4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Remathilis]

I'm not sure how to respond to this other than to say that 4E actually did do that; they just didn't openly announce it.

A lot of concepts introduced in late 3rd Edition books were 4th Edition concepts. Take a look at the knight from PHB2 and see if you notice some of the similarities to the 4E fighter and the 4E warlord.

The late 3.5 stuff bore only passing resemblances. To whit; a lot of ideas from the Player's Options line (attacks of opportunity, Universal School of Magic, customizable PCs) made it into 3e, but to say that PO was a preview of 3e would be very misleading. Sure, there were lots of hints as to things, but there was no "Play 4e Today" moment. That was intentional. 4e was breaking the mold and you couldn't graph any area of it onto 3.5 and have it work. You couldn't drop healing surges into the game the way 4e used them without radical changes to cure magic, resting, healing potions, and the like. The changes were far greater than "giving clerics spontaneous casting". Thinks like the knight, or reserve feats, or Book of 9 Swords, hinted at the direction of 4e, but to say "You can get a feel for what a 4e game might be like by using a warblade instead of a fighter in your next session" is highly disingenuous. Whereas, I did get feel for 3e using 2e and some bolted on concepts like spontaneous cures, sneak attack dice, and upwards AC. It wasn't perfect, but it got closer than 4e did in its run-up; which left me in the dark on how the game would play until the PDFs leaked.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It was presented as 'well balanced' (truthfully, in terms of intra-party balance). In 3e terms that translates as 'mess with this at your peril!' - but they never actually said that. Indeed my experience was very quickly that 4e's GM-side design structures were extremely robust and welcomed messing around; in utter contrast to 3e's glass-pane design. For instance in 4e the DM can hand out five times or one fifth as much wealth per level as recommended, and that translates into an average +1 or -1 on the numbers; either is completely doable and has minimal effect on the campaign. Try handing out x5 or 1/5 wealth in 3e - I'd done the 1/5 and it was horrible how it massively weakened the already weakest classes (the non-casters) while leaving casters almost unaffected.

Yup! Not only is this true, it seems obvious to me, just from reading the game. Fighter's have 90 or so powers in PHB1, most of which (if you even pick them) you can use once a day. Will it make any real difference if you tweak with one or make a new one that is a bit over or under powered vs the rest? No, not really. Worst case it comes up once per encounter. Obviously you COULD mess things up, but you'd have to DRASTICALLY miss the boat. Giving out some made-up feat might be a bit riskier, but its not really genius level game understanding that say putting a pretty stringent qualifier on when something works will keep it from getting out of hand.

There's NOTHING inherent to 4e's design that makes it hard to tweak. To the contrary, the numerical underpinnings are right there on the surface visible to all. Its quite clear what a +1 to-hit does. Its far less easy to determine that in 3e, 2e, or 1e.

I find it odd that people would consider 4e to be some precisely conceived game that might go wrong if tweaked. 1e is FAR FAR FAR more precisely tweaked to do one thing, dungeon crawl style sandbox play, than 4e has ever dreamed of being. Even small tweaks to 1e easily cause major derangement within its designed scope of play, and, despite someone arguing the contrary earlier, it is a brittle-as-hell game. I've never seen classic D&D adapted to much of anything. GW aside TSR never even made the attempt, wisely enough. The only other RPGs I know of that emulate D&D's structure are deliberate attempts to reproduce the features of D&D relatively precisely. 4e is IMHO a far more forgiving and flexible structure, though still most suitable to the FRPG heroic play genre.

 

[Sunseeker]

I did that too, but I quickly realized that the way 4E PCs are built in comparison to the world around them meant that "smash it" was so often such a good option that it rendered a lot of other tactics obsolete. I found ways to fix that, but it took a lot of trial and error.

I find it's more of a player issue than an edition issue. I ran a dungeon last night and only once was the answer "smash it", and only because I set the trap up to tempt them to do so.

A friend of mine who also DMs had similar issues; he found that players fell back upon "well, let's break it/kill it" as a strategy too often because of how good their characters were compared to the world around them. He once commented to me that he no longer saw the point in trying to run social encounters because too many of his players would attempt to just kill the other side if negotiations didn't go their way. While as DM he could then simply ramp up the power of the other side, he tired of trying to keep up with what he saw as an arms race he was too often on the losing side of. To be fair, part of the problem there is one of problem players, but it's worth noting that those players (I know the same group he DMs for because I play with most of them in other games) seemed to learn a lot of that mentality during their experience with 4E. I'm not in any way implying 4E caused them to be problem players, but I do think the way the game was built -for whatever reason- caused them to look at it differently than they had looked at their rpg experience with different games, and I do believe part of it was that they realized what their power level was in comparison to the world around them.

Then a tougher world around you says I! My players will generally face level-appropriate challenges. Certainly breaking down a wooden door gets easier as you go along, but the higher-level you get, the fewer wooden doors you need to break down!

 

[timASW]

3e ruleset worked terribly in Midnight, for intance; 4e Midnight would have been Kick-Ass.
.

I could not disagree more. To me 4e would probably be the absolutely worst possible rules system for midnight with the possible exception of something like exalted.

Midnight wasnt about being heroes or "narrative control" (whatever the hell that means today). Midnight was a grim survival setting where the characters were survivors and scavengers at worst and scrappy rebels at best. No where in that setting is there any room for 4e over the top style heroes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oddly enough I strongly disagree. oD&D was predicated on a certain style even more tightly than 4e was. This got drifted into a mishmash but with things like Vancian magic hardcoded in and the need for magical healing was never as versatile as e.g. GURPS. Or (to cite modern games) the One Roll Engine, Cortex+ or Apocalypse World engines.

So so so so true. 'Classic' D&D is one of the least flexible systems there is. I think people have just gotten used to its narrowness and over the years have taken it as far as it WILL go. That doesn't mean it is a very flexible system. If it were then why did it never get adopted as the basis for anything beyond classic D&D? I mean MA/GW is literally the only other related game and it was a stretch.

 

[S'mon]

I could not disagree more. To me 4e would probably be the absolutely worst possible rules system for midnight with the possible exception of something like exalted.

Midnight wasnt about being heroes or "narrative control" (whatever the hell that means today). Midnight was a grim survival setting where the characters were survivors and scavengers at worst and scrappy rebels at best. No where in that setting is there any room for 4e over the top style heroes.

I guess you were one of what we called the "rotten turnip scavenger" brigade. But if scavenging for rotten turnips was what Midnight was about, what was the point of all those Heroic Path thingummies that every PC had (I was Ironborn)? You don't need to be Ironborn to scavenge for rotten turnips.

 

[timASW]

I guess you were one of what we called the "rotten turnip scavenger" brigade. But if scavenging for rotten turnips was what Midnight was about, what was the point of all those Heroic Path thingummies that every PC had (I was Ironborn)? You don't need to be Ironborn to scavenge for rotten turnips.

To give you a better chance of surviving if a group of orcs or a legate finds you scavenging without a permit of course.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Ratskinner , great post at #215, but can't XP.



Many of those 4e fans, though, demonstrate a clear knowledge of the other games around (be that Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, FATE, etc) and how 4e does or doesn't resemble them. I don't recall ever seeing a post that advocates 4e for narrativist play, and the player has never even heard of non-traditional games.

What I tend to find odd is people who advocate 3E for sim play and then it turns out they've never even looked at RQ, RM, C&S, or similar late-70s/80s vintage sim fantasy system.

Well, I'll certainly avoid assuming any level of experience or lack thereof on any GROUP's part, but I do think that the constant unrelenting criticism of every aspect of 4e has made it a highly analyzed game, and one who's advocates have necessarily done a good bit of analysis. At a certain point one comes to feel almost like some late period Roman must have felt, perpetually opposing the unwashed barbarian masses dead set on mindless pillage

Who needs to read a textbook to play "Pemertonian" 4e? I didn't, I just ran the game like I'd been running my RM game but adding in the DMG advice on the tactical/mechanical side of encounter building, and taking advantage of p 42 for mechanical improvisation.

Since 2009 I've been posting on this forum explaining how I play 4e, how it clearly lacks the sim trappings of 3E but supports a different playstyle pretty well, etc. While some posters seemed to disagree, arguing that rather than playing 4e as written I was doing some sort of weird Forge drifting of it, some others have obviously found what I posted helpful.

Yeah, I have to say, while I don't know if in practice we play a lot like Pemerton & Co play I find what he's saying sounds really familiar. I didn't spend some huge amount of time analyzing stuff. I just read the books and did what worked. I don't care a lot about theory or count myself as some genius amongst DMs. In some respects 4e can be less forgiving than say AD&D (I never ran 3.x) but OTOH in most respects it just works, as do most RPGs when you sit down and take them at face value and play them.

I've never said everyone should like 4e. What I've objected to over the past 4 or so years is being told, repeatedly and often, that because I'm playing 4e my game must be a serious of vacuous tactical skirmishes linked by meaningless freeform roleplay.

There seems to be a bit less of this these days, though, as more people recognise that - whether or not they personally are interested in it - there's a type of heroic fantasy RPGing for which 4e offers genuinely solid support.

Aye, I found most of the criticism eye-rollingly lame. A lot of the rest I have to join the OP in questioning its point and goal, and why it is directed at 4e specifically. I think at the deepest level the issue is that 4e is different enough that its very existence, particularly as a purported improvement, challenges people to ask if what they've been playing for the last however many years is the best game they could be experiencing. It is really of course purely subjective, but most of the critiques have smelled very much like defensiveness, and less like measured analysis. 4e is of course far from being above criticism, and calling one game better than another is probably mostly nonsensical, but somehow I wasn't impressed with the overall willingness of D&D fans to give new things a try.

I get the feeling you're right Pemerton, there's less of this going on now, at least in some places like here. I guess I'll hope that the whole experience has perhaps given the community some improved insight, but its hard to say.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's the diplomacy and warfare parts that bother me. They're a major part of GoT, and I don't think 4e is a particularly good game for dealing with them. I'd also like a game which supports Passions, and that's not something 4e does. The emotional commitmens people have that make them do things even when they know it's a bad idea - those need to be in, and there need to be rules for people to manipulate you through those. If I was trying to do it, I'd take some of the Domain/Mass Combat rules from Basic D&D, and then add a system of passions like that in Pendragon on top.

There are clearly a lot of different ways to approach things. I'd use 4e, make the warfare and domain running aspect into a series of skill challenges, and leave the personality aspects of the PCs to the players to RP. It could be interesting perhaps to have each player write up their core motivation and a couple hooks, but I don't think there's a real need to attach mechanics to it (and you can always at least tie it into character building choices like feats and PPs). NPCs could be manipulated using skills and more SCs, etc. IMHO, for my preferred style of play anyway, the loose 4e approach to non-combat rules structure is an advantage.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Like I said earlier the Dragon mag article laid out the mechanical changes and left the aspect of how it would play pretty much up in the air which is, again IMO, alot more honest than saying it's the same game like they did for 4e.

I'm confused. Where the HECK did WotC ever say that 4e was the same game? They published several BOOKS just on how 4e was different from/improved over 3.x. That's what I remember.