A difficult question

[Tony Vargas]

Maybe it will be easier to list the things that were common in earlier editions of D&D and ceased to exist in 4e at least at launch.

1. Base Attack Bonus that led into multiple attacks.

Only 3.x had this. 2e used THAC0, prior to that it was tables. Class/level, not attack bonus of any kind, determined multiple attacks.

2. Hit points as the sole control for health.

3e introduced formal ability damage and ability drain, and it existed before in the form of various monster abilities. 3e, 2e, and 1e had separate rules for diseases, and 1e even had rules for insanity. 1e had subdual damage, and 2e expanded upon it, IIRC. 1e psionic combat used power points as a measure of ability to continue the combat. And, all included Life-Energy Level Drain in some, form, yet another sub-stystem in control for health.

Really, you should have said: "Prior eds had myriad, incompatible, and imbalanced sub-sytems for tracking various aspects of health, while 4e is 'limited' to only hps, surges, and the disease track.

4. Your defense against a spell was a saving throw. (Minor point for me but true)

Except for 3e spells that used Touch Attacks, spells that gave no saving throw, and spells that used unique-to-themselves resolution mechanics, like 1e Phantasmal Killer.

6. Utility magic came at lower levels and was decent.

Utility magic starts at 2 for formal utility powers, and 1st for Rituals, including rituals that some casters got for free. Using utility magic did not require giving up combat spells, so, if anything, it was /more/ available at low levels than in prior eds.

7. Named spells like Tensers floating disc.

4e has Bigby's and Mordenkainen's Spells, and also has Tenser's Floating Disc as a ritual.

8. The Great Wheel Cosmology

Presented as an option in the Manual of Planes. Also, the formal 'Great Wheel' was introduced in 2e.

9. Nine Alignments.

0e had only 3 alignments (law, neurtrality, chaos). 4e had '5', but the 'missing' alignments were just lumped into others. CN/LN/TN are part of 'unaligned,' NG/LG are Good, and NE/LE are 'Evil.'

13. Spells could be disrupted. (Although by 3e this was all but dead I agree).

You said it yourself.

14. Magic items didn't require personal energy (surges) to use.

Not many 4e items do. And, some earlier items did, requiring you to 'spend' hps to charge or to use them.

17. The game was not heavily dependent on a grid. (even if houserulable 4e wasn't made for theatre of the mind play. 3e started down the path to grid though I agree.).

3e was every bit as grid-dependent, and had more complex rules for using the grid.

19. Classes were not shoehorned into roles even if many players chose a role for their PC.

Roles existed, very strongly, they just weren't formalized until 3e and the 'iconic class roles' of Fighter, Rogue, Wizard & Cleric. The 'Healer' (formally Cleric in 3e) role was the most obvious one, and any class with healing was verymuch 'shoehorned' into it.

I'll stop at 20. There are more though.

12 out of 20 were flat-out bogus, so feel free to continue, as to the others...

3. Wizards had nine spell levels and a goodly number of spells per level.
5. Utility magic was part of the spell selection process and not a ritual.
15. Spells outcomes were based upon both the text and the stat block.
16. Every class didn't have "powers" and was not AEDU.
18. Magic Resistance/Spell Resistance existed.
20. Level drain existed (although again in 3e they were already going the wrong way).

These are difference, but they're mostly a matter of purely mechanical consolidation. Nothing that they actually represented was gone from the game, it was just modeled in a more streamlined, consistent manner.

10. Alignment mattered.
11. Only magic healed instantly.

These are true. They are also clear improvements.

12. Mundane healing was measured in days.

OK, I'll grant you this one. While I'd argue that over the editions, D&D had been moving towards a more proportional natural healing rule (in early D&D, it took high-level characters much longer to heal, in 3e the difference was down to how big your class's HD was), and 4e finally made natural healing the same for everyone, it did cross a line in making it overnight, and not providing any provision for more serious wounds that might take longer to heal. The disease track rule could have been easily adapted to that, but it was never done.

 

[Emerikol]

[MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]

Come on. You guys are quick to strain out a gnat. Most of my ideas are prefectly sound. The fighter attacked multiple times in 1e/2e. He and his counterpart in 3e both got extra attacks. It wasn't identical but it had the same feel.

Classic 4e response. I'm tired of it. Miss the whole point and try to strain out on some minor details.

I realize you can't see that 1e,2e,and 3e had a lot of commonality especially conceptually. I'm not going through all 20 to show where each time you were being ridiculous. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and do it.

 

[stoloc]

[MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]

Come on. You guys are quick to strain out a gnat. Most of my ideas are prefectly sound. The fighter attacked multiple times in 1e/2e. He and his counterpart in 3e both got extra attacks. It wasn't identical but it had the same feel.

Classic 4e response. I'm tired of it. Miss the whole point and try to strain out on some minor details.

I realize you can't see that 1e,2e,and 3e had a lot of commonality especially conceptually. I'm not going through all 20 to show where each time you were being ridiculous. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and do it.

Strangely enough with your list that was pretty much exactly what I thought you were doing -straining out on minor details.

Except where you talked about things that I agree were different and clearly superior in 4e.

 

[Neonchameleon]

@Neonchameleon

Come on. You guys are quick to strain out a gnat. Most of my ideas are prefectly sound. The fighter attacked multiple times in 1e/2e. He and his counterpart in 3e both got extra attacks. It wasn't identical but it had the same feel.

No it didn't. It was a huge difference - the fighter gaining multiple attacks set the fighter apart from every other class. If you can't see that there is a vast difference between a mechanic that makes the fighter types special and a mechanic everyone gets and that one is tied to fighter level and the other to BAB, no wonder we disagree.

But of course you couldn't be accurate in your claim. You couldn't have said "The fighter and other highly skilled warriors get extra attacks for being a skilled high level warrior" because it would demonstrate that 3e was the outlier here, and 4e was in practice closer to the spirit of the older rules than 3e was. The implementation was different but the spirit of the rules was the same, with 3e being the outlier.

Classic 4e response. I'm tired of it. Miss the whole point and try to strain out on some minor details.

And I'm tired of people missing the very point of 4e rules and even 3e and AD&D rules (don't worry - Monte Cook missed the point of many AD&D rules when he designed 3.0) in an effort to criticise 4e on false pretenses. If you want to be taken seriously by 4e fans, stick to the truth.1

I realize you can't see that 1e,2e,and 3e had a lot of commonality especially conceptually. I'm not going through all 20 to show where each time you were being ridiculous. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and do it.

I realise that you can't see that 4e also has a lot of commonality, especially conceptually. And that 3e's concepts are in many cases an outlier. Take, for instance, how classes work. And how different 3e multiclassing is from other forms. Or the insistance in 3e that monsters use PC rules.

4e was an attempt to reimplement the heroic strand of D&D (there's always been a war between the heroic and the high lethality dungeoncrawls) - and reimplement it for an audience more used to MMOs than tabletop wargames because it's no longer 1974. 3e on the other hand tore down anything approaching Gygax's carefully wrought balance, any of the strong gamist aspects that had been there right from the beginning, and much much besides. So you end up with the difference between a class based game which has things like fighter iterative attacks, and a game that attempts to be based on building blocks and interchangable levels.
[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION], re-read your 2e PHB where they classed the classes into the Fighter, Rogue, Magic User, and Priest roles (or whatever it was). Roles were very much a thing pre-4e.

 

[jrowland]

I've always felt 4E was much more like BECMI than 1E,2E,3E, perhaps excluding the "dominion" portion of the companion rules. Few people actually played BECMI enough..most people "graduated" to 1E if they played BECMI at all. A lot of the snarky criticism of 4E could be applied to BECMI, and if memory serves, I heard a lot of the same condescension from 1E players/DMs when they heard I played BECMI. It wasn't widespread, because it was limited to people at school or the FLGS, we didn't have the internet back then, but I think its safe to say BECMI was less popular than 1E/2E.

How do you think the Elf class would fly nowadays?

 

[Tony Vargas]

[MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]

Come on. You guys are quick to strain out a gnat. Most of my ideas are prefectly sound. The fighter attacked multiple times in 1e/2e. He and his counterpart in 3e both got extra attacks. It wasn't identical but it had the same feel.

Prior to 3e, only the fighter and it's two sub-classes got multiple attacks just for leveling. In 3e, /everyone/ started getting iterative attacks at BAB +6 - in that mechanical consistency, it is more like 4e than 2e and prior. There are a lot of such similarities between the two 'modern' editions.

If you were to try your point-by-point comparison again, but 2e and earlier vs 3e and later, you'd have a great deal more success.

Classic 4e response. I'm tired of it. Miss the whole point and try to strain out on some minor details.

There was nothing minor about it. You threw out 20 things 4e had 'totally changed' about D&D, and more than half were, to put it delicately, factually incorrect. Most of the rest, mere mechanical consolidation that didn't substantively change what the game was modeling.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How do you think the Elf class would fly nowadays?

I think it would be a fine introductory 'class' for starter set. Rather than have new players make a series of choices - class, race, theme, background, etc - let them pick one obvious archetype: Fighter, Wizard, Dwarf, Elf, Halfing (and, OK, jarring as it is, because you must have healing: Cleric). When they explore the core game, they'll find that they were, respectively, a Human Fighter (Slayer), Human Wizard (Evoker), Dwarf Fighter(Defender), Elf Ranger(Archer)/Wizard(Enchanter), and Halfing Rogue (Thief) - and Human Cleric(Healer).

(Aside: I don't hate Clerics, far from it, I love the idea of divine classes, it's just cleric as heal-bot that I shudder to indoctrinate yet another generation of gamers to.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

4e was an attempt to reimplement the heroic strand of D&D (there's always been a war between the heroic and the high lethality dungeoncrawls) - and reimplement it for an audience more used to MMOs than tabletop wargames because it's no longer 1974.

I suppose it may have been that. It was also an attempt to address the many valid complaints about 3e. And, there is a case for a bit of pendulum-problem as a result.

3e on the other hand tore down anything approaching Gygax's carefully wrought balance, any of the strong gamist aspects that had been there right from the beginning, and much much besides. So you end up with the difference between a class based game which has things like fighter iterative attacks, and a game that attempts to be based on building blocks and interchangable levels.

That's two major changes. I'm not sure I strongly object to either of them, though. 1e was a complex game, and it had a complex, conscious, baroque balance about it. It was, at the same time, presented as a sort of jumping-off point that you could modify as you wished (though, in a latter Sorcerer's Scroll, EGG backed off from that). 1e's balance was fragile and impractical. Abandoning a lot of it's fiddlier aspects wasn't a bad idea, 3e just didn't get it's own balance right (whether from changing too much or not changing enough). The interchangeable 'building block' levels was, IMHO, positively brilliant. Greatest innovation of the game, and it's tragic 4e didn't find some way to get more of that customizeability. I think towards the end (well, 2nd half), with skill powers, themes, and racial powers - various power swaps w/o the exorbitant feat cost of 4e multi-classing, we had a glimpse of how that might have been accomplished.

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION], re-read your 2e PHB where they classed the classes into the Fighter, Rogue, Magic User, and Priest roles (or whatever it was). Roles were very much a thing pre-4e.

I think that's more analogous to Sources. Sources and roles were both very real things throughout the history of D&D. 2e's class 'groups,' though, were a lot like sources (with a 'skill' source separate from martial, and primal folded into divine), while 3e's 'iconic classes' were very much like roles and presented as such, as a guideline to building a complete adventuring party.

 

[Steely_Dan]

4E wasn't a bigger change from 3.5E than 3E was from 2E.

Yes, it was, massively so, let's not get silly.

 

[drothgery]

Yes, it was, massively so, let's not get silly.

off the top of my head,
major changes from 2e to 3e that were retained in 4e
- fixed ability modifiers
- fort/ref/will saves/defenses
- increasing BAB
- increasing AC
- feats exist
- skills exist
- non-vancian casters exist in the core rules
- bards can heal
- interrupting casting is very difficult
- no racial level limits
- no racial restrictions on classes
- non-humans no longer strictly better than humans (except for level limits)
- multi-classed characters no longer strictly better than single-classed characters (except for level limits)
- existence of a standardized conditions list
- rogue sneak attack from flanking