Tony Vargas
Legend
I like to put it "pi equals 4." Funny how easy geometry gets when pi is 4. I mean, literally funny - both in the hilarious and strange senses.Fine. In no particular order, my less petty reasons for disliking 4e are as follows (my petty reasons include I don't think the hypotenuse should be considered the same length as a side of a square):
Well, nothing new or valid, there. Dissociative mechanics as defined by the Alexandrian is reducible to demanding realism in a fantasy game. A non-starter.As a player, I prefer to stay in actor stance. The dissociative mechanics are something I dislike in 4e. As a player, if my character isn't making a choice I don't want to make a choice.
A re-statement of Dissociative mechanics, and as such, equally invalid.I dislike the reversal of cause->effect the power structure imposes without an equal in-game imposition ("Why didn't you try to trip him? Because I tripped someone else earlier today, he presented no opening." and "Gee it was a good thing you tripped him! Yes that's why I avoided tripping anything earlier today. The Conservation of Martial Action theorem dictates I only get one possible success a day").
Not really a change from 2e or 3e. In 1e, there was a meaningful long-term distinction between being wounded to 1 and -1 - an extra week of recovery regardless of hps restored. Maybe you disliked that in 2e & 3e, too, and house-ruled or ignored, but are unwilling to do so, now?I dislike the way the dying condition is presented -- either the wounds were grievous enough to kill or they were only flesh wounds a la the last scene in The Last Action Hero).
They were. They were also fixed.I dislike the math presented around skill challenges (the probabilities were not only quite borked, the fact they were borked is hard to see because the math is very opaque).
Well, it /is/ the PCs' story, and having players makes the rolls helps keep them engaged.Further, I think skills challenges as presented suffer from having all successes/failures come from PC action. I've devised/stolen similar structures from other games that can include opposition action and choice as well for chases, "submarine hunts", and other such situations.
Conceptually, though, there's no reason opposition action couldn't figure into it - primarily it /does/ figure into it as the opposition is part of the challenge and their actions (past & during the challenge) were presumably considered by the DM in defining the challenge.
At bottom this is no different than attacking a non-AC defense vs forcing a save. That the player is rolling against a difficulty based on the opposition he's facing, rather than the DM rolling makes no difference mathematically.
I think what you may be getting at is using the player as resolution system. You set up a challenge, like a sort of mini-game that the player wins or loses based on his skill at the kind of game (like a puzzle or something) with no reference to the ability of the character at whatever it is he's actually trying to do. Profoundly 'dissociative,' when you think about it. Also a bit unfair & unbalanced, as it fails to reflect what the character is good/bad at, and allows a players who's good at the sorts of challenges you use to 'dump' the corresponding character abilities you're ignoring.
Actually, there was only one malformed Warlord power that caused the target to act rather than allowed him to act. It wasn't the one that granted a move.I dislike having my will suborned by other players without an external effect that can be pointed at (warlord using his turn to move my character. I hear that was 'clarified' in later books so the original player can refuse, but that wasn't the original rule).
And, yes, that one power was fixed, too.
That's lovely, and I'm sure you'd love 13A for that reason, but 4e is no harder to adapt to that style of play than any other version of D&D - really, they're /all/ pretty hard to adapt that way. 3.5 not only used the grid but used more complex movement and area rules that were harder to visualize. 1e was designed for scale-inches miniature wargaming style play, and 2e was still all in inches with volume-filing fireballs and whatnot. 4e, thanks to it's non-Euclidean pi-is-4 geometry is dead easy to visualize - everything's in convenient cubes. Adopt something like SARN-FU, and you'd've had it made.I dislike fiddly positional combat both as a DM and as a player. I much prefer FATE's zones to a grid. I use at most a whiteboard/chalkboard for current character positioning and generally rely on TofM.
You mean beyond the 'day?' True, in 1e, at very high levels, it could take more than a day to re-memorize a full slate of spells - then again, that was an embarrassment of riches scenario, it was unlikely you'd ever expend a whole slate of spells. Aside from that - or taking a week off due to someone breaking the 0hp wound-severity barrier - I don't see what you might be referring to. D&D has always revolved around the day and the decision to 'sleep' and re-charge spells (and thus hps, since the only practical, renewable source of healing was spells) - thus the dreaded 5MWD.I dislike the removal of long-term strategic resource/play. I like the original quasi-vancian spell selection in 1e as a player, for example.
Of course, the default combat under 4e guidelines is a fairly complex, but merely 'challenging' rather than lethal, 'set piece battle.' In 3e, the default was a static slugfest against one monster, ending quickly at low levels due to high damage output from melee types, and even more quickly at high levels, to massive damage exploits or untouchable-save DCs. While prior eds had no guidelines whatsoever, making combats anything from rollover to grind to TPK with little rhyme or reason until you developed the 'art' of designing (and fudging) combats to make them more interesting and challenging-more-than-lethal (if you ever developed that art).I dislike long combat of any sort -
But, nothing forced you to use defaults. You could run a complex set-piece battle in 3e - it was a lot of work, and very hard to make challenging for the PCs (you'd have to go way overbudget, since 3e just didn't handle underleveled monsters very well - something 5e is addressing). You could run quickie roll-overs (like typically 'fast' 5e combats) in 4e - you just dialed the challenge way down and used a lot of minions and underleveled monsters.
Interesting, considering that D&D had very few system for combat avoidance, and those /very ineffective/. A party using a 4e-style Skill Challenge or Group Check to avoid a combat has a fair chance of success. A party trying to 2e dex-check or 3.5 party (or 1e thief) trying to Hide/Move-Silently to avoid an encounter was prettymuch statistically doomed to failure, since you had everyone rolling (or even rolling twice or rolling opposed checks) and even one failure blew it. For that matter, while Hero would also require everyone to succeed to avoid a combat, it'd at least likely be only a single skill, and Hero skills are cheap and easy to boost to ~90% success rates.- for me, D&D is much more about exploration and combat avoidance than combat. I have other games I lean on for stronger heavy combat style games like Hero.
Similarly, exploration in pre-4e consists of one PC doing most of the actual playing (the formal 'caller' in 1e, or just whoever has 'taken point' or who's skills/spells apply or who is just most assertive/engaged when just listening to descriptions and asking questions) while everyone else is little more than a spectator or kibitzer. At least 4e had skill challenges to pull everyone into the exploration pillar, even if it was for 5e that the pillar was finally formalized.
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