How the hell do you feel about a dragon minion -- a 15 HD monster with 1 HP? Does it work better in play than it sounds? I don't think I can wrap my head around the concept of a dragon or demon that can be looked at and dies -- supposed terrors of the game that are completely wussified. Are there controls for what monsters can be minionized? That'd make it more palatable.

Please don't take this as an endorsement of 4E, but here's the idea for minions:

Conan wades through battle hacking left and right and the bodies pile up around him. Even those he just "wings" (and doesn't outright decapitate) turn tail and flee for their lives.

This is a minion. You don't have to "kill" them, they are just out of the fight. A morale check without the roll. They're in it until the get hammered.

What creatures become minions? Whatever I, as the PC, can look down at and spit at. For most your life it is peasants and orcs, and later on when you are really the man it might be a gnoll or a weak ogre. But if ever you are looking down and spitting at dragons ... well then a dragon is a minion. Not because it is "wussified" but because you are a quasi-deity at that point, or god.

Edit: Does it work? In the games I played at cons, it has. You hack through the weaklings to get at the big bad dude at the end. They can still stop you and stick you, but chances are they won't be around to try it again next round.

Ahhh not defeating an enemy.. that takes me back to a planescape game where the players (all 3rd ed players I hasten to add) decided that because the mercykillers weren't admitting to something they were convinced the faction had done... they'd attack their factol... while he was surrounded by his buddies... in their own faction house...  

Much hilarity ensued, to be sporting I let them take down a few of em but in the end.. 6 pcs vs hundred of armed guys... armed to the TEETH I hasten to add.. ahhh.. good times.. good times.
The got locked up, then the real adventure began.

Though.. that was also the game where the elf player tried to convince me she could use urine soaked rags as lock picks.. Seriously...

Oh dear oh dear.

Personally, I get a sick sort of pleasure out of throwing noobs into the planescape setting. they typical D&D mentality of "it looks evil! KILL IT!" and "It's moving! KILL IT" just doesn't apply, it amuses me a great deal to have random monsters hand them their asses. Does this make me a cruel and evil gm? lol.

I recall a game I played in once where we met a ghost. Now, he was far far too strong for the PCs to fight but it never came to that because well... my mage magic missiled him out of his hiding place and then chatted to him for a bit (after appologising and asking if he could kindly NOT possess their buddies and then hide in statues)
The guy was fairly happy to help for a price so a deal was struck and the adventure continued.
The next group to do the same adventure apparently... weren't so diplomatic. 2.. hours... of combat later... they had to kill their barbarian after the ghost possessed him and attacked the others hahahaha. Oh dear.
I do enjoy two day cons just to see how different two groups of people take on the same challenge. (according to the gm, we were meant to talk to the ghost though I don't think he expected us to strike a deal with him, oops)

and sometimes it's totally fine to run away! we ran away from an entire villiage of wights at one point... oh dear god. Hundreds... of ... undead.... *twitch* we totally shouldn't have taken the shortcut through the town. We ran... like girls.. far far far away. Oh yes. sometimes... sometimes the gm urge to kill the players... it's too strong hahaha. (had we actually NOT OPENED the sodding town hall we wouldn't have had to deal with a sea of zombie ghoul things so I suppose it was our fault... I told people I said, let's BURN IT... but nooooo. Hahaha. )

I do like a challege, level specific encounters are all very well and good but sometimes.. sometimes you just want your players to have to hang on by the skin of the nails and come up with some truely ingenious tactic to deal with the problem. It's totally satisfying for the players as well and makes for a good change of pace from the usual hack, slash, hack.. ooo that's Kobold 86 for the barb.. etc etc.

(i've totally gone on a rant again haven't I? Oh man... )

Zenfinite wrote:So, I  look in B1 and see how many encounters are in the different kobold caves.

...

Remember the ogre cave in the original B1 module? Well, with the new rules, I am able to stick a young white dragon in there, and when the party reaches level 3, it's gonna be a HELLUVA combat.

You mean B2 (sorry for nitpicking).

Played at a con a couple weeks ago, and our 4E badasses ran for our lives from a rolling tide of chittering, feral rats. So not all 4E encounters are defeatable. (Naybe this one was, but we sure couldn't figure it out. After the first PC went down beneath the tide and didn't come up, the rest of us knew what to do... Run!)

Been reading through the Player's Handbook.

The words Uber and Munchkin keep coming to mind and role-playing is kept at a bit of a distance.

I haven't played much 2e, I thought the kits were making the characters too powerful. Didn't touch 3e for more than one game session and never played 3.5

I haven't made up my mind about 4e as a board game, but this isn't 1e, not even close, not even with a 10foot pole and some iron spikes.

You choose race and class before you role for abilities. Actually rolling the dice is discouraged, and you cannot use characters who have rolled abilities for the RPGA (what the hell?). At first level characters start with class features, racial traits (which combined with dragon and demon (tiefling) characters looks pretty absurd) feats, at will attack powers (2 per day) encounter attack powers, daily attack powers and with 5 1/2 thousand eps they are 5th level.

It takes 18,001 eps in 1st edition to get a fighter to fifth level, and he doesn't start with even a partial extra attack per round till 7th level.

Talk about powergaming (and not in any kind of good sense). There is an entire world of roleplaying that 4e is never going to touch. The sense of characters being all too mortal, the thrill of overcoming odds when you didn't have a gazillion little powers to throw at a problem, the use of strategy, ingenuity, tactics, diplomacy, running away ( a lot) when faced with a foe too strong to fight head on.

More power does not mean a better game, it simply means missing out on a character building up their strength and having to face challenges that 4e players are never going to imagine. It also speaks to me of a much, much lower span of interest in the game. At these rates of level increase and at the power levels players attain without having to struggle for them, these campaigns can't be meant to last very long.

This isn't a good recipe for a role-playing game, but it might be an interesing board game. Have to see how the battles run, but for actual roleplaying I will stick to 1e.

Well, maybe Uber might be slightly correct.

But 4e isn't implicitly any more munchkin than, say, a superhero RPG when compared to a 1960's spy/espionage RPG.

Certainly 4e is higher powered, though. Maybe that's the term you want. It's kind of like starting a 1e game off at 3rd level or higher. (Notably, that isn't munchkin ether. It's just starting off at a higher power level.)

And it's probably also true that 4e doesn't fit the pulp swords & sorcery genre as well as prior editions of the game.

I don't think you are really looking at this from a 1e perspective. 4e isn't like starting out at 3rd level 1e at all and the way the power increases with every level is completely out of control.

1e was not, as designed, any kind of power game. It could become so to some extent with an influx of magic items, but 4e is beyond anything the most power hungry 1e munchkin ever imagined.

But saying that the game starts at 3rd level and every level jumps a few levels compared to 1e, that is exactly what is wrong with this as a core rules system. The option to power game is one thing, but having the core rules as nothing but a power game completely emasculates D&D.

The point is to experience those low levels where every fight is a risk, where characters die, sometimes like flies. Saying that some brand new PC is a hero, that is missing the core experience of 1e. No wonder players become weary of a campaign every 6 months or so. The Hero is the character that manages to survive, that goes into the adventure green and raw, sees his companions fall around him, who does heroic things with whatever strength he has, who down to his last bits of health jumps into the fight, who faces that first monster with nothing but a short sword and smile and a twenty sider and a six for damage.

My first campaign lasted from junior high through highschool. My next went on for five years with a slightly changing group of players. That was 1e, but this stuff seems designed for low attention span gamers who become bored unless their characters can wrestle Thor for his hammer after a few months of play.

4e is a distraction not an RPG system. It is shiny and new at the moment but how many levels of gauntlet can you play till the novelty and fun wears off and the players realize they are striving for nothing, rolling dice and facing cardboard challenges.

AD&D was about sharing an exciting story, living it, fighting through it sure, but earning every step foreward where experince bought you a little better chance to take a hit and a little better chance to make one, or access to maybe that one spell a little more powerful than you had before. AD&D was a challenge, and a challenge shared, and a step together into imagination and adventure.

4e is a lot of bangs and baubles, but it misses the point, it denies the best part of AD&D, it takes away the challenge, the story, the shared adventure, and offers in return power that means nothing because it is poured out into the players laps and not earned.

 
I'm curious how you feel powergaming-good-sense-wise about playing a one-shot 1e module using 7th level characters, or starting a 1e campaign using 5th level characters. How would that be any worse than 4e's method?

5th-level (and higher) 1e characters still have to face a variety of really tough challenges. I can imagine how the same might be true of 4e's first level characters.

Sure, neither sort of character is going to die in one hit from a sword, but that's far from the end-all-be-all of role playing. And there are plenty of challenges that can give the equivalent sort of "oh my gosh we're really in trouble" sort of feeling.

These are meant to be leading questions. I think you're onto something in that there is (IMO) a part of 4e that blunts the "in trouble" situations, but it isn't the starting power level for PCs.

I'd never start newbie players out at anything but first level. There is nothing like starting the game weak, seeing characters die with one shot, having that d4 HP mage who has cast his spell trying to figure out what to do. There is an old Heinlein novel called Tunnel in the Sky that expresses this very well. The character gets dropped into a survival course and can bring any weapon he wants. He brings a knife. The knife isn't going to run out of bullets, it is not going to encourage him to go looking for trouble, and as a weapon and a survival tool it does both jobs well. 1e is like that. Start a player out at 1e with a free rolled odds and sodds character. Make him roleplay his part, live his character, run from most fights, but if he lives, just getting to that second level is miraculous. That little bit of hit points, the little bit of better odds at hitting, that next spell, those are treasures you take away from the game. A magic weapon, a pile of treasure, those are nothing but numbers on paper, but sharing an adventure, fearing for that one strike that can kill you, those are real, real feelings you take away, real stories you share, real imagination, and in that shared bit of imagination real adventure.

I remember singing fighting songs with my group as we jumped into a fight, my character dying in the final battle but surviving long enough so that the rest of the group fought through and won, thinking our way through encounters and challenges, drinking in taverns and listening for rumours, sinking into the mud of a swamp and fighting leeches that tried to drag us down and the mage setting off the swamp gas to kill them and nearly killing all of us too... I remember a dozen ways of searching for traps, dressing as orcs to slip into an encampment, arguing with gnomes to join us against an evil wizard... I remember finding that first +1 long sword that glowed, and man that was magic...

6 month campaigns, jumping from level to more powerful level, and missing simply everything that the game can be.

At its core 4e misses the point of an RPG. It should just be a boardgame, tactical fantasy miniature boardgame, but it is a damned shame as an RPG.

This may be what WOTC thinks people want, but if this 4e is all they ever know as D&D they are missing something that fired the imagination of a generation. They are missing everything an RPG really has to offer,

JasonZavoda wrote:
I'd never start newbie players out at anything but first level. There is nothing like starting the game weak, seeing characters die with one shot, having that d4 HP mage who has cast his spell trying to figure out what to do. There is an old Heinlein novel called Tunnel in the Sky that expresses this very well. The character gets dropped into a survival course and can bring any weapon he wants. He brings a knife. The knife isn't going to run out of bullets, it is not going to encourage him to go looking for trouble, and as a weapon and a survival tool it does both jobs well. 1e is like that. Start a player out at 1e with a free rolled odds and sodds character. Make him roleplay his part, live his character, run from most fights, but if he lives, just getting to that second level is miraculous. That little bit of hit points, the little bit of better odds at hitting, that next spell, those are treasures you take away from the game. A magic weapon, a pile of treasure, those are nothing but numbers on paper, but sharing an adventure, fearing for that one strike that can kill you, those are real, real feelings you take away, real stories you share, real imagination, and in that shared bit of imagination real adventure.

Nothing changes in 4E except the rules if the DM is good enough.  I'm sure a good DM can create a campaign where everything you state is part of the experience, including being frightened for your life at low levels.  To say that our experiences with D&D were somehow more authentic or real because it was old school reaks of Back in the Day syndrome.  I personally knew a lot of lame, waste of time campaigns back in the day.  I'm sure there are a lot now.  But I don't think 4E (or 3E) for that matter are to blame.  Lazy and unimaginative DMs and Munchkin players are to blame more than any rules system.  We can't wear the rose-colored glasses all the time...a lot of 1E modules blew chunks.  A lot of the new stuff is brilliant.  It's just all in context.

It's like saying Ditko and Lee were the pinnacle of Spiderman comics, and everything that came after just never had the same excitement because the imagination wasn't there.  Personally, if someone's thing is McFarlane's Spiderman, that's cool with me.  I'm a Romita man myself.  But whatever the arguement, Ditko and Lee aren't going to be writing Spidey anymore.  If 4E gets younger people interested, that's good.  I think one good thing 3E did was introduce the game to a younger generation that weren't going to have 1 & 2E on their radar. Now a lot of them are jumping ship to Castles & Crusades, or even back to 1st edition. How cool is that?

Anything that gets them in the door is fine with me.  But my problem is that I'm not sure 4E was the best method to get them in the door.

I remember singing fighting songs with my group as we jumped into a fight, my character dying in the final battle but surviving long enough so that the rest of the group fought through and won, thinking our way through encounters and challenges, drinking in taverns and listening for rumours, sinking into the mud of a swamp and fighting leeches that tried to drag us down and the mage setting off the swamp gas to kill them and nearly killing all of us too... I remember a dozen ways of searching for traps, dressing as orcs to slip into an encampment, arguing with gnomes to join us against an evil wizard... I remember finding that first +1 long sword that glowed, and man that was magic...

Again those magical moments can all happen now if the DM is a good one.  Nothing you stated is edition specific.

6 month campaigns, jumping from level to more powerful level, and missing simply everything that the game can be.

Shoot, if I was a DM for 4E, I'd simply slow down experience to make the game last longer.  Nothing in the rules against that.  But the day of campaigns that last 5 years are over, just as a lot of things.  Unfortunately today's kids want every campaign to be a mini-series with a beginning, middle and end....witness the Pathfinder series which basically takes a group from 1st-10th level through six linked adventures.  Which, honestly, I wish we had back in the day because I didn't write a lot of my old stuff, just strung letter series modules together myself.  Pathfinder stuff would have been awesome!

At its core 4e misses the point of an RPG. It should just be a boardgame, tactical fantasy miniature boardgame, but it is a damned shame as an RPG.

Once again, call it "Mini-Wars"....everyone would be onboard.

This may be what WOTC thinks people want, but if this 4e is all they ever know as D&D they are missing something that fired the imagination of a generation. They are missing everything an RPG really has to offer,

Unfortunately it IS what people want...younger people than us, raised in a different time with different entertainment.  A lot of people playing now were born in 1981 and never got a chance to play 1E (or 2E for that matter).  To tell them "No, you can't like that game because it's not REAL", when that's all they've known, is wishful thinking.  Like telling a computer gamer now "No, you CAN"T like World of Warcraft, here are the old TSR gold box games, they ROCKED when I was your age...."

People playing now will have just as much fun without knowing what they are missing.  It's the nature of the beast.  And, at best, they will soon get bored of super powered gaming and perhaps investigate it's roots...which may lead them someday to 1E or 2E.  

Mike B.

I do have to say that this has been the best 4e discussion that I've seen so far.

My impressions after three or four sessions playing a wizard:

Combat takes too long. I like throwing dice, but for whatever reason, combat in 4e seems to take longer than in 3.5. It's not uncomfortably long, just too long.

Combat is too tactical. You need to know what the PCs can do, and more importantly, how they can do it together. The party is more than the sum of its parts, and it will take practice and experience to learn how to play combats effectively.

Skill challenges seem forced. When faced with a skill challenge, players are picking the skills with the highest ranks, and twisting them to fit the challenge at hand - regardless of how ridiculous it seems. Roleplay feels very forced.

Equal footing. I know this is something that WotC has worked hard to address, but I liked having unbalanced parties. I've never played a 3.5 game that went past level 10, so never saw the widening gap between spellcasters and fighters. But then again, in LotR, Gandalf was the most powerful character by leaps and bounds... no one really had a problem with that, did they?

Nerfing skills and spells. I liked having a long skill list. If I wanted a wizard who was good at tying ropes and had many professions under his belt, and it made sense for the character, why can't I? Spells (or I should say non-combat spells) are greatly reduced, and take away from non-combat roleplaying opportunities.

Those are the issues that have come up so far - after a hand full of sessions. Unfortunately, I can't think of great praises to counter what looks like a negative first impression. I'm going to keep playing and see where the game leads me.

I don't own any of the core books, so if I've totally misinterpreted some rule or anything, it's unintentional. Of course, this is all my very subjective opinion, and what I don't like may be right up your alley... I'm getting the feeling that in a month or two 4e just isn't going to be the game for me.

Afraid of the Dark wrote:Maybe it helps to explain my perspective by admitting that I've never played a mature (for lack of a better word) 1e campaign. I've played a bunch of Erol Otus covered Basic & Expert, but I was very young at that point. And apart from three 1e one-shots that I can recall, all of my junior high through college campaigns were with other systems. My first real mature, long-term AD&D campaigns used 2nd edition. So maybe that taints my viewpoint, or at least helps explain where I'm coming from.

I don't like using terms like munchkin or power gamer to describe certain play styles, because they are typically intended as derogatory.

I've played a bunch of campaign styles, from low-magic, to combat-centric, to player-skill-based, to horror, to theater-ish, to flashy, to conventional fantasy, to high-power, and I see the merits in all of them. They all offer something that the others don't, and that's cool. There is no one true point to role playing games. (Unless maybe "having fun," but I don't even think that's necessarily true.)

So while it's arguably true that 4e gives you more mechanical stuff to write down on your character sheet than 1e does after N sessions of play, which does affect the feel & style of the game, it's *not* true that 1e (or any other system) offers everything an rpg has to offer.

Yes, it's true that players who only experience 4e will never experience various qualities unique to 1e (or Call of Cthulhu, or Rolemaster, or WEG Star Wars, or whatever), but it's also true that 4e can offer some great qualities and compelling role playing experiences that 1e can't offer.

So while it's a shame that some 4e players will never experience unique 1e qualities, it's just as much of a shame that some 1e players will never experience unique 4e qualities.

While I can understand any given player's preference for a system, or desire to honor a game's history, or honor the role playing industry's ability to innovate, I also understand that none of those preferences are objectively superior.


All that said, I don't currently have a desire to play 4e. But I do plan to liberally borrow interesting ideas and learn from the things it offers.

There are some things you can't unexperience.

You can't watch the Lord of the Rings and only after that read the book and have the same experience, because the imagination of the man who made the movie has now replaced your own. Every character has now been colored and painted and filled in with some actor, the actions dictated by some other mind, the grandeur limited to CGI and special effects. But if you read the book first the characters are perfect because your imagination creates the perfect character, the greatest heroes, the most terrible villains, the most enchanting beauty. The words on the page, simple black scrawls on white, draw from the depth of your mind and soul an entire world, perfectly fitted and entirely your own.

The simplicity of 1e allows the imagination to expand to fill in the contours of the game. The generalized characters, fighter, thief, mage, cleric, are vague, their powers uncomplicated especially at the start, forcing the players to use their imagination to expand them, to learn, to adapt, to think in order to overcome obstacles and challenges. And combat was not the focus of the game, roleplaying was. Not diceless shared story telling, or acting, but roleplaying as a group, not a tactical combat unit.

But start a player out with 4e and they have missed this oportunity to experience the simple, straightforward game, the roleplaying game that created legendary experiences and draws people back across time to the days which stirred their imagination. Someone experienced in 1e can play 4e and expand upon it. Someone who has started with 4e is never going to be able to go back and with a fresh and unexperienced eye see what their own imagination can do, what tracks they can carve in the wilderness, what it is to start out weak and gain strength, to fear your characters death with every stroke of a sword.

4e as D&D is a bastardization of a roleplaying game, a misbegotten descendant of the original experience. It will probably become a fine boardgame, but it is an overpowered munchkin-candy nauseus feast of an RPG.