4Edition. Do you like it?

[alhoon]

The question is simple. Do you like 4th Edition?

I would ask anyone that hasn't played it, to not vote based on what he has read/heard about it.


My opinion: For me, it's somewhat good, but I prefer 3rd. 4th is easy and nice and most of all: comfortable for the DM but it doesn't give me the same feel I got from earlier editions.

[Yaoi Huntress Earth]

I have very mixed feelings about 4th edition. I didn't like how some stuff like the alignment system got dumbed down, there's less versitility with the classes (especally the wizard), and I don't really see a reason for Eldarians. Other than that I do like the ease of the system.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

I've played in a couple of games of 4E and I must admit that I really like it. The battle system is much cooler and has a ton of additional options that make it both run faster and seem less monotonous than in 3E.

That said, it now appears that more of the game system is devoted to combat... and I'd already felt that was problematic in 3E. The greater the percentage of the rules that relates to combat, the greater the likelihood that the PCs will resort to combat as opposed to some other solution.

As my group does a lot of combat, though, 4E definitely serves us well. I may like 3E better (and voted that way) but 4E gets no complaints from me.

(Caveat: I have only used 4E as a player; I don't know how it is from a DM perspective)

[Igor the Henchman]

After 8 years of DMing 3E, the current edition felt like a godsend, mainly for the simplified monster creation system. It doesn't seem to matter how many monster manuals I own, my adventures always need to feature some weird new critter - a demon shaped like a giant beating heart, a colony of infectuous spore-covered zombies that corrupt healing magic around them, a malefic wind elemental thing that pushes enemies away and grants bonuses to flying monsters, or just a classic plain old Huge-sized thirteen-fingered hand. In 3E, it took me hours of page-flipping, number-crunching, feat-selecting between four or more books. Nowadays, its more like minutes.

I certainly don't argue that 4E is perfect. Sure, the skill challenge mechanic seems to sometimes confound even the designers themselves, and the artifact rules seem unnecessarily complex, and the power creep is slowly rearing its ugly head again. Still, having both played and DMed 4E, I'd say its an overall improvement. My group, at least, has eagerly converted.

[Jester of the FoS]

I'm torn.
I don't like the limited feel of 4e compared to the flexible sandbox that was 3e. And 4e really needed another 3-6 months of playtesting and tweaking before launch as there's some pretty glaring errors (skill challenges, the discrepancies between monster defenses and player attacks and vise versa that makes high level harder).
And I dislike how every class is functionally the same and the sheer number of powers that need to be made for each class leading to insane amounts of redundancy. And since every class is now a sorcerer it makes players who just want to hit things have to think....

But it plays well and it's easy to learn and I'm having a blast DMing it for one of my groups.

[alhoon]

9 didn't like it and 7 liked it. Out of these 7, 2 prefer 3rd.

So far 4E goes badly on the poll... and well in the comments. That's a bit strange.

As a 4E DM: It is godsend as Igor proposes. I disagree that skill challenges are complex. Just drop the indicated DCs to the bucket.
The idea of the skill challenge is: X successes before X/2 failures. DCs easy, moderate, hard in more than 2 skills. Try to involve all chars, as anyway everyone makes a roll in the skill challenges even if it is to assist another.
That simple. Now, for your particular elf ranger / elf cleric group, nature DCs should be 19 to be considered moderate, while (since there's no body with endurance skill) endurance DCs should be 16 to be moderate.

Remember: If everyone has about 65% to succeed on their skill check in a skill challenge, there's 50% chance of success and 50% chance of failure.

However: 4E seems "dumped down" to me. Very few choices. Sure for the default fighter it seems an improvement but overall, it's less choices. And as for fighters, we have warblades from 3.5 edition.
I hate that a marilith or old dragon needs some effort to take down a 4th level soldier like an orc. I can't accept that and I'm ever-twinking 4E to rectify that.
I dislike the simplicity of some monsters and their limited options. Come on! A lich with only 3 different powers to use in combat?!

Overall, 4E seems "limited", more like a computer game than a simulation of a fantasy world. They have sacrificied too many things for simplicity according to my taste.

But it plays well and it's easy to learn and I'm having a blast DMing it for one of my groups.

I like DMing it too, sometimes (at high levels) more than I like DMing 3E but my players don't like playing it. Not even the guys that play fighters. I have complains like "What? Not two attacks? Critical on 20? No disarm unless you have a similar power? My 6th level char needs 3-5 hits to kill a 2nd level soldier?"
And I admit, I would avoid being a player in 4E for just the same reasons.

[Jester of the FoS]

I disagree that skill challenges are complex. Just drop the indicated DCs to the bucket.
The idea of the skill challenge is: X successes before X/2 failures. DCs easy, moderate, hard in more than 2 skills. Try to involve all chars, as anyway everyone makes a roll in the skill challenges even if it is to assist another.

Keep in mind the update, where they knocked down the starting DCs by 5 but lowered the number of failures to a consistent "3".

[NeoTiamat]

On a time crunch just before classes, but brief comments.

So far, I have been a player for 4E for several months now (one of my DMs converted a game to it soon as it came out, explicitly for testing purposes). I've also made a ton of monsters for 4E for the Fair Folk book, which I admit is dead in the water and ain't going anywhere.

As a player, my general impression of 4E is... it's pretty much the same thing. They've changed the details, but the game on the whole feels very much like when I played a cleric in my most recent 3E experience. Instead of spells you've got powers, but on the whole it feels pretty similar. Admittedly, I haven't played that much of 3E or 4E, but in general I've found the differences to be pretty superficial.

As a DM, I haven't actually run a 4E campaign yet, though I'm planning one. Still, I've been DMing the Eye of Anubis in 3rd Edition for over a year now over in the Cafe de Nuit, and I can say that making monsters for it is a pain and a half. Like Igor, I always find that I need some kind of unique monster that having all five Monster Manuals just doesn't help with. Not even as unique as Igor's. A couple of chapters ago, I needed an Ennui. There are no Ennui in 3E. Took me literally days of flipping through monster books before settling and adjusting a Quori Dream Master from an Eberron book. Painful.

In 4E, you have an idea, you follow the guidelines, poof, instant-monster. Even for an obsessive like me, it rarely took more than an hour or two. And no need to fiddle around with feats, templates, or anything like that.

For that simplification, I can forgive 4E an awful lot of its faults.

[WolfKook]

I tend to agree with you, Alhoon. I DO like 4E... BUT I think the designers sacrificed options and roleplaying in lieu of fast resolution and playability. That's not a bad thing per se, but I just want the whole package.

I mean, having such a fixed (and small) set of powers is a bummer when you have accustomed yourself to having tons of spells and feats and powers of different kinds.

Paragon paths and epic destinies are the same. They are nice, but in 3E you had a dozen prestige classes on each product. And I know that back in the day that was overkill, but more options is always better than less options.

The same happens with base classes. I don't need to feel a niche. I want to roleplay! In my Star Wars campaign, there's a tank, an artillerist and a bomberman... My character is pretty much useless in combat, and I'm fine with that. So, why do I have to fill a combat role? Why can't I have powers outside my area of expertise?

As I like to roleplay, I'm also not fine with the alignment being dumbed down. If anything, it makes it harder to explain! Before, I got two axis, law and chaos, and good and evil, which were more or less easy to grasp. Now, there are less options, but each one is more difficult to explain. I mean, alignment hasn't been perfect, ever, but at least it was fine the way it was.

The same goes with monsters. I like that they made it possible to have monsters quickly and easily, but there should be especiall monsters, "Bosses" if you like (Darklords, maybe?), with more powers, more options, more depth.

But I really like what they tried to do with 4E: To simplify things for the DM, to increase playability and speed-up play. To get rid of the problems of the previous edition, and to make things more streamlined. There are still problems, and some of the things I don't like, as I outlined above, but in the end I like what they intended.

[DocBeard]

The same goes with monsters. I like that they made it possible to have monsters quickly and easily, but there should be especiall monsters, "Bosses" if you like (Darklords, maybe?), with more powers, more options, more depth.

What's stopping you from doing that? It just recommends keeping it to three or four attacks per monster. You can screw with the effects all you want, as long as your Pcs are cool with fighting home brewed monsters.

I know this is not intended to be a debate thread but this just stuck out as a particularly odd criticism.

[Isabella]

I'm gonna come at this from the opposite viewpoint here: I hate 3.5.

Combat is excruciatingly boring. Heaven help you if you're a new player that, horror of all horrors, doesn't know which of the five zillion options that he has are worth taking. Have fun trying to stay relevant as the GM balances all of his encounters to try and challenge the one player who, by accident or design, is way more powerful than everyone else. I hope you enjoy sitting half your combats on the sidelines because you had one bad roll.

Have I mentioned the time the entire party got level drained and I lost the level that would have let me cast Restoration and fix that? Yeah, that was a real blast.

Is 4e weak in the non-combat department? Yes, I'll freely admit that systems like White Wolf worked better for me (even with half the White Wolf skills being redundant, unclear, or worthless). Is 3.5 better? I'm not really convinced. Social situations pretty much seem to be talking a bit, then rolling a die. Maybe beforehand you cast glibness so the encounter poses no challenge whatsoever. Anything beyond that is houseruling on the part of the GM.

The loss of crafting and profession rules might have been a sadder loss if I'd ever actually gotten to use them, but the ones I wanted to take were always crossclass, meaning I could never get them up to levels worth having - and I was making myself even more useless to do it. Gee, thanks for the option.

Every session I played of 3.5 was an exercise in banality as we spent at least an hour of every game looking up some stupid rule in the books - and the rules are in absolutely no semblance of order. The campaigns where we tried to play without looking up the rules led to one player dominating the entire game because we were doing the mechanics wrong, a few unjust PC and NPC deaths, and a lot of hard feelings. I played a cleric in my first long campaign, and then swore off spellcasting forever - every game our entire party was delayed or completely screwed over because I didn't have "mystery spell X" that we really needed for the next obstacle. A few years later, I stopped playing D&D entirely.

Most people I complain to blame the whole mess on the GMs, but that's missing the point - the GMs didn't understand the system any more than I did. 3.5 is way too complicated. Our resident rules expert, who is a certified D&D GM, and a pre-law student, still doesn't know all the rules. I don't want all these rules. I want to sit down, and play a game with my friends. 4e lets me do that.

People have called me stupid and lazy for saying as much, but there it is. 3.5 made me feel stupid just trying to play the thing. WotC does some dumb things, but it's not a monolithic entity, and 4e got me back into gaming again. And for now, I'm having a lot of fun with it.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

4th Ed is a good rules system, but it doesn't feel like D&D to me. As a rules system for Ravenloft, I think 3.5 fits the setting better. But like I've said elsewhere, I think that 4th Ed would work really well for some Ravenloft adventures it would work really well for, Castles Forlorn for one, A Light in the Belfry for another.

[DasSoviet]

4e irked me for the longest time... everything was way too structured, way too combat oriented, way too 'your characters are special!' for my own personal tastes, and the games I like to run. However, once I stopped thinking of it as D&D along the lines 2e/3.5/Pathfinder, I can actually appreciate it. I would not be opposed to running a Sci Fi version of 4e, perhaps in a Starcraft and/or Mass Effect setting.

However, I would not want to run it in Ravenloft, or in Eberron, or Caelea (my big homebrew world)... no place where I want to play up the 'average person saving the world' or 'political intrigue and drama' aspects. I feel that 4e encourages combat, due to almost everything (powers, paragon paths, feats, destines and even races) relating to improving one's self in combat, adding new options and tricks and the like. If you're trying to up the roleplaying as a DM, it really doesn't add any incentives if all your player's abilities reward face smashing instead of sweet-talking and blackmailing.

Also, and this could be just me, but making classes/races/powers in 4e just ends with frustration over balance and attempts at novelty. I tried to do up my homebrew races for 4e, and I was only able to finish the kith and get halfway through the brun before I gave up. And I won't even mention my attempts at classes. Suffice to say, 3.x is far easier for me to customize and tweak for my homebrew campaigns, and the number of 3rd Party publications that I have access to which improve the parts of the game I enjoy running (first among them Dynasties and Demagogues) simply means I'm not inclined to change over to 4e anytime soon.

[Lost Heretic]

4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is one of the best high fantasy roleplaying systems on the market.

It's just not a very good Dungeons and Dragons knock-off.

[Jester of the FoS]

Right now I'm having problems with the magic items.
I *HATE* having to give out treasure every fight and 5 magic items every level. And I dislike how you NEED 3 items each with all the other slots (feet, hands, head, wondrous) being neglected and having to be squeezed in.

I really dislike that you need to start handing out magic items to first level characters.
I mean, c'mon! They killed the sacred cow of +5 weapons being the highest to space them out evenly from levels 1-30, but it would have worked just as well to keep magic items +1 to +5 and start handing out magic at level 6-ish leaving a few magic-less levels where PCs had to rely on themselves.

Mostly, I find 4e is very much a game. It revels in its status as a game and draws its inspiration from other games such as the miniature game, online RPGs, collectible card games, and European board games (Carssacone, Catan). Unlike earlier editions which only seemed to be "games" because no other definition fit.

I've played a game called Last Night on Earth where you took the roles of stereotype characters and one plays the zombies. And it feels as much like an RPG as 4e does. My friends in that game (3/4ths of which I now play 4e with) ended up half RPing in the game.

That's 4e. The DM plays the monsters and the players play the heroes and you go through the scenario.
It's no surprise the official adventures have all been extremely story-lite dungeon crawls.

Now, is this a flaw in the game? Not really, as the rules don't denote the playstyle, official content, or products. Really, I think WotC is just staffed with people who prefer straight dungeon crawls and simple adventures with interesting combats.
It wouldn't take much to have a completely combatless Dungeon adventure with role-playing, mystery, puzzles, skill challenges, and the like. There's just no one on staff to write it.