OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[OgreBattle]

Wonder if a Pokemon style "List of moves, then apply them to monsters" couldve worked for 4e

So every "big brute stuns you with a mighty swing" attack has the same name and effect.

[jt]

That'd be a good start. 4E has a smaller library of standard monster attacks than 3.5 does, even though this format would make better use of them. Previous editions also get away with murder by calling out to the spell list, which makes the monster block look simpler but requires multiple lookups in a separate book to actually use. A sane system would choose the most useful and common monster spells to keyword and ask the DM to memorize those, then copy the standard text verbatim whenever they want to use something that's not on the list.

But really what this game needs is actual rules that generate monsters. They don't even need to be elegant; the summary block shows only the results and not the math homework you had to do to get there. You should be able to sit down and crunch numbers until you know what a kobold warlock looks like. Or anything carrying a different weapon than expected. Instead they seemed to think that if it doesn't show up on the summary block, it doesn't exist, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

I never did that because part of my point with the class was to see how much space could be covered on a 4e class with a single day's work.

That's probably why you had more stomach for it than me. I wanted there to be a gish class, saw that a Duskblade's channel ability could be made to work in a cute way (turn ranged spell into melee attack for +[W] damage, which is roughly on par with other striker damage bonuses) and then flew face first into it taking ten thousand words to execute an idea that I just expressed in nine.

[Username17]

Wonder if a Pokemon style "List of moves, then apply them to monsters" couldve worked for 4e

So every "big brute stuns you with a mighty swing" attack has the same name and effect.

Obviously such a thing could have worked. And it would have been much better than what they actually did. But the result wouldn't have been 4e.

So if you decided that the Hill Giant with a club should have a club swing power where they smacked two characters, then obviously you'd want that club swing power to be on a list somewhere and to have various sword powers and ax powers and spear powers and shit so that if your hypothetical Hill Giant picked up a sword or ax or spear instead they could potentially do something meaningful in combat with them. But again, that wouldn't have been 4e.

To understand the true fucking mess that is the 4e Monster Manual you have to look at that Bill Slavicsek rant "The Devil's In the Details" about his vision for a Pit Fiend that did not exist outside of combat and did not interact with the setting or the scenery at all. And then you have to consider Mearl's weird stoned tirade about what he thought "exception based design" meant. Which basically was "not paying attention to any of the rest fo the work while you were designing things."

So you put that together and you not only had a vision of a Hill Giant who did not have the choice of showing up up with a spear or a sword because he did not exist before the combat music started and he spawned with a club in his hand - you had a vision where the writers thought that it was acceptable to pointedly ignore all the other club related attack maneuvers when writing up the Hill Giant's specific club maneuver. And this wasn't something that they settled for because they were lazy - they were fucking proud of this shit. They wrote philosophical rants about how doing shit this way was a profound insight. And they were wrong.

It's not that you couldn't write up a set of weapon maneuvers and then have humanoid opponents select a couple of weapon maneuvers based on armament and threat level. Obviously you could do such a thing. Obviously that would be less horse shit than what they actually produced. But that wasn't what they were making. They thought they had a better way than doing that, and they were wrong.

Orcus was explicitly a game made out of repeated maneuvers that were kind of like a card game where you assembled warriors and monsters out of cards to make like a "deck" that was a Paladin or a Hill Giant. And Mike Mearls made soem kind of "This doesn't feel like D&D, D&D should be about me pulling things out of my ass" argument to the design team and they bought it. Monsters and classes aren't collections of reused parts, they are Mad Libs filled up with whatever was on the top of the author's head while scribbling them out. That's what they are. That's what they were supposed to be.

The answer at the bottom of every line of inquiry as to why 4e D&D is so terrible is because the fundamental assumptions of how it was supposed to be designed, how it was supposed to be developed, and even what the goals of the design were all terrible. Without exception terrible. It isn't that they somehow missed the idea that there could be consistent flail-based maneuvers such that a PC Fighter and an NPC Stone Giant could both pick up a flail and use it to do stuff in combat - it's that they carefully considered that option and decided explicitly and deliberately to just have everything be a standalone stream of consciousness torrent of gibberish instead. The Hill Giant can't use a warhammer or a glaive because he is deliberately designed to be limited in scope to that degree.

Some of it was justified with "Save It For The Sequel" where new iterations of Hill Giants wearing slightly different pants and wielding slightly different melee weapons were going to be half page gravy trains whenever they needed to spew out more content. But the inherent limitation of the hill giant clubfucker was conceived as a piece of brilliant insight into the nature of the game under-the-hood. They thought they were being very clever rather than incredibly stupid.

-Username17

[tussock]

And did I ever run into that in my day of N-S, Frank.

Who was that said spell lists were murder? jt. Because spell lists were not murder, this is murder. Sure, spell lists could've often been improved with single line spell summaries, as found in the class spell list section of the 3e PHB, a short reminder is unusually enough when the spells do what they say they do anyway. But changing it to hundreds of minutely different but exactly specified things is a fucking nightmare in comparison to spell lists on a monster. I know what Charm Person does, in both AD&D and 3e.

---

Naga lets me look at a bit of that internal consistency. Obviously these don't have full Naga power sets, they're Elite but very compact.

• So the Dark Naga here is +24 vs AC; 2d6+8 poison damage, and the target is slowed (save ends).
• The Medusa in previous post is +15 vs AC; 1d6+7 damage, and the target takes ongoing 10 acid and poison damage (save ends)
• But the other Medusa is +20 vs AC; 1d8+8 damage, and the Medusa Warrior makes a secondary attack against the same target. Secondary Attack: +18 vs Fortitude; the target takes ongoing 10 poison damage and is slowed (save ends both).

Note that most of them don't even give a shit what your Fort def is. Same for pushes and grabs and all sorts of shit, sometimes the mechanics are targeting an appropriate defense, and sometimes they aren't and your defence doesn't mean anything.

I just, you know, there's no way to learn this system of what the monsters are gunna do or what people at the table are going to need to roll or what bit is sustained or on a (save ends) timer. There's no system, there's just a format. The mechanics are any random thing, even on monsters that are on the same page and supposed to fight in the same fight.

Also, the Primordial Naga is an awful concept. It's not even different to the Primordial Hydra. Same level Solo, different number of heads for similar total damage. Nothing to do with Nagas. Garbage.

Nightmare gives fire resistance to the dude riding it, but wouldn't apply any fire damage to anyone riding it or wrestling it or grabbing it anyway. OK.

Nightwalker are L20 Elite, they have a nice Finger of Death encounter power, but the rest of it is very uninspiring, and still manages to be throwing a unique set of penalties at will with (save ends) so that happens too.

Ogre are the first thing I check in every single Monster Manual in every game that has one. They are my gold standard to which everything else is scaled, a sense of damage outputs, movement rates, minimal complexity, and hit point bloat.

'Twas not an inspiring first glance at 4e for me, that.

Worse still was on the adjacent page, where his buddy has 111 hp, and does 1d10+5 damage (errata to 2d10+5) and gets to reroll his attack if it misses. Because that looked a lot like a game where damage hadn't really gone up much, if at all, but hit points had exploded and it was obviously going to be a huge grind to fight five of them beside the sort of things characters could do early on.

It's, um. 1 hp Ogre, or 111 hp Ogre. You can see why it's still playable if you quarter their hit points and double numbers. 2 of them with 27 hit points, the strikers ~4d6+6 type attacks hitting that are actually useful beside weaker area effects and reliable at-will stuff, and you can just fight 10 Ogres, or dozens at higher levels, and not do Minions like that.

Oni include the Oni Mage, which is nice. He sort of does everything he needs to, some monsters continue to just plug into this thing fine.

Ooze are creaky old monsters that struggle to fit into every edition in a lot of ways. 4e handles their arbitrary unlike-anything-else bullshit mechanics with arbitrary unlike-anything-else bullshit mechanics. Gelatinous Cube should obviously be a lower-level Solo, not just because it is not friends with Orcs, but it has always appeared on its own, this is not that hard. Again, most of them are not here.

Feels like they missed a trick to polish them up and present them really well. Another "this should work superbly in 4e, but instead is just passable".

Orc all have a free healing thing, so they have lots of hit points even compared to normal. Bosses full of immediate actions, minor actions, conditional actions, conditional modifiers to their own stuff that aren't even near the stuff they modify. It's quite a lot more messy than most of this book.

Some of the developers obviously had a better handle on this than others, and the lack of a system just leaves it a complete AD&D-style rat's nest at times, except written in 4e codespeak rather than high-Gygaxian English.

---

Orcus is our cover boy.

Gets this, only repeated without the titles, as a full page illustration, in case you missed it on the cover.

I see they know how to write instant death no-save attacks in this, because Orcus has them. His tail reacts to PCs moving adjacent by stunning for one round and knocking prone. It's all difficult terrain and spawning little monsters and ... why isn't this everywhere? It's simple stuff and it just works, just one condition he's applying and it's limited in application, just two recharge things on a Solo. Like, that's usable, playable, mean as and way too big of numbers on it for PCs to get anywhere with core abilities, but it's good.

This is what the Tarrasque is missing. This is what their big Dragons are missing. This is what their Gorgons and Medusae and fucking Carrion Crawlers are missing. Just stuff that happens and works and you either deal with it (usually before it happens) or you run off, or you try something new, or you dig out the emergency potions or whatever. Maybe you roll up some new PCs because that was bullshit. D&D.

There's also an avatar and high priest and a couple other cultists, I guess there's another Demon lord in each one?

Oh gods, I looked at the Monster Manual 2 to check, it all gets worse, everything in the next one is worse, bigger and messier stat blocks, ever more niche humanoids, whole thing makes the Orcs in this one look tidy, but yes, Demogorgan was next.

---

Otyugh are a regular monster. Like, if anything had Number Appearing of 1, it should have been a solo, they always probably worked pretty well as a solo, as a concept, and the manual lacks solos down low. The Gulguthra here used to come alone, because they had stealth (you know, hiding in the shitheap) and a couple reach attacks that grab, at least make 'em Elite. These ones team up with Carrion Crawlers or Troglodytes and ... they live in shit, come on, they don't have friends, it's fine.

Owlbear have always had that deathgrip hug thing, they don't let go, this is not here properly, because nothing fucking works here. Only Demon Lords have things that work. It's an Elite, it's allowed to just tie up one PC, they are outnumbered, it's OK. But no.

Panther seem an odd entry, they don't really have Animals in this, outside the mounts. But this is like the Hounds, everything but an actual Panther.

Purple Worm ooh, it works! Swallowed, dazed and restrained (no save). I mean, it takes a while to get you down, but cool. Of course swallowed critters get net +5 to hit it, though can only make basic attacks (pre-errata, also only basic one-handed weapon attacks, which of course very few characters can make). I mean, it's just gunna get smushed, but it always did. Yay.

Quickling is a pretty neat design, one gets a double spring attack effect with a very high move, and the other gets invisibility, because they couldn't put the whole quickling inside one monster less it be a Lurker and a Skirmisher at the same time.

---

Right, so that's why some monsters work much better in this. If the monster fit in one of their categories, with all its powers, it was allowed them all. Stuff like the Ogre Mage mostly was a Lurker anyway, but everything that wasn't Lurker about it had to be removed, so it looks a good conversion but still misses things. Stuff with an array of spells making it multi-capable just had most of them removed.

So all the very basic bashers are Brutes or Soldiers, other one trick pony types are allowed to carry over everything they had, but Efreet get cut into five different guys. Those categories weren't descriptive, they were prescriptive, if it didn't fit, it wasn't allowed.

That is completely fucking stupid. A monster should do one thing well, but however many things it half-asses doesn't matter, as long as they don't add complexity. Encounter powers are fine.

---

Rakshasa thus become another split-up monster, it's Soldier, Artillery, Skirmisher, and Controller powers becoming four different monsters. Are they good monsters you ask? They oddly chose to use a standardised power Deceptive Veil for it's illusion, rather than the traditional Rhakshasa one that makes them look and act just like one of their friends because they can read your mind, so it's all a bit sad and I don't care to puzzle them out.

Rat is where I was just saying they don't exist but I guess a Giant Rat is fantastic enough for them. Though it's actually just modelled on the Giant Sumatran Rat and called just that in AD&D, so they've accidentally included an animal! Swarms continue to be marvellously simple and effective for the regular rats.

There's no Rhemorhaz.

Roc swallows up Pheonix and Thunderhawk too. The Roc's grab is super-lame and it cannot carry away a dire rat let alone a fucking elephant (not that there are elephants), takes 3 rounds for a L12 Elite Roc to kill a L1 Dire Rat, oh wait, no, no attack of opportunity, so the rat gets away, every time.

Once bloodied, it flies off, only to return with another charge attack.

Such dynamic combats.

Roper basically works, it's a one-trick pony. Just oddly limited here, and not a Solo so misses out on having a go at the whole party on its own.

A roper that does not move, retracts its tentacles, and keeps
its eye and mouth closed resembles a jagged rock formation, stalagmite, or stalactite. In this form, the roper can be recognised with a successful DC 30 Perception check.

But a Roper with it's eye shut is blind, doesn't have blindsight or tremorsence, so can't make perception checks and ... combat never happens? In the land of arbitrary anything, that is just shit.

Rot Harbinger makes tussock wonder what the fuck are these things?

SOMETIMES KNOWN AS ANGELS OF DECAY, rot harbingers are hateful winged undead that inflict a rotting curse with their touch.

Rotting Claw (standard; at-will) + Necrotic
[*]+25 vs AC; 2d10+6 damage, and the target is marked until the end of the rot harbinger's next turn and takes ongoing 10 necrotic damage (save ends).

Dude, no. It doesn't even slide 3 squares, let alone knock prone. That's no curse.

Sahuagin are scalier Triton, thus making them the evil ones. The baron actually has four arms, which mostly work together give or take him throwing his trident at you, when they seem to stop working, maybe, who knows. They all get meaner when they're hitting a bloodied opponent, so that might catch someone, but I guess you notice and heal up.

No sharks to be had, so their priest gets a spectral bite to remind you of what you're missing out on.

Salamander are another pile of fire damage in mid levels, describes a lot of this monster manual. Resisting fire by mid levels is a good idea, which is a nice classic D&Dism really. Feels like they thought of a few things to do with the tail so they had to split it into a lot of monsters.

Gods, is that why there's seven Cyclops? Because they came up with like ten different powers to put in a thing called Evil Eye, and well, there's more monsters.

Satyr has one with a set of pipes, who dazes one target for one round, and everyone else gets +2d6 damage with combat advantage, which you get against dazed targets. So there you go, that's that fight.

Scorpion get a reaction with continuing damage from stinging you when you escape, and damage if you don't escape, which all up is gunna hurt at L1. The L13 version is doing the same thing with bigger numbers and you probably won't care by then.

Shadar-Kai are from Eberron and I never got the attraction at all. I guess they're here to be a level 6-8 encounter for the Shadowfell. Meh.

There's no Shadow. There's a Shadowfell and they didn't give it any Shadows. Weakness is a standard condition, seems an obvious choice now that everything is weak annoying condition plus small damage.

Shambling Mound are a giant special rule in the middle of their stat block that does what Shambling Mounds do. Can't build giant ones with lightning, but yeah, 4e, would be bad. Should def be Elite. The bigger one is, but then can't gobble you up, shoots lightning instead, which is perhaps based off the old Shocker Lizard in a Shambling Mound concept.

Shifter are another Eberron PC race, they used to be weaker versions of lycanthropes, but now are stronger versions of much crappier lycanthropes. They "shift" when bloodied, which works like everything else that changes when things are bloodied in this, which I'm sure isn't as much of it as I was promised back in the day.

Skeleton have 10 varieties at least in D&D history up to here, this instead has none of them and these are 4 new ones and a minion archer.

Skull Lord was previewed as four varieties in 3e's MM V, this is just one of them. Small mercies.

---

Slaad are here. Before them being generally less well represented as they got more interesting (and eventually not represented at all), they have the Slaad Tadpole.

Which, um, in packs of five is just a nightmare. Interrupt actions in general are poison, but an interrupt 2-square shift vs a melee attack is why you want a fucking system instead of a format! Oh, it's also insubstantial after it hits you. Orcus got nothin' on that.

There's pretty good odds (especially right at the start) where almost all of your party has all it's everything in melee attacks to try and get some damage going against this bloaty bastard edition, and that happens. It's a bit like that first Hyrda encounter in 3e, if you're smart you'll walk away and save yourself a lot of dead PCs. You've probably read about that fight already, I have, I recall it ended with abandoning 4th edition D&D. Game's bad enough in how it kills flanking so often.

The rest aren't all that bad, they lean a bit harder on some of the more standard 4e tricks to give them a bit of impact. For some reason the new tadpoles burrow out your skull, rather that being a proper chestburster.

---

Snake again are rather fantastic critters, though the Crushgrip Constrictor is another normal real world thing by another name. Uh, seem fine, simple concepts, eh.

Sorrowsworn were a 3e MM III new Demon type, mostly whispering your feels up into conditions. So do these, and pack it all in not too badly, well, after splitting it into four monsters. Nothing dangerous like their old spell abilities, but you know, grindy grind, all drags on so much with just a few small penalties to everything, just what they wanted. Something something Raven Queen for DC 40, oh right, unaligned, fucking gaslighting monsters. At least 3e had the decency to call them Evil.

Spectre is just rubbish. They left the Shadow out for that? It doesn't do anything.

Sphinx ... has one Sphinx called a Sphinx. Have these people read D&D?

Spider has the Blade Spider, which is what they've called the Sword Spider. There's 30 spiders at least in the history, like, just use them. All new plus a random name change. I don't get it, use what's there already, there's heaps.

Stirge is about the smallest monster in the book, L1 Lurker with 22 hp. At least the tactics say it flies away when bloodied! Woo! Way more should say that. Dire Stirge should've been a Stirge Swarm though, or a minion.

Swordwing were one of the preview articles before the game came out, to show off something about Epic monsters. The commentary I was involved with at the time was a little confused as to why they'd bothered. L25 and it's a flying melee guy.

Much like that Primordial Naga I think they're just out of stuff to do up here. The MM1 has always been chock full of low level stuff, after deliberately vacating a lot of that, too much of the old high level things got squeezed down to fill the gaps and then it's just empty up here at L25+.

---

I've been reading so many of them, that they're all starting to look the same!

Seriously put me off finding a few monsters that could just do things without loads of dice and many rounds passing, Orcus, Purple Worm, Shambling Mound. Though the Mound and Worm were fairly heavily nerfed in errata as a result.

[Josh_Kablack]

Wonder if a Pokemon style "List of moves, then apply them to monsters" couldve worked for 4e

So every "big brute stuns you with a mighty swing" attack has the same name and effect.

You could have made a much better 4e-like game by having such lists not just for monsters, but also doing that on the PC side with lists of Martial moves, lists of Arcane moves, lists of Divine moves as well as lists of Striker / Defender / Controller / Leader moves.

So when you published a splat with a new Martial Controller, you could just write the unique bits this new class gets at starting level and a couple class-specific powers. Then you either let the player pick the rest of the powers off of the Martial and Controller lists OR you write things so that the designers ctrl-v to assign specific pre-existing powers of the Martial and Controller lists to their Catpouncer Marshallord and Tailor of the Blue Harvest Moon class.

That would have saved a huge amount of lookup time at the table as well as cut down MC headache significantly.

[jt]

Who was that said spell lists were murder? jt. Because spell lists were not murder, this is murder. Sure, spell lists could've often been improved with single line spell summaries, as found in the class spell list

I didn't say they were murder, I said they let them get away with murder. The difference is that they got away with it .

Your suggestion here would be a huge improvement.

Under my suggestion, Charm Person would definitely be the sort of spell that ends up on the list of effects a DM is expected to just know. The problems come up more with high-level demons and trickster archetype fey, where you're randomly expected to know what Blasphemy, Insanity, or Pyrotechnics do, and this is considered as obvious as Charm Person because the rule is just "it's a spell so I don't need to write it down."

There's no system, there's just a format.

Very good summary of this mess.

Ogre are the first thing I check in every single Monster Manual in every game that has one. They are my gold standard to which everything else is scaled, a sense of damage outputs, movement rates, minimal complexity, and hit point bloat.

I'm curious, how does that work? I'm making something with very little similarity to D&D but it indeed has an ogre in the monster manual. Say an ogre has 30 HP and a two-target +1 to hit 3d6 melee attack compared to a starting character's 15 HP and single-target +1 to hit 2d6 melee attack. Are you using this as a basis to figure out what parts of the system to look up? Or is there a range you expect?

Orcus ... why isn't this everywhere?

4E would be less disappointing if it didn't include the occasional piece of really good design. Therefor 4E must include the occasional piece of really good design.

If anything had Number Appearing of 1, it should have been a solo, they always probably worked pretty well as a solo, as a concept, and the manual lacks solos down low

This is a really common mistake across games and even across genres. If you have two independent ways of varying monster toughness, the big low-level monsters are missing. Like roguelikes are classically supposed to have monsters you should run away from, but they almost never show you one until you've seen a hundred monsters you could kill, so people fall into the trap of trying to kill everything. I got so sick of it that one year for 7DRL I built an entire game out of the idea that the early floors should include easy monsters that will kill you if you try to fight them.

[tussock]

#Ogres ; a digression.

I'm curious, how does that work? I'm making something with very little similarity to D&D but it indeed has an ogre in the monster manual. Say an ogre has 30 HP and a two-target +1 to hit 3d6 melee attack compared to a starting character's 15 HP and single-target +1 to hit 2d6 melee attack. Are you using this as a basis to figure out what parts of the system to look up? Or is there a range you expect?

Right.

• So Ogre at 30hp I guess the biggest monsters getting up to 200hp or a bit more, which implies all sorts of things about player attacks and damage growing. Possibly less hp growth with more DR or other size-based defence.
• Room underneath for about a cat at the lowest before you're forced to use swarm mechanics.
• +1 to hit on an Ogre I pick very slow bonus scales, could be as little as +4 or +6 at the high end, or a bit more if the small monsters (if they're a thing) are using some penalties.
• You imply a growth in bigger things getting ever more targets, so anything like a big dragon scales in part just by hitting everyone, and things like explosions scale number of targets as they get better or harder to produce.
• 3d6 double target implies few monsters per fight, especially big ones, in turn allowing lots of dice rolling, multiple rolls per hit sort of system, and dice-only damage going up to, either 6d6 for minimal PC hp growth, or lots and lots of dice on top of lots of attacks for high hp changes.
• implies some sort of further defence against damage, either ogre rarely making solid contact, or some sort of soak mechanic that normally reduces damage by quite a lot, or safe knockouts rather than high chance of death, and probably no exploding damage of any sort. Armour as DR probably, in line with small attack bonuses.
• 15hp starting PCs puts them above the town guard, but not much. 2-hit guards and 3-hit PCs maybe.

And the more it gets away from that, the more I have to study it to figure out what it's trying to do and dig at it to see where it might fall over, and often it's enough to give me an idea that it's not worth my time because the Ogre fight isn't really working against what PCs can even do, or some games just have huge gaps where pretty simple monsters will kill anyone at any point in development (like Rolemaster).

Orcus ... why isn't this everywhere?

4E would be less disappointing if it didn't include the occasional piece of really good design. Therefor 4E must include the occasional piece of really good design.

This is wisdom. I am in your debt.

[tussock]

Home run! It's been interesting to go over them again. As a hot tip, using coloured backgrounds under compact and encoded information is poison, and you should not ever do that in your RPG project. Little tabs and stuff are fine, colour dots, bold headers, indents, plain dots, single dark line between powers, and always everything in the same place in each block.

Most of their format is OK, but the colour is killing me. It is still less bad than those fucking coloured headers on the PHB powers though. Don't do that either.

---

Tiefling joins the new crew in the PHB. These have Resist Fire 5 + level, instead of the 5 + 1/2 level that they have in the PHB. Decendants of the ancient Turathian nobles, eh. Sure, why not, who cares how genetics works.

Treant create a zone of damage called Awaken Forest instead of actual extra trees, but whatever, got it under the design radar I guess. Well, one of them does, the other has Reach 3 including a prone and restrain (save ends) minor action that will make you very sad about being a melee character again.

Troglodyte are stink. It's an aura 1 giving automatic -2 to hit them, so again, fuck you for playing a melee character. There's a lot of this about, very little that hurts just ranged attackers, a bit that hurts both, but lots that hurts melee. No chamelion ambush trick, not even regular hiding.

Troll manages to regenerate, even from death, but does not manage to claw/claw/bite or rend or anything because I guess that was a different developer figured that one out. The bigger ones can push 4 and knock prone, which is so sad that it's the best thing in the book.

Umber Hulk are for some reason a bear hug creature now, though they really shouldn't because it lowers their damage quite a bit. Hot tip, don't escape. Confusion is ... confusing to me mostly, slide 5 squares and dazed (save ends) as a minor action in a close blast is just ... again, I shut my eyes during its turn because that is annoying and not confusion.

Unicorn lose the traditional narwhal tusk in the art, and lose their 360' dimension door for a 5 square fey step, but get an actual functional charm power that makes the target take opportunity attacks against anyone who attacks the unicorn. Which is weird, because for all of the monsters who can't charm people in this any more, Unicorns do not classically have a charm power at all. They are immune to Charm formerly, maybe the developer was rushed and read it wrong?

Vampire are another template monster, so they're a bit of a mess to achieve not much, nice the actual ritual is here though. Plus minions, which suits buffy style vamps, so whatever, that can be a thing.

It has regen and a healing surge and a weird recharge condition on a vampiric healing power. Obviously there's nothing even vaguely resembling level loss, negative level concept binned to allow for rediculously long combats I guess.


Vine Horror is from the 3e Fiend Folio, which is pretty obscure, so they even copied the art. The original did cross-reference the 3e MM by creating temporary Assassin Vines, which is a bit much, and this one manages in the stat block as a fine example of how it all fits some critters so well.

Warforged are Eberron again, completes the set for them. I'd say they're even less like constructs here, but constructs aren't like anything here.

I guess they'd picked a 2-world strategy since about 2004 and would be hoping to run support books for them both into 4e, but the Eberron monsters aren't here, only the PC types, so how can play on anyway? Heh. They all went to Pathfinder, surely.

Wight actually steals a healing surge with each hit. Which, why isn't this on the other level drainers? I mean, at least it forces a long rest, might make players not want to fight them because they are legit scared, rather that bored, you know.

The Slaughther Wight at L18 Brute gains 15hp (of 182hp) with every single hit, but not to worry as Vulnerable 10 Radiant should let the laser Cleric compensate. Or the healing is to compensate for the vulnerability jump at 16th level? Anyway, that may not interest you greatly as a game mechanic, it doesn't for me, but it sure is there.

---

In 2nd edition, back when level drain still drained levels and Ravenloft was a thing, a character called Rudolf Van Richten started writing his monster hunter compendiums. He was something like 9th level in the first one, and years later in the last he was about 4th level, after gaining lots of levels, then he died.

That is another little D&D story which does not work in 4th edition.

---

Wolf puts me right on the animal thing, here's one, a Gray Wolf. They now need to flank to trip you, which is better, so yay. Then they all bite the prone PC for extra damage, but not as much as the proper bricks. Game does stuff like this well, but it's very sensitive to the peculiarities of the particular design.

There's a few monsters use Combat Advantage for some additional effect, usually damage because they're try to be Rogues, but it works nicely for status effects too, and would be even better if it cared at all about your fucking defences.

Worg are for some reason a different entry, on the facing page to Wolves, and I'm sure there's room in the white space for it under Wolf. Instead we add the Guulvorg here, previewed in 3e MM V, which has a tail trip and a bite trip, because it's Elite and Elite things can make two hits, just is.

Wraith, in being upgraded Wights, just weaken (save ends) you.

I mean, I'd say "at least they're higher level", but they're not. There's a Dread Wraith all the way up at L25, making it one of the highest level regular monsters in the game, it's all very Elite and Solo packed above there.

Wyvern cannot pick things up and carry them off any more than any other flyer can. It can use flyby attack with reach 2 and hover though, so in 4e that's a couple PCs just never allowed to hit it.

Yuan-Ti are now Malisons instead of Halfbreeds, and Snaketongue cultists instead of Purebloods. But why? I mean if someone got a bit squicked out or whatever about Yuan-Ti bloodline effects, isn't that the point?

I'd say they were ridding the game of awful things about supposedly degenerative breeding practices (note to racist white people, you should stop breeding with other white people if you care about that) but the Malisons are still explicitly a degenerate breed of mutants who've lost their past glories. It's still here.

Zehir (Turkish word, poison/venom) is the new snake god, and I don't care. Like, Greyhawk gods are fine, there's fuck-tonnes of Greyhawk gods, default Greyhawk worked really well in 3e. Fucking Bigby's spells, Tenser, Otiluke, Otto, Mordenkeinen, they're the Greyhawk guys, you want those spells, with the names on them, D&D. They paid money for that IP, use it.

Google randomly suggests I mean Tharizdun, and I think google is right.

Zzzombie were another preview article for 4e that rather made me wonder what the fuck these people had been reading. All proud of having a Zombie that threw bits of itself at you, one that was faster, one that was cold. Not only, like, ignoring that a lot of those stories already appear in things not called Zombies in D&D, Ghouls are fast for instance, Wights can fly, but that there was heaps of Zombies already that they weren't including.

There's Fog Zombies and Mud Zombies and the Zombie Lord, Sea Zombies, Strahd Zombies (which, fucking just put them in everything, those are good monsters), and Tyrantfog Zombies, plus a few they did include, all this new flavour everywhere. That they were somehow thinking was so much better than what came before that they would just chuck out most of 34 years of history and ....

---

Monopoly has new boards, you know, lots of them. Like D&D has the Realms and Greyhawk and Eberron and Darksun and Ravenloft and whatever else they want to dig up, I'm partial to a bit of Mystara. But the fucking core set of monopoly just has the same fucking squares on it it's had since 1928. Because that's what you do. So people can play the same fucking game with their kids that they played with their parents, only you've fixed the broken shit and made it work better.

Not because you called it classic monopoly except the last square was Bollywood, the train stations are now airports, and there's a McDonalds on the Free Parking.


As much as there's a tonne of problems with this book, and there's a whole 'nother post of that coming before I crack into the tedium of that shithouse PHB, just the random little changes to things where it didn't really do anything good, and instead we ended up with even more fire-themed creatures at mid level. The whole edition just says you fight everything because everything's turned to shit and everyone's crazy (uh, Points of Light == Grimdark almost everywhere) ... just let us fight Hound Archons.

Angry, misguided Hound Archons, that doesn't seem like it hurts the game at all. You can still team up with 'em for other stuff, everything could be here, it's just pissing on everyone's memories, like they didn't even like D&D.

There's about 3200 monsters for D&D before this, another ten fucking years of expansion material at their planned rate before needing even one new monster. Also about 300 have been in the first monster manual just about non-stop, until this, and on top of that so many they did include were radically changed.

But we didn't need new fluff to buy it, because it had all new mechanics. How was it ever going to do anything but alienate their customers? Lots of people at the time assumed they were deliberately attacking their old customers, to drive them away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqFPujRZWo
Uploaded by WizardsDND, Jan 1, 2008.

To some extent, they were. That video perplexes me to this day.

[Username17]

The weirdest part to me about the entire 4e experiment isn't the incredibly wrongheaded decisions, it's the amazing levels of hubris with which those decisions were made. It would be one thing to just barrel ahead with hacked together monsters with guestimated numbers and powers pulled out of the ass because you were having the monsters pulled out of thin air for a system that had not fully gelled like Gygax in 1977 - but these fuckers put them together like that because they carefully considered doing it other ways and decided that standalone bullshit was the way to go.

After having just done a major last minute change to damage outputs they still chortled throughout the gaming community that "the math working" was a major selling point of the new edition. Why did they believe that? Obviously the math not working was a huge problem with the edition, and their own limited playtest data pointed to exactly that. No successful skill challenges in playtest, high level test battles that literally never ended, and so on. Who would look at these looming reports of catastrophe and say "Yeppers, we did it boys!" and break out the champagne? And yet they did. They looked at these playtest reports that might as well have been written in poop that was on fire and they seem to have given high fives all around and displayed the results to the world as if they had been results.

Completely related is the weird conflation with "Only Need X" to "Need Only X". So Andy Collins said they only needed to have 8 classes in the PHB. And while that was wrong, you can follow the logic. 2e AD&D launched with 8 classes, so you could make an argument that that was acceptable. But I don't understand the next leap to the part where Andy Collins then successfully convinced the rest of the team that adding a ninth class meant that they should take another class out. Like, I get the idea that you could claim that you were done after making 8 classes, but I don't understand the idea that having noticed that you've made 9 classes you fucking bin one of them.

But we didn't need new fluff to buy it, because it had all new mechanics. How was it ever going to do anything but alienate their customers?

There's lots of room for fluff upgrades in Dungeons & Dragons. And infuriatingly, some of the fluff changes in 4e actually are upgrades. The good changes don't leap out and smack you in the face much because they flow naturalistically. But let's talk about some of them.

Like, Dryders are now Drow who have been rewarded with Lolth themed bodies by Lolth instead of punished with Lolth themed bodies. That's simple, obvious, and makes the whole thing much better. Succubi got sorted with the Devils rather than being Tanar'ri that happened to look and act exactly like Baatezu for "no reason." Again, it's not something you notice because it's like "Wait, wasn't it always like that?" The thing about 4e is that while there are definitely some real fluff improvements, most of the fluff changes - whether by baffling omission or simple statements that contradict old texts are bad. And it's really noticeable. And grating.

Old D&D is full of extremely stupid ideas. Some of them were jokes that fell flat, some of them were racist diatribes that gradually make the reader more uncomfortable the more time marches on, and some of them were just some variety or another of dumb. Nilbogs aren't good because they are literally there to troll the player characters. Babblers aren't good because that is not how language works. The weird Romani Stereotypes are uncomfortably racist regardless of whether they are in space or the horror dimension. And so on. There are lots of places where things can be conceptually improved. And let's not beat around the bush too much - even many of the things that are conceptually passable were originally written by stoned college freshmen on fucking typewriters and just having some fucking adult with a word processor do a streamlined writeup could do a world of good.

But despite the abundance of low hanging fruit, most of the changes in the 4E Monster Manual are quite obviously bad. It's very odd. There's plenty of places you could make D&D better or at least less stupid and offensive by tossing out some of the old fluff and writing new fluff. Just downplay the weird Orc miscegenation rants from 1977 and cross out the idea that Gnolls were crossbreeds of Gnomes and Trolls. But I would say that easily 90% of the fluff changes in 4e are just staggeringly bad.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

The weirdest part to me about the entire 4e experiment isn't the incredibly wrongheaded decisions, it's the amazing levels of hubris with which those decisions were made. It would be one thing to just barrel ahead with hacked together monsters with guestimated numbers and powers pulled out of the ass because you were having the monsters pulled out of thin air for a system that had not fully gelled like Gygax in 1977 - but these fuckers put them together like that because they carefully considered doing it other ways and decided that standalone bullshit was the way to go.

Why?

We've covered the pre-4e WotC culture before, where Dave Noonan got to release Monster Manual V with parts no one wanted or cared about, and there were no consequences whatsoever. Any of these guys could hop on over to EnWorld or Big Purple to hear thunderous acclaim for their abilities as designers, and they had carte blanche from WotC due to their unrealistic pitch of being a WoW killer. The marketing of how 4e is actually the Third Testament is a natural outgrowth of this - of course 4e is good, these guys are living in a bubble of how they are The Greatest Designers ever. Even after the steaming turd dropped there were enough people writing "Mearls, God of Balance" poems on EnWorld and enough purges on those forums so that the designers could keep their hugbox and write the 4e haters off as a vocal minority.

Look at Complete Mage, specifically, the advice in the beginning of the book. It's terrible and obvious evidence the devs didn't play their own game. Hell, look at Mearls' old legends and lore articles where he explains that grease can chump enemies like it is some new revelation revealed to him by an angel - 2 editions later! The entire WotC D&D designer culture is the RPG equivalent of the Donald Trump Fox News bubble. Why is there any shock heads are stuck up asses?

On a semi-related note, I wrote a critical review of the 4e PHB for SA I can link here if there's any interest.

[tussock]

@CapnT, link away, I'm reading over heaps of the commentary of the edition as I go.

But I disagree in general that anyone in this dev team saw it that way. You're mistaking their press output of "everything is fine and we expect great things" from the obvious, published, internal dissent and disagreement over the direction of this thing along the way. It's like Tesla advertising script vs Tesla people who used to work there and can now talk freely.

Their own preview books talked about their internal dissent problems, about how they established entirely new core functions mid-development, and had added entirely new systems of rules to the DMG very late with no time to test them at all.

Heinsoo wrote an entire other game after he got the boot as a demonstration of what 4e should have worked like if everyone hadn't got in his way. Not support material like Monte did post-3e, but a full competing game that is still in production.

Mearls publicly went on at length about how no one else at the office even knew what D&D was, with his "and now I'm running a 1st edition game for these people who've never played it, which is almost everyone here" columns for about a year while they were still technically trying to sell 4e.

Those people didn't even agree what good design was, but eventually you have to polish that turd and get it out the door, tell everyone how great it is and how much they're gunna love it, hope to hell it sells. The various boards that killed negative content about it did so on company orders. In olden days they'd publish letters that talked about problems and offer extensive solutions, they couldn't do that for 4e because they didn't have any, and they knew it.

---

There is a lot of typewriter problems with the 1st edition books. Or mainframe word processor with editors notes on printed copies, for 2nd edition, where most books are single author because the very concept of having multiple people with access to the source document was dangerous, and multi-author books were literally written without access to the other author's work and stuck together later.

I'd like to say 4e was better, it should be, but then I notice the three people "writing" this monster manual for eight months weren't the six people who wrote all the fluff for the PHB and MM in six weeks after it was finished. And like, the whole book is a few lines of fluff, two line monster description, stat block, tactics suggestion, the lore DCs, and maybe an encounter group or four if they felt like filling space.

What exactly were they writing for eight months? The Lore entries? I've already written more than that here. Plus, a lot of those are terrible, and sometimes don't even match the monsters' new abilities, it does not scream of time spent.

I'm assuming it was getting all the design post-it notes packed away into those stat blocks, and the game didn't exist as any sort of database or anything to spit them out pre-formatted. 5e's playtest docs were not terribly inspiring on that front, nor Mearls' commentary on the process they use. There is a bit of copy and paste, but everything does appear very manual in terms of filling in everything and making it line up right.

Quite a lot of the numbers in this MM are wrong, a lot of errata for it is probably something manually copied from the wrong column of a sight-to-fingers spreadsheet of guidelines. Mearls said there's basically a spreadsheet like that they work from.

So that is where their "playtest" time went with this thing, trying to pick the numbers or abilities that weren't filled in completely or correctly, because your eyes glaze over so bad just trying to read it. By MM3 they "solved" some of those issues with, uh, probably a spreadsheet that spat out the base numbers pre-formatted for them.

By then the stat block improved in usability quite a bit by clustering action types, but also the numbers were almost exactly the same on all the monsters.

---

I've been overly harsh on the layout along the way, some of it blends a bit. It's much more subtle than any previous editions when they do it, more space between them, and most of the art has solid backgrounds that don't suit it, but it's there, and quite well done where it's used.

Me not liking the broader art direction or the stat block format makes it hard for me to see. The whole thing still looks tediously blocky, but most of the art and all the stat blocks are forever rectangles, left them so little to work with.

---

Racial Traits gives playable race versions of the playable race sort of monsters in the back. Here be the Bugbear, Doppelganger, Drow, Githyanki, Githzerai, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Hobgoblin, Kobold, Minotaur, Orc, Shadar-Kai, Shifter-Longtooth, Shifter-Razorclaw, and Warforged.

They get powers that are often the same as their monster equivalents, and sometimes not. Another weird thing about telling everyone the Gnome was out of the PHB, eight months before release, is of course you can just play a Gnome anyway. I think they mentioned that somewhere, but it's not in the video everyone saw.

And I just need to say, their Gnomes are quite cool, that illusion reaction is not the worst, doesn't do much, and suits the game history of Gnomes in a clever way, ignoring the old mechanics and representing their old fluff pretty well. I'm imagining someone went to bat for Gnomes, put a lot of time and thought into them, and lost that vote anyway.

Because of the new "all at the back" format for these playable ones, it obviously misses some. There's no Ogre for instance. If they'd included this info on the page like 3e does, it might have cost them the odd encounter group suggestion, but it's probably just room for more monsters and more playable options. 3.5, aside from the terrible +LA tax, was very well formatted for this.

---

Glossary is a four-page job, its good. A lot of the terms are quite different to 3e, and that's one of the best reasons for a new edition. If your standard teams need a serious going over to solve various problems, a new edition is a lot less hassle than errata for everyone. 4e did not follow this lesson itself, and ended up with errata for enormous numbers of the tiddliest things, I only mention a couple of the early ones here in passing.

I believe I've missed some of the glossary differences in my review thus far, despite checking them all the time, that's the downside of using the same old name for new rules, and of course applies equally to people trying to play the game early on. If you want to release any information early, the Glossary is probably a good page. Things doing what they say they do is also an excellent help there.

As for what the problems solved were in 4e's common terms, they are mostly of the type where a group of monsters might have been immune to some class of effects in 3e and previous, and now it is not. That's a better scheme anyway, not printing the particular immunities and resistances next to the monsters can get a bit inconsistent in people remembering them, and 4e sticks them right next to the giant bloated hp. While also eliminating concepts like magic resistance or immunity to non-magic weapons.

Which is why the game wanted to have +30 to all attacks and defences across the levels, so they can still claim epic monsters will level a city. I don't accept that works if you throw enough dice at it, but I can see the concept they were going for.

In reality that big bonus track was hard on the game in many ways, the limit in levels of monsters you can face here is very tight, back to that below.

---

Monsters By Level rounds out the book, and uh, yeah, it's a bit empty up high.

Stacked count of the three MM for 4e, they did a bit of gap filling by the 3rd one, just a bit late, blue line is this one only and there are not many Epic tier monsters at all.

That's, by my calculations, because they converted the 3e monsters by CR in a very formulaic way, the new levels equate to where you fight CR 1/2 to 14 as monsters of 1st to 20th level, except there's not terribly many monsters exist past CR 8 (level 18), and even less past CR 12 (level 26), so up there you fight Elites and Solos that are CR 11-18.

Then they also didn't use a lot of the 4e CR 9-12 range of monsters, quite a few left out, when there's not that many to start with, and also dropped out things like Nightcrawlers and Nightwings that were already filling sparse space in 3e.

Then squeezed the top and bottom a touch to try and fill the gaps, but mostly Level is 2*(CR+1) for monsters, +8 for minions, -4 for Elite, -8 for Solo. And the thing is doing that leaves you not much at level 1, and even less little in the range of level 21-30, particularly past 25. There's various monsters filled those conceptual gaps a bit better in later manuals in all the editions, but those aren't here.

A couple of their new monsters are trying to fill those spaces, or they'd be worse, but others just pile up with the bunch in levels 4-14. Obviously someone pushed things into L12 and into L21 to make the tier count look bigger, and those are generally leader versions of smaller critters, so the actual encounters involving them are mostly made of lower level guys.

Plus, there's just obviously more even-level monsters than odd-level overall, which.

So you mostly just have to fight epic solo dragons, and that doesn't work.

---

And I mean, in 3e you can ideally fight a range of roughly -8 to +2 CR in early 3.0, and a bit tighter later on as the smaller guys lost effect against improving player attacks, but players remained vulnerable to higher level monster sudden death.

But that's a huge range of levels in 4e, and it doesn't work at all with normal monsters. 10 steps in CR is 20 levels of monster concepts in 4e, and +20 on the RNG for standard monsters makes the d20 very, very sad. OK, the +2 CR guy you hope to fight alone, and the -8 CR guys in fair size mobs, and in 4e those are a Solo monster (if it was ever written out that way, and most are not), and minions (and again, in 4e, most higher level stuff did not get a minion treatment).

So where you might face a huge number of Fire Giants at Ragnorok in 3e up near level 18, you'll have to write up your own Fire Giant Minion to do that in 4e because they never really bothered with things to do at high level, and then someone drops a few at-will area attacks and they're all gone.

If they had worked just a bit harder on filling up the levels to fight things with, a few Epic minions in the form of giants and such, a few more low level Solos, they might have ended up noticing that both their minions and their solos weren't working terribly well early enough to do something about it. Maybe even find Epic was working even worse because they had more Epic things to test?

Those are in turn problems that 5e attacked by removing almost all numerical development on either side of the DM screen, without really returning immunity to things, so a few archers along for the ride sort of roflstomps everything.

---

PHB, it is also not good, and I'll see if I can tell you why. Next.

[CapnTthePirateG]

https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-a ... al-review/

4e PHB review I wrote. I think it hits a lot of the "$e" meme stuff we've discussed.

[tussock]

Hmm. There's so much to grump about, doing a bit of research for this is just, even the real fan boys in the day had a lot of reservations. Even the people who loved it had colossal numbers of house rules and radically changed how it played, and were obviously mind-caulking it with 3e or even OSR rules all over the place.

So once again, I shall delve in bit by bit and plug along, and try to expound upon you the homely wisdom of a sad nerd who wanted more from their hobby, wanted only the most glorious of success for their hobby. There's good concepts in this, very good, top of the line stuff for the late aughties. Quite a few of them even, but almost every bit of it is executed with the most tragic, game-destroying flaws.

---

RPGs are hard, they're not like Monopoly, not even like Magic the Gathering, certainly not like the D&D Minitures game, and computer versions fall terribly short in some ways (while excelling over tabletop in others). I don't mean hard to play, they all sort of just flow when it works well. Grappling always stood out in 3rd edition for needing referred to and puzzled out, where most of the rest of it you could sort of forget it was there, and there's not too many other rules in it you have to ignore to get to that point.

4th edition's Grab mechanic in comparison to the old Grapple is excellent. It just happens on their turn, you roll your dice against it on your turn, and if they work you can just attack from there, and if they don't you can attack at a penalty instead, hooray! Then they do their things to make it worse on following turns if appropriate, all like combat, just flowing as the appropriate turns come up and the circumstances encourage.

It's a bit slower, in the number of rounds, but it gets there, and in theory it's the sort of thing you can arbitrarily speed up if you feel the need, just stick two rounds of action into one.

That sort of thing is where the four standard defences and normalised action schedule with most every attack folded into a standard action, the game can comfortably be giving out the same results as 3e with a fraction of the fuss.

I can see how their early concepts for just tidying up what characters and monsters were trying to do, getting the worst mechanics out of the way and reforming it all through a minimalist but thorough action economy, that could've been a boon for tabletop, it was for 3e compared to the arbitrary weirdness of 2nd edition. The little Slides, Pushes, and Pulls to bring immediate effect to taunts and charms, fears and confusion, and let the big boys push folk around while still killing fools. The simplified and regularised area measures and movement costs. Just giving fucking spells to everyone while finally nerfing the Wizards a bit and trimming theirs and the Cleric's 30-year-bloated spell list for sanity oh my hairy assed gods thank you so much, ....

But they're hard to make.

It's all so easy to lose your way, take your "everything is just you on your turn" concept that feels so fast and toss it in the compost with "hey, what about that immediate action, let's use it for some stuff" and "ooh, this would work better as not an action at all" and "hey, I'll give other PCs actions that aren't actions on my turn too". Because it's so fast, so why not, right?

It's all so easy to find a formula for generating things that works at the start and then just blindly follow it along without testing the far end and all the steps along the way. To convert a bunch of stuff between the old system and the new with a simple formula, and then just sort of leave it and assume it's OK, or at least no worse than the previous. Even if it is a basic low-level Ogre with 111 hp.

It's easy, now that you have a whole new concept for a key piece of the game, to make it the core function of a quarter of your character options, and even if your new action structure chokes on it a bit, and writing it out is always a mess, to just assume it'll work like you want it to. Add notes to the tests to tell them all how it should work, so they use it right next time. Add more notes to the DMG to tell everyone how it's supposed to work, despite the tests, because, come on, isn't it obvious.

Easy to think some new thing you wrote is good enough to do away with decades of expectations, and then just set off and write scores more of them as the corporate culture lauds you in meetings and works on stabbing you in the back at the pub after.

It's easy to make a bunch of categories for things, monsters, classes, power sources, and then misuse them in every way imaginable, both forcing things with the most severe of trims into overly-defined and highly regimented boxes, and of not really bothering to define some of those or a whole other group of categories or ever have them do anything at all but make the surrounding terminology a little more obtuse. To just not notice that some of your groups of things aren't working at all, like 3e melee guys at high level, or huge chunks of 4th edition.

It's easy, apparently, though I wouldn't have thought so, to fit an entirely new spell recovery schedule to the game after most of the design work was supposed to be set in stone, because for some reason you've lost the feel of the thing and a mad rush very late in development is exactly the time to go find it with a wild-ass guess at a compromise position, or something.

sweeps handful of scrapped concepts for this very post under the rug

---

But mostly RPGs are hard because unlike a computer game, if there's a door, it's not the small programmed set of options to get through it alone, there's a hundred ways through that door and everyone who tries has a different set. It's like that for every action and every spell and every monster and everything a DM might drop in as a hindrance or help to the party, all has in combination what may as well be an infinity of options for all you can test them up front.

And people want fucking rules for it all, the bastards, that is in fact what they're paying you for, or you're hoping they'll pay you for. It's certainly what you have to promise them, that things will just work, that combat will flow, highlight that smart stuff you did and don't sweat the mess the rest of it became in public.

You can see why someone who was thinking of designing an RPG, might, maybe, just design a little skirmish battles game instead.

Especially if they'd come over recently from the new big-selling thing that was a little skirmish battles game, and was selling ever so well.

---

They start off telling us how to play, and it's full of lies and sadness. Next.

[tussock]

Player's Handbook 1

They don't have a 1 on it, but it is.

---

How to Play
They call out Fighters and Wizards, Ruins and Wastes, call themselves the pinnacle of fantasy roleplaying games ....

In 2008 the in-print fantasy roleplaying games were ... this, and ... uh. Fantasycraft maybe? Castles and Crusades? A few single-author OSR games, like Swords & Wizardry? The Pathfinder alpha test? Hmm, Warhammer 40000 Roleplay, World of Warcraft RPG maybe still going, there's not a lot of competition for that particular category. I like C&C, it's pretty thin compared to this; it's a good AD&D clone using the d20 system. I'll give 'em a maybe, the competition wasn't all that, the Pathfinder alpha had problems, didn't print until 2009 in a much better form. 3.5 was near 50 classes and 2000 feats and it all adds up to a lot of stuff your character can't do any more.

This should've kicked all their asses, it was a good time for it. I suppose coming in second place to "more 3.5" wasn't too bad.

Anyway, more shout-outs, Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard. They show some history, there's a sidebar with a brief ... they call 2nd edition "losing steam" rather than "bankrupting the company", but I expect that sort of lies. Doesn't even mention Basic.

Now we’ve reached a new milestone. This is the 4th Edition of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s bright and shiny. It builds on what has gone before, and firmly establishes D&D for the next decade of play. Whether you were with the game from the beginning or just discovered it today, this new edition is your key to a world of fantasy and adventure.

10th edition, really. My emphasis, that's hmm. It obviously doesn't build on what has gone before, that was 3e, this completely binned an enormous amount of what had gone before to give us some new stuff. It also didn't really support anyone who was with the game from the beginning. There was always a bit of frustration with 3e that it struggled with a few old concepts that didn't work too well any more, big numbers of monsters needed a few house rules, the treasure system was less fantastic and more Friday evening grocery shopping, morale system pls thx, but the mechanics were a strong enough base to mostly cover for that.

A Roleplaying Game
These are always cringe-worthy. Here you make a character, play with friends, the power of imagination (uh, skill challenges?), and how the vibrancy, unexpected happenings, and excitement is all the job of the DM. Only limited by imagination it says, but, uh, encounter powers, you can only use them once each, not to mention the ones you don't have, you are explicitly limited to not using most of your options from the start.

In an adventure, you can attempt anything you can think of. Want to talk to
the dragon instead of fighting it? Want to disguise yourself as an orc and sneak into the foul lair? Go ahead and give it a try. Your actions might work or they might fail spectacularly, but either way you’ve contributed to the unfolding story of the adventure and probably had fun along the way.

Those things will completely fail. The skill challenge system in the DMG wakes up for that stuff and it is brutal. I know there's errata for the skill challenge system, but it was just a gish gallop of continuous nonsense that never even touched on the most obvious of solutions to it's actual problems. I will murder that bloody thing at length in the DMG review.

They introduce points of light, this is a dark ages game, or a grimdark parody of it really, a few remnant towns surrounded by a world full of monsters and magic. Everyone uses magic, even the Fighters, Rogues, Rangers, and Warlords who aren't using magic are using magic. Which is true! They are, those things are totally Fighter spells in this.

What's in a D&D Game?
This just repeats the previous section with more bullet points, for the most part.

Random number generators not included.

An adventure can be a simple “dungeon crawl” - a series of rooms filled with monsters and traps, with little story to explain why the adventurers need to explore them - or as complex as a murder mystery or a tale of political intrigue.

Fucking. Dungeon crawls always have political intrigue in them. It's really hard to do fucking political intrigue in an RPG outside of a dungeon crawl setting, where you just just fucking kill things to sort it out without starting the sort of war you intended to start anyway. The entire history of the game is this. GDQ is a Giant story of political intrigue. Fuck! OK, Undermountain was a tragic dungeon with nothing but deathtraps, but that's mid deathspiral for TSR, was exactly what everyone said about it at the time. Nice maps, shame about the dungeon. Sunless Citadel was politics though, that World's Largest Dungeon third party thing was all politics. Mostly it is.

It's like the people writing this believe the worst crap about D&D. Which, perhaps they did, it would explain some of that Monster Manual. Why even have out-of-combat powers on monsters, and all that.

They note the game requires a grid and miniatures, each sold seperately, and they ain't kiddin'. 3.0 was very careful to not need a grid, 3.5 the rules assume one, and 4e here everything uses the grid and miniatures extensively. People did hand-draw them and stuff, but you can't play without minis. Cards too, really.

Basically, the D&D game consists of a group of player characters taking on an adventure presented by the Dungeon Master. Each adventure is made up of encounters - challenges of some sort that your characters face.
Encounters come in two types.

Where they call out Combat Encounters where you take turns until one side is defeated, and Noncombat Encounters with traps, puzzles, and other obstacles, plus social interactions for any time you want to talk to anyone about anything. One of the better things to come out later in the this edition was making all the traps into combat encounters, where a trap was just another monster, though they never finished that thought so it was always a bit sketchy.

Then Exploration, the concept of going left instead of right, which is nice of them to say given the actual modules for the game throw it out so often. The whole edition turned out rather more Quantum Ogre than this passage would suggest, more so as time went by. Their encounters take up a lot of space in the books and missing them becomes less and less optional.

Their Example of Play is a bit, uh, whatsit, a lot of text for one die roll, which is a tip for how one goes about knowing a foe is behind a door in order to be allowed to surprise them when you go through the door. Which is where the scout ... uh, hides ... the open door? OK, I recall that being an issue with 3e though, so nice they clarified it for 4e.

The Core Mechanic remains as 3e, and while it can be improved this serves them well enough as a local maxima. d20, +Mods, vs Target number.

As with 3e, their target numbers vary far more than the RNG range, monster numbers start high and shift about 30 points across the 30 levels, and PCs need absolutely every bonus on time and maxed out ontop of a max starting stat just to stay close to a treadmill (and in reality you fall behind as the game becomes all Solos with further defence bonuses up top).

Three Basic Rules in addition modify that.
Simple Rules, Many Exceptions. To some extent it's all exceptions. There's barely any rules at all in the traditional sense. That sort of naturally pops up from everyone having spells, as a basic design principle, you're not gunna get rules out of that. It's kind of the whole point.

I think that has massive potential for good, but I have no idea how it's a testable concept. Without a real underlying system a monster might have a 50% chance to kill you in one hit, or a 10% chance to kill you after two more rounds, depending entirely how their particular exception works. With so many functions, every little potential arbitrary modifier (give someone a free save!) is doing such a wide variation of work, changing odds radically for some things and not at all for others, even when mechanics are ostensibly representing the same activity in game.

Just leaves the devs no way to work out what anything's going to do without examining everything else, every time. In practice the compartmentalised power structure wasn't all that tightly confined, and despite the endless nerf cycle of errata, combinations of things kept on breaking their delicate balance point everything was supposed to follow.

But then starting with needing an 11+ to hit and finishing with needing an 11+ to hit only 30 points higher on the RNG, that's probably always going to fail one way or another, let alone how they kept letting people break the action economy. The fact they were off by 3 from day 1 is just a weird addition to that.

Then Specific Beats General and Always Round Down. Which, yeah. If you're gunna do either of those things, it saves a lot of text to do it consistently that way.

---

They finish up here by pimping dndinsider with a "nominal subscription" turned out to be $10 a month, which I'm pretty sure was the only thing kept this whole shitshow alive for as long as it did. It's the sort of thing you can forget to cancel, after all.

That particular "screenshot" never turned into an actual product. In 2008 they were very clear about that virtual tabletop and digital everything tracker and online game environment being essential to the game (uh, pretty much) and it just never happened. They did make the character generator, it was live as these books came out, or not long after.

But then, recall 3.0 had the same, for free.

e-Tools: Character and Monster Generator was the official character generator for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 3.X. The demo version by Fluid Entertainment, called simply the "Character Generator", was distributed on CD format in the first third edition issue of Dragon magazine, and the first printings of the new Player's Handbook. The production version, originally marketed as "Master Tools", was intended to include not just character generation software, but a mapper, a 3D character modeler, and other DM tools. The scope of the project was quickly scaled back until it was just a character generator plus a few minor tools, and the project was rechristened "e-Tools". The first production release in 2002 was extremely buggy, and the rushed patch caused as many problems as it solved.

In 2003, Wizards of the Coast passed control of the software to Code Monkey Publishing, who starting with version 1.01 published bug fixes and software updates, including the upgrade to D&D v3.5. On November 30, 2006, Wizards allowed their license to lapse, presumably because the upcoming (2007) online subscription service D&D Insider included a character generator for the fourth edition.

Like, 4th edition pissed a lot of people off before it even started. Not just Dragon and Dungeon being taken off a hugely popular publisher and immediately killed so as to be resurrected for negligible dndinsider content. Not just that murderous early GSL contract. Not just fuck you for wanting to play gnomes, or half-orcs, or druids, or bards, or barbarians or monks (why was 2nd edition initially unpopular, again? Only for taking out half that stuff? Making pointless changes to the outsiders? Oh right).

But killing e-tools after it was finally working well and with actual content, and it still made some money for them. That's just messed up.

All while promising the same host of utilities for 4e that they promised for 3e and never delivered there either. I dare say they'd be impossible to program for as a company with all the changes they kept making to everything.

I wasn't a subscriber, all I ever saw of being on there was a severely cut-back Dragon mag where you could pay to playtest (though they would ignore your feedback), and the character generator. People happily paid that for the 4e generator, because it is not a great system to make characters for otherwise. Oh, Mearls kept putting up his new Skill Challenge systems too.

---

It's not a terrible intro chapter. It's got little problems. It tells you this is an RPG you can just play like D&D and it totally fails at that. Well, for most people it does. But it's also pretty uninspiring. The DMing described is flat descriptive crap, like mine when I'm tired and grumpy.

It's got a sense of how if you imagine hard enough and the GM works hard enough it can be fun. And I think that's true, which is sad. Because the game itself isn't, and the people who had fun with it were working exceptionally hard and probably would've had better games with any previous editions.

The work people did for condition tracking alone.

I was a Mentzer kid.

This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine.

“As you whirl around, your sword ready, the huge, red, fire-breathing dragon swoops toward you with a ROAR!”

See? Your imagination woke up already. Now imagine: This game may be more fun than any other game you have ever played!

That game also has extensive mechanical issues, it's written for a younger audience, but that Dragon is on the cover and they misappropriated it for their Basic Set in 5th edition not just because it's beautiful Elmore art, but because it "swoops toward you with a ROAR!"


This ain't that, this mostly blames your DM for you not having fun with it, because anything is possible if the DM does enough work. Subtly passive-aggressive. Next up, making characters, without the online character creator!

[Iduno]

These are always cringe-worthy. Here you make a character, play with friends, the power of imagination (uh, skill challenges?), and how the vibrancy, unexpected happenings, and excitement is all the job of the DM. Only limited by imagination it says, but, uh, encounter powers, you can only use them once each, not to mention the ones you don't have, you are explicitly limited to not using most of your options from the start.

The best parts of D&D are always described as "It's zombo.com" or "you can house-rule it into a game that is either playable or interesting, but I'll lie and say it's both and leave out the house-rule part."

[CapnTthePirateG]

Next up, making characters, without the online character creator!

If Dante were still writing this would be a layer of hell.

[souran]

Next up, making characters, without the online character creator!

As Capn noted, playing without the character builder is much more difficult. I enjoyed the table play of 4th edition quite a bit. However, without the ability of the computerized character builder to spit out power cards and lists of buffs I think it would slow 4E down a lot.

I think that the character builder gets at the heart of what was really wrong with 4th edition. That is how badly WOTC misread their market. A great many arguments were made that 4E is MMO like. Regardless of opinions on that, WOTC charged you to play the game like it was an MMO.

The character builder debacle seems to be symptomatic of the feeling by WOTC brass that somehow they were getting screwed by the OGL. While WOTC was within their right to take back control of dungeon and dragon magazines, what they did to Paizo and the other 3rd party developers prior to Gen Con 2008 is shitty. Those developers need the convention season to advertise and make money. Holding the ruleset hostage, even from the developers that had paid into the GSL, was a poor corporate choice. You need to operate in good faith with subsidiaries, suppliers, and agents in addition to clients.

That said, it really shot themselves in the foot because Paizo has straight up said that if they had recieved the 4E rulset with enough time to put out 4E product for Gen Con 2008 their would not be pathfinder.

[tussock]

I believe a market split was inevitable with this game as it is. Not having Paizo against them would've helped, they had such a good company name, but someone would've published a 3e clone with good art eventually.

I hit a snag, it told me to pick a race and class.

---

It's here we get into the meat of the problems with this edition, player-facing options that just straight up punched them in the face for trying to use this thing like it was still classic D&D, while telling them to use it exactly that way.

A lot of people tried to argue, early on, that you didn't need a 20 in your primary stat, it's just so expensive. Some people even tried to argue you maybe didn't even need an 18, because it is always possible to be more wrong. But 4e math is brutal. If you're going to toe up to one of those Elite or Solo Soldiers the game loves throwing at you, in core rules here, then you started perfectly maxed out or ... it's very bad.

---

Making Characters
This edition likes to pretend you can use it like, choose a race, and then choose a class, and then your powers, and then build a story around it. They do at least put choosing your stats late in the order.

Character Creation
Their order of operations is bullshit. To succeed at all in 4e, you pick a class, note in their suggested builds what prime stat you need, pick a race which gives you that bonus stat and another stat which is useful at all, and then you actually hit more than you miss, instead of not doing that, forever.

You should pick the race and class combination that interests you the most. However, sometimes it's a good idea to first consider the role you want your character to fill. For example, if you join an existing game and none of the other players are playing a character in the defender role, you would help them out by playing a fighter or a paladin.

This is how people came to be playing Dwarf Punching Bags. Defenders are pretty awful in this at the best of times, without peak stats it just gets worse.

Binwin is a fucking tragic joke of a character who never accomplishes anything and is always on fire or stuck in a hole or something. Because Dorf Axe Fighters are not something that actually works in 4e.

You can still find old threads of people talking about they can't even kill basic monsters in 4e, that the party has to fight things a couple levels lower at best (which is impossible at 1st or 2nd level), and it's always got a note that they don't think they're badly unoptimised, and usually will describe having some shit like a Dwarf Fighter, sometimes there's a fucking Halfling Fighter. This was the most widely experienced first go at 4e, because this is how the game tells you make your character.

Lots and lots of people never got past that and never came back. They never saw all that heavily complicated teamwork play where you voltron together some mundane looking pulls and shouts into obscurely powerful combinations, because they were first level and had one rubbish encounter power and they probably missed with it, in most fights.

---

And like, the options they actually give you that work are pretty random. One of the Fighter builds is Str(Dex) and the only Str+Dex option here is the Bugbear in the monster manual. The other Fighter build is Str(Con), which is a terrible trap option for several reasons, but if you take it you need to be ... an Orc, from the monster manual, or a Mino, from the monster manual.

And that's comparatively good, some of the stat combinations you want aren't in either book. Int+Wis and Wis+Cha weren't covered for years. And even when you were covered it's by one or two race options per class.

Dwarfs are called out as being Fighters, that is their suggested fucking class (that and Paladins and Clerics). They get Con+Wis. Which is a terrible 4e stat combination that doesn't even work great for the fucking Cleric but is useless for the other two, and leads you to the trap option on Fighters, only an even worse version of it because you're a fucking Dwarf. The game is almost all this for players, so little of it combines like it says it should. Because it just says it works like D&D since forever and it does not do that.

---

I suspect the reason they switched Gnomes for Tieflings is somewhere early in development they found their Warlocks with a Cha(Int) build, and their Gnomes with Int+Cha mods, and panicked about how it looked wrong, and instead of fixing anything about how this worked, they swapped Gnomes out for a Tiefling who also got Int+Cha. Then it cascaded into replacing the Bard with a Warlord after White Raven proved popular in the Bo9S.

But they only have fucking Warlocks instead of Druids because it had a collection of functional at-will magic attacks, 3e's drunk-friendly Wizards, which 4e doesn't fucking give you over what anyone else gets. Probably in the original Orcus design, Warlocks were cool, easy refresh magic with a small hand and small deck, and when they tacked on this AEDU refresh for everyone late in development, they're just completely out of place, but already in so much of the newly commissioned art as Tiefling Warlocks!

---

Anyway, speculation aside, there's a lot of possible solutions, to this basic fucking problem of 4e race and class choices, the weaksauce they eventually patched into the system three years later was turning Dwarfs into Con+Wis OR Str+Con, and giving every race an optional 2nd stat pair that let them play a bit more in line with what people wanted to fucking play since the start.

Haha, look everybody, Binwin is fucking useless and needs help, again.

But like, from the start, if a Dwarf was Str+Wis, and they made a Str(Wis) Fighter build and a Wis(Str) Cleric build, and a Str(Wis) Paladin build, that just works for what you want it to do. Make a Dex+Int Elf with a Dex(Int) Ranger and an Int(Dex) Wizard. It's not hard, it's just not here.

They liked to say the race choices were flexible. If they wanted flexible, that's super fucking easy, Dwarf as +2 Con and +2 anywhere else but Int. That's four and a half good stats and fits everything that isn't a Wizard, which is fine for a D&D game. You're still stuck with the trap Fighter, but maybe don't make that build quite so awful.

They could've done so much that used the same numbers, and instead we get this shit that doesn't fucking mechanically support what it tells you to do with it.

Each character race has innate strengths that make it more suited to particular classes. However, you can create any combination you like. There's nothing wrong with playing against type; dwarves aren’t usually rogues, but you can create a capable and effective dwarf rogue by choosing your feats and powers carefully.

No you fucking can't. NO! Rogues are Dex(Str) or Dex(Cha) and Dorfs can't do any of that. People did that though, because this tells them they can; and of course it was a shit experience, that got a lot fucking worse as soon as all those Hobgoblin Soldiers turned up in the first module.

---

I think people who saw the math, under the words, I think they could enjoy 4e a bit more, most of the active posting 4vengers back in the day were hardcore combat-only optimisers from way back. The fights feel massively less grindy if you tend to hit, instead of tending to miss, with your Encounter and Daily powers in particular. But if they had a Fighter at all it was a Bugbear, and realistically they didn't have a Fighter.

Binwin Bronzebottom started life attacking at +5. Str 16 and an Axe. The game obviously works much better when you start with Str 20 and a Sword, for +8, because the Kobold Dragonshields you fight repeatedly at level 1 have AC 18. Binwin needs a 13+ on his single attack each round, 40% hits is fucking terrible when most of your attacks are 1-try-only, and even if Binwin is doing damage on a miss (he's not) it's for 1 dam vs 36 hp.

---

They also talk about roles, and say you need them all, especially Defenders.

Roles also serve as handy tools for building adventuring parties. It’s a good idea to cover each role with at least one character. If you have five or six players in your group, it's best to double up on defender first, then striker. If you don't have all the roles covered, that’s okay too - it just means that the characters need to compensate for the missing function.

That's such bad advice. All Striker parties are fine, one Striker and the rest Leaders are fine, pretty much take as many of both as you like. A Defender can be OK in a party with a Warlord, but you're really just one less Striker. The Wizard, eh, Orbizards start OK, they're only stupidly game-breaking soon after.

Strikers are doing 50% more damage than everyone else. A 2nd Defender isn't doing shit, and for the most part neither is the first one. Leaders can help the Strikers hit things more often, and keep everyone up and grinding, so that the fights actually end.

---

The saves defenses changed in 4e too. Not just that you don't roll them, but Fortitude uses the best of Str OR Con, Reflex the best of Dex OR Int, and Willpower gets Wis OR Cha.

So the classes that use Dex(Int), or Int(Dex), or the other pairs, are just inherently a little worse than you might think, on account of the game lets you push two stats up very high and so you only get one good defense instead of two. Same deal for the Dex+Int races. Axe Fighters? Yeah, Binwin also gets worse as he goes up in level.

Not that the fucking monsters are consistent with bothering to use your defences, because of course this thing is turtles all the way down. But in principle at least, this is a problem, given that some things do target those defences.

---

Generating Ability Scores
They give you a standard array, of 16,14,13,12,11,10, which is extremely bad. That 12 in the fourth stat never does anything at all. So onto point buy.

The costs are up from 3e. It's like the old 32 point buy only cost shifted to be 22, and then 14-17 costs +1 and 18 costs +2 above the 3e costs. And you want to buy an 18 anyway, and either a 14 with it or a 13/13, depending on your other choices a bit. Some builds need 16/16 and they are generally bad as a result, but if you do drop to a 16 it better be for another 16 and the matched stat pair to get 18/18 and have something like good ranged and good melee. So good luck on that existing at all, or hope you enjoy Bugbears.

It also says you can roll stats, but you can't really roll stats in 4e.

Some people thought having 13s and 12s in your 4th or even 5th stat did anything, because it's a listed option, but all it does is let you hit less often for less damage with your highly restricted encounter power budget.

---

There's more to this yet, but come on, it absolutely disgusts me that the team making 4th edition, through some barely discernible series of stupid fucking meetings, managed to produce a game where they tell you to play a Dwarf Fighter, and then because they missed every possible simple way of making that work within their own limitations, it kicks you in the nuts if you do. AD&D told you Dwarfs made good Fighters because AD&D Dwarfs are good fighters. These are not.

They did a podcast with Scott Kurtz and the Penny Arcade guys, paid them for some comics, still seem to sponsor some of that. Kurtz was the dwarf, and you can tell he's not really enjoying it, but you know, tries to crack some jokes, to pay the bills.

It's simple to design though. Pick a race, and pick a class, and some races work well with some classes, and for tradition's sake, they need to pair up in historically appropriate ways. It's not hard. It just isn't. There is no real mathematical challenge to this. It's a very clean design space. Like, Elf Wizards are massively less popular in 3e than in AD&D, because -1 Con in AD&D does literally nothing at all (and Fighter/Mages are good), and -2 Con in 3e fucks your Wizard in the ear (and Fighter/Mages are awful). This is simple stuff.

I get why they thought a Fighter should be Str(Dex) or Str(Con) on a first pass, I get why they thought a Dwarf would be Con+Wis as a brief outline on day one, but when those didn't match up they just needed to CHANGE THEM so they did.

And it took them three fucking years of people telling them about how it wasn't working right, that the options were basically one race per build allowed ever, after three fucking years of development ???, before they made a half ass kludge of a fix in Dragon mag that still never fucking opened it up like it should have, like the games says it should, like they want the game to be. Fifty people worked on this fucking thing and they couldn't see far enough to get the races and classes lining up. What happened in those meetings?

It just feels so performative. That they're all lost in there, pretending to be game designers, and having not a single fucking clue how any of it works at all.

If some of your classes end up sucking, you know, it happens, but maybe if the Dwarf could be, you know, competent at half of them. Then people could still use it. But they couldn't figure out how to do that, and it's just so trivial to fix in so many ways, even very late in development when playtesting must have noticed how shit the pregen Dorf Fighter was. But that wasn't the sort of thing they were asking the playtesters, it seems.

[jt]

Finally catching up on this thread.

#Ogres ; a digression.

Thanks for this, it was really informative. Most people don't have much of an understanding of their own evaluation processes so it's a great design resource when you see it.

For reference: I'm surprised at how accurate that was overall, everything scales even more slowly than you're guessing, 200hp would be "bring an army" territory, more targets is indeed a common pattern for bigger monsters.

I dare say they'd be impossible to program for as a company with all the changes they kept making to everything.

I could program the sort of virtual tabletop they were promising at the time. I mention this because I know what someone like me costs, and I know what Wizards pays its technical staff, and it's literally half the market rate. So there's no wonder they're constantly stumbling over their digital offerings. (Also I'm pretty sure that back then their engineering staff was paid even worse than they are now.)

The game obviously works much better when you start with Str 20 and a Sword, for +8, because the Kobold Dragonshields you fight repeatedly at level 1 have AC 18.

It's pretty obvious from things like this that their target to-hit rate for correctly built characters was 50%. I've seen amateur designers do this all the time. Don't do this. Your target hit rate should always fall on the high side, because when you miss nothing happens. Your game shouldn't consist of half nothing. And you're not going to miss out on the ability to distinguish more accurate moves - in Pokemon the move Stone Edge is nickname Stone Miss because it has an unusually low 80% hit rate.

A game where they tell you to play a Dwarf Fighter, and then because they missed every possible simple way of making that work within their own limitations, it kicks you in the nuts if you do

I was so used to these sorts of recommendations being bullshit by the time I read 4E that I was already skipping all the passages that contain them. So I missed this particular aspect of 4E being terrible the first time around.

[maglag]

But if they had a Fighter at all it was a Bugbear, and realistically they didn't have a Fighter.

Bugbear fighters? What was hype soon after launch from my memory was Minotaur fighters. Not only did they get the ideal +2 Str /+2 Con combo, they got to wield weapons one size larger which combined with all the powers that multiplied weapon damage could be stacked to allow a Minotaur Fighter to keep up if not outdamage a striker like a rogue while hitting multiple targets and being tougher to boot!

And your dwarf fighter analyzis pretty spot-on, I did DM 4e in darker times and ended up with a dwarf fighter player that missed more often than not.

That's such bad advice. All Striker parties are fine, one Striker and the rest Leaders are fine, pretty much take as many of both as you like. A Defender can be OK in a party with a Warlord, but you're really just one less Striker. The Wizard, eh, Orbizards start OK, they're only stupidly game-breaking soon after.

All-warlord parties were pure cheese with them all inspiring each other to pump an obscene amount of buffed attacks every round.

[CapnTthePirateG]

The weirdest part of all of this is that they could have avoided this problem entirely by letting you pick 2 stats. The promotional materials promised any race, any class, but this was of course complete bullshit undermined by the game mechanics. The racial powers are enough to differentiate the races! It's nuts!

Fighters kinda ate in in the earhole with the first round of errata, because the Martial Power book gave them the ranger's twin strike. I'm hoping you hit the errata at some point, because they seemed to think they could patch dead tree books like an MMO and people fucking hated it. Doesn't hurt that they showed about as much balance thought as your local MMO developer.

[tussock]

Bugbear is also Oversize, and Str(Dex) Fighter is better. The Mino (or Orc) is the Con build, sure, and potion spamming works, we'll get there later.

I could program the sort of virtual tabletop they were promising at the time. I mention this because I know what someone like me costs, and I know what Wizards pays its technical staff, and it's literally half the market rate. So there's no wonder they're constantly stumbling over their digital offerings. (Also I'm pretty sure that back then their engineering staff was paid even worse than they are now.)

Another piece of the puzzle falls into place, then. Thanks for that. The weirdest thing is people would do it for them for free if the ogl just allowed digital tools, and they're allowed to just use and even sell anything that's built under the ogl. They could re-use their own art and add their trademarks and their limited pool of actual ip, and make money for almost nothing.

---

Roleplaying
Hmm, their example is "brooding, fatalistic, and honest". Like, maybe upbeat instead? Maybe the example character for roleplaying is cheerful, encouraging, and supportive. Just a thought. Grimdark everywhere this thing.

Alignment is very different in 4e. The history of Alignment is of course all quite different, game started out as Lawful, Nuetral, and Chaotic, then split Law into Lawful Good and Lawful Evil, and Chaos into Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil. The half Neutral alignments coming last for the usual block of nine.

My alignment system fixes this, like, it's just not that hard. That guy is Neutral, always.

There are of course many alignment threads here because the alignment thread is eternal and never-ending. Basically, because evil people don't like being called on their shit. The 5e designers, uh, hmm. They decided that Lawful people can only be half Good, and Chaotic people can only be double Evil, leaving us with five alignments, which are presented as a linear chain of Good, Lawful, Unaligned, Evil, and Chaotic. Then it gets much, much more stupid.

• Good is following rules and authority, but not blindly, because employment and commerce of any kind is equivalent to murder.
• Lawful is like, all of that, but they prefer to, uh, you know, be less insane about it. Opposed to any privilege or even just lacking selfless benevolence is bad to them, but they also like giant empires with monarchs and want more of them.
• Unaligned is basically selfish. They don't help, unless they're helping themselves, but bad things make them sad.
• Evil is commerce, really. Use rules and order to maximise personal gain, and aren't fussed if laws hurt people who aren't them because ... can't be sad about everyone, bro.
• Chaotic will murder you because that biscuit looks nice and you didn't already give it to them. Maybe you meant to; but you were too slow.

Which, that is possibly the most fucked up set of alignments ever, and that's no small feat. That is awful. It's some sort of super-egalitarian anarchist murder-patrol up at the top because Good must war with ... commerce, constantly, until everyone is equal in every way and spends all day helping people who aren't quite there yet for ... entirely selfless ends. How does anyone eat? Whut? The people doing business are, like, it says business is kin to random killing and murder for nothing, they just don't necessarily get on and don't cooperate.

Who wrote this?
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dn ... F20080602a

It saves most of the old terms, if not their cosmological or gameplay significance.

That is so suited for 4th edition D&D. Copied the names over, totally new experience, quite often very bad if you do what it says.

I guess, 2008, George W. Bush (the idiot son) running out his last days as President, it's a hell of a long way from a fucking Nazi in the white house. I always thought 3e's alignment system was basically a critique of Bill Clinton, so yeah, makes some sense in context.

Then there's the new bunch of Deities, who don't really have anything to do with anything. Again, Greyhawk served very well in 3e, and they kept some of it only different, because of course everything here is just changed for the sake of change.

• Avadra is Good, so wishes for eternal revolution and if it doesn't work out, well, time for revolution!
• Bahamut is Lawful, so opposed to commerce, but like, pro monarchy. Command economy dictatorships ahoy.
• Corellon is Unaligned, art and magic and beauty and hating the black elfs.
• Erathis is Unaligned, so paving the world and building a great empire of laws.
• Ioun is Unaligned, so librarians.
• Kord is Unaligned, so give us death or give us glory.
• Melora is Unaligned, so protect the cuddly animals and exterminate the ugly ones, while loving all animals.
• Moradin is Lawful, so stoic service of imperialism, and also making pretty weapons, stoically.
• Pelor is Good, so a kind, compassionate, merciful alleviation of suffering, and hating on anyone with a shop front.
• The Raven Queen is The Unaligned, so kill literally everyone but especially people who think well of themselves.
• Sehanine is Unaligned, so sneak about and cheat and steal and lie and just generally be a sensate along the way.

And then it mentions the Evil and Chaotic ones hidden in the DMG. Which, fucking seriously, let the players know what they're fighting. This has always been a bad idea, it's this bullshit hiding the Assassin and Blackguard in the DMG in 3e, you can show the players the bad guys, it's OK, they'll be murdering them all for their jewellery boxes in a minute.

Then it seems to suggest you might also want to be a Reserved, Grim, Naive, Timid, Honest, Kind, Reckless, Driven, Calm person with, you know, interesting mannerisms and whatever else too. Which, OK, not my style for a new PC, but whatever, it here, better than missing complete.

And there's 10 languages. Which, eh, it's so few and yet Dorfs have their own language. So they can speak privately with, like, one mid-level monster.

---

I seem to be doing this as a Let's Read D&D 4e. Hmm. This chapter is extremely text and flavour heavy compared to everything else in the game. This is stuff players are supposed to use, you know, to give them reason and cause to have troubles with the monsters and stuff, to be able to say, "yes, that is exactly the sort of thing my PC is going to be all angry about and want to do something to solve. That and those stinking Goblins".

And what they're angry about, or stoically reckless in a timid way about as the case may be, is pretty bland. Chaotic is this insanely murderous thing that obviously everything would be fighting them always, because they will just murder you for no reason, that is their whole thing. And then they put Evil being all cool with that, because they're gunna run some sort of business selling weapons to the grand army that defeats Chaos, and therefore everyone also opposes those guys.

Which, have you seen Chaos in this? Evil are only opposed to, you know, helping the people who would murder them for no reason, and are therefore target #2. It's all so bad. Watch out everyone, the goblins might sell you some shoes, or even worse, pay someone else to do it for them.

---

Making Checks
Everything is 1d20 + 1/2 Character Level + Mods.

And they mean everything. Everything forever. The Mods are presumably supposed to equate to 1/2 Character level as well, for all the attacks, because the monsters are all roughly + full level to all defences and attacks.

The theory is your key stats go up by +4 bonus (Heavy Armour by +6 instead of Dex), your magic item bonus is +6, and if you take all the right feats for everything you might get another +1 or +2 along the way, at least circumstantially. Though many of the needed feats aren't here, and so high levels were sad indeed, and the fix of more feats is of course a huge tax on that resource.

It's again quite a simple thing to get right, you just include enough bonuses in the core rules to overcome the challenge scale you've set the characters. It's not obvious why you want a game with walls that are harder to climb because you're higher level, or why every monster's defences of every kind walk in lockstep with your attack progressions, but this is such a game, and you need the bonuses.

This treadmill they built into 4e, it is so easy to slip backward on it, one item you didn't find in time, one feat you waited for a bit to take (or just needed another year before it existed), one little boost misplaced for story reasons; then even when you get everything you're still slowly falling behind on most jobs.

---

That'll do today. The treadmill in this game gave people the shits. It is seriously a terrible concept for a D&D, 3e did a bit of it here and there, but to put the entire game on rails, even if it had let you keep up a bit easier, people hate on it.

I firmly assert, at every opportunity, that PCs must feel like they get better as they get better. Your bonuses to do the same things should clearly improve faster than the target numbers do, at least within your chosen speciality. This is much easier to do if the target numbers only shift a little, and even stay inside the range of the RNG. Unless you've got some other way to feel like you're getting better, like your spells are Gate and Wail of the Banshee instead of Prestidigitation and Magic Missile.

It makes a lot of the design easier. Not that this treadmill was hard, but Fighters that hit all the time and Monsters that make all their saving throws was what Gary used because it's super-lazy everything just sort of works.

And then 4e gets into how, because everyone's hitting at the same rate, with the same number of encounter spells, forever, everyone's spells have to basically do the same thing as everyone else's spells, all the way up. More of that next. AEDU.

[GâtFromKI]

Completely related is the weird conflation with "Only Need X" to "Need Only X". So Andy Collins said they only needed to have 8 classes in the PHB. And while that was wrong, you can follow the logic. 2e AD&D launched with 8 classes, so you could make an argument that that was acceptable. But I don't understand the next leap to the part where Andy Collins then successfully convinced the rest of the team that adding a ninth class meant that they should take another class out. Like, I get the idea that you could claim that you were done after making 8 classes, but I don't understand the idea that having noticed that you've made 9 classes you fucking bin one of them.

Except a 4e class uses something like 10 pages.

When your classes take between 1 and 2 pages, you can just include every class you've designed in the first book. When classes uses 10 pages each, you have to take into account the total page number of your book and all the other stuff you have to include in the book (races, feats, equipment list, skills, and maybe the rules themselves ?), and the decision to include a class or not is tied to the number of pages you can devote to classes.

Making Checks
Everything is 1d20 + 1/2 Character Level + Mods.

And they mean everything. Everything forever. The Mods are presumably supposed to equate to 1/2 Character level as well, for all the attacks, because the monsters are all roughly + full level to all defences and attacks.

If I remember correctly, the mods were:

• Ability modifier. It increases by +1.5 every 10 levels (abilities increase by 3 point every 10 levels).
• Magic bonus. It increases by +1 every 5 levels.
• Feat bonus. It increases by +1 every 10 levels - whatever combat style you uses, there's a filler feat somewhere giving you +1 to hit, +2 at level 11, +3 at level 21. I don't know why there are so many feat doing exactly the same thing, I don't even know why it's a feat instead of something the characters have.

So we can compute: every level, a character gains +1/2 +1.5/10 +1/5 +1/10 = +0.95 to hit (or AC or defense or whatever). This is not equal to +1. At level 20, you're 1 point behind. So:

• You fall behind the monsters. I don't know how they can have missed this, this is really simple math.
• You need the feat giving +1 to hit per tier, you need the feat giving +1 defenses per tier... Without those, you fall behind the monsters even faster. At that point, I don't even know why there are feat at all. "You can choose any feat as long as you choose the one giving +1 to hit" is the same as "you don't get feats, you get +1 to hit instead". It's the same with magic items: since they are required, there's not point in gaining them at all.

[Iduno]

And it took them three fucking years of people telling them about how it wasn't working right, that the options were basically one race per build allowed ever, after three fucking years of development ???, before they made a half ass kludge of a fix in Dragon mag that still never fucking opened it up like it should have, like the games says it should, like they want the game to be. Fifty people worked on this fucking thing and they couldn't see far enough to get the races and classes lining up. What happened in those meetings?

[Foxwarrior]

My impression of 4e back when I played it was that it was okay, if a bit dull, as long as you weren't using any official monster manuals. And this OSSR seems to agree with that; even the race/class combination problem isn't as severe if it's a difference between an 80% and a 75% hit chance instead of a difference between a 35% and a 30% hit chance.