Has the feel / style of your game changed since you started playing 4E?


4th Edition

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Yes but it wasn't his decision to change direction that was the problem. The problem was waiting 10 levels to have a change of pace that was the problem. I speak only from personal experience but have run all finds of adventures in 3e with the same party of PC's and never ran into that problem. Mostly because I switch up early on so they know they will need a variety of abilities. That was my point.


Dark_Mistress wrote:


I just wanted to address this point. That wasn't a fault of the system but the way you ran it. If you focus for 10 levels on the same thing of course players are going to hyper focus their characters in that direction. If you had mixed things up a lot at the beginning then the players would have took skills and feats to cover other things and it would have worked out just fine.

Yes 4e by default does this for everyone, but 3e works as well for it. Which is why all and all i think this is a loaded topic. Their is no right or wrong answer. Weather playing 4e effected your play style has a lot to do with.
1) What your play style was in the first place. (different games are better at different play styles. Thats not good or bad just the way it is)
2) How the GM ran the game and what they focused the game on. ((aka what play style they went with))

So in short me personally i think both editions can support all the same styles and feels of games. But 4e is better suited to some styles of play and 3e better to other styles, but both can do all the styles.

To a great extent I agree with you but their are some significant caveats. In effect I had not realized I was locking things into a certain style of game and that I'd not be able to get out (that'd not happen in earlier editions). In truth I did not want the game to go down the intrigue route forever I just wanted a change of pace but it turns out that was not an option. In effect I can choose to have either one specific style or I can choose a buffet but what I can't choose is a main style with the odd change up because the main style means characters don't function in the change ups.

Another aspect is that change ups might cause my players to react but a lot f the time they'll attempt to ignore the DMs signals for as long as feasible - they often have specific builds they are working toward ala my Dragon Riding Paladin above. This character can't read my signals and still get to where he wants to be.

Finally change ups will need to be much more common in 3.5 because the choices are less common and much more significant for the players. A feat comes only once every three levels in a game designed around roughly 20 levels of play. Its a very significant choice. In 4E you get a feat every 2 levels in a game with 30 core levels but each feat is much weaker. Choosing to focus on something with each feat is far less of an investment for the character hence changing directions in terms of style is far less disruptive.

Silver Crusade

I will agree with Jeremy's issue, but will disagree as to what I think is the cause.

In 3.5, characters generally are working to attain such-and-such a concept down the road (we'll stick with the dragon riding paladin), and the player is likely to stick with the progression he needs because it is often a very specific set of feats, prestige classes, etc.

The difference in 4e to me isn't that the characters can change direction that much more readily, but that, for the most part, you start playing the build that you want from level 1. I know there are exceptions to this, but 4e doesn't have many of those things that you have to build up to in order to qualify for. Paragon paths and epic destinies often tend to reinforce the character that you have been playing all along, rather than redefine the character in any dramatic way, as I've often seen in 3.5.

In the details, though, it's true that people's specific feat and power plans tend to change as they see the type of campaign they are in and how their character fits into the group, and 4e does have the flexibility that they can do that without setting themselves back on their future plans.


4e retraining is particularly handy when group composition changes. It effectively means that if someone drops out, the party can make minor modifications to compensate without having to sacrifice their own character concepts to do so. In two of my pbp games here most of the players have retrained bits and pieces as they've gone along to adapt to the campaign needs at the time. Some they've liked and kept, some they've ditched after a level. The system is robust enough to let them do that without compromising their preferred party roles.

As a GM, it's great, because I know that the pcs can deal with pretty much any environment I choose to throw them into.

As Celestial Healer pointed out, the paragaon and epic paths tend to be set up to underpin and expand aspects that already exist. As a player who often doesn't know where a character is going, I do appreciate that.

I'm speaking from a position of ignorance where 3.5 is concerned, I freely admit, as I only played it for about 6 months and got no further than level 8 as a cleric. Even at that level though, the choices were bewilderingly rich, but at the same time constricting. I don't mind thinking ahead, but I really hated having to spend feats or skill points in certain specific areas in order to prepare for something I might want to testdrive in 2 levels time.


Ah, yes, your Level 7 Cleric/ Level 1 Noble (Freeport Campaign Setting) with Psychic Wild Talent (Green Ronin). She was... different.


Dear Shareigh. I still miss her. "It's alright mummy, I wasn't unconscious for long!"

Apologies for threadjack.


I've DM'd my 4E campaign for about a year now (Savage Tide, set in Eberron), and have found that, once we settled into the new rule-set and the PC's got their PC builds sorted, the actual style and feel of the game is quite close to how it was under my numerous 3.x campaigns. At the end of the day, I'm still running a long, involved campaign, which challenges the players and involves interesting plots and interesting encounters. In fact, I'm running a 3.5 game under 4e rules, and the "feel" of the game in play is about the same as it would have been under 4e... Outside of some specifics around running combat, and an expanded skill-challenge framework (which only gets used occasionally, and quite loosely), I still run the game exactly the same as I did under 3.5, and hence the overall stories that come out of the campaign are pretty much exactly the same.

The only real change is perhaps that there is more emphasis on playing the "here and now", rather than the "meta-game". In other words, we still do a bit of preparation before hand (but less than under 3.x), but during actual game play we tend to have more decisions to make, and overall we all have a bit more to do (especially the players). Overall, that's a change I like, especially as we're all getting older and have less free time to spend planning outside of game time. The time spent at the table is more engaging and interesting, easier on the DM, and the group time spent outside of the game is mostly spent with emails catching up on plot details, doing some role-play activity, shopping, etc, rather than planning elaborate PC builds or whatever.

The biggest changes for me as DM would simply be in terms of my preparation - I spend less time worrying about any holes in the encounters that my players might exploit, whether something is too hard or too easy, and more time converting and "tuning" the encounters from 3.5 to 4e, to be more challenging and interesting - there are some pretty dull encounters in any 3.x game, and 4e has generally upped the bar in terms of more complex, engaging fights. As a DM, the part of 3.x that I didn't like so much was how players (usually the wizard types, but others from time to time) spent a lot of energy finding the "short cuts" that would win the fight early. With 4e, there is plenty of room for the players to get creative and win more easily, but it's more about the combined group tactics over the course of the fight, rather than the one or two tricks (spells, items, class powers) that kill the baddie with a single shot from a single PC. The closest 4e gets to this is my group's uber-striker, who can dish out enough damage to kill a creature around his level in one round if he's lucky, but that's his role and doesn't imbalance the game at all.

From a player's perspective (I've played in a few games, too), I think there's a lot more emphasis on the group under 4e - in 3.x, players would typically optimise their own character with little regard for the group dynamic. In 4e, players tend to optimise their PC's in relation to the rest of the group - more choices (feats, powers etc) are made that help not just their PC but that synergise with the others in their group. Simple examples would be the striker and defender optimising their basic melee attacks because they can get lots of these granted not just by their own magic items but also from the warlord, the warlord choosing lots of powers that buff others and remove bad effects, the wizard choosing powers that forgo more damage in favour of locking down the enemies so others can kill them, ... That's a change I like. In 3.x, it was far too easy for PC's to be wildly out of whack in terms of power, with everyone on a different page in terms of expectations, and it was hard to DM such that everyone felt comfortable with their group and their contribution to it - in 4e, it's pretty easy to get a group of PC's that can work together and feel they all have a useful contribution to make, not just from time to time, but in every encounter.

There is a change in complexity between 3.x and 4e. In 3.x, creatures and PC's, especially at higher levels, got pretty complex in terms of what they could do, especially magical ones. For example, a wizard could throw down all kinds of effects, many of which got de-tuned or removed from 4e, and they could use a heap more of the really powerful spells per day (at the expense of running out of spells eventually). Monsters in 3.x were, invariably, more complex, with all kinds of powers and spells at their disposal (even if they never got to use half of them). In 4e, everything, especially monsters, is just more simple, in terms of what its individual suite of powers goes, and in terms of its individual contribution goes. In 4e, it's more about how all these things add up and combine - the PC's are more powerful than the monsters because they have more powers, feats and magic items, and the monsters only give a credible threat because they have more overall hp, can combine in (often) larger numbers, and added together with some interesting terrain they have an interesting combined set of options. There's a bunch of other differences which are really quite trivial on their effect on the actual game play - skills which no-one really took or used anyway (e.g. knowledge architecture? I let my players try dungeoneering instead, and really, I've never had a PC take that skill under 3.x, so at least in 4e they had a chance of knowing enough to help out) - rituals vs combat spells generally make sense and is a trivial difference in how things play out (except you don't have to wait a day for the wizard to memorise the right spell, he can generally cast whatever he wants in about ten minutes max) - plenty of other changes, but the overall effect on game play is trivial.

So yeah, overall, 4e feels pretty much the same to me, we still play a campaign filled with fun fights and fun adventures and plots that span a long period of time. There's just more emphasis on how things combine rather than any one piece - the players spend more time working together, and I spend more time putting together monster combos rather than over-working any single NPC or whatever.


Very well put. That pretty much matches my own thoughts on how this version of the game plays.


Bakel wrote:

I played 4E at a Mid South Con. Then I made my group (we play 3.5/Pathfinder) try a trial run at 4E. The "feel" of the overall play was the pretty much the same. We roleplayed, rollplayed, and all that. The only thing that got me was that the combat scenarios tended to last a long time. Then the PC's wanted to go back to 3.5 and we never finished the adventure path. I think we started with 5th Level characters and ran the "Heathen" adventure. We played a couple of sessions before everyone wanted to switch back.

With that being said, did anyone else experience something like this? Maybe, if we started from level 1, we would understand our characters better or something?

I started running a 4E game at 1st level with one player who was an adamant 'don't like 4E' mindset, but by the time the party got to 5th level ( roughly the same time period (ten sessions or so), the told me that his feelings on it were changing and he could see the positives in it. Now he is into 4E and finds 3E an issue, especially for clerics who end up doing nothing but healing the fighter, where as in 4E a cleric can do a Healing word and smite the enemy down with holy prayer backed attacks.

THe fighter can mostly keep himself up with his own abilities, shrugging off injuries, ignoring the pain etc.
I see the positives outway the negatives myself but its a personal opinion.

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