OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[Foxwarrior]

Pragma: I haven't been near a 4e book in many many years, but I recall Opportunity Attacks being their own action type, not immediate actions at all.

[OgreBattle]

Yeah, I think you needed a feat or feature to do more than one a round.

That sort of thing super rustles my jimmies, a a combat grid game like D&D should have a consistent 'physics engine' of action economy and timing baked into the core

[pragma]

Oof, apparently half-remembering 4e is worse than not remembering it. I took my first look in many years to make the last post and missed that opportunity actions were defined just one line above immediate actions. You're right that you get one opportunity per turn and one immediate per round. I could have sworn there was some round-based limitation on fighters being able to slow down enemies, but the only one I can find is turn-based: a bad guy could walk past a fighter, get stopped by an opportunity attack, then ignore the fighter and charge whomever they were headed towards anyway.

[Orion]

I'm not sure why it would bother anyone that many or even most of the races would have a fallen empire in their history. Even in real earth history, fallen empires are a dime a dozen. Most of the well-known ethnic groups of the modern world do have fallen empires to pine for. I actually really enjoyed the Dragonborn vs. Tiefling fallen empire thing -- it was the most interesting (and possibly only interesting) part of the 4E "setting." They tied some paragon paths and stuff into it, and they had this cool thing where they took each other's empires out, but now both are marginalized in human society, so there's obvious bromance potential. Horny & Scaly are the 4E Gimli and Legolas, and that's kind of cool. I also liked the introduction of Eladrin. 3E's elves were trying to do too many things; they were the wizard race and the druid race and the archer races and also had a swordplay thing and they weren't actually good at any of the things they were supposed to be good at. Plus, Eladrin get to teleport, which is one of the very rare instances where 4E let us have nice things.

What infuriated me most in the races chapter was everything about Tieflings except the fallen empire. They mindlessly copied a bunch of stuff from the 3.5 Tieflings with mindshatteringly stupid results. Tieflings are brightly-colored people with huge tails and glowing eyes, so of course they get a stealth bonus. They are explicitly distrusted by other races, so naturally they get a bluff bonus. They're self-reliant and believe they have to be strong to survive, so most of them are thieves and swindlers. These are, of course, the best possible jobs for people who cannot possibly get lost in a crowd. They have no DEX bonus but get Rogue as a recommended class, instead of Wizard or Paladin.

[nockermensch]

The fallen empire only, final destination thing is sad because it betrays a lack of creativity from the clowns running WotC. It's like how in one of those 5e monster books, every single evil humanoid race is doing the will of their evil gods.

It was already bad enough that WotC radicalized gnolls for 4e, but they continued the trend and so orcs, goblins and hobgoblins are little more than fantasy ISIS now.

In both cases, it's insane that they don't realize that haviing different outlooks for races and cultures is better for the game.

[maglag]

The fallen empire only, final destination thing is sad because it betrays a lack of creativity from the clowns running WotC. It's like how in one of those 5e monster books, every single evil humanoid race is doing the will of their evil gods.

It was already bad enough that WotC radicalized gnolls for 4e, but they continued the trend and so orcs, goblins and hobgoblins are little more than fantasy ISIS now.

In both cases, it's insane that they don't realize that haviing different outlooks for races and cultures is better for the game.

[Username17]

Yeah, I think you needed a feat or feature to do more than one a round.

That sort of thing super rustles my jimmies, a a combat grid game like D&D should have a consistent 'physics engine' of action economy and timing baked into the core

4e D&D does have a consistent action economy. Every turn you are allowed no more than one of each of the following:

• Standard
• Move
• Minor
• Opportunity
• Interrupt

The issue is that only the Standard Action is guaranteed to do anything particularly useful, meaning that characters who can do something useful with any of the other four are at a massive advantage. But also that abilities that use the same action type are just 100% incompatible.

The second issue is that it's difficult to even imagine how you could meaningfully make the Defender concept work when limited to no more than one Interrupt or Opportunity action per turn. The Defender is supposed to be someone who reactively controls the battlefield. But if you can only react once between your turns, you can't really control anything. None of the Defenders are good at their jobs, and none of them can be good at their jobs. Because the action economy is well defined, and well defined in a way where no character is capable of gatekeeping anything more than once per turn and the standard encounter is four normal enemies and a pile of minions.

I'm not sure why it would bother anyone that many or even most of the races would have a fallen empire in their history.

Because they did not ever go anywhere with their fallen empires thing. If that had been a meaningful setting element, where history had been a series of overlapping empires that lasted for various amounts of time and rose and fell and shit, that could be a thing. But it all went to "Points of Light" anyway, so none of it mattered.

It ended up looking like you were spinning the backstory wheel and there were only three things on that wheel, rather than that there was any world building being done. Nentir Vale was fucking insulting, and the fact that the backstories on all the races were identical did not help.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

Mearls is on record as hating world building, hence Points of Light.

[nockermensch]

The fallen empire only, final destination thing is sad because it betrays a lack of creativity from the clowns running WotC. It's like how in one of those 5e monster books, every single evil humanoid race is doing the will of their evil gods.

It was already bad enough that WotC radicalized gnolls for 4e, but they continued the trend and so orcs, goblins and hobgoblins are little more than fantasy ISIS now.

In both cases, it's insane that they don't realize that haviing different outlooks for races and cultures is better for the game.

<snip orcposting>

For the record, orcposting is yet another fascist attempt to normalize their hateful worldview through humor and memes. Don't do that.

[Orion]

The primary function of the "races" chapter in a PHB is not to provide a satisfying account of the overall setting, but to help players develop concepts for PCs. To the extent that history is mentioned, the question is not how rich a narrative you get, but how it functions as an aid to characterization. The most you can reasonably expect is that each race that had an empire should have a different relationship with that empire, and these using these empires in character development should make members of different races more different and not more similar. 4e does that. Tieflings used to be a big deal and now everyone hates them; they probably want to atone for or forget about the old days. Dragonborn used to be a big deal and now they have a chip on their shoulder; those that care about the old days will want to remember or recreate them. Humans used to be a big deal and actually still are a big deal. Their empire didn't actually fall so much as splinter and they are still the biggest and maybe only game in town, and they don't waste time dwelling on the old days. That is honestly all you need. (The Dwarf write-up uses the word "empire" once, but that seems to be a mistake; nothing else in their entry supports the idea that they ever had an empire. Regardless, their deal is that that are in the process of losing all their nice things, which is quite different from still having them or having already lost them).

If that had been a meaningful setting element, where history had been a series of overlapping empires that lasted for various amounts of time and rose and fell and shit, that could be a thing.

This stuff should definitely have been hashed out, in another book, but the PHB gives us some things to build on. The Eladrin kings left our world at the dawn of time. Later, Bael'Turath and Arkhosia build empires. The land where Bael'Turath was is incorporated into modern Nerath, while Arkhosia becomes uninhabitable. At some point after Nerath was established, monsters start dunking on the elves and Nerath takes in the refugees. We don't know where or when Dwarf history happens, but we do know that they started as slaves, then built a bunch of largely autonomous strongholds, then lost a bunch of them. When you consider that the 3.5 PHB presents no history at all, describing only an eternal present, it's clear that 4E's PHB was a major improvement.

[Emerald]

This stuff should definitely have been hashed out, in another book, but the PHB gives us some things to build on. The Eladrin kings left our world at the dawn of time. Later, Bael'Turath and Arkhosia build empires. The land where Bael'Turath was is incorporated into modern Nerath, while Arkhosia becomes uninhabitable. At some point after Nerath was established, monsters start dunking on the elves and Nerath takes in the refugees. We don't know where or when Dwarf history happens, but we do know that they started as slaves, then built a bunch of largely autonomous strongholds, then lost a bunch of them. When you consider that the 3.5 PHB presents no history at all, describing only an eternal present, it's clear that 4E's PHB was a major improvement.

Except racial history should be a setting thing, not a PHB default thing.

What you've just described is the Forgotten Realms backstory (except watered down and worse, because 4e+FR is an irredeemable fractal of shit). The high elves created the Isle of Evermeet in the Sundering millennia ago, to which the elves all withdrew. Narfell was an evil empire that bound demons for everything from national defense to carrying mail, opposed by Raumathar which was an Imaskar successor state that leaned heavily on battlemages for its army, and both eventually destroyed each other, the former becoming uninhabitable and the latter giving rise to Thay. Eventually Myth Drannor (the next high-magic elven empire) falls and monsters move in. The dwarves have a bunch of empires (most notably Delzoun) which all fall one by one. And so on; the 4e PHB racial histories are basically a Mad Libs-ified version of the FR racial histories.

But that's only Forgotten Realms--you know, the setting that literally has "this setting is all about ancient fallen empires" in the name. Meanwhile, Greyhawk has a bunch of fallen empires too, but they're all human empires, and none of the demihuman races ever established large-scale empires of that sort; Dragonlance has only two empires in its history, one human and one ogre, and the latter declined due to the ogres' devolution rather than a sudden dramatic fall like the FR or Greyhawk empires; and Dark Sun never had any empires at all, the ancient rhulisti and the modern Sorcerer-Kings only ever ruling city-states rather than having full-on empires.

The 4e racial histories make no sense in any of those other settings and that kind of implicit setting doesn't belong in the PHB. Yes, 3e had Greyhawk gods and spell names in the PHB, but the former only matter for clerics and only start showing up in PrCs and affiliations and such in Complete Divine and Champion, and the latter is pure fluff that can be tied into any setting by dropping a few NPCs into the setting history. Nothing else from Greyhawk was made the edition default in the PHB, and that's how it should be.

The primary function of the "races" chapter in a PHB is not to provide a satisfying account of the overall setting, but to help players develop concepts for PCs. [...] Tieflings used to be a big deal and now everyone hates them; they probably want to atone for or forget about the old days. Dragonborn used to be a big deal and now they have a chip on their shoulder; those that care about the old days will want to remember or recreate them. Humans used to be a big deal and actually still are a big deal. Their empire didn't actually fall so much as splinter and they are still the biggest and maybe only game in town, and they don't waste time dwelling on the old days. That is honestly all you need.

Problem is, the generic fallen empire background was more constraining for character concepts than the existing backstories for those races.

Tieflings in 4e all have the same "my great-great-...-grandpa was an evil noble in an evil empire" backstory and have the same appearance, while tieflings in 3e and before have a variety of appearances and backstories from "I have goat legs because my great-aunt made a pact with a devil" to "I'm supernaturally sexy because my dad was a wizard who boinked a succubus" to "I've got freaky eyes because my mom was in a yugoloth cult when she was pregnant and I was affected by all the fiendish energy around her."

Dragonborn in 3e all have the same backstory like 4e dragonborn do, but in the 3e case that same backstory was "I was transformed by Bahamut to fight evil" so the character could have literally any race and origin story before that as long as it ended in "...and then I asked Bahamut for a blessing/accidentally got blessed by Bahamut/was cursed into a new form by Bahamut, the jerk/etc. and am now part-dragon" as opposed to "I hate you because my ancestors fought your ancestors, grrr." And of course humans are a big deal in every setting, generally for different reasons in each (had the best magical empires in FR, worshiped the insane creator god in Greyhawk, were a populous bunch of expansionist tribes in Dragonlance, were best at surviving magical fallout and genocide in Dark Sun, etc.) and always because they're the default, so they don't need to be given any particular backstory to justify anything.


Now, if the concern is that new players might need some prompting to come up with a character concept and you want some basic cookie-cutter backstores for them, that's totally reasonable, but you can do that with a list of suggested backstories in each racial entry. Every race already had a "Play this race if you want..." list that had several pointless entries and had a lot of whitespace after that, so they could totally have take out the duds and just summarized the backstories of the races in various settings with space to spare.

Like, the dragonborn list includes a stupid and tautological "...to breathe acid, cold, fire, lightning, or poison" item, which could be replaced with something like "...to have been chosen by Bahamut or Tiamat as a mortal champion" or "...to descend from an ancient and powerful dragon" or any other idea you want to throw in to be inclusive of previous-edition humanoid-dragon-race concepts. The Elf entry is only three items instead of four, so you could throw in both "...to be a member of a slowly-declining people being pushed out by the shorter-lived races" and "...to be one with nature in an anarcho-syndicalist commune led by druids and hippies" in place of the two "you're Legolas" items and come out ahead. And so forth.

[Username17]

I do love how often we come down to:

"everything good about 4e was done better in the Tomes. Before 4e even dropped"

No sarcasm - it's good to see different approaches to the same basic problems, with the exception that one actually... like... worked.

It's interesting to remember that when 4th edition was in development, 3rd edition had been out for more than 5 years, and had already been subjected to the largest distributed scrutiny campaign in role playing history. The design issues of 3rd edition were actually very well mapped and exhaustively discussed. For the first time, if you wanted to know what the actual mechanical failures of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons were, you could just ask a search engine.

The 3.5 revisions were made with a very... crude... understanding of what problems were. Andy Collins for the most part was sticking his dick in to punish characters that personally pissed him off and boost characters he wanted to play. The entire bizarre Power Attack damage recalculation is exclusively because he was angry that his Dwarf with a Greataxe benefited less from Power Attack than one of the other player's Ranger. That neither character was remotely balanced or pulling their weight by 9th level wasn't acknowledged or interacted with in any way. For fuck's sake, they even brought that stupid edition change out with an essay on how Ed Stark had written in bonuses to the Druid because they thought for some reason that that was a good idea. Andy Collins' big headline spell nerfs were to haste, harm, and hold person, which were simply the three spells that caused the longest arguments on the Wizard's boards in 2002 - they weren't actually the most unbalanced or game breaking spells and Andy's proposed nerfs didn't even make the spells less problematic in real games in 2 out of 3 cases.

But by 2005 things were a lot clearer. The Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards thing was well understood, the "CoDzilla" meme had successfully explained the Casters >> You situation to people's satisfaction, and people had undertaken real attempts to address these issues. If you wanted a coherent description of the problem space and the plusses and minuses involved with various potential answers in the solution space, you could call that up in seconds.

When 4th edition was being worked on, they had working lists of real problems with 3rd edition to address. When they were doing the advertising copy for 4th edition they recited real problems with 3rd edition when they were prepping their 4vengers with talking points. Everything from skill math being too divergent to casters being too versatile to defensive warriors being unable to be effective meatshields had been openly discussed on the intertubes for five years. People knew what the problems were and various people had made various stabs at proposing fixes for some of them.

It's no surprise that 4e attempted to address issues that K and I tackled in the Tomes. And given that in many cases there are only a couple of potential solutions to those issues, it's no surprise that several times they settled on solutions that were highly reminiscent of proposals that K and I had made 3 years earlier. That in every case K and I came up with something considerably superior is puzzling - but in all ways consistent with the fail train that 4th edition actually was.

Every part of 4e is a failure of design or development or both. So even places where the basic idea of a 4e concept is good, the nuts-n-bolts implementation was and is a catastrofuck. The really weird part is actually just how bad the development was on this fucking thing. I don't even think Skill Challenges are a bad idea. If the original pitch was "you get 5 rounds to make 9 hits to succeed at a challenge, everyone gets to act once per round" almost all of the initial complaints against it wouldn't have materialized. The weird part isn't that what they released instead was an anti-participatory fuck job, but that they never managed to "get there" even after revising the Skill Challenge rules over twenty times and making an entire chapter in the DMG2, it still wasn't there. The development was so amazingly shitty that even with two years and a free hand to read people's descriptions of how and why they were fucking up, they still couldn't stop themselves from fucking it all up.

Mike Mearls read my Anatomy of Failed Design: Skill Challenges. He responded to it directly, and tried to insult me by calling me a communist. Even after having the solution space drawn for him in giant marker pen diagrams, he still kept fucking it all up.

-Username17

[tussock]

Sorry for dropping on this, by the by, I have a bit more written but I'm on an extended mental health bender that's ... well half the reason I was writing here in the first place.

Um, I wish I knew how to get unstuck on things, but yeah, I'm also stuck on things from 20 years ago still, so ... hmm. I don't think I finished the last one of these I started either, but thanks all for the good commentary for what I got through.

And fuck these books. So hard to read. So incredibly random about what works, out of nowhere because everything is unique. It's a lot of work!

[erik]

I salute your ambition at even attempting this, and have enjoyed your work. There’s a lotta shit to unpack in 4e and by design everything is a Steve. Like literally everything. Makes it hard to do a review without addressing it all individually otherwise you can only make sweeping statements and highlight a couple examples.

Enjoyable distractions is all I can suggest to get your mind off things from the past. Obviously try not to go down those rabbit holes and pleasurable distractions help in that regard.

[Mask_De_H]

You don't need to make your mental health worse by reviewing this mess; take as much time as you need to get your mind right.

[Grek]

TIL that shadzar's appearance was apparently Frank's fault.

[Lago PARANOIA]

People on this board talk a lot about how the Knights of the Round and Mongol Archers break the role assumptions. If they're REALLY savvy, you'll hear people bring up stuff like Orbizards and Murder Pinball and the Healgod Cleric.

Unfortunately, there's one party build that eclipses all of them, even the unerrata'd Orbizards who could throw out -17 saving throw penalties all day. The Puppetmaster Buffers. It's a simple build: play an All-Leader Party, especially of Warlords. If you're playing with the full suite of expansion material, most any Leader class will do; they published enough material (except for maybe the Runepriest) where all of the important parts can be in place. Mainly, encounter-long attack boosters and extra attack multipliers.

=============================

The Leader role was an unfortunate brainchild of some observations/assumptions:

1) The party system NEEDS to have a class whose role is 'help other party members at the expense of your own screentime'. Parties should regret not having one.
2) For various reasons, most people don't like playing the 'help other party members at the expense of your own screentime' class.
3) The 'help other party members at the expense of your own screentime' class CAN'T help themselves as efficiently as they help others, otherwise you get CoDzilla.

And finally:
4) Out of a party of 5 people, you only need one such class.

The end result was the Warlord and to a lesser extent the Cleric class. Unlike the Defender role, they had a clear and definite purpose in a party. Further unlike the Defender role, unless your build was doing something weird and/or overpowered (like an Orbizard or an unerrata'd high-level barbarian|ranger) there was no reason not to have a Leader role. This is for three reasons.

1) Low-level 4E D&D, i.e. the part of the game where you can actually die, was really strict on the ways you could access healing. If you're not a Leader, it usually cost you your action in combat and/or gave out really crappy healing. Leaders not only let you access that healing more easily (all of them had a minor-action healing power) but made it more efficient. Moreover, an individual Leader didn't have enough juice to tap into all of a party's potential healing surges in one combat.
2) The contribution a well-built Leader makes rises linearly with the number of other people in the party, with no cap. Especially so if you're a Warlord. You hand out party-wide bonuses and the number of extra attacks you grant scale with the number of people in your party. Your effectiveness literally doubles going from a 4-person to a 7-person party.
3) Because of the observation of people not wanting to sacrifice their individual screentime to help others, Leaders were neck-and-neck with their individual damage contributions compared to Defenders and Controllers. You didn't just hand out bonuses, you also hit the enemy with your sword / holy symbol / crossbow.

The net effect of this was to make the Leader role a difficulty slider. The more Leaders you have in your party, the easier combat will be. Especially at low level, before Controllers got access to their 'fuck you, you're not my dad' status-effect powers and Striker damage started to diverge notably from the other roles.

Take for example the Red Dragon out of the book. It has an AC of 48 and 1390 hit points. Out of the book, assuming you have a 28 in your prime stat, a +6 weapon, a weapon that has a +3 from proficiency, a +15 level bonus, some way of constantly getting +2 to attack (since it's the basic PHB, we're talking Frostcheese) you can expect a +35 to attack. You have an attack that, averaging over encounter powers and daily powers, is around [4W] + 20 from the above (again, we're using frostcheese), so with a 1d10 weapon we're talking 44 points of damage per hit. Averaging out the extra damage per round from Striker features, we can expect an additional 4 damage (so 48) on average, assuming the party has a composition of 2 strikers from a party of five. The vast majority of powers, even with the striker, don't really get to-hit bonuses even with Prime Shot and Paragon Path BS.

With a 40% chance of hit, average damage will be about 19.2DPR (or 20, whatever), meaning that you need to land 70 hits. Spread out among 5 people, that's a ridiculous 14 rounds in combat -- and it's definitely ridiculous, since the Red Dragon will definitely not be taking the full volume of attacks per round.

But let's take the previous party and optimize it a little bit, shall we? Let's assume that everyone took Tactical Warlords. They have a bunch of powers (like Lead the Attack, which you get at LEVEL ONE) which adds an intelligence bonus to hit for the rest of the encounter. Since there's no reason to not have at least a 28 by endgame, that's a +9 to hit, so now it's a freakin' 85% chance to hit. We'll have to drop the base damage to hit, because no strikers and Warlord Powers don't get as big weapon multiplication pluses. To make it simple, we'll subtract 14, so 30 base damage, or 25 DPR. That's 55 hits between 5 people, a still ridiculous 11 rounds.

But wait! Warlords get a lot of 'you make an attack, then everyone else makes a basic attack' powers. 4E D&D Warlords, especially after Martial Power, can have 3 such powers as encounter powers and 2 dailies (leaving room for Lead the Attack, of course). Let's assume they all get into position (taking an extra round to do so) before unloading their powers, so we'll start the first round at 5 attacks. 50 more attacks left to go.

Then the Warlord keeps spamming those multi-attack powers. They toss out 25 attacks in the second damn round. The Ancient Red Dragon, so daunting and insurmountable when you play like the game recommends, goes down like a chump by round three. It's likely they still have most of their Daily Powers.

=============================

Now as 4E D&D adjusted the math and nerfed several other classes before they gave up entirely (most notably the Orbizard and minor-action summoners) to make their 'recommended' party have an easier time, the future just kept getting brighter and brighter for the leader role. A lot of the damage boosts they printed became class-agnostic, they lowered monster AC / HP and increased player to-hit (which shifted the center of gravity from Tactical Warlords to Bravura Warlords), and of course printed Warlord expansion material that plugged in a lot of their holes. Namely, weak Paragon Paths, epic destinies, Utility Powers, weak level 5 and 9 powers, and magic items that directly helped them.

Throughout it all, the 4E D&D devs never realized that they were feeding a monster. The game did a lot to, largely unsuccessfully, patch out the extra-attack effects they gave out to the non-Leaders, but the Leader role just kept getting more and more powerful when it was alread the EZ-Mode class.

[maglag]

Throughout it all, the 4E D&D devs never realized that they were feeding a monster. The game did a lot to, largely unsuccessfully, patch out the extra-attack effects they gave out to the non-Leaders, but the Leader role just kept getting more and more powerful when it was alread the EZ-Mode class.

Heh, in 3rd edition they also kept giving the druid new and better animal companions/wildshapes plus the ever expanding divine spell list.

Although the thing with all-warlord party is that everybody needs to play the same class with virtually the same build and use the same tactic and that plain gets boring fast. People want to each play their own thing, not to be a bunch of carbon copies of each other.

[OgreBattle]

Ah I think I was thinking about exception based design and how shoving and grappling and throwing and so on was going to be slightly fiddly different based on class and monster, instead of a consistent thing to draw from. Some time ago I made a list of "universal combat powers" to deal with that

All warlords sounds fun... in the sense of every party member teaming up with the other. I could see a DnD style game based around that concept, like the paladin smiting someone opens up allies to move away from said smitten ogre, the ranger planting a well timed arrow gives the stabby dude an extra attack, etc.

[erik]

Although the thing with all-warlord party is that everybody needs to play the same class with virtually the same build and use the same tactic and that plain gets boring fast. People want to each play their own thing, not to be a bunch of carbon copies of each other.

You might have a point if this were a game other than 4e since all the other options are equally boring and combat takes 20x longer.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The 'good' thing is that 4E D&D definitely opened up as the game went on to make more party configurations than 'ALWAYS WARLORDS, ALL THE TIME' viable. The five-Warlord Party is still definitely the gold standard for an optimized party, but 4E D&D produced enough viable classes that you didn't feel like an idiot for playing something else. A properly-built Brutal Barrage Battlemind or Wizard (summoner, murder pinball, and/or lockdown) or Necrolord Cleric contributed enough to make up for the lack of multiplication of attacks. And even though no other Leader class was as good as attack multiplication as Warlords, if you were willing to dumpster-dive enough you could make most any leader but Artificer work as well.

But no apologists nor detractors of 4E D&D seem to even acknowledge the Puppetmaster Buffer as a balance problem. The Warlord was excised from 5E D&D (with some bullshit about the Battlemaster Fighter being its successor) more out of laziness than acknowledging the class's fundamental design problem.

[erik]

You could honestly play 5 identical warlords and just fluff them differently. Nobody would know if one was a priest and another a transmutation wizard and another a thief using dirty tricks.

[Username17]

I think the main reason no one ever really talked about how much better than you Leaders were was because the character optimization community always talked about individual contributors. That doesn't just apply to 4e either - when K and I made the Same Game Test we were quite upfront about how it just didn't work to assess the contribution of a character whose primary contributions were buffing or debuffing to help the rest of the party.

But that blind spot was certainly very obvious with 4e because of how painfully simple everything is. In fact, I recall during the Baneguard debacle that some 4rries announced that a mistake I had made was that the choice between a bonus attack and a modest group buff was a "no brainer" and that the bonus attack was obviously better. But assuming there are five players benefiting, the modest group buff was actually larger than the bonus attack!

The entire D&D community just isn't set up to even discuss buffs and debuffs in a charop context. A blindspot which was wholly unacceptable when one of the "roles" of the edition was fucking defined by its buffing.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

I still remember the dumbest thing I ever saw was an Incantatrix that used a scroll of Body Outside Body to get like 500 metamagic effect modifiers per day and used them to Persist and Extend every single spell slot for an entire part of Druid, Cleric, Wizard, Wizard

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's not too hard to envision a game where the basic vision of 3.5E D&D continued indefinitely with a healthy release schedule. See: Pathfinder. But 4E D&D? My God. Can you imagine what things would be like if the 4E D&D vision of the world actually SUCCEEDED? It'd be a fucking mess.

By 2018, we'd seriously be on PHB8, minimum. We'd have these extremely narrow and specific classes. Forget Binder or even Bane Guard, we'd have Great Smith, who is a martial version of the Artificer who has hammer-focused powers. The exponential price of magic items means that characters would have 30 items of level-10 that they rotated for their powers. Combat would be, incredibly, even slower as the game printed enough off-action powers that everyone could get in on it.

That's just game mechanics. Imagine the fucking fluff. Ninter Vale would be even more incoherent -- there reaches a point in a Points of Light setting where the points start overlapping and you have a fleshed-out setting. We'd have so many filler races that loser species like the Shardmind and Kalashtar would be considered top-tier.