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

[Joshua Randall]

This is definitely a big part of the fun of 4e for me. I look forward to my Fighter reaching 5th level so I can Minor Action Rain of Steel on the same turn I Encounter Power - action point - Encounter power - and probably use an item Daily on the same turn too.

Exactly! One thing I appreciated about 4e is that it was honest about its appeal to power gamers / butt-kickers and made their experience AWESOME.

I think 4e actually appealed to various other player types in the Robin Laws framework. For example I think 4e appealed to casual gamers (at least based on my local experience in 4e's early years) and sneakily also appealed to storytellers (if they could get past their distaste for all the numbers and overtly game-y elements, they would discover their narrative control, as is being discussed elsewhere in this thread).

But for some reason the Internet decided that actually making a game that appeals to power gamers in addition to other player types was BadWrongFun and drowned all 4e discussion in hatred and vitriol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The flip side of this is players have less ability to affect the shared fiction.

Part of what I found distinctive about 4e D&D is its player-side resource suites which give players a lot of scope to make decisions about when they really want to try hard and impose their wills on the unfolding situation (action points, daily powers, and so on).

Right, exactly why I said that Essentials was a move to undermine the Story Game interpretation of 4e play. I mean, we cannot say what was in the mind of certain people who pushed Essentials and shaped its design, but the RESULT is certainly to lessen the player's ability to make those kind of decisions, and to push that onto specific builds (IE the Mage, which gets a VERY substantial boost in power and no decrease at all in ability to 'nova').

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think there are two issues here.

(1) Wizards' initial vastly unrealistic overpromising of DDI ("Gleemax" LOL) functionality. That grandiose vision would've required the team of scores of experienced devs and the multi-millions of dollars you talked about.

(2) However, for what it turned out Wizards was actually working on (a character builder), with a small team, the loss of a key person or two can be devastating.

For comparison, in a past life I worked for a major auto insurance company (it's one you've heard of) on rebuilding the rating engine with a team of 6 developers. Yeah. A half-dozen people were responsible for arguably the most important piece of software to the entire company. Our lead dev / technical architect was very, very smart and experienced and savvy about business operations. If we had lost him for any reason, the project would have had major problems.

So I can image that Wizards losing their key person was equally devastating.

Right, but they'd have been back on track in a couple months with a new guy. I mean, I think it probably WAS pretty disruptive, but that is more of an indication of how thin and unrealistically underresourced the whole project was than an indication that software development projects necessarily hinge on one or two key people. I mean, the CB and MB and most of the basic DDI stuff that they did implement is very generic web app functionality at its essence. It didn't take some genius to head that. So their story that they would have had 3D and a VTT and etc. all but for this tragic event, won't hold water. POSSIBLY the generic stuff was a team of half-a-dozen that got set back 6 months, tops. The other stuff was a fantasy anyway, so really any story except "It wasn't possible for us to do." is pixie dust.

I mean, you see similar issues today with the VTTs that are out there. Roll20 has a terrible UX, and I'm not finding that Astral is that much of a different story. There's just no money in that product, so its "hey, it works, AT ALL, that's as good as it will get." I don't fault any of these efforts, at least they have got somewhere!

 

[Undrave]

But again, the problem with Necro/Nether is they are stuck being Mage subclasses, which serves no real purpose. I think that the different types of implement specialities are just as interesting, potentially as whatever is in Mage. It didn't get quite the focus I would have given it though. The summoner thing was a good start, with the tome. The IDEA of a more accurate wizard, a more potent effect wizard, and a more melee capable wizard (staff) were solid ideas though. I don't see the point of the change midstream to a different way of parsing it. Instead why not actually develop those themes? Necro could easily involve a new implement for instance, and Nether, meh, who asked for it?

The use of implements meant that, for once, a Wizard's gear actually has an impact on their performance and their 'fighting style' for lack of a better term. Just like how a Sword or Hammer fighters play differently. They moved the bat guano and other minutiae to rituals and kept fighting more slick and simple... And I think the implement Wizards would have made more interesting 5e subclass than the 8 repetitive ones we got in PHB1.

And then they had to go and try to retcon all the damn School of Magic stuff in... bleh. This was such a blatant appeal to grognards, along the vanishing of rituals... I was really not a fan. It didn't bring anything to 4e and I feel like they were the dumbest thing to base 5e Wizard subclasses on. (They do work great on the new Sorcerers and define the multi-class style subclasses)

(IE the Mage, which gets a VERY substantial boost in power and no decrease at all in ability to 'nova').

Of course the Mage is powerful, it's a WIZARD after all, right? Don't you know Wizards are supposed to be the best class and if they aren't... well it's not D&D! Right?

/s

 

[Joshua Randall]

their story that they would have had 3D and a VTT and etc. all but for this tragic event, won't hold water.

Was that actually a story they told though? I honestly can't recall. I thought the story was more around why character builder v1 was late / missing features / buggy, and that they pretty quickly swept under the rug the bullsh*t pixie-dust full suite of magical unicorn tools (basically admitting it was vaporware). i.e., I thought the loss of a team member was (accurately?) being blamed for a setback in character builder itself (only).

But I'm old and have bad memory, so who knows. Anyway....

you see similar issues today with the VTTs that are out there. Roll20 has a terrible UX, and I'm not finding that Astral is that much of a different story. There's just no money in that product, so its "hey, it works, AT ALL, that's as good as it will get."

So as a professional UX designer, I'll say that while better design isn't free it doesn't have to be expensive. More than anything else it would require a mindset shift from the developers / companies that build VTTs. ("You [developer] are not your user." -- design for the people who actually use your product)

But as you've implied, maybe they are happy enough with their outcomes, and maybe the market of people-willing-to-put-up-with-bad-U.I.-because-it's-still-a-VTT-woohoo! is a good enough market.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Was that actually a story they told though? I honestly can't recall. I thought the story was more around why character builder v1 was late / missing features / buggy, and that they pretty quickly swept under the rug the bullsh*t pixie-dust full suite of magical unicorn tools (basically admitting it was vaporware). i.e., I thought the loss of a team member was (accurately?) being blamed for a setback in character builder itself (only).

But I'm old and have bad memory, so who knows. Anyway....

Heh, you and me both So, short of going and digging back into wayback land, which I'm not really inclined to trouble myself to do, I don't actually know in detail. I do know that the things they DISCUSSED implied at the very least that there would be some sort of online play capability, and the eventual VTT was perceived as an attempt to fill that promise. They certainly talked about 3D character models and some stuff like that (but how exactly they were going to be used I'm not sure). It LOOKS to me, from various discussions about what the D&D team told Hasbro, that they at least had an AMBITION to do something that would rival 'MMOs'. They may well not have really clearly known what exactly that was, and you may be right in thinking that their explanation was only MEANT to apply to the CB.

OTOH, the CB wasn't especially late, the offline CB came out pretty quickly after the game was released. I don't recall the exact timing, but it was not that long, and it was actually a pretty solid offering (albeit only usable on PC desktop, but also was usable offline, sort of a plus/minus situation). I think it is likely that the actual program produced is rather less filled with bells and whistles than was dreamed of, but it is a good solid application that people are still using!

So, it SEEMS like the things that WotC really was telling a story about was the more 'advanced' stuff like a VTT (maybe 3D etc, nobody knows for sure) etc. Anyway, I never either believed the "crazy guy tragedy" story, nor really thought WotC earned much blame here. They imagined something well beyond that capabilities, but you get noplace if you don't dream, and what WAS provided was pretty good quality.

So as a professional UX designer, I'll say that while better design isn't free it doesn't have to be expensive. More than anything else it would require a mindset shift from the developers / companies that build VTTs. ("You [developer] are not your user." -- design for the people who actually use your product)

But as you've implied, maybe they are happy enough with their outcomes, and maybe the market of people-willing-to-put-up-with-bad-U.I.-because-it's-still-a-VTT-woohoo! is a good enough market.

Perhaps. I think they COULD maybe do better. I'm not sure if the failure to do so is purely a resource issue or also an organizational failing. UX can be a pretty tough nut to crack. I once worked with a woman who was offered the job of head of UX experience by Microsoft! She told me even they were pretty inept on that front (this was about 20 years back, things are likely pretty different there now). Anyway, having run small software shops, I don't really fault them too much, though I have complained here and there about Roll20. We can hope they improve with time.

 

[TwoSix]

I've been running a 4E solo game with my 5 year old son and the house rule we've been using is you can use one big thing --- action point, daily, or item power --- per encounter but they all refresh with a short rest, similar to how Channel Divinity powers function. Its worked like a charm so far and effectively made the game 100% encounter-based.

The house rule I had, but only really got to try briefly, was that APs started at 0, but you got one whenever you expended a healing surge. You could only use a daily power by expending an action point, but you could use any particular daily power only once per encounter.

It gave pushing forward despite attrition a mechanical bonus, and tied attrition directly back to healing surges, where it belonged. It also served as almost like an escalation die for longer battles, since stronger dailies would be used more often in the later rounds.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The use of implements meant that, for once, a Wizard's gear actually has an impact on their performance and their 'fighting style' for lack of a better term. Just like how a Sword or Hammer fighters play differently. They moved the bat guano and other minutiae to rituals and kept fighting more slick and simple... And I think the implement Wizards would have made more interesting 5e subclass than the 8 repetitive ones we got in PHB1.

And then they had to go and try to retcon all the damn School of Magic stuff in... bleh. This was such a blatant appeal to grognards, along the vanishing of rituals... I was really not a fan. It didn't bring anything to 4e and I feel like they were the dumbest thing to base 5e Wizard subclasses on. (They do work great on the new Sorcerers and define the multi-class style subclasses)


Of course the Mage is powerful, it's a WIZARD after all, right? Don't you know Wizards are supposed to be the best class and if they aren't... well it's not D&D! Right?

/s

I think they didn't really quite do as much with implements as they could have. It turned out to be a pretty minor feature, and frankly the outright superiority of attack bonuses over all else meant that Wand was pretty much the optimum choice, though the lockdown aspect of orb did mean there was a fair argument for it. Staff proved to be a boondoggle, as it sucked you into a kind of AoE oriented front-line build concept that never got any real support and went against the whole idea of being a controller too much. Likewise when Summoner was introduced they never really got bold enough with Wizard summons to make them a viable alternative to the orbizard. Tome likewise didn't really offer all that much, the bigger spell book feature really isn't that much of a benefit. Frankly in all the years I ran 4e wizards are only swapped my spell selection a handful of times, you pretty much BUILT AROUND specific tactics and thus specific powers, swapping them out was unlikely to be a good idea!

So, basically orb and wand dominate, but even they're not that distinctive, really. They tried larding on top the 'superior implement' rules, but that was just another flavor of magic implement, basically, so what did it really do? Not much, and it was equally beneficial for ALL implements. I admit though, they added some very potent staff enchantments that made USING a staff into a great option, though that didn't really mean you should take it as your implement specialization (orb is still better in that case, blast with the staff, then lock them down with the orb stuff afterwards).

Overall, I think the wizard wasn't actually WotC's great success with 4e. The thematics are way too broad, so it swallowed other classes, like Sorcerer and Invoker, and the pushing control into the powers was always a bit problematic. That was before MM became a "wizards must be gods" guy and invented the Mage...

I agree on the schools too. I never really thought most of them even made sense, though at least 4e kept the list very short...

 

[Neonchameleon]

Exactly! One thing I appreciated about 4e is that it was honest about its appeal to power gamers / butt-kickers and made their experience AWESOME.

I think 4e actually appealed to various other player types in the Robin Laws framework. For example I think 4e appealed to casual gamers (at least based on my local experience in 4e's early years) and sneakily also appealed to storytellers (if they could get past their distaste for all the numbers and overtly game-y elements, they would discover their narrative control, as is being discussed elsewhere in this thread).

But for some reason the Internet decided that actually making a game that appeals to power gamers in addition to other player types was BadWrongFun and drowned all 4e discussion in hatred and vitriol.

Ironically of course 3.5 was probably the most power-gamery D&D in history...

 

[Campbell]

Ironically of course 3.5 was probably the most power-gamery D&D in history...

It's a different sort of gamist play though. D&D 3e / Pathfinder First Edition are built around optimizing at build time and spell preparation to succeed where D&D 4e and Pathfinder Second Edition (in absolutely different ways) are centered on run time optimization for success.