thecasualoblivion
First Post
I'm going to compare it to three other games I prefer and am familiar with, and I'm going to leave out 3.X as in my opinion play experience varied as much table to table as it does for entire systems.
Combat--Combat in 5E goes by fast, often in 2-3 rounds. Monsters hit pretty hard, which is necessary to threaten PCs in a 2-3 round fight. The giants in the current adventure can more or less two-shot anybody. Combat goes by so fast that 2-3 bad rolls in a row and you find that you didn't accomplish anything or you find yourself a bloody pulp on the floor. With BA, these rolls tend to be somewhat close to 50-50 and 2-3 round losing streaks are common. In 2E, things were different. Monsters didn't hit as hard. Fighters tended to have big numbers that would blow bounded accuracy out of the water. You didn't see the losing streaks you see in 5E. Magic was more powerful and more decisive as a rule, and tended more towards "I win" buttons where 5E magic while powerful is still a coin flip. 4E had its own sort of bounded accuracy, but combat was designed to go 5-6 rounds so it evened out in the long run. 2-3 bad rolls in a row wasn't necessarily decisive. Leader role healing mitigated random accidents, and good tactics could mostly keep you out of trouble. World of Darkness isn't as combat focused a game as D&D, but if you wanted to be good at it you could spend the character points to be good at it and/or spend resources like blood or willpower in combat and stack the math in your favor.
Non-combat--I feel the sting of BA more here than in combat to be honest. Too often things seem to come down to a single skill roll, with a relatively high chance of non-success. That or there isn't much of a penalty for failure and the entire party rolls and somebody almost always rolls high, which kind of trivializes things. The skill/check system is kind of featured in the PHB to an extent that I'm less eager to throw it out entirely, like I/we often did with 2E. Non-combat magic seems less potent and in my experience less often used than was my experience with 2E and 3E. 5E tends to be magic item light so there isn't much help there either. In 2E, the groups I played with generally just played free-form, rarely rolling dice. NWPs were more of a declarative statement about what you were good at. Thief skills got rolled, but even a low level Thief could specialize in a few skills after a couple of levels and could use them with confidence. Magic items were IME more common, and certainly more powerful than in 5E, and often were a main focus of exploration and other non-combat scenarios. DMs were more comfortable handing out as many as necessary to run the sort of game they were looking for. Non-combat magic seemed more decisive, and seemed to be used more often. 4E's non-combat was focused on its skill system, and it was less subject to bounded accuracy than 5E. It was trivial to specialize(to a greater degree than in 5E) in a few skills your stats matched up with, to the point where moderately difficult tasks stopped being coin flips. In addition, the skill challenge system was there to mostly to avoid the one roll success/failure situation. Non-combat in World of Darkness was similar to combat. If you wanted to be good at something, you invested character points and stacked the math in your favor. You could spend blood/willpower to further stack the odds. In addition, World of Darkness had resources/merits, one of my favorite game mechanics of all time, where you could apply resources to solve problems.
