I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Yes, some classes had clearer roles than others outside of combat, but all PC classes, all the way back to 1E, had roles to play in combat. And, frankly, a core part of D&D, from the beginning, has been combat (though, certainly, there have always been ways to avoid combat). What 4E probably does fairly well (and, I think, 3E did, too) is not make any class into something that, once a fight breaks out, has the player saying, “well, I’m baggage now.”
This is my chief beef. One of the things I loved about the older forms of D&D was the way that many spells and abilities had both combat and non-combat uses. Consider an old spell like Enlarge. You could use it give your fighter a damage buff, but you could also use it to boost the thief up on the roof of a fortress. And having a giant fighter roaming around in combat creates all sorts of interesting possibilities: Can the floor hold his weight? Can he hit flying creatures that were previously out of reach? And even better was when someone would use a non-combat spell in a creative way that would change the flow of combat: “I use Conjure Food and Water and start throwing gruel at the winged monkeys to distract them!”
Of course, the downside to this sort of open-ended gameplay was that it depended a lot more on the GM to make spur of the moment judgment calls. But it did create fertile ground for all sorts of interesting and creative innovations. The new powers and abilities are much more cut-and-dried – mostly they allow you to do more damage in a particular set of circumstances. The new system is better balanced and depends much less on the whim of the GM, but it has lost a lot of the freewheeling weirdness in the process.
And this is an argument for the epic greatness of 4e?
I don’t disagree with you that it’s a downside of 4E. In 4E, spells from prior editions of the game have been re-grouped into three groups:
- Attack powers (damage-dealing or buff/de-buff spells, intended for combat)
- Utility powers (various other spells which are primarily useful in combat)
- Rituals (useful things that don’t have direct combat application)
While there’s nothing preventing you from using a utility power (or even an attack power) outside of combat, they usually have very short durations. Invisibility, for example, is now a utility power, but it only lasts for a round or two (whereas I remember having a 1E wizard (sorry, magic-user 
) who had the same Invisibility spell running for several months). Rituals, meanwhile, usually have a very long casting time (usually 10 minutes), making them useless to cast once combat has begun.
That said, you can still do some of the things you used to (such as the Enlarge trick you mention above, if you have a comparable sort of power).
I do suspect that one of their design goals for 4E was to make things easier for the DM, and this is probably one of those things.
Pathfinder is an excellent system with clear roots in the D&D tradition. Lots of things have been tweaked, smoothed, and revamped–most of which I agree have improved gameplay without compromising the feel and flexibility of older editions. I’m not entirely sold on the official setting, but then, I’m seldom completely satisfied with someone else’s worldbuilding. If you enjoyed old-school D&D or AD&D, and want something like it, but better and easier to play, Pathfinder is an excellent choice.
If you want Diablo & Dice, an MMO without the convenience of a computerized random number generator, well…such a thing is available.
[quote=“Chronos, post:39, topic:567667”]
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.
Yeah, the concept of party member’s roles being at odds with each other is gone. It turns out, after over 20 years of RPGs, designers have finally figured out that only letting one or two people play at a time isn’t the most fun way to go about it.
Here, let me give an actual example. These are real monsters from the real books, not something I made up.
An Ogre Savage is an ogre armed with a club. He hits things with a club. That’s it. He’s a level 8 brute, which means that he’s intended to be a big sack of hit points. He’s a reasonable challenge for a party of level 6-9; he’ll take a long time to bring down, and while he doesn’t have any fancy tactics or abilities, if he gets a good whack in he’ll put a real hurt on you.
Now, a level 11-13 party might be in an adventure where they need to fight these same ogres. And you certainly could just use that ogre as written; but it would still take a long time to whittle through his hit points, but this time he’s not really threatening to hurt the party. He’s not doing anything interesting. He’s just a meat pinata, an exercise in dice rolling to see how long until he goes away. Do you want to let the party mow down an entire squad of them? I hope you have comfy chairs.
The Ogre Thug is a level 11 minion. He also just has a club, and all he does is hit people. He is the same ogre, even though he is 3 levels higher. The game is just abstracting out how awesome the higher level party is compared to the ogre, and gives you a set of stats that let you mow him down in a way that is much more ergonomically pleasing. It is acknowledging that a creature that used to be a meat sack and an interesting encounter for a level 8 party is a speedbump and a boring encounter to a level 12 party. It is acknowledging that using a full fledged creature with hit points to keep track of and powers to use and dice to roll is a waste of time when you’re talking about mooks.
So instead of the players getting stronger, they just stay in the same place while the rest of the world gets weaker? It seems to me that if you want the leveled-up party to be able to kill the same ogre more easily, you ought to be increasing the damage the party does, not decreasing the HP of the ogre. And what if you meet another party of adventurers, a group much like your own, but of a different level? Maybe you happen upon them while they’re fighting the ogre, and having difficulty, and you come in and save them. Did the monster’s HP suddenly change just because The Heroes are now on the scene?
This is interesting. I knew of several groups that homebrewed up rules for just that sort of thing… medium to higher level adventurers were no longer really threatened by your average 1 hit dice basic goblin, kobold, or whatever… so for example, you would roll to hit, and if you hit, it died. It also rolled to hit, and if it hit it did standard damage rolls, but would die exceptionally easy.
As for “telling a story” or something of that sort, while I like the idea, it’s never been really put down in the books, afaik. You needed a GM, and a good GM.
We used to play, back in the day, and if a whole session went by with no actual combat, that wasn’t an unusual thing. Lots of intrigue, lots of “role playing” no matter what system was being used.
Hell, I did decent story building with Palladium and ICE of all things!
I got a copy of sorts of the Players Handbook for 4th e, and I’m going through it now.
Thanks for all the feedback, and keep it coming, folks.
I ran a D&D 4th edition game from 1st to 30th levels a year ago and I’m not a huge fan of the system. Some of what the naysayers in this thread are saying is true, but it is a fairly good game.
I like that everyone has to think tactically and weigh future benefits vs. immediate gain. Everyone has to agonize like the Wizard in previous editions did about when to loose the one and only fireball they can manage (for instance).
The new races are pretty good, they clear up the muddy mess of the Elven heritage in a clever way, they allow half-giant and dragon PC’s that aren’t over-powered. Multiclassing works, more-or-less.
As a GM, I like the minion rules. If the characters have to sneak past a group of disorganized Orc conscripts lead by a clever Chief’s son with a feathered hat, the only character that deserves more than one hit point in that group is the latter. Why do the rabble deserve the airtime?
There is a ton of stuff I don’t like though. The system has a huge slew of conditions and states that a given character can have. He can be prone, immobilized, slowed, weakened, restrained, bloodied, marked, dominated, dazed, stunned and like 20 more. This makes it very important to carefully track each and every NPC and player in strong detail. The Ranger immobilizes Duke LeEvil. The fighter gives him ongoing 10 bleeding damage. The rogue knocks him prone. The wizard slows him. And on the duke’s turn he has to save against all of those and may keep some and lose some. Then next turn the PCs get to throw on some more. Now if they’re fighting 14 members of the Imperial Guard’s Elite Dragonbourn it starts to get really fiddly.
This isn’t to say its impossible, but you need to keep shit organized, whereas in 2nd edition, you could GM drunk. Or so I hear. 
Mostly I’d say it works reasonably well, but for my money it adds complexity for little benefit.
In our home group, we’ve decided that if you have three or more of those conditions on you at one time, you automatically have another condition: pantsed. 
Don’t use them then! If you wanna spend an evening slowly chewing through dozens and dozens of opponents you know you can’t lose against but want to play it out in long, long, painful detail - go for it! No skin off my nose.
I don’t understand what the beef is. If you don’t like minions, don’t use minions.
This is interesting. Ryan Dancey, ex VP of WotC:
From here.
No, no, the Pathfinder System Reference Document is here.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/
Enjoy it. Seriously. Then buy the books.
Precisely. I don’t use minions, I use 3rd edition instead.
Is that a demonstration of how high Pathfinder has risen, or how far D&D has fallen?
In part it’s a demonstration of how WotC has moved much of it’s business out of game stores and into it’s online D&D Insider subscription model.
Bingo. I have just a few of the 4e books – DMG 1 and 2, PH 1, 2 and 3 and MM 1. I don’t need any more, because my Insider subscription gets me all of the rules content from the books, plus that from Dungeon and Dragon.
I’m paying $10 a month for the sub, but not paying $40 a book for hardcopies, because I don’t need them. At the table, we need character sheets and dice and every once in a while I’ll pull out the GM shield because it has a handy reference chart for all of those wacky conditions.
This will no doubt be met with the same kind of sniffs of disdain as the system changes. 
“If you’re not buying the books, you don’t really own the content.” I own my imagination and my experience; the system (any system) is a temporary framework for turning that into a game session that my players and I can enjoy.
I’ll vouch that he has a story. Funny voices and all.
Not that we adventurers are paying attention - we are drinking beer, looking at the internet, having side conversations about our jobs and saying “oh, is it my turn?..which one is hurt? Does anyone need a heal? how hurt is that guy, again?”
I suspect we have a lot of house rules. I know we do. But the root purpose around here isn’t to role play a story. Its to get together with friends, have fun - and if we take out a dragon during the evening, that’s cool.
We “officially” start gaming at 7:00 - guests and pizza arrive between 6 and 6:30. Sometimes die are not rolled until after 9pm.
double post. but since I did…
We use a whiteboard (well, the sober, paying attention people do). That tracks whose turn is coming up, what status effects are out, who has been hit, who hasn’t. It works very well for tracking - and to some extent does help with the “we aren’t paying attention” issues.