Another big problem I have is that in general weapon > implement.
Weapons simply have had a lot better support from day 1 and some of the best feats for implement users have required them to use a weapon since there is no implement equivalent. There aren't a bunch of different feats that help wand, totem, or holy symbol users like there are for light blades, maces, spears, etc.
There are 11 feats with the word wand or wands in them. 3 feats for totems. 12 for holy symbols. 7 for orbs. And some of those are multiclass feats.
35 feats for heavy blades. 32 for maces. 47 for hammers. 34 for spears
And support for weapliment users is all over the place and they often get left behind even when the class is supposed to use a weapliment.
First and foremost: the split, idealistic and design-wise that Essentials brought on to the game. I have a very clear split of things I really liked, and it all happened before that initiative. I'm not going to say it's the worst thing ever, but, well, it's like that one movie you kinda like, but you've got 30+ other movies on your to-buy list that are just more interesting to you. Essentials is that movie on the end of my to-buy list, after I have everything else that really dazzles me.
Second: After a while, dailies. And while I engineered ways to recharge them before Paragon and Epic, I would much prefer dailies as recharge powers. Then again, I dislike the idea of once per day mechanics of any kind, really.
Third: lack of broad support for all classes. Seekers, Runpriests, Assassins (of the pur shadow type) all left in the lurch and the wizard gets another bought of powers. **** that.
Fourth and final: the destruction of Shadow as a pirmary source for classes. I mean really, the best they could do was Vampire and Assassin? Really? Color me disappointed. I mean, Elemental also saddens me, though I can sort of understand it. But Shadow had such promise.
There are other nitpicks within this thread that lightly annoy me, like "feat taxes" for math problems, but honestly, I find it so easy to just say, "pick an expertise feat you get for free". I know it's still broken, and that it could have been more elegantly fixed, but those guys love their feats and I don't have a problem with handing them out like candy. Likewise, I made up my own ritual budget existing independently of the parcel system to bolster ritual use.
With any of these things, they were problems, but the ease of the fix probably reduces my overall annoyance. My biggest annoyances were, apparently, An overall lack of respect for either what I first liked, the expansive nature of class coverage, or the restrictions that make the game a per day instead of per encounter game.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." --Bill Cosby (1937- )
Vanador: OK. You ripped a gateway to Hell, killed half the town, and raised the dead as feral zombies. We're going to kill you. But it can go two ways. We want you to run as fast as you possibly can toward the south of the town to draw the Zombies to you, and right before they catch you, I'll put an arrow through your head to end it instantly. If you don't agree to do this, we'll tie you this building and let the Zombies rip you apart slowly. Dimitry: God I love being Neutral. 4th edition is dead, long live 4th edition. Salla: opinionated, but commonly right. fun quotesShow
If you can't understand how someone yelling at another person would make them fight harder and longer, then you need to look at the forums a bit closer.
quote author=56832398 post=519321747]Considering DnD is a game wouldn't all styles be gamist?
Overall I think 4e is the best edition to date. Not perfect, but very good overall. The main things I didn't like as much in 4e:
- Combat is a little too long (sometimes a lot too long). In earlier editions we spent about 1/2 our game sessions in combat, in 4e it's closer to 75% or 80% of our time in combat because the fights take so long. I am very much looking forward to 5e with its stated goal of shorter, mapless combat as a viability.
- Skill challenges sound ok in principle but in practice they just haven't done much for me. Half the time when a skill challenge comes up there are players in the party who simply aren't interested in participating or who don't feel they can really do much because they don't have appropriate skills. (And yes, I realize that this is as much psychological on their part as anything else since you can often come up with imaginative ways to use skills in a challenge, but that doesn't change the fact that players feel that way.) Maybe something similar to the idea of a skill challenge that is kind of like a non-combat encounter but less formalized would work? Who knows....
- I like the idea of rituals on paper but in practice they just don't seem to have taken off in my groups. Hardly anybody in my 4e groups bothers using rituals. Even I haven't used them much and I have a couple of characters that know them. I'm not exactly sure why we seem to have sort of a "meh" reaction to rituals but... meh. If I had to guess it might be that since rituals can't be used in combat, and combat is (as I mentioned above) taking up 75% of our game sessions, it's made the situations where you might use a ritual that much less common. Hopefully in 5e, with quicker combat, that will free up more time in the game session for non-combat activity including finding cool uses for non-combat rituals.
1) Too much complexity at the table. Player complexity #1: Players have too many powers with too manys subtle distinctions between them. This leads to, at best, time spent adjuticating the many effects of the powers (-2 to attack from this attack, push three from that attack, temp hit points from the other attack) resulting in too much wasted time tracking and communicating those effects. At worst this leads to analysis paralysis.
Player complexity #2: Too many immediate and free action powers. At higher levels, its impossible to carry out a simple attack. Every attack requires pausing - at least briefly, to see if anyone has an interrupt triggered when you move adjacent, triggered when you attack, triggered when you hit, or triggered after you do damage. Its just too much and it bogs down the game. (Related to this - too many opportunity attacks making movement too dependant upon shift powers, slowing play further).
DM complexity: Too many auras, triggered powers (bloodied burst, death burst, etc) for the creatures. Sure, they are fun to write. And they look fun on paper. But again, they just slow the game down - when the DM remembers to use them.
This leads to: 2) Combats take far too long. When people are talking about a 45 minute to 1 hour combat as SHORT, you now you have a problem. If your game is a strategic miniatures game, it makes sense for combats to take an hour or more. But if the game is supposed to be equally focused on interaction ('roleplaying') and on exploration - you need to have time to fit that in as well. But the length of combats tends to squeeze out any time for anything but combats (especially in LFR organized play).
3) Poorly implemented Skill challenges. The way skill challenges were presented, especially the dissociation of success from actions and is reduction down to an accumulation of successes and failures, led to players losing sight of the fact that they are ROLEPLAYING and thus should be thinking in terms of "what action would I take here" rather than (as the mechanics of skill challenges encouraged - or perhaps even forced) "which of my trained skills can I rationallize using here". Especially the accured failure system which made players afraid to take the logical ACTION (based on the situation) because their relevant skill wasn't high enough and thus made sitting on their butt so as to not hurt the party make more sense than taking action.
4) Mundane Magic items. Magic items included in the PHB and presented as part of the characters build (through wish lists, DM advice, and specialized properties/powers) which took the wonderr and magic out of them and made them merely mundane.
5) Combined with the above, Poorly implented Ritual Magic. By making ritual magic dependant upon a permanent resource (gold, w:ich, as noted above, equates to permanent magic items because the players are presumed to be able to find anything they want) it doesn't take long for most players to figure our that using rituals only weakens them in the long run. If rituals had been seen as adventure resources and (excepting those which created permanent effects/ items) been made dependant upon an adventure-scale resource (e.g. healing surges expending powers, etc.) they would have seen far more acceptance and wider use.
6) Number inflation. In 4E the numbers grow constantly - seemingly just for the sake of bigger numbers. The fighter gets a bonus to attack - and his opponent gets a bonus to defense; all so that in the end the fighter has roughly the same chance of hitting. Its a pointless exercise (given level appropirate targets) - what is the point of increasing both the attack and the defense? Likewise damage per attack scales up - and so do hit points, but the hit pionts go up much faster so that a level appropriate target might take three hits to kill at low level land five or more hits to kill at higher level. Which brings us back to longer and longer encounters. On a related note: The one real effect of this inflation is to narrow the range of creatures that the party can face or that can threaten the party. By the time someting is four or more levels away from the parties level, the fight is hugely imbalanced. I'm sure this is by design (itls the only logical reason for the inflation). But on the other hand, I'd rather low level characters felt like they had a chance to take on something well ought of their class, just as I'd prefer that lower level creatures remain useful against the PCs. So the one 'benefit' of ths number inflation is a drawback in my mind anyway.
All that said - I still play two regular 4E games (although I quit LFR as a lost cause some time ago). I like the game. In fact, I prefer it to 3..x (different system, mostly different problems). I have a strong preference for 4E Essentials characters as they solve some of the above problems. And others have been addressed to some degree in the last year. But I think there is room for improvement. In many ways I miss AD&D. Sure - it lacked customization - but the mechanics were quicker and cleaner and the game played much faster. Take AD&D mechanics, add in feats or other ways of customizeing the character (including some stances for fighters and at-will for wizards), rework the spells to separate out rituals from the combat spells and address the quadratic wizard probelm - and you've got a game.
1) Too much complexity at the table. Player complexity #1: Players have too many powers with too manys subtle distinctions between them. This leads to, at best, time spent adjuticating the many effects of the powers (-2 to attack from this attack, push three from that attack, temp hit points from the other attack) resulting in too much wasted time tracking and communicating those effects. At worst this leads to analysis paralysis.
Player complexity #2: Too many immediate and free action powers. At higher levels, its impossible to carry out a simple attack. Every attack requires pausing - at least briefly, to see if anyone has an interrupt triggered when you move adjacent, triggered when you attack, triggered when you hit, or triggered after you do damage. Its just too much and it bogs down the game. (Related to this - too many opportunity attacks making movement too dependant upon shift powers, slowing play further).
DM complexity: Too many auras, triggered powers (bloodied burst, death burst, etc) for the creatures. Sure, they are fun to write. And they look fun on paper. But again, they just slow the game down - when the DM remembers to use them.
This leads to: 2) Combats take far too long. When people are talking about a 45 minute to 1 hour combat as SHORT, you now you have a problem. If your game is a strategic miniatures game, it makes sense for combats to take an hour or more. But if the game is supposed to be equally focused on interaction ('roleplaying') and on exploration - you need to have time to fit that in as well. But the length of combats tends to squeeze out any time for anything but combats (especially in LFR organized play).
3) Poorly implemented Skill challenges. The way skill challenges were presented, especially the dissociation of success from actions and is reduction down to an accumulation of successes and failures, led to players losing sight of the fact that they are ROLEPLAYING and thus should be thinking in terms of "what action would I take here" rather than (as the mechanics of skill challenges encouraged - or perhaps even forced) "which of my trained skills can I rationallize using here". Especially the accured failure system which made players afraid to take the logical ACTION (based on the situation) because their relevant skill wasn't high enough and thus made sitting on their butt so as to not hurt the party make more sense than taking action.
4) Mundane Magic items. Magic items included in the PHB and presented as part of the characters build (through wish lists, DM advice, and specialized properties/powers) which took the wonderr and magic out of them and made them merely mundane.
5) Combined with the above, Poorly implented Ritual Magic. By making ritual magic dependant upon a permanent resource (gold, w:ich, as noted above, equates to permanent magic items because the players are presumed to be able to find anything they want) it doesn't take long for most players to figure our that using rituals only weakens them in the long run. If rituals had been seen as adventure resources and (excepting those which created permanent effects/ items) been made dependant upon an adventure-scale resource (e.g. healing surges expending powers, etc.) they would have seen far more acceptance and wider use.
6) Number inflation. In 4E the numbers grow constantly - seemingly just for the sake of bigger numbers. The fighter gets a bonus to attack - and his opponent gets a bonus to defense; all so that in the end the fighter has roughly the same chance of hitting. Its a pointless exercise (given level appropirate targets) - what is the point of increasing both the attack and the defense? Likewise damage per attack scales up - and so do hit points, but the hit pionts go up much faster so that a level appropriate target might take three hits to kill at low level land five or more hits to kill at higher level. Which brings us back to longer and longer encounters. On a related note: The one real effect of this inflation is to narrow the range of creatures that the party can face or that can threaten the party. By the time someting is four or more levels away from the parties level, the fight is hugely imbalanced. I'm sure this is by design (itls the only logical reason for the inflation). But on the other hand, I'd rather low level characters felt like they had a chance to take on something well ought of their class, just as I'd prefer that lower level creatures remain useful against the PCs. So the one 'benefit' of ths number inflation is a drawback in my mind anyway.
All that said - I still play two regular 4E games (although I quit LFR as a lost cause some time ago). I like the game. In fact, I prefer it to 3..x (different system, mostly different problems). I have a strong preference for 4E Essentials characters as they solve some of the above problems. And others have been addressed to some degree in the last year. But I think there is room for improvement. In many ways I miss AD&D. Sure - it lacked customization - but the mechanics were quicker and cleaner and the game played much faster. Take AD&D mechanics, add in feats or other ways of customizeing the character (including some stances for fighters and at-will for wizards), rework the spells to separate out rituals from the combat spells and address the quadratic wizard probelm - and you've got a game.
Carl
This exactly. I couldn't phrase it better if I tried.
The players in my campaign don't like having conditions placed upon them without a saving throw (granted, they are all players from earlier editions of D&D).
Combats are too long (unless you houserule monster hp, etc.)
Nice post CarlT. This is a very detailed post that pretty much hits my thoughts right on the head. That probably means that you are speaking for many of us that have similar thoughts. Good job!
Reflavoring: the change of flavor without changing any mechanical part of the game, no matter how small, in order to fit the mechanics to an otherwise unsupported concept. Retexturing: the change of flavor (with at most minor mechanical adaptations) in order to effortlessly create support for a concept without inventing anything new. Houseruling: the change, either minor or major, of the mechanics in order to better reflect a certain aspect of the game, including adapting the rules to fit an otherwise unsupported concept. Homebrewing: the complete invention of something new that fits within the system in order to reflect an unsupported concept.
... 5) Combined with the above, Poorly implented Ritual Magic. By making ritual magic dependant upon a permanent resource (gold, w:ich, as noted above, equates to permanent magic items because the players are presumed to be able to find anything they want) it doesn't take long for most players to figure our that using rituals only weakens them in the long run. If rituals had been seen as adventure resources and (excepting those which created permanent effects/ items) been made dependant upon an adventure-scale resource (e.g. healing surges expending powers, etc.) they would have seen far more acceptance and wider use.
Good post Carl. In reply to the above quote, I think part of the problem with Ritual Magic in 4e is tied to the issue of combats taking so long. Because combats take up such a large chunk of play time in the game sessions, anything that can't be done during combat is therefore used that much less. I think that if combats were significantly shorter in 4e you would find a proportionally increased interest in non-combat rituals.
Money can be a factor too, of course. There are players who won't buy potions, for instance, because they prefer to save their money for permanent items. But if the cost of consumables and rituals is reasonable for the short term benefit they grant then there will be players who will spend money on them.
My standout problem is something that 4e suffered at the beginning and end of the edition: Roles boxed in classes. In the PHB1, Secondary roles were unheard of, the Paladin is a Defender, and nothing else. The Wizard is a controller and nothing else. The Ranger is a Striker and nothing else. While the Rogue and Fighter dabble in Controller and Striker, respectively, they are never recognized for this dabbling, and the game makes it very clear they should be doing their role and not a different one.
The PHB2 kind of fixed this, by imparting secondary roles, but the Devs often couldn't see what the class had as a secondary role (Avenger is by far Defender Secondary. Not Controller. This was a problem of how nebulous and undefined Controller was in general.) However, once they seemed to grasp this concept (The PHB3), they decided to abandon the concept entirely, and kick and shove classes back into their neat little boxes. A Slayer is a Striker and nothing else. A Knight is a defender and nothing else. Any attempts at multiple roles after this resulted in weakening the class as a whole (Sentinel, Berserker), because giving them unrestricted access to a second role's set of powers invoked the fear of breaking the delicate balance of 4e.
Secondly: Regular errata. I'm all for a game that isn't broken, but seriously? I own the PHB2. Because there was never a reprint of any part of any book, a major portion of it is entirely useless. Most of the class features in the book simply are wrong because of Errata. The errata of 4e is now larger than the errata of Exalted, and far more expansive. And in Exalted, they tried to remove the intense lethality of the entire system. ...Com'on. Errata cannot be monthly and regularly outdate books. It was a tool to force players to buy into DDI to use their builder - a supbar option that really only works if other people in your group have DDI, mostly the DM.
Thirdly: DDI, 'core content' behind the paywall, and Always-On DRM. It's a bit harsh to call the online Character Builder Always-On DRM, but it's what it is. It wasn't moved over because it was more cost effective for WotC to build on a now dead platform, but to generate more money by requiring you to be constantly subscribed and have a steady internet connection to utilize it instead of the 'Pay one month, get access to all content, let subscription lapse for X months until several more books were added'. The fact is, WotC doesn't have the manpower to run the Character Builder properly and in a timely fashion. There's something there about "Well, people who buy the books get to use the new options faster!" but it's simply not true, and there's no reason for entitlement here - if I pay for DDI and buy a book, shouldn't I get equal access regardless of my medium of choice? The fact is a bunch of untrained monkeys can hack together a fix for new books faster than Wizards can, and are, for a platform that hasn't seen a update in what? 1 1/2 years? For an attempt to prevent piracy, they didn't do a very good job. Ontop of that, they hid entire classes, setting fluff and mechanics behind the paywall of DDI. I consider Kara-Tur/OA to be part of the Forgotten Realms setting, and as a result, if I purchase the FR books, then I should have access to all of the content available for that setting. Not what's in the book and what they extra fluff they deem me worthy. The month of Kara-Tur in DDI was great, but it was a slap in the face - if you wanted any of it, you needed to pay for it. They locked an entire setting behind the paywall. I'm all for exclusive content for DDI, but if you're going to do that, you need to make things like the refluffed Neverwinter themes, magic items and equipment. Not things like feats that fix entire classes (Intelligent Blademaster, I'm looking at you. Same with you, Painful Oath.) And especially not 'buying power', which is what feats like Painful Oath were akin to. If you had DDI, your Avenger was simply better than someone else's. There's no way about it. Yes, it's a cooperative game, but buying power in any game is bad. Especially in this case, because no one wants to be that guy who sits there and watches the party do cool stuff - like the Fighter in a party of full casters in previous editions. You might have fun here and there, but by far and large, you feel superflous in the grand scheme of the campaign, especially when you're reassured that without you, they wouldn't have their great meatshield!
