D&D 4E Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Did it? It broadened it, but I never saw any breaking in play.

So, how do you reconcile the refresh rates for a Slayer and a Wizard (even the Essentials one)? 'Broadened' means nothing to me, they are simply not compatible.

Well, no, it went in a direction you didn’t prefer.

Hey, I bought a lot of 4e stuff and brought in plenty of people that weren't already playing it. Seems to me like the opinions and tastes of your supporters might be important, but WotC instead put a guy in charge that didn't believe in the game, and apparently didn't understand it.

No, it didn’t.

You can, obviously, just make statements like that, but without any logic behind it, they're of little value, aren't they?

Most of the time you are just hitting and moving. That’s it. Even the number of stances is fewer than the list of encounter and daily powers.

You are picking a stance and then making an attack. How is that a different number of/simpler set of, decisions from making an At-Will attack, which is what I compared it to? Oh, and if you are then going to make a Power Attack, that's ANOTHER decision. "hitting and moving" IS making those decisions. I mean, if you want, we can draw out the decision trees, I'm 100% sure of what the answer is.

And those additional options weren’t valuable to a lot of players. Also, you still had those options.

Except they did value them. Once you hit 10th level, Slayer starts to really fall flat. I mean, you can find some deep charops tricks to pump it up on the DPR front, so it will basically be 'playable' in a sense, but it will just do basically one thing over and over, like charging (which is the best option mechanically). The other similar e-classes, the thief for instance, are even more problematic. Thematically the Sentinel is OK, but it too loses dramatically to the Druid at higher levels. I get it, Mearls decided everything past 10th level was worthless. A lot of people didn't agree.

Yes, it is. It’s much simpler. Less to think about while leveling and when deciding on an action, practically no mental overhead at all. Pick target, attack, use your one encounter power as much as possible every encounter. You can build a Ranger to be fairly simple, but that process isn’t simple, and you still have to review powers and choose one every single turn.

Want to go through the decision trees? You're going to be disappointed.

Clearly? I don’t think that’s clear at all.

I think its pretty clear that the sales numbers for Essentials were not good. It was neither fish nor fowl.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is simply wrong and the slayer is both simpler than the bow ranger and opens the game up a bit more.

• You do not have to pick your stance from round to round. You just declare the +1 to hit stance at the start of the campaign, write it on your character sheet, and you're done.
• The Slayer has excellent chunking; instead of trying to decide at the same time who you're attacking and how you're going to hit them, it gets broken down into simple steps. So if you are facing four foes although the Slayer has officially 16 options they have two at the start (keep or switch stance), four in who to hit, and two in whether to power attack or not. Three simple choices. Meanwhile the equivalent AEDU fighter or ranger with two encounter powers (and no dailies) has a single choice with sixteen options. It's the same number of possibilities but much more overwhelming.
• You only have Power Attack to worry about rather than a rash of encounter powers.

So the slayer, for most people is far simpler.

My experience in play says differently. First of all, while you might choose, theoretically, to only use one stance, EVER, you still have to follow the stance rules, and beyond that you STILL HAVE THE CHOICE. 'chunking' means nothing to me. I want to make my decisions at the RELEVANT TIME, which I find to be always a simpler design. Instead of making several distinct choices, I'm choosing, with say my bow ranger, to do X and everything selected is related directly to my goal and comes temporally at the decision point for that goal. That's simple. I mean, we played these things, in the same party, and there's really no difference in complexity.

Equally importantly the slayer is different. Some things just click with some people and others with others. And the slayer clicks with some people the AEDU classes don't. This is a good thing. I know I'd find playing a slayer incredibly tedious but it doesn't harm my fun if someone else is playing one and they get more fun out of it than an orthodox AEDU class.

I don't think we needed to break the resource paradigm and build something so different, and thus filled with potential to generate awkward issues, as the Slayer and such to get that. I mean, we could discuss alternative implementations, I think you'll find that one probably wasn't the best choice.

The warpriest annoys me because I could see some interesting design space opening up. The trade-off should have been basically a mostly pregenerated character that couldn't cherry pick the best powers in exchange for some bonuses you couldn't get from the base class; there's quite a lot of potential design space there but they used none of it and instead basically had a less flexible cleric.

Yeah, and that pretty much extends to the other classes that were built along similar lines, IMHO. They are not BAD, they are just not really adding enough to 4e to be worth a whole 10 SKUs worth of the product line, IMHO. And then half of every book from then on was a weird amalgam of options for old and new, it was a 'gift' that we just kept paying for, but had little clear benefit overall.

And that was my point, it was a suck of resources from what was interesting and unique about 4e and deserved further development. The GOOD PARTS of late era 4e are the supplements and the adventures, NOT Essentials! The sad fact is we could have gotten more of that goodness. Heck, why not a rewrite of DMG1 instead of RC? DMG1 is actually a pretty decent book, but it REALLY could have used some more polish. Without breaking the numerical 'engine' of the game we could have built a much more interesting game, so no compatibility issues, but much better. Instead we got E-classes, which is just meh.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Eh, I didn't see the move from everybody being AEDU to some being less daily in their powers as breaking the rest cycle. There were still hard healing surge daily limits.

I rarely saw parties hit those limits, but did see parties decide they felt the upcoming encounter would be too hard without dailies. And I'm someone who would have rather had NO dailies for anyone.

From my point of view it meant more consistency in what to expect from PCs combat to combat as there was less spikey daily powers that might or might not enter a combat.

Yes, the reduction of choice, variety and excitement was a huge selling point that they were targeted for and the part I hated the most.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For me, and for you, there is little difference. But we are not 100% of the potential players of 4e or even close. There definitely are players who prefer stances and I've DM'd for two at the same table who were struggling a bit with 4e until one of them got to play a scout (not even a slayer) and another a pyromancer (elementalist).

These are also not normally people who worry about the optimal action - just one that's good enough. And before you say that the scout isn't any simpler than e.g. a 4e PHB Ranger, for you and me this would be right. But he had two years of 4e experience and by the second session he was far far more fluid with the rebuilt scout than he had been with the ranger he'd been playing for three months.

I think people really really don't understand that different people have different thought processes and don't all think the same way. And seriously underestimate that one of the strengths of a class system is being able to cater more effectively to different players.

And yet I am told now by those who like 5e that I should just stop complaining and live with the fact that I can't play a warlord, because obviously nobody needs that...

I mean, nobody can really refute your logic here, for any number N of possible class implementations that could be invented for 4e or 5e there is some larger number N+1 which will cater better to some specific person. Clearly that isn't a sufficient argument to say "we should make more/different classes", right?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So, how do you reconcile the refresh rates for a Slayer and a Wizard (even the Essentials one)? 'Broadened' means nothing to me, they are simply not compatible.

There is no need to reconcile them. I've done long days, short days, marathon days where the group got more than 2 extra action points over 3+ sessions, and it does not matter. At all. All it does is broaden the player experience, so that players who dislike the play experience of stressing over daily and encounter resources can play in the same game as people who love the resource management mini-game of a tome-wizard with a bunch of magic item daily powers.

Hey, I bought a lot of 4e stuff and brought in plenty of people that weren't already playing it.

Okay? So did I. In fact I purchased every supplement except the elemental chaos one and maybe a couple X Power books, on top of having a DDI sub throughout the run of 4e, and introduced a lot of people to dnd using 4e.

Seems to me like the opinions and tastes of your supporters might be important, but WotC instead put a guy in charge that didn't believe in the game, and apparently didn't understand it.

You won't find me supporting or defending Mearls. My opinion of him is not the sort of thing I like to say in these forums (although I sometimes slip). However, Essentials was good for 4e. Full stop. It sucks that it didn't help save the edition from getting the axe, because the direction they were going around the time of Heroes of The Feywild was really good.

You can, obviously, just make statements like that, but without any logic behind it, they're of little value, aren't they?

The point of a statement like that is pretty much that I'm saying exactly what you're saying here, to you. You use a lot of words to say stuff that is unsupported by literally anything, but the extra words don't make it more convincing.

You are picking a stance and then making an attack. How is that a different number of/simpler set of, decisions from making an At-Will attack, which is what I compared it to? Oh, and if you are then going to make a Power Attack, that's ANOTHER decision. "hitting and moving" IS making those decisions. I mean, if you want, we can draw out the decision trees, I'm 100% sure of what the answer is.

If you won't acknowledge the difference between choosing whether to use an at-will, encounter, or daily power, and choosing whether to change stances or not (which isn't an actual decision point unless you have reason that turn to consider changing it, most of the time people just stay in the same stance for most or all of a fight) and then attacking, there is no point in this discussion continuing.

Except they did value them. Once you hit 10th level, Slayer starts to really fall flat. I mean, you can find some deep charops tricks to pump it up on the DPR front, so it will basically be 'playable' in a sense, but it will just do basically one thing over and over, like charging (which is the best option mechanically). The other similar e-classes, the thief for instance, are even more problematic. Thematically the Sentinel is OK, but it too loses dramatically to the Druid at higher levels. I get it, Mearls decided everything past 10th level was worthless. A lot of people didn't agree.

You've misunderstood. A large number of players did not care about the increased options of every class having a suite of powers with different power levels and refresh rates that fostered different tactical play experiences. Having every class have to have that, no matter what, was a problem for a large number of players.

The fact that some classes weren't the stars of CharOp discussions is so far into the realm of inconsequential trivia that I can't even manage to muster a tiny sliver of interest.

Want to go through the decision trees? You're going to be disappointed.

You can write out convoluted nonsense slanted by your own bias and desire to win an argument all you want.

Anyone who isn't desperately trying to win knows that the Slayer is simpler to build and to play than the PHB Fighter. Trying to claim otherwise is complete absurdity.

Trying to claim that choosing whether to change stance or not before attacking with a basic attack is the same as reviewing several powers with different costs and power levels and different kinds of effects is just...mind-bogglingly strange. There is objectively less to review, less to analyze, while building and playing a Slayer.

I think its pretty clear that the sales numbers for Essentials were not good. It was neither fish nor fowl.

Neither were the sales numbers for 4e DnD before Essentials. The fact that Essentials didn't manage to save the edition does not, by even the most incredible stretch of logic, mean that a doubling down of what 4e was going would have done so.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I mean, we played these things, in the same party, and there's really no difference in complexity.

And other people played with both in the same party and did see the difference.

Maybe consider the idea that other people's experiences are also valid.

 

[Neonchameleon]

My experience in play says differently. First of all, while you might choose, theoretically, to only use one stance, EVER, you still have to follow the stance rules, and beyond that you STILL HAVE THE CHOICE. 'chunking' means nothing to me. I want to make my decisions at the RELEVANT TIME, which I find to be always a simpler design. Instead of making several distinct choices, I'm choosing, with say my bow ranger, to do X and everything selected is related directly to my goal and comes temporally at the decision point for that goal. That's simple. I mean, we played these things, in the same party, and there's really no difference in complexity.

All I got from that is you, @AbdulAlhazred do not want to play a Slayer. Good for you. Neither do I. If I were picking 4e classes that I want to play the Slayer would be dead last, well behind the Binder, the assassin, and any of the power point classes.

But although I @Neonchameleon don't want to play the Slayer because I find it tedious and boring and to not work with the way I like to play not everyone sees the world the way I do. But what I utterly fail to understand is why, just because I don't want to play it that means that it should be taken away from everyone when some of those people could (and did) have more fun with the slayer than with classic AEDU classes.

I don't think we needed to break the resource paradigm and build something so different, and thus filled with potential to generate awkward issues, as the Slayer and such to get that. I mean, we could discuss alternative implementations, I think you'll find that one probably wasn't the best choice.

There are only two "awkward issues" I know of from the slayer are firstly that it doesn't scale well past heroic and secondly that some people think that the game should cater to their tastes at the expense of everyone else despite the fact that they are not going to be playing those classes.

And that was my point, it was a suck of resources from what was interesting and unique about 4e and deserved further development. The GOOD PARTS of late era 4e are the supplements and the adventures, NOT Essentials! The sad fact is we could have gotten more of that goodness. Heck, why not a rewrite of DMG1 instead of RC?

They did. Just as Monster Vault is the reworked Monster Manual the DM's Kit was the reworked DMG.

Fundamentally the biggest strength of a class based game is that each player at the table can be playing a game that is more suited to them because the classes can have different mechanics. This allows players with entirely different mechanical tastes to play at the same table without clashes because they can all have classes tailored to them and play them together at the same time.

And to me one of the issues of 4e was that all the classes were tailored to me (and you and @Garthanos ). And not everyone is like us. To me a broader game that covers more tastes while not utterly shattering the central draw is a better game. I personally have never played a slayer and am almost certainly never going to (unless DMing 4e and the players want a hireling); it is not a class built for my mechanical or thematic tastes at all. But that's what makes it a good addition. Not everyone is like me - and if it enables more players to have fun with the game I enjoy than would otherwise be possible and as long as I don't have to touch it it adds to the game.

And I don't see why, when there were already at least 23 classes before Essentials of which at least 19 were pretty good (the other four being the three power points classes and the original assassin) the idea of adding a class to the game catering to different tastes and that isn't overpowered is considered anything other than a good thing. It enables more people to play more easily - and I fail to see the negatives there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Eh, I didn't see the move from everybody being AEDU to some being less daily in their powers as breaking the rest cycle. There were still hard healing surge daily limits.

From my point of view it meant more consistency in what to expect from PCs combat to combat as there was less spikey daily powers that might or might not enter a combat.

Right, and I object to that too, because the actual, unstated, design purpose of that was to allow for variation of intensity at 2 different scales. You have variation within an encounter based on "Monsters unleash their encounter/recharge powers on round one, backfoot the PCs" followed by the PCs unleashing healing + encounter + possibly daily + AP + item use/consumables to 'right the ship' and take things over the top during rounds 3 and 4. It was a good solid model that works really well. It is supplemented by the 'daily intensity variation' which is STORY PRODUCING. You unleash your daily resources, particularly powers and APs, when the story says the "chips are down" (IE you run into the boss monster or whatever). You have to calculate here. These dailies are your stakes within the mechanical framework of the game. There can, and should, be other narrative stakes as well, but those are more nebulous. The designers can design in the mechanical ones, they are almost guaranteed to work (assuming GMs are aware of how things go, which DMG1 was not really quite good enough to tell us straightforwardly).

Essentials is, FUNDAMENTALLY, an attempt to subvert the Story Game nature of 4e! The purpose of a Slayer, for example, as a class is to support something closer to a Gygaxian mode of play in its stead. You don't have the stuff you could stake in SCs, which exist but are not really emphasized anymore. The main resources you would use in them aside from just skill checks are subverted (Daily powers, rituals, practices, item uses, etc.). Its more than just 'unbalancing the rest cycle', which I agree that the core HS mechanic (which is the really key resource) kind of moderates somewhat. The core identity of the game itself is being muddled. Not extremely, but it was a move in the wrong direction, IMHO.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And yet I am told now by those who like 5e that I should just stop complaining and live with the fact that I can't play a warlord, because obviously nobody needs that...

You are told by some people who like 5e that you should just stop complaining there - but not told that by everyone.

And you sound exactly like them. With the main difference being that they do not want new work put in on something they don't care about but you want to actively unmake an already existing sunk cost. And in a game that has twice as many classes as 5e and was producing more than half a dozen new classes every year at the time the Slayer came out.

I mean, nobody can really refute your logic here, for any number N of possible class implementations that could be invented for 4e or 5e there is some larger number N+1 which will cater better to some specific person. Clearly that isn't a sufficient argument to say "we should make more/different classes", right?

We then have two questions:

1. Was the number of classes being deliberately kept down?
   1. In 4e? No. There were 23 classes before Essentials (8 in the PHB 1, 8 in the PHB 2, 6 in the PHB 3, plus the shroud-Assassin).
   2. In 5e? Yes. There have been precisely two splatbooks and one new class (the Artificer) since the PHB. This is a deliberate strategy
2. Is there a significant group that would be served by adding this new class?
   1. For the Slayer in 4e, in my experience, yes. As mentioned two people at my main table. And so what if it was because they had thirty years experience of pre-4e D&D each. That doesn't make them not people or not interested.
   2. For the Warlord in 5e? Again yes. Something better than the piss-poor warlordesque abilities the Battlemaster got would be a start. (I've said in other posts what it would need for me for 5e to scratch at least some of the Warlord itch - but it isn't there right now).
   3. For the Cancer Mage from the 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness? Show me that people actually are demanding it as more than a meme and we'll talk.

 

[Voadam]

I rarely saw parties hit those limits, but did see parties decide they felt the upcoming encounter would be too hard without dailies. And I'm someone who would have rather had NO dailies for anyone.

Different experiences. I was in several games where the combats pushed hard on healing surges as a used resource and limit. It also felt different to me to say our front line tanks are beat up and barely hanging on so lets pull back to rest up, rather than I spent my fun powers earlier, so lets not push on.

Yes, the reduction of choice, variety and excitement was a huge selling point that they were targeted for and the part I hated the most.

I saw it as shifting choices and variety from daily resource management tracking for powers to more focus on choices that can be there all the time or every fight.

I do not particularly like the mini game of evaluating whether the current fight is the expected toughest fight for the in-game day for maximizing effective use of the daily powers. It led to some weird game rhythms like everybody blowing dailies in random encounters when doing a long travel sequence and a combat usually comes up less than once a day. This contrasted with going into a plot important place where most big bad climax fights the PCs will usually have spent some power resources before getting to the climax fight so they get to do less of their pull out the stops cool stuff when it would be most appropriate.

I much prefer always launching into fights hard and making round by round decisions on options like stances and at will abilities without metagame thinking about whether it is a five-minute adventuring day or how many more fights you expect. 4e AEDU was generally better than 3e vancian casters for this, but I liked a lot of essentials options even more than base AEDU.