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

[Pentius]

20th level fighter may have not been as powerful as 20th level wizards, but that doesn't mean they were nothing to fear. They were still very useful in higher level play. If they were not...that was on the DM.

If you read all the hype about old school wizards, you might think a group of 5 high level wizards would clean house...that they wouldn't need any other class help. However, there were many creatures back then immune or highly resistant to magic. A few skeletal warriors would really ruin an otherwise nice wizard party.

Wizards would also get a lot of their reputation for being able to go "nova" and blow all their big stuff in one fight...this helped lead to the "15 minute workday". But again, that was on the DM. My group "worked" for 8 hours a day. If the wizard shot his load in the first 15 minutes...I hope he held onto that crossbow he had at 1st...he's going to need it for the next 7 hours and 45 minutes. Fighter stayed at full combat capacity all day long.

That was where the balance was. You "could" be unstopable for 15 minutes, but then what do you do after that? It was all about resource management. Many people liked that aspect, although I know it doesn't fit everyones taste. Nothing ever will. That's why it's nice to have so many versions of the game to choose from.

I can't speak to 1e, but for 3.x, the idea of a creature immune to or resistant to magic was laughable. It just meant you used spells that got around that. Cloudkill, for example. Or Polymorph yourself into a good fighting form. Or summon monsters to fight on your behalf. I've also gotten good results using Stone Shape to open holes in the floor and just drop enemies out of the battle.

 

[Mr. Patient]

Really? How many classes in 4E have an area burst 2 within 20 power like Fireball? This is still a situation where the Wizard dominates, particularly at low levels.
... The similarity is in structure, not role.

Understood and agreed. But prior to 4e, most classes didn't have any kind of damaging area attack at all, or had very few. Now, everyone has them to one degree or another. The differences between classes are subtler than they were; you have to experience them in play to really understand how the roles work.

I'm not just talking about comparisons between classes, though. Powers within classes have become more homogeneous as well. Previous editions' spells and attacks had tons of fiddly bits and exceptions and loopholes and other craziness that required close reading and interpretation (and, at my table, bickering), but which differentiated one wizard spell from the next more clearly, for better or for worse. 4e has a much cleaner design. Easier to understand, easier to play. But also a lot samier.

 

[Lordhawkins9]

I can't speak to 1e, but for 3.x, the idea of a creature immune to or resistant to magic was laughable. It just meant you used spells that got around that. Cloudkill, for example. Or Polymorph yourself into a good fighting form. Or summon monsters to fight on your behalf. I've also gotten good results using Stone Shape to open holes in the floor and just drop enemies out of the battle.

Agree...3e was like wizard heaven. In 1e, they needed their fellow adventurers even as they got to the higher levels.

 

[herrozerro]

Understood and agreed. But prior to 4e, most classes didn't have any kind of damaging area attack at all, or had very few. Now, everyone has them to one degree or another. The differences between classes are subtler than they were; you have to experience them in play to really understand how the roles work.

I'm not just talking about comparisons between classes, either. Powers within classes have become more homogeneous as well. Previous editions' spells and attacks had tons of fiddly bits and exceptions and loopholes and other craziness that required close reading and interpretation, (and, at my table, bickering), but which differentiated one wizard spell from the next more clearly, for better or for worse. 4e has a much cleaner design. Easier to understand, easier to play. But also a lot samier.

I tink you hit it on the head with this line, on the surface everything looks the same but when you actually get down and play it each class plays quite differently then the others.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

All that being said there's no going back people. There's not going to be some kind of 5e regression back towards the old days. Things don't work that way. There's already so much in that design space it would just not make sense. Why would anyone play such a game when PF and a multitude of OSR games already exist? Sure, some people would pick it up, but WotC long ago clearly stated their goal was a wider audience, not just "lets sell some more stuff to the same old people."

They're going to want to recapture mindshare and really lower bars to entry, and those would be reasons to produce a 5e, but my guess is it will be another forward movement from 4e, not some kind of regression to the old days. That would simply be defeat. I think Hasbro would just sell the game before that would happen.

Yep, the way forward is build on what you have done. To continue your sports car analogy, one of the reasons that high performance sports cars get supported is because the engineers learn things that then get put into more sedate models. And that doesn't mean turning a sports car into a glorified truck, either.

 

[delericho]

The problem with the OGL was that most of the best stuff to come out of it was standalone and largely proprietary. You don't need a 3e PHB in order to play Mutants and Masterminds, Spycraft, or Star Wars, and there's enough rules incompatibility between them that buying something like a Monster Manual to incorporate its contents into your game (if you even want to) is not going to be a simple plug-and-play job, which kinda defeats the point of a universal system "reducing demand for other systems to zero."

Indeed, from a WotC point of view, the advantage of that was negligible (except for Star Wars, of course). For us, the advantage was huge - much less relearning of systems just to play in different worlds. (Not to mention that many of these things wouldn't have been published at all without the OGL.)

Where they did get a huge benefit from the OGL was in all the support materials that were developed specifically for D&D (or rather "the world's most popular RPG"). There were loads of settings, sourcebooks, and adventures, most of which did require the D&D core rulebooks to use, and many of which were good.

(It's also worth noting that, back in the early days, Dancey mooted the suggestion that WotC would take "the best of the OGL", and roll it in to any new 4e. This would have the advantage of allowing them to use tried-and-tested mechanics for their new edition, incorporate things that they knew would work, and which would be popular, all without having to do all the development work themselves. Had that ever come to fruition, that would also have been a major advantage. Alas, WotC moved away from the open gaming model instead.)

I'm not surprised that WotC didn't repeat the OGL with 4e. They're neither allergic to nor incapable of making money; if they thought a 4e OGL would be good for their brand or their revenue flow they'd have done it.

You're assuming both perfect knowledge and total rationality, neither of which can be assumed of WotC. On the face of it, giving away the core of the IP is a bad thing. Even if the long-term ramifications were hugely beneficial, it still wouldn't be surprising to see it canned.

 

[delericho]

Based on their design work for pathfinder, and the new classes?

No. I don't think they could. I think they're good at maknig modules and acessories, but I see nothing to suggest that they could handle 4e, even if they wanted to.

I believe he was talking about them doing modules and accessories.

That said, Paizo did state that their reason for not going 4e was that it didn't allow them to tell the sorts of stories they wanted to tell, so that suggests to me they would have had problems designing for 4e.

I'm not impresed by paizo design wise, it's as simple as that. And by any analisis, they are the most successful potential creators of 3pp. Where does that leave everyone else?

Firstly, I submit that that puts you in a minority.

Secondly, I submit that EN Publishing has done a darn sight better doing 4e modules than WotC have. Not that that's hard.

And, of course, Paizo are no longer creators of 3pp. They're now their own first party publisher.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think there's a pretty decent amount of agreement, at some level, on what irritates people with 4e. I think classes ARE quite distinct, but you really do have to actually understand something about each class and how it works to see that. As for powers being 'samey', it is somewhat true, but I think the main issue here is simply that there are so MANY of them. With 8,000 powers, and lets face it most powers are going to deal with some aspect of combat, that area of 4e design space is simply overloaded IMHO.

In a sense it doesn't matter too much as long as you have a fairly limited number of highly distinct base classes. I mean supposing there had been just 4 classes then it doesn't really matter much if the wizard has 12 different ranged AoE spells, wizard is the class that has that kind of thing and it is no big deal, the fighter powers are a whole different ball of wax. After all 3e wizard spell list runs to many 100's of spells, there's plenty of room for something like 4 good solid power lists, even with the somewhat more narrow focus of 4e powers. The problem is when you have THIRTY classes and you have wizard, warlock, and sorcerer all sharing quite similar thematic concept space. Then you have a variety of other classes like Invoker and Psion sharing a good bit of overlap with that. It is simply infeasible to make them all quite distinct. They certainly aren't identical, but they do tend to overlap a good bit. In all previous editions you could be sure that there was little overlap. So I don't personally think the issue is that all classes have AEDU power structure. I think it is just that there are too blinkin many classes overall. I mean the 2e designers clearly understood the hazard of this when they merged the illusionist and druid spell lists into their parent classes.

 

[Argyle King]

I believe he was talking about them doing modules and accessories.

That said, Paizo did state that their reason for not going 4e was that it didn't allow them to tell the sorts of stories they wanted to tell, so that suggests to me they would have had problems designing for 4e.


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To be fair, there are some styles of play and some types of stories which don't mesh very well with the 4E mechanical structure. For me, that's actually one of the biggest reasons I sought out alternatives to D&D.

I'm plenty capable of tweaking the system, but there's only so far I can tweak it before it's too much work to bother doing when I can instead just play a game that's better suited to what I want. A sports car might be really nice, but I still wouldn't expect a Ferrari to function very well as a Jeep.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To be fair, there are some styles of play and some types of stories which don't mesh very well with the 4E mechanical structure. For me, that's actually one of the biggest reasons I sought out alternatives to D&D.

I'm plenty capable of tweaking the system, but there's only so far I can tweak it before it's too much work to bother doing when I can instead just play a game that's better suited to what I want. A sports car might be really nice, but I still wouldn't expect a Ferrari to function very well as a Jeep.

True, though to be honest I personally don't find 4e has any problems with the types of stuff I see in the PF APs I've read. The couple people I know that have tried them with 4e seemed to have good luck. So I'd observe that perhaps Paizo misjudged 4e.

My personal experience is that I went from running my homebrew setting using 2e to doing it using 4e and experienced no issues. In fact I found 4e to be considerably more flexible. Limited experience with 3e suggests to me that 4e is somewhat more flexible than 3.5 as well. I think 3.5 as a system (and maybe 2e as well) contain more 'wild and crazy' stuff in the books, but in terms of the everyday workmanlike aspects of play 4e wins. A lot of it was just that magic in previous editions had such vast plot power it was hard to devise a lot of credible story lines where the main question wasn't just "and why doesn't a wizard just cast X and deal with this...".

It may well be that the Paizo devs, being very familiar with 3.5 and 4e being new and strange were reluctant to dive in, especially when there were some actual licensing issues in 2008. I think they could have built any of the APs with 4e and been fine, but that doesn't mean they were willing to try and obviously they had an alternative that worked for them. It was a smart move for them, but I'm reluctant to ascribe it to some kind of shortcoming in 4e that I just can't find.