The D&D 4th edition Rennaissaince: A look into the history of the edition, its flaws and its merits

[Zardnaar]

Double post.

 

[Zardnaar]

There's a lot in 4E that would work great in any edition of D&D.

The big problems the playstyle and powers and roles universally applied. Also lead to complexity.

Not such an issue if it's opt in or the playstyle is different. SWSE is fine and 4E is great to mine.

 

[Staffan]

There's a lot in 4E that would work great in any edition of D&D.

The big problems the playstyle and powers and roles universally applied. Also lead to complexity.

I like having the tank (defender) and healer (leader) role defined, but it might have been a mistake to have them apply to whole classes instead of specific builds. One of the arguments I remember is "But I like my fighter to be a damage dealer, not a tank" or even "But I want my fighter to be an archer". The way 4e is built, those are fundamentally not fighters. Moreover, while you can do an archer with the ranger class, the core PHB doesn't have a "heavily-armored dude that just lays down the damage" class, and I'm not sure there was one in the whole of 4e. Perhaps because it would be redundant with two other martial striker classes, or perhaps they didn't want non-defenders with good armor, but that's still a pretty common class fantasy.

Same thing with clerics really, though at least there you had the option of basher-cleric and laser-cleric, and you eventually got an offensive divine casterish class in the Invoker in PHB2.

 

[Zardnaar]

I like having the tank (defender) and healer (leader) role defined, but it might have been a mistake to have them apply to whole classes instead of specific builds. One of the arguments I remember is "But I like my fighter to be a damage dealer, not a tank" or even "But I want my fighter to be an archer". The way 4e is built, those are fundamentally not fighters. Moreover, while you can do an archer with the ranger class, the core PHB doesn't have a "heavily-armored dude that just lays down the damage" class, and I'm not sure there was one in the whole of 4e. Perhaps because it would be redundant with two other martial striker classes, or perhaps they didn't want non-defenders with good armor, but that's still a pretty common class fantasy.

Same thing with clerics really, though at least there you had the option of basher-cleric and laser-cleric, and you eventually got an offensive divine casterish class in the Invoker in PHB2.

Yeah let the players build how they like within reason. A fighter will never make a great controller but striker or tank is viable imho.

5E

 

[Joshua Randall]

The core PHB absolutely has two heavily armored classes who lay down damage. They are the fighter and the paladin.

They don’t deal AS MUCH damage as the strikers, rogue and ranger.

By design.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oh, thank the good Lord. I had written up a bunch of stuff on my phone, and then it got eaten by the "Site is Updating" thing. Thankfully, at least a portion survived.

So, in an attempt to actually talk about 4E design, asking this question specifically to folks who actually enjoyed the system:
In a hypothetical second edition of 4E, what changes would you primarily want to make?

• Improve the thematic distinctiveness of the power sources, trying to give each a cool, distinctive mechanic.
• Emphasize as much as humanly possible that roles are about baseline competencies, NOT straightjackets.
• Improve rituals and make more of them draw on thematics (esp. of power sources).
• Integrate Backgrounds and Themes into a single "Heroic Origin" so that there is continuity across the 30 levels: Heroic Origin, Paragon Path, Epic Destiny.
• Create rigorous and well-built "novice level" rules, coupled with stealing the "incremental advance" concept from 13A so that OSR fans can spool out levelling almost indefinitely.
• Create "Skirmish" rules, which condense combat down to a fast, snappy, low-granularity affair; explicitly intended for conflicts like "two goblins in a hallway" stuff that is popular in early edition playstyles.
• Thoroughly review and improve Skill Challenges, particularly in light of my personal experiences with really good ones.
• Provide many, extensive, well-described examples of SCs entirely for free so folks can see what they're good for.
• Make absolutely ferdamsher that the first 3+ adventures published for it are unassailable solid gold experiences. The impact of early adventures cannot be overstated.
• Trim down the number of powers and make sure every published power has a clear, desirable use-case. "Powers" in general are going to be very numerous,* but a third to half of the powers in existing 4e are crap not worth publishing.
• Likewise, trim down feats and work to fix some of the pretty obviously garbage categories thereof. 4e was stupidly profligate with feats, much to its detriment.
• Finish up the "build your own weapons" rules I've been working on for the past...five-plus years....
• Show in the DMG the benefits of reskinning, minor reworking (e.g. letting a "cryomancer" Wizard reflavor fireball as endothermia or the like, with the Cold keyword, so long as it isn't exploitative), and "off-label" power usage (e.g. setting things on fire with the Sorcerer's burning spray attack)
• Ideally, publish a free "How To 4e Mk II" document which covers how to use its various components (e.g. "page 42" rules, SCs, Skirmishes, combats proper, off-label power uses)

*Just do the math. 25 classes averaging ~2 powers per level across 30 levels. This is a lowball because there are (and should be) FAR more PPs than classes, and definitely more EDs than classes. 25x2x30 = 1500 powers at bare minimum. Considering I am vehemently opposed to any notion of combined power pools (except, possibly, as the One Special Thing identifying a particular power source), a pool of 2000-3000 powers is simply going to happen.

For me, I'm not a big fan of number bloat, so I would reduce (not eliminate) the level bonus and hit points per level (adjusting damage accordingly).

Well, "bloat" is in the eye of the beholder. If you felt a number being big was good and productive despite a general preference for smaller numbers, you would not call it that; at worst, you might call it a necessary evil. Loaded terms like this presuppose that the numbers are necessarily and always a problem, and that reducing them is necessarily and always a better experience. IMO, you cannot make any such assumptions. They have to be actually playtested. And if the playtesting bears out the principle, awesome! Go where the data leads. Just don't assume that smaller numbers are definitely always better than bigger numbers no matter what. That sort of assumption is one of the things that directly contributes to deeply flawed game design, leaving a core principle completely untested.

Makes monster stat blocks stay viable for longer, too.

Does it though? Or does it simply induce rocket tag? Smaller number growth does not guarantee viability, nor is it a choice made without cost. One of the biggest problems 5e as a whole has faced with its combat system is that it largely eliminated any form of numerical escalation of threats other than bigger damage dice and/or bigger HP. This directly contributes to the general "boring fat sack of HP" design problem that at least 5.0 deals with. (Without having the official 5.5e MM to examine, it's not yet appropriate to claim 5.5e has the same problem...but I kinda suspect it will, given some of the other statblock issues we've seen in the previews.)

Expand on Rituals (I love the idea that, in a magical world, anybody who knows the steps can perform ritual magic).

Oh yeah, 4e-style rituals are wonderful. I'm still deeply frustrated at how 5e managed to take that concept--which was empowering and encouraged creativity and diversity!--and corrupt it into something that 99.9% of the time only serves to empower spellcasters even more. Oh, and not only that, but investing into it as a non-spellcaster is actively denying yourself the ability to get better at being a non-spellcaster to boot! 5.5e didn't even fix this when it could've by making Ritual Caster an Origin feat. Instead, it requires level 4.

If I wanted to get really spicy, I'd swap out the six attribute scores for Shadow of the Demon Lord's attribute spread [Strength Agility Intelligence Willpower], but I think that's still too sacred cow for most folks.

Yeah...I thought about doing something sort of like this. Divorce combat stats from "adventuring" (=non-combat) stats, make 3 of the former and 4 of the latter. Power (=damage/Fort), Finesse (=riders/Reflex), and Resolve (=class+subclass effects/Will). Then your adventuring stats are Might (=Str+Con), Dex (unchanged), Wits (Int + observation/awareness aspects of Wisdom), and Presence (Cha + willpower/intuition aspects of Wisdom).

 

[Joshua Randall]

Ability scores are unneeded in 4e, anyway. Everything you DO in the game looks at your ability MODIFIERS. (Yes, I’m aware of the ability score requirements for feats. Those could easily be translated to modifiers.)

You could then have a starting point buy of +3, +3, +1, +1, 0, -1 (that’s 16, 16, 12, 12, 10, 8) or whatever and your racial bonuses give you two floating +1s.

Hmm… 3/3/1/1/0/-1… that seems a lot like some other games I’ve played…. thinking emoji
but yeah, 4e is already a story game at heart, may as well have its character creation more resemble AW or Ironsworn.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ability scores are unneeded in 4e, anyway. Everything you DO in the game looks at your ability MODIFIERS. (Yes, I’m aware of the ability score requirements for feats. Those could easily be translated to modifiers.)

You could then have a starting point buy of +3, +3, +1, +1, 0, -1 (that’s 16, 16, 12, 12, 10, 8) or whatever and your racial bonuses give you two floating +1s.

Hmm… 3/3/1/1/0/-1… that seems a lot like some other games I’ve played…. thinking emoji
but yeah, 4e is already a story game at heart, may as well have its character creation more resemble AW or Ironsworn.

Technically, they still had some uses. Raw Constitution still mattered, for example, though at this hour I'm afraid I can't recall why it did. I'm not sure I entirely agree on the feats thing, but it's not really worth arguing over.

Personally, I'm of the opinion one should push for reform in the areas that are most important to the designed gameplay experience, rather than focusing reforms on the parts that are most obvious. Oftentimes, the obvious simple reforms don't really change much about the gameplay experience--as in, interacting with and using the mechanics--but have an enormous and overwhelming impact on the....let's call it the timbre of the experience. IME, there's little harm in keeping stats as they are, other than as a relatively small learning curve for new players. But it costs a LOT of community goodwill to make changes like this, even if the experience remains 100% identical.

I'd rather spend my budget of acceptable changes on other things. Things that folks might not even realize can be problems.

 

[Staffan]

Technically, they still had some uses. Raw Constitution still mattered, for example, though at this hour I'm afraid I can't recall why it did. I'm not sure I entirely agree on the feats thing, but it's not really worth arguing over.

The Constitution ability score was used to determine starting hp, but that could have been easily fixed by giving e.g. 30+2*Conbonus instead of 20+Con.

There's also the rate of ability score increases that would need to be rethought, but that's not a hard problem to fix.

 

[payn]

Technically, they still had some uses. Raw Constitution still mattered, for example, though at this hour I'm afraid I can't recall why it did. I'm not sure I entirely agree on the feats thing, but it's not really worth arguing over.

Personally, I'm of the opinion one should push for reform in the areas that are most important to the designed gameplay experience, rather than focusing reforms on the parts that are most obvious. Oftentimes, the obvious simple reforms don't really change much about the gameplay experience--as in, interacting with and using the mechanics--but have an enormous and overwhelming impact on the....let's call it the timbre of the experience. IME, there's little harm in keeping stats as they are, other than as a relatively small learning curve for new players. But it costs a LOT of community goodwill to make changes like this, even if the experience remains 100% identical.

I'd rather spend my budget of acceptable changes on other things. Things that folks might not even realize can be problems.

I was surprised that mods only went over so well in PF2. I thought as you do, that would be a sort of change not worth the headache.