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

[AbdulAlhazred]

That escalated quickly.
Guess folks in all the groups i've played in just failed to figure out how to be good 4E DMs/players.

Eh, what I have found is that there was a modest amount of retraining needed. I needed to stop trying to play 2e with 4e rules and find the strengths of 4e. The WotC guys failed to point them out, sadly, as their adventures mostly miss the whole point. That really doesn't leave you with much but trial-and-error and your own smarts.

My feeling is that the course of 4e as a product can be summed up in capsule as everyone picked up KotS, found it to be a terrible slog, fumbled around for a few sessions on their own, didn't immediately get results that improved on what they were doing in whatever previous game, and just put it on the shelf.

The upshot 5e needs to learn 2 huge things from 4e. First of all its quite OK to kill sacred cows if you actually improve the game in the process. Second MOST of the success of RPGs is not about rules, it is about settings and adventures.

Frankly I see the whole DDN exercise as a huge waste of WotC's time and energy. They should be spending it on good adventures and good setting material. Essentials in particular was a giant boondoggle. All that time could have been spent on a quality 1-30 campaign arc to replace that HPE crap.

 

[Herschel]

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.

I never understood people NOT using minions for those cases, but apparently many never "got" it. It always seemed so obvious.

 

[tuxgeo]

My objection to 4E rituals is that they are essentially self-serving money drains.
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The problem in my eyes is resource contention by re-using gold for two diverging purposes. If rituals drew on some other resource, or gold was a story resource and not primarily for combat bolt-ons, then I think 4E's rituals would be sitting pretty.

This connects to the 5E Next project: magic items aren't an assumed part of characters' powers, so gold won't be "primarily for combat bolt-ons" in 5E Next. That frees it up to be used for rituals in the next version, right?

 

[Cybit]

That escalated quickly.
Guess folks in all the groups i've played in just failed to figure out how to be good 4E DMs/players.

This is more of a human psychology thing rather than a rules mechanics bit. In terms of straight mechanics and adjucation, 4E is, (IMO, and I feel like if you took it down to ease of DM'ing and number of checks to make, objectively so), better at ruling and adjucating someone jumping on a chandelier and swinging in than 3.0 is.

However, by giving players options in terms of powers, people will just look to choose from the powers, rather than being more creative by, frankly, necessity (fighters have to entertain themselves somehow). It's not a mechanics issue, it's more a psychology issue.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This connects to the 5E Next project: magic items aren't an assumed part of characters' powers, so gold won't be "primarily for combat bolt-ons" in 5E Next. That frees it up to be used for rituals in the next version, right?

I think the criticism of 4e rituals is misplaced. The economics of 4e don't actually support slobo777's assertion. 90% of the treasure any PC acquires during the game is in the form of items that are of level+1 to level+4 in potency. The gold you receive is on a par with 20% of a level+0 item per level, or almost nothing by comparison. It isn't trivial in terms of spending on things like rituals, but it is basically very trivial by comparison to what you get in equipment. Under no circumstances can you convert that gold into any appreciable extra stuff that is worth mentioning. In fact it is basically good for buying a limited number of rituals/consumables. Sure, you could horde it for half of forever and buy some weak items (a few of which can be pretty useful, but not Earth shattering, and certainly competitive with MANY castings of rituals).

It is fair to say that some rituals are over or under priced and I think they should have scaled the casting costs etc, so there's plenty of room for that system to be cleaned up, but the primary issue isn't that you have to trade magic items for rituals, it is just that PCs get a strictly finite amount of gold and thus players are highly incentivized to horde it mercilessly.

Oddly enough I think things actually work best when you shift more item acquisition to treasure acquisition. I also encourage a very easy-come-easy-go kind of situation with treasure. It is VERY easy to burn it on 'stuff', but there's always more to be had somewhere. If you want to take some big risks you can get some serious wealth too. You'll just likely part with it pretty quick too!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is more of a human psychology thing rather than a rules mechanics bit. In terms of straight mechanics and adjucation, 4E is, (IMO, and I feel like if you took it down to ease of DM'ing and number of checks to make, objectively so), better at ruling and adjucating someone jumping on a chandelier and swinging in than 3.0 is.

However, by giving players options in terms of powers, people will just look to choose from the powers, rather than being more creative by, frankly, necessity (fighters have to entertain themselves somehow). It's not a mechanics issue, it's more a psychology issue.

I don't know. The reasoning sounds good when you say it. IME it doesn't work that way at the table. I think how it DOES work is heavily dependent on the way you present situations in your game. As a DM I always have a rich amount of 'stuff' around for PCs to interact with, and NPCs that use it too. The players will pretty quickly start improvising and stunting too. Powers are nice, but they're only a base to start from. The trick is to make the players feel relatively comfortable doing crazy stuff.

 

[Cybit]

I don't know. The reasoning sounds good when you say it. IME it doesn't work that way at the table. I think how it DOES work is heavily dependent on the way you present situations in your game. As a DM I always have a rich amount of 'stuff' around for PCs to interact with, and NPCs that use it too. The players will pretty quickly start improvising and stunting too. Powers are nice, but they're only a base to start from. The trick is to make the players feel relatively comfortable doing crazy stuff.

True, but players almost always know how their powers will work out, and it's far less risky to use a power than to use an improvised attack. That's part of the psychology part.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

What does this have to do with the point I made, which is just that encounters should be GOOD. First of all many of us can wing that, at least often enough that if we need to pull something new out of the hat once in a while we can. For that matter the 10x less time I have to spend preparing other stuff in 4e gives me PLENTY of time to do up interesting unrelated encounters on the side if I wish. Heck, generate them off some tables with dice if you feel compelled, but there's no difference between doing that beforehand and doing it at the table. Then you have plenty of time to make it interesting.

Your objection in other words IME doesn't amount to anything. We won't even get into the whole question of why you would think random wandering monsters are needed to make the world come alive. I guess people believe all sorts of peculiar stuff, but whatever.

Because you said every encounter needs to be a story etc etc etc and I'm telling you that it doesn't because some people's world, namely mine, work as close to the real world as possible where you randomly have encounters for no other reason than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

When you leave your house do you randomly meet people you know or strangers? I'm sure the answer to that is yes. I'm sure if you wandered into an alley at night and were confronted with a group or thugs then there would be a confrontation. These things do happen in the real world without it being planned ahead and without purpose.

This is how a lot of my games work.

 

[D'karr]

Powers are nice, but they're only a base to start from. The trick is to make the players feel relatively comfortable doing crazy stuff.

For my group this was actually more of an education/presentation issue. No matter how much I told them that they could use "other" resources they didn't get the hint if not constantly reminded. So I devised a way to have it right in front of them.

I wrote a long dissertation about it and provided my solution here.

With that solution that "problem" completely disappeared. You should see some of the stuff they try now.






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[ForeverSlayer]

How is this at all distinct from, say, 3E combat? Excepting the part where your 3.XE fighter has only one button (it says "Basic Attack").

Okay, sometimes, your fighter has two buttons - the other one says "Make a trip attack," but since you always press that button, anyway, once you put feats into Improved Trip, etc., and never* press it otherwise, I think you're still functionally limited to one button.

How about give your fighter some feats next time and get back with us.