/4eg/ Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons General

Modern XCOM works too (AFAIK, it was literally based on 4e).

The memes, Jack. People fell for them.

Oh yeah you're right. No clue how I've missed them.

Now I wonder if I can manage to make a couple new ones by adding them to the .part files.

4e is my favorite one shot game edition

character creation is fast
combat is explosive and balanced
the mechanics are tight

I always start in media res because that's the best way to start one shots.

"Oh shit you're 3 floors deep in a dungeon and the halfling porter fell into an acid trap with the bag containing the food, the map, and most of your treasure into an acid trap. What will you do?"

Then you just roll with it.

But I can't see myself ever running an actual 4e campaign.

You should find the XML files it uses and edit those.

It's a pretty simple layout. from what I remember.

So I've recently started an IRL 4e game. The players just hit level 4 but one of them couldn't find any items that really interested them. After talking things through with the player, we had the idea of them finding a blessed book full of rituals. I gave them the choice of either picking themselves up to the total gold value of a level 4 item, or of me picking them and giving them more bang for their buck, but not a hand picked selection.

Now I'm trying to figure out some fun and interesting rituals to give them access to.

I'm also giving extra support to the rituals system by having the PCs find ritual components/reagents, a GP value specifically for using with rituals and such.

spaceguy here, you're correct

Good!

Rituals are great, but you need to support them to really shine.

Don't be afraid of making up your own rituals as well.

And maybe have some rituals that are just way too powerful to use, but for way too high cost and/or unique reagents. Item creation rituals are pretty good for this.

Even with the 2010 update, this charactere builder seems to be missing MANY character options. I never subscribed to it myself, but I had a friend who did during 4e's heyday, and it was much more expansive than this. It doesn't even seem to have player's handbook II or III content, let alone more esoteric stuff like Heroes of Shadow.

Yeah. I found them in 03-base-items.part
I'm assuming those are the files you mean, they're XML and they have all of the boons from what I've seen.
I'm not so sure about the value of the internal-id field but I'd imagine that just has to be some unique identifier.
Or are there other files / other ways to edit those besides just doing it in a text editor of your choice?

If it has all the stuff, sure but I think the one in OP works just fine, you just have to run CBLoader and let the index file work its magic.

On a second look, it does have SOME phb II content, but only classes, no races. It's still severely lacking. What a disappointment.

This is the version I've been using with two patches instead of one. I tried the OP version with my IRL group but it didn't work on some and didn't have things like dark sun themes on others.

mediafire.com/file/38pt0j437xwz8gl/4e LCB Complete Setup.zip

I followed the installation instructions in the readme, and it's telling me that errors were encountered while loading. Should I put my log into a pastebin?

The CharacterBuilder.exe also encounters an error and fails to launch.

You want to launch with cbloader.exe, not the character builder.

"Errors Encountered While Loading"
Want me to copy the log file into a pastebin for you?

pastebin.com/k7Hem4tg

Oh well. Guess I just won't play 4e.

If I wanted to create a phantom thief styled character, what would I want to do to set that up?

Rogue and pick a lot of Stealth/Thievery skill powers?

user, you don't need to do use the character builder to make a pc.
Use funin.space and some google, it's outrageously easy to find whatever info you want, unless what you actually want to do is theorycraft pcs.

>phantom thief styled character
Er, I do not know that reference, user.
Help me out?

>unless what you actually want to do is theorycraft pcs
yes.

Gimme a minute, I think you're missing a patch or two. Currently uploading a complete package.

mega.nz/#!IclTgDrS!ZvoRfm1yIjWTrcQHgNDLIPocd6cEO1a8B5oHjs4FV3E

Here, try it with this and have another go. This one comes with all the updates and even some instructions.

user, one of the reasons 4e never really took off on Veeky Forums is because it doesn't serve the pseudo-intellectual/autistic needs of posters here to simply invent wacky, rules hair splitting shit that will never see play.
4e is very much a "you make your dude to play the game, not think about playing the game" kinda game.

Being fair, 4e does have its own fair share of theorycrafting, broken builds and optimised play which looks very different from normal play.

Then again, it's also super easy to ignore all that, and even at mid to low optimisation the system works fine.

Always have entertained the idea of a mostly skill based character with less emphasis on fighting, plus have been playing a lot of persona 5 recently

Will not work in 4e.

A core part of how 4e works is that everyone can fight. They might fight in different ways, less direct or more subtle, but 4e puts combat squarely at the center of the game and gives everyone tools to capable combatants.

This.
You will, and the game expects you to be able to, contribute to a fight on your own terms.
You can have a lot of skills and such, but if you can't add to combat, you are effectively damning the party.

Yea, thinking about this now, I feel it would work better in 3E or something, maybe I'll try making one in that edition instead

Sorry for sounding like a moron, I don't know much about 4E

It's cool, it's a fair question to ask.

4e is a system with a very specific, focused design. It does one thing- Action focused high fantasy- but it does it very well.

For something within that speciality, it's amazing. For anything else, you're better off going elsewhere.

What you can play in 4e is a pacifist cleric or a no-attack warlord but those are pretty specific cases.
Those characters still contribute greatly in combat just not by attacking / dealing damage.

Lazylords still deal a fuckton of damage, they just do so indirectly.

So I know I'm about three hours out of date, but on the people talking about half-level skill gain:

I agree that there should be skill influence from stuff like half level, but take this into account when considering the fact that there has not been explicit instruction.

In discussing the evolution of language, some anthropologists once conducted a study trying to determine how much education it takes to pick up flintknapping (stone tool production). They separated test subjects into three groups, and had them be instructed in the production of Oldowan (the simplest) stone tools by people who were already experts in flintknapping.

One group was instructed using english, as the control; another through gesture; and a third just watched with no instruction.

After a bunch of watching and imitating, they had the students of stone tool production go off and try to make Oldowan tools on their own. Of the people who only watched, and were not instructed in stool tool production at all, basically none of them were able to make their own tools. Of those few who did, they were unable to teach it to a new generation of people. (The people who were instructed in english were nearly perfect at passing it on and producing themselves; the gestural people got about 75%)

I'm not saying that it's impossible to pick anything up by osmosis - but Oldowan tools can be effectively learned in the first few weeks of a semester of a flintknapping class. Lockpicking is a lot more complex than that, and having receieved no instruction, it seems like the barbarian isn't gonna be able to do it.

Literally Thief of Legend.

funin.space/compendium/epicdestiny/Thief-of-Legend.html

Why are there two threads BTW?

It seems to be working perfectly now.
Thank you, my good sir!
You are a gentleman and a scholar!

Glad it works for you now. I'm guessing the one you tried initially was missing a patch or something. It's a bit hard to diagnose from the logfiles so it's usually easier to start all over again with something that I know to work.

(posting here too)

That was me.

I have sorta started. Going to the movies, will probably not post about it today, but gonna post tomorrow maybe, if interested.

Another thing - optimised 4e play generally revolved around the game as it was played. The notions of alpha-striking and the basics of defending basically made sense and were incorporated for anyone that played 4e for a while - bust out your strongest powers at the beginning of a fight and it's basically won; the Defender has to make people not want to attack him or his allies, you want to reach the frontlines as fast as possible if you're anything but a ranged dude like a controller or similar...

Ultimately 4e's optimisation guys were people that actually played the game a bunch and understood the game rather than just reading the rules.

The only issue I had with a lot of the charop for 4e is that it very much treated every class in a bubble and if you had more than a 30% chance of failure, you were doing it wrong.
The core math of the game is based on a 55/45% chance of success on your own, but you aren't on your own, you have an entire party that is supposed to be working with you, giving you bonuses, providing CA, supporting your success as you support theirs.
Imo, 4e is one of the few games where white room theorizing ill serves the game due to how party focused it is.

Most 4e optimization is based around the idea of being good regardless of the rest of your party

The strongest 4e optimization is full-party optimization, stuff like the radiant mafia, but that sort of thing relies on everyone intentionally building characters to accomplish the same goal, and while asking people to fill out the standard party roles is easy, asking everyone to play exactly the right build in the right class in that role is generally not a nice thing to do

Hey /4eg/ im fifth edition guy and think that while 4e isnt for me alot of the mechanics seem interesting and id like to implement them, anyone care to elaborate on the 1-hp minions?

Minions are lesser foes designed to speed along the game by providing enemies that while threatening, are also easily dispatched. It lends a heroic air to the game, bolsters the enemy forces, and allows you to have more heads on field with less book keeping.
I know a few guys who run 5e who use minions in their own games.

So, who here likes 4e for the refreshing new "generic D&D" lore it used? Replacing the Great Wheel with the World Axis, creating a not!Greyhawk default pantheon, Arkhosia, Bael Turath, the Eladrin-Elf-Drow split, and all that?

You familiar with the concept of easily dispatched foes who come in hordes but fall swiftly to the heroes? Orcs against Legolas and Gimli in Lord of the Rings, most nameless swordsmen in Conan, characters like that? The minions role is a way to more easily replicate those kinds of mooks in your games.

>So, who here likes 4e for the refreshing new "generic D&D" lore it used? Replacing the Great Wheel with the World Axis, creating a not!Greyhawk default pantheon, Arkhosia, Bael Turath, the Eladrin-Elf-Drow split, and all that?

Yeah, man. The great wheel can suck my dick.

I really like the Eladrin-Elf-Drow split and the new default pantheon but I don't care (or know much) about the other things you mentioned.

4e's lore is generally pretty high quality, but more important than that I think it's basically never outright stupid.

There's lots of great setting details, like the bowl-shaped city at the bottom of the Astral Sea said to have been thrown there by Moradin.

Got into 4e about a year ago with my friends, any advice for a druid summoner? About to hit level 9.

I made a bard that had a +4 bonus to every untrained skill, and additional skill bonuses that made her exceptionally skilled at most things but athletics
The only really big benefit from this beyond the rare skill challenge was for rituals, because I could do stupid combinations of things
The best thing I ever did that subverted the rules never actually required a skill challenge beyond a diplomacy check.

I agree 100%, but one could argue that the DC to unlock a lock should be a level-based challenge
But then why artificially inflate both the skill roll AND the DC, when you could just not have the half-level at all?

This false growth (you attack with +1 against a monster with +1 AC) is because players love big numbers. Seeing your hero go from +6 attack to +30 is cool, even if the enemy AC grew from 16 to 40.

The bad part is what I call the jRPG slime effect: at first level you fight green slimes, at 10th you fight red slimes and at 20th you fight blue slimes, all identical, only different in raw numbers. Leads to a bloat on the Monsters Manual.

5e did this away with the bounded accuracy, but the theme of the game is other. 4e is about heroes that become gods. 5e is about hobos becoming heroes.

The way I look at it, the half-level to skill just exemplifies how getting more powerful in general makes you just better at everything.

A 10th level barbarian didn't "pick up training" from the 1st level rogue, when he uses the same bonus the rogue used 9 levels ago (lets say he's a DEX-barian, I remember that being a path), it's because he's high on spirits.

His hand is guided by spirits. Prankster spirits whisper into his ears, and he can hear them ever more clearly. A thousand dead thieves scream at him from beyond the veil as he triggers the poison dart trap, then laughs off the poison because he is an STR primary class with a good con save.

Whirling Barbarians are the Dexterity Barbarians, didn't have a really good Con save but who the fuck didn't take Endurance as a Barbarian.

Speaking of which, Barbarian|Rogue isn't that bad of a Hybrid.

My favorite meme build

Bugbear
Barbarian
Avalanche Strike
Mordencrad

lol, 6d8 first level encounter power

You ever try to run polearm shinnanigans with a fighter build?

I had one set up that was designed to shut monsters down with an immobilize standard attack at level 11.

They are basically just stuck there twiddling their thumbs while you've got reach.

They're basically like said, enemies that are in big hordes, can do enough damage to be potentially a threat in giant waves but go down in big waves as well.

Played 5e , 3e and OSR, i am reading 4th edition ph and the first thing i notice is how it haves small amount of fluff, do 4th editions takes away classes rp stuff for combat stuff?

No?

Character creation is only fast at level 1, and combat is only explosive with the MM3 maths. 4e had great promise, but shonky math out the outset, inconsistent vision, and the haters all contributed to killing it.

>The core math of the game is based on a 55/45% chance of success on your own
That was a horrible mistake.

It just separates the "RP stuff" (fluff" from the "Rules stuff" (crunch) much more cleanly than other editions.

And why is that?
Success is weighted in an 11+ dice roll, and only goes up with group support. I don't believe that success should be automatic, and that the drive to have every attack land on a 5+ with at least a +3/1d12 weapon is misguided at best, actively working against the grain of the game at worst.

Misses suck. They make the game stagnate, for both sides. They should not happen more than a quarter of the time imo.

Pegging the success at 5+ also means that you are allowed to have enemies with a bigger range of AC, with it mattering less (having an enemy with expected AC +/-5 means you hit only 1/3rd more/less, instead of half as with a success on 10+),

4e has piqued my interest, but the memes...
>it's too much like a video game
>it's too different
>just play Pathfinder, or 5e

They dissuade my philistine friends. Nonetheless, I sense there could be things worth taking inspiration from in this edition, that may be imported to others. What do you think? What 4e content is worth sneaking into other editions, namely 5e?

>Misses suck. They make the game stagnate, for the players
Get it right, user, the only ones who actually care about "failure" are players, especially those who want to win at the game.

Monster and encounter design in general.

Although I've heard that monster design got a lot better in Volo.

Aside from that, skill challenges and maybe some version of the improvised action table.

Enemies also miss, doofus. It sucks when my custom monster can't land a goddamn hit because dice hate me.

As the DM, your misses are an unavoidable situation because you will roll more dice than the players.
It is countered by you getting more crits than all the players put together.

Aye, but with 50% hit chance as the "average" I can have a monster miss all their attacks before they even get to move, even in a not alpha-striking setup.

It's likely to happen a lot, in fact.

With 5+ it's a lot less likely, and trading blows is more fun than missing. All that nice terrain (mostly) goes to waste if everyone misses their repositioning powers.

Of course, I guess you could counter that by just putting a miss effect (non damaging) on fucking everything that monsters do. That could work.

PCs are the ones with the 50/50, not monsters.
That actually depends on the monsters role and type.

failure is good. it builds character.
Warhammer RPG's have you succeed about a 1/3 of the time, and it just makes the game more challenging.

Also many powers still have effects that occur even if you miss.

PCs are 50/50? For skill DCs in PHB 1 maaaybe, but for attacks I feel like its more like 75/25.

75/25 is what the game ended up settling on, but unfortunately it did this via feat taxes and assumed optimization.

55% hit rate is what you will probably have with a starting 18 in your main stat, no expertise, and either implement attacks or a +2 proficiency weapon, falling to an average 50% in paragon and an average 45% in epic

Assuming a starting 20 in your main stat, expertise, and either accurate implement proficiency or a +3 proficiency weapon your hit rate will be pretty consistently 70%, rising up to 80% or higher with good party support

Personally? I say fluff. 4e had a lot of awesome fluff to it, sometimes laid bare, sometimes tucked away like a gem. The divide between Gods and Primal Spirits finally made druids actually feel worthy of being a separate class and not just a Captain Ethnic version of a nature priest. The World Axis was built from the grounds up to make sense and actually be fun to play in. Really, you could do a hell of a lot worse rather than bring over stuff from 4e in terms of fluff.

But user! MUH BLOOD WAR! ;_;

You mean the same Blood War that's STILL present in 4th edition and which even got its own 4e Dragon Magazine articles talking about it? The war between Devil and Demon that is stated in books as early as the Manual of Planes that it exists and is right about ready to kick back into momentum?

The *only* grounds Planescapefags have to whinge about that stupid Blood War is that it's not the be-all, end-all revolving point of the cosmology anymore - it's one aspect of the setting to explore IF you want to, not dominating everything about planehopping. And if that's what they're complaining about, then fuck 'em.

>Captain Ethnic
kek

Go the jRPG route, with 95% hit chance. Work on damage and HP to keep the durability of monsters in 4 rounds in average as intended by design.

That's also not ideal, cause it removes the need for positioning for flank and other actually interesting stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure 65-75% as baseline works out best in practice.

yes, cause why account for probability when you can assume inevitability?

IRL, most attacks miss.

For the record, I'd be totally fine with a no-roll system where you could, say, spend dodge and precision tokens as a double blind to decide if you hit, miss, or graze instead of rolling a d20.

It's just not how 4e is built.

Not sure what that has to do wit ha game about larger than life heroes who take 6 seconds for every attack, but sure.

>Not sure what that has to do wit ha game about larger than life heroes who take 6 seconds for every attack, but sure.

Why are you such a little shit?

Because you make it easy :^)

I don't understand why you engage people if your only interest is in driving them away. There are better ways of getting attention.

4e is explicitly gamist, IRL matters less than what is fun

And besides, moreso than any other D&D edition, 4e runs with the idea that HP is an arbitrary representation, so maybe most attacks are missing, just not by enough to count as a "miss"

65% for the absolute worst you can do works out just fine. The assumption of 55% hit rate is one of the factors that made release 4E such a piece of shit.

Because I actually played the game when it came out. A whiff-fest is not fun and neither is the leader constantly missing the attacks he's supposed to be buffing the party's hit chance with. It also made +2 weapons a pain in the fucking ass to use.

This is actually useful to hear. A group of friends and I are working on a 4e successor game of sorts, and as part of our core math we've set a 65% hit chance as a baseline, along with tuning HP and damage to ensure an ordinary combat is over in 3-5 rounds, averaging out at 4. I'm currently doing some tests with arbitrary numbers, but it seems to work okay.

As long as it's still highly tactical I'm fine with that length. I only get pissy if it's brainless combat that lasts that long.