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

[AbdulAlhazred]

And I cannot speak to your friend, but the 3-Action system is a revelation. It's one of the absolutely best changes I've seen in a d20 game, because it eliminates so much of the nonsense around the Action Pyramid. If they got nothing out of it... well, I don't know. Maybe they were just going for a "3-Attack Round" every time. I don't know. For me, I've found it to be really cool, delivering relatively fast combat with lots of resolution and tactics while still feeling close to something like traditional D&D.

I'm not sure what makes people feel it is all that revolutionary. I mean, 4e has action types, PF2e has action COSTS, its not all that much different. I think the PF2e approach might sometimes give you slightly more complicated choices. So, like in 4e if you have a minor action effect, there's no question, you can do it or not, but normally it won't be a choice between that and making some bigger splashier main attack, whereas in PF2e that might be an option (IE make a 3 action attack or a 2 action attack and something else that takes one action). Is that a GOOD thing? I mean, it eliminates the concept of action types (at least for in-turn actions, PF2e still has free actions and off-turn actions) but replaces it with "action cost" instead.

I'll just close by saying that in HoML I did away with the minor action. It was always too tempting to design in extra attacks and such. If something is really trivial its a free action anyway, and if it isn't, then its a standard! Likewise with bonuses, HoML has ONE situational adjustment, advantage/disadvantage, and that is it. There are fixed bonuses from 4 sources (level, proficiency, permanent, and ability), and they NEVER STACK. You just take the best one you have, and they don't change, unless the character itself changes. Things run WAY quicker this way! People don't worry about little stuff, they go for the tactical 'breakers', the things that give advantage! My game design motto is to not sweat the little stuff, if something isn't "oh WOW!" then its just taking up space and should go away .

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I think this is really instructive with how 4E views combat, and why there is a disconnect with some people: it's a pretty common idea that D&D has to have random, wandering encounters, even if they are trivial. And that's not necessarily wrong, but that's not what 4E is built for. I'd say it'd be preferable to run such things closer to a Skill Check or Challenge than to actually get a combat ready. It's also why I suspect (from what everyone has said) that a lot of the written adventures suck for the system: it's not meant to be that sort of dungeon crawl.

It took WotC a LONG time to figure out how to write decent 4e adventures, and they DID, but 3rd parties mostly didn't get it. So, there's a lot of dross out there, but some really good stuff too. Some of the best stuff is more like 'setting', like Gloomwrought is pretty sweet. Its this sort of stock 'Dark City' thing, but there are these various groups, and you are BOUND to interact with some of them, but somewhere behind them all is the hand of Roland the Deathless. While its a sandbox, and a setting where the GM can bring the various factions and plots and whatnot into more or less of the spotlight, sooner or later you're almost bound to get on Roland's radar! You may take him on, you may ally with him (but he will probably betray you eventually), you may simply try to avoid him and keep your head down. The very streets and buildings of the city can move and shift mysteriously, so there's a lot of fun you can have with designing adventures there! I thought it was a pretty good example of a kind of 'Story Now Adventure', there isn't a fixed path to follow, you can play to find out what happens, but you will definitely use a lot of the stuff in the supplement if you play it for long.

 

[Garthanos]

It gives more turn-to-turn choices for players, in a few ways:

it also provides some minor strategic longer term choices for all players

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

it also provides some minor strategic longer term choices for all players

Yeah, its weird how the 'culture' of 4e play seemed to eschew things like consumables and rituals to a degree that I never understood. You could actually ALMOST break the game by going against that, some of those things are pretty crazy powerful (there were some magic arrows in AV2 IIRC, or maybe MME, that were crazy good).

 

[Garthanos]

Folks have also mentioned that powers worked together.
I think this is key and also part of the attempt to appeal to card players - there were "combos" of different powers that could be used to devastating effect. This of course didn't appeal to everyone; but I really liked it.

I see it as explicit team play within the games mechanics you see team play as having real impact was central to the game. Its not exactly the same as combos in a card game (those are rarely about teamwork)

I like 5e plenty, and I REALLY like that a ton ton of people are playing, and that I can now say at work that I'm going to play D&D over the weekend and almost no one gives me the side-eyebrow-arch; but 4e was a great system in its way. I don't have a group to play with right now, and I really miss the 4e character builder Wizards made (it was so-so but critical for all the various powers and magic item build-ups); but if I had a group that said they wanted to play, I would be in like flynn.

Character builder is better now than it was I still use the offline character builder but make a lot of use of the app that lets you update and put in your own custom elements for me customizing the game is integral to D&D

 

[Garthanos]

Yeah, its weird how the 'culture' of 4e play seemed to eschew things like consumables and rituals to a degree that I never understood. You could actually ALMOST break the game by going against that, some of those things are pretty crazy powerful (there were some magic arrows in AV2 IIRC, or maybe MME, that were crazy good).

Do not hear about much consumables from the optimizing crowd.

 

[Parmandur]

Agree on the preperation, but having DMed a campaign up to LEvel 30, analysis paralaysis was still a bit of an issue during tactical play - with 4 daily attack powers, 4 encounters attack powers and a bunch of utilities, some of these abiltiies being able to used as minor or free actionp plus some magic item abilities, there were definitely players thinking deeply about their options.

But I think on some level you want that in a tactical game - you want people to have meaningful options they need to consider, and not just default to the standard option.
At least on the DM side, it tends to be a lot easier, because the NPCs do not have that many options.

But at least I don't have to manage my attack matrixes. I think in D&D 3, the Cleric/FIghter/Paladin/Hospitaler player basically sat down the day before the game session for an hour o two to remind himself how his character would work. And when I played my Druid/Shifter, I definitley had to do my homework to work out those attack matrixes for the different possible forms I might pick.

I was talking about 5E, not 4E.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do not hear about much consumables from the optimizing crowd.

Yeah, I should dig up my old 'utility mage' character sheet and let them get a look at what you can do. I was kind of starting to annoy the GM with just how stupid awesome the whole consumables all the way strategy was... lol.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm not sure what makes people feel it is all that revolutionary.

It does one of the things the 4e AEDU system does; it encourages people to not just take the same actions every turn. The key thing is that attacking a second time in the turn is at -5 making it dubious, and a third is at -10, making it super-ineffective. Which means that in addition to attacking people have 1-2 other actions with which to do stuff. One of those actions might be movement - but having three actions means you've got at least one floating significant choice rather than "I attack. Done."

This gets round the "bag of sand" issue that having only one attack gives in that your best action is almost invariably to stab the enemy with the pointy sharp metal thing you've trained with. That's generally your best first action but probably not your best third action. And because it's the equivalent to an attack action or a move rather than a bonus action your third action is normally a lot more substantial than a minor/bonus action and everyone has the opportunity to use it.

I think that (a) a fiddly and highly codified game is the wrong place to use it and (b) a class based game is also the wrong place. But that doesn't mean it's other than a good system to steal.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yeah, its weird how the 'culture' of 4e play seemed to eschew things like consumables and rituals to a degree that I never understood. You could actually ALMOST break the game by going against that, some of those things are pretty crazy powerful (there were some magic arrows in AV2 IIRC, or maybe MME, that were crazy good).

I know I did because they'd make things too easy and because you wanted to look at ones much lower level than you were.