D&D 4E 4e's Equivalent to Pathfinder

[The Halfling]

Interesting...from what I saw, the Essentials fighters freed the player in ways that Core rules didn't.

Suppose one wanted to play a knight that had high charisma (leader in battle, etc.). The player could take the "melee training" feat, and have attacks and damage based on charisma, and make STR a dump stat (well, not really, because the knight still has to wear armor). Rather than marking, the knight has an aura 1 defense feature, which I believe is more easily tracked.

The slayer is everything that a fantasy fighter is supposed to be. He can do both ranged and melee attacks, he's highly mobile, he does lots of damage, he's got cool weapon specializations (although its a shame they didn't do another "Heroes of..." book that added, say, a poleax slayer or a longbow slayer)

I will admit that the focus on the fighter having minor-action-activated stances that grant bonuses to basic attacks (both ranged and melee), rather than a variety of a/e/d powers may, indeed be less interesting. I don't necessarily agree that that makes the knight and slayer "boring" to play. At least it is more interesting than "I swing my sword at the monster."

Oh...on that I fully agree. In fact, I use the knight and slayer as a basis for my warrior.

The part that strikes me as dull, is the lack of variety from the Encounter and Daily portion of the E-class fighters.

 

[Droogie128]

Honestly, if they took 4e, cleaned it up and got rid of the feat taxes, then actually fixed the problems that those taxes were put in place for... I'd be totally happy never looking at DDN. They could also maybe clean up the action economy a bit, and actually define terms like "wield".

 

[The Halfling]

Honestly, if they took 4e, cleaned it up and got rid of the feat taxes, then actually fixed the problems that those taxes were put in place for... I'd be totally happy never looking at DDN. They could also maybe clean up the action economy a bit, and actually define terms like "wield".

Yes. The baseline feats from Essentials, barring the feat fixes of Expertise, are a decent starting point.

I've worked on the math a bit, but it's not my area of expertise. I'd rather have a person like Benjamin Durbin do something for 4e, like he did for 3e with Trailblazer. It's not just defenses and attack bonuses, but also hp's and damage. While there are some good workarounds out there, I think there is more that can be done to fix the engine, and smooth it out.

Honestly, I think a change of perspective on powers could be done, too. Instead of powers, call them class features. Set a base line class with a definitive set of "class features" (still using the AEDU structure), then having alternative class features listed in a later section. I don't know.

 

[S'mon]

The GSL is not relevant to a 4e clone.

The GSL is basically a trademark licence. In return for being allowed to use WotC trademarks and trade dress (like the D&D logo) you agree not to include certain stuff in your product (like the text of the 4e rulebooks). There's a few other bells and whistles, but that's the gist of it.

Once WotC revokes the GSL - which I assume they will do around the time 5e launches - it will be irrelevant.

The challenge for a 4e clone, after that point, will be how to do it without violating WotC IP rights - both copyrighs in their rulebooks, and trademarks. I'm not an IP lawyer, but I am an academic lawyer. My view is that this challenge is non-trivial, but not necessarily insurmountable. There is professional disagreement over OSRIC - Clark Peterson from Necromancer, for instance - who is a lawyer and I think now a judge (?) - has expressed the view that it is infringing of WotC IP rights (and hence not compliant with the OGL, despite purporting to be so).

A lawyer colleague of [MENTION=82885]Matt James[/MENTION] had a good series of blogs on 4e and IP law a while back, but I can't remember his name or where the blogs were.


The legality of OSRIC, at least, is disputed.

But not by the licensor, WotC/Hasbro, which as a academic IP & contract lawyer myself, I'd think was the minimum level at which something could be said to be 'in dispute', pemerton. The OSRIC guys took legal advice before publishing; they have never been contacted by WoTC/Hasbro legal dept. After all these years it seems pretty clearly not in dispute. And as we've discussed before, Peterson is not an IP lawyer. Nor did he identify any cause of action. From what I saw of his opinion, he just gave a 'not like it' reaction. Since at the time OSRIC potentially took from his '3e rules, 1e feel' market, that might have been a reason he didn't like it.

Otherwise, agree about the GSL - zero relevance for retro-clones.

Using the OGL to clone 4e might be possible but would be tricky. A much better use of the OGL IMO is to create 4e-compatible adventures and other material using the IP licensed by WoTC in the SRD. Several commercial publishers have done this, especially before the GSL came out. Or if you're not interested in SRD material (such as the details of D&D-specific monsters) you can use regular TM & (c) law. The latter would potentially let you refer to specific 4e monster manual (etc) pages for monsters, though IMO you could not reproduce 4e official monster stat blocks without risking copyright infringement.

In general though I think you'd be better off creating new monster stat blocks using the OGL/SRD route, eg your own 4e-compatible 'hill giant' or 'ogre' stat block using the non-copyrightable 4e formulae, such as attack = level+5. And don't copy a 4e official stat block template, make your own. Anglo-American copyright law likes to protect templates.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], some modest necro there - I'm pretty sure that post of mine dates from the same time we were discussing this on a Paizo thread on General.

You could be right about Clark Peterson's motives - I don't know. My own view on the "fishiness" of OSRIC is in a state of flux - as we discussed, I think the "gnoll" entry is a pretty close copy of the MM, but a recent thread on New Horizons has shown that the "medusa" entry is different. So maybe OSRIC is sufficiently paraphrased to not be a contentious copy.

 

[S'mon]

Ditto. I just have this gut feeling that WotC will find some reason -- probably a bad one, but a reason nontheless -- to pull 4e material and support from DDI.

The Compendium is actually useful, I'd be sorry to see it go. But I've pretty well given up on the online Silverlight monster builder & character builder, I just use my old late-2010 offline versions. The last iteration of the offline monster builder is very buggy, I hate how it loses data, but at least it has MM3 monsters in it. I've stopped using the online charbuilder completely, and I only use the monster builder if I want to edit & print out a Monster Vault or MV: Nentir Vale monster - can't even save the file as rtf. It was quite handy for turning Halvath Cormarrin of the Gray Company from brute-8 to a more respectable soldier-10.
Really though I'd be better off entering the text manually to the offline builder and working from that; for any file I want to go back to, that would save time in the long run. That's what I've started doing with dragons.

 

[S'mon]

I
It's starting to look like WotC is repeating the same mistakes they made last transition.

Frankly, I think their mistake is that they keep publishing new games under the old Dungeons & Dragons trade mark. This makes sense with computer games, because computer tech advances. It does not make sense with tabletop games - Hasbro don't publish "Monopoly 5e" with all the rules different. RPGs are a lot more like monopoly IMO - they work best as evergreen products with full backwards compatibility:

Call of Cthulu
Traveller (except New Era to some extent, and that failed).
Runequest
Dungeons & Dragons, 0e through 2e AD&D.

3e D&D maintained a degree of backwards compatibility, though not enough IMO. 4e did not do this at all; in 2008 it almost aggressively rejected the previous 34 years of play. I like 4e a lot, it does quite a few things in un-D&D ways that I personally like better than the D&D way (magic, for instance). The game, however, clearly does not 'remain the same', and that IMO was a mistake for the larger market. If they want an evergreen product, they need to maintain continuity with the past. If they want a new product, brand it accordingly. And promote it in Dragon magazine, which should be a general RPG magazine again, not the sad thing it has become. Dragon isn't there to make money in itself, it's advertising - it's there to promote your product, promote the hobby, and grow the market. It needs to be (a) cheap and (b) on store shelves of games shops and larger newsagents. Heck, give it a computer games section again, sell it to the computer gamer crossover crowd.

 

[S'mon]

Monte Cook's comments fill me with dread. He doesn't seem to have played 4e or even read the core rules.

I agree - even if they're moving away from 4e, it's stupid not to take advantage of lessons from the 4e design experience. Paizo certainly have; their wonderful Pathfinder Beginner Box shows clear signs of 4e-style presentation.

WotC need to make Monte read the 4e rulebooks! If WoTC don't shape up fast, Paizo are going to completely pwn them in the marketplace and the current disarray will become a rout. At that point I suspect Hasbro will likely shelve the Dungeons & Dragons trade mark as a tabletop game for 4-5 years and probably focus on crpg licensing.

 

[S'mon]

What you could probably get was something that looks a lot like 4th Edition and plays a lot like 4th Edition in general, but which has a completely different set of classes; a completely different bestiary; etc. And, ultimately, that's not going to do the job of a clone. (And would probably be nothing more than a fantasy heartbreaker.)

It can have all the SRD monsters - Ogres etc - built using the DMG formula (Attack = Level +5 etc), and it can have SRD classes - Fighters, Rogues and such. And you could use 4e style Power mechanics. But you can't easily/safely/legally copy actual 4e class powers without risking copyright infringement.

In general, IMO it is easy to legally publish 4e-compatible material, especially when using the OGL. But I agree it is not easy to publish a clone of 4e, 4e seems specifically designed to be hard to legally clone. You could make 'clone Fighters', they could use the AEDU system, but they could not use Reaping Strike or Come And Get It. At least, you would have to strip those powers down to their bare non-copyrightable mechanics and rebuild from the ground up. As someone who teaches copyright law, it seems to me to be a Herculean task to keep it indisputably legal.

 

[S'mon]

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], some modest necro there - I'm pretty sure that post of mine dates from the same time we were discussing this on a Paizo thread on General.

Yeah, Necro by The Halfling on 2nd March. Bulk of this thread dates from the start of my teaching semester, when I was too busy to read the 4e forum much.