D&D 4E Let's Talk About 4E On Its Own Terms [+]

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 1, 2024

4e overall compares well with other games of a similar ilk released since 2008. It's hard to say there's a game that has topped it, really. 13a is ok, a good number of people like PF2, etc, but none of them has really hit the mark. Strike! seems to be a decent attempt but it doesn't seem like it got much mindshare. I also think 4e is just plain got better thematic chops than any of the others.

James Gasik · Apr 1, 2024

As much as I love 4e, even now that the ability to go back and play it is once again viable (where it wasn't, even with just books, for a long time, due to the lost online content like the Class Acts articles and other patches), I probably wouldn't now.

The reason being, as much fun as I had with it, I fully recognize the system had flaws and warts, and needed to bake for a few more years. Some elements were added that simply felt like power creep (I'm looking at you, Themes!) and others fell by the wayside (Rituals), or worse, were introduced and never fully fleshed out (the Martial "rituals", I can't recall what they were called).

What's really needed is a 4.5 edition that isn't Essentials (so, 4.75, I guess?), and that's certainly more work than I'm willing to put in. But hopefully, one day a game will drop into my lap and I'll say to myself "By Crom, it's 4e but better!". I tried 13th Age, but it proved to be a bad fit for my play groups.

And maybe I'll be able to talk people into playing it, lol.

W'rkncacnter · Apr 1, 2024

James Gasik said:
As much as I love 4e, even now that the ability to go back and play it is once again viable (where it wasn't, even with just books, for a long time, due to the lost online content like the Class Acts articles and other patches), I probably wouldn't now.

The reason being, as much fun as I had with it, I fully recognize the system had flaws and warts, and needed to bake for a few more years. Some elements were added that simply felt like power creep (I'm looking at you, Themes!) and others fell by the wayside (Rituals), or worse, were introduced and never fully fleshed out (the Martial "rituals", I can't recall what they were called).

What's really needed is a 4.5 edition that isn't Essentials (so, 4.75, I guess?), and that's certainly more work than I'm willing to put in. But hopefully, one day a game will drop into my lap and I'll say to myself "By Crom, it's 4e but better!". I tried 13th Age, but it proved to be a bad fit for my play groups.

And maybe I'll be able to talk people into playing it, lol.

i mean, there's orcus. i haven't had the chance to play it, but it's free and interesting.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 2, 2024

James Gasik said:
As much as I love 4e, even now that the ability to go back and play it is once again viable (where it wasn't, even with just books, for a long time, due to the lost online content like the Class Acts articles and other patches), I probably wouldn't now.

The reason being, as much fun as I had with it, I fully recognize the system had flaws and warts, and needed to bake for a few more years. Some elements were added that simply felt like power creep (I'm looking at you, Themes!) and others fell by the wayside (Rituals), or worse, were introduced and never fully fleshed out (the Martial "rituals", I can't recall what they were called).

What's really needed is a 4.5 edition that isn't Essentials (so, 4.75, I guess?), and that's certainly more work than I'm willing to put in. But hopefully, one day a game will drop into my lap and I'll say to myself "By Crom, it's 4e but better!". I tried 13th Age, but it proved to be a bad fit for my play groups.

And maybe I'll be able to talk people into playing it, lol.

I don't think anything is really lost. There's a fully complete compendium. RC has fully patched core rules, etc. CB requires some work but it's certainly possible to set up, and it's actually Very hackable.

Manbearcat · Apr 2, 2024

I still play the hell out of 4e. Its still the only game in the market that is even close to doing what it does (I've run Strike(!)...lovely game, but, despite being derivative, it doesn't do what 4e does). IMO, easily top 3 greatest TTRPG systems ever designed...and that claim is unbelievably durable to this day.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 2, 2024

W'rkncacnter said:
i mean, there's orcus. i haven't had the chance to play it, but it's free and interesting.

Haven't really looked at it. Is it in a playable state? How compatible is it with bog standard 4e?

W'rkncacnter · Apr 2, 2024

AbdulAlhazred said:
Haven't really looked at it. Is it in a playable state? How compatible is it with bog standard 4e?

it looks pretty playable to me - it is a finished product.

i think it's mostly compatible with 4e, though classes work a bit differently (they pull from generic power lists instead of having their own - similarly to daggerheart, actually). the main difference i noticed is that the XP values for leveling up differ between orcus and base 4e (it takes about as much XP in orcus to go from level 1 to 30 as it does to go from level 1 to 29 in 4e). i'm not sure i know orcus or 4e enough to really answer this question for you, though.

again, it is free, so the only real cost for looking through it yourself is time, hard drive space, and bandwidth, and i assume if you have a working computer you have more then enough of the latter two to spare.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 2, 2024

W'rkncacnter said:
it looks pretty playable to me - it is a finished product.

i think it's mostly compatible with 4e, though classes work a bit differently (they pull from generic power lists instead of having their own - similarly to daggerheart, actually). the main difference i noticed is that the XP values for leveling up differ between orcus and base 4e (it takes about as much XP in orcus to go from level 1 to 30 as it does to go from level 1 to 29 in 4e). i'm not sure i know orcus or 4e enough to really answer this question for you, though.

again, it is free, so the only real cost for looking through it yourself is time, hard drive space, and bandwidth, and i assume if you have a working computer you have more then enough of the latter two to spare.

Given that I have an entire 4e-like of my own I probably won't spend too much time on it, but I think it's useful to look at his powers a bit.

Tigris · Apr 3, 2024

AbdulAlhazred said:
Haven't really looked at it. Is it in a playable state? How compatible is it with bog standard 4e?

I have looked through Orcus in depth. It is pretty much fully compatible with 4E there are some changes/differences:

- Some words of mechanis are changed to make sure to run not into copyright issues (just a name change not mechanic)

- Classes each have 2 "power lists" they can choose powers from to kind of remove "overlap" in the sense that you dont need 2 similar/same abilities in 2 different classes. (Like cleric and warlord who both have support/healing powers being Strength main with cha secondary). 4E had some attacks pretty much identical in different classes this is not the case here. HOWEVER, this makes classes a bit more complicated

- Character themes cost feats to use. So instead of taking free feats you can spend some of them to get a character theme. This handles the "character themes are additional power" concern and

- Overall its a bit less well balanced than 4E (ignoring the weak 4E classes), but 4E also had quite a bit of errata and one can of course remark that here a single person worked on it and not a big team.

Over all it is compatible with 4E and playable, with both a GM and a player book. So if people want more 4E material, they can use Orcus!

Also small question: What is your retroclone?

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 4, 2024

Tigris said:
I have looked through Orcus in depth. It is pretty much fully compatible with 4E there are some changes/differences:

- Some words of mechanis are changed to make sure to run not into copyright issues (just a name change not mechanic)

- Classes each have 2 "power lists" they can choose powers from to kind of remove "overlap" in the sense that you dont need 2 similar/same abilities in 2 different classes. (Like cleric and warlord who both have support/healing powers being Strength main with cha secondary). 4E had some attacks pretty much identical in different classes this is not the case here. HOWEVER, this makes classes a bit more complicated

- Character themes cost feats to use. So instead of taking free feats you can spend some of them to get a character theme. This handles the "character themes are additional power" concern and

- Overall its a bit less well balanced than 4E (ignoring the weak 4E classes), but 4E also had quite a bit of errata and one can of course remark that here a single person worked on it and not a big team.

Over all it is compatible with 4E and playable, with both a GM and a player book. So if people want more 4E material, they can use Orcus!

Also small question: What is your retroclone?

Heroes of Myth and Legend This is mostly up to date, although there are some other callings in earlier versions that I haven't updated (well, a couple of the ones here are pretty rough, there need to be a lot more feats and probably tweaks to a lot of the existing ones). The current design for defenses isn't super well solidified either. I just need to playtest a few options. I did use 3 4e defenses at one point, but nowadays basically anything CAN be a 'defense', the real question is deciding which ones are effective in which situations.

D&D 4E Let's Talk About 4E On Its Own Terms [+]

AbdulAlhazred

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James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun

W'rkncacnter

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AbdulAlhazred

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Manbearcat

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AbdulAlhazred

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W'rkncacnter

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AbdulAlhazred

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Tigris

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AbdulAlhazred

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