...I can forgive 4E all its sins for bringing the Warlord to my table. So I voted "Other".
I'm the brother with another "Other", except for me, it was the Warlock that came alive. Hands down my favorite class in 4th.
...I can forgive 4E all its sins for bringing the Warlord to my table. So I voted "Other".
That seems right. On the PC-build side 5e looks to me reasonably close to Essentials - asymmetric but rough mechanical parity under the right assumptions about encounters per rest.I guess 5e design is vulnerable to Illusionism, if you want to run it that way. Surely it ought not to require the same level of illusionism as RAW 3e/PF does if you want Fighter types to not keep dying, though.
This all seems right to me, too, and I think your "reasonable DCs" are closely related to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s idea of "transparency".I definitely find 4e to be player-empowering both as a player and when GMing. It gives a lot of mechanical protection to PCs, and its skill system strongly encourages improvisation and creative play - which can be derided as 'mother may I' (a phrase I hate) by some, but 4e strongly encourages the GM to set reasonable DCs and allow effective creative use of skills and powers, albeit generally not to the extent of 'I win' buttons - 4e assumes that an Arcana check to open a warded portal is pretty much exactly equivalent to a Thievery check to open a mechanical lock, whereas 3e/PF tends to treat magic as far more effective.
And it's a hat-trick!I find 4e to be very poorly suited for sandbox exploratory play
Monsters and maths both go to transparency of mechanical structure and ease of use.From the looks of the poll, if Heinsoo et al would have created 4e under a different brand, they should have named it "Monsters and Math!"
Anyway, I just wanted to chime in on this "transparency" thing, and how it relates to play. This:
This was just not my experience at all. In practice, 4e pushed a lot of rules onto me, forcing me to make way more rulings than I'd like to in any given session. Having played 3.X for years, I can kind of see where people are coming from, but I just don't think it's nearly as clean or clear or player-empowered as I hear its fans call it.
But that's just my experience. And I don't mean to go off on an anti-4e rant in a pro-4e thread. I have a long thread about my sessions running a 4e campaign on this site that I've maintained for a while now (coming up on two years this September: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...rage-s-First-4e-Session&p=6180484#post6180484).
I've had a lot of fun with 4e. But I'm still a little baffled by the claims to wonderful player-empowerment. I get the transparency, but player-empowerment seemed quite intertwined in Manbearcat's definition, and that just doesn't ring true to me.
But the reason I bring this up is to not only share my experience, but also to get some perspective on it from outside my own. Anyone have any thoughts to my entire-too-long post? Am I missing something? Am I wrong? Maybe. And I'm open to finding out.
But the reason I bring this up is to not only share my experience, but also to get some perspective on it from outside my own. Anyone have any thoughts to my entire-too-long post? Am I missing something? Am I wrong? Maybe. And I'm open to finding out.
With the caveat that spells are MUCH more open-ended than in 4e, generally speaking, and that non-casters are considerably more circumscribed, relatively speaking. A 5e fighter is pretty tough and is relatively more capable than a 2e fighter, or a 3e fighter, but the overall 'plot' asymmetry is very evident, and even low level 5e wizards tend to dominate combat from a level of overall tactics (IE my level 4 wizard would hold the bad guys at bay or consistently bottleneck them and set them up for the melee types pretty easily in the majority of fights).That seems right. On the PC-build side 5e looks to me reasonably close to Essentials - asymmetric but rough mechanical parity under the right assumptions about encounters per rest.
I think this was the prime impetus at the detailed level of 4e design, was the removal of 'I Win buttons' from particularly the casters. 3.5 in particular is rife with them, but even in 2e I recall that my wizard could pretty much end most encounters or at the very least 'ramp up' from 'let the fighters take care of it' to 'beat this thing to a pulp and win this round' mode.This all seems right to me, too, and I think your "reasonable DCs" are closely related to @Manbearcat's idea of "transparency".
Also the lack of "I win" buttons tends to mean the GM doesn't have to manipulate the fiction in arbitrary ways to challenge the players. Which is also related, I think, to what Manbearcat was saying.
And it's a hat-trick!
I think that you can do exploratory play in 4e, though I don't think that will necessarily bring out the system's strongest features - four years ago now I deliberately ran an exploratory scenario, and posted about it here. But it wasn't a sandbox. It was improvised, which is what I think 4e favours with its robust but "subjective" framework for DCs etc, and it's leaning towards player empowerment.
5e's bounded accuracy should support a classic sandbox better.
4e cares about the ends far more than the means, it is true. If you care a lot about the means, you may have to make lots of rulings on them, as the 4e rules can leave them ill-defined, because they vary so much from campaign to campaign and to allow for easier reskinning.
4e more clearly scales everything, and generally challenges remain relevant only over about 1/10th of the level range, which makes true sandbox play a bit hard. The DM has to thoroughly telegraph the expected difficulty of each area of the sandbox for it to work. You can do it in a limited extent, but the game works best where you have a number of small sandboxes linked together by an overarching plot that drives the action along.
The characters explore the nasty woods where they can find level 1-7 monsters, and then they move on to the pirate town where they can mess with levels 4-10 monsters, and then they deal with the dragon's minions at levels 7-15, and the dragon at levels 12-20, and the land beyond the portal in the dragon cave levels 17-24, etc.
I think 5e probably would work better for an absolute sandbox, though the difficulty with gauging encounters might thwart it somewhat, much like the same problem dogged older editions sandbox play (you just get LOTS of TPKs, Gygaxian meat grinder play in effect).