D&D 4E Mouseferatu weighs in on 4e

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is to me what PoL is meant to be for D&D. lots of small villages which can't defend themselves against whatever bothers them and need the PCs for it. And after the PCs did their job everyone is happy and continue to live their live not bothered by any monster and never to be seen again (unless another adventure is needed).

Well, that's the way that PoL works for Heroic tier adventures. The idea is that with the 3 tiers there are 3 entirely different feeling to the adventures.

At heroic tier it works a lot like above. You affect only a small number of people with your adventures, maybe saving the 300 people a village at most, but normally it is even smaller scale than that, you help the blacksmith by recovering a ring that was stolen from him or save his son.

At paragon tier you help protect caravan routes and stop bandits then help out against a problem affecting a whole city, like an assassination plot against the king or a large horde of orcs that attacks places all over the country.

Then at Epic tier you stop ancient evils that might awaken and kill everyone or plots by gods and archdevils.

The plots AND mechanics of each tier should be very different from each other.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Reduce time for prep==just pull a module off the shelf.

Which is what I do for 3.5. Paizo saved my hobby by providing me with a large number of statblocks all stringed together with a narrative. However, 4E is being presented in such a way that I am starting to think I might be able to homebrew again like I did back in the day because it won't take me the entire weekend to put together one adventure. I barely manage to squeeze in a game, much less the hours of prep required to do anything interesting with the 3.5 rules.

I view worldbuilding as the most enjoyable part of DMing; WOTC seems (impression, again) to view it as a tedious chore which they must alleviate with their "Assumed world" and the POL setting which is designed (by explicit admission) to eliminate the need to create a world, or even more than one village and one dungeon.

I don't agree at all. WotC is making it much easier for me to participate in worldbuilding, which I used to do lots of before I had any serious real-world responsibilities to get in the way. I love doing it, and it's the chore-like task of creating statblocks for unique NPCs, new monsters, and the like that prevents me from doing it and has me purchasing adventure paths instead. By redesigning the system with both quicker enemy design and a larger amount of fluff text to mine for ideas, I can focus on personalizing my campaign.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

No, but I learned in an era when it was practically non-existent. Hell, the 1e DMG wouldn't be out for a year -- we cobbled together rules from the 'Blue Book' game, the three OD&D supplements, and the PHB/MM. Settings? We didn't even have RULES!

I don't know what I'd be like if I started today as a 14 year old. I think growing up on a diet of pre-generated fantasy, computer games, and the like, I'd be a lot more hesitant to go my own way and much more rule-bound.

Hey, guess what? I got started on blue box too, and I want something completely different than you do. I guess these "back in my day, we played D&D with rocks and sticks, and we liked it! You kids these have no imagination!" comments that keep creeping into these 4E threads may perhaps be overgeneralizing.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that anyone we're addressing on these messageboards is a veteran player of many years, who started with 1st edition, if not OD&D, and format our generalizations about the origins of their preferred playstyle with that in mind. Those who do not agree with you are not just a bunch of 14-year old kids who got their heads rotted out with video games. And I mean no disrespect for actual 14-year-olds, who I find are generally more willing to think outside the box than 40-something grognards who absolutely must have things operate they way they've played it for the last 30 years or it "just isn't D&D anymore!!!1"

 

[Lizard]

I didn't really have an answer until I skimmed this thread. Biggest misconception -- power being taken away from the DM as world-builder, DM being assigned as "pre-fab adventure runner".

Good. Glad to be wrong.

As far as the cranky DM's who don't want beginner DM help cluttering up their book -- easy enough to skip. It's not like the DMG is "Dungeon Mastering for Dummies". The thing is, the system's just cleaner. Not dumbed down, not simple. Clean.

I don't mind lots of advice/guidelines/instruction -- that's what you expect in a book called the "Dungeon Master's GUIDE", after all. I just think two pages of "How to design a cool lair" text is worth more than one 2-page map of a lair. Maybe ONE map, to provide an example of "What a map ought to look like, how to key it, etc". But not mountains of 'em. Please.

MMV was a large improvement over MMIV in this regard.

(A "learning to think 4e" section -- a page or so -- discussing the differences in philosophy and how to build encounters, etc, for 4e addressed to those trained in 3e would be good, too -- or just put it up on Gleemax so no one can claim it's useless for people starting w/4e.)

(As a side note, the 3e system was much cleaner than 2e...how clean can we get before we hit, say, FUDGE ?)

 

[Kraydak]

Hey, guys. Don't have a lot of time right now, and I'll be away from the computer for a few days, but...

I'm not going to start trying to dance around the NDA with winks and nods, or by confirming what's not in the game. Sorry about that, but there it is.

Can you explain what happens if a Pit Fiend wants to use magical gear? If he takes levels in PC classes that assume he is wearing (weak) magical gear? Can we still mess with our opponent's gear (Dispel magical stuff temporarily, disarm, sunder, steal) in mechanically significant ways? Can we gift friends/allies with gear in mechanically significant ways?

 

[Rechan]

Thirtysomething grad student w/ 2 kids here.

Not to thread-jack, but I would like to get ahold of your email to chat about Grad school, if in fact you're involved in the sciences, Dr. Awkward.

 

[Rechan]

love doing it, and it's the chore-like task of creating statblocks for unique NPCs, new monsters, and the like that prevents me from doing it and has me purchasing adventure paths instead. By redesigning the system with both quicker enemy design and a larger amount of fluff text to mine for ideas, I can focus on personalizing my campaign.

This.

Designing NPC adversaries felt like bad homework. I recently put my PCs against a cult of a dozen or so 3rd level or lower multi-classed enemies, and it was just a time massacre.

 

[Professor Phobos]

Mr. Rogers:

It came up on another board that someone took your "What else besides basic combat? Roleplaying!" statement as indicative of the complete absence of anything non-combat, non-roleplaying, like stealth or investigation.

I thought that was a bit of a narrow reading, I took you to mean "in the stat block", not that such things were absent from the game entirely.

Could you clarify?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

But why must your help be bolted on for everyone else?
Why can't we both have what we want?

Because your suggestion that there be a "crunch cookbook" and a "fluff supplement" to that cookbook requires that new players, who are already spending somewhere on the order of $100 for the core books they require to begin to play the game (now that the SRD is being taken behind the barn with a rifle), must spend another $20-$30 in order to be provided with a starting point for their game worlds. They already bought the game, and now they have to buy the roleplaying, despite being told that the core books constituted a roleplaying game.

Considering that these are the very people who must buy the books and decide they like the game in order for there to be a future for the game, it is a poor strategy. The easier we make it for new DMs and players to get a rich, enjoyable game off the ground, the better. If the rest of us who have no use for new fluff text must suffer having to gaze upon it, despite it burning our eyes and scalding our fingertips with its hell-forged noobishness, it is merely the price we must pay for a healthy gaming community.

Having the core books still treat everyone like a new DM is a bad thing though. And having that new DM still be treated that way years later is also a bad thing.

That's the problem with print media: after you read something, it doesn't change to reflect your now-savvy understanding of the material you just read. The DMG should come with perforated pages so that you can tear out all that new-DM advice so that it doesn't insult your intelligence when you happen to glance upon it later on.

edit: More seriously, if a new player in 2010 picks up the core books and benefits from the advice and presentation structure therein, then goes out and buys the MM3, why should he encounter a significantly different and more difficult experience with that book compared to the MM1, assuming that the fluff text is just as ignorable in the MM3 as in the MM1? I don't think it's a good idea to have a tiered supplement series in which "you must be this tall to play" using the later-published books and new players are kept in the kiddie pool represented by the core. All supplements should be extremely accessible, because that will encourage new players to buy lots of them, which will benefit us all.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Sadly this seems to be correct.

Imo PoL is more like a concept than a true setting.

Compare it to a old style movie series, best one about cowboys (I don't know if such a series really existed. The Anime Trigun is a bit like it).

The Lone Ranger.