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

[Minigiant]

Additionally, look at how the spells are organized. 2nd and 3rd level cleric spells in AD&D are mostly utility. A few combat, but, primarily utility spells. But the big thing is, no healing spells. You didn't have to compete between healing and utility because, well, there were no 2nd and 3rd level healing spells. And a LOT of those utility spells essentially created magic items - Create Food and Water didn't have a duration. Continual Light just worked forever. That sort of thing.

I can't be the only group that basically only saw cure light wounds prepped for 1st level spells (at least until very high levels) and then 2nd and 3rd level spells were whatever the caster wanted.

I noticed it too. It's why in my simple D&D hack, clerics only get "Create" Spells in the 2nd and 3rd levels. Druids were similar.

Only Wizards got attack spells every level.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's kind of annoying that like over 30 years the most D&D could do to make travel fun is make you spend resources not to engage with it.

Like maybe excise the tedious resource mini game and encumbrance (I get that it was the limiting factor on gold for XP, but that's gone now) and instead create some structure for exploration encounter types. And maybe an actually interesting alternative to random trash mob encounters?

My buddy essentially recreated Kingmaker for a game we're playing and a lot of hexes just have an Interesting Thing with Fallout style environmental story telling or stuff to interact with instead of pointless fights meant to force us to have our recommended violence calories per day and make us spend resources.

 

[Undrave]

Because that’s where the drama and conflict and tension are. That’s where there’s story. There’s no interesting story in the featureless hallway.

...so you're not actually arguing with me. Because what I literally said was, a game shouldn't be designed like this. It should be designed so that making reasonable, smart decisions--not ruthless optimization, just playing smart--contributes to fun, not pulling away from fun.

And let's not forget to think from the in-universe character's point of view: No sane person will take the dangerous maze! It might be fun for the PLAYER but the CHARACTER isn't gonna have a good time fighting for their life!! You shouldn't have to actively fight against your character's survival instinct to have fun!

4e just skipped the pretense and let you dump gold straight into magic.

And 5e let's you dump gold straight into HP with potions

 

[Vaalingrade]

I miss getting to dump gold into magic. Ready access to magic is fun, unlike treating magic like your grandma's ceramic cat collection; 'it's special because you're never allowed to do anything with it that you want'.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I miss getting to dump gold into magic. Ready access to magic is fun, unlike treating magic like your grandma's ceramic cat collection; 'it's special because you're never allowed to do anything with it that you want'.

Absolutely. The Ritual Caster feat doesn't really replace the fact that anybody, not just people with the feat, could use a ritual scroll.

It always bothered me that it's supposed to be really hard for someone to use a spell scroll to cast magic. It makes a more fantastical world, IMO, when the fantastical is reachable but not fully knowable. Like...people casting from scrolls is both a thoroughly D&D trope (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) and actually pretty precedented in the myths of the Medieval period and (particularly) Antiquity, where "curse tablets" and other straight-up ritual magic were frequently conducted by ordinary folk.

Hell, we have actual literary examples of common-folk believing in ritual magic literally from Ancient Rome. The Satyricon includes a section where someone tells a story about a man that performs an, ahem, adult ritual around his removed clothes, turning himself into a wolf. It's presented as something genuine, albeit a little hard to believe.

I think in the push to "make magic magical again," we've instead just made it annoying to access unless you're Pre-Approved For This Mystical Offer!

 

[Garthanos]

I miss getting to dump gold into magic. Ready access to magic is fun, unlike treating magic like your grandma's ceramic cat collection; 'it's special because you're never allowed to do anything with it that you want'.

Ritual magic like the hundreds in 4e are actually more authentic to most legends and myth than the rest. There were some minor scale or psychological errors in that level 1 rituals were arguably priced out of range for level one characters

 

[overgeeked]

And let's not forget to think from the in-universe character's point of view: No sane person will take the dangerous maze!

No sane person would be an adventurer. D&D is a game about insane adventurers. They're looking for the story. The general advice of "please make an adventurer" comes to mind, i.e. please make a D&D character that's going to engage with the things D&D is about.

 

[Vaalingrade]

No sane person would be an adventurer. D&D is a game about insane adventurers. They're looking for the story. The general advice of "please make an adventurer" comes to mind, i.e. please make a D&D character that's going to engage with the things D&D is about.

So... we shouldn't make a bean-counter like travel in D&D demands?

 

[overgeeked]

So... we shouldn't make a bean-counter like travel in D&D demands?

Maybe older editions demanded that. 5E makes it trivial to smash that skip content button.

And there’s a difference between knowing how much food you should pack for an overland travel/camping trip and being a “bean counter”. If you don’t want to die of starvation you bring enough food to last the assumed length of the trip.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Maybe older editions demanded that. 5E makes it trivial to smash that skip content button.

And there’s a difference between knowing how much food you should pack for an overland travel/camping trip and being a “bean counter”. If you don’t want to die of starvation you bring enough food to last the assumed length of the trip.

That's why we have a fighter, duh.