You must name five good things and five bad things about 4e

Good
>Some of the best balance in D&D history
>Characters feel like legit heroes
>Lots of classes
>Complex combat
>Setting Agnostic

Bad
>Classes feel to similar
>Abilities make little sense (bloody path, anyone.)
>Combat grinds to a halt at higher levels.
>Not terribly lethal, which can remove player investment
>The MMO-style ability design doesn't work well on paper.

Good Things
1. Feats that allowed damage variation
2. PoL setting design. Seriously, I loved it.
3. Introduction of so many pc races
4. Wide variety classes that were easily modified
5. Heroes of the Feywild

Bad
1. Totally subjective, but that combat system just felt too burdening
2. Minions. Minions annoyed me
3. Restrictive magic
4. At-will/Encounter/Daily powers
5. Feeling like the use if those powers is just macro-mashing

I kinda hated that about a third of the art was clearly stuff made for Exalted that got rejected and then reused, without bothering to recolor the metallic weapons.
Other than that, was pretty good. One of the few times I actually liked the way they shoehorned in the new races.

Forgotten Realms is the most popular because it features just about everything to some degree, even though it loses out on consistency and atmosphere as a result. Easier to sell, and easier to create new stuff for to sell.

-Best mechanics of any D&D edition
-Most clear, concise and easy to understand rules
-Best balance of any D&D edition
-Powers gave everyone interesting options and created fun choices to be made in every combat.
-The best GM side support of any edition of D&D

-Borked math at first, while it was tweaked in later books it still requires some houseruling and fiddling to really work as intended.
-Rituals and Skill Powers vastly underdeveloped, generally not being worth using outside of specialization
-Essentials
-More restrictive on certain race/class combinations which might make it harder to play a character you could make in another edition.
-Broken promises and awful digital support, abandoning the offline builder and sticking all the existing tools behind a ludicrous paywall

>-Best mechanics of any D&D edition

1) The books are easily the best laid out D&D books - especially the core books
2) It does epic heroes better than 3.pf even if it struggles with sword and sorcery type campaigns
3) Although I feel it failed to use it effectively, the power cards made the game very manageable and modular
4) Combat math was eventually fixed
5) Good digital tools

>-The best GM side support of any edition of D&D
There's more to DMing than setting up combat encounters. 5e is a lot better for DMs, and encourages more customization to fit a campaign without the 3.pf "we have shitty rules for everything" nonsense.

>Another retarded 3aboo and pathshitter thread

>3aboo
>4rry

What's the name for 5e?

I'm partial to 5aggot.

good
>Easy to build creatures and encounters as DM
>Classes being extremely similar makes them easy to learn and play
>character building is fast
>Far better balanced than 3.5
>Consistent terminology makes it far easier to read than other editions of D&D

Bad
>Most (class role here) feel the same as all the others of that role
>Absolutely no support for creativity in using class abilities
>Encounter and daily powers on some characters just dont make sense
>Enemies were giant punching bags with nerf weapons
>Magic items REQUIRED unless you use boons

Death sentence
>IT IS BORING TO PLAY

>threeaboo
>fourry
>fiveaggot
You sir, are the true fiveaggot

>+ Warlords
>+ Balance
>+ Improv guidelines/DM guidelines in general
>+ Clearest rules
>+ Coolest combat

>- terrible starting books (MM1 math is fucked, PHB1 has shitty paladin and other boring stuff and math is bad, DMG1 has shitty skill challeneges)
>- electronic support got fucked
>- later classes not getting enough support
>- Everything Mike Mearls
>- kept the magic items treadmill and zillions of modifiers

5trician.

5ster?

Silly people.

10 of my opinions
Good:
1) Clean combat rules
2) Every class contributes
3) Straightforward encounter building
4) Lots of adventures
5) Plenty of splats

Bad:
1) Cookie cutter characters
2) Magic items fall out of everyone's ass
3) Relatively slow combat
4) More difficult to brew for
5) Rest mechanic leads to awkward encounter balancing

4e is a decent tactics game, but if I wanted a tactics games I would play an honest tactics game rather than a tactics game trying to masquerade as a roleplaying game.

+Slaughtered some of 3.x's sacred cows (Half-Orcs, Barbarians, & Sorcerers in core)
+Slaughtered some of D&D's sacred cows (9-point alignment, vancian casting)
+Is honest about its wargame-y bent (3.x insisted that that grids & minis were "optional")
+Actually achieved something close to intraparty balance across the board
+Took the lore in new directions, with good results (Eladrin, Devas)

-All classes were built from the same framework, making them feel too similar to each other from a mechanics standpoint
-The formatting of most books was really plain
-5-point alignment was a step in the right direction but it still kept alignment as a subsystem
-A bit too wargame-y (the same is true of 3.x to an extent)
-Not as much GSL content as there is OGL content

Good
>Class balance
>Limited healing
>Being able to healbot and fight simultaneously
>Sticky defenders
>Math that actually works, albeit flawed

Bad
>Feat bloat
>Essentials class design
>Twin Strike
>Rituals taking a permanent resource (gold) for temporary effects
>The lack of a defining ability for Controllers and the Arcane power source in particular

I like Nextbeard.

Can I ask a question about 4E here, since this is a shit thread anyway?

Here goes:
How to award gear to players that want specific gear for their specific build and keep them viable in fights until they get stuff they need? I mean, they fight, they get XP and they level up, but gear that makes their build works only on such and such level, then it just gets shit. So what do with this situation?

Even then they didn't go all the way on some things - 9-point alignment might have been trashed, but alignment as a whole was still a somewhat vestigial thing and then you have Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil being the extreme alignments which is just pure ???

Also, the Wizard still kinda has vancian casting for some inscrutable reason. They need to choose which spells to prepare in the morning and everything. Weird as hell.

It's also interesting to note that despite being "wargame-y" it's got even less support for mass combat than 3E did. Who knows what happened there - I guess it just goes to show how far modern D&D play has gone from the domain play of old.

GOOD:
- Very easy to make customized, varied, and interesting monsters and bosses
- Healing is viable both in and out of combat
- Traditional casters got non-splat, effective, "always available" options
- Interesting classes, like Avenger
- Combat flow keeps players on the ropes, but actual outright failure or being completely out of options is a rarity

BAD:
- Utterly broken math in early stuff leads to lots of worthless powers and character options, and monsters from the DM side
- Combat is agonizingly slow if everyone is not on the ball and with a high level of system mastery
- Powers sometimes have very counter-intuitive and hard to grasp effects
- Game rapidly falls apart after Heroic tier in a number of different ways
- Literally everything about how the edition handled feats, and magic items

I had a lot of success running 1-10 or so games, with a set of houserules to eliminate feat taxes inexperienced players will miss, and using inherent bonuses. I liked that players could have 3/4 of their health nuked by a boss, and then rally in the same fight, as well as heal between encounters in a relatively short timeframe. It made a fast-paced narrative, if not combat. I also was able to design villains with a number of unique abilities that I knew would not lead to instant death to the entire party, which is a lot harder to do in 5e. Overall, I prefer 5e.

And detest 3e.

They fucked up clerics.

Nah, there will be. It'll just take a while.

Use Inherent Bonuses and have magic items more more about the properties they provide, rather than the numerical bonuses they give.

>there will never be a perfect marriage between 4e and 5e
>everyone in my area is a 3aboo even though it's shittier than both 4e and 5e

GOOD
> Streamlined a lot of core mechanics
> Races & Classes are clear in theme and function
> Made every class better at what they're supposed to be good at
> A wide but consistent selection of both races and classes
> I love some of the illustrations

BAD
> Failed to fix a lot of core mechanics
> Classes are like a built-in railroad of a mechanic
> Maintained the fallacy that "more options" fixes bad core mechanics (for combat or otherwise)
> The spells/powers/etc are largely superfluous and convoluted in both function and composition
> A lot of the illustrations are garbage

Same sort of thing happened with 5e really. It feels like they almost had a good game, but didn't know when to stop adding stuff or increasing the power level, like they're afraid nobody will play it if they can understand it in one read or their character's aren't over-powering towns single-handed by level 10.

Good
>Must greater class balance
>Tactical combat system has depth
>Flexibilty in classes with modular abilities
>Does away with the limitations of Vancian casting
>Repackaged for maximum new player access

Bad
>The classes loose some flavor at the cost of the balancing; a daily is a daily is a daily.
>Combat at later levels starts to run into an HP bloat problems where you can definitively prevent the enemy from ever winning the battle anymore but still have to slog through it's HP anyway
>By trying to compete with tactical-style MMO's in it's system it brought on a direct comparison which did not favor it. Nobody wanted to play "like Guildwars or Warcraft only YOU do all the math!"
>Weak on setting content. One of D&D's greatest strengths in prior editions were it's various settings. 4e doled out splatbooks for many, but went to huge lengths to homogenize them so they could fit into the new rules and thus the books could be written with minimal effort.
>The repackaging was done not out of a desire to improve the game or update it or make it's rules better for new players, but purely as a marketing tactic by it's creators from beginning to end. It shows sometimes, with it's fluff and rules looking like a checklist of "this is a cool thing right now, let's add it".

Basically all of 4e's problems can directly be traced back to being made by Wizards of the fucking Coast.

That's golden.

>>By trying to compete with tactical-style MMO's in it's system it brought on a direct comparison which did not favor it. Nobody wanted to play "like Guildwars or Warcraft only YOU do all the math!"
What are those MMOs?

>The repackaging was done not out of a desire to improve the game or update it or make it's rules better for new players, but purely as a marketing tactic by it's creators

This is literally the point of everything ever made for nerds. 4e's successes and failures are not about whether it uses marketing tactics, but how successfully it uses them. Marketing to old school purists is just as much a marketing scheme as trying to obtain broad appeal. All companies must engage in business tactics to survive and put food in front of their employee's kids at the end of the day.

4e may have FAILED in its marketing tactics, but all games don't have the integrity to both shun marketing tactics and exist as businesses. And 4e was not actually much of a failure as a game.

Good.
>Fucking amazing DM support, smoothest DnD edition for me to run by far.
>Great monster design, minions are great
>Characters feel like fantasy heroes, the guys you can read about in a novel doing crazy shit and surviving it
>Mechanics were amazing after the MM updates (see bad list)
>Ritual/Power divide means the wizard can still shit all over monster efficacy without also breaking the campaign over his knee (see bad)

Bad.
>Essentials - why cater to people who don't enjoy the game while producing content that people who like the game won't use?
>Rituals were far too costly to the point of being unusable for your average party unless you houseruled it.
>Monsters were terrible before MM3 and MV came out, to the point where I'm thankful I only got into 4e post MM3.
>Far too many feats, a lot of which did very little, on top of mandatory feat taxes. I prefer 5e feats, which is about all I prefer about that edition.
>Easy to learn, but your slower players will be slow to master it, so waiting an eternity for that one guy to pick which of his many options to go for will be a reality for most groups. Slightly patched with Essentials but Essentials is boring as hell.

>5e is a lot better for DMs, and encourages more customization to fit a campaign

Nigga no.
The 4e DMG was one of the best DMG's ever written, and not for the rules or combat advice. 5e's DMG advice is a lot of 'here's how FR works', general setting advice (a lot of it good, to be fair) and 'just make shit up' for rules questions.

The 4e DMG didn't just cover how to run 4e, it gave good advice that could be applied to any game. A few rundowns on types of players, how to keep people engaged, good advice for pacing the story of a campaign, etc.

Strike! with d20 and proficiency?

Good

1)Balanced classes, characters are all useful at any given level(aside from abandoned classes, like 3 of them)
2)The removal of the concept of leaders=healers.
3)Refluffable to any setting/genre as long as the tone remains Big Damn Heroes
4)In line with balance mentioned above, Essentials classes for those who want less complex characters in combat but still want to have a similar level of contribution.
5)Easy as hell to put a game together for. Enemies and DCs are both extremely simple to make up on the fly and retain balance. Preparation was largely unrequired.

Bad:
1)Broken math when it shipped. You can't tout balance and then shit the game up with math that doesn't work. This was fixed, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
2)Skill challenges are shit, there's a good idea hiding somewhere underneath the retarded rules, but good luck doing something with it.
3)Combat gets heinous to keep track of, with half a dozen +1 +2 -1 -2 bonuses sitting on different stats for different characters with inconsistent timing(this one's until the end of my next turn but it's applied to you, and that one's until the end of your next turn, the condition on you needs a saving throw, and this one ends at the beginning of your next turn).
4)Feat taxes used to fix previously mentioned bad math rather than just fixing the math, cutting down build diversity.
5)If any player goes with a non-essentials class but is hesitant to make decisions, combat will slog and become extremely slow as analysis paralysis hits. If multiple players do so, the game is in trouble.

>A few rundowns on types of players, how to keep people engaged, good advice for pacing the story of a campaign, etc.
That's all literally in the 5e DMG, too.

On pages 26-31 and most of chapter 8, I'm aware.

The 4e DMG devotes the first two chapters as well as a good chunk of chapter 8 to that sort of advice.

I'm not saying the 5e DMG is a bad DMG, I'm saying the 4e one is better. In addition to arguing that 4e is smoother for DM's to run overall.

I'd say more enjoyable but that's subjective. I have a friend who really loves running 5e. I'm personally not a fan.

Good:
1) Did away with racial penalties (5e will continue this)
2) Did away with paladin's "always lawful good" restriction, allowing you to play a paladin without being fucked over by a jackass DM.
3) Has quite a few cool classes, such as swordmages and warlords.
4) Gnomes were not in PHB, but tiefling were. Nobody plays gnomes. Nobody.
5) 4e dealt with linear warriors vs quadratic wizards problem.

The bad:
1) 4e dealt with linear warriors vs quadratic wizards problem horribly.
2) Magic mart is still a thing. Except now it's arguably even more ingrained into the system!
3) Essentials.
4) PCs and NPCs are created by and play by wildly different rules.
5) Feats are boring as fuck, every single one last of them.

>2) Magic mart is still a thing. Except now it's arguably even more ingrained into the system!

Inherent bonuses sort of make it not ingrained, though it was at release.

> 4) PC and NPC

This is bad.....because?

I'll have to agree with this - 3E moving away from AD&D by making NPCs use the same rules as PCs was IMHO a pretty bad move. NPCs honestly just don't need all the details that PCs do, especially once you start making chargen complex - why else would so many 3E monsters have a million Toughness feats, inexplicable racial skill bonuses and ridiculous stats?
No, better to simplify things by cutting out the bits that PCs need to care about but NPCs with a ten-minute lifespan don't. Especially since this means you can move away from codified accessible-to-the-players plot powers and just have NPCs be able to do things because they're able to do those things.

Then again, I also think that 4E didn't go nearly far enough. Why the hell do monsters need ability scores?

>Why the hell do monsters need ability scores?

For skill checks and ability checks, I'd suppose. Like if the fighter demigod player says he wants to arm-wrestle Demogorgon. It's dumb, but I can see people who'd want it.

>good
I don't have to play it with OP.
I don't have to play it with OP.
I don't have to play it with OP.
I don't have to play it with OP.
I don't have to play it with OP.

>bad
OP talks about it.
OP talks about it.
OP talks about it.
OP talks about it.
OP talks about it.

>honorable mention
pic related

...

One of the worst things with 'Same stats for NPCs and PCs' was daily-use powers.

There is zero reason for an NPC to not just blow through all his spells in an encounter as he's not likely to be adventuring and trying for more encounters today.

>4: clerics became palladian 2.0 instead of healers
Clerics were the original Paladin you shit

I agree with this. Shit always seemed stupid to me when I first got 4e books. I mean they moved away from it later on but still. 4e at release must have been a fucking mess.

>>The lack of a defining ability for Controllers and the Arcane power source in particular
The defining feature of the arcane power source is that they're all controllers. I'm sure you can see how that might result in what you have there.

I know you hit the quota, but I think magic item treadmill and inherent bonuses deserve to be added.

Yeah if I had more space I'd add a lot more to both sides. The magic item treadmill'd be in bad while inherent bonuses would be in good. I'd have gone on about PoL setting and the way they handled Dark Sun, complain about the lack of a Nine Hells focused sourcebook ala Demonomicon, etc.

It's my favorite DnD and it has a lot of great stuff but a lot of flaws, as well.

I feel like the number scaling in 5E is another thing that's good from it. I know that's not for everyone though. Sometimes you just want to feel like an untouchable badass because you're that much above your enemy.

I actually don't dislike the number scaling on its surface, but I feel its something that's better handled by using minions. Like if you want to represent wading through an army of goblins as still being dangerous, make it an army of level X (Where X equals PC's level) minions. The PC's can still mow them down with ease, but the goblins can still hurt and even kill them if they're not careful.
And I can have them encounter things that are just straight no-threat to them. With 5e it's one or the other, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just not what me or my group are after.

It also applies to how it handles ability checks, which is where I think it's an improvement. Though D&D still has a shitty skill system. I love the shit out of minions though. They work a lot better than just using low CR monsters in 5E.

Oh yeah I see what you mean. I'm fine with that, though I dislike the way skills are handled in general, as you noted.

Here's my go at it:
1.) It concentrated on d&d's strength: combat
2.) The grid-based rules work and serve better than the whole retro-fitting that you have to do with earlier/later editions. It made positioning important and gave you something to do other than attack.
3.) It is really simple and easy to get into. It was my first d&d game and I picked it up with minimal issues.
4.) The abilities gave players something more to do and consider. For example, unleashing an ability that would knock and enemy prone and push him towards your waiting rogue. Emphasized strategy.
5.) It had a pretty fucking neato official character creator that made the process fun rather than a pain in the ass.
6.) Wizards weren't the dominant force. More variety in party composition. Having a Warlord rather than the obligatory stupid-ass cleric was nice.

1.) This game is horrible for anything other than combat. Really? I can only cast fireball as long as I'm aiming it at someone?
2.) Combat could take fucking forever, and with the board state changing with every turn, it wasn't even entirely the player's fault. In a lot of ways, there was too many options.
3.) Every class feels almost exactly the same.
4.) Game was meant to "level up" with you. Suggested difficulties scaled with player level so no matter how talented you were at something, it would still be difficult.
5.) "Daily" abilities were essentially "get-out-of-jail-free" cards.

>Really? I can only cast fireball as long as I'm aiming it at someone?

...That isn't the case though.

>4.) Game was meant to "level up" with you. Suggested difficulties scaled with player level so no matter how talented you were at something, it would still be difficult.

That is also not the case. The scaled DC's were for level appropriate challenges. If you encounter a locked DC 16 door at level 1 and come back at level 30, that door will still be DC 16.

You clearly never read the 5e DMG, and the 4e MM was the best DM aide in the system aside from the MM3 math fix index card.

I own the 5e DMG and literally opened it to respond to It is in no way special and contains less DM aide than the first 4e DMG, let alone the second.

The 4e MM didn't really add...anything and I'm not sure what you're smoking unless you forgot a '3' after the first MM.

Minions are not better than cleave rules, the horde attack rules, and low CR monsters in 5e though.

they kinda are

minions are way faster and easier in play, especially for the DM

IMO it's subjective. I find with my groups that minions are easier to run and better received by my group than low CR 5e monsters, but for other groups they'd be perfect.

Good:

Warlords

A pacifist option that enables people to justify playing do-no-harm healers mechanically.

Satyrs

Heroes of Shadow. Just, all of Heroes of Shadow

Tactical as fuck.

Gloomwrought box set. Shit was cash.

Bad:

"Oh, shit, I forgot that on my turn I can also X whenever I Y!"

PC HP, and how many healing surges

Monster HP before the fixes

Monster HP even after the fixes

>Okay, okay, we'll bundle the last 3 as one thing. Let's be fair, now.

The fanbase, including but not limited to the people who thought complaints about Monster HP after fixes were nullified by the existence of said insufficient fixes. I mean, small thing of a much larger problem. Holy shit, the fan base.

Every stunt imaginable is tied to a RAW move with a level pre-req and this makes DMs reluctant to let you do anything not on a card.

Feat taxes. So many feat taxes. Jesus christ, just reduce how often you can take feats.

For only 9.99 a month, you, too, have a monthly subscription to our mm- ah, uh, character builder.

Half-vampire, half-vampire with vampiric bloodline feats to show that their half-vampire, half-vampire heritage also has a bit of vampire in it. As for class? Meh, just take vampire. /Someone/ has to, it's fucking awful and no-one could have possibly thought it was a good idea.

>good
is still butthurt about it x5

>bad
the war's over :'( x 5

>PoL setting
?

The whole Dawn War setting with the Primordials vs. the Gods and the Elemental Chaos, Nerath, Arkhosia, Bael Turath, the Far Realm, all that shit. My major complaint about that setting was that all the lore about it was scattered between different books and there was no 'Points of Light Campaign Setting', but when you gathered it all together it made for a really great background to run a game in.

>1: the conga line of death
The hell's that?

>2: it played like an mmo on paper, but not in a good way
There's no MMO that plays like 4e. It played like FFT on paper.

>3: it was really easy to cheese the rules and get super high starts early on
Examples? And no, 20 in a stat is not cheesy by edition's standards

>4: clerics became palladian 2.0 instead of healers
See >5: you couldn't die unless you were extremely unlucky or forced it
Your DM was a baby. I haven't had a single session where someone didn't end up in a dying state or dead

>Literally everything about how the edition handled and magic items
To be fair here, Inherent Bonuses are pretty dope

It was forced out by Hasbro overlords roughly a year before its planned time

Good

Interesting battle system.
Only edition so far to figure out this whole martials and casters thing.
Extensive resources so many different types of characters are possible.
Nice framework for abilities.
Nice team balancing suggestions/framework helping beginners not gimp themselves.

Bad

Mmorpg trope battle system can lead to rigid rulings.
Out of combat support very lacking or retarded (so far though, every edition of dnd has been varying degrees of bad out of combat)
Shitty monster math, though it was fixed later.
Characters get better at everything as they level up.
Way too many splats for a dm to keep track of. Make sure your group is on the same page splat wise.

>the Arcane power source in particular
As in, "the power source is bad because in doesn't really have a theme"? Or "the power source is bad because all its classes are Controller-secondary, and Controller is not defined properly"?

>The defining feature of the arcane power source is that they're all controllers

Swordmage (Defender) and Sorcerer (Striker) say "fuck you".

But the Swordmage and Sorcerer have more control than any other class in their archetype (except in the Sorcerer's case, because the Warlock might as well be labeled 'controller', but Warlock aside the Sorcerer has more control than any other striker.)

>My major complaint about that setting was that all the lore about it was scattered between different books and there was no 'Points of Light Campaign Setting',
To be fair, I kind of get the impression that that was the point to some degree?

It's vague as hell and scattered across the entirety of the product range since a)a lot of it was probably made up on the spot Known World-style and b)when you centralize everything and make it more concrete you get the Forgotten Realms.
Lorefags are the bane of the GM.

A PoLand/Nerath book would have been nice, though, no argument about that. The closest they made was what, Threats to the Nentir Vale? And that was a monster manual.

Both, really. They never really seemed to figure out what exactly a Controller should do, I don't think? The role is a lot more broad than the other three, and lacks unifying mechanics - Leaders have minor action heals, Strikers get a situational damage bonus, Defenders mark people, and Controllers... do AoE attacks? Debuff?

The archetype for the Arcane Controller being the Wizard probably didn't help in designing the role, to be honest - historically, D&D Magic-Users haven't had that much of a limit in designing what the fuck they could actually do.

They're all controllers in the same way that divine is all leaders and martial is all strikers. It's a subrole thing. And yeah, is right - just look at all the AoE, zones and forced movement the Sorcerer is throwing around.

Agreed. What alternate thematically-coherent power source(es) would you make instead?

: the conga line of death
>The hell's that?

A stupid complaint about flankers flanking flankers being the optimal strategy.

Basically, flanking goes like this:

player-monster-player

and then the monster moves in to flank

player-monster-player-monster

and then another player moves in etc. At least that's the complaint, in theory it happens once in a blue moon.

: it was really easy to cheese the rules and get super high starts early on
>Examples? And no, 20 in a stat is not cheesy by edition's standards

I'm also interested in this.

I'd probably keep Arcane and perhaps even keep it tied to the Controller role, but it's pretty hard to figure out what the fuck "arcane" is actually supposed to mean.

'Cause, y'know, it's basically just "all magic ever (that isn't healing or biblical stuff)". The general theme was "AoE debuffs and utility", which I guess is something you could work with.

I really don't know, to be honest. I'm not that familiar with the workings of 4E, so I can't really figure out what the fuck should be done there.

Personally I'd try clarifying controller before clarifying arcane. Like the way I've always used controllers (both monsters and characters) is as the guys who stop their enemies from doing what they want to do.
The method for how they get their (AoE damage, zones and walls, dominates dazes stuns, etc.) differs between controllers, but their general schtick is they make things suck for their enemies.
Like a 3.5 wizard but less super-effective.

Strike! solved this by splitting Controller into Blaster (AoE guy) and Controller (debuff/forced movement guy). I agree that otherwise there's a bit too much crammed in there.

That's actually pretty brilliant and so painfully obvious I feel stupid for not thinking of it before.

There are two problems with this.

1. Controllers are already the least used and useful classes. Splitting them up farther will make them even rarer.

2. There are Strikers, primarily the Monk and Sorceror, who already do the AOE thing. Plus only the Wizard really does AOE damage out of the Controllers.

Ever notice how both of those classes have
>You lean towards controller as a secondary role.
at the end of their "Role:" writeup?

Every Striker has AOEs though. Striker and some Wizard AOEs are for damage and other Controller and other Wizard AOEs are for secondary effects. Plus Monks do secondary effects much more. The majority of their powers push, pull, and/or prone.

Hell every role has AOEs for different reasons. Making AOEs a Controller only thing is a little silly. Should they have the largest effects? Yes. Should they be be known as THE AOE role? No not really.

>1. Controllers are already the least used and useful classes. Splitting them up farther will make them even rarer.

I'd argue that defining their roles makes protecting those roles easier, plus makes it so that you are allowed to go more "all in". Like, (and I'm sorry I keep bringing the game up but it's the one 4e clone I know) Strike! blasters always get to attack at least 2 targets at the bare minimum for what counts as full effect/damage. Controllers also always get to weaken and move around foes. Getting both would be too much, but only having one means you can go a bit crazy with it.

>2. There are Strikers, primarily the Monk and Sorceror, who already do the AOE thing. Plus only the Wizard really does AOE damage out of the Controllers.

Yeah, so under Strike! terminology, Monk and Sorcerer would be Striker/Blasters, and Wizard would be Controller/Blaster, or Blaster/Controller.

good:
- Rolling characters doesn't take 4 hours
- streamlined combat
- Balance improved from 3.5
- More PC Races
- Took focus of local gamestore children away from more serious groups.

bad:
- Introduced D&D to a wider, less Veeky Forums audience
- Character customization went out the window
- Mystra dies (Seriously, what the shit, Wizards?)
- Alignments are optonal?
-The core rulebook was lackluster.

Now that I'm allowed to talk 4e,
Holy shit can we please petition wizards to just claim that nothing lorewise in 4e ever actually happened and that it was all just a dream some old god was having? It's been half a decade and it still hurts.

>- Mystra dies (Seriously, what the shit, Wizards?)

Mystra dies every edition. Sometimes multiple times an edition.

That being said
>FR lore
>Ever

Explain.

As someone who hasn't played Strike and interpreted what your saying as make a fifth role, mixing roles didn't come to mind. 4e classes dip toes in other roles but none really blend.

Also much like 3e, 4e blaster wizards are by far the worst wizards. Actual control wizards help the party much more than fireball spammers.

Rogue runs through a group of enemies and nimbly tricks them into stabbing themselves.

What's to explain?