D&D 4E The Dispensible 4E

[P1NBACK]

Disclaimer: This thread is primarily directed at players and DMs who really like 4E. If you haven't played in a long-running 4E campaign, or aren't playing 4E right now, please don't chime in with a bunch of hate. We already know the many issues people have with 4E.

With that said, what I'm really interested in is what big-time 4E fans, people who are running or playing in 4E campaigns right now, or have run or played in a long campaign (3+ months at least), consider things that 5E could improve upon. I don't mean minor tweaks you could make at the table or house ruled. I mean systematic things that can be fixed with 5E.

What are things that bother you right now about 4E that could be dramatically improved upon with 5E or dropped entirely from 5E?

 

[seregil]

I'm running a 4E campaign and playing in another. While I am definitely no great fan of 4E, there s one thing that must be changed: healing surges.

Yuck!

I slap this guy over here and my buddy over there suddenly heals the sucking chest wound he got last round because he thinks its funny?

Really? Really Really?

Sorry, I have said it before and i will say it again: If I hit someone with a sword and hit him (say I crit), NOTHING except magic will heal him. Not a nice song, not a snarky comment from his warlord buddy, nothing except direct divine intervention (or a very conveniently located ER).

Healing surges are a kludge and need to be rethought. In their attempt to fix the cleric=healing, they broke the game. It completely rips out all suspension of disbelief. It's simply not believable, even for a world of dragons and flying carpets.

The other real gripe I have is the power descriptions. One line of fluff? Wow, lots of effort went into that.

So get rid of the HS, find something else and work on the descriptions of the powers please.

 

[Cybit]

Yeah, ditto on the healing surges. I understand making resources to manage a character's daily capabilities, but you could do something as simple as making a constitution check, or reducing the maximum hit points every time a character is healed.

Too blatant of a game mechanic, IMO.

 

[braro]

For me, arbitrary number bonuses.

Priest's shield gives +1 to AC; not a fan. Priest shield gives partial cover? Sure!

Ongoing 5 fire damage? Blech. "Engulfed" that does 5 damage per tier? Awesome!
Ongoing poison damage? Poisoned!
-2 penalty to ac? Why not grants combat advantage; or, if we need to have it stack, create a new condition (Provides an opening?)

I would rather have key words for the statuses, than have a dozen different little things to keep track of.

 

[Ranganathan]

Played 4E since release on a monthly basis. Our group is split down the middle on whether to continue with it or jump to Pathfinder or hold out until the playtest. We've flip-flopped on this for about six months now, but we all basically agree with the following...

Conditions should be dropped almost entirely in favor of simple modifiers -2/-5 that are described as various bits of flavor, hindered, bound, etc. There's really no need for all that.

Non-turn attacks need to go. Defenestration. Pure and simple. Adds too much time to the game without really adding that much important. So attacks of opportunity, immediate interrupts, etc. all gone and hopefully forgotten.

Large hit poit pools. I loved the sight of 30+ hp when I started playing only to hate them in short order due to everything else scaling as well. It's a larger pool for the psychological benefit of old time players. The monsters have big hp pools too so it just makes combat drag out.

Healing surges. Lame mechanic that's a pacing mechanism wit no real purpose. They're stand-in hit points. So drop one or the other. Self-healing I like, surges can toss off.

Feat taxes. Ugh. So over the idea that you need to spend a feat to gain the ability to not suck with certain weapons or to have the same chance to-hit as weapon users.

Something like 90% of the changes made between editions last time need to be rolled back for the next RPG. I like having casters with something magical to do every round and some parity between casters and non-casters, but 4E went too far into the game (re: minis battle game) than it should have. Lots of good rules for wargaming, not so much for role-playing.

 

[braro]

Feat taxes. Ugh. So over the idea that you need to spend a feat to gain the ability to not suck with certain weapons or to have the same chance to-hit as weapon users.
.

I agree; if you have to errata something, don't give us choices to make, plug it in to the core system.

 

[Raith5]

I dont mind healing surges - they work well for me - but self healing of some kind is a must have.

I dont like:

* Measuring distance in squares. It is a unnecessary disconnect between the player and the world
* Milestones - another necessary disconnect. An AP per encounter is not going to destroy things
* Action denial (daze stun etc) at low levels
* Magic items just left me cold
* Too powerful starting point. My preference is for a lower less heroic starting point. I thought 1st levels PCs could be a little less powerful.

I also think they got some key archetypes wrong: the druid and barbarian for instance just did not look right to me

However, overall I really like 4th ed mechanics overall compared with previous editions.

 

[hafrogman]

Healing surges are not the same thing non-magical healing.

Healing surges are a method of standardizing the amount of hit points restored by a healing ability. The alternate argument is that it's just as strange and odd for healing magic not to work equally on two people. Two fighters both reduced to one hp (the sucking chest wound?) . . . a single healing potion will fully heal Fighter A, but not fighter B. Why? Because fighter B is more skilled than fighter A, and thus . . . less susceptible to being healed why?

This would create issues with previous systems where wands of low level healing could be used to heal anyone, so remove those instead. In general, healing surges (the actual mechanic) make a very large amount of sense. So I disagree.



The number one thing I think could be dispensed of from 4e:

- Iron clad classes. There was no room for archer or swashbucklers in the 4e fighter, because it didn't fit in the narrow class design.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I'm running a 4E campaign and playing in another. While I am definitely no great fan of 4E, there s one thing that must be changed: healing surges.

Yuck!

I slap this guy over here and my buddy over there suddenly heals the sucking chest wound he got last round because he thinks its funny?

Really? Really Really?

Sorry, I have said it before and i will say it again: If I hit someone with a sword and hit him (say I crit), NOTHING except magic will heal him. Not a nice song, not a snarky comment from his warlord buddy, nothing except direct divine intervention (or a very conveniently located ER).

Healing surges are a kludge and need to be rethought. In their attempt to fix the cleric=healing, they broke the game. It completely rips out all suspension of disbelief. It's simply not believable, even for a world of dragons and flying carpets.

That's not a complaint about healing surges, that's a complaint about the prevalence of not-explicitly-magical healing effects.

Healing surges is a daily resource that limits the number of times you can be healed, and surge value is a baseline number of hit points that each healing effect restores. That's it.

If you have a problem with the nonmagical healing in 4e, say that. Don't say you hate healing surges, because that's not what healing surges are.

 

[braro]

The number one thing I think could be dispensed of from 4e:

- Iron clad classes. There was no room for archer or swashbucklers in the 4e fighter, because it didn't fit in the narrow class design.

I'm really not a fan of the super-broad fighter; I feel like it has stopped the class from developing a good niche in the past. I feel like one class, one idea, one execution.

There should be an archer and a swashbuckler; but they shouldn't be "fighters" unless fighter is an archtype (class?) and archer or swashbuckler is a theme.