It’s my preferred flavor of D&D. I like the crunchy flavor, and the modular design for classes (originating with 3rd Edition) seems to have nearly been perfected by the Paizo team. I can build any hero I want with classes and archetypes. I’m also fond of their release schedule - they’re not as aggressive about releasing as WotC was in the 3.5 heyday, where nearly every month would have some 128 page little hardcover.
Now, there are valid criticisms of the game, and I won’t think less of someone who doesn’t enjoy it - there are a lot of situational modifiers to keep in your head, for instance. (“Let’s see - I have a +5 to hit, +2 from the bard, +1 from Bless, -2 from being Shaken…”) That’s one area in particular where I feel 5th Edition D&D is kind of a revelation.
I just finished a Pathfinder campaign adapting Ravenloft a month ago, so now I’m going to be running ICONS and Savage Worlds for a while, but I’ll swing back to PF eventually…
I’ve only skimmed the 4th ed D&D rules, and heard that it’s like a video game on paper. It just seemed like the characters were built for dungeoneering and nothing else. From what I understand, the honeymoon was over rather quickly for it.
Yeah, the Bluff, Diplomacy and Insight skills are totally useless when you leave the dungeon?
Ugh. I am SO TIRED of hearing this. No. It’s not “built for dungeoneering and nothing else”; It does place a slightly greater emphasis on combat than 3.X, but frankly, the skill system in 3X is crap, so the 4E skill system is basically the same with less bookkeeping and slightly broader skill categories. You can run any kind of adventure you could run in 3X in 4E. The play experience would be somewhat different for some of them, but not actually as different as most people make out. The main difference would be that the fighter actually contributes to the party.
There are legitimate complaints about 4E; The “It’s just like a video game!” quip is not one of them.
4E didn’t even ‘die’, WotC basically just stopped publishing for it while they were still selling pretty competitive numbers of books. Why did they essentially decide to kill it even though, looking at the sales charts, it was doing just as well as its competition (Seriously; There are charts. 4E and PF were neck & neck all the time)? Because it wasn’t outselling Pathfinder ENOUGH for Hasbro. Or to put it another way: Massive Corporate Entity is disappointed in how much money D&D is making for it, because it is used to Massive Corporate Money and not “Here’s what people actually make by selling roleplaying games, even roleplaying games called Dungeons & Dragons” money. This is also probably why we are on track for another (probably incredibly bad) D&D Movie.
It’s a much maligned game for the primary reason that D&D grognards hate new things and would rather buy essentially the same rules for a third time (Pathfinder, after purchasing 3.0 and 3.5) than explore a new space.
Same rules three times? Same ideas maybe, but not same rules. 3.5 was intended to fix 3’s bugs, and PF fixed further bugs and developed more features. I recently found out they don’t have Mind Flayers, the Gith races or Beholders because they’re TSR property, not public domain.
I didn’t mean to twist your knickers, Airk. I was just passing along the rather scant feedback on 4E that I heard from friends and such. I had no idea how well-received it was overall. What’s this about Hasbro? The wikidoesn’t mention anything about Hasbro.
I still play 4e with a group of friends. We’re starting the Epic mods. Of course, I missed the last 2 sessions due to health issues.
It has it’s ups and downs. It can be a lot of fun and you some of the powers are really cool.
That being said… I started playing D&D back in 1977. I’d grown pretty bored with the game (though not with social playing) until 3e came out and simply reignited my passion for the game. 3.5 was simply a fix for stuff that should never have made it out of playtesting.
And now I have the Pathfinder books and am having a lot of fun doing world building and playing at building higher level NPCs and the like. You’d never see me doing that with 4e.
5e? I dunno. I have the PHB, but as it appears as mostly just a squished down version of 3e, it really isn’t exciting me any.
They’re nearly compatible. That’s close enough for me. Yeah, they moved a bunch of numbers around and stuff, but the fundamentals are nearly identical. Yeah, you can point out a lot of things that are super important to some people, but you can do that with Major League Baseball too.
It was divisive, and got a lot of negative press in no small part from people who repeated stuff they heard of the internet without giving the game a fair shake. So… you hit a nerve.
I’ve never gotten that. I can do a gazillion PCs and I only ever go as far as I want to on detailing them. I always figured that if you’re just going to kill a monster in 30 minutes at the table, who cares what feats and skills they have? Just make shit up at the table. Chances are you’d just forget Zoopa Doopa’s special feat chain in the middle of the combat anyway.
And it hardly matters what Wizardo Supremo has for the same. “Wizard 20”, and when you… IF you ever interact, I’ll make up something more on the fly.
Thank Og for links. For encounters vs monsters and bad guy NPCs, I usually outline a plan of action beforehand and jot down the appropriate abilities, skills and feats that apply in a Word document.
Ex: Vrock Demon (copy of stat block from SRD)
rd 1: fly within 30 ft, Stunning Screech Fort DC 21
rd 2: Fly to 50 ft away, Heroism on self (+2 att dm & saves)
rd 3: Fly to adj, Spores (free) 1d8 dm + 1d4/rd for 10 rds, MI 1d4+3 images
rd 4: full attack etc
I’ve seen well-run 4th Edition D&D games that were engaging. But even the best-run ones were less immersive for me than any other edition because of the design of the game. The powers-based combat design. The combat focus. (Yes, you still have non-combat skills. A lot fewer. Plus, the skill challenges basically make non-combat into another form of combat.) The fact that any PC class with the same role as another PC class felt like the same class with different flavor text. The optional rule to run the game without a GM.
People called it a ‘video game’. And that’s a fair criticism, because with the defined ‘roles’, WotC was making a conscious choice to emulate the biggest name in RPGs, World of Warcraft.
I basically view 4th Edition as a very nice fantasy board game, like Talisman or Hero Quest. It’s fun, in the right hands. I won’t begrudge anyone playing it. But I won’t ever play it again, and it was the edition that lost market share to the point that Pathfinder was outselling it.
Yeah, but give me one thing you can do with the 3.5 skills that you can’t do with the 4E skills.
Only if done poorly; I’ll bet you money that you’re basically running skill challenges in 3.X, you just don’t call them that. It’s just a model of “Here are the skills you can use to solve this problem, here are the skills you can use to help other people solve this problem and here is roughly how many times you need to succeed for it to happen.” And basically every extended use of skills in every game falls into that pattern.
Now here I just have to tell you you are wrong. Fighters and Paladins play nothing alike and they are the same role. They have different restrictions (Paladins have extremely limited options for engaging at range, and very few ways to prevent foes from moving), different mechanisms for defending (Fighters attract attention because their attacks do solid damage, paladins do much less overall damage but can heal), different scopes of powers (Paladins are more likely to be able to affect groups of foes) and different non combat skills (Fighters have like… Athletics and Intimidate). How exactly do they play the same? Because they both have a power that applies a mark? This is exactly the sort of clearly refutable claim that makes this whole discussion seem weird.
Which in turn was emulating Everquest, which in turn was emulating something else, which in turn was emulating D&D, so…??
Do you really mean to say that grouping classes together by what they do makes an RPG into a video game? Because that sounds gonzo to me, and it it’s true for you, I think that says more about what your RPGs are like than it does about 4e.
The only time Pathfinder definitively outsold 4E was after WotC essentially stopped selling it. Pathfinder, for all it is touted, did not actually kick the game off some imaginary throne or something. It pretty much won by default when WotC gave up courtesy of corporate pressure.
Very interested to see WTF they do with 5E, since right now there’s no way that one is going to match Pathfinder book sales either, since there are only three books and no plans to print others that I am aware of.
This was almost exactly my experience with 4th ed. I don’t know about market share, but I do know that the year 4th ed. came out, the cons were full of games for it, and each year after, the number of 4th ed. games being offered halved, while the number of Pathfinder games expanded at about the same rate. Same thing on game nights in the stores. Maybe it’s a regional thing, but in the gamer community around here, people really couldn’t wait to stop playing 4th ed.
I played in a group some years ago. It was an epic 6 game with DM-rotation. I had plenty of fun, but I’ve always preferred more rules-light games. I always felt the craziest stories and the most fun happened when not “playing” the game, rather than faffing around, poking the GM to see what would happen. So much so that I wrote my own ruleset more or less based on that and began on a setting. I don’t have so much time for gaming anymore, though.
I don’t really think this is representative of anything; If you use the “what people are playing at the game store” metric, there are whole swaths of the industry that don’t exist at all.
That said, Pathfinder does, in my understanding, have a far better organized play program than 4E did, which would definitely propel them forward in these kinds of comparisons.
This is pretty much my experience; The more I played, the less I cared if I had a +6 or +8 bonus to hit. But after one less-than-well-informed attempt at putting together my own system, I discovered that other people had already done things much better and smarter than I could have, and I was way better off selecting a commercial system than spending tons of time putting together my own.
Forge a hammer. Run a farm. Write a poem. I could go on for a long time, but I am hoping you see the pattern.
How much money would you like to bet? I could use the cash. The “how many times you need to succeed” part is gamist nonsense intruding on what should be roleplayed. I’m not going to say my party needs five successes amongst a list of skills, if they talk to the right person and roll a single good diplomacy check backed by good roleplay. “Well, he could tell you everything, but that’s too easy, so come up with four other ways you could accomplish the task.”
Then you’d really have your panties in a bunch if I’d said what I originally wrote, that every 4e class feels the damn same, regardless of role.
I’m saying that prior to 4E, while a party might have loosely assigned themselves ‘jobs’ in a combat, terms like ‘Striker’/‘DPS’, ‘Controller’/‘Controller’, ‘Defender’/‘Tank’, and ‘Leader’/‘Healer’ were the sole province of MMOs. Do you really not understand the difference between a fantasy video game borrowing on fantasy tropes, and a fantasy RPG re-contextualizing its mechanics to emulate a video game?
KP, one of my gamer friends, is horrible with math and has to have somebody else make his PF character for him. He’s more into the storytelling nature of RPGs, and contributes much feedback online to the Hero Wars system and similar games that emphasize story content over number juggling.
Hero Wars established a game world called Glorantha decades ago, and continually adds more meta to its cosmos in the form of events and tales. They don’t worry so much about whether the story fits in with established game rules, since their conventions are open to reinterpretation anyway. In a nutshell, the core race is collectively known as Orlanthi, bronze age tribes struggling against the forces of Chaos. Their gods are much like Greek and Norse gods, capricious and flawed and not always on the same page. A “civilized” culture known as the Lunars evolved that worships their own self-made pantheon, which relegates the Orlanthi gods to secondary status. The Lunars supposedly want to combat Chaos, but the Orlanths don’t trust them, especially since the Lunars are generally such snobs.
Other nonhuman races such as dwarves and elves are insular to themselves. The dwarves stay underground and the elves stay in wild forest, and neither have much to do with humankind. Their personalities and ways ot thinking are generally alien and incompatible with humans. So, adventuring parties usually have the same cultural background, unless players can convince the GM why their character should be nonhuman. It forces players to think more about character development, rather than cherry-picking the most optimal race for a min-max stat block.
The thread topic’s kind of derailed, but I’m just glad it’s getting so much participation, so it’s all good.
It wasn’t so much putting the system together. That was fairly easy, as I came up with one, and only one, core mechanic. I just didn’t have time to play it or expanding the setting.
[Hijack]
I’ll actually go ahead share my “game”, as some of you may be interested and may have the time to actually use it. It is a collaborative, free-form roleplaying “system”, where all players are expected to GM from time to time. I will not share my setting, as the mechanic can work with any setting and mine is a shoddy patchwork of things we came up with during our game.
The Mechanic: If there needs to be a resolution, the GM announces a dice-roll. Each side of the dice is assigned to a player(my group consisted of me as a GM and three players, so we rolled a D4. If you are five players, use a D6, with two sides assigned to the GM and so on). The group(including GM) takes a minute or two to think up a scenario each. When everyone is ready, everyone reveals in order, and in one sentence, what will happen if they “win” the roll. The dice is cast and the player who “won” gets to tell the story from that point on until he or she runs out of steam, or until the GM decide to take over.
Magic worked similarly, with the only exception being that if a character decided to use magic, an unexpected price would have to be payed at some point in the future. Prices were never to the detriment of a player, and depending on the player, could even be used as an advantage.
The basis for this to work, is that every player must be on the same page. It helped me a lot, since I have a problem moving things along, getting lost in stats, tables and obscure rules. If a player thought we needed a roll, he could always ask and I’d make an assesment of the situation. If a player wanted something to happen, they could either tell me straight, or see if they would get a seat in the GM chair. I kept a record of all scenarios we came up with and weaved the best ones into the background of the game, adding a lot of flavour to my on-the-go setting and game. I found a fast GMing style, with jumps back and forth between players(they really liked to split up!), kept everyone interested and involed in eachothers individual stories, as they could all expect to take my position and control where it would go.
If anyone tries it out, I’d like to hear your thoughts!
Pattern? All those are covered by the same skill in 3.5. So basically “Craft”? I guess that’s a point, but seriously, all your examples fall into a single skill. If you want “Craft” that badly, it’s not exactly a tough thing to fix.
If you can finish in one roll, you’re not engaging in an “extended use of skills”; You’re just rolling a diplomacy check. Apples and Oranges sir.
No, I’d just know you’re detached from reality.
So to reiterate: Putting a label on something changes it? Roles don’t even DO anything in the rules. They’re strictly descriptive. The idea of a “heavy armor” class has more direct game mechanic impact than roles, and that’s still a mostly impact-free descriptor.
Did I miss the part where it gave actual numbers? #1 and #2 is pretty meaningless if one game sold 40,000 copies and one game sold 39,998 or something. Certainly, you can’t state “Kicked ass” from the contents of that link. I don’t mind being proved wrong, but you’re being kindof aggresive while at the same time not really supporting your claim about “ass kicking”? The claim about 4E production “winding down in Q4” is inaccurate as well - there had been many missed and cancelled releases by Q2. Heck, the DMG3 was cancelled in 2010. I mean jeebus, LOOK at their Q1 2011 releases, FFS. They are: A tile set, a Boardgame and DM Screen. They did not release a single actual book between December 2010 and March 2011, inclusive. It’s easy to outsell the opposition when the opposition isn’t in the game. 4E production was in decline as early as 2010.
Write a poem: this one is tricky. I definitely wouldn’t put it under craft, as it’s completely unlike the examples they give of crafts (alchemist fire, weapons, armor, etc.) I might put it under Profession. I’d be tempted to put it under Perform (oratory), even though that’s not a perfect fit; still, it seems the closest. (FWIW, I’d put other stable arts like sculpture and painting under a subset of perform as well, but that’s just me).
To be fair, I’ve never seen any of these things actually matter for PCs in a D&D game ever. But it’s fun to put some ranks in profession or craft for a bit of flavor, if that’s the sort of game you run.
I had a fine time with 4E. I reject the idea that the backlash was grognards; if that were true, I wouldn’t hear so many of my friends that loathed 4E being drawn back into the fold by 5E.
A large amount of the “backlash” against 4e was from people who were already years-deep into Pathfinder or who had never left earlier editions of D&D. They were never going to like it.
Wizards tried a lot of new stuff with that edition. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t.
I’m of the opinion that the role/power setup was fucking brilliant, and I don’t really give a damn that it was evocative of MMOs. So what? People say that like it’s some kind of massive indictment, but the reality is that Wizards saw a good idea and used it. It was easy to help new players figure out what they want to play by describing the different roles for them, then narrowing to a power source.
“Okay, so it sounds like you want to play a defender. Do you want to have magic powers? Yeah? Do you want to be a holy warrior, or do you want to be more of a wizard?”
It worked really well. I’ve never understood people who say that the classes all feel the same. Maybe people who say that just have no imaginations? I thought Wizards did a great job of making all the classes distinct from one another.
As for “non combat” stuff? There’s plenty, but it varies by class. Magic users were much more versatile outside of combat, just like in other editions.
4e’s biggest problem, imo, is that combat just took too damned long. They tried to make combat much more tactically satisfying, and they got there by adding a lot more “stuff” to do in combat. That led to battles that took way too long, even with mechanics in place that streamlined things.
My group played a shitload of 4e for several years after it came out. It was hugely refreshing for us. All classes were effective at level one, and magic users didn’t outstrip mundane characters at higher levels. Everyone got to be cool. We liked it a lot.
5e is much better, though. Probably my favorite edition of D&D.
Note the “Subsidiary of Hasbro” in the info box.