D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[S'mon]

Unified d20 mechanics stomp the heck out of any rather happenstancy patterns that exist in OD&D tables.

I'd disagree with that, I find d20 system often works very poorly and needs cludges like 'take 10'. The main reason being that it's used for too many different sorts of task resolution where the variance ought to vary a lot, eg most feats of strength should have much lower variance than dexterity-related or intelligence-related stuff. 5e Bounded Accuracy helps, so to some extent does 4e's +1/2 level (so everyone gets good at everything) but in 3e & PF it often works very poorly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd disagree with that, I find d20 system often works very poorly and needs cludges like 'take 10'. The main reason being that it's used for too many different sorts of task resolution where the variance ought to vary a lot, eg most feats of strength should have much lower variance than dexterity-related or intelligence-related stuff. 5e Bounded Accuracy helps, so to some extent does 4e's +1/2 level (so everyone gets good at everything) but in 3e & PF it often works very poorly.

As opposed to craziness in OD&D/BECMI like surprise rolls where elves use a d8 instead of a d6? Or the fact that granularity in these checks is really huge? Actually that last part isn't necessarily a bad thing, you might take a look at the kickstarter for Strike!, it is a 4e-like system that uses a single d6 for all task resolution (combat as well). Its an interesting idea, but early D&D games were a very crude implementation and its hard to understand how the logic of all the various different kinds of dice was ever considered a good idea. I guess it seemed interesting in the very early days, but we're long past that now. A progression of dice sizes may be somewhat useful for say damage rolls, but in other respects its an obsolete concept really. Any probability curve you can devise with various dice can be mapped down to d20 pretty handily anyway, if you really need to.

For myself I've settled on d20 using (dis)advantage mechanics ala 5e coupled with a graded success/failure level somewhat like DW or Strike!. I think its actually a pretty decent improvement on 4e's straight up classic d20 mechanics, but in 100 years I'd never go back to the arbitrary "I just picked up some random shape of die and decreed it to be the die used for X" of the early days. The problem is you can't devise logically consistent modifier rules or extrapolate a rule from one sort of check to another because they all scale so differently. This was a huge advantage of 4e (and to a bit lesser extend 3e/d20/PF/etc).

 

[TarionzCousin]

Is this thread still going--with minimal edition warring? How did that happen?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Is this thread still going--with minimal edition warring? How did that happen?

I was trying to insult OD&D, but nobody was biting hehe. Actually, all those crazy dice are still kinda fun, even for me.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I was trying to insult OD&D, but nobody was biting hehe. Actually, all those crazy dice are still kinda fun, even for me.

"... those crazy dice...."? We use the same dice in every edition of D&D.

 

[JeffB]

As opposed to craziness in OD&D/BECMI like surprise rolls where elves use a d8 instead of a d6?.

Where are getting this from? This is not in the lbbs, holmes, moldvay, or mentzer edited Od&d.

 

[Stalker0]

I think the best parts of 4e were on the DM side of the screen. The monster system was so much better than 3e once a few books had gotten the numbers right, and made for some great tactical combats.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Where are getting this from? This is not in the lbbs, holmes, moldvay, or mentzer edited Od&d.

If you say so...

Even 1e and 2e have the same issue though, there are all sorts of places where pretty much any old die might be specified to generate a probability (the 1e dwarf racial description is a good one). This is all sorts of messy as it is quite hard to scale and adjust these rolls and what happens if some human decides he's going to look for shifting walls or sloping passages? Its a big mess and it discourages going outside what is written up for each race and class since it immediately forces you to change often almost completely unrelated rules. d20 is vastly cleaner. Vastly easier to extend and combine different parts of. Quite easy to extrapolate an effect or rule to a new situation. 'classic' D&D really was hampered by the fixation on using arbitrary different dice.

 

[JeffB]

If you say so...

Even 1e and 2e have the same issue though, there are all sorts of places where pretty much any old die might be specified to generate a probability (the 1e dwarf racial description is a good one). This is all sorts of messy as it is quite hard to scale and adjust these rolls and what happens if some human decides he's going to look for shifting walls or sloping passages? Its a big mess and it discourages going outside what is written up for each race and class since it immediately forces you to change often almost completely unrelated rules. d20 is vastly cleaner. Vastly easier to extend and combine different parts of. Quite easy to extrapolate an effect or rule to a new situation. 'classic' D&D really was hampered by the fixation on using arbitrary different dice.

The rulebooks say so. Im not sure why you would claim a falsehood to prove a point. That is why I asked. :shrug:

 

[S'mon]

Was it 1e Rangers who used d8 Surprise dice?