Aetrimonde

In the previous post, I talked about the things that 4e did well for the types of games I wanted to run. But if 4e had been a perfect system for my purposes, I wouldn’t have felt the need to invent houserules, or homebrew content, or eventually, to write Aetrimonde.

4e got a lot of criticism: some of it warranted, much of it (in my opinion) not. Every new edition of D&D starts a lot of Internet Arguments over whether it’s better than the old one, and I’m going to carefully sidestep all of that by saying up front that no edition of D&D has been good for running the kinds of games I want. This post is about the things that kept me from fully enjoying 4e out of the box, and that eventually made me start writing Aetrimonde.

Wonky Level Scaling

“Level scaling” is a catchall term to describe how characters become more powerful as they gain levels, and how the challenges and foes they face should become more powerful at the same time. This is important in tabletop RPGs, because it’s hard for the writers to give a GM guidelines for designing appropriate challenges if characters’ numeric and other attributes don’t scale predictably or smoothly.

4e tried really hard here…it just didn’t get it quite right. High-level characters in 4e tended to actually feel weaker than low-level ones, because the guidelines used to design and rate monsters meant that level-appropriate monsters felt harder to hit and tougher at high levels, while also hitting the PCs more often.

4e Design History

The biggest problem with 4e’s level scaling is that between levels 1 and 30, a PC’s attack bonuses and defenses would nominally increase by about 25 points (+15 from a +1 bonus at every even level, +6 from the magic items a PC was expected to equip themselves with, and +4 from expected ability increases). Meanwhile, monsters’ attack bonuses and defenses would increase by 29 (+1 per level)…meaning that PCs would need to roll 4 higher to hit a level-appropriate monster at level 30, while the monsters would need to roll 4 lower.

There were also issues with HP and damage scaling: monster HP increased faster than PCs’ HP and their damage, meaning that high level fights turned into a slog of whittling down massive HP pools. This was even worse for 4e’s “Solo” monsters, intended to face an entire party of 5 PCs alone; they had 5 times the HP of a normal monster, and it was rapidly determined that that was about 25% too many.

I believe part of the reason why 4e’s attack and damage scaling (and maybe HP scaling, too) were wonky is that the designers assumed PCs would always be receiving bonuses from an ally that made up for the difference. This did not turn out to be the case in practice, as players often opted for powers with more direct effects, like greater damage or more healing.

4e’s designers tried to fix both of these things, although their solutions were naturally limited by the fact that they couldn’t just release a software patch.

To fix the attack and defense scaling, the Player’s Handbook 2 included feats granting bonuses that closed the gaps between PC and monster attacks and defenses. Unfortunately, this made those feats incredibly powerful compared to every other feat, and became almost compulsory choices. Many GMs (myself included, before I started houseruling more heavily) just gave every PC these feats for free instead.

Meanwhile, to fix the monster HP problems, the designers altered the formula they used for monster HP in the Monster Manual 2, reducing all monsters’ HP slightly, and adjusting Solo monsters to only have 4 times normal HP. They also released errata for the original Monster Manual, reducing the HP of its monsters to match.

Steep Power Curve

4e had a very steep power curve, taking PCs from heroic but very much mortal at level 1, to near-godlike at level 30. The steepness of this curve meant that low-level challenges became irrelevant very quickly as characters gained levels.

This is the first spot where my critique of 4e becomes really subjective: I want a system where low-level challenges remain relevant, if somewhat easier to overcome, at high levels. Not one where goblins become irrelevant at high levels, or where goblins must steadily be replaced by tougher and tougher goblins.

5e has taken a big step in this direction, with the introduction of its bounded accuracy design philosophy making it possible for low level characters to at least scratch high level ones, and reducing the gap between low-level and high-level skill bonuses. It still has a problem of rapid HP inflation, such that high level characters have so many HP that you need impractically many low-level enemies to pose a threat to them.

4e Design History

To give one example of challenges becoming irrelevant at higher levels, level 1 goblins became difficult to use as credible threats as early as level 6, even in huge numbers, because they could barely hit a level 6 PC and would deal tiny amounts of damage, while the PC could hardly miss them.

4e dealt with this by introducing what seemed to me to be a numbers treadmill: its encounter design guidelines for GMs suggested that PCs should generally fight enemies within 4 levels of them. Aside from reducing the variety of monsters that a GM could use for a given level of party, this made it difficult to show the PCs’ progress naturally: past a certain point, you couldn’t pit the PCs against enemies they had previously struggled against if you wanted the encounter to still be remotely challenging.

This also extended to other areas like skill checks: the DMG provided a table of “level-appropriate” DCs for the GM to set, the implication of which was that an “average” difficulty challenge would see a competent PC succeed about half the time at any level. This, again, seemed like a numbers treadmill.

As far as the table of DCs goes, I believe that this was actually a good idea implemented badly. I have come to interpret the table descriptively, not prescriptively; that is, I view it as saying what DCs are easy, moderate, or hard for a PC to handle at a given level, rather than what DCs they should face at a given level. So when one of my players asks to climb a wall, my first thought to myself is “what level of PC should find this wall moderately challenging?” and I then consult the table for an appropriate DC for that level–which is not, necessarily, the level of the player’s character.

I don’t think most GMs viewed the table this way.

Among the failure modes I have read other GMs lamenting are:

• That their players grumbled about brick walls getting harder to climb as they gained levels.
• That at high levels, having every wall intended for the PCs to climb be a wall of force (to explain the higher DC) didn’t suit their narrative.
• That it broke their players’ suspension of disbelief when every wall they wanted to climb turned out be a wall of force at higher levels.

I think all of these could have been avoided if the DMG’s instructions for using the table of DCs had been a little better thought out…or if the system had been designed so that appropriate DCs did not change so significantly between low and high levels, as is the case in 5e.

Rigid Character Creation

This is one area where 4e’s excellent unified mechanics went a step too far, in my opinion.

Until some of the later books, all PCs gained new powers at exactly the same rate. Every character of a given level would have nearly identical power spreads (featuring the same number of at-will, per-short-rest, and per-long-rest powers, other than a few utility powers). There was no ability to choose between utility and offensive powers, or short-rest and long-rest powers.

Powers became available for selection only at specific levels, and did not scale: level 23 powers were more powerful than level 13 powers, which were more powerful than level 3 powers, and so on. While you would eventually start replacing your low-level powers with higher-level ones, you would not always find a direct upgrade for powers you liked, forcing you to choose between effective powers and ones that appealed to your character concept. (Also, where there were direct upgrades, it meant taking up a lot of page space to print several versions of the same power.)

Classes were also tightly siloed, each with a distinct and non-overlapping selection of powers, creating a paradigm where, for example, the sorcerer would either have a power virtually identical to a wizard’s Fireball under a different name, or would have no equivalent power despite that being a very appropriate power for a sorcerer, or would have a power that differed from Fireball seemingly only for the purpose of being distinct. Aside from sometimes breaking suspension of disbelief, this again meant that page space was taken up printing several similar powers for different classes.

A class’ powers would be largely tailored to work with its class features and its intended role: while this made it harder to build a character that was outright unable to fulfill its role, it also meant that it was harder to give characters the flexibility to step even a little bit out of that role. Early in 4e’s lifecycle, there were no powers supporting a dual-wielding fighter or a warlord using ranged weapons.

4e Design History

Some of this did eventually get smoothed out as more books got published.

The Player’s Handbook 3 introduced three psionic classes that got only at-will and per-long-rest powers, but could augment their at-wills with a limited “power point” resource to be on par with per-short-rest powers. The later Essentials books introduced some simplified variant classes, such as the Slayer and Knight variant fighters that got fewer per-short-rest and no per-long-rest powers.

Class siloing was loosened by later books introducing additional power choices and alternate class features to enable different playstyles for many classes, and by expansions to 4e’s multiclassing rules, which provided more ways to gain powers from other classes.

Overly Gamist Design

Here, we’re going to get into a purely subjective opinion of mine. I eventually came to feel, especially on reading later books in 4e’s lifecycle, that the developers would write powers (or even entire classes) by starting from desired mechanics and adding narrative as an afterthought. Which is to say, I think that the design process might have been along the lines of “for the level 13 cleric powers, we need some to deal radiant, thunder, fire, and lightning damage; two using weapons; two using implements; two that heal; two that buff allies; and two that debuff enemies. Figure out how to cram that into four powers, and then come up with descriptions for the mechanics of each power.”

I would much prefer that the design process start from the narrative, and that the mechanics grow from that, along the lines of “we need to support clerics that wield holy weapons, call down wrath from the heavens, channel the terrible presence of a deity, apply divine seals and bindings, or just heal and empower their allies. Figure out what mechanics are appropriate for each of those tropes, and work those into a selection of powers.”

Up Next

Having now covered both the positive and the negative aspects of 4e, my next post will conclude this series on design philosophy by discussing the design goals I took away from 4e and other games as a basis for Aetrimonde.