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

[jayoungr]

Hit Dice barely matter.

You yourself said it depends on the party whether they matter or not.

And I'm out. This is way too much discussion just to say that flexibility can be nice. Peace.

 

[Staffan]

Couldn't you do the same thing to Hit Dice in 5e (caveat: I don't know how Healing Surges worked in 4e)? It's a resource that players would not like to lose, and would simulate conditions wearing on them and their resilience. Though it might just prompt them to hunker down and Long Rest to recover HD...

Thing is that while Hit Dice superficially serve the same purpose as healing surges (enable healing in-between fights), the way they work is almost exactly the opposite. To wit:

• In 4e, you have a mostly-fixed pool of healing surges, and the value of each scales with your hit points (and therefore your level). In 5e, each hit die remains the same absolute value, and you gain more of them as you level up. This might seem similar if you only look at the amount of healing done, but it means they work very differently in practice.
  • It means that using healing surges as a cost for things always feels like the same cost. Meanwhile, a hit die is a big cost at low levels, and a small cost at high levels.
  • It also means that the effects of spending a healing surge always has the same proportional benefit. The 4e Warlord's Inspiring Word lets the recipient spend a healing surge and recover an extra 1d6 hp (plus 1d6/five levels above 1st), which means it's always going to have about the same benefit. You're a 3rd-level rogue with 36 hp? That's 9+1d6 hp back, about a third of your hp. You're 13th level with 88 hp? That's 22+3d6 hp back, even more than a third (this is because 4e hp, and therefore healing surge value, is front-loaded while the 1d6/5 levels scales linearly)! But compare this to the closest ability available to the 5e Battlemaster? That would be Rally, which gives one of your allies temporary hp equal to your superiority die plus Charisma modifier. If you're a 3rd level rogue with 21 hp, getting 1d8+2 or so temporary hp is pretty sweet, that's a bonus of about 33%. But if you're 13th level with 81 hp, getting d10+3 hp is only about a 10% increase, which is just ridiculously low.
• 4e also fuels almost all your healing with healing surges, not just out-of-combat healing. There are a few abilities that don't use healing surges, but I can't recall any that aren't daily powers in themselves (which makes selecting them basically the same as buying more healing surges). Your Second Wind ability? That's a healing surge. The warlord using Inspiring Word or the cleric using Healing Word? That's a healing surge. Drinking a healing potion? That's a healing surge (but using a fixed value instead of your own). 5e, meanwhile, has plenty of non-HD-based healing. You have the Healer feat, cure wounds, healing word, healing spirit, lay on hands, and so on, that are all independent of HD. Of course, that meant that you had a proportionally larger amount of healing surges – the baseline was 6+Con bonus, and it topped out at 10+Con bonus. So you'd probably be able to recover ~150% to 300% of your max hp over the course of a day, as opposed to ~100% as with hit dice.

 

[Garthanos]

At the end of the day, if you were a fan of 4e Healing Surge, that doesn't automatically make you a fan of 5e Hit Dice just because they can also be used to heal on a short rest. That's basically the LEAST interesting thing Healing Surges do.

The ability to short rest and heal is a fairly big thing to the 3e people they see it as dramatic we see it as faded and lacking and not particularly interesting. Some interesting things about HS can be added to HD.... and even doing so elegantly could be accomplished for instance; Any time a character is healed/gains hit points (or maybe even thp) they may spend a percentage of their HD to enhance the heal. This supports the 4e feel of the heroes own nature being why they so completely get back off the ground when the Bard/Warlord/Priest inspires them.

 

[overgeeked]

Because your anecdotal experience is evidence of universality? That's garbage. There are plenty of players who pick races whose ability bonuses don't necessarily help their class - they pick them because they help portray the character they envision, even if they aren't maximizing their optimization.

I've played a lot of 5E with a lot of people. So far, it's been universally true. You'd think between near-weekly games for most of the last going on eight years with various groups of players, cons, Adventurer's League, etc that someone somewhere would have made those choices. But nope. Not one. On social media people talk about a unicorn player here or there not picking synergies, but I've never seen it. People also talk about running without a healer, but I've never seen it. People also talk about not having a ranger, outlander, tiny hut, and some combo of the food & water spells, but I've never seen it. Those players must all be really good at their stealth checks.

 

[billd91]

I've played a lot of 5E with a lot of people. So far, it's been universally true. You'd think between near-weekly games for most of the last going on eight years with various groups of players, cons, Adventurer's League, etc that someone somewhere would have made those choices. But nope. Not one. On social media people talk about a unicorn player here or there not picking synergies, but I've never seen it. People also talk about running without a healer, but I've never seen it. People also talk about not having a ranger, outlander, tiny hut, and some combo of the food & water spells, but I've never seen it. Those players must all be really good at their stealth checks.

Or your experiences aren't as diverse as you think, or you're not actually asking people these questions, or your perception check is the pits. Let's consider all of the possibilities.

 

[abirdcall]

I've played a lot of 5E with a lot of people. So far, it's been universally true. You'd think between near-weekly games for most of the last going on eight years with various groups of players, cons, Adventurer's League, etc that someone somewhere would have made those choices. But nope. Not one. On social media people talk about a unicorn player here or there not picking synergies, but I've never seen it. People also talk about running without a healer, but I've never seen it. People also talk about not having a ranger, outlander, tiny hut, and some combo of the food & water spells, but I've never seen it. Those players must all be really good at their stealth checks.

Have you really played a lot of 5e in the grand scheme of things though?

The truth of the matter is that no one has.

How many 5e players are there now? I think it was over 20 million the last time I looked at numbers and that was a couple years ago. Every year is their best sales year so it's probably much higher now.

How much of a % of the 5e player pool have you played with? How can that possibly be a representative sample?

I think it is more likely that you like to play a certain way and play in games that you like to play in. For example, I would never want to play a game at a convention. I only want to play D&D with friends. D&D 5e is the introduction to hobby gaming for most of the people I play with. This is going to result in a much different experience than playing at a convention or Adventurer's League. Neither of those are representative of the 5e player pool. AL is what, maybe 1% of players?

 

[jmartkdr2]

The ability to short rest and heal is a fairly big thing to the 3e people they see it as dramatic we see it as faded and lacking and not particularly interesting. Some interesting things about HS can be added to HD.... and even doing so elegantly could be accomplished for instance; Any time a character is healed/gains hit points (or maybe even thp) they may spend a percentage of their HD to enhance the heal. This supports the 4e feel of the heroes own nature being why they so completely get back off the ground when the Bard/Warlord/Priest inspires them.

I've played with "for every die of healing, you may also spend one Hit Die."

But only for one session, and with some other house rules in play so it's hard to really tell what effect it had.

 

[Vaalingrade]

No one has a full scale survey of data on 5e, therefore no one can argue about their own trends and observations. Let's just suffocate all this 'discussion' right here.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not sure I'd agree that 5e does this well - rangers, bladelocks, and eldritch knights all failed badly top do what it says on the tin.

Rangers do tangerine very well. People just don't like how it does it

Bladelocks and Eldritch knights are subclasses. 5e does main classes very well. The issue with 5e is that this is where the edition takes its foot off the pedal. In 5e, the main class is built like 4e and the subclasses like 3e. So the subclasses and builds get the massive variations of trope effectiveness we see.

 

[Willie the Duck]

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

Very much so. The 2e-5e and 4e-5e comparisons always seem to me like asking which are more similar: ambulances and race cars or ambulances and hospitals.

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'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 is definitely the case that 5e includes many rules and structures which conspire to make many of the non-combat parts of the game uninteresting. Goodberry and the Light cantrip being prime culprits. With them, the careful weighing out of pre-purchased equipment and whether one should take more rations and torches that supposedly so dominated TSR-era play is just that much less true.

That said, the dirty little secret is that it wasn't necessarily better in the TSR-era. Sure Goodberry had expendable components (and was a greater portion of resources and it was harder to have the spell on your list) and Light was a levelled spell, but begs of holding were one of the more frequent magic items (and magic items were an expected part of the reward cycle much more than 5e makes them.

I think where 5e really changes things is that a single random wilderness encounter is less likely to feel like a threat. As such, being delayed (minus doom clock scenarios, which the DM can only add so many times before it feels janky) and making another wandering monster check feels like less of a threat. The more arduous rest/recharge cycles help with this significantly, when people remember to use them (and I know a lot of groups do not like changing recharge rules based on changing from dungeon to town to travel as it hurts their sense of verisimilitude).

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.

I think the difference is that 5e combat rules are built to make the choices meaningful, and the results meaningfully different. This is decidedly less so with the wilderness rules. It certainly can be done, and done in a 5e-like framework -- they did it very well in Adventures in Middle Earth -- it's just that you have to actively pare down some very integral systems within the 5e rules (including features of classes and backgrounds that would seemingly most appeal to someone wanting to invest in the wilderness part of the game) to get there. If one had to fight the combat system half as hard to get enjoyable results, people would have complained uproariously about it (not that tactical-combat-loving 4e fans, thinking about what thread I am in, did not do that to some significant degree).