D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[Faolyn]

Very interesting. For me, playing in 2e I wouldn't say there was much in the way of RP support or, unless you were a Thief or Ranger, many non-combat abilities. NWPs helped a little there (though they were optional, you got very few of them, they were very INT/WIS heavy, and none were social based), and a smidge from Kits if you used the optional handbooks. So I wouldn't say 2e was particularly rich in that regard. (And in no way am I saying that it was a problem for us at the time; we RPed and explored things just fine.)

4e's rituals (which absorbed many of the non-combat/adventuring spells from 2e/3e), the classes' Utility Powers, skill challenges, and the PHB's good intro all led me to view 4e as being supportive of RP and non-combat stuff, even if they removed the non-adventuring skills. (Which, again, led me to write something to add them back in, albeit in a (clearly biased since I wrote it) richer way.)

It was there. Maybe not codified as rules, but... with 4e, monsters were given roles for how they would work in combat, not as anything else. Rituals were way in the back of the book, whereas spells were listed right with the classes. And there was no real way for me to make a non-combat, utility caster (all of the utility spells were actually combat buffs), for instance, or even a simple illusionist who never inflicted true damage. I can do that in any other edition. Again, maybe they corrected that in later books, but that wasn't there from the beginning and it turned me off.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It was there. Maybe not codified as rules, but... with 4e, monsters were given roles for how they would work in combat, not as anything else. Rituals were way in the back of the book, whereas spells were listed right with the classes. And there was no real way for me to make a non-combat, utility caster (all of the utility spells were actually combat buffs), for instance, or even a simple illusionist who never inflicted true damage. I can do that in any other edition. Again, maybe they corrected that in later books, but that wasn't there from the beginning and it turned me off.

So, you would rather the books explicitly tell you what something is for, than let you figure out for yourself what it is for?

I thought that was the whole problem behind 4e's roles being unbearably offensive and wrong. They told people what something was, and thus forbade things from being anything else. Why is that suddenly good in this context when it's utterly horrible in others?

Also, you can't make a character who is actually incapable of doing damage in any edition. Everyone can make attack rolls. Everyone CAN do damage. You're just choosing not to use the (limited) automatic options. Having slightly more automatic options does not mean you have to use them. Even the 1e Illusionist could throw darts.

 

[Scribe]

Even the 1e Illusionist could throw darts.

As Wizards should... cantrips, bah!

 

[Undrave]

I have no interest in relitigating this again, especially when you should either already be aware or can just go look for yourself, but while I'd say there were more complaints about the cookie cutter nature of PCs, it was also noted (and a source of complaints) that the monsters suffered from the same phenomena.

While the general phenomena has been around since the beginning (AD&D orcs, goblins and hobglins are effectively more alike than any subsequent edition), in 4E the problem was focused around fewer monster options on monstrs previously seen as complex. Rather than a series of spells or special abilities, they had between one and five types of actions they could take. However, each of those abilities, much like PC abilities, often (but not always) tended to be a variantion on damage plus push, pull, prone, etc... Even the non attack+X abilities tended to have similar structures. The game was designed to be run more like MMORPG. That limits options. It was an intentional design feature. They had the intention to create more differentiation by giving goblins a one square shift when missed, etc... but so many of those abilities just ended up being non-distinctive and blending together.

Yes, a great DM could fight the waves of beige monsters by infusing them with colorful descriptions ... but in 4E that wore on people faster, likely because Many DMs and players felt it was more like playing a 'pick your action from this list' video game thna a 'create a story' RPG.

I'm sorry but I still don't understand how 5e does it any better? Outside of Spellcasters who ask you to read a different book, most monsters I've encounter have like... one or two melee options, then an action that says 'Do the other melee attacks as a single action' and then maaaaybe 1 ability with a condition. Is it the addition of stuff you'll never use in combat?

Ooooh, look out, the Spellcaster knows Magic Mouth! Oooh.

Hmm, I'd understood it as multiple target damage, battlefield shaping, and debuffing/position control/action denial. Would there be something else you think would aid in clarifying the role? (and/or did I misunderstand it?)

The other three roles all have a distinct feature: Defenders have a way to Mark, Strikers have a source of additional damage, Leaders have a form of bonus action healing... but Controllers don't have a unifying feature.

Personally I'd give them all an twice per encounter reaction that triggers when an enemy makes a successful Saving Throw. The Wizard could go 'nuh huh' and make them reroll or even fail, the Invoker could get a leader-y bonus on a nearby ally, maybe the Druid could get a free At-Will? Something like that ya know?

with 4e, monsters were given roles for how they would work in combat, not as anything else.

'cause that's what you need. They also had ability score and usually a few Skill Proficiencies. What else do you need? Anything non-combat is easy to improvise. Giving an opponent spellcasting some rituals is pretty easy if they're important characters, otherwise it's just fluff you don't need because they're gonna die in one fight anyway.

 

[Faolyn]

So, you would rather the books explicitly tell you what something is for, than let you figure out for yourself what it is for?

I would rather the books not be so overwhelmingly combat-oriented.

I thought that was the whole problem behind 4e's roles being unbearably offensive and wrong. They told people what something was, and thus forbade things from being anything else. Why is that suddenly good in this context when it's utterly horrible in others?

What? You're not making any sense here.

But how many times do you think you've seen someone play a "skirmisher" monster as a "brute," or vice versa? Versus how many times do you think you've seen those monsters, without those labels," as being used however the DM wants to use them?

Also, you can't make a character who is actually incapable of doing damage in any edition. Everyone can make attack rolls. Everyone CAN do damage. You're just choosing not to use the (limited) automatic options. Having slightly more automatic options does not mean you have to use them. Even the 1e Illusionist could throw darts.

Of course everyone can do damage. But can you make a character who is effective in a 4e party who doesn't, using just the material from the PHB?

 

[Faolyn]

I'm sorry but I still don't understand how 5e does it any better? Outside of Spellcasters who ask you to read a different book, most monsters I've encounter have like... one or two melee options, then an action that says 'Do the other melee attacks as a single action' and then maaaaybe 1 ability with a condition. Is it the addition of stuff you'll never use in combat?

Because there's more to a monster than just how you use them in combat.

Ooooh, look out, the Spellcaster knows Magic Mouth! Oooh.

<shrug> Played a 5e game where we took out frost giants using just control water to drown them. I can think of plenty of ways to combat monsters just using magic mouth. Especially if "combat them" doesn't have to mean "to the death."

The other three roles all have a distinct feature: Defenders have a way to Mark, Strikers have a source of additional damage, Leaders have a form of bonus action healing... but Controllers don't have a unifying feature.

What do they do outside of combat? If it's all improvise, with nothing mechanical to support it, then it's the game saying that they don't care about anything outside of the combat. And that is boring.

5e may have nearly only combat information in the monster's statblocks, but at least, when the MM came out, they gave them sufficient lore to make them interesting. They got more boring as time went on, alas. Thank goodness I was able to grab information from 2e, with its Habitat/Society and Ecology sections.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Split power source/encounter abilities from professions and roles and themes and archetypes. So you can have a party where there’s a divine warrior (aka Paladin), skirmishing archer (aka Ranger), primal warrior (aka Warden) and primal spellcaster (aka Druid) who all take the “Ranger” profession to gain exploration, tracking, survival, herbalism, and etc abilities.

While there is much good in your post, I genuinely think that this is an extremely unwise move, one that would both weaken the game's design and make it actually, truly like several of the false smears so frequently attributed to 4e (like "grid-filling" and all classes being "samey.")

The thing is, unlike what a lot of people say, 4e did not simply add a class for every possible combination of things. Formally speaking, there was never an actual Martial Controller. We got a variant of Ranger that dabbled in Controller stuff, but no actual, proper Martial Controller. Yet we got two different Martial Strikers (Ranger and Rogue), and two different Arcane Strikers (Warlock and Sorcerer), and two different Divine Leaders (Cleric and Runepriest.) We even got two Shadow classes...and both of them were Strikers (Assassin and Vampire.) It was neither true that they created classes to fill every niche, because several niches remained unfilled, nor that they even ignored a niche if it was already filled, because there were several "duplicate" Source+Role combos. Some, like Ranger/Rogue and Warlock/Sorcerer, were perfectly fine. Other were...less fine and probably could've just been merged together (Cleric/Runepriest.)

When they created a class, they always asked a key question: This is already something we know we need to make. How should it happen?

The example of the Avenger is actually quite illustrative here. Unlike with classes like Warlord and Swordmage, where precedent clearly existed already, the Avenger has no native-to-D&D source material. But that doesn't mean it has no precedent at all. We can, in fact, see a very clear precedent in things like Assassin's Creed, or the actual training of ninjas and such: the idea of the silent killer who is utterly dedicated to something outside herself, like a religious creed or feudal lord. That's a worthy space, which is hard to explore with the Rogue as written. It recalls a significant portion of the Van Helsing "vampire hunter" angle that the OG Cleric used to have, but has slowly lost over time, in much the same way that the Warlord features the "Leader of Men" angle that the OG Fighter used to have but has slowly lost over time. Each boosts that archetype that has been neglected to the level of a proper class, with its own mechanics, flesh on its bones, so that archetype can really shine.

Further, there were in-lore reasons to have, as someone once phrased it to me, the "legbreakers of the gods": in 4e, gods cannot directly manifest in the world without expending a great deal of power, so they instead rely on giving mortal proxies tiny motes of their divine power that can grow with time. This process is called "Investiture." It cannot be reversed, except by a ritual which the god's agents must conduct. Once you receive Investiture, that power is yours to do with as you see fit--which means deities and their churches tend to be very picky about who they give their power to. Even with being picky though...sometimes, people will go astray. Heresy is a real issue. Hence, you need somebody who can address that problem. You need someone who can hunt down and capture, or (more likely) kill, the traitorous dogs who would dare disobey their leaders/god/whatever.

From these two things--the Ezio Auditore swooping zealot-assassin, and the grim internal police hunting down and/or executing apostates and heretics--directly arise all of the mechanics of the Avenger. It wears only light armor, because that's (more or less) what Ezio wears, and because the whole idea is that you're a sort of priest-assassin, relying on the strength of your faith and your speed and skill to protect you. It wields MASSIVE weapons but with skill and precision, because it is in some sense a divine executioner. Its "damage" feature is unerring accuracy because "Thou Sword of Truth, fly swift and sure, that evil die, and good endure." It gets another feature that rewards either ganging up on a target with all your buddies (leading the torches-and-pitchforks mob against the heretics!), chasing down an opponent to slay them yourself (Van Helsing vampire hunter), or enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous opponents and by enduring ending the target of your wrath.

This isn't some kind of dull checkbox-filling. Each class is, in fact, actually designed to support and fulfill a particular range of fantastical premises. Which is why it's so frustrating when someone says they want to play a Fighter who does damage but don't want to play a Ranger. "A Fighter who does damage" IS "a Ranger" in 4e terms--that's the class precision-built to support the class fantasy being asked for. It does, also, include other class fantasies if they excite you, such as having an animal buddy or being a crazy-prepared wilderness survivalist, but if what you want is to be the ultimate enemy-slaying warrior who can dance a lethal dance of death with your enemies...the Ranger is what will give you that and it will deliver in spades. (Or would it be blades? Heh.)

The fundamental problem with the "just decouple it!" impulse is that all of the above CANNOT HAPPEN. You instantly, and permanently, strip out the ability to create unique, tailored, flavorful expressions. By turning the game into a reductive "pick a Source, pick a Role, you're done" setup, necessarily both of those things have to become genericized. Every Defender must, by definition, work exactly the same way because...they're all literally using the exact same mechanics. You can't have the crazy differences (and, IMO, really fun differences) between Paladins who boldly challenge their foes and must never shirk from that challenge, and Swordmages who can screw you over from 20 feet away and then laugh as they teleport away or become invisible and now you're screwed no matter who you attack (or even if you don't attack at all!) You can't have the difference between the beefy Barbarian who wades into combat, laughing off the enemy's blows and becoming stronger with every strike she makes, vs the literally lightning-quick Storm Sorcerer who zips around the battlefield, never sitting still.

Under the fully-decoupled design, everything becomes a muddy hodgepodge of everything; every feature must be perfectly generic so it will work with every other combination, and unique and flavorful mechanics disappear. Unless, of course, you re-introduce them....at which point all you've done is create exactly the same system, just harder to learn and easier to mess up. It's literally "just do it worse, with more steps."

None of this is to say that I don't understand why people want this. It has a beautiful sound to it: the simplicity! The elegance! Cleanly, neatly supporting everything, eliminating this random list of 25 options so it becomes just picking one option from each of two lists. It has, as I have phrased this quite some time ago, incredible design meta-aesthetics. But in pursuing that meta-aesthetic, that "beautiful design," you in fact take away something really, really important and get nothing other than making it pretty and symmetric and slightly shorter.

 

[James Gasik]

I would rather the books not be so overwhelmingly combat-oriented.


What? You're not making any sense here.

But how many times do you think you've seen someone play a "skirmisher" monster as a "brute," or vice versa? Versus how many times do you think you've seen those monsters, without those labels," as being used however the DM wants to use them?


Of course everyone can do damage. But can you make a character who is effective in a 4e party who doesn't, using just the material from the PHB?

No, but it was never the intent for 4e to do so. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's not really the intent of any WotC edition for such characters to exist, really. It doesn't take a lot of effort to realize WotC only really balances for combat. They have no real idea what a non-combat challenge is.

I mean what's an exploration challenge? Most of them are "buy the right stuff in town" and "make an ability check". And all of them can be circumvented or trivialized by ribbon class abilities, feats, or spells.

What's a social challenge? Roll a high enough number on an ability check? A Rogue with the right expertise can breeze through these most likely.

It's worth noting that you don't have challenge ratings for exploration (other than traps). Nor is there a statblock for "Wily merchant" with no combat ability and social abilities. Heck, even the Noble has way more attention paid to their combat statistics; all they have to present a social challenge are three skill proficiencies!

 

[JAMUMU]

Aw man, I'm not being cheeky (I am being cheeky) but I would redo 4th Edition by writing 13th Age.

More seriously, something that keeps the tacticalness and range of monster-roles and stuff, but also simplifies it so you don't need a computer to crunch the details (I'M LOOKING AT YOU PF2!) because otherwise combat takes 2.5 hours out of a 3 hour session. I'd also lean heavily into the roleplaying, skill and social areas of the game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would rather the books not be so overwhelmingly combat-oriented.

And I'm saying they aren't. You went looking for very specific things, because you saw those as being the only way something could be not combat-oriented. When you didn't see them, you then assumed that that meant the game was combat-oriented. It isn't--not any moreso than 5e, 3e, or any previous edition. The vast majority of rules, other than the reams of magic items and spell lists, in every edition refer to combat. "Spell lists" refers to both some powers (because, contra what you've said, there are plenty of utility powers even in the PHB1 that are not about combat, at all) and to rituals. Writing off rituals as being unimportant or ghettoized is your false assumption, not anything even remotely supported by the text.

What? You're not making any sense here.

By telling someone what something is for, the argument goes, you are also telling them everything else is forbidden. Hence, by saying what a monster is for outside of combat, you're telling the DM they aren't allowed to do anything else. That's why people hated 4e roles, because they (erroneously) claim that they're straightjackets denying any form of difference or creativity. Why wouldn't that also apply to monsters?

But how many times do you think you've seen someone play a "skirmisher" monster as a "brute," or vice versa? Versus how many times do you think you've seen those monsters, without those labels," as being used however the DM wants to use them?

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think the whole argument is bunk. But we're already in the realm of not talking about what the text ever says, but about what people think about the text even when it explicitly rejects some interpretation.

Nothing about 5e statblocks, as @James Gasik just noted, is even slightly more non-combat-focused than the 4e ones. A couple of skills, maybe an alignment, ability scores. It's not different. But for some reason 4e gets crapped on for being all combat all the time, and 5e gets its praises sung for being super supportive.

Of course everyone can do damage. But can you make a character who is effective in a 4e party who doesn't, using just the material from the PHB?

I have three answers for you.

First: I don't actually believe that a character who scrupulously avoids any capacity to contribute damage is consistently effective, in any edition. So the question, at least from that angle, seems moot; you're asking for something I don't think has ever been true. It certainly wasn't true in 3e, and it's not true in 5e either. A gimmick character isn't effective outside their narrow range, and being hyperspecialized in illusions and never ever doing anything that could contribute to damage-dealing is, in fact, a narrow range. Illusion is widely recognized as a weak school of magic that requires both substantial DM buy-in and very high player creativity, otherwise it's not effective. Being able to solve a combat or two with a clever illusion is not and never has been the same as being "effective." Anyone can contrive a situation where any character, even the most objectively useless, can turn the tide or make a difference just this once.

Second: Not using only PHB material, but if you allow stuff beyond it, 100% yes, it is possible to create characters who have nothing beyond basic attacks for personal damage contribution. Certainly the Warlord can do it, the controversial "Lazylord" setup; there's also a pacifist Cleric option that actually punishes you for doing damage to other beings, but I don't know much about that.

Third: Even your own request, if I consider it to be "effective" for the sake of argument, is at best very difficult to pull off in 5e. An Illusionist gets 4 starting cantrips (due to getting minor illusion for free--or a different cantrip of choice, if they already know that one) and eventually learns a total of 6. You have to be real scrupulous about avoiding the combat cantrips (counting things like blade ward and true strike here), there's literally only 7 truly distinct PHB options (since dancing lights is redundant with regular light) vs 8 combat cantrips (whether damage-dealing or combat-buffing.) It gets worse with the actual spells, since Illusion is one of the smallest schools. There are several spell levels with no Illusion spells at all in the PHB, and several of the spells that are present, such as blur or hypnotic pattern, only have use in combat. (Fascinating a creature for a single minute ain't non-combat utility.)