Major Design Choices of 4e D&D

[Username17]

I am of course very interested in what the specific major design choices of 4e were. Not minor design things like "Paladins should have some radiant damage" but the core directional decisions that the 4e design team went with. They've scattered them here and there, and I would like to collect them in one place for easy perusal:

• The attacker should always roll all the dice determining the effects of a power.
• Your race should define what you are good at for your entire adventuring career.
• Your choice of class at first level should define your character at all levels.
• Your choice of Stats should define your character forever (Lago).
• Monsters should be completely self contained and interact with the rest of the system and world in no way.
• Players should be as isolated from the economy as possible.
• Actions should take many die rolls to resolve.
• The action economy should be inviolate - everyone gets one action (Lago).
• Each die roll should "unpredictable" and both succeed and fail fairly often (Josh)
• Every player should be attempting to "do damage" every round. (Josh)
• Every player character should be healing in combat every combat (Lago).
• Points of Light.
• All effects should have the same durations.
• Characters should be rigidly delineated into "combat roles." Like in an MMO.
• Characters should be required to constantly trade up equipment with marginal improvements.
• Players should bounce up from potentially fatal wounds dynamically and consistently.
• Actual danger should be kept to a minimum.
• All challenges and opposition should scale to the PCs (Doom314)
• Enemies should have no game changing immunities - "I waste it with my crossbow" should be an answer to any problem (Doom314)
• Characters should be defined by the thing they carry in their right hand ("In 4e it is all about the implements").
• Abilities that don't affect combat take up space and should be deleted.
• Anything that lasts longer than a combat should have a permanent cost.
• Feats, and by extension any customizable part of your character, should never give you an "option" - everyone gets the same number of options that are defined in the powers. (MartinHarper)
• The game should focus heavily on squares. Less than 10 squares in most cases (Josh)
• World and plot affecting abilities should be taken out of the hands of players (Lago)
• Battles should be to the death (Lago & Doom314)

Can any one else remember their "big breakthroughs" in designing 4e?

-Username17

[Orca]

Nominally noncombat magic should be slow and ineffective enough to never have any effect on combat?

[Josh_Kablack]

• Monsters should have far more HP than PCs
• PCs should have far better healing than monsters
• The amount of healing a character can get in an encounter is limited by the character(s) doing the healing
• The amount of healing a character can get in a day is limited by the character receiving the healing
• Available durations are "until the end of active character's next turn"; "until one or more saves is made", or "until the end of the encounter"
• There is jack spoon you can do about auras - or other "on the start of a creature's turn" effects.
• PCs are expected to use At-Will powers a lot, but just about never get to add or change them.
• Long range is anything further than a move+charge combo. Most powers should not work this far away.

[ggroy]

[Lago PARANOIA]

- Players should be able to influence the opinions of other creatures only when the DM says that they can.

- Buffs are only good in a combat-situation and regardless no longer than 5 minutes.

- Plopping down extra tokens on the board should be as restrictive as possible.

- Players should retain a minimum level of competence in all skills throughout their career--which means you get into things where a wand wizard can sneak better than a rogue.

- You need to be able to heal in combat, in increasing amounts as players gain levels.

- PC/Monster transparency should be eliminated whenever possible.

- Retrying a task should be much more restricted in this game.

- Extra attacks on the same enemy should be restricted as much as possible--it should only be possible as a special effect. (the ranger being a huge exception)

- One person in the party should be the designated 'DPR vehicle'.

- The expected size of a party should be five people, not four (this is a very big deal when you have strong role protection and only four roles)

- Tasks should be recycled as much as possible. A challenge of 'keep your balance while navigating the rain-slick cliffs' should be just as challenging for a 1st level character as a 15th level character.

- Characters should be locked into using one type of weapon and armor their entire life (3rd Edition did this, too, but nowhere near as heavily as 4th Edition--most of the bigger locks like celestial mithril fullplate were by accident.)

- The game should strive to make all feats be as inferior to an effect of 'generic +1 to attack' as possible.

- 50' by 50' by 5' is the ideal battlefield. You can see this with the shortening of ranges for powers from both monsters and PCs, the heavy restriction of flight, and the fact that a lot of game effects end up more powerful than the game designers had in mind when the third dimension is introduced.

- PCs should be subject to a lot more unavoidable effects at higher level. This can easily be seen with the 'aura' entries that are ubiquitous on monsters.

- If a PC uses their 'big time knockout' power, they should get some kind of consolation prize associated with it even if it misses such as half damage or an unavoidable effect.

- Creatures should not be taken out in one attack, unless they're minions.

[Doom]

I've been running a group through a conversion of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and it really is amazing how very, very, different DnD4.0 is from what used to be called "Dungeons and Dragons".

I'm not quite at the point of writing up my thoughts after a mere 12 hours of play, but I'll puke out some quick concepts I'm seeing:

1) Damage should only be taken during combat situations; admittedly, this should somehow relate to a general paradigm of 'combat and non-combat should be isolated', but seeing as skill challenges could take place during combat, this may well count as a different point. Taking a few points of damage from an incidental trap is meaningless when a character can trivially have 10+ surges, among legions of healing effects.

2) Encounters should always be balanced. It's amazing how much this thinking is ingrained in 4.0 players. The whole party of lvl15s totally freaked out when a tiny monster pops up (eg, a green slime encounter, a single level 4 monster); the reverse is true as well, they have no idea that fights can occur where running away makes sense (spent 3+ hours fighting vegepygmies...even when someone made a natural 20 Nature roll and I specifically told them all they had to do was leave the area the pygmies were defending, still they wanted to fight on, despite death being a possibility). Again, this is close to "danger should be kept at a minimum", but for the fact that often the 'old' game had very easy random monster fights that likewise make no sense in DnD4.0.

Still, the idea of a single small blob attacking the party, instead of two soldiers, two artillery, and a leader, is alien to 4.0, at the risk of being overly verbose.

3) Monsters should always be vulnerable to physical attacks. One player nearly had an aneurism when she found out her bow wasn't doing much damage to vegepygmies (I only said as much every time). Yes, she had two melee weapons and an animal companion, but it took quite a few rounds before she finally broke down and used them.

This is absolutely a switch from Dungeons and Dragons; before, melee fighters could easily encounter monsters they couldn't harm...now, it's the wizards that sometimes find themselves crippled against certain monsters.

4) A player is never screwed. Again, this ties in with "actual danger should be kept to a minimum", but many Dungeons and Dragons monsters had affects, beyond 'save or die', that could put a player out of combat (eg, Lurker Above, Trapper, and, I daresay, Rust Monster) unless he's saved by his teammates. There's no way to do that, now, since most classes have some form of teleport away/no surprise/damage cancellation/whatever, this actually ties in to 'surprise' now being irrelevant, since monsters really can't do anything but damage and effect, an extra round of which is meaningless in the face of padded sumo.

A few more sessions, and I'll have more coherent thoughts, I hope.

(Slightly ninja'd by Lego: Definitely, aura effects without save are the way to go, it's the only thing that actually works on player characters at level 15, as near as I can tell)

[Lago PARANOIA]

To be fair to your paranoid PCs, at paragon level and beyond escaping becomes increasingly impossible what with monsters and their reach, auras, increased speed, and the fewer amount of emergency escape options PCs have.

I'm not sure if that was a design decision or not.


Oh, yeah, that reminds me.

- Monsters should only give experience by defeating them in combat. You get no bread for bypassing or defusing an encounter in 4th Edition, unlike 3rd Edition. Now granted, most people intentionally escalated situations in 3rd because the wargame simulator was the reason most of us were there. But hey, at least the option was there.

[ggroy]

[Username17]

In general I would like to confine it to discussions of what the "big ideas" were rather than the nitty gritty implementation writeups. Also, I would like to stay away from things that are laden with value judgments. I don't think you'd be wrong to say that 4e's ritual system is designed to "make out of combat magic to be expensive and worthless" but I doubt that it was pitched internally in that manner. It might have been pitched something like this:

• Effects that last longer than a combat should have a cost that lasts longer than a combat.

Similarly, I read their playtest reports, and they were weird. Seriously they were writing up round by round how much damage players were doing and how often their attacks missed. Anything else you did that wasn't damage was marked with a little X or star or something. Seriously if your attack pushed an enemy 3 squares to the left you got a little "and more" mark, and if you paralyzed half the enemy squad you got the same "and more" mark. So I think that this stuff:

[*] Monsters should have far more HP than PCs
[*] PCs should have far better healing than monsters

...is actually part of some kind of mathematical line fit rather than a design decision in and of itself. The design appears to be something like:

• All players should do damage.
• All players should inflict damage several times in a battle.
• All players should hit and miss fairly similarly in frequency.

That last one might have been phased internally as something like "every attack role should have a result that matters." With "matters" being defined as "you don't know what it's going to be until it is rolled."

-Username17

[ggroy]

[Orca]

I'm sure I saw something about how rituals might be used in the setup to combat but had been intentionally excluded from direct combat use. Also, I think they all have 10+ minute casting times, and a combat is defined as 5 minutes or less.

So, while I don't have access to internal documents I think the speed was a design decision.

Granted, the ineffectiveness/cost ineffectiveness is another issue.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, Frank, out of the list I gave you what would in your opinion be major design changes and what would just be minor things?

[MartinHarper]

Before I go all 4e apologist on a minority of the points being made. I'll add:

* Feats should not add new combat options. For example, Cleave is a Power, not a Feat. This is because all characters of a given level should have similar numbers of combat options.
* Races (such as tieflings and half-orcs) should not be the result of sex between humans and other races, because rape is an ugly back story.
* Common classes (such as Clerics) should have multiple primary stat choices to make them "accessible to more races".

- Tasks should be recycled as much as possible. A challenge of 'keep your balance while navigating the rain-slick cliffs' should be just as challenging for a 1st level character as a 15th level character.

Not really true. Balance DCs in 4e are set by the type of surface, not by the characters attempting to balance. PHB p181, for example. I know this is a pervasive criticism of 4e, but mostly it is a misreading of the rules. The exception is high-level traps, which frequently have Perception DCs that are insanely high for "noticing the large rotating skull with glowing eye sockets".

Monsters should only give experience by defeating them in combat. You get no bread for bypassing or defusing an encounter in 4th Edition, unlike 3rd Edition.

You don't get XP for bypassing monsters, but you do get XP for 'defeating' them without resorting to combat.

If they sneak past, trick, or defeat the hydra in an encounter, they do earn XP.

----

Characters should be locked into using one type of weapon and armor their entire life.

I'm not seeing this. Armour proficiencies can be trained and retrained, as can weapon proficiencies. Paragon paths and magic items influence a character's weapon of choice. Most "implement" casters will use a melee weapon until they get an implement with a +1 bonus. A fighter might have a weapon-specific feat, or they might not.

Encounters should always be balanced.

Yes, within -1 to +3 levels. The only exception I've seen was where a level 24 lich threatened a level 19 party... and this was turned into a level 19 skill challenge with combat as the result of failure.

Abilities that don't affect combat take up space and should be deleted.

Ironically, most of the stuff they wrote that wasn't about combat took up space and should be deleted. Starting with Rituals and Skill Challenges.

[Lago PARANOIA]

* Feats should not add new combat options. For example, Cleave is a Power, not a Feat. This is because all characters of a given level should have similar numbers of combat options.

Ideally, yes, but you can see how in the basic book they fucked that up with feats like Polearm Gamble and Heavy Blade Opportunity. Same for the Channel Divinity feats.

Not really true. Balance DCs in 4e are set by the type of surface, not by the characters attempting to balance. PHB p181, for example. I know this is a pervasive criticism of 4e, but mostly it is a misreading of the rules. The exception is high-level traps, which frequently have Perception DCs that are insanely high for "noticing the large rotating skull with glowing eye sockets".

Skill challenges.

I'm not seeing this. Armour proficiencies can be trained and retrained, as can weapon proficiencies. Paragon paths and magic items influence a character's weapon of choice. Most "implement" casters will use a melee weapon until they get an implement with a +1 bonus. A fighter might have a weapon-specific feat, or they might not.

???

The best feats in the game are the Weapon Focus/Weapon Expertise/Weapon Mastery/Weapon Proficiency axis. Furthermore, the feats later on in life require a specific stat array so you can't switch from bastard swords to waraxes (for example, Rending Tempest requires a Dex of 17, which is not going to happen if you specialized in axes).

I mean, really, the existence of Implement Mastery will lock you into one specific implement for the rest of the fucking game.

[Doom]

To be fair to your paranoid PCs, at paragon level and beyond escaping becomes increasingly impossible what with monsters and their reach, auras, increased speed, and the fewer amount of emergency escape options PCs have.

Fewer amount of escape options, what? At Paragon level, a party has a buttload of teleports, and extra hit points, and extra healing, and bonus saving throws, as well as bonus moves, pet exchanges, and other abilities.

I don't see a whole lot of monsters with 'inescapable' auras or grabs...I'll concede the possibility of increased speed, but that's a different issue.

But you guys are missing the point about 'balanced' encounters. It's not just 'level appropriate' (violated in KOTS in any event), it's also that you're not supposed to have "4 zombies" or whatever, instead it's a mix of soldiers, artillery, leaders, and whatnot. This is why the MM has suggested encounters of "3 orcs, 2 ghouls and a gelatinous cube" (exaggeration), as opposed to "6 orcs, some bigger than others".

[Lago PARANOIA]

DCs are only set by objective standards when you are outside of skill challenges. Now from what I gather DMs are supposed to design skill challenges in such a way so that the DC of said challenge roughly matches that of its 'real world' DC, but there is no requirement and for some skills like Diplomacy and various applications of Dungeoneering that's flat-out impossible.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Fewer amount of escape options, what? At Paragon level, a party has a buttload of teleports, and extra hit points, and extra healing, and bonus saving throws, as well as bonus moves, pet exchanges, and other abilities.

Buttload of teleports? Are you crazy? What, you mean those weakass 5-square teleports? That not everyone gets? Puh-leeze.

Auras are a very important part of the monster lockdown. They can just run towards you constantly and let their aura do the work. You either have to keep running yourself and hope they don't catch up with you or you do something besides run.

I think the arcane classes, which have the lion's share of teleports/extra moves, might get away if they didn't use them in that or previous fights. Most classes are screwed if a beholder or a dragon keeps coming after them.

[MartinHarper]

I mean, really, the existence of Implement Mastery will lock you into one specific implement for the rest of the fucking game.

Unless you retrain it, which you can do whenever you level up.

Eh, which we should add to the design goals:
* retraining should be easy and not dependent on DM fiat.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Unless you retrain it, which you can do whenever you level up.

But why would you do that? You gain new magic items at intervals other than when you level up and you can only retrain when you level up.

If your implement-using class is a wizard, swordmage, artificer, bard, or sorcerer you'll probably have other feats or expansion options tied up in your chosen implement too (like weapon focus or Siberys shards)--there is barely a point in retraining one feat on the off-chance you gained a kickass magic item, but if you have two or more it's a fool's game.

[Username17]

Well, Frank, out of the list I gave you what would in your opinion be major design changes and what would just be minor things?

It's not necessarily a matter of "just minor things," but more a matter of the design directions and the derived design directions. So with that in mind:

Players should be able to influence the opinions of other creatures only when the DM says that they can.

This would be I think an example of a derived effect, and a somewhat value colored one. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's a result of their haphazard skill rules, which are derived from the desire to make people roll a lot of dice and for difficulty to scale to 50% all the time for individual rolls.

Plopping down extra tokens on the board should be as restrictive as possible.

This is derived rather obviously from their action economy deal. The design imperative probably looks something like this:

• Every player should take the same amount of actions as other players.

And the derivations are that Haste and iterative attacks go away and that summons and leadership and golem crafting have to be incredibly restrictive.

-Username17

[Username17]

Unless you retrain it, which you can do whenever you level up.

No. You can't. You need a high secondary Con to be a Staffizard, a high secondary Dex to be a Wandizard, and a high secondary Wis to be an Orbizard. Retraining is essentially impossible between those because a Wizard only has two high stats: Int and the other thing that boosts his implement mastery at first level.

The choices you make at first level: Race, Class, and Stat assignments permanently define what you can and can't do for the rest of your character's life. And whether you think that's good or bad, that is an essential part of the 4e design decisions.

-Username17

[Doom]

Buttload of teleports? Are you crazy? What, you mean those weakass 5-square teleports? That not everyone gets? Puh-leeze.

Auras are a very important part of the monster lockdown.

Well, I really wasn't talking dealing with monsters far outside of level appropriateness...in that case, you're absolutely correct, if the speed is higher, the party is doomed. No need to be paranoid there, either.

But, for level appropriate, outside of those problematic monsters you've identified, can you give me a scenario that has a real chance of killing the whole party in a round, or at least 50% damage, before a player could use even a weakass 5 square teleport, or any other escape ability?

Also, can you identify a class that, by level 11, has no way to escape from being surrounded on all sides, or at least recover 50% hit points in that one round before being killed?

Fixed busted quote tag. --Z

[Username17]

Updated!

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

- PCs should not be able to affect or derail the setting as much as they could in previous editions, especially with magic.

Rules for getting followers and making stuff are intentionally absent. Staple world-changing magic like fabricate, wall of stone, stone shape, and polymorph any object are either missing or are nerfed. If a game effect is needed that is not in the rules, only the DM can allow it to exist. This is why Orcus is the lord of the dead (including vampires) despite only being able to create one type of monster and his followers getting no necromantic abilities.

- What happens in previous engagements should not affect what happens in future combats, aside from daily powers.

There's a reason why buffs and debuffs only last five minutes and if you want to carry them over from one encounter to another you have to forgo taking a short rest to get your encounter powers back--which never happens.

- The game wants you to play in two dimensions unless absolutely necessary.

Forced movement explicitly can't move people upwards. Flight has been heavily nerfed and is generally impossible to get for longer than 5 minutes. Bonuses for fighting on higher ground have been taken away. Spells are crafted in such a way to assume that a burst or blast only goes up 5 feet.

- Combat should last a minimum of 5 rounds at all levels of play for an 'average' party. Higher-level combat should last longer.

I think the padded sumo effect was slightly intentional. Check out the formula for crafting solo-monster hit points; it intentionally jumps up from tier to tier.

- Monster encounters should be crafted to reflect a variety of monster roles, not by theme.

Seriously, check out the monster manual. The monsters are so mismatched that it makes me think we're playing White Plume Mountain. The monster mismatching happens even when similarly-themed monsters have different roles, like the damn humans!

This would be I think an example of a derived effect, and a somewhat value colored one. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's a result of their haphazard skill rules, which are derived from the desire to make people roll a lot of dice and for difficulty to scale to 50% all the time for individual rolls.

The mess that is the skill rules is a big contributor to this, but I think it goes beyond just that. Even if the skill rules were working just fine, there's the fact that the basic rules intentionally put the 'influence people' skills into a flux. Feats like climbing a up wall or balancing on ice have objective DCs and skill challenges are supposed to conform to them.

Diplomacy does not. It was an intentional design decision to make it so that convincing a racist elven general to aid their dwarf allies is a harder task than convincing a Sigil merchant to give your party a discount.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But, for level appropriate, outside of those problematic monsters you've identified, can you give me a scenario that has a real chance of killing the whole party in a round, or at least 50% damage, before a player could use even a weakass 5 square teleport, or any other escape ability?

None of them; it's very easy to get gangbanged to death at low levels but it becomes increasingly harder.

The phenomenon I was talking about was when players realize that they're on the losing end of an encounter and need to escape. The thing is, they can't. They can put off actually being killed for many rounds but without a deus ex machina they're eventually going to be killed.

Also, can you identify a class that, by level 11, has no way to escape from being surrounded on all sides, or at least recover 50% hit points in that one round before being killed?

Insta-kills pretty much stop happening at level 11. By then we're talking about the slow burn. For example a team of three Mezzodemons will take a really long time to kill a fighter; the fighter has about 100 hit points and they do 8.5 damage per attack. But you can't realistically get away from them if you're on the losing end of an encounter--even if we forget about things like their fukken restraining ability.

For example, starting at level 21.

Ghaele of Winter: Can easily put down an encounter long daze you can't shake off as a minor action. Has a ranged attack that slows and also hovers at a speed of 8.
Verdict: Not getting away.

Larva Mage: Elite monster. Has a minor-action power that recharges 1/3rd of the time that gives a saves-end immobilization.
Verdict: Not getting away.

Giant Mummy: You can actually get away from this guy. He has no minor action attacks, no aura, no ranged attacks, no action-denial powers, and a speed of 6.
Verdict: You can get away, even as an armored paladin.

Dark Naga: Elite monster Has a speed of 8. Has a minor-action at will that save-ends dazes in a burst. What the fuck?! Has a basic attack that slows. Has a 5/6 recharge power that stuns.
Verdict: Not getting away.

Deathpriest Hierophant: Has a speed of 5. So far so good. Has a 50% recharge power that dazes with a large bonus to-hit, being an elite monster that has an additional effective +2 to attack from its aura.
Verdict:Could get away, with some difficulty.

Tormenting Ghost: 156 hit points and insubstantial. Not an elite monster. Yeah. Hovers six squares and phases. They have three blatant fuck-you powers.

ghostly possession: 5/6 recharge power that dominates as a save ends. The ghost reappears next to the sap if they save.

burst of terror: 5/6 recharge power that dazes and immoblizes in a burst.

ghostly terrain: At-will ranged 10 burst 1 that until the end of the encounter creates difficult terrain that immobilizes (save ends) anyone who enters it or starts their turn there.

Verdict: Not getting away.

Wild Hunt Hound: Moves and flies at a speed of 10. Has an at-will that slows, remove teleportation, and then immobilizes as a save-ends.
Verdict: Not getting away.

Yuan-Ti Anathema: Elite monster. Moves 8 squares. Can shift 8 squares and ignore difficult terrain. Can move its speed and knock people prone while it tramples people (this movement does provoke OAs, thank god).
Verdict: Not getting away.

Fire Titan: Elite monster. Has a speed 8 and a reach of 3. If they're near lava can make a 5/6 attack that immobilizes.
Verdict: Not getting away.

Marut Blademaster: Speed of 8. Can teleport and hover 4 squares. This is about the bare minimum of what you need to do to have monster lockdown, since they can just charge foes who spend their time running away and always get an attack. If they're facing an elf in light armor then they can just run and charge--which will net them a hefty attack penalty but makes the elf's death no less inevitable.
Verdict: Not getting away.


That's 10 monsters, only two of which you have a reasonable chance of escaping from.

Now, some of these monsters are such jokes that there's no reason why you would actually be running from them. Marut Blademasters and Yuan-Ti Anathema are not a threat, period. A melee ranger with one allotted daily and all their encounter powers can fight two Giant Mummies by himself and expect to win.

But if you're on the losing end of this fight and need to flee, you fucking can't. This is very strong evidence that fights in 4E are universally the easiest they ever have been.