4E Dungeons & Dragons - Verdict?

[Pilias]

There are more differences in style in playing D&D.

Though this doesn't describe me, you have to allow that D&D can be played as a combat simulationist game, especially if you rely on mechanics more than fluff. Nothing wrong with that, but that means if a given mechanic has been removed from the game moving from one edition to another, how does the simulationist DM deal with what they were already comfortable using. This is hypothetical, as I am sure Midgardsormr injects plenty of RP in his games.

What I am saying, is D&D doesn't have to be Roleplaying at all. So to argue just roleplay it in, might apply to a given DMs style of play but might not be the best solution for everyone.

Regarding the fact the skills have been pulled from 4e. 3.5e has many faults and broken mechanics. The question is for me, was the skill mechanic broken? What reasonable reason did WotC choose to remove skills from play. Its their product and if they just wanted to create a different game, so they removed, that's fine. However, my hope was that 4e was intended to fix a broken 3.5e.
Skills weren't broken, so removing that mechanic offers no benefit to those who were already using it.

To argue, make up a house rule or roleplay out, while a viable solution, might not be the only solution or the best one for a given DM. Besides, if you have to start "house ruling" a new game - to those concerned gamers, wouldn't that indicate that the new is game is just as broken?

Besides, unless you completely understand the new edition, having to create a house rule right off the bat, may make the overall game unbalanced. I'd rather play an entire campaign to understand the continuity of the entire ruleset. Once I understand fairly well, house rules can start to enter play in a responsible manner, not to destroy the balance in the game.

I say, don't fix it, if its not broken - of course D&D is not my IP, and I have no control on what the publisher wants to do with their game.

I know DMs that roleplay everything, with hardly a die being cast at all. It works for those DMs, but I personally don't like. I don't want a DM to dictate how a game is played with no rules to refer in understanding their game method.

That's my dimes worth.

GP

I have to strongly disagree with your statement that the skill system was not broken, it was so unbalanced in later levels that you basically had to set up seperate DCs for skill specialists and another for everyone else, and after about level 5 you either do the same thing with poisons/traps/diseases ect or you just don't use them at all because the DCs provided for all of these things just didn't work as real obsticles to a Rogue after that point. It wasn't unreasonable to expect a level 12 Rogue to be able to run up a flat wall (DC30) as just one example of how the system didn't work well.

[Pilias]

I've played 4th edition many times with a few different groups. Both in person with one group, and online with a few others.

My personal issue with it is that all characters tend to be TOO useful in all situations. When playing a character if feels far too easy to pull one character out and replace him with a completely random one. I don't have to think too hard about what classes other players have, I don't have to worry about finding ways to play to their strengths and weaknesses.

In some ways this is a good thing, but from a few years of playing D&D 3.5 I've found the most memorable events from them stemmed from someone being very ill suited to something and then being at the mercy of other player's to make up for the character's short falls. Sure this can be purely RP based, but I find it adds to the RP to force someone to have flaws and issues that another player isn't going to have.

Things are over balanced throughout the game. I think from the RP view varied power curves are a good thing. A warrior having to haul a weak wizard though the first few character levels then has some interesting issues to deal with as that wizard he laughed at and tormented for being so useless quickly builds up to be far more powerful and important than he can ever hope to be.

I think this is true to a certain extent, you do notice when a particular role is missing from the group, especially Defenders and Controllers, but beyond that with a good party balance between the roles or switching from one class to another within the same role doesn't massively affect the game, but from a gameplay perspective I think that's actually a good thing, the focus becomes less on the stats and more on working together as a team, which is especially useful for new players to the group, who now know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in the game.

It also seems to encourage more experimentation with other classes than I've seen in previous editions, before people would tend to stick with a single archetype, IE ranger, the maybe dabble with rogues or fighter characters or maybe try out a druid or bard, but they wouldn't stray too far from what they were experienced with (again this is in general terms having watched hundreds of gamers over the years in both 2nd ed and 3rd ed).

[Gamerprinter]

No one plays or rogues or other skill-based classes in my group ever.

GP

[msa]

I have to strongly disagree with your statement that the skill system was not broken, it was so unbalanced in later levels that you basically had to set up seperate DCs for skill specialists and another for everyone else, and after about level 5 you either do the same thing with poisons/traps/diseases ect or you just don't use them at all because the DCs provided for all of these things just didn't work as real obsticles to a Rogue after that point. It wasn't unreasonable to expect a level 12 Rogue to be able to run up a flat wall (DC30) as just one example of how the system didn't work well.

Two people have mentioned this, and I'll make a third. I agree with the sentiment "it was nice to have a wide range of skills and rules, as well as flexibility in how you train skills, in 3.5"... its one of the reasons I prefer 3.5. But it is, unfortunately, a tragically broken system (just one that I like).

A search for "diplomancer" will show you just how broken the system could be--some super-munchkin made a 6th level character with a +94 to diplomacy. Even without using a host of supplemental rules diplomacy was particularly abusable, and my new rogue 2/fighter 1 has a +20 diplomacy (7 ranks +5 feats (skill focus, negotiator) +6 sync bonuses (bluff, sense motive, knowledge: nobility) +2 charisma).

Like everyone said, it is very hard to set DCs because they are either easy for a specialist or impossible for everyone else. This is especially problematic when there is some sort of game mechanic or attack tied up in a skill (like diplomacy). I probably only like 3.5 better because in my group we are happy to discard rules in favor of story so these things don't get out of hand, but that's only an option for mature groups.

Overall, I'd say 4e is much more balanced, and does a much better job keeping the entire party relevant in non-combat encounters. There are great ideas on teh internets for 'secondary skills' for players to fill in the story-based gaps that 4e does leave (which are huge).

[msa]

No one plays or rogues or other skill-based classes in my group ever.

That's all I EVER play! LOL!

PS. I meant to add... GP. I wouldn't switch if I had invested that much either. Hell, I haven't switched, and I think I own more books than anyone in my 7 person group (which I play in... not the DM). And I only own 7: the three core books + the 4 complete XXX books.

[Pilias]

I've never liked critical failure rules in a d20-based system. A 5% chance of disastrous failure seems a little too high for my tastes. I was playing in an Alternity game recently in which my technical expert character was attempting to hack a computer system that contained important storyline information. I botched the hacking roll and corrupted the data. The very next time we came across a computer with important storyline information, I did the very same thing. Then I wrecked our spaceship.

I roll a lot of 1's.

Of course, I also roll a lot of 20's, but usually only when my character is doing something he's not supposed to be good at. I put down more bad guys with my stun pistol than one of our combat specialists did with his big plasma gun.

The other problem with a critical failure rule is that when I GM with such a rule in place, my villains have a tendency to commit suicide in creative ways during the climactic battles. Nothing is worse than building up the threat of an NPC in the players' minds to the point where they're almost afraid to engage him, only to have him fall off a balcony and break his neck during the first round of combat. I suppose that's what I get for rolling in the open.

lol, I'm just the opposite, I tend to roll 20s often and hardly ever roll 1's.

In my games I tend to invent reason why characters/NPCs/Monsters keep rolling in specific ways, in fact their current arch villain is a returning menace who was a lucky goblin back when the party was level 1 who rolled 3 20's on attacks in a row and managed to get away from the party because they were locked down fighting the other characters.

[Pilias]

Most DM's have developed a sense of fairness and player challenge\support that is far more important than their game system. I have walked into DMing games I've never read and relied on players to interpret the world reaction into the current rules. It worked surprisingly well.

My favourite system I think has been the Cthulu BRP system. I'm thinking of returning to it in the face of the 4e\3.5e schism.

I don't think its a rules problem but a publishing one. A lot of people I encounter with the latest D&D are unhappy and I find it rubs off.

I'm not criticizing 4e beyond saying I don't find it as much fun.

I do think that 3.5 becomes phenomenally difficult to maintain an alternate reality in as a DM. As the players become super heroes they sort of pull your world setting apart. I imagine this is the same problem in 4e.


Is anyone waiting for the Dresden Files Game from Evil Hat?

I've only gotten to the low Epic levels in 4th ed but I can tell you that thus far I haven't experienced anywhere near the same difficulty I had in 3rd ed with high level characters in giving them appropriate challenges outside of combat, mostly due to the fixes with the skill system which created massive differences between those who chose to put their skill points into skills every level and those who only got 1 or 2 points/level and didn't tend to lump them all in one place (ie the classic Rogue vs Fighter example).

Also the classes are more balanced all the way through, no longer does the wizard hide behind everyone until level 5 then suddenly begin to dominate combat, no longer do you see the fighter fade into the shadows after level 10.

[Pilias]

Interesting discussion. I'm a D&D gamer and I have been playing 3.5 with one group of friends and 4th with another over the last year. I've a few thoughts about the way this has gone. I'm leaning towards 3.5 now but that's as much to do with the fact that my 4e crowd is having a hard time finding time to get together.

I like the 4e streamlining and I think the rulings of minions and cinematic combats are great. I love the way these flow, though they do tend to go on too long. This has caused me to think about how enemies handle encounters when it becomes clear they are going to lose - frequently the case for high hp enemies in 4e. This has actually lead to more roleplaying rather than less. It's also encouraged me to add mid-point complications to combats that make them more interesting. It's a very big change from 3.5 (my 3.5 party is 14th level and if a combat goes on beyond 2-3 rounds something very strange has happened!).

On the other hand I dislike the pure combat focus of the powers in 4e. In 3.5 I loved it when players used weird spells and magic items in the middle of combat. The casting times of rituals mean that non-combat spells will never come up during combat. I'm sure that as my players get more used to the rules they'll start to think a bit more laterally about their options, but right now they're still at the stage of looking at their at will and encounter powers and thinking that they are their only options in combat.

3.5 is getting tough to run at 14th level, but it's still good fun. I just have to make sure that there's only 1 real combat planned for any playing session because these slow things down remarkably. I'll certainly be looking over the Pathfinder rules to see if we should adapt our 3.5 game. I'll also continue to play 4e and I look forward to how the style of play changes as the group get more used to the rules.

I also find that roleplaying picks up as people get more familiar with the rules. FLicking through rulebooks kills the mood a little. I think we're getting back to it now, but there was certainly a dip when we picked up the new rulebooks.

This touches on another thing about 4th edition that I really like.

in 3rd ed I tended to use PC classes with Monster races for challenges rather than monsters of the appropriate level because it was much easier to create a balanced encounter that way, the way the MM in 4th ed is set up allows you do effectively do the same thing using the monsters in the book, some are soldiers, others are artillery, and others are controllers ect instead of using a pack of goblins with levels in fighter, ranger, or wizard/cleric.

It makes my job as a DM much easier because its less work to make a single encounter.

[Pilias]

I can't resist contributing. I like the look of 4e, but though I've had the core books since they were released I've never gotten to play. It is, however, not an evolution from 3.5 but rather an entirely new game built around the same core idea. Still, I love any and all RPG systems just for the idea of them, so I'm not going to just toss one out the window in favor of the other.

In terms of all the combat/RP/etc. arguments, I have to say that for those who favor rules, I'd probably guess GURPS would be up your alley. For RPing or for simple, fluid combat I personally prefer White Wolf's Storyteller system (World of Darkness, Vampire: The Requiem, etc). But neither GURPS nor Storyteller feels just like D&D, and there's something about the way D&D feels to me that makes me love it.

The one complaint I have about D&D, and I have it for both 3.5 and 4e, is that it's not lethal enough. I've never been able to make a campaign where the characters truly worried about dying (but then again, I'm a bad DM and terrible at scaling monster encounters; hopefully 4e's system fixes that a bit, but again, I have yet to try).

So, I can't say I really have a verdict on 4e, except that in theory, I like it. But I also like 3.5, the Storyteller system, GURPS, and other D20 systems in general. It depends on what you're looking for in the game more than whether one is objectively "better" than another.

4th ed fixed the encounter level issues 3rd ed had, you now have a pool of XP and you "spend" it on traps, monsters, and hazards in the encounter and then when they overcome it you divide the XP by the number of PCs and give it out. Theres a nice table with advice on how much XP to put into an encounter.

[msa]

in 3rd ed I tended to use PC classes with Monster races for challenges rather than monsters of the appropriate level because it was much easier to create a balanced encounter that way, the way the MM in 4th ed is set up allows you do effectively do the same thing using the monsters in the book, some are soldiers, others are artillery, and others are controllers ect instead of using a pack of goblins with levels in fighter, ranger, or

Wow, are you going to respond to every post in this thread? LOL!

I actually disagree with this one, although I agree with most of what you said.

I really liked the monster template + classes system in 3.5. The 4e version is fine and good, but it is a little trickier to get the balance right if you are trying to add classes to a monster. IMO, the monsters lose a little bit of their personality when they aren't fully formed classes like the PCs.

I do agree that the 4e version is easier, but I think you could have done the same thing in 3.5 without much difficulty if you wanted to. There was nothing stopping you from just creating 3 different types of goblins with different feats and BaB's.

But that's just me.