Yeah, 4E in particular had the heavy hand of the game designer. It had a very Lawful Neutral design philosophy IMO. I feel much more able to tweak or alter both 3E and 5E, but the intricacies and degree of pre-definition of 4E made me really reticent to do much of anything except make up a few monsters and items.
Complete agreement, here. I used extensive variants for 1e, and at least some in 3e (though 3e had it's own challenges, due to the overwhelming complexity of the later system, and the sense of 'player entitlement' that enshrined RAW and dismissed house rules out of hand), while 4e, like you, I stuck to making/modding monsters and magic items. The main reason was that there was little impetuse to use-rule, add or mod anything on the player side, it was all prettymuch balanced/playable, and whatever a player wanted could probably be built 'off the shelf,' with a little re-skinning (players explicitly being allowed to re-skin everything on a power but it's keywords, for instance), so no DM intervention was required there. That and elaborating on Skill Challenges, of course.
5e got me back into the swing of running in an improvisational style, which I hadn't realized how much I'd missed after, really, giving up on DMing with 3.5, because it was just too much work, and 'phoning it in' with 4e, because it was, at the opposite extreme, almost /too/ easy. Heck, when I run 4e, now, I tend to run it more improv, and little prep, in spite of how easy the prep is, just because I can squeeze out that little extra bit of fun that way.
(2) When I started a thread to check whether or not 5e players/GMs thought that fire-type spells could set things alight, many answered no - that only if the spell description said so could it happen.
Contrast 4e, which - in the DMG - points out that the function of keywords is to clearly convey what is going on in the fiction (so eg a gauze curtain or stack of books might take more damage from fire effects).
To be fair (a) don't 5e fire spells usually mention they can start fires (typically they did in the classic game) and (b) 5e's all about Rulings Not Rules, so if you're not ruling whether a fire spell (or lightning spell, for that matter) sets something on fire, you're just "not doin' it right."
;P
I find it quite the opposite. The 4e description of the Fireball spell is very close to the Moldvay Basic one. Whereas the AD&D description, and 3E description, are full of stuff (about blast pressure; about volume; about setting things alight and melting gold; etc) which are obviously rulings from various TSR GM's games, which are now being served up to the play community as rules. It's karaoke.
Whereas 4e leaves it up to each table to decide eg how hard is it for a spell that deals cold damage to freeze a puddle? Or for another spell that does fire damage to melt it again.
How important is that, really? Mostly, I'd think you could leave that sort of thing up to the spell's little itallic flavor description - which the player had liscence to change.
I said "in function" and...
And I said, no, not even "in function." Consider the actual function of a caster in the classic game. A 1st level magic-user had 1 spell/'day' (more like 4hrs & 15min, depending on how your DM interpreted the rules), and only knew three besides the obligatory Read Magic. IIF one of those happend to be Sleep, he could trivialize a single encounter with level-appropriate enemies that were vulnerable to it - having done that, he threw darts. His function was to make a huge difference to the party in one fairly common sort of circumstance, and fade into irrellevance the rest of the time - while still hazarding his life to an absurd degree. As he gained levels and spells, he could trivialize more sorts of encoutners (and other challenges) more times/day (and eventually the party & their challenges would out-grow 'Sleep'), and could also have spells left over for convenience or creative uses and/or to enable whole adventures so his function expanded a great deal to not only defeating more & more of the day's challenges but to bringing the party into position to even face them in the first place, but, still, when he did finally run out of applicable spells, he was reduced to very lacklustre basic contributions -maybe with a Staff of Striking or Wand of Magic Missles, by this point. At high level he could, with sufficient DM conniavance, make character-re-defining magic items for himself or members of his party, and rarely ran out of spells (though the time it would take him to prepare a whole slate made the 'per day' aproximation overly generous!), his function was whatever he decided he wanted it to be.
No class in 4e came close to that(those) function(s). Rather, function in the party was mainly a matter of Role, and the role of the traditional Vancian caster - the Wizard - was unique in the PH (as was his Vancian casting), that of 'Controller.'
Of course, litteral Vancian casting had prettymuch gone away by 3.0, and even before then 'memorization' was often replaced with the less bizarre 'preparation' (if not with utterly broken 'spell point' systems). Still, "in function," D&D 'pepped' (Tier 1) casting was the same as old-school Vancian memorization: at the beginning of the day, you picked a slate of spells from those available to your class (or in your book), choosing both the spells you'd be able to cast that day, and how often you'd be able to cast each of them, leaving you only with the decision of when to cast each one that day.
In 4e, /only/ the wizard retained that dynamic (though not the function, really, his dailies weren't powerful enough at any level for that), though he never really exceeded the function available to a low-mid ("sweet spot") magic-user in 1e (maybe a 3rd-8th level). But, the 4e wizard was still arguably Vancian. He did still prepare his Daily and Utility spells each morning. He just prepared each 'stot' from a much more limited set of alternatives.
To put it more succinctly, the 4e wizard wasn't imbalanced, overpowered or even arguably 'Tier 1.'
That's the part many people really didn't like, myself included. All right if you'd rather, it's high-power, limited use powers. I'm willing to buy it for casters, to some degree, but it really bugged me for martial characters. Various people came up with post hoc rationalizations "Think of it as picking your moment to shine" or other things, but ultimately until Essentials the martial classes felt weird and wrong to me.
I'd "rather" characterize encounter & daily powers as limited-user abilities, rather than spells, because that's what they, in fact, were. And, it's not a post-hoc rationalization. Powers were designed from the ground up to model genre as well as grandfather in D&Disms like clerical glowy healing and Vancian wizardry, albeit in less-game-wrecking forms.
In genre, a hero will pull some cunning trick, make some heroic effort, invoke some magical power, or whatever - maybe once, at the climax of the story, maybe once before that as foreshadowing, maybe several times to establish his bonnefides as a mighty warrior, mage, or whatever - what he won't do is button-mash his best trick against every enemy, every time. There are many possible ways to model that in an RPG, and Vancian 'memorization' is perhaps among the very worst, but D&D went with it (and has been backing away from it ever since!), a combination of routine 'at wills,' establishing short-rest-recharge 'encoutners,' and dramatic 'dailies,' is arguably not among the worst. It's pretty darn abstract, compared to creating separate sub-systems that, say, let a fencing master 'create openings' or condition opponents to pull off a finsihing move at one point in a given duel, or to let a mage 'gather power' while deflecting/absorbing an impetuous enemy's flashy attacks until he has enough to pull off some great working of arcane might, or let a devout knight stand against the brutal onslaught of a superhuman monster only to have his faith and perserverence rewarded with miraculous victory at the end. But, abstraction is a price worth paying for playabilty, in a game, IMHO.
All editions of D&D do pay that same price, some just get better deals for it than others...
I was much happier with stances, which I think was a clever idea that really should have been kept in 5E and used more for a number of characters. The limited resource in this case is the choice of which stance you're in. IMO this would work great for the bard rather than being a full spellcaster, where different songs work as different stances.
That's not really a limited resource (in 4e, stances were typically dailies, becuase an encounter stance would've been all-encounter, every-encounter, and at-will stances would've had to have been trivial for the power available to unlimitted resources - as the Knight/Slayer demonstrated).
(Yes, I really dislike the general Vancian "fire and forget" mentality applied broadly. I'm OK with it as being part of how D&D functions for some class types like the wizard and as a compromise for priests, but absolutely don't want an extension of it.)
It wasn't an extention of it, it was a repudiation of Vancian, only the wizard remained Vancian.
IMO that's fine because it's an actual part of the class's backplot and exists in the game world: "You're a fighter who's learned a bit of magic on the side."
You could do that in 4e, too, just MC to Wizard, for instance. The concept of using spells is not, by it's nature, related to the limitation of being able to do something only once before needing to rest in order to do it again. It's only the long association of D&D Vancian magic that created that disconnect for you.
Yeah, that's often an issue. The benefit of savoring things you don't have but are building towards versus having too many options or having options that are empty ones due to foes being immune to them. IME, high level fighter types were still quite valuable in 3E, though, but that required a savvy player and the DM making things work, whereas 4E is much more relentlessly game balanced, so much so that I often felt the heavy hand of the game designer.
Spin it all you want, what you just said was that 4e was a better game than 3e. You weren't wrong. Not in fact, and not in spin.
A high-level fighter in the classic game was his magic items, period. A high level fighter in 3e, if it followed one of only a couple of build types, could retain a degree of entertaining tactical relevance in some combats (even most, if the DM leaned a certain way and/or players of casters exercised retraint), but was, overall, increasinly irrellevant to the campaign. 3e's sweet spot topped out at 10th, if not 6th (pre-Polymporph-errata, particularly). E6 was a great idea for some very solid mechanical reasons.
There were two "fighter math" problems. The harder one was figuring out when to Power Attack and if so by how much. (Best to just make it a default value and call it a day rather than "dial a yield.") The other was just the burden of rolling all those dice and doing a bunch of two digit arithmetic. Some people just stink at that and often won't be willing to learn the kinds of strategies that lead to speed up, such as learning to group dice in groups of fives and tens.
Those are both pretty minor, really. An easy rule of thumb for the former is "don't power attack when you full attack, otherwise, PA 5." The idea is that the vast majority of enemies at high level are going to be calibrated so that rogues & such, and fighter second itterative attacks, hit pretty dependably, while additional itterative attacks are dicey, so if you move, Spring Attack/WWA, or expect to get a lot of AoOs, PA 5 gives you a damage boost on attacks that'd probably be hitting automatically were it not for the mandatory miss on a natural 1.
IME some people just never really managed to speed up. Of course the ones that had this the worst were the really hard core optimizer types---the ones who inevitably gravitated towards classes like barbarian and avenger---but a Paragon or Epic tier sheet just got ridic, especially when you factored in magic items. The fact that the power cards were often inaccurate or too abbreviated in various ways. I got into it with a player here who insisted on using spell cards in 5E. The cards often left out key details. He finally got D&DBeyond and looks things up on his phone.
I had not noticed that issue with the power 'cards' (9-up format power descriptions, though the font got absurdly tiny at times) on the DDI sheets, though the feat and feature entries suffered from it horribly. The off-line version let you edit the descriptions and layout, which was hugely beneficial - I miss that.
Frankly, if an optimizer - whether abusing a Tier 1 caster or an outre build - is slow, it's his own darn fault. ;P
IMO it's one reason I dislike tools proficiencies. Some of them are OK but for the most part they're just useless in most games. By contrast Thievery should just be a skill.
One thing I do like about 5e too proficiencies, in spite of there being a potentially infinite number of them to be incompetent with if you don't have 'em, dovetails with something else I really liked about 5e that was long overdue: straightforward 'downtime' guidelines. You can learn a language (also an unduly-open-ended mechanic) or a Tool Proficiency by spending downtime days on it. So the skills that you can't do that with, are the 'real' skill lists, the rest, essentially, flavor. (And, yes, the Thief's lock-picking/trap-disarming/&c belongs on the real skill list, I agree.)
To be clear, I don't actually mind squares but there's just no doubt that things like bow ranges were drastically shortened in 4E so they would fit on expected battlemap sizes.
Nod. I mean, they did have ranges in excess of of not one, but two typical battle maps, but whatever. There was no particular reason not to give a preternatural English-Longbow-of-lengend-inspired archer an implasible 300 yd range. It's just nothing to do with squares vs feet. They could've put a range of 30/180 sqs on the longbow if they'd wanted to, as easily as 150'/900' - and more easily than 10/20/30 'scale inches that can be 10 yds out of doors' ...
The thing is that bonus action attacks are usually quite limited, but it was often possible to chain together bigger attacks in prior versions. You've got one bonus action and one reaction, end of story. I also liked the idea of sacrificing an action (e.g., the bonus action or, even better, the reaction) to maintain concentration rather than the way concentration works now.
Sustain was the 4e equivalent of concentration, and did require an action - often a minor action, sometimes even standard. You can get quite a lot of attacks rolling in 5e, thanks to Extra Attack on top of TWFing for a Bonus Action attack every round, with things like Action Surge & Haste atop that, as well. In 4e, minor action attacks were rare (mostly available to strikers, and, at Epic, to arcanists via a feat) and mostly encounter powers, never at-wills. So you could manage a round or even two of minor action attacks, by devoting all your Encounter flexiblity to belting out damage in an Alpha Strike - it was 'optimal' for, well, an Alpha Strike, which was not often an optimal tactic in 4e, really.
Some off-turn is OK, but some 4E characters had just way too much of that and a lot of it was so situational that for a lot of builds it was useless.
Some builds could go that way, if you wanted to take them there. But, as with minor action attacks, it's not like a given concept forced you to play that given way.
I don't get what I'm robbing myself of.
"some of the fantasy/action genre cadence of combat" - in genre, especially on the more pop-culture/action-movie side of the genre, it's very common for battles to go badly against the heroes, at first, then for them to come back and win.
Cliche, prettymuch.
If you're tired of that cliche, and like the idea of heroes beating down the baddies swiftly & decisively, most of the time (while still giving a sense that the baddies are deadly), you can cut monster hps & increase their damage proportionately (like I said, half/double was oft-suggested). It can be a delicate adjustment, since the other side of 'most of the time,' can end up TPK.
IMO that's a good idea but it's so totally, utterly out of the game world it just bugs the !#@$@#$ out of me. It just feels like a game mechanic that's grafted on to make combat faster and to force a different dynamic at the end of a fight and prevent people from nova-ing right at the beginning. I dislike it for exactly the same reason I dislike high-power, limited-use abilities
It's more of the above, really, capturing the way combats actually go in genre (heroic, dramatic, come-from-behind, &c) vs how they go 'realistically' (nasty, short, & one-sided).
I don't know if "really clever but unmoored game mechanics" was Heinsoo's specialty, but if so it would go a long way towards explaining why I felt that was a hallmark of 4E.
As I tried to explain above, they're just moored to something else: to genre conventions, rather than D&D traditions (or worse yet, "realism"). And, yeah, he seems to have a flair for good mechanics like that - both functional as part of a game and evocative of the genre.
Hmm... in fine GRE Verbal fashion, 13A:4E:
athfinder:3E?
It's been suggested, but not really, no. Hiensoo & Tweet designed 13A, Tweet never worked on 4e and is generally of a different school of design thought, entirely. There are superficial similarities in mechanics, and a sort of 'compromise' between the design philosphy of 4e & the classic game evident.
Many of the folks at Paizo worked on 3.5, sure, but PF was an outrigh clone of 3.5, mechanically compatible with it (at least at first), and intended & advertised as a continuation/re-boot. Not only is 13A not that to 4e, it would be illegal to clone 4e the way PF did 3.5, and Hasbro is as letigious as any other corporation.
