Vancian magic was based on the writing and magic system of JackVance, so no, it wasn’t entirely for gamist reasons. It may have been chosenbecause it was easy to make mechanics for, but there was always a narrativereason.
Meh, the gamist came first. Look at Chainmail, the mechanic was invented for THAT game and it was certainly not modeled on Vance. It just happened that Dying Earth came along and was recognized as a convenient fluff for it when the mechanics were stolen for D&D.
Thisargument is a little sillier, as most modern takes on the cleric tend to havethem lightly armoured like the wizard because they’re spellcasters.
The clerichas its armour and weapons because of its historical source as religiousknights.
Mechanically,giving it heavy armour made it a little too similar to the fighter. From agamist perspective it should have had less armour than it does.
No, actually the cleric is precisely designed for OD&D. He's actually PRIMARILY a fighter at low levels (he doesn't even get his first spell till level 2), but not allowed to have the sword (good magic weapons). He transitions to more of a spell caster/wonder worker as you level up, and of course has a role against the common threat of the undead, which were bad news. He's actually quite well and purely gamistly balanced with the fighting man and magic user classes. The party wouldn't really work well if he was a squishy. LATER ON it might have made more sense to make the cleric squishy. He wasn't not for story reasons but for legacy reasons, nobody wanted to change the design of the big 3 classes.
I agree with that, but it’s harder to add story to somethinglike “the health tracking mechanic.”
But classes and races do have story. The first classesintroduced were options like the druid and rogue that were very influenced bystory and not just “here’s a new mechanic to try out”.
Of course classes have a story.
The origins of the Avenger class come down to needing a divinestriker.
Nonsense. 4e lacks several combinations of source and role, notably including a martial controller. No doubt when they had a concept for a combination that didn't exist yet it was going to be more likely to get priority, why force people to play only martial or arcane strikers? That doesn't mean they just pounded a square peg in a round hole to make some mechanical implementation fit some concept.
It’s unique defining mechanic is basically Advantage.
It’s flavour paints it as an offensive paladin or aggressivecleric. “Divine assassin” isn’t a class, it’s a character, a narrow archetype.
And the avenger is one of the better 4e classes. The seeker,battlemind, runepriest, ardent, and warden are all much worse.
I disagree. We can come up with numerous examples of characters that work well as Avengers. It is a very well-liked class that lends itself to quite a surprising variety of characters. Read some of the 4e boards if you doubt me. I disagree about the other classes you poo poo as well. The seeker is a great primal nature 'wizard', with an archer fluff, quite cool (the implementation actually is not as good as the story, but the story is pretty cool and was clearly where they started from with this class). Warden? Again, the world has vast numbers of stories of shape shifting warriors of the wilderness. Beorn springs instantly to mind, but if you go read some old folk stories you'll find others. The psionic classes? Clearly the Battlemind is "mind over matter" the mental warrior who uses his mind to make his body into a weapon. The Ardent is the telempathic warrior, turning emotion to his own purposes. The runepriest is a bit esoteric, but he is a pretty good Norse priest, and is admittedly one of the thematically thinnest of classes in the game. Still, he's got a strong concept, it is just NARROW.
A lot of what was done in 4e was to split up aspects of overpowered 3e classes into narrower archetypes. Thus the 3e Druid becomes the 4e Druid, Warden, and Shaman. The cleric becomes the Cleric, Avenger, and Invoker, etc.
I'd also like to point out that 4e actually has several classes which MUST exist purely for thematic reasons, such as 4e's Sorcerer, which uses EXACTLY the same mechanics as the wizard and is really largely redundant from a role standpoint (they are both striker/controller types, and nowadays the wizard is actually the better at both roles).
This was very true of late 3e, and even some early 3e classes like the sorcerer, which was created solely to have another class that used the wizard's spell list. And the sorcerer isn't exactly the best example of a unique archetype screaming for its own class.
I think what I would say is that 3e shows the lesson that you must have MORE THAN STORY to make a class really solid. This is why role and source were invented, to insure that both story and mechanics would get adequate focus in every class. So that each one would have a shtick and would work. This was VERY successful. Very few 4e classes aren't useful and fun to play, adding something interesting to the game. Even when a 4e class has no real mechanical reason to exist, like the Sorcerer, it has fun unique thematics and just enough mechanical flair to work (if 4e were rewritten some of these classes might indeed go away, or become sub-classes, but that doesn't mean they were bad classes in 4e). The very few classes that don't work well? Seeker lacks a good MECHANICAL concept, its a perfectly fine concept (again like sorcerer it COULD be reduced to a sub-class pretty effectively).
The point is, yes, 4e is designed to make sure that each class works mechanically so that there are no more idiotic things like the 3e Samurai and Martial, which have crap mechanics and are pretty much unplayable as written without the player doing some massive min/maxing and basically MCing out of the disaster of his class.
Yourmileage might vary GREATLY on this depending on your group.
The vastmajority of the official game hasbeen focused on this, because WotC really want to focus on dungeons at the endof 3e and during all of 4e.
Some ofthis was accidental: the Delve format was built for dungeons and made other adventuresharder to design.
But many,many DMs reject dungeons and run exploratory adventures or investigativeadventures or political adventures and the like.
And given how successful WotC’s adventures have been, theirdungeon-centric design might not be for the best.
My only point was that classes were designed with dungeon crawling in mind, and the rules in general at the start. I don't believe the current rules, 4e in particular but 3e as well, are nearly so tied to that legacy, but 3e certainly still hewed close to traditional class design and so CERTAINLY nobody was thinking about how classes worked "in the world" they were thinking only about how well they matched up with the ones Gary wrote in 1974, for dungeon crawls.
4e OTOH actually has rules that were written to make some sort of sense in terms of relative power levels of PCs. I don't pretend that they made any attempt to figure out how the rules worked as a recipe for a world. It is just not practical to do that.
So... aslong as you didn’t think, it worked okay?
Yeah, myplayers revel in tearing through logical holes. Nerds in general love lookingfor that stuff. Heck, musing about stuff like that is what has fueled EdGreenwood and Kieth Baker’s entire careers.
Greenwood and Baker are experts at tweaking people's imaginations, not at making up realistic worlds. I would venture to guess either one of them would get a chuckle out of the notion that they ever aimed for anything more than a veneer of verisimilitude that would let the players suspend their disbelief and not worry about the patently unreal stage props. Ever must it be so.
My favourite is Ravenloft,so 4e didn’t work as well.
Monsters didn’t require any special preparation and tactics,PCs were hard to kill and even harder to scare, magic was everywhere, it washard to use just a single boss monster, long combats removed much of the horrortone, it was hard to only have a single fight per day without PCs nova-ing, no firearms, andthe like.
The game always descended into something more akin to Van Helsing than Dracula.
I don't agree with many of your assertions here. It is quite easy to make monsters and situations that require preparation and tactics. PCs are just as hard to kill as ever, the DM just uses the amount of force needed to do it, no more and no less. I can't imagine how magic could be more 'everywhere' than in AD&D or 3e!
Frankly I haven't done hard core horror-tone in 4e, but if I were to do it, I'd use small numbers of highly deadly monsters that have nasty effects, which do exist and can be created in 4e. I could also use masses of weak monsters, like a zombie horde scenario. A Solo would make a perfect boss monster, what in fact could possibly be more perfect for Straad than a solo vampire? I've done many solo fights, they are quite good when done well.
As for the issue you have with novas, I'd use traps, tricks, etc to wear the PCs down instead of monsters. Let them wander trapped in some horrible dungeon knee deep in cold water, with only nasty alternatives for escape routes. Once they're tired and weakened and they've finally fought free, then the truth comes out, they still have the boss monster to face. Oh yeah, I can do that with 4e, and in fact IMHO the way it will play out will be even more cool than it was in 2e where I personally didn't have a ton of luck making it click.
I don't know of any version of D&D that does firearms. There have been rules for them in various places and they CAN be done, to some extent, but they've never been commonly used weapons. I'm not sure why they would be necessary in a horror genre adventure, but neither can I see why 4e cannot do them as well as 3e etc. Frankly I'd make them just bows refluffed. Maybe give them large damage dice and 'brutal' or something, but make them Load Standard, so they make a nice opening gambit, then you pull out your blades/bayonets and go at it.
It’s hard to play a low-magic, fragile heroes, supernaturalhorror game with 4e, which was designed to be a high magic heroic fantasy.
(Although, for my two favourite settings, Ravenloft and FFG’s MidnightI’d possibly use inspirational healing. in the former to avoid having a clericto cut down on the magic in the world and in the latter because the onlyclerics are followers of Izrador.)
I think overall your right, 4e is NOT designed for a game that focuses entirely on supernatural horror. OTOH I never thought earlier editions were either, just for slightly different reasons. In 3.x PCs just had too much magic. Full casters in particular are answer machines with a vast array of tools at their disposal. Its pretty hard to make a 9th level Wizard feel helpless. OTOH the 9th level fighter has squat, he feels plenty helpless, especially against enemies that swords aren't good against. You can make it work of course, but the system wasn't designed for it. 4e OTOH just doesn't have fragile heroes, though you CAN achieve it if you want to bend things.
