Wizards in 4E have been 'neutered' argument...

[Garthanos]

Wierdly even though rituals give some large scale effects.. for me having freely useable cantrips and easily adapted at-wills .... make the wizard seem very magical out of the box.

Of course its not a Magi Missile

It isnt just about making the powers seem different either...
When players integrate how they use there abilities well with the situation the DM has set out... we like giving special benefits beyond the normal functionality... sometimes its just a simple DM's best friend but sometimes its more extreme (alah page 42) .

 

[Puggins]

Rituals can bring back some of the feel....but why can everyone do them? I mean, they're not just for Wizards or whatever......and they are significantly more involved to use...

It's important to keep in mind that there's a difference between being able to cast a ritual and being able to cast a ritual well.

Yes, a fighter can learn how to cast rituals with some investment of time- he needs to spend two feats at the minimum, since arcana is not a class feat- but, outside of a distinctly non-synergistic build, the fighter simply doesn't have the intelligence of a wizard.

A 12th level fighter with int12, training in arcana and the ritual casting feat would be able to put up an Arcane Barrier which has an average dispel DC of 27 and break DC of 32. Compare that to a wizard with an intelligence of 20 who has to spend no feats and can weave an arcane barrier with a dispel DC of 31 and break DC of 36.

The fighter's barrier will be useful. The wizard's barrier will be far harder to break. Add skill focus on to it and the DCs get ludicrously difficult.

I think that they do give some additional flexibility.....but my issue is that they take so much more time....it's almost like a dichotomy.....if I want to blow stuff up, well, it's easy....I've got a bunch of options for what I can do instantly. But if I'm a Wizard who specializes in enchantments, or shapechanging, or I want to fly, or make a hole through a wall, or identify an item or whatever, now I've got to cast a ritual. In previous editions these other kinds of effects were integral.....and could be used as easily as combat magic (with the exception of spells like Identify).

Why is being able to use all magic at combat speed so important? most of those spells can still be cast with a minimal time investment anyways. Compare that to 3e, where you'd have to put in a good eight hours of rest if you didn't have the spell already memorized. That passwall was great- as long as you didn't mind giving up a combat spell to memorize it. Now the wizard sits down, opens his spellbook, fetches his components and goes at it right away.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Unfortunately, because this was a Living Campaign, there was no common denominator at all. There was no way to expect one for your typical convention session.

That's exactly what I mean. They can't be tailored to a group. They have to be shipped out the door in one of two states: 1) Dumbed down to the point where any group can do them, regardless of make-up; or 2) Built for the expected party. This is writing towards the lowest common denominator.

If the group is standard make up, (1) becomes trivial and boring, while (2) is fun.

If the group is a nonstandard make-up, depending on what skills you have available, (1) is going to vary between boring and mediocre, and (2) will shift madly between completely trivial and insanely deadly.

Part of 3e's encounter design advice includes encounters that are very difficult but become easier if you have a particular key to that encounter - some tactic available to the PCs that makes it a lot easier. But they're supposed to be a small proportion of the encounters. Using them too often, particularly because the event cannot control for the makeup of the table, should be considered bad encounter design.

You're proving my point, which is that you were far more constrained in encounter design in 3e than you are in 4e by what classes are going to play the adventure. I haven't played much 4e, but I haven't noticed, for example, a case where simply including certain monsters makes a cleric-less group lose bowel control at the gaming table. That was standard operating procedure in 3e. And don't get me started on parties without a full arcane caster. You just don't run published adventures above maybe 3rd level without one, IME.

So, the fundamental rules of 3e created a very large space of encounter design that would be considered "bad" by the definition you're espousing. This space includes assuming the party has access to magic above 3rd level, assuming the party can detect magical traps, assuming the party has any meaningful healing or restoration effects, and so on. That's a lot of "bad encounter design."

You don't think that maybe, just maybe, rather than an epic possibility space of "bad encounter design" that kind of severe restriction might reflect a more fundamental limitation in the game?

I chose the word limitation here deliberately, rather than "problem." It's not necessarily "bad" to strongly encourage certain classes. But don't try to claim that it's less limiting than 4e.

For example, if we're making a party in 4e, someone is going to say, "We need someone who can heal." And in the core books alone (all I have experience with in 4e), I can find both the cleric and the warlord, and neither of them is going to cause the rest of the table to groan and throw a book at my head. Whereas in 3e, if faced with the same question, I rolled a cleric. Full stop. Or I took a book to the forehead. Rolling something else might have been more fun for me, but everyone at the table remembered those encounters that ate us alive last time we used a druid rather than a cleric to heal.

This is where you accuse my DM of sucking for not adjusting for the limits of the party. He ran published adventures by the book. Lots of people do that. It's what most new people do at least for a while. It's what they have to design for. If you have a DM who is willing to go under the hood and convert that standard Detroit model to run on vegetable oil, hydrogen cells, or a Mister Fusion, that's great. It removes restrictions of many kinds. But in 4e that kind of thing is merely tinkering because no single class is carrying literally game-changing effects in its pockets. In 3e it was massive overhaul, depending on what classes were missing.

 

[billd91]

You don't think that maybe, just maybe, rather than an epic possibility space of "bad encounter design" that kind of severe restriction might reflect a more fundamental limitation in the game?

I chose the word limitation here deliberately, rather than "problem." It's not necessarily "bad" to strongly encourage certain classes. But don't try to claim that it's less limiting than 4e.

I'm not claiming it is. I'm claiming that problems with encounters put out by the RPGA are because of poor encounter design for the campaign, not because 3e had some kind of strict requirements for party composition, implied or not.

I'd be of the mind that 3e is no more restrictive than 4e. After all, you don't want to throw solo after solo, or even a series of encounters made up of elite soldiers, at a party in 4e any more than you'd want to constantly throw encounters that need a special tactic available to make them easy in 3e.

 

[billd91]

For example, if we're making a party in 4e, someone is going to say, "We need someone who can heal." And in the core books alone (all I have experience with in 4e), I can find both the cleric and the warlord, and neither of them is going to cause the rest of the table to groan and throw a book at my head. Whereas in 3e, if faced with the same question, I rolled a cleric. Full stop. Or I took a book to the forehead. Rolling something else might have been more fun for me, but everyone at the table remembered those encounters that ate us alive last time we used a druid rather than a cleric to heal.

This is where you accuse my DM of sucking for not adjusting for the limits of the party. He ran published adventures by the book. Lots of people do that. It's what most new people do at least for a while. It's what they have to design for. If you have a DM who is willing to go under the hood and convert that standard Detroit model to run on vegetable oil, hydrogen cells, or a Mister Fusion, that's great. It removes restrictions of many kinds. But in 4e that kind of thing is merely tinkering because no single class is carrying literally game-changing effects in its pockets. In 3e it was massive overhaul, depending on what classes were missing.

I'm not accusing your DM of anything. There's a fine line between adapting the campaign for the PCs and the PCs adapting to the campaign. Ideally, both should occur so that the DM's game and the players' game have a shared common ground both can enjoy. Clearly, adapting to the campaign is something the RPGA designers, in the discussion above, DID NOT do.

I've been running the Shackled City campaign, pretty much as is, for a party with no cleric. They've got a druid, a paladin, and a dragon shaman for healing. They're not exactly hurting for healing, though they've spent a bit more money on it than they might have if they had a cleric in the party.

Adaptations can be made by the party. The druid took on more of the healing caster role (even took a feat for spontaneous healing when she hit 12th level), the paladin has been toting around wound-curing wands since the early levels, and the dragon shaman is well-invested in Use Magic Device ranks. Not a lot of DM retooling was necessary. The players went about designing their characters and successfully adapted. That said, there isn't much about that campaign that has encounters built that need a cleric to make their encounter level manageable.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I've found that in 4e, encounters specifically built using a combination of feats, classes, monsters, terrain, spells and so on will defeat any party that wasn't built well.

In fact, this is true of every iteration of the game, including, I would wager, every house-ruled version you could find.

What you describe is perhaps bad encounter design, but not a problem intrinsic to the system, since its possible to create endless fun, challenging, exciting encounters in 3.5 that don't require any particular class.

That is not my experience. In 4e, when you make an encounter, you are allowed to take a monster from a Monster Manual...you are allowed to increase its level up or down, but no more than 5 points. You may be able to apply a short list of templates on it(which are discouraged by the higher ups in the RPGA due to the balance issues they COULD cause). That's it.

Every monster listed in a book so far has not caused any problems for "substandard" groups in the RPGA yet. I've seen some of these groups. People who don't know how to use their powers effectively, use nothing but at wills and only have a 16 in their prime ability score. They are able to defeat any encounter that is made for their level. Even if the group is ALL fighters who fit the above description, they'll survive.

I've found that in Living Greyhawk, if someone showed up for a table with a 10th level 5 bard/2 rogue/2 fighter/1 cleric that the other players in the game would rebel against them and ask them to play something else to avoid killing the whole party.

Besides, it ISN'T bad encounter design. It is a bunch of unchanged monsters out of the Monster Manual that is within the guidelines in the DMG for designing encounters. It would already be very hard to near impossible without the terrain features. With a couple small terrain features it becomes stupid. But perfectly within the rules and a valid encounter.

If you were forced to limit yourself to only "good" encounter design(depending on how you define that), you remove about 90% of all the choices you have when creating an encounter in 3e. Which is fine, but you can't expect every DM who ever makes an encounter to say "The rules say this is perfectly fine, but I'm not going to do it."

4e suggests that if you have terrain features that do damage that they are instead traps, which take XP from your XP pool.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I'm not claiming it is.

Fair enough. I may be conflating you with some of the others here who have claimed such.

I'd be of the mind that 3e is no more restrictive than 4e. After all, you don't want to throw solo after solo, or even a series of encounters made up of elite soldiers, at a party in 4e any more than you'd want to constantly throw encounters that need a special tactic available to make them easy in 3e.

That much is certain. But just thumbing through the monster manual, a LOT of monsters in 3e were simplified drastically by having a certain ability present, or were particularly nasty to deal with for specific classes.

Let me try to illustrate.....

Can we stipulate that a construct-themed dungeon is possibly a rogue's worst nightmare in 3e combat? Several entire flavors of monster are simply hell on earth for a rogue-heavy party. The only comparison I can think of in 4e is that a rogue-heavy party will look impressive against solos but start to run into trouble with big groups of minions. So, the 4e rogue-heavy party is limited mechanically, while the 3e party is limited by mechanics AND flavor, since the two are more intimately tied in this case.

The mechanics (these are elite soldiers, while these are minions with a solo) are mostly behind the screen, but the flavor is obvious to everyone right at the start. So the DM might feel just as constrained or more constrained by the 4e problem, but the players are going to feel less like they got hosed by the dungeon design than they did in 3e.

That make sense?

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I'm not accusing your DM of anything.

Yeah, sorry about that. That was me anticipating the potential ad hominem rebuttal.... (i.e. "I see. All your problems with 3e were caused by bad DMs"). I spent too much of my internet time in the last few years in the lawless wastelands. It's easy to forget that ENWorld is a little more civil most of the time when you've been away.

 

[Garthanos]

Compare that to 3e, where you'd have to put in a good eight hours of rest if you didn't have the spell already memorized. That passwall was great- as long as you didn't mind giving up a combat spell to memorize it. Now the wizard sits down, opens his spellbook, fetches his components and goes at it right away.

Good point no mental flush process... "because everybody memorizes spell x and y unless they are stupid" spell z when you rarely wanted it would be a bigger time investment than most of the current rituals... it is no longer in your forget me.. slots either you don't impair yourself in battle by having rituals even a lot of them.

 

[billd91]

Can we stipulate that a construct-themed dungeon is possibly a rogue's worst nightmare in 3e combat? Several entire flavors of monster are simply hell on earth for a rogue-heavy party. The only comparison I can think of in 4e is that a rogue-heavy party will look impressive against solos but start to run into trouble with big groups of minions. So, the 4e rogue-heavy party is limited mechanically, while the 3e party is limited by mechanics AND flavor, since the two are more intimately tied in this case.

It's true that some classes of monsters are harder for some classes than others. But I'm OK with that. The flavor determines mechanics. I actually don't like flavor and mechanics to be too dissociated and 4e pushes too far in that direction for me in a number of ways.

If I had built a construct-heavy dungeon, I'd have also put in a variety of other automated defenses (traps and the like) and ways to deactivate or get around the defenses (used by the original builders) that can be exploited even if characters can't bring their full powers to bear on the monsters.