D&D 4E Did the Errata to 4e Fix it ??

[Dragonblade]

Actually, I'm going to disagree with this. 3e is my favourite edition to date, but 4e is more fixed than 3e was.

One of the things that WotC did manage with that errata (that I hated so much) was that they genuinely did make the game "more fixed" as they went. By contrast, 3e actually became more broken as it went, as "Player's Handbook 2" and "Book of 9 Swords" introduced some serious power-creep. So, credit where it's due on that one.

I'll disagree with this on one point.

ToB: Book of 9 Swords actually fixed the horribly underpowered martial characters in 3e. Was it a power boost for melee types? Yes, but only to bring them in line with the hideously overpowered casters which dominated before.

Seriously, I don't know how anybody playtesting 3e could have felt that a 5th level wizard who can fly and cast fireball was equal to a 5th level fighter, who gained nothing from level 1-5 but what? A couple of feats?

With ToB, casters still had a slight edge, but it wasn't as ridiculous as it was before.

 

[Blue]

Delericho, I think I agree with you on all your points. They did put revisions in as errata because they made the "no 4.5" promise. Actually, I would have welcomed 4.5 because in addition to just feeling free to put in revisions they also could have cleaned up some of the cruft. Would you rather take a Tiefling only feat to get a +1 feat bonus to Fort and Will, or Improved Defenses for +1 to all non-AC defenses per tier? They had a lot fo options that clutter up character creation and levelling that remain a barrier to adoption by new players and clutter to more experience 4e gamers.

 

[Argyle King]

A thread I was interested in was shut down.


But had they fixed 4e ??

Improved? maybe

Fixed? no


I'll also add that -in my personal view- some of the 'fixes' caused more issues. For example, I greatly preferred the way that attacks with multiple damage types interacted with resistances, vulnerabilities, and immunities as presented in PHB1.

Likewise, I have no idea how the skill challenge DCs given in DMG2 were decided upon.

 

[delericho]

I'll disagree with this on one point.

ToB: Book of 9 Swords actually fixed the horribly underpowered martial characters in 3e. Was it a power boost for melee types? Yes, but only to bring them in line with the hideously overpowered casters which dominated before.

See, I know that was a very common complaint about pre-4e versions, but it just wasn't my experience at all. Even now, in my 7th level Eberron game, the Rogue is holding his own when in a party with a Wizard, a Psion, a Druid, and an Artificer.

I think part of that is that we mostly played "Core Rules Only", which meant that the spellcasters (especially divine casters) didn't get the absurd levels of power-up that came from every new book containing new and more power spells (and metamagic) for them. I think part of it may well just be that my spellcasters have never been played to their fullest - the artificer in the current campaign is the first time I've seen a player really work to maximise his character. And I think part of it may be that we stuck pretty solidly to the Wealth by Level guidelines, which seems to help non-spellcasters considerably more than casters.

But I think a very large part of it is that our playstyle doesn't really allow the 15-minute Adventuring Day. And no 15m-A-D means that the casters can't "go nova" to anything like the same extent, which vastly mitigates their power.

The upshot of this is that the only* time I really saw a character totally dominate the game was when I allowed Bo9S and one player took a Crusader.

(* Okay, that's not strictly true. I once played in a Ravenloft game where one player "rolled" 18/18/18/18/14/10 for his character's stats, and proceeded to dominate the game. But I'm sure you'll agree that was a special case!)

My other big objection to Bo9S, though, was that the classes weren't just unbalanced next to the PHB martial classes - they were unbalanced next to each other (where I believe it was the Crusader that was the worst offender). That book was one of the test-beds for ideas that would later show up in 4e, and it really shows - it's almost as if the designers had their minds on some other, bigger project...

It's a shame. I actually really like the concept of Bo9S, and would love to combine it with the "Expanded Psionics Handbook" and "Oriental Adventures" to do a "Crouching Tiger"-like campaign.

(And with that, I'll try to stop derailing this thread with 3e-talk. Sorry.)

 

[Campbell]

4e at release was hardly unworkable. There were some legitimate issues with skill challenges and monster scaling in the Paragon+ range. Plus there were issues with abusing action denial abilities to stunlock solos. Most of the issues with monster math were nothing compared to the CR crap shoot of 3e for instance. At release it was far better balanced then any previous iteration of D&D. A good deal of the errata was minor balance tweaks meant to rein in character optimization.

Don't get me wrong. 4e had improved quite a bit around the time that the Dark Sun books were released, but it was a solid game from the beginning. Frankly some of the later "fixes" introduced in Essentials were not needed and started to move the game away from the strengths of the original design. As far as I'm considered with the notable exception of PHB3 late 4e Classic was the high note of the edition.