D&D 4E What Doesn't 4E Do Well?

[KarinsDad]

Maybe.
My impression is that they did very little playtesting at the paragon tier and almost none at all on the epic tier.

I suspect that this is true. When one does not design something correctly and then one does not test it correctly, the design errors might not show up for a long time.

But, unlike Nifft, I don't think they ever did hire any math dudes. Hiring costs money. It's not like this is rocket scientist type math. I think a bunch of them came up with the basic math premise and they just never ran the numbers all of the way to level 30. A simple spreadsheet shows the ups and downs of the numbers in the core system.

 

[Artoomis]

Simple combat.

In many ways, combat is more complicated than ever to due the large number of conditional powers, feats, etc.

It's become very difficult to keep track of it all. What happens when an ally is bloodied? Your own PC? An enemy? An adjacent enemy? You charge? Any ally charges? An enemy charges you? An enemy charges an ally? Ad infinitum.

There are way too many conditional items/feats/powers, etc. It would not be so bad if there were a limited number of triggering events for these things, but the triggering event are virtually infinite.

 

[Herschel]

Yeah.

My impression is that they had hired a bunch of math-dudes to make a balanced system, then the math-dudes left (shortly before the system was finalized), then the system got changed due to playtest feedback, then finally the system got released. From then on it's been a constant struggle for WotC to release stuff which isn't broken. They no longer have the math-dudes, only their notes.

There clearly was a plan for 4e, and they've clearly made attempts to adhere to it, but they seem to have lost faith in some of their own designs.

Cheers, -- N

I guess I think it was more of a "here's the plan, and it works well, but man there are some great concepts that mathematically don't quite work right if one wants to go for certain flavor vs. min/maxing. We need to add some items to make non-stat-optimal races work well because they're cool."

 

[Gort]

Simple combat.

In many ways, combat is more complicated than ever to due the large number of conditional powers, feats, etc.

It's become very difficult to keep track of it all. What happens when an ally is bloodied? Your own PC? An enemy? An adjacent enemy? You charge? Any ally charges? An enemy charges you? An enemy charges an ally? Ad infinitum.

There are way too many conditional items/feats/powers, etc. It would not be so bad if there were a limited number of triggering events for these things, but the triggering event are virtually infinite.

Well, each player only starts with four powers (5 if you're human). Play a lower-level game if too many powers is a problem. At least 50% of your "triggering events" seem to be charges. I haven't had a PC with a power triggered by a charge ever in 4e. Of course, I've only played up to 6th level so far.

Plus, if someone doesn't realise they have a power that's triggered by some occurring event, what's the big deal? They don't use the power, game continues as normal.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the thing is with the math of 4e you have to really do a game design before you start to appreciate how these things play out. I don't find any notions about "math dudes" convincing at all. Its addition for Pete's sake. You don't need "math dudes" to figure out if your addition adds up, lol. I mean I HAVE a math degree, trust me you don't need any kind of higher math, or even algebra for that matter to design a game. That isn't the issue.

The issue is more like you first come up with a basic framework. In the case of 4e its d20 + 1/2 level for PCs. This is nice and simple and only needs adding and dividing by 2. Chances are they also decided monsters would be d20 + level from the start as that's nice and simple too and gives you a bunch of numbers to play with for PCs (+15 over 30 levels give or take).

Now, you pretty much HAVE to come up with this framework right at the start because otherwise how can you even discuss what else you're going to do? All other numbers need to be related to each other and to the framework in order to evaluate them. You can't keep monkeying with it much beyond the start because as you develop more and more of the game you'd have to change EVERYTHING that follows after every time you mess with it. Maybe you can afford to evaluate a couple of options at the start, but that isn't going to tell you much about which one will work best in the full system because there is NO way you're going to be able to build 2-3 entire game systems all the way up just to see which one is best. You've got to commit yourself pretty much at the start.

Now as you go on and add more subsystems like armor and weapons and whatnot and as you have different classes and features and feats that tweak things various ways you're BOUND to find that certain issues show up, like how do you allow for light armor to work with stat bonuses and heavy armor to give just an AB based AC? At some point someone decided that stats would increase (probably because they needed various ways to make up that 15 points that monsters have and stat increases gives you a way). That fed into the AC system and created the need for Masterwork Armor. Pretty typical for a game design process to have this sort of stuff happening.

Even an infinite amount of playtesting and design time doesn't help because at some point the system gets to where you're pretty well locked into all the different decisions you made along the way because changing things causes bigger and bigger ripples of other changes to everything else. So at some point you have a system where things are as good as they're going to get without starting over again from scratch and if you DO start over you don't know if doing things a new way will actually be better or not. Pretty soon its best to just release the thing, knowing its good enough, and with the understanding that when its out there in the world you'll see where some decision or other wasn't perfect and you may want to adjust with items or feats, etc.

 

[DracoSuave]

So the 4E solution is to have "wish lists" so that the game campaign totally revolves around the PCs and items they find should be ones appropriate for them.

As a DM, I find this unpalatable. It just seems wrong that the treasures of the world should revolve around the PCs and if they don't, the PCs cannot even acquire the basic "big 3" sufficiently to adventure because of the sell and craft rules.

Two points.

1) The treasure tables give you enough gold to craft/buy a singular magic item at that level; At level 3 that means you have could potentially craft 3 magic items, 2 reasonably.

2) Your purpose at the table is to craft a story. D&D -can- be a sandbox game where the players are inconsequential pawns in a world that exists regardless of them...

...but that's not what it's trying to be. This isn't Warhammer Fantasy.

This is D&D, where the players are heroes about to engage in adventures that bring them greater and greater glory leading to an eventual ascension to immortality. The tale that the rulebooks suggest is an epic tale, and that seeps into every aspect of the game system.

Look at King Arthur. What is the first thing that comes to mind? Excalibur. Why? As an magic artifact it suits him -perfectly-. It wasn't the -power- of the weapon, it was the prestige of it, an icon that represents the hero.

I mean, you have rules that are based around the idea of 'hit level 30, then live on forever in either a physical or metaphysical or metaphorical manner' There's a definate goal in character progression: Immortality.

Immortals don't find random tools, and wonder what to make of these various useless MacGuffins. They find Sandals of Hermes because they need it. They find the Aegis, because they'll need it to kill the Medusa they didn't know was there.

But regardless, the ONLY difference in this regard between fourth edition and previous editions is that in 4e, the base assumption is that Paladins will get that Holy Avenger sword. In 3e, the base assumption is they'll randomly find one.

Strangely, I've never seen a Paladin without a Holy Avenger sword in 'randomly generated loot' games either....

 

[Nifft]

I think the thing is with the math of 4e you have to really do a game design before you start to appreciate how these things play out. I don't find any notions about "math dudes" convincing at all. Its addition for Pete's sake. You don't need "math dudes" to figure out if your addition adds up, lol. I mean I HAVE a math degree, trust me you don't need any kind of higher math, or even algebra for that matter to design a game.

The early 4e design & development articles threw around words like "negative binomial distribution", which they claim to have used to figure out how long encounters would be under various rules.

They don't use words like that any more, and they don't seem to have been able to actually use negative binomial distributions since shortly before 4e's release (because if they could, they wouldn't have given us the Skill Challenge system as printed in the PHB).

So yeah: they got some experts on contract, their experts left, and now they are patching a system they only MOSTLY understand.

Cheers, -- N

PS: If you read up on the various Skill Challenge fixes, you'll see that a decent grasp of statistics is actually quite helpful when designing a game. That's the most obvious example, but it's far from the only one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The early 4e design & development articles threw around words like "negative binomial distribution", which they claim to have used to figure out how long encounters would be under various rules.

They don't use words like that any more, and they don't seem to have been able to actually use negative binomial distributions since shortly before 4e's release (because if they could, they wouldn't have given us the Skill Challenge system as printed in the PHB).

So yeah: they got some experts on contract, their experts left, and now they are patching a system they only MOSTLY understand.

Cheers, -- N

PS: If you read up on the various Skill Challenge fixes, you'll see that a decent grasp of statistics is actually quite helpful when designing a game. That's the most obvious example, but it's far from the only one.

Meh, I've designed games. A certain handiness with numbers is a good thing, but honestly the best game designer I've ever known is a guy that is certainly VERY clever but wouldn't know a negative binomial distribution from a hole in the ground, though he could probably tell you how long an average encounter is going to last by scribbling on the back of an envelope for an hour.

Its not MATH that gets you a good game design. Its a feel for how things will play combined with an ability to stack a bunch of numbers together in a creative way and come up with a system that is a combination of elegance and fun. 100 Phd mathematicians won't do you a bit of good in that. Nor is a negative binomial distribution really all that fancy. It amounts to saying "If I flip a coin 10 times, how many heads am I likely to come up with?". So yeah, given specific fixed assumptions or ranges of outcomes on say attack dice you can predict the length of an encounter, but it won't answer questions like how good is the encounter or what happens if the party uses unorthodox tactics or has a non-standard build.

People are too enamored of the concept of math in games overall. Its obviously relevant and the math should support the goals of the game, but games aren't math and math isn't games unless you're doing math puzzles. An RPG shouldn't be a math puzzle and as people on this board have AMPLY demonstrated by disassembling the math of 4e its not all that hard to make that aspect of a game work. The trick is making a fun game that works. With something like 4e its doubly hard because it needs to be fun at levels 1-30. If you notice though, the 4e math is actually fairly minimal there as it basically just consists of keeping the ratio of attack and defense and damage vs hit points fairly linear throughout 30 levels while allowing the game to evolve in some meaningful sense.

Honestly I think if you look at the SC system what you find is that it isn't the math that makes it hard for people to run SCs. Its managing to make the SC fit logically into the narrative of the game and not break into the immersion or seem illogical. The SC math is a headache but its not that complex. Where it gets ugly is when you toss lots of modifiers on die rolls and try to work out how they change things. Once you understand it, its pretty simple though. I don't think they failed in the math on SCs in a basic sense. All they failed to do was really explain them well enough. I think the designers just didn't know how to explain it. I can run them fine now after doing it a lot of times but I still can't explain what I do exactly.

 

[KarinsDad]

The early 4e design & development articles threw around words like "negative binomial distribution", which they claim to have used to figure out how long encounters would be under various rules.

They don't use words like that any more, and they don't seem to have been able to actually use negative binomial distributions since shortly before 4e's release (because if they could, they wouldn't have given us the Skill Challenge system as printed in the PHB).

So yeah: they got some experts on contract, their experts left, and now they are patching a system they only MOSTLY understand.

I think that Stephen Schubert might have been the main WotC math geek. He's still there AFAIK.

And I really don't think that the core skill challenge (or the to hit / defense, especially lowest NAD) system would have been broken as bad as it was if they had a real mathematician working it. That just doesn't make sense. The assumption that they must have "tweaked the system after the math geek left" seems suspect.

Plus, the new skill challenge system (where reasonably trained skilled PCs make moderate primary checks close to 100% of the time) although better, is still obviously not designed by a mathematician. The primary trained skill guys basically always succeed and the secondary trained skill guys (or primary untrained skill guys who are slightly worse) get the lion's share of the failures, but still often succeed 75% or more of the time. This is an exercise in dice rolling where a high complexity moderate skill challenge of 12 successes before 3 failures is really not that hard to accomplish if half of the checks are primary trained and the other half are secondary trained. 4 successes before 3 failures is a total joke for a moderate skill challenge.

 

[SmiteMakesRight]

Well I'm not sure they're things it doesn't do well per se, but there are a couple things I don't really like.

-Alignment: I don't like that they got rid of most alignments (at least in mention) in the book, but that's a harmless change since by now, we all know the D&D alignments and can use them as normal.

-Some Corniness: Paragon paths with wings, etc. I don't mean to ding it on that too much, but it's just.. an uncomfortable shift for me, I don't really like it. I think powers and paragon paths were a little overdone.

-Races: The Elf/Eladrin split I felt was unnecessary, and I really get a bad taste in my mouth looking at Devas and Shifters. I actually have mixed feelings on Half-Orcs, both good and bad. I like that they are kind of a fast and strong race, but I dislike how overshadowed they feel as warriors by the other races. Pound-for-pound, they're inferior as a plain fighter class.

All-in-all, I love 4th edition's rules as I look over them. But some of it is just a little much for my taste. Like.. I support the idea of all characters having the ability to use some powers more freely and such. I just think character abilities make them a little TOO 'heroic'.

And another problem is that it feels like characters are railroaded. Like.. you can choose from some abilities each level, but there's little to distinguish say.. two fighters.. or two paladins.. or two clerics. They function exactly the same.

But I'm not sure how much my input since I haven't really played the rules. But I bought PB1/2 (a bargain pack) awhile back, and have been reading them a lot, and these are my impressions.