D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy

[Garthanos]

So, figure out how hard you want the relevant skill check to be? I never played 4E but I haven't found that onerous to date running or playing 5E.

I usually use jumping as an example tbh I need another example... The system says you can jump this far without a roll but your dm might let you jump farther with an athletics/str check.... now how hard and how far who knows? just wing it gunga din

Monks have well defined abilities in the same arena and spells do too.

 

[Garthanos]

Having some well defined things of that sort as a foundation might be something 4e and pathfinder 2 have in common. But in 4e most of those things could be compared and balanced against the special abilities from other sources not so in pf2 from what I can tell and its that latter part that is even more important.

 

[prabe]

I usually use jumping as an example tbh I need another example... The system says you can jump this far without a roll but your dm might let you jump farther with an athletics/str check.... now how hard and how far who knows? just wing it gunga din

Monks have well defined abilities in the same arena and spells do to.

Usually if you're wanting to jump, it's because there's a specific distance you want to clear, right (like a chasm)? Compare that to the distance the PC can jump. If the distance needed is greater than the PC can manage without a roll, DM decides and ideally says before the action is committed to what the DC is. There aren't the various overly-granular tables of 3.x, but it's not really horribly difficult.

 

[Neonchameleon]

@Neonchameleon

What exactly do you feel forced to do in 5E, that you weren't in 4E? I've done horror, and there's nothing I've seen in 5E that seems to me to fight against sandbox play (though a complete sandbox isn't my preferred style). I've never felt forced to be an engineer (to use that analogy) in 5E; the things I'm changing are things I want in my setting, or rules I think need tweaking (but, TBH, just about every game has at least some of the latter).

That was the analogy used and claimed - and I'm asking why it's a good thing.

In 5e I feel significantly less empowered than I am in 4e.

I'm lacking the kinaesthetics that allow me to have ogres slam fighters into walls and have it not feel out of nowhere. And the kinaesthetics that make interesting environments come to life. Without forced movement encouraging and forcing people to engage with the environment it feels like acting against a green screen.

I'm lacking the benchmarks that mean I know my homebrew monsters will be interesting and fun challenges for the players and challenging them about as much as I intend. I'm getting better at this - but running 4e was like having a six month head start and a double XP booster.

I'm lacking the improvised PC plan tools which means when my PCs come up with ridiculous plans out of nowhere 5e gives me nothing but the pass/fail skill checks, leaving things like the pacing all up to me. (@Garthanos just put this in the "figuring out what the bloody hell a skill check might accomplish" category). Actually I'm not missing this - I just bring in the 4e rules because they aren't there in 5e.

I'm lacking the near effortless teamwork and interest produced from the 4e encounter building guidelines, making each one a separate and interesting challenge rather than an excercise in getting monster hit points down to zero.

Which wouldn't be so much of an issue if I was given anything back for it. I get none of that in Apocalypse World - but Apocalypse World gives me a vast amount of its own stuff.

And that's just off the top of my head.

 

[FrogReaver]

People are responsible for what they do in the name of disliking a game.

If you dislike a game... you just don't play it. Use that dislike as an excuse to treat people badly, and that is on YOU, not the game.

Telling people an opinion that think X is a terrible game - that X doesn't play like a D&D game - that's not treating anyone badly.

 

[prabe]

Telling people an opinion that think X is a terrible game - that X doesn't play like a D&D game - that's not treating anyone badly.

I think if that had been the full extent of what had happened, and if people had been clear these were opinons, there might not have been the Great Edition War, which I am happy to have mostly missed.

 

[Garthanos]

That was the analogy used and claimed - and I'm asking why it's a good thing.

In 5e I feel significantly less empowered than I am in 4e.

I'm lacking the kinaesthetics that allow me to have ogres slam fighters into walls and have it not feel out of nowhere. And the kinaesthetics that make interesting environments come to life. Without forced movement encouraging and forcing people to engage with the environment it feels like acting against a green screen.

I'm lacking the benchmarks that mean I know my homebrew monsters will be interesting and fun challenges for the players and challenging them about as much as I intend. I'm getting better at this - but running 4e was like having a six month head start and a double XP booster.

I'm lacking the improvised PC plan tools which means when my PCs come up with ridiculous plans out of nowhere 5e gives me nothing but the pass/fail skill checks, leaving things like the pacing all up to me. (@Garthanos just put this in the "figuring out what the bloody hell a skill check might accomplish" category). Actually I'm not missing this - I just bring in the 4e rules because they aren't there in 5e.

I'm lacking the near effortless teamwork and interest produced from the 4e encounter building guidelines, making each one a separate and interesting challenge rather than an excercise in getting monster hit points down to zero.

Which wouldn't be so much of an issue if I was given anything back for it. I get none of that in Apocalypse World - but Apocalypse World gives me a vast amount of its own stuff.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Much better description than mine ...

 

[Fanaelialae]

Sounds like you are blaming people for disliking a game.

I'm not blaming anyone for anything.

I am saying that people are responsible for their own behavior. A person is perfectly free to dislike anything they want. However, if they use that dislike as an excuse to behave hatefully, then that is on them, not the subject of their dislike.

In other words, don't blame the game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Telling people an opinion that think X is a terrible game - that X doesn't play like a D&D game - that's not treating anyone badly.

But the "X doesn't play like a D&D game" is a ship that should have sailed in the mid 1980s. The play of the incredibly popular Dragonlance adventure path (of course it wasn't called an AP back then) is incredibly different to that of the sort of old school sandbox that I think @Lanefan enjoys.

What 4e did was made a game that delivered on a lot of what D&D promised, right back to the red box days but it was bad at delivering. (I refer to "dungeons" and "dragons" play - with sandboxes being dungeons and epic heroes actively try to fight dragons). Saying that Dragons play shouldn't be catered to is making a claim that a part of D&D that had been highly popular for more than 20 years shouldn't be catered to.

And saying that X isn't D&D is neither more nor less than gatekeeping. Which is treating people badly. Saying that X is a terrible game when it obviously fills its niche well on the other hand is just called being objectively wrong.

Meanwhile saying "I don't like X because it doesn't cater to what I want" is much less of a problem.

 

[prabe]

In 5e I feel significantly less empowered than I am in 4e.

I never played 4E, or ran it, so I don't have that particular comparison in my experience.

I'm lacking the kinaesthetics that allow me to have ogres slam fighters into walls and have it not feel out of nowhere. And the kinaesthetics that make interesting environments come to life. Without forced movement encouraging and forcing people to engage with the environment it feels like acting against a green screen.

I've noticed that combats do tend to be a bit stagnant, and I'll agree that's a problem, and while it's possible to narrate damage roughly however you want, I'll agree it's unfair to insist on that.

I'm lacking the benchmarks that mean I know my homebrew monsters will be interesting and fun challenges for the players and challenging them about as much as I intend. I'm getting better at this - but running 4e was like having a six month head start and a double XP booster.

There are guidelines in the DMG for homebrewing monsters. It'd be nice if that process was faster, and it'd be nice if there weren't monsters in the Monster Manual that clearly were tweaked away from those guidelines. I've had a fair amount of success just reskinning things, sometimes pretty much entirely, but some people have an aesthetic problem with that, and I won't argue about that.

I'm lacking the improvised PC plan tools which means when my PCs come up with ridiculous plans out of nowhere 5e gives me nothing but the pass/fail skill checks, leaving things like the pacing all up to me. (@Garthanos just put this in the "figuring out what the bloody hell a skill check might accomplish" category). Actually I'm not missing this - I just bring in the 4e rules because they aren't there in 5e.

I've had the players in the campaigns do some off-the-wall [stuff], and I've never felt as though the system was fighting me as I figured out how to reflect those, mechanically. Simpler mechanics seem to me to allow for quicker/easier reskinning. (remember I don't have 4E as a reference here, and I'm not setting out to session-war).

I'm lacking the near effortless teamwork and interest produced from the 4e encounter building guidelines, making each one a separate and interesting challenge rather than an excercise in getting monster hit points down to zero.

I haven't noticed anything in 5E that prevented monsters (or anything else) being a problem to solve by some other way than reducing the hit points to zero. I've had the PCs work out some remarkably interesting tactics in the process of solving even some of the purer combat problems.

Which wouldn't be so much of an issue if I was given anything back for it. I get none of that in Apocalypse World - but Apocalypse World gives me a vast amount of its own stuff.

I don't have Apocalypse World as a reference, either, but I will say that 5E has persistently, from the moment I opened the books, worked the way I've expected it to, but more streamlined. There's a lot to be said for that, even if it means I'm working around things that 4E solved (or "solved"). Really and seriously, YMMV, and I'm not setting out so much to prove you wrong as to provide my own experiences as a counterpoint.