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[forsaken1111]

I doubt it. Even at 20th level, I doubt he'll have run afoul of more than two, maybe three dark gods, and the cultists of a half-dozen more. He'll have picked up some very rare information, sure, but there are going to be lots of great gaping holes in his knowledge, especially when you start talking about non-evil deities.
And history? Forget about it. If he saw it happen, it barely counts as history.

But are you going to be the one to tell the 20th level barbarian that he's dumb and ill-informed?

Hah! I did once make the mistake of insulting a barbarian played by a very serious roleplay. He just nodded at me, and pointed.

Six levels later I had forgotten about this, but in the middle of a pitched battle with an aboleth mage who was flying around casting spells at us we ran out of things to throw at it.

Suddenly the barbarian picked up my halfling and hurled him at the aboleth. I did no damage to the aboleth on impact, my attack was ineffectual, and then it ate me.

Barbarians have long memories.

[Neonivek]

4e's 'add half your level to all skill checks' might play better than 3.x's skill ranks, but it makes a whole lot less sense - how does a 20th level barbarian know more about history and religion than a third level religious scholar?

I actually have the exact opposite oppinion then you do. It actually makes MORE sense then 3.x's overly specialised system.

It takes a character who should otherwise be a competent and inspiring character by then and takes away their glaring flaws caused by a system that rewards specialisation over being rounded while at the same time punishing you for not being specialised.

In otherwords the half-level aspect allows your character to feel competent, it allows your character to be competent without being amazing at that particularly ability unless they reached near godhood. I mean... "Behold the diety of darkness and light, all who face him die! unless they happen to be across a 10 foot gap... then you live"

While I'll admit for some skills it starts to seem a bit weird (such as strength) but for some such as jump, climb, stealth, basic knowledge of the world, and others it makes total sense and actually aids the game immensely when you arn't dealing with two things
1) When an action requires total party competence: A lot like stealth... there are many times when actions cannot be done because it otherwise would require the entire party to be competent in one area
2) When a series of actions need to be taken outside someones specialty: The 4e rules lets even them help to. SURE they are nowhere close to as good as the characters meant to do the task... but you don't get the idea that they are essentially a baby trying to build a nuclear submarine.
-Ok and not feeling like a total incompetent character who only survives in the world because he has someone else around him.

Also as for "Barbarian"... I should state that one of the characters they were based off of was Conan the barbarian... and he was hardly a stupid guy. Wisdom is another form of intelligence.

[Gantolandon]

My only experience with D&D 4e comes from the official introductory adventure. To say I wasn't impressed would be an understatement.

Every class felt the same. You could hit the enemy. You could hit him harder. Or you could hit him very hard, but once per fight. The mage, instead of hitting very hard, could hit multiple enemies. That, and the fact that he used ranged attacks, differed him from the fighter.

The adventure itself, something that was meant to hoop people up with this ruleset, was incredibly bland and generic. Basically a classic grindfest with orcs and traps. The things that I remembered the most was:
1. A riddle that was impossible to translate to other languages, as it was based on double meaning of word "sinister" in English.
2. An occasion, where a priest had to roll Knowledge (Religion) (or its 4e equivalent) to recognise the holy symbol of his own god.

Well, let's not talk about rules and adventures. Maybe the lore will be better?

Think about your loved ones. Assume they had been captured by a psychopath and passed out from malnutrition in his basement. Imagine their corpses dismembered and cut into tiny pieces. Imagine those parts assembled into an ugly abomination, sewn together with ugly, sickly green thread and reinforced with rusty metal screws. Imagine this monster brought to life with unholy magic or science. You can see it shambling and moaning painfully, begging to be released from its torment. You can still recognize individual parts of this monster - some relatively intact, others brutally mangled - but its pretty clear that this beast it's no longer what you have cherished so much.

Those are my thoughts about the planar lore of 4e.

[forsaken1111]

The adventure itself, something that was meant to hoop people up with this ruleset, was incredibly bland and generic. Basically a classic grindfest with orcs and traps. The things that I remembered the most was:
1. A riddle that was impossible to translate to other languages, as it was based on double meaning of word "sinister" in English.
2. An occasion, where a priest had to roll Knowledge (Religion) (or its 4e equivalent) to recognise the holy symbol of his own god.

1. Sinister has a double meaning?
2. Sounds like you had a terrible DM.

Think about your loved ones. Assume they had been captured by a psychopath and passed out from malnutrition in his basement. Imagine their corpses dismembered and cut into tiny pieces. Imagine those parts assembled into an ugly abomination, sewn together with ugly, sickly green thread and reinforced with rusty metal screws. Imagine this monster brought to life with unholy magic or science. You can see it shambling and moaning painfully, begging to be released from its torment. You can still recognize individual parts of this monster - some relatively intact, others brutally mangled - but its pretty clear that this beast it's no longer what you have cherished so much.

Those are my thoughts about the planar lore of 4e.

Care to elaborate? Colorful metaphor, but it is entirely meaningless without some specific examples.

[Gantolandon]

1. Sinister has a double meaning?

In heraldry, it means the left side of a coat of arms.

2. Sounds like you had a terrible DM.

This test was an element of the adventure. DM actually decided to skip it after almost laughing his face off.

Care to elaborate? Colorful metaphor, but it is entirely meaningless without some specific examples.

They decided to build entirely new cosmology, but using elements from the old ones. Of course, changing it as they have seen fit, usually for worse.

The Bleak Cabal is a good example. In Planescape, they were a faction of existentialists dwelling on Pandemonium. They didn't actively recruit, taking misfits from other factions and sometimes even discouraging them from joining. Despite believing that life has no meaning, they were the most charitable group active in Sigil. Their headquarters was a bizarre combination of an orphanage, almshouse and mental institution.

Well, they appear in 4e cosmology in Pandemonium. Except that now they are a group of wizards who willingly made themselves mad to achieve ULTIMATE POWAH.

Also, the fiends. In Planescape there were two races of fiends waging an eternal war, locked in an eternal stalemate. Both sides and represented some kind of evil - the organised, malicious, Third Reich-like society versus a bunch of psychopathic egotists with no loyalty to speak of, unified only by fear of their leaders and hatred to their enemies. Both sides were secretely manipulated by a third race of fiends, but otherwise they were quite cunning. They had to - corrupted mortals transferred into more cannon fodder for their armies.

In 4e there are cunning, scheming devils and dumb, brutal demons. The only demon interested in intrigue is, in fact, a devil.

[forsaken1111]

So your dislike stems from the fact that they... changed things? Nothing you listed there is really all that bad, it seems like you just don't like them changing things.

Personally I love the new planar cosmology, which is why I was curious at your reasoning. I've played a few very fun campaigns across the 4e cosmology.

[Gantolandon]

So your dislike stems from the fact that they... changed things? Nothing you listed there is really all that bad, it seems like you just don't like them changing things.

My dislike stems from my perception that they have changed interesting things to something bland. Mad, power-hungry wizards were cliché before Charlemagne was born. Using an old name is adding an insult to injury.

This is the main problem I have with D&D 4e. The third edition has already had somewhat generic feeling. The books were either entirely stripped of fluff, or just boring. The 4th edition has taken it to the extreme.

Personally I love the new planar cosmology, which is why I was curious at your reasoning. I've played a few very fun campaigns across the 4e cosmology.

Do you know the old one (pre-3e)? I'm not saying that you should like it more, but that is the feeling of most of the people I know.

[Heron TSG]

Stuff about higher levels adding to skills in 4e, and how 3.5 didn't work right.

In 3.5, you didn't actually have to train your jump check in order to cross a ten foot canyon. You could have a really high strength score. If you had a certain spell, race, or feat, you could use your Dex score instead. You could lay down a ten foot pole and use your balance check to cross it. You could use one of the numerous ways to fly across. You could fall down the canyon and climb up the other side with your climb check. (Note: Only do this if you don't take much falling damage!) You could throw a bunch of dead orcs into the canyon until you could walk across. Such a challenge is only a challenge if you don't have any imagination.

[Chutney]

or you could all just make a jump check and get on with the adventure 

edit: substance!
Here is the thing not many people seem to realize (a lot of people failing their wisdom checks...) : D&D 3.5e is about high fantasy running around the world with powerful magicks slaying dragons and altering the entire world.
4e is about being heroes and doing heroic things and overall being better than the average person and being big damn heroes (hence why skills increase with levels, all the classes are basically equivalent).

the difference is subtle, but it's there.

[MrWiggles]

I can of see the complaint that all the classes are more or less the same in 4e, but only partially. They all operate under the same mechanics, once you get how to work one character, you won't have to much trouble trying out the other characters. For myself personally, I don't like this. I like crunch, and 4e takes out a lot of the crunch.

As I said before, and others have, 4e is shallow of a game, and pigeon holds you terribly. However, that is the goal of 4e, and I think it does it quite nicely. The class, though operating similarly affect each other and their challenges in different manners that encourage fast decision making (as in faster turn pace for combat), and team work. Team work, I think is much easier in 4e then in previous editions.

I appreciate that the classes aren't broken. The spell casters have been spoken to in length for their over power spelled, but most classes had various issues. Rogue, my favored class, I think even without the additional errata from misc. rules books that its the second class pose for the most abuse.

Rangers, are broken in 3e. It gets better in 3.5, but its still a wonky and weird. The same goes toward the Paladin. The Cleric, couldn't perform its party function when it was low leveled. Bards were so aimless in their ability, that it was hard to use them.  The Fighter and the Barbarian in my opinion are the only two well design core classes in 3e.

[Cthulhu]

I don't hate the 4e cosmology, but I don't use it either.  I just stick with a hideous patchwork Planescape with some elements of everything because when I grew up on the Lore I wasn't aware that Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and all the others didn't necessarily have the same stuff, so it's all jumbled together for me.  I was also a little miffed that they got rid of Yugoloths (Ultrodemon?  Who thought that would sound good?), but it's nothing two seconds of "Nevermind, Yugoloths are still around" can't fix.

[MrWiggles]

3e had Greyhawk as its default fantasy world, but it wasn't strongly presented in the core rules books. When you look at halfing, you examine their racial abilities, most of them are cultural. For instance, rock throwing. There is a similar thing with gnomes as well. However, it wasn't heavily laid on or force upon the user.

I in general used the cosmology in the core books, for no real reason, other then laziness and incorporated into whatever fantasy world I had at the time. I felt the fantasy feel presented in the 3e core book, was generic enough that I could apply it in whatever home brew world I had going at the time.


Now, 4e, (Which I believe defaults Forgotten Realms), I feel that the Realms setting is forced upon DM and the player group to the point in the games I ran in 4e, felt awkward as I to do more to incorporate the Forgotten Realms artifacts into my fantasy world, so that the rule books flavoring didn't seem weird.
---
As for the cosmology changes. I think thats a weak point to critique 4e. 3e it was Greyhawk, and 4e is in Forgotten Realms. So, of course the cosmology is going to different.

[Gantolandon]

As for the cosmology changes. I think thats a weak point to critique 4e. 3e it was Greyhawk, and 4e is in Forgotten Realms. So, of course the cosmology is going to different.

In AD&D both worlds operated on the same cosmology. That was changed in 3e for unknown reasons. Great Tree wasn't particularly good, it required a lot of retconning and even the authors didn't seemingly care to describe it better. If you look at FR books written before the third edition, you'll see names from Greyhawk (or rather Planescape).

[MrWiggles]

As for the cosmology changes. I think thats a weak point to critique 4e. 3e it was Greyhawk, and 4e is in Forgotten Realms. So, of course the cosmology is going to different.

In AD&D both worlds operated on the same cosmology. That was changed in 3e for unknown reasons. Great Tree wasn't particularly good, it required a lot of retconning and even the authors didn't seemingly care to describe it better. If you look at FR books written before the third edition, you'll see names from Greyhawk (or rather Planescape).

If I recall correctly, that is totally true. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realm were more less interchangeable. WotC changed the cosmology to expand the brand, and give it a more distinctive flair. This does a few things; for WotC, it meant different product lines for moar monies. Being a company, I can't blame them for that.

It also, made it matter that you were either playing in Forgotten Realm or in Greyhawk. Also, didn't WotC start a persist official game world that used one them?

[Vanigo]

4e's 'add half your level to all skill checks' might play better than 3.x's skill ranks, but it makes a whole lot less sense - how does a 20th level barbarian know more about history and religion than a third level religious scholar?

I actually have the exact opposite oppinion then you do. It actually makes MORE sense then 3.x's overly specialised system.
[snip]

All perfectly valid points - except they're all about how well it plays, and I already said it may well play better. And, yeah, I say it makes less sense. Not everyone's going to be good (or even passable) at every skill in 3.x, but A) that's entirely realistic, and B) at higher levels you can generally cover for your lousy skills with some other mechanism. A 16th level octogenarian wizard isn't going to be much of a jumper, but he's bound to have a fly spell or two on hand. You can overspecialize a character to the point where he can't get over a 10 foot gap, but it's kind of dumb. Is the game better this way? Probably not. But it makes more sense.