Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4694748" data-attributes="member: 82106">I understand your reaction to 4e. I read through the PHB the first time and the endless lists of 400 powers pretty much put me to sleep. Not that there aren't plenty of interesting ones, but with something like 400+ powers in the one book they do start to seem like a lot of 'more of the same' after a while. I guess if I had been in charge of designing 4e it would have probably been a bit different, but the 4e we have is the 4e we have and after having played it for 6 months I find that some of the things, like the large numbers of powers, aren't so much of an issue. Other things which were not apparent at all going through the rules are larger factors though.Its like this: 4e's powers are all in the details. Its true that a lot of them aren't VERY different from one another, but you can think of them as each being basically a slight variation on what the character does (this is less true of spell casters). If the fighter uses 'Brute Strike' instead of 'Reaping Strike' it is just basically an attack with his weapon, he just put a bunch of muscle behind that one swing instead of maybe a bit more clever swordplay that round. So if you loose the mindset that each individual power is a central facet of the character and just accept them as the bag of little tricks that PC happens to use then the whole issue kind of goes away. Believe me, there is plenty of flavor in each class and build. They are all distinct enough that you won't have a problem identifying with the character.As far as tweaking things goes though, that is a pretty tough thing to do at the level of reworking you're talking about. The 4e powers are a pretty intricately balanced set of interlocking abilities. No one power is a huge big deal by itself, but once you start changing them around you run hard into a lot of balance issues and things that I think you'll find are not going to be easy to work out.All that said I think where you may actually find 4e DOES give you problems is in two areas. 1 is that if the PCs aren't gung ho to figure out the best possible ways to fit their characters together to form a seamless whole it is REALLY hard for them to survive and beat the monsters in combat. "beer and pretzels" level tactics just don't cut it in 4e. Characters don't have the option to just roll out their high level spells if they happen make a dumb mistake and 'fix it'.  Despite all the surges and loads of hit points etc 4e combat is really quite a bit deadlier in overall effect than it was in 1e/2e.2 In order to succeed in combat the players REALLY need to be willing to dig into their characters and make sure they build them so they fight at near maximum ability. There isn't a lot of leeway for suboptimal PCs. There isn't a lot of leeway for suboptimal tactics either. A group of players that aren't really into tactics and tweaking their players is going to find combats to be tough or even downright unwinnable.IMHO this is really the one great failing of 4e. It caters to people who like to dig into the rules and figure out tactics. Those players that are only interested in combat as a part of overall role play may find themselves unable to cope with it or just bored by it. I think the result is that while 4e has good rules systems and those rules systems are fine for dealing with non combat situations that the game still ends up pushing fights to center stage, even if they are rare in a given game, just because you really HAVE to be a master of that part of the game. I think the result is kind of a 'love it or hate it' situation where some players are thrilled by 4e and others are just left cold by it.</blockquote>

Verification