D&D 4E What 5E needs to learn from 4E

[GreyICE]

I know this is a weird thing to say about a system named DUNGEONS and Dragons, but I never felt that 4E lent itself particularly well to the Dungeon Crawl format. A good crawl has a feeling of progressive doom to it, and that website nailed it. With players running 2-3 (or more) "characters" - which were really only characters in the loosest of senses, being more like a squad-based system - and your squad suffering progressive degredation and members dying, tension could ratchet up. Would you ever be able to escape the dungeon? What was lurking behind the next corner? Your fighter opened the door thoughtlessly and had boiling oil poured on his head, now he's dead, lucky Mark still has his fighter so you guys aren't screwed, etc.

4E prefers a smaller number of encounters, all of which matter quite a lot. I mean I'm fairly certain DMG 2 said just narrate your way past curb stomp battles - if your players are ambushed by bandits on the road at level 13, it's an opportunity for roleplaying not a chance to actually fight some bandits (who might have been a threat back at, like, level 1 or 2).

 

[ComradeGnull]

I know this is a weird thing to say about a system named DUNGEONS and Dragons, but I never felt that 4E lent itself particularly well to the Dungeon Crawl format. A good crawl has a feeling of progressive doom to it, and that website nailed it. With players running 2-3 (or more) "characters" - which were really only characters in the loosest of senses, being more like a squad-based system - and your squad suffering progressive degredation and members dying, tension could ratchet up. Would you ever be able to escape the dungeon? What was lurking behind the next corner? Your fighter opened the door thoughtlessly and had boiling oil poured on his head, now he's dead, lucky Mark still has his fighter so you guys aren't screwed, etc.

4E prefers a smaller number of encounters, all of which matter quite a lot. I mean I'm fairly certain DMG 2 said just narrate your way past curb stomp battles - if your players are ambushed by bandits on the road at level 13, it's an opportunity for roleplaying not a chance to actually fight some bandits (who might have been a threat back at, like, level 1 or 2).

I think two things majorly contribute to this feel- survivability, and the use/presentation of the encounter rules.

First, as character creation has gotten more and more detailed and time consuming, having level 1 PCs (or any PC) die has fallen increasingly out of fashion. You encourage people to be very attached to their character from an early stage, you require a lot of work and selection in order to create a character, and the result is that 1) players are unhappy when PCs die young, because now their carefully imagined and built creation, possibly with a pages-long background and personality, is all wasted effort, and 2) DM's are unhappy when characters die because the opportunity cost of pausing play to create new characters gets higher. The result of these developments was high starting hit points, more abundant healing, and fewer deaths. That makes non-combat threats like traps and puzzles much less likely to have lethal manifestations. The suggested cost of failing a skill challenge (like a trap or other non-combat encounter) was losing a healing surge, something you had a half dozen of at level one and could restore at any time by taking a nap. That kills the high-threat atmosphere of a traditional dungeon crawl.

Second, the way the encounter guidelines were presented left a lot of people- particularly DMs new to 4e and new to RPGs- with the feeling that every single time combat started, there HAD to be a full compliment of level-appropriate enemies who added up to the correct amount of per-level per-encounter XP. This meant that instead of a lot of small fights- taking out goblins one at a time, clearing one small room of skeletons, etc.- you got a handful of large, set-piece battles that needed to take place in a big room that could readily accommodate 4-6 PCs and 6-10 opponents. This made for multi-hour long combats that ate whole gaming sessions and left people burned out on spending most of their time picking which power to use next instead of doing something more creative.

I'm confidant you could build a dungeon crawl using 4e, but you would need to artificially reign in healing and take the recommended encounter building guidelines with a big grain of salt.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Interesting - my experience with 4E was the complete opposite. Boss fights were almost always a disappointment to me as a DM in 4E. After the "boss" spent their daily or two, they were stuck with a recharge power and at-wills for the rest of the fight.

However, nearly every boss fight in my 3.5E campaign played out with that overwhelming threat to the PCs, where all my players were sure they were going to have a TPK. The same with my games in 2E and 1E.

(That said, I spent 10-20 hours/week preparing for a D&D session once my 3.5E game got up past level 10, or 20-40 hours for my bi-weekly game. I was spending 10% of that time with my 4E game)

To me, that was what was best about 4E - it was so easy to build encounters compared to 3.5E.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Interesting - my experience with 4E was the complete opposite. Boss fights were almost always a disappointment to me as a DM in 4E. After the "boss" spent their daily or two, they were stuck with a recharge power and at-wills for the rest of the fight.

However, nearly every boss fight in my 3.5E campaign played out with that overwhelming threat to the PCs, where all my players were sure they were going to have a TPK. The same with my games in 2E and 1E.

(That said, I spent 10-20 hours/week preparing for a D&D session once my 3.5E game got up past level 10, or 20-40 hours for my bi-weekly game. I was spending 10% of that time with my 4E game)

To me, that was what was best about 4E - it was so easy to build encounters compared to 3.5E.

Very good, I have a similar experience and feeling, I am seeing 5th Ed being a true successor to 1st Ed (what I wanted 2nd Ed to be).

I think some monsters can be solo, elite, or regular, like the Efreet.

 

[pemerton]

4e's encounter guidelines are for at least modestly challenging or meaningful encounters. Nothing stops the system from being used for trivial encounters, though. A couple of minions at a guard post, a few more in a room - exactly what you're looking for. I've done such things before by incorporating several such trivial encounters into a single ongoing skill challenge. Each failure presents you with a small minion encounter that you must silence ASAP or the enemy is alerted and stiffer opposition will come looking for you.

The variation I've used on this is skill checks to "minionise" monsters: succeed on your skill check, and they're minions, easily disposed of. Fail, and they're real creatures, which might run away, yell warnings etc as it takes multiple rounds to defeat them.

4e does dramatic fights well. It doesn't handle dungeon crawling as well, though

I know this is a weird thing to say about a system named DUNGEONS and Dragons, but I never felt that 4E lent itself particularly well to the Dungeon Crawl format.

I agree with this. You can certainly use 4e to run a scenario set in a "dungeon", but it won't play like a classic D&D dungeon crawl: the game plays best when the encounters are the centre of the action, not peripheral elements (unless you subsume them into skill challenges via minionisation or some similar technique).

 

[Neonchameleon]

This past weeks gaming session reminded me of the one thing that 4E does better than any previous edition IME the boss fight.
...
The tough part is as well as 4E serves up the boss fight it can't seem to avoid squeezing every fight into same mold needlessly.

Yup! I've a set of houserules to make quick combat rules for 4e with damage applied straight to resilience points (i.e. Healing Surges - which actually matter when you're restricting extended rests).

Not being a 4e player I'm curious; what about 4e boss fights makes them exciting? Last I heard (before reading this thread), they were considered a slog.

Scary, scary boss monsters that can tear up a whole party and can't be loocked down that well. More modern ones are mechanically very evocatively written, tearing through the party, normally mobile and very lethal. And an intense integration with the terrain. If you are fighting on a platform over lava in 3.X stay away from the sides and it's a normal-ish fight. In 4e with all the forced movement that lava defines the fight and people will be trying desparately to force each other into it.

The boss monsters in the first couple of years ranged from the bad (overinflated hp and defences, not enough damage) to the terrible (a "Goblin solo" or two in early adventures, the Purple Worm which was almost literally a sack of hit points with the damage output of a standard monster, and the Dracolich which just stunlocked everything).

My rule of thumb is that a good 4e campaign looks something like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Raiders of the Lost Arc being too much a one man show) - a bad one looks more like a Michael Bay action film.

In 4e's conversion of War of the Burning Sky, a lot of quick battles we had beforehand became chunky 'epic battles of epicness,' because that's what 4e does. 4e wasn't really built to let you sneak up on a couple of goblin sentries and kill them, then sneak up on a room full of 5 goblins and take them out in 2 rounds, and so on until you clear out the whole warren.

Agreed. I'm working on some rules where damage is measured in terms of healing surges - but either side of the combat can at the start of their turns elect to turn it into a detailed fight. Of course that's normally a bad choice as they will be attacking hp and not surges, so their damage output will be lowered.

Now, because 4e did not give a damn about justifying how NPCs and monsters get their powers, you could design really nice, dynamic combats. Bosses could do stuff like weave through the party attacking everyone once, then creating a wall of fire in the path they ran, splitting the party in two. You didn't have to create a chain of 10 feats or a special spell to do that. You just came up with something that seemed interesting, looked at a table to gauge about how much damage it should do and with what attack bonus (lower the damage if you want it to not be a threat, raise the damage if the enemy is more powerful than the PCs), and voila. Unique villain, designed in less than an hour.

I'd have given you XP for this explanation if I could.

The problem that I've seen is that, too often, DMs will not create that fight with peons.

I have seen very few EL -1, -2, or -3 encounters ever used.

That's because it still takes half an hour to run. And is never in doubt.

If you want to see a very interesting take on creating a dungeon-crawl system for 4e you should look at the "system" created by @Frylock . He goes into great detail on how to tweak the existing system to accomplish what you want.

Will read, thanks.

Interesting - my experience with 4E was the complete opposite. Boss fights were almost always a disappointment to me as a DM in 4E. After the "boss" spent their daily or two, they were stuck with a recharge power and at-wills for the rest of the fight.

How early in 4e was this? Because early solos were terrible, especially compared to the sheer awesome we've had in Monster Vault and MV: Nentir Vale.

(That said, I spent 10-20 hours/week preparing for a D&D session once my 3.5E game got up past level 10, or 20-40 hours for my bi-weekly game. I was spending 10% of that time with my 4E game)

To me, that was what was best about 4E - it was so easy to build encounters compared to 3.5E.

That really helped!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem that I've seen is that, too often, DMs will not create that fight with peons.

I have seen very few EL -1, -2, or -3 encounters ever used. If the fight is supposed to be "pointless" as someone mentioned in another thread, then the DM should design it with that in mind. Not every fight must be a set-piece encounter against a solo monster, or an elite with his minions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a very short fight against 3 "numbskulls" that are not even a challenge. On the other end, the DM can also design a fight with a much tougher opponent that is a real challenge, but that is a glass-cannon.

The beauty of 4e Monster/Encounter Design is that you can very easily do both.

The "problem" is that the "assembly required" is not very well detailed for the novice. The encounter design section of the 4e DMG should have taken a lot more effort in explaining the "philosophy" behind the encounter, even the "pointless" combat, and how to easily accomplish it.

The 4e monsters are infinitely tweakable, because of the underlying framework. DMs should be given clear, and concise instructions on how to "tweak to taste" for the specific desired effect.

If you want to see a very interesting take on creating a dungeon-crawl system for 4e you should look at the "system" created by [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION]. He goes into great detail on how to tweak the existing system to accomplish what you want.

I know it works rather well because we've been using it to play through the Giants Series (G1-G3) and we have playtested other classic modules with similarly satisfying effect.



-

I'm genuinely puzzled. What is it that makes people feel that 4e has to explain all this when no such explanation was apparently ever asked or expected of any previous edition. 1e doesn't have to point out that 2 skeletons in a closet is a quick low threat encounter for a level 1 party, or that you might want to use that encounter in situation X for reasons A, B, and C. I'm just genuinely curious about what creates such different expectations. Especially from a system which, lets face it, is most likely to be played and DMed by people with considerable experience at this point.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree, 'Indiana Jones' is the sort of thing 4e can do VERY well, and plays to its real strengths. I feel WotC completely missed the boat on understanding what 4e was good for, at least until quite recently.

That being said, you can do dungeon crawls. I've devised several of them and they worked reasonably well. You have to expect your more trivial threats to work a lot like a minor trap or something. A couple skeletons or something like that are going to die fast, but so what? The characters take a hit or two, possibly, and move on. Sooner or later they DO start to run low on resources and all the old tricks like shifting walls and such still work quite well. You can make them map their way around just like it was 1975. I think you're missing a lot of the potential of the system if you play it just like old times, but it's a perfectly viable mode of play for the sake of variety, at least IME.

 

[NewJeffCT]

How early in 4e was this? Because early solos were terrible, especially compared to the sheer awesome we've had in Monster Vault and MV: Nentir Vale.

We didn't even start playing 4E until mid 2010 because we were finishing a 3.5E campaign that ran from late 2007 through early 2010. I believe MM3 was out by that time.

 

[D'karr]

I'm genuinely puzzled. What is it that makes people feel that 4e has to explain all this when no such explanation was apparently ever asked or expected of any previous edition. 1e doesn't have to point out that 2 skeletons in a closet is a quick low threat encounter for a level 1 party, or that you might want to use that encounter in situation X for reasons A, B, and C. I'm just genuinely curious about what creates such different expectations. Especially from a system which, lets face it, is most likely to be played and DMed by people with considerable experience at this point.

I'm an experienced DM, I can make these "assumptions/leaps of logic" on the fly with past experience as my background/framework. A new DM that is picking up his first RPG might need more help in making these "assumptions/leaps of logic" to good effect.

Therefore, the system, independent of what other games have done, should do its best to explain the design assumptions that the game is operating under/expecting. The better the game does this the less gray area it leaves for these types of baseless arguments. It also gives the DM a good basis for when he wants to "break" the system.

From the standpoint of each individual game system, standing on its own, I believe that assuming that "this" has never been explained is not a good enough excuse for not explaining it now. I never had a problem with 4e, it doesn't mean that 4e would not have been better served if the explanations would have been expanded to show the "assumptions."