D&D 4e

>>50791483
Right: better balance

Wrong: plays like a boardgame, not a bad thing, but not Dnd

Changes: Probably would have released it as a spiritual successor to heroquest and not DnD.

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>>50791543

>>50791483
Right: HP / Heal Surges, ORIGINAL character builder
Wrong: Fighters / Rogues figuratively have spellbooks. Somewhat corrected by using Essential Rogues / Fighters, but too little too late.

Done differently: Concept offers better balance, but little/poor testplay sank it. Epic-level combat took forever. Also, power creep to sell books.

>>50791543
>>50791844

>plays like a boardgame

What does this even mean?

>>50792285
4e is deliberately and unashamedly gamist. However people have brain damage from 3e's "RULES FOR EVERYTHIIIIIIIIING" mentality which makes them literally think "I'm a fire mage but I can't use my at-will fire arrows to melt this ice"

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>>50792285

I've not played 4e, but as a fan of both board games and RPGs, I'm pretty sure it means it's been designed well and you don't have to constantly patch shit to keep it from falling over.
In my experience a good contingent of RPG people seem to think that's a necessary feature of RPGs.

>>50792252
How hard were you dropped on your head as a small child? The Essentials Rogue and Fighter were shit on a stick.

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>Did right
More balanced than almost any other game, interesting abilities, healing surges, three tiers of play with changes every 10 levels, 1st party character builder
>Did wrong
Mostly it was the way they advertised it. Also doesn't help that there was a murder-suicide but that was kinda beyond WotC's ability to stop.
>Done differently
I would have kept 3e running alongside 4e but kept the release schedule light on it. Another thing is that I would have had done real playtesting to figure out that the various AC's and damage for monsters should have been tweaked before launch. Last thing is I would have advertised it differently and made it much more clear and apparent that yes, you can still roleplay with the game.

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>>50791483
Right: Balance. Clear power source thematics - Primal/Martial/Divine/Arcane. Easy character generation. The offline Character Builder.

Wrong: Extremely dry presentation. Nothing in the core books of 4e sparks the imagination like the books from the previous ed. Combat is extremely gamey - to the point where it pulls me out of character and feels like I'm playing FF Tactics using my character rather than being my character. Extreme focus on the battle boardgame side of the game, relatively few tools and abilities for the roleplaying side.

Done differently: Release it as a minis battle game, don't call it D&D. Or Maybe slap a D&D mark on it and call it D&D Dungeon Mashers or something like that - replace the D&D minis game with it. If I have to push it out as a new edition, keep the old parchment backgrounds and scatter more sketch-like art through the books - expand descriptions. Ensure even the dry little ability blocks got a few notes on how they could be used out of combat. Keep descriptions grounded in real world measurements - your bow's short range is 30 feet, not 6 blocks. Honestly, 5e did a good job blending 3e's feel with 4e's balance and less reality breaking abilities, so I'd probably be shooting for that.

>>50792252

>Fighters / Rogues figuratively have spellbooks

I never really saw it that way. It honestly feels more narrative a mechanic to me than anything.

Like, when you're watching a TV show, the effectiveness of an attack is almost always inversely proportional to how often it's used. Because even if it might make 'sense' just spamming your strongest thing over and over has no real sense of drama or tension. So you have people stick to basic stuff, breaking out a trick every now and then and only using these big, showy manoeuvres at key moments. That's the feeling I get playing 4e.

>>50792252
>Fighters / Rogues figuratively have spellbooks
I'm with >>50792719 on this. I never saw this as a problem.

>>50791483
Why did you make this thread? This has been discussed to death, you could have found dozens of threads on /tg/ alone if you had used the archive.

>>50793094

Because I've rarely seen it presented in a dry, neutral manner, and so far some of the comments are interesting, regardless of 'side'.

>>50792285
>>50792482
not the anon who said it but my experience was that instead of roleplaying and adventuring in our heads for the gaming session, we stared at a map and moved pieces along squares while playing moves from cards

that is a boardgame not an rpg in my eyes, and that was how 4e felt to me

>>50791483
My biggest problem with it was that a lot of methods of attack were already maneuvers. Dragging an enemy along and bashing their head into a wall sounds like a good move for a fighter, but then you realise its a level 6ish encounter power and it gets kinda hard to justify this version of it being somehow weaker than the special 'drag and smash' attack.

>>50793133
Yeah, for a real RPG you want to read your abilities from your sheet or flipping through a book.

This was, of course, impossible with 4e.

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As far as I'm concerned, if the math was based on bounded accuracy and magic items were not an assumed part of progression/kept in the DM's materials and not PHB, it'd be optimal.
Unfortunately that'd require ripping a lot of the math out, so I stick with 5e.

>>50793186

Why is this a trait of a 'real' RPG? I honestly don't see the difference.

(Also, this is untrue, all 4e powers are in the books and on your sheet, so I'm not sure what you're talking about?)

>>50793133

I guess it's just a personal thing, I never really found the mechanics an obstacle to roleplay. I could play my character and include interesting dialogue and descriptions, as well as basing my choices IC, while still interacting with the more robust set of mechanics the game presented.

>>50793223
>Why is this a trait of a 'real' RPG? I honestly don't see the difference.

It was meant to be sarcastic.

All 4e really changed was the layout and the language. The mechanics were generally the same.

>>50791483
Wrong: They let Mearls get his hands on it halfway through

>>50791483
Right:
Threw out unnecessary sacred cows
Good inter-party balance
Clearly delineated sources/roles that gave thematic and mechanical similarities without playing identically
Paragon Paths/Epic Destinies, they were cool and helped with the transparent power scale and intent of the game.
Warlords
Very gamist/narrative mechanics aren't the gospel truth but they work for what4e was aiming for

Overall, having a CLEAR FUCKING GOAL (action-RPG with an emphasis on teamwork and collaboration) and executing it mostly well. To my knowledge no other edition of dnd has had a clear goal, let alone one followed through.

Wrong:
Obligatory 'Monster math was always off' until right at the end
Published adventures were universally fucking trash. Encounters are well designed but they're all so fucking linear.
I didn't like Themes or Skill Challenges but that be personal taste
E-classes were half-assed. They pussied out and made MBA/RBA-centric classes for the 3tards, then pussied out again and delivered a half-finished attempt on that.

4th was teh best edition and it makes me sad that there will likely never be a 4.5 or 4Pathfinder equivalent (hopefully less shit than Pathfinder is)

>>50793405
>E-classes were half-assed. They pussied out and made MBA/RBA-centric classes for the 3tards, then pussied out again and delivered a half-finished attempt on that.

see >>50793349


Mearls was doing his best to nerf martials into the ground and kill 4th from the beginning, and as soon as Heinsoo was fired, he got his way, mostly.

>>50793405
Do better:
Push nonlinear adventure modules, with multiple ways to achieve the goal/find the treasure/rescue the princess etc
Make the roleplaying angle more prevalent. Give people a use for skills in the middle of a dungeon, encourage people to use that darkness power to counter the magical torches blinding them in the middle of a fight, etc. Anything that delineates that 'the rules don't say fire arrow sets the rope alight, just attack the goblin Steve' thing.
Maybe not have a murder-suicide in the middle of online platform development.

>>50793525
>>50792672
Can someone elaborate on the "murder suicide" and why it happened? I remember getting into 4e in highschool and being excited for the online portion that never materialized.

>>50793648

A tragedy involving the web developer and his wife, IIRC.

>>50793405
What's the "monster math" bit?

>>50793662
Who murder suicide'd who? And why did they murder suicide themself and their spouse?

>>50793699

I believe so, yes.

>>50793410

Seeing how there is less open hostility toward 4e these days and both 3.5 and Pathfinder have OGLs to rip from, I think it's only a matter of time before we see a true 4e successor.

>>50793699

The husband who was the dev killed his wife, then himself.

>>50793410
>>50793756

Spoiler- Part of the reason I made this thread is that I'm starting to work on one with a group of friends. We might get nowhere, but we're giving it a try and having a thread reminding us of the consensus on 4e, from both sides, is a helpful reference.

>>50793848
Are you the Act of Valor team?

>>50792719
It's why 4e would make for a surprisingly good system to use for anime like Dragonball, One Piece, Naruto, etc.

>>50794545

I am not, and hadn't heard of it before. Always interesting to hear about alternate takes on the same concept though.

>>50793679
The original Monster Manual and several of the early books and adventures had monsters with incredibly bloated HP totals. Most D&D combats are expected to last 2-4 rounds. Early 4e fights would often last 5-10.

It wasn't fun difficulty, it was just monsters being damage sponges.

What it did wrong: It called itself D&D.

>>50792285
It means he thinks the fact everything is measured in squares primarily instead of distances- even though D&D has always had rules for tabletop play with miniatures like that- makes it more like you're screwing around on a board instead of having an epic yet measured imaginary brawl.

Honestly it doesn't play like a board game, it plays like an MMO, which also isn't bad but also isn't D&D...unless it's the D&D MMO.

>>50792252
>Wrong: Fighters/Rogues figuratively having spells
Fucking please, get out of here with this shit like Martials didn't deserve that beef up.
Most of their ridiculous spell-esque abilities came later in the game. People like you are the reason Ranger Marks in 5e are spells instead of just an ability, fuck off.

>>50791483
Right: Balance
Wrong: Bloated Enemy HP in the earliest phase, Dumb Concepts for Classes, No PDFs just when the game was getting better allowing Pathfinder to easily swoop in and steal the now alienated audience that doesn't have oodles of money to drop on hardbacks thus making 3.5s reign last even longer
Changes: Improved Grapple mechanics

>>50793679
Monsters in the Monster Manual 1 and 2 generally had too much HP and didn't hit hard enough, particularly in paragon and epic tiers. Solo monsters suffered from this particularly hard, presently very little difficulty beyond their massive health pools. Some of the early Soldier and Controller monsters were also excessively good at their jobs, dragging battles far beyond a fun length.

Mind you, it was all generally better balanced than any monster math up until that point since 3.x's CR system couldn't even pretend to be balanced, but this was definitely a point 4e could have (and eventually did) improve on.

For people just starting 4e it's generally recommended to pick up the Monster Vault because it redoes many of the MM1 and 2 monsters with the updated MM3 math that makes battles much quicker, exciting, and deadly.

>>50794870

>Honestly it doesn't play like a board game, it plays like an MMO, which also isn't bad but also isn't D&D...unless it's the D&D MMO.

This makes even less fucking sense than calling it a board game. What about its mechanics are at all MMOlike? Specific mechanics, not just vague stuff about having defined roles (which D&D always had, 4e just actually told players instead of perpetuating ivory tower behind the curtain bullshit)

>muh MMO

Anyone who says this can safely be ignored.

>>50794870
>No PDFs just when the game was getting better allowing Pathfinder to easily swoop in and steal the now alienated audience that doesn't have oodles of money to drop on hardbacks thus making 3.5s reign last even longer
honestly I think this more than anything is what doomed 4E, although it's online component getting crippled due to the murder/suicide didn't help

Was anyone else a fan of the 'concept' of minions? As a way to try and replicate a hero fighting off hordes of monsters? I thought the way they scaled to hit and damage, making them at least a nuisance was better then gaggles of Low CR's in 3.X clones

>>50795128

Oh yeah, Minions are an awesome idea.

>>50791483

Right :
Passive Skill Totals
Saves as Armor
Multiple Attributes to Attack / Defenses
Balance

Wrong:
Balanced to the point the classes seemed cloned
Damage needed to scale faster, unless you prefer much longer combat

Fix :
If I knew, I'd be much happier in my career

>>50792313
But you CAN. Rule 0 and page 34. Out of combat nothing changed. In combat I would allow this to hurt an enemy by dealing the same amount of damage your fire power would, but cold because of the freezing, newly melted water.

>>50795298

The point was that most idiots hating on 4e assume you can't for no good reason.

>>50795128
Yep, minions were great. I was already playing MnM though which uses minions for the armies of goons so it wasn't a huge culture shock.

People just made the mistake of coming from 3.pf simulationist hell and couldn't grasp that a goblin was only LV1-3 because of narrative, and could be represented as a lv3 brute or a lv10 minion depending on hero level. It had to be 'but no, he is a lv3 with 35HP ALWAYS BECAUSE HE IS A GOBLIN STABBY GUY'

Fucking 3.pf and its tables to see if you shit yourself and if so how long etc

>>50791483
>Right
Balance, healing surges, skill challenges, being a 'gateway drug' for board gamers to RPGs

>Wrong
Balance by standardizing and removing options to the point of all classes feeling mechanically indistinct, making healing too powerful, offering too many different abilities to everything making combat last forever, not offering any handles for noncombat.

Also, it does nothing to counter the standard issues I have with D&D in general: vague skill system, mechanically encouraging combat, awkward 'adventurer' power level, hp/defenses bloat.

>Different
Market it as a board game/wargame OR make (noncombat) skill powers or class-based utility powers a more integral part of the game, cut down half the combat powers, remove the 'plus half level' modifier from everything, lower HP values and healing, give a more solid table of what skill roll equals what result, introduce the 5e inspiration mechanic or similar to encourage roleplay.

>>50793133

I dunno, the cards made referencing your abilities easier rather than, as >>50793186
said.

I'm not sure why everyone had so much trouble playing it like an RPG. My group treated it like every other game, abstracted narrative for roleplay and exploration portions, and only using a map/minis for combat.

Well, okay, we used a map for exploration sometimes, but mainly we just talked everything out. If we wanted to do a thing out of combat, and we'd tell the DM. He'd either say "Yes"or "No" or "Roll [x] for it." The only thing different, in my eyes, is that it codified your abilities into something easy to reference on the fly so you aren't flipping around a book during combat or something.

>>50795594
>>50795250

I've never really gotten the 'classes are too similar' thing.

I've played quite a few and they all feel different and distinct in how they fulfil their role and how they influence combat. Even within the same class your choices can lead to vastly different playstyles.

>>50791483
>What did it do right?
Passive defences. Good 'power' layout. Good use of colour to differentiate at-will, encounter, daily, and magic item abilities. Better class balance than most editions - no 'start weak but become gods' justification for casters, everyone progresses at the same rate. Paragon paths were nifty. Power Points were awesome.

>What did it do wrong?
Feats didn't need to exist. Being trained in a skill needed to give bigger bonuses at higher Tiers of play. Magic item dependency built into the monster stats. Defenders were too sticky and strikers dealt too much damage.

>What would you have done differently?
Simplify the presentation of powers a bit. Remove feats entirely. Make magic items optional and badass, special rewards instead of stuff you're assuming you'll collect. Make the power sources a little more iconic;
>Warriors treat all maneuvers as Reliable
>Rogues get bonuses when they make successful attacks and haven't taken damage recently
>Priests get more/better Channel Divinity
>Wizards get more powers known but the same number of uses per encounter
>Psychics work as-is with Power Points

>>50791483
Right: World building. 4e actually had some great fluff. I know people didn't like how they de-cannon-ed the previous Forgotten Realms fluff and the Dark Sun fluff was a shadow of it's former self, but the "base" fluff presented in Monster Manuals and Player's handbooks was great.

Wrong: Presentation and attempting to market MMO style peripherals. I'm not talking about the mechanics. A combat system is just a flavoring. I'm talking about boon cards and playing on Wed. night while watching their twitter feed to see what boons were active. They also attempted to market 80% of products to players (by having character options in them), which led the character creation bloat, a lack of good adventures, and made it one of the more expensive editions per player.

>>50791483
they should have named it CHAINMAIL 2
from the read of most post here.

i use 4th ed for 'final fantasy' game system / rpg.

monsters have too much hp, but, recharge was brilliant, if anything i would make the classes power go by a dice recharge.

>>50795679

It's been awhile, and I was not a big fan of 4th Ed, so my opinion is likely that of the unwashed masses.

You had a Striker, Tank, Controller, and a Healer?

Many of the Classes that shared a role felt redundant with a lot of the dailies, encounter powers overlapping from Class to Class.

In some ways it is a plus, because mechanically you can describe how you want to dagger strike, cast a spell, or hit someone with an axe the way it seems fun or cool to you, without paying for it on a tactical level

In some ways this is a drawback because once everyone is a superhero, no one is

>>50795797
>Tank
Defender

I don't get the super hero thing. Only the PCs should be super heroes and the BBEG and his Lieutenants super villains. Everyone else only serves to move the story along.

>>50795797
>Tank

Doing Defenders wrong, you pleb.

>>50795924

Sorry, dumb joke from the Incredibles

>>50795797
>Healer

Also never had a warlord or offensively-minded cleric either, I guess.

>>50795797
>>50795924
>>50795948

Leader too. There's a lot more depth to each role than you seem to think, and despite surface similarities those powers you think are really similar just aren't.

Even if they might have the same attack roll and damage, you need to look beyond that. The power tags, the secondary effects associated with it, the traits of their class or weapon that contribute. It's presented simply but there's a lot of emergent complexity that leads to really interesting decision making in play.

>>50795977

God, 4e Warlords are the best fucking class.

>>50795948

Sorry if I can't remember the terms, from that game, I stopped playing 7-8 years ago.

I dropped the edition after the release of the core before any of the various splat books would have been released.

Does anyone have a good link to where you can find all the 4e books? I've found a lot of 4e troves, but it's always missing the latter half of splat books and random stuff like the 4e Book of Vile Darkness.

I'm not even positive the 4e general (when it even appears) has a complete trove.

Keep my favourite mechanic (feats) a part of core gameplay.

Powers. Not inherently bad, but they fucked it up. Specifically, by giving every class basically the same powers and making them have cooldowns and shit to make them all feel like spells.

I would have made powers work differently for every archetype. Works alright for casters. Rogue and fighter powers shouldn't have cooldowns, but I don't know how I'd balance them.

>>50796176

They don't have cooldowns, though? It's more like >>50792719 described it.

>>50793773
>>50793706
But why?

>>50796507

They don't tend to publish that kind of shit on the news, even if they knew.

>>50795594
>making healing too powerful

Huh? Run that one by me as I don't really see it. Leader healing doesn't really keep up with the wear and tear of battle too well unless it's a pacifist cleric who are 100% about healing.

>>50796176
>Keep my favourite mechanic (feats) a part of core gameplay.

What? Feats were integral to 4E.

>>50795797
>Many of the Classes that shared a role felt redundant with a lot of the dailies, encounter powers overlapping from Class to Class.
I keep seeing this over and over again in reference to 4e but I'm truly at a loss for what would satisfy people with this issue. 4e classes, even within the same role, are objectively far more dissimilar mechanically from full casters in any other edition of the game and far and away more dissimilar from the endless list of classes whose "differences" amount to variations on "I roll to hit. Maybe damage. Okay done."

Especially considering that 4e classes by definition DON'T share any of their powers with any other class.

>>50796605
10 to 1 he makes some retarded comment about Second Wind or that the standard 25% heal was too good and rolling Hit Dice is a better version of it,

>>50793220
inherent bonuses work fine

Err, for the most part, dwarven armor and other non-scaling items become ludicrously effective for their cost at higher levels, and it buffs rangers and nerfs monks and sorcerers, which is the opposite of what you want to do

>>50796876
Those people either never played 4E and just jumped on the hatewagon, or are idiots.

>>50796605
Quote myself as a lv10 fighter, two sessions ago, at full health (again):
>Guys, I only have two healing abilities left, we should probably hurry this up a bit

Note that this was after me tanking literally all damage dealt by the enemy for at least five turns, in a party of four with a warlord as only healer. That encounter cost the party ten healing surges in total, nine of which were mine.

Combat in 4e doesn't feel dangerous at all, because with hp pools that large there's zero chance of you actually dying as long as the party has some healing left, as you'll always get patched up before you hit zero.

>>50797031

How on earth did they run through 10 healing surges with only a warlord as a healer? Healing word is limited to 2x encounter.

>>50796796
There weren't feats? Oh shit, I don't really remember. I went back to 3.5 after playing for about a year, and just started playing 5, so I'm mixing things up probably.

>>50796195
Per day and per encounter are cooldowns.

>>50797103

>Per day and per encounter are cooldowns.

I have literally never seen the term 'cooldown' to describe that sort of thing (even when it was used in 3.PF), but sure, whatever I guess.

>>50797031
Do fighters even get two healing abilities by level 10?

They get several that give pathetic amounts of THP, one daily attack that heals without spending a surge, and i think a couple of utility powers at 10 which heal you, but since you can only take one, that still leaves you with only two real self-heals

>>50797103
>Per day and per encounter are cooldowns.
Then what do you call Vancian Casting? Once you use it it's gone and you have to rest for hours to get the spells back after all. Sure sounds like a cooldown to me.

>>50797103
>played 4
>went BACK to 3x

Opinion discarded

>>50797039
Two healing words from the warlord, another from a warlord multiclass, an inspiring word from a bard multiclass, one from the warlord's lion's roar, one from mine, one from another fighter attack power, one from the ability of my armour, two from using a second wind with a cloak of the walking wounded, and one from a healing potion, IIRC. So eleven, not ten. Also healed as if spending a healing surge once. The ones I had left were another healing potion and that stance that gives regeneration when bloodied.

>>50797217
>oh no there's no risk of death when my entire party spent an entire day's worth of healing resources on me

You're just an idiot.

>>50797134
Well, it fits the definition. You get my point now, right?

Although >>50792719 makes a good point, it didn't feel that way to me. It felt like I was casting the all the same spells across different classes, just with different flavour and name. There were exceptions though, like the shaman and a class variation I found called a brawler fighter. The brawler was exceptionally unique.

I've thought of some other things I liked in 4e, come to think of it. Warlock pacts were cool. I liked the way they did skill checks, with successes and failures.

>>50797202
No, that's also a cooldown. I didn't mean to imply it wasn't, and did say the system worked for casters. I'm saying it feels weird to have cooldowns for non magical abilities.

>>50797232
>an entire day's worth of healing resources
Apart from the fact I had healing left by the end of it.

Also, the fact that you can brush off more healing than the HP total of the entire party combined as only a single day of healing resources kind of proves the point there's too much healing in the game.

>>50797217

So 'Everyone ever spent healing on me'. I mean, that is an uncommonly huge amount of healing.

>>50797243

I just find that oddly divergent from my experience. Even within the same role, 4e has a huge variety in its powers, and figuring out their mechanical nuances and how to most effectively make use of them is one of my favourite parts of the game.

As an example, this is one of my favourite powers. It's not particularly good, but it's so much damn fun-

http://funin.space/compendium/power/Fearless-Rescue.html

Fearless Rescue
One of your allies falls, and without regard for your own well-being, you rush to make the attacker pay. Your bravery inspires your ally to fight on.
Daily Healing, Martial, Weapon
Immediate Reaction Melee weapon
Trigger: An enemy within 5 squares of you reduces an ally to 0 hit points or fewer
Target: The triggering enemy
Effect: Before the attack, you can move to the nearest square from which you can attack the target.
Attack: Strength + 1 vs. AC
Hit: 2[W] + Strength modifier damage.
Effect: The ally can spend a healing surge and regains an additional 1d6 hit points for every opportunity attack you provoke while moving to the target.

No other class in the game would do something like that. It captures the martial heroism of the Warlord and the role they play in a group in a nutshell. I don't get to use it often, but when I do it feels fucking fantastic. Especially if I manage to dash through a hail of blows to do so.

>>50797243
I never found this to be the case

Oh sure, a blaster wizard and a sorcerer felt similar, as did a control wizard and control warlock,. But try comparing rogues, rangers and monks. Rogues pick one target, gang up on it with friends, and hit it a small amount of times with massive damage on each hit, Rangers pick one target that the rest of their party is ignoring and smash it into the ground with a gratuitous number of individual attacks, Monks leap into the middle of all the enemies and smash all of them in the face while flying across the battlefield like a demented pinball to always hit the maximum number of targets with their close-range AoEs. And those three classes are all melee-ranged, dexterity-using strikers

>>50791543
Pretty much nail on the head

>>50797256
>Barbarian Rage
>Monk Healing

DERP

File: vader swordmage.jpg (51KB, 900x643px) Image search: [Google]

51KB, 900x643px

>>50797301
My personal favorite is this one

Swordmage

Aegis of Shielding

You create an arcane link between you and an enemy, allowing you to blunt its attacks against your allies.

At-Will Arcane
Minor Action Close burst 2

Target: One creature in the burst

Effect: You mark the target. The target remains marked until you use this power against another target. If you mark other creatures using other powers, the target is still marked. A creature can be subject to only one mark at a time. A new mark supersedes a mark that was already in place.

If your marked target makes an attack that doesn’t include you as a target, it takes a –2 penalty to attack rolls. If that attack hits and the marked target is within 10 squares of you, you can use an immediate interrupt to reduce the damage dealt by that attack to any one creature by an amount equal to 5 + your Constitution modifier.

At 11th level, reduce the damage dealt by 10 + your Constitution modifier. At 21st level, reduce the damage dealt by 15 + your Constitution modifier.

>>50797298
>an uncommonly huge amount of healing
Your experience does not match up to mine here, although it's certainly a bit above average, and usually spread over more players.

In my experience, it's either "the powergamer has killed off half the enemies before they could act", costing a surge or two afterwards at most, or healing-grinding slugfests after which the party goes to sleep at the earliest convenience.

>>50797376

That sounds like bad encounter design more than a problem with the system.

Also, you do realise healing surges are meant as a kind of meta-currency for the adventuring day, right?

>>50797356
>Bardic Music
>Druid's Wildshape
>Cleric's Turn/Rebuke Undead
>Paladin's Lay on Hands

>>50797301

Ranger Attack 29 Ultimate Confrontation
You study your foe’s movements, and as combat grows fiercer, your knowledge allows you to deliver deadlier blows with each hit.
Daily, Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Ranged weapon
Target: One creature designated as your quarry
Attack: Dexterity vs. AC
Hit: 4[W] + Dexterity modifier damage.
Miss: Half damage.
Effect: Until the target is no longer your quarry, whenever you hit the target with a melee attack, you deal 1[W] extra damage. The extra damage increases by 1[W] each time you hit the target with a melee attack, up to a maximum of 5[W] extra damage. If you miss the target with a melee attack, the extra damage decreases to 1[W].

4e has lots of fun ways of increasing damage output, but this one is just my favourite to use, even if it does come one level before cap

>>50796176
Mearls plz go

>>50792672
I still don't understand how the fuck people can think a game isn't "allowing" them to roleplay, that's not something you need rules for.

>>50797356
You're not going convince me by giving me a paltry two examples of cooldowns for martials that make sense. Explaine to me why a fighter could only smack an enemy upside the head once per encounter.

http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Bell_ringer

>>50797460
Game balance

>>50797460

Because it's not a simulationist mechanic. It's not saying 'This is a specific thing you can only do once'.

It represents taking advantage of an opportunity, of noticing an opening and making use of it. It's easy to rationalise as long as you don't try to treat game rules like physics (which they never are, and they never make sense if you try to do so.)

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>>50797433
It was because such a huge portion of the books focused on powers and equipment/magical items. Then there was the description of Skill Challenges and a few other minor things that make people think "This is not my D&D!" Did the game focus a lot on combat? Yes, but considering that balance issues were more or less the leading issue of 3/3.5, they felt they needed to address it. Remove a lot of out of combat issues by streamlining the skills and giving people out-of-combat utility powers as well and suddenly the guy playing the fighter or monk aren't sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while the wizard makes a pocket dimension, the rogue picks his locks, the bard makes his knowledge checks or the cleric heals the party. So yeah, I can see how people can complain but if you have a good DM you should have wonderful campaigns and such.

>>50797460
Repeat after me fucktard, "Martial Exploits are fucking narrative abilities."

Joe-Bob the Fighter doesn't think, 'It's time to Ring Fucknut's Bell' and then yells out "Bellllllluuuuu Ringaaaa" the player decides to use an ability. He just is able to better exploit (haha get it) openings in a fight.

>>50797295
>Also, the fact that you can brush off more healing than the HP total of the entire party combined as only a single day of healing resources kind of proves the point there's too much healing in the game.
No it doesn't.

>>50797492
Well, that makes as much sense as the other guy, but to me it just feels like a game mechanic.

I also hated waiting for my players to dig through pages and pages of powers. Even when they were being good and figuring it out before turn, they'd not be paying attention to what others are doing.

>>50797561

Now this is just confusing. The character builder is a thing, and you can just print out skill cards and have a nice easy deck to flick through to find the one you're after. What's there to get lost in or overly focused on?

>>50797532
That should be up the player. Not a game mechanic.

Don't get so butthurt. You mad that I'm opining on you?

>>50797577
Retarded players are retarded. Especially ones that have the attention span of Rhesus Monkey with ADHD and can't plan their turn in advance.

>>50797587
>That should be up the player. Not a game mechanic.

So a player should be able to decide 'I wanna use my really powerful abilities as much as I want'?

>>50797587

>That should be up the player. Not a game mechanic.

What does that even mean?

>>50797561
>but to me it just feels like a game mechanic.
Because it is a game mechanic?

>>50797577
Yeah, we used the character builder, but at advanced levels there were a lot of powers to get through. We had them all printed out for each character, but it was several pages. Still have this problem, and even worse really, with wizards.

>>50797397
>That sounds like bad encounter design more than a problem with the system.
If encounters at our level can be one-shotted too easily, and encounters at the level where they can't be quickly devolve into grinds, I'd blame the system.

>Also, you do realise healing surges are meant as a kind of meta-currency for the adventuring day, right?
I agree with that, but that brings about another problem. Healing surges were designed around the idea of having multiple combats each day, and the danger not being in the individual combat but in slowly wearing out. This, however, is hard to enforce in most playstyles other than dungeon delving. You're not logically going to run into conveniently encounter-sized bands of enemies six times a day when doing overground traveling or investigation in a city. This means the DM either has to illogically force combay all the time, or the game design falls apart and you get the problem I mentioned earlier.

>>50797587
You heard it here, Wizards should get to cast their highest level spells at will with no limitations.

>>50793133
>we stared at a map and moved pieces along squares while playing moves from cards

This is literally every edition of D&D.

>>50797616
>>50797620
It means the player should be able to say "I bash try to bash him on the head to stun him", and the DM can decide how to work it out.

>>50797657
So you want Martials to play Mother-May-I like the filthy mongrels they are?

>>50797657

They can. There are rules for improvised manoeuvres in the DMG.

>>50797638
Man, follow a reply chain. I said the system worked for casters. I'm ONLY talking about martials.

>>50794908
OSR have much more freedom to take basic actions (like looking around, or talking to npcs) than most other rpgs.

4e has the entire focus of the game on combat mechanics. It doesn't matter which class you play, you have defense, crowd control, damage and support. You're expected to be able to do all these things to help the team, though you can specialize.

That's more like an mmo than an rpg, where people are more versatile.

>>50797657
No edition of DnD ever has worked like that

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>>50797684
Only if the DM is a cunt and the players bitches. Pic related tho.

>>50797708

But then you run into the problem of >>50797684, where martial characters have to play 'mother may I?' and constantly ask the GM if they can do stuff, which takes time and leads to inconsistent rulings, while other characters have clear, specific options they can make use of which generally makes playing them a lot more interesting and fun.

The whole 'Martial's can improvise!' does not hold up from a game design perspective and just leads to boring to play characters with no real options.

>>50797376
>the powergamer has killed off half the enemies before they could act

Unless you're talking about a controller taking out a large clump of minions(and taking out clumps of minions is half of the controller's job, so this is moot), this never happens unless the encounter is terribly built.

I've played both 3.PF and 4e since release and our 4e games has had more PC deaths than any of our 3.PF games, by quite a large margin. Part of this has to do with 4e's encounters assuming the party is always at full health for each fight due to the way healing surges work, but monsters in 4e post-fixes are more lethal than you'd expect.

>>50797752
>OSR have much more freedom to take basic actions (like looking around, or talking to npcs) than most other rpgs.

...wait...what? 4e doesn't stop you doing that.

>>50795998
Im still mad they weren't given any representation in 5e since Mearls still buys into the dumbass "hurr durr shouting hands back on" meme.

>>50797863

That whole thing is hilarious. They write in the book that HP are an abstraction and then continue to buy into the absurd meat points idea. It's nonsensical.

>>50797031
>Note that this was after me tanking literally all damage dealt by the enemy for at least five turns, in a party of four with a warlord as only healer.

I'd imagine the encounter was built poorly, since contrary to what you might expect, Defenders aren't supposed to be tanking 100% of the damage, just a good chunk of it.

Usually my Defenders just spot out the strongest looking guy on the field, run up to his face, and keep him busy while everyone else does their thing.

In any normal fight, a Defender who's taking literally all the damage from a fight is a very dead Defender.

>>50797460
>I set up a very specific opening that requires the enemy leaving a specific opening for me to hit them just right to leave them dazed.
>Now that I've done it, all the other adversaries here have seen it, and won't leave the same opening available twice.

That said, there's no rule against improvising maneuvers. 4e abilities just gives martials the same "Well I can 100% do this and this happens" features spellcasters have had since AD&D.

>>50797752
Um, no? Both systems state that roleplaying has some sets of rules, they just achieve those rules under different guidelines. Just because 4e doesn't have pages upon pages of rules outlining NPC (or even inter-party) interactions doesn't mean roleplaying isn't there.

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>>50797844
>Charisma bonus +6
>dex bonus +5
>wis bonus +11

Yeah sure, equally easy for all classes

>int bonus +18 billion

>>50797985

I am very confused about whatever point you're actually trying to make.

>>50797366
My favorite is a Warlord ability.

>Provoke Overextension
>Smack the enemy and they get a free attack against you they must take. Certain Warlords get a defense bonus against the attack.
>If the enemy misses, an ally next to them gets to punch them in the face.


Just set a Fighter up with a mark on the enemy nearby and you're golden, since the forced attack triggers their mark punishment.

>>50791483
>What did it do wrong?

One of the things I think 4e did wrong was tying classes to one single power source and then try and design classes by combining power sources with role.

In hindsight, I think Power Source should have said a bit about what a power does rather than what sub group of classes uses it. (i.e. Martial powers are physical actions, Arcane powers manipulate reality, Divine powers draw upon Divine entities, Psionic powers involve the use of mind powers, Ki powers involve manipulating internal energy).

>>50797530

Has anyone done this i see it all the time

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>>50798009
You're Highly Intelligent, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

>>50798025

I never really saw the point in Provoke Overextension when you have Brash Assault as an At WIll. http://funin.space/compendium/power/Brash-Assault.html

I mean, I can kinda see how Provoke Overextension is better, it's guaranteed and you get the defence boost, but you can get a similar defence boost with the Harlequin Style feat, and I've had a lot fun roleplaying or using skill checks to bait opponents into taking the chance to attack me.

>>50798086
I wasn't a fan of Brash Assault because the monster can just choose not to take the attack, which smart ones won't always do.

>>50797985

...the fuck?

>>50798109

Fair enough. I just saw it as a chance to make use of my good Cha mod and bluff skill.

>>50792252
>Somewhat corrected by using Essential Rogues / Fighters
Christ. some days, /tg/, some days you just make me lose faith.

>>50798255

As terrible as it was, Essentials somehow had an audience. I don't understand it either.

>>50798431
well to be fair the Essential books themselves were absolutely gorgeous and were in what I feel is the perfect size format for RPG books, wish more games used that design format

>>50798431
What was even the point of essentials?

>>50797657
So why can't the wizard cast fireball as much as he wants? I mean, this is supposed to be up to the player right? What if I want to play a wizard who casts fireball every round?

>>50798948
There were supposed to be ways to have a Wizard who could cast "fireball" every round in 4e. Scorching Burst was an at-will Area Burst 1 within 10 spell.

>>50798255
>>50792504
>>50798431
>>50794870

Don't get me wrong, I hated Essentials too.

BUT the game needs classes that are a bit easier to play, and 3 at-wills, 4 encounters and 4 daily powers are a bit too much for our party's grill.

Or me, when I am sleep-deprived.

Also, there's ways to give martials neat stuff without giving them a fucking spellbook. Different mechanics was the sad attempt Essential did, but as I said, too little and too late.

Also: >>50794870
> Wrong: Bloated Enemy HP in the earliest phase
This. So much. No better proof that the playtesting was butched.

>>50799468
You want an easy class to play?

Play an artificer, use magic weapon every round, you have other powers, but you'll rarely need to use them because magic weapon is so damn good

>>50799805
Ranger, spam twin strike.

>>50798636
to appeal to those who preferred a 3.5 style of class design

>>50801239
>to appeal to those who preferred a 3.5 style of class design

But how did it even do that?

>>50798636
The reason we were given or the real reason?

The reason we were given was that it was supposed to "simplify the experience so it's less daunting to new players"

The real reason was to make martial classes garbage and wizards god-tier again because Mearls has a hard-on for wizards

It almost worked, in a way, wizards are undoubtedly the best controllers in the game thanks to Essentials powers combined with PHB1 feats, but no one who plays 4e ever plays with just Essentials material so it also kind of failed

>>50801277
>But how did it even do that?
took toys away from the filthy martials

>>50791483
Lots

Lots

Make Barbarians better, they're super fun, but at high-levels of optimization they fall behind every other striker class, and even a few defender and controller classes with off-striker capabilities

>>50801335
>but at high-levels of optimization they fall behind every other striker class

Ehhh...everyone falls so far behind ranger most of the time that it doesn't really matter. And a truly tricked out Barb can do some outrageous shit.

>>50801391
They're fragile thanks to poor secondary stats, their striker feature only does anything on a critical, and even then only if it's a critical with a barbarian power, they only get three skills and their paragon paths pretty much all suck

>>50797492
And this is why 4E is for babbies.

In 3.5, such opportunities had to be created through roleplay. 4E just hands it to you and slaps on a cooldown to balance it.

>>50801657

>In 3.5, such opportunities had to be created through roleplay.

Except this is an utterly meaningless statement that proves you're an idiot.

Read the thread for prior examples of why this sentiment is moronic.

>>50801657
I don't see how the 4e way of doing it is more childish than the 3.5 way of doing it


Or how 3.5 does it in your mind, for that matter, because from my experience, 3.5 is ludicrously limiting in what you can do during combat

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>>50791483

>It's another "retards on /tg/ talk about 4e using nothing but buzzwords" thread

>>50801657
4E gives you great abilities to use that feature a cooldown, but could rp around it.

3.5E gives you absolutely nothing, but could rp around it.

>>50801760
>>50801698
>I haven't read 3.5 rules

>>50801760
That's not true, one of those games makes you roll at a penalty and take an AoO for trying to RP anything other than full attacking if you don't have the feats for it.

>>50801771

I have. I've also played them. 3.5 gives martial characters nothing. It gives them less than nothing, because it presents them with options that are all universally worse than just attacking, most of which are more harmful to you than your opponents.

>>50801812
This.

Actually if you compare them it goes like
>I want to do *maneuver I don't have a power/feat/ability for*
>3.5: You don't have the improved *maneuver* feat? Make an attack roll, then a stat contest.
>You also provoke an AoO, and you take a bunch of penalties if it hits you.
>4e: You don't have an applicable power/feat? Well, that's an improvised attack, roll an attack,
>I'll check a level appropriate damage/effect that's applicable from the improvised actions table if you hit.

>>50801771
OK

Now, with that done, please post, in this thread, precisely the 3.5 rules you are referring to, I assume you either have the pdfs or physical copies of the PHB and DMG on hand, so it shouldn't be hard. Because I've read the rules before, but I have no idea what the hell you're on about

>>50801848
4e has flat rules for bullrush and grab actions in PHB1

Not for trip actions though, strangely enough, but they're easily covered by the improvised attack rules. Or for sunder, but that's ok because no one ever used sunder in 3.5 anyway

>>50801850

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialAttacks.htm

>>50801877
Umm, no, I wanted the stuff that you couldn't do in 4e, not the stuff that has rules in the 4e PHB1

>>50801877
90% of those are completely worthless shit.

>>50801877
Why the fuck would I do any of these when I can just full attack and kill the guy?

Without save-or-die and RP possibilities, the only way to win a combat is by reducing the enemy HP to 0. 4e embraced that so the non-utility powers always do damage.
They also knew this is kind of boring, so they attached a secondary effect to all powers.

It is a gamist game, but martial exploits are a narrative game mechanic. (Let the player modify the scene so the opportunity for said maneuver occurs, mechanically justfying the "cooldown")

What they did wrong were that encounter and daily should upgrade too, so new powers offer new effects, not just upgraded versions of previous powers. This can reduce even page count.
What they did "wrong" was the bland, gamist manual. It is too dry. 5e have some things that are EXACTLY as in 4e, but presented more fluffly. This, otherwise, increases page count.

My other considerations are more of my opinion and taste, so won't write it here.

>>50802181
There actually is one "save or die" power in 4e

It's called "slumber of the winter court", it's a level 15 wizard daily, and on a hit and a failed save, it knocks a target out until they take damage or 1d4 hours pass

In a fight where the enemies start bunched up so you can hit all of them, they all fail, and the PCs have no reason to want the targets dead instead of just out of the way, it's effectively a save-or-die

>>50802221
That kind of situation is more "Save or Suck".

>>50802181

>Without save-or-die and RP possibilities, the only way to win a combat is by reducing the enemy HP to 0. 4e embraced that so the non-utility powers always do damage.

Well, that and they expanded what 'Reduced to 0' meant. It could be breaking morale and having the enemy run, it could be knocking people out, it could be killing them or it could be forcing them to stand down and surrender. By doing that they removed a lot of the NEED for Save-Or-Die.

>>50802181
I don't really see why scaling dailies and encounters should be there

It's quite fun picking out new powers at later levels, sometimes just upgrading an old power, sometimes trading one in for something new, it certainly has more weight behind it than simply being handed an upgrade to a choice you made ten to fifteen levels ago

>>50802499
I think he means that if you don't want to switch, you can upgrade instead.

Which means you'd save space on the powers that are just a direct upgrade for a previous power.

>>50802516
Oh, that makes sense

But in my opinion, that's a pretty minor flaw in terms of how powers are presented in the books when compared to spell lists being arranged alphabetically in 5e

Because that is seriously the worst thing, it's as if they designed it specifically to be frustrating and difficult

>>50802516
>>50802499

That and some dailies/encounters simply don't HAVE upgrades. Which makes me sad when I find one I like but it will stop being any good next tier.

>>50802536

Are you complaining about 5e being alphabetical or about the 4e ones not being alphabetical? If the former, yeah. Alphabetical means NOTHING when you are looking for what spells you can personally use.

>>50802552
>>50802536
At the very least, they should have grouped it by level.

>>50802552
I'm complaining about 5e being alphabetical, yes

Also, which powers are you referring to? Because most of the really good ones without upgrades are good enough to last two tiers, sometimes more in the case of things like Low Slash and Command Insanity

>>50802596

The Artificer Summoning/Trap powers are the ones that irked me enough to homebrew some new ones myself.

>>50802619
...But Artificers get awesome summons every tier, they even get Simulacrum, which is the best summoning power in the game

>>50802654

Yes but the summons all dramatically change as you level up. My issue is mostly 'I'd like to use something like one of the lower level summons scaled up'. Hence my talk about wanting powers to upgrade.

>>50802667
I think summons in 4e were specifically designed to not upgrade

Look at any pre-essentials summon power, none of them are repeats of what came at an earlier level for any class that can get summons

My group plays D&D with 3d6 instead of d20.
I think playing it like that is like playing a completely different game (I dare to say, much better game).

Every +1 makes major difference because of the bell curve (instead of measly +5% on a linear path). But also bell curve makes play much more exciting. Easier mobs are easier to kill, harder mobs are harder to kill.

From AD&D to 5E, 4E was best received. For its focus on tactical combat, balanced and tight knit design , usefulness of martials and various neat little things that just add up (and Dark Sun is a major +).

>>50792285
It's hard to describe because D&D has always theoretically supported miniatures but essentially, between action cards, movement being basically described as squares and the linear feel of several of the pre-canned adventures it felt more like playing Heroquest than roleplaying a character.

This is kind of an issue with D&D generally, the class interdependancies, emphasis on precise positioning on a map and spellbooks reward playing it like a MOBA or like collaborative Mordheim but 4e took it all the way, if they'd have supplied the 3 core books in a box with a battle mat, some basic terrain and some minis it literally would have been Heroquest.

Now having said that D&D always kind of plays this way and aside from the legendary monster math 4e did a lot right if that's what you like. You need to actually work at roleplaying rather than playing Diablo with it, you need your DM to do good original level design or port some adventures forward/back to it and you need to be into a game that cares about positioning and mutual support.

>>50802764
4e already has a bit of an issue with bonuses to attack rolls outweighing practically everything else in the game, wouldn't 3d6 just make that problem worse?

>>50802776
Absolutely yes.
It will make high defenses significantly harder to hit, low defenses significantly easier to hit. It makes each +1 AB/AC progressively more valuable

Because of that my DM did some major tweaking like AC, total bonus is halved (round up) excluding stat bonus, it stays the same.
Crit range needs some editing,

4e is balanced at about 60% hit chance. This makes it quite good for rolling with 3d6. But classes that already hit often or have a very good AC will be more powerful than when you roll 1d20.

It also makes specialized classes much more important. No more will barbarian have lockpicking chance just 10% lower than than a rogue(thief), now it will be from 30% to 60% lower.

>>50802884
I forgot to add,

Because of so much tweaking to be done, it is almost not the same system, and he filled dozens of notebooks of just house rules, with enough pages to fill 3 PHB's with plenty of paper to spare.

>>50802934
I'd love to see those houserules transcribed into pdfs, they sound very interesting

>>50792482
Why would you post this

>>50802958
When the current campaign is complete, will do that.

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>>50801657
>And this is why 4E is for babbies.

>>50802884
> It will make high defenses significantly harder to hit, low defenses significantly easier to hit. It makes each +1 AB/AC progressively more valuable
AND gives diminishing returns on min-maxers.

>>50805690
Wouldn't that actually give min-maxers better returns per point, and encourage specialization even further?

>>50805754
> Wouldn't that actually give min-maxers better returns per point, and encourage specialization even further?
Nope. Let's just say a weak character hits at +4 your regular character hits at +6 and the min-maxed character hits at +8. Both attack an enemy with AC 15, and flank that enemy.

Now you get attacks at +6 / +8 / +10, which requires 9 / 7 / 5 respectively. There are 216 possible die rolls, where 3 (and 18) happens .4% of the time, 4 1.3% of the time, etc.

So weak dude hits 160/216 (74% of the time), average dude hits 196/216 (91% of the time), and strong dude 212/216 (98% of the time) which means the same +2 gave 17% odds and 7% odds, which is a diminishing return.

Against AC 18, it's 37% / 63% / 84 %, so increases of 36% and 21%.

Against ludicrous AC (let's say 23), however, it's 2% / 9% / 26%. This probably means the encounter is clearly not one to be fought, with the Min-Maxer having a slight shot at it (letting him shine at what he's good at, or letting him die of his poor decision).

>>50805754

>>50806379
Continued. Which is interesting is that you also see a diminishing return of good strategy when the attacker is immensely more powerful. The dude that attacks at +10 against an against an AC 15 actually gains 7% chance to hit, while regular dude (+8) gains 17%.

That said, however, personally I strongly prefer 2d10 as a die roll. 1% chance for a 2 or a 20, 2% for a 3 and 19, 3% for a 4 and 18 and so on. While it still offers diminishing returns and thus favors balanced characters a bit more, it's not as steep as 3d6 can be.

>>50791483
Right: Where to start? Great new fluff, better balance between classes, ditching racial ability penalties, martial characters that are finally *interesting* to play instead of just being meat-shields for the casters, lists of spells that are completely unique for every caster class, ritual caster for the utility spells, removal of the need for heal-bot clerics, inclusion of Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies, clearly delineated power sources that gave thematically inspiring but consistent origins to different classes, use of Roles to make sure classes had clear design plans and avoid "trap classes", shanking of alignment as a crunchy impact on the games, much more concise alignment descriptions, minions, using saves as an AC type mechanic...

Wrong: First thing to come to mind is how aggressive they were about the new cosmological changes. It doesn't matter that the books themselves pointed out how to rebuild some of the things they didn't use (set the Blood War back into its hot mode or rearrange the World Axis into the Great Wheel) - the amount of smack they talked really alienated the most doggedly loyal fans. Mechanically? Their initial mistakes with monster math and skill challenges - yes, they fixed those afterwards, but they left a sour taste.

Do Better: Try to be a little less dry in the presentation, and make it clearer that having concise rollplay rules does NOT equal being incapable of roleplay. Also, Essentials was a fuck-awful idea that should have been shot in the head before it hit the development board. And making Shadow & Elemental as "secondary only" power sources was stupid.

>>50795753
I thought most people actually rather liked 4e Dark Sun's fluff, because it got rid of a lot of the late 2e stuff that people had hated, like the Mind Lords of the Last Sea?

>>50806725
>I thought most people actually rather liked 4e Dark Sun's fluff
I was just mostly happy that Thri-Kreen got write-ups.

So here's a question that came up in a discussion about a potential 4e rewrite- How could you make armour more interesting?

In terms of gear, choosing armour is pretty dull before you start looking at magic. It's almost always just wearing the heaviest your class has the option to unless you have a feature that supports a specific armour type. It's not any better in 3.5, really, but when you compare it to weapons picking armour types really doesn't have much to it.

Our vague thought was splitting armour into tiers (light and heavy, possibly medium too) and trying to make all armour on each tier roughly equal, even if one type had a worse AC bonus it might have other useful traits or or boost NADs to some extent. Making it work is a lot more complex, but any thoughts on the concept itself, or alternate ways of making armour choices more meaningful?

>>50808820
Split physical damage in blunt/pierce/slash. Each armor is better or worse for one kind. This fixes both the "use the higher AC armor available" that you said and the "choose the highest damage die weapon available".

>>50810072
This sounds terrible and clashes very hard with 4e's design philosophy.

>>50808820
I think the solution is to eliminate a dull element, not force complexity into it.

>>50808820
Do what 13th Age did and roll expected class AC into the class's stat package. From there, you're free to do whatever the fuck you want with armor. I've been doing this in my rewrite.

>>50810301
This. Pull a Legend, stop caring about that shit.

>>50795128
Minions are an amazing concept and I never understood the backlash against them.

>>50811393
I think it was caused by a mental incongruity caused by minions having "1 hp" and the number of abilities dealing damage on a miss.

>>50811957
You do realize that minions have a "Takes no damage on a miss" language built into their subtype right?

>>50806725
>And making Shadow & Elemental as "secondary only" power sources was stupid

Wait, what? Fire, Frost Lightning, etc were huge, especially frost.

>>50808820
One thing I actually hate about DnD is how you can get dex-monkeys with medium armor having the same AC as the Paladin in full plate.

But then, I never liked AC to begin with; armor should make you tougher, not make you get hit less. DEX monkeys should get hit less but hurt bad when they do, while your heavy armor guys get slapped around but shrug it off.

>>50812091
Yes, we of the 4E master race know this, but dirty 3.x peasants had a hard time with it.

>>50812456
He means elemental as in the keyword. It became a power source post essentials, like arcane, divine, primal, etc

>>50812515
...huh.

That was dumb.

>>50812515
Source?

>>50808820
Probably not a popular philosophy, but I've always wanted D&D to give you an incentive not just to roll around in the heaviest armour you can equip all the time - urban and social encounters are a thing after all, not to mention personal comfort. Of course classes that can use heavy armour depend on it, so you'd need to make sure that classes that are used to rolling around a battlefield in a robe or leather vest are similarly depowered in situations where the field plate wouldn't be appropriate.

My solution would be to give every class a benefit for choosing to get a serious and spend a little extra prep time before a major confrontation, whether it's polishing up the heavy armour, coating your blades in a nasty poison, or studying your spellbook so hard that you're literally crackling with weird energies. Of course there needs to be some kind of opportunity cost for when the party chooses to power up like this, which could be as simple as a gold tax for added equipment maintenance, but I'd favour the gamier solution of giving the GM some mechanic to up the ante in response and make the opposition stiffer or the consequences of failure nastier.

So in this paradigm, heavy armour effectively becomes a class feature with maybe an associatee power for fighters and paladins to opt into. And if you can own multiple suits of full plate, it might be the equivalent of a feat chain you can take on or off, effectively letting you change your build on the fly.

>>50812091
Which was more of a patch for part of the incongruity rather than something that eliminated it.

Some people had problems with the idea that minions could survive infinite fireballs (no matter how powerful) as long as they all missed.

1 hp minions work great when damage is yes/no and starts being problematic to comprehend by some when damage is yes/lesser yes.

>>50812485
A fair amount of armor is design to deflect hits as well as absorb it. This is actually why many breast plates have a wedge shape.

>>50812586
It appeared in Heroes of Elemental Chaos.

>>50812592
>1 hp minions work great when damage is yes/no and starts being problematic to comprehend by some when damage is yes/lesser yes.

They still work great. Not tracking minor miss damage isn't a patch to correct a flaw, it's intrinsic to the minion concept that they're not inherently weedy, just numerous and unimportant enough that it's not worth tracking damage beyond "did this guy take a solid hit or not"

>>50812485
DEX monkey are hurt more by hits because they usually have less hp

>>50812515
>>50812553
Reduce all power sources to Magic/Not-magic imo. You get a lot of redundancy when you have to come up with unique classes for the guy that blasts things with magic fire, the guy that blasts things with holy fire, the guy that blasts things with magic fire but also wind and lightning...

>>50812699

What about things that are Sort Of Magic? Like the Paladin smiting you with divine power around a very large blunt object?

>>50812592
>A fair amount of armor is design to deflect hits as well as absorb it. This is actually why many breast plates have a wedge shape.

Sure, but you still got hit in the first place.

If I want to get into armor deflection I might as well just play SoS.

>>50812683
They're not hurt more, they just have less capacity to absorb hurt.

In other words, a Paladin and a Rogue that get hit by a 20-damage attack are both taking 20 damage. The Paladin just has another 40 points to go, while the Rogue has 10.

I'd rather see the attack hit the Paladin and do 10 damage but miss the Rogue.

>>50812719
Slightly Magic is also acceptable. Of course you could just say the paladin, monk, swordmage etc are just the melee-focused classes of hte magic power source.

>>50812699
The idea was that each power source would offer a unique slant to the class design. this stands out the most with primal and psionic. Primals have powers that change their functionality, form druid wildshaping to warden forms, while psionics have no encounters but can augment at-wills. t was a half-baked idea with the other powers sources not being nearly as stand out, but it's an idea worth preserving imo

>>50812758

Well, 4e plate armour did give you Resist(All) as you leveled up.

>>50812758
Or you could look at it as the paladin only takes 1/8th hp damage from a successful hit while a rogue takes 1/5th. It's all supposed to be abstract/narrative anyway

>>50812781
No...?

>>50812758
You're taking hit points too literally, that way lies madness. What happened is that the rogue took a solid hit and the paladin avoided getting hurt somehow (but in some nebulous way is closer to getting hurt)

>>50812815

It did actually. Paragon plate was resist 3 all, epic was resist 5 all.

>>50812766
Yeah, I'd actually like to see more of that in any potential new 4e. If martial, divine and arcane characters had completely different mechanics for using and refreshing their powers it would have gone a long way to avert those initial impressions that they'd homogenised the classes and turned fighters into wizards.

Also every power source should get its own category of ritual equivalents!

>>50812857
Are we talking about the mordenkainen armors? because I don't remember this at all

>>50812904

Honestly, I'd tie it less to power source and more to skill.

Remove 'Ritual casting' as a feat/thing classes start with. If you are trained in a skill, you can use rituals for that skill. A protective ritual is Endurance, as that's the skill it's most closely associated with while thievery lets you do rituals to silence your footsteps or open otherwise impossible locks.

Power source bloat was definitely a thing though, and led to a proliferation of redundant caster types reminiscent of the latter days of 3.5, while we never even got a martial controller.

To look at it another way from compressing everything into Magic/Not Magic... if Arcane and Divine need to be separate power sources, then so should Arms and Roguery be.

>>50812960
>while we never even got a martial controller.
hunter

>>50812960
There was really no need for more beyond psionic, but essentials was a crazy time of bad ideas

>>50812927

Adventurer's Vault, page 7. Masterwork (Aka: Armour with a higher + bonus) rules.

>>50812931
As a setting concept, I like the flavour of experts in a skill developing magic powers naturally from their expertise, but it's a departure from traditional DnD fluff.

I wasn't really talking about every getting access to utility magic, so much as everyone having defined things they can do out of combat, so like the warlord can rally a few minions out of crowd of npcs or the rogue can find somewhere to offload weird loot for a fair fraction of its value, all as reliably as the cleric can cast wards against fire or evil.

It would be weird to me if instead you qualified for the ability to cast warding spells on your comrades by being really resilient personally. But then I'm dubious of the need for an Endurance skill at all, when there are several other scores on your character sheet saying how tough you are.

>>50813021
Huh, well look at that. I always skipped over those due to lower AC alue

>>50813110
Are there? there's nothing you can roll with during skill challenges and the like except for endurance

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<-- I wish there was a 4e equivalent to this. The way 4e handles Attacks, Armor Class, Skills, Levels, Powers, and much more could make for a good superhero/anime RPG.

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>mfw i loved 4e
>mfw my kobold warlord was the most fun I ever had with any character ever

God dammit I miss playing him, however short a time I did. A little reptilian shitter yelling at you like a drill sergeant about how you're on the ground dying yet "I'm a kobold and I'm still standing, what does that say about you?". Healing them by pissing them off.

>>50812677
Working great mechanically does not mean that they work intuitively for all.

Also it was a patch due to how over-effective damage on a miss attacks were on minions in the original 4e playtest rules.

>>50812985
Dang my bad, I ignored essentials classes after the first book (fallen lands?) but I should have remembered that.

>>50813209
I think that most situations where you're called on to endure something can be modelled as an attack against Fortitude or Will.

Ok skill challenges, fair enough, but the hallmark of skill challenges is choosing from several skills to approach the situation and I feel like you have to work pretty hard to come up with scenarios where Enduring is as useful a strategy as doing something proactively.

>>50813217

Look up Valor. It's literally that.

>>50813291
Endurance can be used to represent how long you can do something proactively, like hold open a portcullis while your allies scramble through, or drag a cart through a hot desert into civilization, or swim across a freezing lake with sunken treasure in tow, etc. It's not very hard to imagine uses for endurance as a skill

>>50813296
Oh really? I shall. Thank you.

>>50812904
Well, divine classes have channel divinity

And honestly, I'm just glad druids aren't considered "divine" casters in 4e, because that was always kind of dumb

>>50795095
This
I dont even like 4e and i can tell that saying its like an mmo is retarded

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>>50813217
There a Microlite20 Hack, sadly, its in incomplete...

>>50814097
Channel divinity is the most tacked-on class feature imaginable. But I guess it's a start.

>>50813242
>Play a giant egotist lazy warlord
>All his "attack granters" was him attacking, fucking up, then an ally doing it properly, with the warlord assuming he did it himself, or "Hong Kong Phooey syndrome" as the group came to call it
>Acted like he was the hero of the story, to the point of having his name legally changed to Hero. And the other party members were just his groupies or something.
>other characters didn't like him, and only stuck with him to keep his ass from getting killed, because he's actually not that bad at keeping them alive with his healing, and their dislike of him was part of the glue that kept them together.

All IC obviously. It was a great campaign OOC and he was a fun character.

>>50814770
>>50813242

More evidence that Warlord is the best fucking class in anything ever.

My first and still favourite 4e character is my Dragonborn Warlord. While a hero her morality is very much 'Dragon'.

She cares for her friends, but at the same time she almost treats them like her hoard- A trove of powerful people and great warriors worthy of standing beside her. And when someone messes with her things, she unleashes draconic fury upon them while sheltering her friends beneath shielding wings.

Vengeance is Mine is such a fun power. I wish more 4e powers had names that were so damn satisfying to say when you use them.

>>50815045
Warlords had so many good ones.
My Dwarf Warlord has "Rub Some Dirt on It" "Follow Me In" "I've Got Your Back" "Join the Crowd" and "Teachable Moment" just for the names.

>>50797433
The more different games I've played, the more I think, "Yes, they do". However, DnD, any edition (except maybe 5th?) doesn't have rules for roleplay. After all, what rules do you have to do anything other than make the optimal decision all the time? An example people hate is Fate Points, where you gain them whenever you act a way that's in character but makes things harder. People used to 3.5, though, consider the more rigidly-templated abilities it to mean it discourages roleplay when really it just presents everything the same way.

>>50795128
Minions are fantastic, and something I steal for 5e games too.

>>50791483
Yep this. >>50791543

A lot of the specific D&D flavor they tried stuffing into the system never jived.

Fine game. Not D&D. Not something I'd even recommend as a role-playing game BUT definitely a game I would recommend over all.

>>50816355

>Not something I'd even recommend as a role-playing game

Can you say exactly why? A lot of people say this point but nobody ever explains why it's any harder to roleplay in 4e than it is in 3.PF or 5e, and I really don't see it myself.

>>50816355
My stance is: it's as good as D&D has ever been for roleplaying and storytelling, it's just the quantity of polish on the combat system highlights how lackluster the rules for everything else are.

>>50816426

A game should dedicate most of its wordcount to what it cares most about. This just makes sense. If your system has a lot of combat rules, clearly combat is what it cares most about.

If your system has a lot of combat rules and you try to claim that combat isn't the point of the system, then the system is shittily designed and has a lot of wasted wordcount.

This is always the argument I use when people say D&D isn't about fighting. It either is, or it's a shittily designed system. And nobody ever seems to want to pick either option.

>>50816455
I don't disagree, I just think being all about tactical combat is a fine stance for an RPG to take.

>>50813406
>portcullis

Str check

>swim across icy water

Con check

No reason for endurance to be a skill

Anyone have a pdf of "Strike!"?

>>50816355
>muh roleplaying

I ran and played 4th for years, and guess what, there was just as much roleplaying as there was in 3x, probably more.

>>50816907
the strength check is to raise the portcullis, the endurance check is to hold it up

But yes, the real problem with endurance is that anything that could be an endurance check could just as easily be a raw constitution check

That's why I've removed endurance as a skill in my homebrew for 4e skills

>>50791483
So, because this is the only system me and my friends have ever played, we didn't know what was wrong with it.
It was recently brought to my attention that combat is not supposed to take 3 hours per encounter.

What are some alternative systems to 4e?

>>50817185

If combat is taking 3 hours per encounter, the problem isn't 4e.

>>50817185
Try 13th Age, I don't think it's as good as 4e personally, but it certainly isn't a bad system, and has enough in common with 4e that the transfer won't be too hard

>>50791483
>What did it do right?
Class balance. Sweet, sweet class balance.
>What did it do wrong?
A lot less difference between classes, something that's often been a hall mark of TTRPGs.
>What would you have done differently.
Instead of releasing everything over 3 books for PHB and MM would've done one book for each and only had the traditional 3.X classes and races in it. And then gone for the new stuff in splat books.

>>50817516

>A lot less difference between classes, something that's often been a hall mark of TTRPGs.

Can you go into this a bit? I've honestly always felt the opposite.

>>50817554
The issue with 4e classes isn't that they play the same, I think. It's that they seem to on the surface. People who spend a lot of time with 4e learn the nuance of every class and how to use them and all the little differences between them (Shaman vs Runepriest, for example, are both Leaders but do it very differently), but someone with a more cursory interest sees the way every class is layed out the same, maybe tries a few but doesn't spend enough time to get to that nuance, and feels they all play the same.

>>50816375
>A lot of people say this point but nobody ever explains why it's any harder to roleplay in 4e than it is in 3.PF or 5e, and I really don't see it myself.
99% of the time, the response to this question is just them listing a bunch of mechanics the game gave them to roll dice to avoid having to roleplay, like mind control diplomacy rules, charm person, etc. These days I honestly don't even bother asking for why they think you can't roleplay in 4e and just skip to the part where I laugh at them.

>>50817232
>If combat is taking 3 hours per encounter, the problem isn't 4e.

Yeah, this. Combat in 4E should be over in an hour for a large-sized encounter.

>>50791483
Right: They got rid of it.

Wrong: They made it.

Differently: If I have to make it, keep it like they did Basic and Advanced back in the day. Leave 3.5 as advanced, and make the retard shit of 4e for basic. That way you can keep your playerbase AND expand it instead of fucking yourself in the face with a rusty chainsaw to try to appeal to retards.

>>50818977

Do you actually have a point or an argument to make, are are you just kind of an asshole?

>>50818977
The difference between 3.5 and 4e isn't "Advanced" and "Basic" though, it's more along the lines of "Adventure" and "Tactics", and even that suffers a bit, because it's a bit misleading on the 3.5 side, because it's really damn hard to advertise the character-building side of an RPG, and the character-building side of 3.5 is the best part of 3.5

Maybe "Adventurers" rather than "Adventure"

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>>50818977
I'm feeling generous tonight.

>>50795924
>not having a living breathing world
Pcs aren't special

>>50819285
Depends on the campaign.

>>50819285

Wow, that's an amazingly bullshit false dichotomy.

>>50816927
Here:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/2fuwd4

Fair warning: it's amateur as shit and the first 90 pages are about non-combat stuff that's half meh, half okay but unbaked.

>>50819490
How does it improve on 4E, if at all?

>>50819558

As someone who doesn't particularly like Strike!, it's very streamlined. But in doing so it lost almost all the depth I actually enjoyed in 4e.

>>50819558
Hard to say, because while the underlying inspiration is generally from 4e, it's different enough that you can't just call it "better".

What it did:

- Hardcore streamlining (going from d20 to d6, getting rid of basically all the modifiers, and using advantage from 5e instead, keeping HP at 10, lots of other minor rules improvements etc.)
- Not really bothering with fluff at all, everything is supposed to be fluffed by the players
- The big "new" thing is having a selectable Role on top of Class. Role gives you your passive modifiers and minor action powers (they are even called Role action in this game). In 4e terms, a 4e warlord in Strike! would be a Warlord/Leader. But you could make a Warlord/Striker who would be doing higher damage and more mobile/precise attacks, while still having all kinds of ally-enabling warlord powers.

>>50819622
>>50819617
What I like about the streamlined approach is that adding complexity back is actually a lot easier than removing it. Adding in D&D-isms like stats and skills is pretty easy, and since the combat system's guts are laid out plain, stuff like switching out the d6 for some other dice (I have been flirting with the idea of d10 or d12) should be relatively easy, if that's what you want.

>>50819813

'Adding complexity' meaning basically 'redesigning the whole system'?

That seems no easier than making it simpler to me.

>>50816927
>>50819490
>>50819558
>>50819617
>>50819622
>>50819813
>>50820431
Stop shilling Strike!

Why does /tg/ keep shilling Strike!?

>>50820474

>Half the posts are calling it shit
>Complains about shilling

>>50791483
>What would you have done differently?
I won't have try to piss off a legion of autistic retards by screwing up the fluff in Faerun with a lot of spellfire.

I would just stick to Nerath as the new campaign setting.
I would have hired a game developer that wouldn't try to commit murder suicide to actually make the online version of my game

>>50817185
M8, you have a problem with your group if you take 3 hours to finish what my group take half a hour at most in a string together boss fights battle in 4e.

>>50820431
Adding complexity means adding complexity. This will involve designing your own shit if the shit complexity you want to add isn't already in as a module (or is, but you want something else, or want to tweak it heavily).

For example, if I wanted to add stats and skills from D&D, I could simply go with "pick 2 good (+1) and 1 bad (-1) stats from this list of 6 stats and 3-4 trained (+1) skills from this list of X skills, when rolling for something we use the optional bad(-1)/ok(0)/good(+1)/master(+2) tables instead of the usual trained/untrained, and we will not be using the skill learning rules" or something along those lines.

Or I could just "homebrew" the whole thing and say "we are using LotFP skill system, you have 4 points to spend on skills", if I wanted a more OSR style game.

The system has a bunch of optional rules presented, as well as explaining the math and reasoning behind how everything works, so you really have all the tools you need if you want to tinker.

>>50819285
PCs should be special even if they're not superheroic, but they aren't the only 'special' characters in a setting or campaign. The party are protagonists, and there should be antagonists and deuteragonist/tritagonist types who are noteworthy and near their level of ability in some capacity or another.

>>50819558
That depends on what your take on different elements of 4e happen to be.
If you thought the design or implementation of feats, equipment properties, or magic items was flawed then you'll probably get some value out of Strike.

I would also suggest checking out Gamma World 7e as a strong 4e alternative. It too boils some things away, but not quite to such a degree. Downside is those card mechanics means you can't simply jump into it, though you could ignore those without missing out on too much, or just find scans and treat them like more permanent or semipermanent abilities/items. If you're okay spending money on it you can get the cards printed for you on demand at DriveThruRPG.

Also, maybe check out Rule of Cool's "Legend" system--though that has much less in the way of mechanical similarity. There are tonal and thematic parallels, though, and it's also free.
It's also very dead and has no bestiary.

>>50820809
This does present one of the problems with 4e

It can do PC vs PC combat, but it's really bad at it. And one-on-one PC vs PC combat is even worse, it's almost as unbalanced as one-on-one PC vs PC combat in 3.5.

>>50820843
Are you retarded or it your post simply bait?

>>50820809

Man, I miss Legend. Such potential that will never be completed.

>>50820857
Hm?

But it's true, 4e can't do Pc vs PC combat very well, which makes it very hard to make rivals or antagonists in 4e that can function as mirror images of the PCs like you can in so many other systems, because such characters will either be really uncomfortable to fight, or will be statted totally differently to the PCs

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>>50820884
You are really something.

Hey everybody. I'm also working on a simplified 4e hack and wondered what you thought about my train of thought here. Setting is a kind of vaguely witcher/bloodborne thing where players belong to an organization of professional beast hunters if you're curious.

No ability scores, just modifiers. assign 3, 2, 1, 1, 0, 0 to the six abilities.
Ignore race.
Pick a class, add one point to each key ability your class has.
All class traits are the same but you only get one class feature (probably healing word for clerics, sneak attack for rogues, etc.)
Use simplified weapons and armor from Gamma World.
No feats--on levels where you get no benefit except for a feat, add one point to an ability.

Here's the big change--characters learn powers like they normally would but they can only have some "active" at the same time. Maybe three at heroic tier, four at paragon, and 5 at epic. During a short rest, a character can "strategize" and swap out what active powers they have--daily powers can only be swapped if they haven't been used yet.

>>50820884
In my experience you shouldn't really build enemy NPCs like PCs in any edition of D&D, outside of 3.5 which made special considerations for that. You'll virtually always run into that sort of turbulence.

>>50820904
Make daily powers and at wills swappable only during long rest.
Make encounter powers swappable only during short rest.

This make for more interesting dynamic and C&C

>>50820907
True, but in so many other RPGs that aren't DnD you can do so easily

>>50820904
Your stat array is a bit weird, the total stat modifiers add up to less than what standard 4e point-buy would give you

>>50820942
The numbers are what the standard without any bonus from race array would give you as modifiers.

>>50791483
Balanced all the classes except for the ones it didn't balance at all.

Made all the powers separate and then homogenized them so every class was "use encounter power, use at will powers, maybe use daily power, level up, only bonuses to hit make any difference."

Taken the time and effort to redesign the game around tier 3 classes and make them the most fun and effective classes to play, which is why PF is still outselling WotC.

>>50820884
This is true for basically all D&D tho. Or at the very least the ones I played, I guess. PvP in D&D is just not a great idea.

>>50820939
That might work. Initially what I had in mind was a system where the total number of active powers you have has nothing to do with what type of power they are. You could potentially have only daily powers active if you want.

>>50820975

...What?

To all of that. Just, what?

>>50820975
>which is why PF is still outselling WotC.
5e's been selling like gangbusters and PF's been facing down flagging physical sales since before 5e launched.

>>50820494
>I would have hired a game developer that wouldn't try to commit murder suicide

Well to be fair, he didn't try, he succeeded.

>>50791483
>>right:
>better balanced character options
>simplified dm side creature creation
>excellent character builder

>>wrong:
>entire system predicated on the x uses / y time period premise even when that makes little narrative sense and feels very boardgamey which (imo) was already too prevalent and was one of the worst aspects of 3e.
>like 5e, the hp and damage scales are completely different for pcs andnpcs/monsters, which makes it very poorlysuited for games wherein 1v1 pvp is a reasonable possibility.
>no level by level multiclassing.
>Not enough granularity in skill rankings, no level-by level skill increases.
>tons of bad pr through insulting the 3.x customerbase publically, destroying one of the most popular settings, and revoking peoples access to their purchased pdfs.
>"default fluff" diverged too heavily from all of the existing 2e/3e fluff, and was not isolated to a new setting, but instead hamfistedly retconned in to the existing settings and mixed in with the consistent fluff as though it had just always been that way.

>>what would you have done differently
>balance it for potential pvp.
>level by level increases for PCs.
>drop the individual x/y system for limited use abilities and move to a unified fatigue system wherein you can keep attempting any task but your performance starts to suffer or you risk growing consequences or the like.
>skip the bad pr.
>keep the d&d fluff, make the new weird fluff and race changes exclusive to an alt. setting.

some ideas would be kept, but it wouldnt even resemble 4e as it exists had i been in charge of its design.

>>50820961
The array you've given is 16/14/12/12/10/10

Standard 4e arrays are (ignoring those with more than one odd-numbered stat because your distribution ignores odd numbers) 16/16/12/12/10/8, 16/16/12/10/10, 16/14/14/11/10/10, 16/14/14/12/11/8, 18/14/11/10/10/8, 18/12/12/10/10/10 and 18/12/12/12/10/8

>>50820975
You might as well be saying that Wizards, Clerics, and Druids are all the same in 3.5 because all they do is cast spells.

>>50821019

>makes little narrative sense and feels very boardgamey

It makes perfect Narrative sense. What it doesn't do is simulate 'real' actions in the setting, which I think is generally the issue.

>>50821019
Level by level multiclassing is a shitty idea that should have never happened in the first place.

>>50821024
Those are all valid based on point buy. I was going off of Method 1: Standard Array on page 17 of the PHB.

>>50821019
>>balance it for potential pvp.
>>level by level increases for PCs.
These are bad ideas that should not be done

>>50821039
I think he is saying that. the martial/caster divide is acceptable

>>50821051
Oh right I forgot that exists

Because nobody ever uses it when the point-buy system not only allows for more granular control over your build, it also results in a flat superior stat-array for every possible character, because wasting points on boosting a dump stat to 10, and two stats you'll never put level-up points into to 11 and 13 is pretty obviously a bad idea

Also it's flat worse for your system because your system ignores odd-numbered stats, so the 11 and 13 go entirely to waste

>>50821080
Thanks. Good to know.

>>50821074
Which is a fucking retarded thing to say if you think about it for even half a second. Spells can have effects that look and function nothing like other spells.

>>50821080
Eh, 13 has uses for prereqs.

>>50821043
>splitting hairs
afaic those things are basically the same.
>>50821048
per-level character advancement is the best idea they ever came up with for d&d. their implementation left room for improvement, but still, best idea.

>>50821061
pvp happens sometimes. it doesnt cost you anything to put monsters and pcs on the same number scales in terms of "% of enemy killed per round" and in terms of what numbers those are on both sides, and it means if pvp breaks out the math works out comparably to pcs vs monsters rather tham being a clusterfuck.

leave the "not part of my social contract" to individual groups to decide, rather than forcing them to accept a game that is mechanically broken as soon as pvp breaks out.

>>50821113
>afaic those things are basically the same.

Then afaic you are wrong.

>>50821113
>per-level character advancement is the best idea they ever came up with for d&d. their implementation left room for improvement, but still, best idea.
It's goddamn awful and does not work with the class/leveling system even in editions where it's implemented. It's a trap option at worst and clunky at best.

>>50821043
>What it doesn't do is simulate 'real' actions in the setting, which I think is generally the issue.
That's always been a sore spot for me. In my eyes, "the medium is the message" so 4e's considerably dry and it doesn't evoke nearly as much as it could. It's a UX issue that's cancelled out by an engaging enough DM (but I think everyone here can appreciate that this isn't something one can take for granted).

It's worth noting that this is also why it's been dogged by comparisons with MMORPGs--they both happen to be presented to chiefly give insight on numerical/mechanical interactions while leaving in-fiction relevance on the wayside or as a minor concern.

>>50821113

>t doesnt cost you anything to put monsters and pcs on the same number scales in terms of "% of enemy killed per round"

It really does. Asymmetrical balance between PCs and opponents is a heck of a lot easier to design and is generally more fun for something like D&D. The 'cost' is complexity and the available options rapidly spinning out of control if you try to fit everything into the same tight scale.

>>50821113
Simulationist and narrativist are distinctly different designs

Weird thought. What if there was no basic attack, but each weapon had one or two unique at-will powers attached to it to represent how it is special? I guess that would be like each weapon having a unique basic attack.

>>50821137
It makes for fun optimization though

>>50821119
whats the "makes perfect sense" reason a martial technique daily power can only be used once per day, when you're not too tired to do any of your other stunts?

>>50821141

I honestly never felt that way. When it comes to a system, I want the system to present the useful information in the most concise and effective way possible.

Fluff and flavour is easy, no half decent GM or player will struggle to add their own, but good rules that are easy to understand are a lot harder to try and fiddle together. I'd take an amazing system with no flavour over lots of flavour and a bad system.

>>50821141
This is basically true, and it saddens me considerably.

I mean, it feels so... natural to me to just make your own fluff. Seeing how some people desperately want fireball to be explained in a fucking paragraph instead of like 5 lines feels like asking for WotC to chew their food for them.

>>50821150
As do hybrids, but they do it better

>>50821151 see >>50792719

>>50821113
No, it's an objectively shitty idea that needs to go. It should say something when AD&D multiclassing, a literal gamebreaker, is a better idea than that.

>>50821163
No, no they do not

They do it ok, but they're way less granular, so there's less stuff you can squeeze out of them

4e just isn't as fun to optimize as 3.5, which is fine, because 4e has other strengths, like being more fun to play and much better at fostering cooperation between players

>>50821168
argument required to back up this outlandish claim.

the way things often failed to stack and be level-appropriate, and the often clunky implementation, leave much to be desired I admit, but even so, I'd take flawed per-level advancement over forced character-tracks every time.

>>50821149
This is a cool idea, but it'd also work if you just made weapon descriptors more impactful. As it is now, weapons (by themselves) in 4e are mostly just a DPR calculation, the depth comes from the interaction with feats and certain classes.

If I did something like this I'd probably rip off the Strike! martial artist stances and use them for weapons (spears get reach+reposition, light blades give you shifting, axes do cleave, heavy blades do ongoing, etc.).

>>50821141
I never got he dry critiques for 4e. I thought it had a lot of flavor. The classes, powers, PPs and EDs all had flavor. The power sources came with automatic flavor, and many of the powers evoked fantastic imagery with just a name and a couple sentences description. Some classes required exotic flavors behind their concept just to justify their existence. The PPs and EDs added even more layers of flavor, so by the end of it all you could end up with a primally powered, form shifting warden guardian of the breach to the elemental chaos who's actually been chosen to serve as a living prison for an ancient unkillable primordial. How is that not dripping flavor? Am I just misinterpreting the complaint?

>>50821187
>4e just isn't as fun to optimize as 3.5

I sorta disagree. In 3.5, whenever you optimize, you have to put limits on yourself because the solution would be 99% of the time "just get fullcaster levels on it somehow".

In 4e, you can take any gonzo hybrid concept and then have fun trying to find what interactions you can get out of it. Restrictions breed creativity, and 4e still has enough content to be creative with.

>>50821164
then i want an in-universe represented justification and rational mechanics for that limited use, not a disjointed and arbitrary boardgamey feeling limitation.

some kind of strain or exhaustion or lingering injuries mechanic, or the potential for dangerous sideeffects, or a high financial cost, or what have you, and let me weight the costs and benefits from an interesting in-character perspective and only bust it out when it really matters.

>>50821187
That granularity became useless for an optimizer because all but a few choices were suboptimal. With 4e there were more viable options, and the difference between optimal and suboptimal was smaller. You can make much more with 3.5's multiclassing, but much more will be garbage.

>>50821195
Classes*classes vs classes*classes*levels. It takes exponentially more effort to balance the latter at minimum for very little payoff.