D&D (2024) 4e design in 5.5e ?

[niklinna]

Do you have any examples of specific 4e powers like this? Part of the reason many 4e fans are not keen on such responses is that one, and only one, specific group of classes actually gets subjected to them: martial classes. No one has any problem with the idea that a magical effect can only be used once per combat, but as soon as something is martial, it (for whatever reason) must be bound by what actual, literal human beings in our real, physical world can do. (Even though most people have a pretty bad understanding of the upper limits of human achievement, so it in practice ends up more like "what I, personally, think is possible for a human to do based solely on what I, personally, find difficult to do.")

When the complaint unduly affects the one group within D&D design that has been consistently deprived of opportunities to play at the same level of power and engagement as other groups, it implies a concern about some abstract notion (such as "consistency," "verisimilitude," etc.) being more important than ensuring that most players' desired fantasy gets reasonable and effective representation within the game. Some would disparagingly summarize that as "I can't have fun unless casters are more powerful than non-casters." While that is obviously reductive, it does point to a serious, ongoing issue with D&D design, where anything that tends to be kind to non-casters without also being kind to casters, people find a justification to dislike, and anything that tends to be unkind to casters without also being unkind to non-casters is treated as a horrible affront.

While I recognize that many people do react that way, I felt the artifice of encounter/daily powers for all types of classes in 4e. I feel it for short/long rest abilities in 5e as well, including the spell slot system. But, I recognize the need for some kind of rationing, or everybody would use their biggest guns for everything all the time. Also, spell slots seem to be one of those Things Without Which D&D Would Not Be D&D.

What I'd rather see is some sort of point-based system where your basic stuff is cheap/free, and more powerful stuff costs more of whatever your internal resource is (stamina, magical energy, divine favor, what have you), and the serious nova powers lower your refresh rate as well. That is, however, obviously more complicated.

 

[billd91]

No one has any problem with the idea that a magical effect can only be used once per combat, but as soon as something is martial, it (for whatever reason) must be bound by what actual, literal human beings in our real, physical world can do. (Even though most people have a pretty bad understanding of the upper limits of human achievement, so it in practice ends up more like "what I, personally, think is possible for a human to do based solely on what I, personally, find difficult to do.")

That’s not really true, though. Nobody ever had a problem with using a magical effect once in a combat if it was the only instance of it you had prepared. But nobody had a problem with using a magical effect more than once if you had prepared it multiple times as well. There wasn’t much of a concept of using anything just once a combat outside of a few edge cases. And that’s where we get to a lot of problems people had with the AEDU structure - it was too restrictive in its conception. A model that irritates less is one that gives you resources to spend, refreshed by rests (long/daily or short/encounter), but gives the player more free rein to spend those as they see fit.

 

[overgeeked]

Uh... 4e is still out there. Most of this I'd take a hard pass on, but there IS 4e. People are playing it.

Not enough to keep games going with people I know or am willing to game with. Also note how I ended my post.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

One of the features they're pimping is the removal of PHB spells from 5e

Um... what? Is this true? They want to just do away with spell casting in the core PHB...?

 

[billd91]

No on skill challenges. Please no. No. no no. Not again.

I certainly wouldn’t want to see them as they appeared in 4e. But, using a variant of the structure as a way to gauge levels of success, then I might be on board. First, get rid of the race to get x successes before y failures. The math there is really disadvantageous. Instead, set a number of checks and then lay out how much is achieved based on how many of those are successes.

 

[Charlaquin]

I dunno. His essay highlighted what was bugging me about 4e.

Well, his essay is constructed specifically to give an objective-sounding justification for his own distaste for 4e, so of course to someone who also didn’t like 4e and was struggling to articulate why, it would come across as insightful. But, you’re falling for the same fallacious reasoning of starting from a place of “I don’t like thing” and looking for reasons to justify that preference.

About the fact that the fluff really meant nothing.
I came to the conclusion that in a game I like the fluff interacts with mechanics and should do so.

Except the fluff didn’t mean nothing in 4e, so the conclusion you came to is flawed.

For instance I ran a 5e game where a player had to pick a trigger for his rage. He picked roses. Before that the presence of a rose was just fluff, now their presence were mechanics.

Nothing is stopping you from doing something like that in any edition of the game, including 4e.

In 4e fluff never seemed to matter, one example was I had NPC's throwing magic shurikens in an adventure. They were refluffed magic missile. A player, a monk, really wanted to pick them up. All of a sudden I had to come up with a reason why, or just say, no the rules don't let you, which kinda sucks in the middle of a game.

I mean, that’s a pretty easy one. It’s magic missile. The missiles don’t persist after the spell is resolved, regardless of what you describe them looking like. Inasmuch as this is a problem at all, it’s one that could happen in any edition. What would you say to a player in a 5e game who asked if they could pick up the “darts of force” created by another PC’s magic missile? Obviously you’d say they disappear after hitting their target. If you answered differently than that about magic missiles “re-fluffed” as shuriken, you’ve gone beyond refluffing and have actually changed how the spell works. Which is fine to do, but then any issues that may arise from that change are completely your own making.

Normally that isn't a big deal, but something like that would happen A LOT A LOT in 4e games. Especially in Encounters and official content. I found myself mentally exausted from constantly having to justify fluff that didn't match what the rules were doing. And while it isn't an inherent thing in 4e, 4e by it's design with a hard seperation between fluff and rules all but enforced it.

4e wasn’t designed with a hard separation between fluff and rules. What 4e did more of than most editions previously was let the narrative arise from the mechanics rather than vice versa. Now, every edition has done that to some extent, but 3e perhaps did the least of it, and 4e arguably did the most of it, which I think a lot of players understandably found jarring.

 

[darjr]

I certainly wouldn’t want to see them as they appeared in 4e. But, using a variant of the structure as a way to gauge levels of success, then I might be on board. First, get rid of the race to get x successes before y failures. The math there is really disadvantageous. Instead, set a number of checks and then lay out how much is achieved based on how many of those are successes.

I loved LOVED the IDEA of skill challenges and that XP was tied to them concretely. The problem is that "concrete" part. It would tie down a recipie for solving it, and killing player agency and be jaring by being a "mode" of play.

"Puzzles" in the 5e vernacular are a much better idea and should be extended to other types of encounters that are not traditionally thought of as puzzles. That way it's open ended and the players can do their own thing. And they are an obstacle like any other, not a different mode of play.

 

[Composer99]

Um... what? Is this true? They want to just do away with spell casting in the core PHB...?

I think they mean in monster statblocks. So, for instance, you don't have to flip through your PHB or other resource and find spell descriptions.

Personally, I'm fine with the Spellcasting and Innate Spellcasting traits as-is, but I don't think it would bother me to see them go. (If it does, I can just add them back in or use older statblocks.)

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Apropos of the topic somewhat raised by the reference to The Alexandrian in the original post:

"I don't care for playing games where the mechanics are, or at the very least come across as, divorced from the in-game fiction to too great an extent for my tastes" is a perfectly fine attitude to have. And it's perfectly fine to want WotC to make an effort to smooth over any friction in the interaction between game mechanics and in-game fiction.

The premise that "playing with dissociated mechanics ≠ playing a roleplaying game", on the other hand, is a preposterous absurdity, and the Alexandrian ought to be ashamed to have trotted it out. Not least, when it comes to arguing over D&D, because very nearly all D&D game mechanics - perhaps actually all of them - are both arbitary and divorced from the in-game fiction to some lesser or greater extent.

The substitute for concrete mechanics in any D&D game is DM arbitration. By my reckoning, DM arbitration is also fundamentally "dissociated", no less an abstraction than such as, say, hit points.

 

[Charlaquin]

No on skill challenges. Please no. No. no no. Not again.

Skill challenges took me a long time to learn to appreciate, and while I have come around on them in the context of 4e, I don’t think they would translate well to 5e. 5e demands a different DMing approach than 4e, and I don’t think skill challenges mesh well with that approach.

 

[niklinna]

No on skill challenges. Please no. No. no no. Not again.

You should give Torg: Eternity a try! Instead of skill challenges they have Dramatic Skill Resolutions. Totally different thing.