What did 4e do right?

>Better Magic System (AEDU over Vancian)
This so much
I can't fucking stand Vancian casting
And AEDU gave martials more options than just basic melee and casters a viable method of attack than a crossbow when they blew their higher powered spells
I would like to see D&D allow for more built in options when it comes to roles in combat like Controller Fighter, Tank Sorcerer or Leader Warlock

>Controller Fighter, Tank Sorcerer or Leader Warlock
Strike!

I kind of want to see a version that has vancian casting for some classes and aedu for others.
It makes sense for a sword fighter to be able to pull off a sword move semi regularly, but some kind of ritual based occultist might instead be unable to fire off his abilities several times a day.

That's a funny way to spell "nothing", user.

Vancian casting is AEDU, just tied to a day limit for everything for some random reason.

Vance didn't have re-learning the spell require you wait a standard amount.

I yell at you so hard you heal your internal bleeding.

> they felt like casters shouldn't be allowed to have a tank spec

Yeah, Blizzard always did hate fun.

Damn

Fucking

Straight

Oh you done did it now so many fuckers are going to be crying shilling you'll think you're in a god damn Dickens novel

ONE GAAAAAAAAAME
GAME FOR SAAAAAAAAALE
IT'S YOURS TO PLAAAAAAAAAY
AS LONG AS YOU WILL SHILL IIIIIIIIIIT!

Is there a way to play this without a grid? I wanna enjoy this with my D&D friends.

You can use hexes :^)

But no. 4e and 3e mandate that you use a grid for some reason. If I want to play some tactical deal that revolves entirely around killing things I could just play Warhammer or something.

It's called 5th Edition

Loss of hit points doesn't represent internal bleeding. Or anything, really. Hit points model hit points. As soon as you realize this, and stop arguing over meat points, luck/fatigue/whatever, you have achieved enlightenment.

3e is more easily non-gridable than 4e

Warlords have cool fluff for healers.
And that's a goddamn up hill struggle right there.
Making healers cool/breaking them out of the "nice, priest person" mold is a good thing.
4e had problems, but Warlords weren't one of them.

Part of it I think is that Swordmage didn't go for 'Yeah, you cast magic OR swing a sword' or even 'You can throw a few spells while swinging your sword'. It actually went with the swordplay and the magic being intrinsically interlinked rather than a cut price wizard with a pointy object fetish.

OPTIONS

Literally a divine/primal/arcane/psionic/martial equivalent for each role, all with their own flavor/utility. Want to play an arcane but you really need a heal bitch? Try artificer! Lack a tank but really want to play some back-to-nature woodsman? Warden is baller as shit!

Not to mention how fucking on point Paragon/Epic paths were compared to the shitshow that was prestige classes in 3.5.

Basically the only thing they got wrong in my opinion is not figuring out how to balance summon/companion based characters, which is a damn shame.

Separating Divine/Primal was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Clerics and Druids have always had this issue in many games where 'How is a Nature Cleric much different from a Druid' came into play.

I loved the Primal Classes (Poor Poor Seeker. You had cool ideas but little support due to how late you turned up). Shaman is a particular favourite of mine. I really want to play an Animist Shaman some time with a fire theme. Calling on the primal fire that forged the world and gave birth to life itself.

I honestly love anything that lets me do Fire as Creation rather than just 'Burn shit'

>Literally a divine/primal/arcane/psionic/martial equivalent for each role,
>tfw no martial controller.

No, the hunter doesn't count.

>why is it warlords?
Because there was major lack of a tactical based character in DnD, especially one that wasn't in anyway magic.

>I kind of want to see a version that has vancian casting for some classes and aedu for others.
It makes sense for a sword fighter to be able to pull off a sword move semi regularly

wasn't Tome of battle just that?

Yes user but we can't have nice things because weeb

>What did 4e do right?

Wasn't that anime 90% boring talking and 10% cool fights?

Removing the layer of obfuscation between the players and the mechanics. This was one of its greatest achievements, but also one of the things that people, in my experience, hated the most.

It's why people continue to perpetuate the pointless lies that 4e classes play similarly or that there's no variation amongst powers. They were so used to information being hidden from them and having to go through descriptions and subsystems to figure out what the fuck something actually did that a clear layout made them all freak the fuck out.

Cool fights cost lots of $$$ to animate so the boring parts are there to pad it out.

That's why characters usually don't move a lot when they're talking; it saves money to produce the action scenes.

What 4e did was turn D&D into a boardgame. An elaborate boardgame, but still a boardgame.

This is sorta my point. Because it didn't.

4e honestly isn't that much different from 3.5. It plays very similarly and has a lot of the same elements. The primary difference is that it's open and clear about what they do.

Things like 'mmo style roles' (lol) already existed in 3.5. They were just things you were expected to figure out for yourself. Same for a lot of the mechanics and ways of interacting with the game. A lot of that obfuscation was likely rooted in the ivory tower bullshit that corrupted a lot of 3.5, but that style of thing spread through a lot of games for, IMO, no good reason. There's never a benefit in concealing how a system works from the people who are going to be using it.

Except Paranoia, of course. But that's because knowing the rules is against the rules.

What anime is it anyway? Because a SHARK JUST GOT CUT IN HALF LENGTHWISE!

If google is correct: Katanagatari

I don't know anything about it other than the white haired girl is a cute. Art looks consistently good.

Also iirc it's based off of a book with a lot of boring talking.

Preach it, brother.

"Walk it off!"

I really enjoyed 4e compared to 3.x. It's my favorite D&D.

>It plays very similarly and has a lot of the same elements
No, it really fucking doesn't.

It is Katanagatari, and that ultacool fight scene is literally the "in the next chapter" 30 second preview at the end of one episode.....and never actually shown.

It's the best D&D

I'm having a lot of fun with 5e but goddamn I love 4e.

>and never actually shown.

Fuck that pretentious show.

>Make a party
>Fight monsters
>Do quests
>Level up
>Get loot
>Rinse and repeat

Yes it fucking does.

4e is the product of taking 3.5 as it was and fixing all the stupid shit in it using the experience and feedback gained from it (as opposed to 5e, which is the product of making what people who didn't dig deep into 3.5 and/or kept playing core only thought 3.5 was).

Also, fighters wear heavy armor and stay at the front while robed wizards control the battlefield from afar. Except this time both classes were given tools to do their jobs.

>What did 4e do right?
4E was the hero D&D needed but not what D&D wanted. It was the sacrifice to wake people up about the stagnating and stale situation D&D was in. It single biggest merit was that forced Wizard of the Coast to finally start to do shit with D&D again and we should all be thankful for it.

This

That being said I do really love what 5e has done to D&D in terms of overall simplification.

This is definitely something underappreciated about 4e.

>dead eye badass animu grill
i cringe every time

>Vance didn't have re-learning the spell require you wait a standard amount.

Yeah, in Vance you just needed access to your grimoire. Per-encounter is just as close to actual Vance as Gygax's hard-on for per-day abilities.

The character with white hair in that scene is a guy.

Heck you can probably even hand wave at-wills.

... Which is what cantrips were anyway, 4e just made them a damage source for casters (which is emulating any video game where staff users have a basic ranged attack.)

>4e is the product of taking 3.5 as it was and fixing all the stupid shit in it using the experience and feedback gained from it

Yeah, but some of the stupid shit it it fixed was LFQW, and as a result high level 4e plays a whole lot differently than high level 3.5e, and vastly for the better.

Eh, MMO style 'buff and auras' class based entirely around how 'awesome' you are is pretty lame.

I am all for a character who can rally the people and lead armies and warbands, but I think that should really be left to prestige individual PCs have aquired through their quests and interactions.

Also classes in D&D are supposed to be templates in which to build your own character in a fantasy universe, not a video game class that can cast "Swing sword hard" once every 24 hours.

So why do you support having a magic system? Shouldn't a Wizard have to discover new magical theories and do research or arcane quests to gain new powers? Why does everyone else have to work to achieve things like that but Wizards get it handed out for free?

The Character Builder
Wizards put out some great tools and resources for 4e

Too bad they crippled them with DRM before the project ended in horrific tragedy.

Seriously though, I'd love to see another company actually make good digital support for their game.

Largely agree.

The consolidation of buff/healers into true enabler classes did much to move them out of the shadows into much more active classes. Leader was an apt classification.

Similarly, giving the meat shields control elements to ensure enemies didn't bypass them without penalty really gave them a purpose. Fighters went from balls to flat out amazing.

Admittedly some of the powers took some mental gymnastics to get around, they did a good job making sure characters remained roughly on par. Going back to the fighters, higher level characters weren't left behind in the linear to quadratic paradigm. If your fighter made it to higher levels, you were pulling feats worthy of legends, like Achilles, Lubu, etc.

And going back to the OP, yes Warlords because they pretty much embodied what made 4E fun. It's a damn shame they didn't make it to the next edition.

Magic classes all get a pass because magic isn't clearly defined by its nature. Martials are much more often restrained by realism as shitty GMs think they are anything less than superhuman.

Yeah, that's the utterly stupid double standard I was trying to highlight. It's a fucking plague on RPG design by this point.

This is why I pretty much just play Superhero or generic/universal systems
When everyone is assumed to be superhuman you don't get people complaining about the swordsman taking out the summoner and his minions being unrealistic

Times all distances by 5, now you don't need a grid.

This.

4e is probably the best edition from a mechanical standpoint. The only fix it needs, imo, is a bit of a reduction/increase to its monsters' HP/damage, to shorten down encounters a little.

This is probably the most civil discussion of 4e I've seen on Veeky Forums

dice+1d20

Rolling sense motive to see if this is bait.

>sense motive

Don't you mean Insight?

didn't they do that in Monster Manual 3 and later in Monster Vault ?

They did but arguably not enough. That's for each group to decide, really

Seeker was a salvage of the Zen Archer class draft when Power Source: Mystic Orient was cut

Bit of a giveaway, innit?

Mystic Orient? Seriously?

Ki, actually. And yes, being Power Source: Asian is why they cut it. Monk became Psionic, Zen Archer turned Primal and whatever Runepriest was initially supposed to be became Divine

I still don't understand why power sources needed to exist. No, I get that it's how we got fighters, swordmages, paladins and battleminds as tanks, but I don't understand why the concept of power sources needs to be known to the players and listed in the official books. Why not just keep it as a developer thing?

I suspect the Runepriest was supposed to be a Talisman user.

Apparently, in some Orcus drafts they initially bore powers of their own and when those were cut in favor of classes, Power sources remained as a sort of classification tag

I think it was good where they stopped, because pcs can do surprising amounts of damage.
I had a an elite soldier type get wasted in literally 2 rounds by the party barbarian alone with some half decently synergized powers (and a crit). The barbarian was level 4, the creature was typed up for a level 7 party and wasn't alone.

It must also be noted that Orcus had other very interesting features later cut to streamline the game.
For example:
1) Races used to have their own progressions. Later reduced into feats.
2) Tieflings used to be a race built out of different supernatural features that each had its own possible benefits as you leveled
3) Powers used to be renewable with different renewal mechanisms. Including a class that had a deck of possible powers and when renewing he had to pull from the deck

Honestly? 4e was my first system, but I found that it really wasn't what I was looking for in a roleplaying game.

I wanted something that freed me from the restrictions of computer gaming; not reminded me of them.

Mechanically it was fairly intuitive, but large parties tend to get bogged down; ability texts are so wordy as to need constant reference to textbooks, hand-written skill sheets or sold separately skill-card sets.

The core races were mostly humdrum, but Dragonborn and Tieflings in the core book brought out some real faggotry at my table I'll tell you.

Oh, and everything had too many fucking Hit Points; felt like we were fighting with wiffle-bats and foam armour.

It shouldn't take an hour of game-time to dispose of six goblins.

Switching to Rune Quest I found that much of what I assumed were problems with my players sort of melted away when I switched to a system with more lethal combat, no class/alignment system and races that are intentionally not balanced against one another.

I liked 4e because it was where I cut my teeth; but I've since switched to a version of Rune Quest that came round about the same time and found that the whole classless d100 thing is just innately better to run and play.

Hell, my players, who were all new to roleplaying and hyped up on the D&D train also became quickly frustrated with 4e; and when I switched systems they were keener to come play at my table, after a little initial hesitation.

I only wished I'd figured out that 4e wasn't the system for me before I picked up a shit-ton of supplements.

No regrets though; I still got the Dark Sun modules for it, which are just nice to have; and I may well run a heavily modded game of 4e set on Athas some day; if I don't just use Rune Quest instead I mean.

I just mix it up with other factors when I dm. If a monster is a solo encounter and has a billion HP, then I like to use those hit points to have other stuff going on.

You have to fight it while the cave collapses around you, or while the building is on fire, or while the area is flooding. Or the monster is simply moving somewhere, and the party has to follow it (have to kill it before it picks up the staff of power, or before it climbs out of reach or whatever)

which makes it so that the nature of the fight changes as the battle transitions from one location to another. Each phase of the fight brings new and unique challenges or dynamics, keeping it fresh even though they're fighting the same monster..

It's also a great way to work many of the skill's into a fight. Trap-finding and trap removal to either get a hazzard out of the way or cause it to hit the boss instead (dealing tremendous damage and shortening the encounter) and creating a teamwork moment of "cover me while I rig this to fall on that dragon!". Athletics skills to platform their way away from the rising lava flow, or to pull the scrawny wizard up the cliff (giving the fighters something to do in a ranged attack dominant fight). Using Arcana to detect magic and find the monsters hidden power source while the fighters keep it busy. You get the idea. Lots of hit points means you have lots of time, and there are plenty of interesting things to fill that time with.

>ability texts are so wordy as to need constant reference to textbooks
Are we thinking of the same system?

Also, 4e is plenty lethal in my experience. The way I ran battles, there wasn't a single one when a PC or two didn't go into Dying

Good approach, m8!

4E did a huge amount right, I don't understand the hate.

>Tactically engaging combats.
> Quick, simple and easy combat design
> Huge amount of player options in combat
>Low entry cost for miniatures and battlemats compared to similiar games like Warhammer.
>Amazing game balance , every combat is winnable with the right tactics, nothing obviously broken.
>Original idea of a tactical skirmish game that pits a group against one mastermind player
>Optional roleplaying rules to link combats together which is really cool and flavourful

Power sources influence access to some feats, paragon paths and epic destinies. And since all powers come with the power source of their source class, they're also used for class features. For example: Sorcerer spell power and Warlock Curse class features can only do bonus damage when you hit with an arcane power. And the bard paragon path Daring Blade allows you to use charisma as the attack and damage modifier for all melee weapon powers with the martial power source

The lethality of a system like 4e is mostly up to the DM

I've had DMs that rarely send PCs down to bloodied, and DMs that consistently knock out the strikers once per encounter

Meh, the rest of the show's fight scenes were pretty baller. I can forgive one skipped fight for the sake of a joke, especially when they put that much effort into making the "preview" cool enough to stand on its own.

I've noticed the difference between those DMs is one uses MM1+2, the other uses MM3+MV.
My first dungeon row as a first time 4e DM had 6 pcs.
1 walked out.
Orcs are scary, yo.

They also start at level 3. Might be pretty tough for level 1 characters, seeing how (also level 3) city guards ground my PCs into fine dust

>Controller Fighter
The problem with that is martial control looks a hell of a lot like what a defender does. Beyond that, maybe you could have an abstracted ranged fighter but it's pretty awkward. I have seen an attempt at it though. Something like an offensive warlord is plausible, but it stretches what counts as a martial.

The way I see it, 4e is a great game unless it's your first system. I played it as my first, and I started to hate it after a while because I had nothing to compare it to. After playing Pathfinder for over a year, I really started to appreciate it and now I'm really wanting to go back to it.

I always thought daily powers for martial classes was odd, but I didn't care for what the essentials classes tried to do on that end. What if a fighter, say, got only encounter powers but had a daily resource to use them more often?

It was 1 orc, user.
It was a trap/kobold dungeon, a kobold raiding party whipped into shape by a cunning orc.
The warlock got pushed into a pit of acid and drown/sizzled.
The warlord got stuck in the sap of trees and was stung to death by swarms of bees.
The ranger was pushed into a rock fall trap and crushed to death.
The young farmer boy turned fighter bled out in the dirt after eating 2 consecutive crits from the orc.
The rogue was murder/suicided by the orc's death throes.
Only the cleric made it out, on 1 hp, making repeated trips to drag the dead pcs bodies from the cave.
And I gave them every in game hint that this place was murderous. The city that hired them told them bluntly "We have sent in many warriors and adventurers. A few returned, none whole."
But apparently, every DM lies, and anything npcs say is just for dramatic effect. Ben, you are a fucking idiot.

Partly it's a matter of scale; a Daily is a lot of oomph in one action, and even doing Encounters more often wouldn't provide the same compression of effort.

I would still give classes Dailies, and then give the msome kind of Titanic Effort pool that those Dailies draw on, so that you can perform the same incredible feat more than once in a day, but still have the same cap on number of incredible feats per day.

That said, the reason the designers gave for encounter powers in their notes wasn't that a character could only perform a certain sword-maneuver once per fight, but that it would only be a surprise once per fight, and that afterwards the enemy would be wise to that particular trick, making it not worth trying again. With multi-use Dailies, I would give the same once-per encounter restriction.

This.
There were specific reasons martial classes still had limited resource actions, mostly based on heroic feats of strength.

Monster Math is still kinda fucked even at the end-point they found for it.

I've had much better experience since I started eyeballing it and tossing near random numbers on the enemies that completely break the formula.

Good approach. I've always found that the key to running interesting 4e combat is monster synergy and a dynamic environment, as well as goals that aren't just 'Murder everything in sight'.

Often, I rip encounter design from ARPGs and MMOs, adapt it to the idea of a single group which only gets one attempt, as well as the tabletop format as a whole, and then roll it out as a boss or sub-boss fight. It works surprisingly well.