D&D 5E Sell 5th edition to a 4th edition fan...

[Remathilis]

The time intensive combats are something I did not like and I'm glad this edition moved away from that. The other thing that really bogged things down were all the situational modifiers that would pop up during combat.

A thousand times this.

My group is finishing up a Pathfinder campaign, and right now with six PCs (a cleric, summoner, bard, fighter, paladin, and rogue/gunslinger) all at 7th (soon 8th) level. The group is not caster-intensive (two 2/3 casters a half-caster and a full caster) but my god the sheer amount of +1's they toss around is maddening! "+1 from haste. +2 from good hope." "Did you remember my +1 from bless?" "Oh, I'm in flank, that's another +2 So with all my to hit was a 32. Wait! 34, I forgot my bonus from weapon supremacy..."

If there is one thing I'm done with, its piddly minor bonuses. +1 to craft checks when dealing with stone/metal. Resist cold 5. +2 to hit until next turn. Ahhh!!! I much prefer (and granted, I didn't play long) the advantage mechanic for handling minor bonuses and granting extra dice (like bless's 1d4) because they aren't forgotten. A +1 to hit is forgotten in the cascade of bonuses; +1d4 is tangible and harder to forget. Creature are either immune, take 1/2 damage, or take full damage from a hit. I'm not always looking up what "undead traits" makes you immune to. Its bad for the DM, its bad for the player.

Secret confession: I love this game, but I can't wait to end it to start 5e. Pathfinder is slowly driving me mad...

 

[LittleElvis]

I found even our upper Heroic level fights took a while, but once we hit 18th level, they were monstrously long. Did you guys make any alterations to shorten them?

This may sound too simple, but for me I fixed the problem with 4E combats with one simple change: Everything in the game has 10% (or 15%) fewer hp. That's it. Those long, grindy combats are spared those final boring rounds of everyone trying to hit and kill stuff that's clearly going to die, because everything dies a little sooner. Problem solved. 4th edition just has too many hp, and I really believe it's as simple as that.

I prefer putting everything (players included) at 85% of its hp total, but 90% makes the math much easier to eyeball and fix on the fly, and it works great in practice.

 

[LittleElvis]

I have to concur with people suggesting 13th Age. If you aren't married to 20-30 levels as a paradigm, don't need gridded combat to have fun, and aren't obsessed with building the closest thing to a quadratic wizard you can lay your hands on its definitely your successor edition to 4E - all the good stuff, less bloat, more improve mechanics, and a firm acknowledgment that the mechanics are there to let Players play a Game with their Characters - not to try and be another Mages-and-Muggles worldSim (Ars Magica does that niche nicely, IMO).

Just as D&D games can steal ruthlessly from 13th Age you can borrow anything worth keeping (Advantage, extra exploration mechanics, etc.) from 5E pretty seemlessly.

Let not your heart be troubled.

- Marty Lund

Our 13th Age game is heavily gridded. No reason you can't do that in 13th Age.

I'd recommend against borrowing Advantage from 4E. I've flirted with that idea in 13th Age because I love the Advantage mechanic, but it opens a can of worms. Advantage is crazy powerful in a 13th Age game where rolling natural odd/even or natural 16+ is very important. It's just not very compatible, unfortunately.

Btw, one thing that 13th Age and 5th edition have very much in common are the very well designed classes. They're all fun to play, from what I've seen, though in 13th Age the complexity of the classes varies, which isn't a bad thing imo.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to borrow from 5E for my 13th Age game, and I haven't come up with much yet. Mostly just inspiration (not the mechanic) along the lines of more story and less combat.

Here's one thing I do in 13th Age, though, and I think I've stolen this from a game called Old School Hack: Awesome Points. The party levels up once it has earned 12 Awesome Points. We award Awesome Points when players actually do awesome things. No keeping track of XP (not that you do that in 13th Age--you don't) or even encounters, and it encourages the players to be more creative. I also ask the players to come up with three Aspects for their characters a la FATE, although I don't use any of the FATE mechanics or rules for Aspects. Instead, we roll on the players' Aspects just as we roll their icon dice. It's fun.

 

[D'karr]

I found even our upper Heroic level fights took a while, but once we hit 18th level, they were monstrously long. Did you guys make any alterations to shorten them?

There are several symmetrical fixes to this that are so easily implemented that it's almost criminal that they were not done "officially". All fixes occur from the DM side so it does not impact at all the player side. The important part of all of these is that you want a variety of combat experiences. The base assumptions of the game are great for set piece encounters with the big bad guys, but they can be torture for combat with the mooks and wandering monsters. Combat should never become routine and the way to achieve that is variety and awesome pacing.

In no particular order:
1) Provoke AoO's and violate marks as many times as possible. The more that PCs get to hit creatures the faster their hit points run out. It also makes the defenders feel really effective, and it keeps everyone involved.

2) Modify Monster HP by a fixed percentage based on the desired pacing outcome. This one is different for each table as a striker heavy party needs Monster HP decreased a lot less than a controller heavy party. But there are times when you might want to increase HP rather than decrease, for pacing. In other words, kill monsters out when appropriate to the encounter pacing. Pacing is the key!

3) Don't track HP, track successes. Instead of tracking HP track a pacing appropriate number of hits (2-12). I've found that by doing things this way I can make the encounter challenging and fast without much overhead on my part. A solo creature that is acting solo might have more successes than one with mooks as part of the encounter. The idea is to control pacing.

4) Use minions and quasi-minions to good effect.

5) Encounters should take into consideration the composition of the party. For example, a striker heavy party with few if any area damage effects is going to experience grind against swarms. A controller heavy party is going to experience grind against Solo creatures with lots of HP. Keep that in mind.

6) Whenever possible, avoid repetition. Keep on the Shadowfell is a good example of boring combats with lots of repetition. First you encounter Kobolds on the road. Go to Winterhaven, and head back out to encounter Kobolds on the road. You reach the waterfalls and encounter, wait for it, Kobolds on the falls. It's okay to have an adventure in a kobold warren and encounter a metric ton of kobolds, but the encounters need to be exciting (see #4 above). Repetition is not exciting.

 

[billd91]

A thousand times this.

My group is finishing up a Pathfinder campaign, and right now with six PCs (a cleric, summoner, bard, fighter, paladin, and rogue/gunslinger) all at 7th (soon 8th) level. The group is not caster-intensive (two 2/3 casters a half-caster and a full caster) but my god the sheer amount of +1's they toss around is maddening! "+1 from haste. +2 from good hope." "Did you remember my +1 from bless?" "Oh, I'm in flank, that's another +2 So with all my to hit was a 32. Wait! 34, I forgot my bonus from weapon supremacy..."

You think that's bad? Try 4e above the Heroic tier. There are tons of effects with the added complication of there being no effective learning curve. Virtually everything was popping on and then off, on then off. At least in 3e you usually had a longer duration. If you missed applying it one round, you could get reminded to apply it the next.

If there is one thing I'm done with, its piddly minor bonuses. +1 to craft checks when dealing with stone/metal. Resist cold 5. +2 to hit until next turn. Ahhh!!! I much prefer (and granted, I didn't play long) the advantage mechanic for handling minor bonuses and granting extra dice (like bless's 1d4) because they aren't forgotten. A +1 to hit is forgotten in the cascade of bonuses; +1d4 is tangible and harder to forget.

Yes, while it is a bit of a blunt tool, advantage/disadvantage is much easier to work with than either 3e or 4e.

 

[mlund]

Our 13th Age game is heavily gridded. No reason you can't do that in 13th Age.

No reason at all that you can't use a grid. Just don't expect the mechanics to fill you in with square measurements and LOS / cover rules akin to with 3.5 and 4E D&D did. 13th Age doesn't include that kind of infrastructure in the base game.

I'd recommend against borrowing Advantage from 4E. I've flirted with that idea in 13th Age because I love the Advantage mechanic, but it opens a can of worms. Advantage is crazy powerful in a 13th Age game where rolling natural odd/even or natural 16+ is very important. It's just not very compatible, unfortunately.

Your Mileage May Vary. Personally I find that the can of worms is duly awesome. There are already plenty of game features that manipulate the natural roll results - mostly via re-rolls or "roll 2d20k1" (two d20's, keep 1). They are rightly powerful. Having serious situational Advantage on an enemy should be powerful. I may not be as liberal about Advantage in 13th Age as 5th Edition is, though. Hard to say.

Btw, one thing that 13th Age and 5th edition have very much in common are the very well designed classes. They're all fun to play, from what I've seen, though in 13th Age the complexity of the classes varies, which isn't a bad thing imo.

One of my favorite features is properly-scaling weapon damage alongside properly-scaling spell damage / effect level without the clutter of a bunch of extra attack rolls.

Well, that and being able to play a Warlord again thanks to 13 True Ways.

- Marty Lund

 

[Remathilis]

You think that's bad? Try 4e above the Heroic tier. There are tons of effects with the added complication of there being no effective learning curve. Virtually everything was popping on and then off, on then off. At least in 3e you usually had a longer duration. If you missed applying it one round, you could get reminded to apply it the next.

Yes, while it is a bit of a blunt tool, advantage/disadvantage is much easier to work with than either 3e or 4e.

While my 4e experience was lower-heroic tier, I could already see the problem just in some leader at-wills with the
"everyone gets +1" ability routinely forgotten. I can only imagine when paragon hit and all those extra abilities coming from powers, magic items, class features, paragon paths, etc. looked.

Whereas Pathfinder (outside the core rules) has really latched onto "+1 in this specific situation" to the point of constantly having to watch for trigger for bonus X, Y, and Z. They're a big blur of features and it slows down game to constantly check keywords against certain effects, especially since everyone gets so many.

Both have the same complication problem I'm wanting to avoid.

 

[TrippyHippy]

No, no, it's really true.

’Roles’ as stated and used in 4E were introduced in that edition and had no precedent in any previous edition. To state otherwise is untrue.

 

[mlund]

’Roles’ as stated and used in 4E were introduced in that edition and had no precedent in any previous edition. To state otherwise is untrue.

Back in OD&D we had roles. They were called "classes" and there were 4 of them. I can almost remember their names ... I think they went something like this: "Sword-guy," "Heal-bot," "Spell-guy," and "Oxygen-Thief."

Sword-guy's job was to take hits, defending the rest of the party.
Heal-bot's job was to heal people and maybe cast a buff or "turn undead."
Spell-guy's job was to use Area of Effect spells (IE - Crowd Control or Controller) and try to live long enough to reach a level where the rest of the party was redundant.
Oxygen-Thief's job was to have a terrible percentage chance of doing anything other than die in combat.

- Marty Lund

 

[TrippyHippy]

Back in OD&D we had roles. They were called "classes" and there were 4 of them. I can almost remember their names ... I think they went something like this: "Sword-guy," "Heal-bot," "Spell-guy," and "Oxygen-Thief."

- Marty Lund

Classes are not the same as ‘Roles’ - we know this by virtue of the fact that 5E still has Classes (lots of them) but no formalised ‘Roles’ in the 4E sense. What you may have named those Classes is your interpretation of them, not rules. I played OD&D too, and we didn’t play it the way you describe. The point that you can’t even find a ‘role’ for the “Oxygen-Thief” indicates how much your argument breaks down under analysis.