D&D 4E Revisiting an old question: 4E Liker - anything you worry about?

[Khuxan]

-Fear: Intelligence will not do anything.

It doesn't do a whole lot, but it does something. I would've liked Intelligence to add to Initiative instead of Dexterity - reflectinig your mental ability to figure out the situation. After all, after the first round initiative doesn't have much to do with your reflexes.

-Fear: That it will be difficult to design for because a) there's only so much you can do and with hundreds of powers in just the first book, a lot's been done, b) creating something like a class will need thousands of words worth of powers along with the class itself.

I don't think either parts of this fear are true. Designing a class is certainly more involved than it was in 3.5, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

-Fear: Many powers will just be copy-pasted to create new classes because there exists no system for classes sharing powers.

This is happening in amateur creations, but again it's not necessarily a problem.

-Fear: That combat will be just as slow as it is in 3.5 because people will still need to keep track of finnicky bonuses/ongoing effects.

It's faster, but it's certainly still finnicky.

-Fear: That the social combat system will kill role-playing.

Not a problem, especially since it turned out to be so rudimentary.

-Fear: There will be too many powers per character to keep track of or, conversely, there will be too few so each character will play through each combat the same way.

Neither of these are true, but I think there are definitely elements of truth in each one.

-Fear: The GSL will be too limited and restrictive so innovation is stunted.

YES! Definitely a problem.

-Fear: Powers are unnecessarily limited (e.g. rogue powers restricted to certain weapons), and the solution will be a deluge of third-party products removing these unnecessary distinctions.

Rogues are pretty much the only class that is limited in this way, although others have problems - for example, multiclass characters and using implements from two classes.

-Fear: 3.5 is so robust too few people will convert over so that D&D is no longer profitable.

Not the case or, at least, not the case just yet.

-Fear: The skill list is too pruned.

Not a problem, for our group at least.

-Fear: Class restrictions (such as set trained skills and weapon proficiencies) will result in many new and alternate classes, feats, paragon paths, alternate class features just to remove restrictions that should not exist in the first place.

Not a problem.

-Fear: The quality companies that refuse to convert to 4E will die off.

We shall have to wait and see, but Paizo at least seems to have secured its existence.

 

[eamon]

I forgot a fear, and a rather important one at that: the absence of decent 3.5 era tools (largely due to WotC inability to make them in house, and the more oppressive GSL).

This one seems mostly confirmed. The tools for 4e aren't yet as mature, and the 3rd party tools go to unhandy lengths to avoid including copyrighted material. For instance, it's possible to find pretty nifty charsheets out there (the wiesbaden sheet springs to mind), which fail to live up to their promise since they don't include much of anything in the way of power precalculation - which, arguably is one of the whole points of using such an automated system.

We'll see. Maybe enthusiasts will release great tools in spite of WotC, but it's less likely than it was.
Edit: I should clarify that part of the reason I don't expect wizards themselves to come up with anything inspiring is not that they're necessarily incompetent, but simply that it's not that easy to see what's necessary - and a bit of free experimentation and hobbyists making what they need for their own use seems to work very well for these kind of things.

 

[Yair]

My largest fear was, I suppose, that the game would be complex to run. So far (with 6 sessions under my belt), this seems so-so. On the one hand, a simple fight appears simpler. On the other, the fights are more complicated as the situations and monsters are. I think it's a win on the 4e side on this point - while complexity of running the encounter as a DM might not have changed much, it is used much more efficiently now to deliver interesting and varied abilties and scenarios rather than micromanage complex statblocks.

Another fear I've mentioned is "railroading" the DM (or, rarely, players) with all the Aggro mechanics. I do find this irritating at times, especially on two fronts - (1) the fighter's marking is keeping my monsters from running around and making lots of havoc and fun across the battlefield, which I think would have been better; and (2) my warlock's Divine-Challenge/Eyebite combo is really annoying, making the opponent unable to both see the warlock/paladin and at the same time needing to attack him. On the other hand the party's defenders appear to be quite distinct from the strikers and artillery, so it's kinda a wash.

The thing is, I'm not growing into liking 4e more the more I play it. The main problem is that it feels very much like a boardgame to me, with many rules I don't quite wrapped my mind around and with lots of limtations on precisely how can you be cool. Combat takes forever, and it's mostly spent on tactical calculations and rules minutea, not on fun hacking and slashing and kicking ass. I think I'm growing too old to learn a new rules-heavy game.

 

[Stalker0]

1) That int and strength don't have enough mechanical advantages for classes other than ones that directly rely on them that they become dump stats for almost everyone.

2) That with all the conditions combined with the larger number of monsters that DMing will actually be harder, especially at lower levels of play.

1) Confirmed. While jack of all trades gives a bit of incentive, my party has an 8 int rogue, an 8 int fighter, and a 10 int warlord. Only the warlock has a good int, and I can't see myself putting anything but an 8 in int unless I'm going for specific classes. As for strength, when I played a wizard I had an 8 strength and never looked back. I got my leather armor and never had a problem with encumberance. Dump stats are pretty blatant in this edition.

2) Rejected. At least at the low levels we've been playing, running monsters doesn't seem too bad, and my dm has commented he is having more fun running monsters then he ever had in 3rd edition.

 

[That One Guy]

I had a lot of fears, but almost all of them worked out okay.

Most funny I had one was about the DDI table thing not being fun. Heh. Some were confirmed, but ended up being okay. Others weren't.