D&D 4E Some Thoughts on 4e

[KarinsDad]

I dislike this as well. Much of the fun "magic" of the game has been stripped out.

This is our group's take as well. We have a few players that are vastly disappointed in the sameness of combat from one encounter to the next.

Some, so much that they want to play different game systems.

I'm tinkering with an idea that might help: a feat (call it whatever, Ritual Caster) that lets you cast a ritual you know as a Standard action. You can have as many queued up equal to your INT bonus. You still have to pay all costs associated with each ritual, effectively casting it right up until the final trigger.

We are toying with similar thoughts.

We are considering how we can change rituals so that some of the less powerful ones can be cast in combat.

I'm a Wizard. My Rogue friend has fallen unconscious. I want to cast Tenser's Floating Disk to pull him away from combat. I cannot.

Additionally, the only Ritual our group uses on a consistent basis is Enchant Magic Item. There just seems to be something inherently wrong with spending money to cast Hand of Fate or Phantom Steed or Tenser's Floating Disk or many others. These should be spells, not rituals. They do not bring people back from the dead, they do relatively minor magic.


The bottom line is that magic is now mostly about damaging foes and healing. There is very little in combat utility magic. There is very little in combat defensive magic.

And, most of the in combat magic lasts a round or so.

And, most magic is barely distinguishable from Martial powers.

Magic is no longer special and most of the fun magic is gone or nerfed to the point of limited utility.

There is very little long duration magic anymore either.

Most of the game is really about combat now.

Sure, one can find an exception here or there. But, PCs can no longer Fly over a mountain, PCs can no longer sneak through a town Invisible, magic is no longer special, unique, and with a reasonable duration. It's mundane and pedestrian.

Practically every foe now has one or more powers that are more or less indistinguisable from magic.

Magic used to be the factor that made PCs special and it itself was special. It's not anymore.

 

[HighTemplar]

Luckily with all the new material thats coming, there will be new feats, and new variants which will diversify and maybe bring back some flavor to this insipid game.

Since your next game is not for tomorrow, Have some faith my friend, and house rules are made to please everyone. Be careful not to fiddle with certain things. As previously mentionned, you would be better to open up an expanded spellbook feat to non wizards then to just blatantly put all martial powers reliable.

Unfortunately, being balanced is all this edition has to offer yet, so destroying that, you might as well go back 3.5 ^^

 

[Plane Sailing]

Unfortunately, being balanced is all this edition has to offer yet, so destroying that, you might as well go back 3.5 ^^

Well, that isn't really true, is it? This edition offers a new way of doing critical hits, new way of doing hp, new way of doing healing, new way of doing skills...

I'm not sure that your comment makes any sense in this thread?!?

 

[Bond James Bond]

Luckily with all the new material thats coming, there will be new feats, and new variants which will diversify and maybe bring back some flavor to this insipid game.

Unfortunately, being balanced is all this edition has to offer yet, so destroying that, you might as well go back 3.5 ^^

/signed

If you compare 4E with the late 3.5, it sure looses out on variety of powers and the like. If you compare it with early 3.0, it looks very good.

Patience!

 

[Johnnii]

It sounds as if few people even have tried the Ritual feature and it's versatility. None in my groups have even looked at the rituals for example, despite constant advertising of it's fantastical effects.

 

[Callowbran]

I, too, have been enjoying 4e. I was an early skeptic, but I love the class-powers mechanic.

With due respect to the OP, one of the things I never liked about pre-4e D&D was the "select your powers" each day thing. I just never knew what my character was going to encounter each day. Invariably I would be battling some horrible beastie and run out of power because I had selected "knock" instead of "magic missle" or somesuch. After awhile I would simply stop selecting certain utility spells, or my character would sleep at odd times of the day just to regain magic.

However, anyone wedded to the idea of choosing powers each day should take ALL of the class powers, and simply select the one you want each day: that would be fun, too.

 

[Bond James Bond]

I dislike this as well. Much of the fun "magic" of the game has been stripped out.

I understand this feeling. But consider this:

In previous editions, a wizard was the archtypical glass canon: Throwing high powered magic around, flying for hours, being invisble when it was convenient, cutting travel by teleporting over hundereds of miles via teleport.

This was all good "fun" - at least for the caster. Not sure that martial characters and DMs did agree on that on all the time. Sometimes other characters felt that the wizard was stealing too much spotlight, by emulating other characters roles with a couple of spells. Sometimes it was hell of a work as a DM to stop the improved invisble, flying caster and anoying when the wizard retreated into his safe extradimensional hut when pressed. Not fun.

This all was (halfway) balanced by the fact, that a surpised, unprepared wizard could be taken down in a matter of seconds due to his low hp (not fun - for the wizards in that case).

4E gives the wizard considerable more surviability. This comes at the price of limited arcane power for the wizard.

But that`s the price for balance, and I think it is worth it after all.

 

[Ahwe Yahzhe]

Regarding OP and Wizard Versatility

Back to the OP's concern, I also say go for it- it's not unbalancing. Here are my two house rules relevant to the conversation:

Wizards, at each extended rest, swap one daily or encounter power for a different one.

One Action Point may be used to re-roll an Encounter or Daily Attack, as long as the power is not Reliable or has an effect on a miss. (There is a feat of some sort out for this now, but my house rule stands so they don't have to blow a feat slot for ineffective dailies.)

-AY

 

[KarinsDad]

4E gives the wizard considerable more surviability. This comes at the price of limited arcane power for the wizard.

But that`s the price for balance, and I think it is worth it after all.

I don't think that is the price for balance. There are other ways to balance a game without neutering an entire class concept.

It's not so much that the arcane power is limited. It's that virtually every spell is Evocation.

The issue is not that I want a Wizard to choose powers every day, it's that he has no options to pick from a wide variety of powers in a given encounter. He is limited every round to a small choice of spells. And it is the same options every encounter.

And, Dailies are not even a significant part of that choice. Dailies, at least for me, are for emergencies, not every encounter casting.

So at 7th level, he is limited every single encounter to 6 choices (instead of 5 because he is human, so he has 3 At Wills) which quickly drops down to 3 choices. Six might sound like enough to some people, but for people who enjoyed casting protection spells some rounds, offensive spells some rounds, illusion spells some rounds, miscellaneous spells some rounds, the sameness of casting one out of three to six damaging spells each round is really boring.

Every 4E Wizard is an Evocation specialist with a smidgen of control for all intents and purposes. zzzzzzzzzzz

Every 4E Cleric is an Evocation specialist with a handful of cures for all intents and purposes. zzzzzzzzzzz

Sure, each At Will and Per Encounter spell has some little twist added to it. But the spells are almost all damaging spells (Warlords have a few that are not).


And, it's not just that they are damaging spells. It's that people who loved to play classes for decades now with a lot of choices per round are now faced with a few.

Combat is always the same. Allowing a Wizard or Cleric to pick from a pool of spells each morning will not change that. They will still be limited to their handful of choices each encounter for that day.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I have to ask - what are you doing out of combat with your characters? Are you taking advantage of the rituals to do some of the old Wiz/Clr tricks?

This is obviously one of the huge dividers between those that enjoy 4e and those that don't - that in this version, Wizards and Clerics don't have such a huge range of powers that in the hand of a competent player they start to make other classes look weak and unncessary.

Personally, the fact that scry/buff/teleport became a standard (not a tactic, a standard) indicated to me that there was something badly wrong with the game. I am personally glad that PC spellcasters, for the moment, are much more limited. I also believe that some of those powers will creep back in over time.