D&D 4E Is 4E doing it for you?

[the Jester]

I'm loving it. We just played til 1:30 a.m. last night; I got to use my quaggoth conversions!

Coming from the dm's perspective, I find 4e to be such an awesome improvement that I just don't know what to do with all the time I no longer have to spend on prep.

 

[AllisterH]

Coming from a DM-perspective?

Hell yeah.

I find that I'm spending much less time on designing combat scenarios and worrying whether or not it is either too weak or too strong and more on the good roleplaying stuff.

I really like the fact that in a non-combat encounter, I have an idea of what everyone is capable of even without their specific character sheets.

Really, for me, as a DM, I love it.

Make no mistake about it, I'll still PLAY 3.x (and even 1e/2e). I just won't DM it

 

[Wormwood]

I have never enjoyed mianatures games.

Neither have I---always end up boring me after a couple of games (even Battletech and Space Hulk).

Maybe I like 4e because I don;t see it as a board game, but rather an "action scene simulator"?

 

[Fifth Element]

In the end, D&D went for "grabbed = immobilized, no pinning, no squeezing", and "incorporeal = half damage, otherwise treat just like everything else". There's a spartan principle at work that some folks like, but the mechanic has good reason to regard D&D as a "lite" game, and if he wants something deeper, he can't tinker within the system. If I want to pit the players against a foe that they can't deal with just by cycling through their power cards, then I'm working against 4e's grain, not with it.

I very much agree about the incorporeal/amorphous creatures comments. But you lose me when you talk about "elegant" comprehensive rules, and then pull out 3E grappling as an example.

 

[Felon]

I'm curious, what kinds of skirmish games do you feel have a deepness or elegance that 4e lacks?

These days, when I want tactical skirmish gameplay, I find that Descent (preferrably with the Road to Legend expansion) delivers much more depth and elegance. In D&D, tactics seem fairly prescribed. Attack as a standard action every round. Move if you need to. If you can get flank, try to to get it. If you can't reach the opponent with a move action, then charge. If you need to heal an ally or pull a weapon or drink a potion or reload a crossbow, those "upkeep" actions have all been conveniently made a minor action so you never have to choose to not attack.

In Descent, my most effective option in a round could entail two attacks, one attack, or even no attacks at all; there are other goals in a Descent skirmish beyond "kill all enemies", so you don't need to designate the action used to attack as being more valuable than the action used to move. When I do attack or move, I have many options to combine it with: a dodge, aim, or guard order. I also could elect to use a different array of weapons for the job, because even the choice of which dice to roll is significant (as opposed to D&D, where most characters just use one optimal weapon all of the time). And I've got fatigue as a resource to manage for both offense and movement.

Ironically, while some claim D&D has become more of a board game, Descent has expanded into a campaign game. I would really love to see it take the next step and become and RPG.

 

[Mallus]

So far my group likes 4e, but we haven't done much with it yet.

It's inspired a new, and dare I say awesome, homebrew setting. It brought my one pal back to pen-and-paper gaming after a 5 year absence. It has people anxious to run some of the campaign, as opposed to anxious that they are running the campaign. We all like our initial characters, except for the one guy who's nonplussed by the new rules.

It'll take a few months to give 4e an adequate test drive... but so far, so good.

 

[Felon]

I very much agree about the incorporeal/amorphous creatures comments. But you lose me when you talk about "elegant" comprehensive rules, and then pull out 3E grappling as an example.

???

I didn't use 3e grappling as an example. I didn't speak of 3e at all. Be careful of falling into the trap of thinking that a criticism of 4e design is equivalent to praise of 3e design. Or, for that matter, thinking that because something has been handled in an overcomplicated way that the only way to remedy it is to replace it with something extremely simple.

Grappling is one of those things that somebody's going to want to do in any RPG, whether it's to restrain a mind-controlled friend, or clamp a hand over a guard's mouth so he can't cry out, or hurl a foe over a precipice. It happens to be something any person can do to another person, even unheroic folks. When 4e came around, they had to decide how to handle it, and they came up with a way that doesn't even encompass what the unheroic person can do. In general, D&D's "economy of actions" is very gamist in approach. That's why loading a crossbow takes a minor action instead of several rounds.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Irda,
You can't cast any ritual in combat, so when I listed the "combat spells" of 3.5 I deliberately took out anything that I could not see having an immediate combat effect to do a more "fair" comparison.

That is not a "fair" comparison. Your 3.x wizard may know a fair number of spells, but many of them are (or will be, once written up) Rituals in 4E. The spells that actually translate into attack powers are far fewer in number. I've rolled up plenty of 1st level wizards and I can't think of one that didn't have Magic Missile, Burning Hands and/or Sleep. I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but I suspect 4E and previous editions are exactly the same here.

As for clarification for the versatility if you have a 4E human wizard s/he'll know 3 at wills, when you add 2 more human wizards they will be duplicated in what powers they choose.

False. While there are not an infinite number of choices, there are enough that any three wizards need not be "duplicates" of each other. Your statement is factually wrong.

3.5 if I had 3 wizards not one of the spells has to be duplicated

Assuming they agree ahead of time on who gets Magic Missile, Burning Hands and Sleep (and that no one gets more than one attack spell) ...

If they put the magic items back into the dmg and used those extra pages for more at-wills, encounter & dailies that would have been better.

(1) The DMG already has lots of good stuff in it. What are you cutting?

(2) The whole point of 4E class design is that the classes are more or less equal. The Wizard was deliberately pared back to prevent him from hogging the spotlight all the time.

I also think if you could learn more than just 2 at wills that would be extremely better

Play a Human.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Isn't that when 5e is coming out?

Yes. But 5e is way to videogamey for my taste. And the multi-classing rules are terribly wonky. And less is said about its anime artwork, the better.
I would have expected more from the Pathfinders of the Coast.

That's because of your playstyle, though.

If you played a game with more intrigue and less combat, that wouldn't be true at all.

Which 1st level spells are that important for intrigue? Without looking at my PHB, I can only think of Charm Person...

Lol, and your entire post from the very start isn't?

You are complaining. That's all you've done so far in this entire thread. Stating that isn't inflammatory when it's the simple truth. If you're friends don't like 4e so much, then don't play it.

The fact of you asking someone not to be inflammatory in a thread designed to inflame is breaking my irony meter. Don't worry, I'll leave your thread alone from now on. There's already enough crap in it.

If asked "Is 4E doing it for you?" complaining and criticizing the game should be just as valid as praising it.

 

[WizarDru]

Very much doing it for me. We played about six or seven sessions, completing Keep on the Shadowfell. While there are some rough spots, it was fun as hell. So much so that when we played our 3.5 Pathfinder game this past Saturday, I was reminded how much I liked some of 4e's changes. The player who volunteered to run 4e for us claimed that running it was like a dream...something I find very appealing.