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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4616631" data-attributes="member: 1054">Well, I was going to post my own thread on this topic, but since this one is already here...Things I Was Wrong About:a)The game would be "EZ Mode" and no one would ever die. WRONG! Combats are vicious and at least one PC is getting death marks in each one, on average. I often drift into single digit hit points. If the players do not coordinate well, they are overwhelmed. It's very hard to understand how combat plays just by reading the rules.b)Lack of choices: Possibly because the campaign didn't start until MP came out, I find that DO actually have to think a lot about my feats and powers as I level up. There aren't as many obvious, no-brainer choices as it seemed at first. Retraining also makes it easy to 'try out' new things.c)Monsters. It took me a while to get used to the "Monsters aren't PCS!" design model, but once I internalized it, I have found that creating monsters in 4e is a lot of fun, and the fact I can 'hand carve' NPCs means my fears of a lack of detail for them were unwarrented -- an NPC can have as much, or as little, detail as I wish. (I've been working on a "Civilian" monster type for non-combatant NPCs who still need more definition than a name and a trained skill.)d)Overall feel: I hate to say this, but I am coming to like the fact that magic is less prominent and that PCs have to rely on "mundane" means of solving problems (climb instead of fly, stealth instead of invsibility) well into mid to high levels. (Granted, we're still pretty low level, so maybe this changes.) Despite the "powering up" of PCs in general, in some ways, 4e has a more "realistic" feel.e)Resource management: At least at low levels, spending surges, action points, and daily powers requires some serious thought and worry. While there's somewhat less resource management in 4e than in 3e, there's enough for me to find it satisfying.Things I Was Right About:a)The game feels much more...gamey...than 3e. While in 3e we described our attacks and added a lot of flavor text, in 4e, the number of abilities with no "game world" logic has meant that when initiative is rolled, we basically stop playing D&D and start playing Heroscape with a lot of optional rules. Combat in 4e is FUN, but it feels entirely like a tactical boardgame where we shuffle pieces around. I'm totally disconnected from any sense my character is "there". Likewise, skill challenges are not nearly as involving as just roleplaying it, which is how we used to do it, nor are they as well-done as, say, Spycraft's chase mechanic. The lack of any real integration between feats/powers and skill challenges reinforces this.b)Constant battles between logic and rules: This is a sort of a side effect of the above. We constantly have situations where the DM tries to use logic and what "should" happen, and the rules contradict him -- and the players, myself included, aren't about to surrender any advantage which wonky rules give us. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  While all game systems run into this, including 3.5, the fact that 3.5 was designed to be more simulationist meant it happened a lot less often, and there was a sense of "If the rules and common sense conflict, go with common sense". In 4e, it is very explicit (see "Knocking a gelatinous cube prone") that is the rules and common sense conflict, go with the rules." c)Wizards suck big sweaty... well, anyway. We have a wizard in the group, and I can tell that he's getting very frustrated with the fact he's almost useless in combat, and, since we haven't picked up a lot of rituals yet, no more useful out of combat than anyone else. (Between multiclassing and skill training, most of us have a lot of skills.) The fact that there's really only wizard build (Nuker), no matter how you dress it up, doesn't help. Every level ,he retrains spells, and he still keeps being, let us say, sub-optimal. Great character concept, great roleplayer, great player -- seriously nerfed and boring class. d)Multiclassing. While not totally broken, my ability to create a concept and then create a character to fit it is seriously limited by 4e's multiclassing. It's impossible, for example, to give anyone but a Ranger the ranger's animal companion -- you can't grab class features with a multiclass. The concept of a wizard and, say, a vicious eagle familiar can't be done in 4e -- at least not until WOTC trots out a different "build". I feel very constrained by the fact that many character archetypes basically require either a new class or a new "class feature", with supporting abilities.e)Attack to do anything. Sorry, but the whole "I need to buff/heal you... find me an enemy!" shtick gets old real, real, fast. At least let the buff part fire without an attack roll if the player wants it to.</blockquote>

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