What is the essence of D&D

[Zardnaar]

Having just finished up playing 11 levels of a Forge Priest, I have to say, I'm not in love with the cleric class in 5e. It's a class with too many contradictions - it's got good AC, and good HP, but, all the cantrips are for standing back and pew pewing. It seems to me like a class that doesn't know what it wants to be.

Mostly this.

Unless you roll good stats just play a light cleric or something similar.

Waste of time trying to be a beatdown cleric unless you have good rolled stats or are good at min maxing.

 

[Garthanos]

One problem with figuring out why people like/do something (which may be part and parcel of that original question) is impoverished self awareness/reporting ie its not even about deception but rather people are really bad at figuring out their own "whys" - I cannot tell you how many times I have pointed out that when someone said they disliked X because of Y, how easy it was to point out Y was simply not true. We humans rationalize the "why" wrt just about everything we do and so often we are bad at it. What Tony was doing is working backwards from a result to figure out the whys, which also has its limits but side steps that one.

 

[Garthanos]

Mostly this.

Unless you roll good stats just play a light cleric or something similar.

Waste of time trying to be a beatdown cleric unless you have good rolled stats or are good at min maxing.

I think there are two concepts and the pew pew lazer priest healer in the back that really isnt and the front liner that the hybrid concept is original cleric.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think there are two concepts and the pew pew lazer priest healer in the back that really isnt and the front liner that the hybrid concept is original cleric.

The hybrid cleric doesn't really work anymore IMHO unless you're good at min maxing with the right feats and spells.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Your 1e fighter was level 9 when the mage as 11 this did not do what people thought it did.

It didn't let them both establish strongholds at about the same time?

something that gets left out though is that AD&D PC's were assumed to have more than 10 magic items each. Otherwise, the strictures on paladins don't make any sense. So, if we assume a 6-8 PC party, it's reasonable to think that most of the time, they would be lugging around 60-80 magic items. O.O

And, if we look at the old 1e modules, that wasn't actually a hard limit to reach.

I'm not sure that assumption holds - class designs were not that carefully thought-out (heck, they still aren't), the guy that was tossing out semi-pointless RP restrictions on the Paladin to 'balance' it with the strictly-inferior Fighter may have thought 10 was a serious limit, sure, but those classes were just dreamed up by different folks at different times, before the DMG and it's nominally-balancing treasure tables.

But, if it does hold it makes sense. Magic items were very high-impact, the fighter with dozens of items (never know when this +1 Fauchard-Fork might come in handy, and there's plenty of room in the Portable Hole) might very well be competitive with the Paladin with the top 10 best items he chose to retain. Ok, might possibly be competitive.

I mean, General Tagge said "... it is possible — however unlikely —" and it turned out that possible happened.

Something else to keep in mind from 1e-2e that almost completely vanished afterward was that wealth - as expressed by magic items owned - was much more easy come, easy go.
Fail your save vs a fireball or lightning bolt in 1e? Everything you're carrying now has to save individually, and some of those saves - particularly against lightning - ain't easy to make.

IIRC, that didn't actually go away in 3e.

4e had a level of magic item churn that (along with the lesser importance of items) would have tolerated that, now that I think of it - it also had a briefly-stated philosophy that, if you go and take the party's items away, they should get replaced (which, I'm sure, while accomplishing the same thing, is utterly appalling).

Makes it far easier as a DM to give out magic items when you know the odds are they won't last forever.
Randomly hitting the big score can be far more fun than being able to predict and control when it happens.

Sometimes predict & control is the unquestionable apotheosis of fun - CaW, for instance, with carefully choosing & planning your battles to be in your favor - othertimes, it's the very antithesis of fun.

Yeah, the adventuring day tends to end when either a) the casters run out of spells or b) the party in general runs out of hit points; and of those a) is far more common IME.

Plus, when healing is primarily through spells, you finally run out of hps with there's no healing spells left - more an issue in the TSR era, than the WotC (WoCLW/Surges/HD).
Then there are privileged-rest spells & items, from Rope Trick to Leo's Hut to Mord's Mansion (not to mention Daern's Fortress).

So, in essence, pacing, the most significant balance mechanism nominally limiting casters (and, by extension, the whole party in terms of encounter balance), is under the de-facto control of casters.

Primacy of Magic, again.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I still do not know what to really like for multiclassing 5es is a huge trap nice and pretty and organic (but easy to fail at) and while 4e worked once it got all its features in place it was complex I mean 4e multiclassing has huge numbers of components. From feats to explicitly labeled multiclass feats to themes and finally hybrids.

In a way, multi-classing rules are just a tacit acknowledgement of the inadequacy of class-based systems.

I do think that 3e style 'modular multi-classing' is the most elegant, promising approach. But the classes - apart from the Fighter - weren't simple nor balanced enough to work with it. 5e's optional take is particularly frustrating as it fixes some issues (favored classes/xp-penalties, caster level/spell progression) while breaking others (Extra Attack, ASIs/Feats) that worked fine in 3e.

The implication of 4e feat-based MCing - swapping out powers - had a similar promise, but it was kept too limited (& 4e hybrids worked, but, really, were not elegant, at all). HoML sounds like it did a better job. PF2 sounds interesting, that way, too.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Not that 4e failed through no fault of its own. It failed BECAUSE it failed to learn the lesson of a successful D&D - Magic MUST be primary.

I don't buy that narrative. I dispute that Primacy of Magic is a sufficient explanation for the failure. I strongly suspect that if 4E had e.g. given rangers spells and done something else besides healing with the warlord (and recall that 4E actually did do the magical barbarian first), but retained all the the other structural and presentation traits that people object to about it (which I'm not going to enumerate; I'm sure we all already know the litany), then it would have suffered much the same fate. Something else besides the status of magic made it "not D&D" to the people who were into that sort of thing. Furthermore, the perception that it was "not D&D" would have been immaterial to all the potential new players with no preconceptions about D&D whom it didn't attract and whom 5E did, and to the somewhat smaller number of new players whom it did attract but who then also switched to 5E. So something beyond it being "not D&D" seems to have made it comparatively unappealing as well.

And as a side note, for my money the nonmagical ranger was one of the things 4E did right. So, again, Primacy of Magic is really not looking like a good explanation for me.

 

[S'mon]

I just came here to say that I find it interesting that two things you absolutely don't require to play D&D are:

1. Dungeons; and
2. Dragons.

A complete absence of dungeons wouldn't feel like D&D to me. But Dragons are certainly optional - my Primeval Thule group fight other humans and the occasional eldritch abomination, not dragons.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The meat of my critique is that you're trying to tell me that you know why I switched from 4E to 5E better than I do

I'm offering a theory about what was so different in 4e from prior and subsequent versions of D&D when it was perceived as 'not really D&D.'

Not really much to do with the folks doing the perceiving nor their real or professed ratiocinations for doing so.
Just identifying the significant difference that corresponds.

I will not use the phrase "Primacy of Magic". I will not give any explanation that could reasonably be called "Primacy of Magic".

The Primacy of Magic in D&D is a common thread - except in 4e - it really doesn't matter how you feel about that. I may have, like, just put that label to it, but it's pretty obvious. Love it or hate it or ignore it: it had been there for a long time, it was briefly absent, it's back. It correlates with that discontinuity - a time when D&D wasn't really D&D, and Pathfinder had to step up an /be/ off-label D&D.

You will get a broad variety of reasons.

I mean, I'd /heard/ a very broad variety of reasons for judging 4e, uniquely among all editions of D&D, to be NOT D&D. Many of those reasons are just outright nonsense, or fail because other eds not so harshly judged, shared them. Those that stand tend to boil down to class balance or rewards for system mastery - the latter issue isn't something that's been consistent in all eds, the former is.

Now, sure, it's just a correlation, but it's consistent.

I don't buy that narrative. I dispute that Primacy of Magic is a sufficient explanation for the failure.

Try thinking about it the other way-round. That continuity the OP mentioned? The break in that continuity was 4e. That break would still have been there even had it been commercially successful in spite of the nerdrage (and so many other factors went into the failure, if they'd /all/ been different that doesn't even seem implausible).

What did it do /so differently/ that coincided with that? Not to the appeal-to-popularity 'failure,' but the rejection of it as "not really D&D."

Presentation? 1e presentation and 3e presentation, for instance, were very different from eachother, too, as was 0e, as was BECMI vs AD&D. The nerdrage was minimal by comparison in all cases.

Inverting saving throws into defenses? 3e inverted (un-inverted) AC, broke out Touch AC, re-defined save DCs by spell level - no major issues. The 'power' rubric? Clerical prayers had long used the same mechanic as conceptually-different MU spells with no issue.

Something else besides the status of magic made it "not D&D" to the people who were into that sort of thing.

What "something else" would that be? What broke the OP's continuity of D&D in 2008, if not the unprecedented treatment of martial classes, the unprecedented powering-down of caster classes, and the near-trivialization of magic items?
What, that prior eds hadn't already done, nor 5e retained in some bowdlerized fashion?

Furthermore, the perception that it was "not D&D" would have been immaterial to all the potential new players with no preconceptions about D&D whom it didn't attract and whom 5E did

Actually, the perception of continuity with past versions quite material to a game that trades so heavily on it's legacy & name recognition.
But, again, it's not about how that perception affected sales or fueled appeal-to-popularity arguments, but that the perception existed, and was so virulent & persistent.

And, yes, the status of magic seems like a very real candidate for that difference. The various details people complained about were generally present in other editions - some of the most divisive, even still present in 5e - without significant issue.

Take martial healing (and, indeed, surges & overnight healing) - in 4e, when it was balanced with clerical & other magical forms of healing, it was horrifying, the very concept was supposedly intolerable. Yet, in 5e, it's (all, counting HD as Surges) still present, but martial healing is much weaker (as are HD relative to surges), you couldn't depend upon it to keep a party going, you /need/ the magical healing the Cleric &c, again - and, while the martial-healing /concept/ that was supposedly so intolerable, before, is there, the 'problem' with it isn't: that continuity with all other Real D&D is restored.

And as a side note, for my money the nonmagical ranger was one of the things 4E did right. So, again, Primacy of Magic is really not looking like a good explanation for me.

The Primacy of Magic /requires/ non-magical options (attractive ones, or 'traps,' at that).
"If everyone is special" (magical), "then no one is," afterall.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

So what I'm taking from this is that Fighters and Rogues can go FLOCK themselves like the dirt-eating peasants they are? And if they get uppity, the magic bougie boot should stomp them back down post-haste?

Wow, thank you people.

Please keep the language “family friendly”. Thanks!