Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8954413" data-attributes="member: 6790260">After a fashion, that might be by intent. They told us how the chicken is butchered--not the eleven herbs and spices, so to speak.This is another perfectly valid criticism of 4e. Finding the right balance between fast and engaging combat is a difficult thing, and 4e erred on the side of slow (but definitely engaging) combat. Procedural adjustments can speed it up, as can back-end math changes (MM3), but a bit more effort could be put toward that goal. Trying to get most combats done in (say) 30-40 minutes as opposed to 45-60 minutes would be a big help; that would let a typical 3-4 hour session feature 3-4 combats and 1-3 hours of non-combat play.That's part of why, if I ever made a 4e heartbreaker, I'd put in what I call "Skirmish" rules. Rules for running really fast, low-engagement combats, that can capture the "fight five kobolds...several times" kinds of combat from earlier editions, while still providing meaningful stakes and conflict. Essentially, if full "social combat" rules would be like taking Skill Challenges and expanding them into a complete "social-tactical" experience, these proposed Skirmish rules would be like distilling down the combat engine into something like a Skill Challenge, fast, light, and flexible, but not as deep as proper combat rules. In the ideal case, "Skirmishes" would be satisfying enough on their own that you could effectively treat "Skirmish-only 4e" as the "Gygaxian Combat Module," sort of the logical opposite of the vaporware "Tactical Combat Module" that the 5e designers promised.Runepriest becoming a subclass of Cleric, Seeker to Ranger, and...what, exactly? Eliminating those two leaves 23 classes. Just by keeping the thirteen found in 5e you're already more than halfway to keeping all of the remaining 4e ones (13/23). Swordmage, Avenger, Warden, and Shaman are all really cool, so I'm not sure if we can justify cutting them; that's 17/23. I never cared for the non-Monk Psionic classes, the whole design around Power Points and Augment abilities is deeply flawed, but just axing them seems like such a waste. That leaves Assassin, Invoker, and Vampire; Assassin has plenty of history (it was even a class in 3e!), so that seems to be out too, but perhaps you want it gone. Where would Invoker go--Wizard? Holy magic seems incredibly out of place for a Wizard, but diluting Cleric by building a whole separate controller side into it seems just as bad. Vampire is some really cool design, but I guess we could ditch it....and in so doing, we'll only have gotten rid of 2 (obvious picks: Runepriest/Seeker) + 3 (Augment-based classes) + 3 (Assassin, Vampire, Invoker) = 8 classes. That's still 17, and with some painful sacrifices to get there.It's all well and good to say "not all sources need all roles," but a number of these classes are actually fun on their own. As I previously argued, they aren't just "grid filling." They were made to work with the lore, have fun and engaging mechanics all their own, and actually have meaning and purpose, not just rote performance. There are diehard Warden fans out there, even though many who didn't enjoy 4e would just write it off as "oh that's a Barbarian played as a tank." I, personally, am a huge fan of Avengers even though I've never actually desired to play one, I just think they're neat. (I even built an entire "internal police" force for the main religion of my Dungeon World game, strongly inspired by the lore of Avengers.) Vampires may be kind of superfluous/overly-specific, but they have an incredibly neat mechanic in their tiny pool of healing surges and need to extract surges from the enemies they face. Etc.These things aren't pointless. That means you actually have to start saying that some stuff just doesn't belong in 4e if you want to axe any meaningful set of classes.And this is, more or less, my response to a lot of requests for mass reduction of stuff in 4e. It's very easy to talk about "oh just cut stuff in half!" It's a hell of a lot harder once you actually sit down and start asking what is such a problem that it merits being cut. That's sort of the problem with 4e being actually well-designed. A lot of its components are actually really good, and ditching them solely for simplicity's sake becomes a lot harder to justify. Feats and powers are the main exception, because a lot of them are just poor, but they don't fit into neat boxes--you have to actually review them. Much like how probably half or more of the spells in 5e aren't actually all that good or worthwhile, but the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is to actually review the spells.</blockquote>

Verification