D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[tyrlaan]

I don't see how it is "out of line" at all... The original post is about ease of improvisation in 5e vs. earlier editions... I am disagreeing with Sacrosanct's assertion that the difference is around the number of ways and generalities... and saying I think it's a lack of knowledge around the advice, math and methods presented within the 5e DMG... and that I feel some are posting about the differences without having read the sections in the 5e DMG surrounding improvisation... Does that clear things up for you?

EDIT: And just so it's clear I'm not saying 4e was bad or worse than 5e in the improv department... I'm saying I really don't see a significant difference in the advice, examples or information given in either edition to support improv. The claim was made that 4e was better than 5e in this department, but I don't see it.

This does clear it up, thank you. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the assertion that there's a knowledge gap at play. I do however completely agree with your ultimate statement though - that improv works just as well/poorly in 5e as it does in 4e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

5e has simplified this even more than in 4e. The DMG states that one can use 10/15/20 for easy/med/hard tasks and run into no problems with their game... it even goes on to tell you the success rates around these as well. So now I only need to know 3 numbers... instead of referencing new ones at various levels.

But clearly 10/15/20 are NOT just going to suite every character at all levels as easy/medium/hard. I will buy the "you don't need all 6" part of the argument, but then really why have them? However, even with 'bounded accuracy' a DC20 is a drastically different sort of target for a level 15 PC than for a level 5 PC. By contrast a 'hard' DC in 4e is scaled to level, so as long as you present your hazardous terrain with level-appropriate flavor (your choice of what that is, actually, though examples abound) then the resultant success rates are consistent.

 

[Imaro]

But clearly 10/15/20 are NOT just going to suite every character at all levels as easy/medium/hard. I will buy the "you don't need all 6" part of the argument, but then really why have them? However, even with 'bounded accuracy' a DC20 is a drastically different sort of target for a level 15 PC than for a level 5 PC. By contrast a 'hard' DC in 4e is scaled to level, so as long as you present your hazardous terrain with level-appropriate flavor (your choice of what that is, actually, though examples abound) then the resultant success rates are consistent.

You have 6 because some people want that level of granularity... others don't. The thing is bounded accuracy makes it so that scaling to a specific level isn't necessary. Will chances be different, of course but I think that's because 5e uses DC's as objective settings (thus a hard task should become easier as you become more experienced and practiced)... while 4e doesn't (unless it's DC's for locks or a few other things that are objectively ranked instead of subjective to level for reasons to this day I'm still uncertain of). But ultimately that's a play style thing and doesn't in any way speak to a better improvisation system under the different paradigms of the 5e rule set. Also if you want tier specific DC's just use the monster saves... though IMO it's unnecessarily complicating things.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I never really liked the scale by level DC's of 4e... it meant effectively no mathematical progress was being made by your characters, just inflation of numbers (and hopefully consistent/different descriptions of the fiction by the DM) to give the appearance/illusion that your character had made progress... even though his/her supposed greater capability didn't really come into play in a practical manner since the math of the threats was constantly being scaled up with you...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I disagree. In practical play what works best is knowing what an action SHOULD be able to accomplish. Having plenty of examples gives you a good feel for that, and with its arrays of powers to gauge by that is quite easy in 4e. This is helped by the fact that every class is actually designed around scaled power uses, so this will work well for all characters of all classes. You're not RESTRICTED by this, you are empowered. One of the keys to PLAYER empowerment is having a really good idea of what some improvisation is likely to accomplish. Knowing that I can decide to go for it. The 5e situation is that a fighter player really has no good idea what pulling some stunt will accomplish in detail. Will it knock the enemy prone? Will it stun him? Will it do more damage than a regular repeatable attack? How hard should it be to do something more effective? The DM is left with less to go by.

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.

Yes, but what is the shade of difference between very easy and easy. With 4e its clear, I have level 1 medium, and level 15 medium, I know instantly that the level 15 DC is meant for PCs of levels 8-17 (with it being challenging for a level 8 and trivial for a level 17). Is a 'nearly impossible' DC is 5e meant for a level 1 PC or a level 15 one? I have no idea. 4e makes it quite simple to know the sorts of dangers that the game believes will be appropriate for each level of character, and then gives you easy/medium/hard DCs so you can quickly vary things as needed, providing equal challenge for untrained/trained/highly focused characters.

5e's DC system is strangely anemic IMHO and lacks a number of nice features of 4e's.

 

[Corpsetaker]

I disagree. In practical play what works best is knowing what an action SHOULD be able to accomplish. Having plenty of examples gives you a good feel for that, and with its arrays of powers to gauge by that is quite easy in 4e. This is helped by the fact that every class is actually designed around scaled power uses, so this will work well for all characters of all classes. You're not RESTRICTED by this, you are empowered. One of the keys to PLAYER empowerment is having a really good idea of what some improvisation is likely to accomplish. Knowing that I can decide to go for it. The 5e situation is that a fighter player really has no good idea what pulling some stunt will accomplish in detail. Will it knock the enemy prone? Will it stun him? Will it do more damage than a regular repeatable attack? How hard should it be to do something more effective? The DM is left with less to go by.



Yes, but what is the shade of difference between very easy and easy. With 4e its clear, I have level 1 medium, and level 15 medium, I know instantly that the level 15 DC is meant for PCs of levels 8-17 (with it being challenging for a level 8 and trivial for a level 17). Is a 'nearly impossible' DC is 5e meant for a level 1 PC or a level 15 one? I have no idea. 4e makes it quite simple to know the sorts of dangers that the game believes will be appropriate for each level of character, and then gives you easy/medium/hard DCs so you can quickly vary things as needed, providing equal challenge for untrained/trained/highly focused characters.

5e's DC system is strangely anemic IMHO and lacks a number of nice features of 4e's.

How about you give us some examples of scenarios with a step by step run through showing us how 4th editions is better?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

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.

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.

I played a 4e 'utility wizard' who was basically IIRC a Human Wizard with the Arcane Apprentice theme, the Tome of Readiness option, and Expanded Spell Book. He was also an Alchemist, IIRC. I got huge mileage out of magic with that character. He would constantly cast the "Pass Without Trace" ritual, which gave some absurd bonus like +10 to Stealth checks for the whole party for hours at a time (and that's a level 1 ritual BTW). In combat he was all kinds of nasty. He had 3 different at-wills, cantrips, 2 Encounter powers (from theme) and his daily. Plus he could pick from 3 different dailies and 4 different encounter powers (this is all at level 1). I don't recall all the other details OTOMH but he was an amazingly good buffer/controller and a pretty good blaster. As time went on he accumulated a vast array of consumable items, alchemical items, potions, poisons, etc, all accomplished using the provided rules. He would almost invariably whip something out or produce some kind of ritual, scroll, ingredient, etc that would accomplish what was desired. His ritual casting was REALLY good, by level 11 when he got his PP (I forget the name of it) he was happily casting Phantom Steeds and granting the whole party the ability to fly for hours at a time.

TBH he was rather TOO good in some respects. By really hammering on the rules to produce the most capable possible 'magical generalist' I might not have been quite the equal of a 2e or 3e wizard, but around level 12 I was certainly the equal of a level 8 or 9 classic D&D wizard, which is about right if you think about it, given the number of levels 4e has vs other editions core progression (30 vs 20).

I think the other PCs were far closer to being on par with him in most respects, but this character was quite potent. While he wasn't pumping out loads of damage on a constant basis he could hold his own in a fight, and outside of that he stomped the pants off the rest of the party for being a 'go-to guy'. I'm sure various Bard or certain hybrid builds might have even pushed that further in a different way. I didn't have a vast array of high skill bonuses, but what I did have was awesome!

 

[Sacrosanct]

I disagree..

This is clear. Maybe this will explain better. Take this famous scene from Airplane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7fchtEJpy8

It seems by comparison that 4e tells you exactly what that paper is for, and how you can use it. 5e is much more vague. 5e is Johnny. And I have a really hard time buying that you can do more improvisation with this item when you're limited to only using it a few clearly approved ways. Again, I think you're using "improvise" in a much different way than it's defined. Please note I'm not saying 4e is a "worse" game or anything like that. But it's very much focused on different goals. Clarity and clearly defined roles and objectives. That has a lot of benefits. But as a general rule, rigid definitions has never been the best way to support improvisation when compared to general guidelines. Ever take a drama class? Heck, I'm constantly being told that 4e was designed to take away DM fiat compared to other editions; to make every table the same with the same rulings. Rules over rulings is directly at odds with improvisation because the goal is to remove the gray areas.

Yes, but what is the shade of difference between very easy and easy.

Are you telling me that you're having even the slightest difficulty in making that determination? If easy is 10, and medium is 15, then something that is moderately easy would be anything in between that. With bounded accuracy, a hard task is hard. PCs, especially when they become heroic levels, can complete "impossible" tasks over anyone else. The difficulty rating is always the same and uses the general population as a baseline. Not having 20 different definitions of what "hard" is for each of the levels is a very good thing because it removes needless clutter and complexity. I don't know about anyone else, but after playing for more than a session, I have a pretty good idea what the chances are for each PC at varying levels for succeeding at various tasks without needing additional rules or guidelines for it. I.e., I know that a high level PC who is proficient at a task will almost always succeed at a medium DC 15 check. Which they should. I shouldn't need extra rules telling me what "medium" means at every level. It's also impossible with 5e, because it's skill driven over level driven. I.e., a PC not proficient doesn't get their prof bonus, so two 15th level PCs would have much different rates of success.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

One can say that. One would be misconstruing the meaning and purpose of 'balance' as well as 'improvisation,' but one could.

Putting 'strict' in front of 'balance' doesn't make balance a bad thing, though it makes it clear you'd like people to believe that there's something innately wrong with a balanced game compared to a broken one. Obviously, there isn't.

The point of improvisation is not allow characters to exercise power far in excess of what their level would indicate at whim, for instance. But, yes, even guidelines like p42 in 4e would tend to get in the way of that.

The point of improvisation is simply to allow for the fact that no game system could ever be so complete that it has explicit rules for everything. Guidelines that loosely cover as much of that potential as possible are handy, but they're just guidelines.

The final fallback, of course, is always the DM. The DM, in any system, can rule that a PC can do something the rules don't strictly say he can (or can't do something they clearly say he can), allowing or disallowing any sort of improvisation or off-label use of an ability.

5e cuts to the chase and assumes the DM will do that quite a lot - potentially, with every action players declare. 3.5, 4e, and many other systems give the DM more explicit rules to work with before asking him to rule arbitrarily.

The trade-off isn't making improvisation inferior or a waste of time, rather, it's making the rule set longer (in terms of page count), and potentially more complex (and thus involving more design work, not just to bang out a longer rule set, but to make sure each additional element works smoothly with each other - no easy task).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You have 6 because some people want that level of granularity... others don't. The thing is bounded accuracy makes it so that scaling to a specific level isn't necessary. Will chances be different, of course but I think that's because 5e uses DC's as objective settings (thus a hard task should become easier as you become more experienced and practiced)... while 4e doesn't (unless it's DC's for locks or a few other things that are objectively ranked instead of subjective to level for reasons to this day I'm still uncertain of). But ultimately that's a play style thing and doesn't in any way speak to a better improvisation system under the different paradigms of the 5e rule set. Also if you want tier specific DC's just use the monster saves... though IMO it's unnecessarily complicating things.

But that's just the point. You have no way of knowing what the DC of a lock should be that is locking Vecna's Vault of Secrets vs one that is locking the Village Bank in 5e. And even the highest DC listed won't suffice to make this difficult for the highest level PCs who are good at lock picking.

At least in 4e I know that a level 30 difficult lock is what I should use, and what its DC is. Beyond that I know I should be using an SC, and that's a whole other gaping hole in 5e's mechanics. Oddly it uses a limited list skill system, like 4e's, but the designers failed to appreciate the role that the SC plays in that kind of system.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I never really liked the scale by level DC's of 4e... it meant effectively no mathematical progress was being made by your characters, just inflation of numbers (and hopefully consistent/different descriptions of the fiction by the DM) to give the appearance/illusion that your character had made progress... even though his/her supposed greater capability didn't really come into play in a practical manner since the math of the threats was constantly being scaled up with you...

As for this whole 'scaling' thing, this is simply not really true. In the PHB/DMG rules there is no hint of any scaling of anything at all. All that is stated is that the DM should scale the challenges (IE provide fiction which is objectivized into rules that give higher DCs for higher level characters to face). They use examples like doors to illustrate this.

Later on, in the RC, some wag stuck in some 'scaling phrases' that apply for a few specific uses of certain skills. The idea was obviously to make things like in-combat Heal checks for challenging for high-level PCs (the PHB gives a set of DCs for these that are roughly appropriate for level 1 PCs, and become fairly trivial by level 10). While it was a nice thought in some sense it doesn't really represent a generalized rule. A lock that was DC10 at level 1 isn't mysteriously now DC20 at level 10. Its just that if you run into a lock in a level 10 adventure, its going to be a much tougher lock, generally speaking, and thus be DC20. If you really wanted to, you could put level 1 locks in your level 10 dungeon, but why bother?

 

[Tony Vargas]

At least in 4e I know that a level 30 difficult lock is what I should use, and what its DC is. Beyond that I know I should be using an SC, and that's a whole other gaping hole in 5e's mechanics. Oddly it uses a limited list skill system, like 4e's, but the designers failed to appreciate the role that the SC plays in that kind of system.

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but tool proficiencies, for instance, make 5e's skill (proficiencies that apply to ability checks) system technically open-ended rather than limited-list. FWIW.

As for this whole 'scaling' thing, this is simply not really true.
Later on, in the RC, some wag stuck in some 'scaling phrases' that apply for a few specific uses of certain skills. The idea was obviously to make things like in-combat Heal checks for challenging for high-level PCs (the PHB gives a set of DCs for these that are roughly appropriate for level 1 PCs, and become fairly trivial by level 10). While it was a nice thought in some sense it doesn't really represent a generalized rule.

It might have made more sense for the heal check to scale with the level of the enemy that dropped the PC than with the level of the PC making the check. Similar scaling was done with Aid Another, based on the level of the character being assisted, which does make some sense (you have to be remotely 'in their league' to lend a hand with a skill check - as opposed to 'helping' in some more bonehead sense, like holding a lantern).

A lock that was DC10 at level 1 isn't mysteriously now DC20 at level 10. Its just that if you run into a lock in a level 10 adventure, its going to be a much tougher lock, generally speaking, and thus be DC20. If you really wanted to, you could put level 1 locks in your level 10 dungeon, but why bother?

You might bother with that just to highlight that the PCs are advancing. You also might not bother calling for the auto-success roll, something 5e builds into it's core resolution mechanics. You may not have solid numbers saying that a given lock has a specific DC and comparing it to the Rogue's rapidly scaling Thievery Skill, but you can just have the DM decide no roll is required for the Expert Thief to open the lock he deems relatively 'easy.'