Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7811849" data-attributes="member: 996">Taken the right way - Hussar has an excellent summation, above - it's not about good or bad, just different.People, like you, who didn't like 4e, people who hated it enough to actively war against it, people who reflexively defended it, and people who genuinely liked it best of all editions - at least some from each category - could 'agree' (in various, grudging, differently-spun ways) that was /different/ from other editions.  "Not D&D," in some sense.  Thus lacking the Essence of D&D the OP was looking for. And the imbalances between classes were very much between Tier 1 & 2 full casters and Tier 4 & 5 non-magical ones.  So, yes, class balance had everything to do with magic vs martial.Not so much to do with magic /items/ (though, they were no so longer needed as a crutch to balance martial classes) So, on the one hand I feel compelled to point out that this is flatly false, the classes - if you actually played them - played /very/ differently, fighters were nothing like wizards were nothing like rogues were nothing like Paladins, etc...  The similarity was in structure, resource parity, and balance.But, I have to remind myself, 'feel' is /very/ subjective.  So while the similarity was only in resource management, if you focused only on that similarity, and didn't care about the differences between an exploit using a weapon vs a spell using an implement, vs a controller interdicting the enemy and a striker murdering them one at a time, then, yeah, it's a 'feel.' In either case, though, the complaint speaks /directly/ to the Primacy of Magic, as it requires magic be /better/ - more significant, more powerful, more critical or important - and it can't plausibly /be/ that if it's on the same resource schedule as, and remotely balanced with martial. Two different things, here.  Genre flexibility, without radicaly re-working the rules, is something D&D has always lacked - but, since so many of use were happy to radically re-work the rules, it often got credit for it, just the same.  4e, with it's embrace of readily re-skinning powers (as well as gear as 3e had), could shift genre without any change to mechanics.   And, because it had abandoned the Primacy of Magic, it could easily shift to a genre that didn't include magic, at all. /Style/ of play, OTOH, not much to do with genre.  Balanced games, like 4e aspired to be, naturally work with a wider range of play styles, while imbalanced ones can tend to force (over-reward) or punish specific styles.  We heard the 'doesn't support X style' (like CaW, for instance), a lot.  It would be more acturate, IMHO, to say it didn't /force/ those styles. The whole codification thing started a lot earlier, with the Thief, and continued with attempts at skill systems.  Ironically, while "improvising" in most editions was just an appeal to the DM to make an arbitrary ruling, in 4e even /that/ was codified - well, had guidelines - p42.  You've made this complaint before, the fact that the game gave you license to do exactly what you said you couldn't is known to you. But, again, it's still a fair observation on another level:  if you could just 'improvise' the equivalent magic missle with an arcana check or twin strike any time you swung two weapons, you'd be undermining the uniqueness of the classes.   It's just more an observation about class systems, in general.4e had far fewer ongoing effects than pre-buff-celebrating 3e (and fewer different duration formulae to track for them), and fewer named bonuses and named conditions, as well.  So that could hardly have been not-D&D for that reason.  Compared to playing a caster in the classic game, that was a bit of a simplification, really.  The "have I played this card yet" feel was very much a feature of Vancian in all other editions, in balancing martial v magical, and thus loosing the Primacy of Magic, 4e just extended it - in a consistent, easier to learn, understand & manage way - to all classes. Again, a valid superficial observation, but whether you wanted mechanics first or fiction first, 4e was readily adaptable to the style without changing mechanics.  The power structure separated fluff & crunch, thus the 'fiction' was easily customizable by the player, you could play the character you wanted, doing the things you wanted, the way you wanted to describe them, so if you had an impulse to put the fiction front-and-center, you could, and could do so with more authority and greater freedom of choice.  If, OTOH, you /were/ interested in mechanics and play for it's own sake, that was readily doable, too.  It's another case of allowing different styles rather than forcing specific ones.   It's because the wonder of magic was lost:  without the Primacy of Magic, magic was just another tool.  Without the profound disadvantage of lacking magic, there was no impetus to improvise desperate tricks in combat to contribute, something/anything, to the combat where your few codified mundane abilities were useless.  And that's not mocking or putting words in your mouth.  Playing the underdog is legit style, and it's not uncommon in fiction for an underdog to turn things around with some harebrained desperate trick on the spur of the moment.  4e was /designed/ to let you do that - with p42 improvisation, guidelines that let the DM design encounters that could be very hard, but probably not fatal to too many PC with some dependability, and re-skinning - but it didn't make it /necessary/.</blockquote>

Verification