The Official "4e Critique and Rebuttal" Thread

[Torko]

I feel like a TOTAL badass when I kill a bunch of monsters that are specifically designed to be killed in large numbers. Also I am really smart because I can beat my 7 year old cousin at Jeopardy.

[sake]

The only thing I really don't like about 4E compared to 3E is that rules-as-worded, you don't get to do a lot of creative things with powers becasue the rules are so strictly defined. The difference being that 4E is at least playable RAW.

As long as you make sure to take all the vital math fix band-add feats, perhaps... of course to know that, you'd have to have system mastery.

And ignore the current treasure parcel/magic item system.

And rip the skill challenge system pages right out of the book, and throw it in the garbage.

[Darwinism]

I feel like a TOTAL badass when I kill a bunch of monsters that are specifically designed to be killed in large numbers. Also I am really smart because I can beat my 7 year old cousin at Jeopardy.

Hey awesome job you missed the point of minions

They don't exist to provide a challenge, unless they're present in immense numbers, they exist to provide support for actual threats.

Which is more satisfying to a player; the scenario where they kill two moderately tough enemies or the scenario where they wade through a dozen minions to get to a single very tough enemy. Protip it's usually not the one where they kill two monsters and then call it a day.

[Doom]

Well, it'd be more satisfying if it took more effort than an autodamage spell, or if nigh every class didn't have built-in encounter power spell multi-attacks...but really it's the autodamage, which makes minions neither exciting nor interesting.

[Username17]

Well, it'd be more satisfying if it took more effort than an autodamage spell, or if nigh every class didn't have built-in encounter power spell multi-attacks...but really it's the autodamage, which makes minions neither exciting nor interesting.

Yeah, but this point was basically made in the first post:

Entire armies of high-level minions die in a sandstorm.

Really, Darwinism hasn't read the thread. At all. He's spouting off half baked 4rry arguments that are completely answered already in this thread. Every so often a 4rry signs up on this board and starts spamming bullshit. This is Darwinism and also Swordslinger. They don't have a point, they just want to fight the dragon of 4e haters for a while.

If you engage them, eventually they'll be forced to make a "hundreds of thousands" argument like Titanium Dragon and then ragequit. But if you just fucking ignore them until they make an actual argument, they'll just leave.

-Username17

[Swordslinger]

They don't have a point, they just want to fight the dragon of 4e haters for a while.

The point is that most of the "problems" you cite that make 4E so bad existed in 3E or are just total fabrications.

If you guys would stop being 3E fanboys, maybe you'd realize that.

[Krakatoa]

God do you guys seriously refer to us as 4rries?? Do you not realize how dumb that makes you Sound?

This thread is so full of idiot grogard noncriticism that it was used to supply squares for grog bingo. Reading through a hundred pages of Frank Trollman makes a fool of himself is not neccesary because its the same dozen bad arguments ad naseum.

[Akula]

God do you guys seriously refer to us as 4rries?? Do you not realize how dumb that makes you Sound?

Not half so dumb as your cognitive dissonance makes you sound. PROTIP: in the future, either bitch about being called a name OR engage in name calling yourself.

This thread is so full of idiot grogard noncriticism that it was used to supply squares for grog bingo. Reading through a hundred pages of Frank Trollman makes a fool of himself is not neccesary because its the same dozen bad arguments ad naseum.

Maybe you could present an actual counterargument then? It should be really easy if the argument you address is as bad as you say it is.

[Darwinism]

Well, it'd be more satisfying if it took more effort than an autodamage spell, or if nigh every class didn't have built-in encounter power spell multi-attacks...but really it's the autodamage, which makes minions neither exciting nor interesting.

Yeah, but this point was basically made in the first post:

Entire armies of high-level minions die in a sandstorm.

Really, Darwinism hasn't read the thread. At all. He's spouting off half baked 4rry arguments that are completely answered already in this thread. Every so often a 4rry signs up on this board and starts spamming bullshit. This is Darwinism and also Swordslinger. They don't have a point, they just want to fight the dragon of 4e haters for a while.

If you engage them, eventually they'll be forced to make a "hundreds of thousands" argument like Titanium Dragon and then ragequit. But if you just fucking ignore them until they make an actual argument, they'll just leave.

-Username17

They only die in a sandstorm if the DM decides that they die in a sandstorm. I mean, seriously, your apparent argument against minions is, "if the DM imposes arbitrary damage on them they would die before meeting the PCs," which is a really fucking stupid argument because the DM then says, "Yeah but I didn't impose damage on them because I wanted the PCs to fight them," and then you just look like a total tool.

Still waiting for you to actually provide an actual argument with any evidence to support it.

[Krakatoa]

I'm not objecting to being called names if you feel the need. 4rries is just hilarious and makes me laugh instead of feel the sting of an insult.

-------

Minions are a narrative convention for DMs who want to populate their games with lots of monsters for the purpsoes of flavor. They are flavor text. They're there so that you can having a kobold lair actually be full of Kobolds yet the combat not take all night. They're not meant to challenge the PC's skills but serve as cannon fodder or a wall of bodies for the real threat.

Unless you're some sort of pedant who doesn't understand the difference between game mechanics and a simulation of fictional world physics (Guess which one the DND rules are) then this distinction should be trivially obvious, as should be the reason that a sand storm does not literally kill minions automatically.

The minions rules literally even make it clear that they're narrative convention: the DMG specifies that powers that do damage on misses DO NOT harm minions. Because HP does not measure health, per say, but plot armor, and even minions have a little bit of it.

[FatR]

How don't they? Every encounter I've had that including swarms of minions has ended in the party feeling good about slaughtering a dozen kobolds or goblins or whatever. That's their entire point. They provide a highlight to how heroically powerful the heroes are.

Only to cretins, who feel powerful after knocking out opponents blatantly made total pushovers by God of their world.

Minions are a narrative convention for DMs who want to populate their games with lots of monsters for the purpsoes of flavor.

If your game needs stupid narrative conventions like this to support its supposed genre, then its math sucks all that is ass. Now in games with decent math, heroes just will be actually powerful enough to one-shot weak opponents.

[FatR]

God do you guys seriously refer to us as 4rries?? Do you not realize how dumb that makes you Sound?

Yes, I'll give you this sole point, that's quite insulting to furries.

[virgil]

This place is for 3E fanboys? That's a novel concept. There are many flaws with 3.X, and they've been detailed extensively on this forum. There have also been nearly as many people who've come here ranting like crazy, denying them to be flaws in the first place.

[ScottS]

1. Minions are horribly mispriced. 4:1 is wrong... 5:1 and 6:1 (post-MM3 paragon/epic) are also wrong. I used 12:1 all through paragon and only had a "problem" once (ambush vine from MM2). That includes cases where I used double-death minions or even troll minions (kept rezing until you burned them). I've never seen an explanation of where they even got 4:1, but I'm guessing they only looked at single-round damage output (assuming that minions do approx. half the damage of a standard creature per swing, which itself is often wrong, combined with minions and regular creatures both hitting at a ~50% rate, equals 2 out of 4 minion hits per round doing equivalent damage to a standard; but none of that calculation accounts for the overabundance of autodamage/AOE/multiattack mentioned above, or the fact that every "hit" on the minions immediately reduces their average damage output, whereas standards etc. keep doing full damage until you work the entire way through their hp pool and kill them). A level-appropriate 5-standard fight is painfully easy, but a level-appropriate 20-minion fight is just a fucking waste of time and isn't worth anywhere near the amount of XP they reward you for it.

2. Minions suffer from an extreme version of the "how does this creature interact with the world when it's not fighting PCs" problem. Yes, mooks have a dramatic niche, but stripping down monster stats to such a degree... leaves you with nothing to work with when you're not in combat (and "you're the DM, just make it up", "you don't need rules to roleplay" etc. are copout answers to that). Also, I'm apparently weird and playing some sort of radically perverse version of D&D, in that monsters switch sides and/or get used as replacement PCs at a frequency greater than "never". So I guess it's OK that I stew in nerd frustration every time I rediscover that I don't have a player-usable stat block that I can just flip across the table whenever those situations come up.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Your DM can scale the DCs to your level in 4E ensuring you always encounter a challenge appropriate for your level, Your DM can scale the DCs to your level in 3E ensuring you always encounter a challenge appropriate to your level.

We've been over this earlier in the thread and I have to say that I'm frustrated to see you recycling this argument with no alteration or acknowledgment of the previous conversation.

I always had the same problem with 3E. All the options that were cool were usually shit. In fact, as far as spells go especially, 3E really hosed you when you wanted to do cool shit. You were better off putting monsters to sleep or trapping them in a web than you were running over them with mobile balls of fire or blasting them with lightning. You were at your strongest when you decked yourself out with more rainbow magic than a gay pride parade. But try to burn your enemies with fire, you were gonna suck.

I'll grant you that a lot of cool things in 3E didn't actually work at intended. Classics like fireball and meteor swarm sucked. But this isn't to say that there wasn't anything cool in 3E. Wizards could totally make castles from scratch in a reasonable timeframe. You could seriously have a harem of vampires fellating you if that's what you wanted, you scary pervert. And even if you weren't exactly one of the Kool Kids (like if you were a bard) you didn't spin your wheels in place the entire duration of play--even though they got the crumbs you still got some fun and exciting toys like dominate person or glibness.

4E hardly has ANYTHING going for it. All of the potentially cool game effects are ruthlessly crushed and neutered to fit its game paradigm of 'no permanent game effects without a cost', 'magic doesn't work outside of narrow confines', and 'Vanilla Action Heroes are relevant throughout all levels of play'. Seriously, Szass Tam can't even reliably one-shot kill a first level goblin unless it has a 'minion' tag applied to it.

Something like 75%-80% of non-low level game effects don't work as intended in 3E. Stuff like DR 3/- and uncanny dodge II are not only boring drek but are also inappropriate as higher-level game effects. That's pretty damn bad but it's not insurmountable. 4E has like close to like 98%-99% of game effects being either worthless or stuck at a low-level mentality. If you invited someone not familiar with the system to sit in on a 4E game with 28th or 29th level characters, most people could seriously not tell you the difference between a demigod and someone who did not have the epic destiny benefits at all.

This is again 4E designers and fans missing the point. Sure, only about 4 classes in the 3E game manual were actually able to conceptually do what someone could consider high-level play, all of them casters. That's awful. It's unfair and it's unbalanced and by the time 3E ended everyone noticed. So 4E then decides that the solution to Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards should be Logarithmic Warriors / Logarithmic Wizards. So instead of only having a 1/4th of published classes being cool we have zero of 'em.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Christmas tree magic items suck in 4E, Christmas tree magic items suck in 3E.

I love how you invoked parallelism here as if to imply that 'yes, we suck, but our competition sucks too, so it's not an issue!' First of all, I expect anything the new to be better than the old. King's Quest 5 is a goddamn classic, but if any contemporary adventure game that had all of its predecessor's flaws it'd be crucified and with good reason. We expect newer games to not fall into all of the problems that KQ5 had such as trial-and-error gameplay, unwinnable scenarios, and obtuse puzzles. That's just how game design works. You're supposed to learn from the mistakes of bad older games and fix them in your shiny new ones. The same applies for 4E; I didn't expect them to iron out all of the flaws but considering how reviled certain aspects of 3E magical items were I'd expect them to go after the big ones. So just the fact that 4E's system is comparable to 3E's is a huge strike against it. We expected better after 7 years of gameplay. 7 years is the difference between Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy X.

But you know what? As awful as the 3E magical item system was, 4E manages to be as bad or worse in all of the important areas! The only system of 4E that wasn't worse than 3E's was the custom magical item system and that's just because they didn't even bother. Yeah, no one liked how in 3E people would always go for another plus on their sword over something cool like a cloak of the bat; 4E made it worse by doing the same thing and also making it so that people wouldn't want cloaks of the bat for free! No one liked how 3E had things like Goggles of Mighty Strength, but then 4E turns around and gives us Headbands of Intellect. No one really liked wealth-by-level because it encouraged metagaming like blowing all of your wands of fireball but rationing the effects out so that you'll get backloaded on wealth, but 4E permanently punishes you for every potion you drink and then punishes you some more if you don't drink the potion in time! 3E's wealth by level made it so that it was impossible for anyone to care about getting non-artifacts that weren't tailored exactly how they wanted because it made it so that they wouldn't get anything cool until their WBL got jacked up again; 4E does the exact same thing and also refuses to reimburse you if you get a trash drop. 3E's treasure system is lame and restrictive and punishes people for not spending hours pouring over books but at least it didn't implode for playing as intended; the 4E treasure system does all that and on top of it simply does not work without the DM holding your hand and taking pity on you.

And as awful as the system was, they managed to fuck it up even more with the Essentials change. It's so bad that the Character Optimization boards for 4E flat-out ignores it, using lordduskblade's system--which I must remind you is exactly like 3E wealth-by-level except slightly more unbalanced. Even the people who were willing to give this ridiculous system a chance hate it for several reasons: the ridiculously tiny amount of common items, rare items being lame as ever, encouraging people (even moreso than in 4E) to suicide if they lose the mother-may-I game with the DM, etc.

So yeah, no. I think what you meant to say was 3E's magical item system was awful, 4.0E's magical item system is flat-out unplayable without DM intervention, 4.5E's magical item system is inexcusably, insultingly bad. Even to hardcore fans who buy every book. Like, oh, the people who post on the Wizards forums. Even to WotC's most loyal fans you will not find anyone willing to defend the system. There were and are defenders of WBL though!

[Roy]

God do you guys seriously refer to us as 4rries?? Do you not realize how dumb that makes you Sound?

Yes, I'll give you this sole point, that's quite insulting to furries.

Nah, I always took it as a combo of 4th edition and sorry = aka, apologetics, not furries. Because they invariably show up to both apologize for 4.Fail's failure, and deny the existence of said failure vehemently.

[Darwinism]

It's really adorable that when your argument boils down to, "I don't like 4E," a lot of people can somehow extrapolate that to, "4E is broken and horrible and nothing in it works."

I mean take Lago's example of 4E magic items. Stuff like claiming the game punishes you for drinking potions and for not drinking potions, but there's nothing resembling any evidence for this position in his post! And the crown jewel of, "4E does the exact same thing and also refuses to reimburse you if you get a trash drop...the 4E treasure system does all that and on top of it simply does not work without the DM holding your hand and taking pity on you." Hey, guy, if you played with DMs who actually used the random treasure table entirely you played with shitty DMs. The point of a game is to have fun, not to sift through a half-dozen Kukri +3s or Glaive of Tickling Bursts just on the hope that, one day, the dice will be kind to you and give your character an appropriate piece of gear. The only thing that 4E changed about drops was codifying what decent DMs would do in the first place; your character will typically get items that he or she can at least use.

Oh and

Seriously, Szass Tam can't even reliably one-shot kill a first level goblin unless it has a 'minion' tag applied to it.

Are you seriously implying that a very likely Epic-level Lich is incapable of doing 20 or so damage to a goblin? It's starting to seem more and more like you've never actually played 4E, or that you've played a one-shot and automatically condemned it as worthless, because there's no other way to explain this level of ignorance.

I eagerly await your reply consisting of several more positions on why 4E sucks without any evidence besides, "because I think so."

2. Minions suffer from an extreme version of the "how does this creature interact with the world when it's not fighting PCs" problem. Yes, mooks have a dramatic niche, but stripping down monster stats to such a degree... leaves you with nothing to work with when you're not in combat (and "you're the DM, just make it up", "you don't need rules to roleplay" etc. are copout answers to that). Also, I'm apparently weird and playing some sort of radically perverse version of D&D, in that monsters switch sides and/or get used as replacement PCs at a frequency greater than "never". So I guess it's OK that I stew in nerd frustration every time I rediscover that I don't have a player-usable stat block that I can just flip across the table whenever those situations come up.

You're seriously pissed that minions, who explicitly exist for narrative conventions in combat, don't have fully fleshed out stat blocks that would be used by a scarce fraction of people who didn't realize that they could just look up any commoner stat block and use that if they wanted to give the party control of just some random guy with a sword and a tiny bit of training.

Are you the kind of guy that gets pissed when there's not a stat block for chickens?

[Doom]

I don't think he is...but I do agree with your point about it being as heroic to slaughter chickens as it is to slaughter minions.

(I know, optimal strategy is to ignore, but nobody else is, and I'm bored)

[Darwinism]

So yeah, no. I think what you meant to say was 3E's magical item system was awful, 4.0E's magical item system is flat-out unplayable without DM intervention, 4.5E's magical item system is inexcusably, insultingly bad. Even to hardcore fans who buy every book. Like, oh, the people who post on the Wizards forums. Even to WotC's most loyal fans you will not find anyone willing to defend the system. There were and are defenders of WBL though!

Oh hey look a really stupid argument with no basis in reality. "Well I don't think people should like X therefor no one ever likes X."

Gonna blow your mind here. I like 4E's magic item system. Oh and the entire system is designed around DM intervention so your point that it's unplayable without DM intervention is valid but really ignorant.

[Darwinism]

I don't think he is...but I do agree with your point about it being as heroic to slaughter chickens as it is to slaughter minions.

(I know, optimal strategy is to ignore, but nobody else is, and I'm bored)

Ha ha I see what you did there, attributing a point to my argument that didn't actually exist! You certainly are a clever one!

[Doom]

Sorry, I thought your metaphor was relevant. You acknowledge what you said was irrelevant?

[Darwinism]

Sorry, I thought your metaphor was relevant. You acknowledge what you said was irrelevant?

You really don't like to give up your logical fallacies, do you?

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

Sorry, I thought your metaphor was relevant. You acknowledge what you said was irrelevant?

You really don't like to give up your logical fallacies, do you?

As a matter of basic etiquette, you should probably develop your points a bit more. People here will throw one-liners at you and mock you for apparently random reasons, but that's because this is a discussion we have had *many times*, and you're treading on ground that is not exactly untrodden. It may not seem fair, but you're the newcomer here, and you're joining in a conversation which has been going on for a long time. If you want to achieve anything, you'll have to put in the extra effort to make developed, solid arguments that address the current state of discussion here.

Honestly, you should probably go back and read through the thread, too. You don't seem to understand the actual complaints against 4E that people here have, and that doesn't exactly lend credibility to your arguments.

[MGuy]

Darwin.. I don't agree with Lago on quite a few things but he has had page long rants on exactly what is wrong with wealth by level in 4E and even gave reasons for why it punishes people. While I understand that you can't be bothered actually reading people's actual arguments because the facts don't support your narrative it would be a lot more effective if you really just don't say shit because you don't have a solid argument about anything. All you've posted so far is evidence that you don't "like" other people's arguments without actually presenting one of your own.

It would be more understandable if solid arguments against 4E weren't posted in this very thread so you might've missed them but they are. You Krak and swordslinger are ignoring the facts because you "think" that people are attacking 4E by itself when Lago actually, as far as I can tell, has spent a lot of time actually enjoying the game. People on this board have something critical to say about EVERY game and there've been EXTENSIVE complaints made about 3E and its writers.

Now I'm not attaacking you or anything because I understand being defensive about your game but you should take my advice, chill out, and try considering that you're terribly wrong about how you think the game works. I know its tough cause I went through it myself. Had it not been for Akula, Leress, and a few other posters giving me a quick breakdown when I first got here I'd've probably just raged and left the Den. Please take my advice on this and you'll find a wealth of information here between the nerd rage and dog rape.