It needed a second round of math revision but it is good for what it is. People expected the ludicrous granularity of 3e but with better balance, but let's be honest here the reason 3e was such a mess in the first place was the excessive rule bloat and inconsistent power levels.
It was shit and it was shit the last time you made this thread and every future time you make this same thread it will still have been shit. 4E died because almost no actual player or DM liked it. Only people who liked it were fricking weirdos who think the best part of D&D is moving figurines on a board and all other parts should be made to serve that.
>People expected the ludicrous granularity of 3e but with better balance
No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
Honestly the restrictive licence is probably the biggest stain on 4e
So many things and games could have been made with 4e, but never could be. And these days how many people and companies want an expensive licence to a 15 year old game that is hotly contested?
>No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
You know Jumanji was just a movie, right?
>No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
You're right. Playacting shitty fanfic with homos is what people really want.
It's good for what it sets out to do, but the marketing campaign around it and the framing it used as a mainline edition was foul. Not to mention Mearls imploding it later into its lifetime for his pet project that would later become 5e.
I'm in the camp of thought that maintains that if 4e had come out as Dungeons & Dragons Tactics instead of a new edition, it would've been highly praised. Hell, lots of the mechanics it brought to the table live on in 5e and are lauded as 5e achievements by people who don't know better.
Me personally, it's the only edition of D&D I can bring myself to run and play. But I wholly understand why people looked down upon a game that not only pivoted their experience into the logical endpoint of their own power wanking and turned it into a Tactics game, and then actively insulted them for not conforming. But, yknow, now that the edition is wrapped up, it's an easy recommendation if you're into what it offers. Few games match the way it embraced Tactics gameplay, and those who actually follow its footsteps (Emberwind, Lancer) aren't all the way there.
Giant Guardian Generation (which then morphed into Battle Century G https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/151230/Battle-Century-G) took some heavy inspirations from 4e.
And it is my impression that Lancer also took some inspirations from 4e.
(But I don't play ttpgs. I just really appreciate 4e's combat system)
>very thorough
It isn't at all. The mecha genre is full of much more detailed systems. BCG advertises itself as being rules light. If you want thorough have a look at something like Mekton Zeta. >Why do you feel it's mediocre?
I just don't think its particularly interesting in any way. There isn't much depth in character creation or gameplay. Several of the seemingly intended builds are outright bad and feel like trap options. Combat gets repetitive very quickly.
The main thing Lancer took from 4e was keywords and some aspects of action economy, but it's much more modular for character creation so you don't really get the at-will/short rest/long rest ability cadence.
It wouldnt have been praised, raw out of the books monsters were shit, as a DM you might as well save your money, print out the 6 pages on how to make them along with the 2 and 3e conversion pamphlet and manually port over the monsters for a superior experience.
Yes, good DM can fix it on the fly, but the whole fricking point of 80% of the DM books is content you can take and slap in somewhere without having to redo all the math.
Its the same as the WOTC claim that 5e was made in mind without magic items when it obviously wasnt if you actually look at the released monsters and compare them to the stat to CR table or how in 3e template stacking caused issues as it has too many variables for good calculation beyond manually check every interaction.
Player side, eh, ok, PF2e is doing almost the same shit with slight tweak from daily to turn based economy. Solid enough babys first tactics 1-2 encounter max a session game.
Well, in 4E, all casters automatically recieve at-will magical spells that never run out and have no ammunition counter.
In 3.5 casters don't have that.
So yea, I'm thinking 4E is really fricking stupid-broken in terms of martial-caster disparity.
Reserves, at wills, d4 cd traits, solid chunk of attacks mid levels accessible templates get if DM lets you buy the LA away, the old psionic combat, etc etc
No fricking difference beyond 4e establishing the plague now present in 5e that you cant have interesting at wills, just "better crossbow shot but magic" unless half your class eats up things to make it interesting.
Hindsight is blinding you frendo. 4E looks bad at core now after years of charop threads, but at the time it came out the only complaints anyone could muster beyond autistic screeching about shit twinkies is the ranger power that let you attack forever and the fluff around the rogue power where you flash dash and make everyone attack themselves.
Back in I think December of 2008 I had gotten a ban for "trolling with the truth is still trolling" for posting that 4E dropped as "Dungeon!" or "Dragon Strike" it would have been hailed as a masterpiece of fantastic superheroes.
I dont know what places you frequented anon, but everywhere from boards to game store to even bloody fricking myspace and tumblr had walls of text complaining about the 4e shitting its bed on straight out of the book use after level 6ish, the homogenization of really having 2 and a half classes worth of abilities with 3+ reflavours each, some people seething about Infernal lock and RoWl for no real reason other than "it can do encounter and daily things you can likely do too if your class is of the same role, but its written to be slightly more autism proof/require 40 less iq to understand it and doesnt require having sufficient reading comprehension to go through the entire rulebook, just its ability card" and people actually complaining about the horrible practice of nerfing something (that was a problem because "oh no, my at will or normal is capable of doing 3 more damage which is 3 more than it needs to for minions and between 12 to 40 less for relevant enemies to make a notable difference and break shit") while calling the nerf a errata, yet in the process wording shit in a way that it accidentally breaks 3 other things.
In addition to the WoW accusations which in the hindsight you bring up don't make much sense, it was far closer to Runescape in level of gameplay mechanics portover.
Projecting much WOTCucklet? Not only to the archives prove you wrong, but even on other sites, even bloody fricking tumblr has entire walls of text with people doing WOTCs job trying to fix the base monster math of 4e proving you wrong.
Foundry however doesn’t have someone who autistically scripted every single option for character building or a quick and easy monster generator so everything has to be done manually and that is really tiring and leads to burnout before play begins.
It has essentials at least, but what if someone wants to play Monk.
>Foundry however doesn’t have someone who autistically scripted every single option for character building or a quick and easy monster generator so everything has to be done manually and that is really tiring and leads to burnout before play begins.
the fact you need a computer to make it even vaguely approach playable tells you everything about it as a pen and paper game
The modules are constantly being updated, with save and DoT effects being automated literally weeks ago.
Also, do you really need a monster generator when there are hundreds of premades in the compendium you can just rename and adjust the numbers?
>Foundry however doesn’t have someone who autistically scripted every single option for character building or a quick and easy monster generator so everything has to be done manually and that is really tiring and leads to burnout before play begins.
the fact you need a computer to make it even vaguely approach playable tells you everything about it as a pen and paper game
>a system that was originally designed to be played with a VTT is better with a VTT
Gee, who could've guessed.
It doesn't hold up well primarily because combat had a glacial pace. They gave characters far too many powers. 5 should have been the absolute maximum.
>how does it hold up?
Bad, but better then the rest >Was it unfairly maligned?
Yes. Spell Slots are awful and Will/Enc./Daily is significantly better unless you unironically play Tabletop like a tournament.
Making Abilities and Spells not get in the way way of RP with flavor baked into their rules was also a good change.
Making a spell exclusively function on the assumption that it's a specific substance or environment sucks for RP.
You don't need to have spikes spell be explicitly stated to be made of thorns and add on a burning mechanic, just give the rules for the spikes spell and let people flavor it as they please (barbed wire, hardend earth, ect.). And then allow the DM to extrapolate any extra considerations from there.
Shit like Kelpstrand where it has baked in bonuses that restrict how it can be flavored is superfluous, unless you have a creatively bankrupt DM and group who never uses a system beyond its modules.
>Making Abilities and Spells not get in the way way of RP with flavor baked into their rules
But they don't really support it either.
If that is your line of reasoning, you could simply RP over boardgames. (Exaggeration.)
>But they don't really support it either.
They supported it in the sense of being given a balanced foundations to powers. But maybe some suggestions and rulings to help make reflavors with mechanical benefits a bit easier.
Like if you had a spikes spell that you flavored as being thorns, there could be a bit of guidance in figuring out how you might roll with them being flammable vs being conductive if you had instead made them metal.
But really, out of all the editions 4e does the best in being the "Use for whatever purposes you need" system WOTC keeps pretending DnD is. You just have to treat it as a rules lite one.
There is no problem besides the Black person you're talking to being moronic. We always have a light roleplay and trash talk mix going on when playing something like Diplomacy or Axis and Allies.
This game has a thousand apologists, mostly people who enjoy miniatures and war games, which is telling.
The Daily/Encounter based powers and abilities were way too fricking video-gamey/MMORPG-y for everyone's taste and it failed so spectacularly, that they literally went back to ground zero to make the blandest RPG ever - 5E.
If you like it, that's fine, but don't lie and try to pretend that it's one of the better editions of D&D.
People also say that it "fixed" martials, but it didn't fix anything, and it gave casters infinitely more power by giving them all per-encounter magical abilities. Penetrating Shard single-handedly invalidates every single fricking ranged build.
>Well, in 4E, all casters automatically receive at-will magical spells that never run out and have no ammunition counter.
Just because casters don't have to suddenly become a corner dart thrower halfway through every battle doesn't mean they're suddenly busted. No one thinks the existence of cantrips means that Martials are at a massive disadvantage.
The main thing that made Casters an issue was being having a spell to invalidate anything in and out of combat. Something that separating skills between those two, and making abilities free-flavorable functions helped solve. Martials have just as much freeform tools as casters, the gap is shrunk.
It's also a daily that requires a save before the creatures caught in the burst fall unconscious, otherwise they are just slowed (and it's a simple save and can target only like 4 creatures max). Sleep, meanwhile, in 5e requires the caster to make a roll to determine the number of hitpoints worth of creatures the spell can affect, then requires the creatures caught in the spell (starting lowest HP to highest) to make saves to see if they fall unconscious and becomes effectively useless against most enemies at higher levels. At least 4e's version is usable all the way up to 30.
8 months ago
Anonymous
So 4e casters are stronger than 5e casters, got it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
More like they are on similar level. Here's the rub though - 4e wizard can cast it once, 5e wizard can cast it multiple times.
8 months ago
Anonymous
4e wizard kicks the shit out of martials in fights and non fights.
8 months ago
Anonymous
[citation needed]
8 months ago
Anonymous
No they don’t lol. Martials are the strongest in every role outside controller.
>The Daily/Encounter based powers and abilities were way too fricking video-gamey/MMORPG-y for everyone's taste
I hear this constantly, and yet I never see it explained. What was genuinely wrong with At-Will/Encounter/Daily? Is it literally just parallels, or did it actually lead to any Roleplay or Rollplay issues?
I think that anon meant how powers work, i.e. how you apply damage and moonwalk some squares type of stuff. There is no problem with A/E/D for an experienced gamer, WoD had those since 90's but E powers were once per scene. But there were needed something to alleviate at least 3.5 caster player's culture shock for this.
I think it's a stupid argument, but as far as I've bothered to listen to the people regurgitating it... >Martials having the same At-Will/Encounter/Daily division of powers as spellcasters supposedly "breaks vermisilitude". >The Powers encourage Rollplay over Roleplay by not having explicit "nonstandard" uses inherently written into each individual power's description, such as the old Grease + Burning Hands = Makeshift Fireball combo. Nevermind that the PHB and DMG both say "if players want to use attack powers in unconventional ways, go ahead and let them". >Powers supposedly "have less flavor text" since the mechanics and the flavor text are clearly defined into of jammed into one paragraph. >Martial powers not relying on DM fiat "is unrealistic". This often segueways into: >Martial powers have awful flavor text, ignoring that the game encourages you to customize the flavor text to your character and the situation. >Most save or die/suck spells were debuffed. Charm Person went from being able to potentially permanently control an npc like in 2e to lasting just a couple of rounds. >Pretty much every "solve a problem instantly" spell was reworked as a ritual, which means it takes minutes to hours of time and requires money + a skill check to pull off instead of just "cast a spell; done".
More like they are on similar level. Here's the rub though - 4e wizard can cast it once, 5e wizard can cast it multiple times.
Actually, a 4e wizard can cast any Daily spell of their choice as many times as they have Daily slots. That maxes out at 3-5 times per extended rest, admittedly, but still, they can cast multiple Sleep spells per day if they're high enough level.
it's a moron argument, other tabletop systems had already done similar combat systems to 4e but because grogs were obsessed with vancian magic they seethed at this objective good change and cried that it was "mmoish" even though it doesn't even approach how wow functions in any capacity
>People also say that it "fixed" martials, but it didn't fix anything, and it gave casters infinitely more power by giving them all per-encounter magical abilities. Penetrating Shard single-handedly invalidates every single fricking ranged build.
What the hell are you talking about, Jesse.
Come on bro. There's no way anyone could tell this isn't official just by looking. Clearly you're an autistic 4rrie who memorized every fricking Wizard power.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I can tell it's unofficial from the site it's on, moron.
8 months ago
Anonymous
moron
8 months ago
Anonymous
>5etards think this is qvality falseflagging
shiggy
8 months ago
Anonymous
see
I can tell it's unofficial from the site it's on, moron.
just fricking lulz
, you really are a moron
8 months ago
Anonymous
I can tell it's unofficial from the site it's on, moron.
Nobody "debunked" anything you stupid fricking Black person. All you did was say shit like "wwwwell Helms Deep doesn't exist in 4e!!" And various evasive mealy mouthed tactics like that. Then declared victory, as your game is perfect within the context of the criteria that you perfect wrapped around its grotesque form like cling wrap.
have a nice day. AEDU is dumb cringy dogshit, the per day martial crap is stupid, was in 3.5 and is in 4e. Only 5e came close to doing it right.
Nah, Tome of Battle with it slowly recharging by die roll or x turns as the person is able to refocus, readapt to what changed with the enemy (and for crusader draw upon more of their faith and zeal) was solid.
It was a last ditch test trying to string things for the new crew taking over for 4e to have a solid baseline from 3e base, but monster side mechanics that took the tactics book to splat on things beyond the few dragons and undead that had it originally to then in ToB be given to players as a martial thing, but very good and done, in essence, right.
On 1. You're so close to getting it. What you deride as "power wankery" is meant to be a tool for DMs. The only, I repeat O N L Y, circumstance in which a DM should use minions is when they W A N T cannon fodder. Your players are in a chase and you want roadblocks but not actual fights in between? Minions. Your precious donut steel BBEG wants to throw wave after wave of his own men at team hero to fill their kill limit? Minions. You want to make your players feel awesome just to tear them down in the next room? Minions.
It's a pacing tool.
On 4. Are you a bot or how come you don't have any real world experience at all? Ever been to a boxing match or martial arts tournament? Ever seen someone fight in mail? Ever watched a game of handegg or baseball? None of these are life or death situatios either. I swear to god even in fricking movies there are scenes which are just there to dial the action down. There's literally no movie that's just action scene after action scene without break for 90 minutes.
This might surprise someone as stupid and contrarian as you but you are allowed to flavor the short rest however you like. My group was perfectly fine with just regaining their Encounter powers after every fight unless the DM said no/not here. There is no problem with short rests unless you specifically create one to stir up shit on an anonymous image board.
>Minions shouldn't exist. Those are just lower level creatures.
Such a well-put, thoughtful rebuttal. Why are fricking threeaboos always the most limp-wristed basedboys?
>Those are just lower level creatures
So they're completely non-threatening because they do zero damage? What a thrilling gameplay exercise, wasting my irl time rolling against nothing.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>So they're completely non-threatening because they do zero damage?
Within certain intervals it's false in 3e and it's false in BECMI and AD&D 2e. And you don't need to stretch those intervals forever.
Cannot speak for PF 2e tho.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It's not false in any of those you moron. AC exists and it isn't kept pathetically low like 5E.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Nope, monsters can still threaten a several CR above you in numbers. After a while they don't, yes, and they shouldn't.
None is defending 5e, I just find 4e WAY worse.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Maybe stop having PCs who are built or equipped like shit?
>The only, I repeat O N L Y, circumstance in which a DM should use minions is when they W A N T cannon fodder.
Okay so does that happen at helms deep or not? Do they have 1 hit point while fighting each other? Or is it like shrodingers hit points where they have that many for the PCs but when an NPC hits them suddenly we're tracking hp?
Dumb mechanic either way which was solved in 3.5 with damage scaling and solved in 5e with bounded accuracy. Orcs literally function as minions in 5e since the orc dies in one hit but can still hit and damage high level PCs. Didn't need a stupid mechanic that looks like a stat block typo.
>Okay so does that happen at helms deep or not?
Why do you insist on using the wrong battle? Are you that much of a nogaems or are you arguing in bad faith?
Helm's Deep is governed by mass combat rules and has nothing to do with minions.
Minions are for mines of Moria scenarios, you dingus. The heroes and only the heroes fight against a horde of monsters.
>All you did was say shit like "wwwwell Helms Deep doesn't exist in 4e!!"
I remember once telling a 4rrie that a simple duel between PCs cannot be done in 4e due to the way many powers interact with player agency.
The answer was that.. this not SUPPOSED to happen.
They hamstrung player agency making fantasy tropes impossible then are surprised by why people rejected the game.
PCs and NPCs do not work on the same mathematical basis.
You want pvp in a team based game, and are using attack rolls instead of skill checks to do it.
You never played 4e.
>You never played 4e.
Shut the frick up nigge. I literally played 4e for 2 years and there were two PC vs PC fights to the death for good story reasons. It wasn't bad for pvp but your idea of "this system is good because it only works for very narrow powerwank bullshit game structure set up by autistic devs" is fricking moronic. have a nice day. DnD BX blows the frick out of your shitty system.
>The answer was that.. this not SUPPOSED to happen
Well, yeah, it's a cooperative game, it is designed to be played as a group. This is like complaining about a lack of friendly fire in an FPS, why would it be there?
And why couldn't you run PvP in 4e? It wouldn't work great 1v1 especially if they're different roles but it could be done >the way many powers interact with player agency.
What the frick does that mean and how would it affect PvP?
Jesus, i'm not even a 4e gay and even i, without any inherent rulesystem knowledge, can dismantle each of those points (aside from point 3 which i can only pull a reasoning out of my ass):
1. Doesn't make any fricking sense: do you want mook rules or not? do you think they're bad or not?
2. Powers are action sequence snippets: you pick WHAT happens, then you explain HOW and WHY based on the power description. You may dislike it but the format isn't dissimilar from a narrative focused game and from other abstract d&d asspulls (eg: hit points).
3. I'm assuming it's for adding granularity. To be fair a better criticism on the skill mechanics is to be aimed towards skill challenges: in 4e the gm describes a scenario AND the skill to roll for passing through instead of presenting a scenario and asking the players what they want to do (although if i'm not wrong this was corrected later on).
4. To compliment the fatigue abstraction of per encounter powers and similar stuff. I personally don't like it but i don't like equally other d&d abstraction as well.
5. The only fair criticism. I guess it's because 4e is more aimed at skirmish that other editions. Having more utility powers for each class wouldn't have been bad in my opinion.
6. It wasn't, the default setting was Nethir Vale.
>You may dislike it but the format isn't dissimilar from a narrative focused game and from other abstract d&d asspulls (eg: hit points).
Hit points aren't an ass pull moron and they are fully explained. A DnD character knows, in universe terms, how many hit points he has left. Those are a representative quantity as opposed to an one-off switch like a daily power. They don't even have magic to explain it. "martial" is not a power source. It is not a supernatural entity. It is a complete standout from the other power sources. It has nothing to do with the conception of fighters in any other DnD edition.
Low hit points fighter: "I'm tired and beaten up and sore and I don't think I could win another fight"
Low maneuver fighter: "I have the energy to fight but I already disarmed someone today so we should rest"
These are genuinely just slightly different extensions of the narrative from each other. You can just tolerate one but not the other. Which is fine, but doesn’t make the other inherently wrong.
>Hit points aren't an ass pull
Hit points they way D&D handles them fall apart from a stiff breeze. How come a Cure Light Wounds will bring a peasant back from the brink of death, but do almost nothing to a seasoned fighter?
>do you want mook rules or not? do you think they're bad or not?
You don't need them, because they already inherently exist in the game. You're making a rule that doesn't need tl exist because the natural damage scaling of the game solves it.
Maybe if we're talking about 5E but oneshottable mooks in other editions can't fricking touch PCs. But in 5E, 400 commoners can shoot a dragon to death in 6 seconds.
>3. I'm assuming it's for adding granularity.
Close, but no. The challenge sets the level of the check, not the level of the PC making the check. A level 1 PC can attempt to knock a level 17 door off of it's hinges without finding the key, but it's not likely to happen. The shitty bait in question simply doesn't understand this concept
>An orc warrior has frick-all HP to begin with, a skileld warrior one-shotting them is a regular occurance. >Same reason you can't make a permanent ring of true strike in 3e without shelling out unimaginable amounts of gold, it's balance and consistency >Because the "easy" hazards in the lair of the demon king are going to be a lot more trecherous than the "easy" hazards of the lair of the goblin king (self-appointed) >To account for situations where there will be consecutive battles >This is less bookkeeping than a level 1 wizard, and working within limited resources are a fundamental part of tactics. >Steampunk has always been a part of D&D
>Same reason you can't make a permanent ring of true strike in 3e without shelling out unimaginable amounts of gold, it's balance and consistency >Magic items are the same as mundane fighter powers.
4e haters are so funny because you got this dumb image that gets debunked every thread (see:
Jesus, i'm not even a 4e gay and even i, without any inherent rulesystem knowledge, can dismantle each of those points (aside from point 3 which i can only pull a reasoning out of my ass):
1. Doesn't make any fricking sense: do you want mook rules or not? do you think they're bad or not?
2. Powers are action sequence snippets: you pick WHAT happens, then you explain HOW and WHY based on the power description. You may dislike it but the format isn't dissimilar from a narrative focused game and from other abstract d&d asspulls (eg: hit points).
3. I'm assuming it's for adding granularity. To be fair a better criticism on the skill mechanics is to be aimed towards skill challenges: in 4e the gm describes a scenario AND the skill to roll for passing through instead of presenting a scenario and asking the players what they want to do (although if i'm not wrong this was corrected later on).
4. To compliment the fatigue abstraction of per encounter powers and similar stuff. I personally don't like it but i don't like equally other d&d abstraction as well.
5. The only fair criticism. I guess it's because 4e is more aimed at skirmish that other editions. Having more utility powers for each class wouldn't have been bad in my opinion.
6. It wasn't, the default setting was Nethir Vale.
) and now they're randomly bringing up homebrew (see:
Come on bro. There's no way anyone could tell this isn't official just by looking. Clearly you're an autistic 4rrie who memorized every fricking Wizard power.
) to try and shore up their flimsy arguments. Dude genuinely is pulling out all the stops to win in an internet argument that ultimately boils down to "do you like fluff shit like vancian casting more than you do the fighter having more options than just attack or attack with extra damage and less accuracy"
1. The average hitpoints of an orc at Helm's Deep is 1. They are mooks.
2. Why can't wizards cast a spell more than once a day? Shouldn't they be able to cast it X times per day based on INT modifier? Asking about a simulation decision without examining the intent of the simulation is disingenuous at best. The stated goals of the simulation are in the core rulebooks of 4e. You'll find the answer right there.
3. Because the d20 remains the shittiest possible arbitration tool in tabletop gaming. Realistically if the game used 3d6 as the core roll there would have been no need to do this. But the intent was to provide scaling difficulty. This looks really dumb with a d20's flat distribution.
4. Yes. Short rests are good, actually. The problem they have (and still have in 5e) is that people grossly misunderstand what they are because most people reading these books have never engaged in strenuous physical exercise in their life. A short rest is when, after a 10 mile ruck, you throw your rucksack off and go lay in the grass for five minutes recovering. Or do the same thing after a 5k run. It's not even so much a choice as an autonomic response to ending a period of high exertion.
5. Vancian magic?
6. The default setting for 4e was actually no setting at all, but the explanation of how a Points of Light campaign can be played successfully with the example provided of Nentir Vale. Eberron became widely played because it was hugely popular...it remains very popular despite the "default" setting of 5e being Forgotten Realms.
>that it's an hour long
It's so dumb that they changed that
It's already bad enough they include all these superfluous time keeping element (each turn is somehow 3 seconds), but hard line making what a "short rest" boxed into a definite range is dumb.
5e's short rests are indeed terrible. Back to the origin problem: the people writing 5e had never engaged in rigorous physical exertion, no idea what it was supposed to simulate. Result: nonsense.
Short rests definitely need to be improved in the actual releases, but in your home game just make them better.
> A short rest is when, after a 10 mile ruck, you throw your rucksack off and go lay in the grass for five minutes recovering. Or do the same thing after a 5k run. It's not even so much a choice as an autonomic response to ending a period of high exertion.
After a 5k you're supposed to spend a mimum ten minutes cooldown light jog and then twenty sitting.
>After a 5k you're supposed to spend a mimum ten minutes cooldown light jog and then twenty sitting.
Ah, "ancient wisdom." Do you also carb load like a fricking moron?
That's optimal for fitness, but not a physical requirement. You won't be up to your top after a 5 minute breather, but you'll be good enough to keep going until the next break.
Even when it comes to wizards, it's pretty easy to think of short rests in terms of the Pomodoro Method.
Beats 5th edition by a milestone. I felt 5e was worse from the start, and the deeper it went into 5.5 and then into D&D ONE, the happier I was that Id made the decision to go back to it.
One thing I really like about 4e is the ability to challenge tactically savvy players with enemy group synergies.
For example, let us consider an encounter against a group of xivort darters (level 1 artilleries) who have tamed a bunch of thornskin frogs (level 1 brutes) and wolf packmates (level 1 minion skirmishers).
The xivort darters can daze PCs, which is annoying enough. However, the thornskin frogs can move in to deal heavy damage and knock PCs prone. Standing from prone takes a move action, and a dazed creature can take only one action on their turn, so a dazed PC who wants to use a standard action will have to settle for staying prone. Unfortunately, the wolf packmates can then move in to deal extra damage to the prone PCs. Simple but nasty enemy synergize.
How about a positioning challenge for PCs of a slightly higher level? Let us say a couple of centurions of the Iron Circle (level 6 soldiers) have rounded up several dwarf warriors (level 1 minion artilleries) and a couple of extremist wilden ancients (level 4 artilleries [leader]) to stir up trouble.
The Iron Circle centurions are highly accurate against PCs with no other adjacent PCs... but if the PCs cluster up, then they might just be smacked by nasty area attacks from the wilden ancients, who can also buff the centurions. Worse, the dwarf warriors are many in number, and any PC not in cover is liable to be pincushioned by the extra damage from the crossbow attacks.
I like how 4e is a 30-level game, yet even lower-level encounters can have a surprising amount of tactical depth just with some good enemy selection, to say nothing of terrain.
People don’t want tactical depth, they want to spend hours designing a character to have Big Numbers or to cast a single swift action spell and end an encounter.
Tactics are not exclusive of 4e. In fact, 4e curtails a lot of tactics due to its reductive nature.
People don’t want tactical depth, they want to spend hours designing a character to have Big Numbers or to cast a single swift action spell and end an encounter.
>Big Numbers
This is a nice strawman, but the reality is that in 3e you can do both. Hell, the strategies considered the most powerful don't even involve le big number, but flexibility.
Underrated. 4e is extremely fun for exactly one specific type of game: combat heavy dungeon crawls and the like. It’s for if you want to fight dangerous monsters, or do interesting character builds. Part of why people got so ass-mad is not all DnD is like that, and people didn’t like feeling like they were being excluded.
The people who said 4e would’ve been better received as “DND tactics” are completely right, because this game honed in so far on the combat and tactics part of the game to the exclusion of everything else. People who don’t dungeon crawl but instead do theater kid stuff will naturally hate that, and I don’t really blame them for it even if they should really be playing an actual narrative game. You CAN play narrative in DND, but you really shouldn’t because the game isn’t built for it, and 4e just made that fact way too explicit.
I mean it's more like the lack of rules that makes it hard compared to games actually built for that. I mean, you can play with whatever ruleset you want and narrative games will mostly work because narrative games are mostly imaginary. They run off the back of how good the players and DM are at improv and acting. You don't really need many rules in the first place so a lack of rules won't stop you, but at the same time the game isn't built for it so you won't get any support from the game either.
Compare 4e to like a PBTA game or something. In 4e, outside of rituals and utilities you don't have many out-of-combat tools. You can use your A/E/D to do out-of-combat stuff, but lots of them don't really do anything special your character couldn't already do (how you gonna use cleave out of combat?). Compare this to a PBTA game where they have moves and stuff. Now you can do all sorts of wacky things, and the DM knows how to adjudicate all your special abilities. Like if you're a specifically sexy character in DnD, the DM might not know how to run that. "I guess take a +2 to negotiating with this storeowner?". But in a PBTA game, you might get the "sexy" trait or something, and that rule will list out what kind of situations you can use that in and what bonus it should give you. Makes it much easier to make your sexy character actually feel sexy.
So what I mean is that if you're good at acting and improv, you can make any system work, but if you're just okay at it then playing an actual narrative game will heighten the experience.
Even when I played a lot of 4e I felt the same way. Non-combat stuff just felt barren. Rituals and utilities were super cool but lots of them were still very combat oriented. I don't think you'd have to add a lot to fix that though. Simply having more utilities per character would go a long way.
So older editions of D&D were bad because roleplay didn't have rules?
Rather, this is what happens when you are a player who expects to have the rules tell you what to do, rather than working with the GM.
The real legacy, tragedy, of 3.x, is that it taught an entire generation of players to not cooperate with the GM, but to combat him.
It's a shame, but that is where a lot of the problems people on this board stem from, if they even actually play the games they talk about.
>many people had issues with powers because of their immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path
just you buddy, just you ...
8 months ago
Anonymous
shit, meant
>given that 3.x casters were all about pushing their specific power buttons
Nope, moron-kun. The way magic worked was explainable in-universe, moron-kun.
3.e martial daily shit was at least implied to be based on some sort of stamina, moron-kun, like the constituion based Barbarian rage, moron-kun.
Also, moron-kun, many people had issues with powers because of their immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path, moron-kun. That has nothing to do with AEDU but with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG.
What? No. They're just clearly not geared toward narrative. Again, if you're good at narrative games then you can make any system work. I just think that a lot of the time narrative players are better off playing, you know, actual narrative games.
Problem is, you will alway find some loophole or situation when it make sense when the trait should apply but RAW you cannot use it.
Having rule for this kind of stuff is nice but also tunnel vision and in a way restrict the player.
In your exemple, sure it's nice to have a rule about my character being sexy, but it become a mechanic of the game, not a real thing for the character in universe. The DM decide when you are sexy because it's a mechanic of the game, not because i act my character sexy.
Yeah I can see that, but I think that kind of rules specificity isn't really in the spirit of narrative games in the first place. And people can definitely get too tunnel-visioned, but I at least find the added structure more helpful than not. Worst case scenario if you feel like things are becoming too suffocated then you can just fall back to what you have to do for all out-of-combat in DnD, and play pretend for everything.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Yeah I can see that, but I think that kind of rules specificity isn't really in the spirit of narrative games in the first place. And people can definitely get too tunnel-visioned, but I at least find the added structure more helpful than not. Worst case scenario if you feel like things are becoming too suffocated then you can just fall back to what you have to do for all out-of-combat in DnD, and play pretend for everything.
Yeah that's a valid point, in the end players and DM should work together to get the most of the experience.
Problem is, you will alway find some loophole or situation when it make sense when the trait should apply but RAW you cannot use it.
Having rule for this kind of stuff is nice but also tunnel vision and in a way restrict the player.
In your exemple, sure it's nice to have a rule about my character being sexy, but it become a mechanic of the game, not a real thing for the character in universe. The DM decide when you are sexy because it's a mechanic of the game, not because i act my character sexy.
>WoW artstyle
What? Where? And 4e art is miles above the trash "art" in 5
I want to be literally Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Sun Tzu, not a WoW character.
This "is like MMO comparison" has never made sense. Only an MMO has character archetypes? Is every Final Fantasy an MMO? All classes being viable and useful=MMO?
Sun Tzu is an author/philosopher. Are you trying to reference one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms characters or do you think an author/philosopher would make a good RPG character?
How would fall into any RPG class? Characters in stories aren't written as RPG characters
>Show me where Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Sun Tzu fall into tank/healer/DPS/CC like in 4e?
Uhh
Odysseus is, per Homer's original tellings, perhaps the greatest DPS hero in the history of Greece (although this is debatable). I would argue Odysseus is one of the handful of Warrior archetypes from mythical history not driven by his own rage which makes him an outlier, but he still works as a hybrid ranged/melee DPS hero.
Cú Chulainn is a hybrid tank/DPS and maps pretty directly to WoW Warriors down to be empowered by his own fury.
Sun Tzu is not a warrior, he was a general and philosopher. He does not fit in any iteration of D&D except, ironically, 4e where he would be a Warleader.
A post so true it hurts. 4e fixes each and every complaint commonly leveled against 3.5.
Players don't like it when you fix things. Players like to complain.
>"Martial characters are boring! I hate being stuck as a healing-b***h cleric! The game is only is fun/balanced between levels 3 and 9!"
You assume that just attempting to fix is automatically good. Is not.
People wanted more class features and feats scaling without useless chains, more skill points. Bit a rewrite.
How this is a concept so difficult to grasp is beyond me.
Not only me since 4e failed and PF (which didn't do enough, but was closer to that) thrived.
>with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG. >if you aren't creating a 1 to 1 model of the real world, it's wrong >abstraction doesnt exist, only autism
Another strawman, how cute.
>immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path, >15th level daily >You move up to your speed. Any enemy that can make an opportunity attack against you as a result of this move must do so, but it makes the opportunity attack against itself instead of against you
I don't know what is "immersion breaking" about this. You could read it as either they give too much follow through because of your blinding burst of speed or that while you run past you twist their arm all "stop hitting yourself". Either way it's a neat thing for a rogue to do at 15th level
The power removes agency especially if used on another PC. It's also difficult to explain for creatures like a beholder.
PCs and NPCs do not work on the same mathematical basis.
You want pvp in a team based game, and are using attack rolls instead of skill checks to do it.
You never played 4e.
>PCs and NPCs do not work on the same mathematical basis. >You want pvp in a team based game
Pvp can happen if a player is mind controlled. If 4e cannot do mind control, is another failure in representing a fantasy trope.
>The answer was that.. this not SUPPOSED to happen
Well, yeah, it's a cooperative game, it is designed to be played as a group. This is like complaining about a lack of friendly fire in an FPS, why would it be there?
And why couldn't you run PvP in 4e? It wouldn't work great 1v1 especially if they're different roles but it could be done >the way many powers interact with player agency.
What the frick does that mean and how would it affect PvP?
See bloody path
>crying about Bloody Path
Oh it's you again, hello there moron, please continue to entertain us
>The power removes agency especially if used on another PC. It's also difficult to explain for creatures like a beholder.
I'll quote myself to answer both points: "You could read it as either they give too much follow through because of your blinding burst of speed or that while you run past you twist their arm all "stop hitting yourself"." Used in PvP you could read it either way, a Beholder you could read it as it bites it's a cheek or cracks a tooth. Fun thing about imagination games that.
The more I read 4e, the more I like it. Combat actually looks fun. What's the catch?
i for sure rip off a few lore bits and a bunch of items cause there is some goodies in there. that being said i wasnt wild on the system cause the "powers" thing felt to much like a videogame
I think it was for the most part unfairly maligned. I think it does the tactical board game better than 3.5. It was more clearly and concisely written than most D&D, even outside of the powers. It has the best DMG because it actually talks about how to run a session, not just encounter and plot design. Where it lets players down is outside of combat. I don't think skill challenges quite felt right across the multiple tweaks to those rules. While in general, 4e tries to get out of your way outside of those skirmish arenas - that often isn't satisfying for people who want to focus on the "fantasy world simulator" aspects that were increasingly emphasized from AD&D to 3.5e.The early combat math also led to to some sloggy fights.
5e did itself a disservice by not Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ving the first 2-3 chapters of the 4e DMG into the 5e DMG. Those chapters would novice DMs so much more than several chapters of the shit in that book. Also, it's significantly less homosexual than 5e, since it went OOP in 2014 - just before American nerdom went full gay moron.
Nta, but yeah. Many criticisms of 4e really boil down to "new thing bad".
I have a kind of sympathy for the grognards that spout this nonsense though. At a certain age "new thing bad" just becomes your modus operandi.
4e is good for the classic D&D dungeon crawl, random encounter, problem solvin' and wilderness explorin' gameplay. It's rather lacking in noncombat utilities, though.
I feel like stealing a page from later games and having a dedicated "non-combat" thing progression, like PF2 skill feats or Spheres of X Utility Talents, would nicely round out the system.
At least half of the criticism comes from people who never played it, given the many outright incorrect rules claims, nor played its predecessor, given that 3.x casters were all about pushing their specific power buttons and most martial classes had per-day abilities in that.
Even when I played a lot of 4e I felt the same way. Non-combat stuff just felt barren. Rituals and utilities were super cool but lots of them were still very combat oriented. I don't think you'd have to add a lot to fix that though. Simply having more utilities per character would go a long way.
I haven't played 4e, but I'm currently playing PF2e. Skill feats are awful and I doubt any other edition could be made better by copying the idea. You have one or two feats that completely tower above every other choice you could take, and once you've picked them skill feats become a chore to choose from because they're all so situational you might go an entire campaign without ever using them. A lot of them also don't feel like they should be tied to a feat, there's a lot of stuff that you should just be able to do through skills naturally.
Skill feats are bad in execution, not in concept. Paizo gutted most skills in PF2 to sell them back to you as feats like some kind of AAA game DLC banditry. Paizo also cannot help themselves, they love their feat taxes, PF2 is full of them, and they use skill feats as an avenue to do so.
A general progression dedicated to "you can do utility thing X" it not, in itself, a bad idea.
>given that 3.x casters were all about pushing their specific power buttons
Nope, moron-kun. The way magic worked was explainable in-universe, moron-kun.
3.e martial daily shit was at least implied to be based on some sort of stamina, moron-kun, like the constituion based Barbarian rage, moron-kun.
Also, moron-kun, many people had issues with powers because of their immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path, moron-kun. That has nothing to do with AEDU but with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG.
>with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG. >if you aren't creating a 1 to 1 model of the real world, it's wrong >abstraction doesnt exist, only autism
>immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path, >15th level daily >You move up to your speed. Any enemy that can make an opportunity attack against you as a result of this move must do so, but it makes the opportunity attack against itself instead of against you
I don't know what is "immersion breaking" about this. You could read it as either they give too much follow through because of your blinding burst of speed or that while you run past you twist their arm all "stop hitting yourself". Either way it's a neat thing for a rogue to do at 15th level
PF2e is fricking awful, don't steal from it. 4e has Rituals, Skill Challenges, and even Martial Rituals when can easily be expanded upon. Do you need intricate systems for out of combat stuff?
They're called martial practices and were introduced in martial power 2. Unfortunately they were never expanded on since they were added in one of the last books before essentials.
If you have Foundry, then 4e is the best it's ever been right now. Constantly updating modules, up-to-date databases and compendium, community manuals for every class, a maintained offline character generator, etc.
I also thought it was a good idea. Having struggled through 3e's era of "lol chaotic RANDUMB" BS or the True Neutral "I flip a coin to see how I react" supidity, the 5 alignments of 4e were a breath of fresh air.
Nothing really? The book keeping isn't any more egregious than older editions. It's probably the easiest edition to DM for so long as you remember to keep major battles to set pieces and run smaller skirmishes as either Skill Challenges or roleplay potential with an occasional attack roll here and there. If there's anything mechanically that needs a touch up, PCs should get a free expertise feat at 1st level, and use the Melee Training feat before it was nerfed. Beyond that, you should be good to go as long as your party can pay attention even when it isn't their turn.
It's different from every other edition, so people who only know D&D and D&D-clones have a hard time adjusting to a different sort of book keeping. 13th Age is probably the best halfway point between 3.5e/5e design and 4e if you don't want to immediately jump into the deep end.
>Was it unfairly maligned?
99% of criticisms around encounter and daily powers stems from a misunderstanding, you need to complete a short rest to get access to encounter powers once again making them functionally equivalent to the many 5th edition abilities that only recharge on a short rest (including the entire warlock class) and Pathfinder 2e focus points work exactly the same, these two games combined are like 90% of tabletop market share so I think it's a bit silly for people to act like 4e was doing such unforgivable design.
Points of Light and the Nentir Vale is a vastly superior setting to adventure in compared to the forgotten realms and dodges most of the pitfalls and plot holes these settings full of epic NPC and author donut steels have and you don't need to be a fricking capeshit writer constantly coming up with "Superman in Space" justifications for why X/Y/Z don't simply spend a few minutes solving every single problem and leaving the player characters out of a job.
The murder -suicide of the VTT killed the edition in its cradle though along with the fact it was still a little too early for the idea of online play to be normalized and mainstream
It wasn't shit in 2008 it was non-existent because the one guy who knew what the code did killed his wife and then himself (and 2008 was really just a different time, using online tools for /tg/ shit simply wasn't as mainstream as it is now)
Everyone here has their opinions on it but i just want to say when i first moved out and 5e was hitting the shelves these tanked in price so fricking hard My friends and I got one over every book in the collection say 1 or 2 for a grand total of 100$ and we played that shit up until last year.
i think the average player doesn't actually realize how little was written in terms of concrete mechanics for noncombat situations or even improv moves in combat in their preferred editions
Since this is the closest thing to a 4e general thread on the board at this moment... I really like the idea of Dread Genasi from Ravenloft 3e, and I want to convert Dread Elemental Manifestations to 4e. Anyone got any ideas how I might start?
For what it's worth, here's what they looked like in 3e:
https://1dGanker/wiki/Genasi/Homebrew#Dread_Genasi
best combat of any edition by far, but combat is all it really has
if it was marketed as its own thing instead of as d&d 4e it would probably be remembered more fondly
Let's start with proper character abilities that don't stick to a single artificial and arbitrary formula but rather do what they're supposed to do, translate a real-world idea or concept into a game rule in a way that lets you extrapolate other real-world concepts into the game.
The combat wasn't even good. It was overly abstract and disconnected from the game's reality just like everything else in 4E, plus on top of it it took way too long to resolve. A normal fight against some goblins should be over in 3 minutes but in 4E it took 40-45. Anything with some elites or bosses would take hours because of ludicours HP bloat.
>against some goblins should be over in 3 minutes but in 4E it took 40-45
Just make them minions or a skill challenge if they're not meant to take any time at all.
>Anything with some elites or bosses would take hours because of ludicours HP bloat.
The math was initially fricked, but that was errata'd years ago. Just use stuff from MM3.
4e Pros: >No dealing with Level Adjustment for exotic races. >Standardized race design methodolgy means there are no inherently "weak" races. >Roles & AEDU system means no ivory tower design; apart from Essentials classes, no class requires careful optimization to just be functional. >Very open to reflavoring; the Barbarian class makes a great chanbara movie-style Samurai in execution, for example. >Can easily pull off a Low Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery game because "Martial Classes + Ritual Magic only" is perfectly functional right out the box. >No more save or die/suck compared to 3.pf. >Don't have to worry about being made obsolete if you pick a martial and somebody picks a spellcaster.
3.pf Pros: >Massively larger pool of content, even sticking to just WotC 3.5 and PF1. >Way more "default" races and classes. >Archetypes system of Pathfinder gives more explicit "flavor niche" >Variable class design means you can take a simple class like the fighter and just "tune out" during combat.
>>Can easily pull off a Low Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery game because "Martial Classes + Ritual Magic only" is perfectly functional right out the box.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAH
>There is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing in 4e that is even remotely low-fantasy.
Are you the guy seething about Bloody Path? You realize the whole point of "function over fluff" design in 4e is so that the player/DM can fluff abilities to their own preference? It doesn't take much to refluff most abilities to fit a low-fantasy tone.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>pick out fantasy system to play fantasy game >doesn't even function as a fantasy game unless I just rewrite every single bit of information in the book to be more palatable to the aesthetic I want
Nice system nerd.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>rewrite
Just do it on the fly? Literally every system with template powers like this has the players/GM decide how they want to fluff shit uniquely to each PC/NPC and it works just fine.
Sure, I wouldn't actually recommend 4e if you want robust support for a low-fantasy game, but that doesn't mean it's not easily adjusted for that purpose.
8 months ago
Anonymous
So 4e appeals to people who like overly reductionist bullshit. Soulless.
>Variable class design means you can take a simple class like the fighter and just "tune out" during combat.
That's literally why those boring ass Essentials classes exist. Martials can move, basic attack, pass turn just like god intended.
Seriously do we have this thread every other week? I know TG is starving for decent threads but this is basically junk food man. Sure it get's people taking but it's forgettable, just another "4e, thoughts?" thread.
>how does it hold up?
Most in-depth combat system of any TTRPG I've played. Extremely fun and most systems can't even begin to compare if you're a combat chad. >unfairly maligned?
The average normalgay is unable to comprehend the depth of even a relatively simple 4e build, so no. However, if you're playing with people who have an IQ above 100, any of 4e's common "problems" are solved in an instant.
>monsters offer zero challenge alone or are way too tanky in groups
Just adjust HP and homebrew monsters. >eberron or something
Run your own campaign lmao. >no rp support
Then support it. Rituals do support RP. >some levels feel unrewarding/weak
Then give more feats or other character options. The game doesn't break when people have another daily power. >complex combat
This is a benefit. Suffocate alone.
4e has some number issues in the earlier books, but this can be fixed and got better in MM3. More importantly, it forces all players to make decisions every round of combat. This is the system's Achilles' heel. If your players are on point, are good a coming up with strategies on fly and are willing to play with the tools they have like vulnerability or forced movement, this can be very engaging. If on the other hand your players are slow, can't commit to strategies without long deliberations and are just swinging for At-Will damage every round, it will be a slog. Some of the issues are bookkeeping, and things like printing out their powers as cards and having tokens for statuses can help, but a lot of it is just getting the apes to press the buttons. The same also holds for team monster: use a variety of monster roles (always reflavour mobs them when appropriate) and have a gameplan that exploits some synergy or the environment. 4e is by design gamey and lends itself to set-piece encounters. You're playing XCOM, not Skyrim.
Lancer draws a lot inspiration from 4e and makes this explicit: combat encounters are fully separated from regular RP and almost always have victory conditions that aren't kill all the baddies. This is artificial and rightfully deserves to be critiqued, but the lesson still holds: if you have to take out the battlemat, there should be stakes.
The best designed book we will ever see in roleplaying, because having clear and consistent rules that were easy to reference and find pissed idiots off so bad that Pathfinder got made.
This is the biggest L we got. Every fricking d20 game has dogshit layout now. 3.5 might be the worst offender and they keep imitating that just to avoid being compared to 4e.
If they'd called it anything but "Dungeons & Dragons" I think people would've maybe liked it but then it would've flopped for being a really weird very video gamey pseudo-MMO tabletop game. All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
>All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
I think you're still wrong here but you're less wrong than threeaboos. 99.999 % of which have been saying all classes (including Rogue and Cleric) are basically the same for the last ten years.
I would offer examples of how "I teleport every single round" Swordmages feel different from "dare enter my 10 foot aura of difficult terrain realm" or how "dance my allies" bards are different from "temp HP all day erry day" Artificers, but you probably know...
>All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
Rogue and Warlock function and act completely differently. You end up with two polar opposite gameplay styles, one of which being a focus on multi-target attacks against cursed enemies and the other being (ideally) flanking/invisibility/stealthing up on enemies for combat advantage and then executing them with a sneak attack.
While each class has its powers, none really feel like casters unless you think having anything but a basic attack is the exact same as a spell.
Even pseudo-spellcasters like the psionic classes have a unique feel just because of how psionic augmentation works.
>very video gamey pseudo-MMO tabletop game
Such a stupid thing that keeps getting repeated. Only video games are allowed to have clearly defined archetypes and roles?
It plays nothing like an MMO. This is the weakest critique of the games mechanics.
People who say that have clearly never played an MMO or 4e
>gamma world 7e is better >not the fantasy homebrew that loops back to 4e
it's in French, but it's worth a look legrumph dot org/Terrier/public/jeux-complets/DD4E
Sounds like it would be awesome if I could read it...
Actually, come to think of it, what were the differences between 4e and Gamma World 7e? I've played both but all I can remember being different was the simplified character creation of Gamma World. Were there any other significant mechanical differences?
People talk about 4e being almost a skirmish wargame. How would it handle something like the nightclub shootout in Collateral, something with crowds of noncombatants, cover and concealment, multiple parties (Tom Cruise, FBI, Cartels, the Korean guy's bodyguards)?
Ranger being a martial and dropping the moronic spellcasting part of the class was kino. Shame Beast Master Ranger was trash. I'd just houserule to let a Ranger have a companion, and he could give a few simple commands with a minor action. No beat Powers or anything
Yeah. It was from either the 1st or 2nd essentials book.
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=theme915
And here are the pets.
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate53
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate54
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate55
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate56
I was once in a group with an Artificer who refluffed this as a little robot that followed them around and it worked pretty alright.
>http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate53
Sick. I always liked Ranger in 4e, but could never have my trusty Raven companion because Beast master sucked. I'll need to tweak this to get it to work with a regular Ranger and not use the magic beasts but I dig it.
themes started in dark sun but showed up in basically every publication after that in 4e, they're basically a free second class without having to actually worry about class progression, you just get free stuff from your theme at certain levels
It's always been funny to me that any class is allowed to buy and use extremely useful mounts, but the second you have a class feature centered around animals, they give you total garbage for your options. >yeah, your bro direwolf gives you combat advantage if you're near a friend >your riding lizard has a combined attack, your direboar does it's own attack that prones/pushes when you charge >but you will NOT ever have an interesting beast companion
The only reprieve from this autism is the Vidalis Griffonmaster paragon path, and even then you're waiting until level 11 to get a (relatively) mediocre mount.
In general, they should've expanded on mount feats/items more. Beast Mastery is just the absolute worst of it. Especially sad given how bad ranger is as a class.
The Ranger in4e is quite strong as a striker. Extremely accurate and has multiple attacks per round, which is rare. However, the optimal Ranger build is a bore and has no flavor beyond "I hit often and accurately".
Ranger should have had the animal companion regardless of build imo. And Beast Powers should be a minor action. none of them are particularly good. Or I guess just work with your DM and they'll probably let you just have a mount and treat it as a companion.
this question has been asked like five times in this very thread and every other time this same thread gets posted, and the response, if there's any at all, is something something balanced classes undoes flavor. basically its just 3.5/5e idiots crying because casters cant just snap their fingers and dominate the whole session
3.5 and AD&D gays can at least point to the more naturalistic ways things interacted with the environment - like fireballs setting things on fire, but 5e gays have to content with magical fires not setting things on fire unless specified.
Such dust as this never settles.
It needed a second round of math revision but it is good for what it is. People expected the ludicrous granularity of 3e but with better balance, but let's be honest here the reason 3e was such a mess in the first place was the excessive rule bloat and inconsistent power levels.
It was shit and it was shit the last time you made this thread and every future time you make this same thread it will still have been shit. 4E died because almost no actual player or DM liked it. Only people who liked it were fricking weirdos who think the best part of D&D is moving figurines on a board and all other parts should be made to serve that.
>People expected the ludicrous granularity of 3e but with better balance
No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
>, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
What do you think an rpg is?
4E died because WotC mismanaged it in the last half of its lifespan and it had a restrictive license. No more, no less.
Honestly the restrictive licence is probably the biggest stain on 4e
So many things and games could have been made with 4e, but never could be. And these days how many people and companies want an expensive licence to a 15 year old game that is hotly contested?
>No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
You know Jumanji was just a movie, right?
>No, people expected a god damn R-P-G instead of a stupid fricking boardgame where everything is fake and nothing matters.
You're right. Playacting shitty fanfic with homos is what people really want.
The majority didn't like it and the world moved on.
Attempts to keep it alive with 3rd party stuff failed because not enough people actually liked it.
The world has moved on, so should you.
It outsold every other game with every book for every year it was printed. Your levels of cope are insane.
It's good for what it sets out to do, but the marketing campaign around it and the framing it used as a mainline edition was foul. Not to mention Mearls imploding it later into its lifetime for his pet project that would later become 5e.
I'm in the camp of thought that maintains that if 4e had come out as Dungeons & Dragons Tactics instead of a new edition, it would've been highly praised. Hell, lots of the mechanics it brought to the table live on in 5e and are lauded as 5e achievements by people who don't know better.
Me personally, it's the only edition of D&D I can bring myself to run and play. But I wholly understand why people looked down upon a game that not only pivoted their experience into the logical endpoint of their own power wanking and turned it into a Tactics game, and then actively insulted them for not conforming. But, yknow, now that the edition is wrapped up, it's an easy recommendation if you're into what it offers. Few games match the way it embraced Tactics gameplay, and those who actually follow its footsteps (Emberwind, Lancer) aren't all the way there.
Am I the only person who compares 4e to Super Robot Wars? If I was to make a SRW game I'd 100% use 4e as a base.
Giant Guardian Generation (which then morphed into Battle Century G https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/151230/Battle-Century-G) took some heavy inspirations from 4e.
And it is my impression that Lancer also took some inspirations from 4e.
(But I don't play ttpgs. I just really appreciate 4e's combat system)
Unfortunately neither of those systems are particularly good. Battle Century G is very mediocre while Lancer is just outright bad.
I have been a great fan of Tailfeathers/Kazzam and ICON 1.5 as 4e-inspired, grid-based tactical combat games. I have run and played both.
Battle Century G seems to be very good on the Mecha construction bits, being very thorough in implementing all the usual anime mecha tropes.
Why do you feel it's mediocre?
>very thorough
It isn't at all. The mecha genre is full of much more detailed systems. BCG advertises itself as being rules light. If you want thorough have a look at something like Mekton Zeta.
>Why do you feel it's mediocre?
I just don't think its particularly interesting in any way. There isn't much depth in character creation or gameplay. Several of the seemingly intended builds are outright bad and feel like trap options. Combat gets repetitive very quickly.
The main thing Lancer took from 4e was keywords and some aspects of action economy, but it's much more modular for character creation so you don't really get the at-will/short rest/long rest ability cadence.
It wouldnt have been praised, raw out of the books monsters were shit, as a DM you might as well save your money, print out the 6 pages on how to make them along with the 2 and 3e conversion pamphlet and manually port over the monsters for a superior experience.
Yes, good DM can fix it on the fly, but the whole fricking point of 80% of the DM books is content you can take and slap in somewhere without having to redo all the math.
Its the same as the WOTC claim that 5e was made in mind without magic items when it obviously wasnt if you actually look at the released monsters and compare them to the stat to CR table or how in 3e template stacking caused issues as it has too many variables for good calculation beyond manually check every interaction.
Player side, eh, ok, PF2e is doing almost the same shit with slight tweak from daily to turn based economy. Solid enough babys first tactics 1-2 encounter max a session game.
Reserves, at wills, d4 cd traits, solid chunk of attacks mid levels accessible templates get if DM lets you buy the LA away, the old psionic combat, etc etc
No fricking difference beyond 4e establishing the plague now present in 5e that you cant have interesting at wills, just "better crossbow shot but magic" unless half your class eats up things to make it interesting.
Hindsight is blinding you frendo. 4E looks bad at core now after years of charop threads, but at the time it came out the only complaints anyone could muster beyond autistic screeching about shit twinkies is the ranger power that let you attack forever and the fluff around the rogue power where you flash dash and make everyone attack themselves.
Back in I think December of 2008 I had gotten a ban for "trolling with the truth is still trolling" for posting that 4E dropped as "Dungeon!" or "Dragon Strike" it would have been hailed as a masterpiece of fantastic superheroes.
I dont know what places you frequented anon, but everywhere from boards to game store to even bloody fricking myspace and tumblr had walls of text complaining about the 4e shitting its bed on straight out of the book use after level 6ish, the homogenization of really having 2 and a half classes worth of abilities with 3+ reflavours each, some people seething about Infernal lock and RoWl for no real reason other than "it can do encounter and daily things you can likely do too if your class is of the same role, but its written to be slightly more autism proof/require 40 less iq to understand it and doesnt require having sufficient reading comprehension to go through the entire rulebook, just its ability card" and people actually complaining about the horrible practice of nerfing something (that was a problem because "oh no, my at will or normal is capable of doing 3 more damage which is 3 more than it needs to for minions and between 12 to 40 less for relevant enemies to make a notable difference and break shit") while calling the nerf a errata, yet in the process wording shit in a way that it accidentally breaks 3 other things.
In addition to the WoW accusations which in the hindsight you bring up don't make much sense, it was far closer to Runescape in level of gameplay mechanics portover.
WotCucks trying to rewrite history again. The archives still exist and prove you wrong.
Projecting much WOTCucklet? Not only to the archives prove you wrong, but even on other sites, even bloody fricking tumblr has entire walls of text with people doing WOTCs job trying to fix the base monster math of 4e proving you wrong.
4th edition was fricking sovl
I dont know why people compare it to WoW
A lot of the designs were taken from wow, most notably tieflings, but yeah in terms of gameplay it was nothing like it.
Funny enough, people are calling the new Final Fantasy that was announced DnD5e-lite.
I like it and my friends like it.
Foundry however doesn’t have someone who autistically scripted every single option for character building or a quick and easy monster generator so everything has to be done manually and that is really tiring and leads to burnout before play begins.
It has essentials at least, but what if someone wants to play Monk.
>Foundry however doesn’t have someone who autistically scripted every single option for character building or a quick and easy monster generator so everything has to be done manually and that is really tiring and leads to burnout before play begins.
the fact you need a computer to make it even vaguely approach playable tells you everything about it as a pen and paper game
The modules are constantly being updated, with save and DoT effects being automated literally weeks ago.
Also, do you really need a monster generator when there are hundreds of premades in the compendium you can just rename and adjust the numbers?
>a system that was originally designed to be played with a VTT is better with a VTT
Gee, who could've guessed.
It doesn't hold up well primarily because combat had a glacial pace. They gave characters far too many powers. 5 should have been the absolute maximum.
Who the frick even really cares?
>how does it hold up?
Bad, but better then the rest
>Was it unfairly maligned?
Yes. Spell Slots are awful and Will/Enc./Daily is significantly better unless you unironically play Tabletop like a tournament.
Making Abilities and Spells not get in the way way of RP with flavor baked into their rules was also a good change.
>Making Abilities and Spells not get in the way way of RP with flavor baked into their rules was also a good change
I wish I could murder you.
Making a spell exclusively function on the assumption that it's a specific substance or environment sucks for RP.
You don't need to have spikes spell be explicitly stated to be made of thorns and add on a burning mechanic, just give the rules for the spikes spell and let people flavor it as they please (barbed wire, hardend earth, ect.). And then allow the DM to extrapolate any extra considerations from there.
Shit like Kelpstrand where it has baked in bonuses that restrict how it can be flavored is superfluous, unless you have a creatively bankrupt DM and group who never uses a system beyond its modules.
Also, separating Combat and out of combat actions and spells was a good idea.
>Making Abilities and Spells not get in the way way of RP with flavor baked into their rules
But they don't really support it either.
If that is your line of reasoning, you could simply RP over boardgames. (Exaggeration.)
>But they don't really support it either.
They supported it in the sense of being given a balanced foundations to powers. But maybe some suggestions and rulings to help make reflavors with mechanical benefits a bit easier.
Like if you had a spikes spell that you flavored as being thorns, there could be a bit of guidance in figuring out how you might roll with them being flammable vs being conductive if you had instead made them metal.
But really, out of all the editions 4e does the best in being the "Use for whatever purposes you need" system WOTC keeps pretending DnD is. You just have to treat it as a rules lite one.
>you could simply RP over boardgames
Unironically what's the problem with that?
There is no problem besides the Black person you're talking to being moronic. We always have a light roleplay and trash talk mix going on when playing something like Diplomacy or Axis and Allies.
It was bad. Only contrarians say otherwise.
Still shit, like all things WotC and this thread on repeat
This game has a thousand apologists, mostly people who enjoy miniatures and war games, which is telling.
The Daily/Encounter based powers and abilities were way too fricking video-gamey/MMORPG-y for everyone's taste and it failed so spectacularly, that they literally went back to ground zero to make the blandest RPG ever - 5E.
If you like it, that's fine, but don't lie and try to pretend that it's one of the better editions of D&D.
People also say that it "fixed" martials, but it didn't fix anything, and it gave casters infinitely more power by giving them all per-encounter magical abilities. Penetrating Shard single-handedly invalidates every single fricking ranged build.
Are you sincerely arguing the caster-martial gap is bigger in 4e than in 3e or 5e? That seems extremely disingenuous.
Well, in 4E, all casters automatically recieve at-will magical spells that never run out and have no ammunition counter.
In 3.5 casters don't have that.
So yea, I'm thinking 4E is really fricking stupid-broken in terms of martial-caster disparity.
>In 3.5 casters don't have that.
Complete Mage reserve feats.
>Well, in 4E, all casters automatically receive at-will magical spells that never run out and have no ammunition counter.
Just because casters don't have to suddenly become a corner dart thrower halfway through every battle doesn't mean they're suddenly busted. No one thinks the existence of cantrips means that Martials are at a massive disadvantage.
The main thing that made Casters an issue was being having a spell to invalidate anything in and out of combat. Something that separating skills between those two, and making abilities free-flavorable functions helped solve. Martials have just as much freeform tools as casters, the gap is shrunk.
Sleep is still in 4e and shits all over encounters and it's a level 1 spell.
It's also a daily that requires a save before the creatures caught in the burst fall unconscious, otherwise they are just slowed (and it's a simple save and can target only like 4 creatures max). Sleep, meanwhile, in 5e requires the caster to make a roll to determine the number of hitpoints worth of creatures the spell can affect, then requires the creatures caught in the spell (starting lowest HP to highest) to make saves to see if they fall unconscious and becomes effectively useless against most enemies at higher levels. At least 4e's version is usable all the way up to 30.
So 4e casters are stronger than 5e casters, got it.
More like they are on similar level. Here's the rub though - 4e wizard can cast it once, 5e wizard can cast it multiple times.
4e wizard kicks the shit out of martials in fights and non fights.
[citation needed]
No they don’t lol. Martials are the strongest in every role outside controller.
5e sleep doesnt use saves, its just automatic
It’s a decent daily that doesn’t become useless past level 1.
>The Daily/Encounter based powers and abilities were way too fricking video-gamey/MMORPG-y for everyone's taste
I hear this constantly, and yet I never see it explained. What was genuinely wrong with At-Will/Encounter/Daily? Is it literally just parallels, or did it actually lead to any Roleplay or Rollplay issues?
I think that anon meant how powers work, i.e. how you apply damage and moonwalk some squares type of stuff. There is no problem with A/E/D for an experienced gamer, WoD had those since 90's but E powers were once per scene. But there were needed something to alleviate at least 3.5 caster player's culture shock for this.
I think it's a stupid argument, but as far as I've bothered to listen to the people regurgitating it...
>Martials having the same At-Will/Encounter/Daily division of powers as spellcasters supposedly "breaks vermisilitude".
>The Powers encourage Rollplay over Roleplay by not having explicit "nonstandard" uses inherently written into each individual power's description, such as the old Grease + Burning Hands = Makeshift Fireball combo. Nevermind that the PHB and DMG both say "if players want to use attack powers in unconventional ways, go ahead and let them".
>Powers supposedly "have less flavor text" since the mechanics and the flavor text are clearly defined into of jammed into one paragraph.
>Martial powers not relying on DM fiat "is unrealistic". This often segueways into:
>Martial powers have awful flavor text, ignoring that the game encourages you to customize the flavor text to your character and the situation.
>Most save or die/suck spells were debuffed. Charm Person went from being able to potentially permanently control an npc like in 2e to lasting just a couple of rounds.
>Pretty much every "solve a problem instantly" spell was reworked as a ritual, which means it takes minutes to hours of time and requires money + a skill check to pull off instead of just "cast a spell; done".
Actually, a 4e wizard can cast any Daily spell of their choice as many times as they have Daily slots. That maxes out at 3-5 times per extended rest, admittedly, but still, they can cast multiple Sleep spells per day if they're high enough level.
it's a moron argument, other tabletop systems had already done similar combat systems to 4e but because grogs were obsessed with vancian magic they seethed at this objective good change and cried that it was "mmoish" even though it doesn't even approach how wow functions in any capacity
>People also say that it "fixed" martials, but it didn't fix anything, and it gave casters infinitely more power by giving them all per-encounter magical abilities. Penetrating Shard single-handedly invalidates every single fricking ranged build.
What the hell are you talking about, Jesse.
What the frick is Penetrating Shard.
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Penetrating_Shard_(4e_Power)
This is homebrew, you dolt. And it isn't even a strong wizard at-will. Literally just mediocre damage and nothing else.
It’s more embarrassing to know it’s homebrew than to think it’s official.
>Google search "4e penetrating shard"
Come on bro. There's no way anyone could tell this isn't official just by looking. Clearly you're an autistic 4rrie who memorized every fricking Wizard power.
I can tell it's unofficial from the site it's on, moron.
moron
>5etards think this is qvality falseflagging
shiggy
see
just fricking lulz
, you really are a moron
Illiterate
Oh no, you're moronic.
Yes and yes. Need anything else cleared up?
These were all debunked in the last 4e thread we had here a few days ago, please follow along.
Nobody "debunked" anything you stupid fricking Black person. All you did was say shit like "wwwwell Helms Deep doesn't exist in 4e!!" And various evasive mealy mouthed tactics like that. Then declared victory, as your game is perfect within the context of the criteria that you perfect wrapped around its grotesque form like cling wrap.
have a nice day. AEDU is dumb cringy dogshit, the per day martial crap is stupid, was in 3.5 and is in 4e. Only 5e came close to doing it right.
Nah, Tome of Battle with it slowly recharging by die roll or x turns as the person is able to refocus, readapt to what changed with the enemy (and for crusader draw upon more of their faith and zeal) was solid.
It was a last ditch test trying to string things for the new crew taking over for 4e to have a solid baseline from 3e base, but monster side mechanics that took the tactics book to splat on things beyond the few dragons and undead that had it originally to then in ToB be given to players as a martial thing, but very good and done, in essence, right.
On 1. You're so close to getting it. What you deride as "power wankery" is meant to be a tool for DMs. The only, I repeat O N L Y, circumstance in which a DM should use minions is when they W A N T cannon fodder. Your players are in a chase and you want roadblocks but not actual fights in between? Minions. Your precious donut steel BBEG wants to throw wave after wave of his own men at team hero to fill their kill limit? Minions. You want to make your players feel awesome just to tear them down in the next room? Minions.
It's a pacing tool.
On 4. Are you a bot or how come you don't have any real world experience at all? Ever been to a boxing match or martial arts tournament? Ever seen someone fight in mail? Ever watched a game of handegg or baseball? None of these are life or death situatios either. I swear to god even in fricking movies there are scenes which are just there to dial the action down. There's literally no movie that's just action scene after action scene without break for 90 minutes.
This might surprise someone as stupid and contrarian as you but you are allowed to flavor the short rest however you like. My group was perfectly fine with just regaining their Encounter powers after every fight unless the DM said no/not here. There is no problem with short rests unless you specifically create one to stir up shit on an anonymous image board.
Minions shouldn't exist. Those are just lower level creatures.
PF2 does this right.
>Minions shouldn't exist. Those are just lower level creatures.
Such a well-put, thoughtful rebuttal. Why are fricking threeaboos always the most limp-wristed basedboys?
>Those are just lower level creatures
So they're completely non-threatening because they do zero damage? What a thrilling gameplay exercise, wasting my irl time rolling against nothing.
>So they're completely non-threatening because they do zero damage?
Within certain intervals it's false in 3e and it's false in BECMI and AD&D 2e. And you don't need to stretch those intervals forever.
Cannot speak for PF 2e tho.
It's not false in any of those you moron. AC exists and it isn't kept pathetically low like 5E.
Nope, monsters can still threaten a several CR above you in numbers. After a while they don't, yes, and they shouldn't.
None is defending 5e, I just find 4e WAY worse.
Maybe stop having PCs who are built or equipped like shit?
>The only, I repeat O N L Y, circumstance in which a DM should use minions is when they W A N T cannon fodder.
Okay so does that happen at helms deep or not? Do they have 1 hit point while fighting each other? Or is it like shrodingers hit points where they have that many for the PCs but when an NPC hits them suddenly we're tracking hp?
Dumb mechanic either way which was solved in 3.5 with damage scaling and solved in 5e with bounded accuracy. Orcs literally function as minions in 5e since the orc dies in one hit but can still hit and damage high level PCs. Didn't need a stupid mechanic that looks like a stat block typo.
>Okay so does that happen at helms deep or not?
Why do you insist on using the wrong battle? Are you that much of a nogaems or are you arguing in bad faith?
Helm's Deep is governed by mass combat rules and has nothing to do with minions.
Minions are for mines of Moria scenarios, you dingus. The heroes and only the heroes fight against a horde of monsters.
There is actually another option for cannon fodder that 4e experimented with from time to time: humanoid swarms.
Sure, you could represent those orc grunts as minions:
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Orc-Savage.html
Or, they could be placed on the field as a humanoid swarm:
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Bloodspear-Savage-Throng.html
>All you did was say shit like "wwwwell Helms Deep doesn't exist in 4e!!"
I remember once telling a 4rrie that a simple duel between PCs cannot be done in 4e due to the way many powers interact with player agency.
The answer was that.. this not SUPPOSED to happen.
They hamstrung player agency making fantasy tropes impossible then are surprised by why people rejected the game.
Prove yourself or STFU moron
That doesn't need evidence.
Was the moronic 4rrie you, anon?
PCs and NPCs do not work on the same mathematical basis.
You want pvp in a team based game, and are using attack rolls instead of skill checks to do it.
You never played 4e.
>You never played 4e.
Shut the frick up nigge. I literally played 4e for 2 years and there were two PC vs PC fights to the death for good story reasons. It wasn't bad for pvp but your idea of "this system is good because it only works for very narrow powerwank bullshit game structure set up by autistic devs" is fricking moronic. have a nice day. DnD BX blows the frick out of your shitty system.
>The answer was that.. this not SUPPOSED to happen
Well, yeah, it's a cooperative game, it is designed to be played as a group. This is like complaining about a lack of friendly fire in an FPS, why would it be there?
And why couldn't you run PvP in 4e? It wouldn't work great 1v1 especially if they're different roles but it could be done
>the way many powers interact with player agency.
What the frick does that mean and how would it affect PvP?
Jesus, i'm not even a 4e gay and even i, without any inherent rulesystem knowledge, can dismantle each of those points (aside from point 3 which i can only pull a reasoning out of my ass):
1. Doesn't make any fricking sense: do you want mook rules or not? do you think they're bad or not?
2. Powers are action sequence snippets: you pick WHAT happens, then you explain HOW and WHY based on the power description. You may dislike it but the format isn't dissimilar from a narrative focused game and from other abstract d&d asspulls (eg: hit points).
3. I'm assuming it's for adding granularity. To be fair a better criticism on the skill mechanics is to be aimed towards skill challenges: in 4e the gm describes a scenario AND the skill to roll for passing through instead of presenting a scenario and asking the players what they want to do (although if i'm not wrong this was corrected later on).
4. To compliment the fatigue abstraction of per encounter powers and similar stuff. I personally don't like it but i don't like equally other d&d abstraction as well.
5. The only fair criticism. I guess it's because 4e is more aimed at skirmish that other editions. Having more utility powers for each class wouldn't have been bad in my opinion.
6. It wasn't, the default setting was Nethir Vale.
>You may dislike it but the format isn't dissimilar from a narrative focused game and from other abstract d&d asspulls (eg: hit points).
Hit points aren't an ass pull moron and they are fully explained. A DnD character knows, in universe terms, how many hit points he has left. Those are a representative quantity as opposed to an one-off switch like a daily power. They don't even have magic to explain it. "martial" is not a power source. It is not a supernatural entity. It is a complete standout from the other power sources. It has nothing to do with the conception of fighters in any other DnD edition.
Low hit points fighter: "I'm tired and beaten up and sore and I don't think I could win another fight"
Low maneuver fighter: "I have the energy to fight but I already disarmed someone today so we should rest"
Absolutely moronic.
These are genuinely just slightly different extensions of the narrative from each other. You can just tolerate one but not the other. Which is fine, but doesn’t make the other inherently wrong.
>Hit points aren't an ass pull
Hit points they way D&D handles them fall apart from a stiff breeze. How come a Cure Light Wounds will bring a peasant back from the brink of death, but do almost nothing to a seasoned fighter?
>do you want mook rules or not? do you think they're bad or not?
You don't need them, because they already inherently exist in the game. You're making a rule that doesn't need tl exist because the natural damage scaling of the game solves it.
Maybe if we're talking about 5E but oneshottable mooks in other editions can't fricking touch PCs. But in 5E, 400 commoners can shoot a dragon to death in 6 seconds.
To be fair, AD&D dragons aren't that hard to kill either. It was mostly 2e-4e that vastly inflated them.
If dragons are killable, it means they're actually more usable in most campaigns.
>3. I'm assuming it's for adding granularity.
Close, but no. The challenge sets the level of the check, not the level of the PC making the check. A level 1 PC can attempt to knock a level 17 door off of it's hinges without finding the key, but it's not likely to happen. The shitty bait in question simply doesn't understand this concept
>An orc warrior has frick-all HP to begin with, a skileld warrior one-shotting them is a regular occurance.
>Same reason you can't make a permanent ring of true strike in 3e without shelling out unimaginable amounts of gold, it's balance and consistency
>Because the "easy" hazards in the lair of the demon king are going to be a lot more trecherous than the "easy" hazards of the lair of the goblin king (self-appointed)
>To account for situations where there will be consecutive battles
>This is less bookkeeping than a level 1 wizard, and working within limited resources are a fundamental part of tactics.
>Steampunk has always been a part of D&D
>>To account for situations where there will be consecutive battles
This is not addressing the point at all.
>Same reason you can't make a permanent ring of true strike in 3e without shelling out unimaginable amounts of gold, it's balance and consistency
>Magic items are the same as mundane fighter powers.
There is nothing "mundane" about a fighter in D&D, Nothing.
No-one cares to answer those questions because anyone asking them is just trolling.
Not an argument.
4e haters are so funny because you got this dumb image that gets debunked every thread (see:
) and now they're randomly bringing up homebrew (see:
) to try and shore up their flimsy arguments. Dude genuinely is pulling out all the stops to win in an internet argument that ultimately boils down to "do you like fluff shit like vancian casting more than you do the fighter having more options than just attack or attack with extra damage and less accuracy"
>4e haters are so funny
You find funny 99% of D&D player and 100% of other RPG players.
Maybe the joke is you.
English, motherfricker. Do you speak it?
>100% of other RPG players.
Only D&Dogshit players actually give a frick about 4e
Hey, no, that's not true. Lancer players do as well, if they know enough to know that the mech rules are just 4e retooled.
1. The average hitpoints of an orc at Helm's Deep is 1. They are mooks.
2. Why can't wizards cast a spell more than once a day? Shouldn't they be able to cast it X times per day based on INT modifier? Asking about a simulation decision without examining the intent of the simulation is disingenuous at best. The stated goals of the simulation are in the core rulebooks of 4e. You'll find the answer right there.
3. Because the d20 remains the shittiest possible arbitration tool in tabletop gaming. Realistically if the game used 3d6 as the core roll there would have been no need to do this. But the intent was to provide scaling difficulty. This looks really dumb with a d20's flat distribution.
4. Yes. Short rests are good, actually. The problem they have (and still have in 5e) is that people grossly misunderstand what they are because most people reading these books have never engaged in strenuous physical exercise in their life. A short rest is when, after a 10 mile ruck, you throw your rucksack off and go lay in the grass for five minutes recovering. Or do the same thing after a 5k run. It's not even so much a choice as an autonomic response to ending a period of high exertion.
5. Vancian magic?
6. The default setting for 4e was actually no setting at all, but the explanation of how a Points of Light campaign can be played successfully with the example provided of Nentir Vale. Eberron became widely played because it was hugely popular...it remains very popular despite the "default" setting of 5e being Forgotten Realms.
The problem I have with short rests in 5E is that almost every short rest ability is pitiful and boring and that it's an hour long.
>that it's an hour long
It's so dumb that they changed that
It's already bad enough they include all these superfluous time keeping element (each turn is somehow 3 seconds), but hard line making what a "short rest" boxed into a definite range is dumb.
5e's short rests are indeed terrible. Back to the origin problem: the people writing 5e had never engaged in rigorous physical exertion, no idea what it was supposed to simulate. Result: nonsense.
Short rests definitely need to be improved in the actual releases, but in your home game just make them better.
> A short rest is when, after a 10 mile ruck, you throw your rucksack off and go lay in the grass for five minutes recovering. Or do the same thing after a 5k run. It's not even so much a choice as an autonomic response to ending a period of high exertion.
After a 5k you're supposed to spend a mimum ten minutes cooldown light jog and then twenty sitting.
And the average 5k runner can't teleport or shoot fire so what's your point?
>After a 5k you're supposed to spend a mimum ten minutes cooldown light jog and then twenty sitting.
Ah, "ancient wisdom." Do you also carb load like a fricking moron?
That's optimal for fitness, but not a physical requirement. You won't be up to your top after a 5 minute breather, but you'll be good enough to keep going until the next break.
Even when it comes to wizards, it's pretty easy to think of short rests in terms of the Pomodoro Method.
Beats 5th edition by a milestone. I felt 5e was worse from the start, and the deeper it went into 5.5 and then into D&D ONE, the happier I was that Id made the decision to go back to it.
>what being anally aborted and likely love for PF2e beyond 4e does to a tard
One thing I really like about 4e is the ability to challenge tactically savvy players with enemy group synergies.
For example, let us consider an encounter against a group of xivort darters (level 1 artilleries) who have tamed a bunch of thornskin frogs (level 1 brutes) and wolf packmates (level 1 minion skirmishers).
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Xivort-Darter.html
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Thornskin-Frog.html
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Wolf-Packmate.html
The xivort darters can daze PCs, which is annoying enough. However, the thornskin frogs can move in to deal heavy damage and knock PCs prone. Standing from prone takes a move action, and a dazed creature can take only one action on their turn, so a dazed PC who wants to use a standard action will have to settle for staying prone. Unfortunately, the wolf packmates can then move in to deal extra damage to the prone PCs. Simple but nasty enemy synergize.
How about a positioning challenge for PCs of a slightly higher level? Let us say a couple of centurions of the Iron Circle (level 6 soldiers) have rounded up several dwarf warriors (level 1 minion artilleries) and a couple of extremist wilden ancients (level 4 artilleries [leader]) to stir up trouble.
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Iron-Circle-Centurion.html
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Dwarf-Warrior.html
http://funin.space/compendium/monster/Wilden-Ancient.html
The Iron Circle centurions are highly accurate against PCs with no other adjacent PCs... but if the PCs cluster up, then they might just be smacked by nasty area attacks from the wilden ancients, who can also buff the centurions. Worse, the dwarf warriors are many in number, and any PC not in cover is liable to be pincushioned by the extra damage from the crossbow attacks.
I like how 4e is a 30-level game, yet even lower-level encounters can have a surprising amount of tactical depth just with some good enemy selection, to say nothing of terrain.
People don’t want tactical depth, they want to spend hours designing a character to have Big Numbers or to cast a single swift action spell and end an encounter.
Tactics are not exclusive of 4e. In fact, 4e curtails a lot of tactics due to its reductive nature.
>Big Numbers
This is a nice strawman, but the reality is that in 3e you can do both. Hell, the strategies considered the most powerful don't even involve le big number, but flexibility.
>In fact, 4e curtails a lot of tactics due to its reductive nature.
How?
Underrated. 4e is extremely fun for exactly one specific type of game: combat heavy dungeon crawls and the like. It’s for if you want to fight dangerous monsters, or do interesting character builds. Part of why people got so ass-mad is not all DnD is like that, and people didn’t like feeling like they were being excluded.
The people who said 4e would’ve been better received as “DND tactics” are completely right, because this game honed in so far on the combat and tactics part of the game to the exclusion of everything else. People who don’t dungeon crawl but instead do theater kid stuff will naturally hate that, and I don’t really blame them for it even if they should really be playing an actual narrative game. You CAN play narrative in DND, but you really shouldn’t because the game isn’t built for it, and 4e just made that fact way too explicit.
idk, I've seen it function well enough in rather combat lite campaigns. What exactly in the rules makes it hard to go narrative for most?
I mean it's more like the lack of rules that makes it hard compared to games actually built for that. I mean, you can play with whatever ruleset you want and narrative games will mostly work because narrative games are mostly imaginary. They run off the back of how good the players and DM are at improv and acting. You don't really need many rules in the first place so a lack of rules won't stop you, but at the same time the game isn't built for it so you won't get any support from the game either.
Compare 4e to like a PBTA game or something. In 4e, outside of rituals and utilities you don't have many out-of-combat tools. You can use your A/E/D to do out-of-combat stuff, but lots of them don't really do anything special your character couldn't already do (how you gonna use cleave out of combat?). Compare this to a PBTA game where they have moves and stuff. Now you can do all sorts of wacky things, and the DM knows how to adjudicate all your special abilities. Like if you're a specifically sexy character in DnD, the DM might not know how to run that. "I guess take a +2 to negotiating with this storeowner?". But in a PBTA game, you might get the "sexy" trait or something, and that rule will list out what kind of situations you can use that in and what bonus it should give you. Makes it much easier to make your sexy character actually feel sexy.
So what I mean is that if you're good at acting and improv, you can make any system work, but if you're just okay at it then playing an actual narrative game will heighten the experience.
So older editions of D&D were bad because roleplay didn't have rules?
Rather, this is what happens when you are a player who expects to have the rules tell you what to do, rather than working with the GM.
The real legacy, tragedy, of 3.x, is that it taught an entire generation of players to not cooperate with the GM, but to combat him.
It's a shame, but that is where a lot of the problems people on this board stem from, if they even actually play the games they talk about.
>many people had issues with powers because of their immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path
just you buddy, just you ...
shit, meant
What? No. They're just clearly not geared toward narrative. Again, if you're good at narrative games then you can make any system work. I just think that a lot of the time narrative players are better off playing, you know, actual narrative games.
Yeah I can see that, but I think that kind of rules specificity isn't really in the spirit of narrative games in the first place. And people can definitely get too tunnel-visioned, but I at least find the added structure more helpful than not. Worst case scenario if you feel like things are becoming too suffocated then you can just fall back to what you have to do for all out-of-combat in DnD, and play pretend for everything.
>Yeah I can see that, but I think that kind of rules specificity isn't really in the spirit of narrative games in the first place. And people can definitely get too tunnel-visioned, but I at least find the added structure more helpful than not. Worst case scenario if you feel like things are becoming too suffocated then you can just fall back to what you have to do for all out-of-combat in DnD, and play pretend for everything.
Yeah that's a valid point, in the end players and DM should work together to get the most of the experience.
Problem is, you will alway find some loophole or situation when it make sense when the trait should apply but RAW you cannot use it.
Having rule for this kind of stuff is nice but also tunnel vision and in a way restrict the player.
In your exemple, sure it's nice to have a rule about my character being sexy, but it become a mechanic of the game, not a real thing for the character in universe. The DM decide when you are sexy because it's a mechanic of the game, not because i act my character sexy.
This artwork was obviously made by a foot fetishist.
DnD gays will whine about Wizards being overpowered to no end until they are forced to fight more than two encounters without the ability to rest.
It was fairly maligned, the schizo ramblings and invalid criticism that the game also got doesn't invalidate this fact.
Math was horrible at mid-high levels.
Sameyness and computer game focused designed hurt it.
WoW artstyle was (rightfully) very poorly received.
It was simple and had a lot of great ideas off
>WoW artstyle
What? Where? And 4e art is miles above the trash "art" in 5
This "is like MMO comparison" has never made sense. Only an MMO has character archetypes? Is every Final Fantasy an MMO? All classes being viable and useful=MMO?
Show me where Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Sun Tzu fall into tank/healer/DPS/CC like in 4e?
Sun Tzu is an author/philosopher. Are you trying to reference one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms characters or do you think an author/philosopher would make a good RPG character?
How would fall into any RPG class? Characters in stories aren't written as RPG characters
>do you think an author/philosopher would make a good RPG character?
Yes, bards is still a class for a reason.
>Show me where Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Sun Tzu fall into tank/healer/DPS/CC like in 4e?
Uhh
Odysseus is, per Homer's original tellings, perhaps the greatest DPS hero in the history of Greece (although this is debatable). I would argue Odysseus is one of the handful of Warrior archetypes from mythical history not driven by his own rage which makes him an outlier, but he still works as a hybrid ranged/melee DPS hero.
Cú Chulainn is a hybrid tank/DPS and maps pretty directly to WoW Warriors down to be empowered by his own fury.
Sun Tzu is not a warrior, he was a general and philosopher. He does not fit in any iteration of D&D except, ironically, 4e where he would be a Warleader.
>What? Where?
High Elves are wow High/Blood elves and Tieflings were specifically redesigned to look like red Draenei, you disingenuous c**t.
"Martial characters are boring! I hate being stuck as a healing-b***h cleric! The game is only is fun/balanced between levels 3 and 9!"
"Okay, let's fix all those issues."
"No wait, not like that. Reeee!"
Gamers are recalcitrant little piggies who don't know what they want and they deserved 5E.
I want to be literally Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Sun Tzu, not a WoW character.
A post so true it hurts. 4e fixes each and every complaint commonly leveled against 3.5.
Players don't like it when you fix things. Players like to complain.
>"Martial characters are boring! I hate being stuck as a healing-b***h cleric! The game is only is fun/balanced between levels 3 and 9!"
You assume that just attempting to fix is automatically good. Is not.
People wanted more class features and feats scaling without useless chains, more skill points. Bit a rewrite.
How this is a concept so difficult to grasp is beyond me.
No, that's what you wanted.
Not only me since 4e failed and PF (which didn't do enough, but was closer to that) thrived.
Another strawman, how cute.
The power removes agency especially if used on another PC. It's also difficult to explain for creatures like a beholder.
>PCs and NPCs do not work on the same mathematical basis.
>You want pvp in a team based game
Pvp can happen if a player is mind controlled. If 4e cannot do mind control, is another failure in representing a fantasy trope.
See bloody path
It became a trope of bad 4e design.
>It became a trope of bad 4e design.
More like its one of the only powers you actually know the name of.
More cope.
How new can you get?
>The power removes agency especially if used on another PC. It's also difficult to explain for creatures like a beholder.
I'll quote myself to answer both points: "You could read it as either they give too much follow through because of your blinding burst of speed or that while you run past you twist their arm all "stop hitting yourself"." Used in PvP you could read it either way, a Beholder you could read it as it bites it's a cheek or cracks a tooth. Fun thing about imagination games that.
Fun is bad
Problem solved: You have 6 levels of stuff, triple the XP requirement and you get your things fixed.
Brancalonia does exactly this. Th level cap is 6. Shame its still using 5e as its system.
i for sure rip off a few lore bits and a bunch of items cause there is some goodies in there. that being said i wasnt wild on the system cause the "powers" thing felt to much like a videogame
I think it was for the most part unfairly maligned. I think it does the tactical board game better than 3.5. It was more clearly and concisely written than most D&D, even outside of the powers. It has the best DMG because it actually talks about how to run a session, not just encounter and plot design. Where it lets players down is outside of combat. I don't think skill challenges quite felt right across the multiple tweaks to those rules. While in general, 4e tries to get out of your way outside of those skirmish arenas - that often isn't satisfying for people who want to focus on the "fantasy world simulator" aspects that were increasingly emphasized from AD&D to 3.5e.The early combat math also led to to some sloggy fights.
5e did itself a disservice by not Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ving the first 2-3 chapters of the 4e DMG into the 5e DMG. Those chapters would novice DMs so much more than several chapters of the shit in that book. Also, it's significantly less homosexual than 5e, since it went OOP in 2014 - just before American nerdom went full gay moron.
It's funny that it would actually have been better received if it was less clearly and concisely written.
Nta, but yeah. Many criticisms of 4e really boil down to "new thing bad".
I have a kind of sympathy for the grognards that spout this nonsense though. At a certain age "new thing bad" just becomes your modus operandi.
4e is good for the classic D&D dungeon crawl, random encounter, problem solvin' and wilderness explorin' gameplay. It's rather lacking in noncombat utilities, though.
I feel like stealing a page from later games and having a dedicated "non-combat" thing progression, like PF2 skill feats or Spheres of X Utility Talents, would nicely round out the system.
At least half of the criticism comes from people who never played it, given the many outright incorrect rules claims, nor played its predecessor, given that 3.x casters were all about pushing their specific power buttons and most martial classes had per-day abilities in that.
Even when I played a lot of 4e I felt the same way. Non-combat stuff just felt barren. Rituals and utilities were super cool but lots of them were still very combat oriented. I don't think you'd have to add a lot to fix that though. Simply having more utilities per character would go a long way.
I haven't played 4e, but I'm currently playing PF2e. Skill feats are awful and I doubt any other edition could be made better by copying the idea. You have one or two feats that completely tower above every other choice you could take, and once you've picked them skill feats become a chore to choose from because they're all so situational you might go an entire campaign without ever using them. A lot of them also don't feel like they should be tied to a feat, there's a lot of stuff that you should just be able to do through skills naturally.
Skill feats are bad in execution, not in concept. Paizo gutted most skills in PF2 to sell them back to you as feats like some kind of AAA game DLC banditry. Paizo also cannot help themselves, they love their feat taxes, PF2 is full of them, and they use skill feats as an avenue to do so.
A general progression dedicated to "you can do utility thing X" it not, in itself, a bad idea.
t. running PF2 for a while now
>given that 3.x casters were all about pushing their specific power buttons
Nope, moron-kun. The way magic worked was explainable in-universe, moron-kun.
3.e martial daily shit was at least implied to be based on some sort of stamina, moron-kun, like the constituion based Barbarian rage, moron-kun.
Also, moron-kun, many people had issues with powers because of their immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path, moron-kun. That has nothing to do with AEDU but with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG.
>with the design time forgetting their are writing an RPG.
>if you aren't creating a 1 to 1 model of the real world, it's wrong
>abstraction doesnt exist, only autism
>immersion breaking mechanics - stuff like Bloody Path,
>15th level daily
>You move up to your speed. Any enemy that can make an opportunity attack against you as a result of this move must do so, but it makes the opportunity attack against itself instead of against you
I don't know what is "immersion breaking" about this. You could read it as either they give too much follow through because of your blinding burst of speed or that while you run past you twist their arm all "stop hitting yourself". Either way it's a neat thing for a rogue to do at 15th level
>moron-kun
you live in Delaware, stop talking like this
>crying about Bloody Path
Oh it's you again, hello there moron, please continue to entertain us
PF2e is fricking awful, don't steal from it. 4e has Rituals, Skill Challenges, and even Martial Rituals when can easily be expanded upon. Do you need intricate systems for out of combat stuff?
What the frick is a martial ritual?
They're called martial practices and were introduced in martial power 2. Unfortunately they were never expanded on since they were added in one of the last books before essentials.
They are easy to expand upon yourself since they are so simple. "Do a skill check, spend some surges, do a cool thing."
I'm sad I missed 4e, since it seems like the best version of the game for my tastes
There are still people playing it, anon. Hell, I am still playing it.
If you have Foundry, then 4e is the best it's ever been right now. Constantly updating modules, up-to-date databases and compendium, community manuals for every class, a maintained offline character generator, etc.
does anyone have a decent dm screen or cheat sheet for common rules reminders?
I feel like 4e would be better in 15mm
I like 4e's 5 point alignment the most
I also thought it was a good idea. Having struggled through 3e's era of "lol chaotic RANDUMB" BS or the True Neutral "I flip a coin to see how I react" supidity, the 5 alignments of 4e were a breath of fresh air.
9 point was one of AD&Ds biggest mistakes.
I personally would prefer LG-L-N-C-CE for my five points, but on the whole, it feels closer to cosmic allegiance than a personality quiz.
I prefer Lawful and Chaotic being at the "ends" myself, but you do you, anon.
I think Law-Chaos is a more interesting axis of conflict with benevolent order as the best order and malicious chaos as the worst chaos
Well organized, excellent character synergy, mediocre roleplaying support. For real, all combat and nothing else
for everyone saying 4e has no roleplaying support... what exactly in 5e, or 3.5, or even fricking ad&d actually was "roleplaying support" ??
Something something skill points, something something wizards something something martials suck...
The more I read 4e, the more I like it. Combat actually looks fun. What's the catch?
Nothing really? The book keeping isn't any more egregious than older editions. It's probably the easiest edition to DM for so long as you remember to keep major battles to set pieces and run smaller skirmishes as either Skill Challenges or roleplay potential with an occasional attack roll here and there. If there's anything mechanically that needs a touch up, PCs should get a free expertise feat at 1st level, and use the Melee Training feat before it was nerfed. Beyond that, you should be good to go as long as your party can pay attention even when it isn't their turn.
It's different from every other edition, so people who only know D&D and D&D-clones have a hard time adjusting to a different sort of book keeping. 13th Age is probably the best halfway point between 3.5e/5e design and 4e if you don't want to immediately jump into the deep end.
Sorry I like playing a caster and not being the fighter's b***h-slave.
>Was it unfairly maligned?
99% of criticisms around encounter and daily powers stems from a misunderstanding, you need to complete a short rest to get access to encounter powers once again making them functionally equivalent to the many 5th edition abilities that only recharge on a short rest (including the entire warlock class) and Pathfinder 2e focus points work exactly the same, these two games combined are like 90% of tabletop market share so I think it's a bit silly for people to act like 4e was doing such unforgivable design.
Points of Light and the Nentir Vale is a vastly superior setting to adventure in compared to the forgotten realms and dodges most of the pitfalls and plot holes these settings full of epic NPC and author donut steels have and you don't need to be a fricking capeshit writer constantly coming up with "Superman in Space" justifications for why X/Y/Z don't simply spend a few minutes solving every single problem and leaving the player characters out of a job.
The murder -suicide of the VTT killed the edition in its cradle though along with the fact it was still a little too early for the idea of online play to be normalized and mainstream
thats alotta word salad to say that vtt integration is shit
It wasn't shit in 2008 it was non-existent because the one guy who knew what the code did killed his wife and then himself (and 2008 was really just a different time, using online tools for /tg/ shit simply wasn't as mainstream as it is now)
>zoomers cant into mircroller & muxs
I thought no one cared for Pathfinder 2e
I personally enjoy it but it doesn't compare to my enjoyment from 4e.
It's 4e but worse. People play it for name alone. Some morons cannot be pulled out of the d20 system, and cling to anything that uses it.
Everyone here has their opinions on it but i just want to say when i first moved out and 5e was hitting the shelves these tanked in price so fricking hard My friends and I got one over every book in the collection say 1 or 2 for a grand total of 100$ and we played that shit up until last year.
Imagine if a game had game mechanics instead of nebulously saying anything is possible and the DM just has to wing it.
i think the average player doesn't actually realize how little was written in terms of concrete mechanics for noncombat situations or even improv moves in combat in their preferred editions
Yes, everyone with any comment worth anything did play 3e. This thread is about the shitted up edition.
Since this is the closest thing to a 4e general thread on the board at this moment... I really like the idea of Dread Genasi from Ravenloft 3e, and I want to convert Dread Elemental Manifestations to 4e. Anyone got any ideas how I might start?
For what it's worth, here's what they looked like in 3e:
https://1dGanker/wiki/Genasi/Homebrew#Dread_Genasi
Genasi are already available in a number of edgy flavors, including causticsoul, cindersoul, plaguesoul, and voidsoul.
http://funin.space/compendium/race/Genasi.html
I know, but that's not the same.
People who've never played it will continue to hate it irrationally. People who've played it will have specific reasons to like/dislike it.
It is objectively the best tabletop game ever entitled D&D, a truth which makes wizard mains rage.
The end.
best combat of any edition by far, but combat is all it really has
if it was marketed as its own thing instead of as d&d 4e it would probably be remembered more fondly
What non-combat rules do other editions have that 4e doesn't have?
The best answer they usually give is "skills" (or 'nonweapon proficiencies' in a rare case), plus most of the Enchantment and Illusion school spells.
Let's start with proper character abilities that don't stick to a single artificial and arbitrary formula but rather do what they're supposed to do, translate a real-world idea or concept into a game rule in a way that lets you extrapolate other real-world concepts into the game.
>best combat of any edition by far
The combat wasn't even good. It was overly abstract and disconnected from the game's reality just like everything else in 4E, plus on top of it it took way too long to resolve. A normal fight against some goblins should be over in 3 minutes but in 4E it took 40-45. Anything with some elites or bosses would take hours because of ludicours HP bloat.
If a fight is only going to last 3 minutes then you shouldn't even have it. Just do a skill check and move on.
Why bother fighting goblins if its going to take 3 minutes? Barely worth the effort of throwing dice. it will add nothing to a session.
4e combat it too long, but its better than any other version of D&D. All of them are pretty fricking awful.
>against some goblins should be over in 3 minutes but in 4E it took 40-45
Just make them minions or a skill challenge if they're not meant to take any time at all.
>Anything with some elites or bosses would take hours because of ludicours HP bloat.
The math was initially fricked, but that was errata'd years ago. Just use stuff from MM3.
If I want to try a crunchier, older edition of D&D, what are the pros/cons of 4e vs 3.PF?
4e Pros:
>No dealing with Level Adjustment for exotic races.
>Standardized race design methodolgy means there are no inherently "weak" races.
>Roles & AEDU system means no ivory tower design; apart from Essentials classes, no class requires careful optimization to just be functional.
>Very open to reflavoring; the Barbarian class makes a great chanbara movie-style Samurai in execution, for example.
>Can easily pull off a Low Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery game because "Martial Classes + Ritual Magic only" is perfectly functional right out the box.
>No more save or die/suck compared to 3.pf.
>Don't have to worry about being made obsolete if you pick a martial and somebody picks a spellcaster.
3.pf Pros:
>Massively larger pool of content, even sticking to just WotC 3.5 and PF1.
>Way more "default" races and classes.
>Archetypes system of Pathfinder gives more explicit "flavor niche"
>Variable class design means you can take a simple class like the fighter and just "tune out" during combat.
>>Can easily pull off a Low Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery game because "Martial Classes + Ritual Magic only" is perfectly functional right out the box.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAH
Y not?
There is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing in 4e that is even remotely low-fantasy.
For that, play older editions MAYBE.
>There is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing in 4e that is even remotely low-fantasy.
Are you the guy seething about Bloody Path? You realize the whole point of "function over fluff" design in 4e is so that the player/DM can fluff abilities to their own preference? It doesn't take much to refluff most abilities to fit a low-fantasy tone.
>pick out fantasy system to play fantasy game
>doesn't even function as a fantasy game unless I just rewrite every single bit of information in the book to be more palatable to the aesthetic I want
Nice system nerd.
>rewrite
Just do it on the fly? Literally every system with template powers like this has the players/GM decide how they want to fluff shit uniquely to each PC/NPC and it works just fine.
Sure, I wouldn't actually recommend 4e if you want robust support for a low-fantasy game, but that doesn't mean it's not easily adjusted for that purpose.
So 4e appeals to people who like overly reductionist bullshit. Soulless.
>Can easily pull off a Low Fantasy
>No more save or die/suck
uh-oh
>Variable class design means you can take a simple class like the fighter and just "tune out" during combat.
That's literally why those boring ass Essentials classes exist. Martials can move, basic attack, pass turn just like god intended.
Seriously do we have this thread every other week? I know TG is starving for decent threads but this is basically junk food man. Sure it get's people taking but it's forgettable, just another "4e, thoughts?" thread.
They don't have enough traffic for a general and you have to bait to get anything done these days. Let 'em have their fun.
if you dont like it make a better thread then dumbass
Still shit, just less shit than 5e in retrospect
As it turned out, the median D&D player doesn't actually like thinking about combat.
It doesn't help that the restricted licensing system makes it far harder for it to take on a second life like 3.pf and the OSR.
>how does it hold up?
Most in-depth combat system of any TTRPG I've played. Extremely fun and most systems can't even begin to compare if you're a combat chad.
>unfairly maligned?
The average normalgay is unable to comprehend the depth of even a relatively simple 4e build, so no. However, if you're playing with people who have an IQ above 100, any of 4e's common "problems" are solved in an instant.
What are 4e's common problems? And how to solve them?
>monsters offer zero challenge alone or are way too tanky in groups
Just adjust HP and homebrew monsters.
>eberron or something
Run your own campaign lmao.
>no rp support
Then support it. Rituals do support RP.
>some levels feel unrewarding/weak
Then give more feats or other character options. The game doesn't break when people have another daily power.
>complex combat
This is a benefit. Suffocate alone.
4e has some number issues in the earlier books, but this can be fixed and got better in MM3. More importantly, it forces all players to make decisions every round of combat. This is the system's Achilles' heel. If your players are on point, are good a coming up with strategies on fly and are willing to play with the tools they have like vulnerability or forced movement, this can be very engaging. If on the other hand your players are slow, can't commit to strategies without long deliberations and are just swinging for At-Will damage every round, it will be a slog. Some of the issues are bookkeeping, and things like printing out their powers as cards and having tokens for statuses can help, but a lot of it is just getting the apes to press the buttons. The same also holds for team monster: use a variety of monster roles (always reflavour mobs them when appropriate) and have a gameplan that exploits some synergy or the environment. 4e is by design gamey and lends itself to set-piece encounters. You're playing XCOM, not Skyrim.
Lancer draws a lot inspiration from 4e and makes this explicit: combat encounters are fully separated from regular RP and almost always have victory conditions that aren't kill all the baddies. This is artificial and rightfully deserves to be critiqued, but the lesson still holds: if you have to take out the battlemat, there should be stakes.
The best designed book we will ever see in roleplaying, because having clear and consistent rules that were easy to reference and find pissed idiots off so bad that Pathfinder got made.
This is the biggest L we got. Every fricking d20 game has dogshit layout now. 3.5 might be the worst offender and they keep imitating that just to avoid being compared to 4e.
D&D is d&d for better or worse. And at least we have dark sun
If they'd called it anything but "Dungeons & Dragons" I think people would've maybe liked it but then it would've flopped for being a really weird very video gamey pseudo-MMO tabletop game. All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
It plays nothing like an MMO. This is the weakest critique of the games mechanics.
>All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
I think you're still wrong here but you're less wrong than threeaboos. 99.999 % of which have been saying all classes (including Rogue and Cleric) are basically the same for the last ten years.
I would offer examples of how "I teleport every single round" Swordmages feel different from "dare enter my 10 foot aura of difficult terrain realm" or how "dance my allies" bards are different from "temp HP all day erry day" Artificers, but you probably know...
>All the classes of the same striker/defender/controller/etc. feel super samey since everyone's technically a "caster" now.
Rogue and Warlock function and act completely differently. You end up with two polar opposite gameplay styles, one of which being a focus on multi-target attacks against cursed enemies and the other being (ideally) flanking/invisibility/stealthing up on enemies for combat advantage and then executing them with a sneak attack.
While each class has its powers, none really feel like casters unless you think having anything but a basic attack is the exact same as a spell.
Even pseudo-spellcasters like the psionic classes have a unique feel just because of how psionic augmentation works.
>very video gamey pseudo-MMO tabletop game
Such a stupid thing that keeps getting repeated. Only video games are allowed to have clearly defined archetypes and roles?
People who say that have clearly never played an MMO or 4e
i WILL find an online table to play 4e with
one day.... surely....
There are plenty of people looking to play 4e at all the usual websites, as long as you're willing to DM.
i might run a 4e dark sun campaign soon
Dark Sun works well in 4e. Just enforce no arcane classes and use the enhancement bonus leveling rule so you can make magic items rare and fun.
Its CRB-only sucks. The 'pirated character builder plus funin.space experience' is great.
Gamma World 7e is better in almost every way
>gamma world 7e is better
>not the fantasy homebrew that loops back to 4e
it's in French, but it's worth a look legrumph dot org/Terrier/public/jeux-complets/DD4E
Sounds like it would be awesome if I could read it...
Actually, come to think of it, what were the differences between 4e and Gamma World 7e? I've played both but all I can remember being different was the simplified character creation of Gamma World. Were there any other significant mechanical differences?
People talk about 4e being almost a skirmish wargame. How would it handle something like the nightclub shootout in Collateral, something with crowds of noncombatants, cover and concealment, multiple parties (Tom Cruise, FBI, Cartels, the Korean guy's bodyguards)?
Bodyguards, civilians, and FBI agents are minions. Tom Cruise, the gang boss, and the key agent are not.
Use alternating activations, rolling imitative will bog things down. let all mooks on oneside go on the same activation.
The ideas of 4e did probably result in pathfinder 2e, which is a far more successful iteration of the principles first experimented with in 4e.
PF2e is fricking moronic.
That's what he said
Ranger being a martial and dropping the moronic spellcasting part of the class was kino. Shame Beast Master Ranger was trash. I'd just houserule to let a Ranger have a companion, and he could give a few simple commands with a minor action. No beat Powers or anything
Just take the Fey Beast Tamer theme and refluff it a bit if you don't like any of the animal choices.
>Fey Beast Tamer theme
Is that from essentials? my group never used essentials stuff
Yeah. It was from either the 1st or 2nd essentials book.
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=theme915
And here are the pets.
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate53
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate54
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate55
http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate56
I was once in a group with an Artificer who refluffed this as a little robot that followed them around and it worked pretty alright.
>http://iws.mx/dnd/?view=associate53
Sick. I always liked Ranger in 4e, but could never have my trusty Raven companion because Beast master sucked. I'll need to tweak this to get it to work with a regular Ranger and not use the magic beasts but I dig it.
themes started in dark sun but showed up in basically every publication after that in 4e, they're basically a free second class without having to actually worry about class progression, you just get free stuff from your theme at certain levels
It's always been funny to me that any class is allowed to buy and use extremely useful mounts, but the second you have a class feature centered around animals, they give you total garbage for your options.
>yeah, your bro direwolf gives you combat advantage if you're near a friend
>your riding lizard has a combined attack, your direboar does it's own attack that prones/pushes when you charge
>but you will NOT ever have an interesting beast companion
The only reprieve from this autism is the Vidalis Griffonmaster paragon path, and even then you're waiting until level 11 to get a (relatively) mediocre mount.
In general, they should've expanded on mount feats/items more. Beast Mastery is just the absolute worst of it. Especially sad given how bad ranger is as a class.
The Ranger in4e is quite strong as a striker. Extremely accurate and has multiple attacks per round, which is rare. However, the optimal Ranger build is a bore and has no flavor beyond "I hit often and accurately".
Ranger should have had the animal companion regardless of build imo. And Beast Powers should be a minor action. none of them are particularly good. Or I guess just work with your DM and they'll probably let you just have a mount and treat it as a companion.
The Nentir Vale and Dark Sun were awesome. The former, in particular, was a very *playable* setting; probably the most since Mystara.
If all you care about is tactical combat it's the best in its class
If you want literally anything else then you should play a different game
What do its non-combat mechanics lack that isn't also lacking in 3.x, 5e, even AD&D with NWPs?
this question has been asked like five times in this very thread and every other time this same thread gets posted, and the response, if there's any at all, is something something balanced classes undoes flavor. basically its just 3.5/5e idiots crying because casters cant just snap their fingers and dominate the whole session
3.5 and AD&D gays can at least point to the more naturalistic ways things interacted with the environment - like fireballs setting things on fire, but 5e gays have to content with magical fires not setting things on fire unless specified.
Skills and spells don't feel authentic in 4e.
What the frick is that even supposed to mean?