A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
Returning to 4th Edition D&D
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I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search. https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example. It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own *thing* (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e's Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me. 5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like "I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But... then if I need fireball I won't have it later. So let's do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn't use magic.". Rituals were a decent solution for that.That's valid, we might have under utilized rituals in replacing much of what I felt was lost in vancian casting. I still feel the homogenization of powers, while very sensible from a mechanical standpoint, stood out to me as very video game. I can see you're point in spell slots use for environmental vs combat, I think that was part of what I found interesting in caster classes in 3.5, and later pf1. I get that there is a lot of intelligent design in 4e, and I think on a mechanical level it makes a ton of sense, but I think ultimately it comes down to rules vs rulings mentality to the game. I would say it was very much on the side of rules, and for many players that felt much more like the MMOs they knew than a TTRPG.