Ajar
Explorer
I must spread some XP around before XPing you again, so I'll just say: pretty much this. It amazes me how they managed to take such a clean rules framework and build such a fiddly game around it. It could have been spectacular.
What will happen to 4th edition?
- Thread starter vivsavage
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I must spread some XP around before XPing you again, so I'll just say: pretty much this. It amazes me how they managed to take such a clean rules framework and build such a fiddly game around it. It could have been spectacular.
AmpsterMan
First Post
So can someone enlighten me on the differences between the two versions? I only ever played a few encounters of either system so I didn't really get the feel for either.
3.5e I played a Barbarian
4.0e I played a Bard
The only thing I remember not lilting about 4 was how long combats took (spent an entire session just using at wills at a bunch of spiders) whereas I felt like I progressed much farther at any one sitting of 3.5
OTOH, 3.5 had so many rules, corner cases, exceptions, exceptions to the excrptions, that I felt like I was reading the the Florida Rules of Court Procedures or something.
This isn't to incite vitriol, just genuine interest. 5e is probably going to be my edition of choice.
3.5e I played a Barbarian
4.0e I played a Bard
The only thing I remember not lilting about 4 was how long combats took (spent an entire session just using at wills at a bunch of spiders) whereas I felt like I progressed much farther at any one sitting of 3.5
OTOH, 3.5 had so many rules, corner cases, exceptions, exceptions to the excrptions, that I felt like I was reading the the Florida Rules of Court Procedures or something.
This isn't to incite vitriol, just genuine interest. 5e is probably going to be my edition of choice.
(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
Huge.
4e is very popular with DMs because it has pretty transparent balance. In 3e you could have high-level characters with really low AC or low damage or one or more low saving throws... Worse, there was very little help in determining what good values were. Contrast with 4e. It's harder to have bad stats, and even if you do at least you know how bad they are. (Typical 4e PC AC is 15 + level, for instance, 1 point higher than a monster, although obviously this will depend on your role.)
Because monster stats are balanced too (as of MM3 onward), you don't have a situation where a 1st-level PC can have AC so high they can't be hit, or get dropped in one hit, nor do you have PCs who can't hit enemy AC. A 1st-level monster would attack at +6. A PC with very bad AC, say a sorcerer, might have AC 12, and that's only because the sorcerer is pretty badly-designed. A 1st-level wizard probably has AC 14 or 15, since they can use Intelligence to AC, and that's the lowest AC a PC using a well-designed class can have. You could play a 1st-level paladin using a heavy shield and +1 armor might have an AC of 21, which means they'll still get hit 1/4 of the time, and that's playing the literally toughest class out there.
Not that players necessarily need to spend a whole lot of time making the numbers work. Put an 18 in your key stat, take an expertise feat, get your items "on schedule" (+1 every 5 levels) and the math takes care of itself. Spend your character building time becoming cool instead. Don't spend time trying to make a cool blade bard that just keeps "whiffing".
I like roles. Roles are controversial. Some hate them. One reason I like roles is to keep competition down. In 3e a rogue, fighter and fireball-tossing wizard are all trying to one-up each other when it comes to damage. In 3e, the monk has no clear role, and generally ends up being fast and unhittable but unable to do anything except maybe boringly grapple somebody. In 4e, the rogue is a striker and deals a lot of damage. The fighter is tougher, draws hits, and gets extra attacks if someone tries to ignore his toughness. Put a fighter and rogue side-by-side and carnage flows. If someone decides to hit the rogue, hoping to kill them before taking too much damage, the fighter gets an extra attack. Attack the fighter, and you're attacking a rock who has lots of hit points, AC... and is flanking you with the rogue. The wizard cripples the opposition, but won't end a fight by herself. The monk deals a lot of damage too, but spreads the damage around and can toss people through zones that your friendly wizard set up. It's not going to directly compete with the rogue, if you happen to have one in your party too.
Roles are controversial because, while they make you good at what you're good at, they also make you bad at what you're not good at. You can't do a "switch hitter" fighter/mage in 4e, who uses magic till he runs out, then starts slicing up things very well with his sword. Well, you could, but you'll only be good at one of these things, or maybe even none of them. The bladesinger class was an attempt to make this trope work in 4e, but it failed. Mind you, a fighter/mage in a previous edition can't make both work for them at the same time. Pathfinder got it to work with the magus, ironically by clarifying it's role. The Pathfinder magus is a striker, and due to action economy tricks can cast and stab in the same round. Unlike a 4e magic striker, like the hexblade, it also has a fair number of tricks from the wizard class. Being 3e-based, it has unpredictable AC and so forth, but if you don't care about the numbers the magus is better than any 4e-equivalent class at what it does.
3e had broken magic. Lots of spells didn't mesh well with the system (eg most of those that either gave huge bonuses to skills or required a very high skill score to escape). Because wizards had such weak defenses, they were given overpowered defensive spells to compensate. It really sucked when a PC got crippled because an NPC mage hit them with Tasha's Hideous Laughter and, due to save DC/saving throw problems, the PC failed and failed to stop laughing every turn. And then some.
Yes, 4e is slow. I like to maintain a realistic view of the edition. Monster hit points inflate faster than PC damage (PC damage is less balanced than most other numbers, so it's hard to measure the problem), plus a lot of the bloat makes PCs tougher than they should be.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Exactly! I think 4e could use a LOT of reworking, though I probably have a bit different ideas about exactly how than RW does. Still, we might meet somewhere on the spectrum at a design we both appreciated. I always thought the implicit 21 levels of AD&D was fine, and I thought 4e had too long an epic tier. I don't like 10 levels ala 13a though. In fact its kinda awkward in 13a with 'incremental advances' being needed because the level jumps are so big. I'd go with 9 levels each of heroic and paragon, and 3 final 'EPIC' levels that take the characters on to the realm of demigods (or whatever). You can always make up something like 'Immortals' rules if you want more beyond that.
I don't care about so-called bounded accuracy. I don't think it really accomplishes much, and while you could argue some sort of oddball corner cases in 4e where very low and very high level characters operating together way out of their respective bailiwicks could seem odd there wasn't a problem that came up in actual play. Certainly the WAY the numbers progressed should be reworked but +1/level actually worked pretty well and I'm totally happy with the idea of just making tougher versions of monsters if I want orcs at level 1 and at level 12. I really don't see the point of 5e's attempt to make an orc 'relevant' across 10+ levels.
Feats were definitely an issue, but its actually not an easy nut to crack. You can make all feats simple always-on options to pick and choose from, but that becomes really limiting. Sometimes you DO want the oddball powerful but only comes up in limited situations things. I think the best that can be done would be to make the feats a bit more like the 5e ones where you get only a few, but they are each more substantial. I still don't think it SOLVES the whole issue though.
Powers should just be more significant and fewer in number as well. I think there's at least a pretty good feeling that far fewer should be class powers.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
They really excel at different things. 3e is a game either for people that basically want a sanitized 2e and will avoid the temptation to exploit the gaping holes in rules balance, or for people that want to just run amok. It has a huge amount of very procedural rules that seem to be designed to try to emulate in-game things. It tries to in some sense achieve 'realism', though exactly what that is is hard to fathom often. Its a good game if you want to stick close to the traditional forms of play but with more modern rules.
4e is just different, but it excels at being an action-adventure game. You said it was slow-paced, and this is true IF YOU TRY TO PLAY 3e with your 4e! If instead you play super fast and loose action-packed crazy romping silliness with collapsing mines and guys using whips to crawl along underneath careening wagons and such things then it CAN take on a different life. Nonetheless it is also a complex game, equally as complex as 3e if you like to be very tactical. It can get slow if you aren't careful, and while it has a lot of D&Disms throughout it is still very much not Gygaxian D&D in any major sense. This makes it hard for a lot of fans of other editions to enjoy it.
I really think 4e would have been lauded universally (though probably ignored) if it had simply been called something besides D&D.
dream66_
First Post
Oh I think it would have gotten by with the D&D name... just as long as it wasn't called 4th edition
I'd call 4e, D&D Next, and publish it concurantly with 3.5, and then eventually wind down 3.5 and replace it with what we now call 5e, and Next would just be it's own product line. In a perfect would with 20/20 hindsight of course.
I'd call 4e, D&D Next, and publish it concurantly with 3.5, and then eventually wind down 3.5 and replace it with what we now call 5e, and Next would just be it's own product line. In a perfect would with 20/20 hindsight of course.
AmpsterMan
First Post
Oh wow, I never got far enough to enjoy either system to the end so I never noticed these things about either system. From what I read from the PHBs, 4e DOES seem to be more concsiously balanced with the whole character roles thing. I think 3.5e had a little bit of that, but not as strict and 5e seems to be loosely based as well.
Perhaps 5e will be the version I can finally find a good group and experience DnD to tge fullest xD
Perhaps 5e will be the version I can finally find a good group and experience DnD to tge fullest xD
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, I can't say if the 3.x designers INTENDED there to be some level of balance or not. Certainly even in 2e there was SOME degree of parity with casters and non-casters at low levels and even a 2e fighter was HANDY at high levels, though not really necessary. In 3.x as it actually exists and playing by the books a level 6 full caster is orders of magnitude more powerful than a fighter, and MANY classes are substantially weaker than fighters. The upshot being 3.x is really a very caster-centric game, though if your players consciously avoid the better options or the DM applies some surgery to the game, you can play something that is very similar to 2e balance-wise. That's pretty much how the 3.5 game I was recently playing in went, it was an 'E6' game with a very restricted set of feats, spells, and items. Even so you could build a druid that was stupid powerful if you really really wanted to annoy the DM. Of course 3.5 is awesome for a game of high level caster hijinks. 4e CAN do that sort of game as well, but the DM would have to build in some ways for the casters to go overboard beyond what any high level PC can do. I think such a game would be pretty fun actually.
AmpsterMan
First Post
Thing is, I can see casters being stupid strong to be a good thing from a simulationist point. I.E they are rare in the world and therefore it is the reason the world is still somewhat recognizable (kinda like the wizards in Lord of the Rings) The thing is, that just because that works in a narrative fiction, for a game it kinda sucks (unless you are Gandalf)
I can see the appeal of a more balanced approach
I can see the appeal of a more balanced approach
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Oh, I think 3.x has a strong simulationistish bent to it. It is often very much a 'process' sort of game where you have rules that try hug close to at least some form of narrative that is driving resolution in detail. This may be one of the things that helped lead to caster supremacy, I don't know. I don't think its a given that such a game has to have very strong casters. I can recall RPGs that were similarly in type that had weak casters (and many that had no magic at all of course). I think a lot of it was just a result of a very loosely constrained and very open system. It was POSSIBLE to introduce game elements that both fit into existing subsystems AND broke the game wide open. It was also harder to put in constraints on new or very reworked elements and keep the process realism (IE the druid is broken because the druid follows a narrative game logic that most naturally leads to a hugely powerful wild-shaping ability).
Earlier editions simply lacked the subsystems and openness. In 1e the game was pretty constrained and there was a very explicit "don't let the players get out of line" tone to the DM advice. There just weren't subsystems like feats that would naturally lend themselves to monstrosities like Concentration and quickened casting and such. You could of course have created such elements, but few DMs would choose to do so and undermine the intended rough parity of classes unless you were specifically creating a "caster's uber all" type of game.
4e managed to fight that by just drawing a line in the sand on day one and saying "all classes will be equal" and constructing the rules in such a way that no one class got anything that was substantially different from what the others got. You could have introduced feats that broke wizards and made them uber powers, but you could as easily introduce equivalent feats for fighters since they were basically all playing by the same rules.
The 4e way WAS appealing in many senses. It certainly stuck in the craws of a lot of fans of previous editions though, and I can sympathize with that, its a substantially different sort of game in that respect.
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