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

[Garthanos]

Epic to me is about Scale
In 4e my fighter has an at-will power called knockdown assault it sounds pretty mundane at first glance and is not considered a power house you might even notice it only advances based on attributes of the fighter.

However you might notice a detail it also prones an enemy regardless of size so when you are fighting Gargantuan Dragons yes you can toss their scaled hiney it can be seen as a sophisticated move that uses the enemies strength and mass against them.

In comparison the 5e battlemasters move is forever small stuff with a realism target that makes them not epic in my opinion.

edit: I think 4e assumes the heroes awesome scales to as his foes do over his adventuring career and does not need one to take extra feats or explicit subclasses to achieve this.

@AbdulAlhazred Perhaps going through the Battlemaster maneuvers and giving them a tier adjustment. would satisfy the 5e explicit urge and make them actually service the tiers better.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred Perhaps going through the Battlemaster maneuvers and giving them a tier adjustment. would satisfy the 5e explicit urge and make them actually service the tiers better.

I'm sure you could build epic-scale maneuvers, though I am still befuddled by why powers weren't a good answer to some people. I just don't get it, the whole design was much more elegant and you didn't have these issues where one type of PCs continue to get new better stuff and have an open unlimited list, and others are stuck with a dozen options that can't expand beyond level 1. It just doesn't work.

IMHO, the reason 5e needs to change the rules to make something 'epic' is just flat out that the rules for the rest of the levels don't really work right!

 

[Lyxen]

The rogue thief was worse than a sidekick his abilities were superseded by a yellow notepad full of tricks to avoid the rogue thief doing anything and if you wanted it reliable you had the wizard do it.

It all came down to magic items, in the end, a thief with a ring of invisibility was way better than a magic-user, for example because there were very few slots. Of course, I had this magic-user Thief who had gloves that allowed him to dematerialise any part of his hands and forearms and everything he was holding, which allowed him to search chests without opening them and, in combination with a ring of x-ray vision, to backstab sentinels through walls...

@Lyxen I will say I have no experience with BECMI could you elaborate

The progression was in a sense much slower than AD&D, but the great thing is that it recognised in its inception things which have since been mirrored in a lot of fantastic books/movies of the genre, like Wheel of Time or Sanderson books:

• Lvls 1-3, Basic: clearing out local "dungeons" and threats
• Lvls 4-14, Expert: Wilderness, expanding the scope
• Lvls 15-25, Companion: this is where it got really ground breaking for us with dominion management, because it was fairly simple management of your base/fortress/domain/realm, but it allowed the opportunity for so many adventures, both the the usual kind, but also intrigue with neighbours, alliances and negotiations, wars and sieges environment and what we loved the most, court intrigue.
• Lvls 26-26, Master: Where it recognised that the multiverse was really vast and where the heroes took flight again to counter cosmic threats from gods and demons, and go on the road to godhood, which we did with quite a few campaigns, actually, with varying results but it was always fun.
• And the Immortal set that we didn't like that much because things became very abstract. However, I resuscitated some of the elements to finish our humongous multi-DMs campaign started under 3e because at level 20, things were so complex and took such a long time that players got lost, so I re-created a very simple Immortal game to finish the ascension of characters to godhood. Out of the 100+ characters played in the campaign, about 40 died and about 30 achieved godhood and are now a pantheon that we use in some of our campaigns including 4e and 5e.

I very much consider magic item dependence with basically nothing telling DMs that except a Dragon Mag article years later a flaw not a feature. No effective guidelines about level appropriate hardware existed either.

I completely agree with you, it was a long process of trial and error, with mistakes along the way. I had this elven archmage who was dreaded not for many of class/psionic abilities or her artefacts, but because she had a mirror of mental prowess, and that is really a potentially game breaking item, especially when combined with shenanigans with portable holes.

It was very much over the top, ad hoc, haphazard and usually totally unbalanced with the DM pulling even more outrageous things out of his hat for the abilities of the adversaries. And it required very experienced DMs who had lived through that progression and could invent all these over-the top countermeasures.

And I agree that, in comparison, 4e is a dream of balance and progression, much easier to manage for everyone (teasing here, but only partly though, it's a bit too tame for us, in comparison to our habits of the above).

 

[Garthanos]

• And the Immortal set that we didn't like that much because things became very abstract. However, I resuscitated some of the elements to finish our humongous multi-DMs campaign started under 3e because at level 20, things were so complex and took such a long time that players got lost, so I re-created a very simple Immortal game to finish the ascension of characters to godhood. Out of the 100+ characters played in the campaign, about 40 died and about 30 achieved godhood and are now a pantheon that we use in some of our campaigns including 4e and 5e.

I was reading this it was focusing so much on alternative world theoretical physics it made my "physics minor" brain very annoyed.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@AbdulAlhazred Perhaps going through the Battlemaster maneuvers and giving them a tier adjustment. would satisfy the 5e explicit urge and make them actually service the tiers better.

It would be nice if players ever got the chance to choose/receive "improved" or "advanced" maneuvers that were permitted to do things that maneuvers available at 3rd level aren't allowed to do. I fear I'm too pessimistic to really take seriously the idea that something like that will get included by these designers. They spent nearly three years working on the D&D Next playtest, and never managed to get something like that in, despite their repeated claims to the contrary. If they'd had the will, it would be there.

 

[Manbearcat]

You snorker dork my thought was you could contribute how different play could become in epic tier and how elements like page 42 based rulings and skill challenges and scaling of story presented results in different feel regardless of there still be levels and hit point progression and the like

sigh

Alright, more seriously (and with a hair more time), 4e accomplishes this through 2 integrated features of play that work simultaneously to serve this end:

THEMATIC/PREMISE FOCUSING

* Epic Destiny and (player authored) Quests. Also, you can go the Neverwinter model route (as I did for my fantasy Sengoku Era Japan game) and just have Character Theme be the through line for levels 1-10 that effectively run you through Heroic > Paragon > Epic tropes of play with a truncated leveling experience (and shortening of total play arc/session #).

THEMATIC CONFLICT/OBSTACLE BROADENING (via a stable engine which offloads progression onto all of the below)

* Robust monster, hazard/trap, terrain, p42 stunting math/mechanics/reskinning.

* Keyword tech.

* Scene Based Resolution (both combat with the intricate combat mechanics and via noncombat scene resolution with the Skill Challenge).

---

Then there is the related piece of mythic fantasy, scene-based pacing being extremely functional because (a) pushing forward is rewarded via Milestone mechanics + nonpunitive Short Rest mechanics (and how much of character oomph is offloaded here) + (b) (VERY) related design where Adventuring Day + Encounter Maths + PC resource suite design doesn't create a game that is brutally sensitive to refresh. PC gas tank is deep and robust (see (a) above) and Team PC amplification serves to augment this robustness/depth. (a) + (b) means the game doesn't feature the typical D&D Arms Race over daily resource refresh (which is pretty much exclusively dominated by GM vs Spellcaster PCs). This is a very big D&D thing that creates a very jarring and weird tenor for mythical tropes. The fact that 4e effectively solved it plays no small role in the formulation of unprecedented functional Epic Tier play.

 

[Garthanos]

It would be nice if players ever got the chance to choose/receive "improved" or "advanced" maneuvers that were permitted to do things that maneuvers available at 3rd level aren't allowed to do. I fear I'm too pessimistic to really take seriously the idea that something like that will get included by these designers. They spent nearly three years working on the D&D Next playtest, and never managed to get something like that in, despite their repeated claims to the contrary. If they'd had the will, it would be there.

The Level Up:Advanced 5e has higher ranked maneuvers not accessible earlier (and starts maneuvers at level 1 for all fighters). And maneuvers for all the martial classes including Warlords and Adepts (a Martial Monk)

But I agree there was no will to create that in the WOTC crew.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The Level Up:Advanced 5e has higher ranked maneuvers not accessible earlier (and starts maneuvers at level 1 for all fighters). And maneuvers for all the martial classes including Warlords and Adepts (a Martial Monk)

But I agree there was no will to create that in the WOTC crew.

I haven't read it, but given what @Manbearcat is saying about 4e Epic, which I totally agree with, you have to actually struggle to hack 5e into half a semblance of the same thing with a supplement like this. I don't see the point...

Instead I spent all my energy STARTING OUT where 4e left off, and IMHO my current version of 'Epic' (Mythic actually as I call it) play leaves 4e in the dust! Though, honestly, I need to get on with the whole 2.0 thing because it gets MUCH cooler!

 

[Garthanos]

I haven't read it, but given what @Manbearcat is saying about 4e Epic, which I totally agree with, you have to actually struggle to hack 5e into half a semblance of the same thing with a supplement like this. I don't see the point...

Instead I spent all my energy STARTING OUT where 4e left off, and IMHO my current version of 'Epic' (Mythic actually as I call it) play leaves 4e in the dust! Though, honestly, I need to get on with the whole 2.0 thing because it gets MUCH cooler!

It could be used as direct replacement for 5e its standalone but yes 4e is probably a better starting point.

5e identifies mythic as a flavoring in a sense but basically has no mechanics supporting it even implies they are not needed...

And while 5e does describe the events of its highest tier as being just like those of Epic Destinies but again to even support those events and story you would have to hack things onto it AND It lacks the player side investment and buy in

4e just grants much more player agency

There are also other supplements like Odyssey of the Dragonlords which has elements like fated equipment and destiny story elements which very much feel like 4e and put divine ascension directly on the table even having an explicit ritual or spell.

Yup take some work to get what 4e has out of the box. (let alone move beyond that)

 

[Lyxen]

I was reading this it was focusing so much on alternative world theoretical physics it made my "physics minor" brain very annoyed.

That's strange, these paragraphs did not smack too much of alternative world physics, although indeed there were many, but honestly, how can you do truly epic without epic magic and its impact on physics ?