D&D 4E Am I crazy? I've just gotten a hankering to play 4e again...

[MwaO]

Not my experience. My group is now 15th level and none of their magic items give a bonus to hit. We don't run published adventures. However, 5e was explicitly designed to work without magic items and I argue it works best with as little magic as possible.

No, it wasn't. Next was explicitly designed to work assuming no magic items and then without telling anyone that they changed their mind, they designed 5e to no assumptions of having the items you wanted, but you would have approximately certain values.

And we can know that by how Champion Fighters without feats work from levels 11 to 16. Namely, hit points of monsters from 11-16 go up about 45%(16/11), Monster AC rises +1 over that time period and proficiency rises 1 also. The only real improvement to damage for a Champion Fighter is an extra 1 crit chance in those levels at 15th for about an 11% increase in damage. That extra damage is supposed to be from somewhere and surprisingly enough, if you go from a +1 weapon to a +3 weapon, you get a 43% increase in average damage from 11th to 16th.

Coincidentally, if you go to the 'typical campaign' on page 133 of DMG, on average, roughly that is likely to happen in that time period. There's a lack of certainty of it happening, but...

i.e. if you don't have magic items in your campaign, at some point, Champion Fighters are going to feel as if they suck, because they don't do any extra damage without them. Because the system is designed around the idea that they have a boost from magic items.

 

[dave2008]

No, it wasn't. Next was explicitly designed to work assuming no magic items and then without telling anyone that they changed their mind, they designed 5e to no assumptions of having the items you wanted, but you would have approximately certain values.

And we can know that by how Champion Fighters without feats work from levels 11 to 16. Namely, hit points of monsters from 11-16 go up about 45%(16/11), Monster AC rises +1 over that time period and proficiency rises 1 also. The only real improvement to damage for a Champion Fighter is an extra 1 crit chance in those levels at 15th for about an 11% increase in damage. That extra damage is supposed to be from somewhere and surprisingly enough, if you go from a +1 weapon to a +3 weapon, you get a 43% increase in average damage from 11th to 16th.

Coincidentally, if you go to the 'typical campaign' on page 133 of DMG, on average, roughly that is likely to happen in that time period. There's a lack of certainty of it happening, but...

i.e. if you don't have magic items in your campaign, at some point, Champion Fighters are going to feel as if they suck, because they don't do any extra damage without them. Because the system is designed around the idea that they have a boost from magic items.

Again, not my experience. It is also not what they have said about 5e. That doesn't make it true, but it is true for our group and we have a champion fighter.

Argh! I made another 5e comment - my bad!

 

[Tallifer]

I myself would never use Rarity in a 4E game. It's a late edition fudge which was poorly implemented in my opinion.

 

[shroomofinsanity]

I never ran an official adventure for 4e, but in my years running the edition, the only rarity I cared about was artifact, and that was just to limit it to one per party at any given time(sidenote, i love the artifact mechanics in 4e, as they really set down rules for how these essentially NPC's functioned). But other than that, I let my players look through the item database and let me know what kind of things they were looking for and would pick from either those items or slightly refluffed or tweaked versions of those items for whatever my setting was in that game.

I loved seeing magic items move into and out of the game, with the incentives for breaking them down to make the raw material for rituals and namely making/improving other items. It led my parties to sometimes starve themselves of items to "save up" for really cool stuff.

This was also the edition that really made items blatantly designed for various races/classes/subclasses. Yes this leads to a few less weird items, but it felt really cool that the warlock got that cool item that boosted their curse, or you know, the 12th item to boost twin strike XD.

 

[Campbell]

I myself would never use Rarity in a 4E game. It's a late edition fudge which was poorly implemented in my opinion.

In general if rarity is about power level having both rarity and level feels weird.

 

[Garthanos]

Like I said I didnt get much out of rarity but I did steal an idea. The idea being variable return rate on your magic items when disenchanted or sold.

Basically if the item is 5 levels under yours you can get full 100 percent out of the item but at level only 20 percent (with a progression towards 100 percent the lower relative level it is). Basically your contacts for sales get better at getting you the value out the item... and the person disenchanting the items skill does similar.

 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Glad I'm not the only person left on earth that would love to play 4e again, lol. I love the system personally. Definitely my first choice given the option of any version of DnD. I had actually pulled all my stuff out right before Covid-19 shut us down, and was planning to try to put a group together for Keep on the Shadowfell.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I myself would never use Rarity in a 4E game. It's a late edition fudge which was poorly implemented in my opinion.

You really have to understand the problem that rarity was intended to solve:

In the original design of 4e you had limited uses of item powers per day. The idea was to allow players to have quite a variety of items with powers, but for that to not result in an endless parade of power uses. It wasn't a bad thought but it was fatally flawed. The problem being every player hoarded their 3 daily power uses. Designers COULD have made more items with Surge powers, but they didn't (AFAIK only a few potions have this). Even if they did, nobody can afford to pay that price very much. So the upshot is, any item power which is too good to allow to be encounter or at-will, but not exciting enough to burn one of your 3 hoarded uses on (or a surge) is effectively non-existent.

The result of this is that a lot of items are simply trivial, because their powers are weak enough to use constantly, or because they are simply never used since their powers are too weak to be worth a use slot. It was however, impossible to get rid of these slots because some items are lower level (and thus you could make tons of them) and yet their daily powers are pretty good. For near-level items it isn't a problem, treasure parcel availability restricts abuse, but it is a problem in a slotless game for these certain items (there are actually quite a few).

So, the solution was to do away with slots, but also to restrict item creation. This actually works fine if you have a GM who is a bit flexible. PCs can easily find/research/quest for/buy formulas for specific 'rare' or even 'very rare' items and then craft them. This does allow the GM to put a foot down on abuse though. Items that would break the game if used over and over just don't have formulas you can get, others do.

 

[Ancalagon]

yes

 

[DnD Warlord]

I wish there was a 4e continued. I wish 5e took most of 4e and made it better