/4eg/ - D&D 4e General

D&D 4e General: Weebshit-free Edition

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If you are GMing, remember...
1. To strongly consider giving out at least one free "tax feat," like Expertise and pre-errata Melee Training.
2. To use Monster Manual 3/Monster Vault/Monster Vault: Nentir Vale/Dark Sun Creature Catalog math. Avoid or manually update anything with Monster Manual 1 or 2 math.
3. That skill challenges have always been scene-framing devices for the GM, that players should never be overtly told that they are in a skill challenge, and that the Rules Compendium has the most up-to-date skill DCs and skill challenge rules.

If you would like assistance with character optimization, remember to tell us what the what the rest of the players are playing, what books are allowed, your starting level, the highest level you expect to reach, what free feats you receive, if anything is banned, whether or not themes are allowed, your starting equipment, and how much you dislike item-dependent builds.
If you wish to talk about settings, 4e's settings are Points of Light (the planes and the natural world's past empires are heavily detailed in various sourcebooks and magazines), 4e Forgotten Realms, 4e Eberron, 4e Dark Sun, and whatever setting you would like to bring into 4e.

Pastebin with all the useful links: pastebin.com/paPzDyS4 (embed)

Thread Starter: What was the party composition of your last 4e game?

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funin.space/compendium/monster/Goblin-Warrior.html
funin.space/compendium/monster/Barovian-Commoner.html)
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Essentials was a mistake
Except for the new expertise feats, I love those.

>Thread Starter: What was the party composition of your last 4e game?

Elf Hunter ranger / Tinker Gnome Artificier / Changeling Desert Wind Monk / Half-elf bard (with mark of storm) / Dwarf Fighter

Was an Eberron campaign, sadly died before it got off the ground.

I honestly like the idea behind the classes, plus the imbalanced hybrids are fun to build with/for.

There's a bit more than that in essentials that's good

Mostly feats, mind you, but a few EDs are cool. Also, giving every race a floating attribute bonus choice between two options is great.

And without essentials we wouldn't have Eladrin Knight.

I just love Eladrin Knight.

Yes, but they introduced, and nerfed into the ground, eladrin knight at the same time

If they didn't nerf melee training like they did, an eladrin knight multiclassed into warlock would be amazing, but as it stands, by RaW, you are practically forced to multiclass into swordmage

>What was the party composition of your last 4e game?
Ah fuck, let me try and remember...

>Elf Ranger
>Pixie Wizard
>Gnoll Rogue
And then there were like 4 other players who kept remaking their characters like ever two sessions because they didn't like them

Well, you only lose half your INT in damage, but warlock PPs give you more than that, so I think it's not that big of an issue, if you decide to try for that.

Plus honestly, being STR/INT ain't that bad (though obviously worse than INT/CON or something else).

Why did this game suck so much? Even more so than 3.5 you absolutely NEEDED a fucking battle grid. Also you start out with a metric fuckton of hit points so combats last forever. And you start out as a goddamn superhero instead of a novice character because you have 20 times the hp of the average goblin warrior (which has 1 hp). Same with commoners I assume. The game is designed ENTIRELY around being a video game and making the PCs overly bad-ass from the getgo. Why even bother when you can just run up and crimson cleave a half dozen orcs or some shit? AC scales ridiculously with level so you never actually get any better at hitting things, and Difficult Classes scale with level so that crossing a brook is DC 15 for a level 1 character but that same brook is DC 25 for a level 10 character. There's a shitton more bookkeeping to playing a martial because instead of giving martials GOOD things they decided to make them effectively casters and force them to use the same bland boring tick-box resource-management shit. It also added a fuckton of complexity to the healing system, instead of limiting healing like a fucking normal person. The maneuvers were boring and samey and they are the same boring baby template shit that chokes creativity because why do something interesting when you can just use your level 4 daily powahhh and kill a ton of shit much faster? Hopefully one day Wizards of the Coast will realize that (((Merals))) is a terrible game dev and they should fire him, and Monte Cook, and have them both on the street sucking dicks when no one will hire them because no one wants a terrible game like D&D 4e.

>Striker is a hothead that invokes interparty combat when he doesn't get his way
>player claims it's for teh lulz
How do you deal with this shit?

One encounter, the defender/leader will just leave him to die.

But Strikers are crazy self-sufficient!

Is what they think until they get supported.

*stop getting supported

Got any more pastas? Or did you just type this up yourself? I assume because of (((Mearls))) that that's the case.

>Got any more pastas? Or did you just type this up yourself? I assume because of (((Mearls))) that that's the case.

Refute my points or fuck off. 4e is an infinite-treadmill wargame with a shitton of bookkeeping caused by tryhard devs trying to make a shitton of maneuvers that they couldn't even diversify properly. It's poorly made from the ground up. 5e is infinitely better designed, partly because there is an actual difference between martials and casters while still balancing them . That takes far more design skill than just making them the same goddamn thing and destroying the entire distinction between them.

I was asking honestly. I wouldn't mind reading some oldies.

If those are your actual views, sorry I'm not interested in that discussion.

They are my actual views. supported by logic.

> sorry I'm not interested in that discussion.

Yeah that's what Nixon said to the fucking Watergate tribunal. Too bad, boy, your "game" is on trial today.

I think it was full of great ideas, just sloppy execution. They obviously didn't playtest the classes much, but I appreciated the attempt to mix up typical class design

Hey there pal, /5eg/ here. You need to simmer the shit down, you're not contributing to the thread, and you're making other 5e players looks bad by association.

>Most recent part composition
Pixie Sorcerer
Tiefling Warlord (Lazylord build)
Human Paladin
Half Orc Barbarian

They got a dragon drunk and then stole its teeth.

>Too bad, boy, your "game" is on trial today.

Sorry but this just made me smile.

Whatever, you gave me a laugh, may as well.

> Even more so than 3.5 you absolutely NEEDED a fucking battle grid.

Why is that a problem? It's like yelling about D&D needing a d20. It's a prop. 4e makes much, much better use of it than 3.5 anyway, making the "purchase" more justifiable.

> Also you start out with a metric fuckton of hit points so combats last forever.
> And you start out as a goddamn superhero instead of a novice character because you have 20 times the hp of the average goblin warrior (which has 1 hp). Same with commoners I assume.

You start out with more HP but it scales slower. It's essentially like starting at level 3, which is what most people in other WotC D&Ds do anyway.

Still, rusty dagger shanktown isn't out of reach, there's actually a pretty good "level 0" option in one of the dragon mags (may be in DMG2, I don't remember it).

Also, goblin warrior for reference: funin.space/compendium/monster/Goblin-Warrior.html

It actually has more HP than many level 1 characters. You probably mean a goblin minion. Commoners usually don't get stats, but the one I found (funin.space/compendium/monster/Barovian-Commoner.html) was indeed a minion, so you are right there.

>The game is designed ENTIRELY around being a video game and making the PCs overly bad-ass from the getgo.

Yeah, you are supposed to be competent on first level. Why do you think this is bad? Still, the level 0 rules exist if you want to play it hardcore.

>Why even bother when you can just run up and crimson cleave a half dozen orcs or some shit?

Can you, though? Orcs are pretty tough, especially at first level.

cont.

> AC scales ridiculously with level so you never actually get any better at hitting things, and Difficult Classes scale with level so that crossing a brook is DC 15 for a level 1 character but that same brook is DC 25 for a level 10 character.

This isn't how that works; the stats of a door don't change the same way the stats of a monster don't change. If that level 1 goblin got away and you met him at level 10, and he didn't gain any levels, he'd be just the same difficulty to hit; same with the brook. Unless it got like, wider and there's a storm or something.

>There's a shitton more bookkeeping to playing a martial because instead of giving martials GOOD things they decided to make them effectively casters and force them to use the same bland boring tick-box resource-management shit.

Giving good things to martials wasn't possible without giving them more things. Both 3.5 and 5e had proven this. This does come with bookkeeping, but it is much less than the previous edition (or the next one, for that matter).

>The maneuvers were boring and samey

This got better later.

>and they are the same boring baby template shit that chokes creativity because why do something interesting when you can just use your level 4 daily powahhh and kill a ton of shit much faster?

I'm actually really missing the improvised damage tables from 5e. They encouraged you to use improvised actions, because it saved on your resources. In 5e I never have any reason as a Rogue to not just shoot my bow or GFB in melee.

Admittedly, the power format does have an adverse effect on peoples willingness to improvise.

Improv damage table in the 5e DMG, pg. 249, multi-edition famalam.

Huh, I missed that.

Upon reading however, they aren't really the same (unless you convince the DM to use the severity table since that scales with level).

5e>4e>BECMI/RC>B/X>2e>Original>1e>Basic>3.P

This is about right, right?

Edition Warriors go and stay go.
with you.

5e needs to be just above 3.P.

I prefer 4e and BECMI to 5e, but they are pretty even.