Fourth Edition just feels... incomplete

[LowSpine]

I think what it is is you are comparing it to earlier versions. You could do something and now you can't so it feels like that thing was left out.

Others have felt 4E has no feeling of depth - unfortunately that is a con of streamlining and simplification.

I think depth/complexity/options will come later in splat books, and some will hate this fact, but hopefully the splat books will have allot more in them that you will actually want rather than 10% worthwhile 3E books.

It looks a solid system but has issues with clarifications and ramifications - Intimidate cha vs will - Force to surrender, as an example. It is an overpowered suggestion that must be ruled by a DM, but any decent DM will say no so it seems a bit pointless including that info. (My own suggestion would be target will+hp DC, the lower the hp the more likely to give up, but that would need playtesting and adjusting.)

Some of these things should be sorted - hopefully in reprintings - but it is too late for those who already have the books.

 

[vazanar]

Is it too much to ask for some patience? I just don't see how we can compare an edition of a game that isn't even officially out yet to one that has been around for 7+ years. I know 4e is expensive and it changes a lot so it's scary. You want to know that your investment is going to go towards a good game, but c'mon already! The game is right three books (4 if you count KoTS, 6 if you count the preview books). Compare that to the hundreds of books for 3e isn't fair at all. That's like saying Xbox 360 sucks because in the first few months it was out it only had a handful of games. That's just ridiculous.

Also while I'm at it can I just vent a little about the fact that everybody and their grandmother's grandmother seems to have an early (and illegal) copy of the three books while the rest of us sit here with nothing to tide us over except KoTS? I mean is anyone else getting miffed that the books are being read (and critiqued) and we can't read it for ourselves to see if there's any truth to what people are saying? Is it possible that I'm the only one that doesn't already have the books?

Is it too much to ask for people to actually read a post before responding? He did say he was comparing 3.5 core to 4e core.

And I join you in the general annoyance in the number of people with the book early. KOTS is the only book I have as well.

 

[Simplicity]

I agree 100%.

I bought pretty much all of the 3e and 3.5e books. Because I'm a D&D collector at heart. But I virtually never played with anything beyond the core rules. The PHBII was such a good book, that I eventually added that to my list of "core" as well, but it wasn't immediate.

4th edition compared to the 3.5 core feels extremely bare bones. It's not that 4e is badly done or incomplete. There's just so many obvious places for more choices and more detail. Compare the 3.5e wizard's spell choices at every level to any particular class's power choices. Of course, every class now has choices similar to those wizard choices. That's a good thing.

Artifacts... pretty sparse. The 3.5 books spent a lot of time on those puppies. There are some serious classical artifacts not mentioned. No Rod of Seven Parts? Please let this mean that they're doing this as an adventure...

Traps. Not a lot of them.

Paragon Paths... Making them per class is what really makes these seem so bare. If they'd just said: here. Have 32 prestige classes, we'd be rather impressed. But 4 paragon paths per class doesn't seem like much because we're myopic.

Epic destinies are a ridiculously small set. Which is fine by me. My players never get that high level anyways.

 

[Ximenes088]

So was I. I'm used to playing 3e with core only (thus the COre COliseum in my sig), and, having played that for years, there are still a ton of things I've never tried. In 4e, I can even list all the viable builds:

Personally, I can confidently say that the monk is disgustingly overpowered. But I like what they've done with the cleric- now that they can spontaneously cast healing spells, maybe a few people will even want to play them.

 

[Blackeagle]

For me it is the lack of character customization. Skill list is whittled down from 45 to 17, with many of the old skills all shoved together under a new heading. I can no longer be someone who specializes in locks or traps, I will be equal in all things Thievery.

Far better than 3e where the skills needed to play an archetypal thief took a huge bite out of even the rogue's big pile of skill points. In 4e you get the standard roguish package, plus there are still plenty of skill slots left over to actually customize your character to make them different from the rogue down the street.

 

[Scribble]

4th edition compared to the 3.5 core feels extremely bare bones. It's not that 4e is badly done or incomplete. There's just so many obvious places for more choices and more detail.

Artifacts... pretty sparse. The 3.5 books spent a lot of time on those puppies. There are some serious classical artifacts not mentioned. No Rod of Seven Parts?

Traps. Not a lot of them.

Paragon Paths... Making them per class is what really makes these seem so bare.

4e reminds me of the old days. Yeah a lot of what you said is true, but adding that extra stuff on your own is RIDICULOUSLY easy in 4e...

Even the monster creation rules. They're so easy that for a moment you think... "uhh wait I must have missed something..." but you didn't.

The math is all relatively visible and in some places completely spelled out, so just creating a new power, or item will be just as easy.

I just got done statting out an encounter... When I was done, I found myself thinking up new things I could toss into the encounter to make it more exciting... It's been a LONG time since I've found myself doing that. Usually it was: "Argg... what do I have to work on next to get this complete?"

 

[AllisterH]

re: Magic Items in the DMG

I disagree with this strongly. Once 3E allowed for magic items to be bought and created by the PCs per RAW, it should've been placed in the PHB where the people most likely to use them would need it. A 5 person party and a DM means that there''s 6 people either having to share the DMG or they buy another one or two.

There is no reason I see for a player to buy the 4E DMG which harkens back to the days of pre 3E when there was no mechanical reason for a player to have a DMG. This I consider a good thing.

Same thing applied to the prestige classes. Either they were a DM-only feature and thus should be restricted to the DMG or they are a player option (how WOTC et al ACTUALLY treated them) and should be in the PHB.

re: Options.
I think it really depends on how you look at it and what class you're coming from. If say you're a non-spellcaster, you're making out like a bandit.

As an earlier poster mentioned, if you were a rogue for example, you just didn't have that much choice (skills were one maybe). A rogue player gets class abilities, feats, skills, paragon paths, epic destinies so that say at level 21, two 4E rogues are going to have a much wider/different mechancial options than the 3E rogue.

It's spellcaster's that got the shaft (which I must admit, I don't feel too bad about). I mean, if you took a 3.x wizard and stripped it of its feats and skills, you still had a much wider list of options (spells FTW!) as honestly, SPELLS were the class abilities.

re: Multiclassing
I think multiclassing at the beginning of 3.0 was the main selling point for the options. It seemed like that with multiclassing you had an infinite number of options (or pretty large selection anyway). Of course, by the time of 3.5, we realized that multiclassing really wasn't that good (even for the non-spellcasters, multiclassing isn't that good depending on your base class. For example, for a rogue, once you get TWF from ranger, you can't afford to give up any more sneak attack dice).

 

[Andor]

Re: The books being stuffed to the gills.

Didn't someone say they used a larger font size? How many extra pages of material would have been available if they had used the same font as in 3e?

 

[Eldragon]

I too feel 4e is "incomplete". The OP summed up my feelings quite well.

While I think some of the classes look a lot more fun to play than their 3e counterpart, like the Fighter. My favorite class, Wizard feels like an empty, hollow shell. The spell selection is so light compared to the core 3e PHB that I am totally unable to play my favorite character concepts (i.e. Summoner, Illusionist, buff-master). Instead the Wizard is pigeon-holed into being being the iconic damage dealer in a pointy hat.

I was so excited about 4e too. I guess now I'll have to wait until a few suppliments are out before I really start enjoying the game. Unless I can find a DM who will let me convert 3e spells to 4e.

 

[pemerton]

I guess I miss the fluff. The 3.x book made you feel inside the game, it generated a better atmosphere...

The PHB looks like (-don't kill me!-)a guide to a videogame.

Ron Edwards has remarked that many simulationist RPG texts are written in such a way as to suggest that reading the rulebook is itself playing the game - whereas (what he would describe as) a proper RPG rulebook would be written as such - as a guide to play, not itself part of the play experience. So 4e embraces yet another Forge-ism!