D&D 4E 4th Edition and the 'Adventuring Day'

[Red Castle]

Oh that's interesting. Thanks for your help! 4th completely passed me by at the time, but it seems like it did a lot of interesting things.

It’s my personal favorite and still the one I DM when I play DnD.

While daily powers were powerful and impactful (Barbarian daily were his way to enter into rage, Warlord daily that gave bonus for the rest of the combat, Warden polymorph, etc), what made the players party powerful was synergy between characters, how they could ‘combine’ their powers to create deadly combos. At the start of a campaign, I always go a little softer on the players to give them time to learn how to fight together.

But, to get back to your initial question, one thing to keep in mind with 4th edition is that combat take longer, especially at the beginning when players still haven’t figure out how their class really work. So, you should not make a series of a lot of encounters but should instead make every encounter special and important. It’s not an edition that works really well if you are planning to do random encounters or long dungeon crawl… unless you just want to do combats, which is fine if that’s your thing. But in 4e, think of combats as being a narative tool, part of the story itself. Don’t be afraid to ‘skip’ combats if they are not important, instead of putting out the map, just roleplay them and maybe use healing surge to distribute damage. Healing Surge is great tool to express the characters fatigue.

 

[Voadam]

Dailies did escalate in their impact as the game went on. At first level everybody had 1 special daily attack power per day but this went up until everybody had four per day at 20th and up. The difference between a party of five players using zero dailies and them using 20 is significant.

Dailies were usually either one big special attack (such as your weapon hit doing x7 damage plus a special effect, 1/2 on a miss) or gave you a power that lasted throughout the entire fight (hit for a bunch of fire damage then burst into flames that add damage to all your attacks from then on, make you immune to fire, and damage people hitting you).

 

[Staffan]

Oh that's interesting. Thanks for your help! 4th completely passed me by at the time, but it seems like it did a lot of interesting things.

It certainly did. I think the relatively negative reception came down to these issues:

• Too radical. One of the most common complaints was that it didn't feel like D&D.
• Missing critical things. The core PHB didn't have bards, sorcerers, monks, barbarians, or druids, and the MM lacked metallic dragons and about half the giants as well.
• Miscalibration. At least my group complained that it was too hard hitting opponents, and the fights turned into a bit of a slog given the higher hp values (at least at low levels). My understanding is that this was fixed later in the edition but by then it was too late.
• Wrecking the Forgotten Realms. To make FR work with the new paradigms in 4e, they basically totally nuked it and moved the timeline up 100 years.

But 4e definitely also had good points, they were just overshadowed by the problems. Personally, I wish they had kept healing surges, proper short rests (5-10 min), and rituals.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

In 4e, at high levels I found that you really had to hammer the party with back-to-back (in the sense that they couldn't rest in between) encounters to challenge them.

For long encounters though, I remember they could devolve into a bit of a slog after everyone had used up their daily and encounter powers, and was just chipping away with the at-wills.

 

[Voadam]

Wrecking the Forgotten Realms. To make FR work with the new paradigms in 4e, they basically totally nuked it and moved the timeline up 100 years.

I think this was the other way around. They wanted to reboot the realms as they felt there was too much lore which created a barrier for new fans so their solution was to advance the timeline for the upcoming edition with a new apocalypse that culled gods, changed planes, and changed things up in the setting so that people could start in fresh with less existing spawling details on countries and NPCs and such.

This can be seen a bit with the end of the 3.5 era Grand History of the Realms which ends with advancing the timeline and killing off gods and such.

The 4e design team really liked a lot of the planned changes and made a lot of them core. Therefore since 4e FR came out after the core it looked like FR was wrecked to fit the 4e points of light and cosmology paradigms but actually it was the other way around.

 

[JohnSnow]

Fourth boiled all character abilities down to one of At-Will, Per-Encounter, and Per-Day. It was very video-game inspired, and every class got some of each. In addition, they had healing surges and introduced the concepts of the short rest (during which anyone could spend a healing surge to regain some hit points and per-encounter abilities were "recharged") and long rest (sleep, which recovered all your surges, all your hit points, and recharged your per-day abilities). It was a good system in some ways, and it certainly codified a lot of things. With 5e, the designers basically kept the "At-Will powers for Spellcasters" part and a good chunk of the healing system - although they ditched the in-combat reliance on "Healing Surges" but preserved their short rest use as the renamed "Hit Dice." It's worth noting that they did keep 4e's "you get all your hit points and healing surges (hit dice) back if you take a long rest" mechanic.

Full disclosure: I hate using attrition-based resource-management systems to challenge players.

As a result, I've thought quite seriously about starting with the Fifth Edition rules and jettisoning just about ALL of the "per-day" mechanics, because there's nothing particularly magical about a good night's sleep, other than its effect on removing fatigue.

It would actually be much easier to balance everything on a "per-encounter" basis, and have a system that slowly whittles away at the character's effectiveness at tackling challenges based on fatigue. When you're too tired to go on, you can either stop to rest, or press on at reduced effectiveness.

One of the key elements needed to make this work would be spellcasting checks for anything more substantial than doing things with magic that are, essentially, a magical alternative to mundane gear. There's nothing remotely imbalanced about an at-will "magical bolt" cantrip that does the same damage as an arrow which you can just roll to see if you hit, or another that replaces the need for flint & steel. This is especially true if they, for example, require the caster to be able to speak and/or have their hands free in order to cast, because now they're things they can be denied access to.

 

[Enrahim2]

I want to amplify a point @Red Castle made. When it come to attrition, losing surges (or using dailies) as part of events/skill challenges appeared to be the clearest way to incorporate that into the game. Combats are too heavy to work well for a style of play that try to give attrition trough multiple battles in a day, and the milestone mechanics also serves to make that work.

I think the big problem here is how to render a classic attrition based push your luck dungeon crawl experience into such a thinking? There are a skill challenge example for how to get from the town to the dungeon, but no example for if it could be done similarly for getting from the dungeon entrance to the boss lair? I think if 4ed had managed to from the start managed to present a skill challenge like system that was also applicable for dungeon crawls, then that might have helped a lot. Traps and random encounters could have triggered skill checks with loss of healing surges on failures, rather than being played out.

 

[gorice]

I want to amplify a point @Red Castle made. When it come to attrition, losing surges (or using dailies) as part of events/skill challenges appeared to be the clearest way to incorporate that into the game. Combats are too heavy to work well for a style of play that try to give attrition trough multiple battles in a day, and the milestone mechanics also serves to make that work.

I think the big problem here is how to render a classic attrition based push your luck dungeon crawl experience into such a thinking? There are a skill challenge example for how to get from the town to the dungeon, but no example for if it could be done similarly for getting from the dungeon entrance to the boss lair? I think if 4ed had managed to from the start managed to present a skill challenge like system that was also applicable for dungeon crawls, then that might have helped a lot. Traps and random encounters could have triggered skill checks with loss of healing surges on failures, rather than being played out.

Yeah, it's kind of baffling to me that 4e went with (what looks like) attritional combat balance rather than encounter-based balance. Non-combat attrition seems like a common workaround.

 

[Voadam]

Yeah, it's kind of baffling to me that 4e went with (what looks like) attritional combat balance rather than encounter-based balance. Non-combat attrition seems like a common workaround.

One of my 4e groups turned it into a more encounter based balance by house ruling surges into a reduced per encounter number instead of a per day one and trading in higher level dailies for lower level dailies on an encounter basis.

This made estimating and calibrating encounter challenge much easier for the DM.

 

[Enrahim2]

Yeah, it's kind of baffling to me that 4e went with (what looks like) attritional combat balance rather than encounter-based balance. Non-combat attrition seems like a common workaround.

I am not sure what you think look like attritional combat balance? My impression is more like they tried to acheive encounter based combat balance along with attritional balance for an adventuring day, without fully succeeding (at least in communicating how such a play style would look like)