Neonchameleon
Legend
No edition constrains what you do. But different editions reward and encourage different things.
D&D 4E What 5E needs to learn from 4E
- Thread starter Shadeydm
- Start date
Steely_Dan
First Post
Total, dig that.
Maybe, in your experience most people think free cantrips for casters was the only thing done right. However, my own anecdotal evidence differs. I and, nearly, every gamer that I know are not 4e fans and prefer 3e for mechanics , but we think they did more things right than that.
1. Removing Level Drain
2. Removing 3e XP costs
3. Balancing spell casters and non-casters (even if we did not like the method of giving everyone AEDU)
4. Constitution score to starting hit points instead of con modifier per level
5. Removing most of the non-biological aspects of race and making them feats
6. Martial types getting more cool things to (however, again, not AEDU)
7. At-will cantrips
8. Ranger as a non-spellcaster
9. Magic Missile requiring a to hit roll
10. Heroic Tier Multiclassing
11. Introduction of the Feywild, but most of us had done something similar for our own campaigns
12. Warlord in concept
13. Most like the Elf/Eladrin split (but not how Fey Step worked)
14. Backgrounds and Themes
15. Disease Track
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I think there's a certain amount of truth to what he's saying. If you go back and play OD&D you will find it is perfectly suited to being a dungeon crawl game. In fact it is almost entirely such, almost to the exclusion of RP elements except where they happen to not conflict with the crawl concept. However, I think as soon as the game was released it started to immediately gravitate away from that original concept. Even the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements moved away from dungeon/hex crawl.
I think the evolution was COMPLETE by the time the game got to around 1985. OA was the first major work that really entirely moved away from the central concept (there is no mention of dungeons at all in that book, it is all about character story and backstory), then moving on to the WSG and etc.
The key thing though is it wasn't just a broadening of the environments where PCs would go. The wilderness, the town, and then the other planes always existed at some level. It was a CONCEPTUAL evolution, from episodic adventure that was focused on the activity (IE mapping and looting the dungeon) to story-based play focused on plot and character. I think it is true that to a large extent the SYSTEM never evolved, while the PLAY of the game has. 2e was presented as more of a story centered system, but it failed to incorporate any actual mechanical aspects of that shift. 3e even claimed "back to the dungeon" but again failed to understand the differences between activity focus and story focus in system design.
4e I think he correctly states at least has abandoned any pretense of being activity focused and has pretty much swept away the last vestiges of the original dungeon crawl concept in favor of story arcs and encounters. You CAN explore a dungeon in 4e, but 4e isn't ABOUT exploring that dungeon, it is about advancing the story and said dungeon is merely a scene. You could play Basic D&D in dungeons and wildernesses forever and that was the game, you'd go crazy doing that with 4e.
I disagree. When Rel posted his story based milestone house rule,
"Milestones - There are few mechanics in 4e that I find less flavorful than the "fight two encounters, get a Milestone" bit. But after consideration, I determined that what I needed to do is to simply turn Milestones into, well, milestones. In other words, have something meaningful actually take place. And it doesn't have to be after the encounter either. It can be smack dab in the middle of the battle.
If the PC's interrupt the Evil Wizards in the middle of their Ritual, that's a Milestone. If they maneuver past the Evil Cleric's minions and blow out the Dark Candles that have desecrated the Altar of Pelor, that's a Milestone. When they slay the Hobgoblin Lietenant who led the attack on their village, that's a Milestone. The PC's should constantly be setting short term goals and even quests. Accomplishing those is significant and earns Milestones (and therefore Action Points). Fighting a random encounter of wolves in the woods does not earn you a Milestone."
Mearls posted the following:
"Interesting trivia bit: at one point, we thought about doing milestones pretty much the way you describe.
We decided against it because we figured that for story-based games, the DM would have a natural progression of scenes, while for a dungeon-based game it might be a pain to label some encounters as important and others as trivial."
So milestones were done the way they were to help support dungeon style play.
The change in direction that you mention was occurring in segments of the community before Dragonlance. By 1984, many gamers had already been moving out of the dungeon and away from gold for XP in favor of epic quests and story/quests like solving urban murder mysteries, dealing with court intrigue, and "rescuing the princess" style adventures. About the time of the release of Dragonlance, 1984, we were already seeing articles in Dragon like Katherine Kerr's Beyond the Dungeon. It is possible that the articles that appeared in Dragon during July and August might have been inspired by the article (I don't recall the month that the novels and modules were released). However, it is just as likely that the release of the articles and Dragonlance were a matter of coincidental timing.
Then, there is Dragonlance, itself, which started as a campaign by Hickman and Weiss and both preceded and inspired the novels and modules.
If anything, Dragonlance this other style of play to the forefront and the popularity inspired the designers of 2e, many of whom were ficition writers or aspiring fiction writers, to, officially, support the style of play.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I did say "pretty much". In a sense there will of course always be 'rules covering activities' as well, so of course there's a rule for bashing down doors, which of course is part of exploration (trap rules, though noting they are often now used as part of an encounter).
Obviously dungeons still exist as a concept. The difference is that the game isn't a game ABOUT looting a dungeon anymore. This is most clearly illustrated by the differences in character building rules. In Holmes Basic or OD&D your character was a bare sketch with few options. The few that did exist were "here's a special extra thing you get" or "here's the equipment you can get". The whole game focused on the player telling the DM how his PC poked and prodded the dungeon. The PC was just a 'game piece' practically. You could RP of course, but the focus was on beating the DM's trap filled monstrosity.
Clearly a 3e/4e PC is instead a rich collection of story elements with mechanical hooks that let the players and DM resolve the ongoing action. The character has personality and abilities and the game expects the player to RP the character, and the character to meet and overcome challenges as part of a plot.
I'm glad to see a nod to OA. For me, that book had a pretty transformational effect on my GMing. It really led me to character-driven, episode-based play.
Whereas the WSG headed in a direction that didn't really worked for me. I learned from the WSG that the minutiae of wilderness exploration weren't for me. (Though for many years I did use its weather generation mechanics.)
While overall it was a good list I find this one to be a shocker. I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone I long for the days of fighter/barbarian/rogue/hearthguard/favored soul multilclassing, yet I find 4E multiclassing to be so lackluster it should be renamed to meaninglessclassing. There has to be a happy medium out there somewhere...
Tony Vargas
Legend
4e feat-based multi-classing was over-priced. If, as the game seemed to assume, powers of the same level are roughly balanced with eachother, then paying a feat for each power swap was excessive. Theme-based multi-classing might have worked better. Instead of spending a feat per power swap, you just take a class-related Theme and gain selected powers from that class you can swap. The Wizard's Apprentice Theme came very close to that, for instance.
If 5e had retained the concept of a common advancement structure, something like that could have been done quite easily, and they wouldn't have to have both full-class and half-class (multi-class) versions of classes as some sort of compromise between classic and 3e multiclassing...
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