As of late...

"Slowly I turn"

Because it's a fairly good system that simultaneously fails at being D&D.

>Also points of light was garbage for people who need a power fantasy.

How does a bare bones structure that let the GM fill in the gaps any more of a power fantasy than other more established and rigidly structured settings?

Why do I see people shitting on "power fantasies" on Veeky Forums? What's wrong with them? Isn't D&D supposed to be a power fantasy about being big damn heroes killing big damn villains in fantasyland?

Some people are pretentious and pretend they're better than/above such things, acting like it makes them superior and, in a way, creating their own form of smug, up their own ass power fantasy.

>i wonder why.
the 2 main reasons why 4e has come to be so scorned here is, in my opinion, a mix between a botched launch with lots of unfulfilled promises (see: dnd insider, for example) and the fact that they changed too much too fast. had they released 4e and 5e in reverse order, so that the changes were more gradual, it might have been a different story.
then people went on and found their own reasons to hate it so they didnt just have "shitty release" and "not 3.5" as arguments. and since there are enough flaws inherent in 4e's system there were many reasons to be found.

i still think it's better than 3.5 and always has been

It made a tactical RPG even more explicit about it's miniature wargame-derived nature. What it did not address was the game in any situation other than combat.

4E was a very, very good approximation of an old-school SRPG. If you played it that way it was great. If you expected epic stories around the mighty feats you pulled off that did not involve killing things, you were playing the wrong game.

>If you expected epic stories around the mighty feats you pulled off that did not involve killing things, you were playing the wrong game.

I'm not sure what you were doing wrong, my group never had any trouble with this.

It's not like 3.5 did more on that side anyway, beyond 'I win' spells and a clusterfuck of bad rules that generally served to slow the game down while the GM looked them up, tried to puzzle them out and then just ignored them.

If you can do it reliably and tack it onto something else useful(Dungeoncrasher, whizzards), forced movement in 3.5 is arguably stronger than it is in 4E due to negating or enabling the full attack mechanic, plus healing is a total fucking non-issue for the vast majority of the game because of how efficient wands are.

>No it didn't. Healing is based on lower power 4e.

...no it isn't. 5e healing surges are extra healing. 4e Healing Surges were a cap on all healing. Including magic healing.

People are realizing that it was really good after being forced to suffer the 3.5isms of 5th Ed.

Nerds hate change, so they hated on it. But looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious that a great deal of what in introduced was far superior to how 5th Ed handles things.

>Also points of light was garbage for people who need a power fantasy.

What.

How does a basic skeleton world designed for the DM to flesh out as they wish interrupt a player's power fantasy? You'd think it would be much better for power fantasies than places like Forgotten Realms, which are bloated with powerful NPCs that steal the spotlight from PCs.

>If you expected epic stories around the mighty feats you pulled off that did not involve killing things, you were playing the wrong game.

I think that's less a problem with the game, and more a problem with how you interpreted the language of the game. You felt like the language was more 'gamey' so you decided it was more focused on tactical combat.

In reality, there 4e and 3.5 have the exact same potential for storytelling, since pretty much all of that is something the DM weaves around the rules.

Its been long enough that people who played it in their teens can get nostalgic about it now.

>I never played AD&D but I swear to god it was always about killing shit
This is how I know all you know of AD&D, whether 1e or 2e, is Meme of Horrors

If you actually follow the rules, it's unplayable. Every round takes forever just to calculate modifiers because everyone is throwing them every which way. The business model was fucked, putting formerly core classes into later versions of the PHB.

It failed because it deserved to fail.

Stop blaming games because you have dyscalculia. It takes no effort to track that shit if you aren't retarded.

>Every round takes forever just to calculate modifiers because everyone is throwing them every which way.

Yeah, maybe if you have legit brain problems, sure.

But there was a Warcraft 3.5 book, and it didn't sell well.

Beacuse there's no Elminster to tell you what to do and how to do it, and then have Drizzt do it anyways while being way cooler than you can ever be. Anything other than that is snowflake power fantasy, obviously.

can anyway get CBloader to work? i keep getting the encryption error.

I'm curious to look into 4e, I skipped over it entirely when it was relevant because I was playing Fate.

Do I want original books or essentials? Also, is there a particular trove for it I can check out or should I just hit up the usual PDF share threads?

should be able to find pdfs. Either version is good, but I like the originals better. Better flavor, better options, uncucked Paladins...

Essentials is (For most classes) a lot more simple but also more limited and doesn't scale well outside heroic.

Essentials sounds like a sort of best of compilation but it's new material. It was an attempt to respond to the stated complaints of people that didn't like 4e and it's noteworthy thing was taking away maneuvers from fighters and replacing them with better generic attacks plus stances. It failed to win over a single person who was mad at 4e, and people who already liked 4e preferred the material that won them over in the first place.

It's perfectly ok material to use in a game, but if you want to get why people liked 4e just read the PHB1 warlord.

>How does a bare bones structure

It's easier for a DM to pick stuff that's good and ignore stuff that's bad, then it is to create uniformly good stuff apropos nothing.

That's the advantage that the Realms has.

4e was always best in retrospect because before MM3 math it sucked. Core 4e is a garbage experience with a lot of great ideas.

Core 4e has the Warlord and that's good enough for me.

Boss monsters were pretty lame tho

Everybody's really excited about MM3 math on a business card, because it helped a ton, but MM1 was honestly pretty adequate. And MM2 was noticeably better than MM1 (minions more threatening, mainly).

>5th went back to effectively 3.5 edition rules

how retarded can you be?

>5e Internet Defense Force

Shit game, too many french people.

Roleplaying games are all about amateur dramatics right now, everything else is badwrongfun. If you care about say, mechanics, you should be playing video games instead apparently.

What if I say I care about amateur dramatics being mechanically supported by the system we're playing? Is that roll-playing? Is that still a thing?

I just don't understand the hate for it. I mean people are getting upset about others wanting a different style of game from them. It's literally getting upset over a difference of opinion/taste.

Actually, it's just a resurgence of 4urries wanting their game to not be dead.

Wrong but you can go ahead and be retarded.

Let's look at the monster roles and how to conflate them. Elite artillery? Check. Solo brute? Check. Solo brute soldier? Check check check...

All in all, great fun, if you knew how to play. If you don't, well you get the constant complaining you saw here day in, day out on tg. SSDD

See, the fact that you assume people don't know how to play a wargame that has such basic rules that you can't fuck up anything unless you go out of your way to do so.......oh wait, that's a lie. There's plenty of trap options and stupid choices in 4e, its just that they're much better hidden than other games.

I'm not assuming anything. I can just state my stance without an agenda, you know? It doesn't matter to me if anyone likes 4e or not, just tossing my opinion out there, too!

It's partially because people are playing D&D on online services like Roll20 more often. 4e was originally going to be made to play online as well as the table but the Online Devs working on that shit dropped the ball and the online portion of the game was never released. Now that people have tried playing 4e online people have started to give it a chance. One of the main complaints about 4e at the time was it was too video gamey and not as fun to play on table tops.

Another reason why people have started liking 4e is because people got bored playing 5e with it's snail pace content release schedule. I've been playing 5e for 2 years and with the little they have released, the game has become repetitive. If you play one class variant you pretty much played them all and there's not enough character customization to make characters feel that different as well as 5e just toning things down to point of making the system a little to bland and boring.

>but the Online Devs working on that shit dropped the ball
Way to understate a murder suicide. And it was literally one dev working on it, who didn't comment his shit so that others could take over if anything happened.

>As of late, I've noticed that D&D 4e has been getting some recognition as a fairly good system here in Veeky Forums

Guys, I am going to run my first 4th edition game for a party of fighter, cleric, rogue and wizard, and I have like 4-5 encounter ideas, but I don't feel like it warrants a separate thread, would hate to bump something off the board.

Would anyone be willing to brainstorm through the nuances of those fights with me? I'm trying to make sure I understand all the minion/artillery/lurker/elite/solo stuff.

Go ahead, I'm listening.

What levels are they? Anything notable about their abilities?

Great, thank you very much for your time.
They're not particularly optimized. They know their roles and know what sounds cool
-a 2 handed specialized fighter
-a rogue with a shortsword / dagger, classic assassin type
-a wizard with lots of slows and control
-a cleric - our most shy player, wants to just hang out with others, drink beer, and help out, not necessarily a huge roleplayer, doesn't mind staying in the shadow, stays in the back, no melee skills
-everyone has 3 at wills at level 1 because I wanted to give everyone even more options for fun (human wizard has 4)
-I printed everyone a sheet with easy reference to all their abilities; they're all board gamers primarily that just got into playing with me, so aside from their character sheets they also have easy cheatsheets of abilities

They all start off at level 1.

I'm trying to engage them into the narrative. The first fight will be more "narrative" than "tactical" - i.e. they manage to break away from an execution squad, get the upper hand quickly; the rogue has the opportunity to free himself with his dexterity, the fighter can just rip the ropes apart and smash his executor's head in, the wizard has a time to throw out a prestidigitation, etc. In this fight, I predict sticking with more of a "theatre of the mind", since their executors aren't meant to put a big fight at all.

They run away from their pursuers, their only clue leading them to an old armory, where they may manage to stock up on gear taken away from there. when they spend a few minutes there and gear up, they will trip over some of the living equipment in there. I plan on a single big armor as a Brute and 2-3 living swords to act as his support, trying to strike into fleshy backs of the wizard and cleric.

(cont)

When they get out of there, they will realize that the armory is connected to some sort of an underground road that connects two parts of an otherwise very hard to maneuver jungle. The tunnel is long abandoned and they'll meet a low-tier Myconid and a whole bunch of spores growing from walls. The Myconid himself is a pushover, but the problem with this fight is the spores, which are a bunch of 1-hp Minions that each, however, shoot a low-damage acid that has 2 squares of range - the damage is low, but if they prolong their stay or position improperly, it can accumulate and provoke more attrition. The Myconid himself is just a big shroom to fight in a very difficult environment. I was considering some sort of a gaseous, slow-moving cloud of vapor that would be another Minion-tier, but would explode onto all melees, so either the Defender would have to facetank it or it would have to be taken from a distance.

All of this is supposed to contribute to environmental storytelling, by the way. It makes sense in my head; I'd rather not have kobolds out of nowhere because we need a level 1 beat'em up. The Myconid is just there growing around a patch of mushrooms and just so incidentally happens to be blocking a path to safety.

When they emerge at the other end it will turn out that they were tracked by their oppressor's jungle man - think Kraven from Spider-Man - and his pet snake. The pet snake is supposed to be an Elite, and the jungle man is meant to be a leader with a bow, giving the snake buffs and ranged support. Should the large snake fall, the man will escape into the jungle, setting up for the party's nemesis or, perhaps, maybe, getting killed if the party plays it smart.

No. It's that a horde of min-maxing powergamers showed up, who instead of using the rules to try to make a character that rings true in the imaginary world that they have a hand at creating, use the rules to "win teh gaem." Furthermore, it was a lot easier to pander to that kind of player to sell half-baked supplements and new editions with a lot shorter turnaround.

>Too quick on the post...
This pandering changed the tone of the products available on the market, and basically pushed the people who were into RPGs for any other purpose to the fringes, where we are scrabbling to hold on to the scraps of what tabletop used to be.

>The first fight will be more "narrative" than "tactical"

Sounds like a good spot for a skill challenge. The rules in the DMG are rather ill explained, so use this:

runagame.net/2013/08/4e-skill-challenge-example.html

> I plan on a single big armor as a Brute and 2-3 living swords to act as his support, trying to strike into fleshy backs of the wizard and cleric.

Add some interactable terrain/doodads, like weapon racks/shelves, armor suits, things the characters can use as cover or tip over on to enemies/to create difficult terrain for the animated armor. Maybe make it so the animated armor can pick up weapon racks and throw the weapons at them as a (possibly AoE) ranged attack. Read up on improvised actions, use the table in the rules compendium if you can find it.

>The tunnel is long abandoned and they'll meet a low-tier Myconid and a whole bunch of spores growing from walls. The Myconid himself is a pushover, but the problem with this fight is the spores, which are a bunch of 1-hp Minions that each, however, shoot a low-damage acid that has 2 squares of range - the damage is low, but if they prolong their stay or position improperly, it can accumulate and provoke more attrition.

You may want to stat them as traps instead, but minions work too I guess. I feel like this could possibly be cheesed by ranged weaponry (or just by running away; it doesn't sound like the myconid would be too keen on giving chase), so make sure the tunnel has some twists, turns and stalag-... whatevers to use as cover for the shrooms.

>When they emerge at the other end it will turn out that they were tracked by their oppressor's jungle man - think Kraven from Spider-Man - and his pet snake

I feel like the snake should be a constrictor, wrestling with those is fun for the whole family.

Also, maybe have him set a few log/pit/wire/noose traps around. Maybe have the snake grapple and drag allies into spike pits or hold them still while a log trap swings down.

>Read up on improvised actions, use the table in the rules compendium if you can find it.

I actually found these, not sure how good they are, but they are pretty nice enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?307923-4e-DM-Cheat-Sheet

Fantastic, thanks for the link.
All of those sound like great advice, will consider them. I'm just hoping not to cause a TPK immediately, but that can probably be adapted on the flow.

The spores are supposed to be minions because the idea is that while they can be killed from a range, you have to first position yourself in such a spot where you will be clear from danger, and then you are not using actions killing the myconid. Yes, the entire Myconid lair is basically done as a labirynth of extremely cramped corridors. The gaseous cloud is supposed to be there as an additional pressure thing. It's meant to be somewhat tricky and attrition based, but not necessarily a fight to the death. Just to ease the players to the idea of movement on the board and enemies.

I dunno. I admit that it felt rough there for a while. But I think that kind of wound down a long time ago. As the central driving force of gaming culture, I mean. Honestly, think it was winding down by the time 4e was released. I think the (understandable but not altogether accurate) impression that 4e is the kind of game you described was one of the reasons it didn't catch on better. I have more access to to more variety of games (including those focused on story or character or world or what have you) now than I have at any time in my life as well as more access to people with whom to play them and talk about them.

I mean, that culture and mentality never went away and you still see products that do a good job of supporting it. Pathfinder is great for making wacky, twinked out characters if that's what you're into (and can be if you're not so long as you don't get a bad mix of gaming philosophies). But I don't feel that the players who like immersion and story and whatnot are an oppressed minority now. Honestly, I question whether we ever really were as much as we thought.

Honestly 4e is incredibly fun.

Most of the problems with having insanely long fights got solved by MM3.

I personally prefer playing with an essentials only campaign because most of the core archetypes are covered effectively and there is way way less rules bloat especially now that the 4e tools are less available.

Nerath/Nentir Vale is an excellent setting that avoids most of the problems of FR simply by the fact that it has been barely detailed. In some ways it feels like an old school pre-Wars Greyhawk setting.

The major problem I have with 4e is that it's almost mandatory to play with a battlegrid. That's not inherently a problem but sometimes it's fun to play with Theatre of the Mind and personally I think 5e is stronger with that.

All in all I like 4e and and 5e for different things

I played Pathfinder for a bit and they always seemed to be shoving new (broken, as always) rules and classes and feats and spells out with first party material, and third party was always a shitshow.

That said, I wouldn't really know about OP shovelware. I quickly jumped ship from Pathfinder to GURPS.

I think 4e's biggest flaw is that they were pandering to the wrong crowd. They thought they had a good idea to capture the video game / MMO market by making their game very tactical with lots of options, but in doing so they threw out the aspects that their existing market wanted. You don't market trucks to soccer moms, even very nice trucks.

Also, kind of petty and random but I found all the first-person flavor text extremely annoying and pretentious. Like I can't be trusted to think of how a tripping attack might look.

>complaining about 5e defense force in an obvious 4e shill thread

>They thought they had a good idea to capture the video game / MMO market by making their game very tactical with lots of options

It's funny because MMOs universally require 0 skill.

This!

Either you go on auto-pilot to complete raids or you get your ass kicked because you weren't high leveled enough sorta like 3.PF

>MMO crowd
But thats just the MMO boogeyman.
Tactical combat isnt "the MMO crowd"
The reason i got excited about 4E is because someone told me its Final Fantasy tactics the Pen and Paper RPG.

Speak for yourself. As someone who loves RPGs, the clear layouts, standardised formatting and easy to understand rules were a fucking blessing compared to so many other games with awkward, unintuitive and generally crap layouts with little to no usability features whatsoever.

It really is.

"It look pretty so it's gud."

>the hurr all gms suck analogy
The funny part is that only on Veeky Forums, well known for being a cesspit of people who literally do not even play the game or do not have groups because they are socially dysfunctional, do you find this rampant opinion that GMs are shit until proven otherwise.

You are a fucking imbecile if you think a clear, easy to use layout is 'it looks pretty'. It is a matter of pure practicality and set a good example that literally every other RPG could benefit from.

If anything, it looked pretty ugly, practicality aside.

I would toss in a repeating trap/environmental effect or 2 at the Kraven battle to keep them from being focus fired down.
I'd also recommend you keep the battlefields varied, different height variations, rubble, equipment strewn about when appropriate.
>standardised formatting and easy to understand rules were a fucking blessing compared to so many other games with awkward, unintuitive and generally crap layouts with little to no usability features whatsoever.
This. Both player and GM have easy to read and understand at a glance formatting, and players do not need to learn multiple sub-systems in order to enjoy different ways to play the game. Shit like that is enjoyed by Veeky Forums for a reason.
And why is that?

>And why is that?
It was very bland looking, and the art was bad imo.

I still think it was very practical. Rules language /power layout >>>> natural language/"paragraphs with a bolded name"

Practical sense sorta leans against ostentatious displays.
>art was bad
I disagree as it was the first time since early 3e that every race had a fairly distinct style that you could recognize at a glance.
Dwarves maintained strong geometric symmetry in their design, for instance, Tieflings tended towards bold, dark colors in clothing that was unrestrictive, Dragonborn's armor and building design was emblematic of scales.

When it comes to art it's very much personal preference. I really like the more modern digital art we see these days, I think it's a lot clearer and cleaner, while a lot of the old school art people seem to fawn over just strikes me as rather cluttered and muddled.

That's what makes it a great game. You get to kill all the French people.

Is that some of the the fourth edition iconic character trying to resurrect the 3.X Iconic fighter?

Because it didn't feel like wow. Just same old dnd.
>Oh my elves are purple instead of white oh wait, I already have drows.

I liked 4E but that's because to me it felt more like FATAL than 3.5 did.

>4e has been getting some recognition as a fairly good system here in Veeky Forums almost 10 years after its initial release. I wonder why.
Because nobody masturbates over 3.5 "system mastery" any more.

>I don't know what I'm talking about: the post

>Shilling a dead game
That word doesn't mean what you think it does. Hey try sunshine. It might help your critical thinking processes.

>>Shilling a dead game
That is not dead which can eternal lie...

It was a version of D&D that dared to innovate, which turned off a lot of people. Now D&D is just holdovers from the 70's, held together more by nostalgia than good game design. I won't claim that 4E was perfect, but it did what it set out to do very well.

>4e is because they wanted to ripoff MMOs!
I say this as someone who has never really enjoyed 4e: No, they wanted to fix a lot of criticisms of 3.5 while.

- Every class has a competency floor in combat, thanks to the universal AEDU power system. Plus, Role design which is simply a codified acknowledgement of relationships that have always existed D&D. So long as you understand your class' brand of efficacy you will have something you can do.

- Eliminating saving throws, which was one of the ways spells were so much more reliable, in favor of additional static defenses. Plus more flexibility in how those defenses are figured, which helps broaden the sorts of ability scores or defenses of characters across classes and roles. Further bridging the gap or everybody getting some "effect on a miss" powers.

- The stream-lined categorical skill system, and how you were simply trained or untrained, meant it took less work to allow a character to have a presence in a variety of out-of-combat scenarios.

- Every power is more self contained and has an explicit structure baked into to it; virtually no cross-referencing needed.

- The item property/accuracy bonus system helped make more weapon types are viable and fun across a campaign's lifespan.

- The Paragon/Epic choices mirrored the narrative weight of character defining PrCs without having quite so much inconsistency or abusability.

And on top of all of that they have an updated Feat system, which was the most interesting and defining elements of 3.5.

4e's problem is a UX one. In the interest of clarity 4e is quick to communicate everything in explicitly mechanical terms, but that just leads many people to engage with it in the same restricted and sterilized way. Other games are more verbal and thus convey more trappings in their explanations of things, which means there's more consideration by players of those things. Players have to chew more gristle, and they glean narrative as a fringe benefit.

Looking back over 3.5 rules because i started playing with an oldfag grognard irl. It actually looks like a solid game even thought I remember otherwise. I think monsters that couldn't be critically hit and monsters with spell resistance were underused.

>4e's problem is a UX one. In the interest of clarity 4e is quick to communicate everything in explicitly mechanical terms, but that just leads many people to engage with it in the same restricted and sterilized way.
So you're saying gamers are too dumb to be given just the facts?

Whew.

>I think monsters that couldn't be critically hit and monsters with spell resistance were underused.
>Critical Hits
>Mattering
>Spell Resistance
>Mattering
The rules are shit. Damage doesn't matter when the Wizard can invalidate encounters with one of dozens of spells that don't allow SR.

This was weirdly proven true with 5e. For some reason, a certain portion of the D&D fanbase craves obfuscation, for systems to conceal things from them and not be direct. Its fucking weird IMO.

the critical hits don't matter, but it means that they also don't take damage from sneak attack dice. i didn't see a lot of spells that didn't have spell resist or saves, but i haven't played in a while and i didn't look over everything. I remember the game would start breaking down around level 5 if you let a wizard do what they wanted, but with more creative dm's I don't think that would be the case. I could be wrong though.

It basically did what I was trying to do with 3.P
I noticed that each class in 3.P got their own cool thing, rage powers, rouge talents, so on, but they just kinda sucked. Like most of them were kinda weak and only focused on one area, whereas magic was incredibly powerful and incredibly versatile. The magic system itself was actually quite nice, and had a lot of really cool tricks, so I thought why not just port that around? I tried giving every class spell like abilities that were thematic, knock for rouge, Ox's strength for fighter and so on, but it would have been a massive undertaking. DnD 4e did all that with utility powers.

I'm waiting for the community to realize how strong healing is compared to the rest of the spells. Almost every spell that isn't a variation of fireball or cure wounds isn't worth casting in combat ever. Bless actually does nothing.

Actually, yeah, around level 5 and 6 is when the game starts breaking down. There's an fan ruleset called e6 that caps levels at 6 and after that, XP gets you a new feat.

There's a surprising amount of versatile spells that don't allow SR. A few big ones are Grease (1st level, so you're drowning in it at levels 5+), Glitterdust (General purpose debuff, and a brutal one too), Wall of Stone (Higher level, but good battlefield control against non-flyers), Black Tentacles (Good control), Forcecage (Put them in time-out), Time Stop (obviously good), and Summon Monster I-IX can easily flood the battlefield with actions.

And creative GMs can't really curb the wizard without gimping them AND only throwing weak enemies so the fighters can keep up without a wizard by their side. It's a real mess.

If you're married to d20, I suggest 4e D&D or Fantasy Craft.

It blows my mind. People want to have to muddle through things. I've had people get livid over me correcting something EXPLICITLY incorrect before.

I'm completely fine with 5e. The other guy wants to DM a game of 3.5, so I am playing a wizard in his game.

I think it's part of the reason people like 5e. Instead of the muddled, hard to use mess of 3.PF it's a less muddled, easier to use mess which is still bland and vague enough that you can reinterpret it into whatever your preferred form of D&D looks like. It only really exists for people to project their nostalgic/idealised version of 'What D&D is' onto it, even if the game they remember never existed.

Actually, thats a question I've been meaning to ask, and I might as well ask it here instead of making my own thread.

What were the largest attempts to 'fix' the 3.P imbalance issues? Don't get me wrong I know its a mostly pointless endeavor, and it would be much easier to pick up a new game, this is more of a historical question. What sorts of things did people try?

The easiest fix is banning certain bad content and sticking to a certain tier of classes.

Look up the 3.5/PF tier list, it rates classes based on their abilities. As long as everyone plays classes within a certain tier/tier range, the game works a lot better. Tier 3/4 is my preference, although some people prefer tier 1/2 so everyone can play busted as fuck fullcasters.