pawsplay said:
Changes I already resent:
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- At will magics for wizards
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- Changing the damage of fireball. Why?
To make it possible to play a wizard who is able to perform a meangingful and wizardly action every round. The current game inherits from 1st ed AD&D the assumption that wizards will spend a lot of the time doing nothing meaningful. As a result, when that assumption is disregarded and the wizard goes nova, we get the 15-minute adventuring day and the overshadowing of fighters by wizards.
pawsplay said:
In fantasy source material, spells are precious.
Mabye in some books. And that's fine. But at the game table, "precious" just equals "my PC has nothing to do, so I just sit at the table watching my friends have fun". Or else, "precious" equals "I've just nova-ed all my precious resources - let's rest for 8 hours".
psionotic said:
In the last 10 years, the game has gotten easier to learn and to play, yet tactically more complex. That makes the experience better for new players, and more satisfying for those who are really into fun battles.
The mix of at-will and per-encounter abilities will be a crucial aspect of this, as they will provide the framework in which meangingful choices (ie trade-offs between tactical options) must be made.
Hairfoot said:
With 3E, the designers went to the opposite end of the spectrum from OD&D, which required extensive house-ruling and compliance with DM fiat. Instead, they gave in to the urge to create a rule for everything, which resulted in a dense, often slow-playing game in which rules-based, mathematical character-building trumped roleplaying and fluidity.
I''m hoping that 4E will pull back to more of a balance.
4e will have less in common with earlier editions than 3E does. It will continue the 3E trend of emphasising mechanics (both character build and action resolution) over GM-mediated resolution. Hopefully, the action resolution mechanics will be better (less clunky, more balanced, less prone to leave players with nothing to do at the table) than 3E.
Cbas_10 said:
There may be a way to make such a character as effective at fighting AND magic as 20th level characters....but aside from the crazy Gestault rules, I'm not sure how. Maybe 4e will provide systems where you give up a bit of each class to keep primary bits at higher levels....dunno.
Just confining myself to d20 games, there is the Conan RPG's Base Magic skill, which all classes get (thus facilitating multi-classing into Sorcerer).
Hairfoot said:
Perhaps I've misinterpreted the multiclassing predictions for 4E, but I'm alarmed at the proposal that training as a fighter for 20 levels is going to give a PC a head start when he takes a level of wizard.
Multiclassers have always paid a price for not specialising, and I don't see a problem with it.
There are two issues here. First, we don't know what it means, in-game, to take a level in a class, other than that the PC gets better at something. As someone else pointed out, taking a level of fighter opens up more options for a high-level wizard than a low-level fighter. It's not obviously inconsistent with this in-game reality for the same to be true of a high-level fighter taking a level of wizard.
Second, the aim of any character build mechanic should be to make it
as hard as possible for players, in pursuit of a legitimate character concept, to build a second-rate character. There is nothing illegitimate about the concept "casts a little bit, fights a little bit" - just see Gandalf, for example. It is a flaw in 3E that it is incredibly easy to build a second-rate character in pursuit of that concept.
Or to put it another way,
why is it good for the game that players only get to play effective PCs if those PCs are specialists?
Betote said:
I for one want D&D not as a generic fantasy game rule set (that, to me, would be RuneQuest, or even True20), but a D&D-fantasy game rule set.
RuneQuest is not very generic - apart from anything else, all characters are spell casters, which some players used to D&D find shocking. D&D will not be generic either - it will still be a game in which the reward mechanism is one of levels gained for challenges overcome. So it will continue to be a game of over-the-top heroic fantasy.
Cbas_10 said:
In 3.5, it seemed to be just at the threshold where there was enough balance between actual role-playing and tactical/fantastic combat that DMs could swing the flavor of their own game in whichever direction suited that particular game. 4e seems to swing things away from role-playing as a part of the core mechanic.
Like 3E, 4e will assume as the default metagame priority "overcoming challenges". Within this default framework, I imagine there will be as much scope as in 3E to impute PC motivation, build up a gameworld in which those challenges arise and must be overcome, and so on.
Also, the addition of mechanics to support "social challenges" should broaden the range of challenges that the action resolution and reward mechanics support, and thereby broaden the range of activity that might make up a typical session, and in particular increase its significance
at the table, by increasing the amount of mechanical attention, and therefore playing time, that it receives.
Cbas_10 said:
Okay. Looks just like 3e possibilities.
As far as I know, 3E has no rules for determining, during a single social interaction, how various successful skill checks by various particants (beseeching PCs, wicked viziers, etc) will determine the final outcome of an NPC's decision. The effects of CHA skill checks are presented as absolutes, and so this sort of "social combat" has to be handwaved by the GM. The idea of social challenge mechanics is to eliminate that handwaving. This is one way in whic it supports players in choosing non-combat action resolution: such alternatives become less dependent on GM interpretation, and more robustly supported within the mechanical framework of the game.
Cbas_10 said:
references to "Social Encounters" that give the impression that we will be dicing out conversations with NPCs instead of actually talking to each other at the table.
This is not the first time I've seen it suggested that social challenge resolution mechanics will undermine roleplaying. If this claim were true, it would tend to imply that games like The Dying Earth, HeroQuest/Wars and so on conduce less to roleplaying than D&D. Which I think is pretty obviously implausible.
pawsplay said:
It would mean I would have to convert a lot of creatures that have appeared in my recent campaign if I wanted to keep running it. Which the designers have basically said, "Don't bother, it won't work."
On the other hand, I've read somewhere on these boards that basically any d20 material can be ported into SWSE. So I would expect most monsters to be fairly easily converted: just correlate their hits, attack and damage with a similar monster in the MM to get the challenge level.
I frequently GM Rolemaster, a game with very little level of GM support. I therefore frequently convert modules from other systems, mostly D&D. It takes between 5 and 10 minutes to convert a D&D monster into RM - I'm sure it will be much easier to convert it to 4e, as most of the numbers will not need to change.
