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

[Undrave]

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.

I just mean that % of overall situation where hit die matter is really really tiny compared to the importance of Healing Surge. They CAN matter but you need very specific conditions for that to happen. That's all.

 

[Undrave]

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.

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.

We DO have the DnD Beyond usage data that includes the combination of Class/Race... granted it dates back to 2017.

Is Your D&D Character Rare?

We got a peek at what kind of characters everyone is building, and a lot of players are sticking close to reality.

fivethirtyeight.com

You can see that the most synergetic combination are, by a notable margin, more popular. It'd be silly to claim that nobody EVER plays against type, but I think it's equal silly to claim that class/race synergies don't incentivize certain combination above others. There's a clear tendency to the number that I think the new lineage rule was meant to impact.

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.

The Hit Dice system in 5e might as well not be there, considering how little actually hangs on it. It only exist as itself and that's it. They could have just made the 'Healer Feat' a basic use of the Healer's Kit and made it heal 1/4 your max HP per charge so you could just BUY surges for the party and make it a difficulty dial. Make it ten minutes to use a charge and limit the number of charge you can spend on someone per short rest and boom! Replacement surges that doesn't offend the Grognard's sacrosanct Versimilitude. "It's a healer's kit! That's what it's for!"

 

[Rabulias]

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.

Thanks for the explanation. Not sure I really care for the 4e Healing Surges. :-\

So as you go up in level, it takes more to wear you down (more hits, bigger/tougher/more dangerous hits, higher level spells, etc.). But it always takes about the same number of Healing Surges to get you back up to max? That seems off balance...

Also, if I am out of Healing Surges and the Cleric casts a healing spell on me, I get just a small benefit from it? Why have a Cleric? Let's just grab healing potions and be done.

Maybe I have been conditioned from all the other D&D editions I have played, but I like the traditional trope of higher level heroes needing more healing to get back up to top form. And I also like the 5e view of having separate internal (Hit Dice) and external (Clerics, Paladins, cure wounds scrolls., potions of healing, etc.) healing as resource pools.

EDIT: OK, I was being a bit cheeky about needing Clerics. I am sure they did other things in 4e than healing!

 

[Nefermandias]

My analysis is this is another 2x elements ie the feats in 5e are analogous to two feats in 4e. (level compression evens them out so that the same amount of character empowerment/customization can be accomplished across the character lifetime)

I don't see it. Feats are not even baseline in 5e. Sometimes I'm under the impression they just included feats as an option to avoid fan's outrage. Same with multiclassing.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Thanks for the explanation. Not sure I really care for the 4e Healing Surges. :-\

So as you go up in level, it takes more to wear you down (more hits, bigger/tougher/more dangerous hits, higher level spells, etc.). But it always takes about the same number of Healing Surges to get you back up to max? That seems off balance...

Why? Healing surges scale with your endurance. It's no more off balance than your hit points growing.

Also, if I am out of Healing Surges and the Cleric casts a healing spell on me, I get just a small benefit from it? Why have a Cleric? Let's just grab healing potions and be done.

If you're out of healing surges the cleric needs to break out the big magics rather than the light stuff. Or the Paladin needs to Lay on Hands, spending their own energy in place of yours. Clerics can do this - but I don't think the warlord class comes with any surgeless healing.

 

[Nefermandias]

Why? Healing surges scale with your endurance. It's no more off balance than your hit points growing.

If you're out of healing surges the cleric needs to break out the big magics rather than the light stuff. Or the Paladin needs to Lay on Hands, spending their own energy in place of yours. Clerics can do this - but I don't think the warlord class comes with any surgeless healing.

Tell him the main purpose of the Leader's class feature powers (Majestic Word, Inspiring Word, Healing Word, Healing Influsion, Ardent Surge, Rune of Mending, Healing Spirit...) is to enable characters to spend their Healing Surges during combat. Non 4e fans usually get confused by that.

 

[Minigiant]

Why? Healing surges scale with your endurance. It's no more off balance than your hit points growing.

If you're out of healing surges the cleric needs to break out the big magics rather than the light stuff. Or the Paladin needs to Lay on Hands, spending their own energy in place of yours. Clerics can do this - but I don't think the warlord class comes with any surgeless healing.

Part of what many didn't notice is how the classesof the same role had didn't strengths based on their powersource.


Clerics were the best power healers as Divine was naturally Leader based. You got the most nonsurge healing.
Warlords were not as good healers but best at combat buffs because it was Martial.
On the other hand Bards and Artificers had more utility, THP, and control options as they were Arcane.
Shamans being spiritual and Primal had the cheapest group heals and group buffs.

5e learned from 4e that it is important to hit the main trope and the "twist" trope of a class.

 

[Hussar]

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

But, it's also not a terribly unreasonable reading either. As was mentioned, there are a very large amount of ways to fast forward travel. Multiple classes get all sorts of things that make travel more or less trivial. Food and water? Goodberry, Create Water, Purify Food and Water appear on several spell lists - druid, cleric, ranger, paladin. Bards and Rogues both can shoot their skills into the stratosphere. It's not all that difficult to bypass travel and exploration challenges.

I get what you're saying that it is a choice, but, it's not a particularly difficult choice. "Here, you can use some fairly low level, easily replaced resources to bypass travel difficulties, or, you can deal with the difficulties that typically aren't tied to anything that you actually want to do" isn't really much of a choice.

 

[Garthanos]

Tell him the main purpose of the Leader's class feature powers (Majestic Word, Inspiring Word, Healing Word, Healing Influsion, Ardent Surge, Rune of Mending, Healing Spirit...) is to enable characters to spend their Healing Surges during combat. Non 4e fans usually get confused by that.

They make it much more efficient too (*see Dwarfs for an exception) And since the combats are twice as long as the 5e assumption (3 rounds?) being able to do so is important and as I said earlier (kind of along with action points) that healing surge in combat is also part of the big turnaround combat story / second wind in action.

 

[cbwjm]

I do wish they'd both kept healing surges, and kept tougher PCs at level 1. I think I'll be fixing that for the next game I run buy giving additional hit points equal to your hit die so that a fighter starts out with 20 + constitution modifier at level 1. Means things can be a bit more interesting and less lethal at that level. Probably won't bring back in healing surges though since we tend to use DnD beyond, though I could probably make a custom feat that does some of the math for the players.