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

[Garthanos]

I’m not sure what confusion there could be. Small hits are the same type of thing as big hits, but less tiring/draining to take. It’s a shield block that you feel, but not one where your bones hurt afterward.

The only way I can view them is in a relative sense 50 hp is horrific if you only have 10 hps instant death even and barely a scratch if you have 100.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The 5e design philosophy is to enable the players of the game to create a story. The strategy game is secondary to that. In 4e the strategy game was the most important design element.

Oh, and while on the subject 4e was never a strategic game. Out of character strategy was vastly reduced from 3.X; character optimisation was still a big thing but the object of character optimisation was seldom to create the next Pun-Pun or otherwise snap the game across your knee in character creation so much as get an edge and to make characters work in ways the designers hadn't thought of. And in character once again 3.X was the example of a strategic game, where you won in spell preparation and spell selection.

What 4e was was a tactical game where you won by engaging with the shared fiction. You used forced movement to push the enemies into aspects of the game world, making it something that was very present rather than the environment of the fight being effectively present rather than areas on the floor marked out for people to step round as they act against a green screen. You used reactions and interrupts to respond to what the enemy was doing and prevent them doing what they wanted while persuading them to do what you want. It's not the strategic game which is to hit the right save-or-suck spell or to keep hitting until the enemy hp gauge hits zero. It's to engage with the gameworld and what the other side is doing.

And that people think that engaging with the world and the actions of the other side somehow makes for less of a story than doing what you do in near isolation and forcing the abstract number of the hp gauge down with limited incorporation of what they are doing or where they are to me says a lot about their taste in stories.

 

[Garthanos]

Well, that's not hard to know. "Bloodied" had 4e cooties and there was no way WotC was going to port anything that obvious over to 5e. It just wasn't going to happen.

They needed to make the Battlemaster better it was a perfect disguise for Warlord. It seemed the right mask to prevent the 4e cooties.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oh, and while on the subject 4e was never a strategic game. Out of character strategy was vastly reduced from 3.X; character optimisation was still a big thing but the object of character optimisation was seldom to create the next Pun-Pun or otherwise snap the game across your knee in character creation so much as get an edge and to make characters work in ways the designers hadn't thought of. And in character once again 3.X was the example of a strategic game, where you won in spell preparation and spell selection.

Of similar importance: personal optimization was almost always less important than team optimization. That is: ruthlessly optimizing your own numbers and action economy was likely to do poorly, while ruthlessly optimizing the team's numbers and action economy was likely to produce stunning success. This is exactly the opposite of 3e, where I have been explicitly told by multiple optimizers that it is absolutely a game about highly optimizing your own stuff, and any team dynamics that result are an emergent perk, not a design goal. 5e appears to have gone back to that side of things, albeit slightly more reservedly since "ruthless optimization" doesn't earn as much as it did back in 3e.

This is a seriously under-appreciated Big Issue with 3e. D&D is, and for quite some time has consistently been, a cooperative game. Yes, you can make a competitive game out of it, but that's very clearly not what it's designed for. Character classes are given weak points that are partly or completely compensated for by the strengths of other classes; even people who dunked on 4e's explicit class roles admitted that D&D had implicit class roles all the way back at the beginning. The game's design is implicitly cooperative, but (prior to 4e) it really did almost nothing to encourage actually behaving cooperatively. In-combat healing (outside of 4e) is almost always less efficient than just doing damage; a dead monster has 100% of its damage mitigated, and (prior to 4e) out-of-combat healing was best done through resources rather than spells. In-combat buffing (outside of 4e) is usually less efficient than battlefield control/save-or-suck/save-or-lose/save-or-die, and out-of-combat buffing (even in 4e) rarely lasts long enough to matter for the next combat (unless you're doing scry-and-fry, which is its own ball of wax).

These are all reasons why 4e fans didn't take it well when a bunch of straightforward 4e mechanics (like minor actions, at-wills, bloodied) got a kludgy or half-baked remake in 5e ("bonus actions," cantrips, literally doing the same thing but dancing around it without a name). These things didn't exist just to exist; they all served clear, identifiable functions, and specifically did so to foster a team-centric approach to play. Minor-action healing existed to make support characters more enjoyable, because you could provide support and do your Special Things, but then 5e took that away (can't cast a Bonus Action spell and a regular Action spell in the same turn unless the latter is a cantrip). At-wills existed to give you solid fallback options with meaningful effects when you didn't want to (or weren't sure whether to) deploy the big guns, but 5e took that away (only casters get cantrips, the "cantrip" for a 5e non-caster is...making more attacks, or maybe shoving instead of doing damage rather than on top of doing damage.) Bloodied...well, I mean, they literally just kept the mechanic but pretended it wasn't related by dropping the name, so I guess that's a clear "5e kept it." But seriously, dancing around it without naming it is clearly "we can't LOOK like 4e even if we're USING 4e," which isn't going to endear 5e to someone who liked 4e.

Edit: It's worth noting, 4e's specific way of achieving "support party-based play and reasoning" is NOT the only way to do it. (I know you know this, Neonchameleon, but I think you can guess this post is more using yours as a jumping-off point rather than talking to you personally). The problem, for many 4e fans, is that 5e didn't seem to care about "support party-based play and reasoning," instead, as noted, going back to the 3e "optimize yourself, that's the best possible contribution you can make" mentality. The problem isn't "5e did something different, so it sucks"; instead, it's "5e didn't get the point of the mechanics, so it kept things (seemingly) without keeping their purpose and dropped things (seemingly) without knowing why they were present."

What 4e was was a tactical game where you won by engaging with the shared fiction. You used forced movement to push the enemies into aspects of the game world, making it something that was very present rather than the environment of the fight being effectively present rather than areas on the floor marked out for people to step round as they act against a green screen. You used reactions and interrupts to respond to what the enemy was doing and prevent them doing what they wanted while persuading them to do what you want. It's not the strategic game which is to hit the right save-or-suck spell or to keep hitting until the enemy hp gauge hits zero. It's to engage with the gameworld and what the other side is doing.

And that people think that engaging with the world and the actions of the other side somehow makes for less of a story than doing what you do in near isolation and forcing the abstract number of the hp gauge down with limited incorporation of what they are doing or where they are to me says a lot about their taste in stories.

You see similar things in other 4e mechanics as well. My poster-child example for this is the Lay on Hands mechanic, because it's existed in (AFAIK) every edition of D&D, but only 4e made it one where the mechanics ARE the story and the story IS the mechanic.

In every other edition of D&D, including Pathfinder, Lay on Hands is just a bonus pool of points you can spend. It's a special healing bank account that your deity refills once a day. Honestly, pretty boring, but since it was all I knew for a long time, I liked it.

Then 4e comes along and says, "We can do better." In 4e, for those unfamiliar, Lay on Hands is a daily power that can be used more than once (specifically, Wis mod times per day, but only once per round), on an adjacent ally (you have to be able to touch them!) When used, the Paladin spends one Healing Surge, but the target heals as if they had spent one. It is, very literally, "I give of myself, to replenish you." That's insanely flavorful! The Paladin is literally sacrificing some of her own (enhanced) vitality in order to heal others. And you can make it better--you can invest resources to let it do other things, or to use your surge value rather than the target's (being a defender, you usually have more HP, so this is a good deal), or give extra healing if used on other people (because you can use it on yourself).

THAT is the kind of thing 4e mechanics strive for. Not everything succeeds at doing so. But the core idea is there, and it succeeds more often than it fails: the mechanics don't just imply a story, they are the story.

 

[ad_hoc]

Oh, and while on the subject 4e was never a strategic game. Out of character strategy was vastly reduced from 3.X; character optimisation was still a big thing but the object of character optimisation was seldom to create the next Pun-Pun or otherwise snap the game across your knee in character creation so much as get an edge and to make characters work in ways the designers hadn't thought of. And in character once again 3.X was the example of a strategic game, where you won in spell preparation and spell selection.

What 4e was was a tactical game where you won by engaging with the shared fiction. You used forced movement to push the enemies into aspects of the game world, making it something that was very present rather than the environment of the fight being effectively present rather than areas on the floor marked out for people to step round as they act against a green screen. You used reactions and interrupts to respond to what the enemy was doing and prevent them doing what they wanted while persuading them to do what you want. It's not the strategic game which is to hit the right save-or-suck spell or to keep hitting until the enemy hp gauge hits zero. It's to engage with the gameworld and what the other side is doing.

And that people think that engaging with the world and the actions of the other side somehow makes for less of a story than doing what you do in near isolation and forcing the abstract number of the hp gauge down with limited incorporation of what they are doing or where they are to me says a lot about their taste in stories.

While we're being pedantic, I never called it a 'strategic game', I called it a 'strategy game' which is a genre of game. Often 'strategy games' are tactical in nature but they're still called 'strategy games'.

 

[ad_hoc]

Heroic action character gets knocked down hard because the bad guys start out hard, but then pulls himself up by sheer grit and digging deep (or even by "its just a flesh wound" logic) and turns the battle back on the bad guy very much not reality but one of the basic combat narratives in 4e. Heroes cooperate together in a team of mingled skills attempting a complex task supporting one another to accomplish a difficult end goal that is another fundamental narrative. Sorry "you cannot do that" tm really in 5e as they put that narrative aside.... or honestly just removed the tool to do or encourage it.

I didn't say there is no narrative ability to 4e. Clearly it is still an RPG where the players create a story. It's just not the first or most important objective of the design.

 

[Garthanos]

The problem isn't "5e did something different, so it sucks"; instead, it's "5e didn't get the point of the mechanics, so it kept things (seemingly) without keeping their purpose and dropped things (seemingly) without knowing why they were present."

bingo...

 

[Garthanos]

I didn't say there is no narrative ability to 4e. Clearly it is still an RPG where the players create a story. It's just not the first or most important objective of the design.

My first example was literally mechanics designed obviously core to 4e to evoke specific intentional targeted narratives ... not generic the players did it cause this is an RPG.

Another example and why Roles are actually an expression of story: there was a narrative of the fighter hero who defended his allies in 1e, however there were paltry few mechanics or abilities for characters to make it actually happen (the DM kind of had to make it happen) ... that was til 4e where that concept was presented in an explicit role and mechanically invoked. It was integrated with the TEAMPLAY story like the Xmen in combat. (heck you could even figure Xmen might have been inspired by D&D)

ON TOPIC 5e carried many of those defender/sentinel mechanics forward though perhaps in a somewhat limited fashion.

 

[Garthanos]

THAT is the kind of thing 4e mechanics strive for. Not everything succeeds at doing so. But the core idea is there, and it succeeds more often than it fails: the mechanics don't just imply a story, they are the story.

The avengers hand is divinely guided... constant 5e style advantage against the target of divine wrath (not quite as good as the Paladin example but definitely a kin to it. )

 

[Undrave]

The weird effect that pacing has on class balance in 5e is perhaps the central problem with the game, IMO.

A day with 4-6 encounters, surely is doable - but not all these encounters will be combat! Outside of outright dungeoneering, when do you get that many every day?

and with no Healing Surge you can't have simple environmental encounters or traps.

Like, in 4e you could say "The weather takes a turn for the worse! Everybody give me an Endurance check, if you don't get X, you lose a Healing Surge" boom, minor encounter for the day, ticks one more HS down and now the party realize they NEED to find shelter, quick! Do they press on and hope they find something before having to roll endurance again? Or maybe they try to build a make shift shelter which might take too long if they roll poorly on Survival and might result in them losing another Healing Surge! Traps that trigger can just take a healing surge, no need to calculate damage or anything. It's super easy to homebrew stuff that work like this.

Of similar importance: personal optimization was almost always less important than team optimization. That is: ruthlessly optimizing your own numbers and action economy was likely to do poorly, while ruthlessly optimizing the team's numbers and action economy was likely to produce stunning success.

God I miss that aspect... playing a support character in 5e is SO unrewarding and underwhelming! I've yet to try a Cavalier or someone with Sentinel but that might be my only option to have some support fun in combat...