Does 4e limit the scope of campaigns?

[Thasmodious]

You know what I realized? You only stick to skills. Why? Because skills are the only means of interacting meaningfully outside of combat (well, not the "only" way, to be fair). You don't acknowledge that in 3e, many characters had useful powers that were not skill related at all - I gave you a list.

You gave a very skewed list, exaggerating things in 3e and downplaying and excluding things in 4e. You left out cantrips, cleric and paladin healing, dismissed rituals as ineffective. And you seem to not understand that you are not comparing two directly related things in the two skill systems. In 3e skill use was a single roll to accomplish an immediate goal, most often. In 4e, skill use is often part of an encounter in which multiple skill use, teamwork, and strategy are necessary. In 3e, a skill check got you up a wall. In 4e, a skill challenge is an XP giving encounter with rewards and consequences for failure. The value of skills and their impact on the gameworld have been increased in this edition.

In 4e, the only useful non-combat powers that PCs have access to are Skills, Rituals, and maybe a handful of utilities (and, as I said, those utilities are iffy, since they were designed with combat in mind).

Yes. Because as I've said, 4e blends freedom of character with mechanical support. This is a good thing. No instant win non combat spells. The players have to actually do things to "win" social encoutners, not just cast dominate. Characters have more balanced skill numbers against level based DCs so skill checks aren't mostly just auto-fail and auto-win. There are still plenty of ways to get creative with power use, many utilities useful outside of combat. You act like spells have to tell you how to be creative with them. You talk about web a lot, and some editions have a note on setting webs on fire. But no edition talks about using it as a safety net for a falling character. That is something the DM had to rule then and now. You aren't casting creatively if what you are doing is just part of the rules for the spell.

First off, 1e wasn't just about combat. It was also about getting treasure and exploration. If you read the rules-as-intended for 2e, a huge focus was put on RP and world-building. 3e was combat-centric, much like 4e... but many non-combat elements were kept in.

First off, I didn't say "just about". But combat-centric. Yes, it was. As was OD&D, Red Box, 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e, 6e. That's what D&D is.

Now, the reason people keep saying 4e is more about combat is because so much more of the book is dedicated to combat. Most of the PHB. Most of the DMG. All of the monster manual (since most monsters have lost their uses outside of a fight, except in flavour elements, unfortunately).

So is the PHB in every edition. The combat chapter of 3e and 4e is right at equal in length, and, as many people point out, 4e has fewer words per page. Most of the DMG is NOT dedicated to combat. Look at the table of contents again, you appear to have missed a few chapters. And every MM is about combat, in all editions. That's what we need monster stats for. We don't need stats to determine if goblins collect ceramic unicorns. We need to know stats, so adventurers can kill them. Anything else is story consideration and you don't need a stat for it.

Kind of admitting that having no rules for non-combat skills was a problem, eh?

Go back, read what I wrote again, and this time, really read it, try to understand it. What I said, and have said from the beginning, is that 4e is a great blend of freedom of character and mechanical support. Yes, mechanical support for certain things is good. Having rules for conflict resolution, which is an accurate description of the whole of the 4e rule system, is a good thing. You don't need mechanics to determine if your character is happy or sad. You need them to determine if your high charisma noble convinced the king to aid the party. You don't need them to say that your character can play an instrument or weave a basket or paint a picture. You need mechanics to support using your skills and abilities to overcome challenges. 4e does that better, with a streamlined, more flexible system than any other edition of the game.

If earlier editions of D&D were all about combat, there wouldn't have been spells like Charm Person, or Phantasmal Terrain, or Knock.

So since all those things are still in 4e, 4e is not all about combat. Undone by your own twisted web of justifications. Now THAT'S some creative casting.

 

[tyrlaan]

No. It does it better than the other editions, for all the reasons I state above. It removes the shackles of "system" where they served to constrain rather than free characters to interact meaningfully with the game (such as in the changes to the skill system in general and the way challenges work) rather than 4/5ths of the people gathered watching while the skill monkey did everything. There was a reason in 3e it came down to a single die roll, watching one player do everything is boring, so it needs to be over quickly.

I think the OP has made it quite clear at this point that he's not just talking about the skill system. In fact, I'd argue the skill system/skill challenges is the least of his concerns.

Of course I can't resist putting my 2 copper into the ring While I understand and somewhat agree with the argument that the 4e skill system "removes the shackles" of the system from non-combat skill use, I believe this interpretation is somewhat polarized by your experiences.

Firstly, there are GMs/players out there that will interpret the lack of an Appraise skill to mean characters just can't appraise things. We can argue until we're blue in the face over the relevancy of Appraise to a game and that's not my point. My point is, not everyone is the type to be able to just finagle some ad hoc rules if someone wants to, for example, play a jeweler turned adventurer (who would arguably be quite capable of sizing up items of worth). And while I use the omission of a skill as an example here, the OP's comments about how the Web power is written is another demonstration of this. While /you/ might be capable of going very outside of the box with these things, and therefore less is more to /you/, it's quite the opposite for others. And in their cases, less is just less.

Secondly, in 4e everyone is reasonably good at everything. Sure it prevents everyone waiting for the skill monkey to do her thing, but it introduces other problems. The two big problems I see are that it's just not very plausible and it's certainly not all that interesting when everyone can do everything.

3e tried, unsuccessfully, to legislate out of combat play with poorly designed and realized subsystems like crafting and skill monkeys. 4e dismisses that notion of unnecessarily constraining characters (hey, my dwarf can be a fighter AND a master brewer now!) by thinking that everything they can do has to have a stat. The players and DM are free to play the game, the way we did in the old days of 1e, where you didn't need the books to tell you how to roleplay your character. If you wanted your elf to be a master musician, you didn't need a perform skill, you needed a note under "background". NWP grew out of this and was a decent attempt to put some mechanics behind the freedom, but it fell a bit flat. Then 3e went way too far in the wrong direction. 4e has righted the ship and married the concepts of freedom of character with mechanica; support into a streamlined, easy to run system. A lot of people don't seem to really get this right now and see it is as less when, in essence, it's more. You'll hopefully come to realize the system's potential at some point. It would help to stop trying to spread nonsense comparisons between the game and video games.

It's a bit insulting to post up that "a lot of people" apparently have it all wrong and that their brains haven't pieced it together yet. Speaking for myself, I'd prefer if you could refrain from implications that if I or others don't see your point of view we are somehow mentally behind the curve.

Furthermore, comparing 4e to video games isn't a nonsense comparison. The OP makes a very arguable point. Just because you disagree with him doesn't make it "nonsense." 4e is clearly /heavily/ influenced by MMOs. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a whole different topic. But the simple fact that 4e plainly takes inspiration from video games makes comparisons to video games anything but nonsense. A tad off topic if we truly delve into it, but not nonsense.

All of this aside, I think the OP spelled out some pretty solid examples of non-combat /class features/ (not just skills) that existed in 3e but have went the way of the dodo in 4e. I've seen heaps of talk about skills but not a lot about class features. What I have seen rings a bit contradictory to me, however. A few folks have spoken out that they are happy spells like Speak with Dead are gone and that their absence /strengthens/ 4e non-combat resolutions (basically the less is more argument). I have two issues here:
1) In a world of magic, which DnD is, why wouldn't it be second nature to use magic to solve crimes? Conversely, why wouldn't it be second nature for villains/criminals to use magic to mask their crimes? Are folks running mysteries for the local police but sending the SWAT team (aka the PCs) in to investigate?
2) The less is more argument is based on the foundation that players and GMs alike can think outside the box, working out details and unwritten effects of abilities free of the "shackles" of written rules. So how can someone possess the creative chops to handle all of this but be completely foiled by Detect Evil?

 

[drothgery]

And, the 3e DMG tells DMs it is their responsability to know the abilities of their characters in their campaign and to go through the adventure and make the necessary alterations, because the designers don't know your group, what supplements you use, or what house rules you use.

Sounds reasonable to me.

... but reality says the DM probably threw things together in the one hour he's had free since the last game, and so is running something pretty much off of an adventure and tweaking on the fly.

 

[drothgery]

Can we please keep it polite. [...] There is no reason to get angry, or use hostile language (i.e. sucks) just because you think don't think there is much value in spreading out skills.

There isn't much value in spreading out skills. This isn't a value judgement. This is math. Sorry.

 

[Nightson]

1) In a world of magic, which DnD is, why wouldn't it be second nature to use magic to solve crimes? Conversely, why wouldn't it be second nature for villains/criminals to use magic to mask their crimes? Are folks running mysteries for the local police but sending the SWAT team (aka the PCs) in to investigate?
2) The less is more argument is based on the foundation that players and GMs alike can think outside the box, working out details and unwritten effects of abilities free of the "shackles" of written rules. So how can someone possess the creative chops to handle all of this but be completely foiled by Detect Evil?

How fun is playing the fighter in this world? Or the monk, or the ranger, or the barbarian?

3e forces murderers to have magical sophistication and to plan things out, how is that not constraining?

Truthfully, detaching alignment from anything mechanical was probably the biggest single improvement in roleplaying in D&D ever.

 

[Thasmodious]

Firstly, there are GMs/players out there that will interpret the lack of an Appraise skill to mean characters just can't appraise things. We can argue until we're blue in the face over the relevancy of Appraise to a game and that's not my point. My point is, not everyone is the type to be able to just finagle some ad hoc rules if someone wants to, for example, play a jeweler turned adventurer (who would arguably be quite capable of sizing up items of worth). And while I use the omission of a skill as an example here, the OP's comments about how the Web power is written is another demonstration of this. While /you/ might be capable of going very outside of the box with these things, and therefore less is more to /you/, it's quite the opposite for others. And in their cases, less is just less.

Skills weren't "omitted". A different system, based loosely on the previous one, was designed and put into place. It's semantics, a bit, but it's also an important distinction. 3e didn't have a skill for everything. It had a skill for a bunch of things, and a number of those weren't about the business of conflict resolution. They were a nod to the idea that you have to rules to do something. The 4e books talk about this distinction, between roleplaying and mechanics in both the PHB and DMG. The intent of the DMG is to teach players that have a problem with the kind of open play that has largely defined D&D for its history, with the exception of late 2e (the rules heavy Options years) and 3e with its significantly different take on such things.

Secondly, in 4e everyone is reasonably good at everything. Sure it prevents everyone waiting for the skill monkey to do her thing, but it introduces other problems. The two big problems I see are that it's just not very plausible and it's certainly not all that interesting when everyone can do everything.

Little differences are big differences in 4e. In 3e, it didn't matter if the fighter had a +3 in a skill and the wizard a +10, they were irrelevant to the +23 of the rogue, and their only use was in aiding the rogue against tough DCs. In 4e, a difference of a couple points is the difference between adequate and masterful. A warlock with a moderate dex of 12 and trained in thievery is going to pale in comparison to the rogue with his extra +4. In a system that does not use static DCs (much), that +4 is a consistent and significant difference through all levels of play. The rogue is also certainly more likely to take feats and items that enhance the skill.

4e characters don't get better at "everything". They get better at adventuring, and this makes a nice bit of sense. The fighter is going to pick up a few things about magic while traveling for years with a wizard, sorcerer, and warlock, facing magical creatures, arcane traps and puzzles, and all the wide weird world of magical effect. The studious wizard is going to pick up a bit of athletics and acrobatics from all that dungeon delving, mountain climbing, and exploring. The 4e skills don't pretend to cover everything, just the job skills of the adventurer. And even then, just those with real consequences for success and failure within conflict resolution, and not extras like appraise or use rope.

It's a bit insulting to post up that "a lot of people" apparently have it all wrong and that their brains haven't pieced it together yet. Speaking for myself, I'd prefer if you could refrain from implications that if I or others don't see your point of view we are somehow mentally behind the curve.

Noted. And I apoligize. It was meant to be condescending, responding in kind to Wik, but Wik is not the only one to have that opinion. Behind the condescension, though, there is some truth to that. I think a lot of people have just not clocked enough experience, whether in play or in working with or thinking about, what is a fairly different way of going about things that looks, on the surface, quite similar to 3e. In reality, it's not at all, and is a fairly strong departure from 3es method. I think as the life of this edition goes on this is one of those arugments that will die a quiet death, like many of the early 3e arguments. Only to be replaced by some actual problems/disparities emerging in the system, no doubt, just like 3e.

Furthermore, comparing 4e to video games isn't a nonsense comparison. The OP makes a very arguable point.

Argumentative, not arguable. It's nonsense meant to offend and not inform. It's the same kind of tripe that was thrown at 3e by 2e grognards when that system came out. Video games are an entirely different medium, based largely on ours, but in a very limited fashion. It emulates aspects of RPGs. 4e is not heavily influenced by MMOs. They used an aspect of MMO design to inform their ideas of character balance. Balance is of high importance to MMOs and how they build off the powers of traditional character roles and achieved balance helped inform game designers of how to do that in tabletop gaming.

A few folks have spoken out that they are happy spells like Speak with Dead are gone and that their absence /strengthens/ 4e non-combat resolutions

Those people would be arguing from ignorance of 4e, since Speak with Dead is a level 6 ritual and not absent from the game at all. What 4e has done is remove the instant win spells from the noncombat arsenal. Really, how much fun is investigative games when detect evil, zone of truth, and charm person completely eliminate the need for actual investigation. Casting one spell and winning is hardly the way to run an investigative campaign. There are a number of divination rituals that would be useful as tools in an investigative game. They all offer help, but wouldn't instantly "win" the investigation. Only move it forward or in a new direction.

 

[Wik]

snip

Okay. I'm done with you. I'm tired of watching you spit at people because they disagree with you. You like 4e, and apparently, it has no faults. Cool, I can dig it. I don't appreciate being spoken to the way you are speaking, so I'm done.

You're right, I missed cantrips. I don't count healing as a non-combat ability, since 9/10 of the time, healing comes about as a result of combat. As I've said, I don't care about skills - we can rule them out as roughly equal between 3e/4e... hell, I'll even give you the edge and say 4e wins in skills. When I do speak of other mechanical benefits in non-combat situations, you tell me I haven't read what you've said, and so on.

Let's go back to Web, because it's a perfect microcosm of the editions. You're right, the game never said how to use web as a safety net... and that was one of the great things about the game. It DID say "It's this long, and it anchors between two places, and it does this, and it does this, etc..". 4e gives you a game effect, and a bit of flavour. In other words, it makes it HARDER to use your spells creatively, because all you have is a pure mechanical result.

I can see using Web in creative ways, but only because I have prior experience with the spell in other editions. most of the powers pointed out in the Wizard section are combat-related, and the utilities seem much more limiting than they did in other editions (for the most part; I recognize there are corner cases).

Apparently, I've been deliberately insulting to you. I didn't feel I was. I can't see it in my writing. I was trying to argue my point. You freely admit you were being condescending. So, fine, you win. I really don't care enough about this to get worked up over.

But, I've said my piece, and you have said yours. I do not agree with many of your points, and you apparently think I'm a flaming idiot because of it, so let's just leave it there. 'Nuff said.

***

Moridin: I'll admit that I didn't really pick out some of the non-combat powers in the PHB. I have only GM'ed 4e (and have been since it came out), and I'm not as familiar with the Player Powers. However, I've seen many of them have either very limited effects (Holy Lantern is only a lamp, after all), or are useful just as much in a combat as outside of it (Dark One's Own Luck).

The key distinction, I think, is that those spells that got left out of 4E were the thing you used to get the result you want. I need to know if this guy is evil, so I cast detect evil and I find out. 4E uses powers and rituals to facilitate getting the result you want, but they are not the actual thing that gives you the result. You still have to rely on skills and, yes, roleplaying. It sounds like KM is lamenting the ability to use spells to get a direct result, as opposed to having them by a tweak you use to increase your chances of success.

Yeah. You're right, that some can see them as "I wins". I instead see them as tools. In CSI, just because they can use DNA to link someone to the crime, it doesn't explain everything. I think, using 3e as a starter, the game follows that same pattern. The corpse won't tell you everything. Using Object Read on the murder weapon won't give you a motive. And Skill Challenging witnesses won't do everything, either.

You can run CSI: Eberron if you want using 4e, but I still don't feel that 17 skills and a handful of rituals accessible by all PCs if they're willing to burn a feat is enough to differentiate characters in a setting that is primarily non-combat in nature. That was my initial question - how would you tweak the game's rules to get the effect you want?

I'd do it by increasing the skill list, breaking rituals up into groups, so that PCs can specialize in a ritual of the type they like (one could specialize in Divination Rituals, while another could specialize in transport rituals). I'd encourage the purchasing of non-combat feats, perhaps by splitting feats into two grades, and requiring PCs to balance their choices. And I'd add in the optional Contact Rules from 3e's Unearthed Arcana.

Personally, though, I feel as if 3e suits the genre better, and would generate better results (and more interesting results from the players' perspective). Your tastes may vary, and all that jazz.

Really, I think the big difference in this argument (and most threads that turn into "Edition Wars" - which is unfortunate here, because I enjoy both systems!) comes down to this: 3e is mostly Simulationist, whereas 4e is staunchly Gamist. I think a Simulationist game is the way to go, because I think if I want to play a Gamist approach, I'll turn on my Xbox. Not everyone agrees with me, and that's cool.

How fun is playing the fighter in this world? Or the monk, or the ranger, or the barbarian?

3e forces murderers to have magical sophistication and to plan things out, how is that not constraining?

Truthfully, detaching alignment from anything mechanical was probably the biggest single improvement in roleplaying in D&D ever.

I'll defend Tyrlaan, since he so reasonably defended my own points.

1) Playing a fighter can be great in that world. Ditto for the other classes (except for the monk, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth... like broken dreams). In an investigation-based game, being a fighter COULD suck - so, don't play a fighter. Or, if you are a fighter, then when the fights do break out, you'll be awesome. And, at least in how I'd run CSI: Eberron, there will be combats. Just not as many of 'em.

2) 3e does NOT force murderers to be uber-sophisticated. You can have a feral killer still be a mystery... the GM just needs to think things through. But, in any Mystery RPG, the GM damned well BETTER think things through, regardless of system, or the game will flop. Mysteries are, after all, the hardest adventure type to prepare.

The Feral Killer could accidentally be killing the enemies. Or it could be unaware that it's the killer. You cast Speak With Dead, and the corpse doesn't really know much, or speaks cryptically. Each "game-breaking" spell the PCs cast, you give 'em a clue, but they still have to INTERPRET those clues. That's where the fun lies.

3) And I agree. Good riddance to alignment. It was a great improvement, and it should've gone a long time ago. Mind you, I dropped it years ago. It wasn't present in my 2e DARK SUN games, and it wasn't really a factor in my 3e games, either. But yeah, cutting alignment loose from the rules was a good call.

 

[Lanefan]

The more of this discussion I read, the more I'm reminded how much I disliked 3e's skill system. I haven't tried 4e's, so I'm not sure if that'd work for me either.

I somewhat suspect 4e can handle a lot more than the as-written rules suggest it can, but there's one big problem: each of the books needs to have written in great big letters as often as it'll fit "THESE RULES ARE BUT A FRAMEWORK - IF A RULE DOES NOT MATCH THE SITUATION OR FIT WITH YOUR GAME, MAKE A RULING OR AMEND WHAT IS WRITTEN."

That said, there *is* a lot of room for non-combat stuff to go (back) in - some would call it fluff, perhaps, but even something as simple as 1e's previous profession tables...were you a brewer, an engineer, a jeweller, or what before you took up adventuring...can help add background to a character and occasionally give it an advantage in the field (a good example upthread is the jeweller being able to appraise on the fly). It sounds like lots of non-combat spells are gone - and since when is Charm Person a non-combat spell, and why did they take it out - and skills are being asked to replace them, and-or to replace DM's common sense.

It occurs to me that someone coming straight from 1e into 4e might find the transition easier than coming from 3e to 4e, at least in terms of how the game expects the DM to run it.

Lanefan

 

[Spatula]

Your math is wrong. A 1st level ranger gets 24 skll points with no int bonus, or 28 if he's a human. Rnagers get 6 skill points per level, not 4.

Depends on which version of 3e you're talking about. 3e rangers get 4 skill points per level. 3.5e rangers get 6.

 

[Wik]

Lane: yeah, Charm Person can be a combat spell. I never really saw it as such, though, in common play. You cannot, after all, use the charmed foe to attack his allies, and he's still going to protect them.

You've pretty much got the jist of what 4e has done with the non-combat element of hte game. Some of the spells have been made into rituals (Which cost money, take time, and are very widely accessible to the party... I think this is a good idea with Raise Dead scrolls, and a bad idea in most other ways). The rest have gone bye-bye.

The other big problem is that when something is pure mechanics, there's sort of a vibe that I get (and my players get it, too) that it's hard to bend the mechanics of the effect to fit the flavour. Cleave, for example, is described as cutting through one foe to hit another... can I use my cleave to hit one foe, and then cut a nearby rope? And so on.

Truth be told, I'm tempted to just drop both 3e and 4e, and play BECMI. Most of my favourite D&D memories happened there, or in DARK SUN. Keep the things I like from 4e (already posted my list), and revert to an earlier edition.