I start this thread with no trollishness or malice, but after reading a thread in which one poster was lamenting the return of save-or-dies and Vancian casting, I have to ask: why are 4e players so interested in 5e?
To see if it can be an actually good game in its own right. I have a lot of respect for 1e - it is a very good game about dungeon exploration. And 4e may be the main RPG I play, but certainly isn't the only one. 2e, 3e, and 3.5 are editions I have a
lot less time for because they aren't IMO as good at what they claim to do. If 5e is the best game I've seen at something I want. If not I don't.
As far as I can tell, 4e D&D diverged significantly from previous editions of D&D, in essence putting the game on an easier difficulty setting. (No snark intended.)
Let me stop you right there. I cut my RP teeth on Rolemaster, GURPS and WHFRP - and my third RPG ever was Call of Cthulu using GURPS rules. In my experience, D&D has
always been playing on easy mode. You have hit points. You expect before very long to be able to shrug off a crossbow bolt. You have wizards you can trust with reliable spells. The danger generally stays in the dungeon. There aren't permanent or near-permanent debilitating injuries. And you actually seriously expect to slay dragons.
4e is, to me in the same difficulty class post first level D&D has
always been in - the game itself being inherently lenient with larger than life PCs and any difficulty there is provided by the setting and the local opposition. If anything it's harder because the wizard is no longer walking round with a handful of "Get out of jail free" spells. 4e simply doesn't pretend to be anything it's not this way.
In D&D communion wine may well cure you 1d8 hit points. In WFRP it's more likely to give you the Galloping Trots.
Gone was the resource management and brutally unforgiving combat of earlier editions,
You've clearly never played Rolemaster and seen what can be done to PCs with lucky dice rolls from the monsters. And 3.0 and 3.5 both took away a lot of resource management.
instead replaced by balanced encounters.
That's actually a legacy of the very early
3.0 era. In the module [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Fantasy-Roleplaying-Adventure/dp/0786916443"]The Forge of Fury[/ame] for 3rd level PCs there was an optional location with a [ame="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/roper.htm"]Roper[/ame] (CR 12). [ame="http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2050/roleplaying-games/revisiting-encounter-design"]According to The Alexandrian[/ame] there was a huge internet backlash against even putting the Roper in there and after the fan backlash, wizards didn't put such hostile monstes in their modules again. It seems a
little harsh to blame 4e for a marketing decision created in the very early 3.0 days.
• Hit point mechanics. The introduction of healing surges and overnight healing negated the resource management aspect of HP.
Wrong on the first count, and a technicality on the second count. I'll deal with the second first.
Overnight healing isn't, I believe, the intent of allowing overnight healing. What overnight healing does is
puts the hit points on the same recharge as magic users. This is IMO a good thing. And I'm no more fond of overnight healing than you are - so when I DM I make the trivial houserule that an extended rest is a week at base camp. I can do that without anyone feeling hard done by - and it returns the game to a much older edition feel with returning to the city between adventures - without the clunky attempts such as wandering monsters to prevent wizards resting. That brings the resource management back in a way it hasn't been in D&D for a long time. But politically, I doubt that WoTC could have turned daily abilities into adventure abilities, however trivial it is at the table.
As for healing surges removing resource mangagement, you are IMO emphatically wrong on this one. It's simply that there are now two resource management tracks rather than one.
You're looking in the wrong place for the hit point track and strategic resource management - you should be looking at
4e healing surges, not hit points. That's your
strategic resource. And over long tough days it does get worn down - I remember a fight where we had to put the invoker and the warlock in the front lines (think putting the wizard and the rogue there) because our fighty-types were out of surges. And it's worth noting at this point that there is really very little magic that heals surges (or more accurately heals hit points without costing you surges for the privelige). If you treat your "hit points" as your healing surges +4 (to represent your full tactical hit points), this is still around.
4e hit points are about
tactical resource management. Healing in combat is a feature, not a bug - it gives you something to actively manage. But almost all intended combat healing
costs you healing surges. Which means that it leaves your strategic situation effectively unchanged. You've still taken the damage to your healing surges.
Powers such as Cure Light Wounds (which allow someone to recover hit points as if they had spent a healing surge without actually spending one) first are rare and on a daily recharge cycle (meaning they recover with the surges) and secondly normally cost a standard action, meaning they have a very high opportunity cost in combat.
This is a world away from 3.X where you had the wand of Cure Light Wounds. After 3 years of 3.0 and a further 5 of 3.5 it was a return to the strategic resource management of older D&D while keeping the derring-do that the wands enabled. IMO the best of both worlds.
So to recap, we have a traditional long term healing resource management model in healing surges. We also have something that can be topped up each fight without getting in the way of this in hit points. And because the tactical resource is topped up you can have much more daring fights while keeping the strategic resource management running.
• AEDU power structure.
...
4e took that mess and streamlined it significantly, for better and for worse. Rather than having some players with "powers" (such as spells or smite evil) and those without, 4e gave everyone powers, and the developers made sure that everyone had about the same amount. They also tried to eliminate the fifteen-minute workday by giving everyone renewable powers--no more forcing the fighter and rogue to rest after one fight because the wizard and cleric cast all their spells.
And the at wills wandered across to Pathfinder and into the 5e playtest for a good reason.
This was a complete departure from prior editions. It had its benefits, of course, but it was a completely different beast.
That it was. It's the significant change I'll agree with
• Non-Vancian Spellcasting. This ties in with the above. Some people love Vancian spellcasting, some people hate it. D&D, however, has always had Vancian spellcasting.
People only half joke that 4e so loved Vancian cycles that it made all classes Vancian.
Coupled with this was the drastic reduction in spellcasting power. While spellcasters needed to be powered down in 3e--as certain designers removed the limitations of spellcasting in previous editions and drastically increased their power and versatility
Certain designers
from Gygax and Arneson onwards. Caster power creep has been a thing in literally every edition of D&D and Gygax put Weapon Specialisation into UA to try to bring the fighters up to balance. The 2e wizard gained a lot - specialisation gave him between 25% and 100% more spells, and the loss of the Illusionist meant that he got the best of the wizard and illusionist spell lists.
• No save or lose effects. They exist in the most technical sense possible.
What ultimately this means IME is that DMs are a lot less gun-shy in 4e than earlier editions. And TPKs are actually probably more common.
Certain builds (orb of imposition wizard) could stack huge penalties
That got hit by errata.
I've never found asking people what they want to be a bad idea. And they get some of it. But what treasure parcels ultimately are is a note to adventure designers as to how much treasure you'd expect to put in to the adventure. For a beginning DM this is not bad advice.
In 4e, you give the DM a wishlist and, if you didn't like what he gave you, you could break down magic items and convert them to what you really wanted in a short period of time.
Really? Because you broke it down to 20% of its value. And these days you can only craft common items.
Long gone were the days of gambling on the loot tables and getting something you didn't want.
Last time I remember giving out treasure in 4e I rolled on the loot table in the back of the 4e compendium. And my PCs ended up with a handful of jewels, a painting, and a statuette. Which wasn't what they wanted. This has sneaked back into D&D and it's one I'm happy to use.
That last sentence summarizes 4e versus prior editions of D&D: you get what you want.
I disagree. What to me summarises 4e vs prior editions of D&D is: You can play who you want to.
I want to be a wizard who feels magical and doesn't run out of spells? I can. I want to be sneaky mcsneak the thief? I can. And I'm not overshadowed by the wizard using knock. I want to be Thorgar The Mighty, fighter, who no one dares turn their back on even with the wizard back there? As trivial as the wire-fu monk who was inspired by me falling asleep in front of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hell, I want to play the damsel in distress or the party lucky charm who never appears to actually do anything but makes the party much stronger coming to my rescue? Lazy warlord.
All these are directly supported concepts and about equally strong. So I'm not feeling guilty about playing any of them rather than picking a cleric or wizard.
And for the 4e players, 4e does what they want. It gets rid of the pesky D&D tropes that bothered their games.
Indeed. If I want to play Appendix N rather than D&D, 4e kicks the arse even of the editions supposedly based on Appendix N. My "Grey Ratter" rogue can cast rituals. My gritty sergeants inspiring the men to greater deeds
do so.
Also as DM, if I want to play a low magic campaign, I can simply ban all non-martial classes. And there's still plenty left including combat leaders - the party isn't going to feel as if there's a gaping void.
The Pacifist Cleric is actually pretty popular. But no one is
forced to be a cleric healbot. They can just choose to play one.
Thus, it seems that 4e must not have been what 4e players want, or else they wouldn't be invested in 5e. So my question to you, 4e players, is what you didn't like with 4e that you hope to see in 5e?
I like 4e. But it isn't the
only game on my bookshelf. There's a rack of GURPS sourcebooks, Dread, Fiasco, two editions of WFRP, Spirit of the Century, Legends of Anglerre, Feng Shui, Wushu, Dr Who: Adventures in Time and Space, Leverage, and probably a few more I've forgotten.
What I want from 5e is a balanced game that offers zero to hero progression, fast combat (a failing of 4e which has taken the alternative of tactical combat), a streamlined and easy to use rules system, and is the best game there is at whatever it decides it wants to be.
And does part of my post explain what I see in 4e a bit better to you? I'll agree that a lot of what is in 4e isn't spelled out in the rulebook.