4E Consequences: Being passive, cautious, or a loner is now unoptimized

[thecasualoblivion]

It also might be useful to delve into the mindset of the loner player I game with.

In 3E, he could win in one action, by himself, and thats what he misses. Lets say he was in a sticky situation and needed to get away, he'd use a class/item ability to turn invisible and poof, he was gone. In combat, against an enemy, he'd either use a Save or Die effect, or use an attack with a lot of sneak attack or hideous blow dice(or both), and defeat the enemy in one shot, two tops. He gets discouraged by 4E's assumed 50% miss chance, as in 3E he used the math of the system to almost always hit.

This really doesn't work in 4E. There are almost no way to one shot a non-minion enemy in 4E, short of a striker critical hit and you can't count on that happening regularly. Two-shotting things is almost impossible. In 4E, defeating things with haste and style requires focus fire from the whole party, and that isn't what he does. I've only seen him play strikers so far, and moving so he can mark/curse the enemies that the other characters have caused to be bloodied and finishing them off is alien to him. I'm not sure he even pays attention to what the others are doing when we play.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

It occurred to me that maybe the upcoming Avenger class will appeal to the playstyle that likes to do their own thing. If I understand what we know about the class correctly, they tend to peal opponent off of the main fight to have their own mini one-on-one combat. This could appeal to the lone-wolf types from a tactical combat experience stand-point. Outside of combat I believe they get stealth so they can scout, pick off sentries etc.

The Avenger still needs a team, if indirectly. His class ability depends on being able to engage a single enemy and not be hassled by other enemies. He requires friends to keep the other enemies off of him, and like Rogues, Warlocks, Rangers, and Barbarians, is most effective
finishing off bloodied enemies and being the quarterback of the party's focus fire efforts.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I can sympathize with your cautious players and those that don't like playing defenders, but I'm not sure how 4e has brought these "problems" into focus. D&D has always been a proactive game, where the rules have made it almost always better to attack than to be cautious. In 3e ABs scaled so much faster than AC that it was almost stupid to not attack at first opportunity at high levels. In 4e, heavy armor AC is the only PC stat that scales with monster stats so even epic foes have a 50%+ chance of missing a defender. I'm not sure how your players are afraid to play 4e defenders, but didn't have a problem with 3e "tanks".

If you want to cater to these players, I suggest homebrewing some powers and basic combat options like:

Brace for Impact!
Standard Action
You gain a +1 bonus to all defenses until the start of your next turn. You gain a +1 bonus to your next attack roll.

It also might be useful to delve into the mindset of the loner player I game with.

In 3E, he could win in one action, by himself, and thats what he misses. Lets say he was in a sticky situation and needed to get away, he'd use a class/item ability to turn invisible and poof, he was gone. In combat, against an enemy, he'd either use a Save or Die effect, or use an attack with a lot of sneak attack or hideous blow dice(or both), and defeat the enemy in one shot, two tops. He gets discouraged by 4E's assumed 50% miss chance, as in 3E he used the math of the system to almost always hit.

This really doesn't work in 4E. There are almost no way to one shot a non-minion enemy in 4E, short of a striker critical hit and you can't count on that happening regularly. Two-shotting things is almost impossible. In 4E, defeating things with haste and style requires focus fire from the whole party, and that isn't what he does. I've only seen him play strikers so far, and moving so he can mark/curse the enemies that the other characters have caused to be bloodied and finishing them off is alien to him. I'm not sure he even pays attention to what the others are doing when we play.

It's really hard to be sympathetic to such a player, so much so that I'm not even going to try. Honestly, if you really want to cater to his loner attitude you should be DMing a solo game for him. Myself, I'd tell him to go play video games. D&D has always been a team game, so it's not like this should be a surprise to him.

TS

 

[CapnZapp]

Being passive, cautious, or a loner has always been unoptimized.

The thing that's new is that 4E is much better at making the things that work visible to the players.

That's a solution, not a problem.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I think the biggest difference is that if you were cautious or passive in previous editions, it didn't hurt your friends as much. Things were easily unbalanced in the other direction, and powerful characters and skillful players could cover for weaker characters and less skillful players. In 4E, your friends need you.

 

[Rechan]

One thing that is not helpful in this convo:

"I'm glad that 4e killed your playstyle, it was badwrongfun anyway, and now 4e won't have any of your type in it!"

First of all, a post defending solo play was made on the first page.

And, as far as I'm concerned, if someone's fun is at the expense of others, I am damn sure not going to treat their idea of "fun" as acceptable and equal.

Just because it's labeled as "fun" to someone does not automatically make it acceptable. I might find it fun to troll threads here on EnWorld, but that doesn't mean the mods should accommodate my idea of fun.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The issue with individual characters having more or less short term impact in an encounter is linked to the bane of the entire 4E system: predictability.

Its a term that I don't want anywhere near my encounters. The only way a single character can have that much impact in very short amount of time is to use a system that is more open ended, and yes a bit more swingy. Swingy is an evil word these days but if dramatic individual achievement is desired, it comes with a bit of swing along for the ride.

Minions are used to try and give that feeling of dynamic impact in a low swing predictable system. Since its obvious to the players that the dynamic impact comes from the monster being designed to suck rather than thier character being awesome, that dramatic moment is quite fake in feeling.

D&D was never a great game for loners who tried to operate with a group. Solo play was and is still very possible but it requires special handling for the campaign to work.

I think that the cautious style of play began to lose effectiveness back in 3E before 4E was ever written. It depends more on a group's playstyle rather than the RAW of course, but the mindset of players can change when the style of play moves from dungeons being places filled with strange creatures and traps to areas containing a number of challenges with an X difficulty rating.

The mentality of caution begins to lose ground once the notion that "these are challenges designed for us to deal with" takes over. A party at full strength with this mentality isn't going to weigh thier options before engaging in combat. If the player knows that combat is supposed to be the most fun part of the game, and that encounters are designed to be winnable because hopeless struggles are unfun, why be cautious? The rules assume that victory is attainable via straight up assault so why hold back?

Those that do hold back reduce the players chance of victory because the rules assume balls to the walls input from every PC, preferably optimized in thier specialty. The predictability built into the combat helps ensure that all can contribute equally with the unspoken demand that all MUST contribute equally. All sharp edges and spikes of effectiveness have been hammered down to make equal blunt instruments of every PC. Fighting non-minions is like playing multiplayer whack-a-mole. If one party member stops whacking, another cannot become more efficient to take up the slack.

 

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Compared to say, Shadowrun, where it's: 1 Hour of the Decker doing his thing, 1 hour of the rigger doing his thing, 1 hour of the Street Samurai doing his thing...

I like to call this "The Shadowrun Problem" for exactly that reason. I think it's probably the single biggest problem that game faced.

 

[thelettuceman]

In my 3E game, we have a 7th lvl cleric that recently was able to do over 500 hundred points of damage on a critical hit. The guy is a massive powergamer and not only can he do obscene amounts of damage in combat like a striker, he can also take large amounts of damage do to high hp's, good armor, and the fact that he can heal. He also can cast spells in combat too since he took a feat that allows him to cast as a minor action, so he takes up many of the wizards roles as well, and finally he synergized his charisma into getting him massive diplomacy which means that he tends take over most out of battle encounters as well.

Point being, if your a good enough power-gamer you can pretty much render the whole concept of "classes" relevantly moot. And because of that, where you want to go, so goes the party. If you want to go off into the dungeon by yourself, well then adios. We'll wait back at camp and make s'mores.

If 4E has killed off this particular type of player, then I say good riddance.

One of the failings, and I will be the first to admit this, of the 3E system is that the designers really didn't synergize the different supplemental materials very well. This is why DMs have the authority to say, "I don't want supplemental material X in my game". The only thing they're bound to keep in the game is what is Core, and even then they have a right (if it is a good one) to change that. Just because it is out there does not mean that it has to be used. I mean, if you have a player who can piece together the different rules presented from across all of the WOTC/3+E d20 product line, yeah. You're going to have a lot of broken builds.

I've had a friend who has hit a lot of high amounts of damages in our 3.5e game. The reason is because they're stacking unstackable numbers, and doubling, or multiplying damage that cannot be multiplied by the rules. The DM doesn't catch these, but I've brought up a lot of what he's doing wrong and his numbers are a lot more managable now. I want to know, exactly, how this level 7 Cleric in your party got 500 damage on a critical hit, other than just taking your word for it. That sounds to me like he's either using overly broken rules or are interpreting them incorrectly, or a combination of the two.

My friend is an optimized powergamer, but he doesn't dominate combat. You know what happens to him? He dies most of the time. Yeah, he can dish out and take a lot of damage, and he has ruined a fair amount of the DMs (both mine, and the others) plans by dishing out a lot of damage early on in the round. He goes off like a loner, doing whatever he wants, but he pays for it, he still has the highest PC-death list out of everyone else.

Skallgrim: There's a difference between game-theme and play-style. D&D's theme is different from Mechwarrior, so unless you want to play something like Dragonmech, yeah, you're SOL. That's not what I'm saying. I'm staying playing character types like the lone wolf, or whatever else. So if you don't want to play a game in a medieval fantasy world, what the hell are you doing playing D&D then? It seems you need to take your own advice, either buck up and deal with it, or swap systems.

I'm not trying to claim that D&D was a universal system. Its fairly limited in that respect. But what if I want to play a Fighter class (because of whatever, either high HD, or bonus feats, or whatever) but have a different outlook than the typical meat shield/front line fighter? I think that the system should be able to support that - I don't think that's too much to ask, and I think that any system that forces the players, without fail, to play a specific style isn't something that I don't want to play.

In honesty, my problem is that everyone is saying that they know what's a better system for people, instead of letting people figure it out for themselves. No, the system that's better for people is the system that they like and can understand.

 

[Rechan]

In honesty, my problem is that everyone is saying that they know what's a better system for people, instead of letting people figure it out for themselves. No, the system that's better for people is the system that they like and can understand.

You said yourself:

and I think that any system that forces the players, without fail, to play a specific style isn't something that I don't want to play.

That's what D&D does. So, if you don't want to play a system that does that, then why are you resenting someone who says "If that's what you want, you won't be happy playing D&D, here's some better systems to suit your desires."

We're not talking about a "Less-tanky fighter". You're actively talking about a lone-wolf situation, which 4e intentionally works against.

Others are pointing out the limitations in the system that you are running up against. It's simply easier to go to a system that is built to handle what you want, rather than try and make a square peg fit in a round hole.

What do you expect other people to say? "I see you want something that the system actively works against. Sucks to be you"?

If I saw someone struggling to use a hammer in order to put in a screw, I'm going to suggest a screwdriver, instead of letting them tear up what they're working on because they like and can understand a hammer more. That offends you?