D&D 4E D&D Fluff Wars: 4e vs 5e

[Chaosmancer]

No. While D&D's hp and d20 resolution core systems make DPR the centerpiece for combat and skill checks the centerpiece for the other two pillars, they, clearly, do not exclude the possibility of other mechanisms. Sub-systems like spells, ki, rituals, and maneuvers make that clear enough, and there are also individual examples. The thing is, those sub-systems and individual mechanics are heavily skewed towards spell-casting concepts. Other forms of supernatural power, and the obvious alternative of extraordinary but still natural ('natural' within the context of heroes in a fantasy genre setting) abilities, have barely been developed.

There's a great deal of unexplored design space there.

I think I'm just tired, but I'm confused by your response.

I was talking about Damage and skills being the major two things that non-casters should be good at. How, thinking on it, I couldn't really think of other things that famous non-casters could do. A party of Fighters and Rogues formed from those famous people was then put into a fun little example.

Your response starts with saying that Damage and Skills don't exclude other systems (I agree with that) then mentions Ki (midway through magic and mundane), Spells and Rituals (aren't they the same thing?) and manuevers (mundane clearly) as examples of other subsystems that exist.

I followed up to about there, when I lost you.

I think it is the last sentence, that there are other systems that rely on other powers and extraordinary feats that we don't have designed yet.

I can't disagree with that, their could be a few things like that, but it seems to side-step the point I was putting forth.

If I wrote a story about a strong warrior type and his roguish femme fatale friend, isn't everything you would expect from that story covered by the Battlemaster Fighter and Assassin Rogue? Their skills, their fighting capabilities, their infiltration abilities. Like you said, d20's and skills make up the vast majority of Combat, Exploration, and Social pillars, so what is that team lacking mechanically that they are going to have narratively?

There are no good frightful presence abilities or stances I suppose for our warrior, but that depends on translating the combat on a map to the combat of the story, and stances are often not a major focus of the literature except to explain how much better a warrior your character is compared to the hordes he is fighting.

The lady rogue has everything I could imagine her having.

This is my confusion. I understand D&D heavily prioritizes magic, and they've added a lot of problems best solved by magic, but I don't see a glaring omission in the mundane classes. I suppose Inspiring the Troops is hard, but that's because the narrative moment involves morale of the troops, and morale isn't something we have a system for anymore, we don't really do battles massive enough to warrant it often I think.

Sure, we could make an Inspiring Leader class who takes the bards inspiration and song of rest abilities, combines them with some paladins auras and does so all with no magic, but would that be seen as a necessary addition, or unnecessarily stepping into the places of other classes and taking their abilities?

 

[Parmandur]

I think I'm just tired, but I'm confused by your response.

I was talking about Damage and skills being the major two things that non-casters should be good at. How, thinking on it, I couldn't really think of other things that famous non-casters could do. A party of Fighters and Rogues formed from those famous people was then put into a fun little example.

Your response starts with saying that Damage and Skills don't exclude other systems (I agree with that) then mentions Ki (midway through magic and mundane), Spells and Rituals (aren't they the same thing?) and manuevers (mundane clearly) as examples of other subsystems that exist.

I followed up to about there, when I lost you.

I think it is the last sentence, that there are other systems that rely on other powers and extraordinary feats that we don't have designed yet.

I can't disagree with that, their could be a few things like that, but it seems to side-step the point I was putting forth.

If I wrote a story about a strong warrior type and his roguish femme fatale friend, isn't everything you would expect from that story covered by the Battlemaster Fighter and Assassin Rogue? Their skills, their fighting capabilities, their infiltration abilities. Like you said, d20's and skills make up the vast majority of Combat, Exploration, and Social pillars, so what is that team lacking mechanically that they are going to have narratively?

There are no good frightful presence abilities or stances I suppose for our warrior, but that depends on translating the combat on a map to the combat of the story, and stances are often not a major focus of the literature except to explain how much better a warrior your character is compared to the hordes he is fighting.

The lady rogue has everything I could imagine her having.

This is my confusion. I understand D&D heavily prioritizes magic, and they've added a lot of problems best solved by magic, but I don't see a glaring omission in the mundane classes. I suppose Inspiring the Troops is hard, but that's because the narrative moment involves morale of the troops, and morale isn't something we have a system for anymore, we don't really do battles massive enough to warrant it often I think.

Sure, we could make an Inspiring Leader class who takes the bards inspiration and song of rest abilities, combines them with some paladins auras and does so all with no magic, but would that be seen as a necessary addition, or unnecessarily stepping into the places of other classes and taking their abilities?

Abstracted mass combat, with morale and all, is on the Unearthed Arcana docket...

 

[Remathilis]

The other thing the spellplague did was make FR into a 'Points of Light' setting. A wrecked place in a Dark Age with islands of civilization or Good here and there. That's a radical change from Elminster's old stomping ground. And, ultimately, IMHO, it was a mistake. While the generic default suggested that sort of setting, there was no need to conform past settings to it. Some were already fine for it, and nothing about the game made it unsuitable for other sorts of settings...

This is what happens when you prioritize mission statement over history.

The 4e design team created the notion of the "points of light" method of D&D and instantly fell in love with it. So it became their mission statement. The whole game had to be re-witten to accommodate it. So the default mode for D&D was built around this notion, almost to the exlcusion of any other style of play. Ergo, a world like Faerun, which was much more "points of darkness", had to be radically altered to align with their vision of what a D&D world is (PoL). I seriously think they thought PoL should be the way ALL D&D is played, so the Realms had to be rebooted to fit it.

 

[Parmandur]

This is what happens when you prioritize mission statement over history.



The 4e design team created the notion of the "points of light" method of D&D and instantly fell in love with it. So it became their mission statement. The whole game had to be re-witten to accommodate it. So the default mode for D&D was built around this notion, almost to the exlcusion of any other style of play. Ergo, a world like Faerun, which was much more "points of darkness", had to be radically altered to align with their vision of what a D&D world is (PoL). I seriously think they thought PoL should be the way ALL D&D is played, so the Realms had to be rebooted to fit it.

I mean, my college group was playing that style with the 3.x books and using the Greyhawk pantheon; it's away to play, but yeah, they went too "True Way" there.

 

[Igwilly]

Just to be clear: despite liking the Spellplague as an idea/event, I do not approve what they did to FR. I'm not a FR fan by any metric, and I think FR was a main factor on 4e's performance.

I suppose they could do the Spellplague in at least two other ways:
1) Alternative timeline: a "what if" scenario.
2) Creating another setting, then making the Spellplague the recent cataclysm.
I don't know if those would be popular, but it would be better solutions.

 

[Aldarc]

This is what happens when you prioritize mission statement over history.

The 4e design team created the notion of the "points of light" method of D&D and instantly fell in love with it. So it became their mission statement. The whole game had to be re-witten to accommodate it. So the default mode for D&D was built around this notion, almost to the exlcusion of any other style of play. Ergo, a world like Faerun, which was much more "points of darkness", had to be radically altered to align with their vision of what a D&D world is (PoL). I seriously think they thought PoL should be the way ALL D&D is played, so the Realms had to be rebooted to fit it.

I liked PoL/Nentir Vale, but I did not appreciate having it shoe-horned into pre-existing settings. Many settings did not even need to be readjusted for PoL-ness. The Sword Coast is essentially PoL-Land, as were both Dark Sun and Eberron. It's probably more difficult to name a D&D setting that isn't PoL. The PoL model would have been far more serviceable as a sample setting. I highly enjoyed, for example, Chris Perkin's Iomandra campaign setting for 4E that was about island-hopping and every island having its own dragon.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Abstracted mass combat, with morale and all, is on the Unearthed Arcana docket...

My group tried them, and they were not recieved well. Not sure if it was just handled badly or if they were just poorly thought out for interacting with DnD (spellcasters were a nightmare to run with concentration spells), but two different DMs, two different campaigns,and two different groups, and no one liked them. Those sessions were the weakest of their respective campaigns in a lot of ways.

 

[thanson02]

My group tried them, and they were not recieved well. Not sure if it was just handled badly or if they were just poorly thought out for interacting with DnD (spellcasters were a nightmare to run with concentration spells), but two different DMs, two different campaigns,and two different groups, and no one liked them. Those sessions were the weakest of their respective campaigns in a lot of ways.

Good to know. I will leave them out.

Sent from my XT1096 using Tapatalk

 

[Parmandur]

My group tried them, and they were not recieved well. Not sure if it was just handled badly or if they were just poorly thought out for interacting with DnD (spellcasters were a nightmare to run with concentration spells), but two different DMs, two different campaigns,and two different groups, and no one liked them. Those sessions were the weakest of their respective campaigns in a lot of ways.

No, new rules are being worked on now for a future UA, different approach apparently.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is what happens when you prioritize mission statement over history.

It's a risk you take, yes, and it blew up on them in that instance. It's not what /always/ happens, or no one would ever re-imagine or re-launch anything, ever. Shatner would still be playing Kirk. Marvel wouldn't be making movies.

The 4e design team created the notion of the "points of light" method of D&D and instantly fell in love with it. So it became their mission statement.

An interesting take on the 'why' of it. It rings true to my ears, but do you base it on anything beyond intuition?

The whole game had to be re-witten to accommodate it.

It clearly wasn't, since there were big chunks of the design that were at odds with the concept. OK, D&D mechanics and assumptions have always been pretty heavily tilted in the other direction. 1e training rules, for just one instance, prettymuch required that there be high-level NPCs out there, in numbers. 4e, like 3e, implied a world (or even universe) with remarkably liquid and well-developed markets for insanely expensive magic items, which was starkly at odds with the PoL concept. Even so, the game was more open to PC-centric storytelling, in general (though, really, turning on inherent bonuses starts to look like a really good idea if you start thinking through the implications of wealth/level & make/buy/sell for magic items).

a world like Faerun, which was much more "points of darkness", had to be radically altered to align with their vision of what a D&D world is (PoL). I seriously think they thought PoL should be the way ALL D&D is played, so the Realms had to be rebooted to fit it.

I think that must overstate it, and would, again, invite you to share any instances of insiders coming out and saying anything along those lines. But, even if that was their vision, they produced a system that could be used to play in a much wider variety of ways. Indeed, as I pointed out, above, there were sub-systems (not just magic items, Paragon Paths and Themes also often pointed to a world with large numbers of high-level adventurers, large/vibrant economies, and secure higher powers - fine for the sort of world that FR was before the spellplague) that strongly nudged the game in different directions.