D&D 4E How do you feel about 4E right *now*? (week of 1/21/08)

[pukunui]

4e all the way for me!

I strongly dislike 3.5, as does the rest of my group ... and they are all older gamers who grew up playing 1e and 2e. We are all eagerly anticipating 4e.

I say bring it on!

 

[pemerton]

GMing by fiat annoys me to no end. Mostly this doesn't seem a major concern, but there was a hint of this in the monster design comments a little while back.

I find it helpful to distinguish very clearly between build rules and action resolution rules. It seems clear to me that 4e will wind back the complexity of build rules for those game elements that are primarily GM-controlled (monsters, other NPCs, maybe magic items - though these are in a bit of a halfway position between GM and player control). It won't be build-by-fiat, it will be build with an eye to level (both for monsters/NPCs and for items this has been made pretty clear). There will be guidelines, perhaps even strict rules, as to what counts as level appropriate.

But the action resolution mechanics will be uniform, I think, across GMs and players. So in that respect the game will be nothing like 1st ed AD&D.

I hate the spike and pole style of play, but the second part doesn't jive with my first edition memories- encounters meant xp and gold (which, in itself, was more XP), which was largely point. Avoiding them was counter productive.

I was thinking mostly of wandering monsters, and also the benefits of looting without having to fight - in my experience gold XP sufficiently swamped monster XP that if you could get the gold without fighting that was a good thing.

Goal and quest based XP is much more fun than body-count XP.

4e will follow 3E in this respect, I think: XP will be awarded for challenges overcome. So a purely metagame XP system (with a very thin simulationist veneer for those who squint, and thereby convince themselves that the sole way to improvement is through testing oneself against challenges).

Successfully completing recovering the <whatever> should be rewarded more than grinding through every last group of monsters to no purpose. Which is why the combat emphasis of previews so far has me concerned

I take your point. There will be other sorts of challenges than combat - that's pretty clear, I think. But I don't think there will be quest/goal XP of the sort you're talking about.

It might be possible to easily jack on such a system, but I think you'd want to make sure that it still rewarded detailed exploration, by players in play, of their various character abilities - which will be mostly combat focused. A variant on this would be awarding XP only for challenges that are motivated in a certain way (by goals/quests) - this might require very little change to the mechanics but reduce the pressure to grind.

I honestly think that all of this, and role-playing, can be done regardless of the system.

Maybe, but I think some systems handle it better than others. Because D&D so easily produces characters with superhuman physical prowess (and that's before we get into the magic) I think it has only a limited ability to handle realism. I like the fact that 4e seems to be embracing this from the get-go in it's world setup, rather than trying to ignore it and going for (pseudo-)historical accuracy.

And the default setting a has a distinct list toward the stupid from where I sit. Which I guess is better than the new Realms, which seems to have imploded under the weight of its own stupid.

I don't mind the default setting at all - I actually quite like it, and it's deliberate anti-anthropological bias (justified by an appeal to the preponderance of non-human factors in D&D society). From what little I know about it, I'm inclined to agree with you about FR.

Maybe. Its why I'm here, but I'm still uncertain.

Fair enough. I'm hopeful that 4e will be a major improvement in the standard of D&D as a game, which hopefully will have broader ramifications for the whole RPG scene (given it's the gateway of choice for nearly all players) as well as making for good D&D play.

 

[Steely Dan]

Two thumbs way up. They're addressing so many of my frustrations with 3E, it's as though they were channeling my soul! I am all about game balance and smooth game mechanics that lighten my load as a DM while increasing the overall level of fun for everyone involved.

Now you're channelling me!

 

[Phaezen]

Thumbs up from me

The big things I am looking forward to is party based mechanics, less reliance on magic items (no stat pumping items ftw) and multiple monsters per encounter. And then end of the 5 minute adventuring day.

Phaezen

 

[Bluenose]

One thumb up from me. I haven't really seen enough of the rules to say that it will work for my group, though some of the individual components have looked good. As for changes to the background assumptions, I'd have been making a lot for my homebrew game regardless, so they don't bother me. I did like most of the things in W&M, especially the Feywild and Shadowfell.

 

[Aeolius]

Thumbs down. I have yet to hear anything about 4e that excites me. I dislike most, if not all, of the proposed changes.

 

[Wormwood]

Thumbs up, even more enthusiastically than they were in October.

I stopped running my 3.5 game in November, and I simply refuse to run D&D again until June. It's just no longer worth the effort it takes to fold, spindle and mutilate 3.5 into the type of play experience I enjoy.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Thumbs up, but feeling a bit bored with 4e now. Roll on 5e.

 

[Steely Dan]

Thumbs up, but feeling a bit bored with 4e now. Roll on 5e.

It's true, already 4th Ed is feeling a bit passé.

 

[Pinotage]

Still thumbs down. Some bits look interesting, but I'd rather just rip 4e apart and implement what I like in my 3.5e games. Better than learning an entirely new system with entirely new bugs of its own, and entirely new problems.

Pinotage