D&D 5E Playtested dat 5e at Gencon.

[Enchanter Tom]

Not true. Minions usually had a better AC than, say, Brutes, and dealt a decent ammount of damage. Pile on enough minions, and the party gets the feeling of being slowly overwhelmed, with the added benefit of knowing they're fighting a true horde.

I hated them, and so did the rest of my group.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I hated them, and so did the rest of my group.

Well, that's fine... but you can't get down on 4E for not having a similar feeling of dropping a monster in one hit if you intentionally didn't use the monster for which they were designed for that purpose.

 

[Salamandyr]

I too definitely prefer the way 5e handles low power monsters over 4th edition minions.

4e minions were horrible.

I even prefer 5e lower power monsters over earlier edition mooks because thanks to the lower numerical curve, gobs of them are still dangerous to higher level characters. 100 goblins thrown at a 10th level 1e fighter were pretty much soup. Not so in 5e!

I definitely like that.

 

[Klaus]

All editions have had this, its called 1 hp, and it was a pretty common in 1e with <1hd creatures like goblins.

Different things. Low HD creatures in 1e/2e had low hp because they were that type of creature. 4e minions had 1 hp to facilitate a *story*. They were less simulationist constructs and more storytelling devices.

 

[Enchanter Tom]

Well, that's fine... but you can't get down on 4E for not having a similar feeling of dropping a monster in one hit if you intentionally didn't use the monster for which they were designed for that purpose.

The DM did use them for that purpose, we just didn't like them because they felt like cheating. We instantly knew which monsters were minions (no rolling for damage, they automatically drop on a hit), it felt like a huge, frustrating waste to use an encounter or daily on them (hit point bloat on regular monsters), and the use of them overall sucked the fun out of the encounter.

As a side note, something I forgot to mention in the original post:

• TWF is really great in 5e, weapon and shield not so much. The ranger tossing out two attacks in a round did way more damage than I did, and I didn't feel that I had enough extra defense to make up for it.

 

[keterys]

The 4e damage variance can be pretty painful at low levels. In one group you'll have a 1st level elementalist dealing 1d12+1d10+1d6+8 (avg 23.5) competing with a thief doing 3d8 + 1d6 + 5 (avg 22), both getting free attacks from a warlord, while their paladin defender merely deals 1d8+8 (avg 12.5) with his holy strike. While another group might have 12.5 as their main damage dealer alongside their pacifist cleric (no damage) and enchanter mage (5 damage)

With monsters having ~26 hp, there's a pretty big difference there between "Everything dies in 1-2 hits" and "Everything dies in 1-2 rounds. Per enemy."

 

[I'm A Banana]

Cool report, thanks, [MENTION=6749522]Enchanter Tom[/MENTION] !

Magic missile starting out with three missiles is a good idea. At-will spells are not so great. My friend (who played a wizard) really disliked having an at-will spell (I believe it was ray of frost). He said that it resulted in him defaulting to the at-will spells rather than using his crossbow or another weapon.

...huh, I thought my buddy was an outlier, but maybe not! I imagine you'll be able to remove at-will spells from 5e when it gets published. The idea is to make wizards feel magical even when they're not casting their big spells (which would be "most of the time."), but if your friend is anything like mine, having to use a crossbow is something he WANTS to have to do. Fortunately, that shouldn't be a big deal.

Most enemies died in 1-2 hits. You have no idea what a refreshing change of pace this is from 4e. A single good dropping a monster is definitely a positive. Players didn't need to worry about critical hits for this to happen, either. A good roll on your damage die was usually enough to bring a monster down or at least weaken him enough that a follow-up attack would.

It is REALLY refreshing! 4e hand minions, but they were explicitly non "standard," and a lot of folks didn't like the taste of the abstraction that "1 hp, never dies on a miss" required. I like how 5e's "low HP" creatures means that rolling for damage doesn't feel nearly as pointless, but your damage might be enough to kill it in one hit regardless, if you roll high. I've started using minions a lot more in my 4e play than I did before I playtested 5e -- they're now pretty much the "default."

The fighter's second wind ability I did not like. It takes an action (not so great in the middle of a fight), and the amount it healed was trivial at first level. It's also kind of stupid for the fighter to have self-healing in addition to HD.

Yeah, it's not much, but they haven't been too concerned about the maths, I think. More concerned with the concept of the thing, which I think works well.

 

[Salamandyr]

• TWF is really great in 5e, weapon and shield not so much. The ranger tossing out two attacks in a round did way more damage than I did, and I didn't feel that I had enough extra defense to make up for it.

Agreed on minions.

In the previous packet to this one, I felt TWF was really good at low levels, but started to be really suboptimal once you were rolling multiple dice for damage. Not sure if it's really consequential as an addendum to multiple attacks.

I've been thinking that shields should be +2 AC for a while. Of course, if we're going to have magic shields, that may not be necessary. It will just be another case of TWF being really good at low level and then gradually being less useful as you go up in levels

 

[Morrus]

My friend (who played a wizard) really disliked having an at-will spell (I believe it was ray of frost). He said that it resulted in him defaulting to the at-will spells rather than using his crossbow or another weapon.

It's supposed to! That's a feature, not a bug - the wizard gets to stay a wizard rather than turn into a (crappy) fighter.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

I'm also looking forward to the D&D Next approach to mooks. I'm a big fan of 4E in general—it's the first edition I DMed regularly—but I never found minions entirely satisfying. (Don't tell me, I must have been using them wrong, right?) I think there's too much of a gap in staying power between a level-appropriate minion and a level-appropriate standard monster. In my experience, players inevitably begin meta-gaming. Once a monster survives a hit, they know it'll take several hits to bring down (or they need to aim their pixie thief at it or whatever).

I like that instead of having all the monsters with level-appropriate attack bonuses and AC fall into four buckets of toughness (minion, standard, elite, or solo), all the monsters will have roughly level-appropriate attack bonuses and AC, and there'll be a full continuum of hit-point totals among those monsters. Seems more natural to me.