D&D 5E Sell 5th edition to a 4th edition fan...

[Nergal Pendragon]

My main hold-out on 5e is currently that I can't get a close sense of how the math affects the game's pacing (or what the game considers a "baseline pace"). Like, how much time is a given "adventuring day" supposed to take up? How many rounds? How many hits for monsters / PC's? I think those numbers might be in there, but they're harder to tease out than they were for 4e, which makes me a little concerned about its long-term flexibility. The main reason I liked 4e was that I could make it do what I wanted, but even 4e wasn't always built to be comfortable with that.

I think the lack of a number of encounters in a single day is intentional, so as to add flexibility. That way, the DM decides how many encounters there are based on the DM's individual preference or just the needs of the particular adventure. And it allows the DM to adapt the campaign to how well the individual players manage resources and how much time the individual session is supposed to last.

So I think the lack of an answer on that is because the designers are counting on DMs tailoring the number per day to the individual group.

 

[LittleElvis]

If you like 4th, as I do, I'd play 13th Age over 5th Edition. 5th Edition is a great, elegant system if you feel nostalgia for an older system such as 2nd edition, and it expands creative options for resolving party problems (not as combat-focused as 4th, by a long shot), but it's going to feel like an old Vancian magic D&D game. It just runs far better than those earlier incarnations of the game, because game design has grown by leaps and bounds.

13th Age is the successor to 4th edition, IMO. It has everything there is to like about 5th, as it's faster, lighter, and more elegant. But unlike 4th, there are a lot of great mechanics and encouragement for roleplaying, character creation, improvisational play, and immersion into setting. It gets right what 4th Ed. got wrong, IMO. It was created by a lead designer of 4.0 and a lead designer of 3.5.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think the lack of a number of encounters in a single day is intentional, so as to add flexibility.

Well, there is a measure of that -- daily XP, and a note that 6-8 encounters per day is about average. What hangs my math up now is more trying to figure out, say, how many hits a mid-range monster in a medium encounter is supposed to get on an average character.

That way, the DM decides how many encounters there are based on the DM's individual preference or just the needs of the particular adventure. And it allows the DM to adapt the campaign to how well the individual players manage resources and how much time the individual session is supposed to last.

5e's flexibility makes The Maths a little hard to tease out, but I think they're still in there...somewhere...

 

[Beleriphon]

Disclaimer:
While many people disliked 4th edition for many valid reasons, I'll ask that you bear with me on this. My group and I really loved it, in fact it was our best edition ever. We play together since 1st edition mostly. For us, we did not care that the game encourages combat, because we can do roleplay by our own. By comparison, it seems to us that all other editions (including Pathfinder, which we played for a couple of years) is just boring or broken in some ways (control magic arg!). The inclusion of solos, elites and minions, of Action Points, of Essentials-type classes and powers (which we played much more than standard classes), etc made the game and the fights much more interesting to us.
I understand not everyone feels the same way, but my group is really attached to 4th edition for these reasons and others.

Get the DMG if you plan on playing 5E for anything significant lenght of time, that book has enough option rule changes to make 5E play more like 4E.

So, with that out of the way, can people who really got to play 5th edition help me get enthused by this edition??
In our eyes, 5th is simply going back to older editions that we clearly banned from the table as soon as we really got into 4th edition.
I read the 5th books quickly and I cannot seem to sell it to my group.
We're concerned about the lack of support to 4th edition and the coming disappearance of Compendium and Character Builder (they cannot keep it up for long now that they promote 5th, I guess), and we worry that we won't be able to switch to 5th edition and still have the same fun...

I think you'll find that the rules play less like previous editions than they appear on first blush. All classes are very much like Essentials classes, so you have that right up front. There aren't the difference between monsters, at least not spelled out so clearly, as 4E. There's no minions, but due to the way the rules work a low level mook like a goblin or an orc can still present a moderate challenge to a higher level character, and still die in one solid hit (often just from the strength damage portion of an attack)

Please tell me we're wrong. Explain to me why we don't see the 5th edition in the right way, what we can find satisfactory, keeping in mind what we loved about 4th edition.

Again, my point is not to start a troll fight about editions. Real genuine concern about the eventual inevitability of switching editions.

Thanks!

You might not like it, but if you were mostly using 4E as a combat engine then 5E isn't in all honestly that different. Sure there's some differences, but one the whole I don't think you'd notice for the most part. The combat is fast and deadly. That said the rules do allow plenty of out of combat interaction as well through the skills

 

[Psikerlord#]

I think the lack of a number of encounters in a single day is intentional, so as to add flexibility. That way, the DM decides how many encounters there are based on the DM's individual preference or just the needs of the particular adventure. And it allows the DM to adapt the campaign to how well the individual players manage resources and how much time the individual session is supposed to last.

So I think the lack of an answer on that is because the designers are counting on DMs tailoring the number per day to the individual group.

The DMG suggests 6-8 encounters for a usual day, with 2 short rests. It's all very flexible however.

To answer the OP - maybe try 13th Age. I found it very excellent, a kind of mix of 3e and 4e. Personally I prefer 5e (mainly because combat is so flexible and fast). I would give 5e a go, you might be surprised.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Ah! I was wrong on the encounters.

My mistake! I need to pick up the DMG this weekend.

 

[LittleElvis]

I'll say this for 5th edition, though. The classes seem really well designed, so much that playing your favorite class is likely to feel awesome. For example, I love playing paladins. Although 4th ed. is still my favorite edition of D&D, the 4th edition paladin wasn't terribly well designed. But when you play a 5E paladin, you feel like a stud. You feel like the designers understand your class and didn't nerf you.

And every class seems to be like that, from what I've seen so far. No matter what classic D&D archetypes you like to play, nostalgia has never felt so good.

 

[Wolfskin]

My pitch is brief: 5e it's not the same game as 4e, but you can try it out for free and see if you like it. Perhaps you'll dig it, perhaps not, but trying out 5e certainly doesn't mean giving up on 4e, or vice-versa.

 

[Raith5]

I'll say this for 5th edition, though. The classes seem really well designed, so much that playing your favorite class is likely to feel awesome. For example, I love playing paladins. Although 4th ed. is still my favorite edition of D&D, the 4th edition paladin wasn't terribly well designed. But when you play a 5E paladin, you feel like a stud. You feel like the designers understand your class and didn't nerf you.

And every class seems to be like that, from what I've seen so far. No matter what classic D&D archetypes you like to play, nostalgia has never felt so good.

I thought the Paladin was really good in 4e in terms of impact and flavour (cant say the same about all 4e classes, especially druids and barbarians). But I agree I have found 5e classes really interesting and well designed: except the inexplicable absence of a martial only ranger.

 

[LittleElvis]

I though the Paladin was really good in 4e in terms of impact and flavour (cant say the same about all 4e classes, especially druids and barbarians). But I agree I have found 5e classes really interesting and well designed: except the inexplicable absence of a martial only ranger.

Paladins were tough in 4E. You typically went either CHA or STR-based, and either route had limitations. Like bad OAs with CHA paladins unless you paid a feat tax, though that option wasn't even in the PHB1; or your divine challenge and many nice powers were bad if you were STR-based.

You were nowhere near as sticky as a fighter and Divine Challenge was clunky and not all that effective, so you weren't a great 'defender.' Your skills were a bit limited, as I recall Athletics wasn't a class skill. You always felt keenly MAD (multiple-attribute dependent), which is less of an issue in 5E because of bounded accuracy.

I played a paladin in 4E because I like paladins, but I felt the game design punished me for playing one of the most iconic classes in the game. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't feel right either. It felt like playing a class designed by someone who hated the class. 5E is nothing like that.