D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[payn]

Might I ask what your issue with DoaM is? Because it's been part of D&D for ages. Heck, 5.5e has it too! The Graze mastery property is straight-up DoaM:

Mastery: Graze. If your attack roll with this weapon misses a creature, you can deal damage to that creature equal to the ability modifier you used to make the attack roll. This damage is the same type dealt by the weapon, and the damage can be increased only by increasing the ability modifier.​

And every single spell that includes damage for a successful saving throw is, definitionally, also damage on a miss. You missed them with that fireball, but they still took damage from it.

Not Clever, but I am also not a fan of DoaM. I am ok with spells as they are a limited resource and work in an asymmetrical way to melee combat.

I'll grant you the templates thing. They were pretty good. I think 3e executed them poorly (as it did with many things),

I like the templates too, never really had an issue in 3E. It was the math, always the math. Something like B.A. in 3E would solve so much.

I...don't really understand the analogy you've used for multiclassing. You've never been able to multiclass to the same class. So it would be more like "my scholar [a generic term for people who study] is a doctor/lawyer/architect". Which is a thing people could really do, if they wanted, though I imagine the continuing education classes would be rather a pain at some point!

I am totally with you here. I find clever's description baffling. Though, im like the anti-clever in that I want ala carte multiclassing or the system is going to have a hard time getting me to adopt like 4E and PF2 did.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Or, hear me out, 5E is just a bit better at working the way a lot of people were playing and enjoying those earlier Editions. Maybe that flexible approach is a feature rather than a bug.

IME it's a feature ... for groups who don't know each other before they start. Giving a little bit to everyone means that everyone who gets something. Like meeting at MacDonalds. But almost every group would be better off with something else once they've found what they all enjoy.

I've yet to see a 5e group that wouldn't be better with one of Daggerheart, Draw Steel, PF2e, Shadowdark, or Dragonbane (to list the current popular D&D alternatives). But 5e's decision to offer just a little to everyone means that before you know how the group is going to break it makes a good starter system.

 

[payn]

And yet it's happened every time. 5e crapped on 4e. 4e crapped on 3e. 3e crapped on 2e. If it's a fault of 4e, it's a fault of functionally every edition published this millennium.

This is a false equivalency. I was there for 2E into 3E into 4E into 5E. 4E was the only one the IP holder actively marketed against the previous editions. The fan chatter always does, I'll give you that. Though we are talking about WotC itself deciding to sell the game by actively nay saying the past. 5E ignores 4E, and that may feel like a crapping on to you which I can understand. They are not actively running ads saying how dumb things were in 4E though.

Perhaps. But by that same token, there is only finite space in any given book. We cannot put everything into the first book. Some of the time, some things may need to just...wait, because books can't scale up to infinite size for fixed price.

And, to be clear here? The time span between PHB1 and PHB2 was nine months, June '08 to March '09. If you want to complain--as some already have!--that it was a cash-grab by inflating the number of books, then sure, go right ahead. But don't make it out to be this interminable wait to get core stuff. It took more than a year for 5e to publish its first supplement--and yes, there were things in it that I'm sure folks would have preferred appear in the PHB. (Some of them got put into the 2024 PHB, which is pretty telling.)

For a change as radical as 4E was, telling folks their favorite things are only 9 months away might as well have been an eternity.It was just one more obstacle to converting customers to the new system. Not an insurmountable one, but just one more reason to not adopt. I jumped in with a campaign right out the gun. I eventually noped out and moved onto PF. When I've spoken to 4E fans abotu things I didnt like they usually say, "well if you stuck around X years and got Y and Z books you;d have enjoyed it." I was long gone by then and never looking back.

I think the intent was entirely different between 4E and 5E though. Wizards made an attempt (it was never a promise if you look at the quote "we want to put every class into the PHB") to include as much as possible from every edition. I agree that its impossible to include everything, but I think the effort to listen to folks and try meant a lot. The 4Eapproach was more one of expecting folks to just move on as they had from 1E to 2E to 3E. It was an error that its clear WotC understands now.

If I may ask--what? Obviously it did not have the full slate of classes, as already recognized. But beyond that, what was so essential that you literally couldn't run even a short campaign with it? Again, nine months. And if you spent like $15 on a single month subscription to DDI, you'd get instant access to everything published--and because they were still using the offline tools at the time, you'd keep access to it.

Not Lanefan but... Seems trivial, but it ended up being a lot to ask. I was already on the fence looking for reasons to play 4E, these things simply contributed to my moving on instead.

 

[Maxperson]

Might I ask what your issue with DoaM is? Because it's been part of D&D for ages. Heck, 5.5e has it too! The Graze mastery property is straight-up DoaM:

Mastery: Graze. If your attack roll with this weapon misses a creature, you can deal damage to that creature equal to the ability modifier you used to make the attack roll. This damage is the same type dealt by the weapon, and the damage can be increased only by increasing the ability modifier.​

And every single spell that includes damage for a successful saving throw is, definitionally, also damage on a miss. You missed them with that fireball, but they still took damage from it.

I've acknowledged the inconsistency on my part, but for me it's the difference between magical and non-magical. Magic can do it, but it doesn't feel right to me as a mundane ability.

I...don't really understand the analogy you've used for multiclassing. You've never been able to multiclass to the same class. So it would be more like "my scholar [a generic term for people who study] is a doctor/lawyer/architect". Which is a thing people could really do, if they wanted, though I imagine the continuing education classes would be rather a pain at some point!

Not could do. Do do. I've heard about several Doctor/Lawyers over the years making the news for some reason or other, and those are just the ones that make the news. My recent post mentioned one guy out there with 111 Ph.D.s.

 

[Parmandur]

IME it's a feature ... for groups who don't know each other before they start. Giving a little bit to everyone means that everyone who gets something. Like meeting at MacDonalds. But almost every group would be better off with something else once they've found what they all enjoy.

I've yet to see a 5e group that wouldn't be better with one of Daggerheart, Draw Steel, PF2e, Shadowdark, or Dragonbane (to list the current popular D&D alternatives). But 5e's decision to offer just a little to everyone means that before you know how the group is going to break it makes a good starter system.

I tend to doubt that interpretation, based on my own experience. 5E is very good at scratching the D&D itch we used 3E for in College.

 

[Maxperson]

Just to add a bit here. There is absolutely controller in football. Central midfielder is exactly that. Luka Modrić is best example of modern controller in football. He dictates pace of the game, where ball goes, pulls opposing players from their zones. Pure field control.

Leader is more like captain/box to box midfielder. Think Toni Kroos.

And to use RM analogy, we also have Striker - CR7 and Defender- Sergio Ramos.

You guys can point out that these titles are in soccer, but the 4e roles do not match up to soccer at all. A leader in 4e is a healer and buffs party members, which directly lines up with MMORPG healers, not the soccer leader. A striker in 4e does high amounts of damage, which directly lines up with MMORPG DPS classes, not soccer players who are just trying to score goals. A defender in 4e protects his party from damage by keeping enemies focused on them and preventing them from getting to the others, which directly lines up with MMORPG tanks, not someone in soccer trying to stop a goal from happening. Controller is the one area which doesn't line up with either MMORPGs or soccer, since they don't do what soccer controllers do and control abilities in MMORPGs are spread around all of the other roles.

 

[Maxperson]

And that's....bad?

In an RPG, yes it is. I play RPGs to play my character, not have someone else in the group play it for me by directing me on what I have to do.

A party leader should do nothing more than break ties or in the case of the party spinning its wheels in indecision, make the decision for the group. For example, rather than let the group sit there and debate for 2 hours on whether to go right, left or rest and talk to Zeus in the morning about which way to go, after a reasonable amount of time when it's clear that this is going to go on for hours, the leader should step in and be like, "We are going to go left." He shouldn't at all be a micromanager.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I tend to doubt that interpretation, based on my own experience. 5E is very good at scratching the D&D itch we used 3E for in College.

So are all the other games I listed. But no two groups (no two players) are quite the same.

 

[Artamo]

So what changes to core D&Disms (classes, mechanics, settings, meta-game, etc) that have occurred over time do you like? Which ones could you do without?

Things I like:

• Point buy/Standard Array versus Rolling for Stats: I’m more appreciative of the level playing field rather than the mad scamper we used to do to roll and reroll until we got stats that we wanted to use.
• Standardized stat bonuses: I remember the days when a 13 in Con meant nothing with regard to Hit Points, just your system shock roll. Then there was the exceptional strength table which I’ll never understand exactly why it was that way. I greatly prefer bonuses starting at a lower point and rising predictably.
• Story based adventures versus site based adventures: Ravenloft is probably the biggest change here. I think the pivot from dungeons where the purpose of the game was to explore and plunder the dungeon to a broader array of objectives meant the game changed fundamentally but I think the net effect has been positive. My personal opinion? The game wouldn’t have been as popular if it hadn’t made this pivot.

Things I don’t like:

• Overly mechanical language: I’m more of a fan of more conversational rule descriptions versus the recent change to strictly capitalized words with highly specific meanings that ultimately people argue about anyways. I’d rather have the readability back.
• Force damage: Highly specific example but I dislike damage types that simply have no downside. It creates an impetus to get abilities and spells or create monsters that rely on that damage type because it’s simply a better choice. I prefer trade offs and limits.

 

[Parmandur]

So are all the other games I listed. But no two groups (no two players) are quite the same.

Listen, I like other games, too...but none of the games you mentioned is doing quite the same thing. Daggerheart does seem neat, and the Cosmere RPG is doing something new and exciting that D&D can't offer...but nobody is really living in that exact space in the exact same way as 5E, and I doubt anyone will try.