D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Sacrosanct]

I don't think people are using the word, "improvisation" correctly. Having more powers written down doesn't mean more improvisation. By the very nature of the word, improv means doing something outside of what is defined. More powers means exactly nothing to support improv.

The only thing that affects improvisation are a lack of rigid rules. The fewer times you are restricted from doing something, the more variation and improv you can do. And really it all comes down to imagination of the player, so in that sense, you can improve in every edition, and none is better than the others.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The DCs in 5e are much harder to use, there are 6 DCs, so the DM has to assess everything against 6 shades of difficulty, is this task 'very easy' or 'easy'? What is appropriate for a given situation? .

Um...no there aren't. There are six stages of difficulty, but you can use any DC value you want in that range. Use a DC 13, or a 22, or whatever you want and feel is a good target number.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

p42 isn't just overrated, it's totally worthless. People who like it blow it way out of proportion. It guarantees that you spend a ton of time in game and slow down everybody's turn, trying to do something unique that will never mechanically be superior to something you can do without even thinking, namely mash your power buttons. Talk about a disincentive. Meanwhile, in 5th, like in other D&D, if you lie in wait then lure the big bad and roll a huge boulder down on him, and succeed, your reward is probably an instant kill, unless your DM is being a total d*ck.

There has to be a huge upside to not using your default attacks, which are designed to be efficient and effective. Taking game time and real time to do something exciting or spectacular should come with greater risks but greater rewards. Not definite time sink, for no additional mechanical benefit.

Anyone who quotes p42 like it's a good thing immediately betrays their lack of understanding of what a positive or negative incentive for player behavior is. I've seen p42 being used a couple times, it was always a complete waste of time. Because the damage is laid out the way it is, because each attack you could ever possibly come up with has to be "balanced" with your Button Y. That rule was really, one of the worst things I've had the displeasure of experiencing while playing that game.

Improvised actions work in 5th edition because it doesn't define in advance what damage you should be doing then shoehorn all possible actions players could ever imagine into those neat little buckets.

5e DMG P 238 gives the DCs, and P249 gives suggested damage outputs. What is lacking in 5e is a good understanding of what is appropriate at each level.

Your example of rolling a rock down on a monster in 4e would not be a combat, it would be an SC, which is quite well covered in the rules and allows the PCs to come up with pretty much any plan, use whatever resources (powers, skills, abilities, items, etc) are appropriate, and provides a pretty concise and interesting resolution system.

Beyond that I disagree with your assessment of P42. There's no reason to believe powers should IN GENERAL be better than improvisation, or that improvising isn't quick and easy. Sure, inventing new unlimited attack routines that are as general and repeatable as at-will, or maybe even encounter powers should be avoided, but why would you need to? If a character needs a new shtick, then just retrain or add a new power that grants it at the next level (which come pretty fast in 4e).

 

[Imaro]

There's an improvising damage table, yes, though it is a bit less detailed than the one in 4e, and there's no explicit procedure for using it. Nor does it dovetail with damage outputs of character and monster powers in the game very cleanly.

So there's a table to improvise damage (just like in 4e)... the rest just seems like nit-picks.

EDIT: Actually it's pretty clear that it's for improvised damage on the fly, lists a ton of examples in different ranges, tells you what each severity class means, and tells you the damage for each severity based on level.. exactly what else do you need?

The DCs in 5e are much harder to use, there are 6 DCs, so the DM has to assess everything against 6 shades of difficulty, is this task 'very easy' or 'easy'? What is appropriate for a given situation? We just don't know, and the increments are pretty hefty! Beyond that a 4e game can easily 'slide' the scale depending on the tone that is desired, whereas that really isn't touched on in 5e and would be a bit more awkward.

See my post above about only using 3 difficulties... that work across all levels, this is directly from the DMG.

Where is what easy/medium and hard are explained in 4e? Where are instructions for sliding the scale to get different tones? I don't remember this being in the 4e DMG at all... but I could be mis-remembering.

Personally I like 4e's handling of this whole aspect of play better, and this is before we even touch on SCs.

So it's personal preference... cool, that's not the same as claiming something does it objectively "better"...

 

[spinozajack]

Every system has had to wrestle with the 'fighters are mundane, wizards are special' meme. 4e just handled it better than any other D&D has. Having played 4e wizards and 5e wizards I don't find the 4e ones less wizardly or less fun, just less endowed with an overabundance of 'stuff'.

By 'stuff', you mean spells? Yes, wizards should have spells. Lots of them. And be able cast more than 3 per day.

A wizard in 4th has a total of 3 dailies. To call that a nerf compared to a pre-4e wizard would be a huge understatement.

You reach level 16 then finally you can fly, for 5 minutes, once per day max. Wow. How exciting? A level 16 wizard in 5e can fly for hours a day, if that's what he wants to do. It's versatile, how you spend your spell slots and on what. It doesn't presuppose that you're going to use them for combat. Sometimes utility spells are super useful in combat. A high level 2e wizard can effectively fly all day long if he wants to, or make his whole party fly to get to the top of the castle. In 5e you can't do that because of concentration, but you can still at least explore yourself, or let the fighter or rogue sneak ahead.

Same thing with a fireball. You can never cast more than one in a day in 4th edition. Why not? Not because of balance, surely. Why can't you use your level 9 slot to cast a level 5 spell a second time? I was needlessly punitive and rather stiff, beyond any balance considerations (the other level 9 spells would be probably superior, though not always). There were times when I would level up and my older level dailies or encounters were strictly better than the new options that just became available. How is that balanced? Higher level powers should be more powerful, obviously. Except they weren't always.

I agree that 5e doesn't go mad with caster power, but when you have some people complaining that fighters are so powerful and damaging that it's useless to play an evoker just to catch up to a fighter's peak-encounter-damage levels a couple times per day, and in other places you have people saying that wizards totally mop the floor with fighters after level 5! (that is a fantasy).

Compare the fly spell of 2nd edition, 4th, and 5th. The power of those versions of Fly seems to me to be like 2e >>>> 5e >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 4e.

4e magic took a back seat to class balance. And suffered for it. Hence, why we are playing 5th edition. Which made some fixes but didn't do it by making magic and magic using classes so mundane and weak that the Martial Power source was both magical and stronger.

Compare a level 5 wizard in any edition, to a 4th ed wizard of any level. The 4th ed wizard can barely do what earlier wizards could, and so ineffectively and constrained that it's supremely frustrating to even try. He certainly can't use his Fly spell for exploration. 5 minute encounter-sustain systemic limitation prevents that. Invisibility used to last 24 hours in 2e. Now it's much more reasonable. But it's not 5 minutes max, once per day. That is a whole other set of chains. Those chains exist because the entire game was designed around the combat encounter, and every single power and duration was designed to fit into that blinker tunnel vision mentality, and that's why it was fundamentally impossible to try and play a 4e game and imagine that a wizard was a powerful class with powerful magic. It wasn't. It was weak, limited, chained up and thrown into a dungeon without so much as a torch.

 

[spinozajack]

So it's personal preference... cool, that's not the same as claiming something does it objectively "better"...

One can definitely say that 4e's approach to strict balance in improvised actions fundamentally misconstrues the point of improvisation and makes it on par (or weaker) than just using your default attacks. It makes improvisation a waste of time. That's not a sound design principle. I don't like wasting my time, or having my time wasted, or other people's. We've seen countless times people try to improvise and then, yay, I did the same thing as my optimised at-will. Or even less. It was definitely an inferior system, poorly thought out from the beginning.

There should be no limits on how much damage you can achieve with an improvised action, or what effects it can have both in and out of combat. It should be DM call, ending there. You can have table estimates of damage many types of things do, but they should be proportional and sensible, and not require a strict balance with weapon attacks. Pushing a boulder that weighs a ton off a cliff and onto the enemy wizard shouldn't do the same damage as a non-striker encounter power. That's totally unbalanced and really dumb too. While 4e designers thought they were being clever, they were actually making it so that improvisation is an exercise in complete futility.

In 4e, you use your powers, or you are wasting people's time. Your powers give better results anyway. This also goes back to the status conditions. You might think that using the table there to knock the enemy over is a sound plan, or throwing a net over the enemy, or disarming it, until you realize that you're mechanically better off just attacking and killing the enemy. This was often true in 3e as well, for those trick builds, which required a ton of investment and then you were a one trick pony. In 4e, your class features, feats, and powers all combined to make your character be good at what it is supposed to be good at, and improvising was almost always completely outclassed by the lackluster damage potential of p42.

So yes, one can indeed claim that some improvisation rules in some D&D editions are objectively better. Spending extra effort to achieve worse results means it's not only not worth it to even try, but your team will tire of these antics. The game was rigged in favor of using your powers all the time, and so that's what people did. That's an objectively bad set of improv rules, by any standard.

 

[Umbran]

A wizard in 4th has a total of 3 dailies. To call that a nerf compared to a pre-4e wizard would be a huge understatement.

Eh. That's kind of like saying a hokey forward is nerfed, compared to a basketball forward, because the hokey forward takes fewer shots in a game.

The *entire ruleset* is different. Hit points don't even correlate well. There is no objective measure of power in a game that you can compare across rulesets, to fairly say that one is somehow less powerful than another.

If you want to tell me, "I don't feel I have as many opportunities to take interesting actions in a session one game as compared to another," I wouldn't argue, as that's a subjective feeling.

 

[Imaro]

Eh. That's kind of like saying a hokey forward is nerfed, compared to a basketball forward, because the hokey forward takes fewer shots in a game.

The *entire ruleset* is different. Hit points don't even correlate well. There is no objective measure of power in a game that you can compare across rulesets, to fairly say that one is somehow less powerful than another.

If you want to tell me, "I don't feel I have as many opportunities to take interesting actions in a session one game as compared to another," I wouldn't argue, as that's a subjective feeling.

And yet we have people making the same type of comparison in this thread between the 4e fighter and the 5e fighter when it comes to non-combat effectiveness.

 

[Umbran]

And yet we have people making the same type of comparison in this thread between the 4e fighter and the 5e fighter when it comes to non-combat effectiveness.

They would be equally inaccurate, for roughly the same reasons.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is kind of sad that people are such fanatics about 5e that they can't take any criticism of the system at all and must rely on name calling and strawmanning because they can't come up with substantial arguments.

Look, I like 5e better than 4e. That doesn't mean I can't see some of the issues in the 5e system. Anything I could do in 5e through improvisation I can also do in 4e. The core of the systems is the same (ability checks and attack rolls). The difference is that 4e gives more robust guidelines to both the player and DM which makes a adjudicating actions easier.

Both systems though had a very real problem with the lack of non-combat capabilities for the warrior type classes. 5e is a little worse in this regard due to lack of a theme, lack of martial practices, and fewer total feats.

Right, in essence the core system functionality of 5e and 4e is pretty much the same, at that level. The areas where I don't like 5e's functionality are really OTHER areas myself. I don't like the lack of a uniform power system. I don't like the way healing works, I don't like the 5e spin on rituals, and the general removal of player empowerment. The lack of an SC system hurts too. Monsters definitely feel rather bland, and frankly I'm starting to get genuinely bored by 5e combat.

I think 4e approached fighters and OOC stuff differently. If you were a fighter and you really wanted to have a bunch of OOC abilities you could MC, you could take ritual casting, you could learn practices, or there were various feats and themes (maybe also PP/ED) that would add those things back in. In any case just the fact that skills are broadly applicable and SCs put focus on having a broad variety of them helped a lot.

The earlier comment about 5e and the complete lack of any martial class with a shtick other than 'do more damage' was also telling. This is what I really MOST miss about 4e perhaps. You can be a warlord and rally your allies, while carrying a sword and being a warrior, or a fighter, holding the enemy back like a living wall, or a rogue or ranger doing lots of damage. You could also play 'semi-martial' type characters that weren't exactly CASTERS, but had a magical aspect to them, like a Warden, Barbarian, Avenger, Paladin, or Swordmage.

SOME of this can happen in 5e, but the martial aspect really seems quite limited. You can MC, or use certain feats/backgrounds to kind of get a bit of what it was like to be a 4e warlord, but only a taste.