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PurpleXVI posted:4e impressed me by somehow having worse feats than 3e. In 3e I could more or less always find a feat that sounded cool or mechanically useful(even if only marginally), in 4e I just looked at the list of feats and regularly couldn't think of anything to pick. It was just such an insanely dull list that very rarely ever gave you interesting new options or changed how your class played. It was like they decided that the "get a +1 to a thing"-type of feats from 3e was what everyone wanted more of. I suspect this is for the same reason that (at least in the PHB1) magic items were very boring/limited in 4e. Mechanical balance was the core of the system, and anything that makes a dramatic change to a characters capabilities can break that balance. They might have released more interesting magic items/feats in later books, but I never made it past the phb1 era.
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Dec 22, 2022 15:11
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a lot of later 4E items are basically powers on a stick, which is both more conceptually interesting and easier to track than infinite sprawl of small bonuses a certain degree of "boring" is an inevitable by-product of the game not letting one character do everything, though. character options improving your ability to function in your lane but not really expanding it much is how it's supposed to work, even if this means that some of those systems probably should have been consolidated into each other or made into baked-in class bonuses
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Dec 22, 2022 15:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think the most defensible similarity between 4E and WoW is that 4E has role division (and that role division actually functions and preserves everyone's niche pretty well) which is an absolutely wild thing to complain about. Not that wild when you realise most of the complainers are terminal wizard players who can only derive joy from obsoleting the rest of the party
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Dec 22, 2022 15:36
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I think another reason the 4e = WoW comparison happened is because how many of the grognards at the time considered pnp RPGs above MMOs. WoW was at the height of its popularity, sure, but we had already seen stories of people ignoring responsibilities to game--poopsocking, etc. It felt easy to dump your kneejerk criticisms onto another game getting a bad reputation.Splicer posted:The issue is that 4E is absolutely nothing like WoW so saying "They were trying to make it like WoW" implies the player knows nothing about 4E, or knows nothing about WoW, or possibly both. It's like accusing nWoD of trying to the ape the success of Duke Nukem 3D. This was my experience completely. A friend of mine was was the poster child of 4e hate at the time would never and will never touch an MMO, yet still felt like he could comment on them.
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Dec 22, 2022 15:37
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One More Fat Nerd posted:I suspect this is for the same reason that (at least in the PHB1) magic items were very boring/limited in 4e. Mechanical balance was the core of the system, and anything that makes a dramatic change to a characters capabilities can break that balance. I definitely agree that big "+X" items and feats would've been out of place in 4e, but as you mention, "have another power to break out in battles, perhaps something outside of your usual wheelhouse" is the sort of thing that doesn't really add power but instead adds variety. At the same time I also feel like relying on X uses/period kind of hamstrung them a bit in their ability to do some kinds of design. If abilities instead had a cost to use or a cooldown, that's two extra levers you can pull for ability balancing/ability effects(like an ability that resets cooldowns for allies, abilities that affect power costs, etc.) and items/feats could have interacted with those. I understand that the less mechanical levers there are, the less likely you are to set some of them wrong and gently caress up the balance, but if there are too few levers then abilities end up becoming very same-y and players end up just mashing the same button again and again. Which, just to loop back about my earlier comments about more common keywords and less wordy descriptions, it would've been nice if there were some core mechanics between classes that interacted with each other. Like I remember one or two classes that had abilities centering around "marking" an enemy, but only specifically worded abilities ever interacted with "marks" of various kinds so it wasn't like you could "mark" someone for another player to take advantage of or things of that sort. It made classes feel a good deal, at least in the 4e I've played, like they were hanging out on the battlefield together but not really cooperating around any task other than clearing the enemy tokens. It was rare you saw some sort of combo setup where one player prepared the field and the other landed a good goal or other major bits of teamwork like that.
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Dec 22, 2022 15:40
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PurpleXVI posted:It made classes feel a good deal, at least in the 4e I've played, like they were hanging out on the battlefield together but not really cooperating around any task other than clearing the enemy tokens. It was rare you saw some sort of combo setup where one player prepared the field and the other landed a good goal or other major bits of teamwork like that. Sounds like a table-specific issue. Party optimization in 4E is vastly more potent than anything you can do with one character, both in terms of build and play. e: although "other than clearing enemy tokens" is a bit complicated since the game doesn't really push the GM that heavily to use non-extermination win conditions, but like most tactical TTRPGs it's a thousand times better if you go ahead and do it anyways Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 15:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Sounds like a table-specific issue. Party optimization in 4E is vastly more potent than anything you can do with one character, both in terms of build and play. It might've been, but the wide selection of splats and the lack of consistent, interacting keywords in favour of bespoke essays describing each ability's functioning, means that it's much easier to cough up a combo that doesn't "play well together."
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Dec 22, 2022 15:48
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Tarnop posted:Not that wild when you realise most of the complainers are terminal wizard players who can only derive joy from obsoleting the rest of the party This is as tired as the 4e=WoW argument.
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Dec 22, 2022 15:48
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PurpleXVI posted:It might've been, but the wide selection of splats and the lack of consistent, interacting keywords in favour of bespoke essays describing each ability's functioning, means that it's much easier to cough up a combo that doesn't "play well together." That's fair, and speaks to both why I like 4E so much and also why it's a terrible flagship / "everyone's first" RPG. (Still better than D&D at large, but that bar's hanging out in the abyssal depths with the Anguillians.)
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Dec 22, 2022 15:53
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PurpleXVI posted:Like I remember one or two classes that had abilities centering around "marking" an enemy, but only specifically worded abilities ever interacted with "marks" of various kinds so it wasn't like you could "mark" someone for another player to take advantage of or things of that sort. The deal with marks wasn't that you were marking a target for your allies to hit, it was more like marking an opposing player in basketball. Marks made it so they got a big penalty to attack anybody who wasn't you, and the kinds of classes who could drop them on enemies were the kind who could take a hit. So the way marking interacted with other players was that your ability allowed them to do their own thing without any enemies getting up in their face. There were classes whose abilities did interact more directly with others -- these were "leader" roles like the cleric, warlord, or bard, whose attacks often had the side effect of making other players better at hitting, moving them into better positions, and similar.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:01
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One More Fat Nerd posted:This is as tired as the 4e=WoW argument. Wizard spotted
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Dec 22, 2022 16:12
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This all being said, I have been slowly working my way through FFXIV the past few years, and it ticks all the boxes of enjoyment of 4e for me. The negatives of both don't really match up to make the 4e WoW comparison valid, but I really wish more tradgamers would feel ok about taking mechanics from video games the same way video games take from tradgames.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:14
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redleader posted:beg pardon? Basically, previously Battlefield games had classes which determined which weapon sets you could use. Like, you could be a regular Assault and have an assault rifle and a pistol, or you could be a Mechanic and have a shotgun and a bazooka, so you'd be able to destroy vehicles easily in exchange for range disadvantage in infantry fights. Then BF2042 came along and removed the classes - instead, you picked a single special ability, then picked each weapon from a global list. This is pretty much considered a disaster. The problem is that while it technically increased the number of choices available, it actually lowered the range of options. When anyone could have an assault rifle and a bazooka there was very little reason to take anything else. PF2e manages the same thing. There are feats for breaking almost every one of the standard restrictions on character generation, which sounds like it'd be really flexible, but is actually really inflexible because it makes overwhelming options available to everyone. And this is made worse by the fact that it seems that there's an internal design attitude which is to provide each class/ancestry with a few highlight options and then fill up from a standard list of abilities per-level which are often not worth caring about (flight at level 14+ - while it's still a level 4 spell), so the best build strategy is to find ways to pick the cherries from each splat and then move on. For example, there's a huge range of initial general and ancestry feats you could take, but if there's any optimization going on it's going to be hard to beat taking Adopted Ancestry (Dwarf) and Unburdened Iron. Unburdened Iron lets you wear armor with no decrease to speed, which is a huge deal. It's normally a Dwarf feat, but taking Adopted Ancestry lets you take it as any other Ancestry. And then the GM has to somehow work into the backstory why it is that everyone in the party has adopted Dwarven culture as their own. The optimal PF2e fighter is a human assimilated into Dwarven culture and trained by Gnomes. If you are mad about magic users being overpowered, though, PF2e has you covered - if anything in that game, it's the martials that are overpowered.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:15
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Having played in a few PF2 games, I haven't seen anyone bothering doing any of this. Not a single adopted anything, in fact.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:18
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hyphz posted:And then the GM has to somehow work into the backstory why it is that everyone in the party has adopted Dwarven culture as their own. The optimal PF2e fighter is a human assimilated into Dwarven culture and trained by Gnomes. The land is suffering under the cultural plague of dwarven weebs. Dweebs, one might call them. They insist on digging holes everywhere, wearing long fake beards and filling their rooms with wall scrolls depicting pickaxes and mugs of frothing beer.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:I tend to agree. The whole rest of 4e's character design was so good that feats were in a position that they couldn't offer anything significant, while at the same time they couldn't let feats go as a concept, so they ended up in this limbo where they're adding very marginal bonuses even though they still exist and still have to be picked from. They could also have split utility powers into combat and non-combat and folded some of the classic feat purview into them (like +3 languages isn't technically a power but sure take that as a non-combat utility power sure)
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Dec 22, 2022 16:32
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Tarnop posted:Wizard spotted I am pretty much a dedicated DM. I was a player in a bunch of 2e, played in one 3.x campaign, one 4e campaign, and one PF campaign. I only ever played fighter or cleric. I watched a bunch of folks irl bounce off 4e in the first year after it released, both in my groups and in other groups I had friends in. Probably a total of 20-30 people? There were a few powergamers, but none were the "do everything wizard" type, more the "insane damage charging barbarian" or "bear swarm druid" type. The most common complaint I heard was folks mad they couldn't play their preferred race/class on release, which, yeah the decision to make folks wait a year for Barbarian/Bard/Druid/Sorcerer/Gnome/Half-Orc was pretty flawed.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:36
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PurpleXVI posted:The land is suffering under the cultural plague of dwarven weebs. Dweebs, one might call them. They insist on digging holes everywhere, wearing long fake beards and filling their rooms with wall scrolls depicting pickaxes and mugs of frothing beer. 
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Dec 22, 2022 16:36
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hyphz posted:And then the GM has to somehow work into the backstory why it is that everyone in the party has adopted Dwarven culture as their own. The optimal PF2e fighter is a human assimilated into Dwarven culture and trained by Gnomes.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:36
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hyphz posted:And then the GM has to somehow work into the backstory why it is that everyone in the party has adopted Dwarven culture as their own. The onus for that is on the player group. It's on the GM to instead make the Dwarven ties relevant in the campaign going forward.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:59
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One More Fat Nerd posted:I am pretty much a dedicated DM. I was a player in a bunch of 2e, played in one 3.x campaign, one 4e campaign, and one PF campaign. I only ever played fighter or cleric. That's nice but what does it have to do with the people who got mad about clear division of roles and niche protection?
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Dec 22, 2022 17:05
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My biggest complaint about 4E was that it required a set of Alea magnetic markers to play. (Or other substitutes, but one of the players at my table had a big set of them and loved to pull 'em out.) On of the designers said something like, "3.0 gave everyone moments to be awesome. We wanted 4.0 to have everyone be awesome all of the time." And that was true, except for the Dwarven battlemind who kept trying to chase down fleeing foes (no ranged powers and a slower movement speed) and the Elven ranger who on multiple occasions biffed his Split the Tree daily power (shoot two arrows, do tons of damage with each, roll 2d20 to hit, use the higher result for both to hits) even with his elven accuracy power (reroll a single d20 attack roll you just missed with). And this was with MM3 math, so it's not like they had janky ACs! Man, 4E was a lot more fun then 5E, I've got to say, especially as a DM. Running the math on monsters to create new horrors every week that were surprises to the players without being unbalanced -- that was gold. Um, I'll take a Bigby's Bountiful Burger and an extra-large Potion of Thirst Healing, please.
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Dec 22, 2022 17:09
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Doctor Epitaph posted:This all being said, I have been slowly working my way through FFXIV the past few years, and it ticks all the boxes of enjoyment of 4e for me. The negatives of both don't really match up to make the 4e WoW comparison valid, but I really wish more tradgamers would feel ok about taking mechanics from video games the same way video games take from tradgames. I'm ok with taking mechanics from videogames, but videogames automate things like "beancounting the numerical effects of various modifiers and things" so you don't have to do it manually and combat doesn't feel tedious and interminable.
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Dec 22, 2022 17:11
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PurpleXVI posted:I definitely agree that big "+X" items and feats would've been out of place in 4e, but as you mention, "have another power to break out in battles, perhaps something outside of your usual wheelhouse" is the sort of thing that doesn't really add power but instead adds variety. There are a lot of innovations in 13th Age I'd love to backport into a 4E retroclone (or 4E inspired game). The Escalation Die is cool tech that has been talked about at length in its most vanilla use-case, but there's second order tech you can hang off of it. For example, a lot of 3rd Party resources use "Cyclical" abilities, which are At-Will if the Escalation Die is even (so in rounds 3, 5, 7, 9, etc.), but is an Encounter power otherwise. So you get a cool decision space there. 13th Age also has the Recharge Die for powers. Some people don't like it (because randomization of resources can have bad-feels), and many people house-rule it in various ways, but I love the design space of "Maybe it's an Encounter power, maybe it's a Daily. We'll find out!"
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Dec 22, 2022 17:17
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hyphz posted:The optimal PF2e fighter is a human assimilated into Dwarven culture and trained by Gnomes.
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Dec 22, 2022 17:21
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One More Fat Nerd posted:I suspect this is for the same reason that (at least in the PHB1) magic items were very boring/limited in 4e. Mechanical balance was the core of the system, and anything that makes a dramatic change to a characters capabilities can break that balance. The other problem is that those are all alongside stuff like "Your holy spells do extra damage... no catch no nothing" and "once a day just ignore resistances for this encounter". Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 17:27
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i didn't lead with it because a lot of it is weird edge cases but it is possible to do some pretty transformative stuff with feats and magic items in 4E. my personal favorite was a permanently phased-out Shadar-Kai Swordmage concept that I decided against actually playing because it was obviously degenerate and unintended even if it was a legit reading of the rules it relied on an Enshrouding Candle, I think a headgear item of some kind, and then a bunch of racial feats relating to dim light / shadows, bonuses to teleportation while phased, and stacking teleportation distance feats Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 17:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i didn't lead with it because a lot of it is weird edge cases but it is possible to do some pretty transformative stuff with feats and magic items in 4E. my personal favorite was a permanently phased-out Shadar-Kai Swordmage concept that I decided against actually playing because it was obviously degenerate and unintended even if it was a legit reading of the rules
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Dec 22, 2022 18:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:D&D has been trying to develop computerized tools (at the minimum, a computerized character sheet and character creation) since at least AD&D 2e I maintain that one of D&D's strengths (or at least, particularities) is that its core systems are ruled by rigid mechanics in a way that makes it ideally suited to conversion to computer game. And aside from brand name recognition and franchising, this is one of the reasons D&D has been so successful in the computer game world. And in many ways that's also a strength in tabletop form. D&D is not balanced, it's often not good, but it's often had a core of mechanical rigor that allows it to be predictable and understandable by both players and computers. In a lot of other systems the game programmer would have to make a lot of interpretations and judgement calls regarding what exactly something does when trying to turn it into code. Which in turn means that when the original system is played by flesh and blood humans, the referee has to make interpretations and judgement calls regarding what exactly something does. And that's some of D&D's strength. You don't have to make those judgement calls. When you enter the 10 foot by 10 foot room and there's an orc guarding a treasure chest, players, DMs, and computers know pretty much exactly what they can and cannot do. (It bears noting that this is very much in spite of Gary Gygax, whose 1974 release of Dungeons & Dragons is a collection of nonsense rules and scattered judgement calls that don't have this level of mechanical rigor. The turn towards mechanical rigor is something that happens when other people, also trained on the tradition of tabletop and miniature wargames, try to figure out consistent and satisfying interpretations of Gygax' fascinating little outline of a game.)
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Dec 22, 2022 18:30
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LatwPIAT posted:I maintain that one of D&D's strengths (or at least, particularities) is that its core systems are ruled by rigid mechanics in a way that makes it ideally suited to conversion to computer game. And aside from brand name recognition and franchising, this is one of the reasons D&D has been so successful in the computer game world. And in many ways that's also a strength in tabletop form. D&D is not balanced, it's often not good, but it's often had a core of mechanical rigor that allows it to be predictable and understandable by both players and computers. Yes, reasonably so. People rail against the 4e vs MMO comparison, but at the time it would have been foolish for Wizards to not have looked at MMOs for inspiration given the huge popularity surge they were experiencing at the time. I mean, WoW got a South Park episode. And I think it's a bit awkward that people still fall back on the "you don't have to follow pre-existing rules, you can do whatever you like" even though that line has been the same for years and in those years computer games have come forward in huge strides in the range of approaches they allow to situations. They may not allow literally anything, but they'll probably cover the reasonable choices that at least 50% of groups would end up making.
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Dec 22, 2022 18:49
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hyphz posted:Yes, reasonably so. People rail against the 4e vs MMO comparison, but at the time it would have been foolish for Wizards to not have looked at MMOs for inspiration given the huge popularity surge they were experiencing at the time. I mean, WoW got a South Park episode. Not just popularity, but the sheer amount of money going into creating the most appealing player experiences. There are some fundamental differences between TTRPGs and computer games, but you'd be a fool not to look at what game design ends up looking like after people have spent millions of dollars on perfecting it. The TTRPG industry sure doesn't have millions of dollars to spend on figuring out what makes playing a fighter the most fun, or all that many university courses in best design practices. Computer games are actually well designed. Of course you should be looking at what they're doing.
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Dec 22, 2022 19:23
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MMOs specifically are designed to be good Skinner Boxes, not really games, so copying off their notes may not be the best idea.
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Dec 22, 2022 19:28
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The primary goal of 4e was to sell blind reveal miniatures. The secondary goal was to build a system that could be played online in a living campaign style. Both these goals led to the mechanical rigor of the system. The financial crisis and increased cost of goods killed the first plan, and the second one never materialized because like so many other forward thinking ideas that came out of WotC, they couldn't figure out a way to monetize it.
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Dec 22, 2022 19:33
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Bucnasti posted:The primary goal of 4e was to sell blind reveal miniatures. Do you have any evidence for this besides your tummy feels.
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Dec 22, 2022 19:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think the most defensible similarity between 4E and WoW is that 4E has role division (and that role division actually functions and preserves everyone's niche pretty well) which is an absolutely wild thing to complain about. wow did that worse than 4e still when 4e came out
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Dec 22, 2022 19:53
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One More Fat Nerd posted:MMOs specifically are designed to be good Skinner Boxes, not really games, so copying off their notes may not be the best idea. At the time 4e came out, they were much less so. The retail+subscription model was much more accepted and IAPs/microtransactions hadn't really taken off, so the only predatory design was artificially extending playtime by slowing down progression, which is easily corrected for in a port to tabletop (and the progression system was copied off D&D anyway). The few actual predatory games at that time, like Achaea, weren't popular.
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Dec 22, 2022 20:03
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CitizenKeen posted:For example, a lot of 3rd Party resources use "Cyclical" abilities, which are At-Will if the Escalation Die is even (so in rounds 3, 5, 7, 9, etc.), but is an Encounter power otherwise. Even better, albeit marginally: Because the escalation die is an actual physical d6 that's placed on the table at the end of the first round the PCs push the action forward (with 1 pip showing on round 2 at the earliest), and gets ticked up to a higher face every round the PCs keep doing that, eventually you run out of faces and it sticks at 6 pips showing, so rounds 7+ give you free use of cyclic powers to make up for the fact that you're clearly in over your head. Torches Upon Stars fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 20:11
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Megazver posted:Having played in a few PF2 games, I haven't seen anyone bothering doing any of this. Not a single adopted anything, in fact. It's true that in any genre of games, you can just slap together whatever unbalanced poo poo you want and most gamers will not notice or care if you hosed up anywhere as long as it looks good and runs smooth. But some people like to optimize and they will find problems and imbalances. For example, Smash Bros Brawl was a perfectly good game if you were not playing competitively. At the competitive level, though, enough flaws became apparent that many people preferred to stick with Melee. You can just say those people are playing wrong and ignore them. Or you can actually try to design a good game. In general, point buy and other very open systems are hard to balance, and impossible if you want to publish lines of splatbooks. Class-based systems are good at solving this. It's very easy to say that this power is good here and synergizes in this way, and we don't need to worry about how it might synergize elsewhere because other classes simply can't access it.
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Dec 22, 2022 20:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:Do you have any evidence for this besides your tummy feels. Conversations with designers who actually worked on it. DnD has always suffered because it's business model sucks. You can't get rich selling three books to 20% of your audience. WotC has been trying to find ways to make real money (ie on the scale of MtG) off of DnD since they bought TSR. in the mid 2000's Wizkids was killing it with blind reveal miniatures for Mage Knight and Heroclicks, WotC wanted some of that pie and saw it as a way to make DnD profitable. We were doing the same thing at Blizzard with Upper Deck and the WoW minis game. Thing was there was this little thing called the 2008 financial crisis, which not only tanked consumer spending but increased costs of production, destroying the margin on little plastic monsters coming from China. With out the revenue stream from minis, WoTC couldn't afford to make big investments into 4e like they had planned. Combined with the general backlash against 4e from the established players and it went into a death spiral. 4e with a perfect storm of many individual well intentioned and thought out decisions that when combined became a horrible clusterfuck.
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Dec 22, 2022 20:26
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Bucnasti posted:Conversations with designers who actually worked on it. O so your source is “trust me, my uncle works for Nintendo”. Well then I totally trust you.
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Dec 22, 2022 20:30
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