D&D 4E What 5E needs to learn from 4E

[GreyICE]

I agree, 'Indiana Jones' is the sort of thing 4e can do VERY well, and plays to its real strengths. I feel WotC completely missed the boat on understanding what 4e was good for, at least until quite recently.

*sigh*

WotC missed the boat on 4E so badly that I almost feel like the system never got a chance. First it was like "4E will change everything!" Then it failed to really make an effort to convert players/DMs (especially DMs) by marketing to them - if it had made a strong effort to say "DnD 4E, now with less prep time, easier to run epic adventures in the style of your favorite movie, more balance, cool encounters, neat terrain effects, etc." I think it would have gained some serious traction. It failed to ever really give people a guide to running a Dungeon Crawl with 4E, leaving it up to the community (imagine if one of the first books had been a "crawl" guide that changed HS mechanics and made the old creeping tension crawls work in 4E). Then it started apologizing for its design decisions, practically continuously. Essentials was basically a long apology note to the community that... didn't really solve anything. All it did was make 4E players hate Essentials (and, to be fair, Essentials was pretty awful in most regards).

Now they're like "5E! Absolutely not 4E in any way! But we'll toss the 4E players a few bones."

I swear they have all the good marketing talent doing MtG and DnD gets the rejects from the MtG team. Given the market size of both games, that's probably the smart decision for the company, but I can't help feeling DnD gets shortchanged.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I won't even go on about just how idiotic WotC seems to be. Of course it is easy to sit in the peanut gallery and throw tomatoes at them, less easy to BE them. Still, Essentials was a giant waste of time and sidetrack. What 4e always needed were GOOD ADVENTURES. I do think they made some bad design decisions though that really didn't help.

The game should have been 20 levels, much less space to fill with "we need yet another fighter power #286 , yawn." Scaling powers, power source power lists, etc. Spells should have ALL had names right out of the 1e PHB too (well, maybe not ALL, but they should have all been there). Lots of stuff was just stupid. I'm sure nobody could anticipate some of it, but even just a first reading of the game threw the most obvious flags for me. I just have to shake my head. There was a lot of really great work there, and it was undermined by a few questionable decisions and some VERY bad business execution.

Oh well. The truth is that they're screwed now. They bungled 4e so badly it is poison to half the community even though the core ideas and execution were the right way to go. Now all they can do is what? Make a game that is basically nothing but a nostalgia trip to try to sell one last set of books to a rapidly aging set of players? I guess. The best they can hope for is to spend the next 5 years chasing Paizo's tail lights. I'd flunk anyone that showed up with what WotC is doing now as a business plan in an MBA course. It is rock stupid.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm an experienced DM, I can make these "assumptions/leaps of logic" on the fly with past experience as my background/framework. A new DM that is picking up his first RPG might need more help in making these "assumptions/leaps of logic" to good effect.

Therefore, the system, independent of what other games have done, should do its best to explain the design assumptions that the game is operating under/expecting. The better the game does this the less gray area it leaves for these types of baseless arguments. It also gives the DM a good basis for when he wants to "break" the system.

From the standpoint of each individual game system, standing on its own, I believe that assuming that "this" has never been explained is not a good enough excuse for not explaining it now. I never had a problem with 4e, it doesn't mean that 4e would not have been better served if the explanations would have been expanded to show the "assumptions."

Well, sure, but that still leaves the question of why we don't get this kind of complaint about say 1e AD&D... It explains NOTHING really about the basic assumptions. The word 'level' is thrown around all over the place and never really explained (in any of the 5 ways it gets used no less) yet the whole game is built around level graded challenges and structured environments where each grade of challenge happens in a geographically distinct area (IE a dungeon made up of a layer cake of dungeon levels). NONE of this ever explained in the slightest. Even the example dungeon doesn't really clarify any of that.

Yet I have never heard it said that 1e should explain these conventions, nor that 2e should explain them, nor that 3.x should explain its conventions either. That's what puzzles me to no end. I've read literally 100's, maybe even 1000's of comments that can be summarized with "boy, 4e didn't explain all that stuff, for shame for shame!" yet nobody ever seemed to want or need it explained before...

 

[DM Howard]

*sigh*
I swear they have all the good marketing talent doing MtG and DnD gets the rejects from the MtG team. Given the market size of both games, that's probably the smart decision for the company, but I can't help feeling DnD gets shortchanged.

Not to get off topic but I'll totally agree. There is a gross mismanagement of marketing at Wotc and that is in part what made many people so upset about it. Not that many mechanics weren't under heavy debate but the game itself was not presented the way it should have been and the "my way or the highway" style of gaming along with the DM being stripped of almost all power rules wise was crazy. In terms of marketing just remember the big lead up to 4E where Wotc released that video about D&D Insider and how the digital table was going to be a fantastic and integral part of your game. Saw how that went.

 

[Neonchameleon]

along with the DM being stripped of almost all power rules wise was crazy.

This confuses me. What power is the DM supposed to have been stripped of in 4e? I can't think of any. I can think of a few tools to empower the DM in 4e - and I can think of a mountain of things I consider makework that a 4e DM doesn't need to do (starting with NPC building as if they were PCs, then accounting for plot destroying magic).

In terms of marketing just remember the big lead up to 4E where Wotc released that video about D&D Insider and how the digital table was going to be a fantastic and integral part of your game. Saw how that went.

4e has almost appeared to be cursed. Trigger warning about one of the major incidents that wrecked the digital plan.

 

[Shadeydm]

I see an opportunity to run a climactic boss fight in a way that none of the other editions easily or clearly supported. In 1E there was a campaign arc that I ultimatly intened the PCs to face off vs. an Archdevil and a fight like that would have been great. Same thing for a 3E campaign that would have ended with the PCs facing off vs slumbering demipower from the far realm that 4E system would have made it sing.

It saddens me to see just how far off topic this thread has derailed. I make a post about how well 4E handled boss fights and how 5E could learn from its approach to that specific sort of battle. What do we end up with 4E fans tripping over themselves in a rush to tell me how wrong I am because boss fights are really a boring slogfests...
gotta love the interwebz lol.

Pardon the interruption I now return you to your regularly scheduled edition warring.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I see an opportunity to run a climactic boss fight in a way that none of the other editions easily or clearly supported. In 1E there was a campaign arc that I ultimatly intened the PCs to face off vs. an Archdevil and a fight like that would have been great. Same thing for a 3E campaign that would have ended with the PCs facing off vs slumbering demipower from the far realm that 4E system would have made it sing.

It saddens me to see just how far off topic this thread has derailed. I make a post about how well 4E handled boss fights and how 5E could learn from its approach to that specific sort of battle. What do we end up with 4E fans tripping over themselves in a rush to tell me how wrong I am because boss fights are really a boring slogfests...
gotta love the interwebz lol.

Pardon the interruption I now return you to your regularly scheduled edition warring.

To each his own on that score. I certainly never said it. I've made awesome boss fights. I guess I made one or two that were mediocre along the way to mastering the concept, but honestly even the worst one was pretty good.

 

[DM Howard]

This confuses me. What power is the DM supposed to have been stripped of in 4e? I can't think of any. I can think of a few tools to empower the DM in 4e - and I can think of a mountain of things I consider makework that a 4e DM doesn't need to do (starting with NPC building as if they were PCs, then accounting for plot destroying magic).



4e has almost appeared to be cursed. Trigger warning about one of the major incidents that wrecked the digital plan.

The way 4E was designed, in my opinion mind you, there were player's options that were completely ridiculous but couldn't really be taken out without some extreme house ruling on the DM's part. Now there is nothing wrong with house ruling but when I get to a certain point I think it might almost be better if I make my own game rather than play 4E.

Beyond that, beyond my opinion of mechanics. 4E was designed to provide all these options upon options for the players and this was done will almost no idea that the DM would NOT want them in the campaign. They messed with "my game" as it were and it bugs me that they had this attitude of all-inclusive super options galore with magical supermarket without remembering that D&D first and foremost is about the story set in the world that the DM creates. Wotc was basically saying play your world my way or not at all because they didn't provide options for the DMs otherwise. (And again this isn't a huge deal except like I said before there comes a certain point with house ruling.

 

[adamc]

Interesting - my experience with 4E was the complete opposite. Boss fights were almost always a disappointment to me as a DM in 4E. After the "boss" spent their daily or two, they were stuck with a recharge power and at-wills for the rest of the fight.

While I largely agree that the big boss is not the strongest part of 4e, you can easily make a boss much tougher by adding auras.

I'm a fan of 4e, but the whole "elites get 2x hitpoints, solos get 4x" thing is problematic because it makes the fights take a long time, even when the outcome is obvious. I think victory conditions (not necessarily announced in advance) are the way to go there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

While I largely agree that the big boss is not the strongest part of 4e, you can easily make a boss much tougher by adding auras.

I'm a fan of 4e, but the whole "elites get 2x hitpoints, solos get 4x" thing is problematic because it makes the fights take a long time, even when the outcome is obvious. I think victory conditions (not necessarily announced in advance) are the way to go there.

4e fights almost always should have other things going on besides 'fight to the death'. Not all of those things might be termed 'victory conditions' but many of them could be. Sadly people spent far too much time taking the basic formula of 4e encounters seriously and FAR FAR too little time taking all the other advice seriously (I really suspect the vast majority of people never even read past how to use XP to build an encounter, and then they complain). DMG2 has a wealth of advice on more advanced topics too.

Once you stop seeing encounters, and DEFINITELY boss fights, as simple iron cage death matches the whole game starts to take on a very different cast. Push it even further and put fights in more interesting context and you have something that works REALLY well. All of a sudden the 'sloginess' that people have complained about turns into a positive aspect of the game (your opponents aren't trivial and you have to work at defeating each one).

Every encounter should BE a story. It should have PLOT and CHARACTER, and MOTIVE.