D&D 5E Behind the design of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons: Well my impression as least.

[MechaPilot]

You are only naming very easy things to do.

How about remove healing surges entirely?

Remove AEDU?

Remove most magical items.

These things are not so easy to remove to the point where it is close to impossible because they are baked into the system.

Removing healing surges entirely and removing the AEDU structure are both easy, and removing magical items is trivially easy.


Removing healing surges entirely:
Surges do not exist. A power that says the target can spend a healing surge has that text replaced with the target healing an amount equal to its surge value. Magic items that require the character to spend a surge to use, like potions, no longer require the spending on surges to use.

Now some people will say, "No fair! You kept the surge value in there! That's not removing surges entirely!" While I feel that's moving the goalposts because the surge value does not mechanically do the same thing that the surges do (the surge value doesn't act as a limit on magical healing, the surge value doesn't allow the character to recover HPs during a short rest, and so on), it's also easy to fix. The surge value can be replaced by 1d8 + 1 per level and still scale relatively well with the character's total HPs. It scales better if you consider the first level to be three levels (1d8 +2 +1 per level), but you can get around that clunkiness by adding an ability modifier instead.


Removing AEDU:
Removing the AEDU structure is in no way difficult, though replacing it can be labor-intensive depending on what you want to replace it with. That said, replacing AEDU with a point system is obscenely easy. Every use of an encounter power costs one point, and every use of a daily power costs three points; using at-wills are free. You then use those costs multiplied by the relevant numbers from the AEDU progression of the advancement table to determine how many points you have. That allows you to put all characters on a magic point or fatigue point system if you want to.


Removing magic items:
Just don't give them out. It really is that easy. The system math expects you to have them, but it's not as if you literally must have them. It just means that you use lower encounter level creatures, or less creatures than normal, or you accept that encounters will be slightly harder.

 

[fjw70]

If you want to remove magic items and simplify things replace enhancement bonus, 1/2 level bonus, feat bonus, and ability score increases with a bonus to Attacks, damage, and skill equal to level. The 4e Gamma World did this.

 

[Gnarl45]

It really depends on what they wanted to change in 4e, and how they wanted to change it. Putting vancian casting back in is certainly more effort-intensive than adjusting overnight healing rates. Of course, there are also a lot of changes that are quite easy to make:

Alter the amount of surges per day, the surge value, the overnight recovery rate, or decouple magical healing from limitation by surges? Easy.

Speed up combat by chopping all HP values in half? Easy.

Allow greater flexibility of power use by turning the ability to use two specific powers once each into having two power uses to distribute among the powers as you choose? Easy.

Try things like adding 3e-style save or die effects (and not save or save or save or die effects) without screwing up the class/power balance. If you add a proper save or die, you need to modify every other daily power to make them comparable to your save or die. If you increase the power of every daily power, you need to rework the monster math.

Halving monster HP isn't really a solution. It takes care of the combat speed but it screws up the monster balance and it makes the game less deadly. You also need to increase the damage if you want to have quick and dirty tacticaless combats. I'm sure it worked for some, but so did 2e with its disfunctional monster XP. If you want a little more accuracy in your monster level/CR system, you need to redo the math. Half HP isn't good enough.

Adding utility magic so that non-combat plays more like 2e or 3e is also a lot of work if you want to do it properly. You first need to change the level of every single utility power and ritual. You then need to increase the availability. And if you want to do it cleanly, casters need to give up on some of their combat power in exchange for this availability. You need to rework the classes.

These are the kind of things that I tried tinkering with when 4e came out. And even if I didn't like 4e for various reasons, that mathematical framework made my mouth water. If you don't care about balance, sure it's easy to fix. But after seeing how it can be done, I wasn't ready to settle for anything less than functional math. If I wanted to play with disfunctional math, I would have sticked to 3e.

I've never seen that at all. Sure, there is plenty of internet discussion about what the intent is of the rules as written and how they interact with other rules, but no player at my table ever tried to throw "but that's not what RAW says" or "this internet discussion says you're wrong" in my face whenever I said "I use this houserule."

I envie you! I have dozens of players that tried to twist the wording of the rules both in 2e and 3e to gain some mechanical benefits. In 2e, I could tell them to off. In 3e, it was a lot harder because they could show me dozens of threads to back up their claim. I've also had groups of players that refused to play with me as their DM because I had nerfed some of the more problematic spells.

And it's a bit more vicious thant how you present it. Sometimes a rule just looks strange and you have that feeling it's going to break the game. That internet discussion just convinces you to let it fly in spite of your intuition. And once you accepted something with a group of players, it's hard to take their toys away.

 

[MechaPilot]

Try things like adding 3e-style save or die effects (and not save or save or save or die effects) without screwing up the class/power balance. If you add a proper save or die, you need to modify every other daily power to make them comparable to your save or die. If you increase the power of every daily power, you need to rework the monster math.

Halving monster HP isn't really a solution. It takes care of the combat speed but it screws up the monster balance and it makes the game less deadly. You also need to increase the damage if you want to have quick and dirty tacticaless combats. I'm sure it worked for some, but so did 2e with its disfunctional monster XP. If you want a little more accuracy in your monster level/CR system, you need to redo the math. Half HP isn't good enough.

Adding utility magic so that non-combat plays more like 2e or 3e is also a lot of work if you want to do it properly. You first need to change the level of every single utility power and ritual. You then need to increase the availability. And if you want to do it cleanly, casters need to give up on some of their combat power in exchange for this availability. You need to rework the classes.

These are the kind of things that I tried tinkering with when 4e came out. And even if I didn't like 4e for various reasons, that mathematical framework made my mouth water. If you don't care about balance, sure it's easy to fix. But after seeing how it can be done, I wasn't ready to settle for anything less than functional math. If I wanted to play with disfunctional math, I would have sticked to 3e.

Including 3e-style SoD:
It's doable without wrecking the balance. There are a few ways to handle it: you can make it require a special component that you control access to (for example, medusa eyes for a petrification spell), you could put it on a separate timetable (instead of it being a daily ability, it's a weekly ability), or you could create a hefty cost for it (for example, if an SoD spell drained 2, 3, or 4 healing surges).

Halving HPs:
I didn't mean that you just halve the monster HPs to make combat faster. Certainly, that would make combat faster, but it would also imbalance things by making them less of a threat to the PCs. I meant halving HPs across the board (PCs as well as monsters). That speeds up combat and retains the balance of power.

Utility Magic:
This doesn't seem terribly hard to me. What you say you would want would be to make rituals and utility powers consume combat resources. Replacing a ritual's cost with the required expenditure of an encounter or daily power use doesn't seem that difficult. However, what I would do to more easily accomplish that end is replace the AEDU structure with a spell point structure (I mentioned how to do that earlier). Then you could assign a flat point value to rituals, a point value for encounter utilities, and a point value for daily utilities. To better accomplish this I would probably alter the previous point value determination method to three for an encounter and five for a daily. I would probably also go with 1 point as the value for encounter utilities and all rituals, and a 2 point value for daily rituals. The end result may need tweaking and polishing, but that's a good jump on it.

I envie you! I have dozens of players that tried to twist the wording of the rules both in 2e and 3e to gain some mechanical benefits. In 2e, I could tell them to off. In 3e, it was a lot harder because they could show me dozens of threads to back up their claim. I've also had groups of players that refused to play with me as their DM because I had nerfed some of the more problematic spells.

And it's a bit more vicious thant how you present it. Sometimes a rule just looks strange and you have that feeling it's going to break the game. That internet discussion just convinces you to let it fly in spite of your intuition. And once you accepted something with a group of players, it's hard to take their toys away.

I am quite shy and play almost exclusively with friends. Playing with friends instead of at conventions, FLGSs, and with people that I meet online prevents a lot of issues, but it does also seriously limit my potential play group (so much so that I currently have no one to play D&D with, but that's also a function of most people in my area preferring hunting, fishing, and camping as recreational activities).

I will add that when I am unsure of a ruling that I make, I always stress to my players that it is a tentative ruling, meaning that it can change in the future (though I always try to give them a good reason for such changes). This is also the case with houserules that I make, and homebrew material. For example, if a player wanted to play a crystal mage in a 5e version of my homebrew setting, that player would be told that the conversion of that class to 5e is still a work in progress and that the rules for that class may change as I become more familiar with 5e, but that I will always explain my reasons for any changes and allow them to recreate the character with a different class if they no longer like the way it works (I'll also come up with some in-game rationalization for how that occurs as well).

 

[LostSoul]

I house ruled 4E as I played it, and continue to do so. At this point what I'm working with is a totally different game.

I think that any discussion of house ruling or modifying a game needs to keep in mind that it's done with a specific purpose in mind. It's easy enough to make house rule X to get desired outcome Y if you don't care about Z. For example: One of the first house rules I made was to limit healing surge recovery to one per day. That made hex crawls functional. My players pointed out that Defenders were more likely to lose HS and therefore weaker as a result. I didn't really care about that.

 

[Manbearcat]

I house ruled 4E as I played it, and continue to do so. At this point what I'm working with is a totally different game.

I think that any discussion of house ruling or modifying a game needs to keep in mind that it's done with a specific purpose in mind. It's easy enough to make house rule X to get desired outcome Y if you don't care about Z. For example: One of the first house rules I made was to limit healing surge recovery to one per day. That made hex crawls functional. My players pointed out that Defenders were more likely to lose HS and therefore weaker as a result. I didn't really care about that.

Imagine a 4e game with your (extremely simple) nerfing of Extended Rests to 1 HS recovered/day and a simple Disease Track application (for injuries) where PCs are attacked every time they hit Bloodied and 0 HP. Something such as HS lost and - 1 (- 2 as you move down the track and something injury-specific if permanent) ongoing to <specific ability score> rolls until recovery.

Those two, very simple and noninvasive, changes would dramatically affect the table experience. 4e is not difficult to hack at all. In fact, given its completely transparent math and outcome-based design approach, its quite simple to do so. You just need to know the game's tech and attack it as minimally as possible to reduce overhead during play.

 

[Hussar]

You are only naming very easy things to do.

How about remove healing surges entirely?

Remove AEDU?

Remove most magical items.

These things are not so easy to remove to the point where it is close to impossible because they are baked into the system.

Umm, you can remove all magic items no problem in 4e. Inherent bonuses fix that. Our 4e darksun game has almost zero magic items.

AEDU was removed for all latter 4e Essentials classes. Not a problem.

Healing surges entirely? Ok that would be hard.

 

[pemerton]

Try things like adding 3e-style save or die effects (and not save or save or save or die effects) without screwing up the class/power balance. If you add a proper save or die, you need to modify every other daily power to make them comparable to your save or die. If you increase the power of every daily power, you need to rework the monster math.

I don't agree with this.

If you give magic-users save or die abilities, you want them to be more powerful than fighters (as they were in AD&D, once they got those abilities). Or, if you don't want more power but want swinginess, impose a penalty to hit on the save-or-die ability (say -5 to hit if its paragon and -2 to hit if its epic).

And saying that you have to rework the monster maths is like arguing that in 5e, if you use magic items, you have to rework the monster maths to compensate. If you want PCs to be more powerful (eg via save-or-die, or using a 13th Age-style speed die, or whatever) then just do it. There is no need to rework the monster maths.

Halving monster HP isn't really a solution. It takes care of the combat speed but it screws up the monster balance and it makes the game less deadly.

Then double the damage output, as many people did. Or multiply the number of enemies in an encounter by 1.5.

Adding utility magic so that non-combat plays more like 2e or 3e is also a lot of work if you want to do it properly. You first need to change the level of every single utility power and ritual. You then need to increase the availability. And if you want to do it cleanly, casters need to give up on some of their combat power in exchange for this availability. You need to rework the classes.

Why do you need to change the level of every ritual? To make non-combat play more like 2nd ed, don't use skill challenges, and replace gp costs for rituals with some other notional limit (eg each caster has 1/10 of his/her level's XP worth of "ritual points" to spend on rituals between extended rests).

Remove most magical items.

Utterly trivial. People were posting their inherent bonus rules within days of the books being released.

How about remove healing surges entirely?

[MENTION=82779]MechaPilot[/MENTION] has explained how this is very easy. Just ignore any time a rule says "spend a healing surge" and instead have the character simply recover his/her surge value of hit points.

Remove AEDU?

What does this mean? It's like asking how easy it is to remove a magic-user's spellcasting in AD&D. What are PCs meant to do if you strip away their core abilities.

Essentials gives you builds without daily powers, if that's what you're looking for.

These things are not so easy to remove to the point where it is close to impossible because they are baked into the system.

Clearly not true for 2 out of your 3. You 3rd is under-specified.

In 1e and the like (and, I think, 5e) it's reasonably easy to tell ahead of time what effects a major change will probably have, at least to some extent. This isn't the case with 3e and its ilk, nor 4e

I think the consequences of inherent bonuses and few other magic items are no harder to predict than the consequences of no items in AD&D, or using items in 5e. The players will have fewer options, and hence use spells and other limited-use abilities more rapidly and run out of hit points more quickly.

The consequences of dropping healing surges are also fairly predictable: healing power recharge rates, rather than surge usage, will become the main determinants of the length of the adventuring day. A bit like Wands of Cure Light Wounds in 3E.

Personally I've never found AD&D that transparent. How will the game change if I adjust CLW, CSW, CCW and Heal to restore 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% respectively of the character's total hit points lost? I'd have to do a lot of maths to even begin to work that out.