D&D 4E If 5e Had Evolved from 4e...

[Pour]

There are a ton of knowledgeable, insightful, and generally gifted 4thers on these boards. Had 5e been a direct evolution of 4e, what do you think WotC would have or should have done to push its designs and sure up the issues?

My own personal guesswork would have me believe:

1. Some form of skirmish/combat challenge to facilitate quick, complementary encounters to the more set piece, tactical ones.
2. A retooling of the skill challenge system (incorporating some 4thcore 'gambit' stuff); potentially Next pillar-themed challenges, aka exploration challenge, social challenge, combat challenge (mentioned above) mixing skills, abilities, backgrounds, and player savvy.
3. Smaller numbers, but the same solid, transparent mathematical foundation.
4. More detailed item creation (thus producing more interesting magic items) for players and DMs, providing clearly charted options and some sort of budget system so that they were as easy to assemble as monsters in an encounter.
5. Campaign frameworks and rules variants, allowing for more easily-applied and defined campaign types: low magic, high fantasy, renaissance, seafaring, mystery, espionage, etc; coupled with tweaks in rules (inherent bonuses, variations of milestones and resting, a more robust diplomacy/bluff/intimidate system emulating social combat, etc)
6. A more robust action point that could do more than a standard action.
7. Playtesting of levels 1-30, with Paragon and Epic playable from the get go. Similarly, all three tiers supported from the start to the finish.
8. Less bloat and more definition.

What I would have hoped for:

1. A fully operational digital suite: Compendium, Character Builder and Visualizer, Monster Builder, Trap/Hazard Builder, Item Designer, 3D-VTT, Map Maker, Campaign Blogging, 3rd Party Store; ipad and mobile friendly
2. 3rd Party
3. The cannibalizing of the Arcane power source. There should be an Elemental and true Shadow power source, and with it a Sorcerer whose spells are exclusive and very different than the Wizard's and which deal primarily in fire, cold, thunder, and lightning damage. There should also be an actual Necromancer class.
4. Monster design that addressed monsters MUCH bigger than gargantuan.
5. New settings.
6. A better Dungeon and Dragon, quality AND quantity.

Upon seeing other systems, what I now want incorporated:

1. 13th Age style skill system, basically a set number of points to be invested in backgrounds ala "Torturer", "Thief", or "Blacksmith". Whenever a skill is needed that's pertinent to a character's background, they roll with the background modifier, or else a straight ability score. It increases with level. Why bother with meticulously-defined skills when you can have this? Granted, there is a modicum of DM fiat, but no more, I believe, than when DMs adjudicate whether or not certain skills can be used in skill challenges.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Why bother with meticulously-defined skills when you can have this?

Well, a reasonable, finite, skill list gives players a good idea what their characters can do, and makes balancing skill acquisition possible. Fuzzy skill definitions, whether from open-ended or ill-defined lists or backgrounds or catch-alls like ability scores aren't so stable a platform. But, then, I'm pretty hard on skill systems.

:shrug:

Some things I'd've hoped to've see from a direct evolution of 4e:

• Cleaner multi-classing, using an option like Themes to open up access to power-swaps rather than eating up feats.
• Race, Class, Background, Themes and other options all expanding the players options by allowing swaps rather than adding new powers or features.
• A rationalized skill system that didn't lean as heavily on certain stats, and was more evenly divided among the three 'pillars.'
• Class balance and Roles expanded into the other two pillars.
• Story-based alternative to the 'day' as a re-set point for 'daily' powers and healing surges.
• More milestone-based rewards for having long adventures.
• Cleaning up 'the math' a bit.
• Doing away with the claw/claw/bite theory of multiple attacks - ie TWFing doesn't give you two attacks - nothing should require you to make make multiple independent attacks against the same target to resolve a single action.

 

[Jester David]

The cynical reply is that 5e is evolving from 4e, the same way 4e evolved as a reaction to 3e.
They replaced imbalance with balance, they removed having to choose between options that make you effective in combat and ones for role-playing, they gave every class tactical choices in combat each round, they simplified skills and made it easier to assign skill ranks, etc.

But, to actually answer your question, let me think a moment.

• I think we'd have seen a different category of monster between minion and standard, for quicker fights. The "mook" as it were.
• I think we would still have had the "three pillars" and a greater emphasis on exploration, possibly tied to themes.
• I can see alternate methods or recharging Daily powers being more standard. More alternate class designs that are still based around AEDU. Such as a class that needs to adventure for a certain amount of time to unlock their dailies (gaining them with milestones). More classes like the Essentials Assassin where they have AEDU but with a twist (dailies being poisons applied to weapons and such).
• The four roles would be tweaked. Everyone should do damage, and instead how damage is dealt varies. Defenders deal extra damage via protecting allies, controllers deal extra damage via attacking groups, leaders deal extra damage through buffing allies to hit harder, and strikers deal precision damage to specific targets strategically.
• Fewer powers but more builds modifying powers. Choosing a build augments your class' signature powers with role-specific powers.
• Power source specific powers. At certain levels you choose from a power source list instead of a class list.
• Race specific powers. See above.

 

[the Jester]

There would be far fewer powers with a smoother system of upgrading over time. Many powers would be shared by multiple classes or combat styles.

 

[drothgery]

What I'd hoped for with 5e was something noticeably derived from 4e, but with a lot of flavor changes and a few mechanics cleanups.

something like

• fix monster math so the 'math fix' feats are unnecessary (and never offer anything like them); probably tweaking PC and monster HPs and damage output to produce shorter combats
• remove epic tier from core (too few campaigns last that long, and it eats up a lot of space between powers, epic destinies, and epic-tier feats and items)
• put the 3.5 races in PH1 (with essentials-style bonus choices, the elf/eladrin split isn't really necessary; races don't take much page count)
• bring back the classic alignments - true neutral + unaligned (this is purely cosmetic but would make a lot of people happy)
• come up with a set of 'controller mechanics' (defenders mark, strikers do extra damage, leaders heal, and controllers -- well, they control via their powers)
• as nice as a lot of PoLand is, go back to Greyhawk as the implied setting
• rejig the core classes so there are simple (few powers, non-AEDU) and complex options for all power sources and all roles, and the 'filled-in' power source/role grid is there for martial, arcane, and divine to begin with
  martial - fighter (simple defender, but fix its woeful skill selection), rogue (simple striker), warlord (complex leader), ranger (complex controller)
  divine - paladin (complex defender), monk (complex striker), cleric (complex leader), druid (simple controller)
  arcane - swordmage (complex defender), sorcerer (simple striker), bard (simple leader), wizard (complex controller)
  (that's ten of the 3.5 PH1 classes + swordmage and warlord, and monk and druid shifted to divine because that fills out the divine row of the grid with classic D&D classes which were either traditionally divine in the druid or had a long history of being associated with D&D churches in the monk)
• encounter attack powers chosen by power source
• utility powers chosen by skill powers and/or racial powers

 

[Someone]

-Fix the math. Fix the magic item treadmill along this.
-Fix feat bloat. Somehow. For starters, never, ever, include a feat that just gives static bonuses to whatever, specially to combat stats, since they quickly become mandatory.
-Consolidate all the “damage+condition” powers into a master list that can be chosen depending to class/role and free hundreds of pages on class power lists. Use that space to give each class specific and unique mechanics that help differentiate each one.
-Fix combat length by fixing damage/hit points ratio and limiting number of extra attacks
-Design your rulebooks so they don't read like an engineering manual. Discuss in length how to provide fluff for the crunch.
-Expand the skill challenge concept (at its core, “decide beforehand the winning conditions for a non-combat encounter”) with advice of how to design them for specific situations and how to make them more involving than a long string of die rolls.
-Go ahead and have the guts to divorce rewards from number of monsters killed. Have by default a set of experience rewards for objectives or quests, partially based on monster XP but that doesn't require their slaughter.
-Now that you have faster combat and players that are not encouraged to butcher everything in their way, discuss how to design adventures of all kinds, from the string of carefully set encounters joined by a string of plot, to sandbox political intrigue with little combat.
-Provide in the DMG some tools, clearly labeled as purely optional and not very appropriate to dungeon crawls, to flesh characters beyond aligment, like numerical personality traits ala Pendragon, Ars Magica or Burning Wheel, something D&D has not done ever.
-Instead of yet another default setting, which is unnecesary given that 4e mechanics don't rely on specific gods or concepts like the ethereal plane and such, dedicate some pages to world building and use existing settings as examples.

 

[delericho]

To a large extent, I think you can probably guess where it was going from the Essentials and post-Essentials material.

I would expect:

- Fewer classes, and more sub-classes (see the proliferation of Fighter variants, etc). In particular, note that some sub-classes adopt a different role from their parent class.

- A slight reorganisation of Power Sources. In particular, there would no longer be "Primal versions of Martial powers" - if the Barbarian needs a power that works just like a Fighter power, it would just use the same power.

- I would like to think they would work to split up the Wizard, as it seems to have become an over-arching spellcaster again (they should probably have one class per school, or something). However, my gut feeling is that they would go the other way, and roll the Elemental and Shadow power sources back into Arcane, and expand the Wizard to account for this.

- Hopefully, they would revisit the Feats again. That remains the biggest area of messiness in both the 3e and 4e designs - any time a designer comes up with something that doesn't fit anywhere else, it becomes a feat. So, you have feats that are flat numeric bonuses, feats that are powers-lite, feats that modify powers. It's a mess, and should be cleaned up, perhaps even by splitting those three categories into separate silos and giving an advancement in each.

- Likewise, a new edition is their chance to go through and eliminate the junk feats/powers/whatever that serve no purpose but to bloat the system. Frankly, even if they had made no other changes, it would have been worth a new edition just for that.

- The monster math would probably have been revisited again, with a view to shortening combat without losing the mechanical-flavour that is the strength of the edition's monsters.

But that's about it. The underpinnings of the 4e system are extremely solid (albeit not to my taste). So, if they were continuing the evolution, then 4eV2 would probably not have hit the game with massive changes. It would have been as 2nd Ed is to 1st, rather than as 4e-Core is to 3e-Core.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

• Bounded Accuracy sounds like a good idea to me and would work nicely with 4E, I think. It would also probably help to to avoid feat taxes.
• Combat statistics more optimized for speed (at the risk of swinginess probably).
• Better solo and minion rules to handle crowd control vs solos and area/automatic damage vs minions more gracefully.
• Less messy feats. Give them a very limited scope of things they can do - they shouldn't be too fiddly.
• A better non-combat framework

• Better explained and better described skill challenges
• Rules and guidelines for Organization and Settlements and world creation
• better split of combat and non-combat utilities (possibly explicitely siloing these).
• Better integration of backgrounds and themes

• More flexible approach to power sources - (Essentials already had classes that used more than one source). Classes that mix martial and magical effects, for example. Also classes may share powers.
• More signifcance to milestones.
• Better rules for magical items, e.g. allowing magic items to be rarer but also have much more abilities to really give them a story feel and not just the +x to hit/damage and +xdy crit.
• Roles as less fundamental, but still guiding principle - a class can have multiple roles, and there are clearly spelled out decisions points. (It can start with something big like either taking the extra damage feature or the marking feature for a Fighter, for example).
• Essentialized version of classes in the core
• All Classes gain thematically appropriate class feature "passives" as they grow in levels (Essential classes and Themes already do this).
• Default Paragon Pathes and Epic Destinies for each class that do not have a strong theme attached to it, but still highlight that the character is moving up to something really new and different
• Making the Tier thematic meaning more pronounced in guidelines, story and rules.
• Better multiclasing rules (power swap feats at a minimum to costly to be generally worth it.)

 

[drothgery]

• Bounded Accuracy sounds like a good idea to me and would work nicely with 4E, I think. It would also probably help to to avoid feat taxes.

FWIW, I think 'bounded accuracy' is going to turn out to be very matematically fragile.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

FWIW, I think 'bounded accuracy' is going to turn out to be very matematically fragile.

It could be. I'd like to see it attempted first. There biggest problem is that they still want +x magic items.
Maybe I manage to sit down one day and come up with an idea how to do it in 4E. My main issue is that the xp scaling will not work that easily.

And the thing I generally dislike is that 3E and 4E made focusing on one ability score so important, and D&D Next won't really change that either. I have no good fix for that, really - not using an ability score for attack rolls and defenses also sounds wrong. Maybe if you could apply multiple scores but have a cap on maximum bonus? I don't know.