D&D 5E Are you going to miss AEDU? (And did you feel a lack in the playtest because of it?)

[fjw70]

I won't miss it. There are other way to do tactical combat, and if I do actually want to use the AEDU system then I will play 4e.

 

[TerraDave]

...
Encounter powers never sat right with me either. It was so arbitrary. It's not once every 5 minutes or once per group of bad guys but once a fight. Too gamist for my taste.

My issues with encounter powers, which emerged over a few years of play, is that they really distort how the campaign works. Every fight needs to be "big" enough to be worth the trouble, and this in turn makes it hard to run certain kinds of adventures (though somewhat ironically it works well in more story oriented games where combat is less frequent and can be more dramatic). Of course, I don't think this is only my issue, in fact I think there is at least 1 open thread on it.

This describes me as well.

Even 4e already let go of the AEDU structure with its Essentials classes. In one of my games there's a Thief and as such is built quite differently than a PHB1 Rogue, but he still feels competent, fun, and appropriate to the class concept.

Next so far... hasn't nailed it down yet for me.

Its a good counter-example. And honestly, I think thief might have been a better match for the player. But he had fun with those rogue powers.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I'm actually not switching, but for fighters in D&DN, they do have something in common with encounter powers. Specifically Combat Superiority dice, which works a bit like fighter stances.

The (standard) action to regain a die sounds a lot like Book of Nine Swords, but worse. (In Bo9S you could regain a power by making a basic attack.)

Alas, not rogues, not in the latest version of the document. Then again, the 4e thief in my Greyhawk campaign is both powerful and boring. Move action: use stance to move and get combat advantage. Standard action: Gank. The rogue in my WotW campaign (4e converted) doesn't like thieves because they don't have to work to get combat advantage. (He's playing an eladrin rogue, so he can at least fey step flank once per encounter. Or fey step out of being flanked.)

I ran into one of the players in my group-on-hiatus the other day and talked briefly with him about the Next campaign we're starting up in a few weeks. He was the player who attained the greatest rules mastery with 4E; he played a rogue, the only character to survive the entire three-year campaign from 1st to 17th level, and really got the whole combat advantage thing, and was always figuring out ways to optimize his capacity as a striker. Anyhow, while he's open and curious about Next, especially when I emphasized the "theater of mind" focus, I've had a tingling worry that he, and maybe one other player who attained similar rules mastery, will miss the AEDU paradigm.

The player probably won't like the D&DN rogue. If they only play rogues, there's a real problem there. There's a little too much "mother may I have combat advantage?" going on with D&DN rogues IMO. Bt they may enjoy the fighter, especially if they would have been a fan of the slayer.

I'm not sure it will be that different from the DM's side of the table and monsters will still effectively have the same "powers."

I haven't found most D&DN monsters to be nearly as tactically interesting as their 4e counterparts actually. Often there will be one interesting leader and several more boring monsters. I liked the giant black dragon though; the math is borked, but it did have thematically and mechanically interesting abilities, especially all the off-turn actions.

Of course PCs will still be able to do all kinds of things - everything and more that they did in 4E - but there won't be the same pre-made avenues of expression, i.e. powers. Except for spellcasters, of course.

What sort of things? I don't think I've seen anything like Handspring Assault in D&DN (that's a rogue power that lets you attack and then shift as one action, plus it's reliable so if you miss you can use it again). Or Deep Cut (inflict ongoing damage), or...

So I ask you, for those switching to 5E from 4E, are you worried about missing powers? For those having played the playtest, did there feel like a lack?

I only did a little playtesting, and played a wizard. Back then, there wasn't anything like encounter powers, but at least I couldn't run out of at-will magic I didn't feel much of a lack as a wizard. We did have a halfling rogue, but this was the first packet, so they looked very different. (Back then, they were pure lurkers. Hide one round, gank the next. Frankly a lot more fun on the DM's side of the screen than the player's.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

This accurately captures much of my feeling.

ADEU is artificial homogeneity to me. I've no doubt that 5e can keep things interesting without resorting to this kind of meta-enforcement of mirco-balance.

Given that in more than a year of public playtesting D&D Next didn't succeed here even once, what makes you think that the eventual product will?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Given that in more than a year of public playtesting D&D Next didn't succeed here even once, what makes you think that the eventual product will?

Well, speaking for KM here (in what I imagine his response would be, if I understood correctly what he meant)... the playtest did indeed succeed in not using meta-enforcement of microbalance. The classes have all gone back to having their own individual mechanical formats for the distribution of their abilities, rather than the same mechanical format for ALL classes... while still maintaining a sense of relative balance to one another.

The spellcasters have daily spell charts. Fighters have superiority dice or improved crits, barbarians have a daily pool of rages. Etc. etc. And each of these different mechanical concepts are played differently and feel differently from each other. Using superiority dice feels and plays different than a wizard's spellcasting... or at least feels much more than using AEDU for both does (in my opinion of course).

The fact that you can reach a relative balance without needing to use the same mechanics across the classes (the "meta-enforcement", as KM described it) is a point in the game's favor, and is something at least I think they've been able to accomplish with 5E.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The spellcasters have daily spell charts. Fighters have superiority dice or improved crits, barbarians have a daily pool of rages. Etc. etc. And each of these different mechanical concepts are played differently and feel differently from each other. Using superiority dice feels and plays different than a wizard's spellcasting... or at least feels much more than using AEDU for both does (in my opinion of course).

First I disagree about feel. But then I care more about the effects being different than the method.

But secondly, my point was that in my entire experience of next, I never once found that non-casters were engaging to play or had worthwhile options that you weren't best off simply picking one and spamming it. And that to me is utterly uninteresting. So next might have cutely different mechanical conceits for the classes, but few of them are interesting ones so far as I can tell. Only the casters really should adapt to unfolding situations.

And using Combat Superiority and getting in peoples faces feels and plays incredibly different from a wizard's spellcasting.

 

[keterys]

The fact that you can reach a relative balance without needing to use the same mechanics across the classes (the "meta-enforcement", as KM described it) is a point in the game's favor, and is something at least I think they've been able to accomplish with 5E.

I'm mixed there:
4E should never have launched with everyone on the same paradigm, and I'm glad it at least eventually tried other things (PH3, Essentials, etc), so it's definitely good for 5E to start with a mix of options.

I ran a bunch of 5E, and casters dominated - I realized it was because the (WotC provided) adventure let them get too many rests per combat, and tried pseudo-forcing more per rest and that helped significantly, but it was very much still a case of the casters letting the rest of the party catch up while conserving abilities, rather than optimizing around the 1-2 combat workday.

So I think that "relative balance" is going to be very game and campaign subjective, so I wouldn't mind if the system had some actual influence on it. The equivalent of 13th Age's "and something bad happens if you rest before you do enough stuff", though more appropriate for D&D.

 

[SteveC]

I'll miss it terribly.

Encounters were an a great addition to the game and opened up a lot more designspace: there was now a place between dailys and at-wills.

Plus the options that were opened up for martial characters were fantastic... they allowed them to join even a high level party and be on equal footing with spell casters.

Will sadly miss, and it's part of the reason I'll likely be skipping this edition initially.

 

[Manbearcat]

I would say that "it will be missed" but I'll still be playing 4e so no problem! I'm a big fan of unified class mechanics and unified resolution systems. I've yet to witness the "sameness" that apparently manifests at other tables. Despite the unified power structure, Fighters are mechanically and within the fiction different than Wizards in the extreme at my table (and everyone else is for that matter). Its ridiculously easy to balance. It makes it easy to come up with new, balanced classes, themes, etc. It makes the budget of damage and effect (condition, forced movement, et al) easy to discern. It plays seemlessly with the stunting system and reduces mental overhead and table handling time on player invocation of and GM adjudication of stunts within that system (which feedsback into and from the unified power structure and its math). It feeds back from and into the trap and hazard system (with the tight math), making it absurdly easy to create balanced, predictable (GM-side) challenges on the fly.

If I was playing 5e, I would say that I'll miss AEDU and

[sblock]keywords, forced movement and the dynamism it allows for, overt functional math overlaid by mutable/malleable fiction (outcome based design), disease/curse track, the math that makes the trap/hazard and stunt systems ridiculously user-friendly for GMs, the empowerment of the quest system as an overt player flag for what content they wish to engage with, broad descriptor skills, mutable/open descriptor power fluff constrained by those keywords, unification of non-combat challenge resolution and how it is determinative of challenge outcomes (while married to fictional positioning), healing surges as an open descriptor attrition tool to tax PCs and to make offers with, director and actor stance tools for all PC archetypes, the focus on the scene and the tight and predictable encounter budget math, the focused thematics of Theme, Paragon Path, Epic Destiny that guides play at the various tiers.[/sblock]

5e's Backgrounds and Monster Lair dynamics are the nifty parts of the system in my estimation. It would be nice if they leveraged what makes those so good (for my playstyle) and built modules for the rest of the system around what those are premised upon.

 

[nogray]

Encounter powers never sat right with me either. It was so arbitrary. It's not once every 5 minutes or once per group of bad guys but once a fight. Too gamist for my taste.

Picking a nit, here, but Encounter powers are (pretty much explicitly) once every five minutes (or so), assuming that part of that five minutes is a short rest. You recover encounter powers on a short rest, which is essentially resting and catching your breath for five minutes or so.

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On the main topic of discussion, I would miss the structure, if I were inclined at all to switch. The tactical and strategic variation in having light, easily recovered resources (short-rest to recover hit points via spending surges and regain encounter powers) and deeper, more-difficult-to-recover resources (extended rest to regain spent healing surges and daily powers) is a nice feature. Putting that nice feature in more than just the spellcaster's repertoire and as a primary pacing technique was an added bonus, and something I will consider nearly mandatory before I consider adopting another rule set.

So, essentially, what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] said.