D&D 4E Another Review of 4e

[Bigwilly]

The difference now is that at high levels, the fighter is no longer USELESS, and is also just as much fun to play as the wizard. They are designed to have the same general power level in a combat situation.

In our high level 3.5e campaign (around 16th level), with just a couple of spells our cleric can easily become a better fighter than my fighter. He is also our healer and primary AOE damage dealer. And while I can deal about 40 pts of damage to a single target per round, he can do the same to all targets. Sure, he will eventually run out of spells, but usually we run out of things to hit first. So I for one am certainly looking forward to playing high level melee classes in 4e.

 

[ptolemy18]

I feel that a lot of people who are complaining about this are probably just upset because they can no longer dominate the spotlight in a party.

Personally, if I had to balance everything out in terms of Absolute Balance, I'd prefered the idea of playing in a combat world where High-Level Power automatically equals Spells, and that's just how it is. You can *start out* as a low-level fighter, rogue, etc., who doesn't know magic, but when you get up to 15th+ level, those classes (or their Paragon Paths, etc.) automatically become more "magical" and start taking on spell-like functions. Basically, don't nerf the wizards -- give EVERYONE some magic as levels progress.

(Of course, this would remove the very appeal of playing those non-magic-using classes, to a lot of people... but anyway... that'd be *my* solution. I like spells. ~_~ )

Anyway, my chief complaint about the 4e PHB, apart from my personal desire to dominate the gaming table with some ret*rded spell/Metamagic Feat combination ( ), is that it just doesn't offer as many options for varied character builds as in the 3e PHB. In this way, it's really more of a game for newbies, as opposed to experienced character-crafters, number-crunchers, "explorers", power-gamers, whatever you want to call them (us). It's much easier to make an average character, and much harder to make a notably "good" character or a "bad" character via good or bad choices.

Now, this in itself isn't a bad thing... and it's great to be a dragonborn or a tiefling or an eladrin, but..... but c'mon, the variety of characters you can make in 4e is really very limited, particularly spellcasting characters. It's like someone else pointed out in another thread, about just how few feats were really appropriate for her Dwarven Cleric. In 3e you could play a zillion different types of clerics, wizards, or sorcerers just using the basic PHB, all drawing from different combinations of the same spell list. If I wanted to create a "plant-themed" sorcerer I *could* do it, just using things like Entangle and Plant Growth and Summon Weird Plant Monsters. ~_~ Or if I wanted to create this, or that... basically the options were all there. The spell list in 3e was the Grand Guideline For What Level Any Effect Would Be, and How It Would Work.

And I personally never felt it was broken. (But then again, I also welcomed the added randomness of high levels -- sure, keep flinging save-or-dies at one another! High levels equal unpredictability!)

Here's two related things I dislike:

(1) your class is now Your Class. Yes, I know there's a pseudo-multiclassing system in 4e, but I much preferred the multiclassing & prestige class system in 3e. It was much more diverse and customizable. Now, you're really locked in for life. Again, simple and understandable, but less versatile.
(2) in keeping with this, there are much fewer "cross-class" abilities which are accessible to everyone. It used to be that both Feats *and* Spells could be taken by every class if you had the right requirements. Now apparently Spells are too complicated to exist as a type of thing in their own right, and instead, every class has its own set of feats, even redundant ones, such as all the multiple level 29 powers that cause 7(W) damage. :/

Y'know how I would have done it? Three separate lists of "powers." Arcane, Martial and Divine. Instead of listing each class's powers right next to the class. The only reason not to do it this way is to make it sliiiiightly simpler to keep track of, so they're right there next to your class and you don't have to read through them in alphabetical order from a big list like the spells in 3e. Furthermore, this way you don't necessarily notice if some classes have a smaller number of stronger powers, or a larger number of weaker powers. Which I think is a legitimate design decision.

Essentially, as someone who virtually always plays spellcasting characters (I did play one 3e rogue, and after he died on his third session, I must admit I understand the appeal of 4e rogues :/ ), and who prefers "internally consistent" worlds, I agree that 4e is probably not my game.

I do want to play it at least once or twice to see what it's like to shift all those minis around and push them into lava pits. After I house-rule EVERY SINGLE 3E SPELL back into the game... sheesh, what a pain...

 

[Tuft]

Wizards: the new spells lack diversity. as a wizard, I don't expect to have all the spells at my fingertips at once, but as I gain levels I expect to have a plethora of spells to choose from to learn. like at least 25-30 per level. as I just said though, I'm ok with having more limited access to spells. But Im not ok with there being so many less spells to choose from.

What I really, really badly miss, down into depression, is "flavour" or "feelgood" magic. I don't care that much about counting HP in combat, but there were some situations that occured out of combat that I'm sorely going to long for. Like shapeshifting into a dolphin so that you could ride the bow wave of your ship, or charming an Ogre Mage to tell the ancient history of his people, or shrinking a rust monster so you could smuggle it into the city to end a brewing vendetta...

 

[ptolemy18]

What I really, really badly miss, down into depression, is "flavour" or "feelgood" magic. I don't care that much about counting HP in combat, but there were some situations that occured out of combat that I'm sorely going to long for. Like shapeshifting into a dolphin so that you could ride the bow wave of your ship, or charming an Ogre Mage to tell the ancient history of his people, or shrinking a rust monster so you could smuggle it into the city to end a brewing vendetta...

Exactly! In the designers' insane zeal to make sure that spells never duplicated the effects of *anything* (feats, skills, etc.) they got rid of a lot of great effects. It really bugs me.

I also don't like how ritualized the whole "encounter' thing is in 4e. (i.e., if you cast a saving throw spell on some hapless NPC in a non-combat situation, does it *really* have only a 50% chance of effecting them longer than 6 seconds? Is this another "hand-waving" situation?) But hey, that's just me. I prefer feet to squares too. ~_~

 

[BWS]

You can *start out* as a low-level fighter, rogue, etc., who doesn't know magic, but when you get up to 15th+ level, those classes (or their Paragon Paths, etc.) automatically become more "magical" and start taking on spell-like functions. Basically, don't nerf the wizards -- give EVERYONE some magic as levels progress.

High-level exploits effectively are magical.

 

[ptolemy18]

Also, I really have to wonder how many people who have been complaining about Clerics and Wizards being scaled back ever saw how ridiculous they could get at later levels in 3E. Non super-optimized non-casters might as well just leave the party around 11th level if there's a halfway decent cleric or wizard afoot.

I've only played one 3e campaign that got to high levels (around 15-16), and in the final months of the campaign, there were five players of whom three were spellcasters (a wizard, a psion and... I forget... we did play without a cleric for awhile... I think the DM got fed up and had some NPC cleric accompany us) and two were melee characters (a samurai and a fighter).

Admittedly, the fighter's player was just playing a fighter because he didn't know the rules well so he always played fighters ~_~ ... and he sucked pretty bad. But the samurai was awesome, and was always the last one standing after one of my weak-ass weird-but-not-always-optimal-character-build wizards would be sent to the depths of unconsciousness. I think, however, that this may partially have been because the DM made a special effort to give the samurai lots of opportunities to shine. Not in a "cheating" way, but in subtly designing the encounters and the monsters so that there was always something for the samurai to do, some Lawful Evil foe that respected them, or some melee mooks to cleave through.

In the end it's always the DM's job to level the playing field between characters of varying power levels, if things get out of balance. If the wizards and clerics are being too awesome it's the DM's job to force the PCs to not get enough rest, or have their spellbooks slapped out of their hands, or encounter lots of threats which are immune to particular types of magic, or have the NPCs always trust the fighter characters and distrust the loathsome diabolical mages, or whatever. Some people may consider this to be an annoying solution, but that's just DMing 101... I mean, in the vast majority of RPGs from GURPs to Call of Cthulhu to Shadowrun, it's just a fact of life that some players will have the desire and ability to make characters who are much stronger than others, and the DM must know this and adjust the adventure to try to give everyone equal camera time. I mean, obviously I recognize that some things are egregiously unbalanced (even *I* shook my head at some of the prestige classes in the 3e Masters of the Wild), but I think the obsessive search for balance, like the whole Player Roles idea (though a cool and interesting idea), is part of the way that 4e aims itself at newbie players and DMs, at the cost of some of the options for advanced players and DMs. It's D&D, but it ain't Advanced D&D.

 

[Darth Cyric]

\But the samurai was awesome, and was always the last one standing

Something is very wrong if this is happening, because everyone knows the Samurai sucked horribly.

 

[ptolemy18]

High-level exploits effectively are magical.

True, but they don't really have a magical "theme." They almost always only cause damage and shift people around on the battlefield... they can't do really bizarre stuff like generating matter out of thin air, summoning monsters, creating illusions, shapeshifting, enchantment effects or so forth.

Then again, in 4e, neither can mages. ~_~ D'OH!

 

[ptolemy18]

Something is very wrong if this is happening, because everyone knows the Samurai sucked horribly.

Okay, well technically I think he was a fighter/something. ~_~ It's been awhile and I don't know if they actually used the samurai class as written. But he was all melee, all the time, and this was before the Tome of Battle books. And our DM didn't use any houseruled classes.

 

[ptolemy18]

I've played a few wizards and clerics. The point of playing a wizard, for me, was to be heavy artillery. I didn't want to carefully track my spell list, spell choices, spell components, and what have you. I just wanted to blast rooms full of critters into oblivion, and was occasionally willing to put up with the necessary bookkeeping to be able to do it. I played clerics more often, partly because I really like being a healer and partly because they have a little less bookkeeping.

4th edition makes both of these classes much more playable for me.

Sounds like you would have liked the sorcerer and warmage... Well, that's good that you like 4e, then.

When I think of the most extreme types of wizards possible in 3e, I think of a friend of mine, who didn't play RPGs much, who made a low-STR 3e wizard who specialized entirely in Divination magic. He was trying to play a "oracle" in the ancient Greek sense, and I said, sure, go ahead, let's do it. Now, unfortunately but predictably, his character ended up getting his ass kicked in several combats, and after two or three sessions he left the game. The general D&D format, the predominantly fighting-oriented nature of the rest of the party, clashed too much with his character concept.

But I feel some personal responsibility, because I think that, as DM, I *should* have been able to balance the game so that his character was useful the way he wanted it to be, without boring the other characters. To be able to accomodate every player's character concept (without screwing with the other characters' concepts) is a major aspect of DMing. I don't think he made a "bad" character or a character unsuited to D&D. I think he made a really good character, actually. I think I just failed him, like a high school teacher whose brilliant students end up as pregnant, drug-addict dropouts. ;_;