Y'know, if in a few years they need to release 4.5 to correct the hideous imbalances and generally broken system, I will agree with you in retrospect that 4E may have contained as many errors or more than 3E did at first printing.
But most of the corrections dealing with numbers that I've seen have been balance tweaks or tweaks to damage dice or hit bonus for a particular attack that proved to be not as useful in play as it should have been.
So Blade Ward now does 2W damage instead of 1 and Shadow Wasp Strike targets Reflex instead of AC, and some attacks now have a different hit bonus, and now there's a net bonus for trained skill use instead of a net penalty for untrained (because they've removed the "Add 5 for skill checks" guideline from the DC setting table). I'm sorry, I don't see that kind of ongoing adjustment indicative of sloppy editing.
And yeah, there have been actual errors... like no stats for a zombie plague disease that was referenced in Open Grave, and a reference to "Infernal" when they meant "Supernal" in Arcane Power, but they released corrections for those just as they adjusted the balance of a few attacks post-release.
And it really shouldn't be a surprise that 4E's pages and pages of special attacks require more post-release tweaks than 3E's pages and pages of... oh, that's right. They didn't have anything comparable. The closest thing would be the spell system, which I'm pretty sure received numerous nerfings, adjustments, tweaks, and clarifications during the years it was being supported, and were still left with several spells that required an informal "just don't abuse it" rule.
I have to say that a lot of the complaining about 4E reminds me of the Onion news video "Trekkies bash new Star Trek film as fun, watchable" (http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film). The system is eminently playable, supports any combination of class and race, allows for more complex (but quick and dirty) combat and focuses more on freeform roleplaying than Munchkinned numbers outside of combat.
They've made D&D into a game that lets anyone jump in and play. They've lessened the impact of knowing the arcane intricacies of the metagame inside and out. Yes, you can still min-max the hell out of a character, but if you pick a race and class combination because you like them you're not going to be rendered superfluous by the person who built for stats, and that's a huge step up from 3rd edition.
It's not 3E Version 2, so I'm not surprised that people who enjoy 3rd Edition aren't changing to it... the 4E Forgotten Realms setting shows the folly of trying to convert between the two... but it's a snazzy enough game in its own right.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-05-18 01:42 am (UTC)But most of the corrections dealing with numbers that I've seen have been balance tweaks or tweaks to damage dice or hit bonus for a particular attack that proved to be not as useful in play as it should have been.
So Blade Ward now does 2W damage instead of 1 and Shadow Wasp Strike targets Reflex instead of AC, and some attacks now have a different hit bonus, and now there's a net bonus for trained skill use instead of a net penalty for untrained (because they've removed the "Add 5 for skill checks" guideline from the DC setting table). I'm sorry, I don't see that kind of ongoing adjustment indicative of sloppy editing.
And yeah, there have been actual errors... like no stats for a zombie plague disease that was referenced in Open Grave, and a reference to "Infernal" when they meant "Supernal" in Arcane Power, but they released corrections for those just as they adjusted the balance of a few attacks post-release.
And it really shouldn't be a surprise that 4E's pages and pages of special attacks require more post-release tweaks than 3E's pages and pages of... oh, that's right. They didn't have anything comparable. The closest thing would be the spell system, which I'm pretty sure received numerous nerfings, adjustments, tweaks, and clarifications during the years it was being supported, and were still left with several spells that required an informal "just don't abuse it" rule.
I have to say that a lot of the complaining about 4E reminds me of the Onion news video "Trekkies bash new Star Trek film as fun, watchable" (http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film). The system is eminently playable, supports any combination of class and race, allows for more complex (but quick and dirty) combat and focuses more on freeform roleplaying than Munchkinned numbers outside of combat.
They've made D&D into a game that lets anyone jump in and play. They've lessened the impact of knowing the arcane intricacies of the metagame inside and out. Yes, you can still min-max the hell out of a character, but if you pick a race and class combination because you like them you're not going to be rendered superfluous by the person who built for stats, and that's a huge step up from 3rd edition.
It's not 3E Version 2, so I'm not surprised that people who enjoy 3rd Edition aren't changing to it... the 4E Forgotten Realms setting shows the folly of trying to convert between the two... but it's a snazzy enough game in its own right.