D&D 5E How is 5E like 4E?

[Garthanos]

I cannot keep up with how often your example is moving. Pick something, please, as I'm tired of responding to an argument where you just change the assumptions whenever they're challenged.

I am now thinking about how something like it might make an interesting 4e skill challenge.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Except the math is pretty much the same. You keep bring up these "fixed DCs" but it's not the point you imagine it is. A Gelatinous Cube is a CR 2 threat. If you face it as a 20th level character, it's still not much of a threat even if you can fail the saving throw.

But it is exactly the same difficulty to escape or to outgrapple a monster no matter whether you are level 1 or level 20. What you are trying to do doesn't scale. You are no more competent at the action at level 20 than level 1.

You say 5e left competence on the floor, but it didn't -- it's still there in the system, just not in the same treadmill form that didn't actually increase competence against leveled threats in 4e. 4e keeps you at the same level of competence in play throughout the gam

No it doesn't. It keeps giving you harder jobs. There is a difference. Unlike in 5e you're more likely to e.g. be able to jump a 10 foot pit as you level.

The only way this breaks is when you say that 5e still allows low level threats and you don't get better at their shticks if you don't put any build resources into that thing, but this doesn't happen in 4e. Except, you never face low level threats in 4e at all! If you face an orc at low level, it's a challenge. Then you face better orcs, but not the original orc, and they're still a challenge.

Please stop making things up because the game you are talking about is not actual 4e rules as written.

I've used exactly the same level 6 ogre statistics against level 2 PCs (which made a couple of ogres exceptionally scary) and the PCs were dealing with ogres all the way up to level 8 by which point the ogres were meatshields for the ettin magus leading them. But they were still using exactly the same stats as the original ogres. Your "Then you face better orcs but not the original orc" is, if you mean the original statblock, false. If you mean the fairly trivial observation that the original individual orc is probably dead, fair enough.

You only turn normal monsters to minions after 8 levels. And if you always use personalised statblocks for every NPC you aren't playing any version of D&D I'm aware of.

The orcs get better as you get better -- you're not even seeing that first orc in 4e after you outlevel it.

This is because you have half a dozen levels of getting better before this happens. You only minionise after about 8 levels. Across those levels you are clearly and demonstrably getting better. It's just after 8 levels you've graduated to this not being a threat.

So this comparison to 5e is bunk -- it's not a thing that happens in 4e, so claiming you get better at something that doesn't happen is moot.

You mean that 8 levels don't exist? Right.

What does happen is the monsters are on the same treadmill you are -- you're always facing orcs that are threats. But orcs that stay the same and but still can do stuff? BAD, NO COMPETENCE PCS! Sheesh.

Your second bullet is a complete misrepresentation of what I've said. I said that DCs are set by the actions the PCs take.

OK. So you are throwing out the Monster Manual, the DMG, Xanathar's and the only adventure I actually own.

We aren't talking about D&D 5e here. We're talking about your personal house rules.

Your first bullet is also somewhat of a misrepresentation, but I'm not clear on it, because I'd never define any part of the game as a functional object in the world independent of the player characters. There are concepts in there I don't consider to be rational.

Except that as you have admitted the Purple Worm DC is the same for literally everyone.

Or the level 10 fighter need a 10 to hit a goblin that's been moved along the treadmill with them.

OK. So now we aren't dealing with 4e as written. We're dealing with your personal house rules where you ignore all the guidance presented as to how to use the rules and ignore the monster manuals and all the published adventures.

Then yes I am 100% happy to accept that in your personal house rules this happens. However this has nothing to do with 4e as written. 4e isn't The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. If you DM 4e in a terrible way that is not supported by any of the books and get terrible results then the problem isn't with 4e - it's with you as a DM.

If you personally as the DM choose to take away the progression in the rules by levelling up the monsters round the PCs then this is your choice. It's not the game taking away the progression. It's you. And there's no point discussing how 4e does things badly when the DM goes out of their way to make it work badly.

 

[Garthanos]

No it doesn't. It keeps giving you harder jobs. There is a difference. Unlike in 5e you're more likely to e.g. be able to jump a 10 foot pit as you level.

Or I grab a skill power and so have a resource to make even the 15 foot one automatic periodically.
(generally with a progressively higher distance possibility as I level up my skill)

Not sure why when one is going into paragon one still wants a level 1 adversary or challenge to be viable. 9 levels from +4 to -4 seems sufficient.

 

[glass]

Basically, if you stuck to the best 20% of feats or so, they tended to be really really good. The worst 20% were probably more like 3e feats, but even then, actual outright stinkers (like 3.x Toughness or Pathfinder feats like Death or Glory, or the original version of Prone Shooter which did literally nothing) were quite rare in 4e.

Prone Shooter was not alone: Each of 3.0, 3.5, and PF1 had a feat that did nothing, although TBF the 3.5 one was deliberate (in a humour article).

At the end of the day, if you were a fan of 4e Healing Surge, that doesn't automatically make you a fan of 5e Hit Dice just because they can also be used to heal on a short rest. That's basically the LEAST interesting thing Healing Surges do

If anything, the opposite would be true. If you are a fan of Healing Surges, you are very likely not to be a fan of Hit Dice in 5e.

Healing Surges were a almost-but-not-quite-absolute limit on total healing for the day, and also allowed healing to be proportional to total hp. Hit Dice do nothing like the second thing and do the opposite of the first thing (being extra healing rather than a limit). Basically, they only seem similar if you do not know anything about how 4e actually works (which is admittedly not uncommon for edition warriors).

_
glass.

 

[Garthanos]

Prone Shooter was not alone: Each of 3.0, 3.5, and PF1 had a feat that did nothing, although TBF the 3.5 one was deliberate (in a humour article).

If anything, the opposite would be true. If you are a fan of Healing Surges, you are very likely not to be a fan of Hit Dice in 5e.

Healing Surges were a almost-but-not-quite-absolute limit on total healing for the day, and also allowed healing to be proportional to total hp. Hit Dice do nothing like the second thing and do the opposite of the first thing (being extra healing rather than a limit). Basically, they only seem similar if you do not know anything about how 4e actually works (which is admittedly not uncommon for edition warriors).

Its a bit of a pattern Action points in 4e look like action surge (fighter only) except in 4e it encourages the entire party to press on and provides them with methods of dealing with it. And the 4e action point use was often seriously buffed to do even more by a warlord and paragon paths and similar things.

If you are a fan of action points the fighters ability is lamish.

 

[Garthanos]

The battlemaster has an ability to move allies around sounds like a warlord ability sure but unless you bring in the 5e optional flanking rule its kind of a lot less. (and it uses up the subjects reaction hurray)

 

[pemerton]

But it is exactly the same difficulty to escape or to outgrapple a monster no matter whether you are level 1 or level 20. What you are trying to do doesn't scale. You are no more competent at the action at level 20 than level 1.

@Ovinomancer's point is that this is true, too, in 4e. (As a general proposition, and ignoring minutiae of differences in build maths.)

Eg with the gelatinous cube: in 5e D&D both a 1st and 10th level PC have to roll to hit the same DC using the same save bonus (assuming it's a non-proficient save); but other features of PC or party build will make the significance of being hit by a cube less (PCs have more hp, the party has more ways to buff saves, etc).

In 4e, the relevant bonus or defence will have scaled up, but so will the cube's DC - instead of a Heroic tier cube that requires a level-appropriate DC to avoid being slowed or immobilised or whatever, we have a Paragon tier cube (that is perhaps standard rather than elite, or even a minion) that on a hit does damage plus slows or whatever until the end of its next turn.

I personally think the 4e approach produces more dramatic fiction, and less of the feel of "bumbling through" that you get when the 10th level character is paralysed by the cube but can brush off the few hit points lost. On the other hand, judging from what gets posted about D&D play both here and on other sites, a lot of players seem to like the "hilarity ensues" aspect that flows from the 5e design choices.

If you are only going by the fiction, and you describe a loose scree slope, but the PC is level 20, you're kinda stuck with the DCs -- they do not describe what you described. One of the things I found running 4e was that I needed to be able to describe what aligned to the DCs, not the other way around. The DC space informed my choice of fiction. You get some odd occurrences otherwise, where DC doesn't match description. You describe a loose scree slop to a level 20 character as part of a skill challenge, and now you need to explain why the DC is as high as it is for that.

I follow what you're saying here, but it doesn't describe how I experienced GMing 4e. What you're leaving out, that was central to my experience, is that before I go by the fiction I have to have regard to the tier of play. I think this is a hugely important part of 4e, but it seems often to have been neglected (and I don't think the 4e published adventures fully appreciated it either - a bit like your feeling that 5e adventures don't fully appreciate the rules for setting DCs).

So when I think about the fiction, I think what tier? what fantastic thing is involved here? and then I think about appropriate fiction. And the game has some tools to help with this, like a chart of vertical drops appropriate for different levels, and long, long, lists of NPCs, monsters and traps statted out by level (it also has some tools that don't help quite as much, like long lists of fantastic terrain that tends to be presented in a tier-neutral fashion).

If, after thinking through things in this way, I still want my fiction to contain something that seems tier-inapt, I then have to think about how to mechanically express it. In a combat, the scree slope might be difficult terrain rather than require a check to climb. In a skill challenge, it might mean that physical checks which the scree might affect go from Medium to Hard, or if that seems too brutal then they suffer a -2 penalty. (The most modest circumstantial modifier that 4e generally recognises.) Or thinking about NPCs and monsters, if I still want a goblin in my paragon tier situation then I have to think about how I'm going to express that - eg levelling up and describing the goblin as a serious leader-type; or statting the goblin as a minion; or doing what I did at low-to-mid paragon and writing up hobgoblin phalanxes as swarms.

In some cases I might just change the default fiction: eg in my 4e campaign I ignored the fact that frost giants are (in the core books) a paragon threat and treated them as an epic threat. This is a change, but it doesn't have the "scree slope" problem because there is no intuitive sense as to how tough giants should be (eg we all know Thor fought frost giants, and presumably his adventures are epic tier ones!).

My general impression is that 5e doesn't use the process I've just described for moving from fiction understood as tier-appropriate to mechanically-appropriate expression of that fiction. But I can't say I have a 100% handle on what the process is. The following two bits of quotation from your posts address the process directly; hence I turn to them!

Player bonuses are not mentioned at all in the sections on DCs.

<snip>

I don't even know what the bonuses for a given skill for on of the PCs in my games unless I go look at their sheet -- which I only ever do out of curiosity, never for planning or running or setting a DC.

<snip>

They tell me what their doing, I look at the situation, and I call for a check and set a DC never once considering how good the PC might or might not be at that ability check.

I don't know, because there's no description of the scene for me to align to, and no actions taken. Is it a sheer, glassy wall of volcanic glass? And you're climbing freehand? Yikes, sounds very hard, DC 25 STR check! Oh, you're using a climbing kit? And you're scouting for the best path up? Cool, sounds like a DC 15 INT check to get advantage on the STR check. It's still a hard wall, even with a kit, but using climbing gear is a different approach than freehanding, so DC 20 on the STR check. Advantage if you successfully scout a good path.

<snip>

The dungeons are difficult because of what they represent in 4e -- it's an important quest, so it's an important detail to sneak in, and, since it's important, the DCs need to be level appropriate. In 5e, I'm not concerned about this -- it's the fiction of the scene that determines DCs alongside what the characters do.

To me, this seems to describe a framework of "objective" DCs - ie the DC is established by reference to how hard something is in the fiction, where that difficulty is conceived of in some "absolute" sense rather than relative to the person attempting it. So freehanding a sheerwall of volcanic glass is framed as very hard because that's what it is: and the fact that it's actually only moderately hard for the high level rogue (because the rogue is so skilled in freehand climbing) is not factored into the setting of the DC at all - the rogue's superior ability is all expressed, mechanically, on the PC build side which then yields a number applied to the d20 roll to see if the DC of 25 is achieved.

Games I think of that use this approach are Classic Traveller (without coming out and saying so; it's just absolutely taken for granted), AD&D (ditto as for Traveller) and Burning Wheel (which is very self-conscious about it and gives advice to the GM about how the setting of obstacles in this fashion is a key tool for establishing the feel of the setting; Burning Wheel factors in approach a bit differently from 5e, eg because skills figure differently in PC build and it has a different system for augments based on similar/complementary skills).

Games that I think of that don't use this approach are HeroQuest revised (difficulties are set based on pacing considerations - basically the more previous successes the higher the DC), Marvel Heroic/Cortex+ Heroic (all checks are opposed, either by another character whether PC or NPC, or by the Doom Pool) and Apocalypse World (there are no modifiers to moves for difficulty; that's all handled in framing and consequences).

4e is a bit of a mix but, in the end, I think closer to the second suite of games. In 4e difficulties do have an "objective" dimension in the sense that (say) Orcus has a higher AC than a kobold, and the DC to sneak past Orcus's silent watchers in Thanatos will be higher than the DC to sneak past a goblin sentry. But most of the time this "objective" aspect simply falls out of picking level appropriate DCs and doesn't need to be thought about case-by-case; and the skill challenge structure with its resultant closed-scene resolution also generates a "relative to" rather than "absolute/objective" dynamic to resolution.

Furthermore, in 4e the descriptors used to set a level-appropriate DC - easy, medium and hard - are used relatively, not absolutely. So something framed as easy for an epic-tier PC (say, climbing up a wind-and-snow swept mountain side to reach the portal to the Elemental Chaos at its peak) would certainly be hard for a low-level PC. It would also be reasonable at Epic to treat this as just one move in a skill challenge, whereas at heroic tier it would make more sense to frame the climb as a skill challenge in itself.

I think the analysis I've just given of the difference between the 5e and 4e approaches is pretty consistent with the contrasts I see others post, although a bit more thorough and with less obscurity (I'll come back to that at the end).

5e does give you the option to just have a normal scree climb at any level. Sure, PCs that suck at climbing will be just as sucky at 1st as at 20th. They still suck at climbing. But PCs that are good at climbing trivialize this challenge. Cool. This is on me as the GM if I present this as a challenge, though, and the system should be acting to save me from that choice.

This confused me a bit. The first three sentences seem to be describing 5e working as intended; but then you say "this is on me as the GM" which implies that the first three sentences are describing some sort of error or clumsiness on the GM's part. That implication is reinforced by saying "the system should be acting to save me from that choice". What's wrong with the choice?

In 4e, as I said, the presence of the scree in a higher-level situation would probably be treated as difficult terrain or a DC-adjuster. In 5e, as I also said, the wizard struggling while the fighter trivialises it seems to be working as intended.

What have I missed?

 

[Garthanos]

What you're leaving out, that was central to my experience, is that before I go by the fiction I have to have regard to the tier of play. I think this is a hugely important part of 4e, but it seems often to have been neglected (and I don't think the 4e published adventures fully appreciated it either - a bit like your feeling that 5e adventures don't fully appreciate the rules for setting DCs).

So when I think about the fiction, I think what tier? what fantastic thing is involved here? and then I think about appropriate fiction. And the game has some tools to help with this, like a chart of vertical drops appropriate for different levels, and long, long, lists of NPCs, monsters and traps statted out by level (it also has some tools that don't help quite as much, like long lists of fantastic terrain that tends to be presented in a tier-neutral fashion).

If, after thinking through things in this way, I still want my fiction to contain something that seems tier-inapt, I then have to think about how to mechanically express it. In a combat, the scree slope might be difficult terrain rather than require a check to climb. In a skill challenge, it might mean that physical checks which the scree might affect go from Medium to Hard, or if that seems too brutal then they suffer a -2 penalty. (The most modest circumstantial modifier that 4e generally recognises.) Or thinking about NPCs and monsters, if I still want a goblin in my paragon tier situation then I have to think about how I'm going to express that - eg levelling up and describing the goblin as a serious leader-type; or statting the goblin as a minion; or doing what I did at low-to-mid paragon and writing up hobgoblin phalanxes as swarms.

In some cases I might just change the default fiction: eg in my 4e campaign I ignored the fact that frost giants are (in the core books) a paragon threat and treated them as an epic threat. This is a change, but it doesn't have the "scree slope" problem because there is no intuitive sense as to how tough giants should be (eg we all know Thor fought frost giants, and presumably his adventures are epic tier ones!).

My general impression is that 5e doesn't use the process I've just described for moving from fiction understood as tier-appropriate to mechanically-appropriate expression of that fiction. But I can't say I have a 100% handle on what the process is. The following two bits of quotation from your posts address the process directly; hence I turn to them!

I mentioned just a few frames ago tier based fiction first.

" Not so nebulous I want something to slow down the party at this point in time to increase tension on the plot I need something that will actually have a chance of challenging the characters... I do not pick a patch of ice for the paragon level heros I pick something whose fiction would be challenging for their tier.

They might get past even something I expect to be challenging just by clever choices on their part. (and that is cool too had that happen more than a few times)"

 

[Garthanos]

In 4e, as I said, the presence of the scree in a higher-level situation would probably be treated as difficult terrain or a DC-adjuster.

one could add situational weather features or some parasite that lives on the stuff making it resistant or shatter explosively or whatever

The accident seems like a reason to pull out imagination stops.

Or since at level is actual +4 to -2 see if you missed within that range and move on

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm questioning the experience you may have at this point, because DC 15 is still a very useful DC for a large number of situations at 20th level. DC 10 is still useful. You seem to be assuming that bonuses are so high across the board, but this is a design feature of 5e -- they just stopped the treadmill and kept everything centered at 0 rather that the lockstep increases of 4e. A character with no proficiency is between -1 and +5 on an ability check at 20th level. DC 10 and 15 are very reasonable to set. Sure, a skilled character can be +17, but there's no problem in 4e when the skilled character automatically beats the easy and medium DCs, so I fail to see the complaint. If you're bonus is higher than the DC I set, you can tell me you succeed without rolling. It's cool. I usually don't even bother trying to remember which character has what bonus -- they tell me what they do, and if I think the outcome is uncertain and has a consequence for failure, I'll call for a check and set a DC (and the stakes). I do not need to pay attention to the PC's bonuses. Game works just fine.

Then the problem is that A) the idea that starting that fire in Phlegethos has the same DC as starting the one on the hillside back home, or else you are just dealt out of any possibility of attempting it, since you never improve at all. Or else the difficulty is only modestly better and then the trained guy needn't bother to make a check (well, maybe he'll fail on a 1). This is where the 'spread' causes weird things in 5e. In 4e its level-appropriate moderate/hard most likely, and characters that have middling bonuses in the skill (Nature presumably in 4e) can try it with some chance of success. There will rarely not be such a character in the party.

Really it is not so much that there is a vastly different outcome with skilled GMs, but in 4e EVERY GM will run it this way, 50% of 5e GMs will not know to do it right (at least, IME).

I very much don't do this -- not even close. 5e would be terrible at this.

but that is exactly what it seems to encourage.

You can do the same in 5e. Was there a point to this?

His high end numbers required significant investment to be good at skills. The more normal numbers align with my understanding of what the system can do -- top skills are usually in the mid to high 30's at 30th.

You can achieve +45 without stupid amounts of trouble. I've seen highly optimized characters drawn up with things like +69 in Arcana (which appears to have a couple ways to boost it more than other skills).

Those kinds of bonuses rely on some very specific assumptions, including using Dragon magazine content and specific items that might not feature in a campaign (unless a large part of play is about you getting a high arcana check). Doing a sanity check on the build I say ended up in the mid-40's without the host of Dragon content. Like what @pemerton has. I prefer my optimization to not rely on permissions from the GM to use specific sources of essentially playtest material and/or extensive questing rewards. YMMV.

Everything is core and shows up in the CB in 4e, which was pretty much always the assumption. Maybe nowadays with people going back and picking and choosing and playing 'retro 4e', I don't know. Same with items, the general practice was to get people what would work with the build they envisaged, though that might get a bit of pushback in a few cases that are extra cheesy. Depends on the GM to an extent. Again, I don't know what 'typical 4e play' looks like today, but I would observe I have virtually all the books, all the Dragon/Dungeon PDFs, and access to a working Online Compendium. I could run 4e with 'all the stuff', no problem, could undoubtedly get CB up and going again if I was motivated enough. I know @Garthanos and a few others are still able to run it (I still have all the original downloads on my machine).

Yeah, I hear you, it's a traditional thing for D&D to do this, but it's not required. You can see the pushback against anything that moves away from faux medieval England/France/Germany in the recent thread about the tyranny of novelty. They're complaining about the recent adventures set in hell, the frozen north (which is still quasi-medieval England), or the Feywild. However, not everyone is beholden to this concept, and 5e as a system isn't beholden to it either.

It isn't 'beholden' to it perhaps, but the way it handles advancement and numbers VERY MUCH encourages GMs to play that way. There are real questions about how to run stuff in a more 'gonzo' environment. Granted, if you actually read the 5e DMG carefully, its there. OTOH it 'just works' in 4e. I mean, you literally almost cannot NOT do it (I guess you could certainly assign the highest level DCs to real-world stuff, but it would definitely feel like reflavoring when the book descriptions of high level terrains and whatnot is very fantastical). I think both games are technically capable of the full range, certainly, but one seems to beg for it and the other seems to kind of subtly discourage it.

Okay. I'd suggest rereading the DMG sections on adventure building. It's sufficiently there. The problem here may also be that D&D as a genre is old hat -- it's lost it's shine? Would you consider the Underdark to be a fantastical place?

I do consider the Underdark fairly fantastical, yes. In 4e the 'shallows' are high heroic/low paragon material, with the 'deeps' ranging in the paragon and potentially even up to capstone epic (you could for example battle Torog, delving deeper and further while tracking down his lair until finally battling the Tortured One as a 30th level capstone, that would not require any background material not already present in PoL Canon). Along the way you could visit the strange spacetime warping pyramid of the monstrous Aboleth lords, the weird land of trapped demons, Swordwing cities, Mindflayer enclaves, Beholder nesting grounds, and of course the Dark Elven metropolis of Erhli-Cinlu (sp?).

I would say that the Elemental Chaos and Astral Domains are a bit more 'crazy' than that, no doubt the Abyss is pretty harrowing stuff, but with 30 levels of play to chew through, a side trip into those sorts of realms would probably be expected. The 4e Underdark is said to have 'connections' with many strange extra-planar locations after all (and definitely has direct pathways into the Feywild and Shadowfell (Feydark and Shadowdark). You could battle Fomorians or whatever those weird Shadowdark cultist guys are who's name I have forgotten.