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what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system
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Jul 24, 2020 18:19
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Arivia posted:It's also up as a humble bundle right now if you'd like to check it out for cheap! I bought it last week. Such a good deal! https://www.humblebundle.com/books/pathfinder-second-edition-paizo-inc-books I only read through it once but I'm in love with the action system and how feats work. The possible customization it results in seems really cool without being filled with trap options. My 5e group is doing more rules-lite games online right now but I really want to run PF with them once we're in person again. Or I could finally learn how to use roll20...
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Jul 24, 2020 18:25
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:How similar to 4e is Pathfinder 2e? I never played 4e but from what I have heard about it, it seems like PF2E is trying to use some of the good parts of that edition.
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Jul 24, 2020 18:30
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a fatguy baldspot posted:what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system someone who was actually around for the betas and playtesting would be able to tell you better than I would, but as i understand it, the design philosophy of 5e was “revise 4e so that grognards would come back and streamline 3.5 so that new people can pick it up pretty easily” part of that change is the rollback to fighters being a class expressly for beginners; as a lot of people in this thread will tell you, the features for battlemaster and/or champion should probably be baked into the class, but instead fighters are dumb easy to play (but are still probably the most effective martial class on a damage per round basis, and since they can do lots of attacks without burning any resources, they tend to perform at a high level regardless of the number of encounters you have) instead fighters have more ASIs than they know what to do with, so presumably feats are meant to give the class some flavor, but i think that’s just bad design; it’s basically just an idiot-proof class with such a high floor that optimization/minmaxing is pretty much an afterthought, but also relies entirely on the player to make them interesting next to 5e, the thing i play most is 13th age, and the beginner friendly class there (paladin) still has way way more to do and decisions they can make than a typical champion fighter, and their fighter class has maneuvers baked in; i think having a big list of options can be intimidating for new players, but i also believe that most good dms can tailor challenge to where each individual player is at in terms of understanding the game
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Jul 24, 2020 18:43
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a fatguy baldspot posted:what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system its because people got mad that fighters were doing cool stuff and think only magic users should be able to do cool stuff because otherwise it isnt realistic. i can not even begin to comprehend that mentality but that is the reason
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Jul 24, 2020 19:16
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a fatguy baldspot posted:what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system Were you playing in 3.0 and 3.5? Other people have touched on it, but there is a large contingent of players who consider that the height of DND and when 4e rolled out abandoned DND for Pathfinder as that was effectively DND 3.5 but expanded. (Not to mention Paizo had better modules). But to these players the fighter has to be a simple class, and spell casters have to become overpowered later in the game. The power system 4e had that made martials just as good and dynamic as spellcasters could not be included in 5e to appeal to that group. I believe Mearls is the champion of that design as when he worked on 4e he spearheaded the Essentials line in 4e which got rid of powers for the fighter and made it just a basic attack machine.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:19
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Is there a good guide or overview of 5e as a 3.5 player? Playing my first 5e game (and my first D&D game in years) this weekend. Wanted to find something to give me an idea of the differences and things to dig in on. I found an old list on reddit, but wasn't sure if there was anything newer/better.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:22
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a fatguy baldspot posted:what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system Then came Wizards of the Coast, who took the land of TSR unto themselves and together birthed third edition. Great changes were made unto the land of D&D, including the death of the great wyrm THACO and the mass integration of the Scored Ability. And lo, a small old guard of people from previous editions did say "This new version makes everyone superheroes and is basically Everquest", to which they were told "That's nice dear, but this is the version we're selling" and they retreated to their holes and played their favourite edition and complained about it in niche magazines and BBSs. But within 3rd edition a great and terrible evil was brewing, and it was called the OGL, and Ryan Dancey was its master. For it allowed any man to print pretty much any lovely rear end splat book they wanted and slap the D&D logo on it, up to and including Actual Pornography. Also they hosed up monster HP scaling and thought people would play casters one way but if you play casters a different way they're a million times better so fighters and rogues etc. are now kind of a joke. But the wheel it turns, and Wizards of the Coast was itself consumed by the empire of Hasbro. And they dids't create a Fourth Edition, having learned much, though not enough, from the follies of Third. But the lawyer-mages of Hasbro did see the danger in the OGL. For it was in perpetuity, and yea you could basically just reprint third edition with some words changed around and sell it, seriously, it was legal. And so they did craft a competing spell, the GSL, which was basicallylike the OGL except you had to ask them first, and contained within it was a requirement that all who swore fealty to the GSL would renounce the OGL and all its works, never creating for 3rd edition again. Also they took Dungeon and Dragon magazine away from Paizo with like a month's notice after they'd already paid for a year's worth of art. I'm not going todo the old timey thing for this bit, but basically writing for 3E is easy because it's terribly balanced and hasn't really got a coherent design ethos. A lot of people didn't want to give up this cash cow. And Paizo was looking at bankruptcy due to getting hosed over and were sitting on all this art it needed to get a return on. And lo, a small old guard of people from previous editions did say "Based on the previews this new version is going to make everyone superheroes and is basically WoW", to which they were told "You're absolutely right, it's awful, we, Paizo, are basically going to reprint third edition with some words changed around and sell it, seriously, it's legal. We'll put in all this nice art we happen to have handy, and Ryan Dancey is going to poo poo on 4E because Hasbro said the OGL is bad because people could do the thing that we are literally doing uh don't think too hard about that", and they were given a platform and were put into the Pathfinder beta test and complained about 4E on a world spanning network of information that anyone could search and access with ease. So that was interesting. Also 4E is quite hard to poo poo out splats for because it had actual design behind it so all the other third party publishers jumped on board immediately. Since "Buy our game we got screwed over by a bunch of complicated legal stuff" and "OK writing for that other game is, like, /work/" don't make great advertisement slogans, instead they leaned heavily on "New things bad, old things good, especially D&D 3.x, everything 4E does is bad, everything 4E is related to is bad". American politics style. Since 4E was heavily about "Actually designing things using good design principles is a good thing" and "Fighters: Should be cool again maybe?"... well, fill in the blanks. It's a PR nightmare... well... kind of... 4E is still vastly outselling Pathfinder and has already outsold 3rd edition and is absolutely spewing money from D&D insider but... look, people are saying mean things OK??? Then Mike Mearles gets put in charge of 4E and starts loving it up because he agrees 100% with every single weird regressive non-objection thrown against it because he's a hack and hasn't had a good idea since the 90s and is actively trying to court the shittiest members of the hobby because he thinks that's the best way to sell his game. He makes D&D Essentials which is... not great, and splits the 4E playerbase in two. Sales Then he gets put in charge of 5E and continues this, trying to court the section of the hobby that ran to Paizo because Paizo agreed that the things they liked doing when they were 13 are objectively the best things and they can get that feeling back by staying with third edition forever, the Fighters Suck edition. So Fighters started off anaemic but playable in the playtest and got methodically stripped of everything interesting whenever something was declared to 4E-like, leaving us with... *waves vaguely* this. And that's why Fighters can't have nice things. Splicer fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 20:32
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Splicer posted:And that's why Fighters can't have nice things. This makes sense except... everyone I've ever heard describe playing 4e made it sound boring, tedious, and "same-y" all around, even from D&D diehards.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:45
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change my name posted:This makes sense except... everyone I've ever heard describe playing 4e made it sound boring, tedious, and "same-y" all around, even from D&D diehards.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:52
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a fatguy baldspot posted:What was so much better about the 4e fighter? (I’m reading this thread backwards, lots of good info here) What wasn't? The 4e fighter has the identity "The guy so dangerous the enemy doesn't dare give even a fraction of an opportunity to or they're gonna get eviscerated." Possibly the barbarian hits harder. Possibly the ranger hits faster. Possibly the rogue hits with more precision. But the fighter is the playmaker, the one the enemy must spend their time responding to because if the fighter's target(s) take their eyes off the fighter for a fraction of a second the fighter is going to see the opportunity and ruthlessly take advantage. You can just about get a watered down version of the 4e fighter by taking the battlemaster option and the sentinel feat. But this reckons without the power system. In 4e your powers allowed you to construct a fighter's fighting style. You started off with two at will attack powers. For a wizard or cleric these wouldn't be that interesting - you'd probably take a combination that gave you a melee and a ranged attack (firebolt and shocking grasp or magic stone and shileigleigh would be the 5e equivalent combos). But for a martial character these foundational moves were part of your character. A PHB fighter might pick Tide of Iron, which would (if you were using sword and shield) allow you to push your foe and follow up, they might pick Reaping Strike which makes you forceful enough that even if your opponent blocks they take a little damage, they might pick Sure Strike which is a little more accurate but a little less damaging, or they might pick Cleave which means if they hit a target they also do a little damage to the neighbour. Two of those as your foundation tells you a lot about your character - and then there were far more outside the PHB. Then there were your signature moves - your encounter powers. These are what the Battlemaster dice is an equivalent to - but unlike the battlemaster they scale. A Battlemaster gets their best two maneuvers at level three, a 4e fighter keeps scaling with them, getting one each at levels 1, 3, and 7 each from a hopefully stronger list than the last - and then getting to upgrade them at higher level. But what they do that the battlemaster attacks really don't is that as well as simple strikes their ability to go above and beyond includes options both for movement, and for taking on multiple foes at once. You only get to pick one at each level (again you're creating a personal fighting style here) but rather than just doing extra damage or smashing someone to the ground there are options to attack all foes adjacent to you, or to hit one foe, slip past them, and attack a second. These do more total damage but spread it around so the focus fire isn't as good - or they enable you to move, possibly getting into the back line. Then there's the level 7 encounter power Come And Get It. Which is that awesome moment when our hero challenges all the enemies in 15 feet, they rush our hero and the hero attacks all of them who are coming in - and ends up surrounded with all of them mauled. No non-4e fighter can be that awesome. Then there are daily powers which are what you do when the chips are down but can only do once per long rest. It's just a whole lot more fleshed out and in character creation you create a fighting style complete with how your fighter moves. Oh, and has the equivalent of the Sentinel feat plus a few other things.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:58
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pog boyfriend posted:its because people got mad that fighters were doing cool stuff and think only magic users should be able to do cool stuff because otherwise it isnt realistic. i can not even begin to comprehend that mentality but that is the reason also enemies had way too many HP so you eventually just spammed your highest damage at-will and nobody knew how skill challenges worked.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:00
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Splicer posted:As in they said it was boring and samey or they described things they liked in a way that sounded boring and samey to you? They said it was boring and samey
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Jul 24, 2020 21:10
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They were wrong.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:13
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drat, that sounds cool, sad I missed it.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:18
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Gobbeldygook posted:This is the fundamental problem. In 3e, fighters suck and spellcasters rule, objectively. Fighters cannot meaningfully contribute to mid to high level combat or non-combat encounters without extensive min-maxing while after a point spellcasters have enough spells/day that they can solve every encounter. So if you want to balance the two you either need to bring fighters way up, casters way down, or some combination of both. If you're not willing to allow mid-level fighters to do things like whirlwind attack every enemy within 30', effortlessly punch through stone walls, interrupt any spell within 60', or shrug off elemental attacks, your only option is to nerf the poo poo out of spellcasters so they can't do anything better than what a fighter can "realistically" do. So that's what WotC did. They made lightning bolt hit like 3 people instead of being a 120' line of devastation and a fighter can hit three targets with a cleave attack.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:19
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change my name posted:They said it was boring and samey My first campaign started with me as a confused NPC rogue I'd taken over, continued to me throwing a dagger at a dragon so hard it fell out of the sky and couldn't get back up again, and ended with us flying an airship through a portal opened by the guy who ate my brain.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:22
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4e is a game that heavily relies on positioning and grid tactics and resembles a war game as much as it does “traditional” DnD; as someone who grew up playing final fantasy tactics and tactics ogre, i enjoyed a lot of what it brought to the table in terms of combat but it’s also nigh impossible to play in the theater of the mind. you pretty much have to have a grid and defined dimensions whereas in 5e you can fudge that stuff a bit the first edition of dnd i ever played was 3.5 (or the swrpg system in kotor if you want to get technical) and 4e felt like a big leap forward in comparison, but lots of people like (or are at least familiar with) 5e so that’s what i usually play. eventually i’d like to get into dungeon world and maybe even strike just because those systems feel more fluid and dynamic with regards to “cinematic” combat, but as far as crunchy grid stuff goes, 4e did a lot of good stuff
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Jul 24, 2020 21:25
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Declan MacManus posted:4e is a game that heavily relies on positioning and grid tactics and resembles a war game as much as it does “traditional” DnD; as someone who grew up playing final fantasy tactics and tactics ogre, i enjoyed a lot of what it brought to the table in terms of combat but it’s also nigh impossible to play in the theater of the mind. you pretty much have to have a grid and defined dimensions whereas in 5e you can fudge that stuff a bit I mean, DND is a social game, and no matter how much better one system is than another, if everyone but you wants to play a particular system, well that is the one you play. 4e is better designed, but, I do enjoy 5e, mostly for being a 3.5 alike where you can't achieve apotheosis by like level 8 with Cleric, Druid, Psion or Wizard. Madmarker fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 21:36
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Declan MacManus posted:4e is a game that heavily relies on positioning and grid tactics and resembles a war game as much as it does “traditional” DnD; as someone who grew up playing final fantasy tactics and tactics ogre, i enjoyed a lot of what it brought to the table in terms of combat but it’s also nigh impossible to play in the theater of the mind. you pretty much have to have a grid and defined dimensions whereas in 5e you can fudge that stuff a bit yeah, though it's worth nothing that "traditional" D&D is a descendant of wargames and ostensibly was using grids for everything too, earlier editions actually weren't really more playable in theater of the mind if you were doing things strictly RAW of course few people did because it was a lot easier to ignore a bunch of the rules and handwave/abstract stuff, and for the most part it made little difference because the tactical options/tools available to players either weren't particularly powerful or important (fighter poo poo) or were so powerful and important (wizard poo poo) that exact positioning rarely mattered I mostly played 3.x in TOM too, but 4th edition actually leveraging all the grid stuff you were "supposed" to be doing anyway in interesting/meaningful ways wasn't actually a break with D&D's history/"videogamey" (I'm still mad as hell we never actually got a proper 4e videogame)
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Jul 24, 2020 22:22
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LGD posted:yeah, though it's worth nothing that "traditional" D&D is a descendant of wargames and ostensibly was using grids for everything too, earlier editions actually weren't really more playable in theater of the mind if you were doing things strictly RAW e: Have an AD&D gridded beach towel 
Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 23:12
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Madmarker posted:I mean, DND is a social game, and no matter how much better one system is than another, if everyone but you wants to play a particular system, well that is the one you play. 4e is better designed, but, I do enjoy 5e, mostly for being a 3.5 alike where you can't achieve apotheosis by like level 8 with Cleric, Druid, Psion or Wizard. yeah, at the end of the day what it boils down to is that i like playing games with my friends and i enjoy the social aspect of playing with them enough that 5e is more than tolerable even if there’s a ton of stuff i don’t like or would change about it it’s not borderline unplayable like fatal or horrendously unbalanced like rifts or the linear warrior/quadratic wizard poo poo from 3.5 and it lets me tell a cool narrative story with my friends; that being said, i DO get excited whenever we get to play another system or a game (but i’d probably feel that way even if our campaign ran on pf or 13a or another system)
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Jul 24, 2020 23:14
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Splicer posted:4E TOTM was about as good as 3.x TOTM, but 4E gridded was so good that it was kind of... why would you do that? This is a really good point. You weren't really losing anything playing 3.x TotM. If you try it with 4e, it still works as well as ever, but now you're losing out on a well-designed grid combat system instead of a "yeah, sure, you can use a grid to keep track" system.
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Jul 25, 2020 02:06
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if my team wanted to play a crunchy extremely combat focused game with heavy tactical combat i would jump on 4e without a shadow of a doubt. the game is incredibly good for that type of play, and if your group is interested in that i highly recommend it to all. most of my groups run strongly narrative heavy these days and prefer more rules light stuff, but it is a fun game for what it is
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Jul 25, 2020 02:20
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a fatguy baldspot posted:what was the rationale for walking back the improvements made to fighters? It's like the only thing ive ever really heard about 4e, as someone on the fringes of nerd culture. my introduction to dnd was buying the planescape manual when i was like ten, and being absorbed in the world but turned off by the complexity of the system To offer a slightly contrasting viewpoint: there's a large fraction of people who don't "play D&D" the way you would, say, play a board game - set it up, everybody pays attention and follows the rules, someone wins, put it away. A lot of people "play D&D" as a way to hang out with their friends and enjoy their friends' creativity, even if they aren't as forward or vocal about it themselves. A class like the 3E fighter was good to hand those people because not a lot was demanded of them. 4E expects everybody to be keyed up for mad tactics all the time, which doesn't work for them. A lot of people "play D&D" by reference to all the things that they know, culturally, about D&D, which is totally a singular vision throughout history shut up, and one of "the things they know" is that fighters make attack rolls and wizards argue about having already cast Mordenkainen's Faithful Watchdog, so 4E didn't work all that well for them either because it broke that all to pieces along with, to be honest, a lot of other "things they know" because there wasn't much game to point at the quasi-elemental plane of Dust. Rolling back the fighter worked out for those people, whose money spends as good as anybody else's.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:26
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change my name posted:They said it was boring and samey 4e had a number of issues at launch, mostly because it was released about six months early (they were given two years for development and ended up going right back to the drawing board about 10 months in). This mean that there were a number of genuine issues with it at launch, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Essentially with 4e Wizards of the Coast shipped a buggy beta in 2008 - and many people who disliked it disliked it for those bugs that were patched out over the next two years; 4e fans really like the patched version but it isn't quite the same game. Also a lot of the biggest and loudest fans of 3.5 liked a toxic playstyle (the optimized 3.5 wizard, prepared for everything and that laughs at any notion of game balance) and because they couldn't do this and had to be on the same level as everyone else they found it didn't give them the boost they wanted and considered this samey.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:27
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When's D&D Next Next
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Jul 25, 2020 03:29
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My hunch is stillwith the mostly BS pandering they've been doing about stuff. And the UA's that they are testing That they release a PHB 2 this fall.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:40
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neonchameleon posted:4e had a number of issues at launch, mostly because it was released about six months early (they were given two years for development and ended up going right back to the drawing board about 10 months in). This mean that there were a number of genuine issues with it at launch, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:52
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pog boyfriend posted:its because people got mad that fighters were doing cool stuff and think only magic users should be able to do cool stuff because otherwise it isnt realistic. i can not even begin to comprehend that mentality but that is the reason As an example, earlier the ability Come and Get It was mentioned, where the fighter draws in enemies and marks them. This ability is fluffed as the fighter bluffing his foes into thinking he's dropped his guard, then countering when they fall for it. The grognards HATED this. "It says bluff, there should be a roll! He's dictating what the enemies do, the DM should decide that! This breaks my immersion!" Meanwhile the mage snaps his fingers, a conga line of townspeople dance into the dragon's mouth, and it's fine because that's magic. Fighters weren't the only ones, a lot of the skills were "this is what it does, here's a fluff suggestion for why it does that, feel free to make up your own" and that really threw some people. The shitshow that went under the moniker "GNS theory" had, I believe, had it's shittiest moments by then but you still had people drawing lines between styles of RPG gameplay and declaring that crossing them was badwrong and D&D should not give the players power to help tell the story because of "realism". A lot of that, though, was people who already decided to hate the game and were looking for an excuse. It's a big world and I'm sure somebody was fine with it until they read that skill, but I doubt more than two did.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:57
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Oh, one thing 4E deserves a shout-out for no matter what system/edition you play: the DMG is an actual tool for helping DMs. There are sections in there for different types of players and their motivations, finding story hooks that work, adjusting difficulty so that everything isn't exactly the same effort, useful things the DM can do if they have X hours of prep time... it's small, but even saying "this is something you might want to think about" is unheard of in a lot of systems where the DMG is just a rules reference the players don't get.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:08
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Bruceski posted:Oh, one thing 4E deserves a shout-out for no matter what system/edition you play: the DMG is an actual tool for helping DMs. There are sections in there for different types of players and their motivations, finding story hooks that work, adjusting difficulty so that everything isn't exactly the same effort, useful things the DM can do if they have X hours of prep time... it's small, but even saying "this is something you might want to think about" is unheard of in a lot of systems where the DMG is just a rules reference the players don't get. Based on this, would the 4E DMG be worth a read for someone who is probably never going to run 4E?
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Jul 25, 2020 05:16
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I have a general DM question that I'd trust to be answered here more than say... reddit or the DNDBeyond forums. I'm a relatively new DM-- about one year experience, twenty years on/off as a player-- and I'm running Princes of the Apocalypse. The party is starting to enter the real dungeon crawl-y part and I want to start laying hooks for other adventures. I'm running a very standard Forgotten Realms set-up, nothing terribly exotic in the party aside from one player who is from Halruaa. Anyway they're on-track to be level 10-13 by the end of the adventure (I run milestone XP), so my question is thus-- What is the best way to retrofit campaign books like Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Out of the Abyss, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, and the upcoming Rime of the Frostmaiden? I can always adjust monster stats, but I also want to keep it vaguely plausible that these adventurers are seasoned and strong and not just going through the shonen thing of there always being a new league above them.
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Jul 25, 2020 06:24
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I wouldn't entirely dismiss either of those, especially as it can be a bit of an echo chamber here. So when it comes to adjusting the difficulty of stuff you will want to give the book a few looks. First skim it, just to get an idea of it. Then I'd read through things once or twice so you know what's going on with the details. Because it's those details which you'll need to tweak. It might be numbers, or using a stronger version of a creature that is available. Don't necessarily be afraid of letting your players feel strong. Especially if you combine numbers with say, using a rule that excess damage can spread to other targets within melee reach if the attack roll would still hit them. You can have some fun moments of the barbarian literally cleaving through entire groups of goblins all at once. It'll make them running into the actual challenges all the better. As for hooks... Rumors in whatever spots of civilization they are in is always a good one. Do they have an ally? Have them mention an associate is dealing with something else, and then when the time comes they go into more detail to push things on to the next adventure.
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Jul 25, 2020 07:11
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Trojan Kaiju posted:Based on this, would the 4E DMG be worth a read for someone who is probably never going to run 4E? I haven’t done it but I’ve heard that suggested before.
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Jul 25, 2020 12:39
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tote up a bags posted:When's D&D Next Next D&D Well Actually, Furthermore will be announced next year, and when everyone makes fun of the name again they'll try to pretend it was never called that and that nobody should have ever believed it would be called that and it was always going to be called D&D Sixee. The first print run will still have the original name on the copyright page, which will cause licensing problems that finally sink the brand forever beneath a flood of lovely third and even fourth party supplements.
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Jul 25, 2020 13:44
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Thanks for the 4e chat. For some reason I have the impression that to play 4e you really need some online tool that doesn’t exist anymore? And the rule books as originally published got so errata’d that they aren’t really useful to play with? What books should I be looking for if I wanted to play the ‘final’ version of 4e? (Or is there a 4e thread where I should take this?)
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Jul 25, 2020 15:45
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I wasn't a huge fan of 4e. I still had a lot of fun but I felt like the combat may as well have been from a video game with how regimented everything was. Also I got in pretty early on 4e and the games we played, combat went on for hours becase (as others have mentioned) things were just big sacks of HP and often given ways to heal. When DnD next was announced and the play test released there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on theater of the mind and on being creative with the environment you're given. I seem to remember the GMs being encouraged in the original playtest material to offer advantage and disadvantage if the players acted in ways that'd benefit or hinder their actions, and I enjoyed using that as a carrot and stick to encourage thinking outside of the rules regime. Come the finished product, however, so many classes invest on their niche ways to generate advantage that using advantage and disadvantage as a carrot and stick becomes a bit unfair. I feel like a bold GM could make use of the fact that a skill check is a valid action in combat to encourage the kind of "I pull their trousers down so they trip" plays that are much needed to avoid the "I do the thing that's mathematically the best thing to do" trap which just gets so boring after your first or second campaign. Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jul 25, 2020 |
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Jul 25, 2020 16:03
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Thanks for the 4e chat. For some reason I have the impression that to play 4e you really need some online tool that doesn’t exist anymore? And the rule books as originally published got so errata’d that they aren’t really useful to play with? What books should I be looking for if I wanted to play the ‘final’ version of 4e? (Or is there a 4e thread where I should take this?) While you don't "need" the 4e character builder it is wildly helpful as 4e characters get quite complex and have a lot of options. There's a fan updated character builder still floating around that I would recommend finding if you're looking to play. The updates and errata are a bit of a mixed bag IMO. If you use the updated monster math from Monster Manual 3 see this link for that the player side of things will generally get along fine. There are a few broken or otherwise OP combinations that got errata'd but due to the strength of the 4e system these were mostly "deal way too much damage" and not "ascend to godhood and murder the evil dude in his sleep when he was a baby". Also, 4e got actively hosed with towards the end of it's cycle by Mearls and co, some of the errata is stuff like changing magic missile back to being a fixed damage no-roll attack.
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Jul 25, 2020 16:05
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mind the walrus posted:I have a general DM question that I'd trust to be answered here more than say... reddit or the DNDBeyond forums. princes of the apocalypse is probably one of the worst ones for that Lol, but you can probably hop into out of the abyss and tomb of annihilation at those levels and probably be fine in terms of keeping the power level feeling like it is escalating(in terms of final battles, at least)... i recommend making the early fights easy if you decide to go that route, but not milestone leveling, just to give the players that moment of "yeah we kick rear end. whos next" before you throw the real nasty boys at them. you must stop there, though. you can only pull the "while you were doing this, acererak/the demon lords were building power in the background" once before it feels like the heroes are playing whack a mole with world destroying evils. at that point you have to retire those adventurers.
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Jul 25, 2020 16:34
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