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Hello fellow Dakka people. I have been suffering from the "4e itch" lately. I guess that's a combination of my last campaign winding down a while back and some 4e session videos one of my subscriptions had put up on Youtube. I personally am quite a big fan of the system because of the interesting combat encounters you can pull together with it, although I will freely admit that it is not without flaws and might have something of a "target audience". Unfortunately pretty much everybody in the RPG club I'm a member of is more of a Pathfinder person (2 years of running Pathfinder Society has permanently soured my opinion of that system sorry to say) and there is never really enough people for me to run a group at our weekly meetings. My reputation as the guy who always has the weird and obscure systems hasn't helped things much on this count

I was curious if there was any other 4e supporters out there with interesting or hilarious stories to tell or some insights into what they like or dislike about the system. Maybe even anybody who might want to do some kind of "play over the internet" thing...although that might not be the best idea since I'm rather busy with schoolwork for the foreseeable future.

I was a big proponent of 4th when it came out, and initially didn't like Pathfinder since it has most of the flaws of 3.5.

Ran a long campaign (to level 16) in the Darksun setting with 4e.
I've got mixed feelings about it.
Things I like:
-I like the simplicity of many of the mechanics, and how the rules parts of the books are written and laid out. Very clean, very easy to follow.
-I like the focus on tactical play.
-I really like the idea of separating the mechanics for players and monsters. This makes making new monsters really easy, and I really like the way they "took the lid off" for all the DM stuff.
-Really, really like the base cosmology, I think to be honest (much as I love planescape!) it's a better base for many fantasy campaigns than the Great Wheel.
Stuff I don't like:
-The game never feels substantially different as you increase in levels, the numbers just seem to get bigger.
-The higher level you are, the slower the combats are. This can result in horrible, boring combats. To mitigate that you have to put in a lot of other elements in the combats, and this undoes the plus side of having simple monster design.
- The way the powers are named and described I find detracts from the game, and once the Alexandrian pointed out dissassosciated mechanics, I couldn't unsee them.

So, overall, if I wanted to play a tactical warband game, I'd consider 4th edition, especially up to level 10. After 10, in my opinion, it starts to break down into a slog and it becomes increasingly cludgey to run.

I like 4E, but do not have the time to go into at the moment. Da Boss gives a pretty good overview.

I love me some 4E. Of course, I still love 3.5, but 4E just made things a lot more balanced for our group and easier to run.

We ran an old school puzzle / hardcore campaign a while back and it was really worth great.

I also love 4e, the oly issue I have found that it is to ballanced, if you fiddle with it to much it breaks.

 Anpu42 wrote:
I also love 4e, the oly issue I have found that it is to ballanced, if you fiddle with it to much it breaks.

I've noticed this, back in the wild west days when I first started my campaign (it went to lvl 10 and I loved it) I just kind of messed with the system however I wanted, including introducing a magic item that would let the rogue spend a healing surge to basically make two ranged attacks as a single action (symbiotic type item. Long story). That rogue was one of the biggest cheese wheels you have ever seen until I finally toned it down. I figured the healing surge requirement on the squishy rogue would stop him from abusing it...until I realized a perma-hidden ranged rogue never got targeted by anything anyway.

I think Anpu's talking about messing with the core mechanics, not OP magic items.

If you are worried about things being overpowered, be very very careful when mixing 4E and Essentials.

I love the versatility of 3.5 (and lets face it, the D20 system also powered many of the other games that I enjoyed in the last 10 years) and it's very.. familiar. You know where you are with it. So I was surprised to find that I loved 4e even more. Sure, it's a bit odd the way they have abstracted what a class can do so that it can be shoe-horned into one of a handful of roles and balanced against other classes in that role.. but as someone who enjoyed playing Bards, it was so nice to have the option of 'playing the game' if I wanted to when it came to combat. So shouting at someone does damage now? Okay, fair enough!

Also I found the large suite of powers very appealing and there were enough of them that.. by the time you added on a few splat books.. they helped to differentiate your character in the same way that feats used to in 3.5.

We played the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign, but using 4e, and it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Making every class viable is one of the greatest successes of 4E.

 pretre wrote:
I think Anpu's talking about messing with the core mechanics, not OP magic items.

Actualy I was talking a few thing, but the bigest our was Attributes.
When we first started out we converted some 3rd Edition Character that had some raly high Attubutes. My Cat Girl Rouge witha 20 Dex and Char was not out of place in 3.5 as I had to spend once feat on Weapon Fenis and my Str of 8 was not that bad.
In frouth I was doing a d10+13 with Sly FLurish [+2 Bastard Sword and Versitile Duelest].

Yeah, straight conversion can be crazy.

It is also hard to make Broken Characters. This actualy caused one guy to quit are group, but we dont miss him.

From DM's Point of view 4th is also great as putting together quck encouters is so easy.

Yeah, certainly to the level of 3.5 where OMG broken was fairly doable after a couple splatbooks hit. I loved the tools for DMs as well for 4E, which goes to your second point.

It was more balanced but 4E took away a lot of the uniqueness you could make from the characters. Balanced, yes, but also so boring. I really wanted to like 4D and got all the books, but after half a campaign I gave up and we went back to 3.5. I don't want a dumbed down ruleset, I want a rule set that allows me to create what kind of character I want and do the things I want them to do.

As the DM, it was easier to run a 4th campaign, but in this case easier isn't always better.

I'm not going to go full blown on you here, but more prestige classes/splatbooks/material does not equal more uniqueness.

4E isn't dumbed down, it is just different from what you are used to.

Having played tons of 4E campaigns, there has never been a time when I or one of my players said 'Wow, I totally can't make the character I want with the available materials.'

I forget who said it but:
"What is a Character Sheet?"
"It is a physical representation of the concept of your Character ti fit within the Game Rules"
I think I have had one character that did not convert over well, but all of the others feel mor like they should in 4th.

I think the reason I like 4e so much is because it has rules for you in combat (where I want a really meaty system), but when you're not in combat, or some kind of combat like encounter, it doesn't give you much guidance. I don't really want rules to tell me what happens out of combat. I can make that stuff up on my own.

Of course I will be fair and state that over 75% of my RPG experiences have been from the DM side of things, so I might not be as in touch with the player's perspective as I could be. But 4e is an incredibly easy system for the person running the game.

True enough. In fact, what I discovered about 4e in regards to the non-combat portion of the game was how much of a crutch 3.5 gave you so you didn't have to roleplay. Take the perform skill, for example. In 3.5, if we arrived in a town with a day to kill, I could - if I wanted to - state that my Bard was using the perform skill to make some money at the local tavern, and would also make a gather information check after the 'show'. Dice roll, dice roll, GM checks the result against a table in the book and I get X gold and learn Y random rumors from some chart in the adventure. 4e pretty much takes that away and by giving you fewer rules to rely on in non-combat situations and I felt like it encouraged you to (role) play them out instead.

Some of our players weren't so keen on the way that non-combat magic was handled though and I guess I can't blame them. They always enjoyed finding creative, on-the-spot uses for spells and it was pretty hard to do that unless it was some manifestation of an At-Will power because rituals required too much time and preparation. Presumably, spontaneously making someone's pants fall down to create a distraction or humiliate them was not as fun as shaking your fist at said person and storming off to your workshop where you could make their pants fall down two to four hours later..

I like 4e as a player, but I don't think I could ever run it. I think the GM has some great tools at their disposal, but 4e really demands 'interesting' combats over straight fights to be at the most interesting. I found that straight-up fights tended to be kind of static and just dice-rolling exercises, but the fights where we had to achieve a goal besides killing something while dealing with fights were very cool, and the system really supported this well. I love some of the fights we did where utility powers and such became important because we couldn't just march around en-masse to squash the opposition but had to split up to disable key targets and such.

We never got into rituals, but my group tends to hand-wave a lot of 'logistics' as it's just not fun for us. I do think they're a good idea, though, as they retained a lot of classic spells while preventing a wizard being a 'swiss army knife' that makes a thief worthless at high levels (knock and others).

Skill challenges were revised a couple times in 4e's brief life, and I do wish they had just adopted an even more free-forms system to reward player creativity. I think the biggest change I would have suggested is saying "The base DC is X, but there's a bonus of Y to Z for player creativity. Y means a description of how the skill is being used and is the default, with z reserved for really creative stuff, improvised and well-done speeches/in-character bits, etc."

 Balance wrote:
I found that straight-up fights tended to be kind of static and just dice-rolling exercises, but the fights where we had to achieve a goal besides killing something while dealing with fights were very cool, and the system really supported this well. I love some of the fights we did where utility powers and such became important because we couldn't just march around en-masse to squash the opposition but had to split up to disable key targets and such.

I think this has always been true of D&D though. D&D is at its best when you have to fight 10 goblins, crawl across a broken bridge and stop a timer from completing all at the same time. This has been true of every edition. Simply lining up and rolling damage every turn has never been a high point.

Skill challenges were revised a couple times in 4e's brief life, and I do wish they had just adopted an even more free-forms system to reward player creativity. I think the biggest change I would have suggested is saying "The base DC is X, but there's a bonus of Y to Z for player creativity. Y means a description of how the skill is being used and is the default, with z reserved for really creative stuff, improvised and well-done speeches/in-character bits, etc."

This would have been nice and ultimately is what a lot of DMs did (including myself). I always gave bonuses for PC creativity.

Dynamic combats are always better, but I really felt like 4th demanded a little more from me in terms of encounter prep (rather than monster prep). I have a suspicion that is because I learned the game in 3.0 so I am much more comfortable organically creating a dynamic fight in that system, whereas with fourth I felt like I had to prep the fights a lot more.

In the end though, I mean I think 4th has a really bad rep for no particular reason. I could easily point out the numerous mechanical flaws in PF for example, I just happen to slightly prefer it to 4th. For group balance and being able to play pretty much any class and have it work for you, it's great.

That and one of the nice things bounted out it that overall damage is higher, but then when you need a load if damage you can usualy choose when you want to do it.

It is very entertaining to watch a party nova from the GM side of things (even though it always makes me wince a little when they take my "mini-boss" monster down in one round). The ranger has the reputation of a "living blender" for a reason. So many attacks...

 dementedwombat wrote:
It is very entertaining to watch a party nova from the GM side of things (even though it always makes me wince a little when they take my "mini-boss" monster down in one round). The ranger has the reputation of a "living blender" for a reason. So many attacks...

This is why I ended up making one of my 2 House Rules.
1] No Speding Action Points in the First Round of Combat
2] You can Spend an Action Point to just add +10 to a d20 Roll.

Aww, that's no fun. I like that players can burn someone down if they want to expend the resources.

It doesn't really bother me, but it made me revise my preliminary estimate of "elite" monsters very quickly. I thought they could be a good "big bad" for when you want to have a big guy and support in the same encounter. I've found they have almost exactly enough HP to absorb one round of nova from a reasonably optimized party, then die the next round. That's not quite enough for a cool boss fight.

So after that experience I made the next dungeon have no big boss, but three "mini-boss" encounters, each with an elite of about 2 levels above the party. And to make things more fun I drew random encounters out of an encounter deck (it's in the DMG. Run it at least once in your career, it's incredibly fun if you take some time to populate it well).

That went reasonably well. I loved how the players went crazy on the first big monster I drew and used the dailies, then the look on their face when the second one came in...

P.S. one of those monsters was a black pudding ooze, which lets you put a minion in play every time it gets hit with a weapon attack. The ranger could fully max out at something like 5-6 attacks a turn if he went all put with the action point and minor action attacks and evreything... it was so hilarious to watch the other players get mad at the ranger for hitting the monster so much.

My group never really did the Nova thing. We found a lot of powers really needed set-up to be most useful, and our GM didn't make it easy by having bosses charge into combat without a good reason.

On the other hand, we did have a couple fights where we really trashed what turned out to be the Big Boss's lieutenant, who promptly stepped out and gave us a good fight as we had already burned a lot of dailies on the lieutenant.

Another memory of 4e (we haven't played it in a while) is we had some 'issues' due to being lazy gamers as far as logistics. 4e has some really interesting 'dungeon economy' stuff, and I don't mean how the goblins spend those gold pieces they get from dead adventurers. A stated goal was to end what some gamers called the '15 minute work day' where it made perfect sense in earlier editions for a party o go through 1-3 encounters, using 'free' resources like spells and similar, then rest and recover... So, the party works for 15 minutes, then takes a nap.

Of course, some scenarios might impose a time limit or other reason that the party isn't in control of the rate of play. My group doesn't worry about logistics to save everyone time, but we also have the 'buy-in' that leaving and returning to a dungeon is going to cause problems such as monsters regrouping, traps being set, etc.

4e made some valiant efforts to combat the '15 minute work day', such as the At-Will powers being actually useful. I think a good 4e gm needs to suggest how 'serious' encounters are. Don't just say "This is a minor encounter designed to wear you down a little" but do hint a bit (with room for uncertainty) so the players know if they should be pulling out all the stops or just trying to minimize their losses.

My group found 4e a bit slow (if we play 4e again, I've heard the Monster Vault fixes this by tweaking the math so monsters have less HP, more damage). The GM sometimes gave us a 'refresh' instead of dealing with us going back to town, which may have been a mistake as we tended to be a bit too fresh to make some of the 'boss' encounters a fun challenge.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh... I liked how 4e did different 'classes' of a lot of monsters (I.E. instead of just Orcs, you'd see Orc Warriors, Orc Bowmen, etc.). It seems like it made interesting combats a bit easier on the GM... 3.0 and earlier had ways to do this, but it could be ugly. 4.0 was interesting in that the Orc Boman would probably get some bow-themed version of a special ability while the Orc Soldier would get a version tuned for fighting in melee.

One of my favorite thing to do is throw a lot of encounters with large nuber of minions and a few normals.
Then when they are used to it an encounter with an Elite with a large number of lower level normal Mosnters. It is not a hard encouter.
The expresion on their faces when a Hobgoblin Guard does not die from the simple Attack.

Occasinaly I will switch it up, lots of Normal Encoutner and then the Solo Sorounded bt Minions. It is fun to watch the Fire Ball Nearly Desimate the Minions rather than just couse lots of wounds. It is even funnier when the mage misses with 75% of the To Hit Rolls leaving about 16 Minions still Standing.

Yes! Minions are one of my favorite parts of 4E. I love making my players feel like they are badasses.

As for dungeon economy, I actually ran a hardcore old-style campaign where the players were celebrity dungeon crawlers who played to a crowd. So the longer they went without resting and the more dramatic ways they figured out puzzles, solved encounters, etc, the more prestige/xp/loot they would get. It really made them try to space out those dailies.