Halivar
First Post
After four months of play, both as a DM and as a player, I realized that there are many things in 3.x that I'm not missing that I didn't expect to not miss. In some cases, they're things I didn't realize didn't really work until they were gone and the game improved for it. Here's my short list of the top things that I am happy are gone from my game.
Full attack/Power Attack - This one scared me, at first. As someone who has always preferred melee fighters and paladins, my first impression of hearing that both full attack and power attack were going to missing from 4E was near-panic. One attack a round? No more 2-for-1 damage bonuses? In 3.x, they are the only things that make fighters competitive with other classes; taking them away denudes the fighter of power. In retrospective, I can see that these mechanics failed utterly at allowing the fighter to stand out as a melee character. This is especially so for full attack, since it is used (or abused) with far greater efficiency by splat-book PrC's like the Whirling Dervish. These mechanics are now gone because they simply aren't needed for the fighter to stand out. I can play a fighter without having to "dress up" what is otherwise a dull, repetitive mechanic. The greatest side benefit is that no one rolls for nine attacks per round anymore.
Inappropriately leveled animal companions - Nothing is more annoying than having a large part of your character's "class power" derive from an animal companion/special mount/familiar, especially if you multi-class and your companion is stuck in power-stasis. There are rare cases where I have managed to well-and-truly break the animal companion rules, but usually I end up better off forgetting I have the companion in the first place. This is especially true of wizards and rangers, who have many, many PrC's available that do not scale companions. I am looking forward to a future official reintroduction of animal companions to 4E; if the current design philosophy holds, I expect a solution that scales by level. (BTW, I foresee a problem with static level 4 warhorses. There needs to be a mechanic for advancing them. I would be tempted to say that they are always at least CL-2, using monster advancement to scale them.)
Multiclassing- This is another one that scared me. As a devoted melee player, I have historically relied on multiclassing to add mechanical flavor to my fighters and paladins. To remove multiclassing is to remove my ability to add nuance to my character. I can happily report that my fear here was alleviated in actual play. Multiclass feats enhanced my game over a la carte class levels in two ways. First, powers I receive from other classes are properly scaled to my level, and I choose what powers I get. In 3.x, multi-classing means you must get the bottom tier abilities first. If you're a Ftr10/Wiz1, that means you get... magic missile with 1d4+1 damage. In 4E, you can cast fireball, or something else appropriately leveled. Second, you lose nothing by multiclassing. In 3.x, if a fighter or a wizard wants to multiclass, they risk losing precious BAB or caster levels to do so. At level 10, the power level difference between BAB +7 and BAB +10 or between spell level 3 and spell level 5 is enough to thwart most of the thematically "cooler" multiclass concepts right out of the gate (and heaven help the poor soul playing a multi-classed druid, who has three separate class abilities to lose to stasis). The "multiclass by feat" mechanic allows my players and I to express characters that simply weren't viable in 3.x.
Wands of cure light wounds - Every game, every session, after every combat: "Ok, I pull out the WoCLW, and *bink* *bink* *bink* *bink*." They're cheap enough to outfit every wand-user in the party, and that makes them part of the "standard adventurer's pack" in our games; you're stupid not to have one. The healing surge is a huge thematic change in 4E to accomodate a more cinematic narrative, but also has the side effect of mooting this klunky and decidedly non-cinematic 3.x artifact.
Buffs- Math hurt brain... head too full of dumb... Seriously, the fact that we needed the rule that multiple adjusts of the same "type" don't stack should have been a warning that this mechanic was broken. That WotC then proceeded to make fifteen bajillion "types" in splat books to make sure they do stack should have sent us running to the hills. Not once in 4E play have we spent more than 30 seconds trying to decide what kind of bonus someone gets to their attack or skill check. Good riddance to bad rubbish (WotC, please leave this one dead and buried, because if it comes crawling out of its grave, I'm gon' have a wooden stake ready).
Too many skills/cross-class skills- "One man's trash," and all that jazz, since it's a fiercely debated topic. Here's my take: as a fighter in 4E, I can take a single multclass feat, take stealth, and perform that skill with the same proficiency as a rogue of my level. In 3.x, even with multiclassing, it is hard to accomplish this. Using fighter skill points alone? Impossible, especially given that what are now catch-all's like Stealth and Thievery were really several individual skills. Actually, I wish 4E had gone a step further and abolished the limited class skill list altogether. I'll stick by the rules, for now, and see if the changes made are enough to fix it.
Death from massive damage/Save-or-Die spells - King's Quest V was a really fun game for the first hour. Then I walked into a bar, and died. I expect that I was supposed to be Pavlov's dog, learning the next time I played not to go into that bar; except there was no "next time." Save-or-die is another hotly-contested topic. In my game, it is not appropriate. It is not heroic. It is not cinematic. Not from the player's perspective, nor the DM's. Therefore, it doesn't belong at our table. The problem is that this is a hard mechanic to excise from 3.x because so much of 3.x's balancing presumes the existence of these mechanics. I've had four characters die in the first round of combat (twice, before my first action), and I am happily confident that it shall not happen again.
Level-drain and rust monsters - The latter, though iconic, isn't iconic enough to not piss me off every time it's used. Mechanics designed simply for the expressed purpose of permanently punishing a player for rolling badly is garbage. Some of my characters would have been better off jumping into molten lava at the start of initiative; 1 lost level has a 75% chance of being better than 1d4 lost levels.
There are more, but I heard that you can only keep a person's interest in your monologue for 15 minutes, tops. If you've read this far, you're probably waiting for my post to end.
Full attack/Power Attack - This one scared me, at first. As someone who has always preferred melee fighters and paladins, my first impression of hearing that both full attack and power attack were going to missing from 4E was near-panic. One attack a round? No more 2-for-1 damage bonuses? In 3.x, they are the only things that make fighters competitive with other classes; taking them away denudes the fighter of power. In retrospective, I can see that these mechanics failed utterly at allowing the fighter to stand out as a melee character. This is especially so for full attack, since it is used (or abused) with far greater efficiency by splat-book PrC's like the Whirling Dervish. These mechanics are now gone because they simply aren't needed for the fighter to stand out. I can play a fighter without having to "dress up" what is otherwise a dull, repetitive mechanic. The greatest side benefit is that no one rolls for nine attacks per round anymore.
Inappropriately leveled animal companions - Nothing is more annoying than having a large part of your character's "class power" derive from an animal companion/special mount/familiar, especially if you multi-class and your companion is stuck in power-stasis. There are rare cases where I have managed to well-and-truly break the animal companion rules, but usually I end up better off forgetting I have the companion in the first place. This is especially true of wizards and rangers, who have many, many PrC's available that do not scale companions. I am looking forward to a future official reintroduction of animal companions to 4E; if the current design philosophy holds, I expect a solution that scales by level. (BTW, I foresee a problem with static level 4 warhorses. There needs to be a mechanic for advancing them. I would be tempted to say that they are always at least CL-2, using monster advancement to scale them.)
Multiclassing- This is another one that scared me. As a devoted melee player, I have historically relied on multiclassing to add mechanical flavor to my fighters and paladins. To remove multiclassing is to remove my ability to add nuance to my character. I can happily report that my fear here was alleviated in actual play. Multiclass feats enhanced my game over a la carte class levels in two ways. First, powers I receive from other classes are properly scaled to my level, and I choose what powers I get. In 3.x, multi-classing means you must get the bottom tier abilities first. If you're a Ftr10/Wiz1, that means you get... magic missile with 1d4+1 damage. In 4E, you can cast fireball, or something else appropriately leveled. Second, you lose nothing by multiclassing. In 3.x, if a fighter or a wizard wants to multiclass, they risk losing precious BAB or caster levels to do so. At level 10, the power level difference between BAB +7 and BAB +10 or between spell level 3 and spell level 5 is enough to thwart most of the thematically "cooler" multiclass concepts right out of the gate (and heaven help the poor soul playing a multi-classed druid, who has three separate class abilities to lose to stasis). The "multiclass by feat" mechanic allows my players and I to express characters that simply weren't viable in 3.x.
Wands of cure light wounds - Every game, every session, after every combat: "Ok, I pull out the WoCLW, and *bink* *bink* *bink* *bink*." They're cheap enough to outfit every wand-user in the party, and that makes them part of the "standard adventurer's pack" in our games; you're stupid not to have one. The healing surge is a huge thematic change in 4E to accomodate a more cinematic narrative, but also has the side effect of mooting this klunky and decidedly non-cinematic 3.x artifact.
Buffs- Math hurt brain... head too full of dumb... Seriously, the fact that we needed the rule that multiple adjusts of the same "type" don't stack should have been a warning that this mechanic was broken. That WotC then proceeded to make fifteen bajillion "types" in splat books to make sure they do stack should have sent us running to the hills. Not once in 4E play have we spent more than 30 seconds trying to decide what kind of bonus someone gets to their attack or skill check. Good riddance to bad rubbish (WotC, please leave this one dead and buried, because if it comes crawling out of its grave, I'm gon' have a wooden stake ready).
Too many skills/cross-class skills- "One man's trash," and all that jazz, since it's a fiercely debated topic. Here's my take: as a fighter in 4E, I can take a single multclass feat, take stealth, and perform that skill with the same proficiency as a rogue of my level. In 3.x, even with multiclassing, it is hard to accomplish this. Using fighter skill points alone? Impossible, especially given that what are now catch-all's like Stealth and Thievery were really several individual skills. Actually, I wish 4E had gone a step further and abolished the limited class skill list altogether. I'll stick by the rules, for now, and see if the changes made are enough to fix it.
Death from massive damage/Save-or-Die spells - King's Quest V was a really fun game for the first hour. Then I walked into a bar, and died. I expect that I was supposed to be Pavlov's dog, learning the next time I played not to go into that bar; except there was no "next time." Save-or-die is another hotly-contested topic. In my game, it is not appropriate. It is not heroic. It is not cinematic. Not from the player's perspective, nor the DM's. Therefore, it doesn't belong at our table. The problem is that this is a hard mechanic to excise from 3.x because so much of 3.x's balancing presumes the existence of these mechanics. I've had four characters die in the first round of combat (twice, before my first action), and I am happily confident that it shall not happen again.
Level-drain and rust monsters - The latter, though iconic, isn't iconic enough to not piss me off every time it's used. Mechanics designed simply for the expressed purpose of permanently punishing a player for rolling badly is garbage. Some of my characters would have been better off jumping into molten lava at the start of initiative; 1 lost level has a 75% chance of being better than 1d4 lost levels.
There are more, but I heard that you can only keep a person's interest in your monologue for 15 minutes, tops. If you've read this far, you're probably waiting for my post to end.
