D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Tony Vargas]

I've seen the spam encounters/hoard dailies/disdain at-will & basic attacks attitude. It's amusingly ineffective in many, maybe even most encounters, in addition to tending to bore the very people who engage in it. The logic is sound enough on the surface - iff the relative power of at-will/encounter/daily attacks were just all in terms of DPR and monsters were just blocks of hps. 4e combats, though just last longer than the rocket-tag of 3e and high-level classic D&D, and actions count for more than in low-level classic D&D. Along with the relative complexity of encounters, and the way 4e roles work together, that tactical depth creates a lot of room for using a daily advisedly at some point other than the last combat of the day, or for something other than a nova combo, or for using at-wills even early in a combat, or for saving an encounter until an opportunity to use it well presents itself (or can be manufactured).

Of course, if you really want to, you can devise an 'optimal' build that is generally best off expending it's encounters (attack &, if you can swing it, utility & item) in a set pattern every combat. If you do, and you don't enjoy that sort of thing, though, then it's your own fault - there's lots of other meaningful, viable options.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Abdul. Do you ever run online campaigns?

...what would it take for me to join one of these campaigns or convince you to start one?

Because sweet wounded Jesus this is exactly the awesome experience I have longed to have with 4e, and been unable to find/keep going.

Ah, I did at one time. One of the pieces of my old time group from the 80's became the online group. We ran a lot of 4e using Maptool. It was a little tedious at times. After a while we went on to some rules light games and I took my 4e torch over to the OTHER half of the old group, playing live. That was even more fun. I really hope one day that VTT's are as good as sitting at a table, that might be a real renaissance of the RPG over the 'computer game'.

So, the short answer is I don't currently run any games online. I've been working on my 'hack' though, maybe I'll have to playtest it with some people online, its definitely NQ4E at this point, but it has some of the same virtues.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thankfully I never had these issues.

My own inclinations, combined with the 4e DMG advice on encounter building, meant that I never designed poxy-little piddle-about-and-achieve-nothing-significant encounters (the sort of filler that a module like Q1 is full off). And from the start I think my players worked out that playing the game - which means putting your PC out there and trying to do stuff - is fun.

Our first combat encounter in 4e, at 1st level, was adapted from Night's Dark Terror. The PCs' boat is attacked by bandits, who use a chain strung across the river to block it. I placed an islet/sand bar or two, plus gave the bandits a raft with their magic-user on it. And so in our first combat encounter we had PCs jumping from boat to sand bar, some ending up in the water, taking command of the enemy raft, the warlock teleporting around to take control of dry ground, and eventually the PCs making it to the shore to take down the enemy slinger.

The thing is, the DMG makes it plain as day that this is the sort of encounter the system supports. And there are modules out there - like Night's Dark Terror - that have this sort of thing in them. If people ignore the encounter building advice, and ignore the player-side advice, and then complain that they get these silly little grinds where nothing happens - well, what do you expect when you ignore the advice?!

I didn't quite at first realize the degree of dynamism that was ideal. My first adventure was something like the PCs tracking some goblins back to a half-ruined house where they had holed up (and mostly gotten really drunk and passed out). So the characters move up and there's a sort of confused melee outside, and then they find out that they need to get inside and deal with the now starting to wake up goblins, so it was a time crunch kind of situation that telescoped about 3 encounters into technically one (no short rests). So it worked out well, it was fun and went back and forth in an interesting way, but it wasn't quite as 'action adventure' as what you're talking about, or what I typically do now.

TODAY if I were revisiting that particular story-arc I would probably add a bunch of elements. Just brainstorming maybe some of the goblins have wolves, but I have this idea of somehow the PCs ending up fleeing through the woods and coming crashing into the midst of wearbears, and then trying to do a song and dance (not get their heads bashed in) until the gobos suddenly show up and it all turns into a crazy fight in the dark running around in the woods, with pit traps and avoiding crazed pissed-off bears. I dunno exactly how to make that work yet, but this is sort of how my process will go. Maybe that scene will never come off, but I can put all those elements in the bag and see what happens.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If in every case players take encounter powers that are nothing but damage-buffs (at 1st level, the closest to this for a fighter would be Steel Serpent Strike: 2W, slowed and cannot shift; for a wizard, it would be Chill Strike: 2d8 and dazed) then perhaps it's always best to lead with them, but frankly if you build a boring PC, complaining that it's boring in play seems like reaping what you've sown!

As I may have mentioned, my impressions of 4E were formed entirely within the first six months of release. And I already admitted that controllers might be an exception to this, since their powers tend to be more situational.

Why would a 4e GM not be using p 42? - those are the rules of the game!

In this case, it's actually more like a guideline to help the DM adjudicate. If you're a paragon-level party, and there are only heroic-level fire sources around, then your improvised fire attack might deal less damage than you were hoping.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Its not all about mechanics though, I'd assume you ROLE PLAY your character, you were after all the one talking about how your way was actually role playing, so presumably you might use the power that makes sense in character-logic.

I assume my characters are competent, and understand whatever in-game reality corresponds to HP and the damage-potential of an attack. Barring some in-game circumstances which would benefit from a situational ability, dealing more damage is always better.

Another situation might be if you're uncertain whether or not an enemy is ... whatever in-game reality corresponds to being a minion ... in which case you wouldn't want to expend unnecessary energy on such a pitiful opponent.

 

[Bluenose]

Same here, though if it were intended to be a war along the lines of WW1/2, the Punic Wars, the US Civil War, etc. I might break it up into campaigns, years, major battles, or some other sort of thing.

Maybe even go for a "meta skill challenge." That is, each major "battle"/"year"/divison is a skill challenge that can be won, lost, or drawn (perhaps a total of 6-10 quick rolls), and between battles/years/etc. you figure out resources won and lost and how things feed into future challenges. Then you appraise the whole war and look at how the battles went; if you've fought for 3 "years" (or whatever) and won substantially or secured key victories, whether through brute strength or cunning action, you win the war. It's also conceivable that the war could simply find no victors (what with the whole many rolls trending to the mean thing), which is a result not uncommon in real wars, e.g. WW1 was "won" by the Allies but the victory came at pretty high cost (to everyone except the US, of course, given that we weren't fighting on our own soil) and didn't even resolve several of the underlying issues. Similarly, the US Civil War was primarily ended by the South having destroyed its economy (driving up the sale of cotton until buyers were forced to look elsewhere), its armies run ragged and devoid of food and supplies.

I could see running First and Second Bull Run(/Manassas), Antietam, Fredricksburg, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Appomattox as the "key" battles of the war (not that there weren't others, just that the list started to get overly long!) As long as the "skill challenge battles" weren't overly complex, and had interesting (and useful) interludes of reconnaissance, planning, sabotage, and (possibly) diplomacy, I could see this actually being a pretty cool experience. Particularly if the interludes impressed on the players the weight and horror of war, rather than glossing over it all to make it seem like just an exercise of numbers and probability.

I actually wrote something like 80% of a system for handling conflicts of all sorts between groups using something close to the 4e system. Skill challenges were useful because they include failures and those failures would then apply as penalties to future actions until something was done to clear them. I do admit it wasn't intended for anything quite as large as the ACW, but scaling the effects larger wouldn't have been hard.

 

[pemerton]

As I may have mentioned, my impressions of 4E were formed entirely within the first six months of release.

I'm not sure how this is relevant - Passing Attack is in the PHB, and so was available to fighters in the first 6 months of release. The other 1st level fighter dailies - besides Passing Attack and the 2W-movement debuff one, are one that lets an ally shift (so a leader power, and situational), one that does 1W damage an knocks the target prone (so also situational).

The boat encounter I described above was run in January or maybe early Feb of 2009, when I started my campaign, so barely more than 6 months after release. I didn't need anything but the core books to build it or run it, and the PCs who went through it were built using the PHB.

If you're a paragon-level party, and there are only heroic-level fire sources around, then your improvised fire attack might deal less damage than you were hoping.

If you're a paragon tier party, you will also have four encounter powers, at least three dailies (1, 5, 9), at least 3 utilities (4 at 12th), plus probably 6+ items each, overall leading to a power sheet looking more like the epic one I posted upthread.

 

[Sadras]

I know, but it certainly wasn't being used that way, but in the 'common perception' sense. In any case 'evolved' fits 4e, and 'atavistic' fits 5e /better/ than 'evolved' does, being more specific, and quite accurate.

Actually you cannot dictate how I was using the word evolution, you jumped onto nit-pick semantics when all I was saying was that 4e was a natural progression from 3e given the perceived problems of 3e - same with the progression onto 5e. So if you do not like the word evolution in that kind of context, sure, substitute it with any word that makes sense to you. My original statement still stands however.

 

[Sadras]

No, if you were actually sitting there with power cards printed out from the CB, calling 6 to 9 cards (at wills, second wind, basic attacks, class-feature powers, encounter & daily) '1 card' would not be a bad analogy.
It would simply be false.

You know perfectly well I was speaking about "1 card" in the metaphorical sense - it wasn't that disguised in my posts for you to take this line.

Because you could 'declare actions' all you wanted, it didn't mean they'd actually work - and because anyone could declare the same action, if it seemed to work decidedly well.

Encounters and Dailies are not auto successes either unless they have the "on-a-miss" effect. In the latter half of your sentence you seem to allude that the powers were unique so in previous editions anyone could copy anyone else with a special manoeuvre. Is that what you are saying here?

Why, if you hate being 'limited' by them so much?

There is a predisposition of utilising powers in combat especially if they are sitting on your character sheet. Will you use your powers more or less if they sitting in your hand?

 

[Sadras]

What character did you play, such that you literally had exactly one card, never more?

It was a metaphorical statement and I was initially talking about encounter powers and as you mentioned we start off with one.

Can you point me in the direction of these mythical older-style edition DMs who actually allow "anything you want"? Because I've played several sessions of B/X. They were enjoyable sessions! But "ANYTHING you want" does not characterize the experience I had.

I always find this interesting. People like to compare their current roleplaying experience with those of 20-30 years ago and speak about how bad the DMs were. Has it every occurred to anyone that 20-30 years of experience (for both DMs and players) might have something to do with why DMs are perhaps better now days and its not all always about the system?

Perhaps the problem is that people you have gamed with simply do not wish to exercise creativity unless they are forced to? That's somewhat harsh, so I apologize for that, but it may be true. If someone need their game to FORCE them to be creative in order for them to be creative at all...well, I'm sorry that that is the case, because there are doors closed to them that are open to me.

Perhaps, I'm not ruling this out. I do know that without a codified list of powers in front of them, I find my players are more prone to be creative in encounters. Not that they weren't creative in 4e, just less so - perhaps viewing as I do the 4e powers as a stifling mechanism.