Yes, of course, you could make a character right out of the pHB, ignoring many pages of errata...but how do you ignore the book-a-month coming out, often with interrelating options. You can't miss out on a +1 since that's the heart of the game.

Quote from: RandyB;1103180They did. Only the sole developer died suddenly before the software was finished, and they had to release the game without the software.

His death wasn't exactly a mystery.

https://modenook.com/the-murdersuicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online/

Quote from: Doom;1103211Yes, of course, you could make a character right out of the pHB, ignoring many pages of errata...but how do you ignore the book-a-month coming out, often with interrelating options. You can't miss out on a +1 since that's the heart of the game.

That's not really how that worked though. There was nothing in the other books which, if you didn't take, you'd be "behind". Most were just additional classes, and often weaker options than what was already in the PHB. If you used just PHB, your PC was balanced just fine against those using expansion books.

Quote from: Mistwell;1103217That's not really how that worked though. There was nothing in the other books which, if you didn't take, you'd be "behind". Most were just additional classes, and often weaker options than what was already in the PHB. If you used just PHB, your PC was balanced just fine against those using expansion books.

If you're talking about Wizards, Rangers, Fighters or Warlords in particular that is definitely not the case.  They gained an awful lot from the supplements.  (And of course there's the math fix items and feats - you don't take those you definitely will be behind).  But balance is not the point.  

If you just use the PHB you're missing Bards, Barbarians, Druids and Sorcerers.  If you play a Ranger you basically have two ways to do it: Drizzt or Legolas.  One of the cleric builds is missing powers at some levels to choose.
4E was a game built from the beginning to be expanded upon and added to.  Added to that design on the whole got better as the edition went on - a lot of the best elements are late in the line (like the Berserker class)

You can play it with just the PHB - but personally I wouldn't really want to.

Quote from: TJS;1103225If you're talking about Wizards, Rangers, Fighters or Warlords in particular that is definitely not the case.  They gained an awful lot from the supplements.  (And of course there's the math fix items and feats - you don't take those you definitely will be behind).  

Yeah, you do pretty much need the "+1 to hit per Tier" Feats from PHB2 or Essentials - Essentials ones are stronger with extra stuff added. You might get away without them Tier 1, but a +2 or +3 is huge in 4e.

Quote from: metallica9998;1103215His death wasn't exactly a mystery.

https://modenook.com/the-murdersuicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online/

I didn't recall the details. But his death prevented the completion of the digital tools originally planned.

Quote from: RandyB;1103257I didn't recall the details. But his death prevented the completion of the digital tools originally planned.

Even if he hadn't died, his murdering his ex would have put a spanner in the works.

I ran a 4E campaign for 18-24 months (forget exactly how long) and never used any kind of software at all.  Not having to deal with all the supplements was a plus.  I think I had the first round of supplements, and MM2 was definitely an improvement over MM1.  

Of course, I was running it as a D&D RPG, not a board game or tactical skirmish game.  That might have affected how it went.

Quote from: S'mon;1103227Yeah, you do pretty much need the "+1 to hit per Tier" Feats from PHB2 or Essentials - Essentials ones are stronger with extra stuff added. You might get away without them Tier 1, but a +2 or +3 is huge in 4e.

I know our table banned Essentials (aside from things like Monster Vault), because Mearls is on record saying that was him trying to kill the edition*

You don't actually need those feats if your group combos together. But most of us bought the books we are using with our characters.

*Pure rumor that I believe 100%

Quote from: Rhedyn;1103260I know our table banned Essentials (aside from things like Monster Vault), because Mearls is on record saying that was him trying to kill the edition*

You don't actually need those feats if your group combos together. But most of us bought the books we are using with our characters.

*Pure rumor that I believe 100%

LOL "pure rumor" and "on record" are mutually exclusive. He said no such thing. It's completely fake news nonsense.

In my opinion, Essentials was a big improvement on 4e and made the game much more fun to play for our group. Your view may vary (though given the nonsense you believe, I doubt you even read it).

Quote from: Haffrung;1103130That's probably my biggest barrier to starting a 4e campaign in the future.

Lets see how hard it is. I'm borrowing one of my players copies for this.
Before I roll into this one major observation. The PHB HEAVILY mirrors the Neverwinter MMO and after looking through I can say that this should have been called Neverwinter Online: The RPG. The only notable big difference is HP and damage scaling which is exponentially higher in NWO and the lack or change of skills and feats. They even added Astral Diamonds to D&D! (Assuming it isnt some artifact from some 3e book?)

Ok lets see,
Race: Dragonborn +2 Strength, +2 Charisma. +2 skill bonus to History and Intimidate.  A +2 racial bonus when bloodied, a better healing surge, and dragon breath as an encounter power.
Class: Warlock: Plays off Cha, Con and Int. Two paths, Deceptive and Scourge. I'll go Scourge
Role: Assuming I am reading this right then the only option open to a Warlock is the Striker role?

Next up stats. Lets go with the suggested method of standard array. 16 14 13 12 11 10
Book suggests Con then Int then Cha as important to a Scourge Warlock. Soooo. (But turns out the primary is based on your pact path)
Con: 16
Int: 14
Cha: 15 (13+2)
Str: 12 (10+2)
Dex: 12
Wis: 11

Lets see, they start off with Eldritch Blast
I have to choose a pact. Fey, Infernal, or Star. Lets go Infernal. Alot of these powers play off Con. Grants Hellish Rebuke and Dark ones Blessing - which heals you 1 point per level every time an enemy under your curse dies. Healing potions on legs!
Warlocks curse deals extra damage to those under it when you hit them.
Then the powers, at wills, encounter, and daily... whatever those mean. You get 2 at will, and 1 encounter and daily.
At will: Eldritch blast: uses con or cha so good there. Range of 10. 10 what?
At will: Hellish Rebuke: uses con. Range 10. Deals damage and if you take damage while it is in effect the target takes damage too.
Encounter: Diabolic Grasp: also uses con and range 10. Damage and slides the target 2 squares. +additional equal to int mod in squares for infernal pact. I choose this one. The other is...
Encounter: Vampiric Embrace: con & range of 5. Deals damage and grants you 5 temp HP. Infernal pact adds the same int bonus to the temp HP gained
Daily: Flames of Phelegos: con & range 10. 3d10+con mod damage. +5 damage per round till a save is made.  I choose this one. The other is...
Daily: Armour of Agathys: grants 10+ int mod temp HP. Does cold damage to nearby foes.

Next would be skill selection which seems pretty straightforward.

Feats... oh boy this is where it gets messy doesnt it? 15 pages of them! This really needed a progression tree diagram to show what feats are needed for what other feats. Because several need you to have taken A before you can take B. And some have a C and D step too looks like! AND stat requirements. So you need to consider feats before assigning stats possibly.
It isnt too bad once you get the hang of it. But you need to plan ahead if you have certain goals. Choosing feats willy nilly may make getting the high end ones later harder. That is just a guess based on what I am seeing at a glance here. I am not concerned as I am playing a character rather than a stat block. But still. Its something to bear in mind.

After that is equipment. Armour seems kinda... limited??? Weapons has a fair variety, but is also slightly less. Then there is a big section of magic gear? Looks like for later shopping once the PCs have cash.

Aside from feats, which I'll puzzle out later. This seemed pretty easy to write down. Still need to find the section explaining encounter and daily power use.

I am guessing that later books pile on the complexity of feats or something?

We're currently running a 4e game that cobbled a bunch of early adventures from the initial release and I strung them into a campaign. We started with Escape from Sembia, migrated to the other side of Faerûn, did the adventures in the FRCG, then went into the Scepter Tower of Spellgard. I found two more follow up adventures for that area (Shrouded Visions, From Dusk til Dawn) from Living Forgotten Realms adventures that will finally see the PCs hit Paragon Tier.

Our group consists of 3 D&D veterans, all who've played 3.5 and 5e. Two of them both like 4e and 5e and don't mind switching between the systems. One prefers 4e but doesn't mind 5e. The other player, who started with 4e and has done some 5e really doesn't like 5e. I asked him why and he said he just doesn't like how limited it compared to 4e. Despite the continued success of 5e I'd still rather DM or play 4e. They both have their strengths and I don't mind either, but for preferences it'll always be 4e.

Quote from: Omega;1103401Lets see how hard it is. I'm borrowing one of my players copies for this.
Before I roll into this one major observation. The PHB HEAVILY mirrors the Neverwinter MMO and after looking through I can say that this should have been called Neverwinter Online: The RPG. The only notable big difference is HP and damage scaling which is exponentially higher in NWO and the lack or change of skills and feats. They even added Astral Diamonds to D&D! (Assuming it isnt some artifact from some 3e book?)

It couldn't be called "Neverwinter Online: The RPG" because 4E came first by a wide margin (Indeed, the Neverwinter MMO wasn't even announced until after AFTER Essentials had hit the shelves in 2010 and didn't go live until 2012... it's also known that work on Neverwinter didn't begin until after Atari bought Cryptic in 2009, by which point 4E was already in its second year of release).

Cryptic cribbed from 4E (just like it did from Champions for its Champions MMO), not the other way around. Why do I know this? Because it was peripheral to City of Heroes and the Star Trek Online MMO at the time.

For example, Astral diamonds began in 4E to deal with transporting the exponentially large amounts of wealth PCs could gain (even with 1 pp being worth 100 gp in 4E; a million gp would be on the order of 200 pounds of platinum).

In universe, Astral diamonds were the currency of the epic realms (sorta like the joke about "God, is it true one of your seconds is like a million years to us? YES. And that you pennies are like a million dollars to is? YES. Then may I have one your pennies? SURE, JUST A SEC."); the currency of titans, demigods and the like.

Anyway, you only NEED a computer to build a PC if you're into 3e style charops. Likewise, 90% of the errata was simply to close some loopholes that charops exploited, but that 99% of normal players wouldn't even stumble into (because much of 4E charop involved leveraging multiple elements, typically from multiple books/articles).

Blade Cascade is a prime example. It was a daily power that let the Ranger keep attacking so long as they kept hitting. If you're just employing the normal math that generally means you'll get a couple hits in before a miss, but some charops types leveraged a couple of other powers (and I believe multi-classing) to create an "infinite" blade cascade (basically they got things to where they'd only miss on a natural 1, then used the power).

The errata was to limit blade cascade to five hits at most; which a non-charops type is never likely to ever reach so for a normal table it was irrelevant.

90% of 4E's errata was like that; generally rewording things to close down twisted interpretations of Rules as Written and bring them closer to Rules as Interpreted by any competent DM with an ounce of backbone.

The point being, it is actually very easy to play 4E without a builder program or the errata. The game ISN'T actually an MMO where only PCs with the most optimized builds can participate in end game raids. It's a tabletop RPG with a very transparent system (so the DM can easily guestimate how dangerous an encounter is going to be) where it's pretty easy to hit the basic benchmarks of competency if you just follow the provided advice (ex. the Wizard class tells you to put your highest ability score into Intelligence, your next highest into Con or Wis and third highest into the other of those two; put one of your stat bumps every time you get them into Intelligence and the other into Wis or Con. if you do that you'll have acceptable accuracy/damage and decent hit points/defenses for a wizard regardless of what attacks or feats you take).

The only reason people think otherwise is because charops was a disproportionately loud segment of the online community. They were the ones who "determined" that an expertise feat was needed (because they didn't grok that teamwork and synergy between PCs was intended to (and did) make up for the shortfall) and decided that the "benchmark" for striker classes was to be able to drop one standard enemy a round using only at-wills and that if you didn't build that way you shouldn't even be allowed to play.

Meanwhile, plenty of people who never even looked at a forum made PCs and ran them in campaigns where everything ran just fine.

Quote from: Omega;1103401Lets see how hard it is. I'm borrowing one of my players copies for this.
Before I roll into this one major observation. The PHB HEAVILY mirrors the Neverwinter MMO and after looking through I can say that this should have been called Neverwinter Online: The RPG. The only notable big difference is HP and damage scaling which is exponentially higher in NWO and the lack or change of skills and feats. They even added Astral Diamonds to D&D! (Assuming it isnt some artifact from some 3e book?)

Ok lets see,
Race: Dragonborn +2 Strength, +2 Charisma. +2 skill bonus to History and Intimidate.  A +2 racial bonus when bloodied, a better healing surge, and dragon breath as an encounter power.
Class: Warlock: Plays off Cha, Con and Int. Two paths, Deceptive and Scourge. I'll go Scourge
Role: Assuming I am reading this right then the only option open to a Warlock is the Striker role?

Next up stats. Lets go with the suggested method of standard array. 16 14 13 12 11 10
Book suggests Con then Int then Cha as important to a Scourge Warlock. Soooo. (But turns out the primary is based on your pact path)
Con: 16
Int: 14
Cha: 15 (13+2)
Str: 12 (10+2)
Dex: 12
Wis: 11

Lets see, they start off with Eldritch Blast
I have to choose a pact. Fey, Infernal, or Star. Lets go Infernal. Alot of these powers play off Con. Grants Hellish Rebuke and Dark ones Blessing - which heals you 1 point per level every time an enemy under your curse dies. Healing potions on legs!
Warlocks curse deals extra damage to those under it when you hit them.
Then the powers, at wills, encounter, and daily... whatever those mean. You get 2 at will, and 1 encounter and daily.
At will: Eldritch blast: uses con or cha so good there. Range of 10. 10 what?
At will: Hellish Rebuke: uses con. Range 10. Deals damage and if you take damage while it is in effect the target takes damage too.
Encounter: Diabolic Grasp: also uses con and range 10. Damage and slides the target 2 squares. +additional equal to int mod in squares for infernal pact. I choose this one. The other is...
Encounter: Vampiric Embrace: con & range of 5. Deals damage and grants you 5 temp HP. Infernal pact adds the same int bonus to the temp HP gained
Daily: Flames of Phelegos: con & range 10. 3d10+con mod damage. +5 damage per round till a save is made.  I choose this one. The other is...
Daily: Armour of Agathys: grants 10+ int mod temp HP. Does cold damage to nearby foes.

Next would be skill selection which seems pretty straightforward.  

Feats... oh boy this is where it gets messy doesnt it? 15 pages of them! This really needed a progression tree diagram to show what feats are needed for what other feats. Because several need you to have taken A before you can take B. And some have a C and D step too looks like! AND stat requirements. So you need to consider feats before assigning stats possibly.
It isnt too bad once you get the hang of it. But you need to plan ahead if you have certain goals. Choosing feats willy nilly may make getting the high end ones later harder. That is just a guess based on what I am seeing at a glance here. I am not concerned as I am playing a character rather than a stat block. But still. Its something to bear in mind.

After that is equipment. Armour seems kinda... limited??? Weapons has a fair variety, but is also slightly less. Then there is a big section of magic gear? Looks like for later shopping once the PCs have cash.

Aside from feats, which I'll puzzle out later. This seemed pretty easy to write down. Still need to find the section explaining encounter and daily power use.

I am guessing that later books pile on the complexity of feats or something?

There's zillions of them.  Feats, feats and more feats.  (Most of them garbage).

But a lot depends on what you want to achieve.  You can, as I said earlier, run 4E with just the first set of core books (although I would definitely use the Essentials Monster Vault instead of the original Monster Manual) but character options are severely limited.  Whether that matters depends on your group.  If you have a group of newbies it may not matter too much - if you have a group of people who have experience of other editions and what the same character options then you need at least PHB2.

And as I said overall the game's design got better.  Take the fighter, a lot of it's original powers are one shot hit and do a thing powers - later on they realised that this isn't the most satisfying way to handle dailies and added stance powers that last a whole encounter.  The wizard was supposed to be a controller, but a lot of it's orignal powers didn't do that role too well - too influenced by D&D legacy - later powers upped the amount of control that wizards had.  

4E as a whole has too many options and it would be much better to be able to pare that right down to a smaller amount - however just restricting everything to one book wouldn't be the most satisfying way to do this.

I never said you needed a computer to make a character. ( So anyone who's trying to prove that you don't need the books - stop being such an idiot!)  But I'd rather have one, because these days I can't face the idea of a whole session of players going through books and choosing feats and powers - and because the best version of 4E is not located in one or two or even three books but scattered across a whole range of books which are mostly a waste of page count otherwise (so I really don't want to drag them out of storage) - and if I'm going to play the game I want to play the best version of the game.  (Why wouldn't I?).

My last attempt to run a 4e campaign 2017-18, I wanted a simple Heroic-Tier game in the Nentir Vale, just use a few books, no electronics. Pretty sandboxy, pretty old school. What actually happened was that two players used the all-source offline character builder to make optimised PCs, one of them made the PCs for all the other players, and explained to them how to use those PCs in combat. So basically I ended up just playing against her. One time she was absent, so after a brief fight where the Hunter Ranger massacred all the hobgoblin minions with his AoE burst-1 At-Will longbow/machinegun, the remaining players just froze up and refused to do anything for the rest of the session.

That experience really knocked me back and reduced my enthusiasm. That kind of thing simply does not happen with 5e D&D.

Thinking about my experience, my biggest problems were definitely around the player Essentials material. I think if I try again it'll need to be pre-Essentials only on the player side, just a curated list of the 2008-9 hardbacks. The 4e PHB does do some things that are interesting and very different from 5e; whereas Essentials is more like a poor man's 5e. Also, PC creation at-table!