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

[Undrave]

Not really. As I said, you can gloss over - or you can lean into it and give the ranger player a time to shine.

The Ranger only shine if you played without one first. The Ranger doesn't really get to shine, it's just "Okay you get there without getting lost and you don't need to worry about food." Done.

 

[Nefermandias]

Overall a very good post. I do have a question about the feat comparison, though. I had thought that one of the big complaints about 4e was that it had a lot of feats that didn't do a whole lot in comparison to 3e. 5e on the other hand has feats that do at least as much as 3e feats and often more. I never played 4e really, so I don't know from personal experience. Were 4e feats similar to 5e's in strength?

Not the person you are asking, but I have played 4e from it's playtest until the release of 5e...

No, the feats in 4e do very little by themselves. On the other hand, you get one feat every two levels and one extra feat at lvl 11 and 21... It makes a total of 17 feats at max level.

The whole thing about 4e character building is that you can use those small upgrades to nudge your character in the direction you envisioned.

 

[jayoungr]

Then don't play the game that has those rules then.

By trying to please everyone, 5e basically gutted the bite of Healing Surge management, and didn't replace it with anything (except Spell Slots I guess) it's the whole point of the complaint.

My point is that 5E allows the players to decide whether they want to engage with the resource management [ETA: of healing surges/hit dice] or not. I'm not claiming that makes it perfect--clearly, if you really enjoy the resource management option, it's not going to support that as robustly. I'm just saying that flexibility has its benefits.

 

[billd91]

The Ranger only shine if you played without one first. The Ranger doesn't really get to shine, it's just "Okay you get there without getting lost and you don't need to worry about food." Done.

That is the lamest travel montage I've ever seen.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Overall a very good post. I do have a question about the feat comparison, though. I had thought that one of the big complaints about 4e was that it had a lot of feats that didn't do a whole lot in comparison to 3e. 5e on the other hand has feats that do at least as much as 3e feats and often more. I never played 4e really, so I don't know from personal experience. Were 4e feats similar to 5e's in strength?

They tended to vary, and I freely admit that some were weak. Many, however, were quite good, and not just because they were "tax feats." For example, later in 4e's life, they started adding more flavorful/interesting versions of the infamous Expertise feats, that would encourage players toward certain behaviors (e.g. Devout Protector Expertise was clearly for Paladins and Clerics: +1 per tier to hit with one-handed weapons and holy symbol implements. But it also gave your allies a +1 shield bonus to AC if you were using a shield--a super nice benefit for many allies that wouldn't normally use a shield.)

Basically, if you stuck to the best 20% of feats or so, they tended to be really really good. The worst 20% were probably more like 3e feats, but even then, actual outright stinkers (like 3.x Toughness or Pathfinder feats like Death or Glory, or the original version of Prone Shooter which did literally nothing) were quite rare in 4e.

5e, in making feats compete with stats, has generally beefed them up...but it still has a few feats I would call "not worth it" and others I would cal "near-mandatory." Elven Accuracy for anyone who qualifies, for example, or Elemental Adept for anyone doing a lot of elemental damage (e.g. Gold/Red Dragon Sorcerers, Evoker Wizards, Wildfire druids, etc.) are near-mandatory, while several feats in the PHB come across as "permission to roleplay" rather than feats with any bite (e.g. Keen Mind, Tavern Brawler), provide vanishingly small utility for the cost (Savage Attacker, Weapon Master), or

If you account for the fact that a 4e character would get 18 feats (19 if human) whereas the absolute maximum a 5e character can have is 8 (any race with Tasha's in play, playing a Fighter) and most will only get two or three at best IF they get to high level, some of the "smallness" of 4e feats can be forgiven--just as you'd compress 30 levels of 4e into 20 levels of 5e, you'd compress those 18 feats down a LOT since they weren't competing with ability score increases. If you treat every 5e feat as being (roughly) the equivalent of 2-3 4e feats, I think things come out pretty well--especially because ideas like 4e's multiclass feats are fairly clearly reflected in things like Metamagic Adept, Eldritch Adept, Martial Adept, etc.

Edit: I guess you could TL;DR this by saying, "4e is pretty clearly a midpoint between 3e feats and 5e feats. 3e feats are often INCREDIBLY boring, and you may need to take half a dozen of them just to unlock the one special feat you want. 4e usually avoided feat-trees, and while it had some boring feats, the feats most people would want to take were solid, chunky, and reasonably potent. 5e doubled down on this, and then doubled down again by making feats compete with ASIs, so its feats absolutely had to be really good.....even though some of them still aren't."

5e feats are probably 60% to 80% good options, with roughly a quarter of the good options being "you're taking this unless your DM forbids feats--possibly even before you max out your main stat." 4e feats aren't as big, nor quite as consistently good, but you can clearly see 5e iterating on 4e's design vis-a-vis 3e's design. 4e clearly had the stronger influence.

 

[Nefermandias]

They tended to vary, and I freely admit that some were weak. Many, however, were quite good, and not just because they were "tax feats." For example, later in 4e's life, they started adding more flavorful/interesting versions of the infamous Expertise feats, that would encourage players toward certain behaviors (e.g. Devout Protector Expertise was clearly for Paladins and Clerics: +1 per tier to hit with one-handed weapons and holy symbol implements. But it also gave your allies a +1 shield bonus to AC if you were using a shield--a super nice benefit for many allies that wouldn't normally use a shield.)

Basically, if you stuck to the best 20% of feats or so, they tended to be really really good. The worst 20% were probably more like 3e feats, but even then, actual outright stinkers (like 3.x Toughness or Pathfinder feats like Death or Glory, or the original version of Prone Shooter which did literally nothing) were quite rare in 4e.

5e, in making feats compete with stats, has generally beefed them up...but it still has a few feats I would call "not worth it" and others I would cal "near-mandatory." Elven Accuracy for anyone who qualifies, for example, or Elemental Adept for anyone doing a lot of elemental damage (e.g. Gold/Red Dragon Sorcerers, Evoker Wizards, Wildfire druids, etc.) are near-mandatory, while several feats in the PHB come across as "permission to roleplay" rather than feats with any bite (e.g. Keen Mind, Tavern Brawler), provide vanishingly small utility for the cost (Savage Attacker, Weapon Master), or

If you account for the fact that a 4e character would get 18 feats (19 if human) whereas the absolute maximum a 5e character can have is 8 (any race with Tasha's in play, playing a Fighter) and most will only get two or three at best IF they get to high level, some of the "smallness" of 4e feats can be forgiven--just as you'd compress 30 levels of 4e into 20 levels of 5e, you'd compress those 18 feats down a LOT since they weren't competing with ability score increases. If you treat every 5e feat as being (roughly) the equivalent of 2-3 4e feats, I think things come out pretty well--especially because ideas like 4e's multiclass feats are fairly clearly reflected in things like Metamagic Adept, Eldritch Adept, Martial Adept, etc.

Edit: I guess you could TL;DR this by saying, "4e is pretty clearly a midpoint between 3e feats and 5e feats. 3e feats are often INCREDIBLY boring, and you may need to take half a dozen of them just to unlock the one special feat you want. 4e usually avoided feat-trees, and while it had some boring feats, the feats most people would want to take were solid, chunky, and reasonably potent. 5e doubled down on this, and then doubled down again by making feats compete with ASIs, so its feats absolutely had to be really good.....even though some of them still aren't."

5e feats are probably 60% to 80% good options, with roughly a quarter of the good options being "you're taking this unless your DM forbids feats--possibly even before you max out your main stat." 4e feats aren't as big, but you can clearly see 5e iterating on 4e's design vis-a-vis 3e's design. 4e clearly had the stronger influence.

I said 17 in my post, forgot you get one at lvl 1.

 

[Neonchameleon]

These mechanical details are not there to weigh you down. It's real value is in creating structure and constraints so meaningful choices can be made.

It's no different from combat rules, really. Combat rules are not there to make fighting scenes slower and boring, they are there so you can run a game with stakes and uncertain outcome.

Not everything that happens in the game has to be for advancing the plot. Or maybe I'm just old and Critical Role is the new standard.

Indeed. Not everything has to be about advancing the plot. But things that don't need to justify themselves by deepening the setting and characterisation. To use examples this thread for me 4e combat does that as it's reactive to what each side does and makes use of the environment. 5e doesn't so much, even removing flanking from the default rules and is basically slowly beating the hp gauge down.

Encumbrance is a big one that IMO doesn't add much. It's an abstract number of weight. Thrilling. For tracking encumbrance I'm much more a fan of things like Matt Rundle's Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker (although that version is too stingy IMO for more than basic adventuring); it has more than one function of which a big one is to work out how things look and feel. And it's a lot quicker, cleaner, and simpler than item weights.

 

[overgeeked]

My point is that 5E allows the players to decide whether they want to engage with the resource management or not. I'm not claiming that makes it perfect--clearly, if you really enjoy the resource management option, it's not going to support that as robustly. I'm just saying that flexibility has its benefits.

They did go a bit overboard though. It's shouldn't be either "deal with all this travel stuff" or "make it irrelevant" in one each non-choice. It should go from being difficult, to slightly less difficult, to fairly easy, to irrelevant. It shouldn't go from difficult to irrelevant in one go. Like switching outlander and the ranger to advantage on those checks instead of auto success. Even that would be a great change.

That is the lamest travel montage I've ever seen.

That's bog standard 5E travel for you. If you have someone with outlander, you cannot get lost and you automatically have food. If you have a ranger, you get there in half the time without there ever being the possibility of becoming lost. A wizard with tiny hut, you get to sleep in comfort and style with no worry about environmental concerns or even wandering monsters. To say nothing of other spells like goodberry, create water, create food and water, etc. 5E is designed to skip over travel. They shouldn't have eaten up the page count by including it it's so trivial.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I said 17 in my post, forgot you get one at lvl 1.

That's fair. And yeah, 4e feats mostly were incremental things. That's part of why multiclass feats stood out--they were heckin' chonkers compared to most feats.

But there were still some others that were pretty chunky. Some of the White Lotus feats (read: blending magic and martial skill), Dragonmarks (incredibly popular), Power of Skill if you had a really useful utility power you could nab, many racial feats (and especially racial feats for specific classes) tended to be quite good. None, I admit, quite as chunky as most of the very good 5e feats, but as noted, 4e spread the power out among a larger pool of choices. Some could even enable some ridiculous fun combos, like the Barbarian/Monk/Ranger combo that could do rocket punches.

Spoiler: Digression about 4e rocket-punching

Specifically, being a hybrid Ranger/Monk, with a Barbarian multiclass feat so you qualify for Hurl Weapon. Monks, including hybrid ones, have the Off-Hand property on their bare fists. The Barbarian feat Hurl Weapon lets you use any one-handed off-hand weapon as a heavy thrown weapon, aka using Strength, with a normal range of 25 feet, 50 feet long range. Ranger gives you Twin Strike, so you can double-tap with your punches. Congratulations, you can now punch enemies at a range of 25 feet without penalty, twice a round. I always thought of it as a "vacuum wave"/"chi blast," since in principle your attacks benefit from your ki focus, but flavor is up to you.

Overall though, I think it's pretty much inarguable that 4e at least tried to make feats good, even if it didn't specifically try to make all of them big chunks of feat. (Haha, I'm punny.) 5e builds most on the concept of the chunkiest feats in 4e, and then says, "We'd like more." I don't believe 5e really nailed the execution on this, as noted with my examples of feats that feel...inadequate compared to getting +2 even to a secondary or tertiary stat, but

 

[billd91]

That's bog standard 5E travel for you. If you have someone with outlander, you cannot get lost and you automatically have food. If you have a ranger, you get there in half the time without there ever being the possibility of becoming lost. A wizard with tiny hut, you get to sleep in comfort and style with no worry about environmental concerns or even wandering monsters. To say nothing of other spells like goodberry, create water, create food and water, etc. 5E is designed to skip over travel. They shouldn't have eaten up the page count by including it it's so trivial.

It's not bog standard anything. It's a choice to de-emphasize travel and the potential for exploration that's there.