D&D 4E 4e With No Casters?

[Lizard]

As for the skills, well your examples are sound, but consider the entire party including the full armor plated fighter and the full plated paladin having to quickjly cross a rickety bridge over a churbning river thousands of feet below, while being chased by a hydra! Yeah, time for balance checks!

Not only will the fighter and pally probably not have pumped points into balance (because face it, they hardly get any skillpts as is ANDmost are spent on essentials like ride, diplomacy, intimidate, etc) And plate basically screws any chance they have even if they rolled a nat 20

This is why the fighter has to doff his armor and the high-balance folks use Aid Another to help him across, while doing things like tying rope, quaffing potions of feather fall, or other tricks to improve the odds. Forcing a character to think to overcome their weaknesses -- and rely on their teammates -- improves the game. And if they can't cross the bridge rapidly and safely, they make a dramatic stand against their pursuing foes...

 

[JohnSnow]

That's what we wanna hear!
So much better than the halfling article.
Why can't we have articles like this?

Because whenever they put information like this in an article, nobody believes it.

Article says: "Fourth Edition will be super-customizable. (Rest of article)."
ENworld Poster: "That's just empty marketing spiel. Look at all the details they gave!"

Article says: "Fourth Edition won't require a truckload of magic items. (Rest of article)."
ENworld Poster: "But it allows for 9! That means they're required!"

Article says: "Fourth Edition changes the way magic works."
ENworld Poster: "But I like how magic works in Third Edition!"

Article/Blog says: "Statting monsters and NPCs is faster, easier, and more flexible in Fourth Edition."
ENworld Poster: "I don't see what the problem is with how 3E does it. They're just dumbing down the game!"

And so on. It's not that the previews have been light on information. It's just that nobody ever believes the juiciest tidbits they drop. Or they just want to complain.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Sounds like multiclassing will be tied to feats (thus the recommendation to select divine or arcane via feats as an alternative).

 

[Imban]

Because whenever they put information like this in an article, nobody believes it.

Article says: "Fourth Edition will be super-customizable. (Rest of article)."
ENworld Poster: "That's just empty marketing spiel. Look at all the details they gave!"

Mike Mearls did explain how - even if it was in very vague terms - 4e could be customizable. If he had just posted saying "Fourth Edition will be super-customizable", well, who would have cared?

Article says: "Fourth Edition won't require a truckload of magic items. (Rest of article)."
ENworld Poster: "But it allows for 9! That means they're required!"

And until Mike Mearls clarified how things work out, the article promised that 4e wouldn't require a truckload of magic items and then... provided a truckload of magic items as default. In full context the article was true, but unfortunately the article didn't provide that full context for itself. The ENWorld interpretation was pretty clear here.

Article says: "Fourth Edition changes the way magic works."
ENworld Poster: "But I like how magic works in Third Edition!"

How is this not believing the article? I mean, come on.

Article/Blog says: "Statting monsters and NPCs is faster, easier, and more flexible in Fourth Edition."
ENworld Poster: "I don't see what the problem is with how 3E does it. They're just dumbing down the game!"

Again, how is this not believing the article? It's just that the article provides information that a lot of posters don't like.

Point is, Mike Mearls seems to have been presenting a lot more interesting things in his tidbits for those of us who love tinkering with game systems - a not insignificant group on RPG discussion boards - as opposed to the previews, which have not provided much of that, and mostly provided what's felt to me like empty words and things which seem more restrictive or "dumbed down" as compared to 3e in the name of speed and ease of play.

 

[erf_beto]

The big negative was the comment on heavy armor. Yeah, it's always been like that, but I was hoping for a Power/Feat combo or something that would use the mechanic (1/2 level + dex) to AC for fighters without any armor. Depending on how AC looks at higher level. Still, a flat bonus is workable, too. Maybe in the Martial book if it's too late to work on this now? I can hope.

I don't think Mearls is saying "it's not possible", he's just foreseeing what will break and how to amend it. I guess the problem with light armored fighters is that a lot of their powers will rely on the Defender role (forcing enemies to focus on him, taking damage meant for allies, etc). Without heavy armor that fighter might have low AC and would be hit a lot - wich is not what we want. Perhaps, to alleviate, that fighter could switch some of his talent-trees/powers/feats with the Rogue and call it even - and as far as we know, creating a new base class like that wouldnt be difficult.

 

[Lizard]

You can also roll things back another step and do some crazy stuff with the structure of the classes. Since many of the elements of character progression are unified, you could run classless D&D by allowing players to select maneuvers and spells from any class they want, mingling the two together, or start everyone with access to all heroic abilities and grant access to divine and arcane via feats.

I'm actually slightly surprised you didn't just go classless, given how much of what defines a class is going to be talent picks.

The one stumbling block is that the game expects fighters to wear heavy armor, but you could get around that by building a simple house rule (a fighter in light armor gets a flat bonus to AC to make up the gap).

Hmm. Harder to do dex monkey/swashbuckler types, then (with the default rules). I'm guessing heavy armor has fewer drawbacks in 4e (skill check modifiers, max dex bonus, etc), so it's always a no-brainer to use it.

Shouldn't be too hard to create some sort of "Swashbuckling" talent tree, though, which has AC bonuses and other things mixed in. I dislike 'fiat' bonuses that turn equipment into a pure costume choice, i.e, "If you wear chainmail, you have a +4 armor bonus...but if you wear leather, you have a +2 armor bonus from the leather and a +2 armor bonus from the Gods Of Genre Emulation." (At the least, make I'd make it a Dodge bonus or something else which distinguishes it, mechanically, from armor.)

 

[JohnSnow]

Again, how is this not believing the article? It's just that the article provides information that a lot of posters don't like.

Point is, Mike Mearls seems to have been presenting a lot more interesting things in his tidbits for those of us who love tinkering with game systems - a not insignificant group on RPG discussion boards - as opposed to the previews, which have not provided much of that, and mostly provided what's felt to me like empty words and things which seem more restrictive or "dumbed down" as compared to 3e in the name of speed and ease of play.

Perhaps I was unclear. I wasn't saying that people never "believed" the articles in question, although that's also fairly common.

I was saying that people often focus on one part of the article that bugs them and then complain that we're not getting any real information. We're getting plenty of information - it's just not always to everyone's tastes. Or they have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

The article on magic items is a good example. People believed what it said, but many people read huge amounts into the two or three tidbits they disliked and basically ignored the rest of the article. There were even accusations that it was "self-contradictory."

As another example, people read the Design & Developmnent article on "Death and Dying" and, based on the stats for one monster (the Pit Fiend), decide to totally disregard the statement in the article that it was possible for a 15th-level monster to deal 60 points of damage on a single hit.

People's ability to ignore what they read, or to choose their own interpretation even when it directly contradicts what's actually been said, is amazing. Combine that with the tendency to make "worst case scenario" extrapolations, and I'm not at all surprised WotC hasn't given us more details.

 

[pukunui]

Hmm. Harder to do dex monkey/swashbuckler types, then (with the default rules). I'm guessing heavy armor has fewer drawbacks in 4e (skill check modifiers, max dex bonus, etc), so it's always a no-brainer to use it.

It's also possible that sort of combination could be easily realized by some sort of fighter/rogue or fighter/ranger or maybe even fighter/rogue/ranger combo (depending on how multiclassing ends up working -- it's looking more and more like it's going to be a feat-based thing). So perhaps a rogue with fighter training feats would do it ...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Thoughts?

That that seems like a very good idea/upside, and one I hadn't considered.

Though as Mike and you mention, you would definately need some kind of "swashbuckly" deal to simulate most fantasy literature, where the fast, light character is as or more dangerous than the heavily armoured ones (a recent example being the literally naked swashbuckler vs knight with longsword fight in one of Greg Keyes Kingdoms of Bone and Thorn series). I share your distaste for arbitary genre-emulation bonuses, and hopefully someone will knock together something decent with 4E comes out. Hell, if we're very lucky, maybe something along those lines will be in Martial Power or whatever it's called.

 

[Imban]

Perhaps I was unclear. I wasn't saying that people never "believed" the articles in question, although that's also fairly common.

I was saying that people often focus on one part of the article that bugs them and then complain that we're not getting any real information. We're getting plenty of information - it's just not always to everyone's tastes. Or they have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

It's true that it's not to everyone's tastes, but I don't believe we've been getting plenty of information. Your mileage may vary, and evidently does.

I'll consider the state of our information after D&D Experience goes down "plenty."

The article on magic items is a good example. People believed what it said, but many people read huge amounts into the two or three tidbits they disliked and basically ignored the rest of the article. There were even accusations that it was "self-contradictory."

Well, in a way, it is - the need for piles of magic items is still quite present. Without the piece of information that it's also easier to remove - which you could maybe derive from the article, but it's much better that Mike Mearls came out and said it - it's contradicting itself by positing that magic items are less required and then creating a scenario where magic items are just as required in D&D-as-written.

As another example, people read the Design & Developmnent article on "Death and Dying" and, based on the stats for one monster (the Pit Fiend), decide to totally disregard the statement in the article that it was possible for a 15th-level monster to deal 60 points of damage on a single hit.

People's ability to ignore what they read, or to choose their own interpretation even when it directly contradicts what's actually been said, is amazing. Combine that with the tendency to make "worst case scenario" extrapolations, and I'm not at all surprised WotC hasn't given us more details.

Some people enjoy leaping to conclusions, and some people are goons. I know I've done it a few times with 4e, and regretted it some of those times. However, that's not a reason for WotC not to give us more details - more details reduces the chance that otherwise intelligent people will be given over to tinfoil-hat extrapolations.