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

[FourthBear]

Fear: Rituals will suck, or won't have enough variety and detail in the PHB1, destroying the idea of noncombat magic, and proliferating bags of rats if you don't houserule things into making more sense.

I have the exact opposite fear: that rituals will be so generally applicable and useful that they will quickly proliferate in the core rules and in campaigns such that they become omnipresent solutions. In particular, I dislike the way spells in D&D overwhelm and make skills irrelevant. I fear that powerful, cheap and generally applicable rituals may make that effect even more pronounced.

 

[BradfordFerguson]

FEAR: Combat does not actually run faster.
REALITY: Sweet spot of 3.5 is mid-levels, all of 4E will now play like mid-level game. Epic will not be complicated, just similar yet more powerful.

FEAR: Tracking all the different marks, Tracking all the delayed saving throws and delayed effects (example, sleep is 1 round slow (instant?) + sleep on creatures turn if they spell beat their Will Defense).
REALITY: This will likely slow down things, but we as a community will come up with ideas to circumvent or deal with it.

FEAR: 4E will not have the right flavor to play through Paizo's Pathfinder with regular 4E rules. The first Pathfinder Adventure Path has more to do with the seven deadly sins and thus alignment and also magical schools.
REALITY: Maybe the player's won't care or we won't really notice.

 

[Roland55]

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.

Hmm. Don't need my input. The Scotsman hit my major points.

 

[jensun]

- 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.

This is my main concern. No-one in my group came to rpg's with a wargaming background and we dont and never have used miniatures or a grid. I would like there to be a more abstract alternative to the very detailed tactical movement element but I dont think there will be.

I have seen Mearls LJ post about the issue but it doesnt really resolve anything. I dont want to have to create some sort of SotC zones hack for the game but I also dont want to have to invest in a bunch of miniatures I will never use for anything else.

 

[jensun]

I will add one more. I fear that the art will suck. Some of what I have seen has been great but there are some real bloopers (the Efreeti in particular).

 

[DandD]

Believe me. There are tons of D&D-gaming groups who never used grids or miniature for combat. Be it the original D&D, the Advanced D&D-version, D&D 3.X, or the upcoming D&D 4th edition, no matter what you might think about any D&D-pen&paper-game, you can alway play it without a battlemap and such.

 

[jensun]

Believe me. There are tons of D&D-gaming groups who never used grids or miniature for combat. Be it the original D&D, the Advanced D&D-version, D&D 3.X, or the upcoming D&D 4th edition, no matter what you might think about any D&D-pen&paper-game, you can alway play it without a battlemap and such.

Of course you can.


I played both original, 1e and 2e and never used miniatures for any of them. Non of them had any element of tactical movement so a grid was completely unnecessary. Miniatures were for little more than an aid to visualising the game.

I have played a lot of 3e and 3.5 and havent used a battlegrid for any of them. It was reasonably simple to adjudicate movement, AoO's etc on the fly even with largish groups of 6 people.

4e however seems to have a lot more abilities which move people about, both voluntarily and forcibly, much more so than 3.x. That will make it more complicated to deal with things on the fly. I wont know how much more difficult until I see the rules hence why its a fear.

 

[StarFyre]

lots

Since following 4E since the day of launch of info..aug 16 or whatever it was...i have gone essentially over every aspect I can think of with my players...to gauge thoughts/ideas, etc.

Overall, it's coming to the point that several major concerns came out (some of which from talking to people who have tried it and what they find):

1) do not like the encounter, daily, etc 'powers' for wizards and clerics that much...
2) social system is a video game..roll a dice and see what happens
3) trap system is the same as above (although this is the same as it's always been in most games I believe)
4) several people who played it have stated how it gets repetitive due to the limit choice for players (casters)
5) artificial tactics - marking people, and causing people to shift spaces, etc are not true tactics
6) critical hit system isn't 'fun' enough for what we like
7) monsters, although the new design method rocks..it didnt go far enough
8) some classes still not done to how we envision them
9) deity system nothing special from how we understand it...

All of the above though, we have other house rules we use in 3.XE anyways, some since 2E, and others (ie. total spell system revision/wizard/cleric/warlock, god system, and further monster updates) all in the works....

Sanjay

 

[Vaeron]

Firstly, my main (not fear, perhaps qualm) is keeping track of marking and status effects. An article at the wizards site already offers strategies for keeping track of these things with minis - and that does seem to present a problem to those of us who are more imagination oriented than grid oriented. This isn't really a big deal, I don't think - if anything the "box" shape of all spell effects should actually make determining what's effected by a spell and what isn't even easier for those of us who can't mentally draw cones and radii. Same with the 1-1-1-1 business. I'm all for anything that eliminates math.

But, I've seen the following a few times, and I just can't see where it's coming from:

I am afraid of over-focusing on combat.

That's a DMing issue, really, not a 4e issue. Has anything been released that says PCs will no longer be allowed to talk to NPCs, explore, or have a drunken night out? If anything, released information says PCs should be rewarded XP for social encounters, traps, AND combat. I believe a quote even said it would be possible to level up without ever fighting. A changed combat system changes the rest of the world how, is what I'm wondering. How one plays the game is how one plays the game, and I don't see that the non-combat aspect of the game has really changed at all. If anything, it seems to have been enhanced.

I am afraid that 'rogue' means 'damage'.

Rogue means sneaking, stealing, trapping, and backstabbing. Same as always, as far as I can remember. A rogue is indeed qualified as a striker now. But is that really a change from where the rogue stood in 3e? Standing back and firing a barrage of sneak attack arrows into an enemy? Or dual wielding a pair of weapons to really bring the hurt home? But the PHB lite even shows "trickster rogue" as a possible build, emphasizing Dexterity and misdirection, so there are clearly options and alternatives everywhere.

Thankfully, a lot of the fears mentioned on this thread are things that don't mesh with the information we've been given. That makes me think that most of the fears are baseless. I hope so, at least.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Since most of my information is coming from the recent excerpts we've seen, I'm concerned about one specific thing and one general thing

Specific - that interesting mechanics have been wiped away in the name of "balance." The Phane is an interesting monster whose 3e counterpart had much more interesting powers. On the other side of the coin, I love the Pit Fiend and War Devil in terms of really interesting tactical stuff monsters can do.

General - that the game just doesn't work the way I expect it to.

In both of these instances, I simply believe that this will not be the case, but won't really know until I get my hands on the full ruleset.

Some might call me 4e fanboy, but that is simply because I have decided to take a positive outlook towards the edition. This is not because I believe it will revolutionize gaming or anything extreme like that; I simply want the edition to succeed. That does not mean I don't have reservations, concerns, or even doubts.