D&D 4E The Dispensible 4E

[WarlockLord]

Now, I'm no big fan of 4e. But I came to these conclusions after my friends and I ran a 4e campaign:

Race/class dependency. No one likes being told they MUST be a gnome if they want to be an illusionist.

Grind: Too many hps are annoying.

A legion of fiddly little buffs which change by the turn.

An inflexible system which cannot cover a wide amount of character concepts.

A lack of meaningful or interesting non-combat options.

 

[Incenjucar]

Why is everyone in this thread that is supposed to be the opinions of 4E fans people who are no fan of 4E?

That rather defeats the point, and is a bit rude.

As someone who ACTUALLY greatly enjoys 4E:

* Feat taxes. That is not the way to fix the math.
* Too Much Freaking Wizard Stuff. Seriously. The wizard is just one class. Spread the love.
* Avoiding making monstrous humanoids.
* Not enough non-dragon beasts. If it isn't a dragon or Cthulhu it's probably a humanoid, even if the type isn't humanoid.
* Too much reliance on plus items. I can't stand +X Pants of Math.
* Not enough experimentation. There are barely an optional rules presented in 4E, but soooo many possibilities.
* Attempts to cram collectibles into the game. Fortune Cards, etc. NO. BAD.
* Creating things to fill space rather than because they needed to be created.
* Twin Strike.
* Bad editing. Since day 1 of the edition, this has been a plague.
* Trying to hard to cling to old school stuff. I got over generic old school fantasy during the 90s. It's great that the generic stuff is there, but try new things.
* Obvious armor choices. Waaay too many characters end up in hide armor.
* Too much WAR art. It looked silly in 3E and it hasn't gotten any better. I'm happy to see a few pieces of his work here and there, but I'd like to see more variety, ideally stuff that isn't Chunky Comic Book Style.
* Too little attention paid to the overworld - the dungeon is such a tiny fraction of fantasy. I want to see rules for combats where everyone is riding a horse, or a wagon, or a griffon.
* Too few environments explored. Need more pegasi and mermaids.

 

[MortalPlague]

4th Edition is my favorite edition of D&D. There are so many big positives; the ease of preparation for DM'ing, the monsters and their cool abilities, the terrain effects and how traps and puzzles and skills and incredible battlefields can all key off one another within the framework of the rules. There are some things which I've grown dissatisfied with, however.

First:

A legion of fiddly little buffs which change by the turn.

This. A thousand times, this. This is my biggest beef with 4th Edition, particularly in paragon and epic. I'm running a high paragon game currently (PCs are 20th level), and every time they hit, they have to calculate different damage numbers.

Secondly, the powers. I really enjoyed them to begin with, but as things wore on, I liked them less and less. It's a great idea to have interesting things to do aside from just "I attack with my sword", but I want these options to be more flexible and organic. In so many 4E combats, you fall into the rythym of "Use this encounter power, followed by this one, then this other one, then maybe a daily if things are dicey, then at wills till the threat is defeated". It becomes a checklist of moves you repeat every fight, rather than a series of cool options.

All in all, I really would love to see many influences from 4th Edition make it into the next game, but those two are issues that could use some attention.

 

[Kynn]

But that causes another problem. Now, a critical hit with a sword amounts to merely "a hard poke to the ribs." Either way, the willful suspension of disbelief gets stretched.

What would a critical hit with a sword be otherwise?

I mean, in most cases it doesn't kill you, or even make you start dying.

So "a critical hit with a sword" obviously can't be something like being stabbed through the heart.

It's an injury that you survive but that weakens your ability to take further hits. Narrating it as something more than that is itself stretching disbelief, as characters will be running around with swords stuck halfway through their bodies in multiple places otherwise.

 

[LostSoul]

Getting all your healing surges back after an extended rest.
Treasure tied to character level.

 

[Someone]

There are a lot of things that can be improved in 4e, but the most blatant is the power structure since it's at the heart of what 4e is.

You may be surprised that I don't feel that wizard powers being similar to fighter powers is a problem - I don't understand why magic needs a completely different resolution mechanic than other actions with different fulff to be considered magic. After all, climbing a cliff and talking with someone are completely different activities and they are solved by the same skill roll mechanic.

However in the books and in play I agree thay don't feel different enough. I think powers could benefit from the following:

• Less emphasis on the gamist perspective, where the only factor on designing the power is the game mechanics, and more thought on how the power's effects acan be included on the narrative. This could be as simple as better descriptions or fluff - two lines aren't enough, but also clear boundaries on what each power source can do.
• Too similar powers. I believe that since most of them are damage plus effect/condition and the number of condition and effects are limited, they could be reduced to maneuvers where you can add that effect to a basic ranged or melee attack. This in turn would drastically reduce the size of the power list, leaving more space to define each class by unique mechanics.
• Again, more discussion on how to integrate the power effect on the actual game and how to house rule to adapt it to the group's particular vision of how the fictional world works. For many, a hit is a wound, more or less severe depending on many factors but if a wizard it hit by a greataxe and falls to the ground, the DM immediately announces "the wizrad falls to the ground with a big gash in his chest that shows the internal organs". Thus the disconnect when a warlord shouts him into health. The way the current rules work better is to say "the wizard falls to the ground with blood on his robes" and when the warlord shouts him, then it happens it was merely a light wound; the wound's severity doesn't need to be defined until he fails his third death save (he's dead, the wound was severe) or he's healed (in which case the axe hit was a minor hit and he fell because of sheer shock). Interrupts have basically the same effect, as they retroactively negate actions and change the flow of the narrative.
  
  In any case, the designers need to acknowledge that not every group narrates of understands the world the same way, so they need to design the powers so they can be easily changed by each group to suit their needs, and also discuss more extensively the rationale behind the rules and how to integrate the rules and power results into the story.

 

[Tuft]

That is just an issue with your description.

You don't get stabbed in the chest until you die of a stab wound to the chest or a cleric divinely heals you unconscious dying body of a stab wound.

When the warlord heals you, he is reminding you that you were not stabbed in the chest and that you should stop being a drama queen over a hard poke to the ribs.

So now your character was just a whiney drama queen who blew a mere owie out of proportion, whenever he has gotten a stern talking-to by the Warlord?

 

[pemerton]

I will agree with Crazy Jerome and Someone that 4e desperately needs better advice and examples. Besides the examples they give, I would point to keywords. Keywords get extensively discussed in terms of mechanics interacting with other mechanics. But the only part of the rules that highlights the utterly central role of keywords for fictional positioning (eg fire damage will burn things, forced movement with a fear power means you're running away, etc) is the discussion of damaging objects. Talk about hiding a key part of the game in some third-rank piece of text!

On the mechanical front, I agree that there are too many magic items, too many of which are crappy. And the wall of powers issues is a real one. I play a non-Expertise game, but I would agree that feat taxes are a problem for those who use them.

Managing effects and conditions in combat is fiddly, but is utterly crucial to making combat different from traditional D&D hit point attrition. I don't object to it being cleaned up a bit, even a lot, but somehow keep the emergent intricacy.

On the borderline between advice and mechanics - there is far too little discussion of how paragon paths and epic destinies feed into the fiction and thereby affect action resolution (eg a skill challenge with the Duke surely should play differently for a Questing Knight compared to a Demonskin Adept).

 

[Steely_Dan]

Math scaling (levelling), removing 1/2 level from all character's and monster's attacks, defences and skills has really helped my 4th Ed experience (and reducing HP).

 

[The Little Raven]

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.

Going on 4 years and and people's complaints about healing surges show they still don't understand what healing surges are.

Healing surges are NOT self-healing or non-magical healing. They are a pacing and scaling healing mechanic. They give you a scaling value to determine how much you heal from major healing effects, as well as giving you a limitation on how many times per day you can be healed.

They are completely separate from self-healing (the second wind power) or non-magical healing (the warlord class).