D&D 4E Anyone playing 4e at the moment?

[BigZebra]

Nice tips and ideas. Thanks. I will keep them in mind.

 

[Aldarc]

I wouldn't know... lol. I mean, the premise of HDQ doesn't sound terrible to me "uncover the machinations of the Evil Dragons." The devil is in the details though, so...

TBH I think the premise of KotS is rather weaker actually. It amounts to "there's something bad going on out at the old ruins, go delve!" with a number of preliminary/side quests that really don't seem needed and who's plot elements are not well spelled out. I guess either premise could lead most anywhere though.

I have a basic adventuring premise that I like to go with for a lot of Nentir Vale questing. As the Nerath Empire collapsed and resources in the northern frontiers of the Vale are stretched pretty thin, the characters are part of one of Fallcrest's patrol squads, essentially rangers, and the local lord keeps a chunk of what they bring back. But it's an easy way to plug the characters into the local setting, gives them a reason to be together, while also providing an impetus for them to "go delve!". In one campaign, I replaced Kobold Hall with the Sunless Citadel, which was brought beneath the earth by Torog's crawling. The characters were part of a new squad and the old squad that trained them had gone missing. These were the NPCs you find scattered throughout the adventure.

 

[Unwise]

I'll add my 2 cents to the camp that says 4E is too much effort without the digital tools. It is not just the character creation. It is the selection of monsters too. It is really important to balance things well for a 4E feel of tactical combat. That is very hard to do as is keeping track of all the monster abilities without the tools.

On top of all of that, you have the hassle of making tactical maps for every setpeice encounter. It is a major pain. My prep time for 5E is 5 minutes. 4E can take me hours.

 

[BigZebra]

I'll add my 2 cents to the camp that says 4E is too much effort without the digital tools. It is not just the character creation. It is the selection of monsters too. It is really important to balance things well for a 4E feel of tactical combat. That is very hard to do as is keeping track of all the monster abilities without the tools.

On top of all of that, you have the hassle of making tactical maps for every setpeice encounter. It is a major pain. My prep time for 5E is 5 minutes. 4E can take me hours.

Yup I can totally appreciate that. But for starters I’m gonna demo it using the adventure in DMG.

If that becomes a success I’ll do the Scales of War AP from Dungeon. Perhaps substitute some Demon or some such for Tiamat but I’ll look into that later.
So the monster and adventure design is taken care of.
The hassle is gonna be setting up Roll20. I have written power macros for the powers the PCs are starting with so that’s cool. What’s still missing is importing the maps and create some monster tokens.
I’ll see how it plays out. Looking forward to trying it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It just presented one dull 'steel cage death match' fight in tight quarters after another.

Ironically, they should have paid more attention to MMOs to counter this exact problem. MMO designers have long been aware that pointless and drawn-out trash fights are a problem. You need to either be building up to something through them, or you need most fights to have something interesting in or around them to keep people engaged. Two key examples come to mind, one from World of Warcraft, the other from FFXIV.

In WoW, a dungeon I really quite liked was Vortex Pinnacle. The story part isn't as relevant here as what they did with the fights between bosses. Several of the so-called "trash" fights are actually pre-teaching you how to fight the final boss. There are flattened tetrahedral pyramids of lightning that will have monsters in them at various points along the way; you need to drag these guys out, and (ideally) position any ranged DPS inside them, because they reflect away ranged attacks. Useful stuff, if you can take advantage of it. But it becomes clever when it gets to the final boss, who has a room-wide and nominally unavoidable party-wipe attack. Except...to charge it up, he has to create one of those squashed pyramids of lightning, which deflect away attacks. This means they can avoid the usual blatant telegraphing present in most boss fights, because they can reasonably assume you already know how this works, having literally just taught you. That's one way to make "boring" fights work--give them an interesting mechanic the players can learn from, so that when they get to the big boss, they can leverage that knowledge.

By comparison, in FFXIV, there's a pretty neat dungeon (not my favorite, but a neat one nonetheless) called the Drowned City of Skalla. The designers kept things fresh by featuring a wide variety of different creature types as you push through it. The opening few fights are all ocean-related creatures, due to being deep underground and only accessible through a briny loch, with some creatures being big heavy-hitters, and others being numerous ankle-biters. Then, in the following area, it's all earth-y stuff, sand creatures and earth elementals, and they do lots of big ground AoEs that hurt if they hit you, so you need to stay nimble. Then, in the lead up to the final boss, you get a number of unusual mechanics like targeted cones, or unusual movement modes between fights (turning into...honestly they look like floating trash bags!) No two packs are ever quite the same, and you really feel a sense of changing theme as you move. This leverages theme and mechanics to try to have even the "boring" creatures incite aesthetic and tactical pleasure in the fighting.

It's just such a shame that so few of the designers at WotC actually understood how to make 4e's engine sing. It's, frankly, like they were trying to design fights that specifically presumed 3.x elements like the full attack (which discourages any movement unless absolutely necessary) or the inability to do support things and combat-advancing things in a single turn (due to action economy), while avoiding many of the things that make 4e rich and interesting (terrain challenges, minions with creative tricks, solos/elites that undergo a radical shift when bloodied, etc.)

 

[cavalier973]

If you have the inclination, I think reading an account of your game--or even watching a video of it, if possible--would be interesting and instructive.

 

[beast013]

For what it's worth, I've been running a 4e campaign/campaigns since 4e was released. The demise of the online made for a few challenges with character building. These can be worked around with the old fat client character builder (available for download with all updates), Hero Labs (though it needs tweaking now and then) or owning the physical books or digital copies via drivethru rpg. As a wargamer, I enjoy 4e for its detailed combat system. Sort of an updated chainmail where D&D started long ago. I saw mention of other resources online so stuff available to assist.

 

[Garthanos]

For what it's worth, I've been running a 4e campaign/campaigns since 4e was released. The demise of the online made for a few challenges with character building. These can be worked around with the old fat client character builder (available for download with all updates), Hero Labs (though it needs tweaking now and then) or owning the physical books or digital copies via drivethru rpg. As a wargamer, I enjoy 4e for its detailed combat system. Sort of an updated chainmail where D&D started long ago. I saw mention of other resources online so stuff available to assist.

I never did chainmail though reading it really did give me a feel for where D&D came from ... for me the details of 4e combat are very very targeting cinematic action fiction (but ironically the most flexibility and sense you can make it your own if you want) very much about things being vivid and enabling tangible player choices within that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I never did chainmail though reading it really did give me a feel for where D&D came from ... for me the details of 4e combat are very very targeting cinematic action fiction (but ironically the most flexibility and sense you can make it your own if you want) very much about things being vivid and enabling tangible player choices within that.

The only thing I am not really fond of with 4e's system is just the sheer proliferation and fiddliness of effects and such. IMHO the whole action adventure thing is improved by streamlining the system some and relying more on 'natural advantages' like surprise and terrain (cover, concealment, height advantages, flanking, etc. which were rather deemphasized in 4e's system. Consider the huge advantages of flanking in Chainmail, a unit which is taken on a flank while engaged on the front is almost 100% doomed. I don't even care what the difference in quality of the troops is, it is a very bad situation.

HoML goes in this direction, there are a lot less effects and bonuses, and they are mostly standardized and operate in a straightforward "whomever does X gets Y (where Y is almost always 5e-style advantage)." Combat goes a lot faster. The increased pace creates a greater sense of dramatic action. Tactics are more 'natural' and less "lets exploit this trait of the action/turn system and this and that bonus/duration/effect wording to get something." Since things move faster you simply do more 'stuff' in a given session and end up with the same number of interesting tactical situations to deal with, but there is more variety in the fiction part of it.

In fact in HoML 2.0 I am thinking that the system will be "all dice are rolled by players" and any attack you suffer will be resolved as a check to use a 'defense', which instead of a NAD style thing will be an active power-like thing, keyed to an ability score (or maybe more than one potentially, it will be flexible). Obviously not every defense will work for every possible type of attack, and players will optimize on defensive strategies that leverage their best ability scores, etc. However these defense powers can also have other effects/implications, so it makes a more interesting and varied setup.

This kind of development is why 5e frustrates me, because it could have done this kind of stuff instead of wimping out and being basically just a retread of 2e conceptually (which wasn't even a very good game IMHO).

 

[Garthanos]

The only thing I am not really fond of with 4e's system is just the sheer proliferation and fiddliness of effects and such.

To a certain extent this fan of fate and fudge and similar games considers D&D ummm being fiddly as a something of an assumed LOL. However looking at 3.x and PF and I see that 4e is concise in comparison AND to me 5e lost the big damn heroes angle even if you adjust for level 5 being the start of heroic tier (and analogous to 4e level 1 in theory).