Returning to 4e

I suppose this was going to happen sooner or later. Almost a decade later and I'm not just returning to 4e, I'm staying for the foreseeable future. For all of 4e's faults there nothing like it. Whether it be longings for deep tactical play, excellent character building, the skill challenge system, re-evaluating my concept of story games, or just plain ole nostalgia... it's just time to stop wandering. Time to go home.

Let's face it: nothing has ever done 4e's type of tactical play in an RPG. From what I understand Pathfinder 2e does something similar, but the resource management system of 4e's damn-well near universal At-Will, Encounter, and Daily set up hasn't really been attempted since. It's a very specific itch to have.

No, 13th Age doesn't count. I count it as a step backwards.

Like, when I think back to 4e that's the thing I really miss the most: everyone having a similar system of resources. This lets them figure out more intricate plans and really treat combat as a puzzle.

But that's only one half of the tactical picture. 4e's secret sauce, the thing that keeps the above framework interesting, is Page 42, which allows for strong and effective improvisation. You marry these two systems together and the conversation of combat becomes a free wheeling affair, especially if you're willing to let players sacrifice their power slots to make better on the fly effects. There's a lot of freedom in 4e, but that's specially because of the framework it operates in; any other system it wouldn't work quite as well 

Character creation in 4e is a bit tricky. On the one hand you can have people do it together, and get some really cool workshopping, with people coming up with combos and intentionally shoring up each other's weaknesses and increasing strengths. But it has to be purposefully done. For whatever reason I remember folks not doing this sorta thing by default, but when it is done it's deeply enjoyable. And yeah, I miss it. I'll make sure it happens.

The skill challenge system has gold at its heart, even if it has issues. The GM tells you how many successes you need before three failures; you get XP based on how many checks you had to make, not on how many successes you had. This gives you a good basis for getting XP on the nights when combat isn't on everyone's mind.  4e could be a surprisingly open system for how heavily focused it was on combat, even having rules for getting XP for straight up RP. This doesn't make it a good straight up "story" game (more on that nonsense in a minute), but the game has built in alternatives for when you're just not in the mood to pull out the battle map.

The term story game is bullshit. Period. The term is not positive, it doesn't actually have its own identity. It just means "We don't like DnD and that makes us superior". This isn't to say that DnD is a good game necessarily (5e is hot garbage), but liking DnD is certainly not proof of being uncultured or something like that. That's not to say you can't make a term for the various types in the indie scene. I'm sure better classifications can exist. PBTA (Powered by the Apocalypse) is now very much its own thing, as are FitD (Forged in the Dark) and RiT (Rooted in Trophy). Maybe instead of using story game or Indy as some weird form of identity we simply say what we play and have done with it?  I acknowledge not everyone does this. But I know I did, and it robbed me of a lot of fun I could otherwise be having.

I'm not here saying I think 4e is a perfect game. To the contrary, I think there's a lot of room to house rule. Combat takes way too long sometimes, some of the classes need significant help to be effective, and the system doesn't reward role-playing as it could. But, as it turns out, the design team was cognizant of these issues and were working on evolving the system! Dragon Magazine published a lot of Unearthed Arcana articles, addressing many problems of the system. Turns out that the designers had put a lot of thought into improving 4e and I like a lot of their ideas. From rewarding role-play with action points, long term wounds, go a complete backstory system, I can tell that the designers had more than enough to make a new edition that would have been an actual evolution of 4e. So yeah. 4e ain't perfect. But the ideas presented in Dragon Magazine are great and I'm definitely going to try them. But that means dropping the pretensions to grandeur. 4e's story isn't going to be Dostoevsky, more John Wick. But John Wick has a fantastic story in its own right, easily standing on its own.

And yeah, there's more than a little nostalgia at work here! 4e was the first RPG I legitimately loved. That's just not going to go away. Trust me, I tried to kill that and here I am, ten years later, right back to where I started. I've learned a ton along the way, and will always have Burning Wheel, Trophy Gold, and Bleak Spirit, not to mention Crescendo (whenever that gets done). I learned a lot. It'll make my present so much better.

It's been a good journey. Time to come home.