D&D 4E What Aspects of 4E Made It into 5E?

[Jester David]

I don't know how much cross-subsidy there is across business units within WotC.

If I was managing a firm, and Division A was successful while Division B had failed, I would be hesitant to allow Division A to cross-subsidise Division B on the strength of a promise that Division B will get it right next time! But that's at best a very abstract description of the situation at WotC.

That’s very true. And if 5e had failed as well, they likely wouldn’t try again for that reason.

Really, different brands supporting each other happens a lot. Any time they make a new game or product or start a new product line they’re subsidizing it.

4e struggled at the end. That’s why they rebooted the line to Essentials. Which didn't bring back lost fans, and just lost existing fans. Then they cancelled several books. The D&D division likely didn’t have a huge surplus of cash after 2011.
And then the playtest began and that ran for two years. There’s no way the sales they had were supporting the brand. They had to be drawing from Magic’s profits.

It’s a gamble. The CEO would look at what D&D could be and let them make a new game hoping the payout after would recoup the losses. That’s good business.

 

[Jester David]

Completely leaving aside my personal feelings for 4E--positive, negative, and/or otherwise--I think this is untrue for at least one major reason.

I don't think 5E would have been quite the phenomenon it was if it hadn't had 4E to, in the eyes of many, "recover from."

(To say nothing of the fact that it wouldn't include many of the innovations that it's borrowed from 4E.)

Maybe. I don’t think so.
The initial success... probably. Enough people had stuck with 3e and then played that edition for so much longer they were ready to move on.

All the people who moved from 1e/2e to 5e likely didn’t do so because of or in spite of 4e.
And the *huge* surge of new players over the last two years is entirely unrelated, having nothing to do with 4e.

 

[Parmandur]

I've just made another post - I'm curious if you agree with it also.

As far as 3E/PF is concerned, I think as a system it is extremely different from 4e, and is the culmination of the mechanical strand of the 2nd ed AD&D system design ethos.

The issues that can emerge from this system are well-known. 4e adresses them through treating the encounter as the site of action resolution, and establishing mechanical parity of builds about the encounter.

Essentials departs from the default 4e approach, with some PC builds that have healing surges as their only daily resource. 5e and 13th Age extend this model, using N encounters per day as their balancing method. In 13th Age this is hardcoded; in 5e it's built into the encounter-design guidelines. The 5e approach allows the players and GMs to experience the dynamics/pacing/regulation of play as very similar to mid-80s and onwards AD&D, while those who care about mechanical parity have a clear guideline on how to reach it (the maths is not essentially unconstrained as in upper-level AD&D itself, and as in 3E/PF).

Whereas default 4e will push back very hard against an attempt to run itoin the mid-80s and on AD&D spirit.

I think you are right that 4E neglected the game as reading experience, but OI would say the system producing results was very much a focus of 5E design: they just did better due diligence in market research to determine the desired play experience for their audience and delivered.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

This thread isn't meant to be an excuse for edition warring.

 

[CapnZapp]

I didn't get to play anywhere near as much of 4E as I would have liked (chiefly due to how difficult it was to find a gaming group in general until Critical Role helped bring D&D back into the public consciousness), but so far I've been pleasantly surprised to see how much of 4E actually made it into the latest edition. I thought it might be fun to list features of 5E it inherited from its predecessor.

I'll start:
- Healing Surge-like Hit Dice
- Abilities that recharge on a short rest

On the other hand, many examples might superficially resemble 4E features, but really be fundamentally transformed.

Your first example is a very good one.

Healing Surges in 4E was a deal-breaker for me. It was incredibly jarring how they force every character to seek out damage; and the way no healing - not even magical - could affect you once you ran dry was incredibly fun-killing. You simply never press on after the point where any damage effectively lowers your max hp.

In this light (=healing surges being quite alright in 5E and horrible in 4E) I must say no, they're quite dissimilar once you look beyond the surface similarities (such as having the same name).

 

[CapnZapp]

Monsters not as NPCs.

This OTOH is such a huge life-saver it's almost incomprehensible!

 

[CapnZapp]

I still just call it "bloodied". There aren't any in-game effects, but it's a handy term.

Me too.

Few if any monsters change when bloodied in 5E, but I have a table rule where you never call out current hp explicitly.

Instead a monster (or your buddy) is either undamaged, damaged, bloody, downed or dead.

Nobody wants things like "since you have 17 hp left but Sue only 15, she gets the heal" - at least, not without a Medicine check.

 

[Doug McCrae]

older D&D was sorta gamist, 3rd was sorta simulationist, and 4E was gamist/Nar.

My take is that OD&D and AD&D 1e are extremely gamist, 2e wants to be narrativist but has no idea how to do it, 3e is gamist in its character build and combat systems but simulationist everywhere else, and 4e has a gamist combat system but leaves the rest of the game fairly rules lite so it can be drifted in whatever direction one wants.

2e is the biggest outlier because all the other editions use the right system for what they want to achieve.

 

[doctorhook]

This thread isn't meant to be an excuse for edition warring.

Ooh, but it's been ten years and my blood is still up! And I never played PF (unless you count from 2003 to 2007), so I can't switch to that edition war!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In this light (=healing surges being quite alright in 5E and horrible in 4E) I must say no, they're quite dissimilar once you look beyond the surface similarities (such as having the same name).

Healing Surges in 4E and recovery Hit Dice in 5E are extremely similar in one aspect: it's free non-magical self-healing that means you don't need a dedicated healer role, encourages the rogue and wizard to take a portion of incoming damage rather than leaving it all for the tank, and forces you to describe any HP damage as something which you could reasonably recover from after a rest.

They're also different in one aspect: healing surges were a hard cap on how much healing you could accept in a day, regardless of how many potions and healing spells you had available.

Whether you consider them to be roughly equivalent is going to depend on which of those two aspects is more significant to you.