NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8968703" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'm assuming because they believe the "save again every round" thing makes it more similar to 4e than to 3e. I, personally, disagree--they're not totally dissimilar, in much the same way that hit dice and healing surges aren't totally dissimilar. But that doesn't make 5e saves actually 4e saves with a new coat of paint. The two are quite different.That is, for clarity, 4e saves do exactly three things (and two of them could technically be lumped together):permit variable but diminishing durationsavoid death (death saves)power the "condition track" mechanicDeath saves were kept in 5e essentially as-is, but the condition track was completely trashed and the "variable-but-diminishing-durations" thing is not even remotely the primary point of 5e saves. The majority just decide whether something takes full damage or reduced damage. Some, yes, do preserve the "it won't last forever" effect, but plenty don't--others lean more into what PF2e would formalize later with its four-step variable success (hitting vs missing and standard vs crit), where passing the save means you get hit with a weak effect for the normal duration while failing it means you get hit with the full/nasty effect for the full duration. It all depends, and there's never been a consistent pattern.Variable-but-diminishing duration is valuable, but it's really the "condition track" mechanic that makes 4e saves shine. That invites drama and tension: things could get worse or better or stay the same, and the ending outcome remains uncertain for a good while, rather than definitively being all bad or all cleared up. Giving a specific example, fighting a medusa can allow for a condition track against its petrification: anyone that can see its Petrifying Gaze attack must make a save, first failure makes you Slowed, second failure makes you Immobilized, and only on the third failure in a row are you Petrified (no save.) This creates a great deal of tension, without actually making outright failure that likely; by default, a save is a 50% chance, so any given character only has a 1/8 chance of falling to it, and that's assuming no one is able to give them a boost. That's better than even (~51.3% chance) that no one gets petrified--but it becomes very tense, because any member of the party still could. Since Blinded creatures are immune to the Petrifying Gaze, you can even protect yourself by willingly becoming blind--perhaps by wearing a blindfold.So...yeah. The "condition track" was one of the best, most interesting components of 4e design that could easily be applied to any other game, and 5e just unceremoniously chucked it in the bin because it stank too much of 4e. And it wasn't even original to 4e, SWSE did it first!</blockquote>

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