canyonwalker | (Reply)

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4e solved, for me, one problem that had bothered me about the standard D&D family for ages: It gave non-spellcasters just as many options to do something interesting as the spellcasters. I find playing fighters and fighter-types to be soul-numbingly boring in most D&D-type games, and rogue-likes are at best a mixed bag depending on the GM. "Oh, it's my turn? I guess I hit it with my sharp or blunt metal object. Again." And with healing surges, even clerics have the option to be something other than party medic.

If I'm going to run a game for players who are interested in mechanical combat (as I often do, because that's who I game with) then that is worth quite a bit to me-- enough to make me work to overcome the other problems with the system and still call it a bargain. (And if I'm not running a game for players interested in mechanical combat, I'm not running D&D of any variant, because why the fuck would I?)

And there were definitely problems with it:

1) I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it was unbalanced in the sense of class vs class, but it got grindier and grindier in combat as the levels progressed. My strong sense from keeping up with things at the time is that this is because WotC forced the designers into a death march to get the thing released by an arbitrary deadline, and the playtesting was woefully inadequate.

2) In addition to an action economy per round (which was fairly functional) the game was arc-welded to a power-resource-economy which was also fairly functional... if and only if you accepted their notion of how many fights per game day the characters would experience, and how many fights per level they would experience. I'm referring to the whole "daily power" concept, which turns out to be a very stubborn lynchpin in the architecture of the whole game. It can be fixed-- I know it can, because I fixed it, but my fix only reset the balance for my sense of pacing, it wasn't a universal fix.

Those were the big problems. And they compound themselves if you've got to have four-ish major fights per game day and they're getting longer and crunchier every level.

The smaller problems were:

3) Publishing houses gotta publish. And a lot of D&D publishing falls in three branches: Moar Monsters, Moar Settings, and Moar Classes. Moar Monsters and Moar Settings is fine, everyone loves those. The Moar Classes, though.... Man, if you want to define a new class in 4e, you're really signing yourself up to defining the entire class, including all the various options for level feats, right from the ground up. That's a huge amount of material to grind out, if you're not allowed to borrow extensively from existing classes. And every new class consumes a comparatively huge chunk of the mechanical design space. As a consequence, even by the PHB2, some of the new classes were starting to look weird, uninspiring, and weirdly uninspiring. (This, in contrast to 3e, 3.5e, and 5e, where the new classes are other classes with relatively minor modifications. Easier to pump out, equally or perhaps more uninspiring, but less weird.) 4e reached that phase of its existence pretty damn early, by my recollection.

4) 4e was always supposed to be a sort of a subscription deal. Whether that would have been a good idea or a bad idea, we'll never know. It's at least possible that having a certain revenue per month would have broken or modified the publish or perish mindset. It's also possible it would have been a useless money pit that didn't provide value. But we'll never know because the lead designer for the digital subscription tools killed his wife and them himself (the full story is actually horrible) leaving the project basically in limbo because there were no notes and no one else who could carry it forward.

I am told that Pathfinder 2e is supposedly "the good parts of 4e" lifted and put back into a more classical D&D type mechanics system. I have no idea what these people are talking about, though.