Why do you keep playing 4e?

[ExploderWizard]

We don't get to play any games as often as we would like to. Our group is still in KOTS and just barely 3rd level. We are playing because we have yet to explore what the higher level tiers of play offer. Curiosity and experimentation for us. We have fun as a group no matter what we play.

 

[Storminator]

The nature of our campaign has had us in a small number of large scale fights each combat.

I love that moment half way thru the fight when everyone looks around the table and says "dang*, we're all going to die," and then everyone knuckles down and cranks up the tactics and the teamwork and we scrape thru with only one or two PCs left standing. And those PCs have to rush around the battlefield and heal everyone before the 3rd death save comes up.

Oh, and I love the mage saying "dang*, I'm tanking again, aren't I?" as he beats down the last few monsters.

PS

*Actual game table language may vary...

 

[Nightchilde-2]

For the first time ever, D&D is fun in every aspect IMHO.

That said, we will be switching systems in July, but it's not because of any sort of dislike of 4e on the part of anyone in my group..that's just how we roll. We like a variety of systems in my group. Too many good games, not enough time so we occasionally switch things up.

And I plan to leave the party with one Hell of a cliffhanger...

 

[smdmcl]

The game is fast, fun and exciting. When I play there is tension at the table during combat and we still get to roleplay as often, if not more (faster combat), than we did before.

I have also started to DM again. Something I have not done in ~10 years. The open-ended rules and monster design have me planning a story and easily filling it with NPCs for the party to interact with. I started with KotS and am filling the space in between TL with plot of my own to link the two modules. I'm enjoying it so much I wish I had not bought the modules and decided to homebrew the campaign instead.

I feel like I can write down any and all ideas in my head and fill them so easily with encounters (DDI is awesome). It's a pleasure to be a DM again.

 

[balard]

Because i fell free. I always had pride of my system mastery and knowledge in 3e Ed, but after DMing 4e, i finally fell free again, like the old times of OD&D, and can be really free to make my adventures. I'm having a blast DMing, and my players are sure having a blast playing.

 

[Gothmog]

We just finished our last 3.5 campaign (my bard laid the final blow on the aspect of Lloth, I'm so thrilled.) I've been playing 3e from the start, and D&D for 27 years.

4e is already, hands down, my favorite edition. Since the first time since shortly after D&D was published, it is on the cutting edge of RPG design. 3.5 always felt like the elaboration of prior editions. I appreciated the cleanup of the basic mechanics (AC vs. THAC0, DC ratings, etc.) but 3.5 ultimately suffered from issues that had always hounded D&D. I really feel as if those have been fixed.

ALL of my issues with 3.5 have been addressed.

A. Miniatures don't just look cool, they're fun to move around. Lots of miniature movement action. In 3.5 I used to joke that the minis were just for the first two rounds of combat, then everybody stayed very still moving only when opponents fell. Now the slide, push, pull, and otherwise jockey for position each turn. No more PCs just moving up and LAPDing some poor beast into the ground.

B. PCs are special. They operate on their own ruleset, which means I don't have to make the equivalent of a dozen PCs each week. I once spent three hours designing a villain that a single PC took down in three rounds, stunning him each round so he never got to do a single damn thing. Which brings me to. . .

C. DM friendly. Oh man oh man. It is so easy to make interesting encounters quickly. Skill challenges are a codification of what I've been doing for years. Finally I have a structure to players making investigations, crossing dangerous terrain, attempting to fortify a ruined castle, and all that jazz. Traps have logic behind them, and their use is dramatic instead of annoying.

D. Campaign structure. I love the Heroic, Paragon, Epic levels of play. High level play in 3.5 was so slow. Our group stopped the Ravenloft campaign because we couldn't do two encounters in one session. Play became that slow. I haven't done high level play in 4e yet, but what I see looks very promising. In particular, I like that ability "graduate" over levels so nothing is useless at high level.

E. Modular rules that are clear. I love that everything is so well defined and modular in nature. As someone who actively recruits people into the game, the learning curve is very daunting. The new game is very accessible, although there is still a lot, they learn it in increments by level. Turns a negative into a strength, which brings us to.

F. Better mechanics. Healing surges, at-will/encounter/daily powers, roles for classes. races have greater impact, action points (players always want more actions per turn), extended rests, the list goes on and on. Finally
D&D has a rule engine for, well, playing D&D. Stops silliness like characters buying CLW wands even though they can't use them, so they can give them to a guy who can use them, a backdoor healing surge if I ever saw one.

G. Dynamic combat. I love the groups of monsters in dynamic terrain. I was always pushing for this in 3.5, and it felt forced every time. Now I have a long range of tools (which will increase over time!) to produce interesting combats.

I could probably cover enough points to fill out the rest of the alphabet, but I love 4e and I'm not going back. I'm collecting all my 3.5 books (except the books I'm published in) and selling them on ebay for dinero to buy 4e books with.

Thank you Wizards for 4e.

Great post Firebeetle, you hit pretty much everything that makes 4e a far superior gaming experience for me and my groups. I'll add a couple points I particilarly enjoy as well.

H. While magic items are still assumed to be a part of the game, they are not the core of the character's abilities like they were in 3.x. Gone are the days of the magic item Xmas trees! Now, the abilities and skills of the character are of the most importance, and while magic items are nice to have, they aren't necessary.

I. The new cosmology gets my brain going, and is far more compelling than the old one. I loves me some Shadowfell, Feywild, Astral Sea, Elemental Chaos, and Primordials!

J. 4e has a MUCH more solid framework to build on than 3e. The math works at all levels (we've played 1-7th, 15th, and 25th level adventures) without falling apart, and prepping and running high level games is EASY. I don't think WotC has even started to do some of the cool stuff the 4e system could handle- the next 5-7 years are going to be an exciting time!

K. I like that 4e focuses more on teamwork and mastery of PLAYING the game, rather than system mastery. I'd noticed this over the years of 3e, but it wasn't until someone earlier in the thread linked to a Monte Cook article saying they designed 3e to be a system mastery game that I realized the designers intentionall did this. IMO, thats horrible game design. While all games have some system mastery (even 4e), making it a core goal of game design seems like flawed reasoning, and counter to actually playing the game. Basically, this is saying that they designed the game to be fun for some people (rules lawyers), at the expense of others (more casual gamers, or ones that didn't get into system mastery). I know over the years I saw many new players take a look at the 3e books, and say "no thanks", or get frustrated when someone who put system mastery first made a PC that completely overshadowed their character. Thankfully, that reasoning is now gone.

L. 4e is new player friendly. In the entire run of 3e, I tried to recruit 9 new players- only one stuck with it, and he was really into number crunching. During the last six months, I've tried to recruit 4 new players, and ALL of them are sticking with it (and three of them are women who tried 3e and HATED it). The game is streamlined and easy to understand, without all the rules minutiae and baggage of 3e, but its still complex enough to allow for experienced players to be satisfied too. Thats a win/win situation!

M. Making monsters is a ton of fun. I like that monsters are not designed around the same principles PCs are. That means I can just design a monster how I want, and if I follow the guidelines, I can be 95% assured that it won't be over or under-powered, and will be a fun experience for the players. Compared to this, the whole CR/EL thing was a complete mess.

 

[malraux]

I like 4e so far. I am having fun and so are the players. We like the tactical miniatures side of things.(one likes this side too much IMO) Its quick and easy to run, everyone has maneuvers, even if overpriced I really dig rituals.

But since I saw this and the legion of THIS responses, I got to ask why this? The enjoyment of designing an adventure to me comes from the story and personalities I create. The mechanics of a system are totally irrelevant to that. What does 4e give you that makes it fun to create an adventure for? Honest question, not trying to be snarky or a threadcrapper.

As you note, preparing plot and personalities are largely system irrelevant. But I find that DnD is a combat based game system (or at least that's what I play the game for). Prior to this, I had only really played and run 3e. I found that 3e worked against me as much as with me. For example, in 3e, when I was running EtCRavenloft, while the story and personalities were awesome, the combats were horrid. Undead heavy adventures are rough. The rouge gets screwed (because sneak attack doesn't work), the tank character gets screwed because undead often bypass hitpoints by attacking ability scores, the cleric often feels screwed because the ability to inflict long term status effects (like permanent ability drain) were not keyed to the ability of the cleric to remove those effects. That's the system actively working against you.

In addition, its hard to make creatures tougher (and almost impossible to make creatures easier). Yes, tossing a level of barbarian on a melee monster is actually fairly easy, but not tossing a level or two of a caster class. In addition, a 3e stat block is usually not "complete". I can't just copy and paste a 3e stat block into my notes and be ready. I need to figure out what the spell like abilities do and make sure I understand what its tactics should be. A lot of 3e monsters have entirely pointless attack and damage lines, because their usefulness isn't in their bite (that does 1d4-1 damage), its hidden inside the abilities section. By contrast, a 4e monster has its attacks listed, usually ranked by power. A keyword at the top lets me know its rough tactics (soldiers and brutes run up, artillery hangs back, lurkers lurk, etc) which lets me set monsters down without too many mistakes.

 

[Wootz]

I like 4e so far. I am having fun and so are the players. We like the tactical miniatures side of things.(one likes this side too much IMO) Its quick and easy to run, everyone has maneuvers, even if overpriced I really dig rituals.

But since I saw this and the legion of THIS responses, I got to ask why this? The enjoyment of designing an adventure to me comes from the story and personalities I create. The mechanics of a system are totally irrelevant to that. What does 4e give you that makes it fun to create an adventure for? Honest question, not trying to be snarky or a threadcrapper.

The difference between writing an adventure for a game and writing a book is quite something, actually. I could write up all kinds of neat stories all day, but making them fun to play can be difficult in some respects (because your environments have to be interactive and actually FUN) and I think 4e alleviates that problem with it's simple DMing tools

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Because it's the first edition of D&D I've played that I actually prefer to competing games. Every prior edition has been, to one extent or another, something I would only play as a compromise because I couldn't get a group to agree to a different system; D&D 4e is a game I will actively seek out.

(I'd be just as happy to play Spirit of the Century and would tolerate Mongoose Traveler if only for its lifepath character generation; anything else would be a tough sell.)

 

[ScottS]

Playing it because I have a semi-reliable group of people to play with. Otherwise I'm not getting a real positive vibe from 4e in general, so this is a case of "somewhat boring D&D on a regular schedule" trumping "no D&D". (Actually I have another group playing 3.0/3.5, which is a more interesting and fun game/system, but they're students with weird outside activities, so on a given week it's maybe 60/40 that we'll actually play.)