Anyone play 4th ed.?

[Borgholio]

It's possible to get around this problem in an unorthodox manner by just having everyone play a spellcaster. There are enough alternate class features and prestige classes in 3.5 that you could easily have an all-wizard party without just being all wizards - something like a Cleric/Conjurer for the divine spellcaster, a Warblade/Transmuter for the fighter, a Rogue/Illusionist for the thief and a Sorcerer/Evoker for the arcane spellcaster.

We played a Star Wars RPG based on 3.5 rules. There weren't wizards exactly but Force users, Jedi, etc... The last game I played had one guy playing a gunslinger (ranger) while everybody else played Jedi or different varieties of Force users.

It was a stunningly boring game.

In my experience, a party with variety is going to be more fun than with all melee or all magic-users. The most fun I ever had was with a "traditional" party of a Human Barbarian, Dwarf Fighter, Elf Wizard, Cleric, and my Ranger.

[Civil War Man]

I have only played a few one-shots with 4th Ed, but from the impressions I've gotten it seems like its main problem is that it tried to fix the glaring flaws of 3rd in a manner that introduced different glaring flaws.

No one can really deny that the power gap between classes in 3rd Ed was excessive. Some classes are just flat-out better than others in every single way. You could optimize a Fighter to Hell and back, for example, and it'd still be possible to be overshadowed in combat by a reasonably competent Cleric, with the added bonus of the Fighter being largely useless outside of combat, while the Cleric would still have access to a variety of tricks. 4th appears to have dramatically narrowed that power gap, but the way they did it seems to have also reduced the relevance of anything that takes place outside of combat.

[White Haven]

A lot of the problems people blame on 4th edition trace down to inexperienced GMs, and they just become obvious because 4th is designed to run on autopilot if it has to. As a result, you have a lot of total newblood GMs who pick it up, and less-newblood players end up disappointed. Personally, I'd rather see a lot of inexperienced GMs fumbling their ways through 4e campaigns to get a feel for GMing in a fairly forgiving environment, but that's just my personal preference. Essentially, 4th has systems in place to provide a framework for nearly any situation, but that doesn't mean you have to use them, or use them verbatim.

[Mr Bean]

A lot of 4e is about using it creatively rather than relying on the crunch to carry your through. 3.5 was always an arms race of the GM handing out enough magical doodads or allowing enough martial splatbooks to keep the fighter even with a naked standard 3.5 spellcaster. A great GM can make any system good except the various Fallout knockoffs (Because fuck any system that lets you get perfect accuracy) but 4e and it's ilk are more about using it purely as a framework rather than the underlying system like 2nd edition aimed for. 2nd Ed was not about creating a coherent whole but rather providing rules for anything you could care to try to do. Because of this often times it could break as different authors system clashed. 3.0 suffered from little playtesting (Witness level 2 clerics who could get +4 to any stat at will for hours a day, by lvl 5 they could make it all but permanent) while 3.5 suffered from lack of cross talk. There were monster's made that would be extremly deadly until the next spell book containg add on book came out reducing X Y or Z to joke status.

[Jub]

A lot of 4e is about using it creatively rather than relying on the crunch to carry your through. 3.5 was always an arms race of the GM handing out enough magical doodads or allowing enough martial splatbooks to keep the fighter even with a naked standard 3.5 spellcaster. A great GM can make any system good except the various Fallout knockoffs (Because fuck any system that lets you get perfect accuracy) but 4e and it's ilk are more about using it purely as a framework rather than the underlying system like 2nd edition aimed for. 2nd Ed was not about creating a coherent whole but rather providing rules for anything you could care to try to do. Because of this often times it could break as different authors system clashed. 3.0 suffered from little playtesting (Witness level 2 clerics who could get +4 to any stat at will for hours a day, by lvl 5 they could make it all but permanent) while 3.5 suffered from lack of cross talk. There were monster's made that would be extremly deadly until the next spell book containg add on book came out reducing X Y or Z to joke status.

Even if you do run 4e with some creative flair you have major issues. Combat boils down to the conga line of death and using ability a to shove an enemy into damaging ability b. It used to be so bad they made it so an enemy could only take damage once from each source because people were playing enemy volleyball through walls of fire... It might be balanced, but any system the encourages playing pass with your enemy is stupid.

[Mr Bean]

Even if you do run 4e with some creative flair you have major issues. Combat boils down to the conga line of death and using ability a to shove an enemy into damaging ability b. It used to be so bad they made it so an enemy could only take damage once from each source because people were playing enemy volleyball through walls of fire... It might be balanced, but any system the encourages playing pass with your enemy is stupid.

My read on 4e is most damaging abilities that are lingering only are "end your turn in it" or "move into it" and you can't do forced movement to the same spot you started, you have to commit to a direction with a slide/push/or whatever. Yes you can use synergy to stake pushes/pulls and encounter powers were a mistake 5e fixed even if they made it worse by making some of them to at wills.

Let me give you some examples of 4e fights I DM recently.

1. Underground fort with a bridge across a lower room with stairs at the end ala Skyrim you know those rooms. At the base of the stairs down to this area they fought two mobs who linked tower shields and used total defense to jack ac/reflex defenses up to the point they had a 20% chance at best to hit them while two other mobs used reach weapons to attack over the shields and they slowly advanced up the stairs towards the party.

2. Once they broke the shield wall part 2 of this fight where mobs were hiding behind pillars of the bridge and the fight started with two party members being shoved off the bridge to fall fifteen feet and needing at least 15 squares of movement with a difficult terrain space to prevent running to get back to the fight. As the two melee characters went off the side suddenly the cleric, wizard and ranger had to hold the line while the barbarian and rogue had to run back. The next round of combat the Wizard went off the side as well.

It's much more grid based than if I used 2e, 3.5 or Shadowrun or Mutants and Masterminds or what have you.

[Jub]

Even if you do run 4e with some creative flair you have major issues. Combat boils down to the conga line of death and using ability a to shove an enemy into damaging ability b. It used to be so bad they made it so an enemy could only take damage once from each source because people were playing enemy volleyball through walls of fire... It might be balanced, but any system the encourages playing pass with your enemy is stupid.

My read on 4e is most damaging abilities that are lingering only are "end your turn in it" or "move into it" and you can't do forced movement to the same spot you started, you have to commit to a direction with a slide/push/or whatever. Yes you can use synergy to stake pushes/pulls and encounter powers were a mistake 5e fixed even if they made it worse by making some of them to at wills.

Let me give you some examples of 4e fights I DM recently.

1. Underground fort with a bridge across a lower room with stairs at the end ala Skyrim you know those rooms. At the base of the stairs down to this area they fought two mobs who linked tower shields and used total defense to jack ac/reflex defenses up to the point they had a 20% chance at best to hit them while two other mobs used reach weapons to attack over the shields and they slowly advanced up the stairs towards the party.

2. Once they broke the shield wall part 2 of this fight where mobs were hiding behind pillars of the bridge and the fight started with two party members being shoved off the bridge to fall fifteen feet and needing at least 15 squares of movement with a difficult terrain space to prevent running to get back to the fight. As the two melee characters went off the side suddenly the cleric, wizard and ranger had to hold the line while the barbarian and rogue had to run back. The next round of combat the Wizard went off the side as well.

It's much more grid based than if I used 2e, 3.5 or Shadowrun or Mutants and Masterminds or what have you.

I know that you can't use a slide ability to shake a guy back and forth through the wall, but if you have two characters you can do some stupid shit. Picture a fight with say 15 feet of space between them and a mob is next to one of the characters and between them is a wall of (insert damage type here). Character one uses a slide ability to send the mob through the wall of damage and into range of the other character. Then the other character uses his ability to send the mob back through the wall and past a threatened square of the first character. The mob has now taken damage from the initial slide, the wall, the slide back, the wall, and an OA. This is stupid and the friend, enemy, friend, enemy, friend... conga line of flanking is also really stupid.

[White Haven]

Here's the thing...the vast majority of moves that let you get enough push/slide distance to pull that off without standing in a sea of fire yourself are kind of pants with regards to actually doing damage. So you're having multiple players sacrifice their turns to let Wall of Fire do good damage...or they could just uncase their own arsenals and do it themselves. Sure, you could do what you described... but it requires multiple people (three-ish at least) with very specific setups to pull off, and at that point you could have just used three people doing damage on their own to accomplish similar results without having to worry about 'did we set this up juuust right' and such.

Of course if you do pull it off, why shouldn't an enemy take fuckloads of fire damage from a couple of bored badasses playing Pong through a sea of fire?

[Jub]

Here's the thing...the vast majority of moves that let you get enough push/slide distance to pull that off without standing in a sea of fire yourself are kind of pants with regards to actually doing damage. So you're having multiple players sacrifice their turns to let Wall of Fire do good damage...or they could just uncase their own arsenals and do it themselves. Sure, you could do what you described... but it requires multiple people (three-ish at least) with very specific setups to pull off, and at that point you could have just used three people doing damage on their own to accomplish similar results without having to worry about 'did we set this up juuust right' and such.

Of course if you do pull it off, why shouldn't an enemy take fuckloads of fire damage from a couple of bored badasses playing Pong through a sea of fire?

It feels really gamey and that's the issue. When have you seen a fight scene in anything, outside of maybe a comedy, where two (or more) guys are just batting somebody back and forth? How many fights have you seen devolve into a conga line of flanking bonuses? Tone should drive the rules, the rules should be transparent to the feel of the game and this is where 4e fails.

[Gunhead]

Here's the thing...the vast majority of moves that let you get enough push/slide distance to pull that off without standing in a sea of fire yourself are kind of pants with regards to actually doing damage. So you're having multiple players sacrifice their turns to let Wall of Fire do good damage...or they could just uncase their own arsenals and do it themselves. Sure, you could do what you described... but it requires multiple people (three-ish at least) with very specific setups to pull off, and at that point you could have just used three people doing damage on their own to accomplish similar results without having to worry about 'did we set this up juuust right' and such.

Of course if you do pull it off, why shouldn't an enemy take fuckloads of fire damage from a couple of bored badasses playing Pong through a sea of fire?

It feels really gamey and that's the issue. When have you seen a fight scene in anything, outside of maybe a comedy, where two (or more) guys are just batting somebody back and forth? How many fights have you seen devolve into a conga line of flanking bonuses? Tone should drive the rules, the rules should be transparent to the feel of the game and this is where 4e fails.

This type of stupid shit will keep happening as long as the combat pretty much is built around spells and spell like abilities, allowing you to force the opponent do something without a built in counter. Not a specifically a 4th ed. problem, it's been this way basically from the get go. Well to a lesser degree in your basic D&D when all the fighter classes could do was roll to hit and roll for damage.

-Gunhead

[Covenant]

I liked 4th ed because the focus on combat covered most of the crap I needed the book to cover, and they left the roleplaying aspects free for me to deal with at my leisure. I think a lot of people looked into the book and said "It's all combat! Lame! Now it's World of Warcraft the RPG!" instead of saying "Thank goodness they finally removed all this ridiculous overcompensation about what I can or cannot do with the roleplaying sections!" like I did. I realize a lot of that is player preference.

The conga line of death is bad design, but it is present in oh so many games with strategic combat and multiple units. Picking it out as a design flaw in 4e is just dishonest. 3rd had it as well, as does any other iteration or reinvention of D&D with flanking. That could have been solved by removing the flanking bonus but I don't think people would have liked that.

So I liked the 4th ed stuff overall. Everyone felt useful in combat, and outside of combat I didn't really need a lot of rules to run the show or play my role. I think a lot of players have a really wonky perspective on things, or they're just really used to a kind of game that I find foreign. So many rules randomly scattered around, with so many ifs and buts and what ifs to deal with? Why so many rules for the out-of-combat sections anyway? Those are the parts with the greatest emphasis on player roleplaying and storytelling. Get the rules out of there (those idiotic skill challenges didn't help in 4e either) and clarify the ones for the parts where I can die due to arbitrary dice rolls.

Anyway, it's always about playing pretend to some degree. Where I feel like 3.5 is playing pretend with people who have made up a lot of insane rules just for the hell of it, and 4e feels like an actual game, many people will feel like they've lost something in the jump from 3x to 4. For the life of me I just can't see why.

[Jub]

There are a lot of very bland and samey abilities that cover a few archetypes but nothing that, as built feels cool. Games can be about the way you put all the rules lego together, but in 4e building a character is just following a flow chart picking one ability at certain levels. No choice in where to place skill points, less freedom in multiclassing, less races, less templates, less feats, less spells. They took so much away in the sake of balance and left everybody feeling too equal. When everybody is special, no one is.

Some examples of campaigns you can'r run in 4e. A low powered peasant game, a heroes of horror style game, a ghost walk game where one or more characters are currently dead, a dark sun game. I don't even need to do more because the cuts they made to the system run so deep that I would reach the character limit before I finished listing things you could do in 3.x that you can't do in 4e.

Sure different roles hard different things they did, but when it came to picking a class within those roles they really didn't offer a lot of variety. Plus, even the biggest of daily powers doesn't have a description that stays with me. Nothing in the core books had any lore, any soul. Even he pages went from being styled to look like a tome to being this sterile thing that could have contained sci-fi rules for all the fantasy feelings it inspired.

Plus out of combat roles should exist. Social encounters with at least a loose framework of rules should exist. I can hear you wondering why already? The why is because some classes and characters should be built to sweet talk the noblewoman or swindle the shopkeeper and they shouldn't pass or fail due to the charisma of the player any more than an out of shape player should have to do a push-up to resolve an attack. The wallflower might really like the social aspect of the game as an escape even if he's not good at RPing it and having dice roles to go off of can help that kind of player to get better at it. Stop being such a free form elitist and consider the fact that rules were put into non-combat sections of the game for a reason and weren't cut to help the free form RPers anyway.

The fact is Wizards can't do interesting game balance (when it comes to D&D) for shit, they never have. It didn't matter as much when a character could shine out of combat. Hell they even made fighters cool with the BoNS release and if 4e had gone that way and left mages alone, left skills alone, and just made the least cool class amazing I'd have been all in. Instead the proceeded to ear fuck the game and they shed players like a dog shaking of water because of it.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

It's very difficult to design around these problems while keeping a class system. What's a fighter to do but twiddle his / her thumbs outside of combat? How is a diplomat going to contribute to a pitched battle? Is everyone else supposed to sit around circle-jerking each other while the rogue is sneaking about? This is compounded by the fact that non-combat solutions to challenges are usually resolved in a few dice rolls while combat typically takes a lot of time to resolve, leaving the non-combatants with nothing to do for the majority of the gaming session.

In my d10 system there is a battle of wits that plays out similar to combat and players who don't put any points into social skills can screw everyone over because a skilled opponent can drag the weakest character into the conversation. Any character that ignores stealth skills can likewise cause the whole party to be spotted. This forces players to either design more well-rounded and interesting characters or hang back and miss out on a lot of the gameplay. This also results in more realistic characters, as I don't think there are a lot of veteran soldiers who can shoot well but have no idea how to avoid being spotted by the enemy.

The swiss army knife wizard is cured with magic that is "dumb", meaning that you can magically pick a lock, heal a wound, throw a fireball, etc., but you have to actually know what you're doing or it won't work. Telekinetic manipulation of tumblers is better than using a lockpick so you'll get a bonus, but if you don't know how a lock works it's not getting picked. This means that mages need to specialize and have non-magic skills for their spells to be effective and they can no longer handwave away any obstacle while using the other hand to wipe their asses with the other classes' years of training and a telekinetic third hand to diddle or jack off said character's significant other.

I really don't know how to solve these issues without chucking the class system, but maybe there are other solutions I'm not aware of.

[Jub]

It's very difficult to design around these problems while keeping a class system. What's a fighter to do but twiddle his / her thumbs outside of combat? How is a diplomat going to contribute to a pitched battle? Is everyone else supposed to sit around circle-jerking each other while the rogue is sneaking about? This is compounded by the fact that non-combat solutions to challenges are usually resolved in a few dice rolls while combat typically takes a lot of time to resolve, leaving the non-combatants with nothing to do for the majority of the gaming session.

So you can't play a charming swashbuckler of a fighter/rogue who never went in for the typical rogue skills but grabbed some skills in acrobatics, climbing, and social skill? Nor can you play a diplomat who's skills as a bard aid the entire party? Or he could play a Marshall and kick ass in combat and have speaking skills to inspire an army or awe a foe. When the rogue is sneaking the DM should do other things to keep the rest of the party busy, any good DM already has to know what to do when the party splits and the rouge sneaking isn't the sole cause of that.

In my d10 system there is a battle of wits that plays out similar to combat and players who don't put any points into social skills can screw everyone over because a skilled opponent can drag the weakest character into the conversation. Any character that ignores stealth skills can likewise cause the whole party to be spotted. This forces players to either design more well-rounded and interesting characters or hang back and miss out on a lot of the gameplay. This also results in more realistic characters, as I don't think there are a lot of veteran soldiers who can shoot well but have no idea how to avoid being spotted by the enemy.

So you penalize characters for having flaws and want everybody to play towards a bland kind of middle? Medieval soldiers didn't sneak up, you couldn't with an army and baggage train following yo. Some skirmishers (read rogues) would be sneaky flankers in a battle though. Likewise not everybody should be a face, hell some characters should downright suck at it to the point where fixing it should be either a long term chore or just throwing good points after bad.

The swiss army knife wizard is cured with magic that is "dumb", meaning that you can magically pick a lock, heal a wound, throw a fireball, etc., but you have to actually know what you're doing or it won't work. Telekinetic manipulation of tumblers is better than using a lockpick so you'll get a bonus, but if you don't know how a lock works it's not getting picked. This means that mages need to specialize and have non-magic skills for their spells to be effective and they can no longer handwave away any obstacle while using the other hand to wipe their asses with the other classes' years of training and a telekinetic third hand to diddle or jack off said character's significant other.

Yeah, some spells are kind of dumb, but a wizard who's spending time and money trying to be everything is wasting resources. Knock is great, but better is having the rogue do it so you can save the spell slot/scroll/wand charge for another day. The same goes with Clerics that can do the same things. I'd like to see casters forced down slightly narrower more focused paths so that you could have a mage instead of a rogue that has stealth based spells, charms, illusions, and ways to bypass traps but has only limited offensive spells. Perhaps making magic schools like skills and give mages points to add to them at each level could help? A mage less skilled in offensive magic could either have weaker versions of the same spells, more trouble getting them to work at all, or a bit of both.

[Covenant]

I'd normally not rejoin because I'm not trying to make anyone have to defend their views, but I think you wanted me to respond so I'll try to give some more comments. I'm not going to specifically respond to things that I think are just opinion. For example:

There are a lot of very bland and samey abilities that cover a few archetypes but nothing that, as built, feels cool.

I think that's pretty clearly just an opinion. I found lots of very cool things working from within the system. Anyway.

Hell they even made fighters cool with the BoNS release and if 4e had gone that way and left mages alone, left skills alone, and just made the least cool class amazing...

I think mages were a huge problem, and I think the skills were also a mess--these two problems often came in pairs because the people with skills were often the characters with the spells. Mages and spellcasters in general were so astoundingly versatile that they overshadowed other classes to a ridiculous degree. It's silly to say they should have "left them alone" even if the changes made pretty much thrashed them as a unique game experience. I think that's worth complaining about--fighters and other kinds of "always on" classes really benefitted from the powers system, while an enforced uniformity failed to address the uniqueness of a wizard.

But I think the wizards and spellcasters still caused so much strain on the system that it would have made more sense to find fun exceptions than to just weld them into the same framework. They were given some differences, but I think every unique archetype should feel like a unique archetype. Unique doesn't mean better, though, and that's usually what it came to.

Know that a lot of this would come down to the way the GM wanted to play things out, but it was always a chore as the levels got higher. I preferred lower-level campaigns and low-magic campaigns for this reason.

Games can be about the way you put all the rules lego together, but in 4e building a character is just following a flow chart picking one ability at certain levels. No choice in where to place skill points, less freedom in multiclassing, less races, less templates, less feats, less spells. They took so much away in the sake of balance and left everybody feeling too equal. When everybody is special, no one is.

A lot of this was due to the relative newness of the setting, not a deliberate attempt to ruin the fun of people. They added in a truckload of new races, including some kind of animate... crystal... thing? There were even some rules for playing monster species. I think 4e actually had a lot more than I see most campaigns allowing.

Lego-like character construction asks a lot of players. Most people I ended up playing with do not know how to optimize a character even slightly, and the 3.5 rules for character creation asks a great deal from players who may not know how badly they're messing things up.

I also take special exception to the "when everyone is special nobody is" thing. The logical end to it is "...so some people should just not be special." That's a lousy design ethos. Now I don't disagree that not everyone needs to be good at the exact same things, or else nobody ever can feel special, but the quote is really a pretty terrible one, and feels like sour grapes from people who used to see themselves as "special" and now no better than the non-special people. I am not saying that is your motivation so don't take direct offense, I just wouldn't use that to buttress an argument.

But back to the major point, I don't think the newness of a system (ie, not having updated all old content to the new systems) should be used to say it sucks. New systems need time to have books issued for them. If you pick up a 3.5e Player Handbook and not the hundreds of other books that support it then I imagine it would feel a bit light compared to the entirety of the 4e supplement catalog. It's really not that much of a flowchart--but at least people have a variety of options who had very few before. But that's probably getting into a lot of opinion.

Some examples of campaigns you can'r run in 4e. A low powered peasant game, a heroes of horror style game, a ghost walk game where one or more characters are currently dead, a dark sun game. I don't even need to do more because the cuts they made to the system run so deep that I would reach the character limit before I finished listing things you could do in 3.x that you can't do in 4e.

I'm not sure these are legitimate. Not only is there a well-reviewed Dark Sun campaign book for 4e anyway, but I don't even know how to address a "ghost walk" game or a peasant game. Commoners were basically just a non-class with the barest of support, and warriors/adepts/experts just watered down examples of what their core classes were. You could easily run one of those in 4e by just playing the game at level 1 with classes that have no Powers. That's essentially what a commoner was. Level up a commoner a few times and they become just a lousy warrior, so really, if you want to run a commoner game just let your people play level 1 classes without benefits until they get enough XP to graduate up to adventurer status.

As for Heroes of Horror, I think that's a really bad example. You could totally run a 4e horror campaign without much trouble at all. The rules for the 3.5e Heroes of Horror are available online so I invite you to look if you don't have your book handy, and the majority of the book's grist it is about setting the proper tone. That's roleplaying stuff for the DM and players. The rules are pretty light and again just reinforce the mood. Aspects like Taint make the transition just fine, and while you can't use the creatures 1:1 with the new system, an effective Heroes of Horror system relies on tone and establishing a proper horror contract between the players and DM. Half of the Heroes of Horror rulebook is just new classes and monsters with about 6 pages of new feats and like 20 pages of new rules. Most of these rules are things like fear effects (easily done in 4e) the taint system (similarly easily done) and the tainted locations (nothing that cannot be done in 4e) so i really don't see what the impediment is except that it requires a bit of effort to update the monsters or that it has a list of incompatible classes... none of which, really, are essential to running a horror campaign. Do you need to be a Dread Witch to get into the horror mood?

I understand that 4e requires a lot of adjustments, but it's a whole new system, that's kinda par for the course.

Plus out of combat roles should exist. Social encounters with at least a loose framework of rules should exist. I can hear you wondering why already?

I'm actually not against out-of-combat roles, actually. My complaint with the strict framework of most D&D iterations is that it got "solved" too easily in a few ways and took the fun out of stuff. Again this is the problem with the Caster-Warrior dynamic. The first has a wealth of options both in and out of combat, and many of these options are very effective and fun. The latter comparatively sucks both in and out of combat, and has few options to boot. This is a problem that wizards has repeatedly failed to fix (even in 4e despite their intentions) and which somewhat plagues all of D&D at the core. I think the Paladin shows us a good path out of that mess, where it's a class that certainly feels suited to a player who wants to play a heroic knight, and also has (if not the intelligence) the charismatic presence necessary to have a legitimate (and thematically appropriate) out of combat role. Why the fighter continues to exist at all is kind baffling. Either he should get a heavier wisdom focus (4e somewhat did this depending on build) to become a 'straight-shooting soldier' type of character or they should just make them all barbarians.

Rogues, bizarrely, have a similar problem. They're skill monkeys but a lot of their usefulness gets sidelined too easily by a variety of pretty common situations. Without prestige classes being added into the mix they and monks share a really weird spot that needs the GM to offer up situations where they can actually put their skills to use. Otherwise a wizard is going to be able to pull off some similar things.

The wallflower might really like the social aspect of the game as an escape even if he's not good at RPing it and having dice roles to go off of can help that kind of player to get better at it. Stop being such a free form elitist and consider the fact that rules were put into non-combat sections of the game for a reason and weren't cut to help the free form RPers anyway.

Were they cut as an assault on the wallflowers or something? I think the rules were cut because a majority of them were redundant and unnecessary. It wasn't to help one faction or another, I think their removal helps the GM best of all.

If the Wallflower wants to seduce the shopkeeper but cannot come up with a line cheesy enough to get a laugh and nod of approval from the GM then the same system still applies: throw your dice, match your diplomacy or bluff or whatever is most relevant at the moment, and see the result. Stripping out a bunch of the clutter from that simple, simple system does not in any way diminish the ability for a group to run social encounters in a fun and interesting way. But because the fluidity of all the non-combat role playing elements is so much greater it really does no good trying to simulate all those encounters with a battery of unnecessary cludge. It doesn't help anyone to have a million skills when a smaller number does the same thing anyway. If someone is playing a "smooth talking" character then it makes sense to them, and the group, and probably to the GM, for them to be able to schmooze the shopkeeper. But if they are lacking the right skill or they just botch a roll it probably feels kinda awkward and annoying to the group. This is the power of the GM--to say "okay, you do this" and ignore the need for those rolls, but I think the lack of all those rules freed people from looking at them.

It's similar to some of the things I'm facing in that Boardgame thread you commented on. If I call a Gem a "victory point" everyone will pay attention to it. If I just call it a Gem they'll try to judge worth and not care as much. Labels, and rules, matter. Now if a 6th Ed comes out and includes sections labeled "What If..." and give optional rules for things like social encounters where they are handled like verbal fencing with a lot of mental positioning and dice rolls and whatnot then I say that's absolutely awesome and give them kudos. But just dragging the legacy mechanics of 3.5e along for the ride doesn't do anyone a bit of good on the social front. At best they offered a framework that was optional and often ignored by most of the GMs I knew because they were unnecessary or handicapped clever and interested players from playing along... and at worst they absolutely straight-jacketed groups the same way a to-hit roll can turn simple encounters into a farce.

But I still respect your opinion that 4e was a trainwreck--lots of people think that way. I think it's too bad that people got so angry, but that's the way things go. It wasn't the right direction anyway, but I do hope it helped move the system away from some of the old bad habits.

[Covenant]

Yeah, some spells are kind of dumb, but a wizard who's spending time and money trying to be everything is wasting resources. Knock is great, but better is having the rogue do it so you can save the spell slot/scroll/wand charge for another day. The same goes with Clerics that can do the same things. I'd like to see casters forced down slightly narrower more focused paths so that you could have a mage instead of a rogue that has stealth based spells, charms, illusions, and ways to bypass traps but has only limited offensive spells. Perhaps making magic schools like skills and give mages points to add to them at each level could help? A mage less skilled in offensive magic could either have weaker versions of the same spells, more trouble getting them to work at all, or a bit of both.

I'd rather see magic more democratized and make mages the specialists in it the way swinging a weapon is a skill anyone can do and some just focus more on it. D&D undervalues a lot of really important utility spells in terms of the hand-waved costs, cast-times and restrictions. But because of the way their spellcasting system works they have very little flexibility to fix it. Obviously breaking away from the Vancian Magic would help a lot--fire and forget magic has real handicaps when it comes to keeping wizards flexible, especially when spells unlock as you advance in levels and then (roughly, barring metamagic) get stuck in levelled magic slots rather than being kept as "charges" in an item or limited by actually expendable pre-packaged material components.

Really this is the only problem with a wizard, even the god-mode wizards and clerics. If their power came less from the eccentricity of the setting and more from some mitigatable bit of hassle you would see them having to specialize a bit more without becoming "The Better Rogue" at any point.

[Purple]

I'd like to see casters forced down slightly narrower more focused paths so that you could have a mage instead of a rogue that has stealth based spells, charms, illusions, and ways to bypass traps but has only limited offensive spells.

D&D 3.5 already does that with the various sorcerer like classes (Sorcerer, Beguiler, etc.). And those happen to be my favorites as well. It's just that they left the wizard in when they really shouldn't have. If it were me, wizards would be reserved for high level NPC's only. The beguiler in particular is exactly what you described. A rogue/spellcaster with rogue skills and illusion/utility spells but no summoning, damage or anything like that.

[Civil War Man]

You know, for a while on this board, whenever there was a vs debate of an "X versus Batman" variety, there would be people that would argue that if Batman got any amount of time to prepare for the fight, he would automatically win. That's essentially the problem with 3.5 Wizards. Assuming there are no restrictions put in place, Wizards have the ability to arbitrarily solve any scenario they face if they are given any prep time.

While the obvious answer to this is to place some restriction on the Wizard (through levels, lack of time to prepare, lack of access to magical devices, or even just adding so many locked doors that the Wizard would have to memorize Knock in all of their spell slots in order to bypass them), it highlights one of the weird things about 3.5. Namely, that the onus of balancing the game is placed entirely on the player and the DM. The player has to agree to not try to exploit game breaking combos, the DM has to restrict the player's access to those combos, or both. And there are so many potential combos for a class like Wizard, that sometimes it's easier just to ban the class if there is any doubt in either the DM's ability to control its options or the player's ability to self-censor.

[Gunhead]

You know, for a while on this board, whenever there was a vs debate of an "X versus Batman" variety, there would be people that would argue that if Batman got any amount of time to prepare for the fight, he would automatically win. That's essentially the problem with 3.5 Wizards. Assuming there are no restrictions put in place, Wizards have the ability to arbitrarily solve any scenario they face if they are given any prep time.

While the obvious answer to this is to place some restriction on the Wizard (through levels, lack of time to prepare, lack of access to magical devices, or even just adding so many locked doors that the Wizard would have to memorize Knock in all of their spell slots in order to bypass them), it highlights one of the weird things about 3.5. Namely, that the onus of balancing the game is placed entirely on the player and the DM. The player has to agree to not try to exploit game breaking combos, the DM has to restrict the player's access to those combos, or both. And there are so many potential combos for a class like Wizard, that sometimes it's easier just to ban the class if there is any doubt in either the DM's ability to control its options or the player's ability to self-censor.

Which basically highlights how poorly the system was designed in the first place. Magic in D&D is just handled as a get power for time X, there's no effort required really. Better and more varied magic systems, those that can be called actual systems, usually have some type of path or prerequisite for learning that all important fireball. I do think some of the problems come from the poor handling of magic as a phenomena in a setting. Consider this, which would grant the wielder more power, the ability to chuck fireballs or the ability to control weather? The answer is.. weather control. Hell, if magic existed today, you could rake in some major moolah by having the ability to control weather and by that you could wield substantial power over the non magic users. Fireballs... meh.. I guess controlling fire would be good.. if I wanted to be a magical fireman, that would be useful but not as nearly as bankable as weather control. This type of thing does bug me in every setting that has high magic, why would a magic user go crawl around a dungeon to find.. money. You can, kind of sorta make sense of it if the user is not that powerful, but once he gets sufficiently powerful, I mean, barring some powerful magical artifact that helps him or his agenda some way, why bother? I suppose that would work as a balance in a too. GM: "Your wizard is level X, he is going to start doing more important shit than hauling bags in some hole. Player:"Whiiine! I want to fry more orcs!". GM:"Tough cookies". But that would be mean.

-Gunhead

[Covenant]

This situation is not aided by the GMs and Players nearly always ignoring some of the natural inhibitors on Wizardy behavior... and to be honest, not also helped by certain editions helping them.

Limited access to certain spells and possible spellbook destruction is rarely touched upon because it could be crippling to the wizard or frustrating to come back from, but enfeebling and gear bypassing (touch attacks for example) are a common aspect of many monsters and situations. It is very hard to enfeeble a wizard to the point that their spells are nonfunctional. Given the ranged aspect as well it can be hard to immobilize them out of it too. Silence can do the trick but how many common campaign enemies silence? There are also metamagic feats that overcome a lot of these, and yet there are very few analogs on the other side. Not that I need to yell things in Latin to swing an axe anyway, but metamagic helps alleviate some of the barriers that wizards face, which is nice for them but makes balancing them difficult again.

Another big issue, and one I address when I GM, is spell components. When a warrior wants to throw a javelin I naturally question him when he has never purchased one. "It costs 1 GP, that's a negligible cost," he could say as he throws javelin after javelin. "We can just assume I have some whenever I need to use them. Plus I have the Eschew Javelins feat and I prepared these Javelins earlier today." And then I'd let him do it.

No of course I don't, everyone knows you pay attention to that stuff. Do you have any rope currently? "Well it only costs..." no, you don't have rope, it's not retroactive, it's not automatically in that tiny little Adventuring Pouch. You don't have caltrops whenever you need them, or a grappling hook, or a common lamp, or a shovel. But you will always have as many live spiders as you need because it's in the material components bag.

Now, granted, the material components are absolutely stupid--and they were way stupider before--but they can offer an excellent way of reducing the wizard's ability to pull shit out of a hat unless he has enough bat shit to pull out of his hat and cast whatever spell he needs. I think the components should not only be bigger and more interesting but add a degree of flavor to the wizard and not just add a stupidity tax. Carrying Javelins around because you want to throw them adds to your character's feel and makes them a bit different. Wizards who carry a million little glass vials and really hate being anywhere near danger because they're worried they'll lose a whole day's worth of spells because of component destruction have more character than the one that always has it "in the bag" and never needs to do anything other than point fingers.

It also makes things more fair. Encumberence is stupid but most people agree that tracking encumberence is important. Wizards are rarely encumbered much, but if they have to carry around a few hefty components and carefully think about what they want to bring with them ("Bring the iron powder horn for casting fire magic, or leave it behind and just take a few Yew wands for illusion and counterspells?") and it gives the GM a larger and more important thing to mess with that doesn't have to be the spellbook in order to reign in things or add a bit of delayed gratification to the game. Maybe you lose your powderhorn and are stuck casting simple Gandalf Magic with enchanted pebbles and voice modification until you can re-access not an 'expensive' component you lost. This is different than a Gem or a Pearl which you presumably by at the local Convenience Store and go to cast your magic, or even retroactively say "you had" and then spend at the time of casting. This asks wizards to treat some of their spells like equipment choices because, while THEY are flexible and can do wondrous things in their magic lab, they cannot carry a full wizard's tower with them down into a cave and will have to choose which staff, which cauldron, which heavy stones and potions they want to take with them.

Maybe the ability to whisper incantations and make a flaming pinecone doesn't seem so ridiculous for a wizard when you consider that Gandalf didn't need to smear it with bat guano first.

Anyway, don't bring back 2e material components. But I totally like letting players eschew "dramatically appropriate" simple items and giving wizards bigger and more meaningful restrictions on their spells.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

It's very difficult to design around these problems while keeping a class system. What's a fighter to do but twiddle his / her thumbs outside of combat? How is a diplomat going to contribute to a pitched battle? Is everyone else supposed to sit around circle-jerking each other while the rogue is sneaking about? This is compounded by the fact that non-combat solutions to challenges are usually resolved in a few dice rolls while combat typically takes a lot of time to resolve, leaving the non-combatants with nothing to do for the majority of the gaming session.

So you can't play a charming swashbuckler of a fighter/rogue who never went in for the typical rogue skills but grabbed some skills in acrobatics, climbing, and social skill? Nor can you play a diplomat who's skills as a bard aid the entire party? Or he could play a Marshall and kick ass in combat and have speaking skills to inspire an army or awe a foe. When the rogue is sneaking the DM should do other things to keep the rest of the party busy, any good DM already has to know what to do when the party splits and the rouge sneaking isn't the sole cause of that.

You're fighting against the class system when you do those things, and usually handicapping yourself compared to a standard fighter. And the ones who don't want to play the characters you described are still left with nothing to do while the diplomat does all the talking or the rogue does all the sneaking. Sure, it's possible to have such a large number of classes or such flexibility to overcome these problems, but when you're spending most of your energy as a designer essentially trying to overcome the limitations of classes, why have them in the first place?

I suppose it's possible for a GM to split his/her attention to keep everyone entertained as you say (although I've never seen anyone pull it off well), but it's still a design flaw that so many common situations have one character to handle it while the rest of the party borrows each others' ebola germs.

In my d10 system there is a battle of wits that plays out similar to combat and players who don't put any points into social skills can screw everyone over because a skilled opponent can drag the weakest character into the conversation. Any character that ignores stealth skills can likewise cause the whole party to be spotted. This forces players to either design more well-rounded and interesting characters or hang back and miss out on a lot of the gameplay. This also results in more realistic characters, as I don't think there are a lot of veteran soldiers who can shoot well but have no idea how to avoid being spotted by the enemy.

So you penalize characters for having flaws and want everybody to play towards a bland kind of middle? Medieval soldiers didn't sneak up, you couldn't with an army and baggage train following yo. Some skirmishers (read rogues) would be sneaky flankers in a battle though. Likewise not everybody should be a face, hell some characters should downright suck at it to the point where fixing it should be either a long term chore or just throwing good points after bad.

No, penalizing characters for specializing is also a design pitfall to be avoided. The point is that a properly designed system doesn't have dump stats and wide swaths of the skill tree that can be completely ignored with no consequence.

We may disagree on how central or peripheral stealth and spotting should be to an RPG system, but traveling with an army is not how most of our characters roll. Any warrior, soldier, hunter, etc. traveling in a small group is going to want to see the enemy before being seen, and someone with no conception of stealth will be a liability and probably told to hang back behind the rest. That's not to say there shouldn't be a character who's much better at it than the others and can scout ahead like a thief / rogue in a class-based system, but for a "fighter" to completely ignore that part of the skill tree has consequences, as it should.

The swiss army knife wizard is cured with magic that is "dumb", meaning that you can magically pick a lock, heal a wound, throw a fireball, etc., but you have to actually know what you're doing or it won't work. Telekinetic manipulation of tumblers is better than using a lockpick so you'll get a bonus, but if you don't know how a lock works it's not getting picked. This means that mages need to specialize and have non-magic skills for their spells to be effective and they can no longer handwave away any obstacle while using the other hand to wipe their asses with the other classes' years of training and a telekinetic third hand to diddle or jack off said character's significant other.

Yeah, some spells are kind of dumb, but a wizard who's spending time and money trying to be everything is wasting resources. Knock is great, but better is having the rogue do it so you can save the spell slot/scroll/wand charge for another day. The same goes with Clerics that can do the same things. I'd like to see casters forced down slightly narrower more focused paths so that you could have a mage instead of a rogue that has stealth based spells, charms, illusions, and ways to bypass traps but has only limited offensive spells. Perhaps making magic schools like skills and give mages points to add to them at each level could help? A mage less skilled in offensive magic could either have weaker versions of the same spells, more trouble getting them to work at all, or a bit of both.

There are many potentially good ways to solve the issue, but the D&D games don't even try.

[Borgholio]

One option could be to do away with the class system entirely and base your skills on what you practice. For instance, the old PC game Dungeon Siege had no classes. Whether you turned out to be a Warrior, Ranger or Mage was determined on how much you did certain things. If you found you were spending most of your time in melee combat, your HP and Str would increase as would your skill with melee weapons. If you spent most of your time casting spells, your Intel and Mana would go up as would your casting level. This is just like real life where people have to practice skills to be proficient. I can call myself a Rogue but if I don't practice lockpicking skills, then I'm not really a Rogue.

Let's say I wanted to be a Mage. I would practice magic and become better at it. During combat for instance, I would keep track of the number of spells I cast. That number would equate to a certain amount of my XP going into my Magic ability. If I ran out of spells and had to pull out a dagger or crossbow, then the appropriate melee or ranged skills would increase based on how much I used those weapons. Lockpicking...practice picking locks. You get the idea.

So the end result would be a character whose "class" depends on what he spends most of his time studying or practicing. You avoid being restricted by a certain class (if you want to learn something...LEARN IT), but if you want to specialize then you most certainly can if you choose to.

[TheFeniX]

It's not all that new of a concept. Final Fantasy did it in the second game. Elder Scrolls has been doing it for a while. Later Wizardry games, while locking characters to a class, make dual-classing multiple times easy... and game breaking. Fable was all about it. Galaxies did it as an MMO.

Classes have their advantages. It makes character progression a lot easier to track and is very encouraging to new players. PnP games that break away from this tend to be a lot harder for new players to break into, such as Shadowrun even though the Archetypes provided were usually enough to get you into the game quickly. Tracking multiple different types of XP in PnP can also get cumbersome, but is trivial in a computer game. But not breaking it out has it's problems. In Shadowrun, a mage could spend multiple campaigns just shooting guns, then spend all the accumulated Karma to increase his magical abilities. There are, of course, usually optional rules to cover this problem.

The explanation I heard for DnD classes was that a 1st level character is a badass, well above that of most the 0th-level NPcs. All that training basically hard-locks them into whatever class they trained for. Fighter's aren't just about hitting things. They're supposed to be experts at all types of combat and use of armor, natural leaders, and all that jazz. Ranger's don't just practice with a bow, all their tracking and survival skills take years to master enough to even become 1st level.

Note: I'm not trying to defend the class system, just that Word of God seems to be that people seem to think sword and sorcery is easy to pick up and that 1st level-character are chumps. Except from what I know of 2nd ed. Lore: 1st-level characters are already supposed to be a cut above pretty much everyone.... even if it doesn't work out that way. DnD is just weird. I think you'd be better off finding another DnD type-ruleset with no classes than to try and mess with what AD&D has become.

I ran a D&D campaign using SR3.0 rules and allowing for things like Psyads. It was pretty fun and excessively brutal.

[Borgholio]

Yeah the class system is definitely EASIER. That's probably why it exists in the D&D world in the first place. But I think there should be an alternate system for those who choose to use it. That might be fun.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think classes came from the roots of the original D&D system, which was derived from the CHAINMAIL tabletop wargame. In a wargame, you have distinct classes of soldiers with specific roles on the battlefield. Having a frontline fighter that dabbled in stealth or a silver-tounged mage in a wargame would be silly, but since a formal PnP RPG hadn't really been done before, there was no conceptual template other than the tabletop wargame. When PnP games started being brought to life as cRPGs in the early 80's, classes were very useful for that format and there were few people who thought to question the value of shoehorning characters into limiting archetypes in a mostly freeform storytelling game. Fast forwarding 3 decades and everyone is so used to character class that most people would sooner kludge together an umpteenth class combination to get around a limitation than consider doing away with them entirely.