D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy

[Arilyn]

I dragged out my 4e books to take a closer look at powers, and yes, while there is lots of shifting, pulling and shoving, there are also a lot of very cool flavourful powers. The monk, for example, is way more interesting than the 5e monk. The game is more fantastical, especially when you add in the other player books. We have characters briefly turning into flights of birds or raining down shards from their bows, at 1st level.

I was not a fan of 4e, but taking another look, I think there's a lot there to commend it. Weapon choice is more meaningful. I've always liked the at will, encounter and daily idea, as it is nice and obvious when abilities can be used, and you don't have to rely on short rests.

As far as the character sheet being too complicated? You don't need a program. It's just going to be a lot of erasing when you level up. You are going to need power cards, however. No way all those abilities will be easily memorized. But, then again, I use them in 5e too (my own, not going to buy them.)

The rules books are not immersive, which is odd because of its more fantastical feel at the table. It's not going to fit in with the typical adventures, we imagine in D&D, but if you want to play a game with mighty heroes, heading for fantastic destinies, who'll have a huge impact on the world, 4e is a good choice.

As far as PF2 and 4e? The games don't really play the same. PF2 still feels like PF1. There are some similarities to 4e, but not to the extent that Paizo deliberately chose to copy 4e. I'm not happy with character creation, but playing is smooth and a lot of fun. It feels heavy, which can be an initial turn off, but it doesn't actually play heavy. I think it could use some streamlining, in terms of how skills and feats work, and the monster blocks are still a bit too onerous.

We can't know how happy Paizo is with this release. 5e is so far ahead in the market that rating PF by comparing it to 5e won't work. Paizo could be doing the best they ever have financially, and there'd be no way to know. Paizo doesn't need to be nipping at WOTC's heels. It's just not a realistic goal in the current rpg market which is another topic altogether.

 

[Neonchameleon]

3.x and PF1 required much system mastery, I'd expect PF2 to have much of the same and now with this plethora of feats it can only make the system heavier. I also felt 4e suffered from its many powers. IMO any system that requires a program for character creation will be viewed as cumbersome.

EDIT: I'm not saying 5e is perfect, but it is the system I'm playing right now.

Honestly to me every version of D&D since certainly 1995 has been on the high system mastery end of RPGs. (1995 was of course when Skills & Powers was published). And one key think about cleanliness is how much you have to look up in the books in the course of play; 4e here pulls back everything it gives up to 5e and then some because the answer is "literally nothing other than the self-contained monster statblocks". Indeed by modern standards I'd say 5e is at the heavy end of medium weight (compared to anything like Fate, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, or even the Cortex system)

Shadowrun doesn't have that much crunch, it just has too many equipment tables

Try the explosion rules sometime

 

[Undrave]

4e here pulls back everything it gives up to 5e and then some because the answer is "literally nothing other than the self-contained monster statblocks".

At least, if you have power cards, the powers are fairly easy to understand on their own. Everything you need to know is right there and there is very little need to check anything else in the book. If you knew how to play a class, none of them felt like complete unknowns.

Try the explosion rules sometime

I'd rather not

 

[CapnZapp]

There's a simple explanation of this. Weren't some of the 4e designers involved?

Theory: Instead of giving up on a 4e style game, they decided to double down on it due to personal feelings that style of system was better but just poorly implemented in 4e. Basically using PF2 as a second attempt at reincarnating their ideal system - thus producing something something similar in many respects to 4e with some of the most vocal complaints about it resolved (or at least dressed up nicely).

Maybe that's the most sensible answer.

Thank you, that is my belief as well.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Actually from my experience with PF2, system mastery is not nearly as important. Like, there’s a lot of system jargon to learn, but unlike PF1 and 3e, you don’t need to know the system inside and out to build an effective character. It is much more like 4e, in that it is balanced enough that you can just pick whatever seems cool and you’ll probably be up to par. There’s some room for optimization, but you don’t have to worry about ending up with a useless character just because you didn’t plan your whole 1-20 build in advance.

True, but I find that unless you off-load most of the rule responsibility on the DM, it requires more system mastery to play than 4e.
I have taken to advising the DM if I cast a spell with the Incapacitation or Mental keywords, because I don’t assume he knows my spells by heart, and he doesn’t assume I know the level of the opponent I’m fighting or their resistances.

Last night when drafting my long post, I was considering having the Wizard cast Blindness. The spell doesn’t indicate the effects of being blind, and neither of the two tables detailing conditions detailed the principal effect of being blind (you can only target a creature if you make a DC 11 flat check). The index of the book didn’t directly anywhere relevant. Finally, I ended up spending 10 minutes rereading the Combat section before I found the Correct passage.

 

[Xetheral]

It definitely will, but this is why I say people’s issues with 4e have a lot more to do with presentation than they either realize or admit. I’d wager if instead of Tide of Iron and Grappling Strike, you had a Fighting Style where you did the push-shift thing whenever you hit with a bludgeoning weapon and a Fighting Style where you can attempt a grapple whenever you hit with an unarmed attack or whatever, no one would have complained. In fact, the latter is pretty close to the Unarmed Fighting Style from the alternate class features UA. I didn’t see anyone complaining that the grapple part of that fighting style doesn’t make a difference, despite it being more or less Grappling Strike presented a little differently.

Over 500 posts into this thread and it's only just now that I'm realizing how differently you define "presentation" than I do. To me, presentation is marketing, formatting, and developer statements about design intent/assumptions (whether in the rulebooks or in the press). Whereas the difference between (1) an ability that provides an add-on effect to an attack, and (2) a self-contained ability that includes both the attack and the effect, is a structural difference in how an IC capability is modeled. Both methods are good models (and they both map the same IC capability to the same IC result), but the choice of modeling method is apparently much more important to me than it is to you. I'll try to see if I explain where I'm coming from.

To me, one of the most critical features of any model is whether it preserves relationships in the system being modeled. In practice, achieving that goal usually requires that similar features of the system are modeled similarly, and different features of the system are modeled differently. (There are other approaches to preserving relationships, but none would be practical for a high-abstraction model like D&D.)

So when I choose D&D as the game system to model a particular campaign or setting, one of things I want from the system is to preserve the IC relationships that exist in the game world. A key relationship in my game worlds is that the mundane is distinct from the magical--they're fundamentally different concepts, even though the level to which magic is ingrained in the game world varies between settings (arguably, the importance of deciding the level of magic in the setting shows how important the mundane/magic distinction can be). Ergo, I want the mechanics of my chosen model to preserve the distinction between the mundane and the magical.

That brings me back to the choice between modeling an IC capability as an add-on to an attack or as a self-contained ability. In a vacumn, the choice doesn't matter much because, as I acknowledged in my first paragraph, both are good models and map the same IC capability to the same IC result. But the choice isn't made in a vacumn: the system is modeling many IC capabilities, and the choice between modeling two capabilities identically or differently impacts whether and how the model preserves the IC relationship between those two IC capabilities.

Accordingly, I see a very important structural difference between a system that models mundane and magical IC capabilities identically, versus one that models them differently. The former will tend to blur the IC distinctions between the magical and the mundane, while the latter will tend to reinforce them.

Does that help explain the significance I see in the choice between an add-on ability and a self-contained ability? It seems from your post that, to you, as long as the same IC capability is mapped to the same IC result, the choice between modeling it with an add-on ability or a self-contained ability is insignificant. Is that correct?

 

[Ristamar]

Shadowrun doesn't have that much crunch, it just has too many equipment tables

And some of the most poorly organized rulebooks I've ever seen.

For the record, I really like Shadowrun. I just hate using the books.

 

[Undrave]

And some of the most poorly organized rulebooks I've ever seen.

For the record, I really like Shadowrun. I just hate using the books.

My group tried some Shadowrun for a while... I thought making a rigger with drones would be cool but it turns out there is not a single 'off the shelf' model in the book. For every friggin' drone you have to pick the frame, the AI, the sensors, the weapons, etc and most of these are in different tables separated by multiple pages. AUGH. Not even mentioning the interface you need to use to control said drone.

 

[Undrave]

Rolling for stats has been the default char-gen mechanism in every edition.

Just because its tradition doesn't mean it's automatically the best option. Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people

This is all I ever want a Fighter to do in any edition! Oh, and effectively shoot or throw hard or pointy things at foes more than 5ft away; and maybe be strong enough to bash down a locked door and tough enough to withstand some abuse.

Sorry, I have to say : BOOOOORING.

I guess it's a valid way to play but that shouldn't be the only option for a mundane melee attacker!

Everything else difference-wise between one Fighter and another comes from characterization and personality, not mechanics.

That can apply to EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in the game. Not sure why the Fighter needs to be the boring one and be limited to that kind of differentiation.

Reeks of Caster privilege >.>

 

[Arilyn]

There's a simple explanation of this. Weren't some of the 4e designers involved?

Theory: Instead of giving up on a 4e style game, they decided to double down on it due to personal feelings that style of system was better but just poorly implemented in 4e. Basically using PF2 as a second attempt at reincarnating their ideal system - thus producing something something similar in many respects to 4e with some of the most vocal complaints about it resolved (or at least dressed up nicely).

Maybe that's the most sensible answer.

Maybe? But Mearls and Crawford were very heavily involved in 4e as well. WOTC has laid off a lot of people in the past, who often found work at Paizo. Not sure that the 4e connection is really strong.

I agree with the poster who said that a 4eish style of design comes from looking at the weakness in the 3e design. My husband fiddled around with making a 4e game, before 4e was even announced, and his ideas were quite similar to the 4e design WOTC came up with.

Really, if you are looking for a game that was written to get 4e "right," that'd be 13th Age.