D&D 5E How is 5E like 4E?

[Minigiant]

I feel like 5e is 4e essentials with slower math, more builds, and more opaque wording.

Essentials skill used AED but every class got different amounts instead of everyone using the same structure. Ability Score for race was deemphasized over racial features. The default gameplay style and genre was heroic fantasy and slightly higher than normal magic rather than high magic sword and sorcery. Skills were condenses and encouraged more freeform applications and DM adjudication.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think I'd agree with everything in your post except this - it's beyond vaguely similar. It's more like "Quite similar, with one major change". But yeah good analysis otherwise.

That's fair. It is, at the most basic level, quarter-level scaling instead of half-level scaling. But making it something you have to "purchase" instead of automatic is enough of a major change that I feel the two are really distinct things. They use more or less the same mathematical structure, but serve almost entirely different functions.

Thanks for the appreciation though--and the critique.

 

[Ovinomancer]

5e and 4e are rather different. There's a lot of looking at superficial traits, here, like skill list similarities, or class abilities, etc. Fundamentally, though, 4e was rules first, player facing, and straddled the line between a GM centered game and a player driven one (ie, it functioned pretty well in both modes, but required at least a little of each). 5e, though, is very GM centered, it's core mechanic is "the GM decides", which is very different from how 4e approached things. Secondly, the math works very differently in both systems -- 4e was on a DC treadmill, and had fixed DCs based on level, with the challenge supposed to morph to reflect the math. 5e is bounded accuracy -- you won't get too far from the middle range (of course, being D&D, this breaks in surprisingly easy ways). DCs in 5e are set by the GM, based on what the GM thinks -- this could be based on PC ability and level or it could be based on the approach the PCs take or it could be statically set using a prior edition's sensibilities (looking at 3.x here). This makes the games function in rather different ways, with little similarity in how they actually play outside the normal D&D tropes and genre (which 4e moved away from, much more so than any other edition).

 

[Staffan]

Vaguely similar, but shorn of critical parts: Healing Surges vs Hit Dice

Another major difference is that in 4e you had a mostly-fixed number of healing surges, each of which scaled with your total hp. In 5e, you get more HD as you level up, but each of them still does mostly the same thing. This means that you can't use a healing surge as a cost in the same way as in 4e, because a 4e healing surge was roughly the same cost regardless of level. It also means that a 4e ability that let you spend a healing surge was always about the same power level, but a 5e ability that lets you spend a HD becomes weaker as you level up.

It may be true that WotC's info suggests people use short rests less than expected, but I don't think making them an hour long was a mistake. Rather, it makes resting in a dangerous environment more of a complication. As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing. But the fact remains that the actual length of the short rest/long rest mechanics can be very easily adjusted to suit the table. I like the 1 hour short rest - the 5ish minutes of 4e was far too short.

It is a mistake when you balance classes around being able to recover their abilities multiple times per day, and the adventures then don't afford them that opportunity. The thing is that there are very few situations where you could take a one-hour short rest and couldn't instead just call it a day – the difference only matters if you're under time pressure. But if you have a 5-10 minute short rest instead, that's something you can do while adventuring.

 

[TwoSix]

The 5e Barbarian is really only like the 4e Barbarian in that it’s often powered by some kind of primal spirit magic. In terms of how they actually play, they’re vastly different.

Yes. 4e's contribution was to expand the trope footprint and thematics of the barbarian, rather than inspire the mechanics.

 

[Nefermandias]

This simple fact has proven to be SUCH A BLOODY PAIN IN THE BUTT while trying to make my Warlord class... I really have to go out of my way and write long awkward effect just so they can support casters too. I miss NADs. It makes way more sense that the person trying to DO something should be the one rolling!

As a DM, it's so much quicker to roll a bunch of attacks and apply the effects rather than waiting for each of your players to roll their saves and announce the results. It's amazing how much time we lose each session with player's mental lag every time I ask for a saving throw.

 

[Nefermandias]

Considering the barbarian seemed fairly popular in 3e, that's a really weird position to hold. What evidence do you have that WotC would have folded the barbarian into the fighter considering they're the ones who reversed 2e doing that when they wrote 3e?

Well, they folded Avenger back into paladin, Invoker back into Cleric, Seeker back into druid and Warden back into Barbarian, it's not something unheard of.

To be clear, I doubt they would do that with Barbarian given it's popularity, buy I have the impression that they would have to come up with something flavor wise to justify the class as something separate from Fighter.

 

[Staffan]

Speaking of short rests, I went back and looked at the 5e playtest packets and noted that the change to hour-long short rests happened in the very last one from August 2013. Before that, it was 10ish minutes (with the penultimate packet having one hour as an experimental rule). The change wasn't called out in the "Read First" file which included a list of major changes, so I don't know if people noticed at the time.

I'll also note that this is probably part of a general disconnect between how the designers envisioned the game being played and how people actually enjoy playing it. It's no big secret that the guidelines for building encounters lean heavily toward encounters most people would find very easy, with "Deadly" being about where things start to get sweaty. I also recall some of the designers saying things like "We played some D&D Next on our lunch break, and had three fights in one hour." I get the feeling that the game very much assumes you'll have lots of perfunctory combats against highly inferior foes (which is also why many monsters are just bags of hit points with little in the way of special abilities) where you can just move on to the next one without expending many resources. But people like having some meat to their fights, which takes longer, and uses more resources, which in turn calls for more rests.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Speaking of short rests, I went back and looked at the 5e playtest packets and noted that the change to hour-long short rests happened in the very last one from August 2013. Before that, it was 10ish minutes (with the penultimate packet having one hour as an experimental rule). The change wasn't called out in the "Read First" file which included a list of major changes, so I don't know if people noticed at the time.

So like with most problems with 5e, it's the playtesters who ruined everything.

 

[Undrave]

The 5e Barbarian is really only like the 4e Barbarian in that it’s often powered by some kind of primal spirit magic. In terms of how they actually play, they’re vastly different.

Yes. 4e's contribution was to expand the trope footprint and thematics of the barbarian, rather than inspire the mechanics.

What TwoSix said.

Another major difference is that in 4e you had a mostly-fixed number of healing surges, each of which scaled with your total hp. In 5e, you get more HD as you level up, but each of them still does mostly the same thing. This means that you can't use a healing surge as a cost in the same way as in 4e, because a 4e healing surge was roughly the same cost regardless of level. It also means that a 4e ability that let you spend a healing surge was always about the same power level, but a 5e ability that lets you spend a HD becomes weaker as you level up.

This is the insane thing about cutting Healing Surges from healing: it means that a lower level character gets healed for a greater % of health from the same spell as a higher level one.

As a DM, it's so much quicker to roll a bunch of attacks and apply the effects rather than waiting for each of your players to roll their saves and announce the results. It's amazing how much time we lose each session with player's mental lag every time I as for a saving throw.

Yah and you can keep your PC's AC and NAD handy so you don't need to even ask them if 'X hit or not'.