D&D 4E Just played my first 4E game

[StreamOfTheSky]

Rituals make a kind of sense. Raising the dead shouldn't be something you can do ten times a day, and it adds a sense of the extraordinary that certain things that used to be spells deserve.

Or, they could have retained that by being spells.

Critical hits do maximum damage. Under 3.5, you could still roll a '1' on your crit damage and do all of 2 points. Nice fix - crits should hurt.

If you had any business using a weapon in 3E, crits did hurt, quite a bit in fact. And you're supposed to roll more dice, not just multiply one set of rolls, so the oddds of doing minimum damage were very low.

A high armour class is easier to get at 1st level. Nice.

Don't you know that's just an illusion? It's all crafted so the same to hit odds remain at any level, so your "Armor Class" is really just window dressing now.

Wizards have been seriously neutered. With this 'daily powers', 'encounter powers', 'powers at will' system, one of the major advantages of the wizard - versatility - has been seriously curtailed. No longer can a wizard have a spellbook containing hundreds of useful spells and swap-and-change them for specific tasks - a sort of weapons package if you like. That was the great advantage of wizards over sorcerers in 3.5 - you chose either versatility or firepower.

I agree with your last statement, but you're not understnading something. Wizards got neutered, but every other class got neutered without anasthesia. Wizards are the only class that can really just rely on one or two stats. And in a game where the opposing modifiers are always so close, every extra +1 counts so darn much. I can never even play a Fighter or Paladin again. The stat spread means I'm going to have a 16 in any stat I use to attack, which just isn't enough any more. Fighters can no longer have an easy time hitting, Rogues no longer can auto-win a skill check. wizards still will retain the best attack bonus generally, and have the most versatility in targeting different defenses, so they're still probably the best class, if only because everyone else lost more stuff.

Paths make no sense and are very constricting. They essentially force characters to conform to an archtype.

That and the lack of easy multiclassing do, yeah.

The classes don't cover what they ought to. I don't really miss the monk, but bards are sorely mourned. Warlords just don't fill the same role - in fact, I don't really see what the warlord brings to the game that a fighter couldn't.

Some crappy healing, mainly. Real question is what a Warlord brings to the table that an extra Cleric wouldn't. Also, heresy! Everyone should miss the monk, and cry tears of agony until there is one, at which point, we shall cry tears of joy!

Similarly, some of the races were poorly chosen. While I miss gnomes, my major gripes are the inclusion of the eladrins and the dragonborn. Eladrin are basically super-elves, and dragonborn just seem a tad too exotic to be a real player race.

See, I too like how Warhammer Fantasy has High, Wood, and Dark Elves, so I didn't mind this. Dragonborn are a lame concept and Eladrin do have lame stats, though.

Monsters seem way overpowered. At 1st level, we were fighting kobolds with 36 hit points. That's WAY too high, especially since we aren't really doing any more damage than we would under the old rules.

Tell me about it! I thought they had to be level 3! And their melee attack bonuses were higher than the party Fighter's BEFORE the flanking craziness! And those massive sacks of hit points just make lame powers like Reaping Strike seem even more useless. "I dealt a whole two damage on my miss? Wow, so much help over a basic attack! Hear that guys? I just took out 1/12 of his health!"

The whole thing plays like a video game. It seems like it's been designed to feel that way as well, to the point that while we were playing we kept asking our DM if we could 'save game' and at one point I cracked the group up when a player asked "how do I use this skill" and I answered "hold down B and press up." If I want to go play a video game, I'll go play one.

If it played like a video game, I'd like it, as I've been playing video games far longer than D&D. Unless you mean it plays like an MMO, in which case, it'd be explained why I find it so agonizing.

There isn't enough to distinguish one character from another. Everybody's basically the same. There's not enough options to customise and vary your character.

Amen to that. I think putting this feeling into descriptive text so that others understand what we mean will be by far the most annoying part of criticizing 4E. I think I'll have to keep an essay on reserve to handle such things, cause it's getting really irritating posting such things so much.

I love these threads: "My friends and I gave 4E a chance, here's our list of complaints".

Internet critcs for the win!

I see far more "I played 4E for the first time and liked it" threads than ones who come away feeling worse about it and posting. Do you crap on those threads, too? Or just the ones that present views you disagree with?

(Stuff I'm not going to even quote)

Dude! Just...dude!

 

[AllisterH]

The one criticsm I don't understand is how the skill system feels like a videogame. THAT I don't understand.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

The one criticsm I don't understand is how the skill system feels like a videogame. THAT I don't understand.

Who says that?! Most games have no skill system, and those that do, it's often a "buy it from a skill tree or don't have it at all" kind of deal that's more exclusive to people not trained in it that even 3E, let alone 4E.

 

[Rel]

The one criticsm I don't understand is how the skill system feels like a videogame. THAT I don't understand.

Agreed. The craft skills in WoW are vastly superior to 4e.

 

[Korgoth]

Actually, I really do like threads like this. The poster in question actually PLAYED a session or two of 4e instead of based their like/dislike of the game off of skimming the three rulebooks.

The worst internet critics.. Hell, the worst critics in general are those who base their reviews off of either assumptions, or off of some emotional response.

I see a pattern emerging in some of this give-and-take:

Citizen: "I sure don't like the sound of 4E!"
4ist: "Infidel! You haven't even read the books!"

Citizen: "OK, I read the books. Man I sure don't like 4E."
4ist: "Infidel! You haven't even played the game!"

Citizen: "OK, I've played 4E. I don't like it."
4ist: "Infidel! You haven't even played a whole campaign!"

Citizen: "OK, I've played a campaign. 4E is totally irritating to me."
4ist: "Uh... then you need to play several campaigns! Infidel!"

Citizen: "*Sigh* OK, I've played several campaigns. I hate 4E."
4ist: "Citizen, I must insist that you wear this rat mask until you do like it."

OK... it's not quite that bad. It's actually only about 98% that bad.

 

[portermj]

One thing that I like about the new spell system is that a person doesn't have to choose between memorizing an out of combat spell or a combat spell.

Also, with spells being memorized at the start of the day in earlier editions it tended to negate the benefits of a large, diverse spell list. Assuming the player didn't know the exact tasks that would be required that day it was safer to go with the more generic spells.

 

[Zil]

I actually believe there is something to the statement that 4E feels like a video game. I don't think it has anything to do with the necessity (or lack thereof) of a DM or the difficulty in tracking modifiers. I have heard this from a number of people when they first try 4E - and these are folks that

a) don't read ENworld or any rpg website so they aren't being influenced by 4E haters

and

b) aren't lifelong players - most having started with 3E or 3.5E

I will have to ask them why they got that impression. It would be interesting to find out if there is a common element (or elements) that causes this upon first playing 4E

I've heard (and I've felt) similar things from our 4E games. Going in, I thought things looked more like a skirmish miniatures game than D&D of old, but once you actually play it's more than just that. A number of the powers/abilities really have a video game feel. My wife keeps insisting that it's to aid in the next incarnation of D&D online or some other computer version of D&D and I think she might be right. Of the 5 players in our group (including DM) I think we all see computer game influences in the design and language - heck, two of the group like describing their flavour text actions in terms of video game effects and the rest of just cringe and bear it.

I think part of the reason folks "feel" the video game influences is that the game mechanics no longer makes any pretenses at modeling something that could be a "real world". Instead, the game is modeling something else - the world that exists is action movies, some video/online games, etc. This is what I think people are feeling - the shift from what the game used to try and simulate (20th century sword & sorcery/fantasy literature) to new influences (Martial arts movies, WoW, other computer games, etc). Is this good or bad? Depends on what you expect (or want) from D&D.

 

[Zil]

One thing that I like about the new spell system is that a person doesn't have to choose between memorizing an out of combat spell or a combat spell.

Also, with spells being memorized at the start of the day in earlier editions it tended to negate the benefits of a large, diverse spell list. Assuming the player didn't know the exact tasks that would be required that day it was safer to go with the more generic spells.

I've noticed that some players really hate having to choose spells because they are worried they'll make the wrong choice. This is happening in my current Pathfinder/3.5 game where one player is playing a cleric (she normally plays fighter types, rogues or monks) and she hates having to choose spells for the day.

In our 4E game, I play an eladrin wizard and I find it a mixed bag. I certainly feel much more effective than a 1st or 2nd level wizard ought, but I also find that things are starting to get way too repetitive from round to round. It would be nice to be able to swap at-wills in and out more often - yes, like the spell books/vancian system of old. Oh well. Maybe things will get more interesting as we go up levels.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think part of the reason folks "feel" the video game influences is that the game mechanics no longer makes any pretenses at modeling something that could be a "real world". Instead, the game is modeling something else - the world that exists is action movies, some video/online games, etc. This is what I think people are feeling - the shift from what the game used to try and simulate (20th century sword & sorcery/fantasy literature) to new influences (Martial arts movies, WoW, other computer games, etc). Is this good or bad? Depends on what you expect (or want) from D&D.

In the beginning D&D never really tried to simulate fantasy literature. Sure it was an influence, but the actual gameplay experience never resembled a story. For a start, there wasn't one. It was a bunch of guys in a vast dungeon going wherever they chose, encountering innumerable monsters and trying to acquire treasure.

2e used those dungeon bashing rules to try to simulate stories, a goal for which they weren't suited.

There were many more influences on 1970s D&D than just fantasy books. For example the monk comes from the TV show Kung Fu, the rust monster from a kids toy and the shambling mound from 70s monster comics. D&D wizards are WW2 artillery. The area of effect for their spells used the exact same templates wargamers used for artillery. These 'new influences' you talk about have always been there.

The major influences on 4e's fluff are mythological or literary. The war between primordials and gods is from Greek myth; devils as fallen angels are from Milton's Paradise Lost; the Feywild, warlock's fey pact and the Raven Queen are from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (I've just started to read this and I can already see what a massive influence it was on 4e).

Sure the videogame influence can be seen on the rules. And a good thing too. A huge amount of thought and effort has gone into videogames, any game designer would be mad not to steal what works, particularly from party-oriented D&D-like games such as EverQuest and WoW. That's really just the modern version of the wargame influence on OD&D.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

Fighters can no longer have an easy time hitting, Rogues no longer can auto-win a skill check.

You say that like its a bad thing