D&D 4E What was the big difference between 4e and "essentials"?

[Charlaquin]

Even in PHB 3, the resource numbers remained about on par, even if psionics used encounter power points to augment at-wills instead of getting separate encounter powers, it was a comparable 'Encounter' resource.

And that was the key difference. AEDU could have been ADU or AED or per Round/Minute/Day/Week or Attack/Defense/Social/Exploration. The important difference from prior eds wasn't adding 5 min short-rest recharges and formally breaking out 'Utilities.' It was giving all player characters rough parity in resources, regardless of desired character concept. About the same number of at-will, encounter, milestone, and daily resources (including surges as well as powers). About. There were variations: Defenders & primal classes got more hps/surges, controllers fewer. Wizards got extra at-will cantrips. Divine classes got an additional encounter in channel divinity, leaders in a surge-trigger of varying sorts. Etc. In spite of (and with the help of) those variations, a player could play the character he wanted, without having to accept the innate inferiority of a lower-Tier class. Wanting to play an innately-magical concept didn't force you in under the glass cieling of Tier 2 as a Sorcerer. Wanting to play a valiant warrior without any magical abilities didn't drop you into Tier 5. Or, to compare to the classic game, wanting to play a bookish mage didn't mean you'd have to be suicidally fragile and wait, throwing darts most rounds, until 3rd-5th level to become a regularly-contributing member of the party.

Err... I’m not sure who you’re arguing with here, but it’s not me. You might want to consider the possibility that whoever you are arguing with might be made of straw. My point wasn’t that giving each class access to roughly the same amount and types of resources wasn’t core to pre-essentials 4e, nor that Essentials didnt move away from that, nor that the move away from resource parity wasn’t one of the significant differences between Essentials and pre-Essentials. All of those things are true, as is everything you said in the above paragraph. I agree with all of that. All I was saying was that resource parity is not “the AEDU framework.” Essentials used the AEDU framework, and it did not feature resource parity.

Sure seemed like it. Where 4e delivered much better class balance (though still, certainly not perfect, and still favoring 'caster' types) than any other edition of D&D had before - or shows any sign of shooting for in the future - Essentials clearly back-peddled from that, gutting it's version of the martial classes and relentlessly powering up and expanding the wizard at every opportunity. Oh, and re-introducing broken magic items, and mass errata to 'bring X back into line with the classic game,' pretty indicative of very intentional backsliding.
Sure, it did other stuff that wasn't exactly backsliding - power inflation and feat bloat aren't exactly backsliding, for instance.

I’m not interested in having an Edition battle with you. Regardless of how you feel about how Essentials compared to 4e and whether or not it was backsliding, it is true that the original design intent was not for every class in 4e to have access to the same number of powers of the same type at every level.

Essentials, as a system, was not as good for casual gamers as 4e was, but the smaller-format RC was convenient to carry around, FWLTW.

I had more success introducing new players to Essentials than I did to pre-Essentials, so I gotta disagree with you there.

The logic at the time was hard to follow. Some new players were confused by the numbering of PHs, thinking that maybe buying a PH2 would be as good as getting a PH1, or thinking they needed all three. So, to address that, instead of having a new offering with just one PH, they split the PH in half, put it in two books, neither of which sounded like a PH, and made the material redundant, then labeled buying said redundant material 'Essential.'

Another of the odditites leading up to Essentials was the 'need' for a 'simple fighter,' even though the fighter remained the most popular class, regardless of what was done to it in each ed. At least, post-E, the game delivered on a 'simple caster,' the Elemental Sorcerer, as well.

I've heard a theory that Essentials was designed, intentionally, to fail. I wish it sounded more far-fetched.

It sounds more far-fetched when you take the tinfoil off.

 

[MwaO]

There was out of combat magic, through rituals. These were a lot of the flavourful utility spells of prior editions, like knock or floating disc but also raise dead. Some classes got the ability to cast rituals for free, like the wizard and cleric, while other classes had to burn a feat. (Which didn’t happen often as burning a feat lowered your combat power, which was needed to keep up with monsters. There were a lot of feat taxes.)
However, casting a ritual required spending gold. You spend a few hundred gold and could cast the ritual once. However, each level you got exactly enough gold from monsters each level to buy a magic item of your level. So casting rituals meant fewer custom magic items. And you had to justify having those components in a dungeon.

Players can be pretty reluctant to spend hard earned treasure.

Also three more notes:
It was reasonably trivial for a non-caster to pick up rituals via feat. So while casters often had an inherent advantage by starting off with ritual spells, they wouldn't necessarily maintain a large edge.

The cost of rituals over time went exponentially towards zero as you gained levels above the cost of the ritual. If you're finding 10000 gold per adventure and a ritual costs 100 gold, it isn't a big deal to cast it a few times. Not a problem unique to 4e either — Pearls of Power are eventually super cheap to craft in 3.5e, Healing Potions are 50 gp when high level PCs can typically expect to find 280000 gold per adventure. 5600 healing potions goes a really long way to stopping hps as a resource drain at high level.

The cost of casting rituals on scrolls went exponentially towards zero. When you're finding 50000 gold per adventure and a scroll costs 500 gold, not a big deal to cast it a few times.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If wizards can basically only fight... wow. That's pretty drastic. I'm not sure I like that.

No one "can only fight," in 4e.

The focus of the game's mechanics has always been on combat, with non-combat challenges, in the past being resolved without reference to the character - by player cajoling DM or by a convenient magic item - except, of course for spells trivializing many non-combat challenges.
3e added skills, but spells & items still readily obviate them.

4e silo'd combat in attack powers and non-combat in skill challenges (and rituals). The fighter was bottom of the heap as far as skill challenges went, having the worst skill list (though, as in 5e, a Background could help), while some classes like rogue or wizard got a skill or two for free. And, of course wizards got rituals automatically, though they had component costs.
Features, utilities, & feats (and you got a lot of feats) could go combat or non-combat.

So, the versatility of a prepped caster to go heavily combat or non-combat by spell load out each morning was just gone. At most a wizard could have a combat & non-combat choice for each utility, which were a fairly minor portion of your overall capability.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The tiers are strongly based on *versatility* (not variety, sorry about that) - the capacity for a character to deal with a wide array of problems. To see if a class is good, you must think about how they would do at these following challenges:

Situation 1: A Black Dragon has been plaguing an area, and he lives in a trap filled cave. Deal with him.

Situation 2: You have been tasked by a nearby country with making contact with the leader of the underground slave resistance of an evil tyranical city state, and get him to trust you.

Situation 3: A huge army of Orcs is approaching the city, and should be here in a week or so. Help the city prepare for war.

In other editions, 1) would involve the Thief by virtue of niche protection, then everyone in the fight. 2) Would be trivialized by spells, or by a Diplomancer in 3e, or down to player skill with class irrelevant. 3) Would be mostly planning ('skilled play,' again, character irrellevant), with divination a pre-casting being huge, and magic overwhelming come the actual battle.

In 4e, they'd likely all involve skill challenges, which brings the whole party into it. And, similarly, everyone will be fighting the dragon or orcs.

So I know this is getting a bit off topic but... with this formal definition of "tiers" in mind, was the gap truly reduced?

Virtually eliminated.

Essentials nudged it back - wizards got more spells known, suggestion as a cantrip, little things like that, fighters & rogues lost dailies.

For instance in the one-hard-fight scenario, any 4e class can 'bring it' with their best daily. The wizard, can prep one daily rather than the other in each slot, if one is better than the other in the anticipated fight, if one of his prepped spells is ideal for the fight, he can cast it, once. That's it. Barely a suggestion of his former versatility.
In Essentials, the wizard has a few more prep options, and the fighter & rogue will put in the same power-strike & backstab fueled DPR performance they always do, no matter how tough or important the battle.

 

[MwaO]

So, the versatility of a prepped caster to go heavily combat or non-combat by spell load out each morning was just gone. At most a wizard could have a combat & non-combat choice for each utility, which were a fairly minor portion of your overall capability.

Also, spells that automatically negated plot tended to be drastically reduced or gone or replicable with the right skills. A Bard doing a song to be able to lie to people gets to roll Bluff twice as an example. Not lie without the possibility of being caught.

 

[Tony Vargas]

the original design intent was not for every class in 4e to have access to the same number of powers of the same type at every level.

What makes you say that, and why do you think they stayed so close to that not-goal until Essentials? Or is your point that the goal was something else - eliminating LFQW, for instance, and resource parity was just the method that achieved it?

I had more success introducing new players to Essentials than I did to pre-Essentials, so I gotta disagree with you there.

Consistency is good for new/casual players, Essentials was less consistent, and that would But then before long. But, for that first session, with pregens, no great difference.

It sounds more far-fetched when you take the tinfoil off.

Sure, that's what the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are for...

... j/k, that was SJG, not WotC. Everyone knows WotC prefers ninjas...

 

[masteraleph]

If wizards can basically only fight... wow. That's pretty drastic. I'm not sure I like that.

Others have sort of said this, but just to be clear- 4e is really designed for a group of heroic (the regular meaning, not the 4e levels 1-10) adventurers. That means that they are all minimally competent at basic adventuring tasks- you never need to roll for whether or not you can ride a horse, for example, though taming an animal would be more involved. Most of the rules focus on combat, mostly due to the presumption that a) combat requires the most adjudication, b) players generally shouldn't have to ask "DM, may I?", c) much of non-combat stuff can be narrated and described by the players without rolling, and d) when noncombat stuff does require rolling, it can be done in the form of Rituals (think long casting time spells) or Skill Challenges, or both.

I've described it as a superhero sim before. Think about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example. Sometimes the superheroes fight enemies. Sometimes they have to find out information. Sometimes there's a sequence where they have to escape a collapsing structure. Sometimes they have to negotiate with politicians. Sometimes they have to defuse a series of traps or repair stuff, either in combat or out- the sequence in the original Avengers when Iron Man and Captain America have to get the Helicarrier flying again is a perfect example of that. Sometimes they capture an enemy ship, or even take their own ship but have to work together to fly it really competently. All of them are competent in combat, and all of them have their own tricks and skills. And the in-universe rules mean that Doctor Strange, who can manipulate time and space, is really no better at combat and no more useful to the team than Captain America, who...is really strong, regenerates, and can throw a shield. That's the feeling 4e is going for- a Wizard who can lock down a 25x25 foot area easily but can't insta-kill enemies who are there, a Fighter who naturally draws people to focus on him and has some effectively super-human moves but who also is really good at perceiving things, a Warlord whose words can manage to get allies who should be nearly dead to get up and fight, a Rogue who is competent at manipulating objects and who also is deadly with daggers. It's not that Wizards can only fight, it's that Wizards are good at fighting, and good at doing stuff out of combat too, but they're not better than Fighters or Rogues or Warlords or what have you. There's tons of dialogue and non-combat events in the MCU, but there's no one so good or powerful at anything that they outshine everyone else, and the same is true in 4e.

As for Essentials- a lot of the Essentials resources are really useful for O-classes (pre-Essentials), and a lot of Essentials classes can be made to meet baseline performance, often by poaching a power from the O-classes (for example, the Slayer- the Essentials Striker version of Fighter- can use a feat to poach a power from the original Fighter). They're also usually competent in Heroic tier on their own, especially early Heroic. Their features aren't really as good as the powers that O-classes pick up in Paragon or Epic, and if your goal is to regularly upgrade what you do and be able to do new things, they don't do that very well. For whatever reason (trying to appeal to 3.5 nostalgia, maybe), Essentials Mages are an exception to that, because they not only get the full slate of Encounter and Daily slots that the original Wizard (Arcanist) gets, but they can also take the ones from the original Arcanist with their Encounter and Daily slots. If you understood the 4e math and knew how to build characters, Essentials was annoying because it introduced some classes that dragged a party down. If you were a 4e diehard, simplifying a lot of melee classes and giving Wizards new powers felt like bowing to demands from 3.5e players rather than catering to your own. But Essentials feats and powers are fine, and the classes are fine too with the caveat that you either play in Heroic or eschew the ones that are really lost causes (Hunter and Binder- Cavalier is often listed there too, but is competent enough in Heroic).

One other note- 4e was really designed with digital tools in mind and an "everything is core" philosophy. Unlike previous editions, Dragon magazine stuff isn't overpowered. Errata in theory wasn't a problem, because you were going to subscribe to D&D Insider and the digital tools would reflect an updated version. If you didn't own a book but wanted powers and feats and other crunch from it, that wasn't a problem, because you could find them in the electronic tools. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the tools were never fully realized and updated properly, which hurt the edition as well.

 

[Jester David]

Also three more notes:
It was reasonably trivial for a non-caster to pick up rituals via feat. So while casters often had an inherent advantage by starting off with ritual spells, they wouldn't necessarily maintain a large edge.

The cost of rituals over time went exponentially towards zero as you gained levels above the cost of the ritual. If you're finding 10000 gold per adventure and a ritual costs 100 gold, it isn't a big deal to cast it a few times. Not a problem unique to 4e either — Pearls of Power are eventually super cheap to craft in 3.5e, Healing Potions are 50 gp when high level PCs can typically expect to find 280000 gold per adventure. 5600 healing potions goes a really long way to stopping hps as a resource drain at high level.

The cost of casting rituals on scrolls went exponentially towards zero. When you're finding 50000 gold per adventure and a scroll costs 500 gold, not a big deal to cast it a few times.

It's trivial to pick-up a feat, but that's trading a combat feat for a non-combat feat. That was generally too high of a price for most players.
(Which is another difference between Essentials and vanilla 4e... I don't think Rituals were in Essentials.)

The cost of rituals was always a little funky. Because that had a non-zero cost, there was a reluctance for a while, and I found even buying the rituals led to reluctance. It was spending money for a theoretical benefit, the possibility that this ritual might be of story use.
Justifying having the components was also funky. The party had to spend money on the components before they were to be used. You had to spend the money while in town and hope you'd find a use. Because you couldn't do that in the dungeon.

I tried a bunch of ways to encourage ritual use. I gave out free scrolls and components as bonus treasure. But nada.
I think some of the nature of 4e got in the way: the use of power cards and having everything your PC could do rolled up into the character sheet. While rituals were just listed, being too large for cards. It was easy to overlook.

-edit-
At the time, I suppose I also let the system get in my way. Because Skill Challenges had to be built in advance (to consider what skills could be used and possible benefits) I tended to consider those as solutions to problems rather than creating open ended problems that could better lead to creative solutions. (Not that I would have been averse to my players trying to think of their own.)

4e was not a game that easily supported the stories I liked to tell, and I had to change my GMing style to match the system. And with that added learning curve, I never got to a point of comfort where I could work around the system's assumptions. I was never in my comfort zone.

 

[masteraleph]

It's trivial to pick-up a feat, but that's trading a combat feat for a non-combat feat. That was generally too high of a price for most players.
(Which is another difference between Essentials and vanilla 4e... I don't think Rituals were in Essentials.)

The cost of rituals was always a little funky. Because that had a non-zero cost, there was a reluctance for a while, and I found even buying the rituals led to reluctance. It was spending money for a theoretical benefit, the possibility that this ritual might be of story use.
Justifying having the components was also funky. The party had to spend money on the components before they were to be used. You had to spend the money while in town and hope you'd find a use. Because you couldn't do that in the dungeon.

I tried a bunch of ways to encourage ritual use. I gave out free scrolls and components as bonus treasure. But nada.
I think some of the nature of 4e got in the way: the use of power cards and having everything your PC could do rolled up into the character sheet. While rituals were just listed, being too large for cards. It was easy to overlook.

-edit-
At the time, I suppose I also let the system get in my way. Because Skill Challenges had to be built in advance (to consider what skills could be used and possible benefits) I tended to consider those as solutions to problems rather than creating open ended problems that could better lead to creative solutions. (Not that I would have been averse to my players trying to think of their own.)

4e was not a game that easily supported the stories I liked to tell, and I had to change my GMing style to match the system. And with that added learning curve, I never got to a point of comfort where I could work around the system's assumptions. I was never in my comfort zone.

You're correct that none of the Essentials classes came with Ritual Caster as a default (they could, of course, take them).

We used them a lot in a home game, but that was partially because we had a Wizard who enjoyed being a Skill/Ritual monkey. Took the Cantrips to use Arcana in place of various skills, and Arcane Mutterings (level 2 skill power that does the same thing), Sage of Ages for his Epic Destiny, a zillion items for swapping in, and of course, tons of rituals. Phantom Steed got a lot of use, as did some of the area control rituals (IIRC we locked someone into a tower and getting them out would've required a level 40 enemy to do so), some of the information rituals were really good, etc. And of course, he had a catchphrase- "There's a ritual for that!"

Rituals shine, as MwaO noted above, when you are in Paragon or Epic, or even upper Heroic and the lower level ones cost trivial amounts. Phantom Steeds, at 70gp a pop, is trivial, especially when your default Arcana roll is over 40. Want to use Streetwise? Use Level 2's Seek Rumor. Want to walk through a wall? Passwall (at 1000gp per use, it's still expensive when you get it at level 12, but at level 22, when you should be getting upwards of 100000gp?) To be fair, though, it's not that different from previous editions and spell components- it's just that much of the time, players ignored spell components. How many 2e players carried around fur and the appropriate rod to cast Lightning Bolt, or compressed bat guano and sulphur for Fireball, let alone for any more esoteric spells?

 

[Tony Vargas]

You're correct that none of the Essentials classes came with Ritual Caster as a default (they could, of course, take them).

Though some just got specific rituals, by default.

We used them a lot in a home game, but that was partially because we had a Wizard who enjoyed being a Skill/Ritual monkey. Took the Cantrips to use Arcana in place of various skills, and Arcane Mutterings (level 2 skill power that does the same thing), Sage of Ages for his Epic Destiny, a zillion items for swapping in, and of course, tons of rituals. Phantom Steed got a lot of use, as did some of the area control rituals (IIRC we locked someone into a tower and getting them out would've required a level 40 enemy to do so), some of the information rituals were really good, etc. And of course, he had a catchphrase- "There's a ritual for that!"

Another aspect of rituals is that they tended to be enablers, rather than problem-solvers. You didn't teleport out of a fight, leaving your comrades to die because they weighed too much, you open a teleport circle to bring your whole party to a distant area where adventure awaits. You didn't cast water breathing so you could get into the submerged treasure chamber and grab the best items, you did a water breathing (or higher level waterborn) that affected the whole party and let you go into the ocean depths, where adenture awaits...

... of course, Remove Affliction and Raise Dead were still go-to probelm solvers.