D&D 4E I'm here 4e and left wondering....

[LostSoul]

I really like 4E; I think it's a slick and elegant engine. I do have a few issues with it, though.

The authors explicitly expect the players to make up their own interpretation of how the mechanical actions are explained in terms of the game world. So for instance each power has a line of 'fluff' that you CAN use to describe it, but the fluff doesn't explain how the effect works or imply anything. Now and then the players may find themselves wondering how to describe a mechanical effect in a given situation, but given that its a magical world there's always SOME way to do it. For instance you can knock an ooze prone with a power. Obviously it can't fall on its back, but you can always describe it as being hit in a vital spot or something and so 'prone' in that context can mechanically represent "the ooze is hurting and has to get its act together". 95% of the time you can just take the default fluff and go with it though.

This is probably my biggest issue with 4E, discovered after playing for some time. (That's why I called my hack "Fiction First".) The way I look at it is: If you can always come up with some colour to justify why this power works in this situation, it means that "this situation" isn't really important. What's important is the power and the rules, not the colour around it.

In other words, the situation in the game world doesn't affect resolution (of the situation in the game world, it's strange).

What gets resolved are the numbers on the sheet - HP, XP, attack bonuses, skill modifiers, defences. You have to take the time and effort to give those meaning; but the game doesn't push you that way, it doesn't give you a reason to apply that meaning. It doesn't point to that blank space and say, "Hey, look, what goes here, guys playing the game?"

It makes it easy to ignore the game world, even if you'd like to focus on it. The game is complex and there are a lot of things going on at any one point, and when one thing isn't related to anything else (i.e. the game world), it's the first to go.

However, the elegance of the system is such that it makes it easy to put the game world back in if you strip out some of the other elements. What's more, the system has some nice numbers to it, and it's still D&D with elves and dwarves and orcs and gnolls - that's why I've stuck with it and hacked it into something more of my liking.

 

[Journeymanmage]

Journeymanmage.... Afflictions aka real injuries and illness that the mundane populous have take real money and real risk to cure ...

What I mean is the game does not nail down the nature of the mundane populous leaving it somewhat vague.

Agreed. It's just that in the old editions, you could go out and cure x or y, remove y or z with a few 3rd - 4th lvl spells. Normally those spells were beyond most of the average npc clerics or they rarely had more than a single 3rd lvl spell, unless you were in a major city. Now to cure a disease or affliction, it takes major resources in residuum. 150g for disease and 250g for affliction and if you roll poorly, you can kill the person you're healing. Granted, rolling low and doing damage equal to max hp to a commoner most likely means you do 1 point of damage .... It's a combination of it makes the PCs look important and powerful for only they are hardy enough to take the kind of risks that lead to those situations. You can't do cures or restorative spells because the common npc can't survive the process and the surely can't afford to pay for it. Nor can the PCs pay to cure more than a few people. The PCs just don't have the resources to do that because they really are going to need $$ to upgrade their gear to survive defeating whatever else is endangering the town. Which leads to:

- In the game, Magic is kind of useless to the average person. Cures are too expensive. Light spells last 5 minutes. Many spells don't exist anymore or are rituals that don't do 1/3rd of what the could do in previous additions.

It's comments like this that interest me... How different people can have a big difference in play experience.

In my case, the game hasn't felt this much like the game I grew up playing in a REALLY long time.

I think part of it is ... It's not the "New" experience anymore, some of the shine is gone. I've seen in a few posts people say basically: "for those people new to D&D (4th ed.), years from now when they play 6th or 7th or 7.x ... they'll remember 4th and say 'that was a great system' the new stuff just doesn't compare". That's because this is all new to them. They haven't "Been there Done That". The polished shine is still new. I've played all the D&D editions, I've played the original Tunnels and Trolls, I've played GURPS, Rolemaster, I play-tested DC Heroes, Earthdawn, TORG (The Other Role-playing Game) (I've played a whole host of other games, but I'll stop the list here).

I think the mechanics of 4th ed. are excellent. The classes .. reasonably powered, less "swingy". They are very balanced to each other, they keep that balance and reasonable power up through at least Paragon (again I do not have any experience with Epic level so I won't comment on it.) Clunky rules were cleaned up or removed. Combat is more dynamic (I like that), there are reasons to move and shift around the battlefield. But this also brings up the one word I forgot to put into the previous post... "mechanical".

Not only does 4th Ed feel different, it also feels "mechanical" ... at x level you should have y to y+z hp depending on class. You should be doing n[w] or n-1[w] but with this rider/effect.

I have no intentions of saying which edition is better, that is subjective. I liked each addition for different reasons. 1st and 2nd because it was all new, shiny, endless possibilities and getting better. 3rd-3.x because it cleared up a lot of mess from earlier and added some new stuff (good/bad). I didn't like the "OMG power-creep" of late 3.5 but I think part of that was GM/PCs allowing/taking multiple "splat books" / prestige classes when really it should have been take 1 prestige class, not 4. I like 4th Ed. for the dynamic battles, for the class balance, for the much clearer rules (once you realize that the rules mean pretty much exactly what they say) ... (give or take a small bump). But 4th also feels restrictive (even with a score of classes and hybrids (though I also like the hybrid rules), it feels like low-medium magic, low-medium fantasy and it feels mechanical.
Gone are the days of a 9th level Wizard, Going Invisible, being protected from arrows, flying 200 yards above a battle field and pulling out a wand or 2 and laying waste to an army of hundreds with impunity. Gone are the days of a low con Wizard getting jumped by equal or near equal rogue and getting ganked before taking one action (Short Sword d6 + (1/2 lvl) d6 worth of backstab) surprise round + doing it again when you go first in the 1st round. Gone are Save or DIE. Gone are Hold Person = ZERO actions for 10 rounds per level of caster (iirc). (After the 2nd time I used that as a GM, I banned myself from using it against PCs).

* tldr summary:
Cures and Healing are now very different from previous editions and in-part leave a feeling that in a magical world, magic isn't available or helpful to the common person.

Each edition has/had it's advantages and disadvantages some real, some subjective.

The feel of the game has changed. Some of that is: If you're new to D&D or came in when 3.x was getting out of hand, then yes 4th feels different, 4th is new and shiny. If you've played through several editions / "way back when" ... then the game in general isn't new, and from my perspective:
+ side: It's balanced across the boards better and less swingy, combat can be more dynamic.
- side: Not as ... magical. and more mechanical.

 

[Garthanos]

Agreed. It's just that in the old editions, you could go out and cure x or y, remove y or z with a few 3rd - 4th lvl spells. Normally those spells were beyond most of the average npc clerics or they rarely had more than a single 3rd lvl spell, unless you were in a major city.

8th level ritual approx = a 4th level old spell.... ok that is just me hand waving its my personal translation scheme ;p

Now to cure a disease or affliction, it takes major resources in residuum. 150g for disease and 250g for affliction and if you roll poorly, you can kill the person you're healing. Granted, rolling low and doing damage equal to max hp to a commoner most likely means you do 1 point of damage .... It's a combination of it makes the PCs look important and powerful for only they are hardy enough to take the kind of risks that lead to those situations. You can't do cures or restorative spells because the common npc can't survive the process and the surely can't afford to pay for it. Nor can the PCs pay to cure more than a few people. The PCs just don't have the resources to do that because they really are going to need $$ to upgrade their gear to survive defeating whatever else is endangering the town.

Rituals become pretty cheap at higher levels and a level 6 arcane utility power comes to mind which by mid paragon those rituals are half price. 75gp and 125gp. Compared to the 25,000 gold you are toting for a weapon... umm yeah.... right. I think you might find they could fix umm loads of folk without batting an eye too heavily...(and the skill to minimize the risk will have started kicking for those with that kind of emphasis)

At lower levels true healing being something you really have to want to do makes it better more significant feeling... in my opinion. Whoop de doo ho hum.... you expended a daily to do a true healing or worse waved some cheap wands at it.... that is not really how I want it to feel.

In all honesty in game world during AD&D era basically I had a massive tragedy kill off virtually the entirety of the worlds healers (the healing gift was not something just anybody could do ... ) Basically because I thought healing felt debased and common and death too meaningless with easy resurrection. (so you go on a quest and really risk yourself if you want to try and bring back an ally -- its not some die roll fluke but a plot device this way )

However for those with the Gift ;p I have some homebrew feats that similarly reduce costs and casting time of specific ritual groups. The Germain one called the healers gift. (basically a modified version of the Healers Mark with more lets make these rituals less costly)..

I think to do a long duration effect.... a long duration cost is appropriate. A light spell to lasts 8 hours do a ritual for it. 25 gp and 10 minutes done.

My son was told by his DM in 3e if he wanted the attack to happen the way he described it some sort of spinning strike... he was going to have to take a penalty on the die roll and make an acrobatics check... now that must feel magical. He specifically thought the DM was clueless but I think it was the systems paradigm of lets try to be realistic interfering with somebody wanting to be cinematic and wanting to see LOTR movie in his minds eye.
The game that feels mechanical to him is 3e... and 4e is vivid.

The player now has more role in selecting the mechanics associated with what he wants his character to be doing, in that regards you could say it isn't more mechanical but the role of selecting mechanics(alah the player both narrates and has some well defined choices of mechanics to use with them) is no longer sole purview of the dm .. the dms role of going beyond those tightly defined mechanics is probably more important than ever before which is why you see more development in the form of guidelines shorthanded as page 42.

 

[Garthanos]

This is probably my biggest issue with 4E, discovered after playing for some time. (That's why I called my hack "Fiction First".) The way I look at it is: If you can always come up with some colour to justify why this power works in this situation, it means that "this situation" isn't really important. What's important is the power and the rules, not the colour around it.

In other words, the situation in the game world doesn't affect resolution (of the situation in the game world, it's strange).

I allow both the situation to influence and the players description to affect the resolution of actions employing both skills and powers. The DMs best friend is the easiest way. Perceptive use of the the environmental features . aka paying attention to what the DM described gets encouraged the rules already encourage paying attention to positioning among other things like environmental features which may explicitly exploited.

Using established rules powers and moves as a center point around which to deviate, is solid and well defined. I worry your fiction first will deprive me of a repertoire of tried and true moves (ask martial artists about something called Kata) and will deprive me of having player characters or monsters with a defined combat style.... See bland city.

I am pretty sure so many things about game play are the people factor and the web inhibits the best of communication so we argue loudly over things that face to face just wouldn't be issues.(the things I worry about in your ideas may be things that wouldn't happen for a particular DM - ie it might be just a case of it works for you situation like with other massively DM controlled games)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I really like 4E; I think it's a slick and elegant engine. I do have a few issues with it, though.



This is probably my biggest issue with 4E, discovered after playing for some time. (That's why I called my hack "Fiction First".) The way I look at it is: If you can always come up with some colour to justify why this power works in this situation, it means that "this situation" isn't really important. What's important is the power and the rules, not the colour around it.

In other words, the situation in the game world doesn't affect resolution (of the situation in the game world, it's strange).

What gets resolved are the numbers on the sheet - HP, XP, attack bonuses, skill modifiers, defences. You have to take the time and effort to give those meaning; but the game doesn't push you that way, it doesn't give you a reason to apply that meaning. It doesn't point to that blank space and say, "Hey, look, what goes here, guys playing the game?"

It makes it easy to ignore the game world, even if you'd like to focus on it. The game is complex and there are a lot of things going on at any one point, and when one thing isn't related to anything else (i.e. the game world), it's the first to go.

However, the elegance of the system is such that it makes it easy to put the game world back in if you strip out some of the other elements. What's more, the system has some nice numbers to it, and it's still D&D with elves and dwarves and orcs and gnolls - that's why I've stuck with it and hacked it into something more of my liking.

I think of it as a sort of glass half empty/half full kind of situation. Its true that players who are just into the mechanics can sail through a combat (and some other situations perhaps) paying attention only to the numbers, but on the flip side a player that is very narrative can hang a pretty darn good story on the mechanical framework.

The DM holds a lot of responsibility for how all of this goes of course. First of all since they're in charge of the narrative element of at least half of the cast in any given scene they have an input that in that respect that is at least equal to that of all the players (though obviously NPCs are mostly less developed so it tends to be simpler, you don't need to get too fancy with an orc most of the time). On top of that of course they have the added dimension of constructing the environment, which can have a big impact by providing more or less tools for narrative creativity. Bare rooms and such don't do a lot for the narrative, but lots of really engaging environmental elements can provide a real bonanza there.

Its funny, even something small can make a huge difference. I was running my group through an underground dungeon-like setting the other day. First they ran into various orcs in a couple of rooms/corridors that were fairly barren. The tactical situation was engaging but it was pretty mundane hack-n-slash. Then they came to a room with a table in it, and an orc jailer that was menacing some prisoners. Wow, the dynamic changed. The dwarf leaped off the steps leading in to the room onto the table and let out a mighty battle cry, the jailor used a power to knock him prone, hurling him to the floor! The other players were suddenly energized and a really interesting little skirmish developed around the table. It was a totally simple mundane prop that I added to the room with little thought to any tactical significance and the jailer was just some orc that I dropped in off the Compendium that had a couple oddball powers, but just that minor amount of extra fluff made the whole encounter amazingly more fun.

Obviously the players did the work of rising to it and I've set up other situations that had equally interesting possibilities where it didn't quite gel. Atmosphere and group dynamics play a large part. I guess one thing I like about 4e is it tends to give you a lot of tools in that direction. If the battle had been a fight in say 1e then chances are I wouldn't have thought to have the orc knock the dwarf down (and there's no mechanism ready at hand to adjudicate it). The wizard probably would have dropped a spell that decisively resolved the situation on his turn too. It might well have turned out equally interesting and there would surely have been something cool happening during play but 4e did a good job and with either system players can still be lazy and just work the mechanics and not bother with the narrative.

Out of combat I think 4e works well too. I always had certain frustrations with earlier editions. There was no real foundation for ritual sorts of magic for instance. You could make up powerful spells that had huge casting times or whatnot, or just make something up from whole cloth, but it was totally on the DM's shoulders and it was hard to give the PCs that sort of stuff. Even with NPCs the system really assumed powerful = high level = all the other stuff that goes with high level (if the evil wizard has a spell that can destroy the world then its obviously a 9th level spell, so where are his other mega powerful spells?). It also always irritated me that there was for instance no way for lower level PCs to make weak magic items. Nope, to make even the most measly +1 dagger you HAVE to be a 13th level magic user or cleric! (I guess 3.x maybe changed that, I'm not sure).

It seems to me 4e's design really does pay a lot of attention to constructing a solid framework for that kind of narrative freedom. So far I haven't actually run into those situations where I dream up something and then have to wonder how the heck I can arm twist it into the game in a logical fashion. 1e/2e always seemed to be intent on throwing up obstacles. 4e seems to me to say "yeah, here's a way to work that in".

It may be legitimate for people to object that 4e balance considerations can be somewhat restrictive. Certainly if you want to play a character that is say a werewolf or something then you'll immediately have DM concerns about how that character compares to the others, but then if it was a 1e game the consideration wouldn't really exist, but only because the magic user was already 92x more useful than the fighter, so why bother to even think about it? At least things like PPs and EDs exist to provide some level of support for doing that stuff in a way that lets the PC evolve into it (though it may require a bit of home brew to get the mechanics for that).

Mostly I think 4e's drier presentation of player mechanics (and maybe exposure to 3.x's simulationist bent) has gotten people into a mind set that they should just treat the rules as a codification of elements of play and style too much. It really does need to be "Fiction First" but personally I just see that as an attitude, not something that 4e actually works against. It could have encouraged it more stylistically, but I'm not real sure how the rules need to change to do it.

 

[Quickleaf]

I agree that reading the 4e books (especially the phb series) is dry, but that in play it is dynamic and fun. Having just DMed a year-long heroic tier campaign for a group of 7 gamers new to 4e, here were the comments I noticed repeatedly... Combat was really exciting! There felt like there was more riding on each roll. You always feel like you have choices, sometimes too many. After a while few challenges felt life-threatening (and I consistently gave them encounters 3 to 5 levels beyond them) but at the same time it was nice not to feel so fragile at lower levels. Skill challenges were very fun but players were overall more comfortable with a "roll as you go" style. There's a steep learning curve for players coming from 3e. Players started getting locked in to powers and improvised less (despite explicit reminders). For non-tactically minded players choosing which power to use was overwhelming. It was hard to visualize certain powers in play, especially with leaders. Character creation limits concepts for spellcasters. Rituals were often forgotten but were used to great effect. Leveling is more interesting than 3e. The phb is boring to read..... That's everything I can remember.

 

[Zustiur]

I'm a reformed 4e hater, and agree with pretty much all of what has been said so far.
It took me 2 years (that's 24 9 hour gaming sessions) to go from wishing we were playing 3e and swearing I'd never dm 4e, to looking forward to every game, and being the process of building my own 4e campaign.

Here are my observations on that transition:

• I hadn't ever had a good chance to play 3e, and felt that was being taken away from me
• 4e changes a heck of a lot, it's not subtle at all about those changes
• I hadn't encountered the 'problems' of 3e, so didn't appreciate the heavy handed fixes of 4e
• The PHB books really are impossible to read
• The Character Builder program is a necessity if you're using more than just the original core books
• You really need a good system of tracking conditions and battle positions, whether that be miniatures and tokens, or a program like MapTool
• A lot of the DM fixes of 4e can be applied to 3e, but it would take a lot of front end effort
• KotS is a passable module, but really needs some DM tweaking. I highly advise getting the DM to check with other DMs that have already run it, and asking them what needs fixing.
• My group is painfully slow when it comes to deciding what they'll do each turn, so our combats all take 2 or more hours

Zustiur.

 

[pemerton]

The way I look at it is: If you can always come up with some colour to justify why this power works in this situation, it means that "this situation" isn't really important. What's important is the power and the rules, not the colour around it.

In other words, the situation in the game world doesn't affect resolution (of the situation in the game world, it's strange).

<snip>

It makes it easy to ignore the game world, even if you'd like to focus on it.

I allow both the situation to influence and the players description to affect the resolution of actions employing both skills and powers. The DMs best friend is the easiest way.

<snip>

the rules already encourage paying attention to positioning among other things

Bare rooms and such don't do a lot for the narrative, but lots of really engaging environmental elements can provide a real bonanza there.

To date, my experience has been closer to that of Garthanos and AbdulAlharzred than to LostSoul. Sure, certain parts of the ingame situation are abstracted away (eg the precise phyics and physiology of an ooze, which are implicated in rendering it "prone" or "dazed").

But my players have plenty of other reasons to pay attention to the gameworld - eg they worry about acid from oozes, and getting engulfed, they worry about being grabbed by things with tentacles, etc. And they pay a lot of attention to positioning.

In my experience, the player who engages least with the gameworld is the one playing the archer ranger - other than using Hunter's Quarry, positioning is not so important for this PC, and he is much less often in the way of attacks (especially melee attacks, which often have some of the more interesting effects associated with them). So it may in part be a PC build thing - some PC builds interact less with those parts of the gameworld that the mechanics do do a good job of bringing to life.

 

[Jools]

Eh, I wish there was a better "intro" module for 4E. I like 4E a lot... but KotS can be very, very grindy and drags a bit. It's a good showcase for the pure mechanics, but for the general way 4E plays... not so much. For my group, KotS was like this:

1st half: Cool, it's fun!
2nd half: Hooooow many goblins?

It left us unimpressed - only with more interesting adventures, 4E clicked for us.

Cheers, LT.

Probably too late for you now but try The Slaying Stone, its really nice.

 

[Starfox]

Some of what I would consider to be the key mechanical changes are as follows...

The problem for the writers of 4E is that they wanted to start from a cleans late. Beginning you book by referencing an old system forever ties you to that old system. 4E is written to be a first read, only rpg, and I think it has to be to appeal to new gamers.

What might have been needed (and what your post is) is an "Old-timers guide to 4E".