Quote from: cranebump;887923Well, that definitely identifies the problem.:-)

That was part of 4e's disasterous advertising. "You have been playing D&D wrong!" and the derogatory advertisements.

Quote from: Batman;887944Can someone explain to me what the fuck traditional D&D means?

Something made up by one faction to demean some style of play or make themselves feel important. So "traditional" is whatever said faction likes to puff their egos up with. And odds are that a chunk of what they claim is pure fabrication.

Quote from: Batman;887944Can someone explain to me what the fuck traditional D&D means?

Whatever the OSR Pontifex Maximus, or similar spiritual leader, says it means. So I, as Gran Mufti of the OSR Jyhad, declare thine predilections to WotC Dungeons & Dragons heretical and thus worthy of community chastisement. Unleash the d4s and CheetosDustStorm! Lalalalalalalalalalalalala!

Quote from: Opaopajr;887970Whatever the OSR Pontifex Maximus, or similar spiritual leader, says it means. So I, as Gran Mufti of the OSR Jyhad, declare thine predilections to WotC Dungeons & Dragons heretical and thus worthy of community chastisement. Unleash the d4s and CheetosDustStorm! Lalalalalalalalalalalalala!

And/or is more likely to line their pockets with cash if they have a product to hawk. Or just to shill their free (copied from someone else and the names changed) product.

And/or telling players who were playing OD&D or earlier that they werent playing the game how they say and it was really insert OSR shill here way.

And/or havent a damn clue...

Quote from: Daztur;887063OK, assuming you keep the basic 4ed design goals in place (many of which clash pretty badly with standard D&D play) how would you go about fixing 4ed?

...

Combine healing surges and action points into one bennie (call it hero points or something more creative). Have these hero points be pretty rare.

Then focus in on the stuff that makes 4ed unique: the big stacks of powers.

Here's the thing: 4e is actually ingenious.

Please take this moment to laugh.

The problem with 4e is that... it's like some people had a vision for an amazing cake, and had all the ingredients on hand, but absolutely no idea how to combine them. You wind up with a goopy mess covered in sugar and eggshells that makes no goddamn sense. The end result was nothing like what they had envisioned - or promised - and so lots of folk give it shit, without looking deeper at the system (myself included, until ~8 months ago).

You can't take 4e wholesale. You just can't. The game, as written, is shit. You have to look behind the game, at the principles they were trying to build on, but - for whatever reason - were unable to bring to fruition.

I've skimmed the thread a bit, and some folks have touched on the attrition thing. I think what they were trying to do was ensure that everyone could still do their thing without having to resort to bullshit, and to do that end the attrition factor became healing surges. Can we agree that deciding to play a wizard, then - at low levels - being told you get one magic thing you can do a day, otherwise you're stuck with a crossbow, blows goats? If you're a mage, you should be able to do mage-y shit on the regular. To prevent adventurers from just going nuts and never taking a break, though, you have to give them a limit, and healing surges provide that limit. Not only that, but they're sensible in-world: you get beat to shit, you want to go take a rest, because you might not live through the next fight. I realize it abstracts hit points a bit further than pretty much any other edition of D&D does, but the intent of the mechanic is sound.

But that then brings us to the damage thing, and how long combats take (I once had a 4e combat take 16 hours, split over three sessions, so I'm well aware it's a sensible complaint). I'm going to try to explain my understanding of what they were trying to accomplish, but it might take a minute, so bear with me.

Let's take dragons for an example. The theory was that, at low levels, Dragon X is a solo encounter, a badass the party is hard-pressed to fight. At medium levels, Dragon X becomes a regular monster, something the party might fight a small group of: the adventurers have become badass enough that they can take on a few and live. At even higher levels, Dragon X becomes a minion, such a pushover that the PCs just pretty much need to look at the thing and it'll drop dead, and can fight hordes of something that 15 levels ago, one of which could've easily mopped the floor with them.

A lot of people think this is utterly nonsensical. And if you look at it from a purely HP perspective, where Dragon X as an elite has a shit-ton more HP than Dragon X as a minion, you're right: it is nonsensical. So don't look at it that way.

It is not that Dragon X as a minion is literally weaker than Dragon X as a solo. It is that the PCs' ability to dish out damage is that much greater. Power A might deal 2[w] damage, but the idea is that - conceptually - the damage of that power is scaling as the PCs increase in level. Rather than have powers increase in damage over time, a monster's HP are conceptually reduced in relation to the PCs.

Yes, this results in the sort of weirdness where the state of a monster is dependent upon the PCs looking at it. But really, is this any different from having fireball do 1d6/level damage? At 5th level, 5d6 isn't much (I'm talking from 3.5 here, so keep that in mind), and will probably not outright kill a CR 5 monster; at 15th level, that same fireball now deals 15d6, and is significantly more likely to one-shot that same CR 5 creature. To the level 5 PC, that CR 5 critter is a solo; to the 15, that CR 5 critter is a minion.

Now, this doesn't excuse some of the shitty math that 4e has. Powers do increase in damage as you gain levels (higher level powers do more damage), and PCs and monsters both have more HP as you gain levels, which leads to the horrible grind that is 4e once you leave heroic tier.

What I'm getting at is that all damage output in 4e is scaling, even though the numbers aren't increasing at that rate. It's hidden, but it's there; you can see a glimpse of what they were trying to do with the "damage expressions" table in the DMG for building your own monsters. Monsters are supposed to have X damage output at a given level. Through a combination of factors, that table is shit, but the basic concept is there, and ripe for mining.

The AEDU power structure came about, I think, because they were trying to (1) solve "linear warriors, quadratic wizards," (2) let mages be mages all the time, and (3) didn't want to abandon the "feel" of improving over time, as would happen in a situation where a PC's damage output never increased (even though, effectively, it was, by modifying monster HP in response to PC level). It's an artifact of a shitty approach to what I think was their design intent, not the purpose of the edition itself.

tl;dr - I think you've got your priorities crossed. Healing surges, and by extension the fundamental concepts at play in combat math, are the big draw of 4e, not the "stacks of powers."

Quote from: Omega;887972And/or is more likely to line their pockets with cash if they have a product to hawk. Or just to shill their free (copied from someone else and the names changed) product.

And/or telling players who were playing OD&D or earlier that they werent playing the game how they say and it was really insert OSR shill here way.

And/or havent a damn clue...

Your comment does not have a CheetosDustStorm and is thus invalidated by the rule of cool.

Believers, to the Hippopotamus Water Chariots! Tonight we ride against the infidels!
:cool:

Quote from: GnomeWorks;887973Here's the thing: 4e is actually ingenious.

Please take this moment to laugh.

The problem with 4e is that... it's like some people had a vision for an amazing cake, and had all the ingredients on hand, but absolutely no idea how to combine them. You wind up with a goopy mess covered in sugar and eggshells that makes no goddamn sense. The end result was nothing like what they had envisioned - or promised - and so lots of folk give it shit, without looking deeper at the system (myself included, until ~8 months ago).

That was an episode of Little Rascals... :worship:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i41mQr2IJ_Y

Quote from: Daztur;887955For me that means: PCs go into a dangerous environment and slowly get their resources get worn down via attrition until they either die or escape back to safety.

Before 4ed this had started to break down both through shifts in play style and rules (people not tracking encumbrance, people not using wandering monsters, 15 minute adventuring days, fistfuls of CLW wands, etc. etc.). Standard dungeon crawling in which the basic attrition model doesn't work isn't much fun.

Looking back at the majority of my 3.5 experience I don't remember dungeon delving too much. Even with things like loads of CLW wands (something that a DM can control) basic attrition started to lose its effectiveness after 6th level (hence my love for E6). And I do agree that as character power ramps up the play style changes. Still, despite  the most stingiest of Grognards, 3e and PF are still considered D&D.

Quote from: Daztur;887955From my point of 4ed tried to fix the problems that crop up in D&D when the attrition model isn't working by moving beyond it and making each fight be an interesting tactical exercise in and of itself rather than something that's mostly important because even if you win you'll lose a few HPs and some time and both are precious.

I'd argue that still holds true for 4e, though replace HP with Surges and Daily powers including magical items. Perhaps DMs were far too easy on PCs when it came to allowing them to rest and regain those precious resources? There have been times in my home game (and the occasional pre-bought adventure) that I didn't allow them rest even after the monsters were dead. It forced them to think outside the box, use their abilities in non-traditional ways, and give an urgency to the plot while whittling down their surges.

Quote from: Daztur;887955Now if you take the 4ed ruleset and try to use it for a traditional D&D attrition-based game it doesn't really work well because it takes soooooooooooooooooo looooooooooooooooong to wear a 4ed party down through gradual attrition. Things like plentiful healing resources, resources that refresh after a "short rest," combat vs. non-combat abilities being siloed so that you're not burning dailies outside of combat in the way that you'd burn spell slots to get around non-combat obstacles in older editions mean that if you took a bog standard TSR-D&D dungeoncrawl, converted everything over to 4ed stats and then ran everything with a bog standard TSR-D&D playstyle it would be an agonizing exercise in tedium.

I'd love the challenge, to be honest. I always eyed up the 4e version of the Tomb of Horrors and would loe to try it with a seasoned group of 4e players. But give me a TSR-D&D classic dungeon crawl and I'll run my group with it, sans house-rules, and see how it goes. Maybe it is the system and maybe it's the DM style.

Quote from: Daztur;887955The way you have fun with 4ed is to approach it in a completely different way and have big massive set-piece battles be the centerpiece, not a running series of Fantasy Fucking Vietnam skirmishes.

For example 4ed would be fun for a campaign centered around arena battles in which each session it capped with one massive gladiatorial battle and the rest of the session is interpersonal drama, assembling teams, trying to purchase monsters that's bring in the crowd, trash talking the opposition, attempting to cheat, attempting to stop the other team from cheating, etc. etc. That'd be fun. A dungeon crawl with five combats in a session with 4ed is not fun.

Most combats with us run approx 35 to 45 min and we usually get in 3 per session. Huge set piece battles does sound fun too.

At the risk of feeding that troll some more, let's get back to the actual thread.

One thing I would do to fix 4E is to eliminate most all of the status effects. I'm serious, each character gets one status effect generator, or can only inflict one status effect at a time.

One of the big changes from AD&D to 3e was the realization that status effects can affect combat far more than actual damage.

In 4e, as we've noted, the number of effects in play in any given combat can number in the half dozen, trivially (one for each player, and one for each monster, if there are two types), and can double that if players start blowing dailies and action points (assuming you're one of those folks that believes action points are part of 4e, I've only recently learned not everyone does)...it's way too much to follow, especially when the effects vary significantly from combat to combat.

The worst is, I'm starting to see it in 5e; I have a summoner player, and sure enough, status-effect inflicting monsters are the key once again...but at least there are seldom more than 3 effects in play in a 5e fight.

Naturally, getting rid of all the effect-inflicting abilities and adding lots of abilities that aren't status-inflicting (change a few encounter powers to "reroll a missed attack", "reroll a save", and such) would require a considerable rewrite of the rules, which puts things back in the "why bother, just make a new game from the ground up" category.

But if I were fixing 4e, snipping off a jillion (note: this is hyperbole, not a specific number) status-effect inflicting powers would be on the to-do list.

Quote from: Doom;887983But if I were fixing 4e, snipping off a jillion (note: this is hyperbole, not a specific number) status-effect inflicting powers would be on the to-do list.

I don't think that you have to cut them, I think that you have to standardize them.

Part of the problem with 4e status effects is that their durations are all over the board: some last until the start of your next turn, some until the end of your next turn, some until the start of the creature's next turn, some until their end, some end on a save, etc etc.

If you started with standardizing durations - every status effect you inflict ends at the end of your next turn, full stop (just as an example) - and then standardizing effects, so they don't stack and there are a reasonable number of them, you'd fix a lot of problems.

Continue to point out your bullshit....
But I'm the troll? :rolleyes:

Quote from: Doom;887983At the risk of feeding that troll some more, let's get back to the actual thread.

The umpteen status effects were one of those "gotta see it to believe it" parts of 4e. I mean, I saw those game trade mags with magnetic stackable disc markers, in a 'taste the rainbow!' spread of Skittles colors, and thought they were joking (for that eccentric completionist at your table). But, lo, I played 4e Org Play (Expeditions, was it?) and were those status effects flying - and at somewhat low level, too!

I pitied the GMs and their bookkeeping for both monsters and players.

Thankfully when you strip AEDU away, and go back to older spell and equip options, most of this issue goes away. Dumping AEDU also removes the "pinball wizard" forced movement effects, too, along with quite a few other dissociative, high mod (expertise) dependency, and scaling issues. The exception-based design for each class at every milestone stage really brought more problems than it solved, I think.

That and the feat kludge is still a kludge, and no amount of extra pages worth - regardless of trimming away the 'fruitless trees' - made it any more streamlined for grab 'n go play.
...........................

But what would you do to make it play like you want? Or at least shape it to play like how Daztur wants?

Quote from: Opaopajr;887986The umpteen status effects were one of those "gotta see it to believe it" parts of 4e. I mean, I saw those game trade mags with magnetic stackable disc markers, in a 'taste the rainbow!' spread of Skittles colors, and thought they were joking (for that eccentric completionist at your table). But, lo, I played 4e Org Play (Expeditions, was it?) and were those status effects flying - and at somewhat low level, too!

I really do think it's entirely reasonable to have a large number of standardized status effects, so long as (1) their effects are meaningful and players will care about remembering them, and (2) their durations aren't both stupendously brief and variable in that brevity.

QuoteDumping AEDU also removes the "pinball wizard" forced movement effects, too, along with quite a few other dissociative, high mod (expertise) dependency, and scaling issues.

Of these, forced movement is the one I don't mind, and think it actually adds a solid option to the tactical toolkit for players.

I understand the gripe that that makes a tactical map a necessity. I see that as a worthwhile trade; others may not.

My biggest problem with AEDU is that it made the classes very same-y. They tried a lot of weird stuff, like with psionics, to reduce that, but at that point it was too little, too late. I like my fighters being on par with my mages, but I still want them to feel different.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;887984I don't think that you have to cut them, I think that you have to standardize them.

Part of the problem with 4e status effects is that their durations are all over the board: some last until the start of your next turn, some until the end of your next turn, some until the start of the creature's next turn, some until their end, some end on a save, etc etc.

If you started with standardizing durations - every status effect you inflict ends at the end of your next turn, full stop (just as an example) - and then standardizing effects, so they don't stack and there are a reasonable number of them, you'd fix a lot of problems.

Yeah, that's probably a better way to do it...something would need to be done, all the same.

Just make them Save Ends or Until the end of your next turn. The vast majority of effects are that way anyways.