Oops, that teaches me to try to refer to GNS off the top of my head.
Yah, I’m like this too.
Perhaps you will be interested in Old School Hack. It emulates the feeling of D&D 1st and 2nd Edition without being D&D.
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Wait wait wait… cards? Grid thingys? wtf?
The last time I played D&D, all I needed was some dice, paper, and a pencil.
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You forgot about the miniatures. From what I have observed from my local gaming store, you are not a D&D person unless you have boxes and boxes of miniatures.
Heh, reminds me of ye old Dark Ages of Camelot, where Albion clerics (staff-wielding damage maniacs) would go around in mage robes to trick would-be assassins. And Midgard thanes would tool around with small round shields to look like Healers :).
That would be Albion FRIARS. They didn’t even HAVE to “Go around in mage robes” - they were a “Cloth and staff” class that specialized in beating the crap out of people with their staves.
Anyway, anyone who seriously thinks 4E is a “terrible” system is just not thinking things through. It’s a very good system for what it does, which is tactical combat and abstracted skill based challenges. I still think the “everyone is a caster in 4e” argument is a load of horse droppings because it’s not the -rules- for how something works that determines whether you are a “caster” or not. Otherwise almost everyone in every game system that has some sort of expendable resource is a “caster” and that’s obviously silly. Similarly, I find the idea that combat is somehow too “mechanics heavy” in 4E somewhat humorous considering my experience with far more lumbering systems, and the fact that it was pretty much just as bad in 3e except that you could always count on the fighter/rogue to be able to “I hit him/stab him. Okay, I’m done” to move things along.
I also find it fascinating how everyone is willing to houserule/ignore whatever they don’t like in earlier editions, but suddenly in 4E everything that is written in the books is graven upon indestructable stone tablets that rain down lightning on those that disregard their tenets.
And this is coming from someone who has covered a lot of ground in different systems, including, but not limited to early, badly put together stuff like “original” AD&D, 1st Edition Shadowrun, 1st Ed Mechwarrior, etc., fancy newfangled narrativist games like Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vinyard, Fate/Fudge, Nobilis, and most things in between (Ars Magica, every D&D edition since they started numbering them, several White Wolf variants, blah blah etc.) and even wasted my own time hacking together a system of my very own from the ground up (Houseruling existing systems is for the faint of heart! :P) which I can safely say, while it did a few things more elegantly than most commercial systems, was not as good as most of them.
So I suggest people keep more of an open mind here - not that gamers are notoriously good at that sort of thing, being, as a rule, clannish, set in their ways, and prone to infighting - and evaluate game systems, including 4E, both on their merits and on their goals, and try to keep personal feelings about who is a “caster” and what possible difference that even makes, out of your judgements.
Yeah, but you learned very quickly not to fuck with dudes wearing brown robes (and IIRC their special armoured robes couldn’t be dyed anything but brown or brown-er, at least not when I played). Hence the switch to actual, colourful mage robes.
Same thing about staves - their proprietary smacketh layereth were somewhat plain and distinctive compared with mage ones… but they could still lay some ass whuppin’ with a wizard’s pimp cane, at least enough to turn frail Lurikeen sneakaboos into so much paste.
But Wizards of the Coast doesn’t have preciousssss, exclusive IP rights in those things! How can they possibly make money if you actually use your imagination, rather than buying their pretty bits of cardboard? Why do you hate Capitalism?
You’re wrong. It’s good at what it does, but what it does isn’t good enough.
Well, you have two components to distinguish the two : The rules, and the flavor text. If the flavor text were the important part, then everyone wouldn’t be complaining about how much better casters were than everyone else in 3rd Edition. So yeah, it’s the rules.
4e’s slavish devotion to balance by design over anything else makes me wary of customizing, that’s for damn sure. With 3e, the rules themselves allowed certain characters to be better in certain situations, so there’s less fear of introducing some horrible gamebreaking houserule.
I’ll stack my gaming experience against yours, if you want to start an ‘appeal to authority’ contest, but my judgment of 4e comes from having read it, having played it (two ongoing campaigns) and having actually run it for three sessions as a tryout. I have analyzed 4E on its merits and its goals and found both wanting.
I agree, just because there’s some expendable resource (powers) doesn’t make them the same, it’s the problem that it’s the same damn resource implemented in the same stupid way. Look at World of Warcraft – all classes have some expendable resource, but there are multiple resources (3 in vanilla, 4 after WOTLK, and more after Cataclysm if you count things like Balance druids and the new Soul Shard mechanic). They don’t operate SO differently it’s crazy, but they operate differently enough that it’s fair to say you couldn’t just give a warrior mana, or a rogue rage, and have the system work the same way.
They all, at their root, have an “expendable resource” mechanic, but it’s implemented differently for many of them. If 4th ed was determined to do balance, I would have no problem, but it’s the balance at the expense of variety that’s the problem. And the focus on balance throughout every aspect of the game (i.e. the designers know a party at 4th level can overcome whatever), that it’s difficult to just homebrew a different mechanic for each class without doing things like playtesting and theorycrafting on forums, things which aren’t exactly what you want to be wasting your “fun time” in your weekly gaming sessions on.
The big stumping problem I could see here is that it forces resource management where there shouldn’t be any. Why the fuck does the warrior only get to use his Inspiring Shout or whatever once per day, or once per encounter ? He knows how to scream good. He should be able to scream all the time if he damn well wants to.
It makes relative sense for wizards and priests to only have so much magic, because magic doesn’t really exist and so you can make up any arbitrary rules for it you want. Tolkien ruled that in his world, magic was like a shining beacon telling every other magic user in the world where you were. Fine, who’s to argue ?
If my rogue knows how to disarm a foe, or how to follow a strike with some artful positioning, or whatever it is rogues do in 4E, there’s is nothing logically preventing him from doing it over and over and over again. But in 4E there is, because MMORPG-style balance. So you’ve got these video-gamey cooldowns thrust upon you in defiance of what actually makes sense. This is fine in a video game, where making sense is not the primary motivation and character abilities are expected to fall into silly abstractions. It is not fine in a story-focused medium.
As for tactical gameplay where all classes get to shine, play Pathfinder. Within reasonable boundaries (that is to say, forget epic shit, 4-14ish level) everyone in the party gets to contribute meaningfully. The rogue doesn’t get left out, neither do the warrior or barbarian or paladin. There are some really silly builds to be found (I’m looking at you Summoners, you anime bullshitmongers you), as is expected within every rule set (don’t get me started on Panache whores in* 7th Sea*), but for the most part it’s a solid, tactically exciting ruleset that still allows for interesting, credible storytelling.
“You can’t disarm the orc because you disarmed that guard earlier today remember ?” is not interesting, credible storytelling.
I don’t see “forcing resource management” being too much of a problem. For physical classes you can have a resource system like “fatigue,” maybe each battle you feel “fresh” and after so much attacking you start getting minuses to your rolls – some abilities make you more tired than others, and of course there are potions, spells, and perhaps abilities (like meditate or something) that restores it. Post encounter you gain most (but not all) of your “restedness” back until you explicitly rest at the end of the day (refreshing all of it). Disarming could be listed as a “moderately tiring” action because you have to force the enemy into a situation where you CAN attempt a disarm, and then make a point perfect strike to actually accomplish the feat.
I don’t think the problem is resource management so much as abstracting away the management into something that doesn’t make sense for the class itself.
That’s not my experience, and I have thought things through.
I find 4E combat to be very boring, in that it consists of players saying “I use my at-will attack” for 45 minutes or so and not much else. Of course, some of that could be the fights that my DM sets up, but even the designers acknowledged that fights tend to take too long and they responded by cutting some monsters’ hit points in half.
I haven’t played any face2face RPG’s in a while. (10 years?)
I still have my AD&D books (including Unearthed Arcana, Orietal Adventures, etc), Birthright, e3.0, and non D&D stuff like RIFTS, Middle Earth Role Playing (Rolemaster spinoff), Mechwarrior.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses as systems, and they all titilated the imagination. It’s all about the socializing.
If a player (using the word in the generic sense) is trying to find loopholes or whatever to game the system, they are the ones with issues, not the game system. And I don’t have any advice about how to mitigate the damage when it happens.
There’s gaming the system and there’s imbalance. There’s a difference between theorycrafting Pun-Pun or generally being a munchkin, and having a system where it’s easy to break your character. Luckily, since it’s a human run game you can fix these issues as they arise, but I respect when games try to balance things. I just think 4E went too far on that front. For all its imbalance and faults, if you weren’t trying you had SOME obvious issue (compare a party with a warrior and wizard at level 1, then at level 20, the utility of each will be roughly opposite), but they were easily able to be overcome by a competent DM/campaign designer. The imbalance led to flavor, but I don’t think you can just forget about balance when designing lest you make a bunch of gimped classes, or a bunch of classes that WILL outshine any other class, given the chance.
Wow, so much personal opinion presented as fact. Can we all agree that we have personal preferences and other people’s may be different and leave it at that? Why do other people have to be wrong for you to be right?
I’m not addressing **Jragon **here, but multiple posters in this thread, including those I agree with.
The topic I find interesting is not the merits of 4E, but the idea of a new iteration of D&D that hybridizes previous editions and gives the player the ability to choose the aspects of system that suit them. Is this even possible without massive reference charts and lookups?
Say I’m running a game for Candid Gamera’s 3E character and mlees’s AD&D character, and I want to see if a monster hits each of them. I’m rolling against AC for Gamera and THAC0 for mlees. To gauge if they hit in response, my monsters need to have two values for AC, depending on the character who’s attacking. That’s weird, and probably unmanageable – so how does Wizards think they can pull it off? We have quotes from playtesters talking about the idea – is it still flights of fancy, or is there something real behind it?
I don’t think the point of the system is that Gamera can say “I’m a second ed wizard” and mlees can say “I’m a first ed rogue,” I think the point is so the GM, or rather, the group of players as an entity can say “we’re using second ed armor class and third ed diplomacy with fourth ed encounter based powers.”
ETA: I certainly didn’t mean to act like what I was saying is fact if I’m part of the group you’re addressing, everything I said above is just my opinion about what games did well and poorly. If somebody likes the system, great, I was just saying what I didn’t like about it.
I don’t have any problem with the concept of at-will abilities (though wizards should have fewer or worse at-wills than fighters, to compensate for their limited abilities being more powerful), but I absolutely can’t stand per-encounter mechanics. It feels too much like computer games where you have an “exploration mode” and a “combat mode”, or whatever. It takes me right out of the immersion for “encounters” to have well-defined boundaries. Was the Battle of Helm’s Deep one encounter, or many? What if one of the soldiers retreated to the deep caves for a while to get bandaged up, and then came back out where other soldiers were still fighting? If you want to make something functionally a once-per-encounter ability, like giving it a 5 or 10 round cooldown, that’s fine, but don’t make it “when the encounter ends”.
As for what they’re claiming for 5th edition, it looked to me like they were saying that different characters in the same party could be using different levels of the rules. The only way I can figure that they could do that would be through extensive use of “packages”: You can choose to be an out-of-the-box fighter or wizard (which has the full suite of abilities, but a predetermined set of them), or you can customize your fighter or wizard or whatever by choosing a different set of skills, proficiencies, etc. That’s going to be almost impossible to keep balanced, though.
The longest fight we’ve ever had in more than three years of play lasted 10 rounds. Most don’t last more than 5. And tracking number of rounds for cooldowns is a pain in the ass, so I find “per encounter” to have pretty much exactly the same effect you’re looking for, with less bookkeeping.
If you want to introduce cooldowns, go for it (not that you need my permission, of course!), but for me, the current model works well enough, and I and my players have fun.
I believe it D&D 5th may look something like Microlite 20, which has a base set of rules, and allows DM to add new skills, abilities, spells and perks according to the group’s neat.
Though for different editions to exist side by side, I wonder if they will be using a point-buy system like GURPS…
It’s all about the socializing.