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

[overgeeked]

It’s a game. What’s the cost of having fun?

Losing your character. The cost of engaging with the fun of wilderness exploration is possibly losing your character. Most gamers tend to think of that as not-fun. So the cost of having fun is the possibility of something not-fun happening. Which is a big reason why there are so many low-hanging skip buttons provided. Worry about food, ever? Nope. Here's five quite easy options. Worry about getting lost, ever? Nope. Here's two quite easy options. Which is also why it's so hard to die without a fluke of the dice or a DM who's out get murder characters. Ever notice how ridiculously cheap healing potions are? It's also why optimal strategies like bonus action healing word or 1 hp lay on hands for dropped characters are the common practice instead of using proper healing spells. Because it's more efficient, costs fewer resources, and there's literally no downside. Most gamers are exceedingly risk adverse with their characters. Anything and everything that will give them every possible edge, bonus, skip button, etc is smashed hard and often. If it's possible to skip something, especially something that has a huge downside (possibly losing their character) and has no discernible upside.

 

[turnip_farmer]

But, it's also not a terribly unreasonable reading either. As was mentioned, there are a very large amount of ways to fast forward travel. Multiple classes get all sorts of things that make travel more or less trivial. Food and water? Goodberry, Create Water, Purify Food and Water appear on several spell lists - druid, cleric, ranger, paladin. Bards and Rogues both can shoot their skills into the stratosphere. It's not all that difficult to bypass travel and exploration challenges.

These spells actually bother me far less than they used to, after thinking them through.

Firstly, Goodberry only gives you food. PCs still need to carry or forage for sufficient water, which still imposes the same kind of resource management challenges that allow you to create exploration challenges.

Create Food And Water is not available until 5th level for druids and 9th level for paladins. If they're relying on that, not only does it lock up one of their prepared spell optinos, but they need to save a top level spell slot for it every day. Once the characters reach a high enough level that throwing away a 3rd level spell is trivial, then it's fine, as at this point they should be powerful enough that 'not finding enough food in the woods' should no longer be a major challenge.

What trivialises wilderness exploration is the ranger's Natural Explorer ability. You can still structure your wilderness to keep the same challenges, by being careful with the shape and distribution of the ranger's favoured terrain, but it can feel like you're intentionally screwing the ranger character then.

 

[Minigiant]

Exploration was easily skippable and had many cheap tools to beat it because most people are not RL skilled at it and many who joined after a certain point was not did not sign up to play a survival sim or a colony builder.

So4e just had to roll Dungeoneering/Nature/Streetwise/Thievery X times on an escalating DC track.

5e handed out OP exploration spells and class features like candy

 

[Neonchameleon]

Unless, of course, what you see is adventure. Because, you know, that’s what adventurers do.
So much badwrongfunning in this thread...

I might once have played a character who looked in character at giving themself and their friends unnecessary hardship and life threatening risks as "adventure". Almost all my other characters would consider that character an idiot and possibly more of an idiot than they wanted to adventure with.

Not using spells and abilities to give yourself comfort and avoid engaging with things as, for example, with Goodberry or Leomund's Tiny Hut if you're playing a cleric or druid is a 100% in character choice, and if you're a wizard it's an in character choice akin to going camping without a tent just because you think that would be fun. In the arctic.

One thing D&D adventurers do is die. My characters almost all try to avoid that (and the one memorable one that didn't still sought to end up in Valhalla and wasn't going to let some unworthy foe kill him).

 

[turnip_farmer]

I might once have played a character who looked in character at giving themself and their friends unnecessary hardship and life threatening risks as "adventure". Almost all my other characters would consider that character an idiot and possibly more of an idiot than they wanted to adventure with.

Not using spells and abilities to give yourself comfort and avoid engaging with things as, for example, with Goodberry or Leomund's Tiny Hut if you're playing a cleric or druid is a 100% in character choice, and if you're a wizard it's an in character choice akin to going camping without a tent just because you think that would be fun. In the arctic.

One thing D&D adventurers do is die. My characters almost all try to avoid that (and the one memorable one that didn't still sought to end up in Valhalla and wasn't going to let some unworthy foe kill him).

Leomund's Tiny Hut is okay if you just remove the ritual tag, so players are still forced to make choices (One more fireball, or do I save it for the tiny hut?)

 

[Neonchameleon]

Leomund's Tiny Hut is okay if you just remove the ritual tag, so players are still forced to make choices (One more fireball, or do I save it for the tiny hut?)

In short it's fine if you house rule it?

 

[Staffan]

Thanks for the explanation. Not sure I really care for the 4e Healing Surges. :-\

So as you go up in level, it takes more to wear you down (more hits, bigger/tougher/more dangerous hits, higher level spells, etc.). But it always takes about the same number of Healing Surges to get you back up to max? That seems off balance...

That's because your healing surges scale with you. Depending on your class and Constitution, your healing surges serve as a "reserve" pool of 150 to 300% of your hit points (theoretically possible to have more, but that would require an actually high Constitution, and IME most people settle for "OK" in favor of having better active stats).

Interestingly, Constitution affects this reserve pool much more than your actual hit points. 1st level hp go from 10+Con score (wizards) to 15+Con score (fighters, paladins), and Con does not affect later-level hit points. So for a 10th level fighter, the difference between Con 10 and Con 16 is going from 79 to 85 hp, which is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But they also go from 9 (225%) to 12 (300%) healing surges, increasing their total hp per day from 256 to 340, an increase of almost a third.

Also, if I am out of Healing Surges and the Cleric casts a healing spell on me, I get just a small benefit from it? Why have a Cleric? Let's just grab healing potions and be done.

If you're out of healing surges and the cleric casts healing word, nothing happens. Same if you drink a healing potion while out of surges. You're just too wiped out. If you need more healing, clerics can have cure light wounds (2nd level utility prayer, heals as if you spent a surge), cure serious wounds (6th level utility prayer, heals as if you spent two surges), or mass cure light wounds (10th level utility prayer, heals all allies within 25 ft as if they spent a healing surge and adds your Cha bonus to the healing done) – but that's a cleric that's extra-focused on healing at the expense of prayers like bless (2nd), divine vigor (6th), or shielding word (10th).

And why have a cleric, indeed? One of the goals of 4e was to make party setup more flexible. In most editions, you pretty much need a cleric, because you need that sweet healing. In 4e, healing is part of the Leader role, so a Warlord has the same baseline healing as a cleric, and so does (more or less) the later classes of bard, artificer, shaman, and probably ardent. A leader generally also deals some damage and hands out buffs.

Also, the job of a Leader is to heal you in battle. Between fights, you don't need an external source to trigger your healing surges (though you do get some extra mileage out of them if you have a leader using their healing word or equivalent).

Maybe I have been conditioned from all the other D&D editions I have played, but I like the traditional trope of higher level heroes needing more healing to get back up to top form. And I also like the 5e view of having separate internal (Hit Dice) and external (Clerics, Paladins, cure wounds scrolls., potions of healing, etc.) healing as resource pools.

And that's a matter of taste. I believe this is one point where 4e has a better structure than 5e, but it's not like I'm arguing that this is objectively true. What is objectively true is that hit dice do not serve the same role in the game as healing surges do, except on a very superficial level.

From a historical point of view, I'm pretty sure that the reason for healing surges can be spelled "wand of cure light wounds". The 3e DMG has a whole bit about adventure/dungeon/encounter design that boils down to "a 'normal' adventuring day should have four encounters, none of which is particularly dangerous on its own but soak up resources like spells or hit points, which means the fourth and final encounter actually poses some challenge." But CLW wands meant that you could easily heal up to full out of combat, so hp was no longer a meaningful daily attrition resource. To compensate, many DMs increased the challenge, which in turn meant that casters would use more spells on offense, which meant that the casters needed to rest sooner. And thus was born the 15-minute adventuring day. Healing surges were part of a greater focus on the encounter as the adventuring unit, while at the same time providing a daily attrition resource.

 

[Garthanos]

Exploration was easily skippable and had many cheap tools to beat it because most people are not RL skilled at it and many who joined after a certain point was not did not sign up to play a survival sim or a colony builder.

So4e just had to roll Dungeoneering/Nature/Streetwise/Thievery X times on an escalating DC track.

or those checks were made more interesting by extending the situation into skill challenges where the situation changed based on things done and simplified but not negated by resources/tools they used including rituals and martial practices and exertions(aka hs).

5e handed out OP exploration spells and class features like candy

 

[Undrave]

Unless, of course, what you see is adventure. Because, you know, that’s what adventurers do.
So much badwrongfunning in this thread...

First of all, do you see 'ADVENTURE' from the rules on how to calculation how much weight rations for a week will add up to? Because I don't. Do you see 'ADVENTURE' in a roll to avoid being lost? I don't. Exploration rules don't look like anything fun until they're all together, at the table, and the emergent properties of having to MAKE CHOICES become apparent. But that emerging property doesn't emerge if you take the easy shortcuts the game provide, because the book doesn't do a good enough job to explain what happens when all those rules come together and what it means to cut them out.

Using one skip button essentially makes all the other skip button more attractive because the rules stop being conductive to adventure if they are not working together. Counting rations doesn't matter if you're not counting encumbrance, for exemple, and if you're not counting ration then who cares if you're getting lost in the wilderness? And if you don't care about getting lost in the wilderness, why is it even a possibility? Let's just do a few random encounters and say you arrive at your destination.

And second of all, how the heck is my statement badwrongfunning?!

 

[Aldarc]

But, it's also not a terribly unreasonable reading either. As was mentioned, there are a very large amount of ways to fast forward travel. Multiple classes get all sorts of things that make travel more or less trivial. Food and water? Goodberry, Create Water, Purify Food and Water appear on several spell lists - druid, cleric, ranger, paladin. Bards and Rogues both can shoot their skills into the stratosphere. It's not all that difficult to bypass travel and exploration challenges.

I get what you're saying that it is a choice, but, it's not a particularly difficult choice. "Here, you can use some fairly low level, easily replaced resources to bypass travel difficulties, or, you can deal with the difficulties that typically aren't tied to anything that you actually want to do" isn't really much of a choice.

In general, I get the vague feeling that a fair number of the magic spells that were created by the pioneering players of early D&D were about trivializing travel and the exploration pillar.