D&D 4E In Defense of 4E - a New Campaign Perspective

doctorbadwolf said:

I never found RP in 4e difficult. I think they key is to ignore the printed adventures or liberally hack them, and to just play how you want. The game is extremely robust. The only problem you’ll run into is slow combat, and we found that we could just halve all monster HP values and it works fine.

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I agree with you in general, but that is not what [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is talking about. He/she has an issue with what he/she feels the mechanics are telling him/her about the game world. When he/she sees a minion at 1HP it makes no sense to him/her - he/she doesn't know what that means and thus cannot role play it. And there several more mechanics that create the same problem for him/her.

These are not issue I or my group had, but they ones for him/her.

I mean, the game still functions without minions if you don't like them or can't make them fit with the narrative.
Part of the point of this thread is how to take the good stuff from 4e and run it in 2019. For example, I'm altering Skill Challenges.

4e was fun to play. On itself, it was a pretty good game.

It suffered in the same way that Xbox One suffers today.

The Marketing plan was incredibly ridiculous. They fashioned it after 3e thinking that it would be just as popular. 3e changed the base game more than 4e did (though with the addition of powers into the mix 4e SEEMS to have changed it more to many, and WotC's marketing did not help with htat) in the transition from the AD&D base to the D20 base. Thus they thought they could pull off the same stunts.

It worked for some. 4e sold faster right off the bat and more. It WAS successful, but later on hit many potholes that started showing some serious problems. The PR that started as it was announced sort of let it to that flailing end. The core rulebooks sold well, but beyond that things didn't work out as well as many higher ups probably hoped for.

The Xbox One has had similar difficulties, things which are still perceived to be bad with it today.

They came with the wrong view and it bombed them HARD.

But today the Xbox one has less DRM than the PS4 (and ironically THAT was one of the BIG things that killed it in it's initial announcement when they talked about EVERYTHING with Xbox One being basically onlined DRM'd). For downloaded games it allows people to change their console more often and offline far more than Sony does. Sony is all about the DRM these days while Xbox has backed off Greatly.

The PS4 doesn't have backwards compatibility, the Xbox One doesn't really have it either but after failing so hard they found they HAD to change it up and made a backwards compatibility type emulation so that people could play the older Xbox games.

These things have not really helped. That initial PR damaged them so badly that even as they've made great sales with the Xbox One, they probably will never even come close to being a contender vs. the PS4.

I see the same thing happened with 4e. As a system, it actually was a pretty good system. It got better as time went on. However, that PR at the beginning was a complete disaster. It had the opposite effect then I think they intended.

Customers were REALLY put off by it. When they went to buy the 4e corebooks many didn't do it because they thought it was a fabulous system they were buying. They were doing it just to see what it was and with a biased view so that anything they could think of to back up their opinion that 4e was a mistake could be utilized to back up their bad feelings towards it. To say many players were upset is probably the understatement of the decade!

Many of those that bring up things that experienced 4e players know are wrong today are remnants of those hard feelings brought on by BAD PR and BAD marketing.

A prime example is the one that says you cannot roleplay or roleplaying is less of a factor in 4e. It isn't. If there is less roleplaying in 4e it is for the same reason there would be less roleplaying in AD&D or 3e or 5e. It's the Groups (or DM's) choice to play it like that.

I enjoyed 4e, though I personally would have preferred that the powers and such were streamlined (so rather than having different various powers, one could if they wished simply have ONE powerful encounter power they could use multiple times a day if that's how they wanted to play...etc...etc...etc) and other factors. I thought the game was fun.

Today though, I play very little 4e. Overall, I prefer 5e in my own gaming currently. I still play a good amount of AD&D and also occasionally 3.5 or a 3.5/pathfinder mix, but 4e isn't one of the games that we play much.

I'd say that if one WANTS to play 4e, do what I do with AD&D. AD&D can be a beast to find gamers locally that want to play. Instead get friends who may have an interest but do not really play much and start your own game and recruit them as players. This way I get to play the game version I wish too, even when there seems to be on players around that play that version.

My current game campaign of D&D (BECMI) just started last month in Mid-December and is still going on. Games never die as long as someone wants to play it...the key is being the spark that lights the fire of a campaign.

dave2008 said:

I chose the make them hit harder option with good success. The DMG42 blog did a great analysis about PC HP vs Monster damage. As PC level when up, monster damage went down relative to PC Hit Point inflation. Thus, you had monsters who did less damage (relatively) at 30th level and than you did at 1st level. They created a revised damage by level table to solve this problem. I tweaked it a little more myself and had good success with it.

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Hmm, interesting! I wish I had known about that revised table at the time.

Retreater said:

I mean, the game still functions without minions if you don't like them or can't make them fit with the narrative.
Part of the point of this thread is how to take the good stuff from 4e and run it in 2019. For example, I'm altering Skill Challenges.

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Color me intrigued. I still like to use Skill Challenges in 5E, so I'm interested to hear what alterations you are thinking about.

DM Howard said:

Hmm, interesting! I wish I had known about that revised table at the time.

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Here is the post from DMG 42: http://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/boot-on-face-of-level-1-damage-forever.html

And my version of the table is included with my 4e Epic Updates which are in the download section: http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1367

This amount of damage will start to put the spice back in the game

Retreater said:

I mean, the game still functions without minions if you don't like them or can't make them fit with the narrative.
Part of the point of this thread is how to take the good stuff from 4e and run it in 2019. For example, I'm altering Skill Challenges.

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The point is that some folks don't like games that aren't trying to simulate a world. Others don't have a problem with it.

IMO 4e has a lot less world simulation and a lot more genre emulation in its design. If you want to role play in a fantasy novel or movie, I personally think the 4e structures are actually better for doing that than other editions of D&D.

But if you want to think of the game as a simulated world that has its own physical rules that the game rules are trying to describe, then 4e is going to be a game engine that isn't for you. Because the physics of it are somewhat arbitrary. Because they aren't trying to simulate a world they're trying to emulate a narrative genre, so you get things like minions having one hit point (because narratively they're there to provide a minor obstacle that can be dealt with in one or two actions, not a long-term threat) or challenges that scale with tier (because narratively you aren't going to put the low level hero and the epic hero in front of the same locked door), etc.

(Another problem many folks have with 4e that comes from the same root is if they aren't interested in that particular narrative style. If you don't want to play a high heroic fantasy game, 4e requires a lot of tweaking. If you're in the mood for gritty realism it's probably the wrong game for you because the narrative it was built to support isn't gritty realism. You can make it work, but it requires you to make it work - it isn't there out of the box. For the same reason it's also not a good fit for a "zeroes to heroes" campaign which for some people is D&D. So I understand why many folks have issues with the engine, even if I consider it the best version of D&D so far for my table - because my campaigns tend to all be either high heroic or outright gonzo kitchen-sink fantasy, which 4e is able to do very, very well.)

dave2008 said:

Here is the post from DMG 42: http://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/boot-on-face-of-level-1-damage-forever.html

And my version of the table is included with my 4e Epic Updates which are in the download section: http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1367

This amount of damage will start to put the spice back in the game

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Thanks for the links. I'll definitely need to give it a go with those tables if I can wrangle some friends into it, but I've been thinking about resurrecting the Jilted Quill so I'm not sure I'll have the time.

DM Howard said:

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely need to give it a go with those tables if I can wrangle some friends into it, but I've been thinking about resurrecting the Jilted Quill so I'm not sure I'll have the time.

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Thank you for the link - I just subscribed to your thread. Love to see more Jilted Quill!

Combats Take Forever
I only found this when we started playing 4E. As we got to know the rules, and players got to know what their characters can do, things sped up. I'd add that , as a DM you have know how to finish combat early to avoid grind.

You Can't Roleplay
I found that the combat is too sugary to resist. Your character sheet is covered in awesome thing you can do in combat, but no awesome thing s you can do out of combat. It doesn't mean you can't can't.

"Bored" or "Board"?
I very quickly started adding 4E elements to make combat more interesting

DM Howard said:

I really enjoyed 4E, I would say the only issues I really had were:

Properly creating a sense of threat for the player characters.

The PCs became so good at what they did, both in use of their stats, equipments, abilities, and tactics that became very hard to put the fear of God into them. I often felt like I had to go completely overboard to make a threat real.

"Forty guardsmen surround the party and another twenty with crossbows aim down from the rooftops. 'Surrender or face immediate execution!' shouts Port Town's bailiff."

"Eh, we can take 'em." says the party.

Ability Bloat

4E, once you got up to level six or so started to get really heavy with the sheer amount of options open to a player at any one point in time. There were many times I found myself or other players hung up during combat because we still aren't sure what we should do. Good old decision paralysis. I'm not sure of a good way to fix this besides simply ignoring most of your abilities.

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I don't disagree with either of these points, which is one reason I felt that heroic tier 4e was the best version of 4e. Really, I think the Neverwinter Campaign Setting book was the platonic ideal of what a good 4e campaign would look like.