I think your point here of stating "untruth" lacks the understanding that what was stated is based on opinion. Since opinions in essence are neither true or false. By the poster's opinion it is in his feeling that they are homegenous in design and play. Stating that it is untrue is akin to stating it is a lie, and doing that would be taking him out of context.
No, an opinion based on a false assumption is incorrect. The opinion I questioned was based on a false assumption.
It is like me saying a wizard plays like a fighter because they both do damage. A 4E wizard plays no more like a fighter than 3E wizard. So if the poster thinks that 3E characters are not alike, then the only reason I can think of that would consider 4E characters alike is that he is interjecting a bias against 4E.
If he said I didn't like 4E. Then that is an opinion.
Stating that 4E characters feel homogenous versus 3E characters is a provable untruth. I can show that they play very differently through multiple examples. Just like they did in 3E and previous editions.
The problem with this statement is that an "adventurer" only is that experienced through adventure. To say that he already starts like this means that he has already adventured prior thus making him that experienced. The reason an Experience Point Chart exists is to show the level of understanding/training the adventurer has. To have him start at such a level and never before adventure would in essence put him at a level higher than the effective point of experience he would have had otherwise.
Do you read history? I read quite a bit. I have spent a great deal of time reading about knights and medieval warriors.
They trained from a young age to fight. They didn't see battle for a long time, but because they had sparred, trained with many different weapons, trained to fight on horseback, and learned various tactics and strategies for fighting they were very prepared when they stepped on a real battlefield. So they might live long enough to gain the practical experience of the battlefield.
These men were not the type of men to die easily even to a more skilled warrior. Their training very much prepared them for the battlefield. It was nothing like modern day school.
I view the training a wizard or fighter have as I do the training of those medieval knights. They have spent much of their life training in weapons and armor, sparring, and practicing combat maneuvers. When they start adventuring, they are special operations soldiers just out of bootcamp. A higher class of indvidual than your standard guard. And they have been rigrously trained so they will not die in the first battle they enter to a single hit.
No one sends a boy on the battlefield if he isn't trained to do the job expected of him. I guarantee you that a 12 year old boy trained to be a knight and that was a knight's squire would beat a 20 year old modern man of today in a fight. He would match up in hand to hand against fairly advanced modern hand to hand warriors due to the amount of training he would have received in arms by the age of 12.
So this is a matter of how we view an adventurer's young life. To me a person starting out on an adventure is the apprentice of a stronger wizard or fighter who would not think of letting a student go on their first adventure unless they were fairly certain they would be able to survive.
I think 4E does a better job of simulating the amount of training that a young adventurer would have.
My answer to this is that someone who is a bookworm and has been so for most of his child and adolescent life isn't going to be the most physically fit. More so he also has not been trained to fight in such situations dealing with skill at arms, though he does have magic on his side. Are we to say he is just as hardy and can take a knife to the chest and shrug it off to the already battle scarred fighter? Mind you this bookworm is also the guy whose only armor is his trusty robe his teacher gave him.
See above post.
What you just described would be a non-combat sage, not a wizard. If you want to run that type of character or background, I'm quite sure the Dm could figure out a way to allow that.
A 4E wizard is a character that spent much of his life mastering the art of magic and how to wield it in combat. That's how I envision the wizard.
The problem with this statement is the assumption that the character has spent their life learning their profession. If this were true I would gather they would be very old and at that point most likely would be easily killed to being frail from age.
No, they wouldn't. As I said, historical references indicate that children from medieval times (the time most associated with the tech level of DnD) were trained to fight with weapons almost as soon as they could hold a sword. Children were also apprenticed to craftsmen or sent to learn a trade at the age of 10 or 11. When they finally were able to go out on their own and attempt to start their own blacksmith shop, their trainer would make sure they were very competent before he gave his recommendation.
Squires as young as 12 or 14 served knights on the field of battle. They would wield polearms or spears to protect the rear of knights as they fought.
So no, they would not be very old. That is the thinking of a modern person. Not a person from the type of tech level you would find in DnD times.
Can you please elaborate on your response. As I have seen it I don't know that Clerics had to be wisdom based, and Paladin's had to be strength based. In fact I have seen a cleric who acts much like a wizard, and a paladin who acts like a Spartan from the movie 300. Maybe it is just me but have you actually read the books and considered the options available?
Are you seriously asking me this? All 3E cleric spells were based on wisdom as the prime spellcasting statistic. If you did not focus on and enhance your wisdom, you gimped your character and you scaled badly.
Yes, you could choose spells that blast, but you wouldn't be anywhere near the AoE master that a wizard was. If you were the only cleric in the party, you were needed to heal. If you didn't play this way, then I don't know how you survived high level encounters.
How did your paladin play like a Spartan without having high strength? What did he do exactly? I don't even know what you're talking about. In 3E high strength meant more damage and a better chance to hit.
How did your paladin not focus on strength and still be an effective warrior? He does bonus damage based on strength. He swings based on strength. His second focus stat would be Charisma.
This is how the 3E paladin worked. Did you make some kind of less effective paladin that focused on other stats?
[Please provide examples to back this statement.
You haven't read the 4E PHB yet have you?
Example 1: Paladin can be built around Charisma or Strength. There are useful abilities and primary attacks for either type of paladin.
Strength based paladin: Focused on melee. Holy warrior type with heavy armor and weapons. Generally does strong melee damage. Less focus on implements, less ranged attacks, and less healing ability.
Charisma based paladin: Still does melee attacks for base attacks. Has more access to ranged damage. Focuses more on radiant damage and healing. A more protective paladin that does a bit less damage than a strength-based paladin, but can serve the role as healer.
You couldn't do this with the 3E paladin, especially starting from first level. You couldn't dream of filling the healer role as a paladin at first level.
Example 2: Fighter. Both builds built around strength.
Sword and Shield Fighter: Focused on combat accuracy and pushing the opponent around the battlefield. Higher AC. More abilities for pushing and shifting opponents. More defensive abilities and taunting abilities for drawing aggro, protecting your comrades, and keeping yourself alive.
Two-hander warrior: Focus on big, heavy melee weapons. Does more damage. More focus on hitting multiple targets.
Two different types of fighters. And you can even create a hybrid of the two for a third type of fighter.
This is possible for every class. You can build a different archetype for every class in 4E. So though there are less total number of classes, you can mix and match so much that you can build more different types of characters with 4E than you could do with 3E from level one up to level thirty.
If it isn't arguable why are people arguing it?
I think the diehard 3E guys who haven't spent much time studying 4E or don't know the ruleset very well want to argue. So they make false statements based on shallow experiences with the 4E system that don't tell the truth about it. It's their way of promoting anti-4E propaganda rather than just saying the simple truth: "They didn't give 4E much of a try, they like 3E better, and they don't want to play 4E."
If they said that, then I would have nothing to say. That is an opinion.
Stating that the 4E classes feel homogenous and can't be made as distinctive as a 3E class is just an outright falsehood born of either unfamiliarity the 4E PHB classes or an outright attempt to propagandize against 4E. Either way, I aim to dispel that myth.
I played 3E a long time as both DM and player. I owned every splatbook, the PHB 2, and some 3rd party source materials that further expanded options for characters. I know the 3E system better than most that play it, and the few that know it better than me...well, good for them.
I've played 4E now. Right from the beginning I had more options than I ever had with the 3E PHB. I have never had such trouble making a choice of characters as I have had choosing what race and class to play in 4E.
Not only did they make each class and race unique and individual. They also made each one so good that it is difficult to choose which one to play. I never had that trouble in 3E. The best races were obvious for a particular class, the best feat builds were obvious for a particular class. That isn't the case with 4E. That to me means they did a great job differentiating each race and class as well as balancing them so that one didn't stand too far above the other.
I like that I have a hard choice choosing whether to elf, dwarf, or eladrin. I like that I have a hard choice choosing whether to be a char or str based paladin. Each one plays unique and can give you a very useful benefit. It makes you fret to pick one path or the other because of what you'll lose by doing so. If that isn't differentiation with strong touch of balance, I don't know what is.
