Finally got the 4e core books

[Majoru Oakheart]

Speak for yourself - I love character creation. Getting a rough idea in my head of what I want my character to be like, and taking the classes/feats/skills that equate to that. Or the opposite - choosing a class and saying "This class is what my character will revolve around" and building it up.

Sure, character creation can be fun when you are spending that much effort on a character who is going to be in the game for the next couple of months, when you are planning on controlling his every move during that time. When I am making Palace Guard number 25 whose job it is to be an interesting encounter for my overpowered group of level 10 players and who will die in 2 rounds, I certainly don't want to spend the effort. I want to be able to pull a guard's stats out of a book or modify existing stats within a couple of minutes to be at the right power for my group.

"Needless symmetry" as a comment doesn't work when your game cannot function without it's Powers system, or it's "Only four types of classes allowed EVER" mandate. You have just as much needless symmetry. It's just now somewhere else. Also, 4e decided to throw coherent world building to the graveyard instead, sadly enough.

Then you don't understand what symmetry means. It is about each side having its opposite. Symmetry means that if you have a creature and it is good. Well, in order to fulfill the need for symmetry, you need to create a neutral and evil version of that same creature. If you have a plane that is for good creatures, you need an equal plane for evil creatures. If you have a meeting of the fire and water planes, you need to have a steam plane.

Arbitrary numbers like "There are 4 types of classes" are not symmetry. Classes have powers are not symmetry. And some symmetry is good. It's when you find the need to fill in a chart for no reason other than the chart feels better filled in than with spaces is needless. There doesn't need to be "embodiments" of all 9 alignments. There doesn't need to be a plane for every alignment. There doesn't need to be a type of elf for every terrain type.

I admit that it does when you play with certain types of players. My normal home group finds 4e runs much smoother. They follow and accept rules as written. They use the powers written on their character sheets and choose the options written in the combat chapter. And the options in the book in 4e run much smoother than the ones in the 3e book.

I have another group that has one player who wants everything to make 100% sense all the time. They want to know WHY they can't charge and use a power at the same time. They want to know WHY they can't trip someone with the same attack that stuns the enemy. They won't accept that the answer is simply: "It's less confusing to keep track of less options in a game and it prevents you from being overpowered" like the other people I know will. All of them recognize that a game will never be 100% realistic and that if a game was, it would be no fun due to how unfair it would be.

For that player, they hate 4e because they keep having to restrict themselves to the options in the book instead of it being really open. For most rules oriented players, they like it better because their abilities make sense to them in terms of how they work in the rules.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I think that's what I'm talking about when I say that rules are king in 3e and fiction is king in 4e.

No, the DM is always king.

In 3e, since the rules say "This is how you do a Trip," and tend to spell everything that you can do out (or at least give me that impression), it feels like cheating when someone pulls off the above stunt - even though that stunt makes perfect sense in the fiction.

So the way to make you not feel like it's cheating is to spell out in the DMG that making an arbitrary ruling is not cheating.

You really need to have that written down for you?

That frustrates me.

And I still don't see why it's unbalanced.

Use it on the players a few times and see how they feel about it. It may not be unbalanced. But it's still an arbitrary, ad hoc ruling.

4e did not invent or empower that, though it may be true that 3e did its part to foster a feeling of "tyranny of the rules."

But that tyranny is illusory, and completely self-imposed.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It's not that defining what you could do was bad. That was my favorite part of 3e. It's that in the process of trying to create rules for everything, they complicated things dramatically.

Exactly. Being good or bad for doing this will depend on who you ask.

In 2e, I used to get annoyed because if someone attempted any number of things in combat, I'd have no idea how to resolve them. I'd have to make up rules on the fly for disarming, grappling, tripping, and any other number of things. One one hand, it was good because it let me do whatever I wanted and to get the rules to exactly what I wanted. On the other hand, it slowed down the game a lot as my players and I had arguments over whether the rules I came up with were realistic enough or if they gave an unfair advantage to one class or another.

In 3e, I was glad they added rules for all of these. But the problem was that the rules weren't balanced. There were some tactics that were clearly better than others. Some feats were clearly better than others and some classes and PrC that were clearly better than others. And when you combined options together using the multiclassing rules, not only was the game complicated and difficult to understand but the gap between individual PC power at a table increased a lot.

It's the same problem I discovered while I used to play and run Rifts all the time, with the freedom to choose 200 different races and classes and skills and spells, you inevitably have options that are dramatically more powerful than others. Which makes it hard to DM and write adventures for.

Also, because EVERYTHING is spelled out, there's very little room for making the game my own. I can't decide that this wall of force cannot be destroyed by disintegrate, because there is no such spell and my players call shenanigans on me when I make stuff up as pure plot devices. There is an implied philosophy that says that the reason the rules exist as they do in 3e is to be balanced and that making up new stuff as a plot device is bad form.

Yes. In its own way 3E was very restrictive. By attempting to define everything it was harder to create unique situations without obvious rules holes.

4e attempts to take what I like about 3e: codified rules for most things, but removed the interaction of rules that caused the most problems. Most of the complicated and headache inducing parts of 3e was when someone combined feats, classes, races, PrC and spells together in such a way as to stack 5 different things together. That's also when the rules became the most broken. 4e removes these cases simply by not allowing full multiclassing. It also removes some interactions of rules that had problems, like what happens when you use a certain ability to gain more attacks per round but use them all as grapple attempts or trips instead of normal attacks? It does this by making things exclusive: Either you using a power that lets you trip people or you are using a power to get more attacks, not both.

Meanwhile, since its rules revolve mostly around combat, it opens up non-combat scenarios to be controlled more by the DM. Rituals can do anything I want them to instead of needing to fit into the vancian system.

This is where things fall apart. The rules are very complex and detailed and manage to make little sense at the same time. For example, knocking someone prone does not permit a save. If the target would fall into something bad THEN they get a save. Thats needless complication and lazy rules design.

Because they have rules in them. See, you can have DM freedom in one area: Say coming up with an adventure, the plot, the actions of the bad guys, how the wards on the castle works, etc. While still having rules for combat that are detailed and precise.

I am all for DM freedom but I do not think the rules for 4E combat are very precise. There are some pretty wacky situations already (like the one I described above) and we don't know what effects upcoming splatbooks might have. A lot of the stacking problems you mentioned with 3E only came about with time and additional material.

I found that having codified rules for out of combat stuff just made it all formulaic. No need to find the keys to get past the wall of forces, we know that a couple of disintegrates work just fine. No need to search for the BBEG, we know that there is almost no way to stop us from scrying on him, we can come up with a plan that there is no counter to in the rules.

The whole " reduce everything to a roll" situation in 3E kind of turned me off too. Thinking shouldn't be bypassed by using the rules.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Wow, Wulf, stop picking on the poor guy. This is how I've read your posts over the last few pages, and I've gone from irritated to confused, to really just amused by you.

Knock yourself out.

Yeah, after a dozen posts you threw in one line about "Well if you're having fun, that's fine", but that doesn't change your overall (extremely confrontational) attitude at all. You've basically articulated my argument as to why I've moved to 4e by your overall attitude, better than I possibly could have.

My attitude is your justification for moving on to 4e? Unless I'm mistaken, I don't know you, and you don't know me.

Which is, in a nutshell, "Yes, you could make a DM judgement call in 3.x, as long as you were prepared to get into a pointless argument about rules minutiae."

I'd like to explain that the DM does not derive his authority from the rules, but I'll just cut to the chase and say how happy I am that 4e finally provided you with a set of balls.

 

[deadplayer]

Due to a lot of issues I am only now getting the 4e Players Handbook and DM's guide

OMG, so many issues!

 

[LostSoul]

So the way to make you not feel like it's cheating is to spell out in the DMG that making an arbitrary ruling is not cheating.

You really need to have that written down for you?

That frustrates me.

Yes, I need that written down.

Where else am I going to learn how to play the game if not in the books?

 

[Scribble]

I'd like to explain that the DM does not derive his authority from the rules, but I'll just cut to the chase and say how happy I am that 4e finally provided you with a set of balls.

I've been DMing a long time. I've been winging things, and chnaging things on the fly for a long time as well. I did so in basic, I did so in 2e and I did so in 3e.

What 4e seems to allow me to do is wing things without having to worry about how it will effect the rest of the game. Without having to worry about flubbing a die roll after winging something because the challange didn't work out right. If this was never a problem for you, right on, hats off to you. It works for me.

On the subject of Prep.

I've found I can spend just about the same amount of time in both editions building an encounter. The difference is that in 3e I found most of that time was spent just building the basics. The NPCs, the monsters, the items, their spells, etc.

In 4e I find myself looking more at the location, the terrain, the items PCs or Enemies can pick up and use. (like giant vats of burning pitch, or elevator like platforms to swing around on...) The basic vilains pop in pretty quickly.

If that was never a problem for you, hats off to you. It works for me.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Knock I'd like to explain that the DM does not derive his authority from the rules, but I'll just cut to the chase and say how happy I am that 4e finally provided you with a set of balls.

And we're done!