D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Aenghus]

Alpha striking is a good tactic, and if monsters aren't playing for keeps and trying to win, they aren't being played realistically. If players aren't dying, it's because you're playing the monsters too easy. Why should monsters play nice or play fair? They're monsters ffs, let them kill the PC once in a while. Alpha striking is what both sides should be doing to win. If the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's rigging the game for the PCs. That sucks. Why bother playing a game you know you're going to win? I never understood that mentality.

I find the all-striker party tends to fail if ambushed properly, against minion hordes or in long adventures where their lack of healing surges bites them. Their lack of resilience, control, marking and healing dictates an all-or-nothing strategy where they must quickly win every fight, as they die fast when the tide turns against them. They do have the virtue of winning quickly or losing quickly.

There are many different reasons for playing games. What required is that the players not be focused on killing stuff super-efficiently and the PCs have realistic goals other than killing their way to victory and the referee producing appropriate scenarios for them that require less killing. There's nothing wrong with RPG-as-wargame per se, and most groups I've seen have players who focus on efficient killing, but there are lots of other ways to play the game.

Also some players prefer different character concepts, which perhaps leads to many different classes existing.

 

[spinozajack]

Actually, the kind of burn-your-encounter-attacks-up-front tactics you're talking about are exactly the kind that will give you a grindy-at-the-end combat. Especially against more challenging encounters.

I was talking about using your encounter powers up front if they are striker powers. (which are, if you are playing to win the battle, usually the ones you want). If you have a way to generate 4e's advantage, like Oath of Enmity, or other similar benefits like damage vulnerability, then it does make tactical sense to wait for the right moment to bust out encounters or dailies and on the right target. But grind is generated by not being able to reduce enemy HP quickly, and the fight lasts many rounds, even to the point of a slow depletion of HP on both sides like WWI and attrition. It's not fun. If you want combat not to grind, you need to make sure you have a decent accuracy, and the whole group concentrate on taking one enemy off the board at a time, sometimes on the BBEG, other times on the minions (who might be a better use of early round actions because you don't waste big damage powers to take out minions). But if your strikers can rush by and kill the BBEG in round one or two, and your support artillery know to help you clean up the trash mobs, then you can end most fights early and without losing much HP. Most 4e "balanced" fights are lost due to players playing terribly and without tactics, running off and doing their own thing, spreading around damage. Once you figure out that the way to end combats quickly is to concentrate fire, then it's fairly easy to win almost any "balanced" encounter your DM will throw at you. At which point it becomes a quection of, why is the term "balanced" meaning an encounter PCs are supposed to win in the first place? Balance is not 80-20, it's 50-50 odds of either side winning. By definition. So I don't think 4e was balanced, I think PCs had such an unfair advantage that it was basically a shooting gallery.

I do like the idea of balance, and even 5e doesn't provide it. Otherwise every battle would have a 50-50 chance of TPK. Right now, it doesn't. Monsters are way too easy to kill after tier 1. In 4e, it was the same. So if I'm to say something positive about 4e, it's that it had some good ideas but poor execution. And that its ideas weren't followed through with monster difficulty. But again, that's a critique that applies to 5e as well. The default game is on easy mode. Three death saves? Fairly safe to play in those conditions. You just need one DC 10 to stop the bleeding. An enemy might need a 16 to hit your PC, and several hits to drop them, plus three more until they die, plus three rounds of their allies failing DC 10 checks. The odds are so overwhelmingly stacked in PC's favor it's hilarious to call this kind of thing a challenge or balanced. 4e was much the same.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I do like the idea of balance, and even 5e doesn't provide it. Otherwise every battle would have a 50-50 chance of TPK. Right now, it doesn't. Monsters are way too easy to kill after tier 1. In 4e, it was the same. So if I'm to say something positive about 4e, it's that it had some good ideas but poor execution. And that its ideas weren't followed through with monster difficulty. But again, that's a critique that applies to 5e as well. The default game is on easy mode. Three death saves? Fairly safe to play in those conditions. You just need one DC 10 to stop the bleeding. An enemy might need a 16 to hit your PC, and several hits to drop them, plus three more until they die, plus three rounds of their allies failing DC 10 checks. The odds are so overwhelmingly stacked in PC's favor it's hilarious to call this kind of thing a challenge or balanced. 4e was much the same.

That is very mistaken. That is very much not what balance means. A 50-50 chance of TPK means that your parties should never be able to take on 3 encounters. There has never been a 50/50 chance of TPK in a standard encounter in any edition of D&D. The idea of "easy" mode is a joke.

Look, in AD&D, your 1st level fighter had banded mail, shield and probably a Dex bonus (whoa, autocorrect almost turned that into "sex bonus" totally different game) for an AC of 0-1. The baddies needed a 17-19 to hit you a single time and were generally only doing about 4 points of damage per hit. After about 3rd level, it was virtually impossible to kill a PC in melee combat without massively outnumbering him.

Granted, the prevalence of save or die effects meant that PC's died pretty often, but, it was SoD effects, not combat that killed PC's.

If you can't kill PC's in 4e, you're not trying very hard. It's pretty easy to do. The myth that early D&D was this hugely lethal game is just that, a myth. Your odds of dying in any edition of D&D are about the same, given the same challenges.

 

[pemerton]

I find that surge-management is more often related to dailies than use of encounters. For instance, the party that hoards dailies, can end up very low on surges after a number of encounters that judicious use of dailies could have shortened, and thus be forced to blow dailies less effectively to get through later encounters at all.

<snip>

Optimized DPR is closer to a sure thing, it almost always delivers, and you don't have to think about tactics as much in each encounter (if you like tactical depth and want to be optimal over a whole campaign, or even a whole 'day,' that's a bad thing - if you want to be able to ignore tactics while still contributing consistently, though, it's fine).

It's hard to be sure, but based on what I know about my group's approach and background (eg other gaming experiences) compared to other RPGers I've played with over the years, plus comparing to posts on these boards, I think we're relatively tactically inclined. And the issue of running a long day/campaign is certainly a factor for us.

So the "hoarding dailies" issue tends to be a mistake they avoid, and they're prepared to do the tactical thinking that a DPR focus lets you avoid.

I've certainly played with people in the past who I think would fit into your "DPR as low overheads" approach, and can see that their are 4e builds - especially I would say some ranger and rogue builds, maybe barbarians as well - that would suit them.

 

[pemerton]

Minion rules have so, so many applications (as I posted upthread). One of the best uses of the Minion rules is to use them for monsters with a bunch of appendages. This makes combat with monsters like the Hydra, Tentacle Monsters (like the Kraken, etc), and the Beholder so much more tactically deep for both the PCs and the GM (do I go after the central mass or this appendage or that appendage, etc).

As you probably know, the Dark Sun creature book uses this approach to statting some sort of tentacular sand beast.

 

[Manbearcat]

As you probably know, the Dark Sun creature book uses this approach to statting some sort of tentacular sand beast.

Yup. And there are other designers that took advantage of this masterful aspect of 4e's combat engine as well. The ability of the Pod Demon from MM2 is pretty fantastically contrived. Standard/Recharged Bloodied to spew up to 4 Podspawn Minions. The Podspawn can then detonate the Minion as a minor action, 1/round, recharge 5/6.

Others that come to mind is the Chosen of Yeenoghu from MM3 and the aforementioned Kraken. Just a brilliant component of 4e that helps emulate those high fantasy tropes while enriching players' decision-making with interesting, high-stakes choices.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Necronomicon writer, that's why you play ranger / warlord hybrids. You get most of the healing goodness and immediate action or interrupt abilities from both classes, allowing you to totally dominate. In my experience even with such a character, it was rare that I even needed to use healing abilities in combat to survive. Those minor actions were usually reserved for attacks or quarrying the next victim.

Alpha striking is a good tactic, and if monsters aren't playing for keeps and trying to win, they aren't being played realistically. If players aren't dying, it's because you're playing the monsters too easy. Why should monsters play nice or play fair? They're monsters ffs, let them kill the PC once in a while. Alpha striking is what both sides should be doing to win. If the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's rigging the game for the PCs. That sucks. Why bother playing a game you know you're going to win? I never understood that mentality.

All I'm saying is that you are overlooking a lot of other aspects of play and situations that aren't covered well by 'do more damage quicker'. Sure, you can be a hybrid striker/leader, but that still only covers some situations. The well-rounded party is still the one that has the highest overall success rate over the course of all the things that come up in a campaign, UNLESS that campaign is nothing but endless combat templates with virtually no plot and no variety from "come to a place, fight to the last hit point, and go on." If that's ALL your campaign is, then OF COURSE a party full of Battlefield Archers will kick everything else's ass, pretty much (though actually the party full of Cat Shamans is damned scary).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was talking about using your encounter powers up front if they are striker powers. (which are, if you are playing to win the battle, usually the ones you want). If you have a way to generate 4e's advantage, like Oath of Enmity, or other similar benefits like damage vulnerability, then it does make tactical sense to wait for the right moment to bust out encounters or dailies and on the right target. But grind is generated by not being able to reduce enemy HP quickly

Again, that's only a very basic understanding of the dynamics of a system with more tactical depth. 'Grind' is when you get a combat with a long 'tail' of uninteresting rounds in which you whittle down an enemy who is already, in essence, defeated.

It's more often the result of applying damaging powers inefficiently, than of lacking overall damage potential. All classes have plenty of damage potential, even the non-strikers. Some of that potential is in encounters & dailies, and some comes from party synergy.

A Striker/DPR/burn-your-encounter-early strategy, while it optimizes white room DPR, and can be fairly consistent in play, can end up being inefficient or missing out on synergy when it comes to actual damage throughput. Of course, that's only if you stick to it dogmatically. If you don't use it as an excuse to eschew flexibility and tactical depth, it's just a solid baseline.

At which point it becomes a quection of, why is the term "balanced" meaning an encounter PCs are supposed to win in the first place? Balance is not 80-20, it's 50-50 odds of either side winning. By definition. So I don't think 4e was balanced

That'd be 'balance' in a PvP or DM vs Player mode, sure. In 4e, you got that sort of 'balance' somehwere north of Level+4 encounters.

I do like the idea of balance, and even 5e doesn't provide it. Otherwise every battle would have a 50-50 chance of TPK.

Which wouldn't work with a game that intends for characters to develop over time, create story arcs, or emulate the heroic fantasy genre. It'd be fine 'balance'/fairness for a single-session boardgame or wargame, though.

Alpha striking is a good tactic, and if monsters aren't playing for keeps and trying to win, they aren't being played realistically. If players aren't dying, it's because you're playing the monsters too easy.

The Alpha strike can be a good tactic. It can also be a losing tactic. It depends on the nature of the encounter.

As an aside, it's interesting to consider the distinction between the 4e Alpha Strike and the 3.x Nova. In 4e, the way powers and the action economy were designed, you couldn't do a true Nova in which you just flushed all your most powerful resources up front, and reduced the entire encounter to an Initiative contest. That was a great improvement, but one that a lot of folks had trouble accepting. What they came up with as a 4e Nova was the Alpha Strike: leading with an action point (preferably in some synergistic comb) and blowing through high-damage encounters ASAP.

Some encounters are all but trivialized by a good Alpha Strike, though, IMX, it's usually the Controller, not a team of Strikers, who can deliver on that potential. OTOH, a poorly conceived or executed Alpha Strike or an encounter with an unexpected twist can result in the Alpha Striking party severely disadvantaging themselves. A winnable encounter can even become a TPK as a result.

Why should monsters play nice or play fair? They're monsters ffs, let them kill the PC once in a while. Alpha striking is what both sides should be doing to win.

Once again, you're being overly simplistic in your analysis. Yes, the way hps work make focus fire arguably the best of available simple tactics in all versions of D&D. But that doesn't make them the best tactic, every time, and sometimes, they turn out to be a terrible tactic.

That said, 4e monsters /are/ designed to start encounters strong. They'll have Encounter and Recharge powers that hit hard and put the party at a disadvantage. The party, though, will typically have resources, in the form of surges, Second Wind, a Leader and Controller, to recover from that initially barrage, and additional offensive resources left win the fight. It's they stereotypical, almost melodramatic, heroic fantasy battle trope.

Leaning too heavily on early-round offense depletes the party's offense resources at a time when they may be at a disadvantage, and leaves them nothing but plinking with at wills to grind down the monsters.

If the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's rigging the game for the PCs. That sucks. Why bother playing a game you know you're going to win? I never understood that mentality.

D&D has it's roots in wargaming, and can certainly be played as a small-scale skirmish wargame with two sides (Players vs DM) equally matched. That is not the only way to play, and many less open-minded gamers would say it's "not really roleplaying," but it is one option.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is very mistaken. That is very much not what balance means. A 50-50 chance of TPK means that your parties should never be able to take on 3 encounters. There has never been a 50/50 chance of TPK in a standard encounter in any edition of D&D. The idea of "easy" mode is a joke.

Look, in AD&D, your 1st level fighter had banded mail, shield and probably a Dex bonus (whoa, autocorrect almost turned that into "sex bonus" totally different game) for an AC of 0-1. The baddies needed a 17-19 to hit you a single time and were generally only doing about 4 points of damage per hit. After about 3rd level, it was virtually impossible to kill a PC in melee combat without massively outnumbering him.

Granted, the prevalence of save or die effects meant that PC's died pretty often, but, it was SoD effects, not combat that killed PC's.

If you can't kill PC's in 4e, you're not trying very hard. It's pretty easy to do. The myth that early D&D was this hugely lethal game is just that, a myth. Your odds of dying in any edition of D&D are about the same, given the same challenges.

Well, 4e is really oriented towards story-based action play, so it doesn't heavily favor the "one lucky shot" sort of theory of death which was so prevalent in AD&D play. Its true that a 2e or even a 1e fighter MIGHT well outclass his melee opponents a good bit, he should, but it was still not TOO hard to have something like a troll, an ankheg, or any of a variety of other monsters with some fairly gnarly claw/claw/bite or specialty high damage attacks to gank you in a round, even at mid-level. 4e DOES largely avoid that, you have to either make a bad mistake or just push yourself over the edge to go down hard and fast. OTOH you certainly CAN go down, even to some relatively easy-looking encounters at times. I've avoided issuing any TPKs in 4e, because its an easy game to balance, but I've killed PLENTY of PCs. I don't know that all my groups were tactical wiz-bangs, but none of them was idiotically stupid and they all generally built moderately good characters.

Anyway, the point is its a GREAT system for the dramatic sacrifice. If the fighter wants to stick in the door to give the wizard time to break the secret code and figure out how to work the ritual to close the demongate, he can do it. Even certain death won't happen before he buys a couple rounds, if he pulls out all the stops, so its worth it. The problem with something like 1e is you'd probably just get ganked on the bad guys initiative and that'd be the end of it. 4e isn't so much coddling the PCs as giving them a chance to shine. When you die you generally didn't go down to a bad die roll, it was "OK, now I'm going to up the ante to max and risk death, if I go down it won't be for nothing"

Now, maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea. If you enjoy the bathos of the meaningless meatgrinder type casual death of classic D&D, by all means play it. I think 5e's model is the odd man out here. Its much more forgiving than even 2e, yet its still not geared towards drama and action as 4e is. I find it rather neither fish nor fowl personally.

 

[Hussar]

Well, 4e is really oriented towards story-based action play, so it doesn't heavily favor the "one lucky shot" sort of theory of death which was so prevalent in AD&D play. Its true that a 2e or even a 1e fighter MIGHT well outclass his melee opponents a good bit, he should, but it was still not TOO hard to have something like a troll, an ankheg, or any of a variety of other monsters with some fairly gnarly claw/claw/bite or specialty high damage attacks to gank you in a round, even at mid-level. 4e DOES largely avoid that, you have to either make a bad mistake or just push yourself over the edge to go down hard and fast. OTOH you certainly CAN go down, even to some relatively easy-looking encounters at times. I've avoided issuing any TPKs in 4e, because its an easy game to balance, but I've killed PLENTY of PCs. I don't know that all my groups were tactical wiz-bangs, but none of them was idiotically stupid and they all generally built moderately good characters.

Anyway, the point is its a GREAT system for the dramatic sacrifice. If the fighter wants to stick in the door to give the wizard time to break the secret code and figure out how to work the ritual to close the demongate, he can do it. Even certain death won't happen before he buys a couple rounds, if he pulls out all the stops, so its worth it. The problem with something like 1e is you'd probably just get ganked on the bad guys initiative and that'd be the end of it. 4e isn't so much coddling the PCs as giving them a chance to shine. When you die you generally didn't go down to a bad die roll, it was "OK, now I'm going to up the ante to max and risk death, if I go down it won't be for nothing"

Now, maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea. If you enjoy the bathos of the meaningless meatgrinder type casual death of classic D&D, by all means play it. I think 5e's model is the odd man out here. Its much more forgiving than even 2e, yet its still not geared towards drama and action as 4e is. I find it rather neither fish nor fowl personally.

Not really. An AD&D troll maxes out at 25 points of damage in a round. It's a typical enemy for a 5th level party or so - and even a 3rd level fighter can fairly easily take that, at least for one round. And, note, most monsters, outside of maybe a few very high level outliers, max out their damage at about 25 points per round, maybe 30. And, again, we're talking a fighter with probably an AC of 0 by 5th level (full plate and shield is 1, give a +1 dex bonus with a 15 Dex - not unheard of), the troll is only hitting about 1 in 4 attacks.

Sure, at 1st level, you could die fairly easily. By 4th or 5th though, it was hard to kill a PC in combat. Again, the plethora of SoD effects greatly ramped up PC deaths. Heck, even a small giant spider had a death attack. But death by HP? Not so much.