What is, by consensus opinion, obviously broken?

[ArcaneSpringboard]

I'm going to go with my preferred bugaboo: Too Many Fiddly Bits To Lose Track Of.

So many "This effect ends at the end of your turn" from powers and monster effects and so on, plus situational modifiers, it gets to the point you can easily forget modifiers when they apply.

Yep.

This is specially egregious when you have lots of effects that trigger on critical hits. Just using the Chaos Sorcerer as an example: You roll a 20. First, you do multiple things for rolling a crit (extra weapon damage, class effect). Then you do something special because you rolled an Even number. That's before you resolve the power!

Well remember that starting with PH2, some classes are designed to be for players who like more complicated class mechanics.

My second thing (which I doubt I'll get a lot of agreement on) is the way that Primary Ability Scores are really so important for the class. The mad rush to get the 18/20 so you have a +5% chance to hit. The way that you can't multi-class into Y class because class Y doesn't use your Primary or Secondary ability score. Or the the fact that since your class doesn't use Str, you have so little chance to make a basic melee attack (even if you're a weapon using class: see Cha-paladins, Avengers, Rogues, and so on).

No, I agree on this completely. In fact, I wish there wasn't really any substantial stat increase in the game. It's one of the areas I think 4e went away from the classic max 18 or max 20 stat, and for not a very good reason.

An 18 used to be impressive...now at higher levels it's actually weak.

Another thing I don't really like is how lots of powers do extra damage using say, Cha, yet are purely physical in nature.

Admittedly I have no examples out there though. I'm a DM.

 

[Cyronax]

What's the matter with Rituals? I can see the problem with Magic Items and Skill Challenges, but I don't see what the issue with Rituals is.

Well, beyond RAW making a +8 due to Aid Others practically an automatic by mid-Paragon.

I have vacillated between house ruling a limit to the number of people who can aid another and just letting the rule stand.

I tend to see the huge bonus from four Aids as a reflection of a mundane or un-rushed task.

BUT ....

Say the heroes (party of 5) are trying to cast Knock on an Arcane Locked door in the middle of a dungeon or hostile area. As a (hopefully) savy DM, I'd
totally encourage teamwork, but then I'd point out that a 10 minute casting time involving the entire party would make all of them distracted (-2 of their passive perceptions) and maybe their weapons are sheathed or not ready.

So .... one party member stays out to keep watch, etc.

One minor example, but I hope my point is clear.

C.I.D.

 

[Dausuul]

What's the matter with Rituals? I can see the problem with Magic Items and Skill Challenges, but I don't see what the issue with Rituals is.

Well, beyond RAW making a +8 due to Aid Others practically an automatic by mid-Paragon.

I think what it comes down to is that a lot of rituals just aren't very good. They cost too much and take too long for the effect you get. It's not worth casting 'em.

The ritual system represents a decisive break with the old Vancian approach in which spells are presumed to be available daily and castable in a matter of seconds. WotC now has a defined category of spells that can only be cast outside of combat and have a strict limiting factor preventing casual use. This opens up the possibility of magic with truly staggering effects--the sort of spells you see in mythology and fantasy fiction.

What do we get instead? A box of bland utility spells.

(The insane price curve doesn't help with this. Because of level-based hyperinflation, rituals that cost an arm and a leg at Heroic tier become trivial to cast by Epic, so the limiting factor doesn't limit as well as it should.)

 

[Sadrik]

Sadrik must be on your ignore list.

Hey, I have some very valid points. I don't agree with the premise of the thread, everyone has an opinion on what they don't like, to try and come to a consensus or post what they think is a consensus is false. So I took the opportunity to post some things I disliked in an effort to add to the conversation. I think that is what everyone else is doing too. Put on your amulet of natural armor.

 

[Salamandyr]

Right now I think the only thing actually "broken" in 4e is stacking save penalties, which they have addressed-by changing many of the most common items used so it's "lockdown" is harder to achieve. Pretty much one more pass through with a nerfbat would fix that problem once and for all. Until then, it's pretty easy to houserule that saves of 16 or better always save.

On rituals though, I don't think the problem is with them per se...it's with Wizards' sort of panicked removal of all flavor text from their rulebooks. I think they believe we would add our own "flavor" to the idea of ritual materials...the gold we spend on rituals being used for eye of newt, toe of frog, silver dust for pentagrams, virgin's tears and so forth. And the time period (usually 10 minutes) being less a hard and fast rule as rather a "period of time longer than a short rest but shorter than an extended rest" as the player writing out mystic symbols, chanting, burning incense candles, etc...you know, magic stuff.

It seemed to me the first time D&D had included a mechanic similar to our classic fairy tale approach to magic. But the way I've seen most people describe it is..."you spend money and something happens" Sure, technically, that's all that goes on. The fun is around the description.

I think Wizards wanted to keep ritual materials vague, so we didn't have to worry about exactly how much fiend blood or toad hairs we have on hand (ok, I'd cast Arcane Lock, but I'm out of of harlot's warts) and they didn't want to thrust a particular flavor on us; so they came up with "magic dust" residuum, and let you buy "ritual materials", and then left the fun and interesting stuff about rituals to our imaginations...which led to people thinking the fun and interesting stuff about rituals didn't exist.

So the solution for 5e? Do what 3rd did, include descriptions of the material components of rituals, but let you have a "ritual pouch" that is assumed to have anything you need as long you have invested enough gold to stock it. The character sheet would say ritual materials-500 gp. But the Knock ritual could say "the ritual requires 10 gp of ritual ink made from an octopus, and a small silver key worth 50 gp (that is destroyed in the casting). Runes of opening are painted around the lock while the caster chants the name of famous thieves over and over for 10 minutes"

 

[Dedekind]

I'm surprised by the amount of consensus in this thread. It is 100%, but it is higher than I would have expected.

The only thing I would specifically mention is "the grind." This is a very deep problem that could be an barrier for new players.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

I don't know if I'm the only one who experiences this, but it never happened when I DMd 3.x, and I'm with the same group that I DMd for with that system now, but I find that 4e Requires that there is a magic 7-11 on every single street corner.

 

[Dausuul]

I don't know if I'm the only one who experiences this, but it never happened when I DMd 3.x, and I'm with the same group that I DMd for with that system now, but I find that 4e Requires that there is a magic 7-11 on every single street corner.

Really? I've found the opposite--it's much easier to dispense with "Magic Item Wal-Mart" in 4E. As long as you make sure to hand out treasure with the appropriate number of plusses at a given level, you're good. And if you use inherent bonuses, you don't even have to do that.

Don't get me wrong, I have all kinds of criticisms of the 4E magic item economy. But this particular issue is not one that I'm seeing.

Why do you find this to be a requirement in 4E?

 

[tuxgeo]

The only real issue I have with 4e currently is "Untyped" bonuses which can cause unintended stacking issues. If they could be errated to being "Feat", "Class", "Race", "Item" or "Power" as required to close that loophole things would be a lot better.

This list might need expanding. Currently, there are also "Enhancement" bonuses in 4e; and DMs can give out bonuses for circumstances.
In addition, the "Aid Another" action gives an untyped bonus, so it might seem logical to type that as an "Action" bonus -- but doing so might make it impossible for more than one PC at any given time to give effective aid to some specific ally.

 

[Votan]

Multiclassing is crap. (I suspect it will be replaced lock, stock, and barrel with the hybrid system, which works much better.)

Interesting. I liked 4E mutliclassing (pick up some minor abilities) much more than 3E multiclassing. I guess I prefer single classes over blends and hybrids the basic building block is a class based system.

But I hesitate to use "broken" here in any case -- "slightly suboptimal" is not the same as "ruins the game".