D&D General Why is D&D 4E a "tactical" game?

[Garthanos]

My 5e dual-weapon battlemaster was not too bad here. He drank a potion of growth and then waded into a whole slew of gnolls. I think he managed to kill a good number of them in a couple rounds by carefully selecting maneuvers that gave extra attacks (Riposte I think is the goto there).
That got me up to 5 or 6 attacks per round. It took a LONG time to play out though!

Riposte gets you only 1 in a given round as it takes a reaction. 2 weapons gets you 1 more and 1 for extra attack ... so I think 3 is normal and 4 is your peak with a cs die, unless you used an action surge and cs die, that is a lot of cost for 1 round. Functional but expensive.
Compare to rain of steel where you lawn mow minions. (and still have your tempest fighter and action points along side it)

Also note the comparatively unrestricted opportunity attacks add to that.

 

[Scribe]

To me the guy with normal mundane physical capability being able to confront and kill a giant supergenius flying fire breathing monster armored like a tank with a small piece of steel while somehow being limited to incredibly mundane athletic stunts otherwise is not really plausible, its an incongruity.

But by the time you are poking that dragon with a piece of steel, it's no long steel, and you no longer are walking around as mundane.

Your weapon is blessed/enchanted/beyond steel.

Your armour is hardened by ancient magics.

Your friends speak directly with their God, the Spirits of the land, or have unraveled the mysteries of creation.

Magic is pumped into you, and through that small piece of steel your own knowledge and skill, amplified by your party, all that power elevates you in that moment, to stand before that Dragon.

Underneath it though, yes you are still a mundane being, with metal in your hands.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Riposte gets you only 1 in a given round as it takes a reaction. 2 weapons gets you 1 more and 1 for extra attack ... so I think 3 is normal and 4 is your peak with a cs die, unless you used an action surge and cs die, that is a lot of cost for 1 round. Functional but expensive.
Compare to rain of steel where you lawn mow minions. (and still have your tempest fighter and action points along side it)

Right, plus whatever extra attacks you get for whatever your level is. I'm sure there's some feat or other that can get you another, maybe situationally, but I'm no 5e guru. As you say, it takes burning a lot of your character's resources and even then you can't even HIT as many bad guys as can cluster around you. So, IIRC I had the two basic attacks for my level, plus 1 for the dual weapon, and I could always get one with a Riposte (which at least guarantees you get to use your reaction as an attack). Then, as you say, you can expend your action surge and get another attack once per fight. So, given that I USUALLY ganked the gnoll when I hit, I was only offing maybe an average of 2.5 per round. There were 20 gnolls, give or take.

And here's one of the issues that arises with 5e. The 20 gnolls were not THAT much weaker. They weren't super interesting opponents, but basically the whole 'macho' of the fight was spread out evenly between all these monsters. A 4e version would have, IMHO, been more dramatic, with say a dozen minions, a caster/controller, and maybe a brute or leader/artillery. It would have taken less time, and the spotlight would have been on getting to those plus figures and interacting with them. One could even be an elite, assuming the encounter is level+1 or more.

This is just an added dimension of flexibility that lets you take into account what will be more interesting and fun at the table.

 

[Garthanos]

Right, plus whatever extra attacks you get for whatever your level is. I'm sure there's some feat or other that can get you another, maybe situationally, but I'm no 5e guru. As you say, it takes burning a lot of your character's resources and even then you can't even HIT as many bad guys as can cluster around you. So, IIRC I had the two basic attacks for my level, plus 1 for the dual weapon, and I could always get one with a Riposte (which at least guarantees you get to use your reaction as an attack). Then, as you say, you can expend your action surge and get another attack once per fight. So, given that I USUALLY ganked the gnoll when I hit, I was only offing maybe an average of 2.5 per round. There were 20 gnolls, give or take.

The major difference really is 2 things the 4e fighter actually was able to use a daily and well lets call it own that particular scene type (a hoard of enemies) if he picked that daily and chose to use. Additionally he could get as many opportunity attacks as enemies if they tried to get past (a very defender and melee supporting feature of the 4e rules).

Notice that choice is supposed to be the theme of this thread to me... being tactical or strategic

 

[Garthanos]

The more open opportunity attacks and flanking (that isn't silly overwhelming but a more balanced choice offset potentially by risk) and built in charge maneuver and shift move and powers that provide extra movement including out of turn, all combine to make positional and movement choices more important. So even though I say tactics is choice and not all about position... it is definitely there too.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I refer to 4th edition as a tactical skirmish game because I believe that doesn't sound as insulting to people who actually like it, while still expressing that it has zero appeal to me and does not provide what I want from an RPG.

But by referring to it as a "tactical skirmish game" you are pretending that it's something other than an RPG - which is simultaneously false and insulting. If you were to refer to it as an RPG with strong tactical elements you'd be telling the truth. But it isn't e.g. Warhammer 40k and the only two things you do by your deceptive naming are spread misinformation and ensure that no one who knows what they are talking about will take you seriously because you've just shown either that you don't know what you are talking about or because you know but are pretending that falsehoods are true anyway.

Not liking 4e is fine. But have the decency to call it an RPG please.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But by referring to it as a "tactical skirmish game" you are pretending that it's something other than an RPG - which is simultaneously false and insulting. If you were to refer to it as an RPG with strong tactical elements you'd be telling the truth. But it isn't e.g. Warhammer 40k and the only two things you do by your deceptive naming are spread misinformation and ensure that no one who knows what they are talking about will take you seriously because you've just shown either that you don't know what you are talking about or because you know but are pretending that falsehoods are true anyway.

Not liking 4e is fine. But have the decency to call it an RPG please.

I always have to wonder with these 'drive by' "I hate your game" comments if the poster ever actually played. Did they READ the books and play the game roughly as designed? Did they make a genuine attempt to understand it and give it a fair shake? Or did they just hear some rumor about it, or maybe at most roll out KotS and roll up PCs and play for 1 hour without even reading the actual rules? (Sadly KotS really doesn't help, though the DMG1 back-of-the-book adventure is a good bit better).

I mean, 5e doesn't excite me that much, there are various areas where I just don't care that much for it. Still, you will at least hear me saying what I like (there are definitely some things) and I've read most of the core rules and definitely played a fair amount of it (played in 3 or 4 different campaigns through most of the levels at least twice).

 

[Garthanos]

It's only really even feasible with Feats. I cannot imagine trying it without things like Great Weapon Master or Sharpshooter. Even a Barb's resistance would start to run into problems when you are likely get hit 3-4 times a turn.

That defense side is important too... ready temp hit points even from at-wills and damage resistance that actually stops lesser attacks.

 

[Oofta]

I always have to wonder with these 'drive by' "I hate your game" comments if the poster ever actually played. Did they READ the books and play the game roughly as designed? Did they make a genuine attempt to understand it and give it a fair shake? Or did they just hear some rumor about it, or maybe at most roll out KotS and roll up PCs and play for 1 hour without even reading the actual rules? (Sadly KotS really doesn't help, though the DMG1 back-of-the-book adventure is a good bit better).

I mean, 5e doesn't excite me that much, there are various areas where I just don't care that much for it. Still, you will at least hear me saying what I like (there are definitely some things) and I've read most of the core rules and definitely played a fair amount of it (played in 3 or 4 different campaigns through most of the levels at least twice).

Anyone saying anything bad about 4E is attacked as "hating the game" or misrepresenting.

There are aspects of the games I liked such as my cleric being able to contribute to combat while also being support, it was a nice balance. There are aspects I didn't like. Minions were an interesting idea but ultimately I just didn't care for them. It was goofy, for example, if the PCs were fighting ogres at their level at level 8 the ogre had over a hundred HP but at level 11 it was a minion with slightly better defenses but only 1 HP. I understand the concept, it just didn't work for me. The two monsters represented something so different I just couldn't see it.

But try explaining that? Obviously I didn't play the game (I played it for years), I'm misrepresenting the concept (I understand it, I just prefer 5E's approach), I'm trolling or gaslighting.

People like what they like. I don't understand why anyone other than farmers and construction workers, people who need to haul stuff, like pickup trucks. Yet they're everywhere in the US. Doesn't make people who love their trucks wrong, just means I prefer a different option. I gave 4E the old college try. I really, really tried to like it. But eventually I just burned out on it. In part that's because in the games I played the role playing and creative aspects were minimized for reasons I still can't fully explain.

But I'm pretty sure you'll just write me off as another "hater" because I don't care for something you happen to like.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed. Just using lots of weak creatures as mooks sounds 'simple' in principle, but in practice it isn't nearly as simple as minions. I can literally just drop a spare d6 here and there on the battlemat and that's all the info there is to know about a minion, it has no state at all (unless it gets some condition, but that's pretty rare). You can certainly ignore the hit points of very weak creatures and just think of them as 'alive' or 'dead' in any edition, but then you've got minions! That's all they are folks! Just an official acknowledgement of what is obvious, that a weak enough monster will be instaganked if it gets hit solidly. Think no more of it than that, now what exactly was it you were objecting to?

There's even another reason, though this comes up more in superhero roleplaying than in fantasy.

Sometimes you want a swarm of opponents that can't be simply ignored. Traditionally, by the time you got above the levels where "one hit and they're dead" was true even for opponents who where not avowedly weak (i.e. bottom end opponents in editions where the base weapon damage was within their full hit point range), opponents that were brittle enough to be rolled over by fighters were also exceedingly unlikely to hurt them, and when they did the effect was trivial.

But sometimes that's not what you want. You want the PCs to give the weaker opponents some attention, and that usually requires it to be a problem to ignore them (because there are opponents who are actually dangerous). But you still want them to fold up easily.

This was an issue recognized all the way back to Bushido, which had two classes of brittle group opposition, one that had only a single hit point each, one of which had 10 (which in that system meant you might actually have to hit them twice). They otherwise weren't necessarily harmless, so actually taking the time to cut them down was worthwhile.