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This is also why 5e's system tends to favor control over damage. 5e's spell damage does does not autoscale (which is the principal measure of damage) but its DC do scale (which is the principal measure of control). In 3e you have all these spells, but you only have a few control spells at a...

I would argue one of the reasons for that is, when your in a single campaign, its the rule of fun right. So when a player with a big history wants to make a check about some magical X, the DM might finangle it a bit to make that history so the player can enjoy their bonus rather than arcane...

A capital ship that can shut off the fundamental force of inertia at a whim...the manueverability of those things should be insane.

One mechanic I created when I DMed 4e was "escalating damage" and "immediate damage". In 4e, it was common to have an effect do 5 damage at the start of your turn. Then you would roll a saving throw (which is NOT a saving throw from 5e, closer to a 50/50 coin flip most of the time), to see if...

I will say this. 4e combat's could be long its true, and the grind in the early days was a real thing (that was thankfully fixed in later products). But as a DM I can say this about 4e, it was a lot easier to make encoutners engaging and interesting. There was something there about how they...

So just to ensure I'm being fair, there are things about 4e that I think were great, but it had plenty of flaws as well. The number one issue was presentation. 4e reads like a textbook, not a player's guide. It is clinical, replacing flavor with cold, hyper formatted keywords. It really feels...

Right....which is basically what is happening right now. Instead of the 6 or so fights and then the boss fight, people are doing one warmup and then a boss, or just going straight into high challenge encounters. They are skipping all of the warmup. The attrition model isn't creating the...

Sure but that was my point. That one tweak had a massive impact on the experience of the game went for different groups.

Potions as a bonus action was such a popular 5e houserule, that is why they updated 2024 to make it canon. It makes consumables actually worth using.

It depends on what the meaning needs to be. If your goal is for each combat to have "meaning" in terms of challenging the party....well that's not happening now. The attrition model isn't working because people aren't using it (as the OP stated). So most fights are "meaningless" already in that...

What 4e tried to do was divide the "combat spells" and the "non-combat spells" into two different buckets. The combat spells were at-will/encounter/daily powers. And most were your old trusties like "fireball". They did make some of them encounter powers, and it mostly worked fine. The...

Case in point, the 3e cure light wound wand. Playing 3e without access to that wand (or some equivalent of it) is a NIGHT AND DAY different experience.

There was a minor amount of attrition in 4e based on what you described, especially around the dailies. But the healing surges was more of a binary element. Losing surges wasn't a big deal, it did not stop your ability to go "full out" in a fight. But once your surges got low or to 0, that was...

Ford's Model T once made a lot of money. I'm glad they never fixed anything or improved upon it.

I will quote myself from earlier in this thread. "In a nutshell, the dnd encounter model is backwards. The model should assume that a party is at 100% juice for every encounter. And the system should be designed so that abilities mostly reset per encounter. 4e did it right in that regard...

That is kind of like saying I don't really want my car fixed because I'm unwilling to go on youtube, learn how to rebuild an engine, buy all the parts, and do it myself. There are some things that are quick fixes, but the idea of shifting the game whole sale to an encounter based model (rather...

There is also a baby and a bathwater scenario here. Its important to drill in on what people didn't like about the 4e solution. 1) Is it that they didn't like 4e in general, and so the fixes here (which were "good") were tossed out? 2) Is it that people like the mechanics and flavor of...

I had a game where I asked the players if they wanted to ban Tiny hut in this short series of adventurers I was doing. They decided to play it straight up. Even used it once for a pretty solid ambush. Then I used it against them....and asked them again if they wanted to keep it. Slight change...

yeah that was my assumption, as in terms of the "WOTC stuff", I feel its the opposite. There are so few products outside of adventurers and settings that I can't remember the last time I even looked at buying a 5e book....they are just so rare.

took a long break from DMing for a while (and I wasn't a player in any game so it was basically a break from gaming). let me recharge, and then I was good to go again. Happens, no shame in it.