4th to 5th Edition Converters - What has been your experience?

I don't really miss anything because just about everything I loved about 4e has been brought along to 5e. Back in 2011, in a thread about what people liked about 4e, I made this post:

Iosue said:

I love all editions of D&D, but particularly close to my heart are Red Box Basic and 4e. Red Box because it's what we played the most and the longest back in the day. And 4e because many of its changes are things I house ruled or wanted to house rule in D&D. Things like:

At-will spells - I understood and agreed with the idea of Vancian magic as a limit on Wild Wizard Shenainigans. But I often thought that a magic-user should be able to use some low-level spells whenever they wanted. E.g., magic missile as a basic self-defense spell. Read magic whenever needed. Cantrips to give that wizardly sheen. Lo and behold, 4e does exactly this.

Fighter options - A two-fold problem. Giving fighters (and thieves) more to do at higher levels, and more interesting options than just extra attacks. In BD&D we did this via DM Fiat and stunting, but 4e did this elegantly by making combat more tactical, and giving minis a real purpose. Much fun.

Expanding the "sweet spot". Once we'd done "zero to hero", we tended to start characters at higher levels to create the kind of cinematic fantasy heroics that drew us to D&D in the first place. This is baked right into the game in 4e.

Tiered play - I loved the distinct meta-levels of BECM: dungeon -> wilderness -> domains -> world. I'm happy to see a similar progression again in the core rules.

And while I loved core 4e, I really love Essentials. Everything I loved about the core now tweaked even more to my taste! Plus, maps/dungeon/tiles and tokens!

Finally, the great thing about BD&D was the ease of set-up and prep for DMs. It was real easy to wing it. Now 4e has a similar ease to winging it, plus an easy system for creating accurately balanced (or unbalanced!) encounters or modifying modules. This was brought home to me when I set aside a good hour for reworking the sample dungeon in the Starter Set from 5 adventurers to only 2. In the end it only took me 20-30 minutes.

I'm glad to see all you other guys enjoying 4e, because as far as I can tell, it was expressly designed for me.

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How does compare with my experience in 5e?

At-will spells - Check.
Fighter options - Check. Even marking!
Expanding the sweet spot - Check. Levels 1 and 2 have a "Classic D&D" feel which I enjoy, while Levels 3-10, at least in my experience so far provide for cinematic, high-fantasy heroics.
Tiered play - Eh, more or less check, although I'd like it to be a bit more distinct. Part of the issue there is that WotC has been putting out campaign adventures that go from Level 1 to 15, so there's no real sense of moving from one tier to another, aside from going from level 2 to level 3.

In addition to that, I like the encounter building rules -- clearly influenced by 4e even if not as tight as they are, as well as the monster building rules (same caveat). 5e DMs like a dream for me, and much of that is combining a 4e approach with a B/X sensibility.

I would have really liked something like Monster Vault, with tokens of all the monsters in the Monster Manual.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Not only because you have an option for an SC, but in 5e the game practically falls apart if you have 1 encounter per day. We've been cycling back into our 5e game lately. My 7th level dwarf wizard is part of the group that is exploring and traveling in the wilderness. I literally just fireball everything that we see that looks hostile.

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I guess you're encountering small bunched-up groups of 20 hp foes? I've definitely not found this to be an issue with 5e; tough enemies have too many hp to be taken out by one area-effect spell, and my high level 5e group have encounters with hundreds of weak enemies - the Cleric's area spells & Turn Undead
destroy dozens, but I've been resolving combat 10 rounds at a time, and the Barbarians
are slaying 15-20 foes a (Raging) minute, likewise.

I have found it an issue in my Classic game, but mostly because my son's MU 11
(12 w Ioun stone) Count William and allied dragons have been adventuring alongside 7th level Fighters
who have lots of hp but are doing ca 1d8+6 on a hit when William and the dragons are doing 36 points of area effect, enough to kill Classic hill giants.

pemerton said:

It's an old post, but here's a link to the only deliberately exploration-focused scenario I've run in 4e.

My feeling is that it is not so much that 4e lacks exploration-focused mechanics that 5e contains; but more that 4e contains mechanics, and hence generates an orientation at the table, that makes exploration not a very attractive focus for play.

What do you think?

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Some time ago I ran the Slavers modules (A1-A4) with very little modification to the adventure except for monster and trap stats for 4e. Interestingly enough this adventure worked better in 4e than any time I ran it in 1e. Exploration worked just as it always did when I ran 1e. If the players stated specifically that they were looking where the module said there was something they did not have to roll anything. If they simply said we check the room then they rolled a "search" check. This is no different than how 5e does things, and is no different than what is done in 4e. Just because there are succinct mechanics for something does not mean that you have to continuously roll for things that are obvious.

It's not that 5e has better exploration guidelines. They are pretty much the same guidelines that have been provided for a long time, at least since 3.x. 1e really had no mechanics for this at inception, and only had some of this when ability checks were finally codified.

Room descriptions in adventure modules have changed over the years. 1e adventures just told you where things were located. If the players said I'm searching "there", then they would find things automatically. If they made no mention then they found nothing. It was assumed they were not looking if they did not mention it. IMO that is a lousy way to explore. The character obviously has way more information than the player when it comes to his environment. Exploration should be focused from the character perspective, not the player.

S'mon said:

I guess you're encountering small bunched-up groups of 20 hp foes? I've definitely not found this to be an issue with 5e; tough enemies have too many hp to be taken out by one area-effect spell, and my high level 5e group have encounters with hundreds of weak enemies - the Cleric's area spells & Turn Undead
destroy dozens, but I've been resolving combat 10 rounds at a time, and the Barbarians
are slaying 15-20 foes a (Raging) minute, likewise.

I have found it an issue in my Classic game, but mostly because my son's MU 11
(12 w Ioun stone) Count William and allied dragons have been adventuring alongside 7th level Fighters
who have lots of hp but are doing ca 1d8+6 on a hit when William and the dragons are doing 36 points of area effect, enough to kill Classic hill giants.

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I don't know what level these monsters have been. They're all basically whatever crops up in wilderness adventuring where we are. There were 6 giant lizards, most of which fell to a single fireball (I think they all failed their saves, which at a 14 was admittedly some bad luck for the DM, and I rolled pretty well on 8d6, that might not happen every time). I managed to kill off 3 bandits in a single blast as well, though there were some other monsters. Still, that meant by the start of round 2 half the enemy was literally toast and the other half was getting waxed.

I just find that, at least in our campaign, its not that hard for us to arrange limited numbers of fights per day MOST of the time, and even when its 3-4 fights, at level 7 I've still got 4,3,3,1 plus cantrips, which is generally enough to minimally outdo the other characters in many situations, and definitely when its one or two fights in a day. I'm sure there are other possible characters that could be competitive, ours are far from optimized (my wizard is a dwarf with a 17 INT at level 7, and he's a transmuter, far from an optimum build).

The point is, there seems to definitely be a sweet spot where the battlemaster was REALLY kicking ass, when we were taking on 4-5 fights in a day at levels 1-5, though the wizard even then was tactically pretty impressive. The Cleric, the Eldritch Knight, and the Arcane Trickster were perfectly serviceable and did their stuff. The Cleric definitely makes a big difference in terms of using Bless and etc, but unless you take on undead its not pivotal, just sort of like 'expected levels of buff'. The EK seems middling. Even at level 7 she's not really got much magic beyond a fairly nasty attack cantrip. Her melee attacks work fine, but nothing there is impressive either, and she really doesn't have a 'nova' of any sort at all. Its similar with the Rogue, she's pretty deadly at picking off a guy from a distance from concealment, which is slick, and does fine in melee, but again there's nothing about what she does that is tactically all that exciting or impressive, and she's got nothing like a real nova.

Outside of combat the Cleric is pretty handy, the rogue is quite sneaky and has some nice useful spells. The EK and Battlemaster, meh, nothing THAT exciting, they have skills, a bit of magic or "I can do Tarzan pretty well", etc. Seems like 4 out of 5 times the wizard can pull out something that's quite handy though. Every plan has at least SOME wizardly contribution, but often one of the fighters or the rogue are fairly superfluous for a while.

Certainly 5e could seriously benefit from having had better adventure pacing mechanics that incorporated a standardized resource mechanism. This is a HUGE regression from 4e IMHO. One that I find it hard to live with.

I ran Phandelver for my 4e group, and after that there wasn't any more interest in 5e. So our conversion experience was "we didn't."

This works for me pretty well, since if I want the kinds of D&D experiences 4e isn't great at, I'd much rather run RC D&D anyway.

Obryn said:

I ran Phandelver for my 4e group, and after that there wasn't any more interest in 5e. So our conversion experience was "we didn't."

This works for me pretty well, since if I want the kinds of D&D experiences 4e isn't great at, I'd much rather run RC D&D anyway.

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5e is really great at being a drop-in 2e replacement IMHO. It gets to the 'sweet spot' quicker, and its a little less totally caster-centric, but there's not really that much difference in tone or genre. The rules certainly are quite a bit better tuned to the type of play envisaged than 2e, which was way out of whack IMHO, but if you don't want 2e-style play then 5e is really not that useful. I'm still utterly mystified by the notion that it is some sort of uber-D&D that can do any style of play. That was a truly fantastical canard that WotC seeded. While you can clearly see that it is built in reaction to 4e, and derives a few very generalized lessons from the 4e experience, there's no commonality of play experience between these games, beyond that they both participate in the general 'D&D milieu'. I'm just not a 2e fan. It was kind of a fun experience after 1e, but that was 25 years ago.

AbdulAlhazred said:

5e is really great at being a drop-in 2e replacement IMHO. It gets to the 'sweet spot' quicker, and its a little less totally caster-centric, but there's not really that much difference in tone or genre. The rules certainly are quite a bit better tuned to the type of play envisaged than 2e, which was way out of whack IMHO, but if you don't want 2e-style play then 5e is really not that useful. I'm still utterly mystified by the notion that it is some sort of uber-D&D that can do any style of play. That was a truly fantastical canard that WotC seeded. While you can clearly see that it is built in reaction to 4e, and derives a few very generalized lessons from the 4e experience, there's no commonality of play experience between these games, beyond that they both participate in the general 'D&D milieu'. I'm just not a 2e fan. It was kind of a fun experience after 1e, but that was 25 years ago.

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Oh, I'm not a real fan of 2e, myself. It filed the rough edges off of 1e, yeah, but it made it bland in the process.

When I'm looking for a drop-in/pick-up game, I want it about as simple as possible, and that's why I go with BECMI/RC for that.

Obryn said:

Oh, I'm not a real fan of 2e, myself. It filed the rough edges off of 1e, yeah, but it made it bland in the process.

When I'm looking for a drop-in/pick-up game, I want it about as simple as possible, and that's why I go with BECMI/RC for that.

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Oddly, 2e and 4e are flip sides of a coin. 2e is clearly presented, but the rules simply don't work. Nobody actually sat down and tried to write a game to do what the presentation says the game is about. 4e is the opposite. The system does EXACTLY what it was intended to do, but figuring out what that is requires some serious level of understanding of RPGs and insight into DMing craft. I find it sad that WotC couldn't have hired Zeb Cook and Steve Winter to write 4e.

Obryn said:

I ran Phandelver for my 4e group, and after that there wasn't any more interest in 5e. So our conversion experience was "we didn't."

This works for me pretty well, since if I want the kinds of D&D experiences 4e isn't great at, I'd much rather run RC D&D anyway.

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I'm basically in that spot. I've gotten a PC up to 8th level in Adventurer's League, but I doubt I'll play AL again. I got faced with a choice of playing a 1st level PC at a convention or essentially burning a slot so as to go home early - I ended up choosing to go home early because I was that repulsed by the idea of ever playing a 1st level 5e PC ever again. Yes, I know it goes quick - I don't care because it is that completely painful to me.

I'm not really even that enthused by the 8th level PC, even though he's got cool options(Rogue 1/Knowledge Cleric 1/Book Great Old One Warlock 6) - simply because I'm realizing that most combats are about Hex+Eldritch Blast with an occasional other option to do. In retrospect, I should have just played a Lore Bard, but I'm not clear that would have been that fun either - simply because if I have complexity, I like to try to use it and keeping track of essentially 15+ at-will options would drive me batty.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Oddly, 2e and 4e are flip sides of a coin. 2e is clearly presented, but the rules simply don't work. Nobody actually sat down and tried to write a game to do what the presentation says the game is about. 4e is the opposite. The system does EXACTLY what it was intended to do, but figuring out what that is requires some serious level of understanding of RPGs and insight into DMing craft. I find it sad that WotC couldn't have hired Zeb Cook and Steve Winter to write 4e.

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Yeah, on the surface, 4e often appears to be one game, but once you get a little deeper, it suddenly switches to this completely different game. Zone Defenders vs Lockdown Defenders vs. Catch-22 Defenders. Nova Strikers vs. DPR Strikers. Enabling Leaders vs. Healbots. Controllers who actually control without taking targets off the board for the combat by default vs. Area Strikers with a little control who don't actually do quite enough damage.

And the interesting thing here is that with many of those examples, you could have members of the same class being any of the available choices.