I for one am glad to be free of the constraints of 4th edition. I'm glad 5th edition allows me to choose my role for myself in the party no matter which class I choose.
D&D 5E Sell 5th edition to a 4th edition fan...
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How?
How do you fill the role of healer if you are a rogue? The healer feat doesn't work for in combat heals, resurrections, or condition removal.
How do you control the battlefield as a warlock?
How do you defend as wizard?
TrippyHippy
Hero
Hmmm…
1. Choose a Magic Initiate feat and collect some healing spells and cantrips for your Rogue character.
2. Obtain a high enough level that you can cast magic that controls a battlefield I guess.
3. There is an entire school of magic called ‘abjuration’. I’d look into that.
In short, let go of your 4E paradigm and start afresh in your thinking and approach to D&D.
I tried to re-assure many people that 5th edition would not leave 4th edition fans under the bus, so this topic matters to me. Is it too hard to ask the designers to support all the editions? It does sound like there are some 4th edition elements in 5th edition, but not as much as they need. I'd suggest sticking to 4th edition, therefore, if you love it. Just convert what you like from 5th into your home game.
Nah, I think I will keep my thinking and approach of what makes for good game design, and sadly 5e left a lot of it behind.
You don't seem to understand what filling a role is about.
1. A leaders role is more than just a few heals. It is about buffs, condition removal, damage mitigation all kinds of things the magic initiate feat isn't going to give a character for 8 encounters a day.
2. If you have to wait until high levels to fulfil your role, then well it isn't your role for most of your characters existence.
3. Abjuration school isn't going to lock down the big bad enemy and get him to focus his attention away from the squishier party members.
Class has dictated role for pretty much all of D&D existence, 4e just brought it into the spotlight and embraced it. We called fighters meat shields back in the 80's with 1st edition, and clerics healbots or walking band aids too.
TrippyHippy
Hero
You may think that, but the reality is that D&D is leaving behind you.
No. I don’t care about it. It’s not a major part of my D&D style. I have found other ways to create roles in the game that are not fixated on replicating just one set of edition rules. The roles you promote just represent a fixed way of looking at the game - they aren’t definitive, and act as a limitation for many other gamers.
Well actually, you said ‘Healer’ before, not ‘Leader’. Moreover, I don’t seem to recall that many Rogue characters that did all that in 4E either. For me, ‘Leader’ characters get that way through roleplaying more than anything else, but you could still choose spells that do all that other stuff too.
If you have a character that can “control a battlefield” from Level 1 (!), then it begs the question of what development that character could ever have in the game? There are, again, spells that give you area effects if that is what you are after - but you seem to be asking for the Moon on a stick!
Maybe look into the Enchantment school as well then.
Utter myth.
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I always find it odd to hear people complain about party roles. The roles are not restrictive in any way. Team-work has always been a fundamental of the game, and 4th edition just takes a closer look at the potential is.
TrippyHippy
Hero
Team work is not actually, fundamentally essential to a successful game at all. I’ve seen, ran, and played in plenty of games that are fundamentally based on inter-party conflict. Moreover, it is restricting when the game dictates that you play a character in a certain way or that the game as a whole has to be run like a sports team of jocks. When I play a character in a roleplaying game, I don’t want to be told by other players what my ‘job’ is. I want to play what I find interesting and fun.
Anyway, we’ve heard all these arguments before. Again and again and again. And if that’s not a reason from moving on from 4E, I don’t know what is…
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Neonchameleon
Legend
5e is not and does not cover what 4e does. What it tries to do is the things 4e does badly. More accurately, 5e is aimed at being everyone's second favourite version of D&D (and the favourite of a number of 2E fans).
In which case there is only one sensible course of option open to you. Apologising unreservedly for being utterly wrong about almost everything. A combat emphasis does not mean you can't roleplay - and D&D has always had a strong combat emphasis. (Do I need to dig up Appendix T and the level of detail of combat that differentiates between more than 20 different polearms? And the facing rules?) If you think that a combat emphasis means that you can't roleplay then that's your issue. Obviously he can.
As for the game's seminal origins? Are you referring to the wargame (Chainmail) with bolt on rules, or are you referring to the time Major Wellesley lost control of his LARP (Braunstein)? Either way pawn play was the expected mode of play at the start - and even as late as the 90s, D&D was the intentionally combat heavy game and White Wolf fans were making digs at D&D players about "Roleplaying not Rollplaying".
If you were to go into the discussion without your edition warring approach and say simply that you don't like grid based combat (never mind that it was mandated in 3.5), you don't like the narrative pacing of AEDU preferring instead something more confusing and involving different pacing mechanics for different classes, and that 4e has never clicked with you but you like 5e you might get somewhere. But when you start the conversation by edition warring with complaints that are obviously false (not matters of taste, strictly false) then it undermines everything else you say. And when you are making obviously false claims about 4e then why should the 4e fan take your opinion seriously about anything else?
If and only if you want half-assed versions of the 4e classes. Where's my Warlord? (No, the Battlemaster doesn't even come close to doing the job). For that matter, the 5E fighter is a shadow of its 4e self and unable to hold the line properly. There are precisely two classes in 5e that I consider to be anything like a 4e play experience - the Rogue and the Warlock (and then they've messed with short rests).
The 4e influences on design are almost entirely in flavour and not the structure the 4e fans like.
And here's a part where the flavour didn't carry through. The martial power source doesn't keep up. It's the "I don't have magic" source, not the "badass" source.
By supplement 1 there were four classes. Fighting man Cleric, Mage, Thief. 1E AD&D had Fighter with variants (Ranger, Paladin), Thief with variant (Monk), Cleric with variant (Druid), and Wizard with variant (Illusionist). The only major exception was the 1e Bard (let's not go there). 2e made this explicit. Not having roles in the party was a 3.0 innovation - and not a good one.
Minature-grid play that 3.5 said was mandatory. Which admittedly is a change from 1e where the minature movement rates were in inches. The minature-grid play has a lot less to do with 4e's tactical combat than 4e AEDU has to do with classic Vancian casting.
Hit dice are like healing surges in the same way that a nerf gun is like a gun.
Very very badly. Without the ability to cause people to draw on their inner reserves and keep going long past when they think they are done (i.e. the ability to spend significant healing surges) your inspiring leader can not do their job and you are dependent on a cleric.
And this is an obvious place where the 5e fluff is anaemic. The point of a warlord is that you do not have to play a @#&$ spellcaster - or even have one in the party. And you don't need a spellcaster in the party. Unlike any other edition you can actually have a strong sword-and-sorcery vibe in 4e with very little magic in Conan's or even The Grey Mouser's hands.
Having to play a Bard to get an inspiring leader divides the world into magic users and muggles.
Seriously, your list of examples here are the sort of list that people who both detest 4e and think that roleplaying is impossible in 4e give. And all they do is demonstrate how very much you personally do not get 4e, you don't get why certain decisions were made, and how very badly 4e fans have been catered to.
Nope. They think they have 4e fans locked down. I said a while ago that one of my lines in the sand was a warlord that could ensure you didn't need clerical healing - which actually enables a low magic, sword and sorcery party. This would not have been hard - but it's notable that the Warlord was the one PHB class that did not make it into Essentials (which was when 4e sales fell off a cliff).
We know two things about the Next team's relationship with 4e. Firstly that they themselves knew they were sufficiently anti-4e that they needed to hire someone to fly the flag for 4e. Secondly that Robert Schwalb failed to do what he was hired for. Which means that what we have is a game where the only people who think that 4e fans were catered to are people that actively dislike 4e.
Indeed. I love that my thief can drop large AoEs on the battlefield as well as a wizard can, and that my fighter can heal to the point we don't need a cleric. And my wizard can tank it up in melee. Oh wait...
Not having explicit roles doesn't mean they aren't there. Some classes are better at some things than others. Not having explicit roles simply opens the door to CoDzilla that can cover all roles - and to the 3.X Monk that can't do any.
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