4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

I always love that picture. It shows how much of the complaints are purely about formatting from people with no understanding of how the system actually works.

shut up you moron, 4E is the best edition of D&D

>Use Monster manual 3 monsters and maths unless you want combats to last three hours each.
I'm pulling monsters out of the Essentials:Monster vault for this very reason.

As someone who likes 4e, I wouldn't say this without qualification.

4e is the most mechanically tight and well designed version of D&D. It has a specific design goal and it achieves it well, after you resolve the few niggling issues the system has.

But for a lot of people, 4e wasn't what they thought D&D should be. 5e, while a looser and less well designed system, does a better job of including those ideas, if only because it is a very vague and abstract system basically designed to be rebuilt by whatever group is using it at the time.

I love 4e and am bored to hell by 5e, but I can see why a lot of people in the core D&D demographic like it.

Save this and use the numbers for making your own monsters, they work great.

Skill challenges are to be used in the same narrative sequence, not for literally the same given problem. The skill challenge would be for the entire sequence of "going to see the king", not just for "getting past this one guard"

Also, it astounds me how that image could use actually diverse powers, yet would still be believed because no one knows how to read a 4e power

That's a bad way to run a skill challenge anyhow.

Also the powers:

- Invigorating is one of the keywords in the first one: if you're trained in Endurance, you gain temporary hitpoints (more with the Battlerager fighter) equal to your Constitution modifier when you hit with it.

- The second one has Rattling, which means that if you're trained in Intimidate, creatures you hit with this attack suffer a -2 to hit until the end of your next turn. Creatures that are immune to Fear are immune to this too, however.

- The last one is a light blade-only power that has an interesting thing: it hits for Reflex rather than for AC, which means that in most cases the defenses are likely to be lower there.

They're quite different, actually.

B/X and stuff before TSR are actually surprisingly well designed in a way that hides the intent. It's probably a sort of accidental good design.

Honestly 4e's books kind of remind me of chess books in a way. They've got a specific terminology that unless you're used to it you're going to miss key things, but once you do understand it becomes quite obvious what everything is.

It's kinda telling that they also use at wills, some of the simplest powers in the system by design, to try and prove their point.