Farewell to thee D&D

[Wyrmshadows]

I also find it astonishing that people think that saying "I've been playing D&D for X years" means something significant. The amount of time you've spent in a hobby does nothing to make your opinions any more or less valid than anyone else. It strikes me as pretentious, just like those music fans that claim they're so much cooler because they only listen to a band's poorly produced garage demos, y'know from before they sold out.

Sorry but I am far, far more likely to take adventure building, rule arbitration, and NPC personality development advice from a DM of 20+yrs than someone who just cracked open the DMs guide. I am far more inclined to take character development advice from someone who has been playing for years as opposed to a relatively new player.

Here is why...

Writers who have been writing a long time are better writers.
Painters who have been painting a long time are better painters.
Atheletes who have been athletic for a long time are better atheletes.

...and so on and so on.

Sure there are the odd prodigies who break the mold but a true prodigy is extremely rare. I don't know about you, but most of us mortals actually have improved as DMs/gamemasters/players/etc. through experience. I doubt I would want to play with either a DM or player who claimed to have been involved in gaming for over 10yrs and hasn't improved at all.


Wyrmshadows

 

[Harr]

Gotta give kudos to Celtavian for the calm, rational and even-handed way with which he has answered the snarkers and flamers and those who were trying to drag him or bait him into lashing out. I may or may not agree with all or part of what you wrote, but you sir are a class act, which is more than I can say for some other people in this thread ("Wow what free time you must have", indeed).

 

[jokamachi]

Much of the OP's thoughts ring true. As a 29 year veteran of the game, I too have come to the end of a long and glorious road. Let the young ones with their encounter powers grab for that brass ring. I need a break. A very long, 4e-free sabbatical.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

You know, one thing I've noticed is that the people who hate 4E the most are typically people whose favorite archaetype is mage. II think you have a good point with blaming the "balanced" nature of 4E for turning alot of people off. By giving fighter/rogue types abilities they can use in combat, it has cut off much of the wizard/cleric "specialness".

The people who like fighter/rogue/cleric types tend to enjoy it though. Oh, theres a few rogues who will grumble about the new skill system, but for the most part they're happy to have more "cool stuff to do" rather than "I try to flank the nearest enemy and poke it with my pointy thingy. Until everything is dead". Interestingly, it seems like people who really like clerics don't seem to get too upset with 4E because healing surges finally let a cleric do more stuff than, you know, cure X wounds all the time.

Oh, believe me, speaking on behalf of those who identify Rogue as their archetype and hate 4E, the skill system changes are more than a minor annoyance.

And while I'm no cleric-lover, I'd venture to guess any one of them who thought that in 3E they had to blow all their spell slots on curing never had parties that pitched in to buy wands, and those that complained about wasting combat actions to heal never had access to any splatbooks or other party members with UMD to shore up healing responsibilities.

 

[serow]

OK too bad byebye.
My group prefers 4E over previous editions, we find it fun and easier to roleplay in.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Gee thanks for reminding me!

I also remember the sheer amount of Usenet rage surrounding the change from AD&D2E to D&D 3E. I've had an awful amount of Deja Vu this year...

 

[Stalker0]

Celt, I'm going to agree and disagree with you on some points.

First off, if you post an opinionated view on a subject, you are going to get argument. If you want to just vent, you can write that on a piece of paper and put it on a shelf. Further, when you reply to those same people arguing with you, voicing further points you in fact continue the argument. I personally don't have a problem with people submitting a thread stating why they dislike 4e. Afterall, the boards are here to get viewpoints. But if your going to give your reasons you have to stand with them, and take all the heat that brings.

Alright, now that I've jumped off my soapbox, let's get down to your points.

I think you have some valid points with the wizard. Personally my biggest beef right there is that some rituals take too long and cost way too much. If a wizard wants to cast a floating disk, then have it take a 20 seconds, not 10 minutes. That's still plenty of time to ensure it doesn't have some quick broken combat use, but the wizard still looks cool as opposed to busting out the big book and singing kumbiya for 10 minutes. I think if rituals become a little more useful and more plentiful, that will give the wizard more "wizardly" flavor.

While yes other classes can do rituals, they don't have the innate arcane training, nor the high int, nor the free rituals. They will never be what the wizard is.

To your point on game balance hindering on immersion, I can also agree a little here. Balance to me is actually a very very important concept, I kneel down to the altar of game balance. However, I recognize there are many ways to do that, and some have more game immersion than others. For example, my own personal hatred on this subject is focused on the rogue's weapon restrictions. It really bugs me that rogue's have to use light blades and handcrossbows to use any of their powers. If a rogue spends a feat to get a better weapon, he should be able to use it. And the fact you can't sneak attack with a bow but you can with a crossbow? Come on!!

However, I think you contradict yourself when you talk about encounter powers...and then monster recharges. You said yourself that you think its stupid that a fighter uses a power than has to rest 5 minutes to get it back.

Yet that's exactly what the recharge rules push against!! It allows a monster to use a big move, and then after a few seconds of recovery can use it again. If you used that with a fighter, it would be the equivalent of the fighter pulling out his big attack, and then needed a few seconds of breathing room to use it again...which makes perfect flavor sense to me.

Overall I'm still positive about 4e, but I definitely think it has its flaws (see my threads about skill challenges if you don't believe me).

To me right now 4e is about a new framework, and what the potential for that holds. 3e has had a good run, but has shown some wear over the years. It has problems you can't solve with a quick fix. 4e has problems, the question becomes whether those problems can be solved with subtle additions as the game goes on, or if larger cracks will be found in the end.

Time will tell.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

And my point was that consistency is what makes a good game world good.

Not necessarily - it all depends on how you see the player characters. If you embrace the notion that they are special and that the game rules apply differently to them than to NPCs, then D&D4E works just fine. After all, they are the only characters for which complex game rules are truly needed, since most people at the game table have only to bother with controlling a single PC and thus can deal with a greater complexity.

NPCs, on the other hand, need to be created and used in large numbers by the DM, and thus use simplified rules. Which is also arguably appropriate, since the DM just doesn't have the same amount of time to spend creating individual NPCs as the players can spend on their PCs.

Incidentally, this was my single biggest problem with D&D 3.X - the huge amount of time it took to create NPCs, especially high-level ones - and this is almost sufficient reason to switch to 4E alone, even if a lot of other problems hadn't been addressed. Building a 20th level NPC spellcaster now takes little more time than a 1st level spellcaster - and in which previous edition of D&D could one honestly claim that?

If my players witness a dragon breathing on an army of orcs or humans it will have the exact same breath attack as the one that was used on the players.

Immersion feeds a lot from these small, and apparently insignificant, consistencies that a DM has to present his players with. If the game world is as loose as "anything goes" then this makes it more difficult for me to enjoy it and my players lose some sense of what is "real" or not, which in turn makes it more difficult for them to properly focus on representing their characters.

If you worry about that, I recommend playing GURPS, as I've argued in my previous blog post. GURPS is perfect for this style of play.

D&D 4E requires some more suspension of disbelief, sure - but in my opinion and experience, not more than the typical action movie.

 

[Lanefan]

A few stray thoughts on reading through this thread:

1. Minions. Agree with the OP they're a good idea badly done. They work much better if you spend the effort to roll the damage they do and give them a few hit points so they can survive a 1-point hit.

2. A dragon meets an legion of Hobgoblins and mows them down with a single blast of fire breath. Fine. The same dragon meets another identical legion the next day but because there happens to be a PC travelling with the legion the dragon's breath weapon suddenly becomes nigh-useless? Not fine. Not fine at all.

3. Having varying degrees of complexity within the classes has, to me, always been useful; give an unsure new player a simple class (Fighter, or in 1e Cavalier, Ranger, or similar) to start with and see how it goes. From what I can tell, 4e's made 'em all kinda complex.

4. Also from what I can tell, 4e is a playable game and probably has as much potential to be lots of fun as any prior edition. I say this from the perspective of having read the rules but not played, and from hearing from those who have played. I'm not surprised to hear rave reviews coming out of GenCon attendees, as 4e by design would probably play better in a tournament or one-off setting than any other edition to date. However, what we don't know yet (and obviously can't know for a few years at least) is how well it stands in for the long haul.

5. Goodman had 1e adventures at GenCon? On paper, not pdf? Where do I get 'em?!

Lanefan

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I don't disagree with your assertion about powers. I very much think they were written with the idea you stated in mind.

But I hope you don't mind me disagreeing that the drama rather loses it impact when people are blowing off their encounter powers not because it would be a dramatic point in the story, but rather because they can. That is what I experienced. Every single encounter, encounter powers are used whether or not they are needed.

To me, encounter powers represent "moves more impressive than an ordinary sword swing or magic missile". The powers that are really impressive are the dailies.

You can say that is not as it should be. But as I said, I found with 4E as it should be is the farthest thing from a 4E players mind as they would rather use every power they can every time they can use it.

Well, I tested 4E for the first time last Sunday, and my experience was different - the players thought really hard about when it would be best to use a specific power. Since we were all fairly new to the game, there were a lot of arguments about it, but we all had lots of fun and agreed that this game was an improvement over the previous edition.

And though you seem to have accepted the theory of 4E (which I agree with), versus the actual use of encounter powers, which seems to be the farthest thing from dramatic I've ever seen in a game.

Encounter powers are used every encounter. As I said I have players blowing every encounter power whether it would be dramatic or not. Why? Because 4E encourages them to do so. It encourages the use of encounter powers every encounter. Not just when it would be dramatically interesting to do so, but every single encounter.

Encounter powers are like watching the same action sequence every five minutes. I don't quiet understand how that is good for dramatic tension. I tried to picture it in my head, but after the 10th or so time the fighter had used Serpent Strike or my rogue had used Torturous Strike, the dramatic tension left me.

Encounter powers exist so that the PCs don't get bored with using at-will powers all the time.

Now I used to get that sense of drama you are talking about when a wizard had to go from occasionally blasting off a single spell to unloading whole arsenal and a few magic items to turn the tide of a battle. When a priest had to cast a heal spell to keep the fighter from getting crushed because they knew if he went down the whole party was going to fall like dominoes. Or when the fighter's damage shot up because he just landed an insane crit or cleaved down five enemies on one powerful swing of his sword.

I've actually seen similar dramatic situations in last Sunday's game:

- When the wizard cast a well-placed spell that managed to drop minions like flies (minions are another of my 4E favorites).
- When the paladin and the warlord hurried towards a downed comrade to keep him from dying (we've had two occasions where a PC had already failed two death saving throws...).
- When the paladin shielded the rest of the party by marking and binding the toughest enemies, and permitting the rogue to set up a flanking situation without much fear of reprisal.

From all my experiences, combat in 4E has become a lot more dynamic and interesting than in previous edition.