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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dustin Cooper" data-source="post: 9191946" data-attributes="member: 6922447">I feel like this was an edition designed around online tools.  No one I knew built characters manually, and even now, people will usually point you toward the offline character builder that fans have updated.  At the time when I started (around the time Essentials came out), I was happy to pay my monthly fee for access to everything.  And it would have been much harder with just books.  Like the 4e errata document is 151 pages long.  And while that includes things like small errors on adventures, PHB1's section is 28 pages long.  But someone using the tools never had to worry about that, since they'd always have the most up to date version of everything.While I think it's pretty well known that the combat system has been influential on the indie scene, with it being a clear influence on stuff like Lancer, Icon, Gubat Banwa, Princess Wing, MCDM's upcoming game, etc., skill challenges have also been pretty influential.  They were just iterated on again and turned into "Clocks," which plenty of indie games use.And as someone who thinks this is the best edition of D&D and went back to it after getting frustrated with 5e, I do think the system still has its flaws, and they're worth talking about:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There's so many god damn feats.  Like hundreds. And at least half of them are useless or so situational that no one's ever going to take them.  And if you do, since you get one every other level, you're probably going to forget the situational ones even exist by the time they come up.  And instead of fixing some of the old feats, they instead added new feats that are basically the old feats but better, but also don't stack with the old feats, and the old feats are still there.  Like in the last campaign I ran, I had to tell a player that they should swap out the feat they took that gave them +1 to all non-armor defenses for another that did that but also scaled as you leveled, and she was clearly frustrated by the fact that the game offered her a feat choice that was basically wrong.  Even with me and my experienced players, we usually just look at an optimization guide to see what feats are worth taking rather than read through hundreds of ones that aren't to find a diamond in the rough.  If anything should have been simplified for Essentials, it was this.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Unless you're only playing with Essentials classes, you're going to have a lot of marks, curses, etc. out there, and even with Essentials, you're still going to have plenty of status effects going around.  I play almost exclusively on VTTs at this point, so it's not a big deal for me to add another symbol to a token, but I feel like it'd be a lot harder to keep track of at a physical table.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Until my last campaign, I'd really only played the game in Heroic tier (levels 1-10, and usually it was on the lower end of that), but now that I've done one that got a bit into Paragon (levels 11-20), I really did start to feel the whole problem of turns taking longer and longer as the players got more powers they had to look through.  And it's not even just on their own turns, since sometimes they'll be like "Wait, hold on, I think I have an interrupt for that...let's see...this!  Oh wait, no, that won't work because..."  I feel like the game works best at lower levels.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I recently watched a video about first impressions of the MCDM system, and one person there started talking about 4e and said something like "Everyone felt amazing at first level, and they were excited for how much more amazing their characters would be at higher level.  But higher level characters aren't more amazing, they're just more complicated."  I've been thinking about that ever since, and after that last campaign, I think he might be right.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There's definitely some poorly designed classes by the end.  Seeker never got the supplements to make it work, Runepriest seemed like it should have been a cleric subclass, Bladesinger at best felt like a first draft, and Binder tried turning the Warlock into a controller by making it worse at damage in exchange for literally nothing of value.</li> </ul>And for one more positive I haven't seen yet: monks are great in this edition.  They just wreck everyone around them in a way that feels good and supports the underlying fantasy.  You can be a charisma powered monk whose rage causes fire to spew from you firsts.  It's a shame that the 5e monk wasn't designed around this iteration.</blockquote>

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