Covenant wrote:I'd normally not rejoin because I'm not trying to make anyone have to defend their views, but I think you wanted me to respond so I'll try to give some more comments.
Thanks for replying, I got a bit heated in there, but 4e just brings out the derp in me.
I think mages were a huge problem, and I think the skills were also a mess--these two problems often came in pairs because the people with skills were often the characters with the spells. Mages and spellcasters in general were so astoundingly versatile that they overshadowed other classes to a ridiculous degree. It's silly to say they should have "left them alone" even if the changes made pretty much thrashed them as a unique game experience. I think that's worth complaining about--fighters and other kinds of "always on" classes really benefitted from the powers system, while an enforced uniformity failed to address the uniqueness of a wizard.
But I think the wizards and spellcasters still caused so much strain on the system that it would have made more sense to find fun exceptions than to just weld them into the same framework. They were given some differences, but I think every unique archetype should feel like a unique archetype. Unique doesn't mean better, though, and that's usually what it came to.
Know that a lot of this would come down to the way the GM wanted to play things out, but it was always a chore as the levels got higher. I preferred lower-level campaigns and low-magic campaigns for this reason.
I can't help but agree that full casters in general were an issue. There's no getting around the fact that they could do many things and while I never found batman casters to be an issue in my games scry and die and teleport without error are game changers. I still think they needed to stay powerful, they just needed to be forced into a narrower focus with actual trade offs between schools you're good at and ones that you aren't.
A lot of this was due to the relative newness of the setting, not a deliberate attempt to ruin the fun of people. They added in a truckload of new races, including some kind of animate... crystal... thing? There were even some rules for playing monster species. I think 4e actually had a lot more than I see most campaigns allowing.
I liked some of what they tried with the monster races and I admit I stopped following the game when our group decided it wasn't for us. I did do some googling and it looks like they never did add as many templates as 3.x had or make a book like Savage Species. Players loved that stuff and we never got any of that from 4e.
Lego-like character construction asks a lot of players. Most people I ended up playing with do not know how to optimize a character even slightly, and the 3.5 rules for character creation asks a great deal from players who may not know how badly they're messing things up.
So then they built a flawed character or have to ask an experienced player for advice. Maybe they could even join the community and read a forum or two and get into things. I personally loved the freedom that 3.x brought without going into GURPs level madness.
I also take special exception to the "when everyone is special nobody is" thing. The logical end to it is "...so some people should just not be special." That's a lousy design ethos. Now I don't disagree that not everyone needs to be good at the exact same things, or else nobody ever can feel special, but the quote is really a pretty terrible one, and feels like sour grapes from people who used to see themselves as "special" and now no better than the non-special people. I am not saying that is your motivation so don't take direct offense, I just wouldn't use that to buttress an argument.
Basically I feel like they felt that combat was the only thing that needed balancing. So they cut most of the out of combat stuff, thus cutting the need to balance them. Thus you ended up with a system where balance between classes and roles was so tight and the opportunities to be special were so few that every feels the same on the combat grid.
But back to the major point, I don't think the newness of a system (ie, not having updated all old content to the new systems) should be used to say it sucks. New systems need time to have books issued for them. If you pick up a 3.5e Player Handbook and not the hundreds of other books that support it then I imagine it would feel a bit light compared to the entirety of the 4e supplement catalog. It's really not that much of a flowchart--but at least people have a variety of options who had very few before. But that's probably getting into a lot of opinion.
4e is done now, and it still doesn't have a lot of the custom options that 3.x had. Is that because it was less popular and cost Wizards literally millions of fans and hundreds of millions of dollars, or just because the way the design was constrained? I have no idea, but it just never felt like the new books opened up enough cool things to be worth it. You'd never get an incantrix style character or the difference between a normal caster and a Psionic caster in 4e.
Jub wrote:I'm not sure these are legitimate. Not only is there a well-reviewed Dark Sun campaign book for 4e anyway, but I don't even know how to address a "ghost walk" game or a peasant game. Commoners were basically just a non-class with the barest of support, and warriors/adepts/experts just watered down examples of what their core classes were. You could easily run one of those in 4e by just playing the game at level 1 with classes that have no Powers. That's essentially what a commoner was. Level up a commoner a few times and they become just a lousy warrior, so really, if you want to run a commoner game just let your people play level 1 classes without benefits until they get enough XP to graduate up to adventurer status.
4e Dark Sun straight up, isn't Dark Sun. They made defiling some petty flaw that offers a lot of power to a caster for little cost and made hiding arcane magic way too easy. Then they dumped all the 4e races that were never a part of the setting in there for no reason. People shouldn't expect to be able to use core races and classes in each and every setting, but it seems like Wizards wanted to tip-toe through and not upset any body by disallowing a favorite race or class. They even made the crap often broken weapons that made melee combat tense an optional rule to avoid having to do any work with making the setting run. It just feels lazy and the book feels shorter than it should have been.
Ghost walk was a great 3.x supplement that gave rules for adventuring as a ghost and gave a ton of details about how ghosts work in D&D. It made for a great change of pace game and allowed DMs to not pull punches knowing that even a low level party wouldn't be without the dead player for long.
Have you ever seen a Common build guide in 3.x? Hell there were more threads devoted to the NPC classes than certain PC classes ever got. They took all of that out in 4e and without the skills and feats of 3.x just running a low level no abilities PC class and calling it a commoner would suck ass. Plus they also cut half the interesting non-magical items from 4e (and replaced them with 11 different flavors of the same sword and in the PHB to boot) so you can't even give your commoner as many cool item tricks as they had in 3.x.
As for Heroes of Horror, I think that's a really bad example. You could totally run a 4e horror campaign without much trouble at all. The rules for the 3.5e Heroes of Horror are available online so I invite you to look if you don't have your book handy, and the majority of the book's grist it is about setting the proper tone. That's roleplaying stuff for the DM and players. The rules are pretty light and again just reinforce the mood. Aspects like Taint make the transition just fine, and while you can't use the creatures 1:1 with the new system, an effective Heroes of Horror system relies on tone and establishing a proper horror contract between the players and DM. Half of the Heroes of Horror rulebook is just new classes and monsters with about 6 pages of new feats and like 20 pages of new rules. Most of these rules are things like fear effects (easily done in 4e) the taint system (similarly easily done) and the tainted locations (nothing that cannot be done in 4e) so i really don't see what the impediment is except that it requires a bit of effort to update the monsters or that it has a list of incompatible classes... none of which, really, are essential to running a horror campaign. Do you need to be a Dread Witch to get into the horror mood?
4e doesn't let your characters feel weak. It doesn't force them to have flaws, or to put a -2 into a stat and honestly, just that little change, hurts a Horror game. No longer can you as a DM in both a rules sense and a story sense, pick on a character's flaws. Hell even just having an encounter power, a daily power, and at wills ruins the feel. I liked my horror games where a party could run out of resources, where the mage cast his last spell in desperation and the party has to protect him afterwards, 4e gives them short rests and healing surges and that fucks the horror aspect. Instead of the party being worried about every last hit point and being tense in both an in game and meta game sense, now they have these fucking surges and bloodied states that take away all sense of tension.
I'm actually not against out-of-combat roles, actually. My complaint with the strict framework of most D&D iterations is that it got "solved" too easily in a few ways and took the fun out of stuff. Again this is the problem with the Caster-Warrior dynamic. The first has a wealth of options both in and out of combat, and many of these options are very effective and fun. The latter comparatively sucks both in and out of combat, and has few options to boot. This is a problem that wizards has repeatedly failed to fix (even in 4e despite their intentions) and which somewhat plagues all of D&D at the core. I think the Paladin shows us a good path out of that mess, where it's a class that certainly feels suited to a player who wants to play a heroic knight, and also has (if not the intelligence) the charismatic presence necessary to have a legitimate (and thematically appropriate) out of combat role. Why the fighter continues to exist at all is kind baffling. Either he should get a heavier wisdom focus (4e somewhat did this depending on build) to become a 'straight-shooting soldier' type of character or they should just make them all barbarians.
Fighters exist as the sort of combat baseline to the point where they should almost be an NPC class. The Barbarian wouldn't look so strong and tough if there was nothing to stand him next to, nor would the Ranger or Paladin look as unique if you couldn't say "I'm a fighter, but" when describing that. Honestly I'd do a sort of class wheel thing where fighter, cleric, rogue, and mage stop being classes and instead just show a baseline that bards and rangers and sorcerers branch off from. That way you always get to say "I'm a fighter, but" about every class.
Rogues, bizarrely, have a similar problem. They're skill monkeys but a lot of their usefulness gets sidelined too easily by a variety of pretty common situations. Without prestige classes being added into the mix they and monks share a really weird spot that needs the GM to offer up situations where they can actually put their skills to use. Otherwise a wizard is going to be able to pull off some similar things.
Yes and no. Monks are a strange class that have yet to be done well in the classic D&D style. Even in 5e they came out kind of weak due to the over valuing of the fringe stuff they can do. Rogues on the other hand are the masters of skills, with the right builds and tools they can pretty much do magic.
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I cut a reply to the last bit because again it boiled down to opinion on why some of the skill stuff they removed was bad.
