor class, and defender features of a fighter. Yes, you could theoretically pass for a rogue OOC, with some work, but I'd call that a FEATURE of 4e, not a bug!

Sure, but it's not just about the abilities themselves. It's about the rhythm of the class. AEDU has all classes playing to the same rhythm on different instruments. With more varied resource mechanics, every class marches to the beat of a different drum.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

With respect, I think the 4e Monk is far more than not non-functional; it is the best version of the class in all editions of the game, IMO.

Yeah, but it is not really psionic, they just tacked that power source name on it. It doesn't use ANY of the psionics rules whatsoever. You could cross out 'psionic' and put in 'martial' and nothing will change (I mean, aside from anything that keys off power source, but that isn't a lot).

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah, I was just spitballing how to make such a thing even more ridonculous. BRV, and then Hybrid to Warden...

Oh there's lots of ways to make neat characters in 4e. I had a habit of making oddball hybrid builds, like my OAssassin/Blackguard (building off a feat that gives you combat advantage against anything you've put a Shroud on), "The Professor", my Warlord/Wizard with stupid defenses, a Seeker Cleric, and a Blackguard/Feylock. Oh and my original LFR character, a Bard/Wizard with no real synergy, but who became the master of psychic damage, with lethal Vicious Mockery, lol.

The only problem was, one of my DM's got it into his head that if I was making a weird build, I was obviously going to spontaneously explode in CharOp levels of ridiculousness at any moment, when the reality was, even I had no idea if my character would work or not.

If I wanted to be super effective, I could have just been a Ranger or Barbarian and murdered all the things, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, but it's not just about the abilities themselves. It's about the rhythm of the class. AEDU has all classes playing to the same rhythm on different instruments. With more varied resource mechanics, every class marches to the beat of a different drum.

Obviously I'm not going to agree. I mean, sure, there's technically an equal distribution of powers of each type in all classes. OTOH there are pretty large differences in terms of how a given type fits into a class and how it is leveraged.

Fighters, for instance, are foundationally built on exercising their class features, and this ties into their basic and at-will attacks. Those attacks also have a lot of buffs and there's an entire level of complexity involved in how they interact with weapons and a vast array of feats which impact that. So, for a fighter going around with their 'bread and butter' powers is normal. Their daily powers are OFTEN reliable, so that's quite different from, say a wizard as well (I can't think of even one reliable wizard daily).

So, what you will find with the fighter is that the 'beats' are MUCH less concerned with which powers do I have available, and much more concerned with action economy, movement, marking, use of action points, etc. Honestly, you don't even really look to dailies for 'big moves' in fighter land. They can HELP, but what you really look for is some synergistic situation where you can AP, your buddy the warlord can pump you up, etc.

The Wizard by contrast is HEAVILY oriented around daily power. He can do some interesting things with at-will/encounter powers, definitely, but its mostly about when and where the daily will entirely whack the enemy's plans. While there are certainly many synergies and fiddlings with implements and such its much less about that stuff than about "Wall of Ice" is going to hose the bad guys NOW, HERE.

Playing each of these is radically different. Enough that I can remember one day when one player who was running, I think, a warden, had switched to wizard, and all of a sudden she 'got it' and the encounters went from difficult to cheese in one round. She'd just been playing a wizard like a warden, and they are completely different beasts. This is the reality of 4e, each class is really unique.

 

[James Gasik]

With respect, I think the 4e Monk is far more than not non-functional; it is the best version of the class in all editions of the game, IMO.

The Monk is fine, if you can wrap your head around it's Full Discipline mechanic. I saw a few people struggle with it.

The Psion isn't actually bad, but it suffers mostly because the Wizard exists, with better powers and more support. That's true for most Controllers, mind you, outside of the Invoker, who wasn't as powerful, but could do things the Wizard couldn't.