4th ed, the Good & the Bad?

[Reynard]

3e moved a bit towards making rogues "equally useful in combat" by making sneak attack more extensive. They're intentionally taking it even further in 4e, so rogues should be on par with fighters and wizards in terms of tactical usefulness.

The problem here is that "tactical usefulness" translates as "does lots of hit point damage". Every edition of the game has inflated the hit point scale, which makes being able to do hit point damage -- and lots of it -- supremely important. An alternative to continuing this trend, which 4E obviously does, is to alter the combat rules in such a way as to make non-damaging actions worthwhile, instead of deciding that the sly sneaky guy who's good with locks and traps should be a front line fighter.

 

[Dormammu]

Imagine playing a wizard (maybe of 10th level) that is about to enter a null-magic zone that covers the full dungeon the party has to explore. Will it be fun for him? I mean, he can still provide flanking benefit or use aid another, can't he, just like the Rogue when they entered the undead-infested dungeon, right?

Yeah but what's the point of being the rogue then since pretty much ANY class can do these things.

Especially if the rest of your mid to high level party's fighters and mages are dishing out 30+ hp per damage per attack. It sucks when your PC is completely nerfed or nearly useless in a fight.

Fixing this is not 'catering to munchkins'---it is addressing a gaping design flaw.

So many examples of still not understanding... Rogues don't have to be designed to be balanced against combat. RPGs do not have to be designed to be balanced against combat. The idea of the Thief in D&D was that they were worse than Fighters in combat in every single way. That's because Fighters were meant to be good at combat. That is their thing. Thieves' thing was sneaking, hiding, disarming traps, stealing, etc. If you want to fight, play a Fighter. If you want to steal, play a Thief. This is why you don't need to balance solely for combat. If you want to be good at combat all the time, play a Fighter. It's really that easy. Or did you want to be good at combat and also better than the Fighter at a bunch of skill-based feats? Why isn't that imbalanced?

 

[Dormammu]

That's an alternative, but you risk making the Rogue becoming just like any other "martial" combatant. You really need to come up with alternative abilities that have other limitations then sneak attack.

Yeah, really Rogues shouldn't have been Strikers at all. They'd be much more in flavor of the fiction that inspired them as Leaders or Controllers. That is, they'd engage in dirty tricks that helped their allies and hindered their foes. This could even include the occasional well-timed sneak attack, but would definitely not be represented by being a monster cuisinart. This is one of the couple of ideas infiltrating D&D that can be legitimately sourced to online gaming in my view.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Rogues don't have to be designed to be balanced against combat. RPGs do not have to be designed to be balanced against combat.

Agreed 100%.

My example of the acid flinging rogue was just an example of what a particular rogue could do at a particular point in time. As others point out, as he advances in levels, he becomes more able to UMD. His scouting ability gives the party the intelligence to optimize their choices for upcoming encounters.

He doesn't need to be able to drop the nastiest beast in EVERY encounter with a single blow- its enough that he's capable of doing that in most cases.

 

[pemerton]

Rogues don't have to be designed to be balanced against combat. RPGs do not have to be designed to be balanced against combat.

They do if combat is about 70% (or more) of actual play.

To repeat:

the issue is not so much in-game effectiveness, or XP-earning effectiveness, but rather at-the-table relevance. The way that D&D plays means that the real time consumed by combat is almost always far greater than that consumed by scouting, trap finding and trap disarming.​

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

They do if combat is about 70% (or more) of actual play.

1) That % varies from campaign to campaign.

2) Even if it were the norm, I'd disagree. You don't play a Rogue to be a combat monster, you play a Fighter to be a combat monster.

Even in pure combat games like tabletop wargames, there are units that are horrible combatants but still have a use on the board. Perhaps they provide bonuses to other units, improve C&C, or whatever, but whatever they are, they're not front line combatants.

And yet, they're still important to the game.

 

[Reynard]

They do if combat is about 70% (or more) of actual play.

Which may or may not be typical. Even so, the problem is that the 4E design philosophy, particularly the idea that encounters are the basic unit of play, hardwires the importance of combat into the mechanics and requires that the game design be built so that everyone is equally useful and effective in combat.

Piffle, says I.

The adventure is the basic unit of play. Everyone needs to be equally useful and effective throughout the course of an adventure. It is okay, for example, to have a scene that throws the spotlight on the rogue, and one that spotlights the wizard and then another for each the fighter and the cleric. Some of these can be copmbats, some can be other kinds of ostacles. And the players of the characters that aren't spotlighted can do their best to support the spotlight character ("Keep those orcs off me while I clear the Hallway of Deadly Devices!"), or maybe even sit back and simply enjoy the show (like what happens many times in character-specific roleplaying encounters).

This is why, at this point, 4E doesn't appeal to me (well that and thesetting they are trying to ram down my throat). D&D has never, ever been for me about combats. The game -- the actual play of the game -- allows for so much more, building the entire mechanical foundation of the game around fights is just doing it wrong.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The adventure is the basic unit of play. Everyone needs to be equally useful and effective throughout the course of an adventure.

Gary thought the campaign was the basic unit of play. Magic-users were only balanced against fighters if the game started at 1st, continued to about 10th and then stopped. That idea didn't work because it's very difficult to ensure play fits that pattern. 3e still suffers from this.

I think the session should be the maximum possible balance unit. You can't be sure the game will last any longer than that.

But making it the encounter gives DMs and players a lot more flexibility. Want one encounter per day (as my current DM prefers)? Now the game works. Want ten encounters in a day? It still works.

Likewise having classes needing non-combat scenes for balance really restricts what you can do. What if you want to run a dungeon bash? Well you can't because there's a bard in the party.

 

[AllisterH]

Gary thought the campaign was the basic unit of play. Magic-users were only balanced against fighters if the game started at 1st, continued to about 10th and then stopped. That idea didn't work because it's very difficult to ensure play fits that pattern. 3e still suffers from this.

I think the session should be the maximum possible balance unit. You can't be sure the game will last any longer than that.

But making it the encounter gives DMs and players a lot more flexibility. Want one encounter per day (as my current DM prefers)? Now the game works. Want ten encounters in a day? It still works.

Likewise having classes needing non-combat scenes for balance really restricts what you can do. What if you want to run a dungeon bash? Well you can't because there's a bard in the party.

I think this is a great post.

The unit of play is no longer "over the course of an adventure" but "over the course of an encounter". Hell, I don't even think back in the days of 1E, the unit of play for most people was "adventure" but was a "one night session".

An earlier poster mentioned that in tabletop wargames, not all units are good for frontline combat but what is also true is that the units that ARE good for frontline combat tend also to be VERY poor support classes.

In a tabletop wargame, every unit has a role that it can call its own and some units can fill more than 1 role, but in a well-designed wargame, no unit of the same cost ("level") should fill multiple roles better than any other unit.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Combat 70% of play!?!?!

Sometimes I wonder if I have been DMing D&D at all for all these years.

I suppose this is what I most dread about what I am inferring about 4e's design decisions. Combat is all and if that is the way the game is meant to be played I would argue in favor of making damn sure that all classes were combat optimized. To be honest I wouldn't want to ruin everyone's fun by denying them ultimate utility in nearly all combat situations if most people are actually playing D&D this way.

However, I have DM'd plenty of sessions where there was only 1 battle and a large number of sessions where no combats took place instead being replaced with social interactions and various other non-combat related activities. It isn't that combat optimization wasn't important, it was just that other things such as character development, investigation, attending to one's lands and castle, dealing with intrigues, etc. often meant more.

No one spoke of builds...and none of my players speak in those terms even now...but instead created a character concept and then chose the class, feats, background necessary to make said character concept come to life in all aspects of the game and not just in an infinite dungeon environment.

I could never DM a game that was that combat heavy because I would be bored to tears. That much dice rolling would make me feel as if I were playing monopoly or some board game as opposed to a role-playing game. My enjoyment comes from role-playing NPCs, telling stories, creating intrigues and plot hooks, and making the players feel like "hey that place seems real and my character does too."

If that is how folks want to play, have at it. If for some reason the game funneled my DMing style into this mode when I was a younger, more impressionable DM who believed that "official" actually meant more than some other experienced DM's opinion I would have quit DMing or playing D&D long ago.

Hopefully 4e can, with some ease, support playstyles that are often 20%-35% combat.




Wyrmshadows