D&D 4E Are powers samey?

[cbwjm]

I noticed that as well. A lot of space could have been saved by making the first few instances of powers just upgrade. That could have been the gimmick for the martial power source. Martials upgrade their exploits. Arcanist get new spells. Psionics augment their at wills with power points. Something something divine characters.

That would have been a good option for martial powers. I was actually looking for some examples to see if I actually was recalling the powers correctly. One example was steel serpent strike, level 1 fighter power that deals 2x weapon damage, slows and prevents shifting. The equivalent power at level 13 is talon of the roc which has 3x weapon damage and slows, but actually gets worse in that you need specific weapons to prevent shifting. If you're not using a pick or a spear and want to keep the rider effects over damage, it might be better to keep the level 1 power instead.

But really the same is in non4e D&D.
Why are fireball and delayed blast fireball 2 different spells? It's not as bad in 5e but 3e was full of "same spell but stronger". Then they had the nerve to sell you "same spell but different target or different damage type.". Is it all a scam to force my cheapskate wizard to research in books or buy more tweaked spells scrolls.

Red Grumpy: It's part of the gnomish conspiracy!

Oh yeah, I remember that from 3e. They had a lot of lesser, normal, greater spells for some reason. I recall in one book that had the various orbs of X damage type which had lesser and normal version. Only real difference is that higher level spell had an additional rider effect. And of course there are all of the various cure/inflict wounds spells. One thing I like about 5e is that they consolidated them all down to a single spell that scales with spell slot level.

 

[Minigiant]

That would have been a good option for martial powers. I was actually looking for some examples to see if I actually was recalling the powers correctly. One example was steel serpent strike, level 1 fighter power that deals 2x weapon damage, slows and prevents shifting. The equivalent power at level 13 is talon of the roc which has 3x weapon damage and slows, but actually gets worse in that you need specific weapons to prevent shifting. If you're not using a pick or a spear and want to keep the rider effects over damage, it might be better to keep the level 1 power instead.

Many of them weren't blanket vanilla upgrades of old powers but but spells that added restrictions or more bonuses to the power.

Had they had upgrading powers, either they eould require you to burn a power upgrade on them (which is annoying to write the words for), or the free upgrade would have to be accounted for in character power budgets (balance math). They where trying to avoid quadratic wizard syndrome from 3e, where you gained a linear number of powers each of linear strength.

Each new upgrade gave you one unit of power upgrade. If low level powers auto-upgraded to be on par, you could bump a different power up and break the budget a bit. It would probably still work, but the concern is valid.

I think that would have been fine for spells and prayers. But I think the power sameyness issue came in because they did the same thing for martial and later primal. It wasn't tweaked until psionics.

I think if the designers had each power source do AEDU differently, the backlash might have lessened. Could have made fighters deal 1W more damage with E exploits at level 11 and just kep the first few. By every class until PHB3 use the same AEDU structure wth no explanation, a big change was allowed with no framework for the collective imagination. 4e needed another year of development.

 

[pemerton]

The common thread I'm seeing here is the primacy of the combat pillar in 4E. It is a fact that A, E, and D are all attack powers, and I can see how a repeated focus on combat over several game sessions can make the play experience seem samey.

I have a conjecture about this that I'm happy to share.

As far as I can tell (from reading modules, and reading threads, seeing how people describe their play) the default appproach to D&D is highly GM-driven, where the fundamental job of the players is to work out what the story is that the GM has established but not simply revealed to them, and then to follow clues/leads that come out of their emerging knowledge so as to make the right choices that will lead to the conclusion.

In this sort of play, combat is not usually a device for driving "the story" forward, because it usually does not involve working anything out about the story the GM has established.

My own view is that 4e D&D is extremely ill-suited to this style of RPGing. Its high degree of player "empowerment" (eg say "yes"-type play, player-authored quests, etc) pushes against tight GM control over the plot. And its emphasis on combat as a pre-eminent mode of conflict resolution begs for combat to be a, perhaps the, primary mode of driving "the story" forward. (For a good model of how this can work, see any Marvel comic from c 1970 to c 1990; ot a number of REH Conan stories, though comics are better models for D&D because of the team aspect in many of them.) This is just one reason why I agree with @Zardnaar that "4E couldn't be played like 3.5 no matter how hard you tried."

4e has U and vastly impactful skills and SC ...so I say meh to 5es other pillar purported emphasis.

With fairly solid skill system, support for skill challenges, and less arbitrary "I win" capabilities restricted to only specific classes, I would ask rather what 5e should learn from 4e in that respect.

I agree with these points - one reason I have little interest in 5e D&D is that I don't think it offers very much for out-of-combat resolution. In my view 4e D&D is the best version of D&D for this.

But I still think it's the case that, in 4e, the pre-eminent mode of combat resolution is combat. This is manifested in PC stat blocks (not all combat, but it's the biggest thing), NPC and monster stat blocks (the same), not to mention the general thrust of the default fiction (ancient wars, epic struggles, etc).

And yes, I'm aware that attack powers can - as hinted at in the DMG, and further elaborated in the DMG2 - be used to modify skill checks in various ways. That's been a common feature of my 4e play, though I think my group is probably atypical in this respect. (We also see a lot of ritual use, which seems to be atypical.) And I'm not saying it would be impossible to run a 4e game that was overwhelmingly non-combat conflict resolved via skill challenges. But at that point, I personally would be wondering why we're not playing HeroQuest revised instead.

Given all this, I think it's a pity that the 4e DMG has lots of (very good) advice about the technical/mechanical aspects of combat encounter design, but has very little useful to say about how to use combat encounters as drivers of an unfolding fiction. (The Worlds and Monsters preview volume was better at this than the DMG, but still not excellent.)

 

[pemerton]

due to having different classes on different recharge timers, not every combat plays the same. It is not: always start with encounterpower 1, followup woth daily 1 if needed, then add encounter power 2.

I've seen this sort of thing posted before. It's different from my experience, in two sense:

(1) In my group's long period of 4e play, the pattern you describe didn't emerge. Players would make choices about which powers to use based on their assessment of enemies, terrain, whether they need to hold anything in reserve for possibl reinforcements, etc.

(2) To the extent that each player might have a "favourite" or signature encounter power (eg for the fighter undoubtedly his AoE, be it the 3rd level one, or CaGI, or it's higher level variant), that didn't seem any different to me from other fantasy RPGs I've played where players of casters have their favourite spell, or (in Rolemaster) the player of a warrior has a favoured attack pattern, or whatever.

Have different classes' powers recharge on different schedule.

This took me back to this post (and some of its follow-ups) from FrogReaver:

In 5e the differences in your barbarian, fighter, rogue, ranger and paladin are in plain view.

They all have different resources and vastly different benefits from expending those resources (even though most translate roughly into the same math damage value under "ideal" circumstances)

For me, resource recovery pacing seems like an important aspect of a wargame but much less important in a RPG. Particularly if - as tend to be the case in post-Gygaxian D&D play - the GM is mostly in control of pacing (eg s/he gets to decide when it's nightfall, if a group of ninjas burst into the bedroom, etc), it just seems to invite a degree of arbitrariness for players to have different recovery schedules.

Differentiation of characters, for me, is much more about their relationship to and impact on the fiction, than the rate at which their players regain resources.

5e on the other hand places major uniqueness outside slight variations to the same unified mechanics. Instead each class ends up with it's own unique mechanics that nearly no one else can replicate even if there are certain unified mechanics across the game.

But do they produce unique fictions? Or just unique die-rolling experiences?

Nearly every type of effect you could have in a 4e fighter can be had in a 5e one. Some effects might be greater, some less. Some might not get coupled with damage the same way. But nearly every effect is there.

Do 5e fighters get AoEs like 4e ones? With the implications for battlefield control (via marking)?

 

[pemerton]

No. That is not my point. Not at all.
It is the dynamic of having to use 3 encounter powers or they are wasted.
You can refluff them as you want. In combat every class was "when is the best time to use my three powers..." And most of the time the answer was immediately or you risk to waste them by not using them...

But if the encounter - for whatever reasons - ends before you used such-and-such an encounter power, what's the big deal? There's no cost. And you'll likely get to use it next time.

Even at epic tier we saw a lot of at-will usage: Twin Strike, obviously; from the paladin and ranger, who tend to emphasise off-turn encounter powers; from the invoker/wizard, if the situation doesn't suit use of an AoE encounter power; and from the sorcerer, who has a super-buffed Blazing Starfall. Even the fighter uses Footwork Lure quite a bit, as one manifestation of polearm hijinks.

fights were so finely tuned you really had to try and ink out every advantage possible.

This is such a long way from my experience with 4e I actually find it quite incredible. 4e is, by quite a margin, the most forgiving more-or-less "traditional" RPG I've ever played. Far more than B/X or AD&D (which are especially unforgiving at low levels), or sim-ish systems like RM and RQ and Traveller.

The game you guys are describing does sound a bit sucky, but it also sounds pretty different from my own experiences with 4e.

 

[pemerton]

I remember looking through powers to convert to 5e and thinking that some higher level powers just looked like lower level powers but with bigger numbers. I think it would have been better to simply allow lower level powers to scale every so often, it may have saved some space.

Sure, I think this is uncontroversial. But is also mostly a point about presentation - it makes no actual difference to play whether Warrior's Urging is a new power that you take at the time you train out Come and Get It, or instead if at that time your CaGI it upgrades to have the same bigger numbers as Warrior's Urging.

EDIT: OK, so @NotAYakk has shown how it could be controversial eg because of its interaction with the retraining rules. So a bit more than just notational variant. But still, if that's key to same-yness it doesn't seem that big a deal. The characters are no more same-y than if they just take a few signature abilities and get better at them.

 

[Garthanos]

Do 5e fighters get AoEs like 4e ones? With the implications for battlefield control (via marking)?

In 4e a level 1 at-will power that lets you attack one enemy and mark every adjacent one at the end of a charge even for instance nothing like it in 5e not even for the Cavalier.

The hand cuffs come down to this.

"Nods the fighter lacks anything but a very simplistic scale (more attacks)... aka the maneuvers are not level gated leaving 1 with minor affects against 1 target the whole career. (without spending all resources for each target) "

 

[Xetheral]

To me, I don't paricularly care whether you prefer 4E to 5E or vice-versa. I'd just like to seek some clarity for my intellectual satisfaction:

1. If you are of the view that the 4E classes feel the same because of the identical AEDU power structure, do the 5E bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer and wizard classes also feel the same because they have exactly the same spells per day at every level? If not, why not?

2. If you are of the view that the 4E powers feel the same because they are mostly damage plus effect, do the 5e Battlemaster fighter maneuvers also feel the same because they are mostly add superiority die to damage plus effect? If not, why not?

3. If you are of the view that 4E Leader classes feel the same because they heal in the same way, do the 5e bard, cleric and druid classes also feel the same because they are pretty much using the same healing spells (e.g. cure wounds, healing word)? If not, why not?

1. While don't find the 5e classes you mention to feel the same (due to differences in other features), I do find their spellcasting feature to feel the same. I'm perfectly ok with that, however, because "spells" operate consistently in the fiction, so I want the mechanical representation to feel the same.

By contrast, swinging a sword and casting a spell are wildly different things in the fiction, yet 4e powers nevertheless model them identically. The mechanical representations feel the same even though the underlying IC activities are different. That's why I (personally) find it problematic that 4e powers feel the same even though I'm fine with 5e spells feeling the same.

2. As above, I do think 5e Battlemaster manuevers feel the same, and I'm fine with it because they are also similar to each other in the fiction.

The common thread I'm seeing here is the primacy of the combat pillar in 4E. It is a fact that A, E, and D are all attack powers, and I can see how a repeated focus on combat over several game sessions can make the play experience seem samey.

I would expand this slightly: it's not just that A, E, and D powers are attack powers, but they're (almost) all designed to be used to try to win combat after initiative is rolled. So they emphasize tactical combat. By contrast, many abilities in other editions could be used to try to win (or obviate) combat at the strategic level before initiative is rolled. 4e A, E, and D powers thus cover a narrower range of abilities on the tactical/strategic axis than can be found in other editions (and, arguably, U powers don't make up the difference). Covering a narrower range than one is used to can make something feel the same no matter how much diversity is exhibited within that narrower range.

 

[Minigiant]

I would expand this slightly: it's not just that A, E, and D powers are attack powers, but they're (almost) all designed to be used to try to win combat after initiative is rolled. So they emphasize tactical combat. By contrast, many abilities in other editions could be used to try to win (or obviate) combat at the strategic level before initiative is rolled. 4e A, E, and D powers thus cover a narrower range of abilities on the tactical/strategic axis than can be found in other editions (and, arguably, U powers don't make up the difference). Covering a narrower range than one is used to can make something feel the same no matter how much diversity is exhibited within that narrower range.

The other part is rituals

4e more or less formalized the idea of rituals being out of combat magic that uses seperate resources from your in combat magic. 4e exemplified the idea of siloing in D&D.

Your strategic aspect was U powers for time sensitive actions and rituals for major plans.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Powers are not samey. But after a few levels, classic AEDU became samey in practise.
We stopped thinking about aour story and only though about when it is the best time to unleash encounter and/or daily powers.

I think 4E essentials did a much better job presenting the classes and made them feel different. Also taking away daily and partially encounter powers allowed to focus more on the actual story.

On problem still stayed: combat was too strategic to embed it in a 2-3 hour session of DnD. It made a fun minigame, but that was not what we wanted to do in those few hours.

This is exactly it, and exactly why I love essentials 4e. People who see the presentation and it all becomes samey for them, can look at essentials classes and see unique ability progressions by level, some mostly at-will classes, some with daily powers that pretend not to be powers (like executioner poisons), or a single encounter power that just gets more powerful, etc, and they see (and I don’t grok how) a less samey game.
Meanwhile, others like me see classes that literally have less actual differentiation, but are perfectly fun for the folks who like them. And I like some of the classes, too! A Slayer Fighter is boring as hell, but the Thief Rogue is cool with its move powers that change how your basic attack works, and the Hexblade and executioner are great!