4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Balesir]

Well, just as I thought (amazed) that a good discussion might get going, we get an introductory whinge about "immersion" followed by a wall-of-text-rant about how "my OP character wasn't uber enough". Go figure.

4e works fine in 3d. The skill challenge system was poorly explained and it would have been great to see more powers and systems developed more deeply for non-combat stuff, but WotC seemed to wake up to the real strengths of 4e late and canned it before they came - it happens.

Would 4e have done well as non-D&D? Maybe - if I had found it I'd still have liked it. The real tragedy, though, seems to me to be that it will get squashed as far as future development goes, because it was D&D (but now D&D is something different). But, then, that has its roots with the cruddy GSL and the useless way that WotC handled 3PP with 4e. That's something some folks seem to hold the system accountable for (which makes no sense, to me), but I think it was just "dissociated incompetence".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

They don't blame the system.

You view a company's product through a lens tinted by your feelings towards the company. That's why branding works. Branding is also why nobody bought a Volkswagon Corrado- despite being a Porsche in Volkswagon clothing, it was still a Volkswagen. Nobody wanted to buy a car priced at twice the next most expensive car in the company's line.

So as consumers looked through that perceptual lens, their opinion of WotC's actions leading up to and shortly after 4Ed's release inevitably distorted their perceptions of the game's strengths and flaws. Those who didn't like the rollout found the game's flaws magnified and its strengths minimized.

 

[Balesir]

Ah, OK, that makes some kind of sense. And explains why I never really "got" branding, either...

 

[Neonchameleon]

made it quite clear that combat is the core of the game and that if you didn't want combat you should gtfo. It even goes so far that they stopped even trying to simulate a world to make combat "better".

Complete edition warring nonsense. 4e has the best non-combat support of any edition. And 4e doesn't simulate a world because the D&D rules were never intended to do that. They were intended to simulate an adventuring party - and the worldbuilding using these rules is ... clunky. OK, so Frank Trollman's Tome of Awesome gave it a damn good try (including the Wish Economy) but ultimately it shows a lot of the problems with this approach.

If I look at the 1e rulebook I see exactly what it was - a hacked tabletop wargame with distances measured in inches, and non-combat mechanisms bolted on. Little out of combat and most of that spells, the remainder being narrowly focussed.

If I look at 2e I see they've added a non-weapon proficiency section for PCs to specialise in out of combat. And it clunks. Badly.

3e has two major options out of combat. An almost painfully generic skill system in which everyone uses the same skills the same ways (until Complete Scoundrel with a very few feats like Track providing exceptions) and due to the three dozen skills it serves to define what you can't do. And spells, often making the skill system irrelevant.

4e has less of the general incompetence 3e imposes due to far fewer skills and the 1/2 level bonus. The spells no longer commonly make skills irrelevant. And most of all it adds stunts to skills - yes, utility powers are extremely overloaded, but a stealth focussed rogue can use stealth in ways almost no one else can. It's a little more focussed than the 3e skill system but is both the best and the most relevant skill system D&D has ever had. (It doesn't, however, have the Wilderness Handbook, instead preferring applications of a generic system).

As for skill challenges, whoever was explaining them botched the explanation badly. Try adding something like the following paragraphs to the skill challenge example involving persuading the duke. (Yes, I'm aware that these paragraphs need a good editing - but I think they are more than sufficient to explain what was not made explicit in the text.)

The players have surprised the DM; they are going to go back to the Duke Malebon, the lord of a villiage they rescued seven levels ago and ask him to return that favour by using his army to threaten the orc flank, keeping the orcs pinned and therefore less likely to raid. This wasn't something the DM expected but is a sensible course of action. The DM has only a few memories of this duke, and if he still has any notes on that session they aren't with him, and he wouldn't want to delay play by hunting through his notes for a full refresh on what happened anyway. Convincing the Duke to help is far more complex than a single skill check will account for, but it will merely help rather than solve the problem. He therefore decides to make the attempt to convince the Duke a skill challenge, and skips in a few sentences over the PCs asking for an audience (they're local heroes and have interesting war stories by now) and ushers them straight to the audience room.

For the skill challenge he first needs to decide a level. If he had no other clues to go on, he would probably use the PC's level, but although he doesn't have the stats to this duke to hand he has the stats to another duke, and because the Duke is likely to be sympathetic but this is a large request he sets the skill challenge to the Duke's level -3 or 11 (which is a level higher than the PCs are at present) and because the scene shouldn't be over too fast or be impossible he sets it to Complexity 3. Which means that the skill DCs he will be using for easy, medium, and hard come off the table as __, __, __. [I don't have the table to hand]. He also draws two boxes; one for successes, and one for failures. Each time the PCs succeed on a primary skill he will put a mark in the success box, and a failure on a primary skill adds a failure. The PCs succeed if they fill the succeess box before the failure box. At no point does he mention to the PCs they are now in a skill challenge (although some will probably guess), instead asking them what they (in the role of their PCs) do in the fictional situation.

He then mentally runs down the skills he expects the PCs to use, and how he expects to use them dividing them into primary and secondary skills. Some DMs don't bother with this step, instead judging whether a skill is primary or secondary based on how it is used, but our DM likes to be prepared.


[List of skills for the skill challenge snipped].

Intimidate in this challenge is an interesting skill. Trying to intimidate the duke directly is an automatic failure - he is not going to back down and lose face in front of a few of his knights. On the other hand those same knights (and in truth the Duke himself) are hotheaded; using Intimidate to convey how threatening the orcs are will imply there's glory to be won on the field - this can be done once as an easy rather than medium skill check. Whether the PCs will be able to use the Intimidate skill effectively depends on how they read the situation.

[A column and a half of skill challenge snipped.

This use of History surprised the DM - it was not on the initial list of skills (and privately the DM suspects that the player of the Charisma 8 wizard is doing whatever he can to avoid talking to the Duke directly - a perfectly valid in character decision). Using history this way is, however, something that would be useful without directly taking a step to persuade the Duke. A textbook secondary skill, medium difficulty. It doesn't matter that it wasn't on the list of skills the DM thought of at the start of the skill challenge - it fits the situation so the DM treats it as if it was there all along. Few DMs or adventure writers are going to be as creative as the best efforts of an entire team of players, and writing down every possibility rather than simply examples would take reams of paper.

[The skill challenge continues]​

That is how I have always both read and run skill challenges.

And on recent posts, my wire-fu monk had short distance flight abilities as a level 2 utility power. Pushing and throwing people off ledges is fun, as is running up the side of the castle wall. I believe that Penny Arcade has thoroughly refuted the notion that 4e combat is 2d.

 

[Argyle King]

It took me a while to come around to it, but -despite what some of my posts might indicate- I actually do like a lot of what 4E does/did. However, the handful of things which bothered me are things which matter to me a lot when it comes to playing a rpg; I will mention them below. However, before I get into that, I would like to mention some of the things I liked about 4E so as to not make this post completely negative.

Things I liked about 4E
For the most part, I vastly preferred the 4E cosmology. There were a few things I didn't like, but -overall, I preferred it over The Great Wheel.

I found the lessened power curve between levels to be refreshing. It was nice to be able to run a story line and not need to drastically change elements of it simply because the PCs gained a level or two. In fact, I enjoyed this so much that when I decided to experiment with games outside of D&D, I settled on a game (GURPS) which doesn't have levels at all.

I may be in the minority here, but I felt that both Dragonborn (as a race) and Warlord (as a class) were excellent. A lot of people seem to take issue with those two options being in the PHB, but I preferred them. I found Dragonborn to be far more interesting than I ever found Gnomes to be, so I welcomed the swap there. I enjoyed the Warlord because it was nice to be able to play a melee type who wasn't required to suck when it came to doing anything outside of fighting; the charismatic leader who shouts commands and verbally berates his enemies while beating them down is a fun class to play.

I vastly preferred the encounter design philosophy that 4E embraced; that being that there should be a lot of moving pieces in an encounter. While I do have some problems with how encounters turned out in actual play, a lot of the ideals they were built upon are things I felt were an improvement. I felt it was more fun to have a group of PCs against a group of monsters than it was to have a group of PCs against a smaller group of creatures.

There are a few others, but I'll move on for now.


Things about 4E which bothered me

1) What made sense for me to do given a situation was often not what would make sense according to how the game worked.

I've mentioned this in a lot of other threads already, and this is one area where the labeling of 4E as a 'tactical' game doesn't make sense to me. It seems to make sense to everyone but me, so I suppose I have a different idea of what tactics mean.

Basically, the problem I had was that there were too many situations in which what I felt I would do or what my character would do given the layout of a situation was trumped by what the game said I should do based upon how the pieces of the game worked. For a lack of better words, I felt that I had to learn a second set of reality and work under the assumption of that when playing D&D. Most of the time, it made more sense for me (and I got better results) if I viewed my PC as a piece on a game board rather than a character inside of a world. There are 'tactics' in 4E which would not work anywhere outside of 4E; some of the things that are considered good tactics given the assumptions of 4E would be terrible tactics in virtually any other environment that I'm familiar with; they would get you killed. Likewise, there are tactics which would be excellent tactics anywhere outside of 4E, but turn out to be poor tactics inside of 4E.

2) Tieflings

In contrast to what I said about Dragonborn, Tieflings fell completely flat for me. I didn't find their story particularly interesting, and I didn't find them mechanically very interesting either. Just... I dunno... something about their presentation rubbed me the wrong way, and I didn't like the 4E version of them at all.

3) The PCs were above the world they lived in; not part of it

This isn't exactly a bad thing in and of itself. I feel the PCs should be better than average. However, I found the PCs to be so good compared to the world around them that it create problems both with encounter design and with making sense of some of the fluff assumptions.

When it comes to encounter design and monsters, I applaud that 4E had monsters follow different rules. They didn't need a full character sheet. However, I would have preferred that there was more common ground between the numbers the monsters could generate compared to the numbers the world was built upon and the numbers PCs could generate compared to the world around them. This isn't even something I would normally think about so deeply if it wasn't for the problem being so in my face during a few campaigns. Aside from the PCs regularly squashing the monsters with barely any effort pre-MM3, and still doing so, but with some effort post-MM3, there were also times in which the PCs could too easily literally break the world around them while the monsters (some of whom were described as being massively strong and powerful) would struggle to even batter down some doors.

On obvious example of where this becomes a problem is in the first DM's guide which suggests having a trap skill challenge as part of a combat encounter. Why the heck would the party decide to have a member of the party not participate in fighting the enemy for 3-4 rounds only for the chance to disarm a trap when they could simply break the trap? In a game where using terrain to make encounters more interesting is a common point of advice, this can turn into a problem.

This also lead to some of the setting assumptions being somewhat hard to swallow. The Points of Light concept didn't make a whole lot of sense in a world where the PCs existed. Powerful demon lords were laid low with nary an effort; dragons were stun-locked and killed before they could even move; even some Gods struggled to match power with the PCs. I understand that 4E was built with the idea that the PCs should succeed most of the time, but I think the implementation of that idea was (whether on purpose or by accident) taken way too far. As I said, I understand building monsters different than the PCs, but I still believe there should be some consistency between how the two sides of the monster/PC divide interact with the world they are part of.

4) I honestly started to miss 3E's grapple rules.

Grab just didn't cut it for me. From the PC side of the table, I often like to use grappling. While later 4E options made it better, 4E's Grab was very often a terrible tactic. Other than disallowing my opponent to move using mundane means, it had little effect.

From the DM/monster side of the table, Grab often wasn't very good for monsters either. Some time ago, I remember having a conversation in a previous thread about monsters who had special grab attacks. Even considering the auto-damage that some of them did, it still turned out to be less effective than using other options. In some cases, the was less effective enough that the PCs would intentionally try to get Grabbed (this ties in with #1) because it was better for the party.

In short, Grab was often terrible regardless of what side of the DM screen you were sitting on.

5) I felt there was a poor relationship between the crunch of the game and the fluff of the game.

I'm someone who believes that mechanics do matter; they do have a feel to them. I can take the same story and tell it with two different systems, and, while most of the story might feel exactly the same, there are going to be things that feel different because of how the mechanical parts of those two systems differ.

There were many times when I wanted to tell a story in 4E, but I felt as though I had to bend my vision too much to cater to the 4E system, and it would lose the feel I wanted. Honestly, I learned to live with that, but what bothered me the most was that (in my opinion) 4E didn't tell the 4E story very well either. What I took away from books like Worlds and Monsters and the descriptions of the PoL setting was completely different from how things felt to me in actual play. As a player, it was hard for me to take seriously.

As a DM, I had the most success in 4E when I completely ditched the 4E setting assumptions and fluff. The last game I ran would be best described as some kind of weird mix between sci-fi and fantasy. I completely embraced the over-the-top and somewhat gonzo nature of encounter powers and built a world which was informed by them rather than one which they stood apart from. I had Battle Toads style hover bikes, magic wands that were described as Star Wars style blasters, Drow who lived underground to escape magical radiation from a nuke which was set off years ago, and etc. The game was fantastic, and the players all expressed they had highly enjoyed it. As a DM, it felt good to me to run something people had so highly enjoyed, but it also seemed strange to me that I had the most success using D&D to run a game which wasn't very much like D&D at all. I can't consider this completely negative because it lead to one of the most fun games I ever ran as a DM, but it did take me a while to get there because "ze game will remain ze same" turned out to (imo) not be true at all.

note: Link provided for those who may not be familiar with Battle Toads. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhUC-oa3LzY

 

[Hussar]

4e's biggest downfall has always been the presentation. Always. It's not the mechanics, it's not anything else. It's how it was presented.

I mean, one of the biggest complaints about 4e is the idea of meta-mechanics. The dreaded "dissociated mechanics". Yet, look at DDN. We have Advantage/Disadvantage. Think about this for a second. When you have either, you roll twice and choose the higher or lower result depending.

How is this not completely dissociated from the fiction? Is there some sort of quantum splitting of time, where the reality of the world bifurcates briefly before the observed reality trumps the other? Of course not. The mechanic is 100% meta-game. The player rolls twice, but, in the game fiction, only one action occurs.

Yet, there has been nary a peep from the meta-mechanic police complaining how this breaks their immersion. How rolling twice for the same action does not, in any way, disturb their feelings of "being in the game world".

If this had been introduced in a 4e book, you can guarantee that people would be jumping all over it.

Or the Combat Expertise dice. Again, completely meta-gaming. Pure meta-game mechanic. You roll the dice AFTER results are known. Yet, again, it receives kudos pretty much from anyone. About the only criticism is that it's being used for too many classes.

Again, if this had been a 4e mechanic, people would have loathed it, dog-piled on it, and we'd have forty-six page threads decrying how WOTC has destroyed the game. I mean, dice pools? Holy crap! How un-D&D can you get? Yet, it gets the slide, purely because it isn't a 4e mechanic.

4e, a great game with unfortunately poor presentation.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

On 'want' - I've finally learned not to ask players "What do you want?" All I ever got in response was variants on "I want a pony". In future I'm going to ask them "What do you want to do?" If the answer is "I want to go looking for a pony", then fine. But I can't stand this whole passive wish-list thing where the players are trained to expect to follow the linear adventure and collect the wish-list treasure drops.

In my experience the wish list opens communication between the players and the GM which allows the GM to consider the items that are wished for and incorporate said magic items into a coherent narrative that is part of the story.

A high-DEX Slayer Fighter works pretty well as an archer, since he's adding double DEX bonus to damage with ranged basic attacks. Of course he can fight in melee too, take the melee training (DEX) feat and he doesn't even need good STR to do so.

To be sure! Our Fighter is a Slayer and does this exactly.

You cannot play 4e without a battle grid, and not nerf the players. PF plays fine with or without...

This is simply not true. If you're able to conceptualize pushing with a bull rush, the range and area a Fireball spell uses, determining cover, or threatened squares in PF (and not nerf the players), you can just as easily do the same in 4E. I think that you lose tactical precision when you move from the grid to the mind's eye but that happens in both PF and 4E.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I want to know why everyone's still wasting their time arguing about whether 3E or 4E is better, seeing as how 5E is being worked on.

Shouldn't all your arguments now be about 3E vs 5E or 4E vs 5E?

Arguing 3E vs 4E now is like arguing what's better... 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch floppy disks (with the saddest part being a good half of the respondents here on the board probably won't even understand the reference I just made. )

 

[TerraDave]

....
I brought up Everway for a reason: when WotC published Everway (a very innovative & fun FRPG), they were a company with market share and a hot product, yes, but also with overstretched capital- a classic cash crunch encountered by many successful and growing businesses. They could not financially support Everway with any kind of real marketing or product support. So it was killed off as a product in 1995, and eventually sold off. A few years later, while still struggling a bit with cash flow, WotC was bought by Hasbro.

In contrast, WotC was a much healthier company in 2006-2008 than it was in 1999-2001.

Uhh, no. Not even remotely.

Its easy to check these things on the internet. Atkinson, Dancy, and others have been very open. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_of_the_Coast

By the mid-90s Wizards was making 10s of millions of dollars a year. Yes, they said they "couldn't support" everyway, but that because they wanted to stop loosing money on it.

When D&D was purchased in 97, everyone knew about MotG (and far too many people were playing it, got really annoying actually), about WotC and they were by far the dominant force in hobby gaming. They spent years on 3E, put great resources and thought into it, and were massively repaid.

Hasbro bought WotC for Pokemon. They offered a lot of money for it, thats why it was sold by WotCs founders.

Then, they had cash flow problems, as Hasbro had to justify its investment. The magazines and conventions were spun off with the e-licences, periodic firings became the norm, most WotC founders and many other senior staff would leave, and the gradual decline was on, with the minis and 3.5 giving a temporary reprieve.

By 2006, the glory days were over, and WoW panic on. Its true that MtG would make a comeback, allowing a huge amount of money to be wasted on things like Gleemax and the 3D VTT.

 

[billd91]

I mean, one of the biggest complaints about 4e is the idea of meta-mechanics. The dreaded "dissociated mechanics". Yet, look at DDN. We have Advantage/Disadvantage. Think about this for a second. When you have either, you roll twice and choose the higher or lower result depending.

How is this not completely dissociated from the fiction? Is there some sort of quantum splitting of time, where the reality of the world bifurcates briefly before the observed reality trumps the other? Of course not. The mechanic is 100% meta-game. The player rolls twice, but, in the game fiction, only one action occurs.

Yet, there has been nary a peep from the meta-mechanic police complaining how this breaks their immersion. How rolling twice for the same action does not, in any way, disturb their feelings of "being in the game world".

If this had been introduced in a 4e book, you can guarantee that people would be jumping all over it.

You are really barking up the wrong tree. Advantage and Disadvantage are neither more or less metagame nor disassociated than rolling an attack die in the first place. They're just alternative methods of accomplishing the exact same thing with a complexly skewed probability distribution. One action occurs, one resolution is conducted - it's just done with two dice and a comparison. And the in-game translation is that a character with advantage is more likely to succeed than one without and one with disadvantage is less likely to succeed than one without. End of story.