D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm...not sure I buy the idea that 5e encounters expect that characters consistently fail their saves.

Not when there are things like the intellect devourer.

As I said. Such things as the intellect devourer are the problem. As are spells with a single save.
No oberoni again, as I admit that not everything seems to work as intended.

 

[Atomoctba]

The "training doesn't matter" problem, that is, skills feeling incredibly arbitrary. Because, with "bounded accuracy," skill bonuses start small and rarely become very large. A character with Expertise and a maxed primary stat only gets +15, the maximum possible without magic items. That means they have a 20% chance to fail a DC20 check, something merely "hard," while a completely untrained rube with just a little bit of natural talent (say, +2 modifier) has a 15% chance to succeed at that very same task. The difference between the most talentless hack and the creme de la creme is only 16 points, and this cashes out as a shocking number of embarrassing failures and inexplicable successes. If 5e's designers had allowed more flexibility with their numbers and bonuses, this could have easily been avoided.

Interesting. This is a bug for you. For me, it is a feature. I want the most mook of the mooks have some chance to do something and the most specialist of the world still have a reasonable if small chance to failure. This is what create great stories and epics in my mind. Realistic? For sure not. But again, for me D&D stories are more about tales than realism.

 

[Composer99]

I dunno, out of all of those complaints about 5e the only thing I concur is a genuine flaw in the implementation as such is how 5e handles non-proficient saving throws; to my mind, it causes it to be both out of line with every other single edition of D&D, when you take 4e's "NADs" into account and to fail to uphold the fantasy of "heroic characters being heroic".

Everything else is just a matter of (a) a specific, correctable flaw in implementation (monster design (†)), (b) just a difference in design philosophy that you can like or not like (skills), and (c) DMs making DM choices that you might or might not agree with (magic items; this last could have been nominally addressed with better guidance in the DMG about roughly how many magic items a PC should be expected to have at different tiers of play assuming the "heroic fantasy" default, although I say nominally since it might come for naught with at least some DMs who are inclined to stinginess).

(†) How many hit points a monster has isn't a problem, as such; it's whether or not it's interesting to fight against. Obviously, having scads of hit points is a problem if your monster design is uninspired, but that's because of uninspired design, not hit points.

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At any rate, since this thread has to do with redoing 4e, suffice to say that 4e has a different design philosophy and is meant to uphold a different feel in gameplay than 5e. With those in mind, I'm of the mind that 5e-style numerical bounding would be unsuitable for a 4e redo. Not to say finding ways to cut down on numbers would be entirely inappropriate, but I wouldn't recommend working from a 5e chassis.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Plenty are. They talk about it on this very forum.

For a handful of examples:

Saving throws not scaling. (As I said, "bounded accuracy" isn't actually about accuracy.) Plenty of people consider this a pretty serious hole in the rules, to the point that it's one of the most common house-rules in 5e to either give people more saving throw proficiencies, or outright making it so you get half proficiency to all non-proficient saving throws (effectively, "Jack of All (Saving) Throws.")

Monster HP inflation. (Again: not an accuracy issue.) Lots of people complain about how 5e monsters are just huge bags of hit points you have to chew through and which don't really do anything other than that. But that's, very literally, exactly what WotC promised us when they proposed "bounded accuracy." They would give us monsters that scaled in difficulty primarily through how much HP they had and (to a lesser extent) how much damage they could deal, with little to no change in their hit rates and AC. That 5e monsters are kind of dull is a widely-held criticism even by actual 5e fans.

The "training doesn't matter" problem, that is, skills feeling incredibly arbitrary. Because, with "bounded accuracy," skill bonuses start small and rarely become very large. A character with Expertise and a maxed primary stat only gets +15, the maximum possible without magic items. That means they have a 20% chance to fail a DC20 check, something merely "hard," while a completely untrained rube with just a little bit of natural talent (say, +2 modifier) has a 15% chance to succeed at that very same task. The difference between the most talentless hack and the creme de la creme is only 16 points, and this cashes out as a shocking number of embarrassing failures and inexplicable successes. If 5e's designers had allowed more flexibility with their numbers and bonuses, this could have easily been avoided.

The flaws of the "magic items aren't required" claim. When AC is so static, sure, you don't "need" the items in the sense that they don't make the difference between being able to hit at all or not...but that was mostly not true in prior editions either, and 5e still has the "immune to non-magical weapons" thing so that aspect is false too. Instead, magic weapons become incredibly sought after because they're practically the only way to improve your chance to hit....which makes DMs even more miserly with items than they were before 5e, when it was supposed to be the "you can have items or not have items, it'll be fine either way!"

Bounded accuracy really did directly lead to a significant chunk of problems people complain about fairly regularly. These aren't one-off grumbles, they're commonly-encountered issues today, often requiring house-rule patches or strict DM policies to address. (And no, it is not the case that the problem isn't a problem if you can house-rule it away. The Oberoni fallacy remains a fallacy.)

The silly thing is, what did it fix? On the skill side the BIG COMPLAINT was that my 30th level Wizard with a 12 STR is now able to beat your average athletic peasant (lets grant him a +2 Ability bonus and a +5 Proficiency bonus for +7) because of nothing but his +15 level bonus. Yeah, technically its true, though even at this point he won't win EVERY time, just 80% of the time. The question is "when will this come up?" and the answer is, never, never ever in a million billion years will this come up, especially not in the context of 4e's super heroic version of the D&D genre! Its a vacuous objection to a system that serves QUITE WELL for all the cases that it is meant to cover. Heck, if you need a sturdy 'peasant' to wrassle with your Wizard, just make him a level 30 minion and watch him kick ass. I mean, you must be meeting this guy in some astral realm or something, right? You sure as heck aren't hobnobbing with peasants back on Earth!

Likewise BA, I'm just not seeing any point to this. It requires that, if anything like the established power curve is to exist, HUGE increases in high level monster/PC hit points. If you are now completely changing the power curve in 4e, this is a totally different game! 4e is a game where mighty heroes dare to seek out conflicts with the very gods themselves, and even BECOME exarchs/demigods. No way I am interested in a game where high level PCs need to worry about orcs, unless they are the baddest demon-blood-infused super orcs!

Nor do the complaints about enchantment and requirement to be totally decked with items really hold much water. Even back in the early days of 4e we already figured out inherent bonus, long before it was made a 'rule' (I think it was first a rule in DS and then included in DMG3 IIRC). I mean, sure you WANT item enchantments, but they're not vital to most classes success (warlocks may be an exception, lol). Still, as you say, its FAR more vital to have such items in 5e where no alternatives really exist and the better high level items provide really significant advantages.

I really never saw the flavor arguments either. I mean, in my first campaign, at paragon the PCs were like: A dwarf fighter wielding his father's flaming war axe that was infused with balor blood in a trial by combat with a demon; A chosen STR cleric wielding the sword and shield of an ancient hero and prophesied to save the land; A starlock with a secondary hag pact that was slowly being taken over by his rod; And I forget what the rogue had, but it was another pretty bad-assed weapon that had a history of some sort, etc! The whole system is so dripping with flavor, and easy ways to tie stuff into the PC's history, actions, and build choices that I almost find it hard to understand when I see games where the above sort of stuff isn't the norm!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh macaroni fallacy... again. No. Not a problem with saving throws in general. Works as intended. No need to fix.

Some spells don't work with that system however.
Saving throws in 5e are inheritors of the duration mechanic of 4e. Asummptions in encounter builiding is that everyone fails their save.

Totally is a problem though, as it means higher level casting can be particularly effective, but only some random segment of spells that happen to use saves instead of attack rolls mysteriously benefit. 5e's casting system is borked, lol. Nothing about 5e saves, their very existence, is NOT a bad design. And they are NOTHING like the 4e duration mechanic at all, they're just a randomly distributed alternate to attack rolls. Probably the silliest thing ever implemented in WotC D&D...

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Totally is a problem though, as it means higher level casting can be particularly effective, but only some random segment of spells that happen to use saves instead of attack rolls mysteriously benefit. 5e's casting system is borked, lol. Nothing about 5e saves, their very existence, is NOT a bad design. And they are NOTHING like the 4e duration mechanic at all, they're just a randomly distributed alternate to attack rolls. Probably the silliest thing ever implemented in WotC D&D...

I think you are partially wrong. They are exactly used as a duration mechanic... (Save ends, repeat saving throw at the end of your turn...).

Edit: changed fromngenerally one save in 3e or 2e and duration dependend on caster level.

*partial, because they currently serve two purposes. I think to be really used to prevent sonething from happening, either prof bonus should generally be applied or advantage.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you are partially wrong. They are exactly used as a duration mechanic... (Save ends, repeat saving throw at the end of your turn...).

Edit: changed fromngenerally one save in 3e or 2e and duration dependend on caster level.

*partial, because they currently serve two purposes. I think to be really used to prevent sonething from happening, either prof bonus should generally be applied or advantage.

'save ends' exists only on a pretty limited subset of spells in 5e. I'm not sure of an exact percentage, but just now surveying common spells that you would likely use to create an ongoing effect in an unwilling target I only found ONE that described that mechanic out of a round dozen that I looked at (I think it was Blindness/Deafness IIRC). So I would consider 'save as a duration' to be a somewhat uncommon use case in 5e. It is MUCH MUCH more commonly used as a replacement for an attack role, a mechanism who's very existence simply makes no sense to me at all from a game design perspective.

Bringing it back to the discussion of changes to 4e, I wouldn't change anything about 4e saves, they work fine as a duration mechanism already. Honestly, I think it might be OK to have more things simply last until the end of the encounter though. It certainly simplifies tracking and I think in many cases it would be OK.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Interesting. This is a bug for you. For me, it is a feature. I want the most mook of the mooks have some chance to do something and the most specialist of the world still have a reasonable if small chance to failure. This is what create great stories and epics in my mind. Realistic? For sure not. But again, for me D&D stories are more about tales than realism.

The problem for me isn't (really) the realism. It's that it doesn't tell good tales.

Failing 20% of the time when you are (allegedly) the world's leading expert on arcanology means you aren't really an expert. The kinds of stories you can tell are sharply limited because nobody is really an expert...unless they juice up with magic.

What kind of story is served by the slightly clever Rogue (+2 Int) knowing obscure magic facts 10% of the time while the literally world-renowned wizard who knows as much as anyone fails so often?

And it isn't just me here. There was a complaint right at the beginning of 5e about Asmodeus, where even the very best Deception characters couldn't reliably succeed at lying to Asmodeus himself, the prince of lies, but a random peasant had a 25% chance of doing so. Again, to be clear, this isn't about realism. It is about how many stories get cut off because being a true, actual expert who reliably succeeds at hard things (e.g., would only fail one time in 20, if that) is literally impossible for players to achieve...unless they get juiced up with magic. Even getting to +15 is impossible for most characters, since Expertise only comes from two classes and a couple feats (which many DMs are keen to emphasize are optional, by which they mean "forbidden.")

But this is off topic.

One way I would go about fixing 4e would be doing more to give default flavor to each power, but also make it really clear both THAT that flavor can change, and tools for HOW to change it if players/DMs want them. Some of this was there, but a lot of it showed up late...partially due to the "Purple Wyvern" thing (or whatever that preview feat was that made people SO ANGRY for no reason.)

 

[Atomoctba]

The problem for me isn't (really) the realism. It's that it doesn't tell good tales.

It is in where we disagree. For me and my group, it tells great tales. As always, your mileage can vary...

And we are also against juice it with magic. In most campaigns I play or DM, there is no items giving numeric bonus to anything. Magic items should do interesting things, not be required to do anything.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It is in where we disagree. For me and my group, it tells great tales. As always, your mileage can vary...

And we are also against juice it with magic. In most campaigns I play or DM, there is no items giving numeric bonus to anything. Magic items should do interesting things, not be required to do anything.

So...you can't tell stories about people who are genuine experts. And you can't have the special impact of a situation where players are usually reliable, but this one time it goes wrong because it's especially hard. (Gandalf's failure to understand the entrance of Moria is special because everyone, including Gandalf himself, expects to be able to open the door easily. Without his reliability, the scene has far less value.)

I wasn't talking about magic items. I was talking about spells, like guidance, enhance ability, or skill empowerment; or features like Bardic Inspiration. (Though technically only guidance and BI give bonuses proper.)