D&D 4E 4E Liker - anything you worry about?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Often enough, we read criticism on 4E from people that mostly dislike it.
It often comes down to the same points repeated, and us 4E likers have to jump in and defend what we like (or so we believe ).

But this thread is a chance for those that like most aspects of 4E to describe the stuff they still worry about.
Changes going to far? Changes going not far enough? Weaknesses in the design assumptions? Drawbacks we'd prefer to avoid?

Here are my concerns:
- Fear: Ease of play:
I love the idea of every class getting powers and resources to manage. It was one of the strengths of Iron Heroes, in my opinion. But with that said:
What if it gets too difficult for beginners? It was said that the easiest class to play was usually something like the Fighter - no resources to manage besides hit points, and you only have to find a way to get close to your enemy and hit him hard. It's really simple. Yes, it can get boring over time, but we're talking about a D&D/RPG beginner here.

- Fear: Miniatures/Combat Grid focus:
I don't think 4E is worse then 3E in this regard. But that doesn't mean it would have been nice to get more options to ignore the grid. With area effects and flanking in the game, using a battle map makes things a lot easier. But, again from a beginners perspective, this forces one to use a visual representation. Maybe graph paper and improvised tokens are enough, but it still feels like a barrier to entry.

- Fear: Encounter power "spamming":
People will use their encounter powers as often and as much as possible. If the number of encounter powers are limited, this will lead to repetition. Or if they are not limited enough, every attack/action will use an per encounter power, and they lose their feel of "specialness".
Not that Charge/FullAttack/FullAttack wasn't repetitive or lacked specialness, either, but the improvement might not e as big as I could hope for.

- Fear: Daily powers to powerful/important:
Daily powers might be so powerful that, after some time of game experience, people will return to the 3E 15 minute adventuring day. It's an escalating effect: People learn that any hard encounter can be turned into a cakewalk by novaing. So adventure designers put even harder encounters in the game. Everyone novas all the time, and we're back to square 3.x.

- General: Hit Points as an encounter resource:
It was already true for the most part in 3.x, thanks to Wands of Cure Light Wounds. Healing Surges might actually get us back closer to HP being a per day resource, but still, the rules seem to assume that getting to 0 hp during a combat is a common occurrence. (and not just for the enemy)
But I wonder if the whole thing shouldn't be changed even more radically. Throw away scaling hit points / HD. Throw away escalating damage. Instead of ablative hit points, use a different resource for general "nastiness protection", like "Drama Points" or "Possibilities". Spend a drama point to reduce your damage, reroll your attack or saving throw and stuff like that. A more narrative approach to modeling damage...

- Fear: Irrational fear:
What if everything that looks like something I like doesn't work that great in actual play?!

There are counter points to most of these fears (except the last, because that one is irrational ). All of this stuff can be countered (or validated) by playing the actual game.

So, that are my points, as far as I can think them up.

 

[Khuxan]

-Fear: Intelligence will not do anything.

-Fear: That it will be difficult to design for because a) there's only so much you can do and with hundreds of powers in just the first book, a lot's been done, b) creating something like a class will need thousands of words worth of powers along with the class itself.

-Fear: Many powers will just be copy-pasted to create new classes because there exists no system for classes sharing powers.

-Fear: That combat will be just as slow as it is in 3.5 because people will still need to keep track of finnicky bonuses/ongoing effects.

-Fear: That the social combat system will kill role-playing.

-Fear: There will be too many powers per character to keep track of or, conversely, there will be too few so each character will play through each combat the same way.

-Fear: The GSL will be too limited and restrictive so innovation is stunted.

-Fear: Powers are unnecessarily limited (e.g. rogue powers restricted to certain weapons), and the solution will be a deluge of third-party products removing these unnecessary distinctions.

-Fear: 3.5 is so robust too few people will convert over so that D&D is no longer profitable.

-Fear: The skill list is too pruned.

-Fear: Class restrictions (such as set trained skills and weapon proficiencies) will result in many new and alternate classes, feats, paragon paths, alternate class features just to remove restrictions that should not exist in the first place.

-Fear: The quality companies that refuse to convert to 4E will die off.

Phew. It was good to confess

 

[Jack99]

Fear: That my players won't like it, and I will be stuck with 3.5 forever (/cry)

 

[Plane Sailing]

Minor fear -tracking conditions, marks etc in combat will prove a pain in the neck.

Major fear - 4e ends up being a sore spot for lots of people on enworld and a degree of aggro persists, making the lives of mods and admins much less fun than we would like

I think those are the big ones at the moment.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

Fear: To much of the old flavor is replaced in 4E by "new" and "improved" flavor.
Major Fear: I will stop loving the Realms because the changes are too much.
Minor Fear: Tracking conditions are going to be a PITB to keep track of and use.
Gripe: Not happy with the eight classes they let in and feel Druid and Bard should have made it over Warlock.

That's about it. Like I said, most of my dislikes revolve around the flavor, which is something I can change. Mechanically, it's mostly positive from what I've seen.

 

[fnwc]

Fear: Scaling is done in such a way that level 30 feels like level 1, just with bigger numbers.

Fear: Marking is going to be a pain to track.

Fear: The social encounter rules won't be as awesome as I hope them to be.

 

[Gold Roger]

My biggest fear?

That the amount of powers each character has will disencourage or hinder casual players.

 

[Raith5]

Good question

Fears: 1) the whole miniature focus: I fear that converting "squares" into in world measurements will become a real pain, marking and other aspects of combat become annoying to track.

2) I am also fearful that the healing surges could be too much, too often and as a result not deliver any real tactical benefit to play.

3) What I fear the most though are heaps of splat books which spread meaningful character choices thinly over a vast and growing range of classes, feats, powers, paths etc.

Nevertheless I like a lot of what I see in 4th ed.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Fear: Monotonous gameplay over the range of levels (i.e. only bigger numbers).

Fear: No "mechanical" flavour differentiating the classes(i.e. fighter "feels" like mage).

Fear: My group doesn't like 4E (because it'll make me sad).

Fear: TOO much focus on "everybody has something to do", i.e. design paradigm ruling over actual play experience (we had that with the 3E symmetry).

Cheers, LT.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The need for the battlegrid. My group plays 3e without a battle map. We mostly get by fine, letting the DM adjudicate flanking, AoOs and so forth. It speeds things up quite a bit. I'm concerned that so many powers and abilities in 4e make reference to the grid that it will become almost impossible to get by with only a 'mental map'.

Condition tracking. This looks really fiddly and time-consuming. Each encounter involving multiple monsters is going to make this harder than it was in 3e and there seem to be more conditions, too. I remember in a 3e game having difficulty keeping track of who was blinded (glitterdust... grr) and slowed and that was just two conditions.

Classes. Are they both balanced and sufficiently differentiated? This is a hard thing to do, something no previous rpg has managed, imo.

I won't like it. I was really underwhelmed by the DDXP PCs. I had no interest in playing any of them. That could be a bit of a problem.