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

[Garthanos]

Oh gods yes. We fell hard for the lore of 4E and still use it for all of our other D&D games, regardless of edition.

it was the closest cosmology to my own game world that I had seen in a D&D.

It comes from me.

I think I did read your mention of it then I did my own rough follow ups and yup... it was visible in many many places.

 

[Undrave]

I just wish they had kept more of 4th Edition's lore.

Oh gods yes. We fell hard for the lore of 4E and still use it for all of our other D&D games, regardless of edition.

I love the Cosmology and ancient History! I loved all the lore in 'Plane Above' and the one found all over the Primal Power book... so much awesome stuff that got left behind...

 

[Garthanos]

Or just include it as a condition which gives you the keyword without having to explain it every time. Maybe some minor hindrance when you become bloodied the first time in a fight but nothing ongoing or too drastic.

An over arching effect but remember the tough get going when the going gets tough I would be inclined to hinder generic bad guys when they are bloodied and enhance special bad guys and heroes when they get bloodied ;p.

 

[ad_hoc]

To me, both are the latter.

In 5e, there are many features which are not tightly narrative based. How is it possible for a rogue to sneak attack an ooze or a fire elemental? And how is it possible that by standing near your paladin you become literally better at dodging fireballs?

However, from a mechanical standpoint, they are acceptable.

Designing something for narrative is different than trying to design to replicate reality.

Things happen because that's the way stories work not for reality.

3e tried to justify everything to be realistic. 5e takes an entirely different approach which I believe is why a lot of 3e players struggle with it.

Rogues can sneak attack an ooze because that archetype is good at finding weak points. The game doesn't try to explain how exactly this is done in every situation, it just has rules for the tropes that the class represents.

The Paladin literally has a magical protective aura.

The 5e design philosophy is to enable the players of the game to create a story. The strategy game is secondary to that. In 4e the strategy game was the most important design element.

 

[Ancalagon]

When one of the lead designers explicitly says that a core design assumption--that you'd be getting two to three short rests per day, which is what makes classes like Warlock and subclasses like Champion work in 5e--fails to be true specifically because players take too few short rests per long rest, I don't think it's that weird to say that the length of the short rests vs. long rests might be part of the problem.

And yes, I've crunched the numbers. Champions can keep up with BMs if they get enough rounds of attacking each day. You only see the numbers converge at about 7-8 encounters per day, with 6 the gap is debatable, anything less it's obvious (when looking at aggregate numbers for the day, of course). Warlock is in a more-or-less similar boat; I haven't crunched the numbers as thoroughly as I have with Champ vs BM, but my looser estimates corroborate the "6 (mostly-combat) encounters is good enough, 8 is pretty clearly balanced."

Most groups have fewer than 5 combats per day, and most groups have 1-2 short rests per day. This is negatively affecting the play-experience of 5e, enough that one of the designers explicitly spoke about the problem of short rest vs. long rest frequency. The amount of time taken by short resting three times per day is a full third of the time you'd spend on taking a long rest. It definitely doesn't help matters.

I get that some people like having short-rests come with some kind of "cost." The problem is that they already had the uphill battle of convincing casters and other non-short-rest-based characters to take them. That extra "cost" in time-investment has made the 5MWD problem worse, not better, which isn't a mark in 5e's favor.

The weird effect that pacing has on class balance in 5e is perhaps the central problem with the game, IMO.

A day with 4-6 encounters, surely is doable - but not all these encounters will be combat! Outside of outright dungeoneering, when do you get that many every day?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

small hits are what? ,,,, no nevermind we do not want to go there. It somehow makes sense to you.

I’m not sure what confusion there could be. Small hits are the same type of thing as big hits, but less tiring/draining to take. It’s a shield block that you feel, but not one where your bones hurt afterward.

No matter how you view hits…there’s got to be bigger and smaller hits, or the game makes literally no sense even as an abstraction.

 

[Hussar]

4E and 5E do share some tools, but use them to build different products.

Really?

I just ran a Chaos Scar campaign. I basically translated 4e modules into 5e, pretty close to word for word. DIdn't have to change monster numbers or anything, generally. If the module said 5 orcs, I used 5 orcs. So on and so forth. Worked quite well. No major problems at all. I honestly could have run the 4e modules in 5e pretty much as is.

Except for the Monk being back to be a pile of legacy features

I don't know why they removed 'bloodied' as a condition?! It's so easy to have features trigger off of it and it's a thing the in-universe character could notice! They still have feature that work at 'half hp' but decide NOT to codify it?! Why?! You could easily have a 'bloodied value' not on your character sheet too. Some monsters (and races) had bonuses against bloodied opponents and other got new powers when bloodied and a Dragon always recharged their Breath Weapon on bloodied!

Well, that's not hard to know. "Bloodied" had 4e cooties and there was no way WotC was going to port anything that obvious over to 5e. It just wasn't going to happen.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The 5e design philosophy is to enable the players of the game to create a story. The strategy game is secondary to that. In 4e the strategy game was the most important design element.

In 4e the strategy (really tactical) element was designed to encourage stories, with fighters diving into the way to take attacks and being scary enough that enemies didn't take their eyes off them while people all rushed in and got beaten up and warlords yelling out warnings for people to get out of the way. Just about every 4e power that wasn't a spell was designed round a narrative, characterisation, or story beat.

5e only kept some of this in combat storytelling ability - but it does have more than anything pre-4e with characters recovering from 0hp back into the fight and relatively easy access to some defender ability, while rogues are genuinely fast in a way they weren't pre-4e.

 

[Garthanos]

Designing something for narrative is different than trying to design to replicate reality.

Heroic action character gets knocked down hard because the bad guys start out hard, but then pulls himself up by sheer grit and digging deep (or even by "its just a flesh wound" logic) and turns the battle back on the bad guy very much not reality but one of the basic combat narratives in 4e. Heroes cooperate together in a team of mingled skills attempting a complex task supporting one another to accomplish a difficult end goal that is another fundamental narrative. Sorry "you cannot do that" tm really in 5e as they put that narrative aside.... or honestly just removed the tool to do or encourage it.

 

[Garthanos]

In 4e the strategy (really tactical) element was designed to encourage stories,

4e strategy could very much be seen in the Skill Challenge arena particularly when Healing surges/Martial Practices and Rituals and Wealth and similar resources were applied as natural levers to accomplish the goals. And these structured goals accomplished as coordinated skillful endeavors seem to support a broad narrative that is really very D&D