Jason Bulmahn Speaks about DDXP(His take on the system)

[fafhrd]

Magic missile may be the worst option in most cases. Leave that to the strikers. The wizard should be dropping area attacks to get the baddies nice and bloodied.

 

[Victim]

I was expecting that, truth be told. I was hoping it would not be so clear cut. If I had more than 1 enemy within a small area, the fire blast ability was the best choice. If not, magic missile was the way to go. There were some mitigating factors some of the time I guess. Hmm... I need to ruminate on this a bit more.

Jason

Edit: Ach.. Zinegata beat me to the same point.....

Where is the real choice though? Let's say that using Fireblast is the no brainer when it can hit multiple guys (I'm not sure that it is, since concentrated damage is generally more valuable since it means enemies drop faster and MM has twice as much range). So then the big picture is: "How can our group get the enemies into a tightly packed formation via our movement and powers that shift enemies around?" Of course, that needs be weighed against priorities like not dying, or having rangers/warlocks manipulate the enemy nearest to them for their curse/quarry stuff, etc.

 

[Zinegata]

Okay, let's try this again. This time with context clues.

The "bunch" you refer to is still just a few dice rolls (relatively speaking). Assume a fight lasts five rounds, and all five of those rounds the monster is able to recharge his ability. That's a mere five dice rolls.

By contrast - take a look at the other game examples I showed. Just one combat round in Risk typically requires five dice rolls - 3 from the attacker, and 2 from the defender. And it generally takes multiple combat rounds to resolve the conquest of a territory. And it often takes multiple rounds just to resolve a battle for one territory (of which there are dozens).

When I say a lot of dice rolls, I mean a lot of dice rolls.

To be fair though, this method does require more dice-rolling than the old dragon breath method so it's a little "smoother".

 

[keterys]

That said... the ongoing damage from the dragon's breath doesn't stack, so it's not drastically better than its other options that it really breaks the bank if it rolls particularly well on its recharge rolls and it appears to be _less_ likely to allow a dragon to breath _Every round_ than previous editions.

Amusingly, a lot of the downsides of reviews have been what I'd consider as "Better than 3e, but not as much better as I wanted it to be"

 

[hong]

4E combat at 1st level is swingy because a black dragon might roll high on 3-4 recharge rolls. Okay. Compare to: 3E combat at 1st level is swingy because an ogre might roll middling-to-high on one damage roll. Context please, people.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I am starting to feel that 4E is going to stifle creativity...a lot.

Why?

I'm curious what there is in this post which elicits this reaction.

 

[arscott]

Wait... The sun cleric has a bunch of radiant powers... And that's a bad thing?

Am I missing something?

 

[Nytmare]

Am I missing something?

I think that the fear is that "This cleric has radiant powers, so every cleric must have radiant powers."

As a side note: all 4E fighters will be dwarven women.

 

[dm4hire]

Why?

I'm curious what there is in this post which elicits this reaction.

The reference to limited number of abilities. WotC has pretty much said once you reach a certain point the gaining of abilities stops and you only replace or swap out abilities. The lack of diversity is characters such as wizard won't have as many spells to call upon through the course of the game thereby restricting the way they are played. People like diversity, but if you are restricting what everyone can do so they all do the same number of actions then there really isn't any diversity. You get game balance this way, but lose the diversity in the return. Both characters able to only do x number of actions means the only difference is in how you do it, with the odds of being similar now more profound. A good example of this was the comparison someone did in another post concerning the ranger and warlock, both strikers, who have an attack doing a d10 + modifier. Once all the dailies and encounter powers have been used, they will both fall back to doing their d10 attack action, thus the only difference between them is how they are supposedly doing their damage as the action is technically the same thing, leaving not much diversity between them.

 

[Halivar]

I am gonna be seriously annoyed if high level characters are resorting to casting magic missile and the like over and over again because they run out of 'options'. That's just boring.

No, that's the 3E wizard. The 4E wizard doesn't "run out" of higher-level at-will powers.