Wizards in 4E have been 'neutered' argument...

[Obryn]

With 1e/2e rules? Your 16 str gets you a +1 to damage and that's it. To hit bonuses don't start till str 17.

Yep, although if you look in Temple of Elemental Evil, some of the human opponents get bonuses for Strength scores as low as 15 for no good reason. Regardless, you still get increases to encumbrance, BB/LG, and opening stuck doors.

You don't get bonus hp till your con goes to 16

15. And unless you're a Fighter (or Fighter subclass), anything over 16 won't net you more HPs. But again, there are other stats tied to Constitution, like the remarkably important Resurrection Survival and System Shock rolls. The latter, especially - you don't want that friendly Polymorph spell to prove fatal! Also, if you're a dwarf, gnome, or halfling, you get some insane saving throw bonuses.

With TSR editions, your stats were pretty much meaningless unless you get 16 or above.
(unless you're a caster in which case every point in your casting stat counts, but only due to how it affects which and how many spells you can learn)

Only with AD&D. OD&D and BECMI/BX/etc. lines have bonuses starting much lower. AD&D and AD&D2e were the ones with massive stat inflation.

-O

 

[Garthanos]

With 1e/2e rules? Your 16 str gets you a +1 to damage and that's it.

Thanks my memory of 20+odd year old details is not 100% the gist remains.

 

[MrMyth]

Are you saying 4e has guidelines for roles while 3e has requirements of different roles?

Could you explain that a little? I'm not seeing the basis for such a statement.

TwinBahamut covers it pretty well, but basically: In 3rd Edition, a Cleric (or equivalent healer) was pretty much required. Having a spellcaster, at mid-late level, was really strongly encouraged. Having a meatshield, at early-mid level, was very important. Having a trapsmith could be outright required in some adventures. Some of these requirements were more important than others, and you could build some parties that compensated for being unbalanced in other ways (the party of all-flying archers, for example). But those were the exception, and the average group would be really bad off if they didn't have a balanced party - or, especially, was lacking a primary healer.

4E goes ahead and outright defines the roles and what they represent to the group - but also takes measures to avoid them being necessities. Even without a cleric, you still have Second Wind. Strikers are nice, but everyone is still contributing damage (even while healing/debuffing/etc), and enemies will go down eventually. Etc.

Having a balanced group is still generally ideal, but I think 4E gives you a lot of room - intentionally - to never feel locked into having someone 'forced' to play a role. It is hard to discourage that mentality entirely, but you can get away with it now - as opposed to my memory of seeing someone 'have to' play the Cleric for the group in earlier editions.

 

[Melkor]

As the thread starter, I thought I would come in and post a little update.

Although we haven't had a chance to get together and actually start the campaign we are talking about, I was able to convince my buddy to play a quick encounter (he said: "I'll give you an hour for 4E").

I downloaded the "Stick in the Mud" Chaos Scar module, and used the Quickstart/Shadowfell pre-gens starting him at the first encounter.

He was really bitter at first, making comments like "4E is not D&D, it's Pokemon", and this feels like "Chinese Checkers" or a "Boardgame", but then he really seemed to get into the combat, and actually got excited about a thing or two.

Ironically, the Wizard PC was the first to score a kill, and while we had to stop before the encounter finished, I could tell he actually had fun.

That said, after the game he told me: "It's a fun game....I don't deny that, it's just not D&D". He's willing to try it out for a while though, so I guess that is a good thing.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I'm not seeing this difference of guideline versus requirement between the editions.

The basic roles have not really changed between the editions, 4e is just explicit about labeling some roles.

In 3e if you don't have a cleric or druid as a healer then you have a paladin, ranger, bard, or UMD rogue with wands of cure light wounds with only minor healing in combat or you use potions and pull back after fights to heal up.

I've played in a group where as a ranger with a wand I was the only healer for multiple levels of play and it went fine.

I wouldn't say that anything other than a pure Divine caster works anywhere near as well. Sure, other classes can almost make up for the healing difference (though they never get the really good healing spells), but something like a UMD Rogue can never make up for the lack of a Cleric's ability to use status restoration effects like Remove Disease, Restoration, or the extremely valuable Raise Dead and Resurrection. Even a secondary healer like a Bard can't remotely make up for the loss of a Cleric when it comes to condition restoration. If the PCs are fighting things that inflict curses, use poison, spread disease, and inflict ability score damage, which are all pretty common in 3E, then a Cleric is necessary.

In 4e if you don't have a leader you are limited to second wind in combat and then have to survive until out of combat. I like surges as they make wands unnecessary. They are an improvement in not needing a healer.

See? You are agreeing with me here. 4E has elements that make a dedicated healer a bit less necessary. Of course, the fact that 4E makes all the condition restoration spells which force a team to have a Cleric into Rituals also helps a lot. Now, if you have a party member who is suffering from a disease, any party member with the Ritual Casting feat can help.

In 3e if you don't have a trapfinding rogue you use certain magics to get around traps (fly over pits, neutralize poison to get around poison, heal the damage taken, clerical find traps will not help you) or you take the effects of the traps and soldier on (the barbarian trap finder method).

In 4e if you don't have a rogue or someone with thievery do you have more options than in 3e?

You are equating things that are not remotely the same. 3E requires a Rogue. 4E requires a character trained in the Thievery skill. Those are very different things. Sure, it may be a bit harder to deal with traps in 4E if you don't have a character with the Thievery skill, but there are several classes that have it as a class skill, anyone can get trained in it at the cost of only one feat, and all uses of the Thievery skill can be done untrained barring DM fiat. Compare this to the following quote from the 3.5E SRD: "Rogues (and only rogues) can use the Search skill to find traps..". If you want to find and disarm traps in 3E, you need a Rogue, but literally anyone in 4E can do the same with just a few skills.

This brings up a point regarding Clerics and Leaders. Sure, a 4E team needs a Leader about as much as a 3E team needs a Cleric (it may not be strictly necessary, but it really, really helps), but a Cleric and a Leader are not equivalent to each other. In 3E, you really need either a Cleric or one of the few other full Divine casting classes (which all strongly resemble the Cleric), but in 4E you only need a class that fills the Leader Role, which is a broad category of classes of which many are very different from the Cleric. In 3E, the more a class with healing magic is different from the Cleric, the less effective of a healer it is, but all 4E Leaders have a solid baseline of healing capability.

I honestly don't care whether you call these things requirements or guidelines, but there is a massive difference in how limiting they are. 3E requires or strongly recommends specific classes, and 4E only really asks that you have one character's class be chosen from a reasonably large list and that at least one character has the Ritual Casting ability. That is the central point.

 

[TwinBahamut]

As I pointed out pages upthread to Hussar, 3Ed does not make such an assumption in the rules, but its obvious that many people have assumed that this is so.

You pointed out, and Hussar agreed, that it is not explicitly called out in the rules, which is true. There is no point in any 3E core rulebook that says the game assumes you have a party of a Fighter, a Rogue, a Cleric, and a Wizard. That doesn't change the fact that it is indeed an implicit assumption of the rules, and that the designers have stated several times that it is the case.

Of course, there is also a difference between what the rules implicitly assume and what they implicitly require. The 3E rules assume the team has a Fighter, but a Fighter is nowhere close to being required in that system. This is mostly because there are plenty of good alternatives for the Fighter (many of which are stronger than the Fighter), but few for the Cleric or Wizard (most of their alternatives are much weaker).

IME, the game is perfectly playable with a party when one or 2 of the roles is minimized (the aforementioned successfully completed RttToEE campaign with no divine spell availability over 2nd level) or even completely void (one campaign with just Warriors, a campaign-specific variant of the BttlSorc, and a Divine Caster, and another with just Warriors, a Monk and an Arcanist).

Honestly, I don't care if it is playable or not. The big problem with 3E is that there are a large number of challenges that are simply unanswerable without certain classes. To get back to the point of this thread as a whole, these challenges tend to be the kind that are only solvable by dedicated magic users. If you have mages of any kind in your team (like you claim to have had in your "minimized" teams), then you really are not missing the basic requirements for the system. A team of nothing but a Fighter, a Barbarian, a Monk, and a Marshall would probably have a lot of trouble against fairly normal challenges in 3E, but an equivalent 4E team (replacing Warlord for Marshall) would work just fine.

 

[MrGrenadine]

The big problem with 3E is that there are a large number of challenges that are simply unanswerable without certain classes. To get back to the point of this thread as a whole, these challenges tend to be the kind that are only solvable by dedicated magic users.

4e requires the same variety of characters. Fighter/ Wizard/ Cleric/ Thief has transformed into Defender/ Controller/ Leader/ Striker, but the concept is the same--a party can best handle a wide variety of challenges if there is a wide variety of skills represented.

For instance, isn't the fact that monster defenses scale past character attacks at high levels make leaders a necessity? And Strikers are needed if ever the party runs into a Solo, and heaven help a party without a Controller if they're swarmed by 20 minions...the list goes on.

I never saw a 3e campaign that absolutely couldn't be finished without a Wizard--that would be poor game design, because even if the party had a Wizard, what if he or she was killed or incapacitated? Throw in the towel? Instead, I saw parties that had to think outside the box when the Wizard wasn't present, (or Rogue, or Cleric, or Fighter, or Druid/Spellsword/Thaumaturge, etc) . And I imagine I'll see the exact same situation in 4e.

The Wizard in and of itself is not the problem in 3e--it all comes down to player error, player selfishness, and/or poor DMing or campaign design. And 4e, for all its balance, can't possibly protect a party from those things.

 

[Garthanos]

4e requires the same variety of characters. Fighter/ Wizard/ Cleric/ Thief has transformed into Defender/ Controller/ Leader/ Striker, but the concept is the same--a party can best handle a wide variety of challenges if there is a wide variety of skills represented.

It feels far easier to style things the way I want them these days. When I wanted my AD&D "cleric" to be a fighter wizard it was teeth pulling time... If I wanted him to be Odins (very warlord like) Priest, it was also teeth pulling time... I couldnt have a spear, and even now I have to spend a feat to get it ... grumble grumble, but I can. You can say that is a question of "Bad DMing"
but the game now encourages more open flavor management by the player. Classes have tighter flavor than roles.

 

[MrMyth]

In 3e if you don't have a trapfinding rogue you use certain magics to get around traps (fly over pits, neutralize poison to get around poison, heal the damage taken, clerical find traps will not help you) or you take the effects of the traps and soldier on (the barbarian trap finder method).

In 4e if you don't have a rogue or someone with thievery do you have more options than in 3e?

Well... yes. In addition to freeing up the ability to get access to skills, 4E also adopted an encouragement that no problem has only one solution. Traps can typically be taken apart by a skilled rogue... or simply beaten apart or plowed through, or often magically disabled, etc. The goal is that having the ideal role should help solve a problem, but not be required to do so (unlike in 3rd Edition).

I like the 4e DMG analysis of different party compositions based on different missing roles, but I think it applies to 3e as well.

~shrug~ It may simply come down a difference in experiences. But my experience in 3rd Edition - especially in the RPGA, where tables are made or broken by having the right classes - was that 3rd Edition had much stricter requirements for party composition. That has not been my experience in 4E. Several elements of the rules seem outright designed to avoid that issue, and I've been pleasantly surprised in playing LFR, and seeing tables have remarkable success with non-standard parties. The same sort of tables that would lead to a TPK previously...

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

~shrug~ It may simply come down a difference in experiences. But my experience in 3rd Edition - especially in the RPGA, where tables are made or broken by having the right classes - was that 3rd Edition had much stricter requirements for party composition. That has not been my experience in 4E. Several elements of the rules seem outright designed to avoid that issue, and I've been pleasantly surprised in playing LFR, and seeing tables have remarkable success with non-standard parties. The same sort of tables that would lead to a TPK previously...

This is my experience as well. In Living Greyhawk, there were lots of HARD encounters. Encounters specifically built using a combination of feats, classes, monsters, terrain, spells, and so on to defeat any party that wasn't built well.

A particular example always sticks out in my mind: 2 Dread Wraiths and 4 Spectres in an encounter for 12th level characters(EL 15). During this encounter, there was an "evil aura" that made it so no one could see further than 25 feet away from them no matter what light sources they had. The PCs were on a 10ft wide path with forest on both sides that was described as taking 3 squares of movement for each square you moved and doing damage to anyone who tried due to sharp branches and brambles warped and twisted by the evil aura.

Meanwhile, the Dread Wraiths have Spring Attack, a movement of 60 ft flight, were incorporeal, drained 1d8 con per hit, and life sense. This allows them to ignore all the terrain, "see" the PCs even while in the darkness, and move up to the PCs(with reach) and retreat into the dark woods each round. Since they used touch attacks, they hit almost everyone on a 2.

The Spectres are almost as bad. They drain 2 levels on a hit. In one round, it was possible for them to give someone 8 negative levels. They did need 7s to hit most people of this level though, instead of 2s.

This encounter without a cleric is basically impossible. It's nearly impossible unless you have a cleric with Death Ward prepared. Preferably 2 or 3 Death Wards. Of course, the average Living Greyhawk party had a cleric with Death Ward prepared. Because it was such a useful spell, you ALWAYS had it prepared.

Whereas, I've played in LFR adventures without a cleric, without even a leader and we've survived some pretty hard encounters. They just seemed easy for us because we made up for the lack of healing with an overwhelming amount of damage(we were instead striker heavy) and killed the enemy before they even did significant damage to us.