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

[darjr]

Except the fluff didn’t mean nothing in 4e, so the conclusion you came to is flawed.

This was a very real problem in public games I ran. I had others looking up to me with the same problems. You can dismiss it all you wan't but it's still true.

 

[darjr]

You should give Torg: Eternity a try! Instead of skill challenges they have Dramatic Skill Resolutions. Totally different thing.

Eh I bounced off Torg hard. I super appreciate it however, the setting is amazing. I'm not entirely sure what it was about Torg that I didn't like though.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I think they mean in monster statblocks. So, for instance, you don't have to flip through your PHB or other resource and find spell descriptions.

Personally, I'm fine with the Spellcasting and Innate Spellcasting traits as-is, but I don't think it would bother me to see them go. (If it does, I can just add them back in or use older statblocks.)

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Apropos of the topic somewhat raised by the reference to The Alexandrian in the original post:

"I don't care for playing games where the mechanics are, or at the very least come across as, divorced from the in-game fiction to too great an extent for my tastes" is a perfectly fine attitude to have. And it's perfectly fine to want WotC to make an effort to smooth over any friction in the interaction between game mechanics and in-game fiction.

The premise that "playing with dissociated mechanics ≠ playing a roleplaying game", on the other hand, is a preposterous absurdity, and the Alexandrian ought to be ashamed to have trotted it out. Not least, when it comes to arguing over D&D, because very nearly all D&D game mechanics - perhaps actually all of them - are both arbitary and divorced from the in-game fiction to some lesser or greater extent.

The substitute for concrete mechanics in any D&D game is DM arbitration. By my reckoning, DM arbitration is also fundamentally "dissociated", no less than an abstraction such as, say, hit points.

Im gunna have to stick with the Alexandrian.

 

[darjr]

@Filthy Lucre @Composer99 I don't think they'll go entirely. I think it'll be more of a hybrid. And three years is a long time from now. I think the counter spell thing is something that might cause changes. Maybe.

 

[Charlaquin]

This was a very real problem in public games I ran. I had others looking up to me with the same problems. You can dismiss it all you wan't but it's still true.

I don’t doubt for a moment that you experienced persistent problems stemming from a feeling of disconnectedness between the mechanics and the narrative. But that’s not the same thing as “the fluff meant nothing.”

 

[darjr]

Skill challenges took me a long time to learn to appreciate, and while I have come around on them in the context of 4e, I don’t think they would translate well to 5e. 5e demands a different DMing approach than 4e, and I don’t think skill challenges mesh well with that approach.

I tried so hard with Skill Challenges. I wanted them to work so very much. After a while the advice for the living campaign was to generally ignore them. I think they even stopped appearing in the mods.

 

[darjr]

I don’t doubt for a moment that you experienced persistent problems stemming from a feeling of disconnectedness between the mechanics and the narrative. But that’s not the same thing as “the fluff meant nothing.”

It is because it didn't. We'd have folks show up with familiars fluffed as Gold Dragons. It really meant nothing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What I'd rather see is some sort of point-based system where your basic stuff is cheap/free, and more powerful stuff costs more of whatever your internal resource is (stamina, magical energy, divine favor, what have you), and the serious nova powers lower your refresh rate as well. That is, however, obviously more complicated.

Believe it or not, 4e actually tried this, with its Psionic classes, other than Monk. Those classes used Power Points (PP). ALL of their abilities were at-will effects, which had a stronger, Encounter-like version if you spent a small number of PP ("augment 1" or the like), and a much stronger, Daily-like version if you spent a larger amount of PP ("augment 3" or whatever).

They were generally pretty disliked because they almost always amounted to exactly what you said in the foregoing bit I cut out. That is, you pick your strongest ability and you use it repeatedly until you've solved the problem. And that's exactly the issue with (to use the MMO term) "spammable" resource-based abilities: people will naturally drift to using the most optimal option (or two or three, rarely more than that) every single time, and ignore all other options. This would then truly make most classes "samey," since everyone and their brother would be engaging in basically the same kind of behavior--it's going to be very hard to design that many at-will abilities that can be augmented so.

That’s not really true, though. Nobody ever had a problem with using a magical effect once in a combat if it was the only instance of it you had prepared. But nobody had a problem with using a magical effect more than once if you had prepared it multiple times as well. There wasn’t much of a concept of using anything just once a combat outside of a few edge cases. And that’s where we get to a lot of problems people had with the AEDU structure - it was too restrictive in its conception. A model that irritates less is one that gives you resources to spend, refreshed by rests (long/daily or short/encounter), but gives the player more free rein to spend those as they see fit.

Interesting, I've never actually heard this particular complaint raised before. (Doesn't mean it never was, just that I didn't see it.)

Are people really so attached to "I have 4 fireballs prepared" that not being able to do that is such an insane, onerous burden?

 

[billd91]

Eh I bounced off Torg hard. I super appreciate it however, the setting is amazing. I'm not entirely sure what it was about Torg that I didn't like though.

The Drama deck is what bounced me, ultimately, after the campaign I played in. Don’t think I’ll accept another invitation to play one.

 

[billd91]

Are people really so attached to "I have 4 fireballs prepared" that not being able to do that is such an insane, onerous burden?

Given 5e’s popularity compared to 4e’s, I’d say it is. But it’s not just fireballs.