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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8092018" data-attributes="member: 16814">I... what?  Certainly not.  I mean, I used "more player sided" and not "player sided entirely."  I expressly made my comparisons relative, not absolute.I don't necessarily disagree with you except that the direction to use the same rules in 3.x is just strongly implied, not absolute.  I made the mistake of doing it that way, though, and ended up hating running 3.x by the end of it.  Way too fiddly.  There was zero chance I was going for follow into Pathfinder, which didn't fix any of the structural issues I had in 3.x.  However, if you noted the implication and just ignored it, 3.x could work very well because there were really only a few things you needed to note in the encounter math that mattered and those could be done quite easily.  That required a level of awareness I certainly lacked during my 3.x run, but I see it now.  Still don't want to deal with the fiddly, though, so no risk of return for me.This is exactly what I was saying -- 4e is as player-facing as 3.x, but fixed a lot of the fundamental issues in design that made it work better.  Primary among those was asymmetric play across the screen.  I wasn't explicit, but there's no disagreement here.Now, here we disagree.  5e is much less player facing than 3.x.  You have asymmetry across the screen and the core mechanic has shifted from rules adjudication to GM decides again.  The GM is the engine that makes 5e run, using the rules when they need to, but the core play loop provides the GM the authority to just rule success or failure without ever engaging the rules -- and this holds across all pillars of play.  There's a reason that 5e gets the "DM empowerment" mantra tossed at it as often as it does.Now, it's worthwhile to note that 4e did a lot of things better, like monster/encounter design, no disagreement.  That was, largely, due to the rules structure of 4e, though.  I honestly think 4e did things as well as it did by accidental confluence of design rather than intent.  I say this because the designers were sooooooooooo bad at expressing how the system works (it took, what, until Essentials until the got it pretty close?).  They even contradicted that design in a few published adventures, reverting to a 3.x presentation instead of leaning into 4e's unique design.  I will admit I had early trouble with 4e, and didn't really fully grok it myself until well into 5e, again partly because the designers sucked at explaining it and because it did things very different from older versions.  Great game, love it, would play it in a heartbeat.Weird, I run mostly straight from the books and don't have that problem at all.  Perhaps I'm bringing in my experience on what makes a good encounter -- variety -- and so never put down 12 orcs or whatever.  It's 8 orcs, 2 orogs, and a Priest of Gruumsh, and I remember orcs carry javelins.  The worst you can say about 5e here is that it doesn't explain good encounter design enough, not that the rules result in the above.  They don't prevent it, but they don't cause it, either.I did, you didn't agree.  Different things.  The idea is to provide a toolset that the GM uses to build the game they want.  All D&D is this, with different tropes or genres preferred by the rulesets.  4e was least flexible in this regard because it had high heroes with mystic powers built into it's ruleset -- you'd have to gut the system to remove that genre and it's associated tropes.  5e is more flexible because it doesn't build in as much, but that also makes it easier to fail because there aren't as many clear indications of what the system is supposed to do.I mean, to answer your question a different way, why would anyone ever buy a model car, painstakingly build it, add aftermarket pieces, paint it and then sand and buff it to showroom shine when you can just buy a die-cast?  People like building things.  I like that, in 5e, I've run a Big Plot game (heavy central theme/mystery), a hexcrawl, and a Planescape troubleshooters game.  Each has had very different feels and play with minimal houserules for each (I vary table rules to better match the feel of the game I want, but try not to alter much if any of the core ruleset so it's easy to get into it).  I like the tinkering, and I don't mind having the flexibility to present a range of combats that don't have an expected build structure or format, like in 3.x or 4e.  It's on me, and I like that.Argument from anecdote is dangerous.  I have more players who are willing to run 5e than 4e, with a large overlap of players.  For instance, one of our GMs (since left the group) wouldn't run 4e but loved 5e.  Another has run both (rocky both times), and I have two more right now that are thinking of running that didn't do that in 4e.  That's not representative of anything but my tables, though, so I don't read much into it.  D&D always puts a massive load on the DM.  4e took some off in some places, but added it in others, like being flexible to player introduce content.  Other games have this as well, and share the load via it, but 4e it was usually a button press on the player side that required the GM to provide the actual changes.  That's what stymied my at first -- adapting to a different cognitive load.  Even when I had it down better (again, I didn't fully grok it until much later -- sorry, skill challenges, I love you now!), I didn't feel the load was less, just different.  Also, a HUGE amount of the load in 4e was handled through the digital tools.  If you played without those, holy crud but that system could crush you in options.You can say that, but I disagree they're the same thing.  You could get railroading, or you could get a strong set of themes and tropes that assist a plot.  I ran one, my Big Plot game, where I had things fairly well structured in Act I so as to set the themes firmly, but my Act IV was literally "fight the BBEG here."  The Acts got more and more reactive to the players, with just some notes to reinforce a theme here and there and to invoke plot beats.  What those were became a lot more malleable.  Sadly, that campaign folded in Act III due to out of game circumstances that required the group divorcing a player (illegalities were involved) and that soured the whole thing for me.Still, the point of this was that you can definitely go a big Story game without a railroad.  Set the hook early, get PC buy-in to the plot, and then let go and follow along.Also, there's a poster on this board that played FATE in a very scripted way.  I was surprised, but looked at what they said they did and I could see it.  FATE doesn't really require a free-form approach.  AW and BitD, though, will fight you tooth and nail if you try.I disagree stakes are laid down in 5e are victory or defeat, or that a strong story requires that approach.  That it's a common thinking I won't disagree, but that, to me, is a failing in how all D&D presents combat:  the assumption is that the stakes are death and losing is dying.  This isn't at all required by the game design but it's still a strong holdover from it's wargame roots.  The easiest "fix" to boring D&D combat is to move the stakes from life or death to something else -- make combat the obstacle to a goal rather than the ends itself.</blockquote>

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