Laertes wrote:A question to the D&D players here, if I may:
Suppose that D&D 4th edition, as written in the original three books, was published without invoking the D&D label in any way and without attempting to position itself as a successor to that brand. What would be your specific mechanical critique of it as a game on its own terms?
Oh, it’s Disgea the boardgame. Good for game night, but stupid for running an epic RP game.
Please do not invoke the following, as they are not what I'm asking and may also derail the thread:
- "It's a MMORPG."
- "It's not like old D&D was.”
Well, these two should be invoked because they do have a basis in fact. It was designed to integrate with DDI as way of tapping the MMO revenue stream, so by dsign it has concessions to that model that make it a worse RPG. It also was not like the old D&D, mechanically, in pacing, in what it actually gave you rules to do and in how it encouraged you to play. Yes, there was a subset that played D&D the way 4e presented it, but it not being like the old D&D was factually a selling point by WotC for 4e, and is still the rallying cry of a large portion of the 4e crowd.
Please do expound extensively upon the following, as I have heard them repeated but would welcome a more in-depth analysis by people who know the game better than I do.
- "The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited.”
This should really read ‘the palette of effective choices at chargen is too limited.’ 4e was so tightly ‘balanced’ that if you deviated from what you ‘should’ play as a race/class combo, or took the wrong feats, you got left behind. This is again factually demonstrable because they errata’d the heck out of the core math of the combat system, and then added in feats to specifically address remaining math issues.
Numerically, it doesn’t matter if you only count effective builds, or all builds, 3.x just using core provides massively more choices at 1st level which increases exponentially as you go up in level. 4e builds don’t have the chance to get remotely that complex and customized. A fact backed up by actually running the numbers.
- "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited.”
What you could do was limited to what powers you had. Things that anyone could have done before were either now powers or had to b covered by the infamous pg.42. The problem is; pg.42 is a
trap. The numbers were wrong (and were errta’ed at least once), and the amount of checks needed to do things for minimal bonuses was actually a disincentive if you actually understood the numbers.
There was effectively no disincentive to starting any encounter with your encounter powers barring the requirements were not in place (like no enemies in range 1st turn) or you had knowledge that you could need it later in the encounter (rare). So combat was pretty much the same things over and over in the same order. In many cases where in 3.x you would have used the environment, or switched tactics in 3.x, 4e has you banging your head against the challenge with the same thing you’ve been doing for every other encounter. There was a point in time where in 4e you couldn’t push someone over a ledge.
- "Advancement is too railroadish.”
3.x gives you more choices, and more meaningful choices when creating and advancing characters. The multiclassing alone so vastly outmatchs anything 4e puts forth in customization from advancement it’s ridiculous. In 4e you’re choosing from a very small list of powers, many of which are clearly suboptimal because you choose to be a str paladin over a cha paladin, and some feats many of which are actually a tax to stay effective. If you want a concept that is not specifically endorsed by 4e, such as a paladin archer… there is the door, watch your butt on the way out.
- "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion.”
The only thing that noticeably differentiates your class choice is the powers you get. The rest of the class is really just background noise with how 4e does its bonuses. A lot of the powers are basically the exact same thing, this is especially blatant in at-will powers. It breaks down some when you get to about half the powers you’ll have total, but there is still
a lot of powers that are effectively just ‘replace str with dex.’ This is probably one of the weaker arguments against 4e.
- "The monsters are all pretty samey.”
Monsters are and aren’t samey, at the same time. Monsters are samey in that monsters have really have jack for abilities and the majority get only a single skill. This makes them really boring. Monsters are not samey in that you have no idea what a monster can do without knowing what that specific monster does. Reference Evil Eye in 4e.
What is mechanically wrong with the game as it stands? What are the issues with it under its own terms? Which parts of it worked, and which did not?
- Skill challenges did not and do not work. The have been errata’d at least 3 times, and no published adventure has ever used a skill challenge as presented by the rules.
- Environmental hazard rules like wise did not work, killing a high level character before they could make it out of a desert while allowing a low level character to safely exit the same desert.
- Stealth did not work, it was errate’d to sort of maybe work.
- The math behind the game was NOT balanced. It had errata before the actual books were released because it took less than an hour for the charopt boards to make several broken builds with leaked stuff. Feats explicitly said to be added to fix math issues, and numerous massive changes to numbers of subsystems proves this. Not minor things like +2 instead of +1, but things like ‘skill challenges are impossible to pass’ and ‘here’s infinite attacks’ or ‘here’s infinite lock down.’
- Hp and Damage was entirely out of balance being absurdly grindy for no reason or gain, and to a large detriment to the game.
- Multi-class characters are failures. It failed at this 3 or 4 seperate times. This one is a pet peeve of mine: In one piece of preview material some
idiot said that they felt more like an arcane trickster being a rogue with the arcane initiate feat than playing a actual 3.x arcane trickster.
- Characters are
crazy item dependent.
- Characters can’t loot neat things from monsters because of treasure parcels.
- Treasure parcels. Everything about this is bad. This space should have been used to tell the GM how to judge and distribute treasure in context of the game.
- No crafting rules, until way, way after release, and even then it is objectively terrible from a fluff perspective and has issues from a rules perspective (thanks treasure parcels).
- Rituals are a trap due to finite wealth (thanks again treasure parcels).
- The amount of constant errata made the game impossible to discuss online because heck if anyone could follow all of it, let alone if groups choose to use or ignore only parts of it.
- The errata fixing broken parts (which covered what? 80% of the ENTIRE GAME) were not available to new players, and not really expressed that errata existed, meaning that the badly designed game as presented in the PHB, the core book that players were expected to buy to learn the game presented a terrible, broken game that boarded on unplayable for new people without an experience group to guide them.
If 4e didn't have the D&D name on it, it would have been forgettable.
