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

[GregoryOatmeal]

I tried so hard to love 4E but eventually just gave up on it due to the combat length. It felt like we could only get one combat in and some roleplaying or two combats in a four hour game. I started modifying the structure of my game to put less emphasis on combat and more on roleplaying.

I've heard a lot of ridiculous accusations that 4E is as much a roleplaying game as Monopoly. That's not true. You can have an awesome 4E game without any combat. I find these to be the best 4E games.

But honestly I roleplay more when I play other games. If there is any truth to the accusations that 4E is not a roleplaying game it is because combat is SO time-consuming. In 4E you could have a 90 minute combat. In 5E the combat would be thirty minutes, leaving enough time for one or two other battles or an hour of roleplaying. I just find more stuff happens in a game session.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Some people want to be able to push a "button" and have stuff happen instead of using tactics.

Want battlefield control? Move around the battlefield and set up flanks or cause enemies to stop and take cover. You don't need spells or abilities to do this.

 

[Authweight]

The Slayer didn't do it for you?

The slayer was a good addition to the game, but my table ended up never playing any of the essentials stuff. My players didn't really grok the idea of there being more than one fighter, so every time I brought it up they were just like, "uhh... nah, I'll play the original fighter." They also didn't really like that the slayer was built on a different chassis than the classes they were used to. By the time we added brand new players to the group, we had dropped the character builder and were doing things from books (since we weren't sure how long the CB would be around), and although we had the essentials books everyone found it more intuitive to grab the PHB and build from it instead.

Essentials was one of those things where the idea was better than the actual thing. It was intended for new players, but new players are the ones least able to wade through all the overlapping, seemingly contradictory options that essentials presented.

 

[shamsael]

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.

I've always told haters that 4th edition is the REAL dungeons and dragons, that it brings the game back to its real roots as a system for man-to-man combat. The original books only really addressed how one fights, leaving nom-combat interaction up to the imagination. The original books even advised using a different game to handle exploration and wilderness survival. The problem was never that 4e was a departure from D&D, the problem was that the majority of the player base doesn't want REAL D&D, they quite rightly prefer something along the lines of 2nd or 3rd edition.

If your group manages to truly appreciate 4e, I wouldn't recommend making the switch.

 

[Authweight]

All the barbarians I've seen in 3e have been built on the concept of raging, running into a fight, doing butt-loads of damage, and then going down because their AC sucks. Sure, they have lots of hp (particularly when raging), but 3e barbarians only get medium armor, generally don't use shields (because DAMAGE), and then get an additional AC penalty in a rage. That's a striker if I ever saw one, although one with a somewhat different approach than the precision-oriented rangers and rogues.

I haven't really played enough 3e to judge if this is the case or not, but I'll believe you. Either way, for brand new players, it's not really what they think of when they think "barbarian." This seems to me like something both editions got wrong. The barbarian, IMO anyway, should be a big tough dude, not a glass cannon.

I think healers were probably the thing that lead to roles in the first place. A long-standing issue in D&D has been the need for a cleric, specifically, because of healing. In 3e, you could easily do with a barbarian or paladin instead of a fighter in the party, and a sorcerer can do a lot of the things a wizard can. But you really can't substitute a druid for a cleric, because the druid sucks at healing. This is aggravated somewhat by the cleric having a lot of baggage, what with the connection to religion and all. So in 4e, they decided that you should be able to substitute something else for a cleric and still do OK, and then they took that to its logical conclusion. And of course, WoW's division of classes/specs into DPS/tank/healer put things in focus.

Of course, the dependence on healers for hit point recovery in 3e was alleviated by wands of cure light wounds​, but they broke the game in other ways.

One of the odd things about 4e is they went to all sorts of trouble to make dedicated healers unnecessary, then went back and made a bunch of dedicated healers. In 4e, everyone can heal themselves between fights, and even has ways to do it during fights. Healing in 4e doesn't even give you a while lot more total hp per day, it just lets you get your hp during the fight instead of having to wait until after.

I think the healing was well designed, there just was no need to make it so central to the game. It was like we had finally escaped the clutches of the healbot, and then were like, "weeellll.... I guess we'll have a bunch of healers anyway, just cause."

 

[Pickles JG]

With that said, I am curious about the concern for losing the defender role and the built in "stickiness" of defenders in the various AEDU powers from 4e. I never noticed this as a concern on any of the message boards & forums over the past ten years, nor from newsgroups back in the 2nd edition era, or letters to the editor in Dragon magazine back in the day. Figthers prior to 4e never had any special powers that kept enemies in the front line back then, why is it an issue over the past 5 years? Maybe it's subconscious metagaming, but as both player and DM I've never noticed enemies ignoring front liners and moving right through to wizards in the back, they always take care of the "meat shields" while ranged attackers or spellcasters attacked the party casters - mainly because they would be smacked around mercilessly by the combo of fighters and rogues who played open season by allowing themselves to be flanked, while the casters backed into safer positions anyway and magiced them as usual. If a fighter does pretty strong damage, ignoring him and letting him get a free swipe is a hazard in itself.

Even in 5e with the whole "move/fight/move" thing, they still get op attacks, and casters have plenty of magic and opportunities to lock them down. If you add the marking mechanic back, this just adds to the reason opponents wouldn't want to be flanked behind enemy lines just to try and get hold of the casters. I don't mean to go all "appeal to ignorance" here, I just never saw the issue prior to the advent of the official Defender role.

I DON'T really miss it either, you can do a lot of work with positioning. I have not seen a swarm of eg berserkers just run past the front lines though. Theu77g4uyhave a boatload of hp and only the first one or two will get attacked anyway.

I think I can explain how it came about though. 2e fighters did most damage and were most robust (as evidenced by damage trackers in say Icewind Dale that I have been reolaying recently).
To allow all the classes to be balanced in combat they had to lose some of this. Being tough is only half of being tank you also need to make enemies attack you. The marks and punishment mechanics help supplement positioning for this while also increasing the combat choices.
For me the roles should have beeen mostly a hidden design tool that allowed the designers create classes shine in different ways in combat rather than an overt slot.

That is how it had always worked in earlier editions, though they worked across "pillars". The issue with that being it often turned people on or off at different times in the game. Watch now while the Rogue sneaks about then searche sfor then disarms the traps. 5e does a much better job of allowing characters to be relevant in more stages of the game. Broader skill access for one thing and flatter maths even if this makes it all into a bit of a dice game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

With that said, I am curious about the concern for losing the defender role and the built in "stickiness" of defenders in the various AEDU powers from 4e. I never noticed this as a concern on any of the message boards & forums over the past ten years, nor from newsgroups back in the 2nd edition era, or letters to the editor in Dragon magazine back in the day. Figthers prior to 4e never had any special powers that kept enemies in the front line back then, why is it an issue over the past 5 years?

It's been an issue over the past 14 years. But even back in the 90s I remember the first priority being Squash The Squishy/Kill The Caster whenever you could.

In oD&D and AD&D, withdrawing from combat was very risky and had to be done backwards. Attacks of Opportunity were vicious and based on the attacker's actions rather than getting one action per round. AD&D combat by the book was largely static because of this. There was no need for subconscious metagaming. Fighters could lock people down hard. So could clerics and thieves for that matter. Also in oD&D, BECMI, and 1e you were expected to have a lot of hirelings. And frequently two solid stone walls as anchors.

3.0 made Attacks of Opportunity dependent on the attacker - 1/round, and removed the withdrawing from combat rules. (3.5 left this unchanged) while adding the full round attack to the game, locking the fighter down a lot. It also nerfed the fighter hard in a lot of other places that were more crippling (e.g. the saving throw system). A common question for optimisation in 3.X was how to make the Fighter as sticky as possible (Polearm/Spiked Chain Trippers - and a few other things). This became more noticeable as the 3.X lifecycle went on for two reasons; firstly because people were playing 3.X as 3.X rather than as 2E with a cleaned up and consistent rules set (go into 3.X with an evoker wizard and healbot cleric and a lot of the issues vanish; in 2e that's both good and expected play) and secondly because of the popularity of WoW where hard coded tanking is SOP so more people starting the game expect it to work.

4e kept the fluidity and even increased it by eliminating the full round attacks - but gave everyone back an unlimited number of opportunity attacks and returned a lot of extra stickiness to the fighter. (A level 1 4e fighter has from memory roughly the equivalent of 6 3.5 feats spent on stickiness based on class abilities alone).

5e is almost back to the 3.X situation. One opportunity attack per character per round (rather than it being based on the target). You can move and attack (but don't break the fighters' full round attacks by eating the AoO to not stand in front of them).

Maybe it's subconscious metagaming, but as both player and DM I've never noticed enemies ignoring front liners and moving right through to wizards in the back, they always take care of the "meat shields" while ranged attackers or spellcasters attacked the party casters - mainly because they would be smacked around mercilessly by the combo of fighters and rogues who played open season by allowing themselves to be flanked, while the casters backed into safer positions anyway and magiced them as usual. If a fighter does pretty strong damage, ignoring him and letting him get a free swipe is a hazard in itself.

The big problem comes when the party is outnumbered - especially by melee foes. The most dangerous thing for the bad guys isn't the fighter killing a single extra one of them. It's the wizard fireballing a dozen into oblivion in one single spell (or their AoE of choice). And it's precisely this situation where the 5e fighter fails dismally to hold the line as they only get a single Reaction. The thief doesn't help much here - one attack and if my memory serves me, they won't have sneak attack on their AoO meaning that they aren't likely to kill anyone much more threatening than a goblin without sneak attack (a basic CR 0.5 Orc in the Quickstart rules has 15hp - meaning that one shotting them for a thief without Sneak Attack is almost impossible - but is very likely with 3d6 Sneak Attack).

And if you haven't noticed the bad guys playing Squash the Squishy? I definitely have - to the point it was SOP in the 90s.

 

[TwoSix]

Some people want to be able to push a "button" and have stuff happen instead of using tactics.

Want battlefield control? Move around the battlefield and set up flanks or cause enemies to stop and take cover. You don't need spells or abilities to do this.

Actually, I'll just take my button, thanks.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Actually, I'll just take my button, thanks.

If you don't want a button there are plenty of games without mechanically hard coded spells. D&D was designed round magic users getting buttons.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I for one am glad to be free of the constraints of 4th edition. I'm glad 5th edition allows me to choose my role for myself in the party no matter which class I choose.

4E is yesterday’s news, no matter how a shrinking minority of blowhard gamers try to argue otherwise.

I'm sure that's nice for you, but the OP was pretty clear that they were looking for advice from people who liked 4e. Threadcrapping like this just has the potential to degenerate into edition wars. Posting about how much you dislike 4e in a thread about how 5e might be received by a 4e fan isn't welcome, so please don't.

Thanks