D&D General Why is D&D 4E a "tactical" game?

[Oofta]

I know I’m going to regret this. @Oofta, why do you say 5e is less tactical than 3e?

There were a lot more finicky things you could do in 3.5. Everything from multiple buff spells to weapon materials. Prep mattered more in my experience. It was easier to exploit and get characters like my dwarven fighter that was just simply more effective than most (not that I'm an optimizer per se, I just did what made sense).

Add in different rules for AOOs, tumbling, flanking, the list goes on. Of course "tactical" is in the eye of the beholder.

I had a lot of fun with 3.5, if it hadn't started to fall apart with the overwhelming nature of casters in the mid teens I'd be happy to go back to playing it. Never did get much of a chance to play that chain wielding barbarian who dipped into cleric just to get the enlarge spell.

 

[Parmandur]

I know I’m going to regret this. @Oofta, why do you say 5e is less tactical than 3e?

It's certainly less involved in preparation and "analysis paralysis" than 3E could be.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I just wanted to comment on the whole "Marking" thing: it's less of a magical power and more trying to get at something that is hard to model in TTRPGs without getting into a whole bunch of bookkeeping and die-rolls. "Marking" is low-level threat, something that weighs on your decisions because base fear makes you want to attack the thing hitting you rather than perhaps the more abstract, big-picture threat. The fighter hits you, and he's now on your mind and how you need to fight back or push through and ignore him. So if you decide not to attack the fighter, the penalty represents the mental hesitation and the threat of the fighter preoccupying your thoughts. It's honestly a really good mechanic, and I'd argue the closest thing RAW in 5E to it is one of the Barbarian's Bear Totem powers, where you if target someone else with your attack and you are within 5 feet of him, you're at disadvantage (also you are immune to this if you are immune to fear effects, which makes it pretty obvious what they are pulling on).

Obviously that sort of thing isn't generally restricted to a "class" in real life, but if applied more broadly with an actual mechanic in games (Rather than just GM fiat) it would make things damn-near unrunnable. You'd have to track who has been hit by what on a given turn, how stacking attacks would work, if there would be any way to try and mentally push past that without a penalty (likely more dice rolling), etc... it's a simple idea but it has a lot of big implications. That's why it works as a class feature: it's something that will matter to one person, not every token on the mat, and also increases the tactical options on the stage.

 

[Hussar]

It's certainly less involved in preparation and "analysis paralysis" than 3E could be.

More strategic I would agree with. Buffing is a strategic choice, rarely a tactical one.

 

[Hex08]

So, from what I am understanding 4E is tactical because it focuses on the specific actions characters take during combat, how well they work as a team and how they control and change the field of combat but 3.x was more about character optimization and then just standing there pounding away at the enemy. Interesting differences. Based on some of the descriptions of play I don't think I regret my decision to skip 4E but I can certainly see the appeal for others. It sounds like the game became really complicated as the characters gained levels and the game itself matured, something 3.x suffered from as well. For as much as I loved 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder 1e, I rarely took characters beyond 10th level because the game just became too complicated and fell apart.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The only things I ever see pushback about IMHO are opinion, perspective and impressions. On the other hand I don't know how many times I've seen people blame the lack of 4E's popularity on a "conspiracy" or that people that say they disliked some aspect of it are "unfamiliar with the game" which is what I was responding to.

Given the poster that poster was responding to was claiming something didn't exist which is present in the Rituals system, that was a factual correction and assuming them unfamiliar with the game was the charitable assumption, the alternative being they were deliberately misrepresenting it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Mostly it was just a talking point for people who wanted to edition war since every single thing mentioned applies to other editions as well.

Technically not true, but at least as true of 3e.

(People don't realize how hideously schematic OD&D could be, for example).

 

[MwaO]

I'm sorry, but it does not read that way. It's the edition that is the most formal about rules, even going so far as advising to write house rules down before trying them out. It's the edition that sets the DM first and foremost as a referee, including comparing him first and foremost as the referee of a competitive sport : "A competitive sport has referees. It needs them. Someone impartial involved in the game needs to make sure
everyone’s playing by the rules." This is the first sentence in the DMG about what a DM is...

That's not 4e being formal about rules. That's 4e trying to establish how to set up a long-lasting campaign where everyone has fun. i.e. the DM is not the adversary of the players, but rather the impartial referee. Explain your house rules to the players before springing them on the players in a game. See if they have suggestions. Explain why they're really important to your campaign so they understand them. So you get buy-in.

Coming back to the subject of this thread, the reason for which it's such a good tactical board game is because the rules are strict, clear and complete, and the game is balanced. Yes, you can play 4e in a much looser fashion, and we tried it for years, but in the end, the rules build upon each other and introducing changes in one area messes up the others, for one, and it's also a bit of a shame to have such complete and restrictive rules to ignore and modify them. If you want looser rules easier to modify on the fly, any other edition is better than 4e, because when you touch a rule or do a local ruling, it does not come to bite you in the back with consequences on other effects and powers.

And honestly, it is so much easier to modify 4e on the fly, such as monster creation can literally happen in a couple of minutes when you're fluid with the system or just making house rules. Not having to deal with Vancian casting alone...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Compared to all other editions I’ve played, and to other similar games like Pathfinder, I’d say the one main thing that makes 4e the tactical edition is the amount of off-turn movement. Many abilities will move enemies and allies on the battlefield, much more so than in the other editions or games.

Off-turn movement and attacks, definitely.

I've seen a cool-as-hell duel between a powerful assassin-captain and a Ranger. The two of them danced around one another for a good couple turns before our Ranger put the assassin-captain down. It was one of the most thematic things I've ever seen in any game. (To be clear, for anyone who also reads other threads I post in, I was a player in this game, it's not the Dungeon World game that I run.)

Having actions that trigger in response to certain effects significantly heightens the feel of tactical-ness.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It sounds like the game became really complicated as the characters gained levels and the game itself matured, something 3.x suffered from as well.

This is...kind of right, but mostly wrong.

It's "kind of" right in that, yes, higher-level characters were more complicated than lower-level characters at basically every level of play...but that obfuscates the degree of difference, which is what's really relevant here. After all, 15th level characters in 5e are more complicated than 1st level characters, even if you're looking at options specifically designed to be low-complexity.

The thing with 4e is, after a certain point, you stop gaining quite so many extra options and instead start replacing older options. E.g. no character gets more than 4 regular Daily powers, and even then you only get that 4th power at level 20. No character gets more than 4 regular Encounter powers. (Some classes have exceptions to these patterns, but those exceptions are uncommon.) Instead, at (for example) 13th level, you replace one Encounter power you know with a new one of your current level (or not, you could always choose to just keep your old powers if you truly like them better...but there's rarely much benefit to doing so.)

This means that, while the game does ramp up noticeably across the 1-10 range, it actually slows down dramatically in new complexity from 11 on up. It does still gain complexity, I don't want to pretend it was some perfectly flat power curve or anything remotely like that. But the power curve significantly flattens out at that point.

By comparison, 3e goes full-on exponential growth as you get into the higher levels, and their complexity grows faster as you get out that far due to the accretion of items and feats and abusable optimization strategies. You emphatically do not see such things in 4e, and 4e does a very good job avoiding the problems of "rocket tag," "scry-and-fry," and the "five-minute workday" that plagued 3e so badly.