Well, it is six months to the day when 4e was released, so I'm going to note what my impressions are of the game, and how it is playing out. It is going to be more of a nitpick than a praise list because most of the good things that 4e does were apparent right out of the gate and marketed as a feature of why you should switch. My current level of attitude towards the game is that I feel it is a better play experience than D&D 3.x, but I am also not as excited about 4e as I was six months into 3e.
1) All powers are not created equal. Just like feats, prestige classes, and spells in prior editions, the variables on making an effective power are not always clear. Examples:
I found sleep to be a waste of time, since over the course of 5 combats, with an average of 3-4 foes caught in the burst, I put to sleep one hobgoblin. Sure, the dice were against me, but if you are only 60-70% likely to score a hit, and then only 50% likely to make targets who are hit fall asleep it cuts down on the percentage of foes that are affected. Then, with a 50% chance of waking up every round, it is difficult to get your party stikers into position to do something about it. Contrast this with freezing cloud which instantly kills 60-70% of minion enemies (plus whatever attacks affect them on their initiative) and it becomes a no-brainer. Sleep would only be worth your time if it was errata'd to put minions who you hit to sleep for the entire combat.
Fireball is also a power which you wouldn't bother with. As a minion killer Freezing Cloud is better, and fireball doesn't do enough damage to put a serious dent in more powerful foes. Contrast this with stinking cloud, which can do the initial minion killing just as well as fireball, but can linger round after round for the rest of the encounter as long as the wizard keeps sacrificing minor actions. Sure, Fireball does 2-8 points of damage more initially, but the stinking cloud will get that damage back next round, or the round after that, or the round after that. Fireball simply needs more damage or ongoing 5 fire damage to be worth it.
I'm sure there will be some people who will object that there isn't a problem with these two powers, or have an objection to one of the fixes. Which just goes to show how murky figuring out power balance can be. Luckily, it is easy to errata a power that is not equal to its peers without changing other aspects of the game.
2) You need cards. Perhaps need is too strong a word, but keeping track of powers is much easier when you have cards you can flip over when you expend an encounter or daily power. Plus, it is a rather tactile pleasure to use the cards, in the way it is pleasant to roll dice. What I would really like to see instead of the card decks sold to retailers in March that WotC is planning, would be a card generating utility hooked up to the character generator in DDI. This would allow players to get errata'd versions of powers fairly easily, without having to sift through the errata documents to find the errata that pertains to their powers.
3) Use large combats sparingly. While you could have a session where you fight several combats with a dozen combatants in each combat before you rest for the day, I would advise against it. While you can survive such a day just fine, it would be a long, boring, grinding session. Fighting fewer monsters will still use up some resources, but moves the plot along much faster. More encounters per day means more breaks from combat, which keeps your players fresh.
4) I'm wondering if monsters should have less hit points. While the monster who just won't die is good for dragons, orc chieftains, werewolves and such... I'm not sure if it is good for every monster. I don't know about the rest of you, but my 4e combat experience seems to be that the party knows that the battle is won, but it drags on simply because the hp has to be whittled down for another 3-4 rounds. As a DM and a player I have had combats hand-waved as "finished" to the relief of everybody involved. I understand why monsters have the hp they do, because when DMing 3.x there is nothing more annoying than monsters not getting their cool powers off before the PC's nuke them. I think however, that they might have gone overboard, because too often lots of hp remain even after the monster's encounter abilities have been expended.
5) The DM is the enemy. Since combat in prior editions was about maximizing the damage in an attack you dealt, and reducing the amount of damage you took in, you often had to pull your punches for certain characters and classes. For example, targeting a wizard with a brutish monster was bad form, because he simply couldn't deal with the punishment that the monster can dish out. In the end then, the DM was your friend trying to help you tell the story rather than an adversary because to be a true advesary he often had to be unfair.
I have never needed to pull my punches in 4e. I'm supposed to target a wizard with my brutes, my fighters with my skirmishers, my rangers and warlocks with my lurkers and artillery, and all the other things that would have been considered poor form in prior editions. The players have been given the tools to work together to do something about it. The defenders are supposed to keep the soldiers and brutes off the strikers and controllers, the strikers are supposed to take out skirmishers and artillery. If your wizard gets mauled by a brute it isn't the DM's fault anymore, its the defender's and the wizard's fault for not working out the right strategy and leaving the wizard exposed. Likewise, my monsters work together to try to disrupt and counter the strategy of the player characters. The adversarial nature of 4e combat means that DM is your enemy rather than your friend and that's the way it should be. I have never enjoyed being behind the DM's screen so much in 17 years of playing D&D.
6) Magical items are boring. Magical items haven't been truly magical since 2e. The item that perhaps best exemplifies this is the gauntlets of ogre power. If I get gauntlets of ogre power, I want the strength of an ogre, not the ability to do +5 damage once a day. I don't care if you need to make it an artifact, or an epic level item. Aside from inappropriate names however, there is also the fact that magical items don't have a sense of mystery or surprise anymore, since they follow the rules more judiciously than even powers do.
7. Artifacts are awesome. Here is where 4e has improved on its predecessors. Artifacts have all the wonky abilities you want to give it (eyeballed to be slightly inappropriate to the proper tier), and if you goof up its power level that's okay because it will leave the game in 1-3 levels. You layer them with curses and powers, and the result is magnificent. This contrasts favourably with artifacts in prior editions which you could only introduce 1 or 2 artifacts in a campaign, and since they were of a slightly inappropriate power (because they were artifacts) you had to make using them so detrimental that players would never think of using it, and thus it was only for a glorified plot device to get them to try and destroy it.
8. Skill Challenges aren't working right. I think this is a universal consensus among 4e fans and detractors alike. Aside from getting the math wrong on what difficulty the skills should be, there are problems with the fact that you need far less failures than successes, which means that despite things going well you end up with a failure if one of your players hasn't got the right skill set for the challenge. Signs of how to fix it are already appearant however. Giving partial credit for each successful skill checks rather than a pure pass/fail for skill challenges are one example. Having various problems attached to failed skill checks involved in the skill challenges are another. I do think however, that the underlying idea of giving everyone something to do in the roleplaying side of the game through skill challenges is genius. It just needs more depth and mechanics. Ideally, it should be as well thought out as the combat chapter in the PHB.
I think that's largely my critique of 4e, six months into the game. Since the thread is here, you might want to post your own critiques that I haven't mentioned, or whether I'm on target with my 8 observations.
1) All powers are not created equal. Just like feats, prestige classes, and spells in prior editions, the variables on making an effective power are not always clear. Examples:
I found sleep to be a waste of time, since over the course of 5 combats, with an average of 3-4 foes caught in the burst, I put to sleep one hobgoblin. Sure, the dice were against me, but if you are only 60-70% likely to score a hit, and then only 50% likely to make targets who are hit fall asleep it cuts down on the percentage of foes that are affected. Then, with a 50% chance of waking up every round, it is difficult to get your party stikers into position to do something about it. Contrast this with freezing cloud which instantly kills 60-70% of minion enemies (plus whatever attacks affect them on their initiative) and it becomes a no-brainer. Sleep would only be worth your time if it was errata'd to put minions who you hit to sleep for the entire combat.
Fireball is also a power which you wouldn't bother with. As a minion killer Freezing Cloud is better, and fireball doesn't do enough damage to put a serious dent in more powerful foes. Contrast this with stinking cloud, which can do the initial minion killing just as well as fireball, but can linger round after round for the rest of the encounter as long as the wizard keeps sacrificing minor actions. Sure, Fireball does 2-8 points of damage more initially, but the stinking cloud will get that damage back next round, or the round after that, or the round after that. Fireball simply needs more damage or ongoing 5 fire damage to be worth it.
I'm sure there will be some people who will object that there isn't a problem with these two powers, or have an objection to one of the fixes. Which just goes to show how murky figuring out power balance can be. Luckily, it is easy to errata a power that is not equal to its peers without changing other aspects of the game.
2) You need cards. Perhaps need is too strong a word, but keeping track of powers is much easier when you have cards you can flip over when you expend an encounter or daily power. Plus, it is a rather tactile pleasure to use the cards, in the way it is pleasant to roll dice. What I would really like to see instead of the card decks sold to retailers in March that WotC is planning, would be a card generating utility hooked up to the character generator in DDI. This would allow players to get errata'd versions of powers fairly easily, without having to sift through the errata documents to find the errata that pertains to their powers.
3) Use large combats sparingly. While you could have a session where you fight several combats with a dozen combatants in each combat before you rest for the day, I would advise against it. While you can survive such a day just fine, it would be a long, boring, grinding session. Fighting fewer monsters will still use up some resources, but moves the plot along much faster. More encounters per day means more breaks from combat, which keeps your players fresh.
4) I'm wondering if monsters should have less hit points. While the monster who just won't die is good for dragons, orc chieftains, werewolves and such... I'm not sure if it is good for every monster. I don't know about the rest of you, but my 4e combat experience seems to be that the party knows that the battle is won, but it drags on simply because the hp has to be whittled down for another 3-4 rounds. As a DM and a player I have had combats hand-waved as "finished" to the relief of everybody involved. I understand why monsters have the hp they do, because when DMing 3.x there is nothing more annoying than monsters not getting their cool powers off before the PC's nuke them. I think however, that they might have gone overboard, because too often lots of hp remain even after the monster's encounter abilities have been expended.
5) The DM is the enemy. Since combat in prior editions was about maximizing the damage in an attack you dealt, and reducing the amount of damage you took in, you often had to pull your punches for certain characters and classes. For example, targeting a wizard with a brutish monster was bad form, because he simply couldn't deal with the punishment that the monster can dish out. In the end then, the DM was your friend trying to help you tell the story rather than an adversary because to be a true advesary he often had to be unfair.
I have never needed to pull my punches in 4e. I'm supposed to target a wizard with my brutes, my fighters with my skirmishers, my rangers and warlocks with my lurkers and artillery, and all the other things that would have been considered poor form in prior editions. The players have been given the tools to work together to do something about it. The defenders are supposed to keep the soldiers and brutes off the strikers and controllers, the strikers are supposed to take out skirmishers and artillery. If your wizard gets mauled by a brute it isn't the DM's fault anymore, its the defender's and the wizard's fault for not working out the right strategy and leaving the wizard exposed. Likewise, my monsters work together to try to disrupt and counter the strategy of the player characters. The adversarial nature of 4e combat means that DM is your enemy rather than your friend and that's the way it should be. I have never enjoyed being behind the DM's screen so much in 17 years of playing D&D.
6) Magical items are boring. Magical items haven't been truly magical since 2e. The item that perhaps best exemplifies this is the gauntlets of ogre power. If I get gauntlets of ogre power, I want the strength of an ogre, not the ability to do +5 damage once a day. I don't care if you need to make it an artifact, or an epic level item. Aside from inappropriate names however, there is also the fact that magical items don't have a sense of mystery or surprise anymore, since they follow the rules more judiciously than even powers do.
7. Artifacts are awesome. Here is where 4e has improved on its predecessors. Artifacts have all the wonky abilities you want to give it (eyeballed to be slightly inappropriate to the proper tier), and if you goof up its power level that's okay because it will leave the game in 1-3 levels. You layer them with curses and powers, and the result is magnificent. This contrasts favourably with artifacts in prior editions which you could only introduce 1 or 2 artifacts in a campaign, and since they were of a slightly inappropriate power (because they were artifacts) you had to make using them so detrimental that players would never think of using it, and thus it was only for a glorified plot device to get them to try and destroy it.
8. Skill Challenges aren't working right. I think this is a universal consensus among 4e fans and detractors alike. Aside from getting the math wrong on what difficulty the skills should be, there are problems with the fact that you need far less failures than successes, which means that despite things going well you end up with a failure if one of your players hasn't got the right skill set for the challenge. Signs of how to fix it are already appearant however. Giving partial credit for each successful skill checks rather than a pure pass/fail for skill challenges are one example. Having various problems attached to failed skill checks involved in the skill challenges are another. I do think however, that the underlying idea of giving everyone something to do in the roleplaying side of the game through skill challenges is genius. It just needs more depth and mechanics. Ideally, it should be as well thought out as the combat chapter in the PHB.
I think that's largely my critique of 4e, six months into the game. Since the thread is here, you might want to post your own critiques that I haven't mentioned, or whether I'm on target with my 8 observations.
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