So, what did 4E do *right*?

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rasmuswagner
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So, what did 4E do *right*?

Post by rasmuswagner »

Despite being a mismanaged dumpster fire, 4E did do a few things better than 3rd.

*No skill point accounting.
*Daily resource management. As in, it was clearly identified as an issue and a solution was proposed, instead of the half-assed 3rd paradigm, where HP transitioned from a daily resource to an encounter resource through unintended emergent properties.
*Action type consolidation.
*Move-and-attack paradigm (Full Round Action to attack is a cancer).
*Charging (3rd charging rules are stupidly punitive)
*Low-light vision. Vision and light in general.

What else?
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Re: So, what did 4E do *right*?

Post by Kaelik »

rasmuswagner wrote:*Low-light vision. Vision and light in general.
I very seriously doubt this.
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Post by Koumei »

I wouldn't even agree with the "daily resource management", seeing as you can still go "No let's just rest until tomorrow", it's just that even the fighter wants to do it.

I think laying out a set of damage types and (probably?) sticking to it wasn't bad. That isn't exactly award-winning, plenty of people were already proposing just such a thing for their own projects, after all, but it was still the correct course of action that they happened to take there.

Unless of course they didn't do that, and a splat book added Bug Type Damage or whatever.
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Re: So, what did 4E do *right*?

Post by Voss »

rasmuswagner wrote:Despite being a mismanaged dumpster fire, 4E did do a few things better than 3rd.
This should be a dumpster fire in and of itself.
*No skill point accounting.
Uh... sure. I mean, if thats the only metric you're going to use, then yes, adding numbers together once per level wasn't a thing.

You have to ignore that the skills were hollowed out teaparty bullshit (yes, even moreso), skill challenges and their infinite revisions never worked, encourages group challenges to be single person challenges, the bullshit level based DCs scaled faster than the bonuses did and weren't based on anything but the characters level. so all ice was more slippery when you got to demigod status, but sure. There was less accounting so... that was a win?

*Daily resource management. As in, it was clearly identified as an issue and a solution was proposed, instead of the half-assed 3rd paradigm, where HP transitioned from a daily resource to an encounter resource through unintended emergent properties.
I've got nothing. None of this makes any sense, and I actually like healing surges as a concept. HP started as a spell slot/potion resource, and switched to a wand charge resource for 3rd, except when absurdly many people still expected clerics to be healbots.

I guess you could call those daily and encounter based, but... the amount of table variation was stupidly big. Paizils still whine about how if the party doesn't have some crazy in combat resurrection spell memorized past 8th level, the group is doomed to die. And healing surges were dominated by who had the least or who used the most, so it wasn't... particularly different. The only thing that changed was who making the call to rest.

If you're using action points correctly and have a party filled with competent people you can juggle encounter powers, action points and target selection and really minimize healing surges (especially if you're carrying classes that can spawn extra actions and/or juggle healing surges, heal person A with person B's surges), and go on and on, which neatly strips out the need for daily resource management. So the specific implementation wasn't even good.
*Action type consolidation.
Yes. There were certainly less action types. Sadly, the associated actions were set on fire and disallowed without very specific powers, so... again... I'm unclear how this is better?
*Move-and-attack paradigm (Full Round Action to attack is a cancer).
Combined with the above (and the alpha-strike then at will set routine), it made combat really boring. Full round attacks are problematic as implemented but the 'paradigm' isn't good just for dropping that one thing.
*Charging (3rd charging rules are stupidly punitive)
Closest square is punitive?
I honestly don't remember 4e charging as anything that mattered. So I have to look it up...
+1 to hit and... uh... oh, and you can't use powers (even at will), and still have to move to nearest square.

This is honestly terrible and worse than I remember. Bullshit trivial bonus and more restrictions than benefits.

*Low-light vision. Vision and light in general.
How? I'm honestly not going to give you the benefit of the doubt at this point.

Dropping darkvision is a huge problem, as subterranean races are all now non-functional.



As for actual positive things 4e did?
Taking a huge dump on alignments. People generally default to unaligned and it isn't a big deal or mechanics problem.
And also conceptually unshackling the paladin from the piss-poor concept of awful stupid, and the shitload of stupid arguments that resulted.

Unsurprisingly these are conceptual changes with no meaningful follow-up. Nor terrible mechanics to ruin them.
Last edited by Voss on Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:14 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

I'm pretty sure Frank has said that 4e is a good "Superheroes" game engine; but I can't think of any other upsides to 4e.
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Post by OgreBattle »

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53 ... highlight= has some 4 pages of discussion on it

I like the idea of a bunch of 4e things more than I like the execution but I enjoyed the feeling of the Bladesinger sharing spells with Wizard... but I also know it's mechanically weaker than most optimized wizards and swordmages.

Cross/multi class abilities is my fetish and 4e hybrid classes were interesting to tinker with.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Lemme run a quick search for my most coherent thoughts on this, here we go:
Josh_Kablack wrote:3e Characters die at -10 HP
4e Characters die at -1 * MaxHp/2

3e Characters are fully capable until reduced to 0 HP (the Power Words and Deathwatch are pretty much the only things that amount of HP matters for )
4e Characters reduced to less than half of max HP gain the Bloodied status- which can trigger a myriad of other effects.

3e Effects durations vary inconsistently from a single round to over a year with little rhyme or reason
4e Effects durations vary inconsistently from less than a round to an entire encounter with little rhyme or reason

3e Common damaging abilities range from personal range to 400+40'level and can be extended further with feats
4e Damaging abilities with a range of greater than 20 squares are rare

3e Bows can hit targets out to over 1000+ ft (more with feats and magic)
4e Bows are largely limited to targets 50 squares away

3e Many spell and ability effects scale linearly with caster level
4e A few power effects gain a additional die or [W] per tier

3e Characters gain BAB at one of three rates each level
4e Characters gain +1/2 level to attack (and everything else), differences are due to static bonuses.

3e Characters suffer non-proficiency penalties for using a weapon they are not proficient with
4e Characters gain a proficiency bonus for using a weapon they are proficient with

3e Skill DCs come in both static and opposed varieties. DMs are encouraged to adjudicate unusual uses of the skill by comparing it to an existing static DC chart (see pages 30-31 of the 3.5 DMG)
4e Skill DCs scale with level, there are no static DCs
Skills come with static and opposed DCs, but DMs are outright told on page 42 of the DMG to adjudicate unusual uses of a skill by setting the DC according to a chart that scales by level. The pre-errata version of this chart had numbers that scaled by level faster than most skill bonuses scaled by level.

There, edited

3e: Critical Hits deal damage equal to ( ( a multiple ) times ( the weapon damage expression excluding extra dice ) ) plus ( any additional damage from uncommon magical properties like flaming burst ) this damage is of the type(s) the weapon normally deals
4e: Critical Hits deal damage equal to (the maximum rollable on the damage expression for the power and weapon combo) plus (a number of extra dice equal to the enhancement bonus of the weapon with the dice type determined by the magical properties of the weapon ) plus ( an additional [W] if the weapon is High Crit ) this damage is the type(s) weapon normally deals but with the extra magic critical dice frequently being an additional type.

3e: Character action sequence is: one Full Round Action - which could be divided into a Move Action + a Standard Action + Any number of free actions, aside from Swift Actions which are free actions that exclude other Swift actions and by the way Immediate actions count as Swift Actions for the turn but can be taken on other people's turns. If you take a single Full Round action, you can take a 5' step, but if you take a Standard + More, you can't. You can take a Full Round action to make a Full Attack. You can take a standard action to make an attack action, but if something gives you a bonus or free attack action, you cannot take a Standard action with it. Attacks of Opportunity have a per round limit that is totally different from all of the preceding.
4e: Character action sequence is Minor, Move, Standard. You can trade any down for an additional lesser action type. You can also take free actions until the MC says no. Mounts let you trade Minors up for moves and some magic items allow similar trading up on a small scale. On other people's turns you can take Opportunity Actions and Immediate Actions. You get up to one Opportunity action on each other player's turn. You also get Immediate actions, which can be interrupts or reactions, but whichever you can only take one Immediate action between your own turns.

3e: Has most class abilities on at-will, X/day, or the more rarely once per <time period other than a day> schedule. Often classes gain more uses of per-day abilities as they advance in level.
4e: Has all class abilities on at-will, once per day or once-per-5min schedule. Classes gain new abilities as they level but never gain additional uses or more frequent use of pre-existing powers.

3e Characters retain all low-level abilities into the high levels (with the exception of sorcerer spell swaps and selling magic items)
4e Characters are expected to swap out low level powers for higher level versions starting mid-paragon.



Jan 2012 additions edited in below

3e: Most status ailments (negative conditions) require specific spells or abilities to cure and remove. You need Remove Posion to cure Poison, you need Remove Curse to get rid of a curse, you need one of exactly five spells {Greater restoration, heal, limited wish, miracle, or wish } to fix Insanity.
4e: The vast majority of status ailments (negative conditions) are cured by making a successful saving throw against them, Of the few that aren't, the majority of those are cured by waiting a round, and nearly all of the remaining ones are cured by waiting 5 minutes.

3e: Characters are expected to roughly follow the DMG treasure tables and be able to sell and trade magic items at a harsh, but not unworkable exchange rate, thereby ending up somewhere near the listed wealth-by-level guidelines for magic items. 3e PCs will generally keep some items and trade some items away in order to get more appropriate items.
4e: (original) Players are expected to hand the letters to santa for items they want for their characters and between the steeper cost curve, the much harsher exchange rate and the edition's tighter attack vs AC range, will largely have to stick to what they find. 4e characters will generally keep and use most items, and only trade obsolete items in order to sponge missing bonus types, or trade a pile of like 20 obsolete items for one single item of level-appropriate bonus. (Essentials) Items have a rarity system, which further restricts buying, selling and trading items, meaning that PCs are even more dependent on dropped items.
Stuff there which I would call good ideas (even if the execution was not always well done):
  • Flipping Weapon Non-Proficiency Penalty to Weapon Proficiency Bonus -- mathematically equivalent, but as a bonus it felt less hosey and players remembered to apply it.
  • Trying to scale ranges down to where they fit on a battlemat. If you play with battlemats this is important. Unfortunately 4e's ways to cheese movement, forced segregation of range/melee combatants and cross character synergies really sabotaged the execution here.
  • Attempting to streamline the action sequence. 4es Immediate and Opportunity actions were still way way too confusing in actual play, but Move, Minor Standard was much easier for players than explaining how Partial Charges didn't require a Full Round Action and all that crap in 3e.
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Post by Chamomile »

In addition to no skill point bean counting, 4e also had the most sensible skill list D&D had ever seen. D&D had only seen two other skill lists, and the second was a minor edit on the first during the 3.0 to 3.5 transition (another minor edit if you count 3.5 to PF as pre-dating 4e, I can't remember which came out first), so that's not as big an accomplishment as it seems, but still, the actual list of skills you have in 4e is pretty reasonable.
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Post by Voss »

Unless you count the 1e skill lists in Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides or the skill lists in 2nd edition. Or is 'non-weapon proficiency' confusing you? Because, secret, they're the same thing and fill the same function.
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Re: So, what did 4E do *right*?

Post by Whipstitch »

Voss wrote: Unsurprisingly these are conceptual changes with no meaningful follow-up.
Pretty much all of 4E's good ideas fall under that category. For example, establishing tiers where characters are required by law to staple new tier appropriate bling onto their character concept is a good idea. It allows people to start as the burliest dude in the village and then redefine themselves as something more specific and powerful in time for the party to start traveling the planes and punching Cthulhu. Mind you, it doesn't matter that much in 4e due to classes already being so homogenized, but it's a nice idea.
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Post by Chamomile »

Voss wrote:Unless you count the 1e skill lists in Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides or the skill lists in 2nd edition. Or is 'non-weapon proficiency' confusing you? Because, secret, they're the same thing and fill the same function.
Here is a complete list of 2e's non-weapon proficiencies A-E:
Alertness
Agriculture
Ancient History
Animal Handling
Animal Lore
Animal Training
Appraising
Armorer
Artistic Ability
Astrology
Astronomy
Blacksmithing
Blind-fighting
Boating
Boat Piloting
Bowyer/Fletcher
Brewing
Carpentry
Cartography
Charioteering
Cheesemaking
Cobbling
Cooking
Dancing
Deep Diving
Direction Sense
Disguise
Distance Sense
Drinking
Eating
Endurance
Engineering
Etiquette
I can't be bothered to copy, paste, and reformat the others, but even from this you will notice that "dancing," "cooking," and "cobbling" are all on there, rather than, say, "perform" and "craft." Different NWP require different numbers of slots, so you might think that's used to balance out having skills like "alertness" and "deep diving" on the same skill list. You would be wrong. Those two skills cost exactly the same. The full list has other gems like "persuasion" and "etiquette" being two separate skills, and also "eating" is a skill that exists at all.

Since 2e added in tons of NWP in splat books and pre-dates the standardization of skill names, looking up alphabetical lists online is insufficient to tell whether or not stealth is even present as a skill in any book, but it appears that it is not.

So, no, the 2e NWP list is in fact a flaming pile of garbage.

Concerning 1e's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, here's a quote from where they introduce the idea of NWPs:
In the tradition of the AD&D Orienfal Adventures rules, the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide presents rules for nonweapon proficiencies. These proficiencies include areas of skill such as weapon-making, carpentry, and mining, that can augment the PC’s adventuring skills. Proficiencies are also presented for such skills as climbing, fighting in the dark, and fire building. The latter categories can actually help a character to survive in the midst of an adventure
So the very idea that proficiencies might be directly helpful to the adventure is one they consider surprising. That's not a good omen, and the NWP lists bear out the problem. Craftsman and Adventuring NWP are split into two lists, but you buy them with the same limited number of NWP slots, so these are in fact one skill list chunked up into multiple pieces. These NWPs include such gems as Animal Noise, Dungeoneer's Fire-Building being for some reason distinct from Wilderness' Survival (cold) (the reason is that they're two different books whose skill lists weren't cross-checked against one another very well, and whose skill list when combined is even worse than 2e's because of it), and Dungeoneer's Mountaineering being separate from Rope Use, because apparently you can be expert mountaineer without knowing how to tie a knot.

In the future, you should probably read the skill lists you're defending before you defend them.
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Post by Kaelik »

Jesus Josh, why are short durations, no possible long term status effects, and really short ranges positives?

Fuck, sounds like you might actually like 4e if it wasn't crap design, because you seem 100% on board with the crap concept of "final fantasy tactics, but a TTRPG."
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Hey fuckface, where is that in his bulletpoint list of positives?
Stuff there which I would call good ideas (even if the execution was not always well done):


Flipping Weapon Non-Proficiency Penalty to Weapon Proficiency Bonus -- mathematically equivalent, but as a bonus it felt less hosey and players remembered to apply it.
Trying to scale ranges down to where they fit on a battlemat. If you play with battlemats this is important. Unfortunately 4e's ways to cheese movement, forced segregation of range/melee combatants and cross character synergies really sabotaged the execution here.
Attempting to streamline the action sequence. 4es Immediate and Opportunity actions were still way way too confusing in actual play, but Move, Minor Standard was much easier for players than explaining how Partial Charges didn't require a Full Round Action and all that crap in 3e
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Post by Kaelik »

Mask_De_H wrote:Hey fuckface, where is that in his bulletpoint list of positives?
Hey fuckface, sorry I didn't realize his list of 4e positives in response to the question what 4e got right, that began with: "Lemme run a quick search for my most coherent thoughts on this, here we go:"

Wasn't supposed to be a list of positives.

I mean, was I supposed to realize that Josh was an idiot who began by saying he was listing positives, and then listed what he thinks is (I guess?) all the changes between 3e and 4e comprehensively?

I mean I guess going forward, when someone says "THIS IS THE LIST OF THINGS I THINK ARE POSITIVE" I should read the entire post to see if later on they say "JUST KIDDING I WAS LYING EARLIER!"
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Post by Voss »

Chamomile wrote: In the future, you should probably read the skill lists you're defending before you defend them.
shitbrains wrote:D&D had only seen two other skill lists (3.0 and 3.5)
I wasn't defending them. I was noting you claiming they didn't exist at all.
Last edited by Voss on Sun Apr 16, 2017 9:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

I wasn't defending them. I was noting you claiming they didn't exist at all.
Congratulations on being a slightly different type of moron. Here is the rules text for the AD&D 2e Alertness NWP:
A character with this proficiency is exceptionally attuned to his surroundings, able to detect disturbances and notice discrepancies. A successful proficiency check reduces his chance of being surprised by 1.
People without this proficiency can't even attempt that. They don't attempt it at a penalty, they just don't get to do it. Is that a skill? You could make an argument that it is, because skills sometimes have trained-only applications and can even be entirely comprised of non-trained applications. Mostly it behaves like it's a feat, though, because it gives you an ability you simply do not otherwise have, and that ability allows you to interact more successfully with another game mechanic rather than allowing you to accomplish something on its own.

Now here's Ancient History (the NWP, not the Denner):
Characters with this proficiency are familiar with the legends, rulers, and writings of a specific historical period in the campaign world. They will recognize, without a proficiency check, items, scrolls, artwork, etc. of that period. They will know the main historical figures, such as kings and powerful villains, and the major circumstances of those individuals’ lives and deaths. With a successful proficiency check they will recall lesser figures, such as lords, knights, and heroes, and recall legendary tales, important sigils, and perhaps be able to decipher a small bit of text, symbols, or hieroglyphics. The obscure knowledge trait provides a +3 to this character’s proficiency rating
This is probably a skill. It gives you certain things just for having it trained at all that characters without it would have to roll for or possibly be barred from having at all, which is a lot like a feat, but then it also has other stuff available to it which requires you to roll your skill in order to know a thing, just like a plain old knowledge skill. The majority - but not all - of 2e's non-weapon proficiencies are like this.

So do the NWPs count as a skill list? You can make a reasonable argument that they are or you can make a reasonable argument that they aren't quite, because even though they are a clear predecessor there are several NWPs, including some of the most helpful ones, that don't behave like skills. In any case the whole thing is a semantic quibble completely irrelevant to the actual subject of discussion in which you attempt to declare "aha, but according to some definitions of the word, you are wrong!" On the bright side, the definition you're using itself is not stupid, just the way you think it makes some kind of counterpoint, which is progress since the last time you tried to pull this trick. Also, I actually remembered you this time, so that's progress, too. Someday, you might reach the level of posting actual content instead of vacuous noise.
Last edited by Chamomile on Mon Apr 17, 2017 7:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, Josh confused the hell out of me with his post. Looking over it I was constantly thinking "What? No that's not positive", and then right at the end was "Oh I guess these parts of the list are okay".
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Post by Username17 »

Chamomile, what the actual hell are you talking about?

2nd Edition AD&D has several different skill systems. There are "Thief Skills" which are measured on percentages and it is unclear what succeeding or failing on them actually does. There are "Secondary Skills" which are fully magic teaparty where you have a narrative background that you use to justify being able to do "stuff." And finally there are NWPs, which are finite numbers of slots that you use to buy specific abilities, most of which are mundane and many of which have rules and/or ability checks involved.

Now 2nd Edition's skills were a dumpster fire full of optional rules, incompatible subsystems, and perplexing unique writeups. But that doesn't mean it didn't have a skill list. It had 3, and one of them was initially only available to Thieves and Bards and the other two were officially optional (although almost all later supplements assumed you were using one of them).

2nd Edition's skills were so awful and poorly defined that the way a lot of people played actually having the skill "Move Silently" on your character sheet made you objectively less stealthy than just not having it. But it was very definitely there.

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Post by hogarth »

OgreBattle wrote:http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53 ... highlight= has some 4 pages of discussion on it.
Thanks for the link -- it saved me from trying to think up things I liked for a second time. Here's most of what I said before:

- Attackers rolling all the dice simplifies things (instead of attacker rolls attacks, defender rolls saving throws).
- Monster stat blocks should be simpler than PC stat blocks.
- You shouldn't need magical healing.
- Skills should be an afterthought.
- Keeping track of round/minute/10 minute durations is boring.
- Some non-combat spells are better as rituals that anyone can use.

Those still sound like reasonable ideas (with poor implementation). Also, the idea of minions has a certain appeal.

My main complaint is that it seemed like 95% of my involvement in our 4E campaign was saying "I shoot the bad guy with my at-will power".
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Post by Chamomile »

FrankTrollman wrote:Chamomile, what the actual hell are you talking about?
I don't think NWPs or especially Thief Skills really count as skill systems, because the former has a mish-mash of skills with proto-feats and the latter is a class feature. Arguments as to whether either of them do or do not qualify as skill systems exactly are not even worth having. If you want to say that NWPs or Thief Skills do too count as skill systems I will not bother to argue with you about it because that is a stupid semantic argument that both you and he should be ashamed of perpetuating, which is why I didn't argue with Voss about whether NWPs count as skills when he first brought them up. Unless you think NWPs qualifying as skills makes 4e's skill list not the best of its time (for D&D) and/or that figuring out that maybe skill lists should be manageably small and actually relevant to things you actually care about your character doing should be considered a major accomplishment, what the actual Hell are you talking about?

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention, but Secondary Skills are not only not something I consider to be a skill system, I actually will fight people over that because I don't even think it's reasonable to call it a system of any kind. It's what you have when you don't have a system.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Kaelik wrote:
Mask_De_H wrote:Hey fuckface, where is that in his bulletpoint list of positives?
Hey fuckface, sorry I didn't realize his list of 4e positives in response to the question what 4e got right, that began with: "Lemme run a quick search for my most coherent thoughts on this, here we go:"

Wasn't supposed to be a list of positives.

I mean, was I supposed to realize that Josh was an idiot who began by saying he was listing positives, and then listed what he thinks is (I guess?) all the changes between 3e and 4e comprehensively?

I mean I guess going forward, when someone says "THIS IS THE LIST OF THINGS I THINK ARE POSITIVE" I should read the entire post to see if later on they say "JUST KIDDING I WAS LYING EARLIER!"
You failed at reading comprehension, which is a bad look for someone in the law profession. Don't care why you did and how hard you twatshit to cover up your fuckup. Trying to cover for it in your inimical fashion makes you look like even more of a pissbaby, so I'm rubbing your nose in it.

Eat your crow, suck a barrel, shut the fuck up.

Also shut the fuck up about your "It doesn't count as a skill system because I say so" bullshit, Cham. NWPs at the very least were the prototype for 3e skills, while Thief Skills are literally called skills. They define what you can do in a way that is not an attack, a stat or a save in regards to succeeding at tasks. The fuck else do they need to do, blow you?

Being bad at something does not preclude it from being an example of something. It just makes it a bad example of something.
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K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Mask_De_H wrote:
Kaelik wrote:
Mask_De_H wrote:Hey fuckface, where is that in his bulletpoint list of positives?
Hey fuckface, sorry I didn't realize his list of 4e positives in response to the question what 4e got right, that began with: "Lemme run a quick search for my most coherent thoughts on this, here we go:"

Wasn't supposed to be a list of positives.

I mean, was I supposed to realize that Josh was an idiot who began by saying he was listing positives, and then listed what he thinks is (I guess?) all the changes between 3e and 4e comprehensively?

I mean I guess going forward, when someone says "THIS IS THE LIST OF THINGS I THINK ARE POSITIVE" I should read the entire post to see if later on they say "JUST KIDDING I WAS LYING EARLIER!"
You failed at reading comprehension, which is a bad look for someone in the law profession. Don't care why you did and how hard you twatshit to cover up your fuckup. Trying to cover for it in your inimical fashion makes you look like even more of a pissbaby, so I'm rubbing your nose in it.

Eat your crow, suck a barrel, shut the fuck up.
No I succeeded in reading comprehension and then stopped reading.

Josh wrote something that objectively (and subjectively) to everyone who read it was clearly saying a list of things that were positives, and then later on, said that wasn't what the list is (well, implied it, but still).

His earlier shitty writing doesn't become not shitty because he later contradicted it.

Yes, failing to read the entire thing and just reading enough to the point were I was too frustrated to keep reading caused me to miss the blatant contradiction to the earlier point. And if I was holding myself to the same standard in relevant law practice as I do to reading tgd posts about 4e, that would be a bad thing, because it's important that I not miss things like that in legal documents.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by souran »

4E does a lot of really good and important things. The game that comes out of that is not one that had broad appeal but it did a lot of things that should be starting points for any game design. Here is the list I can come up with
• The table of expected DCs by level broken down into easy/average/hard difficulty. This chart should be on the same page of the DMG as ability score chart is on the PHB. The fact that 3e never produced a chart like this is complete bullshit. Also, I still think that everybody here doesn’t understand 4E DCs. A mountain that has a climb DC 15 has a DC of 15 at every level. What the chart tells you is that the mountains that are relevant to a party should have a DC appropriate to the party level.
• Monsters, including gimmick monsters, have their most iconic abilities pulled out into distinct special abilities instead of hidden in their spell lists. This makes running an unfamiliar monster much easier and most iconic monsters actually perform better because it’s easier to see and understand what they should be doing round by round
• The monsters are balanced enough that you don’t have to worry about TPKs if you follow the guidelines for encounter creation. In fact, sort of like Descent, 4E combat works best when the DM is aggressively adversarial. Now, a lot of people don’t like what 4E combat is (the padded sumo stuff) but it is the only version of D&D that has combat that actually works as designed.
• The 4E cosmology is fundamentally superior. It is easier to understand and quite frankly better for storytelling altogether. The astral sea being a thing that you can literally put a special boat on and sail around is like swapping the old Moorcock bullshit for actual good literature like John Connolly or Patrick Rothfuss.
• While the execution of ritual magic is poor (why it isn’t freaking tied to healing surges is beyond me) the concept is a great way of closing he fighter/wizard gap. All the things that let wizards steal the show at high levels is available to everyone.
4E has a lot of things that are frustrating and others that pretty clearly need a rewrite by someone who is not Mike Mearls or Andy Collins. However, 4E is a lot like the old basic/master/etc boxed sets in that they represent a version of the game that is a dead end because it doesn’t resonate with the player base. Infact, I think that Heinsoo made a comment to the effect that 4E incorporates a number of basic boxed set ideas.
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

Mask_De_H wrote:Also shut the fuck up about your "It doesn't count as a skill system because I say so" bullshit, Cham.
That is exactly the opposite of my argument. Read my post and try again.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

souran wrote:4E does a lot of really good and important things. The game that comes out of that is not one that had broad appeal but it did a lot of things that should be starting points for any game design. Here is the list I can come up with
• The table of expected DCs by level broken down into easy/average/hard difficulty. This chart should be on the same page of the DMG as ability score chart is on the PHB. The fact that 3e never produced a chart like this is complete bullshit. Also, I still think that everybody here doesn’t understand 4E DCs. A mountain that has a climb DC 15 has a DC of 15 at every level. What the chart tells you is that the mountains that are relevant to a party should have a DC appropriate to the party level.
• Monsters, including gimmick monsters, have their most iconic abilities pulled out into distinct special abilities instead of hidden in their spell lists. This makes running an unfamiliar monster much easier and most iconic monsters actually perform better because it’s easier to see and understand what they should be doing round by round
• The monsters are balanced enough that you don’t have to worry about TPKs if you follow the guidelines for encounter creation. In fact, sort of like Descent, 4E combat works best when the DM is aggressively adversarial. Now, a lot of people don’t like what 4E combat is (the padded sumo stuff) but it is the only version of D&D that has combat that actually works as designed.
• The 4E cosmology is fundamentally superior. It is easier to understand and quite frankly better for storytelling altogether. The astral sea being a thing that you can literally put a special boat on and sail around is like swapping the old Moorcock bullshit for actual good literature like John Connolly or Patrick Rothfuss.
• While the execution of ritual magic is poor (why it isn’t freaking tied to healing surges is beyond me) the concept is a great way of closing he fighter/wizard gap. All the things that let wizards steal the show at high levels is available to everyone.
4E has a lot of things that are frustrating and others that pretty clearly need a rewrite by someone who is not Mike Mearls or Andy Collins. However, 4E is a lot like the old basic/master/etc boxed sets in that they represent a version of the game that is a dead end because it doesn’t resonate with the player base. Infact, I think that Heinsoo made a comment to the effect that 4E incorporates a number of basic boxed set ideas.
I read all the way to the end of this list to check you weren't going to say that you were just kidding and it wasn't a list of improvements.

Your list is shit and filled with lies.

Ritual Magic is garbage because it means everyone has the same utility (but really the Wizard just does all of it and has all the utility because why waste a feat if you have a Wizard in the party). I mean, you can hide anything behind poor execution, but ultimately, the concepts that led to ritual magic are shit on principle.

The cosmology is equally crap.

The monsters are crap, being able to balance crap is meaningless, and also, it's really not any more balanced than 3e.

You literally have never read a 3e fucking monster entry have you?
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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