I want to run 4th edition

Not the OP, but I've looked at it before and I'm not sure how someone would actually use this to play the game.

wow thanks everybody, i didnt expect actual answers so quickly, i expected shit posters to be honest.

but thank you so much, ill go look at funning.space now.

is there a place i can pick up lvl 5 pre-genned characters? I've learned over time that nobody actually likes starting at level 1 and i usually start people at lvl 3. also if I'm going to test this with my group i dont want them to take 2 months to build their characters and lose all the hype.

It's not the worst edition, it's just vastly different from the paradigm that 3.X established.

It's a very self-contained system that does what it intended to do extremely well, in that it balances combat. It has very little else to it. Encounter design and character building is all mechanic-centric, it's all very neat and tidy, and it basically just works, but a lot of people feel that it gets to be a little bit soulless because of this focus on balance.

It's basically a tactical unit-based wargame. If that's your jam, you'll enjoy it, and it's not like you can't roleplay, there are just no mechanics to support it. And that's fine, people who need mechanics to roleplay are autism incarnate.

You wouldn't, it's a rules compendium. It's for people who already know how to run a game to look shit up. You should read one of the beginner books at least.

CBLoader makes character building very, very easy, although for absolute newbies 5th level characters would still take some time.

I think the 4e starter set (red box) comes with premades at least.

>and it's not like you can't roleplay, there are just no mechanics to support it

You are not wrong, but... it basically has the same amount of rules support for RP-ing as every other D&D. D&D really isn't an RP heavy system in general.

is CBLoader accessible for mac?

I've been running 4e for years, and you have to get used to refluffing monsters, and shuffling their non-AC-defenses to be appropriate to their new forms. Fortunately, this is pretty easy.

It's less of a module-based game, and works much better with an improv style, where the highly cinematic action-hero nature of the system can shine through.

Whatever you do, remember that, unlike in many other editions of D&D, your players aren't just a part of a living breathing world that grows around them, they are the protagonists in a fantasy novel about them and their adventures.

As far as books you need, the PHB's, Monster Manual 3, Monster's Vault, Dark Sun Creature Catalogue, and Monster Vault 2 are all you really need. DMG can be helpful, but is actually quite unnecessary.

Worst of the editions? Imo it is the best. 4e is a rain man's dream, and great if you have 5 hours to spare for combat. 3.5 is great for "I am a -insert broken minmax here- and I will -insert broken combo here-. But I suck at everything else. Pathfinder is dope. Hilariously broken at times, but good material I guess.

5e is pretty vanilla, but its stength lies in the ability for a (competent) GM to add almost anything to it. Complex combat, new classes, races, etc. It is super easy to homebrew 5e. Also, OOB everything is balanced. No trap options (except PHB Beastmaster). It just takes getting used to the fact that there is so little content compared to the editions (hint hint, it is newer).

I agree with that Rule of Cool's "Legend" is great, but it's officially dead and lacks a bestiary so it'd take more work to run an ongoing game.
Still, it's free and satisfies this interesting design niche where it pulls concepts from both the d20 SRD and 4e.

FantasyCraft makes for FANTASTIC martials and has some interesting mechanical hooks for any number of settings, but has very some fiddly bits and the book's a bit obtuse if you don't basically do at least one full read-through. Having a PDF helps a lot.

Personally I would recommend additionally checking out a game called "Open Legend" (also free). Instead of things like a specific spell list it has "banes" and "boons" representing special effects, many of which can also be done by nonmagical types.

Second for Fantasycraft

Man, that blog post really makes the skill challenge system work really well. I loved the idea of them, when I first encountered them when DMing 4e years ago, but I could never get them to work right, always being up front with entering a skill challenge. But keeping it hidden and part of the flow of an encounter seems so much fuckign better. And im also fuckign pissed my brain never realized this before now.

Now I can bring this over to PF games I plan on running too.

>5e
>Complex combat
>OOB everything is balanced. No trap options

Good one user.

>FantasyCraft makes for FANTASTIC martials

When your Soldier wades through magical fire and poison, up to the Wizard and beats him to a pulp with a Mace, you know that Martial Characters are viable.

>No trap options
......;_;

>But keeping it hidden and part of the flow of an encounter seems so much fuckign better. And im also fuckign pissed my brain never realized this before now.

It's basically THE advice for skill challenges. I mean, there's lots of other small nuance you can add (DMG2 collected a bunch) but that's the basic idea.

Not as far as I know. A D&D insider subscription (ew) would get you the online char builder, and a bunch of other cool tools that don't have an offline equivalent.

Very much this. Damn shame so few people are using the system.

So you're just wanting to run a game using the system? You have no story or idea, just that you want to use 4e?

Fantasycraft had a general thread last year.

Spycraft 3rd Edition is taking precedence, but apparently Fantasycraft 2nd is in the pipeline as well.

Don't fall for that meme. The site is absolute trash.

>(hint hint, it is newer).
Shut the fuck up. It's a shitty release schedule that's the problem, not how new the game is. 4E had already hit Essentials in the same amount of time between 5E's release and now.

Its not accepting new subscriptions ATM. And its very useful. Its the reason I kept doing 4th edition for like 3 years straight. Easily make characters. Easily alter monsters homebrew style. Easily look up enemies to throw into a campaign.

funin.space makes it irrelevant.

This. As long as you have that site, you can run and have fun with 4e as much as you want as long as you're willing to sometimes have to filter through large blocks of text to find what you want/need. That said, it's a godsend.

currently yes. I've run fantasy games in the past so i can easily mock up a game where i dunno undead wolves attack the town theyre celebrating in or something.

although it wouldn't hurt to get a cool pre-gen

4e Didn't really have a large swath of modules to draw on, especially since it had a fairly short print run. Reavers of Harkenwold is probably the best, though I am also partial to Madness at Gardmore Abbey.

Key books are the Rules Compendium, the PHB, MM3 and Monster Vault. The DMG1 and 2 are both good in their own right, but the Rules Compendium should handle most things rules related. They do have interesting advice and other stuff for a budding GM to pilfer though.

Beyond that, the splats aren't too terribly necessary. If you and your group like it and want more, you can pick up some stuff then, but don't worry about much beyond the key stuff to start with.

For modules, I remember the Chaos Scar stuff from Dungeon being pretty cut and dry, but it's also good stuff to pull out and get something rolling in 10 minutes. If you can find a decent download for all the old digital mags, I'd say give it a try. Past that, adjusting the fights from the Dungeon Delve book with newer math would be a good dry run of the system too.

Going to act like this is a 4e general now
Newbie potential player/DM who's far more experienced with 5e here. I know to use the MM3 math changes, but what are the feats recommended to hand out as math fixes again? And is Essentials completely compatible with core 4? Some of the races and classes unique to it are intriguing, and many of the feats are vastly...different form core.

You forget 1e, 2e, BECMI, and 5e.

Yes, Essentials is purely backwards compatible.

woot! yes thats a good idea, ill come back here with questions if i have any now.

Demonomicon (sp) is fucking great. Although it greatly dumbed down demons early on, the Demonomicon redeems them as an antagonist. They're fuckin cool.

I'd say the best 2e antag book is, if not a Van Richten book, Cult of the Dragon. The best 3e one is Draconomicon (imo), as it revitalizes dragons in the wake of the crazy OP protags of that edition, and for 4e its the Demonomicon (sp).

>But the supplements are pure crap.

Primal Power disagrees.

Give out 1 expertise feat for free and use inherent bonuses to fix the issues of magic item necessity.

Essentials is fully compatible with core, but some of the classes suck. New powers and feats introduced should all be fine to take for any applicable class though.

>can you recommend any books other than the players/gm book. and any good modules

Get the later Monster Manuals. The formula for calculating monster HP was broken in the first Monster Manual, so most non-minon monsters have too much health, and using them out of the box isn't impossible, but can create long, tedious fights. Later books fixed the math.

I never ran any 4e modules other than Keep on the Shadowfell, which wasn't a bad module, but it was made with the original monster math, so some encounters are very grindy. Also, it kind of assumes you're not going to use every encounter in the module.

Are you referring to the expertise feats in earlier books that just give a number bonus, or those from Essentials that give additional benefits?
Is inherent bonuses the variant rule from the Dark Sun book?

The only HP change is that solos are x4 instead of x5.

Its damage that is increased.

Any expertise feat will do, but you could technically just give all players a +1/tier to attack rolls and call it good.

Inherent bonuses are from Dark Sun, yes. Make sure to give Magic items of similar bonuses to the ones they have naturally, and consider letting magic items grow naturally with the inherent bonus progression. It makes them actually seem magical when their effects are the bigger draw as opposed to their numbers.

I can make you a straight forward level 5 adventure. Also look for the LFR (Living Forgotten Realms) as its modules are AMAZING.

dude really? sweet, that'd be real cool of you. ill be here all night to answer anything you need. i wish i could offer something as thanks

It will be a little while, so you might wanna check back.

Or, check this shit out: livingforgottenrealms.com/adventures.html

You dont need to do all the LFR tracking circle jerking

>any good modules
Not really, 4th edition did a bunch of stuff not particularly well, the settings and modules being among them.

Modules were mostly shit, yes. But what's your problem with the settings?

Sure, FR got wrecked, but if you liked FR to begin with, you've already had 30 years worth of material.
PoLand was pretty cool if (purposefully) half-made
Dark Sun was widely praised I seem to remember

Dark Sun is always good no matter the context but it's more what happened to the Planescape (ending the blood war, the fuck?) FR and also I cannot say I saw any appeal, whatsoever in points of light.

For the most part I can't help but feel all the settings used in 4e were riding off of older success, and for some that success ended at 4e.

With the exception of Points, but that was so DIY it hardly counts as a proper setting IMO.

Yeah the Dark Sun setting is pretty killer, but you have to negotiate with your DM if you wanna play the most meta of characters.

If you want to play Planescape, you play Planescape with 4E's rules. 4E kind of relies on refluffing anyway.

PoLand changed the cosmology, sure, but I can hardly see it as a bad thing, because new cosmology had no chaff like infinite planes of such excitement as "Magical water and nothing else" or "Plane of healsplosion".
It combined astral plane with bits from Spelljammer to give us Astral Sea for your exploring strange new worlds pleasure
All of the actual locations from Outer Planes are still around, except they're now located either in the Astral Sea or Elemental Chaos.
Feywild and Shadowfell are supposed to invoke mythological archetypes like otherworld and land of the dead. Dawn War is supposed to resemble creation myths of some Earth cultures
Also it's kinda implied that old cosmology is still around, you just have to tilt your head differently

Oh, and Eladrin are still around, they're just called... Eladrin. What we have as PC race is their scrubs, actual elemental feyish outsiders are the same race but their stats in MM are in high Paragon levels

If you want to, of course the best thing about D&D is you can always choose the fluff yourself and I just did not feel much of what happened in 4e. But that's not really a damning judgment on what they did.

Yeah PoL was built try and stay out of a DM's way, but it ended up too blank for some people.

Also remember that most of WotC's best content came from groups other then WotC (Paizo, LFR, ect), and 4th ed is not covered over the open gaming licence, so groups would have to pay WotC to publish games/supplements under 4th ed. In their great wisdom, WotC granted exclusive licences to groups that had no plans to publish anything.

...And pushed Paizo away due to this and other factors who made Pathfinder further spelling doom for 4th edition.

Thank god 5e turned out alright.

>there are just no mechanics to support it
What kind of mechanics did 3e had to support roleplay anyway?

A ridiculous amount of character specialization.

If you wanted an inbred train facts guy as your character you could make an inbred train facts guy as your character.

What about this description stops you from just plastering it onto any other character?

I don't quite understand how that's something that supports roleplay

This might be a something of an unpopular opinion but I rather like 4e fluff and think lots of its books are fun to browse through (Heroes of the Feywild being my fav). otoh it's fights seemed to take forever and were a touch too crunchy for my tastes.

Knowledge (locomotives).

History and Dungeoneering, depending on the specifics

Well, my own issue with 3rd was that the "flavor" characters all had a severe case of the suck. Which wouldn't be so bad, but 3rd punished players for not picking meta characters. So you can be a trainman, but only so long as the trainman was also a wizard or cleric. Otherwise your trainman would either be a deadman, or dead weight.

Fair point, I will concede 3.5 was super bad at allowing flexibility.

I prefer to give out the later ones, because they give weapons a bit of a unique flair.

Either, though some consider the latter for free as too much, since some of those feats are actually worth it even without the bonus to hit

Uh, Keep on the Shadowfell was SUPER shitty.

>he didn't read manual of the planes
>he didn't read primal power
>he didn't read heroes of the feywild
>he didn't read any of the dragon articles

This.

Here are two sins against 4E that you can accidentally commit because they were a norm in earlier editions:
1) Trash fights. Because of how slow and involved 4E's combat engine is, you don't throw enemies at your party simply to drain resources.
2) Featureless rooms. In 4E your battle arena needs piles of crates to hide behind, chandeliers to swing off, mounted windlasses to shoot with and so on, otherwise the fight will be boring

That does mean that it can be tricky to come up with a sudden fight, but it's possible

KotS had both of those sins IN SPADES

I'd recommend hanging yourself before running 4e.

The last thing 4rries need is any encouragement to think they're playing a legitimate TTRPG.

>Featureless rooms. In 4E your battle arena needs piles of crates to hide behind, chandeliers to swing off, mounted windlasses to shoot with and so on, otherwise the fight will be boring
That's pretty much a rule in every edition ever

>Featureless rooms. In 4E your battle arena needs piles of crates to hide behind, chandeliers to swing off, mounted windlasses to shoot with and so on, otherwise the fight will be boring
That's pretty much a rule in every edition ever. If anything it's less true for 4e due to all the powers that can generate zones, movement effects, obstructing terrain, etc

It's helpful in other editions but hardly necessary, especially in the older ones where your turn is like 3 seconds long and you're expected to bring your own furniture (hirelings) anyway.

There's not that many of this kind of powers and they're mostly controllers' prerogative

>It's helpful in other editions but hardly necessary
I can say in 5e it's a requirement if you don't want to be bored to tears, and if you aren't a caster in 3.5 it was the equivalent to DM throwing you a bone so you could actually do things
>There's not that many of this kind of powers and they're mostly controllers' prerogative
Zones were a warden's whole reason for living, movement effects were literally fighter at wills and a whole rogue build's gimmick, warlords and bards were all about rearranging the battlefields as they saw fit and barbarian's rages almost always came with some kind of weird zone or action-oriented buff. Ranger is really the only class guilty of not doing much more than hitting things, and even they dished out disabling effects every so often

Part of the reason controller was a vague role was because they gave controller-like effects to everyone. It was never entirely clear what was actually unique about them because of that.

5e combat is boring, yes. I general, WotC editions are involved enough that non-casters need something to do that isn't 'I attack'. In this respect I agree that 4E is the least dependent of them.

Are there any powers or items that increase a creature's size? I've got a concept for a small character that upsizes to surprise and battle larger foes that relied on the 5e Mystic, but don't know where to start to search 4e.
On a tangential note, are there rules for Large races? I was looking at making centaurs playable, and while I ironed it out in 5e, I wasn't sure if 4e could handle such a thing as well.

There are no official Large races, no class can get Large (even Druids and Wardens) and I can't remember a single item that does that but I might be mistaken here

There's a few warden forms that increase your size, and I remember a primordial themed ED that makes you huge sized briefly.

Generally though, PCs are generally balanced around medium sized or smaller, or else Fighters and wardens, as well as anything with auras, would play nothing but the large races.

Huh. Maybe I missed something back in the day then. Disregard

There are warden forms that increae your reach, but I can't recall any that increase size. the sovreign beast druid ED gives you large size wild shape. Also the Great Spirit shaman PP gives you a large spirit if that's relevant.

Emerald Guardian PP level 20 power, Form of the Life Giver, makes you Large for one encounter. More of a healing focused path though.

4e did Eberron better than 3.5, Dark Sun as well as 2e, and despite the fluff of it being spread across approximately all of the books, had a pretty solid standard setting in PoL

There's a Warden form that makes you large but I can't remember what it is, there's a Shaman PP that makes your spirit large but that isn't what you're looking for, and then there's Giant's Might. funin.space/compendium/power/Giants-Might.html

Giant's Might is fucking amazing, always worth poaching if you're playing an Eternal Seeker

So, the only option that does the trick is 20+. Shame, I'll just have to save those concepts for 5e. Not that there aren't plenty I can do in 4 and not 5 that I'm working on.

You know, you can just start your campaign at level 21

If everyone involved is ok at starting as demigods and going up from there

Aha, found it.

Emergent Primordial ast level 26 can make you Huge for an encounter.

I mean, you can definitely homebrew a large pc race without any real issues. Auras are going to be the only real oddity at first.

Funny thing is that Giant's Might stacks with Form of the Life Giver and Emergent Primordial, letting you become huge or gargantuan respectively

Also I forgot to mention, keep in mind Large size by itself doesn't increase your reach, and increasing your reach doesn't necessarily increase how far you threaten with AoOs.

Even if you get Huge size, you still only threaten spaces adjacent to you unless the power says otherwise, or you have another ability that lets you, with the big benefit being that you increase how many spaces are adjacent to you, and making yourself a bigger obstacle to go around.

4e was the best edition. I started playing 1e in 1985, fite me.

Honestly it was generic enough to allow a ton of refluffing. Also, no caster supremacy (mostly) and this is coming from someone who's fave class is wiz. I hate obviating someone's class. That's not d&d to me.
I was playing a ranger in 4e and for a striker, yes he sucked. He still could kick a vampire's ass, no problem.

Each edition has become even more if a hug box than the previous editions. 5e has but one save or die effect and it's pretty neutered, right? 4e didn't encourage the DM to outright kill either iirc.

D&d hasn't gotten a good edition yet lol

I thought Ranger was the most powerful striker class in the game

At least as far as raw damage output is concerned

It is.

Not that the other Strikers aren't good. Even the Vampire is functional, if a bit more boring since most of their powers are set in stone instead of having choices.

It once was but I thought the ranger had been deposed of the top spot by the 2nd version of the assassin?

My favorite striker was the avenger, hands down. My second avenger was very tricked out for stickiness.

No

The executioner is good enough, better than cha-rogue but worse than str-rogue. Very well balanced especially when compared to other Essentials classes, but O-ranger is still king of both DPR and Nova, through twin strike and blade cascade respectively

4th edition is literally worse than every edition of D&D, advanced or basic. Why would you do it?

What do other editions do better, famalam?

Ah my bad. I'm glad ranger is still top of the striker pile. My ranger wasn't made to be a dpr machine but that's my fault, not the system's.

It's the best for combat. If you need rules for rping, you're a big baby.
Here's your (You).