D&D 5th Edition Announced

[Zinegata]

How did 4th Edition move away from non-combat encounters relative to 3.5? 4th Edition is the first edition of D&D to actually have rules and guidelines for building and playing non-combat encounters!

Except the Skill Challenges never actually worked.

Here's the issue. Skill challenges is basically a "race". You need to get a certain number of successes before you get a certain number of failures. The number of successes required to win is MUCH higher than the number of failures required to lose.

To get a success, a player has to succeed at a skill roll. Here's the thing though: Most players will NOT have the appropriate skill for that particular challenge.

So if you let Krog the Barbarian with zero communication skills participate alongside you when negotiating a Finder's Fee from the king... you're basically guaranteed to have one failure every time Krog's turn comes up. And since you need fewer failures to lose the challenge, you're basically guaranteed to have Krog ruin the challenge for you before your smooth-talkers can win it for you.

Other folks have done the math, but essentially the chance of winning a challenge is pretty bad unless you have a totally optimized party for one skill challege. You can't just have one smooth talker. Everyone in the party should be a smooth talker.

People in the 4E boards pointed this out many, many times. The designers tried to patch it many, many times. They never succeeded in fixing it. So yeah, 4E may technically have rules for non-combat encounters, but they're such shit that people stopped using them as soon as they realized how much it guarantees failure; and Wizards realized this but never actually found a fix.

[Simon_Jester]

One the problem I see...

No rules for non-combat encounters is an open invitation to the DM to let their imagination run wild.

Adding a ruleset (which, realistically, will be tacked on as an afterthought to the combat rules) just limits the DM and creates some bizarre sense that social interactions should be in some sense 'level-appropriate' or otherwise built to work with character stats, rather than being the character's opportunity to interact with the game world as a person rather than a bundle of numbers.

Hence the arguments I've heard for why things like Diplomacy checks can actually screw up social encounters more than they help.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

The rules also say not to set up encounters such that certain players cannot contribute, combat or non-combat.

Regardless, even if 4th Edition has broken non-combat rules which are thus never used, how does that make it a step back from 3.5 with its total lack of rules outside of "Diplomacy is hells broken"?

[S.L.Acker]

The rules also say not to set up encounters such that certain players cannot contribute, combat or non-combat.

Regardless, even if 4th Edition has broken non-combat rules which are thus never used, how does that make it a step back from 3.5 with its total lack of rules outside of "Diplomacy is hells broken"?

4E puts you into a very gamy mind set from the word go. From counting things out in squares, to having very little fluff in the core books, and then trying to add in fully fleshed out, but broken as written rules for diplomacy. The game just doesn't pull at you and get you thinking about the world; instead it gets you thinking about collections of stats and predetermined loot tables.

[Zinegata]

The rules also say not to set up encounters such that certain players cannot contribute, combat or non-combat.

Regardless, even if 4th Edition has broken non-combat rules which are thus never used, how does that make it a step back from 3.5 with its total lack of rules outside of "Diplomacy is hells broken"?

Not an excuse. Even if you only include the smooth-talkers in the challenge, you will STILL have a greater chance of failing than if you simply rolled one dice. This is the consequence of counting failures and successes, but having a much lower bar for defeat than success. You are better off just rolling one dice like in 3.X.

4E and 3.5E both have their share of broken non-combat encounter rules, but the key difference between 3.X and 4E is that 4E ceased to define itself by actual physical bounderies in favor of blatant game-speak.

For instance, there's the issue of squares.

In 3.X, each "square" is defined as an area that is roughly 5feet by 5 feet.

In 4E, the whole world is measured in terms of "squares", without defining the actual physical size of this square.

Now, this may seem like a minor quibble. But what if you're negotiating to buy some land from a local baron? What if you want to build a castle on that land and design your own rooms?

Are you gonna tell the baron "I want to buy a land that is six hundred squares in size?"

Now, parts of 3.X had pretty shitty guidelines for the "real world" stuff. But the difference is that it's there. 3.X acknowledges that there is a world in between the combat mini-game and the non-combat mini-game. Heck, there's even spells and abilities that do absolutely nothing in combat or challenges; but have an aesthetic effect like "local farms have a better harvest" and "you can make crap food taste like anything you want" or some such.

4E doesn't even try to pretend that it's anything BUT a combat mini-game with the occassional non-combat minigame.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

With the non-combat encounter setup, I meant that the DM should allow situations where all the players have skills that can work. If the Barbarian wants to take no interpersonal skills in a game that will have a lot of interpersonal interaction and refuses to try to think up alternative ways to contribute, then he's a net drain on the party, yes. But so is a Fighter who puts 3s in STR, DEX, and WIS.

Do people really think the people in the D&D 4E world talk in rulespeak? I though that was confined to parody works. The rules for combat in a game describe how to apply rules to combat, not how the world actually works.

If you apply this logic to 3.5, do townsfolk talk to each other about hitting the AC of a cow to slaughter it and hoping they inflict enough HP damage? Does the blacksmith bitch about the DC of the item he's been commissioned to make? Oh no the rules didn't tell me how much vitality or luck whatever it is hitpoints are are contained in one HP, WORST GAME.

[S.L.Acker]

Not an excuse. Even if you only include the smooth-talkers in the challenge, you will STILL have a greater chance of failing than if you simply rolled one dice. This is the consequence of counting failures and successes, but having a much lower bar for defeat than success. You are better off just rolling one dice like in 3.X.

4E and 3.5E both have their share of broken non-combat encounter rules, but the key difference between 3.X and 4E is that 4E ceased to define itself by actual physical bounderies in favor of blatant game-speak.

For instance, there's the issue of squares.

In 3.X, each "square" is defined as an area that is roughly 5feet by 5 feet.

In 4E, the whole world is measured in terms of "squares", without defining the actual physical size of this square.

Now, this may seem like a minor quibble. But what if you're negotiating to buy some land from a local baron? What if you want to build a castle on that land and design your own rooms?

Are you gonna tell the baron "I want to buy a land that is six hundred squares in size?"

Now, parts of 3.X had pretty shitty guidelines for the "real world" stuff. But the difference is that it's there. 3.X acknowledges that there is a world in between the combat mini-game and the non-combat mini-game. Heck, there's even spells and abilities that do absolutely nothing in combat or challenges; but have an aesthetic effect like "local farms have a better harvest" and "you can make crap food taste like anything you want" or some such.

4E doesn't even try to pretend that it's anything BUT a combat mini-game with the occassional non-combat minigame.

That's the other thing, 4E did away with all the little utility spells that made playing a mage something more than just a tool for sending elemental damage and summoned monsters at the enemy. Clerics had stuff like create food/water, purify food and drink and other little things. Mages had rope trick, the Leomund's tiny hut series of spells, presitidigitation for doing minor tasks. All of those vanished with the new edition.

They also just washed things over and flat out told you that the heroes are better than the common man. No more humorous commoner only games, no more even trying to define what people's role in a town are. They just flatly made everything feel like a game.

With the non-combat encounter setup, I meant that the DM should allow situations where all the players have skills that can work. If the Barbarian wants to take no interpersonal skills in a game that will have a lot of interpersonal interaction and refuses to try to think up alternative ways to contribute, then he's a net drain on the party, yes. But so is a Fighter who puts 3s in STR, DEX, and WIS.

Do people really think the people in the D&D 4E world talk in rulespeak? I though that was confined to parody works. The rules for combat in a game describe how to apply rules to combat, not how the world actually works.

If you apply this logic to 3.5, do townsfolk talk to each other about hitting the AC of a cow to slaughter it and hoping they inflict enough HP damage? Does the blacksmith bitch about the DC of the item he's been commissioned to make? Oh no the rules didn't tell me how much vitality or luck whatever it is hitpoints are are contained in one HP, WORST GAME.

Except that the game might be mostly combat but then, due to the retarded way the Skill Challenges 'worked' the party got fucked in the small RP with the king portion due to some poor dice and a badly designed system. Far better just to let the players talk to the NPC with the dice only coming out if things stall.

[Simon_Jester]

With the non-combat encounter setup, I meant that the DM should allow situations where all the players have skills that can work. If the Barbarian wants to take no interpersonal skills in a game that will have a lot of interpersonal interaction and refuses to try to think up alternative ways to contribute, then he's a net drain on the party, yes. But so is a Fighter who puts 3s in STR, DEX, and WIS.

Thing is, in any normal RPG, there will be significant role-playing and social interaction for all members of the party. If your party has a big fighter, one who is not optimized for tea parties because that's not his job, he is a net liability to you in a social situation.

Which means that in every social situation, you're failing these 'social challenges' because the fighter isn't an optimized talker, he's a fighter. Which is weird if you're trying to model some kind of real-ish life where warriors are often reasonably persuasive speakers, or at least able to talk to kings and such without pissing them off and getting thrown in the dungeon.

Do people really think the people in the D&D 4E world talk in rulespeak? I though that was confined to parody works. The rules for combat in a game describe how to apply rules to combat, not how the world actually works.

It's not about that, it's about the way the rulebooks encourage you to think about what you're doing. In 3rd Edition, there's lots of talk about distances in feet, the civilian economy, bits of culture, and so on. If in 4th Edition much of this is stripped out in favor of a laserlike focus on the rules for combat, it influences the user's sense of how the game is 'meant' to be played.

That sense, that the game is written to be first and foremost a tactical wargame, probably turned off a lot of 3rd Edition players.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Don't rituals in 4th cover a lot of the utility out-of-combat spells from 3.5? Even if they don't cover it entirely, there are rituals for every class which is a nice bonus.

If you want to play an RPG without using any rules for interpersonal relations then that's easy to do: just play without those rules. If you feel 4th Edition including more extensive rules that still aren't balanced might make this harder to pull off, that's certainly a valid complaint.

I'm still not really getting why stuff like "squares" is an issue. It's a simple step to cut down constant division by 5 (since 3.5's combat also used 5'x5' squares). In a system with something as gamey as hitpoints being everywhere, squares seem like nothing. Then again, I've never once used the default fluff when playing 3.5 so fluff being less emphasised in 4th is something that could slip by me if it's an issue to others.

[Stofsk]

I never played 4th Ed, but I took the time to read a little from the player's handbook.

Racial negatives were done away with, replaced instead with bonuses to two abilities (and humans get a bonus to one ability that you can choose). I thought this was an absolutely terrible idea that seemed to cater to the min-maxer crowd rather than role players. As far as I'm concerned, you either get rid of the entire concept of a racial bonus to an ability, or you balance it with a penalty - you don't ignore the issue and increase the bonus. That's just stupid.

4th Ed pretty much lost me before I got into the second chapter. I took a look at the classes and their descriptions and everything in the text SCREAMED at me 'this is WoW for tabletop'. I vaguely recall reading the entry for Fighter and/or Paladin and I was helpfully told that 'there are basically two ways to play a fighter - as a tank or as a damage dealer'. That's the point where I basically stopped reading.

So I'm kinda happy to hear that they've ditched this system and are working on a 5th Edition.

[Zinegata]

Jogur-> Have you ever actually fucking PLAYED 4E? Because by your tone it seems you're in the "I read the marketing promises but never actually played it!" crowd.

With the non-combat encounter setup, I meant that the DM should allow situations where all the players have skills that can work. If the Barbarian wants to take no interpersonal skills in a game that will have a lot of interpersonal interaction and refuses to try to think up alternative ways to contribute, then he's a net drain on the party, yes. But so is a Fighter who puts 3s in STR, DEX, and WIS.

Did you miss the part where I said that a party of smooth talkers will still have a shittier chance at winning a skill challenge than if ONE smooth talker just rolled ONE dice?

Let me put it in simpler terms for you. The Skill Challenge system is so shitty that a team of expert negotiators working together have less chance of winning a negotiation challenge than ONE negotiator just saying the equivalent of ONE line (roll one Dice).

Do people really think the people in the D&D 4E world talk in rulespeak? I though that was confined to parody works. The rules for combat in a game describe how to apply rules to combat, not how the world actually works.

So what is the size of a square in 4E? You're a dishonest shit trying to dance around the issue because you know damn well that 4E cannot even define this very simple and basic thing OUTSIDE of combat mechanics.

Again, the fundamental issue is simple. 4E is a combat engine. If I wanted to play a fucking combat mini-game and nothing else, there are other games out there that do it better like Descent.

An RPG is supposed to be more than a goddamn combat engine. Stop making excuses for shitty design.

If you apply this logic to 3.5, do townsfolk talk to each other about hitting the AC of a cow to slaughter it and hoping they inflict enough HP damage? Does the blacksmith bitch about the DC of the item he's been commissioned to make? Oh no the rules didn't tell me how much vitality or luck whatever it is hitpoints are are contained in one HP, WORST GAME.

Uh... yeah. Trolling much over games you don't like?

First of all, I've already said there are some bad stuff in the guidelines of 3.X. Your cow example just shows how much you don't know about the game, when the bigger issue is stuff like how a common household cat can seriously kill a commoner (which they can totally do in 3.X.).

But your argument that "Hey, 3.X has people speaking ala Order of the Stick in terms of hitpoints and DC" is just simple stupid shitheadedness on your part.

Let's take for example, somebody who wants to "Jump"

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/jump.htm

When a 3.X player wants to jump, he doesn't say "I am trying to jump a DC20 challenge". He says, "I am trying to jump 5 feet into the air", and then you cross-reference to the grid. Because 3.X actually fucking defines what a "DC20 Jump Challenge" is in real-life terms.

So when a Blacksmith bitches, he isn't gonna say "I need to pass a DC18 skill challenge!"

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/craft.htm

The player actually thinks of what he wants to do ("I want to make an Exotic Melee Weapon!"), checks the actual fucking challenge (DC18), and then can bitch about how it's hard for him to do because his total bonus is just +2.

That's a huge difference from a world-building perspective. But hey, given that you dismiss arguments by invoking Order of the Stick stupidity in order to excuse 4E's shitty design and blatant lack of world-building tools (to the point that one D&D 4E designer suggested that you can just put any skill not in the book that you want on your character sheet and that's "liberating!"), I'll just have to mark your argments as nothing more than stupid fanboyism.

[Zinegata]

Don't rituals in 4th cover a lot of the utility out-of-combat spells from 3.5? Even if they don't cover it entirely, there are rituals for every class which is a nice bonus.

Spoken like somebody who hasn't played 4E.

Rituals are shit. They are a good idea conceptually, but they're not actually "out of combat" spells that actually affect the world or such. They're ultimately just ways to get past obstacles. Mechanically, they are no more interesting than a key to a locked door.

If you want to play an RPG without using any rules for interpersonal relations then that's easy to do: just play without those rules. If you feel 4th Edition including more extensive rules that still aren't balanced might make this harder to pull off, that's certainly a valid complaint.

If you want to play an RPG without using any rules for interpersonal relations or for how the world works at all, play a fucking tactical combat game like Descent instead.

Being able to ignore bad rules is not an excuse for shitty design, or a retarded design paradigm.

[S.L.Acker]

Don't rituals in 4th cover a lot of the utility out-of-combat spells from 3.5? Even if they don't cover it entirely, there are rituals for every class which is a nice bonus.

Please, if you've never even looked at a 4E rulebook then why are you in this conversation?

Rituals cover a few major things, and a very few minor things.Tthey don't even come close to replacing the little utility spells you could find in the PHB alone.

If you want to play an RPG without using any rules for interpersonal relations then that's easy to do: just play without those rules. If you feel 4th Edition including more extensive rules that still aren't balanced might make this harder to pull off, that's certainly a valid complaint.

I'm still not really getting why stuff like "squares" is an issue. It's a simple step to cut down constant division by 5 (since 3.5's combat also used 5'x5' squares). In a system with something as gamey as hitpoints being everywhere, squares seem like nothing. Then again, I've never once used the default fluff when playing 3.5 so fluff being less emphasised in 4th is something that could slip by me if it's an issue to others.

You're not getting this at all. Most role playing books have sections designed to do little but get you into the game world and little touches in and out of the rules to accommodate this. Things like 3.5 having lists for trade goods so you could have a low level character with some of his wealth stored in the form of live stock or salt. Things like NPC classes, even if seldom used, at least gave a nod to the fact that the heroes and monsters aren't the only things of importance in the world. Everything from the antiseptic bland white used in the 4E books to not giving squares any official measure are knocks against it.

The lack of being able to make the character you wanted both in the rules and in RP are another massive knock against it. In 3.x even if things could get silly, you at least had the ability to make the rules suit what you wanted to do. In 4E, even after supplements, you still felt like you were playing Fighter type 4 instead of Elric the Drunken Swordsman.

[Agent Sorchus]

I actually don't mind that it is very hard to do skill challenges. Why should everything be easy?

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I'm not trying to defend if the non-combat encounters are easily broken or not; they worked when I played and I stopped following people examining the system in depth before I got into 4th. I was bringing them up as an example of 4th at least attempting to find ways to arbitrate non-combat stuff consistently, even if upon examination they failed at it. I still hold this puts it no worse than 3.5, though (where if you follow the rules as written, Diplomacy wins everything including some combats), except in maybe luring people away from rules-light stuff where they would otherwise.

As to how big a square is, it's big enough for a human to fight in, not big enough for two. If you have to pin an exact number on it, why not go back to five feet? Even if they don't give a conversion in the rules, you can make one. Again, in a system with armour class and hitpoints which cannot ever be converted into real-life terms, how does this straw suddenly break the camel's back?

Having rules in the DMG for how much gold a pound of salt is worth is low on my priorities; if it has to come up, it's easy for the DM to make up (and will likely make more sense that way). NPC classes just made things weird because the entire concept of levels in D&D is tied up with adventuring through sequentially harder situations. I guess if the change in tone from the slimming of these rules turns you off that's something I can't argue with.

[S.L.Acker]

I actually don't mind that it is very hard to do skill challenges. Why should everything be easy?

Yes, why should a very skilled negotiator fuck up an easy job simply because the odds are stacked against him... It gets even worse when he fails because in the land of D&D 4E Knights are the masters of shoving their feet into their mouths in social situations.

[Zinegata]

I actually don't mind that it is very hard to do skill challenges. Why should everything be easy?

Because people actually want to suceed working as a team once in a while like how they showed in the examples, as opposed to failing almost every time they work together.

Besides which, D&D has leaned much more towards letting people succeed starting 3.X. It's also notable that the Skill Challenges are about the ONLY part of 4E where players have such a catastrophic failure rate - the rest of the game (the combat aspect) leans much more towards letting players succeed, so it's not even a consistent aspect of 4E.

In comparison, a game like 40K Dark Heresy leans towards making players fail constantly whatever they want to do.

[Zinegata]

As to how big a square is, it's big enough for a human to fight in, not big enough for two. If you have to pin an exact number on it, why not go back to five feet? Even if they don't give a conversion in the rules, you can make one. Again, in a system with armour class and hitpoints which cannot ever be converted into real-life terms, how does this straw suddenly break the camel's back?

And what happens when your players question "Why is it 5 feet?! It doesn't say so in the book!"

Fluff is important as it establishes a point of reference. It's as if you're in the Matrix and nobody agrees on what a meter is.

Moreover, do you understand the concept of presenting examples to show how it's a symptom of one problem? I keep repeating the squares thing, but that's not the only problem. It's just one that fills the entire bloody book, because again the design paradigm is one that fits a tactical combat game and NOT an RPG.

So your continued dismissal of examples is the same as looking at a dying tree, saying "It's not so bad! It's just one dying tree!", and missing the point that the rest of the forest is FULL of dying trees because the designers were idiots and thought that a whole forest of dying trees was a great idea.

[S.L.Acker]

I'm not trying to defend if the non-combat encounters are easily broken or not; they worked when I played and I stopped following people examining the system in depth before I got into 4th.

So you're trying to talk about a system which you haven't even used...

I was bringing them up as an example of 4th at least attempting to find ways to arbitrate non-combat stuff consistently, even if upon examination they failed at it. I still hold this puts it no worse than 3.5, though (where if you follow the rules as written, Diplomacy wins everything including some combats), except in maybe luring people away from rules-light stuff where they would otherwise.

Except that other RP's do that aspect better, and a combat simulator (what D&D 4E is) should make diplomacy quicker and easier not a drawn out series of dice rolls that's designed to make the party fail. Diplomacy in 3.5 was broken, but so was a lot of shit in 3.5. If balance is your entire measuring stick for how good a system is then 4E might win, but frankly I measure based on fun and the level of freedom within the rules you have to do what you want.

As to how big a square is, it's big enough for a human to fight in, not big enough for two. If you have to pin an exact number on it, why not go back to five feet? Even if they don't give a conversion in the rules, you can make one. Again, in a system with armour class and hitpoints which cannot ever be converted into real-life terms, how does this straw suddenly break the camel's back?

If you just got into D&D 4E who would you know that earlier versions had 5' squares? How much space does one person in combat occupy exactly? As for AC and HP, why do you think those are two windmills worth tilting at? They're generally consistent representations of how hard it is to land a telling blow and how tough a person is. A person talking might talk about how hard it is to land a disabling blow against a well equipped knight or how hard it was to put down that ork and these are things that need to be abstracted unless you want a total redesign of the game. On the other hand how are you supposed to turn squares in a dungeon into a reasonable measure when the rules don't give you any guide for doing so? How wide is a DC 18 chasm in 4E anyway?

Having rules in the DMG for how much gold a pound of salt is worth is low on my priorities;

PHB you tool, I thought you played this edition?

if it has to come up, it's easy for the DM to make up (and will likely make more sense that way). NPC classes just made things weird because the entire concept of levels in D&D is tied up with adventuring through sequentially harder situations. I guess if the change in tone from the slimming of these rules turns you off that's something I can't argue with.

Except that the game gives you no guidelines for doing so. It doesn't even try and pretend that noncombat things aside from trying to bullshit a king out of more loot are important. Read through the 3.5 PHB and the 4E version and see which one has more fluff and more nods to real world units of measure and noncombat situations.

As for NPC classes you're again missing the point. They didn't work with the normal PC system of experience, but they gave you a rough guideline of how skilled an NPC would be without it being purely designed by the DM. Sometimes when rolling up NPC levels for a random city you got surprised by a roll and that gave you a new plot thread for that city. 4E doesn't even give you the option for these things.

Also way to ignore the issues of actually building the character you want to play as opposed to picking from a very limited pool of options for each class.

[Yogi]

Personally, what killed it for me was the way NPCs were handled.

In 3.5e, if you encountered a group of Orcs, you encountered a group of people like you. The have stats, alignments, equipment, skills, and possibly class levels, just like you. They can be befriended, slaughtered, negotiated with, convinced to join your side, sneaked around, or surrendered to depending on the circumstances. Even if the DM intended for you to kill them, the players can do anything.

In 4e if you encounter a mass of Orcs, it's most likely that the DM created them for you to kill. Hence, these Orcs are of the "Minion" class (I think that's the name, it's been awhile) and thus they all have ONE hit point each. Their purpose is to die, and any other interaction is essentially meaningless. Even if you manage to negotiate with a tougher monster, they don't have the same stats as player characters and don't play by the same rules, making cooperation difficult.

In 3.5e, the rules were flexible enough to have an Ochre Jelly Fighter/Psionic join your party (requires semi-creative rule interpretation). In 4e there is no option to do anything like that.

Also Taunt.

In 3.5e, melee fighters can protect their back-row fighters by making attacks of opportunity to people trying to move past them. This could kill an enemy, or possibly trip or disarm them, leaving them at a bad spot and causing the Sneak Attack character on the team to salivate with delight. It's a serviceable abstraction that allows for tactical positioning and gives a reason why not every enemy immediately jumps on the mage in the back, ignoring the armor-wearing tanks.

In 4e they Taunt the enemy, forcing it to attack you or suffer a penalty. No real battlefield planning or tactics, but a ripped-from-WoW MMORPG-style taunt.

[Mr Bean]

About 4E Rituals
They are in a word garbage, lets take a look at some rituals and compare them to their 3.X counterparts

First the best example
Knock

Knock
Transmutation
Level: Sor/Wiz 2
Components: V
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Medium (100 ft. + 10 ft./level)
Target: One door, box, or chest with an area of up to 10 sq. ft./level

A spell you could cast by the 4th level, it took six seconds to cast and was an instant door opener or chest unlocker. Not a combat spell but when your running away and a door is bared from the other side it's the difference between TPK and a hasty escape. It's 2nd level so 4th level to cast.

Now lets compare it to 4E

Knock
Exploration Ritual
Level: 4
Components: 35 GP plus 1 Healing Surge
Casting Time: Ten Minutes
Range: Touch
Target: One target

Okay so the Ritual takes 10 minutes to cast, cost you 35 GP a pop which at level 4 can be expensive quickly and unlike knock you have to use your Arcana check in place of a Thievery check. So for 35 GP and 10 minutes effort you can duplicate the efforts of a thief you might not have handy.

Knock in 3E was very situational spell which if that situation came up you felt awesome but was otherwise worthless except to very clever players who understand how useful being able to say unlock a prisoners chains from 100 feet away.
But in 4E it costs you money and takes ten minutes? In what circumstance would it take less time to simply bash the lock or door open if it's not Arcane locked in the same amount of time. Or hell you might have time to get to the nearest tavern an hire a thief for 30 GP for an hours work. In other words the designers took a situation spell and massive decreased the already rare instances it could be useful into the area of "never".

Another example

Silence

Silence
Illusion (Glamer)
Level: Brd 2, Clr 2
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Long (400 ft. + 40 ft./level)
Area: 20-ft.-radius emanation centered on a creature, object, or point in space
Duration: 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: Will negates; see text or none (object)
Spell Resistance: Yes; see text or no (object)

A sneaky spell to use, takes only a standard action to cast (6 seconds) but lets you do something like making taking out that room full of guards easier if everyone's in silence. Or prevent a sleeping enemy from awaking by dropping a silence on their bed. Again situational but much more common that there are dozens of times (Say vs spellcasters) when you want to prevent sound from being created in an area.

Silence
Warding Rituat
Level: 1
Components: 30 GP
Casting Time: Ten Minutes
Range: Touch
Target: One room/ Burst 4
Duration 24 hours

This is Silence combined with a Permanency in 3E except it's only lasts 24 hours. Not long enough for long term usage and too long for the short term "murder the room full of guards in silence" uses.

Again the Ritual casting times are without question insane. My first 4E house rule was to reduce all casting times for Rituals by a magnitude. IE 10 minutes becomes 1 minute, an hour became 6 minutes and eight hours became an hour (Rounding) and I never one ran into a single issue of rituals being used in mass and abused. They still could not use any of them anywhere near combat but quickly casting Water walk then entering combat was a lot more sane with a one minute magic time vs ten.

Problem is that Rituals are mostly in expansion books, the helpful ones anyway that everyone benefits from.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

4th Edition offers a lot less total freedom in how to build a character mechanically than 3.5; that is a fact I don't think anyone would try to contest. If you're looking for that in a game, 3.5 is better than 4th. In fact, 3.5 is the most extensive game I know if in that regard due to the huge variety of distinct and inconsistent rulesets 3.5 is constructed out of. Whether you build a character whose only real option is to roll a d20 and then 2d6 every round to subtract some hit points from one target or you have a character who's focused on making opponents roll a d20 to avoid death/becoming ineffective can make the game play differently, sure, but people keep passing this off as roleplaying and I think that connection is tenuous at best. You can make very distinct characters in terms of roleplaying when everyone in your game rolls a d6 to resolve all conflicts, and it might even be easier when you're not investing so much effort in which specific dice your character uses.

If you're using the term "roleplaying" to describe mechanical character option depth then I don't really get it but if so then this argument I guess just came from a misunderstanding.

[S.L.Acker]

4th Edition offers a lot less total freedom in how to build a character mechanically than 3.5; that is a fact I don't think anyone would try to contest. If you're looking for that in a game, 3.5 is better than 4th. In fact, 3.5 is the most extensive game I know if in that regard due to the huge variety of distinct and inconsistent rulesets 3.5 is constructed out of. Whether you build a character whose only real option is to roll a d20 and then 2d6 every round to subtract some hit points from one target or you have a character who's focused on making opponents roll a d20 to avoid death/becoming ineffective can make the game play differently, sure, but people keep passing this off as roleplaying and I think that connection is tenuous at best. You can make very distinct characters in terms of roleplaying when everyone in your game rolls a d6 to resolve all conflicts, and it might even be easier when you're not investing so much effort in which specific dice your character uses.

If you're using the term "roleplaying" to describe mechanical character option depth then I don't really get it but if so then this argument I guess just came from a misunderstanding.

If you have a character concept in mind you can use the rules to support it. If you want to be a big bad necromancer raising an army of undead followers there are four or more ways to do it. Want to be a nimble fighter, great take your pick of which set of tools you think fits your idea the best. just because they all involve rolling dice and overcoming an encounter doesn't make them the same. The intelligent swashbuckler has rules to let him use his smarts in a fight, or you could build a dexterous fighter that's dumb as a post using another set of things entirely.

Just having mechanics that suggest a certain type of character can also help a ton if you're a player who doesn't yet have an idea. You can flip through a book, see some cool class, read up on who these guys tend to be and what they stand for, and then start shaking dice. By the time that's done the feats and skills and classes you took will give you a strong basis for a back story. What does 4E do to aid the player in making fighters different from one another?

[someone_else]

Full agreement with yogi's post Being mainly a group of roleplayers, they did some pretty nasty talking-through-problems shit with less-blood-frenzied enemies that would be impossible to do in D&D4.

Hell, they kept the alignment-change helm I threw at them god knows when as a random treasure and used it to convert a fucking Medusa to Neutral Good (by talking her into trying it while she was a woman in disguise, a disguise they saw through during one adventure), made the choice permanent with that cleric spell (atonement?) and added her to their team, ruining the climatic boss fight in her lair I had prepared for weeks.

I had to make her weep for her past misdeeds damnit. Ever seen a Medusa weep?

I wasn't even going there as summoner/blaster wizards aren't always the ones to watch for. It's the Cleric with 24/7 buffs due to burning those worthless turning attempts to keep spells running all day, add in some magic items that seemed reasonable at a glance and you have something that does what the fighter does better and has magic to spare.

Sorry if it's tangential, but can you be a bit more specific? Never encountered this issue. Always had issues with wizards. Must be that all Rule Benders players I had avoid cleric like plague, but this never happened to me.

Mages scouting with divination and using utility wands to bypass traps and locks is yet another way magic made the game break, or a fairly low level dexterity draining spell that worked sort of like Ray of Enfeeblement being able to three hit dragons. Mages weren't broken because they could spam out fireballs and summons, they were bad because they could replace other characters entirely with a very minimum amount of tweaking.

Yes, but that's an issue only if they have wands and/or staves that let them cast the same spell all over again for 50 times at a ridicule cost (and dragons that were never subjected to a Ray of Enfeeblement in their long life and/or are not smart enough to think of a countermeasure in time with their HIGH int score). Which is stating again "wands/staves are broken", not an issue of wizards per-se.
A non-wanded wizard can be better than a thief/scout/whatever, but only 3-4 times a day (if he is mad enough to optimize himself for that task only, and then suck at wizard-only tasks).

If you start putting tasks that only the wizard can do a fuck about, you force him to use up spell slots to be prepared for that "just in case", and that leaves less slots to steal work to others. That's a group game, and the DM does have much more control on what the players do than most imagine.

All divinations that gave them significant bonuses do have some kind of costly component either standard or I added it (with the sad excuse of removing the XP cost ala Pathfinder, so players wouldn't complain ). And when the supply of diamonds for limited wish is LIMITED (who is giving them rewards huh? the DM!), they won't casually cast it to look around corners.

Making combat more random tends to make the game less fun, because they mean that no matter how smart a player is their character could die to sheer dumb luck. Sure it's realistic, but killing the characters off to something they had no say in and no matter how they prepared couldn't stop tends to be bad game design. Though I suspect it would make fortified armor more worthwhile...

You read the rules linked?

"Wound points cannot drop below 0...
At 0 wound points, a character is disabled and must attempt a DC 15 Fortitude save. If he succeeds on the save, he is merely disabled. If he fails, he falls unconscious and begins dying."

and

"A dying character is unconscious and near death. Each round on his turn, a dying character must make a Fortitude save (DC 10, +1 per turn after the first) to become stable.
If the character fails the save, he dies.
If the character succeeds on the save by less than 5, he does not die but does not improve. He is still dying and must continue to make Fortitude saves every round.
If the character succeeds on the save by 5 or more but by less than 10, he becomes stable but remains unconscious.
If the character succeeds on the save by 10 or more, he becomes conscious and disabled.
Another character can make a dying character stable by succeeding on a DC 15 Heal check as a standard action (which provokes attacks of opportunity). "

Dropping to the ground is relatively easier, but dying isn't that easy for the melee class, high fortitude they have.

Anyway, they do have access to resurrection magic one way or another (and mid-high level encounters are supposed to carry significant risk of killing a few characters even in normal D&D 3.5), now fortified armor's price as some sense, this system allows me to avoid the escalation to Bigger Monsters, Bigger Bigger Monsters, The Mother of Bigger Bigger Monsters, the Avatar of the God of the Mother of the Bigger Bigger Monster... and so on that eventually begins to look stupid.

This means that the hits that actually injure them aren't a Gargantuan red dragon's tail sweep, but people with weapons, that on average just injure them and force a retreat at most put them to sleep but not really at risk (so everyone has to rush there and carry away the comrade).

It also means I don't have to dump a fuckton of critters to be a threat and be handled in a smarter way than just "chaaaarge!!!!", so combat when happens is much faster (less opponents to keep track of)

It also makes them more survivable in their first steps into the game, as even the crappy wizard now has around 15 Hp.

At least to us anyway, the "epic" scale of D&D has already bored everyone in my group (sounds like grinding). There are fantasy monsters, but nothing HORRIBLY out of scale sitting at 10 minutes walk from a populated village just because otherwise the 14th level party would have nothing to do. All serious stuff they encounter now has some kind of class levels on top. And generally an organization of some kind to hide behind.

Another positive aspect is keeping them in check. Now they won't survive 10 rounds against the King's personal guard, go figure his 200 6-ish level knights in magic armor. Any 10th level party can easily level the kingdom if you don't start placing silly overpowered guardians that make no sense cost-wise (how did this king of a 50km2 piece of land raise enough funds to buy those adamantium golems?) and archmages at every corner.

Lastly, it's wrong to think they have no say, they know that death could come significantly more easily (especially with sneaky sons of bitches... i mean rogues), so alter their tactics to something slightly more sane than "barbarian activates rage and charges Monster". I've started to see people using cover!

As for BoNS, most players of martial classes loved it. It meant that, while you still tended to be a guy who hit things in combat and had little to do outside of combat, that you finally had cool things to do in combat that didn't involve spiked chains and trip attacks. I mean mages are allowed to do high fantasy stuff for giggles at higher levels, but fighters are stuck being in low fantasy mode because unless you take some crazy feat path you basically just wail on stuff with a chunk of metal repeating the same style of attack over and over again.

Meh, my group never looked at the fighter class well for its uselessness outside combat.

I guess it depends on playing styles, here combat isn't central (although does play a part). So the fighter would read fantasy comics for say 2/3ths of the session time.

The most melee-oriented guy in the group is a barbarian (using spiked chain), the second is the druid.

Whether you build a character whose only real option is to roll a d20 and then 2d6 every round to subtract some hit points from one target or you have a character who's focused on making opponents roll a d20 to avoid death/becoming ineffective can make the game play differently, sure, but people keep passing this off as roleplaying and I think that connection is tenuous at best.

The difference is that D&D 3.5 (and d20 for that matter) can be easily hacked to get what everyone likes out of it without major pains, hacking D&D 4 to do the same is basically down to rewriting significant portions of the core rules.

Having a character that you like, regardless of how that may seem stupid for an outsider, will eventually lead to affection, and possibly turns into trying to play him as a character and not only as a "damage dealing appendage".

If the game does not allow the player-character connection to be established, then no real RPG can evolve.

Then again, if they are too stupid to go outside of the "damage dealing appendage" part of their life, there is little reason to choose a pen-and-paper game over a computer one.

[Spoonist]

Then again, if they are too stupid to go outside of the "damage dealing appendage" part of their life, there is little reason to choose a pen-and-paper game over a computer one.

This is what I don't get. How could they possibly think they could go in the direction of computer games without people realising that computer games are better on, you know, computers?

I used to play D&D and AD&D back in the olden days from some 30 years ago. Even back then grinding was a problem, to then build a system that increase grinding was for me a clear sign of insanity. Why go with p&p if I want to play a board game or computer game? It just doesn't make any sense.

Nah, the D&D franchise was dead to us as soon as the Forgotten Realms was in decline.