Why I think you should try 4e (renamed)

[Ariosto]

And, let's face it, it's pretty much impossible for everyone who plays D&D to be satisfied.

Ah, yes. Who could forget the bitter Bearded Dwarf Women Controversy?

 

[Rechan]

Ah, yes. Who could forget the bitter Bearded Dwarf Women Controversy?

SHH! Do not speak of the Argument That Shall Not Be Named! It will result in disaster!

 

[I'm A Banana]

And, let's face it, it's pretty much impossible for everyone who plays D&D to be satisfied.

Just wait for that mythical Final Edition, where everyone gets exactly the rules they want because they choose which rules they want for their own games, still professionally designed, rather than relying on an immutable codex of rules that happens to change once every 5 or so years.

 

[Wormwood]

For example the fact that a 9th level fighter cant kill a second level character in one blow is a horrible situation to some groups. There are plenty of fixes (make them minions, just narrate it etc.) but, none of them appeal to me as a DM.

Since my players don't expect me to delineate the "level" of their opponents, that situation has never come up.

I want my characters to earn their power and i want that power to mean somthing.

As do I. And they do,

I want a system where characters can be diverse, and not just be defined in terms of combat.

And this is a situation unique to 4e how, exactly?

I want a system that has rules for situations outside of combat.

Again, so do I. Thankfully, I found the skills and skill challenge system.

My group tried to construct a trojen horse durring our last session. The best mechanical way we could do it was to turn it into a skill challenge. We didnt use a single skill that would acctually help to build the horse, and the entire thing was a bit unsatisfing.

I'm putting on my 2e and 3e hat and I can come up with nothing except NWP: Carpenter or Profession: Carpenter (in 1e, of course, you could just narrate your 20th century engineering knowledge into the game). On the other hand, this is the sort of thing *perfect* for a Skill Challenge (how about History, Nature and some Thievery to hide that trap door).

 

[FireLance]

IMO, the seminal difference between 4e and the prior incarnations of D&D is this: In 4e The world exists based upon the PCs interactions. (For example: In this type of role-playing minions make sense. The power of a creature is viewed only in relation to the PCs powers.)

The earlier editions of D&D believed this: The world exists and the PCs interact with it. (For example: In this type of role-playing minions do not make sense. Each creature has power based upon it's place in the world, regardless of the power of the PCs.)

Both types of play can be a lot of fun, but they are entirely different ways of viewing a role-playing game and, I believe, this is the primary reason for the dissatisfaction many of the the D&D audience has with 4e. The basic assumption of what type of role-playing game D&D is changed.

I was having similar thoughts, but from the DM side of the screen. I believe that the "default" DM style has gradually shifted from being a referee running mostly status quo encounters in a sandbox-style game to an entertainer running mostly tailored encounters in a game with an assumed plot or story arc. Issues such as whether an opponent is appropriate for the PCs (in terms of attack bonus, AC and other defenses, hit points, damage, etc.) and how an opponent is supposed to perform in a fight with the PCs (how hard is it to hit, how many hits are required to take it down, etc.) are only meaningful when the DM sets out to tailor an encounter.

If a high-level party decides to take on an ogre tribe, and becomes bored because the ogres have attack bonuses that are too low to make them a meaningful threat, but have so many hit points that they need three or four hits to kill each ogre, the sandbox referee DM would not consider it to be a problem. After all, it was the players who decided to take on the ogres instead of the black dragon in the swamp or the giants in the hills. However, if an entertainer DM wants to send a high-level party against a tribe of ogres (and for some storyline reason, it has to be ogres*) he will want ogres that are (1) not boring to fight; (2) still a threat to the PCs; and (3) for the sake of in-game consistency, less dangerous than the stone giants the PCs fought last week and the frost giants they are going to face next session. This is the line of thinking that results in the concept of minions.

Similarly, practices such as varying the opponents' attack bonuses, AC and other defences based on the PCs' level are born out of the desire to create an interesting encounter first, and to justify how the opponents came by those numerical bonuses later, as a secondary concern, if it ever comes up at all. To be fair to 4e, though, there is sufficient scope within the official guidelines (I hesitate to call them rules) for variations in the numerical bonuses of opponents of the same level (usually depending on the role the monster is expected to play in a fight) and for the PCs to face opponents of varying levels.

At the end of the day, though, I believe that most of us do agree that mathematically-sound guidelines are a good thing, and internal self-consistency is a good thing, and mcuh of the sound and fury about putting the cart before the horse is because we simply don't agree which is which.

[SBLOCK=*] IMO, a much better solution would simply be to never come up with a storyline in which the high-level PCs have to fight ogres. I personally prefer to confine my use of minions to the lower levels, but YMMV.[/SBLOCK]

 

[Barastrondo]

It just seems saying 4e is a good RPG, is like saying Transformers should win best picture.

Why is it such an over-the-top thing just to call an RPG good? I'd figured it was more like "it just seems saying 4e is a good RPG is like saying that blue cheese tastes good on hamburgers." Not everybody is going to like blue cheese. Some people might like blue cheese, but prefer cheeseburgers with cheddar or American cheese only. Yet you can mention liking a blue cheese burger without anyone saying "That's like saying that McDonald's should get three stars in the Michelin guide."

I think 4e is one of the best written RPGs out there (in terms of explaining the rules and certain mechanical elements that get to the core of the matter). However, when ever someone comes up with a situation that shows that the game does not work for their group in a situation, the response seems to be that, "Thats not how the game is meant to be played"

That isn't necessarily a personal attack. It's just a way of saying that your play style and the play style the game is built for are different, often in very specific situations. In some cases, the person may simply be trying to offer advice. I prefer to look at statements like that with the benefit of the doubt: does the person mean "Try doing X, it works great," or "Any competent person should have been doing X, what's wrong with you?" Often it's the former.

People who like a game, any game, are frequently trying to share the love. This is a cool thing, even when it's not 100% clear that's what they're doing! It's so much nicer than trying to spread the hate.

 

[Rechan]

Why is it such an over-the-top thing just to call an RPG good?

Because he was saying that 4e is not a good RPG unless you're looking for the lowest common denominator, nothing but base, mindless entertainment.

The way I read his comment, to put it in a simpler analogy: Calling 4e a Good RPG is like calling toast with a slice of cheese on it a pizza. It's only good if you haven't eaten for three days.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And I think that part of that Transformers analogy is because 4Ed is a bit more combat-centric than 3.X, at least at the starting line. 3.X has non-combat skills, non-combat feats, non-combat spells & powers...things relatively absent from 4Ed.

Transformers, if the reviewers are correct, is an action flick that really focuses on action, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Hence the comparison.

 

[Rechan]

And I think that part of that Transformers analogy is because 4Ed is a bit more combat-centric than 3.X, at least at the starting line. 3.X has non-combat skills, non-combat feats, non-combat spells & powers...things relatively absent from 4Ed.

I can staple paper wings to my car, but that doesn't mean that I can now say that my car is more flight-supportive than the next car.

Just because the Craft and Profession skills exist does not give 3e a robust number of non-combat options.

4e has non-combat powers and spells: they're called rituals and utility powers. And feats to increase skills. And magical item creation rituals. 4e has non-combat skills.

Does 4e have fewer than 3e? Yes. But it's fewer the same way that 2 is fewer than 3.

There's always an underlying assumption with these arguments that frustrates me: that 4e is the most deviation from all the D&D editions.

You know what skills were in 2e? Non-weapon proficiencies - it says right there in the name, 'This has nothing to do with weapons'. What were the non-combat related stuff in 1e?

If you set all the editions next to one another, the one that stands out the most different from the others is 3e.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The way I read his comment, to put it in a simpler analogy: Calling 4e a Good RPG is like calling toast with a slice of cheese on it a pizza. It's only good if you haven't eaten for three days.

I read it more like calling 4e a good RPG is like calling Transformers a good movie. It's fun and entertaining and all, but it lacks depth and substance and if all you're going to do is watch explosions and look at hot girls, you can satisfy this by buying a gun and watching porn, without needing to go to a movie theater. That the movie is marketed mostly at young men and teenagers shows it as a middle ground between boyhood and manhood in the US -- a stepping stone between playing with action figures and pulling girls' hair to entering the military and grudgingly settling for monogamy.

The implication there being that 4e is shallow, not that it's not fun, but it's not something you can invest yourself into, and the sort of fun that it provides can be found in other places as well (board games, video games, whatever), places that actually focus on it. Transformers is entertaining, but prurient, cheap, tawdry, base, and simplistic. It is eye candy, it is pornography, it is nothing beyond titilation.

Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing for 4e to be, depending on your perspective. I'm not sure most people would say that D&D has any sort of responsibility to do anything but let me have fun.

4e has non-combat powers and spells: they're called rituals and utility powers. And feats to increase skills. And magical item creation rituals. 4e has non-combat skills.

The Craft and Profession skills does not give 3e a robust number of non-combat options.

There's always an underlying assumption with these arguments that frustrates me: that 4e is the deviant of the D&D editions.

There's a tangle of assumptions and annoyances that would do well to become disentangled, here.

First, the final bit: a lot of 4e is deviant, seen from the perspective of other editions. It switches cart and horse, it sacrifices sacred cows, it is about action and combat not about survival and resource management, etc., etc. 4e being deviant isn't limited to what it does or doesn't do to the combat/noncombat mix.

4e is like every other edition of D&D in that its support for things to do outside of beating things upside the head is sparse. You are meant to fight things.

However, utility powers are for combat, by and large. They just aren't attacks. You do things during combat other than attack.

Rituals are not for combat. Skill challenges are not for combat. But every other edition had "rituals" (and had more of them, because they were wizard and priest spells), and we've had some form of skill challenges since the introduction of thief skills, mostly with more granularity and variety than 4e provides, so 4e does offer fewer things to do aside from combat.

4e doesn't offer anything really new, and the things it does offer -- the quantity of skills and rituals -- is significantly less than existed in most other editions.

4e isn't particularly aberrant for D&D in not providing a lot of things to do outside of combat. 4e provides less, but no edition provides much.

But if you were running a fairly combat-lite game before 4e, certainly you can see how 4e provides fewer options for that kind of game than 3e or 2e (regardless of if they provided a huge number or not, 4e does provide less).