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

[Ovinomancer]

WotC overdesigning games for a particular intended game pacing that tables don't actually want (or can't) adhere to is a recurring problem with their design.

Yes you can then frame it as working as designed, but it remains an issue that the goals of design are inflexible and misplaced.

No, they're not aligned with your goals. This doesn't mean they are misplaced. Part of the problem with D&D editions is that people don't bother to try to learn how the new edition works and is intended to play because they already know how to play D&D. This leads to dissatisfaction, both because there's a misalignment between design and table goals, but also because there's an incomplete understanding of what the problem is and so changes to address it are often poor patches and don't work as well as they could. I see lots of this on these boards, especially involving adventure pacing. 5e does a very poor job even pointing out that the game is built on an expected pacing and an even worse job at explaining that pacing, which leads to a host of attempts to fix it by addressing rests, which are a downstream issue from the problem and seem to only partially work (or require toggling on and off). On the other hand, 4e is extremely clear about all of this, and you can easily understand how a change can affect things. Only play on pacing 1-2 combats a day? Halve or reduce to 1/3 available healing surges and you'll see the pacing results, because you've halved/thirded the expected encounters a day.

 

[Mordhau]

No, they're not aligned with your goals. This doesn't mean they are misplaced. Part of the problem with D&D editions is that people don't bother to try to learn how the new edition works and is intended to play because they already know how to play D&D.

Exactly. And these are the customers WotC are writing the game for. Therefore, their goals are misplaced.

They need to design the game the way that people want to play. Not try and get people to play the game they want to design.

 

[Dausuul]

...I feel like I'm missing something here. I have heard many many criticisms lobbed at 4E--some justified, some not--but I can't recall ever before hearing that there was a pacing issue with the adventuring day. In fact, I have always regarded that as a great strength of 4E, that you are not shackled to a daily attrition model. You can have one day with a single encounter, and another day with six in a row, and they both work fine. Maybe you don't burn through all your healing surges in the 1-encounter day, but so what?

(I do remember a lot of talk about "grind" within a single encounter, but that's an entirely different issue, with two main causes. First, people did not understand that they had to adjust encounter difficulty for player skill--a skilled well-optimized party will demolish an encounter that would TPK a bunch of newbies, and there is no way the books can tell you how skilled your players are. You have to figure that out yourself and dial in your challenge levels accordingly. Second, Wizards gave monsters too much defense and not enough offense in the early monster books. Once they got the stats properly calibrated, combat went much quicker.)

 

[Mordhau]

...I feel like I'm missing something here. I have heard many many criticisms lobbed at 4E--some justified, some not--but I can't recall ever before hearing that there was a pacing issue with the adventuring day. In fact, I have always regarded that as a great strength of 4E, that you are not shackled to a daily attrition model. You can have one day with a single encounter, and another day with six in a row, and they both work fine. Maybe you don't burn through all your healing surges in the 1-encounter day, but so what?

(I do remember a lot of talk about "grind" within a single encounter, but that's an entirely different issue, with two main causes. First, people did not understand that they had to adjust encounter difficulty for player skill--a skilled well-optimized party will demolish an encounter that would TPK a bunch of newbies, and there is no way the books can tell you how skilled your players are. You have to figure that out yourself and dial in your challenge levels accordingly. Second, Wizards gave monsters too much defense and not enough offense in the early monster books. Once they got the stats properly calibrated, combat went much quicker.)

It has the same issues there always are. A single encouter doesn't really feel particularly dangerous unless it's truly epic, loss of healing surges doesn't raise any tension if it feels like you never use them up, an encounter with bandits while travelling through the wilderness is more epic than the final boss fight at the end of the dungeon because it's the only combat the DM has planned for the today and once the players twig to that they'll blow all their dailies in the one fight.

It's why 13th Age moves the pacing away from the day and puts it squarely in the GMs hands after four fights and give the GM narrative control. This is a solution, but in my experience it's somewhat disempowering to players who no longer really have strategic control about when to rest or retreat.

Changes to the number of healing surges characters get, like changes to the rest schedule in 5e change that pacing somewhat but they don't remove the degree of inflexibility they just cahnge where exactly it lies.

In both editions you also get the issue that the less numbe of combats you have the longer it takes. There's the paradox where the best way to speed up combat to make time for other activities is to increase the number of combats (so players need to conserve resources, so that opponents don't need to be as dangerous etc).

Mind you, it may be that this is an issue that D&D cannot ever really solve in a satisfactory manner without people complaining it's no longer D&D. A big part of the issue here is that people want to play D&D as a game that does a whole gamut of different types of fantasy stories, but at the same time regard as sacred cows game elements that tie it inextricably to a certain intended play style.

They could probably do better than they have though.

 

[Jaeger]

They are revising the core rulebooks. Calling it a revision of this editions core books. But ya know, 5.5 and 6e and what not. It probably doesn’t matter what they call it but how backwards compatible it really is. And to some that doesn’t matter either, a new core set IS a new edition to them. Which I get too.

I fall into the camp that believes that "50AE D&D" will be a solid 5.5+ 'not-edition' of the game.

There are just too many small things that they want to change, and too many rules from splat books that they want to incorporate back into the core rules that they will have to go through and re-balance to make them work with all the other changes.

The accumulation of all these small changes will have a cascade effect that will push them into doing a full on 5.5+ ‘not-edition’.

When talking about the "50th Anniversary release of D&D" Ray Winninger's own words were: "A living game that continues to grow and evolve." and "The next evolution of the game."...

And that is completely leaving aside the fact that in the announcement video WotC has openly said they will also do a new round of survey’s asking their ‘players’ how they can make the "Evolved" D&D Revision even better... I don't need a magic 8 ball to see where this is going.

I would also take the claims of "Fully Compatible" to mean the same thing they claimed in the 3.0 to 3.5 era.

IMHO by never using the word 'edition' when describing it, they are relying on the hubbub of it being the “50th anniversary release of D&D" to give them the cover to do all this with minimal pushback from the player base.

And it seems to be working...

 

[darjr]

I would also take the claims of "Fully Compatible" to mean the same thing they claimed in the 3.0 to 3.5 era.

I think there was a distinct change in WotC with 3.5, at one point it was supposed to be backwards compatible, but then somewhere they decided it wasn't going to be. I hope they know of the lesson it taught.

 

[Mordhau]

When you think about it, even a fairly backwards compatible thing like rewriting the Ranger class is going to make lots of subclasses incompatible.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Exactly. And these are the customers WotC are writing the game for. Therefore, their goals are misplaced.

They need to design the game the way that people want to play. Not try and get people to play the game they want to design.

It's a mistake to think that you're the target demographic. 4e was a commercial success. I know that's not the preferred story told.

 

[CleverNickName]

They are revising the core rulebooks. Calling it a revision of this editions core books. But ya know, 5.5 and 6e and what not. It probably doesn’t matter what they call it but how backwards compatible it really is. And to some that doesn’t matter either, a new core set IS a new edition to them. Which I get too.

Yeah I was talking about the 2024 edition, whatever you want to call it.

I can't find it now, but I read a review of Tasha's when it came out that pointed out aspects of the design that were moving 'back' to 4e type design. In addition, it seems there's been a resurgence of interest in those mechanics, so I was sort of curious to see what aspects could/should be brought over (or should not be brought over).

I just wanted to check...I've been out of town for work, and only been able to check in for a few minutes at a time. From the way folks were talking in this thread (and others), I thought something exciting had been officially announced. Alas, it wasn't so.

That said: the Rules Expansion is just a re-release of Tasha's, Xanathar's, and Monsters of the Multiverse, in a gift set. Not really as exciting as I first thought.

 

[darjr]

I just wanted to check...I've been out of town for work, and only been able to check in for a few minutes at a time. From the way folks were talking in this thread (and others), I thought something exciting had been officially announced. Alas, it wasn't so.

That said: the Rules Expansion is just a re-release of Tasha's, Xanathar's, and Monsters of the Multiverse, in a gift set. Not really as exciting as I first thought.

But that's not the revision of the core books. ??? But I think your response is probably the healthy one.