D&D 4E Am I crazy? I've just gotten a hankering to play 4e again...

[Campbell]

One of the issues with 5e's implementation of proficiency is the lack of any granularity. You either have it or you do not. This is largely fine for weapons and skills (though falling further and further behind while leveling is not super fun), but it's a real issue with saves.

As you get higher level you get more and more vulnerable against the spells and abilities of level appropriate challenges. Often you almost guaranteed to fail your weak saves even against low level spells.

This has not been a feature of any other version of the game.

 

[Horwath]

One of the issues with 5e's implementation of proficiency is the lack of any granularity. You either have it or you do not. This is largely fine for weapons and skills (though falling further and further behind while leveling is not super fun), but it's a real issue with saves.

As you get higher level you get more and more vulnerable against the spells and abilities of level appropriate challenges. Often you almost guaranteed to fail your weak saves even against low level spells.

adding half proficiency to your "weak" saves solves that thing.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

The BIGGEST single flaw in 5e's engine, and it is a core flaw that cannot simply be fixed with an optional rule, is the stupidity of saves vs attack rolls. EVERY SINGLE TIME we play 5e and someone casts a spell we now have to go look the damned thing up and figure out which rules it uses. This is dumb, bad game design, and just adds nothing to 5e. It was clearly added to the game as a "well, it existed in AD&D so we sorta gotta emulate what was there", which doesn't impress me in the least. This is why my own game play, which is pretty divergent from stock 4e, is still essentially based on 4e and is not a variant of 5e.

The other problem is defenses. The 5e version of defenses, IMHO, is a bad implementation. I'm not sure why they did it, except maybe to get rid of a 3e/4e ism (the three 'combo' defenses/saves). It makes no sense. It is hair-splitting to say if an attack should target WIS or CHA, WILL would have worked fine there. Also you can at least have a go at an "I have even defenses" or "I have a monster WILL but little FORT" as a choice, but with 6 numbers, you just have to be stuck with where they fall, so you have kind of lost a bit of characterization territory. I don't see what was gained with this change either.

The awkwardness with armor class is not so great either, but then I'm not convinced AC was a great success of the 4e engine either. The whole mess with Barbarians and whatnot and light armor patch feats and such was a mess. The theory was OK, but it didn't hold up well. Still, 5e definitely didn't make the situation better, it just moved things back in the direction of AD&D, kinda, but really all it did was restate armor basic bonuses as a flat number instead of an offset from the base of 10. And yeah, medium armors kinda suck, although there are a few niches where you might want to use them (IE if you have a DEX between 12 and 15 and don't want to wear heavy armor).

In other ways I think 5e did OK, cutting the game to 20 levels of play was good. I'm OK with the range of bonuses and such. It isn't some amazing solution to anything as it is sometimes advertised, but for a 20 level game it kinda works. I don't think it ends up BETTER than 4e's approach though. The ditching of A/E/D/U I think was a bad choice as well though, but you COULD hack that back in if you were really determined. It is just that you might as well just use 4e and avoid the problems above to start with...

5e almost did most things OK, but then it fumbled. I don't like their class design much either, but that's a different story.

I have a house rule to solve the spell description problem: If the player doesn't know how the spell works, the spell fails to cast and the spell slot is still expended.

Since announcing this rule, I've never had to use it. Players come prepared.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have a house rule to solve the spell description problem: If the player doesn't know how the spell works, the spell fails to cast and the spell slot is still expended.

Since announcing this rule, I've never had to use it. Players come prepared.

All you did was prove my point Explain why 5e's random oscillation between save and attack roll is useful or makes sense. Saying "I can be a jerk to my players and force them to deal with it" doesn't seem like game design to me...

Anyway, I wasn't really trying to get into EW territory with this, it just is a reason why I always hanker to play 4e instead of 5e, it is a LOT friendlier game at the table in general.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

All you did was prove my point Explain why 5e's random oscillation between save and attack roll is useful or makes sense. Saying "I can be a jerk to my players and force them to deal with it" doesn't seem like game design to me...

Anyway, I wasn't really trying to get into EW territory with this, it just is a reason why I always hanker to play 4e instead of 5e, it is a LOT friendlier game at the table in general.

I don't see how that isn't friendly. It's simply acknowledging that if a player wants to play a spellcaster, it's going to require more work. Rogues, fighters, and barbarians are great classes for players who prefer to avoid bookwork.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One of the issues with 5e's implementation of proficiency is the lack of any granularity. You either have it or you do not. This is largely fine for weapons and skills (though falling further and further behind while leveling is not super fun), but it's a real issue with saves.

As you get higher level you get more and more vulnerable against the spells and abilities of level appropriate challenges. Often you almost guaranteed to fail your weak saves even against low level spells.

This has not been a feature of any other version of the game.

Yeah, there are some issues with 4e in terms of the differences between weapon/implement and skill proficiency that do get problematic (it is hard to use skills like a defense, which really should be possible, but isn't for example). However, 5e's skill/save/check system didn't fix that, it sort of doubled down on it and shifted the problem around instead.

In my own house game I have fixed it. ALL proficiency is worth a +5, and there simply is no AC, so no AC vs NAD issue. This fixes a huge amount of little annoyances of 4e all in one fell swoop. Again, a 4e-based 5e could have done all of this and had the best of both worlds, but alas lack of vision...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see how that isn't friendly. It's simply acknowledging that if a player wants to play a spellcaster, it's going to require more work. Rogues, fighters, and barbarians are great classes for players who prefer to avoid bookwork.

Right, you can only imagine your character in a certain way because you're not endowed with all the hours of free time needed to read through and copy 100's of spells. I just don't see that as a design win either.

But the core point still holds, there's no reason, mechanically for saves. They are simply not needed. The system would work fine without them, and 4e did exactly that. It improved the game by simplifying how power resolution worked. Heck, I'd be OK with the idea that everything used saves (though I still don't think 6 saves is great), then players would always roll when their PC faces danger. Heck, PC attacks could all use attack rolls too, monsters and PCs don't need symmetry of rules. That would be a "player always rolls" type of system, but the one we got, where randomly one half of all spell attacks work each way, that is just thugly.

 

[Horwath]

Yeah, it is just a giant PITA. In 4e you know exactly how every power works, you make an attack roll. Yeah, you have to know against which defense, and is it a weapon or implement attack, but this is all rolled into a single attack expression (and knowing the weapon vs implement part is trivial for most PCs). You really almost never need to look up powers, and because of their format it is not too big a deal to put them on your sheet if you do need to.
5e spells OTOH are just sucky. You have to go read through the thing to understand basic stuff about how it works, and because you have 30 or more of them at higher levels, you either have a 20 page character sheet to rummage through, or else you're fishing in the books. Often there are more obscure spells you use only now and then too, where powers mostly get used pretty often.
And weapon attacks? Ugh, that's even more thugly in 5e, although at least they don't randomly use saves instead of attacks half the time. But knowing what you can do on a given round (even at low levels) requires understanding several class features and how they interact. My 5e fighter fights with 2 weapons, so I have to interface the core '2 attacks' rule with the fighting style rule, and then soon I will have to fold in subclass mechanics as well. It would be a lot easier to just have 3-4 powers. My options are no less limited in 5e, but I have to piece them together out of several rules.

In the end, 4e's plethora of feats and class feature interactions gets pretty tedious as well, but it was a cleaner baseline, and my own game has jettisoned most of the complexities and replaced them with more story-focused elements, and now it is a really pretty cool game! WotC left a whole lot of really good ideas behind just to have saves and get rid of powers for fighters. It wasn't worth it.

the WORST thing in 4E was bland and boring spells.
no flavor in them

 

[Garthanos]

they took at-will cantrips and made them better.

Huh?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

the WORST thing in 4E was bland and boring spells.
no flavor in them

I do not see how randomly making some things use a different subsystem, and it doesn't seem to have any thematic pattern or clever reasoning behind it whatsoever, makes things less 'bland'. I didn't find 4e bland at all, myself. The problem IMHO with 5e spells is just that they dominate the game so thoroughly that non-casters are relegated to a peripheral role in the game.
Anyway, 4e has rituals, which are just as open-ended as any other spell-casting system, such as 5e's.