Prove to me that 4E isn't an irredeemable pile of shit

I feel like the word MMO should be in the middle really

>Correct me if I'm wrong
Sure.

Pathfinder was created because Wizards of the Coast wanted to switch to producing Dragon and Dungeon magazines in-house instead of outsourcing them to a third party publisher.

Said third-party publisher (Paizo) obviously wasn't a fan of that decision, so they decided to make their own version of D&D with blackjack and hookers.

Wizards of the Coast had updated the open license with their newest edition (4e) to keep random companies from copy-pasting their game and selling it as an "original", but due to some legalize dreamed up by Ryan "Every Project I Manage Fails" Dancey, the 3.5 open license is valid forever.

Also Paizo made big money publishing 3.5 content in Dragon and Dungeon magazines, so it makes sense that they'd stick with familiar ground.

>Ryan Dancey

Did the MIRRION DORRAR KICKSTARTER Pathfinder MMO ever come out, or is he just rolling in the piles of cash Pathfags gave him?

Burden of proof OP

Can't prove a null set, mate.

We should make a /4e hatin' general/, at least we wouldn't have to deal with the same shitty bait threads every other day.

Well first of all

>irredeemable

I dunno if a tabletop RPG can perform an evil action. I somewhat doubt this game caused or imperited anyone to do something malevolent. Perhaps in a capitalistic sense it might've underpaid artists and workers but that's just common nowadays.

>pile of shit

Well it's a book not a pile. That's plainly obvious since it's constructed in an actual format with paper and hard bounds ends.

Furthermore it is... probably not made of fecal matter? I mean I've picked up the book and looked it over and it didn't smear brown smelly waste product all over my hand and its smell is indeterminant of its own construction.

So there you go OP. 4e just from an obvious observation is not an irredeemable pile of shit.

unlike your mother where it's more questionable

what thing it does?

Exciting tactical combat where team-work is actually necessary.

Action focused heroic fantasy storytelling with an emphasis on teamwork and tactical combat, using narrative power structures to create fun fight scenes while also providing interesting mechanical choices to everyone involved.

You can't play a Star Wars game without homebrewing.

Oh that's more proof that it is trash.

Misread the title.

...What?

I'm afraid it's on you to prove that it is.

4e is trash because it can't run Star Wars without homebrewing.

Move along please

I don't see how that's at all relevant when the game has neither "Star" nor "Wars" in the title.

I am very confused as to why a game would be bad for not being able to do something it was never intended for.

It isn't you OP so logically if 'proof by counter example' holds true it can't be an irredeemable pile of shit.

It proves that the game isn't adaptable or simulationist enough to run multiple different settings.

If I wanted to play a fantasy only combat based level game, I'd play a board game.

No joke, it's probably easier to run a Star Wars game in 4e without homebrewing than any other edition. Powers are easily refluffed and there are classes that straight up seem almost designed to fit into certain SW archetypes (psychic warriors and spellswords are Jedi. I don't give a fuck what their fluff says, they're Jedi).

All you have to do to run a SW game in 4e is change the names of everything. Swords are now vibroswords, crossbows are now blasters, telekinetic thrust is now force push, etc.

Isn't SAGA the 4e Star Wars? No need to homebrew.

warlcok || swordmage is called the Darth Vader build

But a game doesn't need to be adaptable or simulationist to be good.

Fuck, for me simulationism is generally something that makes me enjoy a game less.

I think you're confusing 'I don't like it' for 'It's not good'.

its only an irredeemable pile of shit if you are that type of person that plays DnD for the High School Drama play assisted by dice rolls.

If you want a DnD with REALY good crunch and freeform roleplaying 4E is the only good DnD.

Oh yeah unless youre a caster player, in that case go fuck yoruself.

I like playing casters and I still know 4e is the best edition.

Shit, at least playing one caster feels really different from playing another in 4e. The universal spell lists of other editions were pure cancer.

Neither can anything that doesn't have Star Wars material with or without the serial numbers filed off already officially written for it, sir. Move along, please.

Roleplaying games are supposed to be tools for the DM to craft his story with. 4e is a game that the DM adds his story too.

4e isn't really built for storytelling, it's built to be played. For example 4e would be the worst in a no magic or no combat situation.

4e works well as a game but isn't a good system for advanced and nuanced storytelling.

It has merit but I don't play role playing games for the combat, I play them to tell and shape a story.

No, people who don't like 4e are just people who prefer simulationist RPGs

4e can do a lot of things really well, but it is NOT simulationist, not at all, that is the real main difference between 4e and 3.5/5e

Risus can run Star Wars well.

T. A dude who has run Star Wars risus.

Are you kidding? It's GREAT at running different settings

Pretty garbage at running different tones, but the rules are simulation-light enough that you can refluff basically everything

Nope. As a GM, 4e gives me plenty of excellent tools to use to craft a story. That they aren't the tools you prefer to use doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'm a huge GURPSfag that loves simulationism, but I also love 4e because it's a well designed gamist system with tight mechanics. Well designed systems deserve love and poorly designed ones deserve derision, which is why I constantly shit on 3.PF and DW but praise 4e and DRYH.

Aaaaaand the memes have started.

Guys, why are we arguing in this POS thread?

As said by the first dude the game can run high fantasy combat great but any tonal shifts would be okay to bad and would require a bunch of work to be fun and playable.

For example here are some tones that wouldn't work that well.
>mystery horror (I.e when they cry nonsense)
>loony toons
>soap opera
>hard sci-fi
>historical fiction
>hotline Miami.

It can't run those things, sure.

Why would you want it to?

>4e gives me plenty of excellent tools
What tools? Serious question. I only played 4e very briefly and forget most of it by now.

Maybe I want to play those kind of games?

Then don't use 4e? It's been said before in this thread- It is a system which runs a single kind of thing very well. It makes no attempt to do anything else, and has no need to do so.

Then use a different system?

But you see, gurps and risus can run all of those wonderfully without any homebrewing. Because they allow for GM creatively and tools as opposed to being a game that can have some story added to it.

The GMing advice in the DMG's is second to none. Really comprehensive, well thought out and with some things I found useful even as a veteran GM.

Skill challenges, while initially flawed, matured into a very good framework for setting up non-combat challenges and helping adjudicate them.

While they are flawed, rituals are so much nicer for me to handle as a GM than magic in other editions. I know what the PC's can do, I know how long it takes them to do it, and by pacing out parcels of ritual components I can vary up the amount of resources they have that they can allocate to problem solving.

Out of combat utility powers are awesome, but a case of wasted potential, as the system strongly disincentivizes picking anything non-combat. This is me homebrewing to make use of the options the system has available, but giving players a dedicated slot for non-combat utilities also gives player characters a lot of interesting tricks they can use in non-combat scenes and problem solving.

Weirdly enough, Backgrounds, Themes, PP's and ED's are also things I've fallen in love with as a GM. Talking to players about their selections, what they mean and the path they see their character taking gives me no end of plot hooks.

The artifact rules are amazing. They're powerful items in combat, but the real fun for me is the ways they can build or lose concordance, and how giving a player an artifact which is slightly askew from the goals and morals of their PC can force their character to make some really tough decisions, or prompt them to take actions they otherwise wouldn't to try and win the artifacts flavour. It's led to some incredibly interesting situations.

GURPS and risus are both boring as sin. If you enjoy bland flavourless mechanics they're okay I guess, but I cannot fucking stand them.

>GMing advice in the DMG's is second to none
The only book that I think does that shit better is the Dungeon World book, largely for the same reasons.

The system works pretty well as Gamma World, but definitely not as D&D.

That's an opinion. What isn't an opinion is the fact that 4e can't run a hotline Miami game well without extensive modification.

It's also irrelevant. It was never intended to do it, and I don't see why anyone would want to. Unless they were just astonishingly lazy and refused to learn new systems.

Indeed

And yet neither are as good as 4e at heroic combat. Which is fine. They're GENERIC role-playing systems. They're made to be jacks of all trades and masters of none

user, it's the current year. Expecting people to remember how to play more than one system is able-ist.

I dunno gurps is basically the best at black ops and hard sci-fi.

Paizo, who were at the time were producing and publishing both 'Dungeon' and 'Dragon' magazines, received a lot of feedback and letters about 4e's preview materials intended for WotC, begging them not to produce the game that way.
After that they decided to use the open game's license to essentially adopt 3.5 and continue it on their own.

Your mind is already made up

I enjoyed it.

It came out, briefly. In 'beta', three years later and technically still is 'in development' by a studio of three people.

The hilarious part is the backers at $100+ level getting emails out of the blue that they 'needed to buy more time,' because the game launched and they had no idea and the company was like whelp your sub time is up fucko give us more scam money.

because people play it and enjoy it

>action focused heroic fantasy storytelling
lolno. That's Dungeon World. 4e is good at miniatures wargaming and that's about it. There's nothing about 4e that works as a "storytelling" system.

Look buddy. I hate 3.PF as much as the next guy, and I only play 5e because it's the biggest game around, but 4e combat is not interesting. It's a slog of bean-counting and numbers crunching, and that's about it.

>freeform roleplaying
Translation: zero mechanical support for roleplaying, meaning that every social interaction trends toward one inevitable conclusion: miniatures-based combat.

Skill challenges. Your argument is invalid.

What is the mechanical support for Roleplaying that specifically 4e doesn't have and other editions of D&D do?

The system is fine, it's the fans who ruin it.

Different guy here, skill challenges just transfer roleplay into the encounter format though.

Skill challenges are a conflict resolution system, with an XP reward because 4e rewards everything with XP.
The other user was saying that 4e has no mechanics that facilitate roleplay. He's wrong.

>Exciting
I find it nothing more than tedious grinding. If I want my 'toy soldiers with tactics' fix then I'll play a wargame. In a wargame the other player is actively trying to kick my ass, while in 4E the system and the DM are both desperate to avoid a TPK.

Yes, he's wrong in that regard, I agree. However, he is also partly correct in his assertion that 4e, at least via skill challenges, does turn roleplay into something closer to organized combat than previous editions did.

You can't be serious. How would that even happen?

It's curious that you completely ignore pointing out a few different ways 4e facilitates storytelling.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't what he was saying.
It seems like he's saying that social interactions only exist to start combat.
Which isn't true.

It's fun.

Ok, but at this point, we have people ITT arguing that 4e sucks because it has codified mechanics for role-play, and people arguing that 4e sucks because it doesn't have codified mechanics for role-play.
The takeoff is that 4e suck anyway,, but you understand that it's hard to take critics seriously.

I guess we're reading it differently then.

Ryan Dancey and the Pathfinder fanbase.

If I'm being completely honest, both sides have become completely insufferable in my eyes.

Not him, but
>Translation: zero mechanical support for roleplaying, meaning that every social interaction trends toward one inevitable conclusion: miniatures-based combat.
I'm not seeing any kind of transition that'd make the combat bit read as figurative, and it'd make the first half ("no roleplaying mechanics") disagree openly with the second ("combat-ish roleplaying mechanics").

I think you just read into it what you were thinking, or translated it to the nearest available thing that made sense.

I translated that as an accusation that what skill challenges don't count as roleplay because they turn said instances into pseudo-combat.

That said, it's always possible that I am projecting my own impressions. We'd need the original poster to come in and clarify the matter for a proper conclusion.

>OP
>being detailed and clear and not just screaming "4e sux"

I was referring to the writer of the post contested in this particular conversation.

It's not FATAL.

A TTRPG is only ever an "irredeemable pile of shit" when it is practically impossible to derive any enjoyment from it whatsoever. FATAL is the only tabletop game I know of that can't even be enjoyed ironically. Veeky Forums actively warns off anyone who tries. Meanwhile, plenty of people like 4e, just like plenty of people like 3.x and plenty of people like 5e. Or Dungeon World. Or Fantasy Craft. And so on.

Aside from anything subjective, which would be more than enough to slap the "irredeemable" part right off, it's just overall better in direction and balance, at least compared to 3.5.

No, it's not perfect, quite far from it actually, but after 3.5 nobody can really say that 4 wasn't a step in the right direction.

>but after 3.5 nobody can really say that 4 wasn't a step in the right direction
That in of itself is pretty subjective. Some people don't care all that much about balance, for example, as evidenced by the 3.x fanbase.

That's not even the best part. Most people never got their physical rewards. People outside the US especially never got them. I'm not sure anyone international ever got anything, the Americans at least got like one third of their stuff.

How are skill challenges different from, say, using your attributes/skills to do something in WoD? Seriously what is the difference between:

>DM: "As you creep along the landing, you notice that the floorboards are strained and uneven; there is little chance of them remaining silent."
>Player: "Hmm, okay, can I get up on the banister and remain balanced long enough to shimmy my way over to the door?"
>DM: "Only one way to find out. Roll Acrobatics."

and

>Storyteller: "As you creep along the landing, you notice that the floorboards are strained and uneven; there is little chance of them remaining silent."
>Player: "Hmm, okay, can I get up on the banister and remain balanced long enough to shimmy my way over to the door?"
>Storyteller: "Only one way to find out. Roll Dex+Athletics."

Well, it's also worth remembering that 'Skill challenges' are something different to just asking for a skill roll. They're a mechanical structure to assist a GM in adjudicating more complex tasks that will involve multiple rolls of different skills by multiple participants.

Well, to begin with, I am not overly familiar with the WoD system as a whole and cannot be a good judge. The other thing is that your example seems to be a basic skill check, not a skill challenge.

You're making a false equivalence there. People complain that the skill challenges were too rigid and more like Skill Bingo. They can also complain that there are no meaningful social mechanics without there being any inconsistency between that complaint and the first one.

It's more or less 'Long term actions' (Either over a full scene or hours/days). Doing a full negotiation session or infiltrating MGS style rather than quickly charming someone there or slipping past a single guard.

>Well, it's also worth remembering that 'Skill challenges' are something different to just asking for a skill roll. They're a mechanical structure to assist a GM in adjudicating more complex tasks that will involve multiple rolls of different skills by multiple participants.

Yes. In WoD that would just be multiple rolls like the one described prior, just as it would pretty much me multiple skill checks in 4e.

It's the same shit. DM/ST/GM poses a problem, players may ask for information but must ultimately provide their intended solution, DM/ST/GM asks for a number. In a prolonged sequence, this may happen multiple times, which is basically what skill challenges are. Other rules may come into play from system to system, such as accounting for multiple participants, etc, but it's the same shit. Almost every TTRPG has mechanics like this.

But there's a difference between just expecting the GM to figure it out themselves and actually having a structure in place to support them. That's what Skill Challenges are.

Prove to me that 4E is an irredeemable pile of shit.

In fact, it's SUPER similar to WoD, because like WoD's way of dealing with protracted problems with multiple participants, you're essentially trying a few attempts to gather as many successes as possible and as few failures.

As someone super unfamiliar with 4e, what exactly IS the structure? Because on the surface it seems like "everyone roll a vaguely applicable skill and see if enough of you hit this DC to win."

>Because on the surface it seems like "everyone roll a vaguely applicable skill and see if enough of you hit this DC to win."

More or less. It's 'Get X successes before Y failures'.

Gamma World 7e is the best thing to come out of 4e and WotC D&D in general.