What is the essence of 4E?

[Blue]

To add to my own post - a trait that defined it from the preceding edition was that Monsters were exception based instead of built like characters.

 

[Garthanos]

To add to my own post - a trait that defined it from the preceding edition was that Monsters were exception based instead of built like characters.

That was part of the easy to DM feature

 

[Blue]

That was part of the easy to DM feature

My post was a single sentence starting with "To add to my own post", which is a clue that I am only adding onto the defining traits I had listed. It contained nothing about being easy to DM, so that part could not have been "part of" it.

Now, others may have mentioned "easy to DM", but the post you are quoting is explicitly not referencing anything except my own definition. Which did not include that.

 

[Garthanos]

My post was a single sentence starting with "To add to my own post", which is a clue that I am only adding onto the defining traits I had listed. It contained nothing about being easy to DM, so that part could not have been "part of" it.

Now, others may have mentioned "easy to DM", but the post you are quoting is explicitly not referencing anything except my own definition. Which did not include that.

Nothing truly problematic, in some fashion I was pointing out a connection between yours and others points. Additionally based on the design goals of 4e that element was not a goal just a method... Along with many perhaps subtler others including mathematic transparency.

 

[Ancalagon]

To me, the essence of 4e is really the structure of character powers, and the universal application of that structure to *all* characters.

I was going to say "at will, encounter and daily powers, for *everyone*" but Umbran said it first - and better.

My experience with 4e is very limited, but I think I could have lived with that structure. It's a lot of other things that didn't work for me... the "mmo feel" and the plethora of modifiers were a big factor.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I was going to say "at will, encounter and daily powers, for *everyone*" but Umbran said it first - and better.

Is a unified power structure enough for you to say that a game is like 4E?

The RPG genre of video games went through a rapid evolution during the nineties, but one of the standards that they settled on was to simply treat martial maneuvers exactly like spells - i.e. they cost MP, and if you had a gish-style character, then it drew from the exact same pool of MP whether you were casting Fireball or using Power Strike.

If someone translated that model to the tabletop, would it strike you as very 4E-like?

 

[MarkB]

I've heard this once before, and I had never considered it before then. Do you consider it to be a core aspect of 4E that your character build choices should be made in consideration of what works best for the party?

It's not essential, but it's very possible to make complementary builds that synergise very well and can massively improve a party's performance. It's some time since I last played 4e, but I played through a campaign from 1st to 30th level, and a lot of our level-up decisions were about which powers would best let the characters support each other. My bravura warlord and the dragonborn barbarian were a particular powerhouse as I recall, with my character being able to grant extra attacks and options, and the barbarian having lots of abilities to generate additional attacks based off their own actions. I forget how many attacks per round we'd string together on average, but the record was somewhere in the teens or twenties.

Is a unified power structure enough for you to say that a game is like 4E?

The RPG genre of video games went through a rapid evolution during the nineties, but one of the standards that they settled on was to simply treat martial maneuvers exactly like spells - i.e. they cost MP, and if you had a gish-style character, then it drew from the exact same pool of MP whether you were casting Fireball or using Power Strike.

If someone translated that model to the tabletop, would it strike you as very 4E-like?

It certainly sounds that way to me. 4e characters don't typically have distinct wellsprings of power, but the structure of their abilities is pretty unified across the board. Fighters have the same mix of at-will, somewhat-limited and very-limited abilities as spellcasters or any other archetype. The only thing that fundamentally distinguishes a wizard's spell from a fighter's combat maneuver is the name.

 

[Jester David]

I was having a discussion with someone else on another forum, concerning the topic of Pathfinder 2 (Electric Boogaloo), and a comparison came up between that game and D&D 4E. It was suggested that the two appear quite similar in many ways, because combat is very tactical (Theater-of-the-Mind being neither practical nor encouraged), and every character has a new choice to make at every single level. It was subsequently countered that making a choice at every level, in order to create an extremely customized character, was not considered one of the core defining traits of that edition.

Following that premise, then, what is the core defining trait of 4E? Is it the choices? The grid? The unified resource structure? What do you consider to be the essence of 4E, such that you would recognize a game as being 4E-derived if it shared such an element?

I'm definitely getting a 4e vibe from a lot of the Pathfinder 2 design. Both are expanding and building off of 3e and trying to fix the problems with that ruleset. And for some reasons, the Pathfinder people never once stopped to look at and play 5e to figure out how 5e moved away from the designs of 4e, so they can avoid making the mistakes of 4e....

Both games seem to be very gamist RPGs that use many jargon terms, keywords, and symbols rather than natural language. They both seem to be games that focus heavily on tactical miniature play with regular character choices every level (or twice at some levels) and a heavy focus on building characters, with the differentiation of characters being built into modular rules elements. And both seem to employ a Red Queen's Race element to levelling, where the numbers increase regularly so you need to continually increase in power and cannot fight foes too far above or below you.

I'm getting some serious déjà vu from the launch of Pathfinder 2.


Now, the essence of 4e...
I'd say the essence of 4th Edition very much was designing and customising characters. Because the rules of the game were for a tactical miniature wargame.
No... literally. This is not me edition warring. The combat rules for 4e and the rules for the revised D&D Miniatures game were almost identical. The difference was there was a condition in DDM that was not included in 4e. I gave copies of the DDM rulebooks to players to explain how to play 4e.
4e was literally D&D Minis where you could build your own token... and with a skill system tacked on. (And, boy, was the 4e skill system tacked on.)

Which is a very retro design when you think about it. D&D as a tactical miniature wargame where you play one character instead of an entire warband. Déjà vu... again.

That is the essence of 4e. You design a custom character that fits a role in the party with which to engage in interesting and dynamic tactical combat encounters. And it does that very well.

 

[darkbard]

4e was literally D&D Minis where you could build your own token... and with a skill system tacked on. (And, boy, was the 4e skill system tacked on.)

I'm not sure how you can make such a claim when the entire noncombat components of the game are built upon the skill system, most notably (though controversially) in the instance of Skill Challenges, and even combat stunting integrates skills into mechanical resolution (see p. 42).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

What I really liked about it was that as a DM I got the tools that I could make a challenging fight and know that it would work. Also that the monsters could use most of their statblock where as in 3.5 I often found that the monster with 4 pages of stats never got to use them as it was dead too fast or spend most of its time stunned or something.
I also liked that the party had roles and could synergize to become more efficient as a unit, particularly to cover a member that was missing or down.

I still like it but my players rejected it. They found the aedu power structure too samey and I personally found that the tactical options produced too much analysis paralysis which often bored the players not directly involved.
I never understood skill challenges