D&D 4E Another Review of 4e

[Anguirus]

Why exactly can feats count for build diversity when we're talking about 3E, but they can't when we're talking about 4E?

As for summoning/necromancing, three things are relevant here:
1) They were changed because they broke the game in the face AND took forever. When one person in the party is taking 3-4 turns, it's a fun killer for everyone else even if they enjoy rolling all those hits and keeping track of all those HP.
2) They are nevertheless on the way, in a changed fashion.
3) If you want a preview, the cleric and the wizard already have a few summoning powers. They seem much improved and less game-cluttery, and I look forward to an upcoming system that fixes the problems while still giving choice. A dedicated summoner class is likely, and the illusionist and necromancer are on the way.

4E is not perfect, but the best decision they made was tossing the old spell system (that has been chugging on, barely changed, since 1E) instead of forcing the rest of the system to accomodate it.

 

[IceBear]

It's certainly the way I feel. Prior to 3rd edition, I never gamed with ANYONE who used miniatures, or even wanted to use them. 3rd Edition's
practical necessity for miniatures seems have become an absolute need for them in 4th Edition, and that's one of the two deal breakers for me (the other is the everybody having magic-like powers). I simply have no desire to play a miniatures game when I want to be playing D&D. For me, D&D has always been a game about adventure, exploration, creative thinking, role-playing, and vicarious glory, not tactical combat set-pieces strung together by a plotline. WOTC has taken the D&D brand places were I simply will not follow them.

I have ALWAYS used miniatures during combat while playing D&D (started with the red box and 1E) - it was a chess board and Stratego pieces but my groups have always used them. Just find it difficult to imagine never meeting anyone who wanted to use miniatures. Even in my PBeM games and what have you we would track position on graph paper (which is what is discussed in the 4E DMG for tips on how to handle playing the game without minis). I dunno why using minis is such a bad thing - it doesn't seem it impact our roleplaying abilities as they are only used in combat and people still try to do funky things

 

[MadWanderer]

Great for kids, bad for complexity

And the lack of any noncombat abilities is annoying too. I've played characters with little combat abilities who were almost all social, and they were awesome. I'm not saying they should have such a divide, but presently they have no real abilities for outside combat.

God do I agree with the review and the above quote.

I love out of combat abilities, and appart from skills and rituals, there are none worth noting...That makes me sad. Very sad. Apparently, being a member of a Class is just about being good in combat.

On the other hand, this afternoon I ran Burnt Offerings (Paizo) for my two kids who are 7 and 10. My daughter (10) played a rogue (nice class but where is diplomacy???) and my son (7) played a wizard.
Character creation was easy for all of us (I have barely had time to read the rules) and we immediatly started to play with only 5 mns worth of rules explanation. They had never played RPGs before. It was soooo easy for a 7 year old to play a wizard. He used cloud of daggers and Flaming sphere and had a great time. For this, I am grateful to 4th edition.

For myself? Not so much. I always play fighters when I have the choice, but the one time I played a sorceror, I had a blast choosing enchantments spells and pulling practical jokes with Tasha's hideous laughter and other effects. With my one and only cleric, I used Calm emotions all the time on the flighty and depressed rogue of the team...
I love the fluff in my classes, I love the useless spells. I love imagining an apprentice wizard who developps a spell to remove leg hair from women and makes a fortune.

4e is all about combat and balance in combat and I hate that. If 3e skewed the balance in favor of the arcane or divine classes, 4e does the opposite and makes them a pale shadow of themselves and makes them boring to me. My son had a lot of fun though. I hope he continues to have fun.

As for class builds and 3e being superior as far as options?
When I met my wife, she was playing a rogue that specialized in information gathering and in diplomacy and had no skills in being a thief. In 4e, all rogues have thievery...That is not a Swashbuckler!

Same for the ranger. If I want to make a city soldier who specializes in archery well apparently he is forced to learn about dungeons or nature as part of learning how to shoot a bow. Easy enough to houserule though but it pains me to have to do this so soon over something so trivial.

4e is DnD for dummies as I have been calling it. Fun game though, and my kids can play it. I think 3e would have been way too complex for a 7 year old.

 

[VannATLC]

Seriously, I give up.

4e is a framework for combat driven and encounter based resolution. That's what the rules are for.

Everything else is up to the players, which is *exactly* what a good system should be.

DND is a framework. Official and 3rd party Campaigns are a packaged product. Adventure Paths such as KoTS fit in the losely detailed 'default' setting.

It enshrines no fluff, and allows a huge design space for 3rd party Campaign settings, as well as the traditional settings.

They've fleshed out the basics of a world, for people who need examples on where to go.

They have, deliberately, and consciously, reduced the system mastery components of the game. The vast amount of people do *not* enjoy it. They've recognised this.

Magic is no less complex than it ever used to be. Individual class abilities are focused on the requirements of the game system.

Rituals allow a design space for everything else. The vast amount of issues I've seen are essentially people complaining that it is a new game.

Far too few of them seem to be solid complaints about the system itself. (And there are, at least, some reasonable complaints about that. Stalker0 has highlighted some important ones, for a start.)

 

[Hussar]

How are you getting a dozen fighters? I don't have a 3.0 PHB handy, but I'm looking at the 3.5 PHB and can only find 8 trees of fighter feats(Combat Expertise, Dodge, Unarmed Fighting, Mounted Combat, Archery, Power Attack, Two Weapons, and Weapon Specialization). And how different are an archery fighter and an archery ranger? If you count each wizard specialization as a different build, that's 9 builds(1 per school of magic plus 1 non-specialist). I'm also not buying a dozen distinct barbarian builds. He's only got 7 feats, the rest of his class features are set in stone.

In addition, how many of those 1056 builds are viable? Elves and halflings don't make good barbarians. Bards and monks have trouble keeping up at all without prestige classes. If my choices are 128 viable builds or 1056 builds of which 256 are viable, I'll take the 128. Far less chance of accidently nerfing myself.

This.

It is so incredibly easy to screw yourself over in 3e. Wanna play a rogue? The DM doesn't tell you beforehand that you are going to meet lots of undead and constructs? Guess what? You're screwed. Wanna play an Enchanter in the same campaign? Sorry, nope, screwed. On and on and on.

I'd much, much rather a system that didn't include bad elements to reward people for min/maxing.

 

[Lurker37]

there are tons of other role-players I know who have no patience for the "moving miniatures around on a mat" aspect and, although they may enjoy the aspect of "role-playing a character" and "rolling dice," seem to NEVER be able to get behind the whole aspect of the miniatures. ("I run up to him and attack him!" "Sorry, he's 7 squares away, and you can only move 6 squares!" "WTF!?? I hate this game! I can't be bothered to remember how many squares it is!" :/ ) These people may be excellent role-players and very fun to play with, but the miniatures are just A Bridge Too Far. Or rather, A Bridge Too Nerdy.

Seriously, in my experience, there really are a lot of role-players who dislike miniatures, or who can simply never be bothered to learn the rules about them. Maybe they're by definition casual gamers and won't buy any gaming stuff, so Wizards is intentionally not marketing to them. I dunno. I'm not one of 'em, but I know a lot of 'em.

I know you weren't actually meaning to imply that anyone who uses minis is either cheap or geometrically challenged, but it could be misread as such.

I play with two groups, neither of whom could use miniatures where they currently play due to factors such as table space, pets and small children.

Miniatures simply aren't practical for all groups, and many more groups don't use them because none of the other RPGs on the market require them.

Furthermore the extra cost of miniatures presents a barrier to entry.

The process of spending money on something already seen as superfluous by many experienced roleplayers is further frustrated by the way minis are sold: a DM cannot simply buy the exact miniatures they need for a night's play without paying the inflated prices for minis unpacked from their boxes. Common monsters are cheap, but suddenly putting an exciting and interesting monster like a dragon on the board co$t$. That s*** doesn't fly so well.

It's even worse for new players. Consider a new DM preparing to run his first ever game that he's talked a few of his friends into. When getting a reasonable variety of monsters is a large financial outlay, who'd want to take the risk that their players won't like the game?

The question is whether WoTC want a smaller player base who buy miniatures, or a larger one, some of whom do not buy miniatures. If it's the latter, they ought to put out some web articles on playing 4E without a grid, as some rules elements may prove problematic for some groups otherwise.

 

[AntiPaladin]

I don't think that emphasizing miniatures will diminish the player base. There are tons of people that enjoy the collectible aspect of the hobby. Look at the millions of people that play collectible card games, minis could be the thing that finally convinces some of them to start playing D&D.

I admit, randomized booster boxes is a shameless way to promote consumerism, but I'm an American damnit and I get off on that stuff. I did chores as an 11 year old to buy Magic cards, and I still get an amount of pleasure far greater than $12 when I open up a new box of minis. I always get at least one that is unexpectedly interesting. It can be a good thought experiment as a DM to go through a stack of miniatures and mentally organize them into an adventure.

But wait, I was so busy spending my money on plastic army men that I forgot that I'm not role playing anymore. I'm just mindlessly moving minis around on a grid like a war game, crap!

 

[Lurker37]

But wait, I was so busy spending my money on plastic army men that I forgot that I'm not role playing anymore. I'm just mindlessly moving minis around on a grid like a war game, crap!

*Double checks his post*

Did I imply that? If so, my apologies.

 

[theNater]

Undead summoning/Controlling Cleric. Planar based cleric.
An Undead summoning wizard. For that matter, any sort of summoner.

I don't understand the phrase "planar based cleric". If you explain it to me I'll see what I can come up with.

The other things here are summon/control creatures. Those are assistant creatures, which as I said before were intentionally removed. However, I would like to point you at Astral Defenders(Cleric 9) and Knights of Unyielding Valor(Cleric 10). Both of them summon ghosts to fight for you. And wizards can summon a gigantic ogre, which is mostly intangible and invisible. The spell is Bigby's Grasping Hands(Wizard 15).

There are others, mostly look for the keyword "conjuration" and be ready to apply flavor.

Bard (a buffcaster who's quick)

Warlord, high dex and light blade. Some relevant abilities: Warlord's Favor(Warlord 1), which provides one nearby ally a +2 bonus to attack rolls against a certain enemy for one round; and Bastion of Defense(Warlord 1), which gives your allies either a +1 bonus to all defenses or a handful of temporary hit points. And note that the high dex you'll want for the light blade can easily make hide armor as good as chainmail, so you can have your full movement speed.

Druid (a nature spellcaster)

Fey warlock. Witchfire(Warlock 1) is that same unearthy flame that druids use for faerie fire, and Thirsting Tendrils(Warlock 17) and Thorns of Venom(Warlock 23) both call forth plants to do nasty things to your foes.

If that's not enough or not soon enough, recall that nature damage spells often use fire or lightning, wizards can throw around plenty of both of those. Toss a little flavor on Web(Wizard 5), making it roots growing out of the ground instead of webs appearing out of nowhere, and you've got the makings of a fine nature caster.

Barbarian(Some sort of berserking character.)

You mean a character who, when his back is against the wall, goes into a frenzy, striking out at all who threaten him? Like a fighter using the Rain of Steel(Fighter 5) stance?

A martial artist (unarmored as well)

Nobody's making you use a weapon or wear armor. In reference to the weapon keyword, page 56 of the PHB says quite clearly "You can use an unarmed attack as your weapon."

Making such a build viable is a little bit harder. I'd go with a ranger in cloth armor(which is only called armor so that it doesn't need a separate list of magic effects that can be applied to it) using the Two-Weapon build. All of your powers still work, because you're using a one-handed weapon(the unarmed attack) in each hand. Scale the dex score way up for the armor class, you'll be 3 points behind someone of the same dex in hide, but other Two-Weapon rangers will usually have higher strength and lower dex than you do, so you'll probably only be 1 or 2 points behind, which is annoying, but not immediately lethal. And you'd have to check with your DM on this, but the enchant item ritual allows you to imbue a normal item with magic. Running with the conceit that the unarmed attack is a weapon, each of the unarmed attacks you use should be enchantable. Of course, you only get that bonus when you are using the unarmed attack as the weapon in the power(no enchanting a weapon and the hand wielding it to get double bonuses ).

Whew! That one was fun. Got any more?

and the lack of any noncombat abilities is annoying too. I've played characters with little combat abilities who were almost all social, and they were awesome. I'm not saying they should have such a divide, but presently they have no real abilities for outside combat.

They noncombat abilities aren't gone, they're just reworked, with the addition that you don't usually have to choose between combat abilities and non-combat abilities. So now you can have characters who focus primarily on social abilities and fight very well. Any character can get skill training and skill focus in all of Bluff, Diplomacy, and Insight by level 10. It's easy to arrange to have all of those by level 6, and possible to have them all by level 4.

 

[Gladius Legis]

TheNater had a good point about the number of viable build options available to 4E, but I think he sold the system short.

If you look at a first level PC you have:
1 of 8 races to choose from
1 of 8 classes to choose from
2 of 4 at-wills (not including wizard) for a total of 6 possible combinations
1 of 4 encounter to choose from
1 of 4 daily to choose from

8 * 8 * 6 * 4 * 4 = 6,144 different combinations of starting powers/races/classes.

This does not include: Feat selection or build selection

And, as far as I can tell, each selection would make a character that is interesting and viable to play.

Math doesn't lie, folks. And as far as I can tell, unlike 3e, most of those combinations don't suck.