The MECHANICS of 4e however handle the same exploration tasks, and even in the exact same ways, that 5e does! You have the same Perception skill and you can use it to make checks, the same sorts of equipment and resources, etc. 4e has rituals, 5e has spells and rituals, its all 6 of one and half-a-dozen of the other in that sense.
It seemed like the relevant difference was in the published adventures. Classic D&D had adventures peppered with little DM secrets along the lines of "if a character rubs hydrosulphuric acid on the underside of the brass gargoyle in area Q, using a chamois cloth in a counter-clockwise motion, they discover... " modern games had actual mechanics for finding stuff based on the character's abilities, not
just the players' action declarations. 5e goes the amusing path of having the mechanics listed, but having a core resolution system that lets the DM substitute success/failure/whatever-else-he-wants-in-narrating-the-results-of-an-action for actually using those mechanics. So it's every bit as skill-roll-driven or player-skill-driven as the DM wants it to be.
But 4e has this really amazing system for framing up action scenes that is almost completely lacking in 5e. Skill challenges aren't REALLY ideal for exploration/investigation tasks, but they CAN work there. So it just tends to be that you don't do the 'pixel bitching' kinds of things in 4e because its time to get on with it.
Bare SC mechanics do work for just 'cutting to the chase' and resolving a whole-party task without dwelling on the details of it any more than you want to (which could be a lot, if you dressed the challenge up, and can be fun) or putting in a single point of failure that holds up the whole game until someone goes back and performs the correct action in the right place.
That being said, you could do entire adventures full of that stuff, and oddly 4e will really handle it BETTER mechanically. Not only because you have an option for an SC, but in 5e the game practically falls apart if you have 1 encounter per day. We've been cycling back into our 5e game lately. My 7th level dwarf wizard is part of the group that is exploring and traveling in the wilderness. I literally just fireball everything that we see that looks hostile. There's ZERO incentive to even mess with it. I know I have 3 level 3 slots, and multiple encounters are unlikely, so I just unleash. Its actually kinda rare that the other PCs act while there's still a threat (I was getting really lucky on my init rolls the other day, I nuked 3 encounters in a row and left nothing but pickings).
Obviously, your DM needs to use fewer, tougher enemies, or more, more spread-out ones.
In 4e those tactics wouldn't work. That is you'd USE those tactics, but so would the fighter, the cleric, and the rogue.
And you'd all have to if you wanted to 'Alpha Strike' an encounter, which still didn't work at all dependably. Though when it did, it could seem pretty spectacular.
In 5e the rogue's got zip, her bow is deadly, but its not THAT much better than Fire Bolt, and doesn't hold a candle to a level 3 spell. Same with the fighter, she can easily do nasty damage, but its nothing like my nova.
Nod. Thus 6-8 encounters. You've only got 3 fireballs, that's less than have the expected encounters. And they're meant to be trivial, so blow up 3 trivial encounters, you get to look flashy, but the rest of the party was going to kill them all by the second or third round, anyway at no meaningful risk, and the cost of a few hps instead of a top-level spell.
In 4e the rogue would be murderizing, the fighter would be holding back the bad guys, and the wizard would be cleaning up minions or locking down a couple of them while the cleric did leader stuff, no one attack would dominate, and if it was a one-encounter day, so what? We'd all nova.
Yeah, boring and samey. ;P
5e's presentation is better, and its character options are a lot simpler to pick, but at the table I don't find its rules all that easy to use, and the books are just horribly organized. We actually just gave up trying to find the rules for spell failure chances for reading a higher level scroll last week, its just unfindable.
Does 5e ever use the words 'spell' and 'failure' in the same sentence?
For most classes more and more of a range than in 4e, too. Most caster classes but the Wizard, who already got cantrips over and above at-wills. Of course, is you don't cast spells...
Gone. No at-wills beyond basic attacks, no dailies, encounters limited to one sub-class. Combat Challenge, gone. Combat Superiority, gone. Feats, optional. Marking, only if everyone can do it.
contracted back to something like what it was in 2e and 3e. Jury's still out on exactly where the sweet spot is. 5-9? 3-11?
Yep, 3 distinct Tiers: randomly-deadly un-heroic struggling low-level, playable/heroic mid-level 'sweet spot,' high level crazybrokenfun. Prettymuch the 'sweet spot' thing from a different angle.
With both the Sweet Spot and Tiered Play aspects, 5e has a neat little feature: the exp tables are weighted to minimize your time in the first and last Tiers and maximize enjoyment of the sweetspot.
Clever.
In addition to that, I like the encounter building rules -- clearly influenced by 4e even if not as tight as they are, as well as the monster building rules (same caveat). 5e DMs like a dream for me, and much of that is combining a 4e approach with a B/X sensibility.
5e has successfully swung the pendulum back to the DM's side of the screen. It is incredibly fun to run, you can improve like crazy, you have carte blanche and there's little resistance from players. But you gotta throw out those guidelines...
It sounds like you're fighting very weak foes for level 7
Which Bounded Accuracy is meant to enable.
I'm still utterly mystified by the notion that it is some sort of uber-D&D that can do any style of play. That was a truly fantastical canard that WotC seeded.
I've always been mystified by how 'canard' came to have that meaning when it's root means 'duck.'
Seriously, though, 5e can be adapted to any style of play, because it puts so much of the game exclusively in the DM's hands. You can't so much as build a character without knowing which explicit rules options your DM is using. Basic pdf? PH Standard? Feat Option? MC Option? DMG Modules? You can't roll a d20 until the DM has judged success/fail/roll and assigned a DC. With that level of DM Empowerment/dependency, the DM really can just mold the game to whatever style he wants, if not by on-the-fly rulings, then by opting in or out of rules, player choices, or modules, if not by that, if not by that, then via on-line resources like L&L and DMsGuild, if not by that, then by re-writing as much of the game as he wants.
While you can clearly see that it is built in reaction to 4e, and derives a few very generalized lessons from the 4e experience, there's no commonality of play experience between these games, beyond that they both participate in the general 'D&D milieu'.
I guess 4e is the odd D&D out when it comes to commonality of play experience.
