D&D 4E What 5E needs to learn from 4E

[Primitive Screwhead]

I agree that 5e needs to steal the 'epic finishing battle' from 4e. The challenge in doing this is that 4e succeeds by giving PCs very concrete, grid based capabilities that can result in player choices that matter every round.

4e fails, as mentioned, when the encounter is not 'important' as this detailed connection to the grid and the escalating math collide. The higher level threats take longer to kill unless you use dailies. Which means at high levels any threats before the 'finishing battle' have to be either grind-fests as the PCs avoid wasting dailies or Nova and a push towards the 15 minute adventuring day.

I am running WoBS at 28th level and I am looking at converting the 16 combat encounters in the final module to three set-piece battles. I have experimented with using skill challenges, skirmish fights, and zone combat. But those are all patches on the 4e combat system and starts to look like some hack-job. My players forget the rules we are using and the Bard has difficulty translating his 'shift ally 1 square' rules into whichever variant we are using at the time.

 

[ComradeGnull]

Though, I'm not sure why the OP wants only solo battles to be interesting...

I think it is more about as [MENTION=32833]Scylla[/MENTION] points out, making minor but necessary combats flow more quickly and work at a lower level of detail.

Combats are like settings or rewards. You want to spend most of your time on the important parts- designing the throne room, the armory, the route the players are most likely to take to get into the building, the dragon's horde at the end of the adventure. If they decide to go through the Big Bad's shoe closet and look for loose change, you can make all that up on the fly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

4e's encounter guidelines are for at least modestly challenging or meaningful encounters. Nothing stops the system from being used for trivial encounters, though. A couple of minions at a guard post, a few more in a room - exactly what you're looking for. I've done such things before by incorporating several such trivial encounters into a single ongoing skill challenge. Each failure presents you with a small minion encounter that you must silence ASAP or the enemy is alerted and stiffer opposition will come looking for you. It can supplement or substitute for more traditional dungeon-crawling with a mapper & caller and so forth.

Yeah, I agree. If an encounter was trivial in AD&D you can make it trivial in 4e as well. Trust me, level - 4 encounters will end REAL fast. In fact TBH most at-level encounters should not last more than 15 minutes.

I don't think 4e's monster hit points are 'bloated' either. If you reduce them a whole bunch all you do is kill the tactical aspect of the game, there's no point in doing anything but damage really at that point.

I think what 5e is going to have to do is place greater emphasis on situation so that you can work with a wider variety of monsters. For instance if surprise is more effective then a few weak monsters getting the jump on a party is quick but also dangerous for a moment or two. The opposite is true too, a party can then get the jump on some tough monsters and hope to steamroller them.

I think 4e DID tend to lard a few too many choices onto the PCs at a certain point though. I think things got a bit out of hand with even level 1 PCs often having 6 or more powers to choose from.

Really I think some of the tweaking DDN has done so far is on the right track, the combat system itself is lighter weight but CAN be quite tactical with a few minor additions.

Honestly I want to see 5e learn from 4e that regularized rules with structure work and would be the best way to organize things. I'm not real fond of the mess that is 5e character subsystems.

 

[Incenjucar]

One of the better ways to speed up combat is to focus on brutes. Previous editions tended to have a lot of very generic "me smash face!" monsters, while 4E mixes it up so much that people forget that there are still plenty of monsters who have like two things they can do, max, which can be resolved in seconds.

 

[Raith5]

I agree that 5e needs to steal the 'epic finishing battle' from 4e. The challenge in doing this is that 4e succeeds by giving PCs very concrete, grid based capabilities that can result in player choices that matter every round.

4e fails, as mentioned, when the encounter is not 'important' as this detailed connection to the grid and the escalating math collide. The higher level threats take longer to kill unless you use dailies. Which means at high levels any threats before the 'finishing battle' have to be either grind-fests as the PCs avoid wasting dailies or Nova and a push towards the 15 minute adventuring day.

This is the big issue for DDN. While I think the fun of 4th big boss fights and epic finishing fights is a property of the whole game system not just monster design, I think DDN's focus on the adventure (rather than encounter) will be a good thing for a variety of reasons.

I think game mechanics could (should?) be able to productively scale with big and small encounters. Maybe daily powers or action points could be available when PCs are challenged by Orcus or an army of undead but not with respect two goblin scouts for instance.

 

[Recidivism]

One of the better ways to speed up combat is to focus on brutes. Previous editions tended to have a lot of very generic "me smash face!" monsters, while 4E mixes it up so much that people forget that there are still plenty of monsters who have like two things they can do, max, which can be resolved in seconds.

To be honest, I never really felt like it was the DM holding things up in 4E.

Monsters have 1-3 abilities, occasionally a rider effect or conditional effect. The big slowdown is players, and in particular out of turn actions by players (which slow down everyone else's action resolution) as well as omnipresent riders and conditional effects on player powers.

Although I really did like 4E's design, they really went overboard in certain ways that were pretty finicky. I'd prefer for classes to be able to be defined in 5E with less than 30 pages of abilities with slight variations in damage and status effect.

 

[Gothikaiju]

To be honest, I never really felt like it was the DM holding things up in 4E.

Monsters have 1-3 abilities, occasionally a rider effect or conditional effect. The big slowdown is players, and in particular out of turn actions by players (which slow down everyone else's action resolution) as well as omnipresent riders and conditional effects on player powers.

Although I really did like 4E's design, they really went overboard in certain ways that were pretty finicky. I'd prefer for classes to be able to be defined in 5E with less than 30 pages of abilities with slight variations in damage and status effect.

As primarily a 4E player, I agree-- just let me take the same encounter, utility, and daily as many times as I qualify for (non-4E players: imagine a mid- or high-level caster who can't choose any duplicate spells except cantrips/orisons). Aside from speeding up things during combat, by reducing a bunch of mediocre/similar options to a few preferred ones, it would also allow clearer expression of character concepts-- being easily able to choose all ice or fire powers, for a pyro/cryo-mancer, for instance.

To the thread topic-- yes! 4E Boss fights against MM3 and later solos are great, but routine fights could stand to be somewhat faster. All those little forced movements and status effects that were great in a skin-of-your-teeth Solo fight slowed things down a lot against a bunch of peons, IMO.

 

[ComradeGnull]

So what about the idea of having the game explicitly distinguish between big, detailed, 'bullet time' boss fights and small, rules-limited fights? This struck me as something that could strike a balance between the two while making the game style more of the 'modular' type that people are looking for- you have small, simple fights and you have big, complex fights, and you have different abilities that become available in each type of fight. You can even have a all-little-fight campaign or all-big-fight campaign if you want to explicitly emulate a pre-4e vs. 4e style.

Didn't want to derail this thread with the idea, so I wrote it up in a little more detail here

 

[KidSnide]

I think the strength of 4e boss fights (i.e. long set pieces, whether against a solo or just a dangerous set of interesting monsters) is that monsters get dangerous and cinematic abilities that contribute a lot to the story of the combat. A good combat will shift back-and-forth between the players feeling like they are in danger, feeling like they are in control, and going back to being worried again. Monsters with sudden (sometimes rechargable) encounter changing abilities are good for this. You see this most with later designed solos that change forms when bloodied or in combinations of lesser monsters where one type puts a dangerous condition on the PCs and another type of monster exploits it.

But I don't see this as just "the other side of the coin" of long 4e fights. Yes, WotC developed this monster design skill because of 4e's tactical combat. But the problem with 4e combat isn't the number of choices per se, but the number of unimportant choices. 4e is a tough system for fast combats because it forces players to count out spaces on the grid, figure out how to use minor actions and track a ton of conditions. I suspect groups that learned to play 4e well learned how to deal with these issues and didn't waste time on them in less important combats. I've played with too many players who couldn't get through a turn without spending 30 seconds thinking about his (or her) minor actions -- even when it is evident to everyone at the table that those minor actions aren't going to affect the outcome of the battle.

D&DN seems to be trimming away many of the "irrelevant considerations." It keeps the good part of minor actions by using abilities that let you "cast the spell and also attack," but eliminates them as a general category of resources to track. Likewise, advantage and disadvantage are better than the +2/-2 modifiers because the effect is big enough to matter.

-KS

 

[D'karr]

To the thread topic-- yes! 4E Boss fights against MM3 and later solos are great, but routine fights could stand to be somewhat faster. All those little forced movements and status effects that were great in a skin-of-your-teeth Solo fight slowed things down a lot against a bunch of peons, IMO.

The problem that I've seen is that, too often, DMs will not create that fight with peons.

I have seen very few EL -1, -2, or -3 encounters ever used. If the fight is supposed to be "pointless" as someone mentioned in another thread, then the DM should design it with that in mind. Not every fight must be a set-piece encounter against a solo monster, or an elite with his minions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a very short fight against 3 "numbskulls" that are not even a challenge. On the other end, the DM can also design a fight with a much tougher opponent that is a real challenge, but that is a glass-cannon.

The beauty of 4e Monster/Encounter Design is that you can very easily do both.

The "problem" is that the "assembly required" is not very well detailed for the novice. The encounter design section of the 4e DMG should have taken a lot more effort in explaining the "philosophy" behind the encounter, even the "pointless" combat, and how to easily accomplish it.

The 4e monsters are infinitely tweakable, because of the underlying framework. DMs should be given clear, and concise instructions on how to "tweak to taste" for the specific desired effect.

If you want to see a very interesting take on creating a dungeon-crawl system for 4e you should look at the "system" created by [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION]. He goes into great detail on how to tweak the existing system to accomplish what you want.

I know it works rather well because we've been using it to play through the Giants Series (G1-G3) and we have playtested other classic modules with similarly satisfying effect.



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