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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8432734" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>I actually love Essentials, I just haven’t been upvoting it in the Survivor thread because I know it’s less popular among 4e fans and I want <em>some</em> version of 4e to last as long as it can. I’m playing strategically and picking my battles.</p><p></p><p>As for what I like about Essentials, I like that classes don’t all follow the same structure. This kinda started with the PHB3, where psionic classes had a different power structure than others, but Essentials revised the other classes and gave each power source its own structural feel, which I thought was really cool. In pre-essentials 4e, your class’s role made a real gameplay difference, but unless you were a psionic class, your class’s power source was mostly just flavor. Essentials changed that. It did come at the cost of a certain level of game balance, and it made it so as a DM you had to pay a bit more attention to the structure of the adventuring day, so I can see why other 4e DMs didn’t care for it. But I actually quite liked that about it.</p><p></p><p>Another thing Essentials did that I liked was it changed a lot of at-will powers to <em>modify</em> your basic attacks instead of being attacks themselves. I found that a common experience with new 4e players was having to sort of teach them not to use basic attacks. I don’t know if anyone else had this experience, but I often found that new players would assume their at-will attack powers were “for” specific situations and would default to basic attacks if they didn’t know which at-will power was “best” to use in any given moment. And there would end up being a conversation about how “you might as well use one of your at-will powers instead, because it’s pretty much the same as a basic attack, but better,” and once they caught on it would be like “why do basic attacks even exist then?” Essentials “fixed” that by re-working a lot of the old at-will powers from attacks to stances or reactions that modified your basic attacks to do the thing the original version of the power did.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8432734, member: 6779196"] I actually love Essentials, I just haven’t been upvoting it in the Survivor thread because I know it’s less popular among 4e fans and I want [I]some[/I] version of 4e to last as long as it can. I’m playing strategically and picking my battles. As for what I like about Essentials, I like that classes don’t all follow the same structure. This kinda started with the PHB3, where psionic classes had a different power structure than others, but Essentials revised the other classes and gave each power source its own structural feel, which I thought was really cool. In pre-essentials 4e, your class’s role made a real gameplay difference, but unless you were a psionic class, your class’s power source was mostly just flavor. Essentials changed that. It did come at the cost of a certain level of game balance, and it made it so as a DM you had to pay a bit more attention to the structure of the adventuring day, so I can see why other 4e DMs didn’t care for it. But I actually quite liked that about it. Another thing Essentials did that I liked was it changed a lot of at-will powers to [I]modify[/I] your basic attacks instead of being attacks themselves. I found that a common experience with new 4e players was having to sort of teach them not to use basic attacks. I don’t know if anyone else had this experience, but I often found that new players would assume their at-will attack powers were “for” specific situations and would default to basic attacks if they didn’t know which at-will power was “best” to use in any given moment. And there would end up being a conversation about how “you might as well use one of your at-will powers instead, because it’s pretty much the same as a basic attack, but better,” and once they caught on it would be like “why do basic attacks even exist then?” Essentials “fixed” that by re-working a lot of the old at-will powers from attacks to stances or reactions that modified your basic attacks to do the thing the original version of the power did. [/QUOTE]
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Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?
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