BlinkingDuck, threadshitting isn’t welcome in this forum. If you hate the subject of the thread, don’t click on it.
No warning issued.
It’s just an action movie trope. You don’t have to use it if the trope doesn’t work for you, but some people find it fun. “Mook” rules in RPGs is an old idea; D&D 4E is behind the curve on that one.
Ahh, FENG SHUI. There was a game. Totally incoherent world, but a nice ruleset.
[can’t be arsed to take it to ATMB] Didn’t look like a threadshit to me - it sounded like someone who likes D&D but is horrified at the news of what they’ve done to the system.[/cbattitA]
Sounds interesting but I see where the objections are coming from. With all the tweaks (and 3rd Ed was drastic enough), is the game D&D in any recognisable form any more? Not that Gygax got everything right or anything like it, as any fule kno… 
To some extent, it’s not intended to be. If your gaming group switched from 1st edition to 2nd, or from 2nd to 3rd, it would be possible to convert over the characters and leave all of them pretty much recognizably the same: A tenth-level fighter with a sword +4, or a sixth-level wizard casting a fireball, is pretty much the same thing in any of those three systems. For fourth edition, however, they designed it with the assumption that it would not be possible to directly convert characters, spells, items, etc.
Indeed. One of my gaming groups has been together since 1982. We’ve converted some characters from 1st, to 2nd, to 3rd, and to 3.5. (Heck, WotC even published a little booklet at the introduction of 3E, showing how to convert 2E characters.)
A 4E “conversion” is more about taking the general character concept, and rebuilding it in 4E.
4E isn’t a bad game system, IMO. But, it’s the biggest quantum change in the ruleset that D&D has ever gone through.
In some ways it’s a better system. I am intrigued by some of the ideas. But they should not have kept the name of D+D because it is so different. I think the system was getting incrementally better as it went along (barring 2 being a minor step down from “1.5”*) 4th Edition removes the possibility of official support for bettering the existing aspects of the game.
In my ideal world, Wizards would produce another game called Magic Online: The Roleplaying System, and have it coexist with an improvment on 3.5. I’d play both of them.
*i.e. AD+D 1 after all the supplements came out for it.
It’s nice to see the Edition Wars aren’t confined only to EN World. 
Exactly. Not trying to threadshit. Horrified is the right word.
By what, exactly? You’re reacting (some might say overreacting) to brief descriptions of the game. If you really like previous editions, then keep playing them. The fact that you don’t like the current edition doesn’t mean the game is dead.
People said the same thing when 3rd edition came out - the idea of allowing players to take a level in any class they wanted without the draconian dual-classing process struck some people (including people I played with) as watering down the rules. The game survived.
So 4e is picking up tropes from MMOs. Where, pray tell, do you think the MMOs got them from in the first place? The idea that there are underlying archetypes in combat is older than WoW; I’ve been in plenty of adventuring groups that selected characters for balance - “we need a healer, so who’s playing cleric or druid?”
New names for the roles is an attempt to (a) provide new players with a logical framework for understanding game balance and roles in combat and (b) provide experienced players with handy labels for the things we already knew. It also gives the designers an underlying framework for game design.
Up-thread there’s a comment on the similarity between changes to D&D and changes to Magic, and I agree for the most part: some of the wonder and mystery is gone. I miss it, but I don’t miss the rules inconsistencies and game balance issues that had me tearing my hair out as both player and GM. Trying to put together encounters that don’t kill the spellcasters at level 1 is tough; trying to put together encounters that give the spellcasters a challenge past about level 14 is even harder.
With 4e, the players are on a fairly even footing. Everyone has something to do in combat, and let’s face it, in most roleplaying games, that’s what the game is about. It may not be for you, but that’s okay - there are lots of other games out there.
You could try a novel idea and put together encounters that tell a story.
Like I said, it’s not AD&D. It is not the sequel to or an evolution of 3.x.
It’s more like there was a parallel universe where Basic D&D kept on chugging along, and got all the way to a 4th edition of THAT mindset. And then a wizard zapped it into our universe. Is that a nerdy enough description?
A couple similarities off the top of my head:
Both games only concern themselves with adjudicating combat, or at least adventuring in dangerous situations
Both games are tiered into power levels. Basic had Basic, Expert,Companion, Master Immortal; 4E has Heroic, Paragon, Epic
Anyway. If you want the next edition of 3.x D&D, you want Pathfinder.
I could, and I do. Assuming that one of the things one does in a role-playing game is actually use the rules system for its primary purpose, you wind up fighting every now and again.
Sure. But if the players sleep through it because it’s too easy or get murdered in the first wave, how does that help the story?
Yes, you can make balanced encounters in any system. 4e just happens to give you tools to make it easier.
Oh, as far as the minion thing: The whole point of that is so that you CAN fight the things that were scary 5 levels ago and mow them down. It just does so in a way that fits the ruleset better, and makes the fight move along.
I mean, really, do you want to spend the time rolling dice to chisel through 80 hit points per ogre when you know they can’t really hurt you and they’re just there to pad out the bad guy’s numbers? Especially when you can’t miss and they can’t hit because of how the combat values scale? 4E just says to take a new stat sheet, call them the same ogres and let the heroes feel powerful as they drive them from the field of battle in a single blow.
I read the core rulebooks and wasn’t impressed. Not only do the classes seem homogenized, abilities seem so as well. Also, it’s as though the authors made a list of everything from 3.X that anyone ever decried as OP (no matter how gratuitously) and nerfed it into the ground. Character creation just doesn’t seem like any fun in 4e.
And what’s with the artwork? Suddenly, tieflings! Thousands of them! Dragonborn too!
I will defend many things about 4e.
The artwork is not one of them. Ugh.
The classes are not homogenized, although it may seem that way because they’re aimed at delivering the same relative effectiveness. They get there in somewhat different ways - Rangers, and Rogues are both damage-dealers, but rogues generate bonus damage when they have combat advantage (opponent unaware, stunned, flanked by your buddies, etc - it’s the new backstab), while rangers generate their bonus damage by designating a target as their “quarry.” Mechanically similar but not the same, different in flavor.
Honestly, if you want to find things to criticize about 4e, it’s not hard. The same can be said of any game system, though. If you want to find out what it is, we can talk about that, or y’all can just enjoy trashing it for what it’s not.
Then why do you need rules at all?
Quoth Brainac4:
The fact that there are well-defined roles isn’t a problem. The fact that everyone has a well-defined role in combat is. In all versions of D&D, every character class had a role, but some of them were non-combat roles. Whenever I play a rogue, I would consider it a minor defeat every time initiative was even rolled, because it meant that I hadn’t succeeded in sneaking my way past combat. Likewise, a bard, say, should be talking his way out of fighting. And a spellcaster, while having the versatility to be useful in combat, also has the versatility to be useful outside of combat.
Quoth Chipacabra:
Except that they’re not the same things, they’re completely different things that you just give the same name. There’s really no comparison between a low-level stand-alone monster and a high-level minion monster. It’s like in computer games, when a character suddenly one-shots an enemy in a cutscene, when they never could have done that in the game itself.
HAH! No, the problem is that, as usual, you’re just looking at the core rules. It’s possible to make some hilarifyingly broken characters in 4e, but it’s hard using just the player’s handbook. There’s fun to be had, but the core rules are pretty restrictive.
Tieflings and dragonborn are core races now, so they need to appear in the art. You weren’t complaining about halflings being in the 3e art, were you? 
OTOH, if you think the art is fugly, well, can’t argue with you there, but don’t blame the dragonborn. 
With regard to the whole “D&D is dead because 4e uses role archetypes” - well, that’s stupid. I’m sorry, it is. Maybe it never occured to you, but role archetypes can be applied to pretty much any class based game. 1st ED AD&D had role archetypes. Fighters got more hitpoints, but rogues could backstab. Clerics and druids had healing spells, blah blah etc. Seriously. Where do you think MMOs got the idea? They didn’t come up with the idea of a “tank” on their own. They came up with it because back in D&D, the fighter in platemail with the d10 hit die tried to stand in front of the wizard in cloth with the d4 hit die. Nothing has changed regarding archetypes except that the game designers have come out and spelled this out for the newbies.
That’s not to say nothing has changed about the game - pretty much every comment in this thread is spot on - the game is essentially a tabletop skirmish battle simulation, and it does that fairly well. The rules for non-combat actions are clearly a footnote. Classes have been homogenized, ruleswise, to a certain extent, which is great if you didn’t like playing a fighter because wizards had all the cool stuff, but not so great if you liked the variety inherent in the wizard class. The game absolutely encourages minmaxing, and, given enough supplements, provides an entertaining structure for knock down, drag out fights. There is a good variety of options available within in each class - strength based paladins vs charisma based paladins, and stealthy rogues vs thuggish rogues vs charismatic rogues, etc. - and it’s fun to see how different character types interact and things like that… though all of this is predicated on having an extensive toy chest - I thought the game was pretty wretched just playing from the player’s handbook, because for the type of game it is, you need spades of options, and there just wasn’t enough of anything to do it.