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I will start out by saying that I love 4th edition. However I will also note that the rule system does not suit all campaign types, and thats OK by me. What I would like from this thread is to distill some campaign types or themes that play to 4th editions strengths. The things that come to mind for me are:
1. Combat. The 4e combat system is great. Campaigns need to embrace this.
2. Low/No "Throwaway" Combats. The 4th edition combats can be lengthy. Combats should have some form of weight behind them, minimal "random" combats.
3. Strong story, but aimed at "Mythic" level of PC involvement. PCs should not be dirt farmers or blacksmiths in 4th edition.
4. Out of combat is freeform. Skill Challenges never worked for me.
I would love more input from you all given that we have had 6 years to get to know what the rules can do.
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I never played 4th, but what I saw of it led me to believe it would have made an awesome rules set for a turn-based tactical RPG on the PC.
I'm surprised they never did anything with it digitally.
I think it's main strength was tactical combat with minis, but again I never played so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
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Agreed that combat is one of its strengths.
I also really liked what it did with the "mythology" of the game, the feywild, shadowfell etc. I do realise that many people did not like this, but I felt it "cleaned up" things and makes it less fiddly to run. I like to think of it as a "reimagined" version of the DnD mythos.
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I agree with your points 1 and 2 but not necessarily with 3 and 4.
I'll start with point #4 because its the easiest. If Skill Challenges don't work for you well then don't use them. If they do well then go right ahead. Game works either way so just go with your preference.
All that said I have found that its pretty easy to get a crappy Skill Challenge and I've found that making good ones often require quite a bit of work as well as some idea as to why it is you want a skill challenge in this spot for them to be good...most of the time. They do work quite well for major trap disarms and the like as well. In this case they are just being used simply as a kind of compromise. Yes the characters can use their skills to say shut down the mechanical monster...which is more variable then simply saying it has to be killed through HP damage but they need to do more then just make a single skill roll (because that would be too easy).
Point #3 is were I'm not all that clear on whether I agree with you or not. I mean I have no idea what you mean by 'Mythic'. OK I would not really want a basic Blacksmith that took up adventuring most of the time mainly because one can do better in the Drama Department. A Blacksmith with 'something' in her background that can be used for character development is fine however. Maybe her Father had some dark secret that will become relevant later in the campaign or maybe she is actually related to the Fey or who knows...but something is better then nothing in this regards for the same reason TV show characters work better if they have interesting elements in their history...its just better drama and story telling.
On the other hand I have found that 4E works best for me when it is essentially 'grounded'. When the PCs are pretty much mortals with some cool combat moves as opposed to fledgling Gods. 4E does a very good job in this department as well. The Dm sets the vast majority of the DCs so one can pretty much chase PCs with target numbers appropriate for their level for a lot of the game. Hence sure you can pole vault over the counter as part of your move...if you can make a DC medium Acrobatics or Athletics check.
This is good stuff as 4E combats are often pretty mobile and the PCs have limited access to the really crazy stuff the DM can keep them in this range for a really long time. The whole friggen party does not have access to fly. Its not going to happen. One character this turn might be able to leap 15 feet into the air and make a swing with a power, which is pretty fantastic for a 10th level character but its not quite at the point where the whole group flies over the mountain...something they are not going to be able to manage until very high levels.
I've stated this sort of preference at length before but as a rule I'm looking at my PCs as being pretty mortal until around 5th level and even after that they are more like James Bond until 16th. At 16th...well now they are Mythic. That's the point when they really are starting to takes steps toward destinies and such that will reveal that they are newly risen Angels or the like. At this point I'm going with DCs that make pole vaulting over the counter trivial and putting DCs for ever more crazy stuff into the adventure.
I think the system really does support this sort of thing. Other Editions can have some pretty tough Orcs but in 4E they are pretty much on the table right until about the end of the Heroic Tier. I'd say Elite Veteran Guardsmen and the like are also challenges roughly to this point and the PCs then go through a period where only Famous Named Mercenaries and such are on their level right up until the point where the PCs get to 16th level. After that their really are no more 'mortal' threats that really phase them. Only Arch mages and the like are now on their level. At this stage they have gone beyond the Ken of mortal men and their deeds are the stuff of bards songs. By 21st and beyond their deeds are the stuff of legends. People will be talking about them when the countries they have grew up in fade away and new nations arise...
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Seems to me that it lends itself towards a Monte Haul style of game play. Its practically a Wargame rules set with a thin layer of storytelling mechanic wrapped around it to give resolution mechanics to the non-combat events that tie the fights together into a narrative.
It was an interesting idea, but sadly it felt far too much like playing a very slow version of some kind of video game. Blue Drake is right. It would have made a great video game engine. It makes a piss poor storytelling apparatus.
If you feel like using it to run your games, skip the grand plot, make characters motivated by exploration and money, google up a random dungeon generator, and enjoy the combat.
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Seems to me that it lends itself towards a Monte Haul style of game play. Its practically a Wargame rules set with a thin layer of storytelling mechanic wrapped around it to give resolution mechanics to the non-combat events that tie the fights together into a narrative.
It was an interesting idea, but sadly it felt far too much like playing a very slow version of some kind of video game. Blue Drake is right. It would have made a great video game engine. It makes a piss poor storytelling apparatus.
If you feel like using it to run your games, skip the grand plot, make characters motivated by exploration and money, google up a random dungeon generator, and enjoy the combat.
This is the exact opposite of what you want to do with the system. It won't work. For the combats to take advantage of of the high mobility in combat and all the forced movement powers you need to design your combats carefully. Your looking at something to the tune of roughly 5-7 combats per level and each of those combats should be well thought out. They need to be in an interesting environment where the powers and mobility are going to be shown off. An automated Fish Processing Factory, for example, makes a good scene for a combat. Here your going to want to explain all the interesting features on the map and how they work (Actually write this stuff down on the map so your players can see it). You want to know which direction the conveyer belts go and how much forced movement they do per turn and when that forced movement takes place. If there are counters with fish on them then you need to know what the Athletics DC is to move over them without slipping and what happens if you flunk the roll. In this example I went with creature falls prone, slides one space in a random direction (use a d8) and ends the current action. If a PC or monster uses a Power like Drop Kick to push an enemy into the automated Fish deboner then you need to know how much damage the Fish deboner does. Etc, etc.
If your not spending a lot of time on your encounters (both in designing them and in playing them out) your probably doing it wrong. Because of this limit the number your going to handle in the adventure but make those that come up excellent encounters.
On the other hand the out of combat adventuring can be really quite excellent. The system is intentionally set up so that all characters are roughly equally good inside and outside of combat and you don't have to worry about the mage or cleric using a spell to solve the adventure. No such spells until the highest levels. This means that all the Players get to have fun when the weapons stay sheathed. There is no Bard whose job is to talk to all the NPCs nor is the fighter useless outside of a fight. Use this to make elaborate adventures between the fights.
In particular I've found 4E to be an excellent system for city adventuring and my current campaign focuses on the PCs being investigators that solve various kinds of mystery's.
My most recent Adventure was called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spider and if you think that your pretty sure you recognize most of that title...yeah your right.
In fact I ripped off Le Carre's novel completely. I spent hours taking notes on the 6 part BBC miniseries until I new the plot backwards and forwards - then I turned it into a 4E D&D adventure. Anyone that has read the book or seen one of the movies (I recommend the BBC mini series - it was excellent) knows that the story is all about the discovery of a Mole in the upper ranks of the Spy organization and the story is about how that spy is ferreted out. Of course in my version I interspersed this with 6 combats...though the first took place to foreshadow the adventure and the last three where final combats that took place once the Mole had been discovered and backtracked to his handler. My examples of a fight in an automated Fish Processing Factory is from one of the combat scenes I ran in the middle of this adventure.
In any case as even at 14th level there are no spells or magic powers of the PCs that would allow the PCs to side step the adventure (via intelligent use of a spell or more likely a combo of spells) the PCs were forced to interact with my cast of weird and wacky NPCs until they got to the point where they believed they had figured out who the Mole was. Then they carefully had one of the other NPCs they had talked to feed the mole (false) information that they knew would be significant to the Moles master (The aforesaid Spider of the Adventures Title) and this sent the mole racing off to tell his master what he had just learned. They then just followed him back to The Spiders Secret Base and the final epic climax.
A big one in my case as the PCs have been facing off against the shadowy Spider (who pulls all the strings from behind the scenes) from level 1 and in the final fight one of the Players revealed that he had secretly been one of her agents since the beginning. When he turned around and gutted the parties cleric there was chaos at the Game Table. Of course I had worked all of this out with the player in question before this combat but for the rest of my players - well I've never had one PC betray the party before so it was a pretty dramatic scene.
In any case this is an example of what 4E is good at and if you have a hankering to do some investigative style city adventuring I recommend the system. No plot breaking magic to ruin your adventures and no single class (such as a bard) whose entire role within the party is to shine outside of combat...thus making not fighting this particular players 'spotlight moment'. Swords being sheathed is no players spotlight moment and they are all expected to participate and are roughly equal to each other when doing so.
I will start out by saying that I love 4th edition. However I will also note that the rule system does not suit all campaign types, and thats OK by me. What I would like from this thread is to distill some campaign types or themes that play to 4th editions
strengths.
Personally, I think 4E can handle a lot more than what some people care to believe. It does, however, require more work on the DM to get it right and it'll often take some time to adjust it correctly. Here's what I'd go with:
1. Gritty: This thematic style can be considered difficult to achieve with 4E due to the way the system operates with Surges and the expectation that you'll go into most combats at nearly full HP. First thing is to remove that expectation right from the get go. Second is to A) Limit how often the PCs get down time in the form of a long rest and B) Have TONS of effects that drain surges. These could be anything from poison gas, necrotic miasmas, devilish curses, even ground that's just saturate with "taint" or evil. Another way to accomplish the gritty feeling is to restrict the game at the system level via Houserules. The two that easily come to mind are 1) starting Surges are half of what they normally would be (so your typical fighter has 10 surges/day, now he has 5) and 2) Regain only 1/2 surges during a long rest.
Another thing to do is put in LOTS an LOTS of disease. Something I did for a Gothic Horror 4E game was have a PC contract Vampirism that was extremely difficult to cure. Each time he failed on the disease track, he'd slowly turn into a vampire and his alignment would change and stuff like that. IT took a while to remove the disease but it was interesting to see a Knight of Torm just tear into the neck of a corrupt noble they had intended to interrogate.
2. High Magic / Epic-ness: It's not a shocker that 4E tends to do the Super-hero PCs style quite easily. Embrace that. Sometimes a fun beer and pretzels kind of game can be just hilarious and fun. I did an Epic campaign where each player created a Hero from 80's cartoons. We had She-Ra, Link, and Snake-Eyes battle the forces of Hordak (She-Ra's enemey) and Cobra as Gannon attempted to use the unified Tri-force and reign domination over all the realms of the cartoons. Sure it was cheesy and silly but it was FUN. She-Ra would fly past on Swiftwind and battle the Cobra air-forces as Snake-Eyes just decimated Hordaks ground troops with Link using both Blade and Bow at his side.
3. Low-magic: First thought might be "no way" but looking at the Dark Sun campaign, it's pretty clear that you can indeed run an entire 1-30 campaign with 4E and not have any magical items at your disposal. You have to use the Inherent bonus rules (which are fun) but it's possible. Heck I had intended to start out such a campaign using ONLY Martial characters with the 0-level rules (provided by Dungeon/Dragon mag) and go from there to 30th level. In doing so what you have to do is then cater the monsters to the story. Personally I think Low-Magic and Gritty sort of go hand-in-hand but that's me.
4. Put more emphasis on out-of-combat to make that just as interesting. One great way of doing so is using 5E's Traits, Flaws, Bonds, and Ideals charts. I mean they're not tied to the mechanics in anyways and there are some really interesting ideas there. Once you do that and the DM has an idea of the sorts of characters he's dealing with (not just in class/race specifics) then he can help tailor the campaign to meet the back stories of these characters.
Also it's great to have the players set goals: 1 short-term, 1 long-term for their character. Have them be fun and unique but obtainable. A short term goal should be achievable around mid- to late-heroic tier. A long-term goal should be achievable around mid- to late-paragon. Make the characters important AS they gain levels to show them that their actions have consequences. I've seen a lot of people who play 4E say there's no substance to the game and that it's all combat. When the rules focus on combat it's easy to get caught up in only that aspect. As a DM, you need to show them that there's more than what your encounter power can do OR that taking a non-combat related feat or utility power can still be a good selection.
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Competent protagonists from the start, episodic story-telling, "Monster-of-the-Week" style. So Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Doctor Who, perhaps Spiderman on some arcs. Sadly while individual power inflation was toned down from other editions it's still too much to do that in a satisfactory manner, unless you restricted your characters to one tier of play. If they'd combined the basic structure with the "bounded accuracy" concept that's so badly implemented in 5e, that would have been a closer match for the sort of literature that D&D always seemed to be trying to do and failing at.
Here I agree with you. One of the unfortunate elements of 4E is that their is this constant number escalation that serves no real purpose but is so entwined into the system that you can't really get rid of it.
The most obvious example is in the skill DCs. They go up by 1/2 per level and the recommended DC by level chart does pretty much the same thing. As I mention above I go so far as to essentially chase the PCs with the recommended by level DC ratings in order to keep them bounded as mere mortals for as long as possible. This simply means that, on average, the DC to pole vault over a counter rises at about 1/2 a point per level right along with my PCs increases. Its pretty much always about the same target number. That is a bunch of calculations that really don't need to be in the game. If it was not so built into the system I'd rather that PCs skills don't rise except when they boost their stats or if they decide to actually pick up Skill Focus or some such. In this manner one could have set DCs that, very slowly, get ever easier so that by 16th level or what not Pole Vaulting over counters is simply trivial.
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I agree with your points 1 and 2 but not necessarily with 3 and 4.
I'll start with point #4 because its the easiest. If Skill Challenges don't work for you well then don't use them. If they do well then go right ahead. Game works either way so just go with your preference.
All that said I have found that its pretty easy to get a crappy Skill Challenge and I've found that making good ones often require quite a bit of work as well as some idea as to why it is you want a skill challenge in this spot for them to be good...most of the time. They do work quite well for major trap disarms and the like as well. In this case they are just being used simply as a kind of compromise. Yes the characters can use their skills to say shut down the mechanical monster...which is more variable then simply saying it has to be killed through HP damage but they need to do more then just make a single skill roll (because that would be too easy).
Point #3 is were I'm not all that clear on whether I agree with you or not. I mean I have no idea what you mean by 'Mythic'. OK I would not really want a basic Blacksmith that took up adventuring most of the time mainly because one can do better in the Drama Department. A Blacksmith with 'something' in her background that can be used for character development is fine however. Maybe her Father had some dark secret that will become relevant later in the campaign or maybe she is actually related to the Fey or who knows...but something is better then nothing in this regards for the same reason TV show characters work better if they have interesting elements in their history...its just better drama and story telling.
On the other hand I have found that 4E works best for me when it is essentially 'grounded'. When the PCs are pretty much mortals with some cool combat moves as opposed to fledgling Gods. 4E does a very good job in this department as well. The Dm sets the vast majority of the DCs so one can pretty much chase PCs with target numbers appropriate for their level for a lot...
My "mythic" comment was probably a little off centre, what I was getting at was that the characters in 4e are pretty full on in their power, they have some pretty crazy powers. Being able to push people around with arrows, fire 9 arrows in 6 seconds etc, kind of makes "gritty" harder to pull off. I think what I meant was the you need to embrace the PCs "cool moves" and that PCs are generally portrayed as "superior" to the remainder of the world.
The game also seems to imply that PCs shouldn't suffer too badly from diseases or general hardships. It hints that the NPCs suffering should be what shows the PCs superiority.
My "mythic" comment was probably a little off centre, what I was getting at was that the characters in 4e are pretty full on in their power, they have some pretty crazy powers. Being able to push people around with arrows, fire 9 arrows in 6 seconds etc, kind of makes "gritty" harder to pull off. I think what I meant was the you need to embrace the PCs "cool moves" and that PCs are generally portrayed as "superior" to the remainder of the world.
The game also seems to imply that PCs shouldn't suffer too badly from diseases or general hardships. It hints that the NPCs suffering should be what shows the PCs superiority.
OK in this regards, again up to a point, we agree.
The reality is the PCs have bullet time moves, that is the nature of their powers and you need to embrace that. This does not mean that the NPCs are grounded however, with sometimes normal NPCs being Solo's and such its really the case that everyone has bullet time moves. I like to think of it as 4E being a kind of Fantasy Summer Blockbuster Simulator. When the fighting starts things there are a lot of big moves flying around.
On the other hand that the PCs can't get disease or suffer seems off to me. There is nothing really that tells us this in the books and in fact the excellent Darksun book has some good rules for making your PCs suffer from lack of water and such. 4E can have pretty brutal diseases, I've had a PC die from disease before, all depends on target numbers really. If one wants to keep that sort of element mostly out of play well that's the DMs prerogative. If your playing Darksun though you really need to include this sort of thing.
On the other hand by RAW its really pretty tough to die in 4E. I've tended toward some house rules to up the mortality level of the game so I suppose I can see where your coming from.
Contrary to popular opinion, I find that 4e is as immersive and 'real' as any other D&D or D&D-alike, and sometimes more so! Everyone gets a level-based bonus to AC and initiative, so I can treat hit points as a real in-world energy rather than as a metagamey abstraction. Monsters have stats and abilities that make sense, rather than X arbitrary feats and skill ranks based on their HD. Surprised combatants are always at a disadvantage, rather than probably being no worse off defensively than usual. Alignment is essentially inert, so nobody has to worry about how an organic personality fits into an inorganic spectrum of tropes. Melee attack bonuses are based on fighting style, MBA aside, rather than defaulting to Strength for everyone and every weapon.
This all means that 4e is great for immersive, believable campaigns.
4e is good for campaigns with moral ambiguity. Again, alignment is 99% inert, so when the PCs encounter an orc who claims to be different from his bloodthirsty kin, there are no clear answers or easy solutions.
4e is also great for creating a sense of real escalation without needing to obsolete monsters every five levels or so. A 1st level solo is a 6th level elite is an 11th level standard is a 16th level goon is a 21st level minion. Sadly, the MMs have stat blocks for each monster at only one of these castes, so it takes some effort on my part to re-caste monsters that I want to reuse at different levels. But to have foes show up throughout a campaign, posing a [collective] threat to the PCs while providing an objective benchmark for the PCs to measure their prowess against is totally worth it!
4. Out of combat is freeform. Skill Challenges never worked for me.
I never got SCs to work either, but I didn't go total freeform -- I went old school. Freeform the barmaid seductions and other unimportant stuff, and single skill checks for relevant stuff, with logical limits based on circumstance. ("No, you can't diplomance the Duke into anything totally absurd, no matter how high your bonus is.")
A 4e DM once commented that SCs are best used as an informal framework to hang complex challenges on -- don't tell the players they're in a SC; just use the SC math to adjudicate the degree of their success or failure. That sounds like wisdom, and I know that many DMs like Jeremy have gotten SCs to work.
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A 4e DM once commented that SCs are best used as an informal framework to hang complex challenges on -- don't tell the players they're in a SC; just use the SC math to adjudicate the degree of their success or failure. That sounds like wisdom, and I know that many DMs like Jeremy have gotten SCs to work.
I'll emphasize that I never tell my players they are in a Skill Challenge and if they figure it out to quickly then that often, though not always, results in a busted or at least less interesting Skill Challenge because it turns into a boring scripted routine in which the players scan their skills, discuss who has the best skills that might apply and who has the 2nd best. Then the best makes the skill roll while the second best aids him. This eats up time, is completely non-immersive and is boring. On the other hand if the players are just doing stuff and you sometimes ask for a roll...well that is good gaming.
Furthermore the idea that SC are an informal framework where you start the design process but not where you finish it is key. I've gone at skill challenges from a lot of different directions over the years. There are group checks where the whole group makes some of the rolls and there was a scene with the Players trying to cross a river where I had the players describe what they where going to do. How they planned to get over the river and after I (secretly) counted about 7 or so separate events that I figured would involve a roll I rolled the clock back and said - OK lets play through this. So Gladness starts by hammering a prong into the wall to tie the rope onto...OK Mike give me an athletics check...and then Slick Rick flew across and did the same thing on the other side and...
In this case for example my players described what they where going to do organically and only after the fact did I introduce the Skill Checks. By no means is this the only way to handle this however. The main key is to try and make sure that your players don't know that they are in a SC. This does mean calling on skill use outside of SC and you should do so a lot. Reality is more often then not the scene in question simply does not justify a SC but a skill roll will be fine. This helps disguise the SC's when they do come up. You don't want your players associating Skill Use with a Skill Challenge so pick your moments for putting one in. There are a LOT of times and places where they are simply inappropriate and getting good ones means learning to recognize when you'll end up with a bad one.
Thanks for the tips, Jeremy!
I wonder if SCs would have caught on better if the DMG had somehow described them without giving them a title. Like, if there was just a table of DCs for complex non-combat encounters, an explanation of how to use them, and a few examples. Granted, that wouldn't have made the original SC math any better, but I wonder...
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Thanks for the tips, Jeremy!
I wonder if SCs would have caught on better if the DMG had somehow described them without giving them a title. Like, if there was just a table of DCs for complex non-combat encounters, an explanation of how to use them, and a few examples. Granted, that wouldn't have made the original SC math any better, but I wonder...
Maybe. I mean ultimately WotC did do some series of articles in which interesting Skill Challenges where gone over. The big problem is that the enemy of Skill Challenges is any kind of hard and fast rules. What your really doing is designing a skill based mini game to cover some adventuring situation that is both interesting in its own right works with the adventure whether or not it succeeds (often due to the idea of fail forward) and can be explored with the use of a diverse assortment of skills. This is sort of what I mean when I say I've gone at them from all sorts of directions. I mean I'm roughly using the 4 or 6 before 3 rules (because the maths - they work) but am otherwise usually building a mini game to explore the advance the slave army or sneaking past a sleeping dragon or what have you.
Furthermore its worth pointing out I certainly have my failures even with quite a lot of experience. Heck part of that experience is in figuring out how to best get the heck out of a Skill Challenge that has gone sideways, preferably without my players knowing that they where ever in one never mind that I'm aborting it because its not working.
The problem with trying to put them into a rule book is that they really are so varied in how the DM can handle them that its hard to convey this. I mean thinking about it the last one I ran - where the PCs led their freed slave army into the war, was one where I violated my single most cardinal rule of Skill Challenges - never let your PCs know they are in one. My players figured out they where in one pretty quickly and I knew that in this case they would figure out they where in one. I just did not care for this particular scene the most important element was to role play them leading the Slave Army into the War. This was their 'We ARE the big damn HERO'S scene' of the campaign. I mean I had often been pretty mean to them early on and a lot of the time they had felt like small fish in a big pond but here I wanted to really convey that now they had made their mark on the world.
To role play that without it just being them listening to me blabber was the real goal and a Skill Challenge of them leading their army toward the climatic battle was just what the Doctor ordered. If they would always deal with the challenges of that march through having the best player handle the problem well that was no problem. After all the scene took place over the course of about a week. The PCs had more then enough time to discuss among themselves who would take point on dealing with the issues that came up.
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I think another problem with skill challenges is that they seem like a good fit for social encounters, but they're really not - since at the end of a failed skill challenge it's very hard, as a player, not to try and role play learning the missing information or persuading the reluctant ally.
Most of the really bad skill challenges in wotc modules were social, in my opinion.
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I am pretty sure the idea of skill challenges originated with an idea that an out of combat mini game could be fun (and why not!) and then an attempt was made to codify a certain amount of difficulty into a certain amount of xp reward. Which at its core is a pretty good idea. The issue however is that the implementation is just nearly impossible to nail in game, requires preparation, and at its worst it stifles player creativity.
I tried to use a version of the SC which amounts to players saying what they are doing and making skill checks. When roughly enough checks succeed to equal the difficulty that I am going for them you get the xp reward. But to be honest it is fairly arbitrary and not particularly engaging. Because at its heart it's about getting lucky with skill rolls to earn xp. Out of combat (or freeform as I described it above) is at its best when it is the players wits and imagination against the obstacle. And this is kinda the opposite of a skill challenge. I know you can bolt on auto successes etc, but in the end you just end up with a fairly unsatisfying experience in my opinion.
I ended up using the encounter building rules for an average skill challenge, at the players level generally, and awarded that amount of xp every half hour of solid roleplay/skill checks. Not scientific at all, but probably the most satisfying solution to me.
I hated skill challenges...and basically if I used them, did them like Tequila Sunrise describes above.
Outside of combat, 4e actually was the CLOSEST to the Original D&D type game I ran overall, once you didn't use SC as much as some.
It was more freeform, with people able to do just about anything they could imagine. At the same time, there is some order to it with skill checks in the relavant areas, and a SC thing was more like a guideline on how tough it may be if they use certain skills, but definitely not used as a limitation on what could or would be done.
Single Skill Checks were much better overall than Skill challenges.
My favorite campaign and campaign world in 4e however, was Dark Sun.
Loved running games in that campaign, and 4e was perfect for it.
4e seems more heroically oriented normally, even if that doesn't seem to fit the mold of Dark Sun...but you start as a hero in essence (and not as a mook) and go up from there.
Of course, in Dark Sun, even heroes are struggling just to make sure they can have water to drink tomorrow...so still pretty dark and gritty in that fashion.
I will start out by saying that I love 4th edition. However I will also note that the rule system does not suit all campaign types, and thats OK by me. What I would like from this thread is to distill some campaign types or themes that play to 4th editions strengths. The things that come to mind for me are:
1. Combat. The 4e combat system is great. Campaigns need to embrace this.
2. Low/No "Throwaway" Combats. The 4th edition combats can be lengthy. Combats should have some form of weight behind them, minimal "random" combats.
3. Strong story, but aimed at "Mythic" level of PC involvement. PCs should not be dirt farmers or blacksmiths in 4th edition.
4. Out of combat is freeform. Skill Challenges never worked for me.I would love more input from you all given that we have had 6 years to get to know what the rules can do.
4E combat is too ponderous and slow for my tastes. It's great for big set piece battles, but not so much for room-by-room dungeon crawls. I think what happened is that the designers looked back on all their best and most memorable combats from previous editions and tried to engineer a system that would produce that result all the time, not realizing that a fight with a couple kobold sentries isn't supposed to feel epic.
In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.
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4E combat is too ponderous and slow for my tastes. It's great for big set piece battles, but not so much for room-by-room dungeon crawls.
At first I thought so too until I came to the conclusion that I was doing it wrong with "balanced" encounters and trying to put an even amount of monster-types into these dungeons. For example, each room having 2 standard soldiers, 1 standard lurker, 1 standard artillery. It was pretty balanced but combats would then take 35 - 45 minutes. So I started throwing in LOTS of minions and maybe 1 standard, and the minions would often be a few levels higher than the PCs to make it more difficult, not to mention that I wouldn't differentiate which one was a minion and which wasn't, which tended to make the PCs pause when they were popping off Enounter and Daily powers. The frustration apparent on their face as they "waste" a precious resource on a minion is really priceless, muwhahahaha.
I think what happened is that the designers looked back on all their best and most memorable combats from previous editions and tried to engineer a system that would produce that result all the time, not realizing that a fight with a couple kobold sentries isn't supposed to feel epic.
Which is why, as a DM, it's important to gauge the relativity of your combat encounters. If you throw a few kobold sentries at the PCs, after 2 or 3 rounds and nothing significant has occurred, have the Kobolds retreat or surrender or *gasp* even reduce their HP to where the next shot kills them. The point of combat is to be dramatic, not just something to get into as a throw-a-way encounter. You can also run such an encounter as a Skill challenge. The point is to discern the reason for the Kobold's appearance and decide if combat is the best way to go about overcoming that obstacle. If the Kobolds are there protecting a way through a valley or bridge, can the PCs find a way around without engaging in combat? How about persuading the Kobolds to leave by bribing them or maybe looking for an alternate route.
Basically there are TONS of ways to get around a boring combat that will take 30 minutes but a lot of DMs are either too lazy to do something different or the Players aren't imaginative enough to find a simpler solution (as it pertains to 4E).
In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.
Well that's one way of handling it and I've done that before too. I also think people skip over the possibility of awarding story-based XP which helps alleviate the requirement for more combat to fill the XP gap.
4E combat is too ponderous and slow for my tastes. It's great for big set piece battles, but not so much for room-by-room dungeon crawls. I think what happened is that the designers looked back on all their best and most memorable combats from previous editions and tried to engineer a system that would produce that result all the time, not realizing that a fight with a couple kobold sentries isn't supposed to feel epic.In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.
I'm pretty much with you here outside of the 4E combats being too ponderous...though I'm not arguing particularly that they are not, for the most part, long. Just that this aspect does not bother me when done well.
There are elements one can do that get around this...lots of minions, very small numbers of elite and solo enemies that are powerful but have very few powers that, to some greater or lesser degree, get around the long combats.
There is also in some ways two 4Es to consider in this regards. Are your players playing Essentials at least predominantly or are their character choices predominantly AEDU based? High level AEDU characters have decks of powers and its going to take a while for each player to go through his combos every combat. Hence a DM with predominantly essentials based PCs, especially but not exclusively, at lower levels can run a pretty quick game.
If the PCs are predominantly AEDU there is no possible way the DM can really have a fast combat. The DM can make choices in the combat that will serve to significantly speed it up. However I would consider those options as something that is in the DMs toolbox. In effect you sometimes hand the PCs much quicker combats as a kind of change of pace - but most of the time our DM of higher level AEDU based PCs would do well to follow your advice and jetson the XP system in terms of leveling while refocusing combats to meaningful encounters.
When I run it, at least on my good days, I treat 4E like a Fantasy summer blockbuster in the form of a tabletop RPG. Watch Peter Jackson's Middle Earth Trilogy (or the Hobbit) and its perfectly clear that there are 1-3 combats between major plot points. That is pretty much what I'm looking for. 1-3 combats between each plot point and an adventure averages roughly 3 major plot points per level.
If the PCs are predominantly AEDU there is no possible way the DM can really have a fast combat. The DM can make choices in the combat that will serve to significantly speed it up. However I would consider those options as something that is in the DMs toolbox. In effect you sometimes hand the PCs much quicker combats as a kind of change of pace - but most of the time our DM of higher level AEDU based PCs would do well to follow your advice and jetson the XP system in terms of leveling while refocusing combats to meaningful encounters.
This is true for the 1st few encounters I suppose however it's been my experience that as people become familiar with their character's abilities, they quickly decipher which powers are good to use and when, cutting down on what people call "option paralysis". What I've found slows down play is Immediate Interrupts and Immediate Reactions. When PCs are always cutting in as the monsters are going (nearly taking a 2nd turn) it can bog down the game significantly. So what I've done is reduce the number of Immediate Reactions/Interrupts any character can have to 1-per tier (not including features like a Fighter's Combat Challenge or a Swordmage's Aegis power).
4E combat is too ponderous and slow for my tastes. It's great for big set piece battles, but not so much for room-by-room dungeon crawls.At first I thought so too until I came to the conclusion that I was doing it wrong with "balanced" encounters and trying to put an even amount of monster-types into these dungeons. For example, each room having 2 standard soldiers, 1 standard lurker, 1 standard artillery. It was pretty balanced but combats would then take 35 - 45 minutes. So I started throwing in LOTS of minions and maybe 1 standard, and the minions would often be a few levels higher than the PCs to make it more difficult, not to mention that I wouldn't differentiate which one was a minion and which wasn't, which tended to make the PCs pause when they were popping off Enounter and Daily powers. The frustration apparent on their face as they "waste" a precious resource on a minion is really priceless, muwhahahaha.
I think what happened is that the designers looked back on all their best and most memorable combats from previous editions and tried to engineer a system that would produce that result all the time, not realizing that a fight with a couple kobold sentries isn't supposed to feel epic.Which is why, as a DM, it's important to gauge the relativity of your combat encounters. If you throw a few kobold sentries at the PCs, after 2 or 3 rounds and nothing significant has occurred, have the Kobolds retreat or surrender or *gasp* even reduce their HP to where the next shot kills them. The point of combat is to be dramatic, not just something to get into as a throw-a-way encounter. You can also run such an encounter as a Skill challenge. The point is to discern the reason for the Kobold's appearance and decide if combat is the best way to go about overcoming that obstacle. If the Kobolds are there protecting a way through a valley or bridge, can the PCs find a way around without engaging in combat? How about persuading the Kobolds to leave by bribing them or maybe looking for an alternate route.
Basically there are TONS of ways to get around a boring combat that will take 30 minutes but a lot of DMs are either too lazy to do something different or the Players aren't imaginative enough to find a simpler solution (as it pertains to 4E).
In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.
Well that's one way of handling it and I've done that before too. I also think people skip over the possibility of awarding story-based XP which helps alleviate the requirement for more combat to fill the XP gap.
I can't tell you object to my dm style specifically, or to the very concept of houseruling in general.
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4E combat is too ponderous and slow for my tastes. It's great for big set piece battles, but not so much for room-by-room dungeon crawls. I think what happened is that the designers looked back on all their best and most memorable combats from previous editions and tried to engineer a system that would produce that result all the time, not realizing that a fight with a couple kobold sentries isn't supposed to feel epic.In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.
I'm pretty much with you here outside of the 4E combats being too ponderous...though I'm not arguing particularly that they are not, for the most part, long. Just that this aspect does not bother me when done well.
There are elements one can do that get around this...lots of minions, very small numbers of elite and solo enemies that are powerful but have very few powers that, to some greater or lesser degree, get around the long combats.
There is also in some ways two 4Es to consider in this regards. Are your players playing Essentials at least predominantly or are their character choices predominantly AEDU based? High level AEDU characters have decks of powers and its going to take a while for each player to go through his combos every combat. Hence a DM with predominantly essentials based PCs, especially but not exclusively, at lower levels can run a pretty quick game.
If the PCs are predominantly AEDU there is no possible way the DM can really have a fast combat. The DM can make choices in the combat that will serve to significantly speed it up. However I would consider those options as something...
I'm not running 4E presently, but if I did I would definitely follow the model of 1-3 combats per plot point with a minimal emphasis put on small, incidental combats. This worked out very well for the last 4E game I played in, and when those little skirmishes did pop up, wthey were impromptu and we eschewed the map and minis altogether which was nice.
That's why I like to decouple advancement from experience points, the primary source of which is usually killing things. It saves me some bookkeeping and incentivizes players to adopt a more creative approach to problem solving.
I can't tell if you object to my dm style specifically, or to the very concept of houseruling in general.In my opinion, the best thing to do with 4E combat is to jettison XP counting, and find some other system for leveling up PC's that doesn't rely on X encounters per adventure, then limit combat only to meaningful, high stakes encounters. So a room in a dungeon shouldn't be an encounter, a floor of a dungeon should be an encounter. Anything incidental, like a rogue sneaking up to a guard and slitting it's throat, can be handled via skill challenge.Well that's one way of handling it and I've done that before too. I also think people skip over the possibility of awarding story-based XP which helps alleviate the requirement for more combat to fill the XP gap.
On the contrary, I'm in very much support of houseruling and I think that removing the XP system is a very elegant way of breaking down the whole "10 encounters per level up" math that the system uses. It's arbitrary and I've seen people post very different ways to accrue XP.
I was also throwing in another way of doing XP in the form of Story Award points, something that not all DMs do. It's something that I've found in a lot of 3rd Edition adventures and only here and there with 4E ones.
This is true for the 1st few encounters I suppose however it's been my experience that as people become familiar with their character's abilities, they quickly decipher which powers are good to use and when, cutting down on what people call "option paralysis". What I've found slows down play is Immediate Interrupts and Immediate Reactions. When PCs are always cutting in as the monsters are going (nearly taking a 2nd turn) it can bog down the game significantly. So what I've done is reduce the number of Immediate Reactions/Interrupts any character can have to 1-per tier (not including features like a Fighter's Combat Challenge or a Swordmage's Aegis power).
My experience is that interrupts are a big drag of course and the new character issue is there as well but I'd add in Combos where one player goes about playing three to five powers, often somehow linked with each other using all their actions and an action point. Obviously one can't do that every round but all of them can do it at least once and it takes some time to resolve.
The other slow down with my group is group planning and plan retrofits. This I think is pretty much a function of how brutal I am. They are invariably trying to work out who is supposed to be doing what and then getting mad at the guy who was not paying attention or being forced to come up with a new plan because their old one just went south. Can't really blame them for this - I kill them, recently I kill them a lot.
Hence with my group it often looks like "Read out the initiative order Eric...OK so Bob Frank and Mark are going and then its going to be that Lich. Well the Cleric is down and we are all down to less then half hps so we need to get the cleric back up and some one needs to lay a condition on that Lich before its turn or we are dead. Any of you guys have something that could get the cleric back up? Who has something that will shut the Lich down?"
This sort of thing sends my players looking through their deck trying to see if they have the answers to the problems on the table in there somewhere and chances are they do. Everyone has a 'something' for the cleric and something for the Lich but more time is lost as all the somethings are evaluated until they decide who has the best something for the cleric and the best something for the Lich. Watch for this whole process to start again if the something for the Lich fails such as a bad roll or I've got some custom defence on the Lich they did not realize was there and it made their attack wiffle.
All that said I do see your point in that if one does go with a little house ruling one can reduce interrupts and run simpler monsters to get the game speed up in 4E. Doing Essentials is good for this as well.
Personally I prefer to handle this adventure side and go with long tactically interesting and dangerous combats but not very many of them per adventure. This works well as long as you make sure to stay out of traditional style super dungeons. Those obviously don't work. Dungeons can but they have to be encounter focused.
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I've always thought 4e was an awesome engine for a superheroes game. The way the dailies and stuff are presented make perfect sense for a comic book style game, and all of the pushing and battlefield movement represents, say, the Thing wiping the board with someone during "clobbering time".
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1. Combat. The 4e combat system is great. Campaigns need to embrace this.
2. Low/No "Throwaway" Combats. The 4th edition combats can be lengthy. Combats should have some form of weight behind them, minimal "random" combats.
These contradict each other.
You say the combat system is great and you want to minimalize or skip them.3. Strong story, but aimed at "Mythic" level of PC involvement. PCs should not be dirt farmers or blacksmiths in 4th edition.
So what features of 4e facilitate this? The character themes in Neverwinter and Dark Sun is one I can think of. I guess like the Paragon stuff is another.
I realize that the point of this thread isn't "4e is great and here are four reasons why", it's more "4e is great, let's brainstorm how a campaign that would play to 4e's strengths would look".
1. It's a skirmish game, so get good at building interesting encounters quickly or use roll tables for random terrain effects etc.
2. It's very susceptible to "My Precious Encounter"-syndrome, so go read "The Lazy DM" or some OSR stuff to make it less linear, or do the opposite: embrace it, play up the board-game:y ness and just give your players a linear strength of encounters as if you were playing Descent or something.
3. Embrace character themes like in the Neverwinter Campaign Setting or 4e Dark Sun and let the themes the players chose be relevant in how the campaign progresses.
I think 4e is an underrated, elegant game but I'll probably never play it again because there are plenty of editions I prefer over it.
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1. Combat. The 4e combat system is great. Campaigns need to embrace this.
2. Low/No "Throwaway" Combats. The 4th edition combats can be lengthy. Combats should have some form of weight behind them, minimal "random" combats.These contradict each other.
You say the combat system is great and you want to minimalize or skip them.
The first statement should probably read. "The 4e combat system is great for epic set-piece encounters."
Ah!
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I like combat as war and resource attrition in my fantasy/D&D game. 4E worked against these things most of the time putting it at odds with my personal gaming preference for fantasy/D&D. Though as a system I think it looks pretty good to go.
I think 4E style would be a natural fit for a Mass Effect game. If I wasn't so lazy and I had a lot more time, I'd re-skin 4E to Mass Effect. "Bloodied" becomes "shields down" and "healing surges" become "meta-gel application". I think the hard-coded roles would work wonderfully for the Mass Effect classes like solider(defender/leader), biotic(controller/striker), and engineer(controller/striker).
1. It's a skirmish game, so get good at building interesting encounters quickly or use roll tables for random terrain effects etc.
Not sure what the rush is? How about just expect that the DM sits down and designs good interesting encounters and if that takes him a good chunk of time...well that is the price for being the DM. I mean if I told you we were going to play a skirmish game and I had picked a battle for you to play out then you'd also expect that I put some effort into it right? My view is its the DMs job to put some real thought into designing interesting and meaningful encounters in a 4E game. That is not to say that DMs can't ever have a busy schedule or some such. Occasionally your going to need something fast...I suggest a Dragon with a Rider in this sort of case or maybe a Beholder. But these should be the exception not the rule. If you don't have time to make good encounters you need to switch editions or give up the DMs chair.
2. It's very susceptible to "My Precious Encounter"-syndrome, so go read "The Lazy DM" or some OSR stuff to make it less linear, or do the opposite: embrace it, play up the board-game:y ness and just give your players a linear strength of encounters as if you were playing Descent or something.
Well I have to admit that I'm certainly susceptible to 'My Precious Encounter' circumstances. After all I just spent 6 hours designing a battle in a Circus against the Evil Clown Cult and did a map in Gimp which featured the flying Trapeze, the Canon, A giant see-saw etc. and poison gas to punish anyone on the ground forcing the battle up onto the circus instillation. So now my players are going to play through this encounter dang nab it!
I design my adventures in one of two modes, either like Adventure Paths - by which I mean your not going to complete the adventure without triggering the key scenes and the battle with the Evil Clown Cult is going to be a key scene. The other might be more like your descent description though I'm not certain. However the gist is I have a certain amount of liberty to assume the obvious when writing encounters - if the PCs are traveling its assumed they stop at Inns and act in a normal manner that one does at an Inn unless its been previously established that the group has some quirk in this regard (a quirk that I can take into account when designing encounters - so if the PCs always sleep in the woods then I can make my encounters with that in mind).
Certainly its not the best system for a true sandbox campaign. Keep it story driven. Story driven based on the PCs backgrounds or previous actions is fine but story driven nonetheless.
3. Embrace character themes like in the Neverwinter Campaign Setting or 4e Dark Sun and let the themes the players chose be relevant in how the campaign progresses.
Good idea but keep your eye on the ball here and be ready to resolve stories and put new ones in place at appropriate times. The main issue you have to contend with is that stories in terms of character backgrounds and such come in two distinct flavours which, in a fantasy game, boils down to low level stories and high level stories. You might think of them as human centric stories and mythic stories. A human centric story is something like a love triangle or a plot twist where the Queens illicit lover is actually your father - anything that is about emotional relationships between people. This story just stops working when the PCs can offhandedly storm the Kings Castle. At this stage your average story about conflict between humans starts to fall apart in a fantasy RPG. On the other hand if your background is that your the last living member of your entire species - well that can function at higher levels.
Hence the kinds of story's appropriate for a characters background are different when the character is 3rd level and when they are 16th level. If the PCs story can evolve with the levels so much the better - though sometimes its just time to decide that this characters story has been told and its time to roll up a new character for the rest of the campaign.
Not sure what the rush is?[...]
I'm certainly susceptible to 'My Precious Encounter' circumstances. After all I just spent 6 hours designing a battle [...] So now my players are going to play through this encounter dang nab it!
You just answered your own question here.
The reason for “the rush” is so you don’t have to get so attached to any particular encounter or outcome, letting the adventure happen at the table, through the player’s choices, instead.I design my adventures in one of two modes, either like Adventure Paths - by which I mean your not going to complete the adventure without triggering the key scenes and the battle with the Evil Clown Cult is going to be a key scene. The other might be more like your descent...
I don’t see a big difference between those two modes since I think triggering key scenes and key battles is very “descent”-style:
“We’re here to experience what the DM has presented and we’re ok with that”My favorite mode on the other hand is more “We’re here to explore this sandbox and no-one at the table — not even the DM — knows what will happen.
In order to enable that with 4e requires some work.
Not to say that only my mode is valid. If your players love your carefully crafted clown combats and want to stay in that mode of play, it seems like you have a happy table and can keep going.
I’m just saying that the pattern of My Precious Encounter DM-ing has its advantages (quality in encounters) and its disadvantages (inflexibility in the DM, and a sense of “I slaved for hours over a hot stove so now you better eat this!” i.e. “follow this one path of key scenes or suffer”).
Given that, you can go in one of two ways:
• Either find ways to get encounters of good quality but quickly so you don’t feel attached to them or forced to make them happen (such as some random tables and other shortcuts) so you can run an open game, or
• Embrace the “linearity”, let the players know that that’s how the campaign is run, and have a great time with those parameters.
I've mostly played in games that has been in one or the other and for my own taste I love the more flexible mode.
you'll have to improvise or they'll bypass something you've designed
Then you're in MPE territory. Which, again, is a valid mode of play but not the only way. I love the more sprawling play when if players bypass something, that's just cool and good.
Thanks for the clarification! Yeah, that makes more sense.
I found 4E could handle most fantasy settings, except for worlds or stories with intricate high level magic with detailed spells. In theory magic rituals could fill the gap, but there is a lot of work to be done on that front. The rest of what 4E can or can not do is often compared to other D&D editions and specific mechanics that are offered. A lot of bias comes into play depending on what version of D&D you weaned your teeth on.
“We’re here to experience what the DM has presented and we’re ok with that”My favorite mode on the other hand is more “We’re here to explore this sandbox and no-one at the table — not even the DM — knows what will happen.
In order to enable that with 4e requires some work.Not to say that only my mode is valid. If your players love your carefully crafted clown combats and want to stay in that mode of play, it seems like you have a happy table and can keep going.
I’m just saying that the pattern of My Precious Encounter DM-ing has its advantages (quality in encounters) and its disadvantages (inflexibility in the DM, and a sense of “I slaved for hours over a hot stove so now you better eat this!” i.e. “follow this one path of key scenes or suffer”).
Given that, you can go in one of two ways:
• Either find ways to get encounters of good quality but quickly so you don’t feel attached to them or forced to make them happen (such as some random tables and other shortcuts) so you can run an open game, or
• Embrace the “linearity”, let the players know that that’s how the campaign is run, and have a great time with those parameters....
I see what your saying and I agree with the idea that the DM can try tricks and such to make 4E encounters on the fly allowing for a better sandbox experience.
My view however is that this style of play tends to highlight 4Es weak points while failing to emphasize its strengths. It can be done but its not the best system for this sort of game. Especially if its really spontaneous - by which I mean the DM has just no clue what antics his players are going to get up to every week.
4E, in my experience, works better when the DM is prepared for what is coming when it comes to fights. Interestingly its great at heavy sandbox so long as swords stay sheathed...the skill system is versatile and can be used for ad libbing pretty easily. Combat though, well not so much.
Hence I like the system for city adventuring...but not if my players might suddenly decide to rob the bank.
One can split the difference and 4E can be designed to work well in that circumstance. Hence the DM can provide a specific local or environment and allow the players to handle that however they see fit. This works because the DM can prep the environment ahead of time. You can get around some elements with pre planning as well. For example my Players are about to explore a 'lost world' island and that means lots of 'random' encounters with dinosaurs. My solution here is to design 12 good encounters with the dinosaurs ahead of time and I'll slot them in as needed.
But actual 'lazy DMing' style adventuring is not 4Es strong suit. Lazy DMing style encounters don't tend to have enough interesting moving parts and that tends to show off the fact that the system is pretty slow without highlighting its strengths in terms of the mobility and interactions of the powers. If the DM is just pulling encounters off the shelf and coming up with maybe a gimmick and a few terrain features the encounters ultimately tend to play out pretty much the same and that is not where 4E shines. In fact I suspect that it would tend to play out more the same in 4E then would be true in many other systems due to the fact that 4E is not a very 'swingy' system. Once the PCs get good at doing whatever it is they do in 4E it takes big events to throw them off their game and your not as likely to get that in an off the shelf encounter hence the vast majority of the time the PCs will not be forced out of their comfort zone and if you can't get them out of that you'll tend to loose them to routine and boredom.
I suspect that pure sandbox play will be something that 5E does much better then 4E and if that is what your looking for then my guess is 5E will be a better system for it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
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I would love more input from you all given that we have had 6 years to get to know what the rules can do.
It works well for folks who have played in an MMO, but have not played a tabletop game before.
Check out my 4e campaign at Bold Beginnings .
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I would agree. It synergizes really well, and actually promotes team work when people know how to optimize. Which, by the way, is easier and (depending on who is playing: see above) is more intuitive. It's even meant to happen just as it would be in an MMO (barring PVP, which of course is its own animal).
So emulating an MMO in many many ways seems to be the core strength of 4th edition.
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You can do a lot with 4e, but it's a question of effort for payoff. You have to ask if the amount of effort required to do the alternate playstyle worth the payoff received compared to using a different game system?
I mean, you [u]can[/u] play a game of espionage and courtly intrigue that's 95% roleplaying, but if you're not using any of the mechanics of 4e are you still playing 4e?
4e lends itself to heroic action games. The PCs are the big brave heroes and begin as heroes rather than everymen with potential.
Heck, at level 1 you belong to the "heroic tier" and are expected to be saving towns or small regions. You're not a caravan guard or fighting rats in a basement.
And it works well with worlds that are high magic and high fantasy. There are a lot of races, classes with magic, and magic items in 4e.
You can remove most of the magic items from play or use the treadmill of magic, but it's hard to have just rarer magic items (as magic items don't stack with inherent bonuses). And it's hard to get away from the fantastic with devil people, races that teleport at the drop of a hat, people made of crystal shards, and the like.
Combat is a big part of 4e. All your powers are based on combat, so without regular combats leveling up and gaining gear (the main forms of character advancement) become unimportant and less appealing. A good 4e game needs to have regular combat, with several encounters over the adventuring day.
There is a skill system, but the math on that isn't particularly solid and the numbers quickly become obscene.
With that in mind, I think the ideal game is one that is just a hair over the top. Lots of big cinematic fights in interesting locations and action set pieces. More Hollywood action and less gritty realism. More gun kata and wire fu and less Die Hard and Jason Bourne.
Dungeon crawls and exotic locations to be explored are also good. Anything where you can have 3-6 encounters and thus avoid the nova factor.
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Nova factor?
Dailies plus action points.
If a party only has one fight a day it's two or three rounds of them dropping dailies like they were nothing. The first round becomes the entire party using a daily, action point, second daily.This can obliterate even a difficult encounter.
Because players get everything back overnight, travel encounters where you have one encounter every other day, don't work as well because the party is always at 110%.