D&D 5E What needs to be fixed in 5E?

[Nahat Anoj]

One big problem I have with 4e is tracking conditions. Anything that can be done to streamline that process gets a big boost from me.

On a related note, I also dislike tracking various fiddly bonuses. Something that pares this down will also be a welcome development to me.

While 4e's skill system works okay for me, compared to the combat system it seems like an afterthought. 5e will need a skill system that's as well thought out as its combat system, IMO.

I don't think the concept of daily resource recharging works all that well for me. Perhaps it's iconic for a wizard to study his spellbook each day to memorize, but I'm willing to see this and other daily abilities go. Have everyone focus on at-will and encounter abilities, with some kind of per encounter resource that can be spent to augment these abilities (not unlike power points for some of 4e's psionic classes, actually).

I don't mind healing surges per se, but I don't like how they're on a daily refresh. I'd like to eliminate them entirely or giving a very limited number of "Heroic Surge" points that refresh after every encounter (I'd fold Action Points in with this). I'd also be interested in making these "Heroic Surges" the same as the per encounter augmentation resource I mentioned above.

tl;dr version: For me the biggest "fixes" are streamlining the fiddly bonus/condition tracking, thinking hard about how skills come in to play, and minimizing/eliminating daily resources.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the idea that there shouldn't be Source, but that there only need to be 4 classes not linked to Roles is interesting.

What if the four classes were Hero, Mage, Priest, and Psion? Yeah, each one would be a source.


'Class' is a sacred cow of D&D and we probably can't get rid of the term. But, if the term Class came to mean either what Role or Source does, now, that wouldn't be a bad thing.

Source, while mechanically of little import, is a very powerful defining element of a character. A divine character is very different from an archanist from a warrior from a psionic or primal spirit-talker or dark spooky shadowthing or whatever. OK, it works better with the first 3 sources.

So, label what is currently Source 'Class,' and let each 'class' be customizeable to cover each of the 4 roles, that'd be fine.

Or label what is currently Role as 'Class' again (as was done in 3.x), and customize each class to work with the Source you want.

Personally, I think the former would work a little better.

 

[KarinsDad]

The numbers aren't going to work. Well, OK, they'll work, but I don't think they'll do what you want.

So, if enemies hit 'x' half the time, they'll hit x+4 about a 30% of the time. If damage averages around 12, damage through put vs Plate would be 3.5, and damage throughput vs None would be 3.6 - higher damage makes no armor better, lower damage makes plate better. Heavy-armor characters would thus be good at wading through legions of low-damage mooks, while they'd want to strip their armor off to fight a dragon or giant.

Good point.

I was also thinking of a concept of:

None: AC x, damage resist 0
Leather: AC x, damage resist 1
Chain: AC x, damage resist 2
Scale: AC x, damage resist 3
Plate: AC x, damage resist 4

In other words, armor doesn't change the chance to hit, it just changes how much damage the PC takes.

This, of course, would have to be offset by disadvantages of armor. With such a concept, hit points of PCs could be the same and their combat ability and armor would dictate their survivability.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Hm... it is hard to come up with possible solutions to a problem that can't quite be defined...

In prior eds, there was a greater gulf between best daily resources (spells) and unlimitted-use resources. So, when the party threw down it's best stuff, it was /really/ good. But, that hardly made it easier to stretch the party to their limits - more often, it made the bad guys go down on the first round. ... hmm... On the healing side, surge triggers rather than surges are at a premium in the single-encounter day, so the abundance of surges shouldn't be contributing.

Here's an idea: describe a really memorable 3.5 climactic encounter that you ran.

The thing is, when the game got to be higher level in 3E/3.5E, the battles often became a contest of the spellcasters buffing the party beforehand, and then dispelling the bad guys' buffing spells during the combat (the party had a cleric, sorcerer and a psion, as well as an allied NPC cleric). So, before a combat, the party would decide which spells to cast on themselves, and once combat started, the caster would focus on debuffing the enemy to make it easier for the party melee types to finish off the bad guys.

However, I'll see if I can recall one of the bigger battles towards the end of the campaign, though I won't bore people with all the details.

The party was:
An elf paladin of freedom/champion of Corellon
A dwarf fighter
a human sorcerer
a human cleric
a halfling psion
a goliath barbarian
a human rogue/spellthief
a human fighter
an NPC cleric (sister of the PC cleric)
the sorcerer had a young copper or brass dragon as a companion
the cleric had an elf scout/ranger as a follower type

The PCs were all at level 16, the NPC cleric was 15 and the elf scout follower was level 13 or 14.

The setting was a mountaintop lair of some unknown and powerful evil that the PCs needed to vanquish (and, unknown to them, set the timeline to rights...). At the edge of the mountain lair, they cast their buffing spells.

The players move in and encounter a large group of zombie ogres... which they quickly plow through as they head deeper into the mountain.

Suddenly, flames erupt ahead of them and they hear a deep mocking laugh... the players move forward with caution - the party sorcerer casts his Improved Invisibility. The deep mocking laugh was from a balor, who proceeded to engage the party.

The first round was pretty tough on the party, but they did a pretty good amount of damage to the balor. However, in either round 2 or 3, the dwarf fighter got into position to do a full attack and just landed an amazing series of blows - four of his five attacks landed (he was hasted), two of them were crits that confirmed. With his four attacks, he dealt out a good 200 points of damage and sent the balor back to the Abyss. (oh, we make all our "to hit" rolls on the table as well) I was stunned, needless to say.

The balor promptly exploded, dealing 100 or 50 points of damage to everybody in the party save the sorcerer (just out of range). This left a few people in pretty bad shape, but nobody was quite dead yet.

Right after the balor exploded, however, the party blinked and they were imprisoned in a pair of Force Cages. The lich mastermind walked in and proceeded to attack (the lich had gated in the Balor to allow itself time to cast more buffing spells, then cast Time Stop & two Force Cages to imprison the party - well, everybody but the sorcerer, who was cowering in the back of the room)

The lich blasted the two most wounded party members into death - the elf scout & the dwarf fighter (he missed his save on the balor explosion). Luckily, one cleric was able to Revivify the dwarf, who was then healed up by another party member. I think the psion was able to Disintegrate one Force Cage, while the sorcerer cast his Greater Dispel on the lich (who was protected by 9 or 10 different spells, including one that made it immune to all metals, magical or mundane.)

Since the lich was also an archmage, it had some advanced counterspelling ability, so it may have actually caused one or two of the initial dispels to rebound on the casters. In the meantime, the other Force Cage got Disintegrated or taken down somehow.

But, several rounds of combat ensued because the elf paladin had a sword made out of glass and the goliath had a huge stone greatclub and they could damage the lich physically while the clerics, sorcerer & psion all tried debuffing the lich.

However, in one round, the lich Mazed the goliath barbarian, sending her off the board, leaving only the weak hitting elf paladin as somebody that could affect the lich in melee. Amazingly, though, the barbarian rolled a natural 20 on her INT check the next round and popped out of the maze at the end of her turn.

the lich pulled out all the stops - nearly every high level spell in the book. I hit the psion with Otto's Irresistible Dance, hit a bunch of them with Horrid Wilting, hit with a Finger of Death, only to see the PC make his save; Delayed Blast Fireball; you name it... plus, a bunch from the Spell Compendium, not to mention 7 or 8 lower level quickened spells. So, the lich was firing two spells a round for most of the combat.

Finally, at the end, the lich was being grappled and the party rogue flew above her and hit with a touch attack and poured a maximized potion of cure serious wounds down her throat, doing 39 points of positive energy damage to the lich, effectively killing it. (they had to track the phylactery down, of course). The NPC cleric also got killed with Wail of the Banshee, and I think the sorcerer was dropped once, only to get Revivified.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not sure that I agree that there should be only four classes, but they can be far fewer than there are right now. WotC has shown that they can create distinctive classes without having to write an entirely new set of powers for each one.

I think one of the major problems with 4e is that, as implemented, it required too much splat. There are so many character classes that WotC has to put out a metric s**tload of splat books and dragon articles just to provide adequate powers and feats for the classes they already published. (And there are still undersupported classes like the "should-have-been-a-cleric-flavor" Rune Priest.) This massive workload requires too much system mastery of the players and distracted WotC from getting other things right, like adventures.

I think it's worth noting that the quality of WotC products improved dramatically once they stopped trying to publish a thousand new powers and feats per year.

-KS

Yeah, I don't pretend to know for sure what the 'ideal' number is, but I'd note that it ranges somewhere between 2 (weapon users and magic users) and some other low number. OD&D started out with 3 (fighting man, magic user, and cleric), then added the 4th of the big 4 almost immediately. Nobody has actually created a 100% compelling argument for a class that has to exist since then. All the barbarians and rangers and whatnot are really variations of fighting man. All the various casters are variations of magic user. Even cleric and thief can arguably be subsumed under fighting man and magic user. I think you really need a STRONG argument for the existence of an entire class and power list. Honestly, Essentials seems to have that dialed in pretty well, and I think if they had been doing a clean reimplementation they'd have stuck to the big 4.

There can easily be the 30+ BUILDS we have now though. I just cannot find a strong argument for anything beyond the big 4 to be classes. Those are the archetypes of heroes, the man of learning, the man of physical prowess, the man of devotion, and the man of the shadows. Everything else is a variation on those.

[MENTION=15922]Karen[/MENTION]sDad Yeah, it is certainly one possibility. My only issue with it is I think you will find that having 2 very different basis for defense will be REALLY hard to keep reasonably balanced. Which one is superior will be very situational and you may find that a lot of design space is sacrificed in various parts of the game because anything that is suitable to use against a guy with substantial damage resistance is way too strong or weak against a guy with a higher base AC. The same goes for PC resources, an item that is innocent in the hands of a lightly armored character could be overwhelming in the hands of one in plate. Add another couple points of DR on top of your armor and all of a sudden you're starting to look might hard to hurt at all, or add a small AC bonus to your light armored guys and all of a sudden they're so far ahead of the guy in plate that you can't find a formula for monsters that will challenge both in a reasonable way.

I could be wrong of course. It would be a worthwhile experiment to put some kind of system together and see if it can be made to work without excluding too many other options from being able to show up in game.

I didn't say much about powers before. I agree that (the issue of power lists aside) there are really too many choices floating around. I think powers should be scaling and maybe it would be a good idea to make most of them available right off at level 1, and just scale them. Maybe class powers should all basically work that way.

Lets imagine there were 3 classes (fighting man, magic user, and cleric, yeah I really AM old-school believe it or not!), each with a power list. ALL of these powers could be basically 'encounter' type powers. They all scale with your level and provide the basic core of competency. At-will powers could be attached to builds, providing basic differentiation and assisting in defining your particular role. Daily powers could be acquired via masteries and other 'character building' choices. This doesn't have to be overly strict either, basically each element adds some choices to what you can pick from. Maybe some classes/builds/masteries lean more or less in the direction of one use type or another, and I don't know that it is necessary for each choice point to have only one type (utilities already come in all use types, and that works for them).

In a system like this lets say you wanted to be a 'rogue'. Well, you're basically a fighting man, your combat tools are weapons. So you have your basic encounter powers (hit things with your weapon with different variations), and then you have your build, which gives you your sneaky sneak mechanic and some sneaky at-wills, and maybe you pick 'fencing master' to be a real wiz with a rapier. You could then perhaps also have a theme, 'outlaw' that rounds that out. You're pretty nicely defined at that point, and maybe you have to make 4 power choices and perhaps some kind of choice related to race.

Seems like you're in good shape, there are a lot of options. Another guy could decide to be a less sneaky 'nobleman', pick fighting man, knight, fencing master, and noble. He's a nice defensive dex based fighter that's good with the rapier too, but also with a bunch of advantages for having a decent CHA and maybe a little side of leader in there. He fits his archetype pretty well too.

Now, say someone wants to be a witch! Well, your obviously using magic, so we'll make you a magic user. Maybe your build is something like 'pacted' to represent your witchy pact with the devil. Then you could have a mastery in say alchemy (witch has gotta have her kettle you know), and perhaps she also takes the outlaw theme, them witches are always living out in the sticks avoiding the man after all. Again, it seems like this character would be pretty set.

Obviously you've got a whole bunch of details to iron out, and nothing is ever quite as easy as it sounds, but I think with that sort of setup you've got a rather classic feeling D&D with a lot of 'old school' spin to it, plenty of more modern build-character-through-choices, less different types of elements and powers than there are now, etc.

I might also do a few other things. Kick the 1-30 level structure for instance. I think 30 levels is more than is needed. It begs for too many extras to need to be tacked on. AD&D really had a practical limit of around level 18, after which no character gained much of anything significant. So make 3 tiers of 6 levels each. That way there are NOT going to be dead levels at all, contrariwise there will be a couple of new things per level. This also ties back to the current "Epic tier problems" thread. A full 1-18 campaign is more doable in a year time frame. Epic doesn't have to last over long (which it really does now), etc. It also compresses the overall spread of bonus growth, so that you don't need as many ways to push numbers up. Individual monsters remain usable for a wider span of the game, etc. 30 levels was an interesting choice, but I'm going to go with Gygax on that one, 18 was enough.

You might even manage to make a game that didn't totally piss off either the 4e people or the old school people, lol. Doubtful, but at least you might come closer, and I think I'd play it.

 

[RHGreen]

One of the good things about being a wizard in older systems is that you could, technically if not practically, collect every spell there is.

I wish it could be the same for all powers.

Say that you manage to collect 6 Encounters and 5 Dailies, but you can only use 2 of each per day. But not in a vancian way where you have to choose at the beginning of the day. You simply have them there waiting to be used.

Also, I want more than 2 at-wills (3 for human.)

You could dish out powers as a reward, like magic items, for doing good stuff. 2 characters of the same level could have a different number of options based on how well they have played. There should be a minimum, however, as you don't want to be an ineffective character. That would be unfair.

Some people don't like having too much book keeping for spells/powers. I don't see the problem. If you have some printed out cards just use a card and lie it face down to represent having used an encounter power. Perhaps if you can only use a given power once, leave it face down and only get it back after an extended rest, or another mechanic.

If fact you can do this as a house rule with existing 4E. It doesn't make you more 'powerful', it just gives you more options.

BTW I hate having to swap out powers as you go up in level (I forgot how to swing really hard) and using the same at-wills over and over again.

Edit: You'd think WOTC would love your character being able to collect powers, especially in the form of cards, MTG and all that.

Oh and the ability to scale up powers so that a 1st level power can be boosted up, say, to a level 6 version.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Hm... it is hard to come up with possible solutions to a problem that can't quite be defined...

In prior eds, there was a greater gulf between best daily resources (spells) and unlimitted-use resources. So, when the party threw down it's best stuff, it was /really/ good. But, that hardly made it easier to stretch the party to their limits - more often, it made the bad guys go down on the first round. ... hmm... On the healing side, surge triggers rather than surges are at a premium in the single-encounter day, so the abundance of surges shouldn't be contributing.

Here's an idea: describe a really memorable 3.5 climactic encounter that you ran.

I'd solve this problem by bringing in a few other related issues and doing a combined solution:

Make a more robust, expansive form of skill challenges. This is worth doing anyway, but for purposes of this problem, the main addition is building into the skill challenge framework ways for combat use to serve directly as checks. That includes weapons, defenses, and spells.

Next, redo the XP assumptions, advice, and adventure pacing to include lots of smaller fights. These fights don't use the full combat rules. Instead, they are skill challenges. But given the previous point, if the fighter wants to "swat goblins with my sword," he has something to roll to show generally how well he did. We aren't tracking hit points and the like in this fight. You smack the goblins around until they die or run off or get knocked unconscious or whatever. The details aren't important, only what resources got used, and enough direction from the participants to narrate what happened.

Include in this expanded skill challenge more variety than a series of binary results. You need some kind of staged success, to make up for the fact that you aren't pulling off hit points bit by bit. ("Disposition" from Burning Wheel would be a good way to go here. It's a vastly simplified point system for two sides to whittle down as a group, based on the capabilities that each group brings to the conflict.) More nuance would be nice in regular skill challenges, too, and would allow for more variety in skill and feat use.

Thus, these combats get handled in 15-20 minutes, but they aren't simply rolling ad hoc skill checks in the current skill challenge format. Having plate and shield, a big axe, and the ability to use it--matters. But if you want to intimidate or talk or whatever, you can do that too.

There. Now most adventures are structured such that you get a hefty chunk of your experience from smaller fights and challenges. These smaller fights do use up some resources at times, but not always, and not much. Now you can have the main combat system built around the expectation that the party will only do one or two such fights per "day". These are the boss fights, and the occasional sub-boss fights when warranted. You get a lot of experience from each of these fights, of course, but they aren't the roughly 80% of XP, as with 4E now.

Big fights will always seem more important and exciting, because they are tougher, narratively more important, and they take more time. Pacing has slowed to focus attention on each momemt in the fight, drawing attention to it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One of the good things about being a wizard in older systems is that you could, technically if not practically, collect every spell there is.

I wish it could be the same for all powers.

While I enjoyed spell-hunting back in the day, the downside of that was that every magic-user could prettymuch become the same character - because spells were the defining feature. It was worse for Clerics/Druids becaue they didn't have spells known, at all, they all had access to all the spells in their list, so any given one could pray for the same spells.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The thing is, when the game got to be higher level in 3E/3.5E, the battles often became a contest of the spellcasters buffing the party beforehand, and then dispelling the bad guys' buffing spells during the combat.

I'm familiar with that, yes. Can't say as I miss it.

However, I'll see if I can recall one of the bigger battles towards the end of the campaign, though I won't bore people with all the details.

The party was:
An elf paladin of freedom/champion of Corellon
A dwarf fighter
a human sorcerer
a human cleric
a halfling psion
a goliath barbarian
a human rogue/spellthief
a human fighter
an NPC cleric (sister of the PC cleric)
the sorcerer had a young copper or brass dragon as a companion
the cleric had an elf scout/ranger as a follower type

Wow. Big party, with 3 hangers-on.

Right after the balor exploded, however, the party blinked and they were imprisoned in a pair of Force Cages. The lich mastermind walked in and proceeded to attack (the lich had gated in the Balor to allow itself time to cast more buffing spells, then cast Time Stop & two Force Cages to imprison the party - well, everybody but the sorcerer, who was cowering in the back of the room)

I think this prettymuch sums up the combat, actually. At least, I think I get it. At some points in it's history, D&D has been like a massively complex game of rock-paper-scissors. The DM comes up with some challenges, the players have to come up with the right resource/decision to overcome each challenge. Not saying 3.5 was exactly one of those points, but what I think you're describing is the interplay of very choice-rich PCs and very choice-rich enemies - each with access to a /lot/ of the same choices (the important ones, of course, at that level, being spells).

And, you're absolutely right, 4e does /not/ provide that. I even see how the symptom is that you find the encounters a little anticlimactic as a DM. You have a lot less choice, and mostly very different choices from the players, in designing your encounters. PCs'll have 4 or 5 attack powers at first level, and more than 10 by the end of paragon. Standard monsters have two or three, sometimes only 1, and even Solos rarely have 10. You /can/ custom-build monsters, but it is an entirely different process than building a PC.

When you have a game where both sides have access to most of the same options, you have more, I guess, 'strategic' play. D&D could often be played that way, as a strategic game pitting party vs DM, and one virtually 'won' before any fight actually started. 4e definitely doesn't evoke that style. It's very much a cooperative game, the DM's job is to provide challenging fun as he helps to develope the story, rather than to give an honest try to 'win' each combat. You /can/ do that in 4e - Lair Assault, for instance - but the same innovations that make it very easy to run a conventional 4e game, make it more difficult to run a balanced/'fair' adversarial one.


So, I think I see the problem. 4e gives the players and DM very different resources with wich to build their 'side' of any conflict. Players get tons of rich material to build their PCs with, including fair opportunities for power combos (nothng like 3.x, but they exist). The DM, OTOH, gets a free hand to design (exception-based design) monsters, traps, and skill challenges, but he builds them from a very different set of choices than PCs. That makes it an inherently unequal contest. The DM can just go ahead and make something arbitrarily nasty that'll whipe the floor with the PCs, but there's no fun in that. You /can/ stick to encounter design 'rules,' and devise level+5 encounters that'll seriously challenge you PCs, maybe even gank them. But you're still doing it with a different set of choices, so it's never a 'fair fight.'

About the only time you'd get the feel you're talking about would be if you built an 'evil adventuring rivals' party of the PCs level, and used them. Then you'd be playing on a level field, as it were, and the PCs would be in serious trouble.

 

[Oldtimer]

That's great but not everyone is trained in Aikido or Judo. Those who are would most likely have a feat that would enable them to grapple or attack while prone or maybe even stand without drawing an attack of opportunity.

Sure. And since Aikido is supposed to be based on old samurai fighting techniques, we could probably argue a long time about how well a D&D fighter should know these.

But, more importantly, do we really want to penalize this action? Why would we want to deter the prone fighter from spending his move action to stand up? Why do we want the "fall prone" rider to make some powers be even more powerful?

The rogue knocks the solo monster prone and we all circle him and kill him when he tries to get up. Which means he'll stay on the ground and the combat will be a static slugfest.