D&D 4E Mouseferatu weighs in on 4e

[helium3]

Oh hey, here's another question.

Do spellcasting classes still have spell lists and spell slots? In other words, is there any sort of day to day versatility in the powers that magic using classes have?

 

[Woodroez]

Hi, the comments made by mouse and John have spread through the internet a bit, and I thank them both for the comments.

My question would be just how much epic-level play have you two, or other testers you know, done? I've seen some concern on whether it will be as well-tested as other levels.

 

[Baron Opal]

Jon, Ari, thanks for your comments. I appreciate them greatly.

As I look over my shelves I have a number of adventures that I enjoyed running or playing in 1e and I wonder how well they would translate to 4e. My question to y'all is, how difficult would it be to write these adventures in 4e? Not an exact translation, but a similar adventure with similar difficulties and themes.

A4 - In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords
D3 - The Vault of the Drow
N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God
S2 - White Plume Mountain

I think each of these modules has a different range of power levels, assumed gear and tactical approaches that many people are uncertain 4e can handle. Can 4e handle them all?

Thanks.

 

[Spatula]

Mechanics and prior editions:

Here's where we get into pure matter of opinion. I believe there are three possible ways to handle "secondary" rules in an RPG.

1) Don't provide them at all, and let the DM handwave everything. Basic D&D did this to some extent.

2) Try to include specific rules for everything under the sun. 3E tried to do this. Some people like the result, but others--myself included--felt that the result was a cumbersome clutter that kept getting heavier as time goes by.

3) Include a solid core, with a baseline system easily extrapolated to fit situations that aren't spelled out. This is my preferred option.

So far--and I stress so far, I'm not making any promises--4E seems to have managed option number 3. I have a hard time thinking of any actions or skills that couldn't be pretty easily extrapolated from the existing mechanics.

And #3 wasn't there in 3e? Ad hoc resolution = roll d20, add skill or ability modifier, done.

When I think "try to include specific rules for everything under the sun," I think of 2e, which had rules for all sorts of situations but they were all different subsystems (or 1e, where you sometimes had different subsystems for the same situation, like surprise). In 3e, everything is d20 + attack / save / skill / ability score. How is that not "a solid core, with a baseline system easily extrapolated to fit situations that aren't spelled out"?

 

[Lizard]

Actually, one of the things that made me saddest when I looked at the 3.0 MM for the first time was that the ENTIRE PAGE worth of info about the monster, from habitat to behavior, was gone. It made me a very sad panda. Because I love monster info.

From what it sounds like, 4e may return to that, and that has me excited. Just being able to read the 4e MM for enjoyment and ideas is great.

And I hate fluff in my crunch books. I want the rules to be robust enough to give mechanical meaning to the fluff I make up myself. (i.e, if I say, "Gnolls are masters of archery", I want some way to make sure I can build gnoll archers from the default gnoll template. If I say "Gnolls are led by demon-worshipping necromancers", I want to make gnoll necromancers. Etc. I want *just* *enough* fluff so that there's a common vocabulary of shared baseline assumptions, i.e. "Gnolls are savage, evil, cannibal, slavers." Leave the rest to me. KTHXBAI.)

MMIV was the first WOTC product I really felt was a waste of money, filled with useless fluff, pointless maps, templated and leveled monsters I could do myself, etc. I really hope that's not the 4e model, but my hopes are slim at this point.

 

[Plane Sailing]

And I hate fluff in my crunch books. I want the rules to be robust enough to give mechanical meaning to the fluff I make up myself. (i.e, if I say, "Gnolls are masters of archery", I want some way to make sure I can build gnoll archers from the default gnoll template. If I say "Gnolls are led by demon-worshipping necromancers", I want to make gnoll necromancers. Etc. I want *just* *enough* fluff so that there's a common vocabulary of shared baseline assumptions, i.e. "Gnolls are savage, evil, cannibal, slavers." Leave the rest to me. KTHXBAI.)

It sounds like you may be disappointed then.

In Worlds and Monsters it says that they have been working on the humanoids to give them distinctly different flavours, so fighting each type of humanoid feels distinctly different (so Gnolls are sorta cowardly bullies, orcs are tough brutes, hobgoblins are skilled soldiers).

Personally I applaud this, I think it is a big step forward. I think it will probably be welcomed by the majority of DMs (and the relatively fewer number who want to customise things to the degree that you do will quickly gain the experience and confidence to make bigger changes, if you believe the post that Mouseferatu made a little higher up - and I can't think of any reason to not believe him).

Cheers

 

[Lizard]

It sounds like you may be disappointed then.

In Worlds and Monsters it says that they have been working on the humanoids to give them distinctly different flavours, so fighting each type of humanoid feels distinctly different (so Gnolls are sorta cowardly bullies, orcs are tough brutes, hobgoblins are skilled soldiers).

Personally I applaud this, I think it is a big step forward. I think it will probably be welcomed by the majority of DMs (and the relatively fewer number who want to customise things to the degree that you do will quickly gain the experience and confidence to make bigger changes, if you believe the post that Mouseferatu made a little higher up - and I can't think of any reason to not believe him).

Cheers

A lot depends on how this is done. Crunch books should give me the "how" (the raw mechanics) and leave the "why" (culture, history, backstory, relations with other races) to me.

So "Hobgoblins are disciplined soldiers. They get +1 when within 5' of another hobgoblin." is Crunch. I'm down with that. Er...yo. I will then decide WHY they're soldiers, if there are non-soldier hobgoblins and what they do, how they relate to other races (Hobgoblins are the 'Klingons' of my world, honorable, brutal, warriors who put the LAWFUL in Lawful Evil.)

"Hobgoblins were soldiers of the ancient Apos'tro'phe Empire, until they rebelled when they were order to kill their kobold allies, and then they served the ancient lich-king Evillus"...Waste of space. Bugger it. Degree of hatred directly proportional to wasted space. Suddenly talking like Rorschach. Should not reread Watchmen before bed. Use that paragraph to give me a few hobgoblin-specific feats (or their 4e equivalent) I can use to customize my hobgoblins and as a model for adding my own abilities.

"Here's a page and a half of a hobgoblin war camp with maps and a bunch of high-level hobgoblins statted out with the rules we already gave you so you could do it yourself."... We hates it! We hates it FOREVER!

The fact the gnome will have a "lair" in the MM fills me with dark, cold, dread...

(I do not wish to claim this stuff doesn't have a place. I did write Ultimate NPC for Mongoose, after all, part of which was filled with stat blocks. But that was the advertised purpose of the book, and I tried to pack it with original crunch, too. AND NO LAIRS! Encounter tables for places, but NO LAIRS! Sorry. Hate lairs. I'll go away now.)

 

[Plane Sailing]

Reminds me of the distaste that I've always had for fluff which implies relationships with existing groups. The first time the Svart appeared it said something like "enemies of hobbits, hobbits always hate them and attack" or something similarly stupid. I didn't want a new monster which had built in relationships with existing creatures that altered their behaviour.

So by and large I'm probably fairly close to you here - I like distinctive mechanics for creatures, but like distinctive fluff somewhat less (especially if it implies ties which I'm likely to want for my homebrew).

Less of an issue for monsters than for PC races of course, because any changes I decide to make would be considered less of a potential imposition

Cheers

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

A lot depends on how this is done. Crunch books should give me the "how" (the raw mechanics) and leave the "why" (culture, history, backstory, relations with other races) to me.

So "Hobgoblins are disciplined soldiers. They get +1 when within 5' of another hobgoblin." is Crunch. I'm down with that. Er...yo. I will then decide WHY they're soldiers, if there are non-soldier hobgoblins and what they do, how they relate to other races (Hobgoblins are the 'Klingons' of my world, honorable, brutal, warriors who put the LAWFUL in Lawful Evil.)

"Hobgoblins were soldiers of the ancient Apos'tro'phe Empire, until they rebelled when they were order to kill their kobold allies, and then they served the ancient lich-king Evillus"...Waste of space. Bugger it. Degree of hatred directly proportional to wasted space. Suddenly talking like Rorschach. Should not reread Watchmen before bed. Use that paragraph to give me a few hobgoblin-specific feats (or their 4e equivalent) I can use to customize my hobgoblins and as a model for adding my own abilities.

"Here's a page and a half of a hobgoblin war camp with maps and a bunch of high-level hobgoblins statted out with the rules we already gave you so you could do it yourself."... We hates it! We hates it FOREVER!

The fact the gnome will have a "lair" in the MM fills me with dark, cold, dread...

(I do not wish to claim this stuff doesn't have a place. I did write Ultimate NPC for Mongoose, after all, part of which was filled with stat blocks. But that was the advertised purpose of the book, and I tried to pack it with original crunch, too. AND NO LAIRS! Encounter tables for places, but NO LAIRS! Sorry. Hate lairs. I'll go away now.)

Hehe... I understand your feelings (even though I don't share them). I think it's okay for the first core rulebook with monsters to have such material. People starting the game are probably well served with this stuff. But it's probably to late in the second source book, or at least should be specifically marked as "for use by people that don't want to make up this stuff on their own". But the core rule books are "also for use by people who don't have a clue on the game yet and might be overwhelmed making these things up" and "also for people who don't have the time to make these things up".

I don't know how large that second and third group _really_ is, but it's obviouls that WotC is thinking of them now.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Reminds me of the distaste that I've always had for fluff which implies relationships with existing groups. The first time the Svart appeared it said something like "enemies of hobbits, hobbits always hate them and attack" or something similarly stupid. I didn't want a new monster which had built in relationships with existing creatures that altered their behaviour.

So by and large I'm probably fairly close to you here - I like distinctive mechanics for creatures, but like distinctive fluff somewhat less (especially if it implies ties which I'm likely to want for my homebrew).

Less of an issue for monsters than for PC races of course, because any changes I decide to make would be considered less of a potential imposition

Cheers

I think the bad part are things claiming to be "Always Evil" or "Attacks X on sight". This limits the possible behaviour considerably, and often enough, these extremes don't make sense from a versimilitude point of view. (Which is why they will probably be get ignored anyway.)
Linking species by common enemy and common ally is a lot more interesting as a starting point, though it's probably also often ignored in homebrews. (Or not?)