Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="catastrophic" data-source="post: 5641989" data-attributes="member: 81381">Actually, it was a huge improvement in every way, and most of the criticisms made against it by it's detractors are of dubious merit at best.  I'm highly critical of 4e, but I also understand it, and know that it serves well in those roles that the anit-4e-brigade claims it fails in.  Even failed systems like skill challenges stand head and shoulders above 3.x, which had no such systems. Of course, you can talk about modules, you can even talk about art- but this is about design. Good art and modules don't cover the terrible design or reduce it's damage to actual play. And to be frank, I don't think any edition of DnD comes ever close to being a 'modern RPG', apart from 4e.  Why would you say 'likewise'? Also, why would you say 'merits'? In system terms, there is no comparison betwen the two- one is a solidly realised rpg built from the groun up, and the other are a set of glorified house rules for a game that never worked that well to begin with.  4e isn't flawed. It's base is rock solid, and it has none of the 'abysamal failures' you claim, unless you're arguing outside of the design of the system itself. Certainly, no such failure is fundmetnal to it's design- 4e didn't make the WOTC modules into endless grinds, if anything, their module design habits from 3e did. I might speculate about any number of systems, like one that dumped ability bonus and replaced it with ability value, as mister mearls suggested in an early colum- but the basic philosophy and design of 4e is a huge asset, and tossing it aside to please people will only result in inferior design. I just made them up for the example, but I could imagine them being stats given to any persuasion task, preferably in a system where more than one pc can roll into the same task and cover each other/play off each other a bit. It could be as simple as them being three numbers to describe each persuasion task. They'd average out to a base target number, which would be the 'challenge rating' of the tasks, or whatever.  You roll once, add your base persuasion value, then take that value and apply it to each of the three stats- including the modifiers for your type of persuasion.  You would need to make successes equal to each of those stats- three intimidators will have no trouble hitting the power value of most tasks, but they are unlikely to hit the complexity value of complex tasks.  GMs, and modules could even add various outcomes basec on wether you say, talk your way past a gate guard but don't hit the treachery target (he might notify a superior), or persuade some dwaves to held defend a village, but fail the power target (they could do it, but only for an exorbirant fee). This could also be used for other tasks. A travel task might have a high or low target in values like stealth, wayfinding, and movement. A knowlege task could have various subdomains. Some tasks could be balanced amongst a subset of skills liek the social ones above, while others like knowlege would be more a matter of wether you know the right kind of stuff or not- but still allowing you to roll any knowledge skill you have.  And of course, there's nothing stopping a pc from having more than one social or knowlege skill.</blockquote>

Verification