D&D 4E Another Review of 4e

[azarias]

Ptolemy -

thats a good review. Well considered, well spoken.

The point that interests me most is this: is 4th edition so targetted towards the new player that it lacks depth for the more experienced?

You give an answer, and back it up pretty well. Me, I think the jury's still out. Yes, it is simple (rather pleasantly simple) to stat up a 1st level character. However, have you noticed threads here and there noting the difficulty of creating higher level PCs?

Try one yourself. I'm currently tinkering with an Elven Cleric/Ranger with the heroic level multiclass feats. I think it might be possible to make paragon multiclassing work with this character (in fact, I think it may be intended for this combination to work well, given the number of Ranger powers that work off high Wisdom).

It's tricky, though. The 4E designers made a lot of helping players avoid 'traps' in design, and essentially, since you can retrain, those traps are no longer permanent...however, to realise you need to retrain you need to get under the character's hood and understand how the engine works. That isn't nearly as easy at high level as it is at 1st.

In essence, what I'm saying is this: 1st level seems an ideal and simpe starting point for new players. 15th level seems like it might be a more satisfying experience for experienced gamers. That would be neat, wouldn't it?

The jury's still out on higher levels, really, but I would suggest that there may be enough meat on the new game to make higher level builds more satisfying. It's interesting to have a peek at the Character Optimisation boards over at Wizards/Gleemax in this regard. There is plenty of activity over there, and plenty of healthy disagreement. That suggests that high level 4E character building isn't nearly as simple as it seems.

Finally, a point others have made elsewhere: it's not really fair play to compare the complexity of 4E as it is (bright and shiny and new) with that of 3.5 in its final incarnation. Yes, 3.5 had a wealth of simulationist world-building material, and if you can compare new to new (which is difficult) it may still seem the richer game. But 4E also has to handle being compared to late-era 3.5, with all its accumulated material.

Or again, to boil it down: yes, we have no crocodiles. We do know that we'll have Primal classes in the PHB2, though: how many cookies do I win if we have animals in the MM2?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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.

*gasp* How can you say he was a Samurai if he didn't it written under this class and level entry?! Is that even possible?

(Or did they use the 3.0 Oriental Adventures Samurai. I didn't find that one bad. The 3.5 was, though...)

 

[theNater]

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

Never tried the warmage. Tried the sorcerer a couple of times, and it is better.

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.

I was just reading the cleric's full information earlier today. Have you seen the Divine Oracle paragon path? If your friend had built a cleric aiming for that, and picked up some of the divination rituals, he might have been able to develop the character he wanted while still being a force in combat. Sounds like good news to me.

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. ;_;

That sort of balance has often been part of the DM's job. 4th edition, possibly to make life easier on novice DMs, has moved that burden to the ruleset. That's another thing I like about the system, but I can see why it might not be to everyone's taste.

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.

When I look at the PHB, I see 8 classes with 2 suggested builds each and 8 races. That says 128 build options right off the bat, with the nice bonus that while few of them are super-powered, all of them are viable. Even if a Dragonborn Battle Cleric plays the same as a Halfling Battle Cleric, which I don't believe, we're looking at 16 distinct builds before we even try non-standard power selections(it's pretty easy to see which powers go with which builds, picking some powers from each build could give a different feel), paragon paths, epic destinies, and the multiclass feats. How big of an exploration space do you want in 317 pages?

 

[Sylrae]

its only 317 pages because the dmg has been cut down to 221. the 3.5 dmg had 320 pages, and the 3.0 had 256. and the 2e AD&D dmg i have here has 256. the 3.0 players I have here is 286. thats a gain of 31 pages in the phb, and a loss of 99 pages from 3.5 dmg to 4e, or a loss of 35 from 3.0 to 4.0 in the dmg(I don't own a 3.5 players)which essentially means that, looking at just the players and the dmg, from 3.0 to 4.0 they cut out 5 pages. but from 3.5 to 4.0 thats more like 100 pages missing.

If you look at the 3.0 phb (not even the more updated, and bigger 3.5) and just look at one class. lets go with fighter. There are at least a dozen ways to make the fightr based on which fighter feats you take, and thats just in the players. then for examples sake lets say there are a dozen ways to do the other classes too (barbarian, and rogue might be less, but liik at cleric domains, or wizard specialization. an average of 12 will fit our purposes, and is actually probably low.) theres 132 options. that's before you even look at races. multiply it by eight for 1056 options if you want to say different races = different builds.

1056 is an acceptable number of choices. 128? nowhere even close.

 

[samursus]

And I hate the whole grid/minis thing. I tried it and the game devolved into a boardgame right before my eyes. The players stopped thinking outside the box, stopped being creative. It went from jumping over monsters and swinging on chandaliers descriptions of how and where they were attacking the enemy to "I move 4 squares and attack the enemy".

I have actually had the reverse happen... played a test combat with my brother and his gf last night. They were hopping and bopping all around the area. Being able to see exactly where terrain features were seemed to inspire them to use them. Waaay back when we played w/o minis and grids... it was mostly hack and cast, as they tended to forget room descriptions, and it made it harder to judge distances relative positions etc.

Maybe its because my players don't just see the grids and minis, they make it come alive in their minds.

So I would attribute your issues to different types of imaginations rather than an inherent discouragement of creativity in a mini/grid set-up.

 

[Sylrae]

hmm. interesting.

also, just a small thing, but the inability to stand between squares always bugged me. I know theres no rule AGAINST it per se, but if they use a grid and minis (while I'm a player) then they don't let me do that. square counting always kinda bugged me too.

if it works for some people thats fine, but i much prefer when we used measurements in feet, instead of squares (I know 1 square = 5 feet but its more math than id like to think of every three seconds because I dont like the grids. )

Grids had one advantage though. there was never any confusion about who was standing where.

my compromise, I use a whiteboard. Then I scribble down fast diagrams of the room, and the position of the players via shorthand. it a player moves I change his position on the whiteboard. then if an effect goes off, he is where he said he was, and there can be no confusion. its abstract enough that they dont act like its a boardgame, but its concrete enough for me to know whose getting hit.

 

[cdrcjsn]

The point that interests me most is this: is 4th edition so targetted towards the new player that it lacks depth for the more experienced?

You've hit upon something that a lot of people still haven't realized.

The game is deceptively simple.

For 95% of the players out there, they can follow the simple guidelines provided and create an effective and useful character.

For a small minority though, they'll notice little things that they can tweak about to create some pretty amazing builds. I know I've created over a dozen paladin builds so far and none of them are alike.

The only builds that I can't envision with the new system are the playstyles that are not currently supported (shapeshifting, summoning) but have been announced as slated for the upcoming PHB2.

 

[Ipissimus]

Playing 1-3e, I noticed that the players always seemed to realize how naff the non-spellcasters were once they got past level 10. With the sole exception of the Thief/Rogue, I've never had a fighter type character stay that way for long. In one campaign, the ranger decided to chuck it all in and become a dragon just to keep up with the wizard. In my last campaign the only non-spellcaster was a rogue, who didn't need spells to deal a respectable amount of damage.

This was the logical conclusion of the system. But it was just about as much fun to play for me, as DM, as carpel tunnel syndrome. 'Tactics' went like this. Open door, dump area effect spells into room, loot corpses, move to next door, repeat. I couldn't use any of the standard monsters because they all seemed to assume that my players were stupid and couldn't dish out twice that many hit points in a round between the four of them to the entire room.

And for that power, they never really gave up anything. The Cleric could both take part in the nuking and protect all the squishy characters when needed or even turn a squishy character into a barbarian.

I persisted but eventually closed my campaign out of boredom.

So, yeah, I'm glad to see the back of 3e spellcasting. It was fun for my players while it lasted but it was tedious for me.

 

[Felon]

I'm curious as to why it seems that you associate complexity with fun. You say that complexity is what made Clerics and Wizards fun. You think having characters with hundreds of possible builds (only a handful of which are useful) is fun. And you seem to honestly think that having to explain everything with a set of rules instead of "hand waving" is fun.

I'm curious as to why that is because I think you'll find that, for a lot of people, "complex" is a more approximate substitute for "frustrating" than it is for "fun".

What's with all the "it seems to you" and "you seem to think" business? He thinks it's fun because for him it is.

Newsflash: people are diverse. For some folks, the complexity of the rules is a major component of the fun. Some people enjoy meticulously building countless iterations of characters. Some folks enjoy the resource managment aspect of a game.

You prefer simplicity and hand-waving, then more power to you. To each their own. But don't feign curiosity and act as if the OP is suffering from some delusion just because he's not describing your playstyle.

 

[theNater]

If you look at the 3.0 phb (not even the more updated, and bigger 3.5) and just look at one class. lets go with fighter. There are at least a dozen ways to make the fightr based on which fighter feats you take, and thats just in the players. then for examples sake lets say there are a dozen ways to do the other classes too (barbarian, and rogue might be less, but liik at cleric domains, or wizard specialization. an average of 12 will fit our purposes, and is actually probably low.) theres 132 options. that's before you even look at races. multiply it by eight for 1056 options if you want to say different races = different builds.

1056 is an acceptable number of choices. 128? nowhere even close.

How are you getting a dozen fighters? I don't have a 3.0 PHB handy, but I'm looking at the 3.5 PHB and can only find 8 trees of fighter feats(Combat Expertise, Dodge, Unarmed Fighting, Mounted Combat, Archery, Power Attack, Two Weapons, and Weapon Specialization). And how different are an archery fighter and an archery ranger? If you count each wizard specialization as a different build, that's 9 builds(1 per school of magic plus 1 non-specialist). I'm also not buying a dozen distinct barbarian builds. He's only got 7 feats, the rest of his class features are set in stone.

In addition, how many of those 1056 builds are viable? Elves and halflings don't make good barbarians. Bards and monks have trouble keeping up at all without prestige classes. If my choices are 128 viable builds or 1056 builds of which 256 are viable, I'll take the 128. Far less chance of accidently nerfing myself.