Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Ratskinner]

Eh, I don't think so. I think the idea that the best of the best is 'untouchable' is a myth that was raised up by martial arts masters and whatnot, not something THAT realistic. Musashi reputedly won a significant number of duels, but we don't really know exactly how accurate that tally was, nor how good his opponents were (or weren't). Heck, maybe it was basically all PR except 1 or 2 fights. Swords are damned lethal.

Plus you've got the idea that maybe its just how it worked out, given the odds. That is, give 100 (simulated) baseball players the same batting skill. Run them through a bunch of hits (randomly). Some will just have a better tally than others. In that case, we know that the batters had the same skill and its just the odds, but in a real-life situation (especially with low numbers of "at bats") it becomes very hard to distinguish "pure skill" from "pure luck" from "pure circumstance" from "better strategy" from "better equipment" from....etc. Its part of what makes drafting for sports (especially American Football, IMO) such a random thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Don't worry, plenty of us here played it for years, if not decades. 5e is a lot like 2e AD&D (and to a slightly lesser extent, since they weren't that different, 1e and the early game) in a lot of ways. Combat, oddly, not so much one of them, in significant part because of bounded accuracy. No wonder you weren't making much sense, if you thought BA was a feature of the classic game. BA is actually closer to the 4e 'treadmill' than to any prior editions' scaling mechanisms.

The similarity is more in the classes, and the swinginess at low level, and - most importantly - the degrees of freedom left to the DM.

Yeah, 5e combat is kind of its own thing. Its swingier and less tactically elaborated than 4e, but far less so than AD&D. It certainly isn't as much rocket tag as 3.x but it can get pretty dicey at higher levels.

As for the bonus progressions of different games...

In AD&D a fighter gets +1/level (or +2/2 levels, whatever) up to needing a 20, which then repeats 6 times in 1e (but not in 2e). Add in expected increase of +3 from magic weapon and +3 from other magic (gauntlets, etc) and you get something like maybe roughly +18 over 12 levels. 4e is built on a +1/level math engine, but level 20 is more like AD&D level 12, so you might consider it to have basically the same progression, or less if you just compare levels 1-to-1.

5e obviously has a much slower progression, I think it was roughly about +1/2 levels, but I haven't played a fighter, so...

Of course HP and AC progression are also important. AD&D has little progression of AC, relatively. A level 1 fighter might be AC5, and he might be AC -5 at level 12 (but probably more like -2, depends on the game as it 100% depends on magic). 4e obviously progresses AC the same as to-hit, and 5e is closer to AD&D. So generally in 1e and 5e you'd expect higher level PCs to hit more often. In both of these games though HP progress at a steeper rate than in 4e, so 4e characters take less hits at higher level but have relatively less hit points (without getting into healing, which changes things a lot). 3.x here is just wonky, with damage mushrooming much faster at high levels, but SODs become the most important thing anyway, so the progression doesn't really matter.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Those descriptors sound tactical to me...?

What? How?

How is "running smoothly" tactical? How is "the game does about what you explect it to do" tactical?

How in the 9 hells is "every player option has lore" remotely tactical!?

 

[Tony Vargas]

However, that's confuddled by the fact that D&D (including all its derivative media) has become a source for a great deal of what people consider to be genre combat.

Nod. When a game can start getting away with simulating itself, it becomes a perfect simulation, indeed. ;P

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Plus you've got the idea that maybe its just how it worked out, given the odds. That is, give 100 (simulated) baseball players the same batting skill. Run them through a bunch of hits (randomly). Some will just have a better tally than others. In that case, we know that the batters had the same skill and its just the odds, but in a real-life situation (especially with low numbers of "at bats") it becomes very hard to distinguish "pure skill" from "pure luck" from "pure circumstance" from "better strategy" from "better equipment" from....etc. Its part of what makes drafting for sports (especially American Football, IMO) such a random thing.

This is true.

I remember some military historian commenting that the best model of generalship is that every general has a 50% chance of winning each battle, and 'great generals' show up in history at almost exactly the rate expected by random chance based on that model!

Of course none of that negates the possibility that Musashi and Robert E. Lee were still the very best of the best in their fields by far more than chance. It just may well be that they are not as rare as we might imagine and even Musashi would get gutted by a lucky peasant sooner or later. Maybe in his case its 1 in 100, we don't really know.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't think AD&D combat between Conan (clearly a high level fighter) and some equally high level monster would be that fast. It would minimally require 6-7 rounds to chew through one or the other's 50+ hit points, I'd think a 10 round fight would be easily expected. Maybe 3.5 would do it closer to what you're talking about, as there's little chance anyone would move etc, and 6 second rounds full of iterative attacks would be over reasonably fast.

I'm thinking of things like Conan leaping on people, escaping grapples, charging, dodging, etc. Those are all mostly kind of implicit in AD&D action, but more spelled out in 4e. Its been 20 years since I last read any of those S&S stories, maybe I remember the fights being more elaborate than they were, but it seems like your depiction wouldn't fit 4e or 1e very well.

His fights are over very, very quickly: parr of the short story medium, likely; in Robert Jordan's Conan stories, everything takes longer, because of course it does.

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[Parmandur]

Don't worry, plenty of us here played it for years, if not decades. 5e is a lot like 2e AD&D (and to a slightly lesser extent, since they weren't that different, 1e and the early game) in a lot of ways. Combat, oddly, not so much one of them, in significant part because of bounded accuracy. No wonder you weren't making much sense, if you thought BA was a feature of the classic game. BA is actually closer to the 4e 'treadmill' than to any prior editions' scaling mechanisms.

The similarity is more in the classes, and the swinginess at low level, and - most importantly - the degrees of freedom left to the DM.

Fair enough; my limited exposure's main takeaway was that THAC0 was beautiful, and I was happy to see the math replicated in 5E (30 being the new -10).

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[Parmandur]

I'm not sure what Salvatore wrote in terms of its genre. I seem to recall that it didn't match up well at all to AD&D fights though. AFAIK his stories are all D&D pastiches in any case, which is not really S&S is it?

I think LOW LEVEL 1e might do what you're talking about modestly well, but I don't think high level will. Thing is, nobody would do that stuff at low level, you'd be crazy. Characters hire a wall of footsoldiers or find some way to 'cheat' unless they have a death wish, so really its only 4e where you'd normally find out. I think low level 4e plays out 'heroic action' combat pretty well. Maybe Conan shades more to a grittier level though.

Conan is bringing a gun to a knife fight, because he is a Mary Sue, to be fair (though Howard was a boxer, so the fights are quite good, Conan's super humanity aside).

Salvatore has written D&D official novels, and his own standalone S&S fiction; since the 80's, TSR and WotC kind of dominated that neck of the literary woods...

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[Tony Vargas]

Fair enough; my limited exposure's main takeaway was that THAC0 was beautiful, and I was happy to see the math replicated in 5E (30 being the new -10).

THAC0 included a 1:1 progression for the equivalent of proficiency for the fighter. The math is not replicated, though it's quite close right at the lowest levels.

Slayers are awesome, aren't they?

They're amusing for an hour or two, IMX. But if you want to call back an older melee type, they're admirably one-Dimensional...

I tried a slayer build whose achtick was that she used her bow until the enemy for near, at which point she pulled out her big honkin' sword and started thrashing.

I had two character concepts, one of which I got to play through 14th in 3.5, that worked rather like that. 1 Level of Barbarian, then the rest into archery (a Rogue in the 14th level case, Ranger2/FighterX in the other, a mounted archer based loosely on a Rider of Rohan type). Mostly archery, when someone finally pins you down in melee, you open a can of Rage.

I reprised the Barb/Rogue as a Slayer for part of Crystal Cave, using the Berserker MC feat in place of an actual level of Barb, and snagging thievery from a background. Worked OK.

The Archer-Slayer was one of those cute little builds that's obvious at a glance at the class, but feels like it's unintentional. Like the Lazy Warlord, really, that way.

 

[Nagol]

It is when one person doesn't really know what they're doing, one person is the best in the world at X, and the weapon is not a gun. The difference between a 1st level Fighter in every edition of D&D and a '0' level NPC is usually a +1 to +2 to hit and maybe a couple of extra hp.

The myth of the expert is more a middle-level talent being unable to touch best in the world, which is the fantasy trope.

And the -4 for non-proficiency in the weapon being used for a total swing of -5 to -6. That's quite a swing.