D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[thecasualoblivion]

This isn't my preferred edition by a long shot. I'd much rather play 4E, 1E/2E, or 3.5E(more or less in that order) than 5E, but due to life circumstances that have nothing to do with D&D, I find myself now starting Curse of Strahd.

I played a few sessions of 5E about a year ago, and I've been in the same room where more than a few sessions were played and I kind of watched.

Here are some thoughts:

1. My main dislike of the game comes from that I find it by far the most random of any edition of D&D, and being that random I never feel in control of my own destiny. It feels like the dice matter more than my decisions in play, or my decisions in character building. In 3E or 4E, good play could be and was often more important the dice. 1E/2E could be randomly dangerous, but that element of danger is mostly missing from 5E. 1E/2E was random but lethal, and there was a level of calculated risk involved in everything you did and your decisions thus mattered. 5E is random, but things don't seem to matter much. If you fail you fall on your face, not lose/die. This wasn't at all how I played in any previous edition.

2. Given this randomness, and my powergaming tendencies, I find myself playing selfish glass cannons. I say selfish because teamwork in 5E feels like taking one for the team, and that isn't my style. Selfishness also involves being a coward and letting other people take 5E's randomness to the face, which makes me feel better as it isn't happening to me. I say glass cannon because even high defense 5E characters seem fragile. High defense in 5E only seems to make you less fragile(while still being fragile), and from a powergaming standpoint it seems like a bad investment, better to just kill enemies faster.

3. I was a Defender roughly half the time throughout the 4E era. I never felt fragile nor felt like I was taking one for the team during any of that, while in 5E I feel both are true. So I'm not playing tanks anymore.

4. Playing support seems to feel like taking one for the team as well. Some people seem to enjoy that, but it's not my style.

5. The optimization guides on forums for 5E don't really seem as helpful for 5E as they were for 3E/4E.

6. Spellcasters seem a bit weak on the whole until cantrips start to scale

 

[Sunseeker]

As someone who played mostly in 4E and 3.X; I tend to agree with your reviews. I like the edition for its overall simplicity, but I find myself frustrated by many of the same things you do.

1: I would go as far as to say it's not just randomness, but a level of unreliability. It's not so much that things are unpredictable, after a couple hits it becomes fairly easy to predict the outcome of any given action, but any given action seems to have largely the same chance of success as a coin flip. Even classes who should be reliably good at something, such as Fighters, seem to have little control over their ability to hit on a regular basis.

2: What I've tended to find is that there's a "deadzone" of AC between 16 and 20-21 where there's no point in having an AC within that range. If your AC is greater than 16, but less than 20, you are either best served by "going tank" and getting to the 20+ range, or "going glass cannon" and going for 16 or less AC in exchange for higher output. It seems like monsters can reliably hit between 15 and 18 AC on a regular basis which is a minimum 10 on your average monster with a +3-4 modifier and a +1-2 bonus, which once again, is a 50/50 chance to hit, might as well flip a coin (after writing this, I may try it in my next session). Defenders ARE fragile, unless as noted above, you can reach into that 20+ AC range (which is difficult at low levels, but I guess that's the point). Once you hit 22AC (Plate+Shield+two defense boosts) and if you're able to bump that up to 24, you are almost unhittable except by monstrously powerful creatures (things with like, a +17 to hit).

3: I think the biggest downside to defenders now is that they lack the ability to defend. Sure, they can take a hit. But in order to actually defend they need to put in significant feat investment (typically, at least two, Shield Master and the Heavy Armor DR/3 feat), in a game without feats (as a I feel many older gamers are attempting to play) this makes defenders an even WORSE investment. I loved 4E's defenders. Simple and effective. 5E does not have a simple and effective defender.

4: Currently playing a support character and I'll say this. It's not so much taking one for the team, but it's either you are FULL support, or you are not support at all. There's no reasonable middle ground. And much like older editions, it feels like support is back to "I shield him." or "Gain 2d8+5 HP". It's not really a role so much as a game function you're performing, this has been true of many past editions of the "support/healer" role. It's also true of many other games.

5: I think this harkens back to the randomness. There is indeed a much higher reliance on the dice to decide your fate in this edition, which makes any potential builds, as the word I used before unreliable. The level of RNG makes it difficult to ensure a specific outcome, with the ability to ensure a specific outcome taken out of the mix, building becomes less useful since you could put together exactly the same thing as someone else and get entirely different results.

6: I agree, but I think that was the point. Spellcasters in several prior edition were flat out superior and in many ways a well-built spellcaster still is, but being more powerful than the alternatives is no longer something provided to spellcasters by default and something you have to specifically work to become. I like the weaker spellcasters, but I think it needs some tuning, both to make them stronger in some regards and less powerful in others.

---As I mentioned in another thread, I enjoy 5E largely for its simplicity and speed. After my campaign wraps up (which could be quite a while), I'm thinking I'll go back to 4th. After nearly 2 years of 5E; I just don't think the speed and simplicity are enough to outweigh what I enjoy about 4E.

 

[Rhenny]

Here are some thoughts:

1. My main dislike of the game comes from that I find it by far the most random of any edition of D&D, and being that random I never feel in control of my own destiny. It feels like the dice matter more than my decisions in play, or my decisions in character building. In 3E or 4E, good play could be and was often more important the dice. 1E/2E could be randomly dangerous, but that element of danger is mostly missing from 5E. 1E/2E was random but lethal, and there was a level of calculated risk involved in everything you did and your decisions thus mattered. 5E is random, but things don't seem to matter much. If you fail you fall on your face, not lose/die. This wasn't at all how I played in any previous edition.

2. Given this randomness, and my powergaming tendencies, I find myself playing selfish glass cannons. I say selfish because teamwork in 5E feels like taking one for the team, and that isn't my style. Selfishness also involves being a coward and letting other people take 5E's randomness to the face, which makes me feel better as it isn't happening to me. I say glass cannon because even high defense 5E characters seem fragile. High defense in 5E only seems to make you less fragile(while still being fragile), and from a powergaming standpoint it seems like a bad investment, better to just kill enemies faster.

3. I was a Defender roughly half the time throughout the 4E era. I never felt fragile nor felt like I was taking one for the team during any of that, while in 5E I feel both are true. So I'm not playing tanks anymore.

4. Playing support seems to feel like taking one for the team as well. Some people seem to enjoy that, but it's not my style.

5. The optimization guides on forums for 5E don't really seem as helpful for 5E as they were for 3E/4E.

6. Spellcasters seem a bit weak on the whole until cantrips start to scale

As for the randomness, sure, the game can feel random at times, but there are also many mechanics built right into the game to help give players more control over randomness. Advantage/Disadvantage is the one big one, and inspiration is another. There are also racial traits (like lucky) and feats (like lucky) and a ton of class abilities that work to grant advantage or allow for dice replacement, etc (like the Diviner dice tricks). Spell use also can influence the randomness. The barbarian, the bard...and now that I look at it, almost every class has something he/she can do to warp the odds in his or her favor even at low levels. By in large, there are many more ways for players to deal with randomness in 5e than in 1e, 2e. Also, in 1e and 2e, playing a wizard with 1d4 hp per level really amplified the feeling that life/death was random for those characters. One good hit at low level...bam, and at 7th or 8th level with 25-32 hp, the randomness did not go away.

I think the feeling of randomness in 5e is mostly due to the way the game is run, and the choices that players make when they build their PCs. If a DM does not award inspiration (or allow players to call for inspiration or grant others inspiration like some groups have done) and advantage/disadvantage is not applied as liberally, the game is not taking advantage of those tools. If the players are not playing the class/race/feat choices that minimize randomness the same holds true.

I also think that 5e was designed to minimize the impact of powergaming so it is perfectly legitimate that a powergamer may not like it as much. The key idea of Bounded Accuracy does keep boundaries on how much better any one PC can be than another even at different levels (also how they perform relative to the monsters they face). Many find this a benefit, not a drawback, but again, it is perfectly understandable that a powergamer may not like it.

From a purely gaming approach, it probably is best to deal more damage rather than defend in most situations, but in some situations it is better to avoid combat altogether to save resources or circumvent the risk that a lucky attack or two (including the critical hit) could do some serious damage to one or more PC. There are also situations where one PC deciding to go into a defensive stance, could mean the difference between success and failure. Choices are there. DM and players need to take advantage of them if they want to tip the odds.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't think your opinion is unusual - there's a lot of powergamers I know who are a little underwhelmed with 5e, for probably similar reasons (and with probably similar edition preferences)

I think it's sometimes useful to talk about these in terms of play goals. What some powergamers hope to get out of a game can be very different than what other players hope to get out of a game, and they can conflict. By way of demonstration, here's what I see at work in your points.

1. My main dislike of the game comes from that I find it by far the most random of any edition of D&D, and being that random I never feel in control of my own destiny. It feels like the dice matter more than my decisions in play, or my decisions in character building. In 3E or 4E, good play could be and was often more important the dice. 1E/2E could be randomly dangerous, but that element of danger is mostly missing from 5E. 1E/2E was random but lethal, and there was a level of calculated risk involved in everything you did and your decisions thus mattered. 5E is random, but things don't seem to matter much. If you fail you fall on your face, not lose/die. This wasn't at all how I played in any previous edition.

5e is swingier than 3e and 4e - the dice have a larger influence on the outcome of a fight than they did there. This can be a desirable thing, though - if your play goal is to use the dice to help fuel an interesting story, a high roll or a low roll is an interesting point in that story, and the unpredictability of the roll keeps everyone engaged in the outcome of it. What you roll matters in 5e, in part because "Everything went exactly as planned" isn't an interesting story or a tense moment.

That can compete with the kind of mastery that some powergamers love to exhibit, because "everything went exactly as I planned, and I frickin' handed that encounter its butt on a silver platter" is a cool moment that increased variance kind of gets in the way of. The dice won't let you just be the frickin' master of this game. You also have to be lucky - something no amount of skill will ever fix.

In as much as 5e hopes to appeal to a more "casual" audience, a high variability is a good thing - more woohoo! more arrgh, character-building matters less, etc. But the price it pays is that folks who want that kind of mastery don't get it as strongly as they would from 4e or 3e.

2. Given this randomness, and my powergaming tendencies, I find myself playing selfish glass cannons. I say selfish because teamwork in 5E feels like taking one for the team, and that isn't my style. Selfishness also involves being a coward and letting other people take 5E's randomness to the face, which makes me feel better as it isn't happening to me. I say glass cannon because even high defense 5E characters seem fragile. High defense in 5E only seems to make you less fragile(while still being fragile), and from a powergaming standpoint it seems like a bad investment, better to just kill enemies faster.

3. I was a Defender roughly half the time throughout the 4E era. I never felt fragile nor felt like I was taking one for the team during any of that, while in 5E I feel both are true. So I'm not playing tanks anymore.

Characters (and monsters, compared to 4e) drop faster in 5e, and even high-AC or high-HP characters can be killed by the lucky. This can be a desirable thing, though - if your goal is to keep monsters viable threats for more levels, giving a random group of goblins a chance to take down a 5-person part that is level 15 is something you want to support. So being able to totally outclass a monster is not something 5e wants on the table - you are ALWAYS vulnerable. It's also desirable if you want fast fights - you've gotta make every hit feel tense and risky.

That can compete with one of the thrills of powergaming - being "untouchable" (or nearly so). Similar to the above, being able to ignore whatever enemies throw at you can be an awesome moment, a payoff for all the effort you put into balancing DEX with other scores and buying good armor and the like.

For a more "casual" audience, that fragility is a good thing - another element of the arrgh to woo-hoo swing, and from the DM side, letting them apply more varied monsters and threats. But the price they pay is that for the powergamers, you can't get good enough that you push the system to its limits.

4. Playing support seems to feel like taking one for the team as well. Some people seem to enjoy that, but it's not my style.

If you're oriented on your own character, yeah, playing support probably won't be satisfying in any e.

5. The optimization guides on forums for 5E don't really seem as helpful for 5E as they were for 3E/4E.

That's something of a symptom of there being less options and less mastery overall in 5e. 5e doesn't rely on a bunch of character options that can be compared and contrasted, and its flexibility and DM judgement lends itself to less hard-and-fast guidelines. An optimization guide has less to say about making your Champion Fighter The Best than it did in 3e/4e.

This can be good if what you want out of a game is to easily make an effective character. It doesn't help folks who love to optimize much, though.

6. Spellcasters seem a bit weak on the whole until cantrips start to scale

A continuation of 4e's tamp-down on spellcasting power. This is a good thing if you don't want spellcasters to dominate! It's not great for folks who are looking for a dominant strategy, though (especially coming from 3e).

....so, overall, we've got some trade-offs. Ultimately, I think this means that there's a niche that 5e's design has left open - there's an audience of mastery-focused players who would snarf up a 3e/4e style game that focused on skill and character-building strategies, because 5e doesn't fire as strongly on that.

I'd recommend someone get all over that with an OGL, personally!

 

[thecasualoblivion]

1. Between the unreliability and how most things die in 2-3 hits or 2-3 rounds of the party ganging up on a single enemy, it rarely feels like any single action matters.

2. Most of the test characters I've built are 15-18AC, wherever they end up with zero investment in defense(just what class and stats give them for free). Going higher would mean sacrificing offense, which in 5E is a bad investment. I've seen 20-22 AC characters get torn to shreds, so I'm not even confident when they get to that level. The only really sturdy character I've ever seen was a Barbarian taking half damage from everything with a huge pile of hp.

3. Being able to hit and being able to defend are major and entirely separate investments in 5E. It takes a while to accomplish both and you have to sacrifice everything else. A 1st level 4E Fighter could take both for granted, and could invest in being a threat damage or control wise. In 3E, one of the highest regarded weapon user builds was a defender style build based around ToB Crusader using a glaive(among a mess of other things). I forget the specifics, but it was in the style of the 4E defender and the CharOp guys considered it one of the most optimized things you could be without casting spells.

4. Kind of the same as the 5E tank. You have to put everything into it or not bother, and it leaves you fairly ineffective personally on offense. Kind of what I meant Bout taking one for the team on both counts.

5. I see your point.

6. What I meant was that spellcasters are in particular weak at levels 1-4 and to a lesser extent 5-10 because of cantrip scaling. On top of this, spell slots are more limited at those levels. Later on, your cantrips(and the party weapon users) are more efficient at dealing damage than magic.

I don't like the edition, but an advantage is that for me it's new. There are so little mechanical choices that this game is going to get stale after a while for me, much faster than 3E or 4E did. Im still more or less at day 1 so that's a ways off. I'd still rather play 2E.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

As for the randomness, sure, the game can feel random at times, but there are also many mechanics built right into the game to help give players more control over randomness. Advantage/Disadvantage is the one big one, and inspiration is another. There are also racial traits (like lucky) and feats (like lucky) and a ton of class abilities that work to grant advantage or allow for dice replacement, etc (like the Diviner dice tricks). Spell use also can influence the randomness. The barbarian, the bard...and now that I look at it, almost every class has something he/she can do to warp the odds in his or her favor even at low levels. By in large, there are many more ways for players to deal with randomness in 5e than in 1e, 2e. Also, in 1e and 2e, playing a wizard with 1d4 hp per level really amplified the feeling that life/death was random for those characters. One good hit at low level...bam, and at 7th or 8th level with 25-32 hp, the randomness did not go away.

I think the feeling of randomness in 5e is mostly due to the way the game is run, and the choices that players make when they build their PCs. If a DM does not award inspiration (or allow players to call for inspiration or grant others inspiration like some groups have done) and advantage/disadvantage is not applied as liberally, the game is not taking advantage of those tools. If the players are not playing the class/race/feat choices that minimize randomness the same holds true.

Advantage/disadvantage being in the hands of the DM means it may as well not exist to somebody like me. If I don't have control over it, it isn't useful to me. The 5E games I've played and watched haven't seen much adv/dis, and I've never seen inspiration used. As for the player choices that minimize randomness, from an optimization standpoint they are generally weaker than the offensive options, and are only really useful when they're free.

I also think that 5e was designed to minimize the impact of powergaming so it is perfectly legitimate that a powergamer may not like it as much. The key idea of Bounded Accuracy does keep boundaries on how much better any one PC can be than another even at different levels (also how they perform relative to the monsters they face). Many find this a benefit, not a drawback, but again, it is perfectly understandable that a powergamer may not like it.

From a purely gaming approach, it probably is best to deal more damage rather than defend in most situations, but in some situations it is better to avoid combat altogether to save resources or circumvent the risk that a lucky attack or two (including the critical hit) could do some serious damage to one or more PC. There are also situations where one PC deciding to go into a defensive stance, could mean the difference between success and failure. Choices are there. DM and players need to take advantage of them if they want to tip the odds.

Choices might be there, but they are generally less compelling than they were in earlier editions, and nearly every choice in 5E seems less interesting than either "hit it hard" or "hit it harder".

 

[Sunseeker]

1. Between the unreliability and how most things die in 2-3 hits or 2-3 rounds of the party ganging up on a single enemy, it rarely feels like any single action matters.

Focus-fire has ALWAYS been a way to win. This is more a DM-side issue than a player-side issue, which no edition is going to provide a solution for. The answer to focus-firing enemies (which is a good strategy) is to have enemies focus-fire players. When 4/5 goblins are left open to target whoever they want while you spend 2-3 rounds killing that other guy, that's 2-3 rounds they get to spend picking off your healers, your squishes or whoever they want to target. The only way to counter this strategy is to split up your attacks, which will make each individual enemy last longer and typically generates a better fight where everyone takes some damage, instead of noone or just one guy.

2. Most of the test characters I've built are 15-18AC, wherever they end up with zero investment in defense(just what class and stats give them for free). Going higher would mean sacrificing offense, which in 5E is a bad investment. I've seen 20-22 AC characters get torn to shreds, so I'm not even confident when they get to that level. The only really sturdy character I've ever seen was a Barbarian taking half damage from everything with a huge pile of hp.

5E lacks granularity. "resistance" and "vulnerability" much like "advantage" and "disadvantage" are HUGE game changers. AC provides regularity and is a fairly granular feature (since it can be increased incrementally). Thus by 5E's design standards where as [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] points out "the dice matter" granular features are much less vibrant than non-granular features. Providing resistance or disadvantage will ALWAYS be a superior choice than +2 AC.

3. Being able to hit and being able to defend are major and entirely separate investments in 5E. It takes a while to accomplish both and you have to sacrifice everything else. A 1st level 4E Fighter could take both for granted, and could invest in being a threat damage or control wise. In 3E, one of the highest regarded weapon user builds was a defender style build based around ToB Crusader using a glaive(among a mess of other things). I forget the specifics, but it was in the style of the 4E defender and the CharOp guys considered it one of the most optimized things you could be without casting spells.

4. Kind of the same as the 5E tank. You have to put everything into it or not bother, and it leaves you fairly ineffective personally on offense. Kind of what I meant Bout taking one for the team on both counts.

Right, 5E is very much "either/or", not both. There's a reasonable amount of "threat" a defender needs to produce towards enemies before they'll realize they just can't hit him, and move on to other targets. If he's not able to keep them invested in stopping him, and they're not reasonably able to land a hit on him, then he has failed in his purpose. Now I certainly think defenders do need to sacrifice some offense to gain defense, just as glass cannons sacrifice defense to gain offense. You should not be able to build a guy who is both amazing at defense and amazing at offense (though paladins and barbarians are fairly awesome at doing both simultaneously though "encounter" and "daily" features).

I agree with the direction they took, but I don't think they've found the right amount of balance. I think one of the best elements they lost from 4E was the "Defender Aura", which allowed you to keep enemies near the tank, so they didn't just walk away from his low damage and near invulnerability. Now that's a feat, which as above: making a defender in 5E requires heavy feat investment. I don't like that, it doesn't provide options, it provides drag.

6. What I meant was that spellcasters are in particular weak at levels 1-4 and to a lesser extent 5-10 because of cantrip scaling. On top of this, spell slots are more limited at those levels. Later on, your cantrips(and the party weapon users) are more efficient at dealing damage than magic.

Reliably, yes. However cantrips simply don't do some of the cool stuff the rest of your magic does. Which is IMO, a good thing as it leaves room for casters to take spells that are cool or fun instead of spells that just blast stuff. There's certainly less reliability in those spells but I like the idea of providing room for utility by moving the IMO "boring" simple straight damage spells to cantrips.

I don't like the edition, but an advantage is that for me it's new. There are so little mechanical choices that this game is going to get stale after a while for me, much faster than 3E or 4E did. Im still more or less at day 1 so that's a ways off. I'd still rather play 2E.

From personal experience one of the two will happen:
1: it will grow on you.
2: it'll make you want to play your preferred edition even more.

If #2 happens, go play your preferred edition. No harm no foul. If #1 happens, then that's cool too.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Focus-fire has ALWAYS been a way to win. This is more a DM-side issue than a player-side issue, which no edition is going to provide a solution for. The answer to focus-firing enemies (which is a good strategy) is to have enemies focus-fire players. When 4/5 goblins are left open to target whoever they want while you spend 2-3 rounds killing that other guy, that's 2-3 rounds they get to spend picking off your healers, your squishes or whoever they want to target. The only way to counter this strategy is to split up your attacks, which will make each individual enemy last longer and typically generates a better fight where everyone takes some damage, instead of noone or just one guy.

That isn't quite what I meant. What I was talking about is that most of the battles I've seen in 5E, in play or as a spectator have been either groups of weak enemies, or one strong enemy and 0-3 weak ones. Weak enemies a glass cannon can generally solo, as you hit hard enough to kill it before it can badly hurt you. Against strong enemies, they usually die to 2-3 rounds of focus fire.

 

[Galendril]

The problem with the huge number of choices in 4e is that it takes a large investment of time to make character. I think the designers realized most people don't think sitting in room alone studying rulebooks and reading charops forums was fun. The fun comes from actually playing the game.

Additionally, the massive number of choices in 4e was an illusion. There were way too many traps. My 4e DM was a huge power gamer and I can't tell you how many times he told me I made my character 'wrong' or I was playing my character 'wrong'. There should be no wrong choices for the game to be fun. That's why I am grateful for 5e!

 

[thecasualoblivion]

The problem with the huge number of choices in 4e is that it takes a large investment of time to make character. I think the designers realized most people don't think sitting in room alone studying rulebooks and reading charops forums was fun. The fun comes from actually playing the game.

Additionally, the massive number of choices in 4e was an illusion. There were way too many traps. My 4e DM was a huge power gamer and I can't tell you how many times he told me I made my character 'wrong' or I was playing my character 'wrong'. There should be no wrong choices for the game to be fun. That's why I am grateful for 5e!

I just spent the past 5 days pouring over books and forums learning how to min/max every 5e class and building 10 maximized level 1 death machines with levels 2-10 mapped out for Curse of Strahd. I made 10 because I didn't know what other people would run, except for one person I know is playing a Rogue. I can also say that while powergaming and tactical play aren't as effective as I'd like, they still make for a much more powerful character than a casual picking things with little thought to mechanical effect. The casuals at the table of the Rogue I built for someone else were in awe of a 4th level character hitting for 20 damage a turn. It was something they never saw before and didn't know was possible.