D&D 4E In Defense of 4E - a New Campaign Perspective

[The Crimson Binome]

I understand your complaints. I think any edition of the game - or any media for that matter - assumes a certain level of suspension of disbelief. Any edition of the game has had monsters/opponents who function under different rules and had different abilities. Even in 5E we see kobolds with pack tactics, hobgoblins with phalanx fighting, dragons with recharging breath weapons, liches with frightening gaze attacks. Yet I don't think I've seen players complaining that these creatures bend the rules to challenge the characters.

The key difference is that monster abilities only function because those monsters are innately different within the reality of the game world. A dragon can breathe fire, because of normal biological differences that our characters can all see and understand.

It's different when you're talking about NPCs of playable races, since there is no obvious biological difference. For the most part, many NPCs (at least in 5E) have abilities that work similar to PC abilities, but streamlined a bit so that they're faster to run at the table. It would make sense that the PCs could pick up those tricks, if they stopped adventuring for a while and practiced what the NPCs were doing. Not so in 4E, where NPCs just work different, for no discernible reason. (I mean, we all know that they work different to make the gameplay more mechanically interesting, but that's not a sufficient explanation for our characters who actually live in that world.)

And minions - I love them. I think they fill an important role in the game which no other edition has been able to answer: How do you make a big epic combat with many opponents without bogging down the game and let characters feel badass when defeating them but still have them be challenging?

Minions fill an important role in terms of both gameplay and storytelling, but they don't make sense in terms of how the world works. In the context of high-level heroes fighting high-level enemies, a weaker enemy that you miss twice and then dies from the third attack is effectively similar to one with much lower AC that can take three hits before dropping, but only in the abstract. It doesn't make sense when you look at any of the individual steps, or move the creature to any context other than fighting high-level heroes.

HP capacity, in earlier editions, was an objective measurement of how much punishment you could take. Maybe a wizard could take 4 points of abstract trauma, while an ogre could take 29. An arrow from a longbow does about 5 points of abstract trauma, so we know that a wizard would fall after getting shot once, while the ogre could probably take six.

The weakest possible character in 4E is a level 1 wizard with 3 Con, which would have 13 HP. An arrow from a longbow now does about 10 points of abstract trauma, so the wizard can now probably survive one; but a level 8 ogre savage (which is the only stat block I can find) has 111 HP, so it can take 11 arrows before falling. But an ogre minion (which is level 11, according to Google) only has 1 HP, which means it will definitely die from the first arrow that actually hits it; in fact, it would die if the wizard limp-wristedly cuts it with their dagger. That's what I mean by it being weak. In any other edition, you actually have to hit an ogre with some objective amount of force if you want it to die, but 4E minions will die from an arbitrarily small application of force. (Although, in practice, high-level minions tend to die from high-level fighters hitting them with magical swords. Or the Rod of Reaving.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And here's where I come back with - 4e presented a narrative approach to playing D&D in a way that the fiddly rules of AD&D and 3e D&D were unable to cope with.

So I actually found RP-ing in 4e to be easier than any previous edition of D&D because it was easier to play it as a character in a fantasy novel, rather than as a simulation of a fantasy world with its own physics.

I feel like it would be pretty easy to transition between 4E and something like FATE, or Savage Worlds, but it would be much harder to transition between 4E and 3E or GURPS.

 

[Retreater]

(Another problem many folks have with 4e that comes from the same root is if they aren't interested in that particular narrative style. If you don't want to play a high heroic fantasy game, 4e requires a lot of tweaking. If you're in the mood for gritty realism it's probably the wrong game for you because the narrative it was built to support isn't gritty realism. You can make it work, but it requires you to make it work - it isn't there out of the box. For the same reason it's also not a good fit for a "zeroes to heroes" campaign which for some people is D&D. So I understand why many folks have issues with the engine, even if I consider it the best version of D&D so far for my table - because my campaigns tend to all be either high heroic or outright gonzo kitchen-sink fantasy, which 4e is able to do very, very well.)

I thought Dark Sun in 4e was the best version of it, and it certainly was grittier than the standard 4e game.

 

[Retreater]

I find running 4e to be so much easier. Like instead of treating NPCs like fully fleshed out characters with spells from various books to look up and keep track of, and spell slots, etc. So for me, since we're clearly playing a game, that's something I'm willing to sacrifice simulation for better gameplay.
At any rate, D&D is hardly the benchmark of simulation. And to say that a dragon can breathe flames every 6-18 seconds or so doesn't kill the game for me.

 

[dave2008]

Minions fill an important role in terms of both gameplay and storytelling, but they don't make sense in terms of how the world works. In the context of high-level heroes fighting high-level enemies, a weaker enemy that you miss twice and then dies from the third attack is effectively similar to one with much lower AC that can take three hits before dropping, but only in the abstract. It doesn't make sense when you look at any of the individual steps, or move the creature to any context other than fighting high-level heroes.

To be clear a minion is representative of a creature at a certain point (level) to the PCs. If you move a minion to another context, it ceases to be a minion. So a minion at level 11, becomes standard at level 6 or an elite at level 1. It is really a clever way to jump power without a huge number bloat. Everything is relative, which I found really fascinating.

Being a fan of epic games this was a huge boon. The best D&D tools for epic play / monsters ever really. Unfortunately, WotC handle 4e epic play very poorly IMO.

 

[dave2008]

I feel like it would be pretty easy to transition between 4E and something like FATE, or Savage Worlds, but it would be much harder to transition between 4E and 3E or GURPS.

I found the 1e - 4e - 5e transition pretty seamless. Though I have never tried FATE or Savage Worlds games.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

To be clear a minion is representative of a creature at a certain point (level) to the PCs. If you move a minion to another context, it ceases to be a minion. So a minion at level 11, becomes standard at level 6 or an elite at level 1. It is really a clever way to jump power without a huge number bloat. Everything is relative, which I found really fascinating.

It's certainly a novel idea, but it unfortunately tells us very little about how the world actually works, which I've always taken to be the major goal of having such a detailed system in the first place.

I mean, if a level 16 ranger can fire an arrow for 10 damage, and it has the same ogre-killing capacity as 111 damage from a level 8 ranger, then what do the numbers even mean? It seems like the numbers are arbitrary, and we could get the same level of information with vastly reduced complexity by playing Savage Worlds.

 

[dave2008]

It's certainly a novel idea, but it unfortunately tells us very little about how the world actually works, which I've always taken to be the major goal of having such a detailed system in the first place.

I mean, if a level 16 ranger can fire an arrow for 10 damage, and it has the same ogre-killing capacity as 111 damage from a level 8 ranger, then what do the numbers even mean? It seems like the numbers are arbitrary, and we could get the same level of information with vastly reduced complexity by playing Savage Worlds.

Well it is more complex when everything is relative. There is also the complication of how I think it was intended to be used and how it was actually implemented. The idea is that every 5 levels there is a 2x jump in power. This is roughly expressed by the change from minion - standard - elite - solo. So a level 8 Ogre Savage, would also work as level 13 Ogre Savage Minion, or a level 3 Ogre Savage Elite for a PC at those levels. However, the Ogre Savage is a brute (means a lot more HP), and there is no minion brute (so that doesn't scale correctly). In addition a problem that 4e had was that they inflated all of the monster levels when they stretched everything to 30 levels. This leaves you with strange situations (like the ogre) when you try to scale things up and down.

For example: The balor in 4e is a level 27 elite, an "epic" threat. However, balors are not "epic" threats and should have been levl 18 or so (like every other edition). If everything is about 2/3 the level it was at in the MM the whole system works better (and you need minion brutes too)

 

[Raith5]

I can certainly see why many people did not like 4e, but I found 4e to be a really pure expression of D&D expressed in clear, consistent and fresh fashion. I played a campaign till 30th level and the combats were lengthy, especially in Epic, but when you are fighting Orcus or Lolth then that is OK. I do think there were too many choices for PCs after early Paragon, but I think the monsters and melee classes were the best expressions of any edition.

 

[Jer]

I thought Dark Sun in 4e was the best version of it, and it certainly was grittier than the standard 4e game.

Dark Sun is an interesting case. Because on the surface the world would appear to be grittier.

But even in its original incarnation, you were expected to play "tougher" characters than average. I don't have my books handy right now, but I seem to recall that in the original 2e version characters started somewhere around 3rd level. This fits well with the assumptions of the 4e engine, so I think that's part of what makes a good fit there. (For the record - I agree that Dark Sun 4e worked very well, and is also my favorite expression of that gameworld. Though I think that it could have been better if they'd pushed it farther and did for Dark Sun something along the lines of what they did for Gamma World - making it a standalone game built on the 4e engine instead of trying to force it into the 4e D&D framework they'd built).

So I think it depends on your definition of "gritty". Batman, Daredevil and the Punisher are all considered "gritty", but the narratives they exist in are full of superheroic people doing larger than life things, so the 4e engine would probably fit well enough if your vision of your character was "like Batman, only in a fantasy world" because it's good for those kinds of narratives. Likewise, Dark Sun characters tend to be larger than life people doing superheroic things, because the world they live in is super deadly and everything seems like its trying to kill them. So even though you get that desperate feel the narrative is still fairly "superheroic" (for lack of a better term).