6 months later: impressions of 4e

[Phaezen]

This thread was interesting at the beginning (for 4 pages or so)...

The question was what are your impressions ofter 6 (7 ) months of 4e play. If your not going to answer the quesstion, elaborate it, add to it and offer something constructive, be it negative or positive, then keep it to yourself.

This said, I really enjoyed all the post in the first part of the thread. Lots of good stuff both the criticism and the praise. Pity that some enjoy writing the sound of their own voice, whether what they want to write was what was being discussed or not.

And with that non so gentle prod to get things back on topic.

6/7 months in and the interesting parts of the system are starting to come out. We are starting to see more creative use of the rules structure by WOTC (at least in the Dragon and Dungeon magazines), which is hopefully an indication of where the rulebooks are going, especialy with the creative use of feats.

Some examples of what I am talking about:

The Gladiator article (368)- using multiclass feats for weapon specialisation as well as feats to alter at wills.
The Damphyr article (371) - more creative use of feats as a race template.

Various other highlights,
Adventurers of the realms (370) - multiclass specific paragon paths
Campaign Items & Artifacts articles (368) - chock full of ideas of using artifacts and things like airships as treasure in you campaign.
Class Acts Warlord (369) - Once again multiclass (Warlord/Infernal pact Warlock) specific goodies.
And from Dungeon the various Far Realms adventures (Sleeper in the Tomb of Dreams, Last Breath of Ashenport, The Tear of Ioun series: Touch of Madness, Brink of Madness)

Phaezen

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

6/7 months in and the interesting parts of the system are starting to come out. We are starting to see more creative use of the rules structure by WOTC (at least in the Dragon and Dungeon magazines), which is hopefully an indication of where the rulebooks are going, especialy with the creative use of feats.

Slowly, we are starting to see the full potential of the system and what you can all try with that.

 

[jensun]

Maybe he means that it's not likely the BryonD is going to accept Mallus' suggestion.

This would be true.

 

[jensun]

That may be true but with 4E you get way more pop-ups:

"This rule/power is ridiculous. Allow? Deny?"

Maybe but these are very easy to turn off with the application of some imagination and basic thought.

 

[Lizard]

Maybe but these are very easy to turn off with the application of some imagination and basic thought.

We've given up trying. Narrating combat in 4e is just too much of a chore, because no matter what description you pick for Power Effect A, Power Effect B comes along and doesn't make any sense when it interacts with your flavor text for Power Effect A -- but the rules say it works, so, it does.

So we just play out 4e combat more-or-less like chess. You don't ask, in chess, how a knight can jump over a castle -- or how a castle can move, for that matter. You just move the pieces. Same with 4e.

 

[Eric Tolle]

After playing 4E for a couple months, I and the rest of the group have been enjoying it quite a bit. The role-playing is good and largely tangental to the system, the only dungeon we've seen was the one we bribed a prisoner out of, and the combat has been fairly minimal. My wife, who absolutely hates wading through the mechanical aspects of character building actually enjoyed making her character, and we’re both looking forward to starting our next 4E game. Nobody in our group has had any problems with the system, though some would like

So, as far as I'm concerned, 4E corrects some of the hideously awful imbalances present in 3.X, and is probably the least munchkin oriented version of D&D I've seen in a decade or two. Things I've liked like:

• correcting the notion that some classes should be obviously stronger and better than all the others, or that other classes becomiw more or less redundant after a certain point. There's none of the "There's druids, clerics, wizards, and their sidekicks" aspect in 4E.
  
• Massively reducing the complexity of creating a character, especially an experienced one. The designers realized that figuring out the feat chains, skill synergies, and the like in 3.X was a chore that added complexity without making characters more individual, and was done better by games like GURPS and HERO .

There was a point years and years agoo where I had the patience to spend hours working out the fiddly details involved in optimizing a 3.X character. But I had enough of all that in my Champions years. 4E’s a fine game, probably not my favorite game out there, but I and the rest of my group are enjoying ourselves just the same.

 

[SteveC]

I just wanted to take a moment to implore people not to go down the road we seem to be starting with this thread. It's kind of funny, until 4E released, ENWorlders tended to be pretty civil group among ourselves, since we all came here to talk about a game we loved: D&D.

Since 4E launched, it seems that we just can't get away from arguing about it. I am not immune from this, but I would like to offer a suggestion: your experiences with an edition absolutely do not preclude anyone else from having the exact opposite experience with another edition of the rules. In fact, they're entirely independent from those of any other ENWorlder.

For me, seven months later I find that 4E continues to be my game of choice, largely because it plays much like I hoped it would, and addresses the vast majority of prep and play issue I had with 3X. That doesn't mean that anyone who's still playing 3X or an earlier edition of the game is invalid in their experiences at all.

My advice is this: there are a couple of games that are the darlings of ENWorld that I really don't enjoy. When discussion of them first started to become hot, I got involved with several threads, and that was pretty much to my detriment. Eventually I learned just not to get involved with those threads, or in a neutral thread to not toss out flames, but rather to simply discuss things.

So if 4E still isn't for you, this is the thread to say "six (seven) months later, still no 4E for me...perfectly happy with X." I'm not trying to mod anyone's posts, but I'm speaking from experience when I say you're likely to be a lot happier if you give it a try.

--Steve

 

[Pbartender]

To put it succinctly, it's not as good as I'd hoped, but it's better than I expected. Over all, it's been fun to play, and the style of the rules is a good fit the way my group likes to play. As a DM, it saves me a lot of time prepping for encounters, which gives me more time to focus on the plot and characters involved in the adventure.

 

[Storminator]

Something I've noticed: We don't use the books at the table. We've gone whole sessions without using the books. I find it much easier on the immersion.

In my next campaign, it will be a house rule: No book reference at the table. If you need to look it up, you can't do it. If I don't know, I'll make it up immediately, and we'll look it up later.

PS

 

[Lizard]

Something I've noticed: We don't use the books at the table. We've gone whole sessions without using the books. I find it much easier on the immersion.

In my next campaign, it will be a house rule: No book reference at the table. If you need to look it up, you can't do it. If I don't know, I'll make it up immediately, and we'll look it up later.

PS

See, our DM has a rule that only the player involved gets to look up a rules issue, because we ALL have the books and we ALL constantly reference them, and he's gotten tired of being at the center of a debating team.

"On page 172, Paragraph 3, it says..."
"Ah, but on page 186, Paragrah 2, it says..."
"It depends on what the meaning of 'attack' is..."

I don't see 4e as being any less rule-heavy than 3e; if anything, the fact that Every Word Is Capitalized And Meaningful leads to lots of debates which strongly resemble discussions of object oriented programming -- X is an instance of Y, but overrides Z. (And it's a really nasty OOPL, too, like C++, with multiple inheritance, 'friend' classes, and all the rest.) As I noted earlier, the fact that Rules>Common Sense, by design, means you CAN'T just wing it -- you have to parse the rules code and forget about "what would really happen" or "what seems logical".

Fortunately, the 4e books ARE well written in terms of being able to quickly locate the relevant rules. We no longer have to let the one rules lawyer in the group look everything up for us; we can ALL be rules lawyers now! Viva Equality!