Okay people, a little wake up call.

[Greg K]

I promise all of you will will be okay with 4th edition.

No we all won't. Despite agreeing with many of the stated goals and admitting 3e has some problems, I am pretty much disapponted with 4e. Barring one or two things I might be forgetting, the only changes that I consider that the designers of 4e to have gotten right are:
- increasing starting hp (no more wizards dying by housecat)
- making many of the racial abilities into feats
- skill challenges (granted, I have Unearthed Arcana and complex skill checks, but nice to see it)
- passive perception
- toning down spellcasters (but per encounter/daily still suck and the Elements of Magic books for 3e do the same thing while being much better magic systems. My opnion of course)
- possibly the multiclassing rules
- providing a couple of build examples for each class
- the idea of rituals (but I have this in UA with incantations)
- the changes to the planes (removing the Great Wheel, introducing the Feywild)
- removing certain spells (e.g., rope trick)


On the other hand, I dislike
- per encounter/daily powers,
- paragon paths and epic destinies (at least prestige classes in 3e are optional)
- the changes to skills and removal of skill ranks
- the paladin's divine challenge and marking
- a whole bunch of other stuff including many of the powers for various classes.
I ifnd the above things not fun, many are just cheesey, and negate any benefit from the things I do like.

I would much rather stick with the core 3e, Unearthed Arcana, a few other select WOTC books ( primarily MM2, Fiend Folio, Heroes of Horror, and the dedicated monster books (excluding Libris Mortis)), existing third party support, and a couple of house rules rather than trying to rewrite 4e into something I will enjoy.

 

[smathis]

Anyway, not wanting to pick your post apart or anything . Just happens that I use the UA system in my 3e games, and wanted to mention that "5 successes before 3 failures" and skill checks over more time than rounds was present in that system .

It's all good, Mark. I was reading the SRD prior to the post and obviously screwed the pooch on those parts because I went back and (voila!) there they were. My bad.

I still think the changes to the 4e core rules make it more hospitable to non-combat types of encounters than 3e. There are some improvements to the mechanic in 4e. And it's good that the complexities and XP are now nailed down -- as opposed to just a DM kind of guessing/fudging it. Having them as part of the core rules is a big plus too, in my book.

But I don't need to hide behind an obvious screw-up to hold those points. Foot-meet-mouth. My bad on that.

Thanks for the correction.

 

[Aus_Snow]

MAKE IT UP !!!!! STOP RELYING ON EVERYTHING TO BE SPELLED OUT FOR YOU.

Why should anyone have to, if they just don't want to buy into 4e. That's right, they don't have to. They can work with something closer to what they want in the first place. Less work tinkering then, hence more actually productive time. Equals good. Some have already found their perfect game. Why on Earth should they buy into something less than perfect for their group. That's right, they shouldn't.

I promise all of you will will be okay with 4th edition.

Wrong. We know enough already that no group I have anything to do with will be OK with it. Er, except if you mean being OK with its existence, in which case, sure! Yep, it exists.

 

[Mark Hope]

It's all good, Mark. I was reading the SRD prior to the post and obviously screwed the pooch on those parts because I went back and (voila!) there they were. My bad.

I hate it when the SRD does that, changing its content when I'm not looking

I still think the changes to the 4e core rules make it more hospitable to non-combat types of encounters than 3e. There are some improvements to the mechanic in 4e. And it's good that the complexities and XP are now nailed down -- as opposed to just a DM kind of guessing/fudging it. Having them as part of the core rules is a big plus too, in my book.

Agreed. In an evolving system I'd say that's one of the greatest advantages that a new edition has over its predecessors - it can incorporate several years of developments into the core rules. (I was actually hoping that 3e would have a fixed version of the point-buy class construction system from 2.5 and was really disappointed when it didn't.)

But I don't need to hide behind an obvious screw-up to hold those points. Foot-meet-mouth. My bad on that.

Thanks for the correction.

No worries - glad you took it in the spirit it was intended .

 

[SSquirrel]

When 3E reached a sufficient "critical mass" of rules, people more readily switched in droves. WotC released 3.5

Fixed that one for ya Henry

 

[Kesh]

Fixed that one for ya Henry

I'd advise against "fixing" posts. That particular FARKism tends to be frowned on here.

 

[SSquirrel]

This was fixing to make a humorous point tho, not fixing to denigrate a poster. Timing wise, the critical mass timeframe that would be around the time 3.5 was released.

 

[noretoc]

Alright, then. But please recognize that the game has a fundamentally different design goal than what you want. It's like saying "boy, this chocolate cake sure is disappointing" while eating a bagel.

Actually no. It is like ordering a chocolate cake from a place that I used to get cake all the time from and loved it. Then the chef comes out and says, here is your chocolate cake and puts a bagel in front of me. Then tells me about all the great flavors of of chocolate cake we have now, the garlic, the onion, the raisin.....

 

[hong]

In MY day, generic food metaphors involved ice cream and peanut butter, and we LIKED it.

 

[pemerton]

And most importantly some people wanted to do different things with the classes.

<snip>

I like my systems to give me options. I want complexity most people find unnecessary. I want to give my character useless skills such as "profession: librarian" so I can smirk on the inside as I make my character (mechanically) more "rounded" while I watch people min-max their character and then wonder why it isn't that much fun to play afterwards.

The edition doesn't matter. Power gamers will always clash with roleplayers.

Both these quotes suggest that the gamers in question are playing the wrong RPG. RPGs exist which include mechanical representation of both "adventuring" skills and "background" skills, and in which it is possible to make choices about trading off one against the other while at the same time it is possible to avoid gimping one's character. Examples (which are otherwise quite different) include Rolemaster, Runequest and HeroQuest.

The problem with 3E is not that it permits (or even forces) hard choices, but that it is poorly designed, insofar as it makes it almost impossible to build a mechanically viable character who also has background skills.

3E provided substantive tools to support that style of play, sure, but it also provided substantive tools to support a style of play geared in a completely different direction AND tools to support a style of play that sat on the fence. That wasn't really new either, but a certain level of customization and granularity was new.

I don't agree with this, for the following reason:

In 3e, you had to make stuff up in order to make all those profession and crafting skills seem useful in an RP setting. It's not like NPCs had a "hunger" attribute against which the profession (cooking) skill would be used and 3e lacked the "no tastebud" feat that would give someone +5 to their save versus profession (cooking) when used in an attempt to sway their opinion of you.

The difference is that in 4e the designers seem to have decided that because there was no system fully supporting a librarian skill or cooking skill, and no system supporting the "12 hours a day of WoW" feat, that those subsystems were outside the scope of the rule book. It's not like they WERE in the scope of 3e -- that system simply provided you the ability to spend your skill points in ways that made it so that you were sub-optimal in all the systems 3e DID have rules for.

This identifies a further problem of 3E - it has character build mechanics that are unsupported by action resolution or reward mechanics. In this respect it also differs from such otherwise diverse games as RQ, RM or HQ.

Instead of Rogue let me say, renaissance man. I want the third son of a Baron who's quite learned in different things (Rogue gives enough skill points for this) and fights with a light blade style. Rogue in third edition fits this perfectly and it's not an uncommon concept.

<snip>

Some people consider it the most fun if the game from one battle to another. Perhaps loosely connected with a story and a goal or two. 4.0 is perfect for these people. It's build for tactics, balanced fighting etc. If they made the renaissance character I mentioned earlier they would love the 4.0 version.

Another extreme might be people who want to deal with other aspects of the world. Let's say the renaissance character managed to win a keep and wanted to deal with the administration, hold a ball and talk to some people about art and woo the girls there so he could marry her and add more land to his own (a more political social based game) then 3.x seems a lot better then 4.0.

Leaving aside that the 3E Rogue is an assassin (via Sneak Attack) rather than a reneissance man (the 3E Bard more closely fits this archetype), the notion that 3E is well-suited for playing the sort of game you describe is pretty implausible. It has no real mechanics to support social interaction, it has no mechanics at all to support wooing girls or dealing with landed titles and it has no Administration skill (perhaps Profession could be adapted, but as noted above Profession in 3E is a skill without a mechanic).

Also, your suggestion about the sort of player to whom 4e would appeal appears a little condescending. Just as 4e has more sophisticated combat mechanics than 3E, so did Runequest and Rolemaster than AD&D. It doesn't follow that either of those games produced a less serious approach to play.

I don't think 3.0 is really any less geared towards tactics and balanced fighting. I don't think the primacy of combat in any version of D&D is really a debatable point.

<snip>

4e is the first edition of D&D where skills really shine.

<snip>

Now, if you're looking for a system that arguably does it better, then I could not disagree if you'd compared 4e to HeroQuest, Hero's Banner or (maybe) the new Song of Ice and Fire.

But 3e?

Hopefully you don't mean 3e which has virtually no social system. Perhaps you mean 4e, which has an easy to use non-combat challenge system that looks to work very well and is quite flexible when it comes to systematized social games.

Both QFT.

4E's skill challenge system will get more people more involved in noncombat interaction than 3E's unfocused menagerie of skills, without any directions for use, ever did.

I think this almost goes without saying. Where well-designed mechanics lead, play will follow.