Haltherrion
First Post
I see 4E getting a lot of flack here. For those who have tried it and don’t like it, I’m sure you have good reasons for it. I’m not really trying to convert anyone but I think, at least as an academic exercise, I’d like to try to provide a counterpoint.
Overall, my group and I like the system better than any other D&D system we’ve played. My players go back to AD&D2 and I go back to OD&D. 4E is not without its flaws but on balance, it’s a strong net win for us.
Our group likes roleplaying and a typical session may have as many or more non-combat incidents as combat incidents. But we do have combat and since, in any system I can recall, a combat incident generally takes longer to resolve than a non-combat incident, we generally spend a fair amount of a game session in combat. Plus we all like board games and enjoy interesting combat mechanics. Given the time in combat and our enjoyment of tactical games, 4E is a very nice system for our group.
There are things I don’t like about 4E but there are things I don’t like about earlier systems. Some things I think 4E improves:
· My favorite pre-4E classes are casters but especially by high levels, the casters have far more “interesting” things to do in a round than the non-casters. They had many spells to cast and in later systems, many variants with meta-magics while the melee classes were mostly locked in placed swinging their weapons.
· Pre-4E combat for us could get very static. Characters had few ways to move an enemy and little incentive to do anything but take a full round attack action. Any movement beyond a 5 square adjust meant you got only one attack that round instead of your n-attacks at higher levels. This mechanic even introduced a noticeable change in combat as PCs leveled, got their extra attacks and stopped moving around much on the battlefield so they could use those attacks.
· Early systems were much less crisp on how actions were defined and were much less regular. 4E, you get a minor, move and standard action, plus clear rules on free-actions and responsive reactions. Everyone has the same amount at all levels. Gives everyone a fair amount of “air” time during battle.
· 4E abilities and combat rules make for fun battles with tactics and terrain mattering a lot more than they used to. Moreover, everyone has a roughly equal amount of stuff to do in battle.
· At lower level in pre-4E, casters quickly run out of spells to cast. Many was the wizard who carried (and made heavy use) of his crossbow until he had a reasonable number of spells to cast. Moreover, it introduced a major break as players forced daily rests after using their 2 spells per day. 4E greatly softens this. Within encounters you start with 2 and get a few more encounter powers as you level. Dailies are more restrictive but not critical to having fun in combat. And the at-wills are respectable and always give you something to.
· Healers often had thankless and fairly dull jobs. While sometimes 4E goes a little too far, there are first off, a number of very distinct flavors of healers and builds that are more or less healing focused, and second off, the healer generally has a wide range of options from dealing damage to moving foes around to doing other interesting (both in terms of utility and color) support things.
· The classes are nicely re-imagined and balanced. There are few classes that stand out as over or under powered.
· The race mechanics adds a wide range of interesting classes with both unique color and abilities without having to introduce ECL which I’ve made heavy use of in earlier systems but find clunky.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the combat aspect because this is where I think 4E stands above earlier systems. Gone are the battles were the player with the fighter takes a quarter the time to resolve his actions compared to the mage and the cleric tunes in occasionally to toss out a heal while flipping through the monster manual to stave off boredom. Everyone gets an equal amount of the time during combat and has an equal contribution to make.
What about non-combat? Well, I think 4E oversimplified skills and I think the skill challenge, while interesting to a point, is overdone but in the end, I don’t think any system has a ton of impact on the non-combat side. Very early D&D left it entirely to the players since there were no skills and some of the middle editions had fairly weak skill systems. Those systems worked fine for non-combat mostly because non-combat doesn’t need a lot of rules to work fine. Put another way, I think any of the D&D editions works fine out of combat.
4E has its weaknesses. These have been called out at length elsewhere but briefly, while I like some of the “leveling” they did, they went too far. A character in cloth can have the same AC as someone in heavy armor, heck, everyone has pretty similar defenses. They also reduced skills to “you’re poor at it, you’re good at it, you’re very good at it” which is fine for a rules-light system but D&D isn’t rules-light and could stand to have something more robust. There are other things I’d like to see fixed but overall, my group and I like more things in 4E than in any early D&D edition.
Overall, my group and I like the system better than any other D&D system we’ve played. My players go back to AD&D2 and I go back to OD&D. 4E is not without its flaws but on balance, it’s a strong net win for us.
Our group likes roleplaying and a typical session may have as many or more non-combat incidents as combat incidents. But we do have combat and since, in any system I can recall, a combat incident generally takes longer to resolve than a non-combat incident, we generally spend a fair amount of a game session in combat. Plus we all like board games and enjoy interesting combat mechanics. Given the time in combat and our enjoyment of tactical games, 4E is a very nice system for our group.
There are things I don’t like about 4E but there are things I don’t like about earlier systems. Some things I think 4E improves:
· My favorite pre-4E classes are casters but especially by high levels, the casters have far more “interesting” things to do in a round than the non-casters. They had many spells to cast and in later systems, many variants with meta-magics while the melee classes were mostly locked in placed swinging their weapons.
· Pre-4E combat for us could get very static. Characters had few ways to move an enemy and little incentive to do anything but take a full round attack action. Any movement beyond a 5 square adjust meant you got only one attack that round instead of your n-attacks at higher levels. This mechanic even introduced a noticeable change in combat as PCs leveled, got their extra attacks and stopped moving around much on the battlefield so they could use those attacks.
· Early systems were much less crisp on how actions were defined and were much less regular. 4E, you get a minor, move and standard action, plus clear rules on free-actions and responsive reactions. Everyone has the same amount at all levels. Gives everyone a fair amount of “air” time during battle.
· 4E abilities and combat rules make for fun battles with tactics and terrain mattering a lot more than they used to. Moreover, everyone has a roughly equal amount of stuff to do in battle.
· At lower level in pre-4E, casters quickly run out of spells to cast. Many was the wizard who carried (and made heavy use) of his crossbow until he had a reasonable number of spells to cast. Moreover, it introduced a major break as players forced daily rests after using their 2 spells per day. 4E greatly softens this. Within encounters you start with 2 and get a few more encounter powers as you level. Dailies are more restrictive but not critical to having fun in combat. And the at-wills are respectable and always give you something to.
· Healers often had thankless and fairly dull jobs. While sometimes 4E goes a little too far, there are first off, a number of very distinct flavors of healers and builds that are more or less healing focused, and second off, the healer generally has a wide range of options from dealing damage to moving foes around to doing other interesting (both in terms of utility and color) support things.
· The classes are nicely re-imagined and balanced. There are few classes that stand out as over or under powered.
· The race mechanics adds a wide range of interesting classes with both unique color and abilities without having to introduce ECL which I’ve made heavy use of in earlier systems but find clunky.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the combat aspect because this is where I think 4E stands above earlier systems. Gone are the battles were the player with the fighter takes a quarter the time to resolve his actions compared to the mage and the cleric tunes in occasionally to toss out a heal while flipping through the monster manual to stave off boredom. Everyone gets an equal amount of the time during combat and has an equal contribution to make.
What about non-combat? Well, I think 4E oversimplified skills and I think the skill challenge, while interesting to a point, is overdone but in the end, I don’t think any system has a ton of impact on the non-combat side. Very early D&D left it entirely to the players since there were no skills and some of the middle editions had fairly weak skill systems. Those systems worked fine for non-combat mostly because non-combat doesn’t need a lot of rules to work fine. Put another way, I think any of the D&D editions works fine out of combat.
4E has its weaknesses. These have been called out at length elsewhere but briefly, while I like some of the “leveling” they did, they went too far. A character in cloth can have the same AC as someone in heavy armor, heck, everyone has pretty similar defenses. They also reduced skills to “you’re poor at it, you’re good at it, you’re very good at it” which is fine for a rules-light system but D&D isn’t rules-light and could stand to have something more robust. There are other things I’d like to see fixed but overall, my group and I like more things in 4E than in any early D&D edition.
