D&D 5E So whatever happened to the Tactics Variant/Module or Whatever

Garthanos · Jul 20, 2019

dave2008 said:
I find in 5e it is best to us straight 5e monsters for mooks and then dress up a boss with a few 4e-isms. Strikes the perfect balance for me and doesn't require much effort at all.

Insert DM in the equation who doesn't have that 4e as a resource and you have a need for the obvious part of a tactical module.

The thing is character abilities need to interact interestingly with monster abilities the ability to easily stand up from being prone is meaningless if nothing prones you. I do not see this stuff as operating in isolation.

Charlaquin · Jul 20, 2019

dave2008 said:
Yes, especially after playing 4e I have a wealth of easy options at my finger tips! To be honest, I lot of 4e monsters aren't as engaging as people claim. That being said, there was an excess of conditions and movement that could be fun.

I find in 5e it is best to us straight 5e monsters for mooks and then dress up a boss with a few 4e-isms. Strikes the perfect balance for me and doesn't require much effort at all.

The strength of 4e’s monster design, IMO, was not in the design of its individual monsters, but in the way monster roles allows you to build dynamic tactical encounters more easily than in other editions. The individual monster designs were fine, good even, but in 4e one individual monster is only a fraction of what makes up a combat encounter.

Garthanos · Jul 20, 2019

Charlaquin said:
The strength of 4e’s monster design, IMO, was not in the design of its individual monsters, but in the way monster roles allows you to build dynamic tactical encounters more easily than in other editions. The individual monster designs were fine, good even, but in 4e one individual monster is only a fraction of what makes up a combat encounter.

I think people do not always get how over all structure contributes

It kind of relates to 5e designers take on healing surges mentioned earlier.

Xeviat · Jul 20, 2019

Charlaquin said:
The strength of 4e’s monster design, IMO, was not in the design of its individual monsters, but in the way monster roles allows you to build dynamic tactical encounters more easily than in other editions. The individual monster designs were fine, good even, but in 4e one individual monster is only a fraction of what makes up a combat encounter.

That section of the DMG was my favorite and most used section of that book.

4E monsters were so easy to refluff and retool, and you could have interesting dynamic encounters right out the gate. I remember an encounter in an exploration game I ran where first level characters were being stalked by a pack of wolves. I made stats for an "alpha wolf", which were soldier wolves while the younger wolves were still skirmishers. The soldier wolves had a mark but also had a grab instead of the usual knock prone. When they grabbed someone, they used their movement to drag the target back away from it's friends so the skirmishers could dog pile.

Yeah, that's possible to do in 5E, but the game doesn't immediately give you the tools.

Flamestrike · Jul 20, 2019

I'd like to see some ToB style stuff personally.

Campbell · Jul 20, 2019

Honestly, I don't think the 5e designers were up to the task. Everytime I hear them talk about 4e I'm amazed by how little they get the appeal of 4e.

Garthanos · Jul 20, 2019

Campbell said:
Honestly, I don't think the 5e designers were up to the task. Everytime I hear them talk about 4e I'm amazed by how little they get the appeal of 4e.

That right there feels altogether too true though at the same time I wonder how that could happen

Garthanos · Jul 20, 2019

Charlaquin said:
There were some pretty cool variant rules in the DMG, and that was it. .

And some are kind of innadequate like how second wind is very nearly un-used in 4e due to action economy and which is even more tied down in 5e. But it gets a variant?

Thought i would double down on why the variant they presented isn't really even the interesting parts of Healin Surges

Healing Surges in 4e

A limit to healing albeit high limit to "commonly available" healing (no healing if your subject is out except by dm controlled resources)
Defenders and to a lesser degree melee combatants have more not just more hit points they need healed more often doing their fighting style and role.
A resource spent in extreme exertion for skill use not just healing and sometimes by magic items and rituals adding this could be nice in a module
Flavor wise putting the awesome in the character being healed as much as the healer
proportionate healing - yes its kind of flavor too. (remember curing light wounds healed your low level character completely folks you were unconscious and dying from a "light" wound in 1e to 3e how cute)
oh.yeah... and second wind for emergencies / leaderless groups.

Lanefan · Jul 20, 2019

CapnZapp said:
It died when WotC decided to not rock the boat afraid that any new ideas would jinx the edition and stop the profits rolling in.

They avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as "new edition" like the plague.

Zardnaar said:
It's there in the class design and optional rules in the DMG.

I think the fanatics took things a bit to literally. They said fans of 1E to 4E could play together not that it would be 1E to 4E.

What we were told and-or led to believe in the pre-playtest and early-playtest days were three things:

1. 5e would be 'modular', the intent being to limit or even eliminate knock-on effects to other modules when making changes to one
2. 5e would be designed with kitbashers in mind, such that a DM could - with more or less effort - massage the game into what she actually wanted to run
3. With enough kitbashing 5e could be largely made to play like any previous edition (the implication being that the 5e design would be robust enough and flexible enough to handle this)

Well, other than some options in the DMG 1 seems to have largely disappeared along the way. 2 may or may not ever have truly been the case despite what was said at the time; and 3 - while still true - would now take huge gobs more work than originally - 'promised' is too strong a word to put here, and 'implied' is too weak - due to the absence of 1 and 2.

The other thing they never gave us (in fairness they never said they would, but...) right from the start are conversion guides to-from each previous edition - how do you port a 1e Illusionist or a 4e Warlord into the 5e framework and make it work without losing the uniqueness of the class; or how does 0-1-2e style level loss work in the 5e milieu; or ... (I could go on for pages here). A 16 or 24 or 32-page softcover adventure-module-sized conversion guide for each previous edition (so 5 of these, 1 each for 0e/BECMI and 1-2-3-4e) is all it would have taken...and it's work that was probably 90% done anyway during the design process - all they'd have to have done would be type it up and lay it out.

The only guides we have to go on, and these were all released well after the fact, are the updated-to-5e re-releases of some classic adventure modules from 0e, 1e and 3e.

MarkB · Jul 20, 2019

Garthanos said:
And some are kind of innadequate like how second wind is very nearly un-used in 4e due to action economy and which is even more tied down in 5e. But it gets a variant?

Thought i would double down on why the variant they presented isn't really even the interesting parts of Healin Surges

Healing Surges in 4e

A limit to healing albeit high limit to "commonly available" healing (no healing if your subject is out except by dm controlled resources)

Defenders and to a lesser degree melee combatants have more not just more hit points they need healed more often doing their fighting style and role.

A resource spent in extreme exertion for skill use not just healing and sometimes by magic items and rituals adding this could be nice in a module

Flavor wise putting the awesome in the character being healed as much as the healer

proportionate healing - yes its kind of flavor too. (remember curing light wounds healed your low level character completely folks you were unconscious and dying from a "light" wound in 1e to 3e how cute)

oh.yeah... and second wind for emergencies / leaderless groups.

Another aspect of healing surges, that I don't think 4e ever adequately encouraged in the rulebooks, was that they worked flavour-wise as a way of showing how beaten-up a party gets over the course of an adventuring day. The way I always narrated it, a character who was at full hit points but down to their last 1-2 healing surges did not look the same as a character who was at full hit points and full healing surges. Instead, they'd look battered, bruised, bandaged up and practically on their last legs. The only thing the "full hit points" part was buying them was that, at least, they didn't currently have any open, bleeding, untreated wounds.