The Early Verdict (kinda long)

[The Little Raven]

The trouble with this is, due to character classing, one choice implies (even requires) another. More flexibility in character design ameliorates that... like the archery tree in 3E being available to anyone... not just the guy who knows a lot about the wilds.

Well, giving all kinds of abilities to any kind of character kinda defeats the purpose of classes. That's why particular sets of capabilities are drawn together into a single place. It's just like in previous editions, where if you wanted to be a healer or a blaster, you had to be a cleric or a wizard. Forcing class restrictions on certain things (spellcasting, for example), but not others (melee or ranged combat, for example) is inconsistent design.

 

[The Little Raven]

So to build this kind of characters you have to ignore rules. Strangely in 3E you didn't have to do that. So which edition does support this kind of characters better?

In 3e, if I wanted to make a character that wasn't sub-optimal, I had to ignore a whole lot of rules, specifically the ones that they made sub-optimal on purpose to serve as newbie traps.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Nothing at all. What in 4th Edition allows me to play a character who is required to be cunning, witty or ingenuous? Maybe it's too fine a distinction, but I happen to like sometimes playing a character who has those qualities in lieu of kick ass combat ablities, rather than in addition to them.

Okay, I think I understand what you've been trying to say in this thread. You're saying that the sweet, sweet temptation of effective combat abilities makes it much more difficult to concentrate on playing a character who survives by being cunning, witty and ingenious. Only by deliberately crippling the character can you experience the exhilaration of surviving only by your wits as a player. Leaving yourself no other options forces creativity.

It's just like how some mountain climbers want to climb without using ropes or safety equipment. Sure you can wear the safety harness and then pretend it's not there, but it's not the same. For the real rush, climbers like that need to know that letting go of the rocks means death.

And it's true that 3E lets you do that by the rules, and 4E won't. But let's be honest, even in 3E you were deliberately circumventing the intent of the rules when you did something like that. Sure, there was nothiing in the rules to prevent your character from spending all his feats on Skill Focus: Farm Equipment and the like, or your cleric worshipping a god who didn't grant spells. Still, that's not how the game is designed to work.

For 4E, yes you have to deliberately break the rules for something like that. You have to say, "My PC isn't going to take any powers, even though the rules say he should. My PC is only going to have one healing surge, just like an NPC." And that's not supported by the rules. You have to house rule it.

All in all, i think that's a good thing. Disengaging the safety harness should be something a player does deliberately, in full understanding of what they're doing. It's not something that should be allowed to happen to a PC by accident. So yes, to free climb you need to house rule.

But here's something you may not have seen yet. In the DMG, there are some actual guidelines for PCs who want to "stunt it". If instead of hitting the ogre with a sword, you want to shove the flaming brazier on top of him, there's support for that in the rules. It tells the DM how to adjudicate something like that instead of winging it. I think that's pretty useful.

 

[BraveSirRobin]

I will preface my comment by saying that I don't have the 4e books yet and haven't read more then a few pages of them. I certainly haven't played under the new ruleset, yet. As such, my comments have nothing to do as a commentary on 4e.

That being said, I am quite shocked to have read comments in this thread that 3.x is better for social/political games. IMHO, 3.x is horrible for these types of skill challenges/ games mostly because the characters are so unbalanced for those types of encounters. I tend to DM many adventures, all PBP, and almost always ignore/supplement/change skills rules in 3.x so that most of the characters aren't standing around doing nothing for most encounters. Someone brought up the notion of the encounter to fix farm equipment so that the character with the skill in farming can use that skill. So what are the other characters doing? Nothing. In fact the majority of the classes are just standing around during these encounters unless they act totally out of the ruleset, which I always allow. So, unless you tend to run games of only rogues and bards in your games, the 3.x ruleset is just totally broken for social/political games. The fact that people claim that 4e is worse scares the bejeezus out of me.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Non-adventuring skills. 3E has a variety of non-adventuring skills which can be the launching point of any number of social/non-adventuring encounters and plot hooks.
Oriental Adventures (1st edition) included non-weapon proficiencies that could be extremely important in the highly stratified world of the samurai, where warriors were expected to exhibit refined social graces as well as martial prowess. These non-weapon prpficiencies were incorporated into at least 2 adventures published by TSR. One of these was a tea ceremony, the other an impromptu poetry contest during a moon viewing event. Good performance could lead to a better political connection with the daimyo.
Now, you could model some of these options with raw ability checks, but then you end up with someone doing really well just because they happen to have a good Int or Cha rather than having actually devoted time and effort to the craft (as rated by the spending of non-weapon proficiencies or skill ranks). Or you have the DM kind of hand-wave it. I'm not saying that it's wrong for the DM to hand wave it but then you're not really rewarding a player's investment in a road less traveled, where they tried to carve out a really unique niche for themselves.

The DMG's advice on this is to just let the player make up whatever backstory they want for their PC and then make it relevent in play. So if your PC is a former cabinet maker, then you get a big bonus on a perception check to notice a cabinet with a false bottom and you let them build a cabinet without rolling if they want to. Yes the DM is "winging it" but not really more so than deciding that this sort of thing come up in any prior edition. The only difference is that now the DM is winging both the situation coming up and the bonus it gives, instead of just the situation coming up.

The protest against doing it this way that I've heard in the past is, "Well, some munchkin player will just have his PC have 50 backgrounds in order to get bonuses on everything." To which my response is, so what? Having a character with a stable and consistent backstory is a reward in itself.

By the way, I also recommend handling languages this way, if your campaign world has multiple regional langauages rather than "Common". Let the character speak whatever languages makes sense from their backstory, and let them learn new languages if they spend in-game time doing so.

 

[Dark Eternal]

I don't understand your point. Are you saying that my enjoyment of my heroic character is dependent on you playing a character who is sub par in combat? Are you saying vice versa? Its been ages since I played in a campaign where someone was playing an intentionally gimped character. Everyone in my 3e games played characters designed for, amongst other things, combat effectiveness. Was I not having fun, and I just didn't notice?

My original point was simply this: some players/characters/parties/gaming groups play the game with certain priorities, and others have others. Your enjoyment of your heroic character may not be dependent on me playing a character who is sub par in combat, or vice versa. Perhaps Juan's enjoyment of his heroic character is. Maybe everyone in my 3e game plays characters designed for, amongst other things, a higher-than-usual degree of challenge from the game's combat encounters due to their character's lack of combat effectiveness, which they make up for with cunning, ingenuity and wit. Maybe my players in my thursday night campaign didn't like the fact that their combat effectiveness was of no use to them when they encountered the ancient dracolich, and they were forced to rise to the occasion by talking their way out of certain death by finding some way to manipulate the creature using social wiles instead... and maybe by next thursday night, that was all they could talk about. The point I'm really making is, the options that the game provides define at least a certain bare minimum of the world in which the characters live, breathe and think. In 3rd edition, the options allowed that world to be nearly as dynamic and realistic as the player's imaginations combined with the DM's creativity could allow. Is this same thing true in 4th edition? Not yet, certainly - there's only a little bit of material out there so far. But from looking at what they've already got, do I have reason to rest assured that my game world will be every bit as fully realized as my 3rd edition one was?

In a dynamic world, all kinds of people may be motivated by events to try and take up the gauntlet of becoming a heroic adventurer. Some of them will be true heroes, destined from birth to be mighty conquerers or fearsome warriors or what have you. Some may be farm equipment builders. Some of them may even be former villians, redeemed from lives devoted to the most insidious of evils by the selfless love of an innocent woman, who now want to atone for the sins of their past. Even 3rd edition didn't make room for all of these would-be heroes, but I think it made room for more of them than 4th edition does.

In a dynamic world, some of those people may be useless at killing things, but good at persuading things not to kill them. Some may be afraid of their own shadow, but able to stand before a King and convince him before all and sundry that they deserve to be equipped and sent forth to slay the dragon that sunders the land. Some may even be sickly, weak mages who have given their all for their magic, and who manipulate the actions of their supposed allies from behind the scenes to weave a tapestry that will guide them to a destiny greater than any dared or feared. Does 3rd edition allow me to portray more of these things than 4th edition does? Does it allow me to do so more convincingly?

There is certainly no reason to say that you can't do things in 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, because the truth is it's our game. We can do what we damn well please with it, whether it's designed to do it or not. But it's going to do it better if it IS designed to do it. And if I've gotten the impression that it's not, from what I've seen so far, then perhaps it's me not looking at it right... or perhaps it's the game not being designed to do it. I don't know which. But I've not yet seen a single person say "4th edition lets players do so many more different types of characters than 3rd edition did!"

 

[jackston2]

A lot of problems can be solved by creativity.

The wizard who can only cast one spell? That's easy! All of his powers are the same spell, but he's using that spell creatively each time.

Like, say he has the spell that summons a bit of ice. Magic missile is him throwing the ice... sleep is flash hypothermia brought on by freezing the air... Wall of shadows is a whirling blizzard... etc etc.

As he grows he's discovering how to creatively use that simple spell: summon ice, in new and exciting ways during tense life or death moments!

Heck, when he desperately tries out a new technique in the heat of combat (can he blind the enemy by freezing his eyes shut?) and it works, that meant he had gained a new power.

 

[helium3]

But my players are accustomed to being able to approach my primary campaigns with the expectation that the game will last for years, that it will ultimately be the vehicle for their most memorable characters on their epic journey to higher levels and greater and greater stories... I take my obligation to them, to focus on making the game as rich and rewarding as possible, very seriously.

And I beg you to understand that we were very excited about the release of the new edition, with many of the issues it promised to address. I'm not saying it failed to meet our expectations, but I'm certainly going to examine it for long-term viability, given that Dungeons & Dragons is our game of choice, and most of us have been playing it for more than 20 years.

And that's totally awesome!!

Just don't forget that 4E was designed with market research material that indicated that the vast majority of gaming groups don't last more than a year and a half at best. Thus, the game is designed more to appeal to that group of people than a lucky SOB like you.

An approach I wouldn't mind using is switching systems depending on what's going on. 4E for combat encounters and something else for other things.

 

[LostSoul]

Dark Eternal,

What kind of mechanics do you use to support those things? Specifically:

• a higher-than-usual degree of challenge
• combat effectiveness of no use to PCs
• manipulating creatures using social wiles
• defining the world
• PCs able to persuade things not to kill them
• PCs who manipulate the actions of other characters

 

[Rel]

Hey, Mourn, just so's you know, you're edging toward getting booted from this thread. Tone it down a bit.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about 4e. I have now played it a couple times with my wife and daughter. I think it serves well as a cohesive rule system for the kind of games I ran for them. I think the PHB doesn't read particularly well and doesn't inspire me a lot. But that's ok. The game plays fine and I get inspiration from plenty of other places.

But something about it just feels a bit...limiting I guess. I can't quite place my finger on it but I think I'd sort of describe it as a bit of a "movie set feel". The world is pretty and shiny and a great backdrop for the adventures of the PC's. But if you glance behind it, you see that it's just a backdrop and not all that functional.

That peasant over there? He has whatever qualities that the GM decides he needs to be an adequate peasant. No mechanical underpinnings but that's not important. He's only a peasant. Same with the King. He's got whatever qualities a king has. Was he once a Fighter or Warlord? Is he NOW a Warlord? If the PC's aren't going to fight him, who cares?

Is this a bad thing? In many cases, no. I don't need to have the hardness of the walls of the peasant's hut written down. The PC's aren't going to try and knock it down anyway. It's unnecessary. But it also just feels a bit shallow to me.

I know that some of you are going to say, "What? You had the hardness of a peasant's hut written down in 3.x?!" No I didn't. So why can't I shake this feeling? I don't know. I've not puzzled it out yet.

However, I think I've made another realization as well: It may not matter for the foreseeable future.

My next game was probably going to trend towards a "back to basics" style fantasy RPG anyway. Nothing huge and fancy. No intricate backstory or grandiose plotlines already in place. Just some fairly lighteardted, kick in the door plots with enough NPC's and BBEG's to make the whole thing compelling. Maybe a bit of depth will generate itself as we go along.

Perhaps 4e is the perfect vehicle for this. I may give it a more full scale try than I'd been thinking. At very least I'm going to demo it for my gaming group for a night or two and see how it grabs them. If they like it better than Savage Worlds then I may well opt to use it for my beer & pretzels romp of a next campaign.

And if, by the end of that run, I find that 4e has more depth than I'm currently giving it credit for then dandy. We'll get some extra mileage out of it. And if not, no big deal. Plenty of other systems out there that we can use.