Your experience of Fighters being powerhouses is very different from that of most people I know who played 3E, and I suspect it comes down to playing style. In a "dice battle" (start combat, roll until someone's dead), Fighters can devastate. The meme of spellcasters as the classes that render everybody else obsolete, though, is based in Batman-style play: you win the fight by being ready before it starts.
Yeah, the Half-Giant Barbarian could win the fight in one round, but what do you do if the fight's effectively over before that?
Either approach can be fun, but they're not what I'm interested in. What I like about 4E is that the battles are won and lost based not on what spells are prepared and cast before the battle starts or what you roll but on the tactical decisions made round by round. You will never win any but the easiest fights on autopilot... especially at higher levels, where by design monsters' base combat numbers scale up faster than PCs.
If the party is working together, not everybody has to think... when I'm not DMing, I usually end up in a leader role and part of what I end up doing is figuring out the strategy that the members of the party who would be the "sluggers" implement. We fought one battle where our Barbarian's player was half-asleep from driving all day. She was just "Who am I hitting this time?" It worked.
But you are right that resource management is not something you can get away from any more no matter what you choose, but I think it's still not all that complex, especially if you're playing with cards so you have a visual and tangible reminder of what you can choose from.
And yes, if you glance at them, the characters will seem to be very similar because all their abilities do fit into the same templates instead of being separate and unrelated subsystems. But actual play is very different, and in fact the character classes still vary considerably in their complexity. Wizards still have a vestige of spell preparation that means their resource management extends beyond combat. Arcane and Divine characters still tend to be more complex in their capabilities than Martial ones. Fighters are still towards the shallow end of the pool... though I won't deny that the shallow end is deeper than it was.
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ninetydegrees
Re: D&D
on 2009-12-15 06:44 am (UTC)Yeah, the Half-Giant Barbarian could win the fight in one round, but what do you do if the fight's effectively over before that?
Either approach can be fun, but they're not what I'm interested in. What I like about 4E is that the battles are won and lost based not on what spells are prepared and cast before the battle starts or what you roll but on the tactical decisions made round by round. You will never win any but the easiest fights on autopilot... especially at higher levels, where by design monsters' base combat numbers scale up faster than PCs.
If the party is working together, not everybody has to think... when I'm not DMing, I usually end up in a leader role and part of what I end up doing is figuring out the strategy that the members of the party who would be the "sluggers" implement. We fought one battle where our Barbarian's player was half-asleep from driving all day. She was just "Who am I hitting this time?" It worked.
But you are right that resource management is not something you can get away from any more no matter what you choose, but I think it's still not all that complex, especially if you're playing with cards so you have a visual and tangible reminder of what you can choose from.
And yes, if you glance at them, the characters will seem to be very similar because all their abilities do fit into the same templates instead of being separate and unrelated subsystems. But actual play is very different, and in fact the character classes still vary considerably in their complexity. Wizards still have a vestige of spell preparation that means their resource management extends beyond combat. Arcane and Divine characters still tend to be more complex in their capabilities than Martial ones. Fighters are still towards the shallow end of the pool... though I won't deny that the shallow end is deeper than it was.