Any interest in Hero Lab + D&D Next?

[MagicSN]

Originally Posted by SAbel

Its the R&D team playing the game and it is enough to make sure I do not purchase this game system! All the things that I dislike about previous versions of D&D are laid out in this part 1, rules lawyering, ambiguous combat (locations and movement/actions) poor spell casters searching through the books to figure out what they can do, Players threatening to kill each others characters, and a guy (I know who he is just do not ant to put his name here) who thinks that you have to act like a Jerk to play a Dwarf (MC Mix-a-lot) "in character" {really it only took 10-15 min to make that waste of a character} and this is to attempt to draw me into the game system!

I think you probably need to differentiate between the system and how a certain team plays the game. I have to admit in D&D 4e we had more rules lawyering than we ever had now in Next. The whole nature of 4e of "optimization is 100% needed to have a character up to the job" caused this a lot in our group. Spellcasters are not weak in Next BTW. And players threatening to kill each other characters? What can I say. Really poor RP'ing that is. As is comic dwarves. The not exact locations... at least in my group people saw this as advantage, as it makes the game less "chess-y". But it is also possible to work with exact locations and miniatures in Next. Just many people prefer not to do this.

Next certainly has still issues, but at least for me personally the issues in 4e were worse (starting Paragon-Level if you did not include at least 3-4 fights per evening dailies were so overpowered, that the endfight usually was trivialized by some overpowered daily power).

What I CAN say for sure is we had the focus much more on RP again, and not on the mechanic nature of combat and character creation on Next.

[cryptoknight]

Roleplaying or not Roleplaying is a choice that those at the tables make. I've had characters that were nothing more than a piece of the battlefield, and I've had characters that have more RP in them than I've had in 1/2/3.5.

Any game system that returns Vancian magic is a poor one, seeing that go out the door was the best thing 4e did.

One thing I disliked about 4e was the simplified skills system (which has gotten even more simplified, not less which makes baby pandas sad).

[MagicSN]

Originally Posted by cryptoknight

Roleplaying or not Roleplaying is a choice that those at the tables make. I've had characters that were nothing more than a piece of the battlefield, and I've had characters that have more RP in them than I've had in 1/2/3.5.

Any game system that returns Vancian magic is a poor one, seeing that go out the door was the best thing 4e did.

One thing I disliked about 4e was the simplified skills system (which has gotten even more simplified, not less which makes baby pandas sad).

The problem is if you need 3-4 fights per evening so fights don't get unbalanced by powerful dailies, you have LESS time for RP. We usually play 2 fights per evening and LOADS of RP Scenes. In Heroic Tier this was fine, but in Paragon Level it did not work anymore... To have exciting fights so much gametime would be needed for the fights, that time was lacking for RP. In the end we ignored this and just had very easy fights, due to not having enough of them.

Also due to the way how encounters are balanced in 4e (the "MMO-y"/"chess-y" nature of it) even if the characters acted clever you cannot really reduce the number of enemies in an encounter- if you do so it will go trivial usually. So you either ignore the advantages the players "RP'ed out". Or you say "Well, you got rid of 3 of them - Okay, you kill the rest, we do not really need to play that anymore".

About Vancian Magic - it is sort of a mix in the latest playtest. You do HAVE to select a number of spells (1+spellevel for full casters), but you do not have to select in advance which spells you cast. You can cast ANY of the selected spells and then just cross off a spell slot of adequate level. It's sort of halfways a magic point system (with spell slots being your magic points ^^), halfways Vancian.

Skill system - I agree. Before 4e I played Midgard (a german Pen&Paper system, oldest Pen&Paper RPG in German Language) and there is a really VERY detailled skill system there. Anything D&D offers, be it Next, 4e, or any other edition, is inferior to that (but that game had other issues, mainly with highlevel play). But if I see a D&D (of any edition) skill system my first thought is always "Well. This is sort of primitive".

[cryptoknight]

But you don't... simple as "the day isn't over, so we'll write down what dailies you used"

It's not per day of gaming, it's per in-game day. If that in-game day takes you a month it takes a month. That said, recent LFR mods that are single extended rest mods have shown themselves to be challenges combat wise for mid-high paragon.

[RavenX]

Originally Posted by cryptoknight

Roleplaying or not Roleplaying is a choice that those at the tables make. I've had characters that were nothing more than a piece of the battlefield, and I've had characters that have more RP in them than I've had in 1/2/3.5.

Any game system that returns Vancian magic is a poor one, seeing that go out the door was the best thing 4e did.

One thing I disliked about 4e was the simplified skills system (which has gotten even more simplified, not less which makes baby pandas sad).

Cryptoknight,

I could probably write a dissertation on the things about 4e that I didn't like. I only ran it because my players wanted to try it. I never liked it from day 1. Pathfinder was a saving grace for me. 4e had the shortest shelf life of all the game systems, so I know I am not the only one that felt this way.

Skills are over-simplified to the point there is no diversity in the game system. I liked having a large quantity of skills such as 2e provided. You could make a truly unique character and story for that character based easily on skills. 4e the skills feel too generic. This wasn't my biggest complaint though, I hated the fact the saving throw was reduced to a single roll and the old 3.5 saves became static defense values. I didn't like how they treated every class as a magic character template. Giving everyone magic type powers takes away from the role of the spell casters in the group. I also didn't like the way they reduced role playing situations down to skill challenges. You can basically substitute a series of skill checks for any RP situation if the DM goes with that route. To me, that axed the role playing potential completely and replaced it with roll playing.

I have agreed with my players to run next or 5e whatever they call it, but under the provision that I may change the skill system or any other elements I don't particularly like. I quit running the next playtest when Monty Cook left the company under "Creative Differences". I'm not saying Monty is the be all end all of RP game designs, but the man did help pen 3.5 and pathfinder, and both systems were loved and did well for themselves (Pathfinder still is). I liked Monty's original idea for Next, a modular system that included elements of all editions so that DMs could choose the exact parts they wanted. It was a good idea. Unfortunately Hasbro didn't care for it, so they may end up alienating their audience again. I am happy with the current Forgotten Realms modules, the fact they made them compatible with 3.5, 4, and Next is promising. If they maintain that compatibility with other editions once Next is out, they will continue seeing me purchase books from them. My players love Pathfinder, and to me 3.5 compatible means Pathfinder compatible. If hero lab supports Next, I will purchase the license. I just need to see finished books in my hands from Hasbro first. They could make serious changes that look nothing like what was published in the playtest packets between now and GenCon.

[cryptoknight]

And once again. Roleplaying did not have to break down to a skill challenge. That's a choice that DMs typically made. The only time I saw it break down to that was in LFR games at Conventions, where a 4 hour time slot was all you had.

Did I like what they did with the skills? No, but calling everybody a magic user is an over simplification of the powers system. FWIW, 4e lasted 5 years, same as 3.5. 3e lasted all of 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edition...ns_%26_Dragons

And compared to playing a fighter or rogue in 3.5?

3.5e
"What do you do?" "I hit him" "roll dice" "roll damage maybe"
vs 4e
"What do you do?" "I hit him with nifty power X and pull him into flank with the rogue.","roll dice","roll the dice and maybe do some damage and change the battlefield"

You can call it wizard like powers if you want, I thought of Dailies and Encounters as maneuvers, just sometimes I wished I could take the same one over and over.

[RavenX]

Originally Posted by cryptoknight

And once again. Roleplaying did not have to break down to a skill challenge. That's a choice that DMs typically made. The only time I saw it break down to that was in LFR games at Conventions, where a 4 hour time slot was all you had.

Did I like what they did with the skills? No, but calling everybody a magic user is an over simplification of the powers system. FWIW, 4e lasted 5 years, same as 3.5. 3e lasted all of 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edition...ns_%26_Dragons

And compared to playing a fighter or rogue in 3.5?

3.5e
"What do you do?" "I hit him" "roll dice" "roll damage maybe"
vs 4e
"What do you do?" "I hit him with nifty power X and pull him into flank with the rogue.","roll dice","roll the dice and maybe do some damage and change the battlefield"

You can call it wizard like powers if you want, I thought of Dailies and Encounters as maneuvers, just sometimes I wished I could take the same one over and over.

I will say you're being Generous on your time frame of reference too. 4e was launched at GenCon 2008 and by GenCon 2011 was officially killed by Hasbro. Any products they still had in the pipeline were still released because they were already in production, but they knew it was dead before Essentials was released officially. It wasn't selling.

The reason you saw Skill Challenges used at Conventions is that it is not a choice for RPGA judges, they have to use the rules as they're written. As an RPGA judge you don't get to choose or use DM adjucation, you have to do everything by the book and RPGA supplemental books. 3.5 and 3 are the same. 3.5 was an update of 3, they would have called it 4 if it was a new version Crypto. As I said, you're being far too Generous with time frames.

[cryptoknight]

You're just a Hater Ravenx and I don't know why.. .I've been in 4e campaigns where we role-played our way through them, and I've been in LFR, where the dice come out to get us through the horrible mechanic that is a skill challenge. I've also been in LFR where we roleplayed our little hearts out.

As for the RPGA enforcing rules as you say, that hasn't been my experience. From calling fights early, to roleplaying through encounters and skipping the skill challenges, I've seen it all with 4e.

[RavenX]

I've never liked 4e and never will. If that makes me a hater, fine, I can live with that. You can pen me down as a Justin Beiber and Limp Bizcut hater too while were on that page. I gave it a chance, didn't enjoy it and gave up on it. I've run every edition that's been released from 1st to next.

[jbearwillis]

To each their own, My group and I give 4E a year of are time to give it a chance. The feel of the game was as if we were playing a computer game moving our toon on the screen, Powers or if you like abilities felt like their counter parts in computer games. with cool downs and the like. After a year we gave up on 4E. All the classes felt the same to us. Same powers different names, the only difference was when you got the power. Like I said to each their own, but I guess I'm a hater also because I refuse to ever go back and play 4E. I chose to keep my computer games on my computer and my table top RPG's on the table. Not mix them up. My believe Wizards made 4E the way they did to try and bring computer games to the table or at least the ones that never played a table top game rpg, which there were a lot of them. I just believe 4E ran its course for what it was made for.

If you enjoy it, then you enjoy it. if you don't you don't, you don't - It takes all kinds to make the world go around. But to call people haters just because they don't like some games is just plain off the wall - LOL. If you think it's a great game and its for you great. I felt it fell short in a lot of area's and wasn't for me and my group felt the same.