New Essentials Builds!

[The Little Raven]

Right now this instant she can go into CB and already will see a substantial number of options, 5 builds of Fighter, 3 builds of Barbarian, at least 3 of Warden, all of which could be interesting. Why does she need at least 2 MORE subclasses of Fighter that will soon pop up in her CB? What character can you build with these that you couldn't build before?

A simple one that doesn't require reading through tons of options to build?

The PHB1 Fighter at 1st level has 16 at-will attack powers, 17 encounter powers, and 16 daily powers. That's nearly 50 powers for the player to look through to decide which ones fit her character. And then there's picking the class features, and figuring out how they interact with eachother, your powers, and your ability scores.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A simple one that doesn't require reading through tons of options to build?

The PHB1 Fighter at 1st level has 16 at-will attack powers, 17 encounter powers, and 16 daily powers. That's nearly 50 powers for the player to look through to decide which ones fit her character. And then there's picking the class features, and figuring out how they interact with eachother, your powers, and your ability scores.

Ok, so this particular player created a Warden today, and due to whatever vagueries of Windows I ended up running it through CB. This is a level 10 PC. It took me an hour just to FIND some of the feats in CB.

The game isn't suffering from overly complex classes. It is suffering from sheer BLOAT. Even just making an Essentials character in CB you're going to be wading through all that, incrementally increased in volume by practically a whole new system layered on top of the existing one.

I have nothing particularly against the Essentials MATERIAL. I just think that ship sailed a good long time ago. If 4e was going to go that direction it needed to happen at the start. The system is NOT becoming more appealing in actual use with more stuff, even if that stuff is in and of itself simpler.

I mean if you want to play with a simple set of options just don't use material from specific sources. A PHB1 or PHB1+MP1 Fighter has a lot of fun options, but not an overwhelming number for a player to choose from.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think I see what Al is getting at. So there is a problem with 4e that it's getting too complicated and confusing. There are too many feats, too many powers - classes that were relatively simple when you picked 2 of 5 at-wills and 1 of 4 each encounter & dailies have become almost nightmarish, with alternative class features, 5 or 6 'builds,' a dozen powers at each decision point, and litterally thousands (OK, only 2 thousands) of feats.

/As a business that wants to sell products/, what do you do? Re-set the game with a new revision? Tried that (3.5), it worked, but there was a lot of animosity. Nix large swaths of redundant feats and marginal builds? People paid you good money for all that crap, you can't just banish it from organized play or reccomend DMs stop using it. What do you do?

Well, what WotC did was to launch a 10-product adjunct to the game that, /taken alone/ would be simpler. Of course, we're not taking it alone, because we're a bunch of geeks who not only use every scrap of info published for our beloved games, but also go around obsessively grid-filling anything we deduce might be 'missing.' So, yeah, used that way, it's gonna suck.

I don't know how much better it would've been, but I can think of two possible solutions.

The first is no help, because it amounts to "if it hurts, don't do it." Slow down the production schedule. Release one - really good, thoroughly playtested, carefully-previewed-to-generate-buzz - book a quarter, at most. The goal would have been to generate sales of each suplement comparable to those of the core 3, by leaving demand for new material high. The problems with this are myriad. 3rd party providers would swoop in with offerings; fans would complain that the flagship RPG of all time was 'going unsupported,' even with staggering sales it just wouldn't deliver the same revenue as producing crap books every month. The biggest problem, of course, is that they already didn't do it, so it's not a solution.

The other solution would have been to take the Essentials aproach - a simplified 'on ramp' to 4e - but, instead of salting it was a lot of 'new' material to maybe attract current fans, make it 100% compatible with the game as it already existed. The same game, just in smaller, more easily digested bites. Instead of coming up with new class advancement mechanics, just have builds with powers pre-chosen and laid out in an advancement chart. If a player 'graduates' to the complete game, his character converts cleanly to all the new options.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, Tony, I think that is a reasonably good summary. Honestly I don't think there's a THING wrong with Essentials. It isn't EXACTLY the choices I would have made but I think it is well designed and people will have fun playing it.

I think the real issue that I'm thinking about is tangential to Essentials. It seems like D&D has wound itself up into a frenzy of publication. I'm not really exactly sure how we got to this point. I mean consider the time period 1975-1985, the "Golden Age" of D&D and other RPGs. In this ENTIRE PERIOD we had OD&D (7 very small books), part of BECMI (I'm not entirely sure which books came out in that period but it was I think B, E, and C basically). Then we had AD&D, which up to 1985 consisted of 3 core books, FF, UA, and MM2. Basic + OD&D combined don't weigh in at as much as the 1e AD&D PHB, so we basically had about 7 books total worth of material to play with over a 10 year period.

Now, there were certainly plenty of adventure modules, several settings, The Dragon, probably a few odds and ends I've missed too, but the point is the game was hugely successful and obviously made a lot of money for TSR. When did it become mandatory to come out with a book a MONTH just to stay in business and keep the game "alive" vs the book a YEAR that sufficed 30 years ago?

I'm just not sure I really think that the new way is actually that much better than the old way. At this point 4e is just over 2 years old. It is already the heaviest RPG in existence with 30+ full sized hardback volumes. On top of that the crunch in Dragon and Dungeon really is pretty vast when taken as a whole. I mean 3.x MAYBE got there after 8 years. The problem is there is just no viable way for this pace to be maintained, except to keep endlessly "repaving" the whole system until it collapses under its own weight. At some point you HAVE to step back and stop with the adding endlessly to the system. A lot of the guys I played with back in the 80's and 90's are still around, but most of them already won't touch 4e. They don't DISLIKE it, they're just blown away by the sheer monstrosity of the whole thing.

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

I personally like lots of options. They should however remove, errata, or upgrade all the crap items/powers/feats though. Especially the obsolete ones. You know, where the new feat has everything the old feat had but an extra +2 to bla? Or the new feat is better in every way and has less restrictions? These types of things, trap feats are fit for the garbage heap. Stop wasting people's time with that crap.

But there will always be a spread of usefulness and power. That's fine. Part of the fun of this edition is chosing the optimal way to run your character. If the player has no time or motivation to do this, why would they have any to do it in earlier editions? Do you think 3.5 has less clutter? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But I haven't seen any other free or commercial builder as clean and easy to use as Wizard's.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have glaring flaws though, e.g. a blind monkey these days could write a scripting language plugin to let you add customized feats that actually do something to the rest of your sheet. Otherwise you might as well just mark any house rule stuff manually anyway after you print it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It seems like D&D has wound itself up into a frenzy of publication. I'm not really exactly sure how we got to this point. I mean consider the time period 1975-1985, the "Golden Age" of D&D and other RPGs ... we basically had about 7 books total worth of material to play with over a 10 year period.

Battletech.

In 1984, FASA released an innocuous little board game called BattleDroids, that was quickly re-named Battletech (because Lucas figured they owned 'droids). The premise of the game was, "hey we can pick up the rights to a few illustrations of Anime robots, lets make a game outta that." It exploded.

I had one friend who got into it, and by 1987 he had six feet of bookshelf devoted to suplements. It was a pace of publication the broader gaming industry had never seen before. It became the standard everyone apired to.

White Wolf was the first RPG-focused company to succeed, like Battletech, by focsusing on setting over 'crunch,' managing a book-a-month publishing pace as it slowly detailed its 'World of Darkness.' Once the 'World of Darkness' expanded beyond the original Vampire, it became a book per month per line. TSR tried to immitate that success in the 90s, and, with the name recognition of D&D, and a flurry of settings (Darksun, Spelljammer, Planescape, etc), succeeded.

D&D may have changed hands, and WW may or may not be doing so well these days (I've stopped paying attention), and the focus (for D&D at least) may have shifted from fluff to crunch, but the standard set by Battletech remains. Sell /lots/ of books very fast or your game has failed.

Publish or perish.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

hmm... I wonder is there a way for Wizards to make money and not publish tons of crunch on an ongoing basis?

The thing about 3.x was that the tonnage of stuff was not really in your face. If you had a character concept and you remembered that there was some cool stuff in book x and y that fitted the concept you took them down from the shelf and built the character. All the other stuff was filetered out by not choosing the books.
However, in the CB its there in front of you every time the application is used. At some point the weight of stuff will become overwhelming, unless they find a way to allow users to exclude stuff on a more granular basis than source.

 

[Jack99]

r. All the other stuff was filetered out by not choosing the books.
However, in the CB its there in front of you every time the application is used. At some point the weight of stuff will become overwhelming, unless they find a way to allow users to exclude stuff on a more granular basis than source.

You do not need to exclude the whole book. You can exclude anything you want from the CB - even a single feat, or all feats, or all magic items or whatnot. It takes some time, sure, but at least its something that you only have to do once.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

You do not need to exclude the whole book. You can exclude anything you want from the CB - even a single feat, or all feats, or all magic items or whatnot. It takes some time, sure, but at least its something that you only have to do once.

Ok, I had not spotted that the treeview was expandable. I though it was just a simple list.
Thanks.

 

[Jack99]

Ok, I had not spotted that the treeview was expandable. I though it was just a simple list.
Thanks.

Seems to be a common mistake. I have seen lots of people who thought the same. The treeview probably has a high stealth modifier