D&D 4E Am I crazy? I've just gotten a hankering to play 4e again...

[DnD Warlord]

the WORST thing in 4E was bland and boring spells.
no flavor in them

If they kept the fluff write up but the 4e stream lined mechanic how would that work??

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If they kept the fluff write up but the 4e stream lined mechanic how would that work??

Well, 4e does have a 'flavor text', it is just that, because it doesn't need to explain the mechanics, it is pretty brief. For a fireball it is just something like "a ball of fire shoots from your fingertips and explodes amidst your enemies!" or some such. Not really 'unflavorfull' in and of itself. Essentials also adds an ADDITIONAL flavor text block outside the actual 'stat block' of the power. This is usually more general and explains how or why the PC has this power, etc.
Some powers are pretty broad in terms of interpretation of exactly what they're doing, but the power NAME usually says quite a lot by itself (IE 'Come and Get It', this is pretty descriptive).
Of course 4e could have had a paragraph or two on each power, but the way the game was organized that would have created a huge bloat! OTOH I have long argued 4e has way too many powers, so...

 

[DnD Warlord]

Well, 4e does have a 'flavor text', it is just that, because it doesn't need to explain the mechanics, it is pretty brief. For a fireball it is just something like "a ball of fire shoots from your fingertips and explodes amidst your enemies!" or some such. Not really 'unflavorfull' in and of itself. Essentials also adds an ADDITIONAL flavor text block outside the actual 'stat block' of the power. This is usually more general and explains how or why the PC has this power, etc.
Some powers are pretty broad in terms of interpretation of exactly what they're doing, but the power NAME usually says quite a lot by itself (IE 'Come and Get It', this is pretty descriptive).
Of course 4e could have had a paragraph or two on each power, but the way the game was organized that would have created a huge bloat! OTOH I have long argued 4e has way too many powers, so...

Oh you don’t have to tell me. I LOVE 4e, it is my fav version of the game to date

 

[Garthanos]

Some powers are pretty broad in terms of interpretation of exactly what they're doing, but the power NAME usually says quite a lot by itself (IE 'Come and Get It', this is pretty descriptive).

Yes Come and Get it is vivid - I love the more vivid power names sheesh its all the 5e throw backs that are boring .... completely missing any of the flavor. And some power names are positively subtle poetry. A Murder of One. Soul Break, Dawn's blazing fingers, Timeless Trek in Mithrendain, Tear the World, Ubiquitous Assault. Cascade of the 5 suns, Dark Moons Reckoning, Maidens Light and on and on and on.

 

[Garthanos]

Howl of the Alpha Wolf, Song of Sublime Snowfall , Wrath of Wolfstone,
White Raven's Call

And the funny thing is HEMA basically says these are more realistic than "I hit it with my sword" even when we arent talking about magic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes Come and Get it is vivid - I love the more vivid power names sheesh its all the 5e throw backs that are boring .... completely missing any of the flavor. And some power names are positively subtle poetry. A Murder of One. Soul Break, Dawn's blazing fingers, Timeless Trek in Mithrendain, Tear the World, Ubiquitous Assault. Cascade of the 5 suns, Dark Moons Reckoning, Maidens Light and on and on and on.

Right, but there are a lot of fairly generic powers lurking around. Some have good names, but unmemorable mechanics and little reason to pick them. I really wanted a 4e with 250 powers, not 50,000.

 

[Garthanos]

I really wanted a 4e with 250 powers, not 50,000.

Can you do that without blandification because I smell bland... (just being suspicious because it currently feels like someone hit the game with nostalgia bleach)

Right, but there are a lot of fairly generic powers lurking around.

A certain amount is actually OK providing contrast particularly for at-wills.

 

[Undrave]

I have a house rule to solve the spell description problem: If the player doesn't know how the spell works, the spell fails to cast and the spell slot is still expended.

Since announcing this rule, I've never had to use it. Players come prepared.

Brutal!

I don't see how that isn't friendly. It's simply acknowledging that if a player wants to play a spellcaster, it's going to require more work. Rogues, fighters, and barbarians are great classes for players who prefer to avoid bookwork.

Why though? Why should your archetype decide how much work you have to put into the game? The Warlock is just shy of being the 'Champion' of Spellcasters, it's actually pretty neat if you want to just spam Eldritch Blast you'll still be effective. Also, Battlemasters have saving throws too.

But the core point still holds, there's no reason, mechanically for saves. They are simply not needed. The system would work fine without them, and 4e did exactly that. It improved the game by simplifying how power resolution worked. Heck, I'd be OK with the idea that everything used saves (though I still don't think 6 saves is great), then players would always roll when their PC faces danger. Heck, PC attacks could all use attack rolls too, monsters and PCs don't need symmetry of rules. That would be a "player always rolls" type of system, but the one we got, where randomly one half of all spell attacks work each way, that is just thugly.

I agree with you. Plus, you have all these Battlemaster maneuvers that ad a saving throw when they could have just been folded into an attack to the NADs instead.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree with you. Plus, you have all these Battlemaster maneuvers that ad a saving throw when they could have just been folded into an attack to the NADs instead.

I have come up with an even more fun concept, and this shows why NOT being anchored to 'tradition' is so cool:

Go to a 'player always rolls' type of system. So, instead of 'defenses' and 'attack checks' PCs get 'saves' (or I would call them defense checks, but whatever). Now if you attack and your a PC you always roll, if you get attacked and you are a PC you always roll. This has a few effects, like higher dice is always good for you (so 5e style inspiration would always work right, whereas it is broken 50% of the time in 5e now).

But, the really neat part is, you can now have DEFENSIVE MANEUVERS. You could implement this a few ways, one would be to have powers that were defensive, another would be to allow the player to narrate their defense (I dodge the fireball! OK, make a REFLEX check!). Actually you probably could get away with 5e-style 6 defenses in that case, since you'd get to choose which ones to use, and could probably cook up a way to use a good ability score most of the time.

I like it . Also it allows for a whole other type/set of powers. You could do a lot with that. Like now you could have a new reason to pick powers. Get rid of a lot of boring ones and replace them with defenses. You'd need slightly more slots to get some flexibility, but there could be a few ways to implement it.

 

[Moorcrys]

Wizards and the GSL license made things extremely difficult for anyone other than WotC to create content from what I understand. It’s one of the things that drove folks like Paizo to go their own way.

That and the the fact that the mechanics were so very different, 4e could have done with another pass at streamlining and removing all of the dead weight with feats and re-mathing the earlier monsters and skill checks. Similar to how 3.5 rebalanced 3.0. Essentials tried but they still left all of the old, wonked stuff in the builder etc which made things even more confusing, especially for new players.

That said, I loved 4e. I enjoy 5e as well (and I’d never go back to 3e - my mind just isn’t wired for that level of system mastery... I just stopped having fun unless I played simplified characters that were about 1/2 as effective as my math and build-savvy friends). 4e is a very different experience than other editions, but I never got tired of it or felt like I was out of character ideas playing it or that my imagination or role-play muscles suffered because of the mechanics. Definitely some warts like all editions have, but we always had a good time playing.

So in my opinion, hanker away.