D&D 4E Anyone playing 4e at the moment?

[Garthanos]

I find Disord much harder to find things in than a forum though the search is ok, just prefer forumn or blog interfaces with people creating actual subjects

Its chaotic

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I find Disord much harder to find things in than a forum though the search is ok, just prefer forumn or blog interfaces with people creating actual subjects

Its chaotic

I did manage to reclaim my account. It took going out onto Google and doing some searches to find out how, discord itself doesn't really document that, or if so its not clear how to find it. Turns out the option exists at the very beginning when you start to accept the invite, but if you once click through the 'claim' link, which is the only way to find out if your email is already used, then you are forever shunted away from any link where you can try to recover your password, at least until you dump all your cookies and start completely over again.

Its just basic stuff like that which spells the difference between a good experience and a not so good one. roll20 has a lot of somewhat analogous quirks where the clearly just don't have the resources to make stuff work well. Gaming is certainly not an industry brimming with money for that kind of thing... lol.

 

[Garthanos]

A lot of the people on there are very 4e savvy

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A lot of the people on there are very 4e savvy

Yeah, it is definitely worth poking around. Eventually I gotta find some players, lol. My old guard ones are all just not playing online these days, and not within range of any FTF games.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Oh, sure. I mean, ToL kind of just gives you the "make a check and it happens" without any real conditions or requirements IIRC, so it is pretty 'Epic'. OTOH there really isn't AFAIK any paragon or heroic version to scale up.

This is one interesting thing with 4e. While there ARE powers that can be seen as scaled up versions of other powers, and some things like the Cleric Turn Undead scale fairly hard within themselves, you don't really see a lot of straight up progressions where you have an unabashed series of "I'm just making bigger nastier versions of this now" so much in 4e. I mean, that doesn't seem to be what the designers chose to emphasize heavily. It was probably a smart choice, as they seem to be more interested in the progression of effects, action economy, etc. vs "bigger fireball that does 5x more damage"

And it was actually quite problematic.
In essentials some of your powers just scaled up (IIRC) . Before, it was not uncommon, that you did not upgrade your level 1 power, because the higher level ones just did not have the same functionality, more damage, similar effect, but overall worse.
If I want a power that is exactly what my old power did, but better, just scale it up.

 

[Aldarc]

I find Disord much harder to find things in than a forum though the search is ok, just prefer forumn or blog interfaces with people creating actual subjects

Its chaotic

I miss the days of Google Groups. It was a nice mix between the formats. The death of Google Groups hit some TTRPG communities pretty hard.

Yeah, it is definitely worth poking around. Eventually I gotta find some players, lol. My old guard ones are all just not playing online these days, and not within range of any FTF games.

I am potentially interested in online play FWIW. The state of the pandemic is slowly wearing me down.

 

[darjr]

I miss the days of Google Groups. It was a nice mix between the formats. The death of Google Groups hit some TTRPG communities pretty hard.


I am potentially interested in online play FWIW. The state of the pandemic is slowly wearing me down.

Yea, I’m sick of being in front of my computer

 

[Garthanos]

I am not sure why they didnt decide to have more scaling powers. I certainly would have preferred it. Did they think as separate powers they could simply have more... and scale flavor if they wanted? nuclear blast ... vs Fireball.

 

[Garthanos]

I will say they do have scaling on many powers through feats and through attribute bonuses and other things which combine to increase effectiveness. When I was calculating how much damage a fireball did in spite of lower numbers of dice many static modifiers were involved and brought the damage far closer with elemental bonuses and so on.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And it was actually quite problematic.
In essentials some of your powers just scaled up (IIRC) . Before, it was not uncommon, that you did not upgrade your level 1 power, because the higher level ones just did not have the same functionality, more damage, similar effect, but overall worse.
If I want a power that is exactly what my old power did, but better, just scale it up.

I don't recall anyone claiming any of it was 'problematic' except in the case of psionic powers with enhancements, which were clearly not all thought out too well in terms of power bands. Outside of that, I don't recall anyone having big issues. YES, there are some nice lower level powers which either have some inherent scaling in them, or simply don't NEED to really scale beyond the basic static bonus increases and such that everything gets. I think there are really not a LOT of cases where Epic PCs are relying heavily on something like a level 1 Daily, but there are a very few powers that stand out enough you would want to keep using BOTH the level 1 version and some improved one. Sleep was a classic example there.

The Essentials situation is more that there is a LACK of any sort of scaling at all. Instead you normally have the 'combo powers', like with the e-Fighters where they can invoke a 'hit harder' rider that essentially just replaces encounter powers. The problem there is that these classes don't really stand up too well at Paragon and Epic. They WORK, but without all the nice conditions and effects that standard characters get with their higher level powers, they tend to be just bashing for damage, and not even really quite keeping up on that.

So, there's a big PROGRESSION with PCs in 4e, but it is usually less "more of the same but bigger" and more I can still do the same, OR I can do this more Epic flavored thing that is similar, but cooler.

At least that was my experience. I'm playing around with progression concepts with HoML, and trying to avoid big lists of powers and whatnot, but it is hard to scale up existing powers and still get the 'awesome' to really pop.