D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[Mishihari Lord]

The Cliff's notes of my personal experience with 4E: Bought the core books. Read them and saw that I liked it less than any previous edition. Put them on my shelf and went back to my other games. Oh, and stocked up on popcorn, the better to enjoy the edition wars from the sidelines. I can't say that I understand the level of acrimony and vitriol, but at least it kept things from being boring.

And I am a bit boggled at folks still trying to refute the concept of dissociative mechanics. When I read the article I felt that it pointed out exactly what I didn't like about 4E. It was kind of an epiphany, very helpful in evaluating future games as to whether I'd enjoy them. I've met too many people who sincerely attribute their opinions on RPGs, not just 4E, to this criteria to be able to dismiss it as just a disingenuous edition war tactic.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Right after PHB2 came out. I found myself wondering why we just didn't have a generic-yet-comprehensive list of powers for each role (or heck even rules for producing them on you own) with advice on how to tweak and refluff them into whatever you wanted.

...then I thought "duh, because that's just about the last book they could sell you."

I guess I see the possibility space as a lot bigger than character options.

The 4e framework could allow for deep dungeon or hex crawls, mechanically crunchy PC interaction, internal character struggles against your own character's flaws, gritty injuries...

Basically, lots of different types of stories and ways to play.

The publishers didn't explore this much. Because there was A Right Way To Play, they weren't really as interested in exploring other approaches to the game as they were in supporting their chosen way ("Have some more combat and character creation options, guys!").

I didn't need a Seeker, a Runepriest, a Battlemind, an Ardent, a Hamadryad, a Bladeling...

I needed associated mechanics, long-term endurance, rest-shifting, deleting surges, generic role mechanics, iconic power source mechanics, dungeon building advice, guidelines for more binary design....

 

[Pickles JG]

And I am a bit boggled at folks still trying to refute the concept of dissociative mechanics. When I read the article I felt that it pointed out exactly what I didn't like about 4E. It was kind of an epiphany, very helpful in evaluating future games as to whether I'd enjoy them. I've met too many people who sincerely attribute their opinions on RPGs, not just 4E, to this criteria to be able to dismiss it as just a disingenuous edition war tactic.

What I find mind boggling is that people who claim to hate dissociatve mechanics will not wory about hitpoints which are completely dissociative. (part meat largely not)

Hit points are so familiar people forget they are gibberish but worry about "Come & Get It", one of my favourite powers for the cool action movie images it conjures.

Anyway dissociative has not worried me since I realised D&D was a terrible simulation of reality & a fun game (1983)

 

[Ratskinner]

Right. I've posted in the past that 4e had some similiarities to a Marvel Heroic or HeroWars/Quest free-descriptor system, except that you have to pay WotC for every descriptor you want to use in your PC building.

Enhh...I'm not confident that 4e would work all that well as a free descriptor system beyond character gen and description. (I've been around the "let's add aspects to D&D block several times now.)

That is, I think you could implement it at a broad character level...especially in skills...almost every d20 game I know could adopt 13th Age's freeform skills without too much tweaking. You could maybe replace class and race with some lesser version of Fate aspects or MHRP distinctions as well (interacting with the Action Point economy I would think).

However, freeform resolution loves the abstract and functions at what folks around here improperly call the meta level. You wouldn't easily be able to implement freeform descriptors within the detailed, fiddly, and not-generally-meta combat resolution system of 4e. That is, the balance of all those fiddly powers depends on conditions like "prone" or "slowed" having a precise meaning mechanically. So somebody coming up with a "covered in goo" condition on the fly would get clumsy. (At least clumsier than in Fate or Cortex+.)

Which makes the 4e system as a whole slightly more amenable to freeform descriptors than 3e. Because, at least IME, once you have working freeform descriptor combat, then you've essentially got Fate/MHRP with a different resolution mechanic...which means you probably would have better off just doing that from the start.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And I am a bit boggled at folks still trying to refute the concept of dissociative mechanics. When I read the article I felt that it pointed out exactly what I didn't like about 4E. It was kind of an epiphany, very helpful in evaluating future games as to whether I'd enjoy them. I've met too many people who sincerely attribute their opinions on RPGs, not just 4E, to this criteria to be able to dismiss it as just a disingenuous edition war tactic.

I think the issue is that a lot of people claim to "hate disassociative mechanics" in general and say that's why they hated 4E, but forget that all editions of D&D use quite a lot of disassociative mechanics. If they were more specific, and didn't try to blame the entire thing on "disassociative mechanics" in general, but rather to say that they couldn't grok this or that one (uh-oh, admission of something potentially considered a failing, so of course that's a no-no for many!), or that they can take some, but 4E had too many, or whatever.

Also, let's be real, it has been used as a disingenous edition war tactic, so people using it more honestly are difficult to pick out (and some are very confused and/or just using it as a buzzword, thinking it means something it doesn't, to complicate things further!), just like it can be hard to differentiate people who use "4E is WoW/M:tG lolz" as a cheap, meaningless, and somewhat dated insult from people who think there is actually some sort of resemblance (with WoW they are usually really confused about either WoW or 4E or both).

 

[Ratskinner]

I guess I see the possibility space as a lot bigger than character options.

The 4e framework could allow for deep dungeon or hex crawls, mechanically crunchy PC interaction, internal character struggles against your own character's flaws, gritty injuries...

Basically, lots of different types of stories and ways to play.

The publishers didn't explore this much. Because there was A Right Way To Play, they weren't really as interested in exploring other approaches to the game as they were in supporting their chosen way ("Have some more combat and character creation options, guys!").

I didn't need a Seeker, a Runepriest, a Battlemind, an Ardent, a Hamadryad, a Bladeling...

I needed associated mechanics, long-term endurance, rest-shifting, deleting surges, generic role mechanics, iconic power source mechanics, dungeon building advice, guidelines for more binary design....

Your frustration is one that I share. However, I figure by the time you've made all those adjustments, you've essentially (no pun intended) written a new edition to the game. One that needs to be all-but-completely rewritten every time you switch feels. Which, to my mind, isn't exactly high praise for a system's flexibility.

 

[Ratskinner]

And I am a bit boggled at folks still trying to refute the concept of dissociative mechanics. When I read the article I felt that it pointed out exactly what I didn't like about 4E.

What I find mind boggling is that people who claim to hate dissociatve mechanics will not wory about hitpoints which are completely dissociative. (part meat largely not)

Hit points are so familiar people forget they are gibberish but worry about "Come & Get It", one of my favourite powers for the cool action movie images it conjures.

I think the whole "dissociative" thing is overblown and there are plenty of "just wrong" posts and opinions floating around out there on both sides. Generally, I think Pickles is right about it. We've been painting over the dissociative cracks in the walls of D&D's fundamentals for so long that it's easy to forget the cracks are there...for some of us. However, everyone gets their noses out of joint because the h4ters don't like to see those cracks pointed out and "dissociative" has enough negatives sounding phonemes in it that it immediately strikes 4vengers as pejorative. IMO.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Your frustration is one that I share. However, I figure by the time you've made all those adjustments, you've essentially (no pun intended) written a new edition to the game. One that needs to be all-but-completely rewritten every time you switch feels. Which, to my mind, isn't exactly high praise for a system's flexibility.

How do you figure that? A lot of what KM describes there is really totally doable just by adding to 4E's rules, not subtracting or replacing. That's not re-writing the entire game.

I agree with KM that it's sad that they didn't do more clever stuff with 4E, because it had a ton of potential which they never directly used. In the space it took them to write up a few dull PP or esoteric PPs, they could easily have detailed entire cool systems which would have given the game different aspects, or a different feel, without re-writing.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Your frustration is one that I share. However, I figure by the time you've made all those adjustments, you've essentially (no pun intended) written a new edition to the game. One that needs to be all-but-completely rewritten every time you switch feels. Which, to my mind, isn't exactly high praise for a system's flexibility.

That's the work that I was hoping the designers would do, instead of more keywords and attack powers. The math is predictable enough that I can see how it might be done from here, but it's still a lot of work, such that I would rather pay for a book where someone already did that than have to do it myself as a DM. And "bucketing" would be important.

For me, 4e Dark Sun is probably the farthest they went. Think of how useful inherent bonuses and themes are for any game that wants to de-emphasize magic items and emphasize unique archetypes in their games. Imagine if it would've done the same thing for injury, gritty survival, wilderness exploration, and arcane magic (some of which 4e Dark Sun also attempted, but survival days and arcane defiling aren't the strongest mechanics). Now think about if they were doing that kind of stuff around the launch instead of 2 years into the edition. Imagine if the first DMG would have included options for kicking healing surges and minis combat and martial dalies and inspirational HP out of the game in a way that supported the kind of game someone might have wanted to run with it.

But 4e had a Right Way to Play. I agreed with Mearls when he said something along the lines of "4e told you the best way to play guitar was to play heavy metal, and that's really only one way to play the guitar." (I'm butchering that quote, but riffing from memory).

At my most optimistic, I'm hoping 5e takes a mechanical underpinning as tight as 4e's, and doesn't pretend like you have to play it in a certain way.

 

[Nagol]

<snip>

But 4e had a Right Way to Play. I agreed with Mearls when he said something along the lines of "4e told you the best way to play guitar was to play heavy metal, and that's really only one way to play the guitar." (I'm butchering that quote, but riffing from memory).

At my most optimistic, I'm hoping 5e takes a mechanical underpinning as tight as 4e's, and doesn't pretend like you have to play it in a certain way.

“In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’” says Mearls. “But there’s other ways to play guitar.” found here