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

[Aldarc]

Sorry to be obtuse, but you can explain that a bit more? How are hit dice and healing surges very different, or evince very different approaches to game design?

@EzekielRaiden talks a bit about it in the thread that he links earlier. Not to steal his thunder, but he gets to the heart of it there: the big difference is that healing surges are a pacing mechanic in 4e. Healing surges capped healing abilities, and they were also used to power some magic items and rituals.

So imagine if we were playing D&D 5e and the cleric casts Healing Word on you. What happens? The cleric player rolls 1d4 + their character's spellcasting modifier. If we were playing D&D 4e and the cleric casts Healing Word, the other player would (optionally) spend one of their healing surges and gain an additional 1d6 HP. Your healing surges were not based on how many HD your character had, but, rather, were determined by class: e.g., Cleric (7 + Con modifier per day), Fighter (9 + Con modifier per day), Wizard (6 + Con modifier per day), etc. So effectively, healing surges were both a pacing mechanic and a way for healing to be relative to the target's total HP value.

 

[Stalker0]

Oh believe you me... I'm currently playing in a Pathfinder game and using the d20pfsrd for the options to choose from, and those feat lists are ridiculous. I'd say 95% of them are things that denote something along the lines of "If you wish for your character to have this piece of flavor and fluff, spend this feat slot to say you are it and we'll throw in a small mechanical bonus."

... get a +1 bonus to hit

Hey a +1 one to hit is downright amazing in context. There are feats like "get a +1 to hit...against goblins....on a tuesday....if your wearing slippers". Some of those feats are so niche its downright insane.

 

[clearstream]

Heh... you think 4E feats are underwhelming but 3E feats aren't? A standard 3E feat like Dodge (+1 AC) was so blah that 5E just gave Fighters a way to get that exact same thing at 1st level for free with a Fighting Style. And in 3E fighting with two weapons required what... three separate feats(?)... to remove the penalties for dual-wielding that 5E now just says "Go right ahead from the start!" And in order to make attacks against an opponent without killing them required feats to do so rather than just making it part of the narrative that sending someone to 0 HP could kill them or just render them unconscious.

To me... that's my history of 3E feats-- the game says "Here's the stuff you can do standard, and anything you want to do beyond this standard we are going to penalize you for it. And if you don't want the penalty, take a feat to remove it." So most of them just end up being fixes to things that shouldn't have been considered broken or penalizable in the first place.

I like the sizing of 5e feats, and their association with ASIs. It creates a strong balancing tool for game designers (which somehow, they still misapplied in a few places!) Being able to have full-ASI and half-ASI feats creates a lot of design space.

I'd like to see the trap feats brought up to mechanical viability. Possibly a couple of standout feats toned down slightly. More use of half-ASIs, and allow the ASI part to always apply to any ability. Also fewer unnecessary prereqs. Essentially, let feats give players more ways to tailor their characters, rather than assuming that for e.g. martial feats only buff physical abilities.

 

[Campbell]

Healing surges (which are rather poorly named) represent your inner reserves and form a central part of narrative of combat in 4e. Combat in 4e is all about finding your inner strength and working together to overcome what should feel like incredible odds. Almost all hit point recovery is built around inspiration and rallying which is why it's limited by healing surges. You had the strength all along. Getting knocked down and getting back is a constant fixture of the combat model.

Hit dice are pretty far removed from that idea of pushing yourself to overcome the odds. That's fine though. The story of combat in 5e is just different.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

• Saving Throw Duration Tracker: 4e's "saving throw" is actually a fine idea, its just a terrible name because it caused narrative dissonance from every edition of dnd prior to it (because its NOT a saving throw!). But the idea that specific effects have a duration that is maintained by a coin flip, rather than continuously making saves, is perfectly fine and good. 5e kept it with the death save rule, and no reason it can't be adapted for other purposes.

That is how 5e uses saving throws in most cases... Duration is fixed and you can escape depending on your ability to withstand.
And actually this is how saving throws in 5.5 should be used.
Effects that kill/disable with a single saving throw actually don't fit into 5e. They should all be changed to at least 2 or 3 saving throws. Death saves as you say is a good idea, as well as stone to flesh.
1st saving throw: minor effect, second: major effect: third: potential kill.

Dominate monster or polymorph could easily work that way.

Dominate:
1st: charmed
2nd: confused
3rd: dominated

Polymorph:
First: incapacitated
Second: stunned
Third: polymorphed

And those spell should at least require concentration or even a bonus action to keep up until the full effect takes place.

 

[lkj]

I've argued since the Next playtests that 5e was built on a 4e chassis. There are definitely good elements that didn't get adopted-- likely for reasons associated with feedback during the Next playtest. But with the new audience being much broader, I think the window has opened to get in even more of the good stuff from 4e.

Incidentally, I liked 4e. But many of my players didn't. I always contended it was because the innards were too visible. That's a much longer discussion. And I can see it's already going on here!

Adrian

 

[Stalker0]

Healing surges (which are rather poorly named) represent your inner reserves and form a central part of narrative of combat in 4e. Combat in 4e is all about finding your inner strength and working together to overcome what should feel like incredible odds. Almost all hit point recovery is built around inspiration and rallying which is why it's limited by healing surges. You had the strength all along. Getting knocked down and getting back is a constant fixture of the combat model.

Hit dice are pretty far removed from that idea of pushing yourself to overcome the odds. That's fine though. The story of combat in 5e is just different.

And this is a great example of presentation vs mechanics.

Presentation wise, your right there are narrative differences between surge and hit dice.

But mechanically? They are extremely similar. Both represent "a finite reserve of recovery" that requires some measure of "rest" to utilize. They are of course not exactly the same, healing surges scaled based on hitpoints and were mainly based on class/con score. Hit Dice are mainly based on level with some adjustment based on class. Also most healing in 4e required surges, so it was possible to be "unable to heal". In 5e, magical healing does not require hitdice, so healing is "theoretically infinite" with the right resources.

But its quite clear that the hit die concept came out of healing surges, they mechanically serve a very similar purpose.

 

[Dausuul]

There's a lot I could say about the whole dissociated mechanics thing, but it mostly boils down to "The D&D ruleset has never mapped perfectly onto the fiction. 4E's mistake was that they stopped pretending it did."

(And I'm not being snarky, I mean it; it was a real failure of design. D&D is a game of illusions. The rules don't need to model reality, but they need to help you pretend that they're modeling reality. @lkj's observation that "the innards are too visible" is spot on.)

Anyway, to the OP's question: What 4E truly excelled at was framing a great set-piece battle. There were other things it did well, but that was its supreme gift. Powers refreshing on a short rest meant you could count on the party entering combat with a decent but not overwhelming amount of firepower. Monsters were designed with specific jobs to do in combat, and their stats were tuned to let them do those jobs well. The precisely calibrated power curve ensured that you could reliably estimate encounter difficulty. And with this rock-solid mechanical foundation, I as DM could turn my full attention to spicing up the encounter with terrain hazards, secondary objectives, custom monsters, and the like.

5E carried forward some of this stuff, albeit in diluted form. The short rest was nerfed but not removed. Most of the monster design "technology" was discarded, but solo monsters survived as legendary creatures. And while 5E's power curve is a lot fuzzier than 4E's, it is still much better defined than in any previous edition.

Myself, I would like to see those elements strengthened in 50AE*. Bring back the old 5-minute short rest, maybe with a limited number per day to prevent abuse. Do a wholesale overhaul of the Monster Manual along 4E principles. Tighten up class balance where possible. (But keep classes mechanically distinct; I don't want to see a return of the one-size-fits-all AEDU framework. The two-sizes-fit-all Warrior/Caster framework is bad enough as it is. At least we have warlocks and rogues.)

*Stealing this from @Charlaquin: "50AE" = 50th Anniversary Edition.

 

[Stalker0]

That is how 5e uses saving throws in most cases... Duration is fixed and you can escape depending on your ability to withstand.
And actually this is how saving throws in 5.5 should be used.
Effects that kill/disable with a single saving throw actually don't fit into 5e. They should all be changed to at least 2 or 3 saving throws. Death saves as you say is a good idea, as well as stone to flesh.
1st saving throw: minor effect, second: major effect: third: potential kill.

Dominate monster or polymorph could easily work that way.

Dominate:
1st: charmed
2nd: confused
3rd: dominated

Polymorph:
First: incapacitated
Second: stunned
Third: polymorphed

And those spell should at least require concentration or even a bonus action to keep up until the full effect takes place.

I've had a similar idea myself, though I think in such a model the first effect should "automatically work", which is more consistent with most fantasy narratives.

When the wizard casts a spell, its rare for a hero to be completely unaffected. Instead, they begin to fight the effect and break it off before they are taken over by it.

So with your concept, the idea would be that a Dominate Person for example might automatically charm on the first round, but then requires saves to escalate it or knock it away. On the one hand, the wizard has to wait longer to get the "meaty effect", but on the other, they are rewarded by always getting effects from their spell.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Heh... you think 4E feats are underwhelming but 3E feats aren't? A standard 3E feat like Dodge (+1 AC) was so blah that 5E just gave Fighters a way to get that exact same thing at 1st level for free with a Fighting Style. And in 3E fighting with two weapons required what... three separate feats(?)... to remove the penalties for dual-wielding that 5E now just says "Go right ahead from the start!" And in order to make attacks against an opponent without killing them required feats to do so rather than just making it part of the narrative that sending someone to 0 HP could kill them or just render them unconscious.

To me... that's my history of 3E feats-- the game says "Here's the stuff you can do standard, and anything you want to do beyond this standard we are going to penalize you for it. And if you don't want the penalty, take a feat to remove it." So most of them just end up being fixes to things that shouldn't have been considered broken or penalizable in the first place.

I'm not saying the whole of 3e's feats system was good. The 'Don't suck feats' in particular were bad design, but 4e feats were like PF2 feats where they're super situational to the point they rarely come into play. Meanwhile 5e first makes them optional, then tradable for raw boring numbers, then less frequent.

My desire is for feats that are useful as 5e feats but without the desire to appeal to the people who hated 3e for having feats on multiple layers.

Also a reasonable number to choose from rather than the like, 20 there are now with some character builds that literally have no worthwhile feats to take and have to be bored to death by bigger numbers.