Stuff 4e did better than 5e

Many consider their backstory to be better fleshed out, giving them a greater depth as a character race.

In 5e, as in 3e, Gnomes are, in essence, the mid-point between Halflings and Dwarves, semi-bucolic burrowers with an intense love of crafting, an innate curiosity for the world, and a touch of magical power that's...unconnected to either of those races, as well as having a predilection for illusion magic that's somewhat unexplained.

4e's gnomes are ex-slaves of the Fomor, the dark overlords of the Feywild, and this informs a lot of the racial abilities and trends they have. They have a greater focus on stealth, which combined with their illusion magic explains how they escaped the Fomor, Their curiosity and general convivial nature is tied to their newer status in the Material plane: they're so happy to not be enslaved that they're friendly to everyone, and they want to learn more and see more of the world because for so long their people lived and died in the tunnels and dank halls of Fomor castles.

Their concept is a little more unified, focusing them on arcane classes like Bard, (Illusionist) Wizard, and Warlock, and making them basically "mini-mages".

Everything. Literally all 4e needs is the Escalation Die from 13th Age and a couple of free feats and it's close to perfection.

To specify. MMO like Wakfu, not MMO like Everquest

4e is actually the most difficult edition to directly translate into a videogame. Every class has multiple off turn actions they can take so it would end up playing like those gba Yugioh games where the game pauses every time there's a change in priority and gives you a yes or no prompt.

It was absolutely amazing at boring people and giving the whole RPG market to Paizo for 6 years.

In seriousness, it was really good at having optimal builds that really no other RPG has. There is only one way to build every class the best. This makes every class playable by the slow user who the 3e Fighter was made for.

>Niches
>A good thing

It had Eberron!

The amusing thing is how wrong this is, when the "optimal build" changed depending on race, weapon used, powers chosen, and party composition.

>The amusing thing is how wrong this is, when the "optimal build" changed depending on race
Which has to with Optimal BUild. 4e fucks you over for not being the right race harder than any other edition of D&D to date.

Warlord

>do you have a 16 in your primary stat?
>yes?
>Go ahead
You do not need an 18-20 in your primary stat to play the game, user. 4e actually allows for the least amount of optimizing for a pc that can still be successful since Basic.

They also have a thing with masking trauma with humour, and while being friendly they're also very guarded about themselves.

Everything

Having chargen that's actually interesting and has real choices. Weapon choice actually fucking matters beyond like two class features and a single feat for each combat style.

For all the bullshit about optimisation, 4e is the best edition of D&D to play if you don't care about that. Just picking what seems cool and making flavourful choices will still give you a character who can participate in combat and do awesome things without having to 'Mother may I' with the GM. And if you do want to try an improvised action, it has better guidelines than any other edition for doing so anyway, rewarding creativity.

It wasn't without flaws, the early game math fuckups being big ones, and it isn't a game for everybody, but for action focused heroic fantasy storytelling it's unsurpassed, IMO.

Character customization. More options in combat. Monsters were more interesting to fight. Less of the clutter involved with spells being slapped onto classes/monsters to give them their options. Classes were more mechanically and thematically consistent.

Calculator class with comparable mechanics for DnD when

I actually just started to include the flavor text on all of my players' powers and i think it improved the game drastically for some of my more imaginative players. There is one who still just wants to run in and punch things, and get powers reflect that but some of the others really like calling out the flavor text and rolling. I think 4e did that very well so that you don't just have to say "Well, i full attack" and instead everyone can give some flavorful descriptors when their character attacks.

Sometimes, power names alone are enough to do that. There's something viscerally satisfying about taking a hit with my Warlord and being able to say "Vengeance is mine!". God, Warlords get all the best powers.

Yea, the edition really does a good job making even mundane things like at-wills seem really cool. One of my more imaginative players loves his druid for hawk and flame seed at wills because the flavor of them is fun. Chucking seeds and shooting flaming hawks at mooks is satisfying in a way that every-turn abilities and actions just weren't in other editions.

Warlord has loads of powers like that. Where you can imagine that half of using the power is just shouting the name of it

It's more than just raw stats. 4e has a lot of niggling racial synergies that screw people over. Enjoy being a shittier version of a class because you didn't play a dumbass genasi for more element cheese.

Except the system works fine if you don't do that. Low to mid optimisation 4e is great, while it's a garbagefire in 3.PF.

Ooh, actual good thing it did was never make you look up spells with monsters. They were simple but all on one page.

>Just fine
As long as your DM knows to homebrew a shitton and pull all the punches then yeah, just fine.

Mid optimization 3.5 is where 3.5 is best

That's where all the really fun minmaxing is, as opposed to druid/cleric/wizard spam

...No? It works right out of the box, by default, with no issues whatsoever. What are you even talking about?

Aww come on user, can't you just let people like this unpopular thing. I'm being argumentative but that's just being rude.

What?

No, it's the other way around, when you optimize the DM needs to turn up the heat. The suggested encounter difficulty in 4e is actually quite low if you compare monsters and players of similar level

...What?

I dunno, i think you described it all perfectly there.
>niggling
That's what they are really, little bits and pieces that can make your character better in one fashion or another. Now, it sound like you see these things as absolutely necessary or just better than other options. In some cases, you are correct. However, i and that other user both seem to see those as only possibly interesting options and unlike, say 13 int for a 20th level wizard in 3.5, these disparages do not invalidate your character and you can still be relatively optimized even if you aren't the ubermensch build for your class. The disparity between optimized and unoptimized characters is generally lessened in 4e than it is in other editions. There are exceptions, and obviously if you're purposefully building a shit character, then you can contort this but overall a character that is not fully optimized is not going to be invalidated because they didn't take x or y option.

Fair. I should have been more specific in that low op 3.PF sucks, as that's where you get people stumbling into trap options and the like.

Do you guys actually play 4e? Because it's sounding like no. There's a 4e The Guild living campaign and we have 100 players and your idea on optimization is pure comedy.

Sounds like you just have a really warped perspective. I play 4e. It works fine with minimal optimisation and is perfectly capable of dealing with an unoptimised party with no strain whatsoever.

I do, i run a game every week and while i like when my players optimize, it has never been necessary for the system to work. It sounds like you might be playing in a pretty optimization heavy campaign? Maybe the dm masks the encounters harder on purpose? I don't know what to tell you.

I don't understand, if you just look at what sort of stuff you get with only a basic idea of 4e optimization vs what monsters of equal level get. Then 4 at-level encounters per day is really easy. I've seen this as a DM, as a player, and from solo simulations

If you are just giving your players really easy the whole time and same level then your game is probably pretty damn boring.

>5 ft shift
>flanking
"I take the help action" says no one ever, because it's gay af
I guess they wanted pack tactics to feel more special but honestly flanking isn't good enough to demote it to optional rule status

That's why I don't. I ramp it up, typically two to four levels up depending on the tier of play and how hard my players have optimized. But I also understand that having all encounters of approximately equal difficulty is boring. So I throw both easier and harder fights at them to keep it interesting

I am a little confused. What do you mean exactly?

Pathfinder tried that. On paper it sounds hilariously amazing. In practice it's met with disdain. Sacred Geometry I believe.

I've thought about this myself

The best conclusion I could come to is a blanket nerf to off-turn actions in the form of not being able to control whether they go off or not. When they're triggered, they activate. With the added stipulations that if you have more than one power that triggers off of the same thing, then encounter powers trump daily and at-will powers, dailies trump at-wills, interrupts trump reactions in that order. So a daily reaction trumps an at-will interrupt

Why not just select those actions on your turn? If they get activated, great, if not, then you can select to use them again next turn. Maybe select targets for them too, to make it more selective so a mook doesn't waste your daily.

hmmm...

Yes that makes sense

Or it could be done the dickhead way you see in so many RPGs where that's an option, but by default it's automatic

Buddy, have you seen how long a 4e combat takes? you'd die of old age before a epic level combat would end.

>inb4 muh essentials characters

If you're going to lie, you might try not to be so patently absurd.

Yea, i think either way has its flaws but both would be better than slowing the flow down with an interrupt prompt

Buddy, I've run multiple 4e games and they slow down to a fucking crawl at level 11 because you have a War and Peace page amount of powers to sort through

You can't deny it takes a fuck of a load of time for combat to go on.

I love 4e as much as the next guy, but you just gotta call a spade a spade

I've never understood this complaint. As long as you're halfway competent at playing your characters, combat shouldn't take long at all.

I've just never experienced that? If you've been playing that long you know what all your powers do and it's usually pretty easy to know which one you're going to use on your turn, resolve it quickly and move on. The only turns that take longer are action point combo turns, but those are part of the fun.

Then again, it might be different standards of long combat. I'm fine with a good, in depth fight taking an hour or so to resolve, but in 4e that tends to only happen for the biggest boss encounters. Anything else is under 45 minutes, almost always.

To be fair, new players tend to get easily bogged down by the option. This isn't 4e specific though.

define long

long for you may be 8 hours

three hour combats were the average here, and the crux of that mainly being that 4e characters become so fucking durable that anything less than multiple CRs would do nothing to them

They'd just 15 minute workday shit, rarely ever use healing surges

I have no idea what Mythic WoW efficiency players you have, but even with optimal times from some members and a timer I installed,combats still took a gods age to finish (any meaningful ones)

But if you're at epic level, you're not new players.

Unless you skip to that point while never having played heroic before, but that's just a bad fucking idea.

Were you playing pre math fixes? Because that's what it sounds like.

And my group aren't hyper efficient. They're currently level 6, their first time playing the game, and they still finish fights in half an hour most of the time.

I'd say XCOM, actually.

Like, even with the math fixes it still took forever to resolve fights.

>level 6

no fucking wonder the fights aren't taking long, they don't have an entire novella of powers to sort through yet.

hold onto your ass the second they get to like 10 or 11.

Yea, i had a group where we started at 11 and some of them had a bad time keeping track of they wanted to do. I had the problem players spend some time looking at their powers and just picking the and notating the ones they wanted to use the most. One guy even numbered them in an order. Combat got a lot quicker when everyone was deciding what they wanted to do while it wasn't their turn.

Nope. I've played above that before, and I honestly don't see much difference. You gain powers gradually over time, letting you get familiar with them, to the point you know what option you're going to use before you look through your powers to find the precise numbers. Unless your players have severe issues with recalling information, I just can't see what the problem is.

>There is only one way to build every class the best
Not really? The standard Halfling Rogue was pretty fucking strong, then you have stuff like milking the shit out of Riposte Strike, which the Halfling was just bad for; the Elf was the best for Cunning Sneaks but others could easily hold their own there; there were Arena Champion builds that just abused Bluff, and that's before we get into a debate over whether Daggers, Rapiers, Slings or Crossbows were the better weapon - and that's just for one class.

>Paragon Paths & Epic Destinies really let your character feel like a power-house.
I've never understood why people say this shit. 4e always felt like you were smacking shit with a dry noodle. Every single enemy had such health bloat that it took like 2+ hours to do an encounter unless you halved everyone's health. Didn't matter which striker I chose, unless I was burning dailies every round nothing was going to die fast enough before the healer ran out of spells.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but even then, play with the new math. I gotta admit I never played with the old math, but the new one plays fast and fun as anything.

>unless you halved everyone's health
I wonder what post-MM3 math had you do.

Like, here is the question then, have your players ever gotten to single digit healing surges?

'cause like you have to pick two out of three here for 4e, at least it was for me.
challenging combat

meaningful combat

not tedious combat

...Most of my players start with single digit healing surges? I'm just confused by this point.

I also don't see why it's pick two. Then again, it might just be personal preference. I don't mind putting time into 4e, but 4e has just never felt particularly longwinded to me.

by single digit i mean were they ever close to running out of surges at any point outside freak random crits?

>4e wasn't a perfect game by any means, but what stuff did it do better than 5e?

>Everything. Literally all 4e needs is the Escalation Die from 13th Age and a couple of free feats and it's close to perfection.
I knew someone would say this.

I don’t even play D&D, yet I find 4e fans insufferable.

I've seen Defenders go into fights at 0 surges before. I've had players down to no healing resources during a tense boss fight where any hit might take someone down. I'm not sure what else to say?

Unless you're a constitution-using character, a genasi monk with the right feat, or a defender, it's highly unlikely that you'll have 10 or more healing surges maximum at level 30

If you're instead trying to say how often has a player run out of healing surges. Well, typically at least one person, usually a melee striker or defender with low con will run out after 5 combat encounters

>I'll cherrypick one post and act like I have a point

3.PF fanboys are infinitely worse for that bullshit.

I dropped it after playing for about 5 1/2 years. If I ever go back to it I'll try it with the new math, but it would take a lot for me to go back.

>then you have stuff like milking the shit out of Riposte Strike
This was the best shit before my favorite combo got shut down with the one free action attack per round errata. I couldn't care less about the riposte itself since I wasn't playing Brutal Scoundrel, but that just meant its low accuracy made it a great setup for ruining someone's day with an all but guarantee Nasty Backswing and Press the Advantage following up on that.

I honestly don't know what goat you sacrficed to have that happen, but god almighty I've never seen "Tense" and 4e in the same sentence when it comes to my fights. my players kept on steamrolling things or it became a rock em sock em robots smackfest back and forth for hours

My groups tend to ignore that errata. We're low optimisation overall so it doesn't cause problems, and it's more fun for the Warlord to just be able to have his allies go fucking ham.

Have you ever played with the new math? Because the big thing it did was decrease monster HP and increase monster damage, making fights a lot more active, dangerous and, well, tense.

I dunno. I feel like that’s missing the forest for the trees. If you were going to turn a tabletop system into a program, you’d want the following properties: 1) using abilities requires minimal subjective interpretation, and 2) you can always evaluate any interaction between abilities without recourse to subjective interpretation. Of all the editions of D&D, 4e seems to come the closest to satisfying these requirements— indeed, that seems to be a selling point for its fans.

Unless I’ve gravely misunderstood things, difficulties involving off-turn stuff diminish if you translate from turn-based to real-time, which is the main change you’d probably make if you were going to create a D&D MMO.

It's less decreasing monster HP and more increasing everything player-side while also increasing monster offense.

Wakfu is an MMO

Monster defenses dropped, solo/elite hp dropped, damage went up.

I feel like that's actually too defined, especially since a lot of those traits would drop off after a generation or two of their new environment. But part of that is I like gnomes as very explicitly fey-related compared to other races, so focusing on them as just friendly ex-slaves doesn't sound like what appeals to me about the race at all.

This. 4e was the edition that killed my group. Half wanted to stay in 3.5, half wanted to switch to the "new and improved" (read cartoonish and video gamey) 4e. To the depths of the 9 hells with 4e.
And leave it there

That sounds less like an issue with 4e and more an issue with your group that would have happened no matter the new edition.

Comrades' Succor is a level 1 ritual that makes surge management moot.

Wow, that sounds incredibly boring. Glad no game I've ever played has used it.

>4e is balanced if you ignore all the broken stuff
How are those Intlord + all striker encounter novas + minion clear bomb parties doing for you?

No idea, I play low to mid optimisation games and focus on things that seem fun and make meaningful statements about my character.

In practical terms, balance doesn't mean it's impossible to build an overpowered character. It means that it's pretty easy to make a party who are all on the same playing field and that all options are viable, which is mostly true for mid to low up 4e with a few unfortunate exceptions like Seeker and Vampire.

Balance goes out the window at paragon, then again at epic.

Paragon is where the game really starts and all the 4e CharOp guys play in combat-only games online.

...What are you even talking about?

I mean, that might be true in super high op stuff? But I don't care about that. 4e works fine as an RPG just using the rules to do cool things, not obsessively minmaxing everything, and it works for that throughout.

Zeitgeist, a setting and adventure path for D&D 4e, has a whole industrial nation where no rituals or arcane, divine, elemental, primal, psionic, or shadow powers work at all.

You can get around this by carrying a +2 or better implement... unless you step into this one big spot, where even that fails, and all racial encounter/daily powers also fail. The party likely goes there for combat encounters in the adventure path.

Is this a good idea?

That sounds extremely dull and arbitrary.

I miss you, Warlord

>when you just wanted your group to toughen the fuck up in place of magic bullshit

Warlords were the goddamn best, and that 5e will not get them due to HP memes is a fucking tragedy.