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

[SteveC]

I can say, if you use Roll20, there is an implemented character sheet, and you can code your own powers for it--simple ones aren't even that hard to do directly, actually, without any coding at all. It took me a while to get fully fluent with it, but (from experience) I can get back into the swing of it with a bit of time.

Oh sure. It's just that there are thousands of powers and feats to program and there's no way I'd have the time or ability to do that. I would definitely pay for it, but I think that would be a small enough market that it wouldn't be worth it for a developer.

 

[FrogReaver]

Oh sure. It's just that there are thousands of powers and feats to program and there's no way I'd have the time or ability to do that. I would definitely pay for it, but I think that would be a small enough market that it wouldn't be worth it for a developer.

I feel like 90% of the powers could be created by creating a weapon damage multiplier and programming maybe 20 stand alone conditions/effects and then just combining them as needed.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I'm preparing to run a 4E home game and creating tactically interesting and balanced encounters for every fight from scratch just seems like too much work with everything else I have to do so I just decided to run Scales of War and I'll just add some notes to the stat blocks (because I think most of them are using the old monster math) which I think is just to double their damage and reduce their HP by a quarter or half?

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[Micah Sweet]

I wouldn't go that far. As I noted upstream, a lot of the marketing humour at the time was very inside-baseball/self-referential that would've confused newcomers. They surely misjudged how certain things might land (again, like satire or sarcasm it's likely going to go awry with some), but I never got the sense they didn't care about me and my 20ish years of playing to that point.

Well, I certainly did. The game was different enough from their previous efforts (lore and rules, as has been said), and the marketing was IMO quite dismissive of those who weren't on board with 4e's ideas that I felt the message they were sending was, "This is D&D. You don't like it? We don't want to hear from you, so go away".

 

[TwoSix]

But it never felt like D&D to me. Too many sacred cows slaughtered; too many core assumptions altered

I'm always fascinated by this statement. I don't think it's wrong in any way; I've seen this opinion offered up by a ton of people who are casual D&D enjoyers to believe it isn't true for them.

But try as I might, I can't see it; to me if it has elves and wizards and throwing d20s around, it feels like D&D. I can't grok which sacred cows were removed that are actually essential to the D&D experience.

 

[Joshua Randall]

@eyeheartawk on a more serious note, if you want to run some published 4e adventures with interesting encounters and monsters that mostly don't need adjustments, the go-to's are

• Reavers of Harkenwold (from Essentials DM's Kit)
• Cairn of the Winter King (from Monster Vault)
• Madness at Gardmore Abbey (standalone)
• Tomb of Horrors (the standalone one from 2010 -- more a thematic sequel -- not the re-skin of the O.G. tomb)

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm preparing to run a 4E home game and creating tactically interesting and balanced encounters for every fight from scratch just seems like too much work with everything else I have to do so I just decided to run Scales of War and I'll just add some notes to the stat blocks (because I think most of them are using the old monster math) which I think is just to double their damage and reduce their HP by a quarter or half?

Setting up interesting combats in a game that actually has the mechanical tools to make that work is always either of interest in and of itself, or its just extra overhead. Short of pre-done encounters (whether because of pre-written adventures or just drop-ins) I'm not sure I see any way around that.

 

[hirou]

That's part of why my "what would you do to update 4e" answer included my "Skirmish rules" concept.

You piqued my interest enough to make me dig through 30 pages of this thread in search of that post. I second the opinion that rules for "light combats" would alleviate 4e problems. Do you have any ideas how this would be accomplished or is that just an abstract wish?

 

[Pedantic]

I'm always fascinated by this statement. I don't think it's wrong in any way; I've seen this opinion offered up by a ton of people who are casual D&D enjoyers to believe it isn't true for them.

But try as I might, I can't see it; to me if it has elves and wizards and throwing d20s around, it feels like D&D. I can't grok which sacred cows were removed that are actually essential to the D&D experience.

I've got a theory it can be narrowed down to two points of design aesthetic that 4e didn't account for:

1. Mundane prowess must be modeled through general systems for it to feel mundane.
2. D&D magic must be at least partially universalized to be recognizable as D&D magic.

That is, if you want your fighter to feel like a general reflection of the warrior archetype, it has to be primarily using or modifying actions that are available to all characters. I think this might be slightly less true of the rogue (given it originally was defined having access to a unique, additional skill system), but if you're going to write a skill system, the rogue should probably have class abilities that key off stuff written inside it.

The second point is that D&D magic has to be fairly universal; fireball can't be something only your wizard does, it must also be something that NPC wizards cast and that monsters deploy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

4E also has skill challenge rules for systematizing those key RP interactions and negotiations. So you've got the option to employ more mechanics and get xp for it too.

Of course there are plenty of people who are more than a little hostile to mechanical engagement in some of those areas anyway, so to them that wouldn't have seemed a virtue.