What CAN'T you do with 4e?

[hero4hire]

Things that I cannot do with 4e without significant amount of house rules or fiddling.
-Planescape (Loss of Alignments, Casting Times, No more Planes frankly, no Blood War,...it goes on)

Using the Blood War & Old School Alignments are so easily done I really am surprised anyone mentions it. I am glad Casting Times are gone for Combat Abilites. Rituals all have casting times yes?

-Gnomish Inventions (Small amounts of steampunk for when I want a bit of it).
-Magi-tech/High Magic (Floating Cities, Magical Coaches, Portal Hounds, ...)

The Artificer is coming out next month in Dragon.

High Magic is either Plot Devices or can be done as Rituals.

-Mass Combat (maybe fixed in subsequent books)
-Rules for Building Castles, Siege Weapons, and Ruling over a kingdom. (Fine to fiat if npcs is doing it, but what happens when the characters want it).

Not my cup of tea, but I am sure there will be rules for this. I dont really remember ANY core D&D book having Mass Combat.

-Guide to building Campaigns and Setting.

I will have to look in the DMG again I thought they *did* include this.

-Chase rules (for the roof top pursuits and such) <Not in 3e I admit, but it would be nice>

Thse are called Skill Challenges. In the 4e demo included a Chase that was a skill challenge.

-Clever uses of equipment and skills (Magyver solutions) + spells

Eh? Isn't this the province of the Player to come up with Clever Uses for what they have? You need rules for it? Which previous edition included this?

 

[Mallus]

Because some people prefer a game which models a world which doesn't know who the protagonists are?

I prefer a game which models the worlds found in adventure fiction and film, so a certain recognition of player protagonism is expected, no? Wasn't the recommended reading list they used to include in the DMG almost entirely fiction (and not history, ethnography, and comp. religion)?

I always assumed that when people talked about D&D in terms of being a simulation, it was as a simulation of stories, ie where the concept of the protagonist is key. This seems, well, traditional, to me. Look at how even AD&D recognized the protagonist/antagonist status; PC's got class levels while most other members of their race got at most 2HD, barring key opponents. This isn't new to the system.

You have no trouble with protagonist/antagonist abilities.

Nope. I see them as different out of necessity. Different goals/purposes. The problem is that antagonist abilities that present interesting challenges to overcome would be problematic as PC abilities. Given that, one could either declare the abilities off limits --with some attendant rationalization, of course-- for the PC's or remove them from the game entirely, and lose potentially interesting encounters. I choose to do the former. It's a bit of trade off.

A lot of people, however, DO have trouble with "Somehow, these people learned abilities which no one else knows and which PCs of equivalent training and power can't learn."

Who says anything about 'equivalent training'? What's verisimilitude-threating about the idea that some NPC's have spent their entire imaginary lives learning different imaginary things than the PC's? Things that the PC's might learn if an equal amount of imaginary time is spent? I imagine it's simply not practical game-wise for most players to play out their PC's 5 years of game time spent in a hobgoblin tribe learning their l33t boomerang tricks, or the next 10 as a thrall to the Absolute Evil learning the fine art of zombie hoard raising.

Is believability better served by having all NPC skills/abilities/manifestations of wahoo acquirable by the PC's after a brief 2-week crash course? Skill acquisition in D&D is designed for playability and not simulation, after all. In some cases, doesn't effectively placing certain abilities outside the reach of the PC's enhance realism/verisimilitude/etc?

Put another way, why does the presence of abilities that the players can't learn threaten S.O.D. but the ludicrous ease with which they can and do learn things not?

Being told that the evil wizard's spell is pure plot device and that they can't pick it up can be very SOD-breaking.

Perhaps the spell requires 10 years worth of virgin sacrifices in order to cast. That seems genre-appropriate to me, and I prioritize genre-emulation.

The more the unreality of the world is thrust into the face of the players, the harder it is for them to care about the world or their characters.

See, I just don't see what's inherently realistic about playing 'anything you can do I can do better'. The notion that PC's can master any skill/power/ability at all in a playable amount of time is a lot harder for me to buy into.

 

[Lanefan]

I think your *footnote here is pretty important, actually. In my estimation, 4E is a big improvement in this area, because it encourages you to think of the world as a real world and then model it in play with the rules, rather than thinking of the world as purely an expression of the rules.

Except that a globe is not a cube in reality, so the rules are not modeling a globe in play the least bit accurately by making it a cube. To me, this aspect of 4e design is doing the exact opposite of what you suggest.

And Mallus hits lots of nails on the head in the post just previous to this. There's nothing at all wrong with NPCs having abilities PCs don't have provided there's a reasonable in-game explanation for it...the most obvious of which is that the NPC spent the time learning said abilities while the PC spent the same time learning the abilities that allow them to function in their adventuring class(es). If the PCs want to then turn around and pick up those NPC abilities, they'd better be prepared to put their adventuring careers on hold for the decade or so it'll take to learn them...meanwhile, their current class skills will lie unused and rot away to nothing...

Lanefan

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

See post #105 in this thread

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=230206&page=7&pp=15

and #50 in this one:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=4289152&posted=1#post4289152

To see what I find to be to 4Ed's detriment.

And no, I don't care what may or may not be added in future supplements- a lot of my complaints are about things from the Core that are no longer there or have been severely altered.

IOW, I probably won't be buying those supplements.

 

[Steely Dan]

-Planescape (Loss of Alignments, No more Planes frankly, no Blood War,

I've converted my ongoing (3 years) Planescape campaign to 4th Ed, you really shouldn't have any problems; I have merely set up the alignments slightly differently (see below), but still keeping true to the original importance of all the alignments of the Great Wheel.

The planes are simply still there (my party is on the first layer of Ysgard at the moment, and is about to hop on Yggdrasil and stroll down to Nidavellir).

And as for the Blood War, just keep it going – done.


-Lawful
-Lawful Evil
-Lawful Good

-Chaotic
-Chaotic Evil
-Chaotic Good

-Evil
-Good
-Unaligned



One thing I particularly love about 4th Ed is the clear and tight writing (and good editing). Every previous edition of this game has had cryptic/vague/byzantine (not clear and tight writing on my part) writing and sloppy editing, IMO.

 

[Toras]

Using the Blood War & Old School Alignments are so easily done I really am surprised anyone mentions it. I am glad Casting Times are gone for Combat Abilites. Rituals all have casting times yes?
The Artificer is coming out next month in Dragon.

High Magic is either Plot Devices or can be done as Rituals.

Not my cup of tea, but I am sure there will be rules for this. I dont really remember ANY core D&D book having Mass Combat.

I will have to look in the DMG again I thought they *did* include this.

These are called Skill Challenges. In the 4e demo included a Chase that was a skill challenge.

Eh? Isn't this the province of the Player to come up with Clever Uses for what they have? You need rules for it? Which previous edition included this?

As I've said, the alignment thing and simply saying that there is a blood war is simple. However, the problem comes to the changes that they've made to the connective realms (Feywyld, Astral Sea -> Great Wheel) It takes a lot of modification to manage. Not to mention all the planar creatures that would need to be altered to reflect the Great Wheel (cosmology). It could conceivably be done, but it would take a great deal of effort.

As for the High Magic, I meant magic as a common as much as grand. Societies where the majority are in fact magic users. I understand that you could in theory use a ritual for it, but in order for it to function in any real way they would need to be faster than 10 minutes.

When I said Campaign Construction, I mean more like generate campaign settings I suppose. World balancing, etc....

As for the creative use of equipment and magic, I've done a great deal with a slope, a pit, and some oil. Used it take out a number of mindless undead once. Use acid to take out the hinges on a large set of stone doors and pushing it in to get the drop on an evil cult. I cannot count the number of interesting attack plans we've used Xorn movement or Wind Walk for. Hell Stone-Shape has done its duty pretty handily....that's just a few of them.

 

[vagabundo]

Here's one thing I genuinely don't like about 4e. One of the very few. There are slightly too many exceptions in the MM. Exception-based design gone too far. For example the owlbear and the umber hulk both grab their victims with two claws and then get to do a continuing bite attack. But the mechanic used is different. The umber hulk deals ongoing damage, the owlbear gets a separate attack.

It offends my sense of neatness. I don't mind if the rules aren't consistent with the game world, those are different things. But the rules should be consistent with the rules.

That said, 3e monster design was, on the whole, much too lazy. Far too much reuse of PHB spells. Way too many monsters were boring, about 50% seemed to have improved grab. The 1e monsters otoh were too goofy. Every time one could do something that wasn't in the core rules, like grab you or trap you in a net or something, a different mechanic was used, which went too far.

4e has by far the best monsters of any edition of D&D, imo. They have the balance almost, though not quite, right.

This would bother me more if the stat blocks were anything less than they are; they are excellent and easily printed on cards. The streamlining of the monster/npc stat blocks is one of the biggest little-tweaks that really makes a difference.

I agree, monsters this edition totally rock: very interesting and fun for the DM to run.

The DM got sidelined a little in 3e, too much work - not enough fun.For someone who only DMs (always a bridesmaid, never the bride) this edition has been a (rpg) lifesaver...

 

[Henry]

Regarding the Alignment discussion: I agree with Steely Dan. Would it really be harmful to add "Lawful" and "Chaotic" to the list of existing alignments? Seeing as how alignment means less than it ever has, mechanically speaking, it's about as tough as adding, "was born on a farm" to one's character sheet. Even if a DM said, "I like the new Alignment system" there's nothing stopping a player from playing a Lawful Neutral character.

 

[Steely Dan]

Even if a DM said, "I like the new Alignment system" there's nothing stopping a player from playing a Lawful Neutral character.

Of course, in my 4th Ed Planescape campaign, that would simply be Lawful, as Unaligned has replaced Neutrality, but I know what you mean.

So The Outlands would be Unaligned, and Mechanus would be Lawful, and Limbo Chaotic.

Back in the day there was only Lawful, Chaotic and Neutral.

 

[Mallus]

No in the old days some stuff was explicitly NPC only

I don't want to see that return. *shudder*

Why?

Do you accept the idea that some abilities that would be appropriate for an entire-party-challenging short-term villain could be game-breaking in the hands of PC's? If so, why would you deliberately want to break the game? Everyone playing bears some of the responsibility for maintaining game balance/playability. It's not all on the DM.