Honestly I donât even remember a crafting system in 4e. Oh, maybe it was that whole residuum thing? I played a full 30 level campaign, and for the most part everyone just âfoundâ whatever items were best for their characters. I donât recall it being a bad system, inherently, it was just a very lazy design because the notion of items changed dramatically from earlier editions. Iâm not sure what perspective youâre taking âworthâ from here, and how that ties to âD&Dâ as a specific game across different editions.
4e didnât have problems with that, that was 3e. 3e you could have +50 to hit or +10 at the same level, still rolling a d20 to modify it. Scaling was wonky, magic items were plentiful ranged in ridiculousness, and there was an expectation of +'s scaling. They largely did away with this in 4e. 4e did have a defined bound âyou should have +x and yâ, but deviating from it as a group was vastly vastly simpler than 3e. 4e I ran and played quite a bit, and the problems it suffered from where not that it was âunbalancedâ so much as it was âtoo balancedâ. Level 9 played like 19 played like 29. Numbers kept scaling up, but combats religiously took us 2 hours, and always felt basically identical. All the terrain variety and specific character skills and opponents kinda meant not much, because every character and every enemy played by certain pre-determined rules. In that, they were successful in their design, but it also made the game very boring for a certain different objective of role-playing games.
To get into this even further, in late 3e there was a 3rd party book published that tried to ârevealâ the underlying numbers and systems for 3e D&D and ascribe some semblance of system to it so you could balance the unbalanced game.
Iâm just trying to get you to articulate an actual argument with premises that purport to lead to some kind of conclusion. You likely donât need any specific numbers, because we âshouldâ be talking conceptually here.
There was a 3rd party book Iâm really having trouble remembering the name of that came out in the 3.0/3.5 era that was largely the âfirstâ professional attempt to standardize and streamline the progression that characters would potentially go through in that edition. It looked at monster stats, for example, to try to figure out based on attack ratings, damage, saves, ac, hit points, etc what was a balanced creature of X and what players should be expected to have in their attacks and defenses, etc. This was published significantly before 4e, and was VERY informative in 4e design. Like Iâve said way up-thread, each edition was a reaction to that which came before. 3e had rules for everything, dozens of subsystems that could be good/bad/exploited/ignored/etc, and one of the major sticking points for people was how âunbalancedâ the game got in various different ways as you progressed in leveling. That reaction heavily informed 4eâs design, as well as their desire to get out an internet product and try to turn it into a revenue stream. And 5e was a reaction to the âdullnessâ that some people felt with 4e, and more, etc.
What I take some of your comments to be are about some kind of (in your words) DNA of the game that is⌠maybe badwrong? And that no edition or game has ever been the best at doing something? And then now getting stuck on non-sequitur stuff about the specific minutia of numbers, which really are not here nor there, though conceptually the numbers did have an effect on the design in various later iterations.
