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

[Hussar]

Dismissive or not, @overgeeked has it pretty much right: it's in the players' interest to reduce the challenge, and it's only natural that players are going to complain about elements of the game that make it more challenging.

The problem is not that they complain, however. It's that the designers listen to them.

LOL

Again, very much not my experience. 1e and especially 2e, were the easiest editions in the game. Good grief, after about 4th or 5th level, the PC's could mop the floor with pretty much anything in the game. The only dangerous elements were save or die. Combat certainly wasn't.

Remember how a 1st level party could take on about 20 kobolds at the same time and win 9 out of 10 times? THAT'S what D&D used to be.

Sorry, but we are not going to agree on this. I found 1e and particularly 2e to be incredibly generous and easy mode games. 3e? 3e was very lethal. That got dialed back in 4e but, 5e? I have zero problems whacking PC's in 5e. I'm actually a little shocked how easy it is.

 

[Mordhau]

I don’t get it. If the DM wants to challenge the PCs why are players trying to avoid being challenged.

Is it all about the players’ fun?

The DM isn’t an organ grinder or a trained monkey. They get to have fun, too. If the type of game that is fun for each person doesn’t match up as a group, they shouldn’t play together.

That's why I asked if it was only about the DMs fun.

Sure that's legitimate. But it does suggest that if the DM is challenging the players because they think they ought to, or because they think it's their job to do so then they are, in fact, wrong.

I suspect most people DMing want their players to have lots of fun. That, in fact, they derive most of their enjoyment from faciliating that. Therefore, if what you are saying is correct, these people should stop challenging their players. Right?

I think, in fact, you are on the right track in that the open playtest (which was never really a playtest, however) is part of the explanation for what has happened. I just think the way you have tried to articulate it fundamentally doesn't work.

Edit: I suspect the issue is more that players want contradictory things. They want to be challenged, but they also want to be free of restrictions and limitations. When you put these things together, and you don't really playtest, but you offer lots of surveys that aren't necessarily based on actual play (and given timeframes often couldn't possibly be to any great extent) then you get issues. I think it's related to what computer game designers mean when they talk about gamers optimising the fun out of games. (But note the loss of fun - it's not about players vs DMs, it's about players vs themselves; they make things less fun for themselves.).

 

[Aldarc]

I also would be interested to see a return to the 5 minute rest concept, though I think that is too big a change for what they are considering.

Dnd's current model is "steadily drain away resources until encounters are actually a threat". I would rather it be "characters are consistently strong....until the story says their not"

This is where things like fatigue and life drain etc come into play. Maybe there are conditions that prevent a short rest, maybe the current terrain prevents it, perhaps getting too close to a legendary monster creates an effect that hinders resting, etc. Aka make the narrative assumption that players always short rest after a fight....but gives the DM tools to thwart that mechanic when its narratively appropriate and you actually do want the players to "run out of gas".

I think this creates a much smoother curve than the current model.

Monte Cook's Cypher System essentially has short rests (i.e., Recovery Roll), but the amount of time required for each Short Rest gets longer each successive time until finally a Long Rest is required. I wonder if something like this would work for D&D 5e. It would mean that Short Rest based classes/subclasses could get them more regularly but there would be more of attrition after subsequent encounters.

So, first of all, 4e fully embraced the abstract nature of hit points. Most hit point damage was assumed to be luck/morale/energy/divine favor/whatever rather than actual physical injury. The only thresholds that mattered were Bloodied (which meant showing visible but largely superficial signs of wear like cuts and bruises), and 0 HP which meant unconscious and possibly dying - technically this is how 5e says to narrate hit point loss as well, but in 4e, many mechanics actually relied on this narrative. Which incidentally is one of the reasons I say it is objectively not true that the fluff didn’t matter - it very much did matter, to the point that some fluff couldn’t be ignored… which was a problem for folks who prefer “HP as meat.”

Now, keeping in mind this model of narrating HP loss, this means healing magic doesn’t fuse broken bones and knit open wounds. It restores your stamina, energy, resolve, will to fight, etc. And once we accept that, it’s pretty trivial to accept that you have a limited reserve of such willpower, and that past a certain point, no amount of magic is going to help. You’re just plain tapped out for the day.

It is definitely transparent. To me, that’s an unambiguously good thing.I want to understand what the rules are doing and why they’re doing it, and in 4e, that was always abundantly clear. And personally I think that’s the true source behind all this “dissociated mechanics” nonsense. 4e pulled back the curtain and showed the gameplay purpose the rules served, rather than pretending the rules existed primarily to model the fiction. A lot of folks didn’t like that (though for the life of me I’ll never understand why), and “dissociative mechanics” is what came out of their attempts to articulate that.

That is the odd thing about it though: healing surges are far more diagetic (i.e., "associated") as a conceptual mechanic and more simulationist of various fantasy fiction than simply spending HD to heal between combat or the whole taking no sides on the fluff of HP as abstract vs. meat that we find in 5e. I agree that Healing Surges were poorly named for what amounted to a character's Vital Reserves.

You're missing another aspect of Healing Surges: they were used for more than just healing damage taken in combat.

Traps, for exemple, wouldn't inflict HP damage, they would generally drain a healing surge (basically, it was assumed you would rest and spend your HS to recover HP anyway so it cut the middle man), environmental effects like a snow storm or extreme heat would ALSO drain surges if you failed an Endurance check. Certain rituals would require you to spend Healing Surges, the entire Martial Practice concept used Surges to fuel them, some Magical Item used them, I think the Warden had a power to spend a Healing Surge to grant Temp HP to everybody and that some monsters would drain them. You also had diseases and curses that could reduce your healing surge total or prevent you from recovering them!

Yeah, healing surges were part of the resource attrition game for player characters, and I don't think knowing or not knowing their healing surges is any more disassociated than a character knowing their HP totals. In some respects, it's mainly something in-fiction that the character can feel but is represented more concretely to the player in terms that they can understand.

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.

The problem here is that this proposition assumes that these people aren't just playing D&D differently from how WotC assumes, but also playing D&D the same way as each other; however, even reading through discussion on 5e alone makes it abundantly clear that this is not the case. I'm skeptical that WotC could design "the game that people want to play" in the manner that is being suggested here. So "the game that people want to play" seems to exist in the same rhetorical space as "the State of Nature" does for political philosophers of the Enlightenment: i.e., the fictive place to load-up and guise one's assumptions, biases, and agendas while giving it the airs of empirical objectivity.

 

[Stalker0]

Monte Cook's Cypher System essentially has short rests (i.e., Recovery Roll), but the amount of time required for each Short Rest gets longer each successive time until finally a Long Rest is required. I wonder if something like this would work for D&D 5e. It would mean that Short Rest based classes/subclasses could get them more regularly but there would be more of attrition after subsequent encounters.

I've played Cypher and I think as a healing concept it works quite well. But as an ability recovery mechanic....that's a bit trickier.

 

[Mordhau]

The problem here is that this proposition assumes that these people aren't just playing D&D differently from how WotC assumes, but also playing D&D the same way as each other; however, even reading through discussion on 5e alone makes it abundantly clear that this is not the case. I'm skeptical that WotC could design "the game that people want to play" in the manner that is being suggested here. So "the game that people want to play" seems to exist in the same rhetorical space as "the State of Nature" does for political philosophers of the Enlightenment: i.e., the fictive place to load-up and guise one's assumptions, biases, and agendas while giving it the airs of empirical objectivity.

No it doesn't. It assumes that there is such a wide variety of ways that people play that there needs to be flexibility.

My point wasn't that WotC design their rest schedules wrong. The point was they design them inflexibly.

 

[Aldarc]

I've played Cypher and I think as a healing concept it works quite well. But as an ability recovery mechanic....that's a bit trickier.

I agree, but if people are not taking the number of Short Rests that WotC assumes they would and balanced around, then that obviously poses some issue for the Short Rest-based character options. WotC's solution seems to be abandoning Short Rests in favor of putting everyone on the same Per Day cycle.

No it doesn't. It assumes that there is such a wide variety of ways that people play that there needs to be flexibility.

My point wasn't that WotC design their rest schedules wrong. The point was they design them inflexibly.

IMHO, 4e was the most flexible that WotC ever designed them as it was primarily framed around encounters and healing surges rather than assumptions about "X number of Y in an adventuring day." This left players and GMs free to focus on pacing from their respective sides.

 

[mcmillan]

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.

Since people didn’t seem to explain, last weekend at the ”future of D&D” panel they announced that they were working on core rule revisions to be released in 2024 for the 50th anniversary of D&D. Since it’s still 3 years away we don’t have much to go on - mainly just that the intention is to be backwards compatible so material released pre-revision will still be useable and that we can expect previews and surveys about it to be coming

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don’t know, it sounds to me like you at least understand their function as a pacing mechanic in theory, even if you never experienced it personally.

Shrug I mean... I understand the language you all are using when you say it's a pacing mechanic, but I don't see (and never did see) why that supposed pacing gained from them was necessarily a useful thing. I mean, hit points and spell slots are a pacing mechanic too (you run low on both, you better rest) so why healing surges are better (if indeed those of you in favor of them feel they are) just doesn't resonate with me. Which isn't surprising, because like I said.. we don't know what we don't know.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You're missing another aspect of Healing Surges: they were used for more than just healing damage taken in combat.

Traps, for exemple, wouldn't inflict HP damage, they would generally drain a healing surge (basically, it was assumed you would rest and spend your HS to recover HP anyway so it cut the middle man), environmental effects like a snow storm or extreme heat would ALSO drain surges if you failed an Endurance check. Certain rituals would require you to spend Healing Surges, the entire Martial Practice concept used Surges to fuel them, some Magical Item used them, I think the Warden had a power to spend a Healing Surge to grant Temp HP to everybody and that some monsters would drain them. You also had diseases and curses that could reduce your healing surge total or prevent you from recovering them!

Sure, but there's nothing special about that-- it's just another pool of something that gets drained. That's essentially no different than the Exhaustion table. You start full, things happen, and you starting losing parts of it until you're dead.

Now the fact that healing surges kind of combine hit points and the exhaustion table together into one grouping might have its merits, I would never deny that (since obviously many people found that to be true.) But at least in my case personally... I still never saw healing surge loss to occur so much prior to extended resting that it ever was going to be an issue or cause player concern.

I'll be honest... I think part of that might very well have been just how many hit points PCs had total when you took into account healing surges. I mean, a 1st level PC with 25 HP and 6 healing surges (just throwing out random numbers here) had essentially 150 total HP available to them in a day. So at least the way I ran my games, I was never going to blow through all that to make running out of HS a thing to worry about. If others could pull it off, I could definitely see why it would appeal... but if we couldn't, it's no wonder the system just never resonated.

 

[Nefermandias]

LOL

Again, very much not my experience. 1e and especially 2e, were the easiest editions in the game. Good grief, after about 4th or 5th level, the PC's could mop the floor with pretty much anything in the game. The only dangerous elements were save or die. Combat certainly wasn't.

Remember how a 1st level party could take on about 20 kobolds at the same time and win 9 out of 10 times? THAT'S what D&D used to be.

Sorry, but we are not going to agree on this. I found 1e and particularly 2e to be incredibly generous and easy mode games. 3e? 3e was very lethal. That got dialed back in 4e but, 5e? I have zero problems whacking PC's in 5e. I'm actually a little shocked how easy it is.

Let's just put it this way: back in AD&D, your character would die upon reaching 0 HP. No appeal (no, the -10 thing wasn't in the base rules and was actually based on a misunderstanding of a particularly obscure option discussed in the DMG).

Now in 5e though? You cannot die unless you somehow get one shot to a negative HP equal to your maximum. Death by bleeding out is virtually impossible if you are in a party of four and the DM doesn't go out of his way to stab you on the ground.

So yea, I would disagree with your assessment that 1e and 2e were easier.