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

Malmuria · Sep 30, 2021

EzekielRaiden said:
I encourage you to check out the post I linked above. I wrote it, specifically breaking down all the points of design where I felt the two games diverge despite appearing similar (and at least a few places where 5e is more like 4e than 3e!)

The one thing I didn't specifically discuss there was short rest abilities. The fact that 5e changed the short rest to be an entire hour pretty radically changed the nature of short-rest anything in 5e vs 4e. In 4e, short-rest abilities are reliable tools, something you can count on to have basically all the time--with short rests being only five minutes, it's hard but not impossible to enter a combat without all of your short-rest abilities at the ready. Not so with 5e, both intentionally and unintentionally: they very much intended short-rest abilities to be stretched out over 2, or even sometimes 3 combats. They also intended that players would get 2-3 short rests (average 2.5 or a little higher) per day, when in practice, most groups go for 1-2 per day (average 1.5 or a little lower). Short-rest classes were balanced for a playstyle that doesn't, generally speaking, actually happen. So, in both theory and practice, 5e short-rest abilities are a rare spice to be carefully rationed; 4e short-rest abilities are reliable tools meant to be deployed consistently. Again, a case of "vaguely similar, but shorn of critical parts."

That's part of what's going to change in 5.5e, by the by. Most classes that use short-rest things are going to be reworked so that they instead use some variation on the "proficiency bonus per long rest" system. I'm not sure how they intend to fix some of the bigger issue cases, like Battlemaster Fighters and Warlocks who are disproportionately punished by getting few short rests per day, but they'll almost certainly do something.

Maybe what bothers me about some of what Alexander calls disassociated mechanics is not just that they are abstracted but actually that it is somewhat difficult to reattach what happened in the game back to the fiction. So a mechanic that says, you can trip someone 4 times per day feels disassociated for me (why only 4 times?), whereas saying they have a 20% of tripping an opponent if they try seems more consistent within the fiction. Or, as I understand it, 13th age doesn't have rests; your abilities just reset after X number of encounters. How does one attach that to the fiction, even after the fact? So it kinda strikes me as the inverse of the OSR principle to not look at your character sheet, because in these instances the only way, it seems, that you would understand what's going on in the fiction is if you looked at your character sheet and saw, oh yes, this comes off cooldown now, or I've run out of uses for this ability.

Into the Odd is one game that made the equivalent of "short rests" make sense for me, because HP is "Hit Protection" and defined as your character's energy and ability to dodge and such, whereas the characters strength score can be damaged and that represents actual physical injury.

Charlaquin · Sep 30, 2021

I think if there’s one useful thing that can be derived from the dissociated mechanics essay, it’s that there are some mechanics that require the player to make decisions based on factors that don’t directly arise from the fiction. However, I think every conclusion he draws from this observation is faulty, almost certainly due to the fact that he started from a place of trying to rationalize why he didn’t like 4e.

billd91 · Sep 30, 2021

Charlaquin said:
I think if there’s one useful thing that can be derived from the dissociated mechanics essay, it’s that there are some mechanics that require the player to make decisions based on factors that don’t directly arise from the fiction. However, I think every conclusion he draws from this observation is faulty, almost certainly due to the fact that he started from a place of trying to rationalize why he didn’t like 4e.

Rationalize or put into words/a conceptual framework?
Seems to me a lot of people‘s approach to Justin Alexander’s analysis are just as subject to rationalization depending on their feelings about 4e. The bottom line is either his approach makes sense to you or it doesn’t and whether or not that is true probably depends on whether you feel the same disconnect as he did with 4e.

Charlaquin · Sep 30, 2021

MichaelSomething said:
It's not there already?

Hit dice, short rest abilities, and at will cantrips don't count?

Hit dice are not like healing surges in any of the ways that actually matter. They are superficially similar, but their design role and gameplay function are completely different. The same can pretty much be said of short rest abilities. At-will cantrips though are indeed an example of 4e design in 5e. It’s definitely present, but it’s largely kept very low-key.

Charlaquin · Sep 30, 2021

billd91 said:
Rationalize or put into words/a conceptual framework?

Same thing. The point is, he started from “I don’t like 4e” and then worked his way backwards from there, which is a poor way to do analysis. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, it causes you to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.

billd91 said:
Seems to me a lot of people‘s approach to Justin Alexander’s analysis are just as subject to rationalization depending on their feelings about 4e. The bottom line is either his approach makes sense to you or it doesn’t and whether or not that is true probably depends on whether you feel the same disconnect as he did with 4e.

I understand the disconnect he had with 4e. I don’t experience it in the same way he did, but I recognize a meaningful difference in 4e’s gameplay feel from that of other editions of D&D, and I think it’s perfectly valid to not like 4e because of that difference. But in trying to form a conceptual framework that could explain his preference objectively, he ended up committing a number of logical fallacies and ended up forming an argument that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

EzekielRaiden · Sep 30, 2021

Malmuria said:
Maybe what bothers me about some of what Alexander calls disassociated mechanics is not just that they are abstracted but actually that it is somewhat difficult to reattach what happened in the game back to the fiction. So a mechanic that says, you can trip someone 4 times per day feels disassociated for me (why only 4 times?), whereas saying they have a 20% of tripping an opponent if they try seems more consistent within the fiction. Or, as I understand it, 13th age doesn't have rests; your abilities just reset after X number of encounters. How does one attach that to the fiction, even after the fact? So it kinda strikes me as the inverse of the OSR principle to not look at your character sheet, because in these instances the only way, it seems, that you would understand what's going on in the fiction is if you looked at your character sheet and saw, oh yes, this comes off cooldown now, or I've run out of uses for this ability.

Into the Odd is one game that made the equivalent of "short rests" make sense for me, because HP is "Hit Protection" and defined as your character's energy and ability to dodge and such, whereas the characters strength score can be damaged and that represents actual physical injury.

Do you have any examples of specific 4e powers like this? Part of the reason many 4e fans are not keen on such responses is that one, and only one, specific group of classes actually gets subjected to them: martial classes. No one has any problem with the idea that a magical effect can only be used once per combat, but as soon as something is martial, it (for whatever reason) must be bound by what actual, literal human beings in our real, physical world can do. (Even though most people have a pretty bad understanding of the upper limits of human achievement, so it in practice ends up more like "what I, personally, think is possible for a human to do based solely on what I, personally, find difficult to do.")

When the complaint unduly affects the one group within D&D design that has been consistently deprived of opportunities to play at the same level of power and engagement as other groups, it implies a concern about some abstract notion (such as "consistency," "verisimilitude," etc.) being more important than ensuring that most players' desired fantasy gets reasonable and effective representation within the game. Some would disparagingly summarize that as "I can't have fun unless casters are more powerful than non-casters." While that is obviously reductive, it does point to a serious, ongoing issue with D&D design, where anything that tends to be kind to non-casters without also being kind to casters, people find a justification to dislike, and anything that tends to be unkind to casters without also being unkind to non-casters is treated as a horrible affront.

darjr · Sep 30, 2021

Charlaquin said:
I think if there’s one useful thing that can be derived from the dissociated mechanics essay, it’s that there are some mechanics that require the player to make decisions based on factors that don’t directly arise from the fiction. However, I think every conclusion he draws from this observation is faulty, almost certainly due to the fact that he started from a place of trying to rationalize why he didn’t like 4e.

I dunno. His essay highlighted what was bugging me about 4e. About the fact that the fluff really meant nothing.

I came to the conclusion that in a game I like the fluff interacts with mechanics and should do so. In 4e it seemed the design strived for the opposite.

For instance I ran a 5e game where a player had to pick a trigger for his rage. He picked roses. Before that the presence of a rose was just fluff, now their presence were mechanics.

In 4e fluff never seemed to matter, one example was I had NPC's throwing magic shurikens in an adventure. They were refluffed magic missile. A player, a monk, really wanted to pick them up. All of a sudden I had to come up with a reason why, or just say, no the rules don't let you, which kinda sucks in the middle of a game. Normally that isn't a big deal, but something like that would happen A LOT A LOT in 4e games. Especially in Encounters and official content. I found myself mentally exausted from constantly having to justify fluff that didn't match what the rules were doing. And while it isn't an inherent thing in 4e, 4e by it's design with a hard seperation between fluff and rules all but enforced it.

though folks mileage may vary.

overgeeked · Sep 30, 2021

There’s a fair amount already in 5E.

This thread is helpful.

What should be brought forward...

4E skill challenges...though looser and better presented.

4E monster design.

4E clarity of the math behind the game.

4E monster types: minions, standard, elite, solo; monster roles: skirmisher, brute, soldier, etc; and the bloodied condition.

4E monster lore checks listed with the monsters.

4E encounter design.

4E classes like the warlord and the swordmage.

4E bonuses and scaling. Your level and training mattered more than your d20 roll after a certain point. That was nice.

4E World Axis cosmology.

4E Dawn War.

4E Nentir Vale and Points of Light.

4E split between rituals and combat magic.

4E residuum.

I loved almost everything about 4E except how clunky it played, how long it took to resolve combats, and near pure focus on combat.

darjr · Sep 30, 2021

No on skill challenges. Please no. No. no no. Not again.

darjr · Sep 30, 2021

overgeeked said:
There’s a fair amount already in 5E.

This thread is helpful.

What should be brought forward...

4E skill challenges...though looser and better presented.

4E monster design.

4E clarity of the math behind the game.

4E monster types: minions, standard, elite, solo; monster roles: skirmisher, brute, soldier, etc; and the bloodied condition.

4E monster lore checks listed with the monsters.

4E encounter design.

4E classes like the warlord and the swordmage.

4E bonuses and scaling. Your level and training mattered more than your d20 roll after a certain point. That was nice.

4E World Axis cosmology.

4E Dawn War.

4E Nentir Vale and Points of Light.

4E split between rituals and combat magic.

4E residuum.

I loved almost everything about 4E except how clunky it played, how long it took to resolve combats, and near pure focus on combat.

Uh... 4e is still out there. Most of this I'd take a hard pass on, but there IS 4e. People are playing it.