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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751237" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I said "in function" and... That's the part many people really didn't like, myself included. All right if you'd rather, it's high-power, limited use powers. I'm willing to buy it for casters, to some degree, but it really bugged me for martial characters. Various people came up with post hoc rationalizations "Think of it as picking your moment to shine" or other things, but ultimately until Essentials the martial classes felt weird and wrong to me. And yeah, I held my nose and played them, but I really, really hated daily powers for martial characters. Encounters were annoying, but bugged me less. They were a classic example of forcing the same logic onto every type. I was much happier with stances, which I think was a clever idea that really should have been kept in 5E and used more for a number of characters. The limited resource in this case is the choice of which stance you're in. IMO this would work great for the bard rather than being a full spellcaster, where different songs work as different stances. (Yes, I really dislike the general Vancian "fire and forget" mentality applied broadly. I'm OK with it as being part of how D&D functions for some class types like the wizard and as a compromise for priests, but absolutely don't want an extension of it.) IMO that's fine because it's an actual part of the class's backplot and exists in the game world: "You're a fighter who's learned a bit of magic on the side." Yeah, that's often an issue. The benefit of savoring things you don't have but are building towards versus having too many options or having options that are empty ones due to foes being immune to them. IME, high level fighter types were still quite valuable in 3E, though, but that required a savvy player and the DM making things work, whereas 4E is much more relentlessly game balanced, so much so that I often felt the heavy hand of the game designer. There were two "fighter math" problems. The harder one was figuring out when to Power Attack and if so by how much. (Best to just make it a default value and call it a day rather than "dial a yield.") The other was just the burden of rolling all those dice and doing a bunch of two digit arithmetic. Some people just stink at that and often won't be willing to learn the kinds of strategies that lead to speed up, such as learning to group dice in groups of fives and tens. IME some people just never really managed to speed up. Of course the ones that had this the worst were the really hard core optimizer types---the ones who inevitably gravitated towards classes like barbarian and avenger---but a Paragon or Epic tier sheet just got ridic, especially when you factored in magic items. The fact that the power cards were often inaccurate or too abbreviated in various ways. I got into it with a player here who insisted on using spell cards in 5E. The cards often left out key details. He finally got D&DBeyond and looks things up on his phone. IMO it's one reason I dislike tools proficiencies. Some of them are OK but for the most part they're just useless in most games. By contrast Thievery should just be a skill. To be clear, I don't actually mind squares but there's just no doubt that things like bow ranges were drastically shortened in 4E so they would fit on expected battlemap sizes. The thing is that bonus action attacks are usually quite limited, but it was often possible to chain together bigger attacks in prior versions. You've got one bonus action and one reaction, end of story. I also liked the idea of sacrificing an action (e.g., the bonus action or, even better, the reaction) to maintain concentration rather than the way concentration works now. I think they got a little rigid and would be OK with a regular action being reduced to a bonus action, for instance. Some off-turn is OK, but some 4E characters had just way too much of that and a lot of it was so situational that for a lot of builds it was useless. The PHB2 Bard was an example. In a game we had, one of the characters was a drow bard named Kortuss. The bard could move allies around. This left the player asking "does anyone want to get moved?" at the end of nearly everyone's turn with the answer almost always being "no, I ended up exactly where I wanted to be." His nickname was, of course Kortuss Interruptus. I don't get what I'm robbing myself of. 4E monsters frequently felt like a punching bag to me, way too little offense compared to their staying power and many of their powers and synergies were boring. I didn't find most of their status effects that interesting, although some of them are good: Forced movement was an excellent idea, as is prone. That really reinforces the theme of a monster like a giant that it does damage to you and frequently pushes foes smaller than it and/or knocks prone. In 5E I really like things like that and tend to reintroduce them. During 4E after not running anything else for a fair bit, I ran some 2E (our old version with lots of house rules) and felt "wow, this is what I remember!" when I had the characters fight a mountain giant. The fights were much faster and nastier. The mountain giant's attacks felt very threatening. Now the mountain giant is an example of a very high threat monster (base damage 4D10!) but still, the more limited hit points and higher general damage makes fights feel much more nail biter-y. I'm still running that 2E game though due to it being online we have adopted a number of 4Eisms, such as all movement or areas of effect are just squares. I get pretty good outcomes, but this is probably an example of something that really only works because of the group of us. We've played this game for many years and all the players are very experienced. Part of this is probably me. I never really had a feel for 4E's numbers the way I felt some other DMs did, but quite honestly once I felt that 5E was a solid (if not perfect) game, I said "goodbye". IMO that's a good idea but it's so totally, utterly out of the game world it just bugs the !#@$@#$ out of me. I don't mind that if there's something in a fight that makes something like that happen and have used things like that in the past, for instance by introducing some kind of creature that shifted the odds and made overall combat more violent, but on every fight? It just feels like a game mechanic that's grafted on to make combat faster and to force a different dynamic at the end of a fight and prevent people from nova-ing right at the beginning. I dislike it for exactly the same reason I dislike high-power, limited-use abilities applied outside of the context of a spellcaster. I don't know if "really clever but unmoored game mechanics" was Heinsoo's specialty, but if so it would go a long way towards explaining why I felt that was a hallmark of 4E. Hmm... in fine GRE Verbal fashion, 13A:4E:<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />athfinder:3E? That said, there are some damned good ideas in 13A, just as there are in 4E. I really like the Archetypes as part of the world and damage scaling by level is also a very good way of cutting down on rolls without undoing the theme of the characters.)</blockquote>

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