D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[Tony Vargas]

You sound sceptical? - but I'm not sure if you're sceptical of the build, or just of my terminology.

'Tactical Fighter' for me conjures up the reach-based battle-field-control builds of 3.x, which the 4e fighter doesn't really emulate, mainly for lack of threatening reach.

At low heroic, where a good number of monsters are higher level than the PCs (for the obvious reason that the PCs are at or near the bottom of the level range), I used few or no soldiers, and plenty of low hp, high damage artillery and low defence, high damage brutes.

And just to put my own spin on it, I've even had multiple good, non-grindy encounters using so-called "crap" monsters like wraiths (weakness and insubstantial) and the young black dragon (darkness).

My experience with "the grind" in early 4e was strictly limitted to over-leveled Elites. The notoriously badly-designed encounters in KotS and TsL - Irontooth, Kalarel, Paldimar. Even same-level Solos weren't that bad.

MM3 definitely reduced the issue, though a subjective 'grind' phenomenon is always going to be there for anyone who dislikes combat in the first place, due to the games emphasis on making combats interesting. MV stuck with the MM3 improvements, and also addressed the relative 'lack' of fluff with more expansive color commentary on the monsters.

 

[pemerton]

'Tactical Fighter' for me conjures up the reach-based battle-field-control builds of 3.x, which the 4e fighter doesn't really emulate, mainly for lack of threatening reach.

Polearm Gamble restores the threatening reach (say I as a frustrated GM who has trouble closing his monsters!).

My experience with "the grind" in early 4e was strictly limitted to over-leveled Elites. The notoriously badly-designed encounters in KotS and TsL - Irontooth, Kalarel, Paldimar.

I never played KotS and changed TsL quite a bit. I posted my 13th level solo version of Paldemar (for 12th level PC) on the "boss monster" thread.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Polearm Gamble restores the threatening reach (say I as a frustrated GM who has trouble closing his monsters!).

Partially, at Paragon level. :shrug: It's one of a very few things I miss about 3e.

I never played KotS and changed TsL quite a bit. I posted my 13th level solo version of Paldemar (for 12th level PC) on the "boss monster" thread.

KotS was just awful in places. Aside from Paldemar, TsL was pretty enjoyable - though my DM at the time might also have tweaked it...

 

[Crazy Jerome]

So you've essentially admitted that for two full years D&D players had to play "slogfest" combats using 4e's rules as written.......

Measured against perfection, 4E math was and still is lacking. Measured against 3E, it's easier for a DM with some mathematical clue to work around the issues in 4E than 3E--at any equivalent point in their development.

What makes this not so obvious, however, is that the 3E issues for the most part get progressively worse the higher the levels go, whereas the 4E issues are more flat--still getting worse as levels increase, but not so dramatically.

Shrug. It wasn't anything that couldn't be handled with a bit of thought, same as 3E orcs with great axes doing vast overkill on poor 1st and 2nd level characters.

 

[innerdude]

What I'm trying to get it in my comments is that claiming that "You're all playing D&D 4e wrong, if you were doing it right, you wouldn't have grindy fights" is pretty much exactly counter to the 4e rules-as-written in June 2008.

Non-grindy fights were pretty much the exact opposite experience average (read: groups with run-of-the-mill GMs) play groups had under the original rules.

Feel completely free to defend the fixes. Just don't try and tell us that everyone from 2008 to late 2010 were "Doing it wrong," when people were just doing what the books said. Using the Rule 0 fallacy to defend 4e's strength as a ruleset is incredibly weak.

The real point in all of this is, of course, that 5e better have the vast, vast majority of its baseline math correct out of the box. Buying a dozen splatbooks just to make 5e playable is a flat-out non-starter.

And as for Neonchameleon's comments, I hear all the time of people saying, "I'd go back to plain old D&D 3.0 without too much fuss."

NEVER ONCE have heard a 4e player say, "Hmm, I think I'll go back to the maths presented in the original Core 3."

 

[Neonchameleon]

What I'm trying to get it in my comments is that claiming that "You're all playing D&D 4e wrong, if you were doing it right, you wouldn't have grindy fights" is pretty much exactly counter to the 4e rules-as-written in June 2008.

Non-grindy fights were pretty much the exact opposite experience average (read: groups with run-of-the-mill GMs) play groups had under the original rules.

The biggest problem is that WotC have produced the two DMGs with the best DMing advice in any edition for 4e. Then mysteriously ignored them for most of their modules. I don't know why.

And as for Neonchameleon's comments, I hear all the time of people saying, "I'd go back to plain old D&D 3.0 without too much fuss."

NEVER ONCE have heard a 4e player say, "Hmm, I think I'll go back to the maths presented in the original Core 3."

Nope. But I'd still consider this maths more balanced and better thought out than the maths for 3.0. At least 3 3.0 classes (monk, bard, ranger) I consider objectively terribly written. (Of course I consider two PHB classes to be as bad - the Starpact Warlock and the Strength-Paladin).

And there's an apples to oranges comparison here in terms of power creep. Whenever you add a splatbook with one single cleric spell to 3.X, all clerics everywhere get more powerful. And the case is almost as strong by adding wizard spells or new beasts to polymorph or (especially) wild shape into. The options bloat at the table just by adding a new splatbook. 4e characters on the other hand simply get more options - it's like adding a splatbook of fighter feats; yes you might be able to produce more powerful fighters. But it doesn't change things at the table immediately and the basic balance of the high end game.

There's also an apples to oranges comparison in terms of errata. 4e has polished everything with errata so even the PHB has got objectively better over time, with little exploits being closed and things being rebalanced. This doesn't apply to 3.X which bareley errata'd anything except to produce 3.5. So all the unbalanced stuff in 3.X has stayed around, dragging the game down - whereas in 4e when they produce unbalanced options they fix them. Meaning we don't have badly thought out prestige classes (such as the Planar Shepherd) warping the game - where we do have Paragon Paths that cause problems (Kulkor Arms Master) they get fixed. So there's no need to run back to the strongly playtested sections - i.e. the core 3.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

NEVER ONCE have heard a 4e player say, "Hmm, I think I'll go back to the maths presented in the original Core 3."

I've never heard anyone say that they would go back to the 3E bard or ranger, either, though I might have missed the handful who did say it. There was a reason why everyone and his brother took a crack at alternate versions of those classes. It got so bad there for awhile that I begin to think that no wannabee designer had any street cred until they had produced one: "Naw, we can't take you seriously. Where's your alt ranger?"


In any case, it is somewhat apples and oranges for two very big reasons:

• The 4E design is a lot more ambitious, and thus looking only at its short-comings versus its own goals is a bit misleading.
• OTOH, 4E had the wealth of 3E experience upon which to build, and thus starts from a different base understanding--i.e. it should accomplish something more.

4E also had the handicap of working under a more secret test environment in the early going, with predictable problems in working out some of the basics. Of course, that's an argument that both 3.5 and 4E should have been launched a bit later, so that open testing would be more acceptable. And I was hollaring for an open playtest for the next version of D&D before Next was even a gleam in a PC's eye, for this very reason. But then, we've had an open playtest for 3E out of the gate, we'd have probably avoided the sucky bard and ranger, then, too. If you want to say that WotC has a history of being a day late and a dollar short on this kind of thing, you'll get no argument from me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What I'm trying to get it in my comments is that claiming that "You're all playing D&D 4e wrong, if you were doing it right, you wouldn't have grindy fights" is pretty much exactly counter to the 4e rules-as-written in June 2008.

There was a bit of 'you're doing it wrong' behind some of the early 'grind' complaints. Sure, the KotS fight with Kalarel was a grind. But, it was also a fight that broke the DMG guidelines, which come right out and say that an elite that many levels above the party can be problematic. Of course, that section of the DMG may well have been written /after/ KotS... The grindy fights in the first two modules were the result of using a 3e convention: make the bosses much higher level than the party. In 4e, instead of making a 'more powerful' monster much higher level, you just make it an elite or solo. By using overleveled elites instead of near-level solos, those combats were 'done wrong.'

By the same token, when I listened carefully to early 'grind' complaints what I heard was people using 3.5 tactics in them. In 3.5, the 'nova' was the winning strategy: hit first, hit as hard as you can, FTW. Translated to 4e that means throw a daily+AP+encounter combo in round 1. In low-level early-4e that gets you some bloodied and pissed off monsters and leaves you with nothing to do for the rest of the fight but spam at-wills. If you're more judicious with your dailies and encounters, the fight won't take any longer (it might even be a little shorter), but will be more interesting and feel less like a 'grind.'

So, yes, playing using tactics that leveraged the broken bits of 3.5 didn't work as well, because 4e was differently broken. Not really 'wrong' or punished, per se, just not over-rewarded.


But, no, I'm not about to defend some of the early gaffes, like the first set of Skill Challenge rules. OMG. They were fixed, but it was still quite an oversight.

 

[Balesir]

Yeesh - I had totally blanked out Irontooth (mercifully); yeah, that was a grindy combat. As pointed out, though, the problem wasn't the system - it was the mal-designed encounter (which ignored advice given right there in the DMG). After that one I vetted and changed the Kalarel and Paldemar stats (which, thanks to the monster design guidelines in the DMG and the offline Monster Builder, was easy to do).

So, yes, playing using tactics that leveraged the broken bits of 3.5 didn't work as well, because 4e was differently broken. Not really 'wrong' or punished, per se, just not over-rewarded.

Indeed - I still see comments to the effect that "tactics are trivial - you unload your encounters as soon as you can, maybe a daily if the opposition seems tough, and then spam at-wills into anything that's left"... It's not a "wrong" way to play, but it's definitely suboptimal "tactics" in 4e.

But, no, I'm not about to defend some of the early gaffes, like the first set of Skill Challenge rules. OMG. They were fixed, but it was still quite an oversight.

Oh, gods, don't get me started!

It's not as if other games didn't have examples of the guidance needed to run such systems well - and five minutes with a calculator by a competent statistician would have told them the dice maths was broken! I applaud them for actually giving non-combat situations some mechanical thought, but sadly the thought was so shallow that the result scared many folks off before the fixes came along!

 

[pemerton]

What I'm trying to get it in my comments is that claiming that "You're all playing D&D 4e wrong, if you were doing it right, you wouldn't have grindy fights" is pretty much exactly counter to the 4e rules-as-written in June 2008.

Non-grindy fights were pretty much the exact opposite experience average (read: groups with run-of-the-mill GMs) play groups had under the original rules.

Feel completely free to defend the fixes. Just don't try and tell us that everyone from 2008 to late 2010 were "Doing it wrong," when people were just doing what the books said.

I'll defend the original maths as workable up to at least late heroic.

Original damage is 8 + 0.5*(level -1). New damage is 8 + level. New damage reaches 1.5 times old damage at level 13 (old damage 14, new damage 21) - by that point, the old maths has pretty much broken down. But at 7th level the difference is much less - old damage 11, new damage 15. That's not nothing, but I'm not sure it's game breaking!

And as for Neonchameleon's comments, I hear all the time of people saying, "I'd go back to plain old D&D 3.0 without too much fuss."

NEVER ONCE have heard a 4e player say, "Hmm, I think I'll go back to the maths presented in the original Core 3."

Wouldn't bother me for a Heroic game. Not viable for anything above that. (Not unlike 3E, dare I say!)