Look, I am a PFRPG GM, so this isn't a flame war. I am doing some personal project research. I have mainly read 4e books, so I have no play experience. What I am trying to find out if the general system seems to keep pretty well balanced all the way thru the levels? Does it seem to stay playable into the Epic tier? If there are any problems with playability, what are they?
I've played games in every tier, and have DM'ed into paragon tier.
Keeping track of conditions is the ugliest aspect of higher level 4e. That and some battle grind. But otherwise, in my experience, 4e holds through all tiers and does a good job of raising the stakes at each tier.
There are builds that might seem over-powered, but no class seems to dominate. The characters never become singular aspects of doom, dominating any encounter. And WotC has been pretty quick to erratta any power of feature that becomes out of whack.
Over all, 4e is much more balanced. Less ways to make your character completely useless, less ways to make a character that's completely overpowered. There's still a few cheesy builds (the feycharger, for example) and a few magic items that are too good (the Badge of The Berserker comes to mind) but overall it's balanced.
As someone who's played games at all three tiers, I'd say it stays balanced. Yeah, things get increasingly complex as levels go up, but characters generally stay relatively even with each-other.
(Before you ask, the feycharger is an Eladrin Swordmage that uses the feat that lets them use their teleport as the movement for a charge and the feats that buff attacks after a teleport. Not that bad at the bare minimum, but the theoretical optimizers found a complex way of getting a bunch of feats from different classes together to boost it to obscene levels. Let's be honest, I don't know the specifics of the build that well. As for the Badge of The Berserker, 4e has a lot of things that boost charging because you probably won't be doing it every turn. The Badge removes the main reason you wouldn't charge every turn, the opportunity attacks for when you run away from this guy to charge the other guy. Thus, someone with a Badge of The Beserker can just run back and forth between two groups of enemies and generally murdering everyone.)
Someone with a better grasp of the system's flaws (and there are always flaws) will probably be around soon.
I've played games in every tier, and have DM'ed into paragon tier.
Keeping track of conditions is the ugliest aspect of higher level 4e. That and some battle grind. But otherwise, in my experience, 4e holds through all tiers and does a good job of raising the stakes at each tier.
There are builds that might seem over-powered, but no class seems to dominate. The characters never become singular aspects of doom, dominating any encounter. And WotC has been pretty quick to erratta any power of feature that becomes out of whack.
I would say this is pretty accurate, though the tracking of conditions part can vary wildly between perfectly tolerable and heinous depending on the party composition and encounter design. Some run very smoothly, others can take a couple hours. Having some experience makes it a lot easier - you get better at keeping track of what's going on pretty quickly.
That was my impression when I read the system back when it first came out. Not my game, but seems well balance thru the levels.
Do most of you think it is a feature of how skills & combat work? The mechanic of adding 1/2 level to your skills, etc. Seems to spread out the math over 30 levels that used to make the game almost unplayable by 15th level in 3e.
I GM a weekly game of 4e & play in a quarterly game. Observations thus far are that it appears well balanced.
As a GM what I will say is that this game is a dream as it allows me to 'play the game' instead of adjudicating/tracking numbers & rules.
With the Adventure Tool creating encounters is a 5 minute job allowing me to concentrate on the story/campaign.Across a group of 9 gamers with something like 300 years of RP'ing experience between us (yes, we're that old!) and only one WoW player in the group - there is no one who has said they didn't like it - or have found outrageous imbalances (yet - we are working on it lol).
I would fit in with your players then, because yes, I am that old too.
Look, I am a PFRPG GM, so this isn't a flame war. I am doing some personal project research. I have mainly read 4e books, so I have no play experience. What I am trying to find out if the general system seems to keep pretty well balanced all the way thru the levels? Does it seem to stay playable into the Epic tier? If there are any problems with playability, what are they?
My two biggest issues are:
1) The killing characters and the prevalence of TPKs is either to common or too rare depending on whether the DM hits players when they go down.
2) There is a pitfall in terms of party design in which character parties with too many Leaders and Defenders and not enough Strikers as a proportion of the overall group can create a situation where it is extremely easy for the DM to design 'Grindy' encounters. Its possible for a DM to design around this kind of a group but it means having familiarity with the system and paying very close attention to how each encounter is set up. It also makes using adventure modules a dangerous proposition.
In general the solution to this is to insure that there are is only a single Defender and a single Leader for a 5 person group allowing another leader or defender at 6 players and again at 8 players. Some groups can have slightly more then this depending on their actual character make up (if every Leader and Defender in the group leans toward striker as a secondary role for example) and others may have a higher tolerance for Grind but generally the play group should lean toward Strikers.
My experience with this has been that players often don't recognize that its good for Game Night if the encounters are hairy with enemies breaking through to run rampant among the mages and healing being in short supply. Hence defense heavy party builds - which are not actually any better then the striker and controller heavy party builds but suffer from taking longer to resolve a combat and generally just being less exciting if the Defenders manage to lock all the enemies down - the enemies will still be potent because this party build has a low damage output so the enemies will live longer and attack a more often.
That was my impression when I read the system back when it first came out. Not my game, but seems well balance thru the levels.
Do most of you think it is a feature of how skills & combat work? The mechanic of adding 1/2 level to your skills, etc. Seems to spread out the math over 30 levels that used to make the game almost unplayable by 15th level in 3e.
I think it's more that everything uses the same system, rather than systems built on top of systems.
You know the complaint about 4e that all the classes are the same? It's not true (each class falls into a role and that role determines...etc), but each class is built on the attack mechanic with side effects. Each character has roughly the same numbers of powers and a lot of work has gone into balancing the power level of powers at each level. So it's not like any other version of D&D where spellcasting adds multiple independent systems to the mix. 3.x and PRPG have put some good work into unifying these systems (like polymorph), but they are completely removed from 4e.
Another big balancer: the removal of save or die. With SoD effects it's all or nothing, so based on what your fighting, spellcasters are either not contributing at all or they're ending the fight right there.
I think the +1/2 level keeps skills relevant through the entire game, but I'm not sure if it keeps things balanced. Spellcasters just don't alleviate the need for most skills at higher levels.
Another thing you should watch out for is enemies with healing abilities. If it's like a troll's regeneration when your party has plenty of access to the elements that stop it or something that occasionally steals healing when it's used on someone it's grabbed, those times can be entertaining from a tactics standpoint. If it just uses a Healing Word and the party has to stand around beating it with at-wills for four more turns, that isn't.
Also, a party of reasonably-optimized characters that works well together will always be able to beat something easier than a party of extremely-optimized characters that don't work together at all.
Davi hit a nail on the head. 4e rewards teamwork better than any RPG I've ever played before. A party that works as a team is awesome since every class seems to have 'help the party be better' powers. Leaders do this the best of course.
I very much enjoy that aspect of 4e.
The best balance I have seen, is anyone can DM, expecially those that have not considered it before. In the past with other games, we only had two dedicated DMs, myself and a friend who no longer plays. But now I can actually kick back an enjoy how others interpret the game, or present their ideas in regards to roleplaying as the rules become much less an issue. Therefore, we all share DM duties. Of course the lynch pin to this is the computer tools offered.
In reality, you only needs to pay for a months subscription to DDI to obtain a complete rule set, generators and supplmental material. That is another bonus, as I could care less about having the books. The only exception being the DM guides, or the upcoming rules compendium.
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That idea of 4e = teamwork seems about right. Our 4e group is awesome when we all do what we should be doing based on class, and we can really suck when we don't coordinate. In another thread on min/maxing a 3.x character someone said they didn't want a character unless it could be solo, meaning not really relying on the rest of the party. Perhaps that the fundamental deference between 4e and 3.x? One is more "group" orientated from a mechanics point of view?
Musings.
(lol) I might be too old and burned out for 4e.
First fight all these conditions started springing up, and I just didn't hardly care.
I'm not really sure its exactly the conditions that are the issue but more the frequency of them turning on and off. You could be under a whole heck of a lot of conditions in 3.5 as well - you might not exactly call them that but that was what it was when you where buffed out the wazoo. What makes things more difficult in 4E is that conditions just don't last. Almost all are either save ends, until end of this guys next turn or when you make your next attack.
There is both a time saving element and a confusion element in this style of play. You save time initially because players don't walk into an encounter under any buffs. They just don't work like that so there is no pre-combat book keeping phase. On the other hand there is a confusion element because your always trying to remember to save out of conditions or remember that your buddy gave you a +1 to AC until the end of his turn. Furthermore all these conditions that you can save out of - usually the bad guy is really good at sticking them back on so there is often an element of some one in the party is always trying to save out of the bad guys main schtick - gets even more complex if you have multiple bad guys each with some different schtick.
I agree that using some kind of markers like poker chips helps a lot - a visual reminder makes remembering this stuff much easier and that's really where this stuff trips up the game...when your constantly remembering some important effect when your turn is long over.
Do most of you think it is a feature of how skills & combat work? The mechanic of adding 1/2 level to your skills, etc. Seems to spread out the math over 30 levels that used to make the game almost unplayable by 15th level in 3e.
What I like most about the 1/2 level skills mechanic is that it really supports change ups in the campaign. You could stick your players in dungeon after dungeon and still find that they more or less work if you then stick them in some kind of a palace intrigue type adventure.
The reverse works as well - stick them in Fantasy Murder Mysteries for 5 levels and they'll still be able to do dungeon delves if the campaign turns down that path.
Its also very important in a game where, by design, you can't really get off the ground and encounter design means that there are always chasms to leap or boulders to dodge.
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(lol) I might be too old and burned out for 4e.
First fight all these conditions started springing up, and I just didn't hardly care.I'm not really sure its exactly the conditions that are the issue but more the frequency of them turning on and off. You could be under a whole heck of a lot of conditions in 3.5 as well - you might not exactly call them that but that was what it was when you where buffed out the wazoo. What makes things more difficult in 4E is that conditions just don't last. Almost all are either save ends, until end of this guys next turn or when you make your next attack.
There is both a time saving element and a confusion element in this style of play. You save time initially because players don't walk into an encounter under any buffs. They just don't work like that so there is no pre-combat book keeping phase. On the other hand there is a confusion element because your always trying to remember to save out of conditions or remember that your buddy gave you a +1 to AC until the end of his turn. Furthermore all these conditions that you can save out of - usually the bad guy is really good at sticking them back on so there is often an element of some one in the party is always trying to save out of the bad guys main schtick - gets even more complex if you have multiple bad guys each with some different schtick.
I agree that using some kind of markers like poker chips helps a lot - a visual reminder makes remembering this stuff much easier and that's really where this stuff trips up the game...when your constantly remembering some important effect when your turn is long over.
It may have been my incompetence at tracking them as a DM.
Well I have learned the facts that I wanted. You guys have been a big help. Like I said, this isn't directly related to me playing 4e. I am doing something els, but this information helps that along. For once a 4e question seems to have started a fun & lively discussion rather than a flame/edition war, lol.