That’s a good idea actually. We use the Maptool program from rptools.net. It allows us to apply markers and halos to the tokens on the virtual game table.
I’d love to have a virtual game table, but I can’t justify the cost.
My complaint is that it feels like nobody can do anything. You shouldn’t need more than the core rulebooks to, you know, do stuff.
Halflings didn’t dominate 3e art the way tieflings and dragonborn dominate 4e art. It seems like they’re in the majority of the (core book) illustrations. You barely see any dwarves, halflings, or even eldarin (who are sorta new). It sets a tone for the whole edition that turns me off.
Actually, I’ve been using Minions since mid-3E. ‘Mooks’ were in the Feng Shui/D&D crossover. They work pretty okay.
That’s an interesting perspective. My initial reading of the Player’s Handbook was that there were, if anything, too many options. Each class has at least two build options, each with associated feats and powers. Trying to take it all in (which as the GM, I needed to do to understand the choices my players were going to be making and how that would affect the game) was not an easy task.
There are certainly restrictions to what you can do - the fact that only Rangers have attacks that use both weapons*, for example, causes consternation. What people are ignoring is that the rules are a framework. Unless you’re trying to make characters for an ongoing RPGA season or something, you can make characters however you want.
*although any class can take Dual Wielding for a +1 to damage and Dual-Weapon Defense for a +1 to AC, many people feel cheated of “real” dual-wielding.
I don’t like 4E. I have joined a couple of local 4E games, and they’re fun enough, but I find that they are fun in spite of the rules, which is a rare thing for me, because I generally like RPG rulesets.
Every class feels the same. There’s no real multiclassing, except the odd ‘hybrid’ character option - which is comparable to 2E’s multiclassing. Roles are rigidly enforced in combat - you are quite likely to die unless you have all four covered - and yet, the classes of different roles still feel the same. Everyone’s a Jedi filled with quasi-mystic powers. Sure, the fighter pushes people around the battlefield and the rogue uses that positioning to get extra damage, but it’s all ‘I use Encounter Power X, I get 2 weapon dice of damage plus my highest stat, enemy takes this particular secondary effect.’
Unlike 3E, where class levels were fungible and could be used as building blocks to customize monsters, I don’t have that power in 4E. (Unless I subscribe to their Adventure Tools, apparently, which allow the construction of custom monsters.) So you have the Ogres from the Monster Manual, and if you want to tweak one - well, you’re off on you’re own, then, in terms of encounter balance.
There’s pressure to buy the latest books (or subscribe to the online service) so you have access to the latest feats and powers. To some extent, this was present in 3E, but in 4E, they actually release new feats that do everything an old feat does, and then some. Empirically demonstrable power creep. The rules allow your character to retrain a feat or power at every level so you can make use of the comparatively broken new options from your latest book, too.
Of course, you don’t really need a Game Master anymore - the core books present options to run a GM-free game, so you can go from encounter to encounter doing the monster mash, using the monsters’ tactics laid out in the Monster Manual, and basically play a $100 edition of Hero Quest.
What irks me most, though, is that the rules have completely given up any simulationist pretense. Suspension of disbelief is not something the designers cared about. If you have a magic sword that has a use ability and a magic shield that has a use ability, you may use one of them (not both) in a given day. Magic items sell for 20% of their value (if you’re an adventurer) and 100% of their value (if you’re the shopkeeper selling to the poor adventuring saps.) Roused from sleep by ambush, and need to get into your armor? Well, what kind of armor do you have? Padded armor? That’ll take five minutes. Leather? Five minutes. Chain Mail? Five minutes. Plate? Five minutes. Full Plate? … Five minutes.
It’s not that there aren’t ANY rules governing things outside of combat. It’s that the only rules they DID make for it actively try to interfere with realism.
Now, that said, it’s a fun little skirmish game. But I’d never GM it.
That’s not been my experience. Yes, having most, if not all, of the four “roles” covered, makes for a better-balanced party. I’ve played in parties with no striker and three leaders (no lack of healing, but combats took forever), and parties with four strikers and no defenders (needed to be careful about keeping enemies at bay, and budget healing resources carefully). It can be more challenging, but “quite likely to die” is an overstatement, IMO.
True, and I think I mentioned that upthread. The designers acknowledged that 3.x was, in their opinions, a very good simulationist ruleset. They also acknowledged that they weren’t trying for a simulationist feel with 4E. It’s wahoo, cartoon-style stuff. If you want a “realistic-feeling” game, 4E probably isn’t for you.
I think you miss my complaint, by a small margin. I don’t need a game to be dedicated to simulationism. I need a game to present a set of rules that present some kind of self-consistent world, else I cannot immerse myself in it, which prevents me from role-playing before I ever start. You can have a wahoo, cartoon-style game and still present an internally consistent world. Every game of TORG I ever played comes to mind..
Well, I didn’t think much of it, but on the other hand, it’s better than Anima or the mess that Exalted eventually became.
To explain Exalted, imagine a game rulesset which is simple, easy-to-use, and fun - and badly written that every book which touches on any topic , and in which multiple rulebooks (rules, not story) have been declared non-canon and void within both of the individual editions. It has an errata larger than most of its published books. Major plot points revolve around things which according to other books either do not exist or do not actually function.
It’s a cool game, but it’s gotten almost unplayable. And then you’ve got the Paranoia Combat builds, the fact that the way the combat system scales that you tend to either insta-kill your foes or get insta-killed if there’s even a small mismatch in power, and the non-combat powers tend to either be ignored or completely dominate, and there’s no consistsency.
I mean, yeah, we had a blast playing it. But we had to ignore half the rules to do so. White Wolf is the only comany I know which writes rules so badly they routinely put in written disclaimers suggesting you ignore large sections of them, not for fun, but simply to make the game playable.
Anima isn’t a bad game, but it’s grossly over-complicated, poorly written (or maybe well written in French and Japanese [!] and then awkwardly translated) with a lot of obscure effects. I have not yet been able to make a character in it.
Now, one thing which utterly pisses me off about DnD4 is the skill system. It’s another thing which I have to ignore, specifically the way Challenges work. Basically, you can easily use your skills to officially “succeed”, and be past the challenges, but not actually in any way do it. You just need to stack up enough good rolls to get by, even if it makes no sense. It’s a massive oversight and suggests the designers simply didn’t care. News flash: I can handle that without any system for it!
To be fair, there were a couple of new feats in 3.x which dominated over older ones, too, but they were mostly for things that weren’t really good enough in the first place. For instance, Azure Dodge was better than Dodge if you had anything else at all relating to incarnum, and it was better than Psionic Dodge even if you didn’t.
That’s my main complaint with 4th Ed. Much of the skills/feats/actions/spells are now very abstracted instead of simulated, and that abstraction is deeply integrated into the game mechanics. This has made it much harder to remove or tweak portions of the gameplay (i.e. house-ruling) without breaking higher level core gameplay mechanics.
For example, if a non-magical non-supernatural rogue feat can only be used “once per encounter” for purely arbitrary game mechanic reasons, and my player makes a justifiable case that “that’s stupid, is my inherent balance or adrenaline cosmically linked to the relative aggression of nearby beings?” I’m either forced to say “suck it up, that’s the rules” or open up a huge houseruling snowball effect with the game mechanics.
It isn’t as easily “plug and play” as prior editions. E.g. Don’t like spell components? Gone. Casting time? gone. Intoxication tables? gone. You can omit almost anything and the core gameplay foundation remains internally consistent.
For me, it turned DM-ing from creative fun into an overhead burden task. When characters inevitably come up with creative unpredicted solutions it used to make my role in the game fun and exciting. Now I go into encounters with the predisposition of “please don’t do anything unexpected, I really don’t want to deal with that”.
…but enough about Aggro…
You could easily end up paying $100 for a complete copy of Hero Quest.
Well, I did get used to having coins of all denominations weigh the same in the previous edition. Certain abstractions and simplifications are worth giving up strict realism for. What bugs me is that a lot of the special abilities in 4e seem to have no narrative correlative. It’s great that my bard can give another player the ability to shift if missed by an opponent, but, um, so… what just happened there? Does the bard have a sack full of banana peels? Is he filling the battlefield with big musical notes that push people around? It doesn’t say, and you’re not supposed to think about it.
Remember how the GM used to try to spice up the combat by describing what the enemy just did, even though it was really just a roll to hit? A lot of shit that happens in 4e combat can’t be described, only explained in game mechanics. What happens in the metagame stays in the metagame.
I’d play 4e if it included that. And if the bard could cure sickness by playing the cowbell.
What’s wrong with the 2E?
Oh God, the mark system. I think the mark system is what really killed things for me. I simply couldn’t take any such system seriously: they stopped any pretense of this being a “real world”, and became a video game you played IRL instead.
A complete mess of hundreds of semi-interrelated systems which didn’t work well together and tended to break the game.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I consider this the least offender. You can actually describe something happening here. The fighter has an eye on that one clown, and if he tries something other than forcing the fighter to defend himself, the fighter is going to slip one in. Yes, it was added to enforce “tanking”, but it’s better than the “taunt” concept used in MMORPGs. Really, if you didn’t choke on Attacks of Opportunity in the first place, whose role was to make the “free attack” of 2e easier to adjudicate, then marking isn’t much of a stretch.
But as nifty as this whole shifting business can be, there is no way to explain what’s going on with some of them. You can stand ten squares away and cause one guy to shift out of his square and then shift another guy into the vacated square?
It is much easier to run encounters with minimal prep, of course. But I also find that I can’t get excited anymore about world building, and developing a deeper story. Of course, if this were ENWorld somebody would come along and say that that’s just bad GMing. Okay, you got me. But somehow I feel that the game sucks the creativity out of me.
Well, the best and longest-running RPG I was ever involved in ran mainly on 2E rules, with some little bits incorporated from unofficial 1E supplements like Dragon, and of course plenty of DM discretion. I didn’t notice the game “breaking.” Maybe you have a specific example.
No, this is an EXPLANATION of why they are in the art. 
Anyway, to reiterate a few points because I think they’re right:
2e was a trainwreck, especially if you bought all the supplements. No that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a ton of fun with it, no that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you if you’re still playing, it just means that the rules were unbalanced and easy to do gamebreaking things with if you followed them to the letter, which of course no one did.
4E is very gamist. It makes no apologies for it. If you like gamist games, you’ll like 4E, if you like simulationist games, it will annoy the heck out of you.
Some 4E powers are hard to “explain”. This is usually only the case with powers from the Martial power source (it’s hard to figure out how some things happen through muscle or cunning, but you can handwave arcane/divine/primal magic pretty easily, because, you know, it’s magic!) though, and frankly, I don’t really think there are that many of them. I REALLY don’t grasp how you can complain about the mark system, but maybe that’s because I usually think of it in terms of a paladin, and… >handwaves< it’s divine punishment!