So, after some delay, I’m back, and ready to take a look at the rest of the PHB.
I’ll first say this: 4e is slowly growing on me the more I read. I’ll be trying to talk one of my usual groupmates into running a one or two session game so I can evaluate it from a PC perspective, but the more I look at it, the less irritating I find it.
Most of it, anyway.
I think an important part of this is getting used to the idea that unlike 3e, where character capabilities changed massively over 20 levels, 4e characters really don’t. A 4e character has essentially the same capabilities at 5th and 25th level, with bigger numbers. And while the specifics of the numbers are problematic (an issue I will address in either the DMG or MM sections), the concept isn’t offensive to me, though I do find it less interesting.
In some ways, it’s curious to watch the reactions to 4e. A lot of people whose D&D experience pre-dates 3e or enjoy retro play deride it for its strict concern with balancing and emphasis on playability at the expense of flavor; meanwhile, many of my friends from the 3e “generation” consider it a step backwards, abandoning the high-crunch rules interactions and customizable characters for a stricter emphasis on single classing, niche protection, and more limited capabilities.
Anyway, on with the show.
Chapter 5: Mad Crazy Skillz
First up, I do not miss having three separate skills for noticing things. Which is another way of saying “Thank Eris they consolidated the skill set into something less inane.”
I also don’t miss skill ranks. They were a pain to track, especially if you were heavily multi-classed, and too many skills were either “fall behind once and you may as well give up”, or “take 5 ranks and never look at it again”. Now it’s 1/2 level + ability, with +5 if you’re trained (and some skill checks require that you be trained), which in my mind is just as reasonable and far easier to work with.
Bonus points for clear and unambiguous guidelines on what monster identification rolls get you. And for getting rid of 10 + HD for that, which never made any sense to begin with.
I don’t have any major complaints, except that the Diplomacy writeup continues a tradition of shit uselessness. It’s seriously two paragraphs long and offers not even so much as a table of example DCs. It is, however, tied into the “skill challenge system”, about which I will have some words when we get there.
Props: Good write-ups, plenty of things to do with each skill that give GMs solid examples from which to extend and improvise. Explicit assumption that characters are “always taking 10″ on passive skills like Perception makes everyone’s lives better.
Hate: Guys, Diplomacy needs a system. Preferably one that doesn’t let you win the game. Why get rid of taking 20? That seems unnecessary. Also, Stealth seems to have some serious issues in requiring concealment or cover to stay hidden, but I’d have to see that in play to know for sure.
Pro Tip: Intimidate’s the clear winner here — it explicitly lets you convince a “bloodied” (1/2 HP or less) foe to surrender with an Intimidate check against their Will save. Which you will want to do all the time, since things have stupid huge numbers of HP.
Chapter 6: Feats of Strength and Courage
Feats. In many ways, they represent everything that was 3e: conceptually, a great way for helping your character stand out; in practice, some were wildly overpowered in synergistic ways, and some were so terrible you frequently forgot you’d taken them.
Given the way 4th is written so far, you’d expect 4e feats to hew towards the weaksauce. And you’d be right. The good news is you get a lot more of them. The bad news is you probably don’t care.
The simple fact is, some of the feats are actually quite awesome (Alertness is +2 to perception and you don’t grant combat focus when surprised, which is basically uncanny dodge plus a bit and that was always good times), and some are a waste of space (Wintertouched grants you combat advantage against foes vulnerable to cold if you attack with a cold based spell; this is not something that you spend a feat on). But an important point to remember is that bonuses in 4e are really hard to come by, so you pretty much need to pile up the incremental ones.
In particular, bonuses to saving throws are few and far between, making feats like Human Perseverance (+1 to saving throws) unexpectedly worthwhile. That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily feel good about taking them. Just that you shouldn’t cry yourself to sleep at night.
Just to remind you what “epic tier” means in 4e, it offers abilities like “When you make a melee attack with a hammer, mace, or staff, you can score a critical hit on a natural roll of 19 or 20″. In my day, we called that Improved Critical, and ignored it. But whatever.
This is also the section that covers multiclassing, and here’s how that works: Set a feat on fire, gain a minor benefit from another class. Set three more feats on fire, and for each one you can trade one of your powers (first encounter, then utility, then daily) for one from that class. If you take all four feats, you can opt to forgo your paragon path in favor of a few more of their tricks. You can only gain powers from a single other class (unless you’re a half-elf, who get an out-of-class trick for free anyway).
I’m… not sure how I feel about that. I loved 3e’s open multiclassing for the flexibility it gave you, but it had the usual 3e issues — it was too easy to make a character suck at everything by multiclassing them wrong, and too easy to make them stupid powerful by multiclassing them right. I like it conceptually, within the general aesthetic of 4e, but I think it’s generally a route to gimpsville and probably would never use it.
Props: Racial and class feats that actually matter. In particular, racial feats you might even take.
Hate: The “channel divinity” feats are good ideas, but restricting them to a single god each is annoying and overly restrictive. Deity is an RP choice, in my opinion, and not all games will use the default deities anyway. Consider them house-ruled.
Pro Tip: Mounted Combat. As mentioned previously, you can’t cast Fly until level 14, but you can buy a hippogryph and ride it around starting at level 5. Do the math.
Chapter 7: Gear Me
The ongoing idea that somehow “leather armor” and “hide armor” are two totally different things is so stupid it borders on offensive. Then, in possibly the single most obviously video-gamish thing I’ve seen from these books so far, they have higher level leather and hide (and chainmail, and whatever). Fortuitously, these advanced materials correspond precisely with the tiers of advancement.
Amazing how that works.
Anyway, it’s pretty dumb.
The good news is that weapons get some nice flavor and different abilities without requiring quite as much tracking as in 3e. Seriously, I’m pretty okay with the weapons, except for the part where they (smartly) grouped them by type, then (stupidly) assigned proficiency by another, different type. That’s pretty dumb too.
Mundane gear is mundane gear, and there are no real chocks in it.
Magic items. Wow. Okay, the whole magic item economy is just stupid beyond reckoning. Merchants who buy for 1/5 value and sell at a 5% markup are stupid. Disenchanting weapons for 1/5 their value in Large Prismatic Shards residuum is stupid. The prices for magic items are way stupid – toward the high levels, you’re paying astronomically larger amounts of cash for trivial bonuses, and no one is going to do that.
I have my solutions, and you may have yours, but do something about it. For the kittens.
Props: Uh… they managed to avoid reprinting candle of invocation. That’s progress, I guess.
Hate: Level 20 Flying Carpets with a maximum altitude of “10 squares” make me very sad. Say it with me: Hippogryph. Level 5. Figure it out.
Pro Tip: Since your wizard is using an orb anyway (since it’s one of the very few ways to throw a substantial debuff on enemy saves), you may as well grab any of them and go with it.
Chapter 8: Missions from Gods
How to adventure, with no real surprises. At least they have an explicit cap on how often you can take an extended rest, which is a clumsy but workable method of keeping people from doing it after every fight.
Seriously, this chapter is like four pages. We’re already past it.
Props: I like the healing surges mechanic. Lots of things can key off it, and it’s certainly a better guide for daily endurance than hit points.
Hate: The “one daily magic item power per milestone” is, like the extended rest hack, a klodgy hack that makes no one feel good about themselves.
Pro Tip: It’s four pages long. I got nothing.
Next time: Combat (which hasn’t changed much) and Rituals (for which I must get my rant on), then on to the DMG.
It’s amazing what you can do to balance mechanics once you’ve completely thrown off the shackles of suspension of disbelief.
Here’s the thing:
On the one hand, I agree.
On the other hand, c’mon, it’s D&D, it’s not like it’s never had any weird setting issues caused by rules. Glossing over them or coming up with crazy-ass explanations is part of the game!
On the gripping hand, it’s still a really clumsy and heavy-handed way to do it.
There’s crazy-ass, and then there’s crazy-ass. Take ‘teleportation circles’. I abhor these. First, because it takes something that should be deeply setting-specific and makes it part of the core rules (presumably because some core-rules spells rely on them, unnecessarily). Second, because it’s screamingly obvious that they’re there for a sort of ‘I want to go home to sell my lower-level magic items.’. ‘Okay, you’re there’ convenience which just reinforced the whole video game feel. Third, because it would have massive ramifications on city design and fantasy society development to have these little teleport boxes all over, but WotC is happy to let us ignore any of those ramifications because they obviously don’t give a crap about it. But all that said, I can ignore that crazy ass by saying ‘there are no teleportation circles’. Or ‘there are teleportation circles, and the world is really unfamiliar. Major cities are in caves and on mountaintops instead of next to rivers and on coastlines’.
But the sort of crazy-ass mechanic that precludes players from doing something as primitive as sitting down for a couple of hours is basically irredeemable. What do you do? “Sorry, you can’t sit down” “Why? I’m wounded and tired” “I dunno. The gods make your butt hurt. They hate excessive resting. It’s like Job. Get a move on”.
Just stupid.
“Pro Tip: Intimidate’s the clear winner here — it explicitly lets you convince a “bloodied” (1/2 HP or less) foe to surrender with an Intimidate check against their Will save. Which you will want to do all the time, since things have stupid huge numbers of HP.”
I greatly contend your assumption that Intimidate in combat is this useful.
Hostile enemies get a +10 bonus to their Will save when you’re trying to intimidate them, and if it’s a bloodied foe they are usually going to be hostile towards you. I haven’t fully looked at the numbers, but if you look at it a level 1 Dragonborn Paladin with high charisma trained in intimidate will get a +10 to Intimidate. The typical Will defense for a level 1 creature is ~15, so you’re going to have to roll a 15+ to Intimidate them into surrendering. It takes a standard action, so it seems like a pretty even difficulty and that’s assuming the maximized Intimidate skill.
From the number crunching I’ve done so far, the numbers seem consistent / slightly harder all the way up.
I’d take a 50/50 shot at immediately removing an enemy from the combat. I’d take it a lot. On average, you’ll take out a (bloodied) enemy every other round, with a single character. There’s no other route to do that other than getting lucky with crits, which is even less likely.
Here’s a question. If you Intimidate the entire encounter into submission, do you get your “parcel”?
Pretty much. It’s 50-50 if you can’t drop his Will defense any lower (a dedicated Paladin can get an Intimidate check of +21 at level 10 all by himself, which is about 50/50 with the average Will defense), and that’s still hella faster than trying to smack his HP down.
In a party, it’s even easier. A level 6 Rogue can grant you another +2, and there are several ways to reduce opponents’ defenses — a Fighter’s Chains of Sorrow comes online at 13, Paladin’s Break the Wall at 15, and Warlocks can do it from level 1.
It’s seriously not hard, and totally worth a standard action. Intimidate is the new Save or Die.
Fun writeup! I like the “pro tips.”
How is rolling a 15+ on a d20 a “50/50 shot”? Unless I’m misreading Bartoneus’ post, it sounds like a 1 in 4 chance to me.
You can get better than that by stacking bonuses. I managed to get to a +21 modifier at level 10, which is 50/50 at that level, and the margin improves. Though, granted, only by a little over time; it’s pretty hard to get the kind of skill modifiers you could land in 3e.
Winterborne has a use . . .consider the Dragonborn Wizard who takes Cold as their breath weapon and uses a lot of Cold spells . .. may well be worth the Feat.
It’s also fairly easy to get a Cold Descriptor weapon, and this feat would apply to those attacks as well.
However the real win here is going to be attacks with the Radiant descriptor for Paladins. Big, big damage and a lot of late game foes with vulnerabilities.
I think the real issue with the system is that it is now almost impossible to consider a character in a vacuum. My Dragonborn Warlord went Tactical because our party has no Defenders, so I need to be able to get the Strikers in and out of melee quickly, and control where the enemy is. On paper the Inspiring Warlord looks more attractive, but without a Fighter or Paladin and the party has another Leader (cleric) to add more healing, so it’s a matter of overlapping and stacking abilities and boni.
Anything I can do to grant the Rogue Combat Advantage means that much more damage in a round.
So anyhow yeah, most of the problems you’ve listed are indeed problems, and also easily solved by house ruled or changing your setting to have a different economy.
About the suspension of disbelief thing, in a later comment I think you have it right when you said “this is D&D”. Whatever crazy thing you want to throw in you damn well should be able to, and with all the easy acceptance and enthusiasm as an obsessive “Buffy” fan when the show was fresh. Suspend disbelief. Do it now. Do it with mind boggling idiocity. Do it like you’ve just spent $40 a book to be able to play a game about being a hero in a supernatural world. Otherwise, maybe you should just start reading biographies.
In short, my disbelief only applies to the real world.
In support of the ” explicit cap on how often you can take an extended rest” idea, I know I have one hell of a time getting to sleep most Sunday nights, because I was out late gaming Saturday night, and got up very late Sunday morning (or is that afternoon). I have no problem with the cap.
I’m onboard with a number of your other comments, especially the flight issue. They state this stuff about how the various tiers of play should feel, keep to those ideas with the powers, then violate them with the equipment (in this case, the hippogriff). Seems kinda dumb to me.
Yeah, I expect to have a notebook full of house rules if I run this one. Then again, I usually do, no matter what game I play.
Got to disagree on the ‘extended rest’ complaint.
You can flop on your rear as often as you like. You can only get your powers recharged ‘every now and then’, which is just as much a hack as the ‘wizards get their spells back every night’ rule.
Since characters live in a self consistent world, you do need some flavor text, and to accept up front that hit points, integral stats, action points, initiative dice, encounter powers, and so on, are all things that need a flavor text wrapper. Create those, and the rest is just how you track the die rolls.
On another note, power optimization does not seem positively correlated with role playing in any of the groups I have sat in on or run. Of course, our group has found Amber diceless to work out well. Part of the flow of that game is explicit buy-in on balance, and a requirement that players create flavor text themselves.
Scott
Agreed, the cap can be made to make sense and is necessary to avoid the “15-minute adventuring day” issue that cropped up in 3e. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it’s functional.
In my experience, power optimization and role-playing are orthogonal. The one doesn’t have much impact on the other, certainly less that the drift the GM brings to the game. If the GM is running the game in a very fiddly, technical way, the optimization elements will be in the foreground; if he’s not, they don’t, but they can still be there.
Amber… is a thing. I’m very hesitant to draw conclusions or project trends based on Amber. It’s a weird duck.
I agree with your points here, overall. While I feel the concept of breaking magic items down into residuum is awesome, the implementation of it leaves me cold. It is basically a built in way for players to convert items they find into one they want to find, at a steep cost.
The skills are an excellent upgrade to 3.x. I really do wish that they had better systems for both Diplomacy and Intimidate, however. There are builds on the Char-Op boards of WotC’s forums focused exclusively on using Intimidate as a save or die effect. There is a magic item type called ‘flensing’, which lets you treat an opponent as if it were bloodied, and they get that and every bonus to Intimidate they can find, play Dragonborn, etc. They usually have a 70% chance to cause a foe to surrender each and every turn they take. They only get one attempt on any one foe, but still… It’s potentially game-breaking, considering how strictly and ruthlessly balanced everything else is…
If / when I run a 4th ed game, I’ll be houseruling Intimidate to make it useful, but not overpowered. Also, adding more Feats. The list I saw available made me a little disappointed in the lack of options.
I’ve seen some people building up encyclopedic rule systems around Intimidate, trying to balance it. I hate that.
I would use the following:
- Bloodied is not a condition status for being intimidated;
- Bonuses against fear applies;
- An intimidated subject becomes Weakened (save ends);
.
All the rest remaining the same.
This turns the skill check still useful, and eliminates the save or die problem.