D&D (2024) Do you plan to adopt D&D5.5One2024Redux?

[Warpiglet-7]

or the secret third option of 'that was just the background that was most apropriate considering my character's backstory'

I want to roleplay as a pirate but don’t expect this to be a pirate campaign is my modal observation.

Close behind is I like perception or whatever. In most of my games backgrounds are..in the background.

Honestly criminal background characters in my experience make mention of their history and proceed to pick locks…I don’t see too many running to safe houses or getting hooked into a new racket.

It’s cool if people lean in but I don’t generally see that a great deal

 

[soviet]

How does that quote go? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result?

I keep posting this but no-one listens

 

[Hussar]

so what are you saying here? '4e had great mechanics for keeping things running smoothly but people didn't like the explainations for why the mechanics were there'? (genuinely asking for clarification here)

Pretty accurate.

 

[Hussar]

Nothing to do with a positive 4e comment. You cited a bunch of stuff as 4e innovations that weren’t. That’s why you got pushback, not because you said something good about 4e.

Saying AEDU isn’t neo-vanician isn’t edition waring.

Saying 4e is DnD World of Warcraft, however, is.

 

[soviet]

You can state that you liked the game without insulting a lack of imagination.

I don't mean it as an insult. I appreciate it can be taken as one. But I do think it's true that some people find it easier to improvise these kinds of contexts than others, and that it can have an impact on how natural or believable such abilities feel in play.

 

[Hussar]

Yet funnily enough, it’s perfectly acceptable to say you don’t like a game while claiming those that do lack imagination.

 

[Oofta]

I don't mean it as an insult. I appreciate it can be taken as one. But I do think it's true that some people find it easier to improvise these kinds of contexts than others, and that it can have an impact on how natural or believable such abilities feel in play.

Whether you mean it as such, saying that people lack imagination or improv ability to make something work is also an insult.

I simply didn't like the way the game worked. Could I come up with an excuse for how something functioned? Obviously. But it would be an excuse papering over a style of play I grew to dislike. When I play my characters, I envision what they are doing. My fighter turning into Taz from Loony Tunes when he turned on rain of steel was a nice feature from a gameplay point of view, it was terrible for my sense of inhabiting a believable character in a fantasy world.

 

[soviet]

But that's really the issue. For some of us, we could clearly visualize what the power was doing, and didn't need the extra bits. Others really wanted to know "hey, how does this power even work??!!111" and there was...very little. Why did it work without all the things Oofta mentioned that would definitely have been in the ability in almost every other edition? Why does it work on mindless undead and avatars of dead gods? Because it says so, and that's the same with just about every other thing in 4e.

Now, there's something to be said about abilities that don't have a million caveats about what they can be used against. Take for example 3e's Sneak attack. It's "precision-based damage" so it can't be multiplied on a crit. Doesn't work against undead or constructs or oozes (I think?) or elementals, who in strict defiance of their art and minis "have no discernible back or front", or even sometimes against creatures who had too many eyes (all-around vision) or were inexplicably, Rogues 5 levels higher than you were. Can't be part of a "volley" attack. Needed clarifications on whether or not it worked with some spells (something I had DM's reject outright as a matter of course). In fact it was the areas where it wasn't limited that got the most scrutiny, like DM's who insisted it was "once per turn" and "you can't Sneak Attack with a greatsword"!

Now contrast and compare Sneak Attack in 5e. Yes, it can only be used once a turn. No, you can't use it with a Greatsword. But when you meet it's requirements (have advantage or don't have disadvantage when attacking someone adjacent to an ally who isn't incapacitated) it works. You don't have to ask if you can crit with it. Or if it works on random strange creature #852. It does.

And there's a lot less argument about it. People (mostly) accept that this is the Rogue's method of dealing damage and their means of contributing in a fight. But removing all the "grey areas" from the rules is going to invite these questions- we see it actually even in 5e now, where the designers don't explicitly define things like what "teleport" means or whether or not a hemisphere has a floor, and multiple page thread debates arise over it. And even if some developer weighs in via a tweet (or X or whatever you call it now), a lot of people still disagree, lol.

4e told us we don't have to quibble about the details. But it turned out, for a lot of people, the fun was in the details. They like knowing things like "you can't charm a zombie" (even though, inexplicably, you can in 5e). That fireballs are somewhat inexact, being spheres in a world of cubes. And what mystical words one needs to mumble to cast magic missile. Oh and being able to rely on things like "magic missile always hits" even if it turns out to be better that it doesn't, lol.

I don't disagree. I think if you're a player that likes filling in those kind of gaps in the rules text with a cool description of your own, especially where an explanation of some kind is probably needed (e.g. Come and Get It), then the powers in 4e are a pretty cool platform for that kind of improvisation. Ditto with skill challenges really.

If you're a player that struggles with that kind of extemporaneous detail, or doesn't like it, then they can feel a bit flat or lacking in plausibility. We definitely had a couple of players who regularly just said things like 'I cast X spell" and before they reached for their dice I'd have to say 'well hang on, what does that look like to our characters?'.

For sure the way that powers are presented in the text is very dry and can make it seem like that sort of flat mechanical use is what's expected. It's been a long time since I read the books but I don't recall there being a lot of guidance about how to add some appropriate flavour to them in use.

 

[tetrasodium]

Going to have to disagree: telling a Rogue player that his one big combat trick only works against half the monsters in the game didn't sound like a good thing to me then or now.

It was FAR less than half. The clause was only living creatures with discernible anatomies—undead, constructs, oozes, plants, and incorporeal creatures lack vital areas to attack". All of those are a type (ie ooze, construct, etc) rather than subtype(ie air/fire, lawful/evil etc) so there's no reason to look at the subtypes. The creature types in 3.5 mm are Aberration, Animal, construct, dragon, Elemental, humanoid, magical beast, monstrous humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, Vermin. The underlined ones are able to ignore sneak attack but the vast a good chunk of them are pretty freaking rare to use (ie constructs oozes &plants). Out of that chunk the ones you do tend to see with enough regularity that a phase like "Yea we fought one in a campaign once" is because it was memorable to fight a marut/badass treant/etc. Excluding those one off monsters you are left with a bunch of fairly easy minions (ie most constructs) & spicy monsters with a gimmick (ie the vast majority of level appropriate oozes). The only real sneak/precision immune type that is common to encounter is the undead type & the vast majority of those are mooks likely to be found with a sneak/precision affected necromancer/summoner or are scary badass monsters like the lich & wraith that often extended their scariness through the 4th wall & across the gm screen.

Even if it was a mostly undead campaign for whatever reason there were feats & magic items that could allow sneak/precision against a sneak/precision ignoring creature type If a rogue is encountering sneak/precision immune creatures with any regularity it's probably a sign that A: they are doing something that the GM is negatively reacting to for whatever reason (ie: Bob's incredible CharOp PC at a table of not so optimized PCs bob is still far ahead of), B: In something like an undead heavy campaign sharing a boat with the pyromancer who showed up to a plane of fire campaign, or C: faced with a newer/not so skilled GM who doesn't realize the problem & still has more to learn

 

[Oofta]

I don't disagree. I think if you're a player that likes filling in those kind of gaps in the rules text with a cool description of your own, especially where an explanation of some kind is probably needed (e.g. Come and Get It), then the powers in 4e are a pretty cool platform for that kind of improvisation. Ditto with skill challenges really.

If you're a player that struggles with that kind of extemporaneous detail, or doesn't like it, then they can feel a bit flat or lacking in plausibility. We definitely had a couple of players who regularly just said things like 'I cast X spell" and before they reached for their dice I'd have to say 'well hang on, what does that look like to our characters?'.

For sure the way that powers are presented in the text is very dry and can make it seem like that sort of flat mechanical use is what's expected. It's been a long time since I read the books but I don't recall there being a lot of guidance about how to add some appropriate flavour to them in use.

So you really don't get how insulting the bolded is, do you? The issues I, and 95% of the people I played 4E with had nothing at all to do with how the powers were represented. It definitely had nothing to do with the fact that we weren't intelligent or creative enough to come up with explanations.