D&D 4E Keith Baker on 4E! (The Hellcow responds!)

[Vomax]

Overall, 4e just feels more restrictive. Classes are tightly focused, and 3e style multiclassing, where you basically build the class you want from the classes which are there, is out.

Haven't the designers said that mutli-classing is in fact easier now in 4e? As someone else said, roles are going to be pretty tightly focused, which makes sense to me. If I can be a good defender and a good striker at the same time, why would I ever choose to instead be only one?

At tenth level you WILL pick a Paragon Path, at 20th level you WILL have an Epic Destiny.

The paragon paths open up more abilities for your character, they don't replace them like prestige classes did in 3e. You can limit yourself to only abilities that come from your starting class if you really dislike the idea.

The lack of skill points basically means you can't "fine tune" your abilities. Non-combat skills are reduced to a dismissive "Scrawl it on your character sheet, like anyone gives a damn if you're a blacksmith". Etc, etc, etc.

You can still choose to focus on some skills, which will set you apart from everyone else, but I suppose you can no longer choose to be at level 10 and have 2 points in Knowledge (plumbing) and 3 in Profession (candlemaker) if you wanted to.

 

[Sir Brennen]

Jack Vance, obviously. Fritz Lieber. Poul Anderson. Robert Howard. Michael Shea. Lynn Carter. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tolkien because Gygax's friends nagged him about it. HP Lovecraft.

Can't believe you forgot Michael Moorcock.

 

[Lizard]

Can't believe you forgot Michael Moorcock.

Hey, my wife was nagging me to go out to breakfast.

 

[Sir Brennen]

An "Upgrade" should not leave me with *fewer* options.

Unless the designers see paring away irrelevant options as part of the goal of the upgrade. Removing options which don't add anything to the fun and playability, or even worse, add complications which actually take away from fun and playability, is a good thing. Instead, they've made sure that the design space for characters, monsters and adventures routinely used play allows for the ability to introduce *meaningful* options for many splatbooks to come.

I mean, if my options for ice cream flavors were Vanilla, Hot Tar or 3-Day Old Roadkill, is having more options a good thing in that case?

The thing is, there are a variety of D&D campaign styles out there, some of which the core rules (of any edition) cater to more successfully than others. For 4E, the designers seem to have decided to consciously embrace the type of game that most (but obviously not all) people tend to play, and push the ruleset even more inline with that type of game. Will that leave some game-style structures on the curb? Probably. But if trying to accommodate a wider range of those structures, especially if they are much less commonly played, would weaken the rules, then better to stick to a stronger, central vision than try to be all things to all people.

 

[robertliguori]

Unless the designers see paring away irrelevant options as part of the goal of the upgrade. Removing options which don't add anything to the fun and playability, or even worse, add complications which actually take away from fun and playability, is a good thing. Instead, they've made sure that the design space for characters, monsters and adventures routinely used play allows for the ability to introduce *meaningful* options for many splatbooks to come.

I mean, if my options for ice cream flavors were Vanilla, Hot Tar or 3-Day Old Roadkill, is having more options a good thing in that case?

The thing is, there are a variety of D&D campaign styles out there, some of which the core rules (of any edition) cater to more successfully than others. For 4E, the designers seem to have decided to consciously embrace the type of game that most (but obviously not all) people tend to play, and push the ruleset even more inline with that type of game. Will that leave some game-style structures on the curb? Probably. But if trying to accommodate a wider range of those structures, especially if they are much less commonly played, would weaken the rules, then better to stick to a stronger, central vision than try to be all things to all people.

Yes, more options is good. Labeling the sub-optimal or specialized options as such is necessary, and segregating them to remove distraction, but leaving them there for the times when you really do need to give an ice-cream cone to an anthropomorphic vulture, is ideal.

Originally Posted by wgreen
Something that may be valuable to point out: The rules do not exist to provide us with "laws of physics." Common sense can do that.

Common sense tells me magic doesn't work, dragons can't fly, and drama fails miserably in the face of cold reality. Common sense is therefore a piss-poor method of adjudicating the physics of a world with magic, monsters, and narrative causality.

Rules are more than the physics of the world; they are a set of shared expectations. If my character has 200 hit points, that means something different than a character with 190 vitality points and 10 wound points, and I should not see results expected from VP/WP in a HP system.

If the task of writing a rules system to match common sense is too much (as it generally is), then the least I expect of a GM is to outline clearly "Although the rules imply the outcome would be X, the actual outcome is Y, because the rules fail to take into account confounding factor Z."

 

[hong]

Yes, more options is good. Labeling the sub-optimal or specialized options as such is necessary, and segregating them to remove distraction, but leaving them there for the times when you really do need to give an ice-cream cone to an anthropomorphic vulture, is ideal.

That is not ideal. That is a waste of pages, money and brain cells that could be put to better use elsewhere.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

That is not ideal. That is a waste of pages, money and brain cells that could be put to better use elsewhere.

Says the guy with over 16,000 posts.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. All in fun and all that.)

 

[Lizard]

That is not ideal. That is a waste of pages, money and brain cells that could be put to better use elsewhere.

For you. Maybe for the majority of potential D&D buyers -- that's WOTCs gamble. Not for everyone. My pre-order for Traveller 5, all 1,000 gloriously crunchy pages of it, says all you need to know about my tastes.

 

[hong]

Says the guy with over 16,000 posts.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. All in fun and all that.)

Indeed. If robertliguori had followed my example, he could have had 5,000 posts by now!

 

[Hellcow]

Haven't the designers said that mutli-classing is in fact easier now in 4e?

Yes, and it is. You can multiclass at first level if you choose. The key difference between 4E and 3E is that there is a difference between a ranger who's multiclassed to paladin and a paladin who's multiclassed to ranger. The paladin is still first and foremost a defender, the ranger a striker. But the ranger-paladin is distinctly different from a ranger-rogue - or a ranger who hasn't multiclassed at all.

I wish I could lay out all the options that are available, because there are a few things I really like that make characters of the same class completely different from one another. You haven't seen them, because what you've seen are the base characters from DDXP. So you don't know how multiclassing works, what options feats provide, and so on. But there's ways to make three paladins very different from one another (and I don't mean "One took Power Attack and the other took Dodge"); they simply don't involve taking a LEVEL of ranger.

Looking back to SWG: I'll note that I never said you HAD to be a janitor - I said you COULD be a janitor. And that KotOR does not give you that option. It's a difference in design goals, and SWG put a great deal of design time into supporting the "world sim" role. KotOR focused on the hero experience, and that's what 4E is doing.

But beyond that - Lizard, you see to be under the impression that you CAN'T stat out NPCs in 4E. Why is that? In the campaign I'm running at the moment, I've got a large cast of NPC characters. A few are statted out with all the detail of PCs, and in fact I've used the PC class system for them - just as if I was making a NPC with PC class levels in 3E. A few are statted out at the level of the typical monster: critical skills and powers, ability scores, hit points. And a few are background characters I haven't bothered to stat - names, treated as minions if they get attacked.

4E doesn't provide special CLASSES for these characters. I didn't have to say "Hmm... I guess he'd be an expert instead of a commoner, because I've given him four skills and Heal isn't a commoner class skill." It hasn't devoted significant design space to NPC classes - although as a disclaimer, I have not seen the DMG and thus don't know exactly what is said about creating NPCs. But I do know that NPCs are not supposed to be treated as interchangible cogs with identical ability scores; you simply don't have a twenty-level class system tied to them.

Oh, and as an aside, you DON'T have to have an epic destiny. I probably shouldn't say more than that, but it's not like lightning strikes every character at level 21; that's the point at which it is POSSIBLE to discover your epic destiny.

At the end of the day, it's true: 4E is more like KotOR than SWG. It's designed to let you play a hero, and if you WANT to play the janitor, it's not the right game for you. It doesn't provide all the options of 3E, because unlike 3.5, it's not an evolution of 3E; it is a new game, which shares some basic principles but completely redevelops others (for example, magic). For you, that may make it a flawed system, and that's fine; you can stick with 3E. Meanwhile, I WANT to play a hero - and 4E, IMO, does a much better job of it than 3E. I'm having more fun than I ever did with 3E. But, of course, I had more fun with KotOR than I did with SWG. So I think they are focusing on a particular flavor of play - focusing on the hero's tale as opposed to the world simulation tool. But essentially it's a question of doing one thing well instead of being a jack of all trades and master of none. And if you think 3E DOES do all things well, no one's going to stop you from playing it, and some companies are going to continue to support it. Me, I'll be playing 4E. I've got an epic destiny to fulfill.

And let's face it, we're talking about a core system here. All it takes is a single rulebook - "The Anti-Epic Handbook" - to provide a commoner class, 0-level characters, and supporting rules, and you're good to go.