D&D 4E Things I Learned From 4e

[I'm A Banana]

Glad that many agree!

Anyone else want to offer up their lessons learned playing 4e?

 

[Mr. Patient]

What I've learned is that sharply reducing the number of effects, conditions, and save-or-dies sounds really good on paper, but in practice leads to really boring monsters. I think there has to be a middle ground between a banshee TPKing your party in one round, and having a medusa who struggles to petrify a single PC. YMMV, of course.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I agree with some of what was listed above -

I think a lot of the non-combat stuff can be handled without many rules, though I would like a separate category for non-combat feats & skills that is more robust than what is in 4E (craft, perform, etc)

I agree 100% that we should not need X number of +Y magic items by a certain level, and slowly growing as the players go up in level. I much prefer magic items to be special, though they don't have to be rare.

I'd love for combat to move faster as well. 4E combats were a step in the right direction after 3.5E. Maybe trim conditions back even more? Make healing surges worth 10%, 15% or 20% of hit points instead of 25%? Make monsters and PCs do more damage?

 

[Radiating Gnome]

On Activities Outside Combat:

I don't know what to do about this. I want cool tactical combat, and I dislike shallow subsystems. I'm worried that anything except a broad framework (like the skill challenge system) would simply take up too much space or be too tough to balance in terms of providing a unique experience for each type of activity. Ideally, yes, exploration and intrigue and stealth and everything else would have its own rules structure to support it. I just don't think it's feasible.

Actually, I'd be interested to see a game that gives equal time to combat and non-combat encounter. Or at least gets closer to that. Combat is always going to be important, if you could, for example, take the skill challenge mechanic and apply it to variety of other types of encounters, make it flexible enough so that a DM can build to his own vision with it, but have a robust set of examples and types of challenges, I think it could be very cool.

1. The skill challenge mechanic could be used to replace 4e ritual magic in very cool ways. No more needing the "know" a ritual in the 4e sense. A ritual might be defined as a recipe of skill checks required to complete -- and then allow for modification for things like components, focii, magical locations, and so on.

2. The skill challenge mechanic could be used to give PCs some control over encounter building. I'm experimenting with some ways of doing that right in my 4e game.

3. A system for intrigues and reputation and so on could be handled with skill challenges.

And so on. One thing I've been noticing lately is my games lack the sort of visual/descriptive wonder I get when, for example, I watch a movie. Watching Ghost Protocol last weekend, I marveled at the magnet-catch-in-the-stupidy-large-fan-shaft bit. In 5e, we could try to use skill challenges to represent that.

It would mean a lot of things -- some serious attention paid to making good skill challenges for lots of different situations, etc. But I think it could be done, if it were given the same sort of attention that combat (and the same number of pages) has been given.

-rg

 

[ppaladin123]

I learned that feats are not the place to hand out static or scaling bonuses to hit, damage or defense, especially in a game that seeks to tighten up the math and target ranges. Bonuses to hit and defense will keep you alive in combat and thus are hard to turn down.

I learned that "utility powers" are not the place to put flavorful out of combat abilities, because this places them in direct competition with abilities that will keep you alive during combat and those are hard to turn down.

I love the idea of rituals, spells that take a while to cast but have a huge impact (raise the dead, control the weather, teleport, plane shift). But, if their price is in gold and they are expensive, they compete with necessary magic items that will keep you alive during combat and thus won't see much use. And, they better do more than offer 6 seconds of scrying or a slight bonus to overland travel speed.

 

[NewJeffCT]

What I've learned is that sharply reducing the number of effects, conditions, and save-or-dies sounds really good on paper, but in practice leads to really boring monsters. I think there has to be a middle ground between a banshee TPKing your party in one round, and having a medusa who struggles to petrify a single PC. YMMV, of course.

good point - as a DM whose been gaming for 30+ years, it's kind of disappointing that it's so tough for a medusa to turn one PC to stone.

However, if you're the PC that was turned to stone or killed by a Finger of Death or similar, it kind of sucks to be you for that combat in game, especially if it happens in round 1 of the combat (let alone multiple deaths a la banshee or some high level evil spells (Wail of the Banshee or Implosion))

 

[Mr. Patient]

However, if you're the PC that was turned to stone or killed by a Finger of Death or similar, it kind of sucks to be you for that combat in game, especially if it happens in round 1 of the combat

Oh, definitely. One way to mitigate that is to make combat move much more quickly. OK, so you were petrified in round 1, but if the combat is over in 10 minutes, it's less of a big deal.

I'm not voting for moving the pendulum all the way back to 3e (or 1e), but I think 4e has swung too far towards simple hit point attrition. I'd like to see more dramatic effects from time to time, both from the PCs and the monsters.

 

[Pour]

I learned being DM doesn't mean I have to devote 40 hours a week to prepping games or know every in-and-out of my players' abilities and their combined synergies. The ease and openness of DMing 5e will largely decide whether or not I make the switch.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Oh, definitely. One way to mitigate that is to make combat move much more quickly. OK, so you were petrified in round 1, but if the combat is over in 10 minutes, it's less of a big deal.

I'm not voting for moving the pendulum all the way back to 3e (or 1e), but I think 4e has swung too far towards simple hit point attrition. I'd like to see more dramatic effects from time to time, both from the PCs and the monsters.

Good point - if the combat were over quickly, it would be less painful. My last 3.5E campaign, the combats to to be so long that I had extra NPCs tagging along with the party just in case a PC went down early (OK, your dwarf is dead... here, run this NPC for now, at least until you can get hit with a Revivify or similar.) because the one combat would often run almost the entire session (and longer once we got up past level 15 or so)

 

[I'm A Banana]

Good point - if the combat were over quickly, it would be less painful. My last 3.5E campaign, the combats to to be so long that I had extra NPCs tagging along with the party just in case a PC went down early (OK, your dwarf is dead... here, run this NPC for now, at least until you can get hit with a Revivify or similar.) because the one combat would often run almost the entire session (and longer once we got up past level 15 or so)

Yeah, that's one of the big things 4e taught me. I like combat. I don't like it enough to spend more than about 10 minutes on one. I think if you have faster combats, debilitating conditions (like petrify, or even instant-death) are less of a problem. It's also true that recovery shouldn't be narrowly limited -- if any character can break a Petrify (rather than just the cleric) by spending an action, it means that you don't have to even sit out for THAT long.

That's kind of what I mean by more "swinginess." I'd like things to go back and forth from "ARGH!" to "WOOO!" more frequently.

Ideally, yes, exploration and intrigue and stealth and everything else would have its own rules structure to support it. I just don't think it's feasible.

Coming at it from a perspective of thinking 4e combat is WAY TOO detailed and fiddly to begin with, I think it's quite possible.

I mean, a skill challenge is basically a combat where you only use basic attacks and where you only face minions. Functionally, they're nearly identical. If it's possible for combat to get more interesting an detailed, then it's possible for noncombat to get the same treatment.

No bullet point for "I don't want a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the crunch and the fluff"?

4e didn't teach me that, but it's very true anyway.