D&D 4E Edition Experience - Did/Do You Play 4th Edition D&D? How Was/Is it?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Pathfinder was publicly released for sale in August 2009, over a year after 4e came out. It was announced publicly on March 18, 2008, when 4e had already been announced and it was already clear that 4e would be a total break from the 3.x design lineage. It's success was as an alternative to 4e that was being sold in stores. The open public beta was released at Gen Con 2008, after the June 2008 release of 4e. It's success was as a competitor to 4e, not 3e.

Yeah, sales started to slump for 3.5 late in its run, but I think that's because WotC got into a rut with what they were making, not due to an inherent fault or obsolescence of the edition. They wanted a fast-moving stream of new hardcover books, crunch-heavy, mostly setting-agnostic, and a lot of players had all the "crunch" they'd need. The only setting-specific stuff they were doing was Forgotten Realms, and that tended to focus on stuff in the current era of Faerun, not in other times (like the Netherese era) or other parts of Toril (like Kara Tur, Maztica, or Zakhara. . .much less Osse or Katashaka, those continents have NEVER been explored in any official work)

I remember the snow and sand sourcebooks and thinking that I didn't need an entire sourcebook on that, that there was enough guidance on the subject in the core rules for any desert or arctic adventures I'd need to run. I remember posting once in that era here that I had enough D&D books to last a lifetime, at least in regards to "crunch". WotC could have leveraged their other D&D IP's for things that 3rd party publishers couldn't compete with and didn't feel redundant to existing works.

There were other directions they could have taken. Paizo had been saying for years that their annual "Campaign Classics" edition of Dragon was their most popular. They could have had limited-run revivals of Planescape, Spelljammer, Birthright, Al Qadim, Kara Tur, Maztica, Mystara (and its various sub-settings like the Hollow World or the Savage Coast) or Dark Sun. They could have had a 3e version of 2e's "Historic Reference" series about playing D&D in low-magic quasi-historic settings. After they had to cancel d20 Modern because of Hasbro's rules about "brands", they could have tried a remake of Urban Arcana from that rebranded as a D&D branded urban fantasy setting.

They could have pursued licenses to make D&D adaptations of existing fantasy novel series.

They could have done an actual Greyhawk line, and an actual Greyhawk setting book (there hasn't been an actual Greyhawk campaign setting book since 1e, just random supplements set in that setting!)

They had a lot of options if they wanted to pivot from generic crunch-heavy hardbacks while keeping the generally popular 3.x rules framework.

3.5x was a HOT MESS. The problem with continuing with that game is, simply put, there are 1000 ways for a 3.x game to mechanically go to heck. By 2006 it was a hodge-podge of rules. It was super complex, really hard to build characters, and filled with lots of dead useless classes, PrCs, races, garbage feats, etc. It is very hard to develop good material for 3.x!

Beyond that, WotC/Hasbro had come to conclude that, from a product design perspective, 3.x was poor. They were looking at CCGs, and Euro-games, as well as some more modern RPGs, and concluding that, since 3.5 was a mess, not a great design, and tapped out for sales, that a new edition, built to current product design standards, and with high playability, easy expansion, and an easy path to being incorporated as digital content, would serve them well. This is all fairly well established and was discussed by WotC themselves during 4e and at the end of 4e. I am not going to try to track down articles that may not even exist anymore, but the Euro-game design aesthetic was heavily stressed. This is why they, for example, laid out monsters with stat blocks.
And it worked! The game has a different, modern, feel. It is VERY easy to generate new content for, classes, powers, feats, races. Each new thing seems to work well, has a good power level, and doesn't break other existing material. DDI worked, although the VTT was a bit of a bridge too far.
None of this could have happened by sticking to 3.5e. Furthermore, WotC market research told them that 3.x D&D was kind of imploding. Over time less and less new people came into the game. The rules were seen as dense and obtuse, only really understandable by expert players. They did not believe they could grow the game on top of 3.5, and any light touch update wouldn't fix these problems.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's not a mundane task, but an example which comes to mind is putting Dimensional Shackles on a creature. A cheap magic item was a fight-ender because monsters struggled to get out of it before they were beaten to death. (That's assuming they even survived long enough without being stunlocked or incapacitated to even be alive.)

That's a level 17 item (so very high level) with an extremely high DC and it is completely false to suggest PCs could easily have dealt with. That's DC35. That isn't anything around that level that doesn't struggle to hit DC35, and it's very specifically an Acrobatics check.

I'm not going to deny those aren't a highly-abusable item (your group was abusing in a manner that they are definitely not intended to be used - as a regular "lockdown to murder" tool, not a capture tool), but the problem wasn't with the monster math there, it was with ridiculous DC of that particular item, and the fact that it requires Acrobatics and only Acrobatics will do.

It's been years since I've played, so I don't have specific situations in mind. It's more of a general comparison of monster math to world math versus comparing PC math to world math. Monsters struggle to do a lot of things which are trivial for PCs.

DC35 Acrobatics is not "trivial" for most L17 characters in 4E. It's really weird to say that. The math is half your level, plus the stat mod, +5 if you have the skill. So, let's say you were an Acrobatics-focused character with great stats and you had 24 DEX by this level, and you had the Acrobatics skill. This is a very good case scenario for the PC. That gives you 9+7+5 = +21. A very high bonus. You have a 30% chance to get out of those shackles. That's the opposite of trivial. At level 17, DC35 is literally off the chart in difficulty.

Let's look at a normal PC, though, a Fighter say. Maybe they have 16 DEX, are level 17, not trained in Acrobatics. So they have +11. They cannot succeed, unless a 20 always succeeds (I forget).

Looking at a random L17 monster, a Bone Devil, they have 18 DEX, and have a +12 total. They're better off than the Fighter, but yeah they're not getting out either.

The actual difficulty chart for L17 is 16/23/31. The literal only advantage PCs have is that they have more skills - most monsters only have 1-3 skills, PCs I think have 4-6. And a skill is +5.

Thus it sounds like your DM was messing something up, pretty severely.

It was common that the group I played 4E with to easily crush most monsters.

Edit: This was even after the usual DM intentionally made encounters tougher, so as to better fit a group which works rather well as a team.

I mean, there are really three possibilities here, given you already acknowledged this didn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon (not after the fixed monster math, anyway).

1) You played the greatest, most masterful, most awesomely-skilled players in history, and 4E just wasn't tough enough for total Chad Badasses like yourselves.

2) You played with a bunch of min-maxed, possibly outright-broken characters straight from the 5E CharOp forums, with rolled stats, every dodgy Feat under the sun, and outrageous items, and you abused every angle you could find to force the game to be easier. Your claimed usage of Dimensional Shackles as a tool of murder kinda suggests that there's maybe something to this.

3) Your DM was doing something wrong, like, wasn't using the fixed monster math, or he was messing up encounter difficulty, or something along those lines. Certainly we saw on this board that some people did struggle with encounter design and balance, even after the monster math fix. And it was usually people who had convinced themselves that ignoring the guidelines was the smart thing to do, or people trying to replicate specific adventures/encounters from previous editions.

I mean, pick one or more, I guess?

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but your claims just don't fit the actual numbers. So something had to be going wrong with the DMing or the PCs.

 

[Argyle King]

That's a level 17 item (so very high level) with an extremely high DC and it is completely false to suggest PCs could easily have dealt with. That's DC35. That isn't anything around that level that doesn't struggle to hit DC35, and it's very specifically an Acrobatics check.

I'm not going to deny those aren't a highly-abusable item (your group was abusing in a manner that they are definitely not intended to be used - as a regular "lockdown to murder" tool, not a capture tool), but the problem wasn't with the monster math there, it was with ridiculous DC of that particular item, and the fact that it requires Acrobatics and only Acrobatics will do.



DC35 Acrobatics is not "trivial" for most L17 characters in 4E. It's really weird to say that. The math is half your level, plus the stat mod, +5 if you have the skill. So, let's say you were an Acrobatics-focused character with great stats and you had 24 DEX by this level, and you had the Acrobatics skill. This is a very good case scenario for the PC. That gives you 9+7+5 = +21. A very high bonus. You have a 30% chance to get out of those shackles. That's the opposite of trivial. At level 17, DC35 is literally off the chart in difficulty.

Let's look at a normal PC, though, a Fighter say. Maybe they have 16 DEX, are level 17, not trained in Acrobatics. So they have +11. They cannot succeed, unless a 20 always succeeds (I forget).

Looking at a random L17 monster, a Bone Devil, they have 18 DEX, and have a +12 total. They're better off than the Fighter, but yeah they're not getting out either.

The actual difficulty chart for L17 is 16/23/31. The literal only advantage PCs have is that they have more skills - most monsters only have 1-3 skills, PCs I think have 4-6. And a skill is +5.

Thus it sounds like your DM was messing something up, pretty severely.



I mean, there are really three possibilities here, given you already acknowledged this didn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon (not after the fixed monster math, anyway).

1) You played the greatest, most masterful, most awesomely-skilled players in history, and 4E just wasn't tough enough for total Chad Badasses like yourselves.

2) You played with a bunch of min-maxed, possibly outright-broken characters straight from the 5E CharOp forums, with rolled stats, every dodgy Feat under the sun, and outrageous items, and you abused every angle you could find to force the game to be easier. Your claimed usage of Dimensional Shackles as a tool of murder kinda suggests that there's maybe something to this.

3) Your DM was doing something wrong, like, wasn't using the fixed monster math, or he was messing up encounter difficulty, or something along those lines. Certainly we saw on this board that some people did struggle with encounter design and balance, even after the monster math fix. And it was usually people who had convinced themselves that ignoring the guidelines was the smart thing to do, or people trying to replicate specific adventures/encounters from previous editions.

I mean, pick one or more, I guess?

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but your claims just don't fit the actual numbers. So something had to be going wrong with the DMing or the PCs.

I'll look for some of my old notes.

As far as DMing... I can't speak for what the guy who normally DMed did.

As far as ignoring the normal guidelines, that's something I did, and I found that I did not have the same problems after adjusting games I ran (based on notes I took from the player side of things in his games).

 

[MwaO]

It was common that the group I played 4E with to easily crush most monsters.

Edit: This was even after the usual DM intentionally made encounters tougher, so as to better fit a group which works rather well as a team.

Honestly, I think 4e's the most lethal edition for a certain group of DMs. Namely ones who hate random, pointless death, but if a player repeatedly does stupid acts in combat and gets some bad die rolls...

I have a lot of problems killing a PC from a random bad save. But that wizard who moved right up to the big orc, out of range of the leader, missed with color spray, I gave a couple of chances to rethink what they were doing? Well...that Wizard died. And I could point out how I tried to give him some options to save himself, but he ignored me.

And I killed far more PCs in 4e than in every other edition, including AD&D.

 

[Dausuul]

And I killed far more PCs in 4e than in every other edition, including AD&D.

The very first 4E session my group played, the party fighter got eaten by rats.

We still crack jokes about it twelve years later.

 

[MwaO]

The very first 4E session my group played, the party fighter got eaten by rats.

We still crack jokes about it twelve years later.

We TPK'd twice the first two times we played it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Honestly, I think 4e's the most lethal edition for a certain group of DMs. Namely ones who hate random, pointless death, but if a player repeatedly does stupid acts in combat and gets some bad die rolls...

I have a lot of problems killing a PC from a random bad save. But that wizard who moved right up to the big orc, out of range of the leader, missed with color spray, I gave a couple of chances to rethink what they were doing? Well...that Wizard died. And I could point out how I tried to give him some options to save himself, but he ignored me.

And I killed far more PCs in 4e than in every other edition, including AD&D.

Same here.

4E "unleashed the beast" within me, DM-wise, as it were.

In 2E and 3E, a lot of the time, players did exactly the right things, but dubious design, or ridiculous numbers on the monster side caused them to fail, so in 2E, frankly, I fudged (a DM's screen lets you do many things), and in 3E, I didn't fudge, but I did softball it monster-wise (also the 3E difficulty guidelines were total rubbish based on bonkers assumptions, like that literally all PCs had an appropriate-level Cloak of Resistance on). Bad luck was the main killer in both those editions, for my groups, not stupidity.

4E though, wow. Once the math got fixed and even a lot before that, you could play hardball. PCs didn't go down to "bad luck". They went due to sustained stupidity, bad tactical decisions, and a lack of teamwork. It really took an effort to die. So with that and the more predictable way encounters worked out (no more "whoops the main enemy failed one save and is now out for the rest of the fight!") I was able to be much more aggressive. And the PCs suffered for it. I had a great time with this. Instead of spending combats worrying that I'd screwed up and sent too-hard monsters, I just played hardball with the PCs, and ganged up on them, bullied them, and generally attempted to oppress them with the monsters.

Of course 4-6 brains vs 1, once they started cooperating, had an advantage. But it made them way more engaged with the game. In 3E we'd seen a lot of people get that "I don't care until it's my turn" deal, whereas in 4E, because they needed to cooperate and deal with actual tactics from the enemy, not just make the odd save or AoO, out-of-turn, they were far more attentive. 5E is somewhere in-between I note.

First session was a near-TPK for my group - they only got saved by the Warlock, who did some amazing stuff to beat the remain kobolds. For yes, it was kobolds who laid them low.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can see why 4e might not work very well for superheroes, particularly compared to other games designed for it like Mutants and Masterminds. Part of the genre includes using powers in weird and unique ways to solve the problems of the current episode that I don't think the power structure in 4e is well-suited to (and M&M's extra effort handles really well).

4e always struck me as reasonably well-suited for kung fu action where the AEDU structure fits the conventions of the action sequences in the movies - basic strikes abound (at will), but special moves get used only once for the coolness of the move in the action sequence. Of course, this perception may be somewhat colored by my first reading of the 4e PH while waiting at the drive in for it to get dark enough for Kung Fu Panda to start.

Well, I think 4e, literally, would need a lot of reflavoring to work for supers, and the classes and such wouldn't be a great fit, but that is hardly surprising. OTOH using the rules core and producing new classes, PP/ED, feats, powers, and rituals, and tweaking the skill system slightly (IE you want something like 'Engineering' and maybe 'Science' instead of Arcana and Dungeoneering) would make a pretty solid game.
There used to be a set of character sheets for 4e where everything was reflavored to be Star Wars. It was AWESOME, these were stock 4e characters, using totally standard 4e rules, but just with the serial numbers filed off. I think it is more possible than you do anyway. Something like M&M's 'effort' would be either SCs or Rituals/Practices (again, a little reflavoring and rules tweaks around the edges, plus some new material). There are a number of really excellent supers games out there already, so I don't believe it would be somehow spectacular and better than other games for this, but I think it would work pretty well. At worst it would be a bit of a quirky take on supers.
I think you can do kung fu action stuff very well with 4e, but a lot of the genre doesn't really translate well to 4e's rather gonzo epic play. Still, you could transition into something closer to Chinese myth at Epic, with Monkey Gods, super powerful martial arts spirits, etc. Again, it would be interesting, and might require less outright reflavoring than supers, and again it would be kind of quirky, but fun.

I am one who doesn't hold with the "4e can only do one thing well" theory. There are plenty of things it isn't good for, but there are a lot of things it CAN do well, and they are all sort of crazy action adventure veering into gonzo super powered exploits kind of stuff.

 

[Tallifer]

Recently I have been playing a lot of 4E with the Guild on roll20 (a sort of adventurers' league thing). Along with all the one-shot quest-and-combat sessions, I have played in numerous sessions where not a single sword was bloodied, and everything in between. We even played through a campaign closely based on a module by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 4E is just as versatile as any edition of D&D.

 

[pemerton]

Other than 4e wizards have always been the Swiss army knife of casters. If they had a beefed up spellbook and prep time they were pretty powerful.

When you know you are headed into Ice Gulch to fight Frost Giants you dont study your cold based spells.

4e, you just picked whatever at will and encounter spells you want and we're stuck with them until you levelled up. Daily and Utility slots were slightly adjustable, but only with two choices instead of one.

This invalidates the traditional lore of ancient wizards with dusty times of forbidden knowledge...and it's the only edition to do so. They did attempt to alleviate this by creating the ritual system, and that does go some way to helping even things out, however a 4e wizard doesn't feel like any other editions wizard.

I think you're underselling rituals here, and also the use of the Arcana skill. In my 4e play experience the wizard/invoker (started as wizard multi-classed invoker; around 15th/16th level came back to life as an invoker multi-classed wizard) was a "Swiss army knife". Not in combat - but for me that's never been the main focus of wizard versatility (AD&D wizards in combat were Magic Missile, Fireball and Lightning Bolt with a few bells and whistles around that). But because of (i) his ritual book, and (ii) his ability to bring Arcana skill to bear in a very wide range of skill challenges.