Has Fourth Edition ever received a more thorough drubbing?

youtube.com/watch?v=daksqex8zUE

This guy has some pretty spot-on observations about D&D 4e.

> The session-long fights
> Lack of roleplaying mechanics
> Shitty utility powers
> Insane focus on combat
> Zero mechanical diversity among classes
> Martials are literally casters
> Creative actions punished by system
> Hit point bloat
> Skill are an all-or-none business
> Can heal / regain energy just by thinking
> Creature types are literally defined by their combat roles because that's all they are

Perhaps the die was cast when Hasbro decided D&D needed to appeal to a wider audience; they made sure the game would never be mistaken for a good RPG. Just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for their Neverwinter MMORPG. D&D 4e might be gamist (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-3.5 in its refusal of interesting and mechanically-diverse character options. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to (5e).

>a-at least the combat was good though
"No!"
The combat is dreadful, it's a complete slog. As I played, I noticed that fighter and ranger maneuvers were really just spells, but the game had written "exploits" instead to pretend there wasn't magic involved.

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time I found two abilities that were basically the exact same thing. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. The game is so governed by turning fighters into wizards that it makes no sense from a narrative or even gamist standpoint. Later I read a lavish, loving review of 4e by a random forum user I forget the name of. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are playing World of Warcraft at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to play D&D 4th edition." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you play D&D 4e, you are being trained to play online MMORPGs and MOBAs.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=Qp6EbvJ0ssM
youtube.com/watch?v=DuAaL7W6SSw&t=364s
1d4chan.org/wiki/D&D_Optimization
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Pretty accurate to be honest. He's saying anything new or controversial.

Inb4 the 4rries show up to defend their tabletop MMO.

>lindybeige

discarded

>lindyposting

> ad hominem

discarded

Ad hominem is not an argument. If your argument is a personal attack, you have lost the argument because you could simply give those words to someone else and invalidate that entire argument instantly.

Well there is really nothing to defend. Skill challenges were a failure. Combat maneuvers were a failure to the point that 5e returned to 3.5's caster supremacy and spell slots. Healing surges were kept in because D&D is just a bad system in general that fetishizes a rest-fight-rest structure, but that's just because 5e is bad in general.

The only good ideas 4e had:

> different bonuses to hit based on weapon
> two weapon fighting is viable
> 1/2 level to attack and AC

That's it. The rest was hogwash.

>Zero mechanical diversity among classes
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually understand the system and has never played it.

If a fighter a wizard somehow had the same basic attack, they would still do different things because of class features.

>Skill are an all-or-none business
Also untrue. Trained/untrained doesn't account for other bonuses.

>Can heal / regain energy just by thinking
As opposed to waving a wand around? Makes just as much sense.

>Creature types are literally defined by their combat roles because that's all they are
Here's (you)r >Large Magical Beast.
What would you rather there be? I don't look for a fluff description for Renraku's Reds in their statblock.

> Lack of roleplaying mechanics
Much better than needing to look up tables that define if someone cries and how much.

> Shitty utility powers
> Creative actions punished by system
Examples?

> Insane focus on combat
> Martials are literally casters
Why are these problems? Don't forget that Rituals are a thing and that most classes didn't get it for free.

What exactly do you want out of this thread?

5e isn't back to caster supremacy. It's back to casters being casters and martials being martials instead of the retarded homogenised power system of 4e.

Casters aren't OP in 5e like they are in 3.5

> repeating the same flaws everyone has been talking about for a literal decade
The worst part about 3e/Pathfinder haters is how they bring up the same flaws every fucking time and expect people to just be shocked like they haven't ever heard a thousand times over.

Amy second Virt is gonna appear and try to convince us to play Dungeon World

>281 replies and 3 images omitted. Click here to view

How about the ranger utility power that is literally just movement? Because the dev's definition of utility is anything that doesn't deal direct fucking damage, but not anything that is actually useful outside of combat.

> Why are these problems? Don't forget that Rituals are a thing and that most classes didn't get it for free.

Oh, I don't know, perhaps because there is even less reason to play a martial in 4e as in 3.5? At least the 4e casters make sense. The fighter gets to do a cool attack for double damage.... but because of "reasons" he can't do it until the next day. Wait, wait, did he expend magical energy? No.... did he get tired? Not really, he's at full hp. Then why can't he do it again? Because Wizards took a page right out of the League of Legends playbook and added a "cooldown" time to everything, to add even more bookkeeping to a game that apparently didn't have enough of it already.

of course, this is the system where you start with 15 to 20 times the hit points of an average orc warrior so I guess I shouldn't be taking it too seriously.

Fuck off.

For 4rries to admit their system is trash, and that 5e is trash because of 4e's ideas that it took with it (i.e. second wind, action surge, hit dice healing surges, hit point bloat on monsters)

4rries ruined 5e and they deserve to be punished for it.

Again, 4e came out 2008,
League of Legends 2009

Who is this autistic inbred looking faggot and why should anyone care?

Lindys opinions have been disregarded ever since his video on the bren vs. MG42.

I don't even need to see his video to know it's all based on opinion and not fact.

WoW came out in 2004.

>Spoken like someone who doesn't actually understand the system and has never played it.

Actually, I played it for 2 years. All classes function mechanically the same: they have a set of abilities split into at-wills, dailies, and encounter powers. They all have shitty attacks for extra damage. All of them are spellcasters. No, no, shut up boy. Fighters are spellcasters. Rangers are spellcasters. Because they quite literally restructured Vancian magic to drag down ALL the classes, not just wizards and clerics and druids. See in 3.5 vancian magic was even shittier, but at least you got to be OP if you could put up with erasing the shit out of your spells every time you cast one. Now in 4e you get to make tick marks on your character sheet every time you want to make a halfway effective attack. Yes, 4e totally leveled the playing field: now everyone gets to wallow in the same vat of shit.

> As opposed to waving a wand around? Makes just as much sense.

Yes because that's magic which is a core conceit of fantasy. Healing surges aren't magic.

> Also untrue. Trained/untrained doesn't account for other bonuses.

Yeah no shit. Except they are still an all-or-none thing. There are no relative skill levels. If you somehow did learn a new skill at higher levels you would instantly be doing it just as effectively as a ranger who'd been doing it since 1st level.

Not an argument.

Also not an argument.

Being unable to understand why certain things can only happen so often instead of all the time sounds like you're just being uncreative rather than the system being bad. There's a ton of stuff that "doesn't make sense" in all D&D versions, but this is the one thing that really sticks out?

You're wrong about the HP stuff, too.

What exact power are you talking about? If it's forced movement, it's useful. If it's a minor action for a move, it's useful. Does something really need to do damage to be useful? Sleep doesn't do any damage and it's got usefulness out the ass.

And Everquest in 1999, before 3rd edition.
Do you think maybe mmo's drew more inspiration from tabletop than the other way around?

I'd say that Game Geeks RPG's drubbing of 4th edition is the more thorough drubbing. They do raise a lot of the same points really.

youtube.com/watch?v=Qp6EbvJ0ssM

youtube.com/watch?v=DuAaL7W6SSw&t=364s

Oops, sorry, wrong game. All these shitty "MUH POWAHS" video games tend to blend together, kind of like the 4e classes when you realize they all do just about the same fucking thing.

These days? Yes.

...

>Being unable to understand why certain things can only happen so often instead of all the time sounds like you're just being uncreative rather than the system being bad.

Oh look, it's this stupid argument again!

> look I made a shitty game mechanic!
> if you can't explain it, you're a bad DM!

Yeah, fuck you.

> There's a ton of stuff that "doesn't make sense" in all D&D versions, but this is the one thing that really sticks out?

Such as? Oh, are you going to go "lmao it doesn't make sense that dragons exist because of square cube law" or "haha magic isn't real"? If so you'll just make yourself look like more of an idiot. Yes, magic is a convenient excuse, and a core conceit of the fantasy premise. Except, fighter powers aren't fucking magic so why the fuck can I only use them once a day?

I know why: game balance. This is a VITAL point. Because the Wizards developers were too goddamn lazy to actually balance casters and martials, they decided to make casters into martials. Easy solution! Oh wait, why can I only cut-and-run once a day? Well, that's up to YOU, Mr Dungeonmaster. It's YOUR job to fix the glaring logic holes in our terribly designed "roleplaying" game.

The only people who like 4e are martialfags who are glad that their fighter can do more each round than full attack.

They know their shitty game is a tabletop MMO but they'll never admit it.

>All classes function mechanically the same
Have you never used class abilities like Marks? And if you're talking about bringing everybody into a vancian system, that's not really 4e's original idea, so you can't blame 4e for it.

>Healing surges aren't magic.
Wrong. Magical healing uses healing surges. Drinking potions uses healing surges. They are literally magic.

>If you somehow did learn a new skill at higher levels you would instantly be doing it just as effectively as a ranger who'd been doing it since 1st level.
First, this is wrong. Second, even if it was true, why is this a problem? At level 20 ("high level" since 4e goes to 30) everybody has at least a +10 to their skills already anyway. If the ranger only has +5 more to the skill than a wizard and the wizard picks up +5 to equal the ranger, why is this bad? Are you disregarding class bonuses and stat bonuses? Like, a wizard isn't going to get a Con bonus to Endurance, so even the Wizard trained Endurance the Human Fighter will still be better at it. And a Dwarf Fighter will be better than a Human fighter.

Sorry the jocks beat your ass too hard and made you go full caster retard, user

Casters are objectively superior to martials in 5e. The difference is less that if 3.5, but still there.

>I made a shitty game mechanic!
You've failed to explain why it is a shitty mechanic in terms of mechanics and instead have basically said "I don't like it."

>fuck you.
Not an argument. :^)

>Such as?
Being able to heal for as much as you want.

>game balance. This is a VITAL point
>glaring logic holes
>terribly designed
I'm getting mixed messages here. Is game balance good? It sounds like you're saying yes. But 4e put everybody on the same vancian treadmill for balance, so that's bad? Or is it bad because it doesn't make sense to you?

>this meme again

You're playing D&D user. Playing the guy with muscles doesn't make you any less of a nerd than the rest of us.

No they aren't. Caster supremacy is only a thing in 3.5

This would be true, except I, OP, am a martial-fag myself. In fact I recently played a wizard for the first time in D&D. And I am enjoying it, but I always preferred martials.

Except, 4e doesn't let me play a martial. I am literally not playing a martial when I play a 4e martial. I am playing a spellcaster.

Half of what made playing a martial fun was the simplicity of it. 4e could have made martial more interesting but most of the maneuvers are just different varieties of dealing damage, or "shifting". There is nothing interesting there. Just extra bookkeeping for the DM in the form of "ongoing damage" and combat advantage that lasts until next turn, so as to break up the monotony of slogging through a 200 hit point monster.

Old maneuvers also become fucking obsolete because the game has to scale up damage for the ever-increasing hit points because the developers realized that fights would take 48 hours instead of 24 hours if they kept them as is. So you might as well erase half these powers from your sheet. It's like feat chains, except even worse. In fact it is very very similar to how those 1st level spells lose effectiveness at higher levels.... isn't THAT interesting.

Hell, my gaming group literally switched from 4e back to 3.5, spending 2 hours converting our characters and homebrewing 4e spells into 3.5, just so we could stop playing this godawful system. They hated how restricting and bland it was.

>So you might as well erase half these powers from your sheet.
This is literally what happens. You stop gaining encounter and daily powers and instead are told to replace them.

I really doubt that you've played 4e, because this is in the level advancement table but you seem to have missed it.

Denial.

Everything a martial can do, a caster can do almost as well or better.

But a martial can't cast sixth level spells.

QED

>Wrong. Magical healing uses healing surges. Drinking potions uses healing surges. They are literally magic.

So does resting.

> Have you never used class abilities like Marks?

Yes, and the difference in them is about as significant as the ranger's dual attack and the fighter's shit. Yes, there is minor mechanical diversity. No, it does not make up for the shitty framework the game creates to artificially drag everyone into the vancian framework for NO reason.

Hell, if wizards can have at-will attacks, then why have these once-per-day powers at all? It clearly doesn't break the game. I'll tell you why: tradition. WotC is so beholden to vancian magic it will literally destroy its own game system to fit that framework.

Marks are even more egregious dissociated mechanics than the maneuver system. They are abstract as fuck and have no real world bearing outside of their in-game definition. Again, it's a game, not a roleplaying game. I can literally see the status halo hovering over the mob's head as the tank moves up to protect the clothies before they run out of buff spells.

> projecting

If you actually think anyone's martial/caster preference is based on getting bullied in middle school then you clearly haven't talked to another gamer or played an RPG yourself in your life. Which would be pretty fitting for a Veeky Forums poster, but still.

So, is this fuckface the new Spoony?

Well it might have something to do with the fact that we stopped playing 4e at 6th level and converted our game over to 3.5 because it was better.

Even so... the game's designers are so eager to fill up 300 pages so they can charge a Ben Franklin for the boxed set, that they cannot conserve design space by, I dunno, not making powers grow fucking obsolete and need replacing? Perhaps have them improve over time? Oh wait, that wouldn't make sense, because they are meant to be basically spells.

4e took the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic and made it into an entire game. Whereas Weaboo Fightan Magic was widely considered to suck, not because of power issues, but because it made playing a martial ten times more complicated and bookkeeping-heavy than it ever needed to be.

Of course a martial can't cast spells. He's a martial you imbecile.

If you want to cast spells roll a caster.

But a caster can attack.

Again, QED.

>4rries
Wow, this takes me back. What's next, "shit twinkie" and "DURR *clang*"?

>Whereas Weaboo Fightan Magic was widely considered to suck
u wot m8

I don't know why you're arguing with me dude. I agree with you. 4e is shit. You're better off actually playing WoW than playing 4e.

>So does resting.
Short rests do not inherently heal you in 4e. You must still spend surges during short rests to heal (Bards give a passive bonus to healing done during short rests). If you're talking about extended rests, well they heal you in other versions as well without being magic.

>WotC is so beholden to vancian magic it will literally destroy its own game system to fit that framework
Pretty sure 4e works very well internally, it's not nearly as broken as you seem to claim.

>it's a game, not a roleplaying game
What prevents it from being a roleplaying game? You're still roleplaying a character.

>What prevents it from being a roleplaying game? You're still roleplaying a character.
Sure, just like I'm roleplaying a military commander in an RTS game.

A caster won't get very far in combat without spells.

Anyone can pick up a sword and swing it.

casters have more supremecy in 5e then they ever did in 3e

>less spells per day
>more caster supremacy
Pick one, cockmunch.

Ah, so you admit you didn't actually play 4e, thank you.

We already have one thread dedicated to this cunt, fuck off.

Was just planning to use this one.

>Perhaps have them improve over time? Oh wait, that wouldn't make sense, because they are meant to be basically spells.
Well, again, you're wrong that this doesn't happen because at-wills improve over time. Honestly, the number of times you've been factually wrong just emphasizes how your argument is based more on opinions than facts.

Not true. Bladelocks can out damage most martial classes by polearming it up.

Early levels druids do better in melee, and later polymorph does better.

They really don't.

You have no clue what you're talking about.

Fun thing about those powers used as an example

They both SUCK

Fuck off Lindy, you already have a thread about your shitty videos.

Someone with a degree in archeology who thinks he's an expert on everything because he has a Southern English accent and wears a lot of woolen clothes.

>infinite cast cantrips
>infinite cast elemental cantrips
>no xp costs on the biggest spells
>restrictions on magic items that make it impossible for the fighter to compensate for the wizards extra versatility like they could in 5e.

*like they could in 3e

user, I've seen what cantrips are. Trust me, the fact that you can cast an endless amount of them doesn't break the game.

Martials don't get the spiked chain in 5e which is a big strike against them.

Good. Martialcucks deserve to be put back in their place after 4e.

This is a joke, right?

Reminds me of Spoony saying that a wizard's d12 damage cantrip is broken in 5e. Even though a barbarian wielding a greataxe can infinitely deal 1d12 + (1.5 * Strength modifier) damage.

>Session long fights

That was my issue with it. I might as well play Warhammer if the game is just going to be about killing things. Actually I take that back, WHFRP is a very cool game that offers a lot besides killing things.

they only gave them less spells per day because people were not having there partys have enough encounters per day.

>If the wizard can have at-will attacks, then why have these once-per-day powers at all?

Because they make it interesting, there are classes in 4e that don't have daily powers (essentials martials) and they are painfully boring to play as due to the lack of in-combat options, even if you blow three feats on martial cross training to get proper encounter powers

Well, warlock/sorcerer eldritch blast spam comes pretty close

its barely about the power it grants its about the extreme versitilty from all those elements and the money saved on crossbow bolts

The warlock can't do fuckall else though.

i fucking hate this guy

he sounds like he has stuff in his mouth all the time

plus he is one of those "old school set in his way type" whose thoughts on game design comes off more as unwavering bias rather than opinion and mostly picking favorites with the older editions

plus he's big and fat and must smell like swamp ass and bratwurst

>extreme versitilty from all those elements
Solved by limiting known cantrips.
>money saved on crossbow bolts
This must be a fucking joke.

Wait, wait, guys, I have something great for this.

You might think the dude in OP's video is a moron but get a load of this: 1d4chan.org/wiki/D&D_Optimization

Just go read the part about warhammers. It's maybe the dumbest thing I've ever read.

>Weaboo Fightan Magic was widely considered to suck
But that's wrong. One of the very few ways that 3.5 even pretends to function as a system is if you use Psionics and ToB ONLY (with psionics called magic, and power-points called mana.) This very board points it out constantly.

in 3e if you were running the game right the wizard should have been going through a good 20 or so crossbow bolts a day

I've only played 4th edition a couple times, and one thing that stood out to me was that the combat WAS a bit slow. It just struck me as weird, because I've never encountered a Veeky Forums meme that was true.
Any fans of 4th know why that is? Is it bad GMing? Is it bad players? Is it lindy-posting?

That looks like a really bad example

A party where everyone is playing the same defender class, vs two enemies with regeneration the party has no way of stopping, while everyone in the party is aiming for defense over attack, against enemies that never attack, only boost their defenses higher every round in order to extend combat longer

Of course it takes forever.

Too many tactical options presented at once.
HP bloat in MM1

There's a lot of choices to be made in 4e, lots of characters have off-turn actions they can take, including monsters, and off-turn actions slow the game down significantly by adding more choices, and every choice requires deliberation, so every choice takes time, not to mention the multitude of choices already available to the players every turn with their standard, move and minor actions.

Of course, this also means that in a party with a clear set plan of action, combat goes by super fast, because the choices have already been made

>Pointless edition Wars 2010 Edition - 2.0 Electric Boogaloo: The Thread

I think one major problem is that 4e isn't really designed around having a lot of random encounters that you can blow through. The system is really designed to make each fight an interesting encounter mechanically. Because of this, the DM having a good sense of encounter design is way more important than in most games. You have to be thinking about each encounter in terms of mechanics, not just fluff.

If you just think, well, I need an encounter against bandits, so I'll throw 5x of this bandit enemy at them, you'll get a dull drag of a fight.

Yup combat takes longer. I disagree with almost everything else, but yeah, combat takes longer. You can get it down to 45 minutes per fight if you're in person, and if your group understands the mechanics of their characters. The thing is, the combat (which is the meat of the game really) is fun enough to be a tabletop-wargame in and of itself, and it's a shitload faster than Mordheim, but simultaneously a lot mechanically deeper.

Combat basically IS a VERY WELL BUILT tabletop-wargame that you zoom into whenever a fight breaks out, and it's distinct from (what little there is of) the rest of the game. Some people hate this, and some people love this, but it's one of the inalienable truths of 4e. It just so happens that "tabletop wargame that's fast enough to play in under an hour, and deep enough that controlling one persona is interresting, that you can use to zoom into when your diceless role-playing results in a fight" is basically exactly what me and my table need. Been running 4e since it came out, and never looked back. Sometimes I'll run SR or AD&D2e for nostalgia's sake, or a hyper-light one-page system for a one-shot, but 4e has become my go-to system, and my players seem to love it.

However, combat does take longer than it takes in 2e or 3e (and 5e, but I don't count 5e as distinct enough from 3e to count as its own system.) You can't escape that. You can mitigate it, and what you get in return is (to me and my players) worth it.

>mfw i unironically love 4e the most
>mfw warlord was the most fun I ever had with any class ever in 17 years of D&D

suck my cock, grognards

To add to this, 4e is a tactical grid based game that thrives on good environments. Which is great, but it's tantamount to saying that 4e suffers when good environments aren't available

>an unabashed warlordfag
Words cannot describe how pleased I would be if all of your ilk suddenly vanished in a burst of flame one day, freeing us from your "but muh warlord" bitching for all eternity.

Fuck off Lloyd

I just hope you always build you character last, or at least build your character in tandem with other people building theirs

i really really hate the idea of the healer being tied to essentially the cleric, as it's pretty much always been. HP was not always a purely physical representation of your life force, so I fucking loved the idea of non-magical healing. So making someone that yells at you and insults you like a drill instructor in the midst of battle to heal you really resonated with me. I'm not a DPS chaser like I used to be when I was new to D&D way back, so I really loved the feeling of battlefield of control with the non-magical healing.

My fucking sides...
Someone please caption this, I'm on phone now

>i really really hate the idea of the healer being tied to essentially the cleric
And I don't care.

prove it in 5e.

4e and Warlord are both great.
The level of customisation in 4e was also insane, from backgrounds, feats, utilities, tattoos, skills, multiclassing, paragon paths, everything really, there was so much choice for everything

As a fan of charOP overall, 4e is pretty good, but it's still not as good as 3.5

Because at a certain point, quantity becomes a quality all by itself

nice try faggit.

>4e is Wow Clone/MMO
>Not Final Fantasy tactics

Do people actually mean anything by beyond its 'casual population shit'.

I went and got myself a world of WarCraft account simply to see if there is any merit to it, and I cant really any similarity other than ''it's got Orcs'.

Well, first you give the Wizard a spellbook with every spell in the game, then you tell him to go ahead and prepare all of them, then you have a 5 minute workday....

stop posting this stupid fuck

There was none, but 3.X crowd, playing WoW in their free time, was unable to figure out better insult, so it sticked.

>so it sticked.

>How to make proper bait thread in two simple steps:
>1. Make it edition war
>2. Add lindybeige photo

It does have a bit of a similarity in terms of set combat roles.

But yeah, it's definitely got more in common with Disgaea/Tactics Ogre/FFT than any MMO