Falling off the 4ed bandwagon

[ggroy]

Why would they need to spend multiple Action Points to use another Encounter Power? You can do that anyway.

This is after they are all used up, that I allow one to be used an additional time for the the cost of two action points in the same combat encounter.

(The previous phrasing wasn't particularly clear).

 

[Windjammer]

I'd argue you have a fourth option (which isn't necessarily the best one for you, I dunno, but it's there): fix the bits that are wobbly for you.

For instance, you mentioned that people are feeling locked in by their powers. One thing working well to help us avoid "power railroading" is that I had everyone make up a card that says "Do something cool." It's a constant reminder that the player can completely ignore their powers and try a stunt to gain some other result

Ey, great minds think alike. Here's what I did. We're using WotC' Power Cards which come with a useless DDI promo card. So all you need is a felt tip pen and some self-adhesive white paper (cut this as suits).

However, the card is useless without a very good GM picking up the players' cues using that card. As PirateCat says here:

I just adjudicate damage and effect on the fly (repeatability means less damage, as does a particularly effective special effect like blindness. I raise damage the first couple of times people try this to encourage its use.)

I'm even more extreme in diverting from what the 4E DMG, page 42, recommends to happen as a result of players using (something like) the WildCard. However, I'll use Jeff Rients' words to illustrate what I'm talking about, as his example really serves best as a reminder just how much freedom from the hardwired mechanics are possible - and how enjoyable they make the game. (Needless to say, that advice is edition-neutral.)

How to Awesome Up your Players:

4. The game is neither the mechanics nor the rules - Don't let the mechanics dictate anything they don't have to. ...

Last night Gruul the Half-orc had a bead drawn on one of the bad guys and loosed two feathered shafts into him. This dude only had 2 hitpoints left and Gruul hit him with two critical strikes. In some games those crit rolls would have been wasted. Any two arrows hitting would have iced that mofo. But Jon (the DM) freaked my out when he then called for Jason (Gruul's player) to roll two to-hits against another foe standing directly behind the first. The shots hit and damage is tallied. Jon: "The first guy totally explodes and the arrows pass through him, into the second guy, who drops dead." Do you see what Jon did there? He went over and above the call of the mere rules to allow Jason's guy to totally kick ass. In-character this did much to cement Gruul's reputation in the party as a badass mofo with the bow. Out-of-character my appreciation of Jon's DMing went up a big ol' notch.

The OP makes a very good point, however, that all these fun effects are avoided by the hardwired 4E ruleset (see his reference to the vorpal sword), and in the end - given how all in this post is edition neutral, he may be better served to use another edition to base his game on.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I know that I'm continuously in wonder at Sagiro's DMing (we're 19th lvl in a 3.5 game that started back in 2e), and I think I'm on my way to getting that same feel for my 4e games. I think I agree with RC, in that we've captured "magic" in every edition we've played. It has a ton to do with your group and your campaign, more so in my opinion than a rules set itself. It just takes work to keep the players involved, intrigued and on the edge of their seat for what happens next.

I like 4e right now because it's so much easier for me as a DM. My prep time has dropped from 3 hours a game to 30 minutes. That leaves me more time to plot, and that makes me happy. But I'm sure I'd get that same benefit with other game systems as well.

I cannot help but wonder if, for some of us, prep time is part of the fun. I know that it is for me, though prep time for my Pathfinder game is more along the lines of six hours for four sessions of four hours each, not quite an hour and a half per game. More time spent all at once, less over the course of the adventure.

I very seldom plot the game all that close to the wire, and feel vaguely guilty when I do. So I take my time, and plan for an adventure or two down the pipe.

Much of the advice (limiting races, feats, classes, etc..) is good for any edition - and can help shape the game world. Not every setting has to have everything.

The Auld Grump

 

[BryonD]

I cannot help but wonder if, for some of us, prep time is part of the fun. I know that it is for me...

http://www.enworld.org/forum/pathfi...thfinder-bestiary-preview-ii.html#post4937631

I should note... monsters in the PFRPG are not "easy" or "fast" to create. I don't consider "easy" and "fast" to be selling points for creating gaming material. That role is and should be filled by things like the simple templates, or by the fact that a GM prepares for the game before play begins... having been a GM for decades, I've actually always believed that building the game is just as fun (and is often MORE fun) as it is to play the game.

emphasis mine

I know I LOVE prep time. So much that it becomes impossible for me to identify what my personal ratio of prep to play really is. I know I can run decent games purely on the fly. But I also know that I run better games when I do some prep. And I also know that I spends hours and hours tinkering with plot and characters and places. But those hours are spent not as prep that needs to happen so I can play, they are spent as having a blast time. It has been a very long time since I spent hours building an npc only to have that go down in 5 rounds. If an npc is intended to go toe to toe with the PCs, then I spend an appropriate amount of time building him. But that 8th level npc that gets a 10 min write-up for 30 minutes of play time may very well have a boss or buddy who gets a two hour write up and back story for ZERO play time because he never directly steps foot on stage. That is an extreme case.

To me a very large portion of the fun is not the action itself (which is quite fun) but the context and interactions that drive the events and relationships.

It is like writing a song. Time at the table is like letting the other players go into these crazy improv solos that fit my music but I never would have thought of myself.

 

[Fifth Element]

The OP makes a very good point, however, that all these fun effects are avoided by the hardwired 4E ruleset (see his reference to the vorpal sword), and in the end - given how all in this post is edition neutral, he may be better served to use another edition to base his game on.

Eh? What about 4E makes you unable to do things such as jrients' example?

 

[Barastrondo]

The question is sometimes not a matter of which boxes are checked but whether or not some games even have certain boxes available for checking.

I really don't think that's true. The checklist that is your opinion is something you create. The individual player is the one who comes up with a list of things like "reminds me of the good old days," "fighters kick the amount of ass I want them to kick," or "there should totally be rules for vampire werewolves." Sure, many games will not even try to check off some of the boxes on your list, but the importance assigned those boxes is completely different from player to player, sufficiently so that arguing about any one box (no matter how much you want to check it off) can get dang counter-productive dang fast.

Especially when a box appears for the same game, with the same wording, on different people's checklists: and one can satisfactorily check it off and the other cannot. If one person has checked off "fighters kick the amount of ass I want them to kick" for a given game, and another is irritated because it's left blank, nobody gets anywhere unless you actually look at the reasons why that is — without assuming that the answer is "One of these people must be wrong."

I cannot help but wonder if, for some of us, prep time is part of the fun. I know that it is for me, though prep time for my Pathfinder game is more along the lines of six hours for four sessions of four hours each, not quite an hour and a half per game. More time spent all at once, less over the course of the adventure.

I think that's true for a lot of people, but you'd also see a huge variance between just what parts of prep time are fun. I love coming up with weird architectural details, trying to figure out distinctive features for NPCs, or jotting down extra names I might need. I am less enamored of filling out stat blocks, unless they're something I can use again and again (like a supervillain in a nonlethal solutions sort of RPG, or a disposable monster the players might encounter more of later on).

I know guys who love rooting around like a haruspex in the guts of the d20 system at its fiddliest, including one guy who enjoyed building complicated things out of a game he never ran just to see what he could do. I also know folks who would just as soon jot down a stat block as "5 dice melee, 4 dice social, 8 health". I think it's not about how much prep time a game requires, but how much it enables you to spend as much prep time as you like on the things you like prepping best, and as little as possible on the things you like prepping least.

 

[Obryn]

I should just let Barastrondo write all my posts for me from here on out.

-O

 

[Hairfoot]

I think that's true for a lot of people, but you'd also see a huge variance between just what parts of prep time are fun. I love coming up with weird architectural details, trying to figure out distinctive features for NPCs, or jotting down extra names I might need. I am less enamored of filling out stat blocks, unless they're something I can use again and again (like a supervillain in a nonlethal solutions sort of RPG, or a disposable monster the players might encounter more of later on).

It can change over time, too. For a couple of years after 3e came out I was hooked on prep and character builds, but now I lean toward retro-clones because wading through the details makes me nauseated.

 

[N0Man]

It's a systemic flaw. You used to be able to memorise and cast spells like Charm Person or detect thoughts to assist in roleplaying encounters without taking 10 minutes plus and performing a ritual. In fact, Charm Person or Detect Thoughts could be very subtle spells, yet they don't exist in 4E in a form useable for non-combat encounters or in a subtle way.

I strongly disagree with the phrase "systematic flaw". It seems to imply that it's an objective fact rather than a matter of taste, or that it was oversight or lack of planning. It may not be your taste, but these were clearly intentional design decisions with specific reasons behind them.

You may think Charm Person and Detect Thoughts assist roleplaying, however others (including WotC) feels that these tie the hands of the DM and completely break stories, invalidates encounters, and can solve a mystery with no more effort than casting one of many plot-breaking spells. Since these types of spells do completely break many social encounters, I personally feel that they *hurt* roleplaying, not help it.

Plus it often leads to ridiculous arm races between players and DMs. Players memorize their list of broken spells, and DMs are forced to either let the players breeze his storylines with no real work, or he has to make his NPCs setup magical defenses against things, and this can repeat.

There are alot of spells like that in the new edition. For example, polymorph-based infiltration is not real possible in 4E as far as I could tell from the base rules.

I'm not sure why you'd think this. There are definitely polymorph, shape change, and disguise effects in 4E that most certainly could make this possible. Though, I suppose the Polymorph keyword didn't really appear in the first year of books.

The quick teleport in and knock open the door rescue mission is not going to be the same in 4E. You won't be casting teleport in combat any longer or knock.

Not as a party, but several classes (and races) have usable teleport powers in combat.

As for Knock, I think again this is an intentional feature. They want Wizards (or other ritual casters) to be able to use Knock as an option in case you don't have someone with Thieving skill, but in a way that doesn't invalidate the skill. I think it's a reasonable compromise. If you have to get a door open during combat, there's still the option to bash it in.

I've also seen attempting to open a magically locked door become part of a skill challenge in combat. While some members had to fend off the monsters, others could use skills such as Thievery, Arcana, or brute force to slowly remove the defenses of a door (or gate, wall, portal, etc) while in combat.

So no, it isn't just a play style issue. It's inherent in the system, which is more limited than previous editions of D&D primarily because the magic system is far more limited.

So now you hack your way in and hack your way out of just about everything. Though some DMs do creatively use skill challenges to resolve encounters. Skills challenges were a nice addition to the game, though at times all that rolling is pretty boring and lessens immersion.

You certainly more limited in a lot of plot, story, and encounter breaking powers.

Also, many spells that acted as a replacement for skills of previous editions have been toned down, removed, or turned into slower casting rituals in order to make skills or the classes that tend to have those skills more useful instead of being invalidated by casters.

They've tried to make skills more useful. A lot of people dislike how many skills were combined so that a smaller set of skills are present, and feel that actually reduced the impact of skills, but if you think about it that's exactly the opposite of what it does.

Decreasing the number of skills, making skills more broad, and making sure every class has a few skills to pick has the effect of greatly increasing the chances of someone in a party having a needed skill and makes it less likely that even your Fighter can often contribute when skills can be useful, rather than just slinking to the back of the party and wondering when the next combat will happen.

You see, many of these things that you dislike and see as flaws, some of us think are things that are healthy for gameplay. It's all about what style of game you want to play. For me, I prefer the 4E style.

 

[N0Man]

I do want to add, that there are a few things that bug me about 4E... though it's not really 4E's fault.

The Combat powers work so well and are so interesting that many people get caught up in the combats and forget the game has a lot more to offer.

Too many players in 4E seem to get too caught up in the character sheet, and their lists of skills, powers, and abilities and forget about doing things that aren't on the sheet. Frankly though, I've found many players have done this in every edition.

Too many DM's run sloppy skill challenges and treat the usable skills as a to-do list that either they read to the players they can try (with no reason how they apply to the situation) or just let players call out skills (again without saying how they are using the skill). Skill challenges can be run well, but I think they are greatly misunderstood or misused.

I often find that there's so much edition hatred and bias on the internet that goes on that it's often hard to get players to come into a new game with a fresh unbiased outlook. I've found that almost every new player coming in that came into my games with those biases ended up playing their character in ways that just reinforced those biases (and I don't even think they intend or realize it).

On the other hand, I've loved playing 4E with people who were clueless about it, didn't know about the debates and edition wars, and often who never even played D&D before. Many of these players were fun, adventurous, and sometimes more creative than the standard player. Since they didn't know about the supposed limits of 4E, they didn't have any reason to hesitate to go past them. ;-)

Also, not enough players really have taken to heart how much 4E promotes reskinning, refluffing, substitution, improvising, and trying to make the game your own. There's a lot more power and depth in 4E than many give it credit for. It has it's weaknesses (for example, if you want to be a character specializing in disarming your opponent, or if you want to just play a simple crafter (which really is a poor fit for D&D adventures anyway) but it still has a lot of power.

I also want to add, before 4E, I never wanted to DM, but now I think it's lots of fun. I never wanted to play a healer (Cleric) before 4E, but Leaders in 4E are great. Also, before 4E, Warriors bored me completely, but I wouldn't mind playing them now. I find that overall, they've done a good job of making all classes fun.

Now I admit that spell casters are a trade off. Casters can do more at level 1 than ever before, and don't ever completely run out of spells, and those are great things. However, they'll never get the ridiculous ton of spells they can memorize per day like in previous editions.

However, I still think it's better for the health of the game. It gives more classes a chance in the spotlight instead of just being sidekicks to the wizard. Spells are less likely to completely overshadow and invalidate skill based classes (though with extra costs of time and money, many Rituals still exist for a pinch). It also reduces prep time for wizards every rest, trying to decide what they want to memorize (that is if they don't just memorize the same list every day anyway, effectively nullifying the advantage to their great selection).

Trust me, I had misgivings about casters too, but after much thought, I reluctantly had to admit that it made for a more balanced, more team-oriented, and more manageable game.