D&D 4E Things from 4E Not Done Well

[hanez]

This:
"whenever we were approaching a new class we had to home in on what makes this guy special and unique within in the game - not just in the world of D&D but, since we’re playing a game, why is this game piece different than another game piece and why do I want to play it instead another game piece."

I love the above quote. Why? Because too often in 4e we were told "you don't need rules to help you role play", and "you don't need different mechanics to make your class feel special/different". You know what... I do.

Have you ever played talisman? Even in the board game, the pieces are DIFFERENT, they do different things, you might pick a piece not because it is more powerful but because its more fun or quirky or you like some weird ability of the game piece. But in D&D 4e this element of the game has been diminished because they are so similar, same type of powers, same amount of powers, powers are mostly about combat. Just waaay to generic... blah. My class is more then just a thought of an sorceror in my head, it is also a game piece, and the sorceror game piece should act and work differently then paladin game, this might mean it might be more powerful or weaker at different times, in combat, or out of combat, at different level progressions or situations. It is ok if the classes are different, thats what the DM and the humans in the game who like and trust eachother are for.

The effort to make all the game pieces equivalent at all times in the game seems much more suited to professional or online play, which is sad, because D&D should embrace the things that cannot be arbitrated by a computer, it is after all attempting to be the real world alternative to WoW and other mmorpgs so why not celebrate its differences.

 

[Greg K]

Not to mention the near endless supply of "kits" in 2E with all those brownish-red books that had a dozen or more "kits" for each class and each race.

In theory, I liked the 2e kits. I also prefer the 2e Complete format to both that of the 3e Complete [x] and Races of [y] and 4e's PHB 2, 3 approach. Where the 2e books failed, in my opinion, was that the game lacked a unified system like that of 3e or 4e to be the building blocks. The result was that the kits benefits were often just a disparate hodge-podge of inelegant mechanics.

 

[Aenghus]

4e is my favourite edition of D&D, and I've played all but OD&D. However, it isn't perfect, no ruleset is.

1. Daily powers don't work as written in low stress situations, where there isn't a number of encounters before an extended rest can be taken. (I houseruled this to fit my preference for avoiding novas in encounters, by disallowing daily refresh till a number of encounters had been passed when in wilderness/ one encounter a day mode)

2. Rituals didn't quite work, due to player reluctance to spend money on them. I still think they are a good idea, just need some tweaking.

3. Maths fix feats. These tend to be both boring and so not taken by non-optimisers and too good for optimisers not to take, thus widening the power disparity between them.

4. The melee training feats should be folded into classes as in some of the essentials ones. I personally have no problem with weapon attacks based off non-physical stats.

5. Combat feats and non-combat feats should be split into different resource pools, so they don't compete.

6. Better adventures,as the core 4e adventures were lacklustre. Even if they don't sell well, good adventures are absolutely essential to teaching new players, and giving new DMs ideas.

7. While I personaly like detailed tactical combat, and seen D&D played that way, ofen with minis, since 2nd ed, others don't. Supporting a quick combat option will improve appeal, and improve flexibility for scenarios where combat isn't the focus.

There's more, but that's enough for now.

The really major improvement 4e provided for me is in making DMing much easier, including improvisation. I really appreciate not having to vet every PC like a hawk for broken or useless stuff, like I did in 3rd ed or 2nd ed(kits mostly for 2e). I really like the transparency and options for reskinning.

I used to see the flavour text of skills and powers as describing the only way they worked, but have increasingly moved away from that opinion. I now see flavour text as advisory only, and not to be taken literally. This makes reskinning much easier to tolerate, at the price of moving away from a rules-as-physics view of the game.

I worry that increasing PC customisation and dropping roles will return us to the days where a DM won't have a good idea of party capabilities without knowing the exact details of every PC build, and massively complicate balance.

A major factor in any new ruleset is the subjective factor. As others have often said, 4e plays better than it reads, and characters and classes feel different in play even if their character sheets look superficially similar.I adopted 4e as soon as it came out and I've seen no reduction in roleplaying from my 3.x campaign.

 

[Balesir]

Seriously, just stick to Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Gnome as your core brand. Leave the other races as parts of settings modules. Shoe-horning Tieflings, Dragonborn, Goliaths, etc. into the Realms kind of rubbed people the wrong way.

This reminds me of one other thing that grated during 4E for me: clarity about the (excellent basic concept of) "everything is Core". I too kthis to mean (and genrally found it supported in fact) that every element - race, class, monster, whatever - in the game was balanced with the others. In other words, as a DM I could safely and without extensive thought and design for the ramifications, include anything in the rulebooks in our game.

What it should never mean - but some took it to mean (especially players but even designers who, frankly, should have known better) - is that "every game element must be included in every game world". That way madness lies - not to mention that it hamstrings any attempt to develop a genuinely unique game world.

Saying "everything should be 'safe' to include in your world" is fine* - saying "everything is mandatory to include in your world" is not.

Edit: Actually, it's better than fine - the lack of this in older editions' "unearthed Arcana" type stuff is a definite weakness.

 

[Keldryn]

Combat Takes Too Long

On one hand, I like the tactical options that 4e offers. Unfortunately, I've found it very difficult to get even a fairly mundane encounter resolved in much less than an hour of play time. By the time a typical encounter was finished, we'd been out of the "flow" of the game long enough that it would take some time to get back on track.

The amount of time that it takes to play out a combat encounter in 4e (45 min to an hour or more seems to be very typical) coupled with the 4 or 5 encounters that characters are expected to be able to handle in one game day means that it's likely that one game day will extend across multiple play sessions. For those of us that play once every 2 to 3 weeks, that is not very appealing, as people often forget what they were doing, even though it was "earlier that same day" in the game world. Sure, you can run fewer, more challenging encounters to make up for this, but those often tend to take more time to resolve.

Combat used to provide a nice change of pace from slower, methodical exploration -- that's not just nostalgia, as I ran some B/X and AD&D 1e games in the past year and it held true. My experience with 4e is that combat often just kills the pacing of a session. A climactic encounter with some build-up was a blast for the first 20 or even 30 minutes. After that, player interest dropped off quickly.

4e combat length also makes random encounters -- once a major deterrent to taking frequent rests-- problematic. The time investment required to run a 4e encounter is such that any battles which are not important to the story can feel like a waste of time. But I'm tempted to allow the players to rest without incident because otherwise I feel like I'm punishing the players by wasting their time.

Class Bloat

Once you get through the traditional D&D classes, it gets harder to justify the existence of a class. Some of them don't seem to represent mythical or fictional archetypes; some of the PH2 and PH3 classes seemed like they existed to fill out a combination of role and power source, with the story elements added after the fact. Did the avenger and invoker need to be distinct classes, or could they have been alternate builds for the paladin and cleric? The "primal" power source reads as basically the "druid" power source, with the barbarian feeling kind of shoehorned in.

Powers are too Specific

The powers system seems very inflexible to me, as most powers have very precise effects, which in turn leads to the proliferation of different powers. It also makes characters overly specialized. Yes, if you want your "fighter" to be an expert archer, play a Ranger instead, but it's barely worthwhile for anyone other than the Ranger to bother with a bow, as no other classes in the PHB or PHB2 have any powers that work with a bow, and its 1d10 damage is rather insignificant in the context of 4e monster hit points.

The Essentials approach of basic attacks modified by stances was definitely an improvement on this.

Swinging my Sword with Charisma and Visciously Mocking an Ooze

This has been discussed to death. Yes, it can be rationalized, but after a while we got tired of trying to explain some of this stuff. Most of these "dissociated mechanics" can be explained creatively, but it can pull people of the game while we try to figure out a good way to fit it into the narrative.

Too Many Fiddly Bits

Temporary hit points are handed out like candy and are another thing to have to track.

There are too many +1/-1/+2/-2 to hit/damage/AC/defenses until the start/end of your/target's next turn effects. They are common enough that an individual's modifier to these stats can differ by a point or two every single round of combat. It's too much mental effort to track for a relatively trivial bonus.


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[nnms]

The game is basically a string of encounters in combat mode tied together with exploration and dialogue interludes that have a drastically different play experience. There's also no real interaction between the results of combat mode and the following non-combat mode. You'll healing surge yourself back to full HP and move on.

Contrast this with games where you stay in one narrative mode and use the system as needed to resolve the unknown within the narrative as you go. While previous editions did also have a strong division between in-combat and not, 4E has (by far) the harshest transition between the two game modes.

And the whole irrelevancy of combat outcomes other than to decide between a) victory or b) one or more PCs die or c) a tpk really sucks. One of the options ends play for one person, one of the options ends play for everyone and the only "good" option is to maintain the status quo you had before you entered the combat.

This can be mitigated with good adventure design, but it's certainly a matter of fighting against the system than working with it.

 

[Zireael]

* Interrupts
* Rituals
* Lack of OGL
* Too many too small modifiers
* Changing the alignment system
* Too many core races
* Too little stuff not related to combat

 

[Number48]

* Gave barely a pittance to roleplaying, was clearly designed for convention-style play.
* The concepts of building a monster or NPC were great, every. single. one. in the monster books was only designed for combat (although the system itself could float non-combat abilities).
* I don't want my role dictated to me. A rogue IS a striker, a fighter IS a defender is too dictatorial for me. If I it were easier to be a rogue-styled character with my choice of theme, then we can talk.
* The characters need to built from the concept first, not by hashing together a bunch of numbers and slapping a quick background on them.
* Each edition has its fine balance of the characters feeling like a bunch of numbers with a skin over them, but 4E didn't even give us the skin!

 

[Tallifer]

Please limit your entries to lists - take discussion of specific parts to another forum (as several of them may generate such discussion):

I will start off:

1. Monster stats, esp Defenses, being so static and based upon level and not creature's abilities. (Seemed odd a slug of a creature having high Ref - but I always modified these on the fly).
2. Being able to do 'everything, all the time' is not fun in my mind. From powers with extra actions, to striking and critting any creature with any weapon, to removing the difference b/w weapon types (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing).
3. Poison and other effects simply being damage that you can get over in a matter of rounds. Some poisons (and other effects) could use the Disease rules/daily saves/checks.
4. Hit Points for all involved, and as a result damage had to be ramped up and made weapon damage meaningless.

I reluctantly agree, having come to many of the same realizations after a long time playing this favourite Edition of mine.

1. Fifth Edition should get rid of increasing bonuses and statistics for characters and monsters per level. Bonuses to abilities, attacks and defenses should only come from magical items, feats, natural strengths and supernatural agency. Hit points and damage can increase to demonstrate level.

2. There should indeed be natural restrictions such as arrows not harming skeletons, maces not harming jello, fire not harming fire elementals. That would not break Fourth, neither would it be hard to implement.

3. Poison and acid should definitely be dangerous. Although magical or divine healing should negate it. (Also there should be wondrous herbs: I loved the drug-addled economy of Rolemaster.)

However I disagree about weapon damage. Most higher level martial powers use multiple weapon dice, so the size of your weapon mattered. Imagine the difference between 6d12 and 6d6 regardless of bonuses.

 

[WheresMyD20]

The marketing for 4e was bad- especially that "game remains the same" video.