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

[Joshua Randall]

Just as damage or striker-ing is everyone's job, it turns out that in 4e some level of control is part of everyone's power set.

(In before someone tells me about an absolutely pure damage build with absolutely zero condition imposition. Yeah, I know. I'm talking generalities here.)

 

[Staffan]

Just as damage or striker-ing is everyone's job, it turns out that in 4e some level of control is part of everyone's power set.

(In before someone tells me about an absolutely pure damage build with absolutely zero condition imposition. Yeah, I know. I'm talking generalities here.)

I think the weakest part of the 4e role setup is the Controller/Striker difference. It is not super clear what a Controller does in the PHB, particularly since there's only one Controller class, and there's nothing obvious about what makes a class a Controller. With Defender, it's Marking and some type of punisher mechanic, with Striker there's a single-target bonus damage mechanic, and with Leaders it's some way of triggering multiple healing surges per encounter. You can see that the Wizard has AOE and imposes conditions, and moves enemies around, but other classes do those things too.

 

[Kannik]

I think the weakest part of the 4e role setup is the Controller/Striker difference. It is not super clear what a Controller does in the PHB, particularly since there's only one Controller class, and there's nothing obvious about what makes a class a Controller. With Defender, it's Marking and some type of punisher mechanic, with Striker there's a single-target bonus damage mechanic, and with Leaders it's some way of triggering multiple healing surges per encounter. You can see that the Wizard has AOE and imposes conditions, and moves enemies around, but other classes do those things too.

I'm still waiting for time to post my own 'what would you tweak to make a new version of 4e' thing, but adding a core 'controller-y' feature to each controller class would be one of them. The Protector Druid got one with Nature's Growth, so it could be that kind of encounter-level power or a rider added to the use of powers. This would help make things clearer up front as well as helping to sell each controller's flavour (and be fun to boot).

From what I gather, a Controller's powers do three main things: battlefield shaping/control (ie messing up the enemy's ability to maneuver or strike at/reach your allies; this can include repositioning them, providing new terrain/barriers, debilitating area of effect spells like stinking cloud, removing them from the battlefield, etc), lower damage but large-scale area of effect damage spells (for busting minions and also making everyone think twice about bunching up, which also fits in with denying the enemy's full tactical positioning freedom), or straight up removing the enemy's agency through dazes/stuns.

As an aside, a Monk is an interesting cross-over striker that focusses on multi-target damage (compared to most strikers which focus on one or two at a time)... "Shift your speed +2. Attack everyone you want along that movement. Laugh the whole way."

 

[Joshua Randall]

Monk irritates me, a 4e lover, as much as 4e irritates anyone not named me.
Have banned Monks in every game I ran since they were released.
“Fiddly” is the word.

Weirdly, I do really really enjoy l the “skirmish” powers that rogues get. I am a mystery unto myself.

 

[Zardnaar]

Monk irritates me, a 4e lover, as much as 4e irritates anyone not named me.
Have banned Monks in every game I ran since they were released.
“Fiddly” is the word.

Weirdly, I do really really enjoy l the “skirmish” powers that rogues get. I am a mystery unto myself.

Wouldn't Barbarian kinda do that? Can't remember that well but wife's one was bouncing around raging and minor action healing surge. Think she got called Sonic the Hedgehog.

Some sort of axe attack adding con to damage as well iirc.

 

[eyeheartawk]

I kinda want to see two 4E versions on some aspect: I would like a grid-based and battlemat-less ruleset. But I am not sure the latter really works. In play, I think using the grid and all the position stuff is really fun, but needing some form of grid to adjucate can make things more difficult - you need more space/better tools.

We played this way for a few sessions, since a square is a set measurement (forget what exactly it is off the top of my head) but yes, a powers area of effect can be easily converted on the fly. That worked fine, but yeah the issue became that even if we did that the positioning was still too important and needed to be tracked more definitively than theater of the mind readily supports.

At the time, we had come from 3.5/ Castles and Crusades and so we had gotten away with handwavy positioning without miniatures/tokens. Part of the reason we ended up moving away from 4e was because nobody wanted to start accumulating minis and tokens and we weren't keen on proxying with pennies or whatever.

That all being said I don't really know of a way around that though. Seems like an intrinsic feature of the system that you can't really houserule around? I'd like to be wrong on this count.

 

[Joshua Randall]

You could use a 13th Age style Engaged (base-to-base) / Close / Far Away abstraction, but all powers would need to be rewritten to support that.

You could use a Fate style Zones abstraction, but all powers would need to be rewritten to support that.

In a couple of the LFR adventures, there is an abstraction where, to see how many endless mooks you affect with a power (think horde of zombies), you take the size of the burst/blast plus 1. So an Area Burst 1 would affect 2, a Close Blast 3 would affect 4. Obviously this is highly abstract and can really punish players who were otherwise great at positioning. (I should easily be able to hit 4 targets with an AB1, not 2; etc.)

But anyway. Without significant rewrites, 4e needs the grid.

As for minis: I used and still use the flat cardboard “pogs” sold by Fiery Dragon Games and WOTC themselves (Monster Vault, Madness at Gardmore Abbey). Super affordable, durable, differentiated enough to tell the monsters apart.

PCs are actual minis, but you only need, ideally, 1 per player over the course of a campaign.

 

[eyeheartawk]

You could use a 13th Age style Engaged (base-to-base) / Close / Far Away abstraction, but all powers would need to be rewritten to support that.

You could use a Fate style Zones abstraction, but all powers would need to be rewritten to support that.

In a couple of the LFR adventures, there is an abstraction where, to see how many endless mooks you affect with a power (think horde of zombies), you take the size of the burst/blast plus 1. So an Area Burst 1 would affect 2, a Close Blast 3 would affect 4. Obviously this is highly abstract and can really punish players who were otherwise great at positioning. (I should easily be able to hit 4 targets with an AB1, not 2; etc.)

But anyway. Without significant rewrites, 4e needs the grid.

As for minis: I used and still use the flat cardboard “pogs” sold by Fiery Dragon Games and WOTC themselves (Monster Vault, Madness at Gardmore Abbey). Super affordable, durable, differentiated enough to tell the monsters apart.

PCs are actual minis, but you only need, ideally, 1 per player over the course of a campaign.

Yeah, agreed. I don't like 13th Age for different reasons, but I do like their abstract engagement ranges. I think the old Middle Earth RPG (the non-5E one) had a similar thing too.

Now, I've invested those flat Pathfinder standees with bases for enemies. It's cheap and I can store thousands in not alot of space. And yeah, nowadays most people invest in a Heroforge mini/STL for their own PC since you'll be using it for awhile.

 

[dbolack]

This one always struck me as odd too. Like, it's basically just a cleaned up 1E it's more like 1E than BECMI is and that was always part of the group. I did hear alot of derision about the whole Jim Ward led sanitization of the game though, so maybe that was a bigger part?

It's been a while and was pre Eternal September but the biggest complaint I remember was that the revised DMG, etc had only been out a couple of years before Second Edition and given that was in the height of the "hur hur T$R" grousing...

 

[pedr]

The basic problem is that MMOs don't have the same conception of the adventuring day, but use a faster, more abstract version of the same thing

I don't really play MMOs, but this is an interesting comparison and opens up the discussion of 'what limits on using the most powerful powers every attack, or every encounter add to the fun of the game?'

Clearly in both MMOs and combat-heavy tabletop games, a significant part of the tactical 'fun' is making choices about what abilities to use and deciding when to use particular resources across a session or period of in-game or real-world time.

Maybe there could be some more innovation in this? 13th Age tried to make the recharge of the most powerful powers a narrative rather than time-based thing, and I think that will be clearer in the second edition. Draw Steel basically does the same by limiting a complete recharge to a very long rest in relaxing conditions, so something only possible after the completion (or abandonment) of a quest. But what else could there be? I wonder whether PC abilities could recharge like some monster ones do 'every time you drop to half hitpoints' or 'when you regain a hitpoint while unconscious' maybe. Or even add some kind of meta-currency where you can charge up and recharge powerful abilities by hitting with less powerful ones (gain a point every time you use an at-will power, spend five points to regain the use of an encounter power, or ten points to regain the use of a daily power, etc).

4e was, and is, unashamedly a game. That's usually to its credit, in my mind, because making the activity people engage with when playing D&D fun and engaging ought to be high on the list of priorities when designing a version of D&D. But it does then mean it gets judged as a game, so some of the criticisms of monster design, the potential for analysis-paralysis to slow down combat, and so on are valid. It's why I'm disappointed that 5e wasn't able to be a revision or evolution of 4e, and why I'm hoping to play Draw Steel soon.