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

[Dausuul]

I don't know why they removed 'bloodied' as a condition?! It's so easy to have features trigger off of it and it's a thing the in-universe character could notice! They still have feature that work at 'half hp' but decide NOT to codify it?! Why?! You could easily have a 'bloodied value' not on your character sheet too. Some monsters (and races) had bonuses against bloodied opponents and other got new powers when bloodied and a Dragon always recharged their Breath Weapon on bloodied!

Personally, I'd like it back too; but I can see why it was removed. Each new piece of jargon increases the barrier to entry, and D&D is already full of weird terms that you have to learn to play the game. "Bloodied" triggers are not common enough in 5E to justify adding another one.

 

[Undrave]

Personally, I'd like it back too; but I can see why it was removed. Each new piece of jargon increases the barrier to entry, and D&D is already full of weird terms that you have to learn to play the game. "Bloodied" triggers are not common enough in 5E to justify adding another one.

They could have been more common if they had a keyword to hang off of. You just need to go the Magic the Gathering way and have reminded text every time it shows off in player facing options so it becomes more commonly understood. Like if the Barbarian had a feature like "When you are bloodied (your current HP are half your maximum HP or lower) and you have no Rage left, you regain 1 Rage" and so forth.

 

[overgeeked]

They could have been more common if they had a keyword to hang off of. You just need to go the Magic the Gathering way and have reminded text every time it shows off in player facing options so it becomes more commonly understood. Like if the Barbarian had a feature like "When you are bloodied (your current HP are half your maximum HP or lower) and you have no Rage left, you regain 1 Rage" and so forth.

Or just include it as a condition which gives you the keyword without having to explain it every time. Maybe some minor hindrance when you become bloodied the first time in a fight but nothing ongoing or too drastic.

 

[Undrave]

Or just include it as a condition which gives you the keyword without having to explain it every time. Maybe some minor hindrance when you become bloodied the first time in a fight but nothing ongoing or too drastic.

"Bloodied" by itself didn't mean anything, it was just a trigger for other effects.

 

[overgeeked]

"Bloodied" by itself didn't mean anything, it was just a trigger for other effects.

Right. So you could reintroduce it as a purely descriptive condition. I suggested some mechanical weight above simply so that it wouldn't stand out when compared to the other conditions in 5E.

 

[Minigiant]

Except for the Monk being back to be a pile of legacy features

The thing 5e learned from 4e was that making sure Monks were actually flippy fast dirtying stunlockers first before they added all the legacy trash.

That's also why favored enemy isnt a combat feature in 5e despite so many wanting it to be.

 

[CleverNickName]

I have only limited experience with even-numbered editions of the game; most of what I've played have been BECMI, 3E/3.5E, and 5th Edition. And I was never a member of any game design team, so I can only speculate on their motives and directions. So with all that said:

2nd Edition felt very different from BECMI...there were a lot of changes, and a lot more complexity. And that wasn't surprising; this was the whole point of creating an "advanced" product line. But all in all, it felt like these two had more in common than not. I didn't like the updated game mechanics (I felt they were too complicated), so we never played it much. I really liked how all of the lore was expanded and the campaign settings that were released with it, though, and I still cherry-pick from them today.

3rd Edition felt drastically different from 2nd Edition AD&D. Also not surprising, because it was being produced by a different company with different goals in mind. The third edition felt like a whole new game compared to BECM (which I was still playing at the time) and AD&D (which I had only played a couple of times and didn't prefer.) We switched from BECMI to 3E, and played it for more than a decade. We really liked the modular rules and unified d20 mechanic, and the immense amount of supplemental materials.

3.5E felt nearly identical to 3rd Edition. Not surprising either, because it was intended to be more of a "bug fix" or "patch" and not a whole new game. We switched to 3.5E in mid-campaign, and barely noticed.

When 4th Edition came out, it felt a lot like when AD&D 2nd Edition was released: there were a lot of changes, but it still had more in common with 3.5E than it didn't (especially if you were playing with the Book of Nine Swords expansion). And like the 2E AD&D game, I didn't care much for the changes to the game mechanics. (I know that there is strong disagreement on the amount of influence that MMORPGs had on the 4th Edition game, and I know where I stand on that topic.) When our 3.5E campaign ended, we decided to switch to Pathfinder instead of 4E. But between you and me, I thought 4E had the better lore and flavor.

5th Edition somehow felt both like a step back from 4th Edition, and a step toward BECMI. If that makes any sense? It recaptured a lot of the old-school D&D feel that I had been missing from BECMI, mostly with the tools that the DM was given and how the DM was expected to adjudicate things, and I really liked that. It was also cleaner and more streamlined than 3.5E, and I really liked that too. So we switched to 5E, and I doubt we will be changing again anytime soon. I just wish they had kept more of 4th Edition's lore.

 

[Garthanos]

See, it makes sense to me. A level 1 Cure Wounds is a small magic. The level 10 fighter has taken big hits. Small magic doesn't do as much because the level 10 fighter needs more done. The level 1 fighter can only take fairly small hits without being taken out, so small magic is all that's needed.

small hits are what? ,,,, no nevermind we do not want to go there. It somehow makes sense to you.

 

[overgeeked]

I just wish they had kept more of 4th Edition's lore.

Oh gods yes. We fell hard for the lore of 4E and still use it for all of our other D&D games, regardless of edition.

 

[MwaO]

I think that's where the idea of 4E/2=5E comes from. Because that's almost literally the math. In 4E it's +1/2 level; in 5E it's 1 + 1/4 level. In combat, most 5E character are doing about 1/2 the damage they were in 4E, but monster hp (or rather encounter hp) is about 1/4 what it was in 4E.

It comes from me. Early on in 5e, I ran the math of a 'typical campaign' and basically, you should expect to get +9 to hit/+6 to important skills instead of +18 to hit/+12 to important skills over the levels of 1-20. It is much fuzzier, it might be the equivalent, and no one gets aware of this by default. And that continues throughout most of the system, except when it doesn't. And that's where almost all the problems pop up...

So, problems:
Bad saves that never scale. When a typical PC can be expected to fail a saving throw when they roll a 12, this really forces a lot of bad types of mechanical countermeasures. And makes some monsters a big yawn against certain types of PCs.

Skills where a complete incompetent(8 Str Wizard, 8 Int Fighter) has a 25% chance of succeeding at a DC 15 check that a max stat, max level PC can still fail 15% of the time. This problem was shown by the Bounded Accuracy article's verisimilitude example ironically, where the max strength PC could open the iron-shod door 35% of the time and the minimum strength PC 15% of the time.

Magic Items. In a 'typical' 5e campaign, a PC ought to expect to get +1 good, number changing permanent magic item per 4 levels and +1 consumable per level. Adventurer's League has problems in part because they double that number due to adventure structure/number of PCs and don't aim for approximately a +3 to hit max.

NPCs not using 4e type monster math, but rather being built like PCs. If you've ever tried to run an archmage at the table on the fly, you'll know what I mean here. I rewrote them on dmsguild in 2016 to run more like 4e monsters and they've been popular(search Simple Casters if interested)