DDO goes F2P. - (DDO Unlimited)

[Bunk]

4e does actuall feel very MMOGish. As in, everything is painfully well balanced.

Since people are asking for it, I shall rant on what I dislike about 4th. Before I do though, I will admit that I have played it a fair bit and enjoyed it, especially the combat, but there are a lot of things that irk me:

Skill system - there are about 10 skills. Your rank in a skill is your level + stat bonus. You pick about five skills that you get +5 in. That's the total variation in skills.

Magic Items - every magic item in the game has a level requirement (WoW). You are expected to replace all of your items with new better ones pretty much every few levels (WoW). There is no way to improve or upgrade magic items. My character found a cool named unique Holy sword in one of his first adventures - that was awesome until I realized that it would be useless junk by the time I hit fourth level.
 - on crit effects - Many magic weapons only have an actually ability that works when you crit - which is basically always only on a 20. Yay 5% proc items!

Daily uses - I don't mind the system of having abilities you can only use once per encounter or once a day, but I hate that they merged magic items in to that. Basically, at any level I have X number of "Daily" powers I can use. So at sixth I might have 1 Daily powers. I might also own three magic items that have a once Daily power. If I use one of those powers, I am not allowed to use the other two that day. This results in being afraid to use a cool situational magic item, becuase you just might need that other item to save your life later.
 - I liked the 3.5 approach of "I have a crap load of cheap weird magic items on my character sheet to scour through and hope to find an appropriate one to save my bacon at any given time" better.

Balance - the game just has a general feeling of "overbalance" While each class has abilities that make it unique, it still mostly comes down to: At-will 1d8 + stat, Encounter 2d8 + stat, Daily 3d8 + stat versions of the same thing.
 - Druid Shapehift - you get it at level one. Why? - it's purely cosmetic - it just gives you access to the same abilites that every other class has, just with different names.
 - Paladin Mount? - nope sorry, no way to balance that with every other class, so it doesn't exist.
 - Found a Wizard's book? Yep, you can scribe those "Rituals" - no combat spells though - that would be unbalanced.
 - Cleric of a specific Deity? Cool - you get an option for one unique Feat you can take (most of which are subpar to normal feats) - that's the grand total of what makes a cleric of Bahumat different from a cleric of Hextor.
 - Just little things, like every class has the same base to-hit bonus.

Combat moves being "Powers" - want to trip someone? Better have that power, or it can't be done. Same for disarming. Wrestling doesn't seem to even exist anymore (you can grab an opponent - he has to stay in his sqaure...)


There are plenty of rules that can be interpreted and adjusted, just like any other game - but I didn't buy 4th to have to home-cook every other rule in the book just to make it not feel like MMOG&D.

It's not a bad game by any means, but at this point in it's existence it just doesn't feel like D&D.

[WayAbvPar]

Sure glad I never bothered picking up the 4E books. Level requirements for items make my irrationally stabby.

[Ashamanchill]

Thanks for the low down Bunk.  That does seem very MMOish, very fabricated as well.  I guess if my friends and I ever start up again, we'll stick with our own little version of the 3e rules we created.

[Bunk]

To be fair, there are some good qualities to the game, and it is a very well though out tabletob battle system. It just doesn't feel like D&D.

Stewie and I were talking about 4th at luch today - we plan on asking the Wizards guys at PAX this year if they are going to show us the same Beta Demos of the Gleemax tools that they showed us at PAX last year...

[Montague]

Sure glad I never bothered picking up the 4E books. Level requirements for items make my irrationally stabby.

There are no level requirements for items. Items are given a level and the DM is advised not to give items 5 or more levels above the players level.

Also magic items can be upgraded, I believe its the transfer enchantment ritual - not sure of the name.

[Stewie]

Bunk and I often argue(debate?) about the merits of 4e.
I really do feel like its D&D
One of his issues is that each character has basically the same type of powers, IE warrior gets an at will attack for x damage and then a wizard gets an at will that does x power and they are essentially the same thing with different names.

Really this is the same in every game. damage is damage and you don't generally get a huge swing of damage between 2 different character of the same level if they are both made with high damage output in mind.

Complaining that "my magic missile is the same as his bow, just with a different name"  can just as easily be done in 3.5
To take that a step further you could say that a fighter with an axe and a fighter with a sword are the exact same thing if they do the same damage. Statistically they may be but in a roleplaying game you  define your character by other methods. My lawful axe wielding beer swilling xenophobic dwarf warrior could be a far cry from your chaotic sword toting human bandit.

The simple fact of the matter is that in 4e you get plenty of opportunities to customize your character to whatever you want and the way your damage is dealt is and always has been a matter of roleplaying.

I do agree to a point on the items, although saying that they are level specific is not being totally honest.
You can use a much higher item if your dm were so inclined. the idea being that your dm will look at the relative power of an item (in 4th this is actually quantified for you) and decide if he/she wants their players to have these. this is no different then any previous edition.

Most of the complaining I hear about 4th is really just "I don't like change, waaa!" Ultimately any RPG is what you make of it.

[WayAbvPar]

Sure glad I never bothered picking up the 4E books. Level requirements for items make my irrationally stabby.

There are no level requirements for items. Items are given a level and the DM is advised not to give items 5 or more levels above the players level.

Also magic items can be upgraded, I believe its the transfer enchantment ritual - not sure of the name.

I was just going by this-

Magic Items - every magic item in the game has a level requirement (WoW)

[Slyfeind]

Eh, THAC0 was there as far back as 1st ed, and probably before. 2nd Ed just pointed it out.

I recently went over some old 1st ed modules as I was playing with the NWN toolset, and rediscovered S4- Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Holy crap that module had a lot of depth to it. I think that's what made Gygax great in my eyes. Other D&D writers and DMs tried to force some dramatic story arc into their campaigns. Gygax just put the players into a situation that had enough potential for it, and let it happen. Or not, if the players didn't want it.

My biggest problem with 4e is one of its greatest strengths: the rules allow even bad DMs to run a good game. I prefer more DM rulings and player exploration in my role play.

[Ingmar]

Items do not have level requirements, they have levels. The levels are just there to let you figure out how much something is worth/costs to make and when it would be appropriate to put one in as treasure. The DM is still free to give out whatever items he wants to whoever he wants, they do not have level restrictions on when they are usable.

You're also misrepresenting the daily item use thing a bit - you do get more uses of daily items as the day goes on assuming you keep having encounters and hitting milestones. The rule is there to keep someone from blowing 43 daily item powers in one fight and breaking the game. Yeah it is one of those places where balance is given the nod over realism, I suppose, but overall I think the game is better for it. Really I think the item system is more flexible than prior editions, not less - you don't have to spend experience points to make them a la 3rd edition, and 2e and prior didn't even really have any concrete rules for item creation at all.

Clerical differences are one of the things I do miss but apparently we are getting a system for that in the divine book. I think that was one of those 'cut for space' things in the first PHB. There are a number of things like that, it will take a while to fill out all the little niches that the older systems had filled out over their decades of existence, etc.

[Koyasha]

2nd Edition item creation was kinda crazy in that casting Permanency (which was required in order to finish ANY permanent magical item) took 1 point of constitution.

That said I'm still a big 2nd Edition fan, if not in the exact rules (I actually like a LOT of the 3rd and 4th edition rules, like allowing any race to be any class and so on, although I hate others) but in the general feel of the older editions.  3E and beyond changes something that I can't quite put my finger on, and it detracts from the experience, to me.

4E is cool but I have never gotten a chance to really play it yet.  Don't own the books either so eh.

[Ashamanchill]

Well this thread has accomplished one thing.  I really, really want to start up a game with my friends, like the good ol' days.  Fuck having jobs, and GFs raggin' on you to spend time with them, and not living around the block from each other anymore, and all the other crap that steals our time.

[Sjofn]

Combat moves being "Powers" - want to trip someone? Better have that power, or it can't be done. Same for disarming. Wrestling doesn't seem to even exist anymore (you can grab an opponent - he has to stay in his sqaure...)

Grappling can go fuck itself and I am glad it is dead, dead, dead in 4E.

[Bunk]

Combat moves being "Powers" - want to trip someone? Better have that power, or it can't be done. Same for disarming. Wrestling doesn't seem to even exist anymore (you can grab an opponent - he has to stay in his sqaure...)

Grappling can go fuck itself and I am glad it is dead, dead, dead in 4E.

Oh come on! Who didn't love the three pages of grappling charts in the first edtion DMG? 17 rolls to determine that you elbowed the troll in the head for three subdual damage.

Obviously I misworded and somewhat misremembered the Magic item system in the haste of my rant... Still are issues though. In 4th its geared for you to have a "set" of magic items appropriate to your given level, which requires upgrading them every few levels. That's how the whole "treasure packet " (don't ask) system is designed.

In third, I might still hold on to a bag of tricks I got at level three when my character level is level 15, and I might still infact use it just for fun. In fourth - not a chance I'd still have that, since it would require using one of my daily powers to use it.

[Ard]

Grappling can go fuck itself and I am glad it is dead, dead, dead in 4E.

Badly written rules aside, grappling was one of the few major weaknesses casters had against melee characters in 3.5 at least, and was one of the few things that really necessitated the use of the Still Magic feat.  I haven't looked into 4th much, so I have no clue if they ever figured out any other way to balance out that sorta thing.

[WayAbvPar]

I recently went over some old 1st ed modules as I was playing with the NWN toolset, and rediscovered S4- Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Holy crap that module had a lot of depth to it. I think that's what made Gygax great in my eyes.

After Keep On The Borderlands, that is probably my fav module, both for nostalgic reasons as well as the pure awesome that existed within.

[Bunk]

Simple - in 4th Wizard spells are "powers" No interruption rules at all. Magic missile - usable every round, does about the same damage as a fighter would with a bow, a little less than a Ranger would with a bow. Fireball - once per encounter - does about twice the damage of magic missile, and hits an area.

Non-combat spells are now Rituals. Most of them take ten minutes to cast, cost you X value worth of spell components to cast.

[Bunk]

I recently went over some old 1st ed modules as I was playing with the NWN toolset, and rediscovered S4- Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Holy crap that module had a lot of depth to it. I think that's what made Gygax great in my eyes.

After Keep On The Borderlands, that is probably my fav module, both for nostalgic reasons as well as the pure awesome that existed within.

I loved Lost Caverns, but really, at it's core it was a big random dungeon maze with several dozen rooms each containing a monster that sat there and waited for adventurers to come and kill it. I did love the final room though.

[Koyasha]

Tying everything to powers and turning non-combat spells into rituals, not to mention essentially gutting the spell selection in general, is one of my biggest problems with 4th edition.  To me, combat in this sort of game is about coming up with intelligent, clever, and unexpected ways to do things, and using magic in unusual and creative ways in order to defeat your enemies.

Doing something like setting up a Magic Mouth to shout a warning is something you can do if you're going through an area you're likely to get flanked from another tunnel.  But it becomes absurdly impractical with a 10 minute casting time and a 50 gold piece material cost.  4E tries to boil the system down to the level where a computer could be the DM, in a way.  2nd Edition gives you just enough to base your game on and leaves all the details up to the DM.

On the other hand, 4th Edition's 'at will' powers and 'encounter' powers are an awesome idea that improves a lot of the boring and weakness of the low-level game.  Everyone knows the pain of being a 1st level mage in 2nd Edition where you cast a Magic Missile then spend the rest of the day hiding behind a rock and maybe using a sling to be a pointless annoyance to enemies.

[Montague]

Tying everything to powers and turning non-combat spells into rituals, not to mention essentially gutting the spell selection in general, is one of my biggest problems with 4th edition.  To me, combat in this sort of game is about coming up with intelligent, clever, and unexpected ways to do things, and using magic in unusual and creative ways in order to defeat your enemies.

Doing something like setting up a Magic Mouth to shout a warning is something you can do if you're going through an area you're likely to get flanked from another tunnel.  But it becomes absurdly impractical with a 10 minute casting time and a 50 gold piece material cost.  4E tries to boil the system down to the level where a computer could be the DM, in a way.  2nd Edition gives you just enough to base your game on and leaves all the details up to the DM.

On the other hand, 4th Edition's 'at will' powers and 'encounter' powers are an awesome idea that improves a lot of the boring and weakness of the low-level game.  Everyone knows the pain of being a 1st level mage in 2nd Edition where you cast a Magic Missile then spend the rest of the day hiding behind a rock and maybe using a sling to be a pointless annoyance to enemies.

Not to mention that in 3rd edition if you weren't a wizard, cleric or sorcerer you didn't get to do the "cool stuff". By the time you reached 12th+ level your job was to occupy the monsters while the casters killed/disintegrated/controlled everything.

On the other hand though, the at-will powers do tend to tamp down creativity of the players, which is a shame because Wizards put in a very elegant system for improvised attacks and damage on page 42 of the DMG. The problem is that when you have an at-will power that does X amount of damage, you don't have much incentive to do something risky that may either backfire, kill the monster, or not work entirely depending on the ruling of the DM.

[WayAbvPar]

I recently went over some old 1st ed modules as I was playing with the NWN toolset, and rediscovered S4- Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Holy crap that module had a lot of depth to it. I think that's what made Gygax great in my eyes.

After Keep On The Borderlands, that is probably my fav module, both for nostalgic reasons as well as the pure awesome that existed within.

I loved Lost Caverns, but really, at it's core it was a big random dungeon maze with several dozen rooms each containing a monster that sat there and waited for adventurers to come and kill it. I did love the final room though.

That is what I liked about both KOTB and LCoS- no real rhyme or reason, just full of almost every monster around. They are like evil petting zoos!

[Ingmar]

I recently went over some old 1st ed modules as I was playing with the NWN toolset, and rediscovered S4- Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Holy crap that module had a lot of depth to it. I think that's what made Gygax great in my eyes.

After Keep On The Borderlands, that is probably my fav module, both for nostalgic reasons as well as the pure awesome that existed within.

I loved Lost Caverns, but really, at it's core it was a big random dungeon maze with several dozen rooms each containing a monster that sat there and waited for adventurers to come and kill it. I did love the final room though.

Yeah I have to agree with this. What made Lost Caverns really awesome was it had that whole extra book of new monsters and spells, which was a first at the time, not the adventure itself which was fine but not outstanding. For seminal early adventure design I think there are better places to look, like Dwellers of the Forbidden City, The Veiled Society, and Night's Dark Terror (the later two being 'basic' D&D modules, rather than AD&D.)

[Slyfeind]

I loved Lost Caverns, but really, at it's core it was a big random dungeon maze with several dozen rooms each containing a monster that sat there and waited for adventurers to come and kill it. I did love the final room though.

This is what made it great though. The Tournament version of S4 was just that, room after room of monsters until you kill the boss and get the treasure. But the campaign version was this insane political struggle where half the Flaeness was after this mighty artifact, and had to deal with entire civilizations that thrived, allied, warred with each other, in a mountain range that most thought was just wilderness. You could run that module so many different ways. I DMed it when I was young and just did the caverns thing, but the NWN adaptation by Sir Otis puts all the politics and exploration into it. I started to do my own NWN module based on it, but when I found Sir Otis's, I lost interest. I hate how he made it so you starve after every zone, though. I could never get past that. There's another adaptation by Barron Wasteland which just isn't that good, but I took it as more of a first draft that he never polished.

[Sjofn]

Grappling can go fuck itself and I am glad it is dead, dead, dead in 4E.

Badly written rules aside, grappling was one of the few major weaknesses casters had against melee characters in 3.5 at least, and was one of the few things that really necessitated the use of the Still Magic feat.  I haven't looked into 4th much, so I have no clue if they ever figured out any other way to balance out that sorta thing.

When you have fucked up rules that are SO BAD your entire group looks dismayed when you start the grapple, and then consider you an asshole when you go through with it anyway (I hope your ranged attack characters didn't want to hit the bad guy!), the "it might screw over a caster" positive side doesn't really balance it out. It was terrible, so so so terrible. I never really found the ranged casters to be a big deal as a player, dunno about the DM side though. Our DM(s) didn't seem to have much problem dealing with OUR ranged casters, but their "win" condition is us thinking "shit, we might lose" instead of killing everyone.

In 4th casters don't have any "haha, I just instantly killed half your party" spells, which makes the I MUST STOP THEM FROM DOING ANYTHING AT ALL less a panicky priority.

[Ard]

When you have fucked up rules that are SO BAD your entire group looks dismayed when you start the grapple, and then consider you an asshole when you go through with it anyway (I hope your ranged attack characters didn't want to hit the bad guy!), the "it might screw over a caster" positive side doesn't really balance it out. It was terrible, so so so terrible. I never really found the ranged casters to be a big deal as a player, dunno about the DM side though. Our DM(s) didn't seem to have much problem dealing with OUR ranged casters, but their "win" condition is us thinking "shit, we might lose" instead of killing everyone.

Oh, but you forgot the icing on this clusterfuck of a cake!  As soon as you grapple a mage, the mage in question immediately has to go digging through their spells to find out which ones have somatic components.  One more thing to look up, that's even potentially longer and more tedious than the grapple rules themselves!   

[Sjofn]

And didn't you have to PREPARE your spells to be still (unless you were a sorcererererer, of course)? I only really played a cleric at high levels, I hated low level casters so much I never really made it to the "OK, I'm finally cool for the entire combat" stage with any of them.

[Numtini]

This is really reminding me of why I played Runequest.

[Ard]

Still spell feat only affected spells that had somatic (must move around) components.  It includes like 90%+ spells in the game.  This is where grappling and pinning a spell caster comes in.  It also makes the GM have to go dig through the spell lists to find out which are still the get out of jail free cards that only require a concentration roll instead.

Don't get me wrong.  The grappling rules were really annoying.  I just got good at abusing them.

[Sjofn]

Yeah, I know they were for somatic component spells, I just thought you'd have to prepare them as still for them to actually be still-able. Same with silent spell, etc.

[Lantyssa]

Grapple spell casters?  Bah!  I just hit them so hard they couldn't make their concentration check.

Actually I mostly played 2nd Ed and I wished I could pin casters, even if he was on my side.  Damn Wild Mages.  I'm pretty sure he did more damage to me over the course of any given adventure than enemy casters.

[Rendakor]

Sjofn is correct, you have to prepare your spells as Still using the Still Spell feat in the PHB. There is a Sudden Still feat in one of the splat books, however, that lets you still a spell you haven't prepared as stilled, once per day.

I'm generally with Bunk on the 3.5 v 4th debate. 4E felt way too much like an MMO for my tastes, and the homogenization of all classes/abilities was my other big complaint. Of course, having ~$300 worth of 3.5 books colors my opinion.

[Sjofn]

I don't really feel the MMO-ness other people complain about, personally, but that's just one nerd's opinion on that, I suppose. It's come up often enough that I guess it does for other people, and I can see being wrinkly nosed about it.

On the other hand, I like what they've done with the classes, and I don't feel they've been over-homogenized so much as actually balanced in a way I prefer. I loathed the way spellcasters started out as absolute shit, then wound up basically being The Amazing Wizard and His Adorable Little Friends. But then, I've always prefered something being "homogenized" for balance than imbalance for the sake of flavor. The classes all have flavor, they all have character, and they can all function (although the paladin sort of sucks in 4E) the WHOLE TIME in their roles. It doesn't bother me in the slightest that a wizard casts magic missile as an at-will and it's not, at its very core, that different from a ranger shooting her bow, as in 3.5 it never struck me as hugely different to have a wizard pew pewing with a wand every round to conserve spells or whatever. Maybe I invest a lot more in the flavor of a class lore-wise than mechanics-wise?

The skill thing I can kinda understand, although you'd think as someone got more powerful and moved in more powerful circles, that would help them intimidate some level 1 nobody, even if they never trained it and had a shitty charisma. That's how I think of it, anyway.

I HATE that learning languages is a goddamn feat though.

[Lantyssa]

I don't like what they've done with the Warlock, at least from reading since I have yet to play 4th Ed.  They didn't get a lot of, or really very powerful abilities, but they got to use them as much as they wanted.  Now all the cool stuff is an encounter or daily power, and Eldritch Blast can't be modified.

[Sjofn]

Meh, it feels pretty similar to how they worked in 3.5 to me really, although that's just from playing WITH a 3.5 warlock, not AS a 3.5 warlock. 99% of the time they were going zot zot zot with their blast on their turn, you pretty much do that in 4E, with the additional amusement of cursing people so you zot for more damage and having something happen when that cursed thing finally eats it. I played a warlock for a while in 4E, the thing that grated on my nerves was that I had such a hard time actually HITTING anything compared to the not-spell-caster strikers because of how weapons modify to hit (and the fact that impliments lag behind in that regard). I hit less often for less damage and it got frustrating for me, although I was never, ever, ever, ever in danger of dying like the rogue often was, which I suppose was part of the balance.

Right now I'm playing a defender type (the warden) and it is rad.


EDIT: I guess what I mean with the warlock thing is that I would've singled them out as the class that changed least from 3.5 to 4. Wizards, especially if you liked them in 3.5, are the class I would say changed the most in how they function, and I can TOTALLY see why the typical "I always play wizards" people would hate it, even if I disagree that the 3.5 way was better.

[Trippy]

This is really reminding me of why I played Runequest.

Ah, those were the days...

[Lantyssa]

EDIT: I guess what I mean with the warlock thing is that I would've singled them out as the class that changed least from 3.5 to 4. Wizards, especially if you liked them in 3.5, are the class I would say changed the most in how they function, and I can TOTALLY see why the typical "I always play wizards" people would hate it, even if I disagree that the 3.5 way was better.

If all you did was zot stuff, then yes.  I liked their other powers, like creating the short-lived Darkness that was composed of bat-like shadows, or their cloak of flying, or being able to turn into a a cloud of shadows.  They traded the massive damage of other classes for utility, flavor, and unlimited use and they just don't seem to have it in Fourth.

They'd still rank up there for choices were I to play, but they're so rigid with their pacts now and the encounter/daily power usage, it seems like they would play very differently.  Not necessarily bad, just not having the things I liked about the original.