The roots of 4e exposed?

[houser2112]

That depends on what constitutes a "3e adherent". Do you mean someone who stuck to the 3e family (including PF) rather than play 4e? Or do you mean someone who will pretty much never stop playing 3e until something with even more options comes along? Or do you mean people who like the options of the 3e family for when they want to scratch that particular itch, but are willing to play other games? Those are, in essence, three different groups of "3e adherents", two of which will likely have no inherent problem adopting 5e if they like the game.

Groups 1 and 2 seem like the same group of players, since Pathfinder IS that "something with even more options", and I dispute the notion that 5E belongs in the 3.PF family. Group 3, in their willingness to play games other than 3.PF, to me fail to live up to the definition of "adherent". 3.PF is just one of many games they like to play.

They didn't stop fighting the edition war in 2009.

And it's not like there was a plausible chance that every 3pp was going to abandon the 3.0 & 3.5 SRDs... the potential for continuous, legal support for 3.5 was there in 2008 and remains, today. That can't ever be changed.

Unfortunately true. I was mollified by Pathfinder, though.

ASI's and 'bigger' feats seem like a modest sort of change. They retain the innate flexiblity & customization of feats, if with less granularity and far fewer options.

Combining them into one class-based "resource" is not a modest change.

5e has Class & sub-class, background & personality traits, race &sub-race, and optionally Feats & MCing to differentiate characters. 3.5 has race & templates, class, multiclassing & PrCs, and Feats.

But for the vast gulf in sheer number of options under each of those headings, 5e is not particularly behind 3.x in build complexity or amenability customization.

Subclass is a decision made once, no later than 3rd level; background, 1st level; personality traits are too fluffy to include in this discussion; (sub)race, 1st level.

If you're not a spellcaster, feats and multiclassing are all you have after 3rd level at the latest. Your skill proficiencies are locked at 1st level (unless you multiclass into one of the two classes that explicitily grant them or spend a precious feat), and they're all at the same proficiency level relative to each other forever. ASIs/feats sharing a resource changes the "which feat should I take?" question by kicking it up a level into "should I take a feat at all?". Making that resource class-based makes the decision whether to multiclass (which dilutes your power already) harder than it was.

All of this together makes the character builder in me sad.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Unfortunately true. I was mollified by Pathfinder, though.

Probably why I don't recognize your handle, even though you've been here since 2002. And kudos to you, sir, for taking the high road.

Combining them into one class-based "resource" is not a modest change.

I admit the shell game 5e played with some mechanics was a little odd. Taking caster advancement it making it based on character level instead of class level (an improvement over 3.x, IMHO), but then taking Extra Attack & basing it on class level instead of BAB(character level), for instance. Taking spell scaling from caster level to slot, but then taking DCs from slot scaling to character level. It's ... inconsistent.

Making allownaces for that perplexing tendency, the oddity of consolidating Feats and Stat increases yet also basing them on class level (even though their virtually universal), instead of character level doesn't seem that extreme a change.

Subclass is a decision made once, no later than 3rd level; background, 1st level; personality traits are too fluffy to include in this discussion; (sub)race, 1st level.

Sure. In 3e I'd plan my whole build before the character had a single point of xp, so I don't see that as a major downside.

If you're not a spellcaster, feats and multiclassing are all you have after 3rd level at the latest. Your skill proficiencies are locked at 1st level (unless you multiclass into one of the two classes that explicitily grant them or spend a precious feat), and they're all at the same proficiency level relative to each other forever.

Yes, we don't have fiddly skill ranks anymore. On balance, I think that has to be a positive, since anything less than maxxing a skill (essentially picking a skill at first level, and keeping it the same level relative to eachother) in 3e resulted in it rapidly becoming useless, the net effect is the same in 3e & 5e, just with less bookkeeping to get there, and less potential for abuse.

ASIs/feats sharing a resource changes the "which feat should I take?" question by kicking it up a level into "should I take a feat at all?". Making that resource class-based makes the decision whether to multiclass (which dilutes your power already) harder than it was.
All of this together makes the character builder in me sad.

I can't disagree with your bottom line. I just feel like it's due lack of material, more than structural deficiency, but I don't feel the excitement towards character creation when contemplating a possible 5e character that I did with 3e & 4e.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But, they take more time to resolve, especially when each is at a different attack bonus.

Not in my experience, and here’s why: most of your math- even the variable stuff- could be figured out ahead of time. Those modifiers tended to be constant from round to round. A player with a Fighter with iterative attacks knows that each one will be 5 lower than the previous, unless it was an additional attack at the highest BAB. The modifiers were written on your character sheet.

Regardless inoffensive edition, a 3Ed Bull’s Strength will last an entire combat, if not hours. Especially if metamagically Extended.

In contrast, ifnyounlooked a my big chessex battle maps from when we played 4th, and almost every player’s spot had combat mods written on the margins, varying from round to round.

As an additional complication, nearly every 4Ed class had powers that granted situational bonuses, not just the magic using classes as in 3.X. I’m not talking the tactical maneuver stuff common to both- like flanking. I’m talking about all those little conditional mods from powers and abilities.

 

[Shasarak]

Because Hasbro’s demands changed. Had they not, D&D absolutely would have folded.

Brands under 50 million had to stand on their own merits. Brands over 50 million got extra support from Hasbro.

There is no evidence that DnD would have folded as long as it could have retained an income that supported its expenses. Which is exactly what we have now: a couple of guys making a couple of books a year.

 

[billd91]

That's reasonbly fiddly. 3e also had situational modifiers, even that old stand-by, higher ground, that could change every round. And at higher level, those longer-durration bonuses from spells could get targeted-dispelled one round and re-applied later...

... then there were the self-inflicted ones, like power attack & expertise & the various combat options...

I played a fighter in a 3.0/5 campaign that went the whole run, from 2000 until well after 4e had come out in 2008. Modifiers changing every round was routine. Of course, I brought much of that on myself - I liked swapping weapons, using maneuvers, applying Expertise some rounds, etc...
...but the same was true in 4e, you could make a character (or party) with lot of fiddly modifiers, or not. When I did pregen characters for cons, for instance, I'd pick feats with static effects, items with properties, etc, that could just be figured in, so the player wouldn't have to worry about them.

Part of the problem with the fiddly 4e modifiers was they weren't always self-inflicted. The self-inflicted ones were easier to track because you had planned for them yourself - the ones coming from another PC were, by 17th level, godawful.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Part of the problem with the fiddly 4e modifiers was they weren't always self-inflicted. The self-inflicted ones were easier to track because you had planned for them yourself - the ones coming from another PC were, by 17th level, godawful.

I have to consider allies' buffs as self-inflicted, too.

You should at least have a safe word worked out with your 'leader...'

"... I cast Mordenkainen's Multifaceted Munificence on Barg the Battl-"
"er? ... flumph... FLUMP!"

 

[pemerton]

you can’t blame WotC for trying to monetize the crap out of 4e when Hasbro was pressuring them to meet an unreasonably high bottom line. It was anti-consumer for sure, but it was Hasbro’s fault, not WotCs. We’re seeing the same thing in the AAA video game industry right now, with gamers losing all of their goodwill towards developers who are resorting to unsavory monetization schemes like loot boxes, when it’s the publishers who are pressuring them to do so.

I don't know anything about video games, but I think I missed the unsavoury monetisation schemes of 4e. I bought the books I wanted, but not the ones I didn't (Draconomicons, Eberron, most of the adventures); I didn't buy any miniatures (which in any event were being sold well before 4e was released); I paid for a couple of months subscription to DDI around 2011 to download all the Dragons and Dungeons.

I think the last thing I bought from WotC was Into the Unknown.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The more I read Tony's stuff the more I wonder if we've ever been in the same group. (I know we havent, it's just fun to see similar experiences.)

I think one of the major drawbacks of the game is that often, content in published material doesn't pace well against how the game actually plays for the majority of groups.

During 4e, I went out of my way to use the published modules. More because we were all in our 30s or 40s, all had full time jobs and families and we wanted to get together twice a month and get to max level eventually. This meant it could take us 3 months to get through a module if we averaged 3 main encounters a session while using those modules. How long did it usually take us to get through those three encounters, plus roleplay, plus side things that make D&D the game we want to play.. about 8 hours. That's right, Keep on the Shadowfell, was about two months. Thunderspire was about three. Same with Pyramid of Shadows.

I imagine that many folks never got through the modules and many that did, made serious changes to them. We also played through Zeitgeist, and that was a much better experience due to how sandboxey it was from the start (kudos to Wickett and co.)

Anyway, a good rule of thumb should be that a session of D&D should never have to be longer than 4 hours in order to split a good module up into between 2-3 sessions to play to finish on average. If the game plays slower than that.. tune it up.

Be well,
KB

Right, and here's the key thing. I'm as busy as the next guy, and I think in my first campaign we were lucky to play for more than maybe 5 hours at a stretch. I VERY quickly discovered that with 4e you wanted to make things fast-paced and follow the advice to 'cut to the chase'. I never was a module guy really, and I pretty much abandoned 'writing an adventure' after the first year or so of 4e. Things went fast and happy after that. Whenever it threated to get slow, something HAPPENED.

This was the problem with the play you are describing, it was driven by the modules, not inherent to the rule system. A lot of people simply (I guess) never tried to actually move away from basically the standard approach at all and simply kept throwing 'monsters in room' with minor variations at parties until they pulled their hair out.

I'm not accusing them of being stupid either, the game only unevenly explained how to avoid that and it required a close reading and some playing around with it. If you didn't hit the golden formula then you might just go on thinking it was slow, or that it needed to be hacked. It didn't really.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep.

Personally, I think the efforts the designers put into adhering to some but not all of D&D’s sacred cows was harmful to its potential. I genuinely like certain elements of its engine, and think it could have been turbocharged by ditching classes. Ditch alignment completely (or just Good-Unaligned-Evil) instead of the approach they took. Perhaps even the 4 roles could have been ignored. No need for hybrids or multiclassing- just build your PCs using the feats & powers you want.

As an essentially toolboxy, genre-neutral type system, that form of 4Ed might have been a second hit for WotC while 3.X trundled along to its natural conclusion, whatever that may ultimately be.

I could even imagine that version of the system still being a market presence today.

PERSONALLY, I'd have handled alignment as Law, Neutrality, and Chaos. You can call that harking back to the origins of the game, which is entirely true, AND it meshes quite well with the Gods vs Primordials 'world axis' cosmological architecture of 4e. I suspect they did the 5-point alignment as sort of a compromise between the two. You get an 'evil' to bin devils in, a 'good' to bin elves in, and then LG and CE fill the bill for the law chaos axis as well as good evil. Seems like it was a compromise, and thus a mistake.

A more disassembled 'kit like' 4e would be OK. I think actually 4e IS in a lot of respects a very 'kit' kind of a system. All the numbers are written write on the front of it, and each subsystem is quite modular and all held together basically by a couple of 'glue' concepts, keywords, the d20-based check, and AEDU. I'd even consider AEDU a bit secondary to the other 2.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you are right. It seems doubtful that Paizo would have realised that 4e was a "story first" game and been able to create an adventure path to play to 4e's strengths. That would have been asking for a real hail mary shot to pull that off for sure.

At the time, yes. NOW I think it is crystal clear. I certainly have no problem with the conclusions Paizo drew in 2008 based on what people were doing and how the game seemed to play to them. This is again the same old story though, had WotC given them a year to mess with it, and a year for them to understand what they did and for a DMG to be written which matched that, then it would have perhaps been a different story.