D&D 5E Fixing the Fighter

[Remathilis]

Oof. Urg. But the only thing you need to change for 4e is to not make the dungeon a physical dungeon. Either replace it with a set piece battle or set your "dungeon" aboveground most of the time.

Let me repeat that - I did a double take the first time. "realistically proportioned dungeons." Dungeons aren't a realistic terrain feature in the first place. You know what 4e does handle well and does give plenty of space? Outside. The great outdoors. And if you want somewhere more threatening? We have the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

4e does not do well at dungeoncrawls. There are plenty of other things to do. And I very seldom find dungeon crawls fun at the best of times. (Somewhere like Caverns of Thracia is worthwhile for exploration - but that's hardly realistic either).

Of course not. Take 4e out of the dungeon and put it outside. Who needs pit traps when you have rolling terrain, hillocks, scree, rivers, and ponds? Or if the PCs are on a road put a ditch beside it and the bridge is the obvious spot for the ambush. These aren't components of big set pieces any more than a camp fire makes for a big set piece.

That's a partial copout. EVERY fight is outdoors? Players never go into sewers, or crypts, or abandoned keeps or towers or the Underdark?

If a game called DUNGEONS and Dragons cannot handle Dungeons very well, something in afoul.

They pulled the previous attempt at 4e for being terrible 10 months in to playtesting - and still released 4e on time. It was shorted by a year. And then there was the tragedy round Gleemax.
Agreed. The initial guidance for DMing skill challenges sucks.

4e felt rushed out the door. It was, IIRC, to meet Hasbro's opinion on slumping sales. If a properly playtested 4e came out in 2010, I'm 90% certain many of its mechanical bugs would have been fixed and it would have garnered more goodwill. Ah well.

Honestly? You didn't need those monsters there in the first place.

In 4e there is no such thing as "cannon fodder, quickly cleared away"? Wait, what? You think minions are something other than cannon fodder?

The only thing you need to change to get that adventure to work is the map. I'd rather use MV monsters but the MM1 standard monsters and minions at low level are generally serviceable (other than the Wraith and the Needlefang Drake Swarm).

I used the XP budget to get from 2nd to 3rd level. (I'm too rusty in 4e to recall how that amount is done, but I used it per RAW. Same with treasure.) Therefore, I figured if I'm stocking a dungeon (something I've done for years) I should use their numbers. Sure, I could've used minions, but you need waves of them to be competitive (an wiser DM might have had a series of crypts open and waves of skeletons crawl out every round, but I digress). And there is NO reason why an iconic monster like a wraith should be that fnarged unless nobody at WotC played that thing before releasing it (The Ranger-Orcus Killer designed at game's release gives me that feeling).

Contrary to popular belief, "Ze game is NOT ze same!" Everything I learned about D&D adventure design that worked in Basic to 2e to 3e and 3.5 seemed no longer valid. Your response seems to prove me theory correct.

 

[billd91]

That's a partial copout. EVERY fight is outdoors? Players never go into sewers, or crypts, or abandoned keeps or towers or the Underdark?

If a game called DUNGEONS and Dragons cannot handle Dungeons very well, something in afoul.

It does kind of underscore the idea that the 4e had the wrong identity.

4e felt rushed out the door. It was, IIRC, to meet Hasbro's opinion on slumping sales. If a properly playtested 4e came out in 2010, I'm 90% certain many of its mechanical bugs would have been fixed and it would have garnered more goodwill. Ah well.

I can't say that it felt rushed any more than 3e felt when it came out. But I do think it embodied a much larger transformation of the game and how it's played. And with that sort of scope change, you'll have problems that won't be found without a large player base involved. Will 5e/Next manage to avoid the same problems through running a big, open play test? Hard to tell. Play testing can find some serious problems but it will almost never find them all.

 

[Hussar]

Umm, I'd point something out (having now been following the thread for a while) - map design for adventures has changed RADICALLY between editions. Remember almost all 1e and 2e maps were 10 foot/square scale. This is why AD&D maps work in 4e without any real change. Well, most of the time - the Against the Giants maps had to be changed because giants got a whole lot bigger in 3e and 4e.

I'd also point out that tiny corridor maps was something people bitched about with Paizo maps for Dungeon magazine.

But, yeah, that map for that adventure Rem is a terrible map for 4e. You need a bit more room to move around. Change the scale on that map to 1 square=10 feet and you'd have a totally different experience.

 

[Neonchameleon]

That's a partial copout. EVERY fight is outdoors? Players never go into sewers, or crypts, or abandoned keeps or towers or the Underdark?

If a game called DUNGEONS and Dragons cannot handle Dungeons very well, something in afoul.

Ever been in a crypt? I have. And a sewer. Both are fine. So are abandoned keeps - you have space. Especially if your encounter takes up several rooms. What isn't OK is a maze of twisty and narrow underground passages except as a very rare change.

4e felt rushed out the door. It was, IIRC, to meet Hasbro's opinion on slumping sales. If a properly playtested 4e came out in 2010, I'm 90% certain many of its mechanical bugs would have been fixed and it would have garnered more goodwill. Ah well.

Possibly. But even in 2008 it had fewer obvious mechanical bugs than 3.5 does.

I used the XP budget to get from 2nd to 3rd level. (I'm too rusty in 4e to recall how that amount is done, but I used it per RAW.

In short you decided "This adventure should be one level. Therefore we are going to make it one level by adding extra fights until it is one level whether they are either narratively appropriate or interesting". I can hardly blame the 4e designers for that.

And there is NO reason why an iconic monster like a wraith should be that fnarged unless nobody at WotC played that thing before releasing it (The Ranger-Orcus Killer designed at game's release gives me that feeling).

This is merely following in D&D's great traditions. No edition since 1974 has been properly playtested. Seriously. No one looked at the Druid and the Monk and thought someone was wrong? No one tried paring them off against each other? No one looked at the CR3 Shadow and thought "That can't be taken by 3rd level people"? I don't believe that the MM1 is any worse than the 3.5 or 3.0 monster manuals for playtesting or design.

Contrary to popular belief, "Ze game is NOT ze same!" Everything I learned about D&D adventure design that worked in Basic to 2e to 3e and 3.5 seemed no longer valid. Your response seems to prove me theory correct.

You mean it followed in the traditions of 3e where the game pretended to be the same but really, really wasn't?

 

[pemerton]

4e in 2008 was something that nobody had learned to write for.

<snip>

Its amazing at set-pieces (one of the best adventures I ran was a white-dragon solo in an abandoned banquet hall, with tables and windows and stuff) but not every dungeon room is 160 by 160 foot with pits and traps.

Yet I had no trouble running 4e adventures from Jan 2009 - mostly, at that time, converting the old B/X module Night's Dark Terror.

the DMG offered NO usable advice

Yet I was able to use its combat encounter build advice, its skill challenge advice and its treasure placement advice in the process of adapting Night's Dark Terror.

Of particular relevance to the current discussion, it emphasises the need to leave enough space for movement to take place.

The MM1 is bad. Horrible. I'd wager half the monsters in there are unusable do to poor math. Yet that was all I had when this module was written.

<snip>

The 4e Monster Manual was a train wreck

The MM1 is fine for heroic-tier monsters, especially low heroic-tier ones. I've even run successful encounters using the notorious wraiths (@Neonchameleon is not the only one to hate on them!).

I can't compare 4e to 3E, which I have little experience GMing for, but for someone who learned GMing in the B/X and AD&D era, it didn't pose any special challenges.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The more I think about it, the more I think that [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION]' criticism about 4e not being able to handle "Realistic Dungeons" is spectacularly wrong. Looking at his dungeon in Wild Roses, the thing that makes it unplayable in 4e is how monumentally and spectacularly unrealistic it is. Looking at the corridor going north, it is approximately straight, 100ft long, 5ft wide, and has stone walls dug into the rock. I can not think of any common human structure that's built that way - it's a spectacular waste of stonework and masonry. To build like that you either need to be following a seam of precious metals/minerals or have incredibly diggable rock and be trying to keep secrets.

That map is no ordinary crypt - indeed most crypts are either tiny because they are meant to preserve a single family, or are large and open because it's easier and more sensible to build that way. Yes, that shape is about right for an early version of the Catacombs of Rome - but no ordinary villiage is going to hollow out a crypt like that for itself.

 

[Umbran]

It does kind of underscore the idea that the 4e had the wrong identity.

Because, as we all know, "Edition X is not D&D" is such a successful conversational ploy around here, and is totally not edition warring or anything like that... NOT!

Folks, how about we spend less time and effort beating down things we don't like, and more on talking up what we do like, hm?

 

[Hussar]

Not to dogpile on Remalthalis here, but, I gotta wonder about something. That map in 3e would be a problem too. Granted, 3e combat is a fair bit more static than 4e combat, but, movement is still somewhat important. But, with all these narrow corridors, you essentially have one PC doing all the fighting while everyone else stands back and cheerleads. It's all choke point encounters. So, I have to wonder how interesting this adventure would be (at least the dungeon crawl bit because the rest seems like a lot of fun) in 3e.

And, if you look at where Rem is looking for inspiration, even 4e fans will say that these are bad examples - published adventures and early Dungeon advice. For some bizarre reason, WOTC adventure writers didn't bother to read the DMG. If you look at how encounters are built in the DMG, 5 CR Par creatures is NOT what's advocated. Of the five or six sample encounter templates in the DMG, I think only one uses that format. Almost all the others use bigger and smaller creatures and more or less than 5 baddies.

It's really kinda the reverse of how I experienced AD&D. In AD&D (and BD&D) I learned how to write adventures from the modules - Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, The Lost City, etc. Which meant I was learning from some of the best adventures for D&D ever.

4e players learned adventure design from some of the absolute worst adventures ever written for D&D. And it really poisoned the well. For Next to do well, WOTC really, REALLY has to pull its head out of its posterior and make some decent adventure modules to really showcase the system.

If you follow the adventure design advice in the DMG 1 (other than the Skill Challenges - obviously) you get a pretty darn fun adventure. If you look at the Chaos Scar adventures, they really do follow the DMG 1 much more closely. It took WOTC a couple of years, but, they finally figured out that you have to design adventures for system.

 

[Remathilis]

Not to dogpile on Remalthalis here, but, I gotta wonder about something. That map in 3e would be a problem too. Granted, 3e combat is a fair bit more static than 4e combat, but, movement is still somewhat important. But, with all these narrow corridors, you essentially have one PC doing all the fighting while everyone else stands back and cheerleads. It's all choke point encounters. So, I have to wonder how interesting this adventure would be (at least the dungeon crawl bit because the rest seems like a lot of fun) in 3e.

Just relooking over the encounters, I'm sure they would have less padding (no goblins, iron defenders, ochre jellies, etc) to fill the XP budget. Turning (esp in Pathfinder) would eliminate a lot the weaker undead, and ranged/magic attacks would be more important. A lot of the adventure was a pain trying to spend the XP budget.

Thinking on it, MIGHT have used the map as 1 square = 10 ft when redrawing it on the battle mat (I'm never a giant fan of counting exactly when drawing the map on the battlemat). It would have doubled the rooms, and some of the halls. Still a tight squeeze, but I might have made that call back then. Its been a long time...

And, if you look at where Rem is looking for inspiration, even 4e fans will say that these are bad examples - published adventures and early Dungeon advice. For some bizarre reason, WOTC adventure writers didn't bother to read the DMG. If you look at how encounters are built in the DMG, 5 CR Par creatures is NOT what's advocated. Of the five or six sample encounter templates in the DMG, I think only one uses that format. Almost all the others use bigger and smaller creatures and more or less than 5 baddies.

Even the sample encounters in the MM rarely followed that advice!

It's really kinda the reverse of how I experienced AD&D. In AD&D (and BD&D) I learned how to write adventures from the modules - Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, The Lost City, etc. Which meant I was learning from some of the best adventures for D&D ever.

As did I. I copied from the pros. They promised me these fantastic new combats and new way of writing encounters. Naturally, I used them as a guide.

4e players learned adventure design from some of the absolute worst adventures ever written for D&D. And it really poisoned the well. For Next to do well, WOTC really, REALLY has to pull its head out of its posterior and make some decent adventure modules to really showcase the system.

God's yes.

If you follow the adventure design advice in the DMG 1 (other than the Skill Challenges - obviously) you get a pretty darn fun adventure. If you look at the Chaos Scar adventures, they really do follow the DMG 1 much more closely. It took WOTC a couple of years, but, they finally figured out that you have to design adventures for system.

Sadly, by then it was probably too late for more than a fair share of players.

 

[B.T.]

4e does not do well at dungeoncrawls.

Then why call it D&D?