Great Caesar's Ghost! Here we go again with the same old discussions about 4E over ten years after it was finished. I am really glad to still see interest in 4E after all this time, since it was my jam at the time and I'd much prefer it to 5E.
I'd love to see the option to play on current VTTs with the full character options. I started to look into if the character builder from days of yore was still available, and it looks like that's true. The problem is that I'm playing on a VTT and all those powers don't exist in a current VTT form. Which is sad.
I know it will just fall on deaf ears, but ... can't we just stop having the same discussions about 4E when we're one and a half editions away from it? Much like if you don't like Skills and Powers, let it go in 2025.
Folks like me enjoyed the tactical battles in 4E, and we could have the same type of roleplaying or skill based challenges as in earlier editions, or in 5E for that matter. If you don't like those battles, 4E isn't for you. And you have 5E for that style of play, not to mention BECMI or OSR games as well. It really is that simple.
I can say, if you use Roll20, there
is an implemented character sheet, and you can code your own powers for it--simple ones aren't even that hard to do directly, actually, without any coding at all. It took me a while to get fully fluent with it, but (from experience) I can get back into the swing of it with a bit of time.
Maybe (1) stop claiming that people are gaslighting you when they are just pushing back on your critical opinions and (2) stop thinking of roleplaying as something that happens outside of combat. Roleplaying and combat are not mutually exclusive.
No kidding.
That said, I don't think you will get disagreement that combat in 4e arguably lasted too long. But there are reasons for that which were stated in other threads, including issues with monster math, some of which were adjusted last minute by higher ups.
Certainly. This was one of the pretty major mistakes the 4e design team made early on. They did it for reasons that seemed sound at the time, but it was a bad move. Specifically, they aimed for most combats to resolve in 4-6 rounds, leaning to the top end; monsters didn't do as much damage with each hit, but lasted longer, and many early Leader things were more about sustained output than about being a force multiplier (with the Cleric being
particularly so...as one of the first two Leader classes.) The point was to let the opponents have plenty of time to show off their Cool Trick(s), and plenty of time for the PCs to rally from any initial setbacks and power through to the finish. Unfortunately, in practice this meant many combats, especially those done purely "by the book"--as many people do early on in an edition when they don't know what the system is capable of!--tended to be slow and kind of grindy and, oftentimes, less "threatening" and more "logistically expensive."
Turns out, that's not what most folks wanted from D&D combat anymore (and the folks who would want it were never going to touch 4e to begin with, outside of the later 4thcore development). Of course, we have to be careful about presuming that what folks want is, in fact, a rational thing to begin with, because that isn't always true. In this case, there's an inherent tension between wanting
fast combat and wanting
rewarding combat, as is the case with most things. Stuff you can breeze through too quickly can't matter very much, except in the biggest and (in D&D's case) often the most frustrating ways. Most folks want both fast and rewarding, and that's...often a real challenge. OSR-type games certainly give fast and dangerous combat, but usually its combats aren't rewarding--often explicitly so, e.g. you don't get XP for fighting, only for GP value of loot collected, but sometimes only implicitly, e.g. combat is brutally lethal and it's expected that a "smart" player will figure out that rolling for initiative when you haven't won the battle in advance is a sucker's game. Getting combat that is simultaneously fast, and dangerous, and rewarding...that's a lot trickier, and the 4e designers erred pretty heavily on the wrong side.
By the time the MM3/MV math had come out, the damage was done, and even that measure only mostly fixed the problems, and even then to progressively lesser degrees as the characters got into high Paragon or Epic.
Players prefer snappier, more "dramatic" combat in many cases, though not all. That's part of why my "what would you do to update 4e" answer included my "Skirmish rules" concept. Some folks who love tactical battle mechanics might never use them. Other folks might almost exclusively use Skirmishes, with few to no standard combats. More or less, the idea is to drop down the granularity and time investment of regular combat, while still (a) having meaningful costs, (b) giving players some choices, just rapid-fire and simplified, and (c) making it so that experience at least
can be "part of this balanced breakfast" so to speak.
The analogy I like to use is that Skirmishes are to proper Combats what "party skill checks" (like you have everyone roll stealth, and if a majority succeed then the party succeeds) are to Skill Challenges. Or, at least, they would be that, because I've never written up any rules attempting such a thing. It would be probably my third-highest priority for a "4.5e", after Novice Levels/Incremental Advance rules and the general cleanup of unnecessary, crufty powers.
