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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6782435" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'd say it falls between 30 and 45 minutes, yeah. Close enough to 5e that I haven't noticed a difference. I actually haven't played nearly as much 4e as I'd like--only about twice as many sessions of it as 5e, in fact. The longest fight I've had clocked in somewhere around an hour and a half, two hours--and that was because we (somewhat foolishly) alerted an entire fort's worth of small, separate combats so they got mashed together into a single huge beat-'em-up. It was tense and exciting; I almost went down a couple times, but our Bard kept my Paladin up, and we laid down the pain. The DM was actually quite pleased to not have to go through a bunch of disconnected trash fights, though he only told me that after the fact, of course! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />Perhaps that's part of the problem. No fight I've been in has been less than five rounds in 5e. Oftentimes, this is because we lose at least one party member within the first round or two, which is why I feel I must focus so much on healing. Admittedly, we have only just hit level 3 and that is a breakpoint for many classes...but when we still have people dropped (or, in the Druid's case, thrown out of wild shape) in the first or second round after the DM openly tells us he's going to try to pitch us some softballs...well, it's hard to believe that one more level will make that much of a difference.Well...I kind of am playing a full caster? The Bard is a full caster in 5e, isn't it...?Background thus far has had zero influence on the campaign--though technically speaking it's about to have a huge one. Our target turns out to have been a fiend disguised in human form, and has made off to hell with a sacred object of the city's patron goddess (thus dooming the town to ruin until it is returned). Being only (freshly) 3rd level characters, getting to hell is normally out of our league...but my character's Academy contacts were explicitly called out as a good thing to pursue if we want to follow/track this guy down. So I guess it's going to matter in the future, but for now that's literally the only time Background will have mattered for our group.Honestly, unless my character dies again (the frustratingly high chance of that continues to cast an unfortunate pall over my experience of 5e), I'll be sticking with the game until it ends, whether by wrapping up or falling apart. Due diligence--giving 5e a full, honest commitment, not just a token effort--is a part of it, but it's more just that I'm gaming with friends, and would rather not say "screw this, I'm done" unless something actually "bad" happens.Fudging doesn't really work over Roll20 though--we can all see the dice. Our DM has "ignored" certain monster features (e.g. he checked a particular demon's spell, saw that one cast would put anyone who failed the save to 0, and decided "nope, not casting that"), but other than being exceedingly gracious about bringing my character back from the dead, has avoided any "screw the book, I make the rules" behavior as far as I can tell. Well, I guess he's also said that levelling up gave us some of the benefits of a long rest when we reached level 2, but I dunno if that counts?Yeah...about that...the DM is not exactly stingy with long rests, but definitely expects us to play a "full day" even if we only get into one fight. And, as said above, a fight where nobody's down, or damn close to it, by the second round is a miracle, I don't believe I've seen that happen at all the whole campaign. I even missed a session where the same happened--some spiders apparently screwed the party all to hell, and my vicious mockeries, done by the DM on my behalf, apparently saved the day). Perhaps I just have a too-heavily "make sure everyone can participate"-focused mentality; taking such a..."mercenary" attitude (not the best word, but the only one that comes to mind) about my allies lying in the dirt doesn't sit well with me, even if it actually would be better for the party in the long run.Though profoundly frustrating, when I went for 16 Str and have specifically built for being a grappler, which (Valor) Bards are supposed to be good at... Spoilered for length and digressing from the main topic.[sblock]5e, explicitly, prioritizes a "traditional" look and feel. In every edition except 4e, the approach to choice and variety for characters has been, "if you wanted choice, you should've played a caster! Why are you playing a Fighter if you like choices?!" and "if you don't like having lots of choices, why are you playing a Wizard?!" In other words, the traditional approach has been the extreme of giving casters most/all of the bells and whistles, and giving the non-casters nothing beyond their imaginations. (And, for everyone else: please don't bother bringing up how powerful the imagination can make you, it's not an argument that will result in anything useful added to the thread, and I'm 99.99% certain you won't change my opinions any more than the last two dozen attempts did.) 4e also took an extreme, non-traditional solution: "EVERYONE has lots of choices! What do you mean you don't like making choices?!" It tried to back away from that with the Essentials subclasses, but I'm not really sure how well that worked.I truly wish that 5e had taken a much more middle-of-the-road approach, an approach like the ones talked up early in the playtest, where a Wizard could choose to be about as simple as the low-complexity Fighter, and a Fighter could choose to be close in complexity to a typical Wizard. Really, I would've liked "the range of complexity found in the whole of 4e, Original and Essentials both," but that definitely didn't happen. I suppose you could argue that 5e did take a bit of both sides, but IMO taking the worst of both rather than the best. It's still, to use your term, "choiceless non-casters" vs. choice-saturated casters, but now we have the oh-so-lovely "oh, you want choices? Here, YOU CAN BE A CASTER TOO" thing, almost doubling down on the "casting is for choices, non-casting is for if you abhor choices."Heck, even the Warlock is like that--the choices are just ones you have to make at character creation/development rather than on the battlefield. (I still haven't gotten over the irony of the supposedly-"simpler" caster being dramatically more dependent on optimization than the supposedly-"complex" ones.)My experience of 5e, such as it is, has been that it hews to whatever extremes were taken in prior editions. Occasionally it incorporates something more modern, e.g. at-will abilities, but always in a way that more closely resembles the old extreme rather than the new one (only casters have at-will abilities).[/sblock]Moon Druid, Devotion Paladin, Tempest Cleric, soon-to-be-Beast Master Ranger, and myself (Valor Bard). Often, a self-debate about whether to use a spell slot comes up for every character but the Ranger, and that's mostly because the Ranger's player doesn't really like spells that much (but likes the "spell-less" Ranger even less). But then they end up just regular-attacking anyway, or in the Cleric's case, attack + that bonus action storm thingy.Yeah, when I asked the DM about it, I pointed out basically that--more to learn, but we'll survive much better--and he more or less said "nah it'll be fine." I think he may be regretting that decision now. I've also noticed he tends to generously round XP now, whereas he didn't so much in the first few sessions, so he might be subtly trying to push us past this "hump" without an overt "I'mma do it my way" solution.As for the RAW, my problem pretty much lies in your "almost." It may be intended for the book to be overtly and eternally second-place to the DM's preferences...but what about when the DM's preferences are "don't change what the book says"? I know for a fact that, even when he's found a particular effect unfortunate, he's gone with it unless I convince him that that's not what the book says. (Specific example: an enemy with Multiattack making an Opportunity Attack against one of my party-mates, where the second attack crit. I told him Multiattack doesn't apply to OAs, and he was adamant that it did until I provided a page reference and he checked the book himself, even though he openly lamented doing so much damage to the character in question.)I cannot claim to know my DM's mind. He and I have...very different ways of thinking. But my experience has, as I've said, been "a fight without at least one character at 0 HP, and rolling death saves unless healed, almost never happens." It may be because of his other 5e group, which started a month or two before ours; apparently, they have repeatedly tackled above-level challenges and come out relatively unscathed, despite also beginning at level 1. Since this group was my DM's first 5e group, perhaps he got a mistaken first impression that low-level 5e characters are substantially more robust than they really are?What's the point of having the early levels be so nail-bitingly dangerous if you, as DM, are "supposed" to walk on eggshells until things aren't dangerous? Kind of paints "DM empowerment" in a funny light, too--you can do whatever you want, but unless you're being perverse, you should want to do X.Also, whoever said the lethality stops at 2nd level? That's the level we nearly TPK'd (and my character did actually die).</blockquote>

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