D&D 4E What's so bad about 4th edition? What's so good about other systems?

[AbdulAlhazred]

What if I want to play a game style in which those out of combat details matter?

I suppose that's one of the places where I don't have an answer. DM Fiat works well in a lot of cases, but there are also a lot of game styles I like to explore in which that doesn't work well.

What are some of the solutions you would suggest?

note: Once again, I am not defending 3rd Edition. I'm instead curious how someone might further tweak 4th Edition to better suit some of the things I want to do.

Depends on what things you want to do. 4e has a number of rather open-ended aspects. You've got backgrounds, which effectively you can use to cover almost anything. There are published backgrounds that do all sorts of things, and just the standard skill or language thing is pretty useful by itself for adding some little element to round out your character concept.

So for instance if I wanted to be a character that plays the lute then I'll just say to the DM, "Hey, I'm taking the Professional Musician background element (or whatever it is called, I'm sure there is one)" Done. When you want to influence someone you can describe it as using your instrument to play music if the situation is at all appropriate to that. This can be used in an SC or whatever. You can apply it to any other skill for that matter where you can make a logical case for it. For that matter if you say have the Healing skill you could play soothing music. It doesn't have to do anything, though if I really wanted to make that a really important part of my character I can say ask for a +2 to checks where I'm able to play. It is a method-oriented system that isn't attempting to codify what you know, but to describe how you operate.

There are of course many other things you can do. Pick a theme that gives you some specific capability, use skill powers to become particularly good at specific things. There are a pretty decent variety of other utility powers that are useful here as well, and various racial feats and such. Then there are just feats in general. There are actually quite a lot of feats that are useful to do specific things.

What is nice is none of those options says "you have to know this to do X, nobody else can". Niche skills tended to do the opposite whereas a power that gives you a nice bonus to do something or a reroll has a different message. There are always the general skills you can use all the time. Martial practices are a bit of an oddity in that they work more like skills than anything else, letting you do something very specific whenever you want. I'm not sure they were really a great idea, but they certainly are a good resource for picking up interesting abilities that don't compete with anything else.

I guess you could also count boons, though technically they fall under 'treasure' they are really a type of freeform training.

Then of course there is the sometimes maligned but powerful ability to just fluff things. The level 30 invoker that can't swim just walks across ordinary bodies of water (with at least a +15 Athletics he may be weak in that skill, but he's able to do things normal level 1 people can't). The wizard mutters some minor incantation and picks a lock with thievery. Albeit the rogue would do it with much greater facility, but he can do it. These are all skill checks but they need not imply that the character can do something that for RP reasons or just lack of training the PC "can't do".

I'm really not sure what other things you were asking for specifically.

 

[catastrophic]

<snip>
Don't be afraid to do things besides SCs anyway. You can make up quests that will surely require a certain number and types of skill checks to succeed on the way, with an XP reward equal to an encounter/challenge. Same thing just disguised as something else.

Yeah, i've been running a campaigin since 4e came out, and we started with a skill challenge as the second event of the game, and evolved from there.

I've done a bunch of variants and alternative approaches to things, including an obsidian style approach wiht turns, rounds, and multiple successes per roll. I also used a social combat system for major social conflicts, in which the pcs ltierally push and pull their foes around a conceptual space battle map, while fighting over various goal tokens.

But recently i've just been doing what are essentuially puzzles, stripping away skills entirely in such scenes, and simply giving players a bunch of moves and options to use to win the challenge, with multiple victorty conditions up for grabs.

This is partly because i run in maptool, but imagine a map with various pcs, npcs, and multiple victory tokens in play. The pcs have to grab as many of the tokens as they can, scoring points off them or positioning them in various ways.

One recent example was a negociation with the ruling council of a pirate island, with four different goals to be pursued- passage for the pc's fleet, a potential alliance, rights for the local tribes, and information on the pc's main campaigin foes. Each of these goals represented by a token, which the pcs or their oppoents could score points off of, move around the field, and from that, the outcome was determined, with varying levels of success for the four goals.

Now in the past, i would allow these manuvers and so on to be defined by socia skill rolls. But without the skill rolls, all the players get the same stake and options, and the focus is on the tactics they use, and the outcomes they pursue.

That's basically the norm in my game now. Skills are ok for other events, but for those big, encounter scale scenes, there's too much inequalitiy between classes and various other drabacks, for them to play a primary role.

What if I want to play a game style in which those out of combat details matter?

Really, 4e tried to hit this issue wiht skill challenges. If 5e was a continuation of 4e, you'd have a much better skill challenge/noncombat events/ect system to work with. This would include things like more balanced skills, and a resource system so that at other times, skills could be more freely interpreted in open narritive.

 

[herrozerro]

On the note of skill challenges my opinion is that they should not go above complexity 1 for most tasks that have short time periods. for instance: Diplomatic negotiations, disabling a trap, etc.

unless you have a group that has a good reputation for RP then all skill challenges become is long drawn out things with just numbers standing in the way of the game.

Skill challenges as presented in the DMG suck, but in the DMG2 they get better. My favorite Skill challenges are the ones that have other attributes tracked as well. For instance the traveling within the city challenge in the DMG2 or the doom island challenge from thrusday knights.

Especially with the thrusday knights example it was a challenge that had a clear goal. Move the ship away. But it had multiple things to do to acomplish that goal.

The classic example of a bad skill challenge the diplomatic situation unless it has a longer narrative to it to allow for other things to effect it. (lets say this is a summit that will last a week, characters could use all sorts of skills to interact with the nobles outside of the conferance rooms.) it should be a quick and easy complexity 1 challenge.

 

[delericho]

4e is to 3e what Windows Vista/7 is to Windows XP

Now, are you absolutely sure you want to go with that analogy? Because Windows Vista utterly sucks.

 

[wlmartin]

I am sure Delericho, Vista works fine for me however I basically turned off all of the graphical settings within it so my menus and such all look like I am in Windows XP still.. no glitchyness or anything.

It may have not been the best Analogy but the idea is that 4e "IS" an evolution, it didnt crack open the previous editions and remake a new edition with the remains, it simply amended and tweaked the previous editions... an evolution for sure.

Some may not consider it an evolution because some people think an evolution has to always be better in all ways than before... evolution is about progress and this is why men still have nipples and we all have an appendix --- we dont need them but we could hardly argue that we are not more evolved from Apes just because nature didnt get it all right

 

[delericho]

I am sure Delericho, Vista works fine for me however I basically turned off all of the graphical settings within it so my menus and such all look like I am in Windows XP still.. no glitchyness or anything.

Of course, by that analogy, you've successfully house-ruled your Vista edition to be almost exactly like the previous edition, and it's now almost as good...

It may have not been the best Analogy but the idea is that 4e "IS" an evolution, it didnt crack open the previous editions and remake a new edition with the remains, it simply amended and tweaked the previous editions... an evolution for sure.

As I'm sure I said to you in a previous point, I don't accept that. Rather than being an evolution, 4e is in many ways a revolution of D&D. Sure, some concepts were brought forward (and some improved), but they also took out huge sections of the system (and setting) and simply threw them away to replace them with something entirely new.

The Great Wheel becomes the Astral Sea. The Cleric's healing becomes Healing Surges. Vancian magic is just gone, replaced with At-will/Encounter/Daily powers. And so on. Much of 4e is radically different from previous editions of D&D. Much of it is completely new (to D&D).

Note: that isn't to say any of these are necessarily a bad thing. Just that I don't agree they're evolutionary changes; they're revolutionary.

 

[Argyle King]

I'm really not sure what other things you were asking for specifically.

Exploring interests my character might have outside of encounters. Examples might be things such as building a castle, running a business, being a lord of a keep, raising & leading an army; etc.

I'm aware that some of these fall under skill challenges of some sort. However, I don't feel that skill challenges tend to give me the feedback I want. Likewise, while I feel that backgrounds are a very good idea, the type of feedback I want is more than +2 to a skill or a utility power. I'd like to delve into the details of performing those tasks and have rewards from the system which are more complex than that.

I'd also like all of my character's resources to be available at all times. I've seen suggestions elsewhere in which it was said to reward players money and such for something like a business, but to say they could only use the resources gained for non encounter related things.

 

[herrozerro]

On the topic of 4e not being an evolution, here is a great perspective I read from the WotC forums by Tempest_Stormwind:

"Also, the idea of warriors using spell-like mechanics for martial exploits did show up pre-4th. This was clearest in the Tome of Battle (3.5 - martial maneuvers are very similar to 4e powers, except all of them were per-encounter with some method of recovering them), but was also present in earlier editions somewhat - look through any fighter-type book for the phrase "once per day". This was the key phrase that gave some powerful abilities limits - it was what allowed the wizard to cast his mighty spells that made everyone feel sad in the pants, but "only once per day". It also showed up on several warrior special moves (paladins come to mind).

From the perspective of a game designer starting from an earlier edition, the big innovation of power mechanics (apart from rules standardization) was probably the use of "per encounter" balancing (which showed up systemwide in WotC's Star Wars Saga Edition game, which is mechanically somewhere between 3.5 and 4th). The idea was that a day is made up of some variable number of encounters, and it's the encounters that care about balance (the day cares about stamina, the encounters care about power. It's like the difference between torque and mileage.). That grew out of cooldown-based mechanics (which were featured prominently in the Tome of Magic, with the strongest abilities of pact magic operating on a 5-round cooldown, on the assumption that this would work out to more or less once per battle anyway; cooldowns have been present in the game for a VERY long time, going back at LEAST to 2nd edition dragon breath). Even then, the "power level" of these once-per-encounter abilities is pretty close to 3e's Warlock, which took traditional spell effects and made them at-will, available some levels later at the point where sorcerers had enough spell slots to cast "enough" of those spells such that it didn't matter (the warlock itself tended to lag a bit since all of its abilities were balanced towards at-will, so there was no extra "buck" to spend for more "bang".). And even then, the sorcerer itself (at least the 3e version; this holds to a lesser extent with its Player's Option version) was an attempt to give wizards some stamina for signature effects (because if the wizard has to bust out a crossbow, he doesn't feel like a wizard).

So, we have a clear evolution here: Powerful "Per Day" abilities, notably Wizard spells -> Sorcerer (more time spent casting, less bookkeeping) -> Warlock (at-will magic at the point where it isn't gamebreaking, even less bookkeeping) -> Cooldowns (can afford a bit of extra power, but not truly at-will) -> "Per Encounter" (removes the need to count rounds) -> "Hey, why not use these mechanics, instead of 'once per day', for special warrior moves?" (Tome of Battle) -> Martial exploits. Then there's another step from AEDU to Essentials-style, but I admit I have no experience with essentials, so I don't know how to best describe that. However, this is a pretty clear lineage, at least from a rules-designer point of view. The idea of powers like this didn't come out of nowhere - it was a succession of related design and development decisions. By and large I see them as good decisions in general, too - anything that gives you more time playing the game and feeling like your character, and less time like an accountant, is a good move in my books."

 

[delericho]

Edit:

Actually, no, never mind.

I'm wrong - you've successfulyl convinced me of the evolution of the big ideas in 4e.

 

[herrozerro]

Edit:

Actually, no, never mind.

I'm wrong - you've successfulyl convinced me of the evolution of the big ideas in 4e.

I know you edited it but I have a response for healing surges

Healing surges are about what AC was from 3e form 2e, a radical shift in how things were presented but overall a similar mechanic.