They wouldn't be the heroes if they were just normal men.
That aside, I really think this all stinks highly of "I don't like 4e-ism" and "you're not doing it right".
Hmmm. Interesting point.
It's not that 4E-ism is bad, it's that it's not D&D. I see a distinct difference of mortal heroism and super heroism. Let me explain my opinions on the super heroism of 4E and maybe some people will see where these thoughts are coming from in our gaming community:
1) When I used to play Champions years ago (1E through 5E), nothing bad ever happened to the PCs as a general rule. They took a ton of STUN damage, but rarely took BODY damage. There were really no game mechanics for anything worse than BODY damage, so the PCs felt protected. Yes, they could and did lose fights, but nothing even close to temporary ever happened to them. This emulates the comic books quite closely in that superheroes as a general rule have problems in their personal lives, but they rarely have debilitating problems from combat itself (unless designed into the PC).
2) When playing 1E and 2E, and somewhat with 3E, semi-permanent bad things could happen to PCs. PCs could lose ability score points. PCs could get level drained. PCs could get diseased or cursed or poisoned. The gaming environment, unlike the Champions world, felt more threatening and the PCs felt heroic, but not superheroic. PCs could walk into a burrow mound and the players knowing that undead in there could level drain their PCs were extremely apprehensive and cautious. It wasn't another simple encounter where powers were spammed, it was a careful search and quite frankly (like Sunday's superbowl), a bit nail biting where anything could happen.
3) 4E doesn't feel anything near 1E through 3E, hence, it doesn't feel like D&D, even though many of the terms are the same. It feels like Champions, not like D&D. The 4E game designers wanted to bring new and preferably young people into the game. A laudable goal, but the implementation was somewhat misguided. Very few bad things can happen to PCs because one of the design goals of 4E was to remove things that bugged some players in earlier versions of the game and add in shiny new things. Player entitlement (which I'll talk about later) was added to the game. There are many examples, but I'll give a few:
a) Level Drain, temporary and permanent. This was deemed bad, so it was removed. It was one of the most dreaded aspects of something bad that could happen to a PC, so it was removed.
b) Disarm. Obviously, PCs cannot fight without their absolute best magic stuff, so it too was removed.
c) Poison. It used to last beyond just a single encounter, now it can be gone by the very next round in many cases. Huh?
d) Curses. These are not even part of the core rules. Mummy's Rot is called a curse, but it's a disease. There are a few minorly cursed magic items that eventually showed up, but for the most part, curses are mostly a no show in 4E. There is a Remove Affliction ritual, but it is hardly ever used.
e) Grabs. Grabbing in 4E is, quite frankly, a bit of a joke. It doesn't really matter too much if many PCs are grabbed or not, most can still attack normally with no penalties and with any weapon. And grabs are really easy to get out of. The many tentacled monster is embarrassed as most PCs casually get out of its mighty grab, some of them spell casters and they didn't even need magic.
f) Fear, confusion, insanity, polymorph, and petrification almost never occur in 4E. If someone is feared, they shake it off in a round or two and the main result of fear is a little bit of forced movement. The 3E versions of Shakened and Feared are watered down to practically nothing.
g) In earlier versions, some bad things that happened to PC lasted for days or weeks and sometimes even months. Now, many bad things like poison are shaken off in a round or two. Bad things in earlier versions required powerful magic to counteract them. Even diseases can be negated by 4E PCs, often with a single extended rest.
h) Maneuvers. PC maneuvers were rolled into the powers. I cannot trip a foe just because humans in real life can trip, instead, I need a power that knocks the foe down.
4) I've talked about what was taken away a little here, now it's time to talk about what was given to players to make their PCs feel more like superheroes and less like heroes.
a) Let's start off with hit points. Any PC can recover all of his or her hit points without any magic at all during a short rest. They can also self heal during combat and sometimes even if the PC is unconscious. Physical damage is gone from the game and has been replaced with the equivalent of Champions STUN. This is a level of entitlement, not asked for by players, but handed out by the 4E design team. Now, it's a major part of our D&D gaming community. Pro-4E proponents get very defensive about this, but even this core portion of the game system has been nerfed.
b) Powers. The game designers even called them powers, just like out of any comic book or Champions-like RPG. They could have called them abilities or something else, but they called them powers. Could they have been any more blatant about it? In Champions, players spam a few superpowers over and over again in combat. In 4E, players spama few powers over and over again in combat. In many ways, 4E feels closer to Champions than it does D&D.
c) Balance. While balance is a laudable goal, 4E took it out of the realm of mostly differing game mechanics for different classes and into the world of cookie cutter everyone seems the same. Everyone has their powers, everyone has the same number and levels of powers (until Essentials), and the designers tried to make the powers balanced with regard to how often they could be used. Balance became one of the new gods of 4E to the exclusion of much of what makes D&D, D&D.
d) Effects. Many effects that were D&D-like (fear, confusion, polymorph) were replaced by things like Forced Movement that most PCs have access to. Also, effects are handed out like candy so much that every encounter has multiple effects on the board on nearly every round (with the extra bookkeeping that this resulted in).
e) Action Points. Darn, I rolled bad. Let me try that again. Again, a level of entitlement was handed to the players on a silver platter.
Getting on the entitlement issue, this is NOT entitlement that players demanded of WotC. It's WotC screwing up and giving entitlement to their players in an effort to kowtow to the instant gratification of our society and hopefully bring in more gamers. Players didn't cause this mess, WotC game designers did. Granted, many players love this type of gaming and do not consider it a mess, I'm merely pointing out how it is so drastically different for many other gamers who do consider it a mess.
Now that the players have this entitlement though, like anything in life that people have, they don't want to give it up. We want our healing surges. We want our forced movement and teleport at level one. We want our self healing. We want our cake and eat it too.
4E is SO different from earlier versions of the game that players in droves fled back to 3.5, to Pathfinder, and to other game systems. 4E backfired on WotC in many ways. Yes, it did also bring in new players, but at a cost. Many players of D&D did see issues with 3E that needed correcting, but they didn't want a game of superheros with powers flung around the board like monkeys throwing poo where they would have to do a lot of bookkeeping of the vast plethora of superpower effects on a grid where the game is nearly impossible to play without the grid and without the bookkeeping.
And putting one's head in the sand and denying that D&D 4E no longer feels like D&D for many players doesn't change the fact that 5E is attempting to bring D&D feel back to D&D. It's such a major issue for such a large portion of the D&D community that the game designers even see where they foobared.
So, it's not that the players of 4E are playing the game wrong, it's that WotC turned D&D in a superhero game with a lot of heavy duty PC protection and entitlement built directly into the game system. It's not that the game system isn't gritty, it's that it cannot even be slightly gritty without house rules.
Yes, one can challenge the PCs, just like one can challenge the PCs in Champions. But, nothing physically bad (except a very rare death) can happen in 4E. One typically doesn't ever have to go to a Temple to get rid of an affliction, most afflictions get rid of themselves by the end of the encounter or the end of the day.
Using D&D terminology on these mechanics doesn't change the flavor of 4E to D&D.
And btw, this is not an attempt at an edition war.
It absolutely is. Knock it off. Everyone has had enough of the "it isn't D&D" nonsense. -- Piratecat
It's an attempt to explain why the entitlement and superhero type of terminology has entered our D&D gaming culture concerning 4E. It's a matter of lack of D&D feel to the game.
