Very first thoughts after reading 4e PHB

[Dumnbunny]

After having read through and played a total of about 50 hours of 4e, I can say I'm in love with D&D again. I quit playing and running 3.x D&D about 4 years ago- it was bloated, cumbersome, had insanely powerful PCs, required inordinate amounts of prep time, and was too heavy into system-mastery to play for me and my group. 4e feels like playing 1e again to me- like I've found a childhood friend I haven't seen in 20 years. True, 4e uses the 3e base mechanics, and has new things like powers in there, but it has the tone and feel of 1e when I've played or run it, and I'm loving every minute of it! To me, my players, and a lot of people on here- 4e feels more like D&D from the 1e era, which is an incredibly good thing!

I'm right there with you. I played D&D back in the days of red box D&D and AD&D 1st ed, and to me it felt like D&D went badly off the tracks with 3.x. I tried it out, wanted to like it, but it didn't grab me. It just wasn't D&D to me.

Fourth feels like a return to D&D original roots, and has brought me back as a D&D player for the first time in about 20 years.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Regarding the necessity of magic items: I'd like to see you in a 4e game, with no magic items, trying to deal with level-appropriate challenges after 10th level. It looks to me that 4e 'deals' with that issue by making sure that the spell-casters require the same basic magic items as the fighter-types - things with increasing bonuses to hit.
In that sense, I guess it levels the playing field. But it's a mistake to say that dependence on magic items is a thing of the past. It's still built right in.

Everyone will miss his "+" to attacks and defenses. But it's easy to compensate. Basically, grant an extra +1 every 4 levels to everything.

But you are right. The dependence is still built in. The moment they decided that they could not remove +9 Swords of Ogre Decapitation (okay, maybe a better example is: +3 Flaming Longsword) from the game without it losing an important part of its feel, this was a given.

I personally could have gone without it. But the new system seems a lot more transparent then having enhancement bonus with weapons, shield, armor, ability scores and natural, deflection and resistance bonuses...

 

[drachasor]

Everyone will miss his "+" to attacks and defenses. But it's easy to compensate. Basically, grant an extra +1 every 4 levels to everything.

But you are right. The dependence is still built in. The moment they decided that they could not remove +9 Swords of Ogre Decapitation (okay, maybe a better example is: +3 Flaming Longsword) from the game without it losing an important part of its feel, this was a given.

I personally could have gone without it. But the new system seems a lot more transparent then having enhancement bonus with weapons, shield, armor, ability scores and natural, deflection and resistance bonuses...

Yes, the to-hit isn't that different than before. You get to miss out on about +3 to +5 to hit (and a lot to damage) since there are no ability score increasers. That does get significant. It isn't nearly as bad as the massive amounts of AC magical items granted in 3.X, because that was crazy. Now that defenses go up as you level at the same rate as bonuses to-hit, things are much more sane.

Anyhow, in 4E you can easily get a bigger bonus to hit from allies and tactics than you get from your weapon, which is a big change too.

 

[Quartz]

But you are right. The dependence is still built in. The moment they decided that they could not remove +9 Swords of Ogre Decapitation (okay, maybe a better example is: +3 Flaming Longsword) from the game without it losing an important part of its feel, this was a given.

But is it easier to compensate for a lack of magic items in 4E?

 

[AllisterH]

But is it easier to compensate for a lack of magic items in 4E?

If you mean, can a DM not use magic items and still use the MM? Then yeah, pretty easily.

Three methods.
1. The method of adding +1 to your attack, +1 to your defenses and 1d6 per critical hit for every 5 levels.

2. When designing encounters, for every 5 levels of the party, subtract 1 from their encounter level i.e, a 14th level party would be considered a 12th level party.

3. Use monsters and encounter budget as is, but subtract 1 for every 5 levels of the party from the monster's attacks and defenses.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

But is it easier to compensate for a lack of magic items in 4E?

Yes. The beginning of my post had my simple solution, AllisterH gives you even more.

The "trick" in 4E is that the effects of magic are clear. There is only a very limited amount of ways to improve your "core" aspects - to hit and "to-be-hit" (defenses, AC), and the advancement of these bonuses is made clear. You can't get this clarity in 3E, because it's hard to guess what kind of weapons, armor and other magical enhancement a character can have (or what he should have).

 

[webrunner]

You CAN play the Celric as a weak, damage-focused Paladin - bashing people over the head with radiant damage all the while

and you CAN play the Cleric as a weak, damage-focused Wizard, firing laser beams

Or you can play the Cleric as as Cleric, focusing on the things like their buffs and heals.

Every class can do a 'damage dealing' role, and there's basically two main ways to do that: ranged and melee. From that, there's damage types, and targeted defenses, but that's all secondary.

If you compare the classes' damage dealing capabilities, other than strikers you'll see they're all about the same. But the main focus of a given class isn't always about the damage: if you play them all as damage then yes, you can swap stuff out and not notice. But fi you look at the 'secondary' effects, which are actually the 'primary' effects in addition to the damage, you'll see things that one class does better than all the others:

Wizard: AOEs and battlefield modification
Warlock: Single-target ranged damage and single-target control
Ranger: Extremely reliable ranged damage, and melee versatility
Warlord: Battlefield positioning and using other characters' benefits (ie: using other people's better melee stats instead of his own by telling them to attack instead)
Rogue: Manipulating combat advantage and enemy and player positioning to maximize damage
Cleric: Healing, protection, and single-target buffing.
Paladin: Minor healing and buffing, along with enemy tanking
Fighter: Enemy tanking, and enemy positioning, as well as keeping the party's back lines in the back

You can't play a Cleric and expect to be able to be a reliable force in keeping enemies away from flanking positions, and keep them attacking you, and stuff.

 

[VanRichten]

Unlike VanRichten and his ilk, I was actually willing to give the game a fair shake. After all, any mouth-breather with a couple active brain cells can look at a book and say they don't like it becuase it's different from what they're used to. An pre-schooler can make the same exact statement about Lord of the Rings based on the exact same critera and be just as accurate.

I think you missed the part where I stated that I would give it a shot. But that right now based on what I see isn't D&D.

As for Pathfinder... to each their own, but I agree with the others above that it does very little to fix the core problems of 3rd edition, namely that once you get past 10th level the math starts breaking down, you absolutely need magic items just to reasonably function/ if you're a non-caster, and the casters (batman-wizards and CoDzillas especially) horrendously overshadow the non-casters.

So instead you prefer a system that gives that same requirement to the base needs of the class? I gather that is what you are saying because that is what 4E did. It gave all those nifty abilities from magic items and made them class abilities.

4e looks to have fixed many of those. Not saying it's problem-free becuase there is no such thing as a 100% RPG, but gone are the days of linear warriors and quadratic wizards, and magic items are no longer required just to do your party job.

Unfortunately I would find this to be an incorrect statement. Try running the game past 10th level and have no magic items for your PCs. I am sure you will find this will be more difficult than you expect, and most likely will find the magic items to be a necessity.

Not to mention having actually had the termerity to play 4e compared to more than a few anti-4e grognards, the classes play very differently from one another. Based on the 1st session of what will hopefully be an ongoing campaign, rogues still do the sneaky stuff and are looking for flanking/sneak attack opps, Fighters are holding the frontline dishing out consistant damage, Warlocks are happily blasting from behind the frontline, Warlords are helping to hold that frontline while driving the party onwards to victory, and Wizards are weeding out the chaff so the frontline can focus on the bigger threats. And we're doing our things in different ways. The only 'similarity' is that we all have 'powers' that are at-wills, once per battle, or once per day.

Doesn't this now make you sound like you are shoe horned into doing a specific job? What about the fighter who doesn't want to stand there and tank? Or the Warlock who wants to be right in the action and DPS? Do all rogues have to be sneaky? Note I am not anti-4E. I am only stating it isn't D&D.

Like I postedin in a different thread, 3e is akin to NBA basketball where it's all about the individual superstars where 4e is more like college basketball where it's a team effort.

Your analogy leads me to believe you have had a bad DM or just bad roleplaying experiences. The idea of teamwork is not defined by your rules but by the people who make your team. If for you the system was the problem then my suggestion would be to find another group.

 

[The Little Raven]

You keep saying this like it's all the same people.

No, I don't. I keep saying it in response to theorycraft complaints that "X is broken," because theorycraft means little in the face of actual play. If the complaint was based on "in actual play, I find X isn't working," it would be different. Most people I've seen that have actually played the game have a different opinion about the broken nature of certain mechanics.

There are plenty of people who read the monk and didn't think it was over-powered too.

That didn't stop the vocal theorycrafters from expressing time and again how broken it was until time passed, and actual play responses demonstrated how wrong that was.

And if you're trying to tell us that the supposedly good script from Clones matches the dialog from the actual film, then I have to wonder why it's considered a good script. The dialog in that film was bad and not just because the acting was wooden.

You do know that scripts change during filming, right? And scenes which appear in the script never get filmed, and ones that do often end up on the cutting room floor, right?

 

[billd91]

You do know that scripts change during filming, right? And scenes which appear in the script never get filmed, and ones that do often end up on the cutting room floor, right?

Indeed they do. But then using that to illustrate how theorizing from the rules differs from play is applying a poor analogy. Script is to final movie dialogue as rules as written is to rules in play as house-ruled by DM. Neither end result is exactly like the original form and neither has a whole heck of a lot to say about analysis of the original form.