D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Manbearcat]

I've never been a huge fan of dragons, as a GM. (My players know to expect demons and undead, and not too many dragons.)

In 4e, as best I can recall, I've had three dragon combats over 29 levels.

For someone who is not a huge fan of dragons (I am personally), you ran more dragons as antagonists than I did in my last game. All of the dragon fights you outlined are awesome and represent 4e's capacity to climactically pull the trope off well.

My only dragon was a Blue Dragon attack on the high seas in the nautical portion of my game. The dragon was well out of their league at that portion of the game but they had two recharge 5/6 harpoons mounted on the stem and the stern of their vessel that proved key. The battle ended up catastrophically damaging their ship and setting them adrift for a period (resolved via micro-SC for a success in a macro-SC), but they ultimately defeated the dragon.

 

[Pickles III]

I think the tactical depth of 4e is a bit of a chimera as PCs win pretty much all the time. If players are terrible then the DM will go easier on them & if they are elite ninjas he will up the difficulty, either consciously or not. Of course this is the same for any edition - the alternative is very short or very dull campaigns.

Some of the most fun I have had with the game was with a striker heavy party with a bit of spot healing. It's fast & edgy stuff. On the other hand my absolute favourite thing about 4e is forced movement effects especially used to damage monsters. I use these effects & the home made terrain powers because I find them fun to use not because they are necessarily the most effective things there are in term of "winning" encounters as we win all the time anyway.

It is something lacking in all the other editions of the game & definitely fits with the somewhat contentious "combat as sport" analysis. It works for me though. To some extent "combat as war" is to avoid boring combats as much as dangerous ones as they are just not so much fun in other editions - bad grindy end games notwithstanding.

 

[Aenghus]

I think the tactical depth of 4e is a bit of a chimera as PCs win pretty much all the time. If players are terrible then the DM will go easier on them & if they are elite ninjas he will up the difficulty, either consciously or not. Of course this is the same for any edition - the alternative is very short or very dull campaigns.

I disagree re the tactical depth in 4e, as it makes individual encounters interesting even without the constant fear of sudden death. Players generally find entertaining ways to mix and match their power use. Super high death rate D&D isn't common nowadays AFAIK.

Some of the most fun I have had with the game was with a striker heavy party with a bit of spot healing. It's fast & edgy stuff. On the other hand my absolute favourite thing about 4e is forced movement effects especially used to damage monsters. I use these effects & the home made terrain powers because I find them fun to use not because they are necessarily the most effective things there are in term of "winning" encounters as we win all the time anyway.

It is something lacking in all the other editions of the game & definitely fits with the somewhat contentious "combat as sport" analysis. It works for me though. To some extent "combat as war" is to avoid boring combats as much as dangerous ones as they are just not so much fun in other editions - bad grindy end games notwithstanding.

I do like forced movement, though it makes for more DM prep to put in terrain features to make such powers more useful. The "don't negate powers" guideline in 4e is useful here, as it means halflings can use forced movement to push around T Rexes and dragons, whereas in other editions such endeavours would likely be met with howls of derisive laughter.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I do like forced movement, though it makes for more DM prep to put in terrain features to make such powers more useful. The "don't negate powers" guideline in 4e is useful here, as it means halflings can use forced movement to push around T Rexes and dragons, whereas in other editions such endeavours would likely be met with howls of derisive laughter.

I'm reminded of a poster (I think from RPG.net?) who was almost beside themselves with glee at the prospect of a Brawler Fighter--I believe the specific phrase was "chokeslam a dragon."

 

[Tony Vargas]

I disagree re the tactical depth in 4e, as it makes individual encounters interesting even without the constant fear of sudden death. Players generally find entertaining ways to mix and match their power use.

"We're gonna die!" doesn't create tactical depth, just desperation, maybe some pathos. Really, when players fear for their character's lives excessively, you see less tactical depth - you see more strategy and risk-avoidance (ie: only attacking when you're confident of swift, overwhelming victory), but tactics become more conservative.

Super high death rate D&D isn't common nowadays AFAIK.

5e's brought it back at low levels - if the DM doesn't think to compensate for the fragility of low-level PCs, that is.

The "don't negate powers" guideline in 4e is useful here, as it means halflings can use forced movement to push around T Rexes and dragons, whereas in other editions such endeavours would likely be met with howls of derisive laughter.

Nod. "Push" doesn't have to mean physically shoving.

I'm reminded of a poster (I think from RPG.net?) who was almost beside themselves with glee at the prospect of a Brawler Fighter--I believe the specific phrase was "chokeslam a dragon."

I've played Brawling Fighters, and, yes, they're all kinds of awesome - almost to the point of being as much controller as defender (not really, but some of the fun of a controller, anyway).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've played Brawling Fighters, and, yes, they're all kinds of awesome - almost to the point of being as much controller as defender (not really, but some of the fun of a controller, anyway).

Might need to make my next 4e character one of those. I suffer the curse of having several fun character ideas I'd like to try! Heh.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the tactical depth of 4e is a bit of a chimera as PCs win pretty much all the time. If players are terrible then the DM will go easier on them & if they are elite ninjas he will up the difficulty, either consciously or not. Of course this is the same for any edition - the alternative is very short or very dull campaigns.

Right, any RPG is as easy or hard as you are desiring to make it. You can play 4e as an easy-going story game where 'loss' is just a setback and the PCs almost always win fights regardless. Or you could play it as a completely hard-assed survival game, like 4th Core, using exactly the same rules. The same is true of every edition of D&D. If you want you can make it tough, or you can go pretty easy and just play to have a few laughs. So I guess the question is why is the tactical depth not a 'chimera'?

I think the reason is because its how the story plays out that matters. In a 4e game the DM has a lot of control over the difficulty, and the players have a lot of control over the amount of risk they're willing to take. Assuming your DM is capable then you can have a quite interesting time finding out HOW the player's win all those fights. THEY (the players) can also choose NOT to win in the narrow sense, they are masters of their fates and they can choose what victory means for them. If the Paladin chooses to go down blocking the door so that the refugees can get to safety, that's COOL! Its not so easy to do that in classic D&D where relatively fragile characters make it difficult to count on your sacrifice being meaningful. At higher levels it MIGHT work, but by then the game is too unpredictable to employ that sort of plot, the wizard will likely blow the whole thing up with some clever use of Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion or something.

Some of the most fun I have had with the game was with a striker heavy party with a bit of spot healing. It's fast & edgy stuff. On the other hand my absolute favourite thing about 4e is forced movement effects especially used to damage monsters. I use these effects & the home made terrain powers because I find them fun to use not because they are necessarily the most effective things there are in term of "winning" encounters as we win all the time anyway.

Well, as a DM, I went a lot further. I have crazy action terrain. Basically go watch any of the classic action movies of the 1980's (or whenever) and you see scene after scene of people falling, running, jumping, things burning, collapsing, flying, etc all over the place. That's what 4e does so well its just not even funny. It kills at that stuff.

It is something lacking in all the other editions of the game & definitely fits with the somewhat contentious "combat as sport" analysis. It works for me though. To some extent "combat as war" is to avoid boring combats as much as dangerous ones as they are just not so much fun in other editions - bad grindy end games notwithstanding.

Eh, I think you COULD do combat-as-war, but I don't like the distinction that much. If the players want to go poison the orcs water supply instead of charging in the front door of the orc cave, then great, 4e is certainly not getting in the way of that. It maybe never developed some of the equipments and utility magic quite to the same degree as classic D&D, but the possibility still exists. I've seen players do some of that in 4e and we worked with it. It was fun. OTOH at least you CAN do 'sporting combats' in 4e, you REALLY wouldn't have wanted to do that in say 2e, or 3.x! 5e is a bit more forgiving I will admit, but it lacks the romping action stuff that 4e comes with.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm reminded of a poster (I think from RPG.net?) who was almost beside themselves with glee at the prospect of a Brawler Fighter--I believe the specific phrase was "chokeslam a dragon."

The halfling in one of my campaigns took Bowl Over and just loved that power. He was constantly body slamming monsters into a heap all over the map. It was completely goofy and quite fun.

 

[pemerton]

I think the tactical depth of 4e is a bit of a chimera as PCs win pretty much all the time.

In a 4e game the DM has a lot of control over the difficulty, and the players have a lot of control over the amount of risk they're willing to take. Assuming your DM is capable then you can have a quite interesting time finding out HOW the player's win all those fights.

I agree with AbdulAlhazred here.

I also have doubts about the "combat as war"/"combat as sport" distinction. To me it seems to be about mechanical features of early D&D rather than about the content or character of the fiction.

For instance, early D&D had fairly tight resolution mechanics for "I cut his head off with my sword": roll to hit, roll to damage, adjust hit point totals, etc.

Whereas it had very relaxed mechanics for "I slip poison into his drinking goblet": perhaps a DEX check, and poison bypasses the hit point mechanic.

You could easily resolve sword swings the same way: state intent, make an appropriate check, and then narrate the outcome without anything like a hit point mechanic to constrain the scope of success and force multiple action declarations to get total victory. Burning Wheel permits this: "I cut his head of with my sword", make a simple check, and if it succeeds the enemy's head is cut off! I've allowed this in 4e too: "I kill him with a Magic Missile", make an Arcana check, and on a success the NPC is "minionised" and dies to the MM's autodamage.

Sometimes, though, it's fun to have a hit point track, or some analogous device, that forces the resolution to become a bit more intricate and gritty. That's why not every 4e combat is fought against minions, and why some non-combat challenges are resolved as skill challenges. (Here's an old thread with some good discussion of the latter point.)

In my experience, those who vigorously advocate the "combat as war"/"combat as sport" dichotomy are generally advocating for player control over certain aspects of scene-framing (or, rather, scene-reframing) with that control mediated fairly loosely via free roleplaying that takes advantage of gaps in the system's formal resolution mechanics. Although many of those advocates don't seem to have a lot of familiarity with variations in the mechanical design of RPGs, and so tend to run together the metagame element of their advocacy (which I've just described) with claims about the imaginative nature of the fiction that is generated by pursuing their favoured approach to action resolution.

 

[Bluenose]

I think the tactical depth of 4e is a bit of a chimera as PCs win pretty much all the time.

Quick mathematics moment. Under the 3e paradigm you typically face 14 encounters of equal level before you level up. Assuming half the encounters are potentially lethal, and that there's a 99% chance that you'll survive any particular potentially lethal encounter, do you know what level you get to before your probability of being alive is less than 50%? 9th. If you get to 10th level without dying, having faced 70 encounters where you only had a 1% chance of dying, then you're doing better than average. And you're saying 4e PCs win pretty much all the time. Do you really think other editions are particularly dangerous for PCs?