After years of it being dead, I finally played this game, and here are my thoughts

Welcome to the fold, brother.

Ahh, but the strength of 3.5 is that you can scrap huge portions of the system and still have a fully functional game. In many ways it basically functions as 3 different games in one

That said, never play core, core 3.5 is hot garbage

It's just really really obvious that they wanted to expand their audience with 4e and get people who've been playing World of Warcraft but never touched a tabletop RPG in their life.

To that extent they clearly succeeded. 4e has probably the shortest lifespan of any edition but it looks like it brought in the most amount of players since the original box sets were sold everywhere.

But the extent to which everything was simplified and streamlined...take the Wizard for example. It didn't feel like you were "casting a spell", it felt like hitting a button and watching an effect happen, then setting a cooldown timer for the ability. It was very Game-y, at least to me, and not so immersive.

Also I share the common complaints that Character Building became WAY too bloated by the end of its lifespan and that Encounters dragged on WAY too long due to the tactical nature of the combat.

>But the extent to which everything was simplified and streamlined...take the Wizard for example. It didn't feel like you were "casting a spell", it felt like hitting a button and watching an effect happen

And what about the game created this feeling? What is the difference between spell slots and a limited selection of Daily powers that lead to the change in your experience of playing the game?

I don't mean to press, but it is a subject I'm very curious about, examining exactly why 4e got the reaction it did, in the nuances and the details rather than in broad strokes.

Gronards gonna Gronard, bro.

I enjoyed the hell out of 4E. Easiest edition to DM for in my opinion, and the player classes were a blast. It was like Final Fantasy Tactics in table top form! When one of my players ended up not enjoying his class, I house-ruled some ancient powersuit and that replaced his class powers with parts.

Of course, most people in my area were on the 4E hate-wagon and refused to give it a try, so I ended up DMing PF, too... Fuck PF. Fuck it hard, with a sharpened stick. Okay, maybe it wasn't the system that was the problem, maybe it was the players, because when I said 'Core Only' they heard 'Bring whatever 3rd party bullshit overpowered races, classes, and magic items you can find! I don't fucking care'.

But yeah, I've been running some 5e lately and that's fun, too.

>Also I share the common complaints that Character Building became WAY too bloated by the end of its lifespan and that Encounters dragged on WAY too long due to the tactical nature of the combat.

This much is true to a degree. I'll argue that more options is always better, but there was a lot of stuff released that was pretty garbage top to bottom. It was off putting for new players to have so many options that were all equally as lack luster

As for combat time, this got much better, and the tactical application was intended design. It was a different type of game that tried to capitalize on the grid based system that the 3.X mini line built up. In this, it worked wonderfully, but it wasn't everyone's flavor of fun.

Being fair, 'Core only' is one of the worst ways to run a balanced game of 3.PF.

Never play core only with PF, it's garbage

Not to say you should allow every kitsune or android or whatever the hell a lashunta is into your game, just be wary of the disparity in power between the core classes

All that being said: I still have all of my 4e books. There's a LOT of great fluff you can use completely divorced from the Edition. I also really liked some of the box-sets they sold. Both Monster Vaults are great and Madness at Gardmore Abbey is a genuinely fantastic adventure.

Functionally, they do work the same, but they were also a LOT more constrictive. You couldn't mess with a spell by casting it from a different Spell slot to affect its power, things like spell scrolls felt less like rare magic items and more like One Use Power Cards, and they were also presented in the exact same manner as Martial Abilities. It made mages and warriors feel really similar, and that's just weird to me.

My friends and I play 5e and it's fun. We're all filthy casuals, but as long as we enjoy it I think it's alright. It's a good excuse to enjoy each other's company.

>As for combat time, this got much better, and the tactical application was intended design. It was a different type of game that tried to capitalize on the grid based system

You're correct in this. That's why I love the Adventure Board Games.

A good DM who knows what they're doing can make the game just as fun to play as a regular adventure style game too. But I suppose that takes being able to stomach the game feeling like a game than a story with dice rolls.

So it really was the presentation and structure, more than the mechanics, which tangibly changed your experience? That's really interesting.

I might have been too dismissive of similar complaints before, 'it's just formatting and layout' etc, but that such things might have a real effect on how people perceive and interact with the system is worth exploring.

4e fighters were more similar to 4 wizards than 3.5 fighters were to 3.5 wizards, but 4e sorcerers are far more different from 4e wizards than 3.5 sorcerers are from 3.5 wizards, and in my mind, that's the difference that matters more. Because standing back and throwing arcane magic is always going to feel different from standing right in the front lines in the middle of the melee, but making one ranged spellchucker feel different from another ranged spellchucker is far more impressive

I've always found it kinda confusing how loathe some people are to accept the 'game' part of Roleplaying Game, especially in D&D, which has always been a very gamey system.

To be fair, it's been a long while since I've taken a real good look at 4e. And I'll be completely honest: I played a lot of 4e. I used it to get my friends and current group into D&D. We play 5e now, and I run it real deadly and they love it.

>3.5 is a passable system that can definitely be used for fun games.
Why play it when it's the worse edition of the game and there are literary free to play, better versions?

>Functionally, they do work the same, but they were also a LOT more constrictive. You couldn't mess with a spell by casting it from a different Spell slot to affect its power, things like spell scrolls felt less like rare magic items and more like One Use Power Cards, and they were also presented in the exact same manner as Martial Abilities. It made mages and warriors feel really similar, and that's just weird to me.

Essentials did try to address this with the sorcerer, who got to boost spells; not in the way wizards could before with metamagic, but still gave a shot at giving the "tinkering feel".

There were also a bunch of feats that let you make tradeoffs as a wizard IIRC, but they were kinda poor from what I remember.

Here's my D&D shelf. Not included are my 4.5e Essentials books

>But the extent to which everything was simplified and streamlined...take the Wizard for example. It didn't feel like you were "casting a spell", it felt like hitting a button and watching an effect happen, then setting a cooldown timer for the ability. It was very Game-y, at least to me, and not so immersive.
But that's literally every edition.

The only real difference was that 4e wasn't up its own ass about padding out the text of what it did.

This is the thing which always confuses me when people claim that 4e classes are homogenous. In terms of actual play experience, they're significantly more different from one another than the equivalent classes in other editions, they just look more similar on the surface. It's weird.

...

But there is no fucking balance. There has never been balance. I was just trying to make my life easier so I wouldn't have to keep track of all the bullshit that opening up the floodgates allows. It's not like I don't own a good chunk of the official material anyway (for a system I despise, I own enough of their goddamn books), I'd rather not have to keep track of the mountain of book work that some players come to the table with.

Because, you see, I did try to let the players loose and to make whatever they wanted. What they came back with made me hate life, if it were only Kitsunes and shit like that, I could deal but... Custom monstrous races from the Advanced Race guide that were nightmare fueled fetish bait, feats from some dark corner of the internet that they swore were legit, deities that allowed clerics to take the best combinations of domains, spells with names that made my eyes roll into the back of my head... Yeah, no. Never again.

I know that if I took a chainsaw to half of the shit, there is a completely serviceable system in there... But why? It's not like I enjoyed 3.PF enough to put forth the effort to do that, and every time I tried to someone who bitch and moan about it 'not being fair'.

How does this picture make you feel, 4rries?

It's easy to go 'hurr obfuscation', but the user is speaking sincerely and explaining his experience, which is something you rarely get around a topic that gets so heated. It's worth considering whether such things are more significant than we'd otherwise think.

Personally, I'm always a fan of technical language and incredibly clear rules, just for ease of use, but it's wrong to assume that it's the only way of thinking, or that games which have avoided doing this just did so through incompetence. There does seem to be a real, tangible appeal to the more poetic approach, even if the gains are somewhat ephemeral compared to the loss of usability as a result.

I'm not sure if it'll change my general approach or preferences in the attempt to write my own game, but it's still worth thinking about and if you could achieve a compromise, preserving ease of use while also providing the layers of fluff that seem to help some people engage with the mechanics indirectly.

Wait, shit, wrong picture.
>Even WotC literally states that 4e is not true DnD, and it should have been called DnD Tactics

What I'm trying to say though is that the difference is there only because the guy himself imposed it onto the game.

He's complaining about push button magic as if that was a problem unique for 4th edition. When in 3.5, pathfinder, and 5e, they all worked the same way. When you get down to brass tacks, it boils down to the same thing.

I use my standard action to use an ability, of which I have limited resources, which is referred to in the game's fluff as a spell. I will get this resource back after a suitable period of rest.

Mearls hated 4e when he was in charge of 4e, why should that have changed now?

Mike Mearls thought Essentials was a good idea. His opinions can go back to sucking off Wizards, along with the rest of him.

>It's easy to go 'hurr obfuscation', but the user is speaking sincerely and explaining his experience, which is something you rarely get around a topic that gets so heated. It's worth considering whether such things are more significant than we'd otherwise think.
>Personally, I'm always a fan of technical language and incredibly clear rules, just for ease of use, but it's wrong to assume that it's the only way of thinking, or that games which have avoided doing this just did so through incompetence. There does seem to be a real, tangible appeal to the more prosaic approach, even if the gains are somewhat ephemeral compared to the loss of usability as a result.
>I'm not sure if it'll change my general approach or preferences in the attempt to write my own game, but it's still worth thinking about and if you could achieve a compromise, preserving ease of use while also providing the layers of fluff that seem to help some people engage with the mechanics indirectly.

>Man in charge of a shitty game thought that the game was shitty
Woah. Makes you think.

>use nature domain for the guy with a scimitar and a shield.
Does he even understand what a druid is?

We're having an actual discussion about the differences between the system here, we don't need you to come along and shitpost and derail it into another edition war. Shoo.

The devs didn't know what the fuck 4e was about. the fans were the ones to crack most of the code and unfuck the system mechanically in the early stages. I don't take the opinion of a group of people who don't even understand their own game with any sort of seriousness.

In the old days before we could really quantify game speak, this sort of thing passed. But anymore it feels like a simple nod to the old days for the wrong reason. Admittedly that is my strict opinion on it, and others are entitled to their opinion. But that they're so quick to dismiss a game for having no narrative depth when the system only provides a game framework and leaves the fluff to the players and DM is quite telling in my eyes. It's not like D&D hasn't ever been about combat, puzzle solving and looting from the get go.

A man paid to talk up whatever current project he is working on talks up his current project, while trying to downplay his previous project, in order to both convince players of his old product that this one is better, while also trying to convince people that didn't that the problem you had is totally fixed. You could totally see this shit when 4e was being marketed, even if Mearls wasn't the face at the time. "You know all those arcane rules in 3.5 that sucked? You know all those balance problems? WE FIXED ALL OF THEM!" I wasn't around when Wizards got D&D and made 3e, but I'd be willing to be the same tactic was used.

In short: Mearls is doing his job as being a shill.

They shilled for 4e when 4e was what the bosses wanted sold. He'll shills for 5e when 5e is what is the product for making money. And you can be your ass that if Mearls is still around come 6th edition, he will throw 5e to the lions to prove that 6e is the new hotness and you need those new books.

Mearls has a weirdly strict idea of how D&D should be played

Which, it should be noted, is not how anyone actually plays it

*He's retarded and his opinion should be ignored.

>cyclical intiative - too predictable
I'm in a game where the dm likes to use some new variant initiative every game and sometimes doesn't even bother with it at all, and I gotta say I really miss cyclical initiative. The alternatives are a fucking mess

I just use a battle wheel, but I'm practically playing my own system at this point.

The CharOp forums were the best thing about 4th edition because of all the metaphorical codebreaking.

To use a video game analog, it was like discovering skiing in the original tribes. Suddenly the game was alive.

which is why there's so little to discuss now

With no new material and the game functionally "solved" as is, there's very little left to talk about, it's like /co/ with Megas XLR

Most hilarious to me is Player's Handbook 1, original printing. Ranger's could conceivably do Infinite Damage with the right equipment and build.

Unfortunately. And since wizards hamstrung the ability for the game to grow outside of their control, there is never really going to be a revival.

I wonder what me means by action typing and removing bonus actions.

Simplifying the game is always welcome, but I feel like bonus actions would be just replaced by "bonus actions by another name", or worse, free actions that aren't exclusionary, leading to every character doing as many of those as possible in a turn.

>cyclical initiative is too predictable
I don't think there is a D&D player alive who particularly likes the way initiative is handled in any edition of the game. The issue is that everyone needs to go, you can't have too many people on the same team going at once or things get wacky, fast people want an advantage in going first, and doing the mechanical aspect of initiative is boring and unfun and people don't like doing it. These four things pull against each other and leave you with something simple that works and you're done with it quickly.
>fighter subclasses are too bland
And who's fault is that?
>warlock and pact boons
Sure. Whatever. Who cares?
>Ranger modeled on the paladin
Mearls has been ruining D&D for almost ten years now and still going strong. He is adept at recognizing a problem and then choosing the exact opposite solution from what will actually fix it.
>Druid needs more shapeshifting
Gee, sort of like... I dunno... that game you murdered in 2010?
>Action typing is too fuzzy
Again, your fault. Refer to the better game you killed on how to do this.
>Bonus actions are too clear, we need to 'smart design' a new way to do extra stuff each round but find a way to limit it that isn't just creating another thing by the same name that has worked fine for decades
neck yourself Mearls

>How does this make you feel?
Pic related

It was a team effort (you needed a buff, the target needed a debuff) and it was more of an "arbitrarily high because you only have less than a few % to miss, and can reroll your misses 3 times anyway".

I also find the idea of a ranger, empowered by a cleric (or possibly by the warlord telling him to believe in himself) going absolutely fucking bonkers with two swords on an orcus who is held in place by the epic level wizard.

>*find the idea... epic level wizard exactly what I want out of my high level games

I wish someone merge my two favourite editions: B/X and 4e.

I remember an OSR being described that way but I don't remember which... I think it had "Hack" in the name... Dungeon Hack?

Either way, I like both B/X and 4e but there's a lot of ways a combination could go.

No, fuck YOU, OP. You have shit taste in games and you will probably die alone.

See

That's the core difference between 3.5 and 4E right there.

In 3.5, you optimized your beatstick to blow things up on their own. Any aid on top of that is nothing but a cherry on top because it's unreliable unless it's a prebuff.

In 4E, you pick and optimize your Striker to take advantage of your party Leader, who is in turn optimizing around the kind of party they have, and their core strategy always involves the rest of the party.

Not that there's anything wrong with the former - I prefer my Warblade charging in and WARBLADE SMASHING the giant ogre and turning it into a pile of goo in 1 round, solo, to the kind of protracted engagements 4E lends itself to, if not by a whole lot - but it really does tell you where both games' priorities are.

>defender optimized to keep heat off striker
>leader optimized to keep defender standing and make the striker strike harder
>striker optimized to take advantage of defender's defending and the leader's leading
>controller optimized to make sure enemies don't overwhelm or stop everyone from doing their jobs
Man I miss that degree of fine-tuned teamwork

>but it really does tell you where both games' priorities are.
One was decidedly about the group of heroes that worked with each other, the other was about individuals who each did their own thing.
3e really tossed out the group focus for individuals, and I think the game suffered for it.

Destroying class roles from day one didn't help.

This is one of the things which super confuses me when people complain about 4e, going on about how 'roles' are so artificial and an MMO thing.

Except 3.5, by design, was built around the exact same roles. They just didn't tell you what they were, and fucked up the execution to the point that some classes couldn't fulfill their role and others could effortlessly fulfill multiple simultaneously.

It's almost like you played the game after it was already filtered and tweaked and most of the primary enormous issues had been mended or modified.

Launch 4e had issues, no doubt, but I'd hardly describe them as 'enormous'. Core RAW is still a better and more functional game that 3.PF.

What better game?

Than core 3.PF? Sure, what isn't? But better than 3.PF period? I don't think so. I pretty much swore off 4E until it fixed my complaints with the system and went right back to playing 3.5 with shit I actually liked.

Things at start were too tanky. The game was nothing but tactical combat but the tactical combat sucked. It tried to do only one thing and at start it did that one thing terribly.

I'd say at start it was more broken than 3.PF because what it tried to do didn't work. Later on it was less broken because it was just boring tactical combat exercises and it did a solid job at that. It was better designed later on as a Game (with rules, balance etc) than 3.PF. Wasn't really a fantasy adventure game though.

> Wasn't really a fantasy adventure game though.

Why not?

Because they didn't give that any focus. They were so focused on the game part and trying to get it right that they forgot what kind of game they were trying to make.

Damn shame.

Depends on how fed up with 3.pf's flaws you were.
I was mightily fed up, but couldn't get people to try other fantasy games.
user, that is a non-answer.
You haven't actually said anything of substance.

Can you expand upon what you felt was missing?

At least it's dead now and mistakes became learning experiences.

What do adventures culminate in? Big heroic battles. So they put a lot of effort into making big heroic battles fun, and left it loose as to how the DM brought the players there.

as someone who started with 4e, I really enjoyed the granularity and breadth of options available for combat abilities, but also understand the problems with the system, especially with combat and lack of role-playing incentive.
I do wish 5e had a few more options for combat abilities, especially for martial classes

Look here, I say a lot of stuff, okay?

You guys come here asking for opinions, I give them.

Not my fault you don't have the guts to try it out yourself.

I've been defending 4E for years, everybody got butthurt over the edition change and the power gap between martial and spellcasters being reduced so they demonized it for no good reason.

I was less fed up with 3.PF bullshit than I was with 4E padded sumo bullshit. That was unironically every bit as bad as getting stuck as a sword and board Fighter in 3.0.

With a Druid in the party.

The problem I had with 4e was people not being able to decide what they were doing.
In my first campaign, when battles went too long and it was clear we would win, enemies would either run away or surrender, which usually led to more interesting situations, like our bargaining with an orc war chief and holding a black dragon hostage.
Then again, that DM was a 1/2e grognard who didn't have all his npcs fight needlessly to the death.

>4E padded sumo bullshit
I have no idea what this is

The MM1/2 monster math sucked. Monsters had way too much HP but didn't do enough damage, so fights were non-threatening slugfests rather than interesting tactical engagements.

Low enemy damage, high enemy HP(relative to then-current damage levels) and AC. It's hard to hit them, to put a dent in them, and they don't hit you back very hard. Fights get dragged on for multiple rounds longer than they should take - and I already prefer combat to be one and done, so it was like pulling teeth.

Of course presentation affects experience. That is why UX design and usability engineering are such big topics in software development.

The same goes for TTRPGs. Quoting from a G+ group:
>This was where I learned that (although it sounds like a dumb tautology) the selections you put in front of players affects what choices they make. The Slayers d20 includes pretty much every type of character from Slayers with full d20 writeups, so the races section in particular includes all the ones that the source material pretty much only used as gags. In the Slayers books and anime, the protagonists are almost all human, but the creators themselves wound up having a party with no humans. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but I'm guessing it wasn't what the designers of Slayers d20 intended.

So what fixed that. MM3? Essentials?

A cheat sheet in mm3, if I'm not mistaken.

MM3, summed up with this image

The fixed math first popped up in some modules, then was brought in to MM3 on forward to Monster Vault.

>They just didn't tell you what they were, and fucked up the execution to the point that some classes couldn't fulfill their role and others could effortlessly fulfill multiple simultaneously.
Yes, so the people complaining about how roles are artificial never even knew about the existence of roles in 3.5, because how would they?

True, but that makes their comments more a statement of ignorance than a real assessment of the traits of the system.

I remember an user actually crunched the numbers in the MM3/monster vault and found out this was mostly bullshit. The major differences in post MM3 monsters, particularly solos, is that they were less vulnerable to being disabled and had more options/modes of attack in battle. They were just straight up designed better

Yeah. I'm just saying that their reaction is a logical consequence and not really confusing at all.

I've done the same math, and yes, that card is fairly true, but often not completely spot on. It usually comes within 2 points of attack/damage/defenses, and is a rough/ready measure of hp.
Even then, that is not the static math, but a way to create enemies on the fly while maintaining a sense of balance for the level.

>It wasn't perfect,
Which is what Veeky Forums wants. Prefection basically- Regardless of how achievable that is.

Reality is people play what they find fun, regardless of flaws.
>It wasn't perfect, but it was fun.
Which is exactly what you have done. Now apply the same argument to 2e, 3x,pf,and 5e.
Fuck there are people that still play 3.5 even when the slightly more fixed version of pathfinder is available. THAT I don`t understand, but there you have it.

Seems like the only thing that's happened here is that YOU don't understand how Veeky Forums works. Also. Why would you take advice from Veeky Forums? An opinion coming form a person that took Veeky Forums's word at face value? Not sure anyone can trust YOUR opinion on anything.

>The major differences in post MM3 monsters
Monster Manual 3 monsters have more standardized defenses (mostly; they still flip flop back and forth on what the AC of an artillery monster is supposed to be), and deal much more damage than Monster Manual 1 and 2 monsters.

The extra damage is quite important, because it means that encounters consisting of Monster Manual 3 monsters can challenge a party as well as a much higher-level encounter against Monster Manual 1 and 2 monsters. The latter encounter would be bloated with higher defenses and higher hit points.

>particularly solos, is that they were less vulnerable to being disabled and had more options/modes of attack in battle. They were just straight up designed better

Solo monsters are still quite weak for their XP values because, for all of the anti-control abilities loaded up them, they are *still* exceptionally vulnerable to the right control effects. For instance, to my knowledge, not a single monster in the game is outright immune to attack penalties. Therefore, slamming a solo monster with a tremendous attack penalty (e.g. from a psion's Dishearten) is a very good way to neuter it for a round.

What game is that?

DOOM 2016

What's the problem with essentials?