Quote Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet View Post
Spoiler: Tangent
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Related: some people have noted that 4e D&D was really well balanced on a system level. But they forget what the cost was.

No, it was not that the classes were samey. It was that the scenarios were samey. I've not played 4e, but those 4e modules I've seen & seen analyzed were strictly formula. Literally. The price of balance in 4e was making system math the gospel for GM scenario design. A great idea had they aimed for a computer game scenario design program, but a waste of human resources for tabletop roleplaying games. It's wrong paradigm for the medium.

Why? Because scenario design in tabletop games can be open ended The scenario doesn't have to be complete: bugs can be fixed, content added and solutions invented on the fly.

Scenario design in computer game is typically closed. Everything that's desired to be in the scenario has to be input before playing starts, or at very least algorithms put in place to fill in for imagination.

A living human can adjust on the spot in ways a computer can't. On the flipside, a computer is much better at crunching numbers, so trying to make a human into a computer these days is counter-productive. 4e was a step towards that direction - towards closed design and number crunching - and as a result didn't play into strengths of a human GM.

Now, older versions of D&D, and old wargames, were not exactly perfect in this regard either - but looking back, they had an excuse: computation wasn't as well developed in the 70s and 80s as now, and some unwieldy parts which would be better done by computers now were only possible for humans back then. Indeed, one of the reasons why computers are so good at those things now is because lonely nerds of old realized how cumbersome AD&D rules (etc.) were and spent a lot of effort to outsource the burden of the running the game on a machine.
Spoiler: Tangent
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4e was not like that at all.

It's not my favorite game, and I'm not interested in running it going forward, but I did run it for ~2 years and it was absolutely brilliant for human DMs, especially coming off of high-level 3.5e.

Machines do things like track %damage to your weapon every time you swing a sword (IIRC Diabolo 2 did that), or a machine can roll on a location-specific armor chart for every attack, or use complex formulae to apply critical hit results. 4e did none of that. 4e was a human-centric game, which allowed a player or DM to pre-calculate as much as possible for speedy combat at the table, and gave DMs the freedom to innovate with confidence because encounters could be planned with predictable results.

As a tactical skirmish combat game, D&D 4e was more interesting and enabled the fairest DM creativity that's ever been seen in D&D.

You know who benefits from ballpark estimates & back-of-the-envelope calculations? Human DMs. Machines don't need estimations, they can just plug in numbers and get exact results. Humans need estimates. 4e gave humans the tools to choose a baseline, and innovate off of that. It gave DMs a firm place to stand.


As a 4e DM, I could tweak monsters in unique ways and have a reasonable expectation that I wasn't screwing over the PCs. Can 3e do that? Hell no.

Moreover, small per-monster abilities -- like the Kobold's Shifty ability vs. the Goblin's miss-triggered movement ability -- made even simple monsters feel distinct from each other.

3e Kobolds felt exactly like 3e Goblins unless the DM put in effort to make them distinct. 4e did not have that problem.

Same-feel encounters was not a 4e problem. It was a 3e problem, though.


4e was an excellent tactical skirmish game. (D&D is a lot more than tactical skirmishes, of course...)

4e had plenty of problems, and as mentioned I'm not interested in running it as-is, but your guess about why is absolutely wrong.

The reason that I care about this topic is that 4e got some things right, and I'd like to keep the good parts of 4e, while learning from the edition's various mistakes.

Encounter design was one of the good things about 4e, and one of the things that I wish 5e did better... not to mention every other game out there. Encounter design isn't easy, especially not with wacky systems like Exalted or Mage.


Just my 2cp.