Dungeons & Dragons - New & Old

I started D&D with 4th edition. I haven't played in about a year, but I do like the changes in 5e. I may join a Roll20 game at some point this summer.

Double post.

Grimsark_sl said:

Yeah they were super quick to pigeonhole 4ed. But then I have to give them props for recognizing a failed product sooner rather than later.
The few games of 4ed I did play, where VERY FUN though. I plan to steel some of the non-combat mechanics for my 5ed campaign. IMO that was were 4ed shined brightest.

Click to expand...

Yeah. Combat in 4th got bogged to death by tracking marks, status effects, et all. How bad could it get?*

What they did well in 4th was making every character a legit bad ass from level 1, and giving everyone something to do in combat each round. Those were good changes. I'd still play 4E if I didn't have to do any combat or use a battle map.

*When it first came out I was in a party with 8 players. A single fight, not even a great fight, lasted 10 hours. That was like 6 rounds tops.

In the campaign I was running I had a set of painted wood tiles color coded for each player. Who is the Ranger's Quarry? The dude standing on the green tile. The players tracked all their own shit. It was easy for everyone to look at the map and know who had what going on who.

Status effects could be a serious pain in the dick though. After a snafu once or twice I was very careful to keep that in check when designing encounters.

I've been able to find most of the 3.5 books for free online. My buddy has converted the old Temple of Elemental Evil mod into Fantasy Grounds (hours of work, evidently). We're thinking about streaming it on Twitch, hah.

Himeo_sl said:

Yeah. Combat in 4th got bogged to death by tracking marks, status effects, et all. How bad could it get?*

What they did well in 4th was making every character a legit bad ass from level 1, and giving everyone something to do in combat each round. Those were good changes. I'd still play 4E if I didn't have to do any combat or use a battle map.

*When it first came out I was in a party with 8 players. A single fight, not even a great fight, lasted 10 hours. That was like 6 rounds tops.

Click to expand...

4e was designed from the ground up to be licensed to computer games, with the PnP bit almost an afterthought. Frame it in that context and it makes sense.

I found the 4e game to be such a massive improvement over the previous editions that I am still somewhat in shock that they scrapped it all. I guess everyone has different experiences with the games and how group dynamics work, but my experience went something like this:

D&D editions 1-3.5: One melee character runs around like something out of a Hong Kong Wire-fu action flick swinging with 3-6 attacks per round and eviscerates everything. One character (usually a chick) rolls their one d20 every round and mostly misses. Low level wizard stands in the back cowering behind a rock waiting for a good time to use his one Web spell (it never happens). Final character is played by the group goofball and does something entertaining but of questionable combat utility and the GM has to decide if this is either useless or game altering in its effect.

D&D 4e: Melee character is pretty effective but the encounter and daily powers serve to really anchor what they can and cannot do in a given combat round. The chick is motivated by the interesting options in front of her and makes good use of abilities rather than just doing her one attack or heal and seems much more engaged, wizard is chucking spells every round of combat and never once pulls out a goddamn lawn dart to throw into the melee, goofball comes up with funny ways in which he/she uses powers and it may require some GM judgement call but again the boundaries are more evenly set.

Yeah I can see how people might get bogged down in status effects and marks and such in 4e, but that is as much a product of toolset and actually using miniatures as it is of the abilities as written. I had earlier edition games bog down even more than 4e ever did when we used the big plastic battle mat. Perhaps 4e prompted people to make more careful use of miniatures and positioning than they did otherwise, but for my part there was no appreciable difference there.

D&D 5th seems much more about the interactive storytelling than it is about making sensible combat rules and I really take issue with this, because roleplaying is more a factor of how your group interacts than anything else. I think we had more 'roleplaying' during 4e than we ever did previous to that because people were motivated to get almost cinematic in describing their moves. You can add roleplaying elements to any game with a sufficiently creative bunch of people, I want a rulebook to provide actual rules and the 5th edition material seemed woefully lacking in that category. I have a feeling things will fall back to a couple characters dominating the play session while the others just kinda hang out.

I was in the beta testing of 5ed for like a year. My group went back to playing 3ed after a few months as we didn't really enjoy 5ed.

Qhue_sl said:

D&D editions 1-3.5: One melee character runs around like something out of a Hong Kong Wire-fu action flick swinging with 3-6 attacks per round and eviscerates everything. One character (usually a chick) rolls their one d20 every round and mostly misses. Low level wizard stands in the back cowering behind a rock waiting for a good time to use his one Web spell (it never happens). Final character is played by the group goofball and does something entertaining but of questionable combat utility and the GM has to decide if this is either useless or game altering in its effect.

Click to expand...

Maybe it comes from playing with the same people for over 10 years, maybe because we all have IQs higher than that of jello, but everything you describe here is a function of non-creative players, not a bad gaming system. Also, why is a low level wizard hanging out with some melee that's getting up to 6 attacks per round? He's just asking to eat random AE damage or have a bad guy simply look in his direction and make him fall over. House rule was if someone died and wanted to make a new character, they came back as 1 level lower than the lowest member of the group.

Anyways, I just thought that was an unfair representation.

I brought up my experiences as a counterpoint to the vocal RPG fans who complained that 4e was "too hard". I personally found the guy who disliked 4e the most was the dude who, through a combo of personal charisma and esoteric rules lawyering, was able to turn himself into a superhero at level 3. The 4th edition didn't give him.the option to be ambidextrous, blind-fighting, dual wielding, double specialized, dervish of death with Racial Hatred of every living and unliving thing. Was this a strong factor of GM spine? Absolutely, but the formalism of 4e provided the structure to reign in power gamers as well as uplift the more introverted players.

My biggest problem with 4th edition is all the classes felt a bit to similar. My wizard casts his burning hand spell okay fine. My warrior uses his cleave power which mechanically works almost identially to the burning hands. It basically made things feel a bit to much the same between classes and a bit boring because of that. It was a lot better balanced but it clearly was designed with video game adaptations in mind which is some what ironic as I can't recall any video games using 4th edition rulesets.

That's mostly in line with the criticisms I've experienced as well. The people I found to dislike it the most were the people that liked the gross inequalities that had crept into every single other campaign we had ever played. They liked hotdogging, basically.

kaid_sl said:

My biggest problem with 4th edition is all the classes felt a bit to similar. My wizard casts his burning hand spell okay fine. My warrior uses his cleave power which mechanically works almost identially to the burning hands. It basically made things feel a bit to much the same between classes and a bit boring because of that. It was a lot better balanced but it clearly was designed with video game adaptations in mind which is some what ironic as I can't recall any video games using 4th edition rulesets.

Click to expand...

The low level game, specifically the core classes, do feel very samey. As they released additional books with more powers and more choices for class features it got a great deal better. Classes feel much more mechanically distinct.

We tried some 4th edition but after you had warriors going I am going to cast my cleave on people everybody just felt like all the classes were identical and boring so went back to pathfinder. I am not surprised that over time they wound up making them feel more mechanically distinct but the classes and powers from the players handbook did not really inspire folks to want to play it long enough to find out.

Cleave isn't a spell!

Everything is a spell for the muscle wizard.