Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Imaro]

But I seemed to have the opposite experience with 5e. As an old-school wizard expert I found 5e's spell-casting rules to be a bonanza of ways to make a powerful wizard that had the rest of the party mostly for his side-kicks. They WERE a good bit more combat-effective even at mid-higher levels than in 2e, but spell-casters still set the agenda. I think you can viably craft a 'no casters' kind of game that isn't completely nerfed, etc, which is a huge step up from 3.x and certainly a step up from 2e, in which games non-casters were all VERY definitely '2nd tier' except at low level.

Still, I wouldn't put any 5e non-caster party up against a wizard, not one played like it wants to win.

HOW?? Not being snarky or funny here either. I'm honestly curious I've been running and playing 5e for a while and I'm not seeing this at all, especially within the limits of Concentration. I honestly think a party of...or possibly even a single NPC ranged fighter (Battlemaster) with a Longbow and a good stealth could, if not own him, give a Wizard a nice run for his money... In fact I think A ROgue with high enough stealth and Cunning Action could as well (Unless were talking open clear field here). That Wizard isn't going to be able to hold onto his Concentration while he's pelted and he's going to be burning through his spells quickly unless he resorts to cantrips... What I've noticed in my 5e games is that the wizard is much more effective if he's buffing the fighters and staying back so that he's not getting knocked around and having to make concentration checks.

 

[Parmandur]

HOW?? Not being snarky or funny here either. I'm honestly curious I've been running and playing 5e for a while and I'm not seeing this at all, especially within the limits of Concentration. I honestly think a party of...or possibly even a single NPC ranged fighter (Battlemaster) with a Longbow and a good stealth could, if not own him, give a Wizard a nice run for his money... In fact I think A ROgue with high enough stealth and Cunning Action could as well (Unless were talking open clear field here). That Wizard isn't going to be able to hold onto his Concentration while he's pelted and he's going to be burning through his spells quickly unless he resorts to cantrips... What I've noticed in my 5e games is that the wizard is much more effective if he's buffing the fighters and staying back so that he's not getting knocked around and having to make concentration checks.

Yeah, more this thing.

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[AbdulAlhazred]

HOW?? Not being snarky or funny here either. I'm honestly curious I've been running and playing 5e for a while and I'm not seeing this at all, especially within the limits of Concentration. I honestly think a party of...or possibly even a single NPC ranged fighter (Battlemaster) with a Longbow and a good stealth could, if not own him, give a Wizard a nice run for his money... In fact I think A ROgue with high enough stealth and Cunning Action could as well (Unless were talking open clear field here). That Wizard isn't going to be able to hold onto his Concentration while he's pelted and he's going to be burning through his spells quickly unless he resorts to cantrips... What I've noticed in my 5e games is that the wizard is much more effective if he's buffing the fighters and staying back so that he's not getting knocked around and having to make concentration checks.

Well, bows are nice but I can be invisible or take other measures. Not that any of that is totally sovereign against melee attacks, but its pretty good. Worst case I can get a shot at SODing your notional battlemaster into a goldfish or holding him, or petrifying him or a couple other options.

The key to being a REALLY bad-assed wizard is, you never get into the situation where a fighter is in your grill. If you got there, you already failed. You have so many levers on a situation, there's just no need for that. The measure I often go by is to ask, "which is more potent, 5 wizards or one wizard, one cleric, one fighter, one rogue, and a ranger?" Well, at higher levels you'd almost always be a more powerful force as 5 wizards, or maybe arguably 3 wizards, a cleric, and a bard in 5e but certainly 5 full casters. The overall strategic and operational options available to that party means they simply won't often need a fighter type, and 5e really hasn't dealt much with the "a wizard can in a pinch obviate the need for a rogue". I'm not saying rogues, fighters, etc aren't fun to play or that they can't participate in a significant way in the game, THAT is reserved for 3.5, but if you really play with the full "what can I do with my magic to change the rules of the game in my favor?" kind of mentality, then casting is head-and-shoulders above swordplay.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, bows are nice but I can be invisible or take other measures. Not that any of that is totally sovereign against melee attacks, but its pretty good. Worst case I can get a shot at SODing your notional battlemaster into a goldfish or holding him, or petrifying him or a couple other options.

The key to being a REALLY bad-assed wizard is, you never get into the situation where a fighter is in your grill. If you got there, you already failed. You have so many levers on a situation, there's just no need for that. The measure I often go by is to ask, "which is more potent, 5 wizards or one wizard, one cleric, one fighter, one rogue, and a ranger?" Well, at higher levels you'd almost always be a more powerful force as 5 wizards, or maybe arguably 3 wizards, a cleric, and a bard in 5e but certainly 5 full casters. The overall strategic and operational options available to that party means they simply won't often need a fighter type, and 5e really hasn't dealt much with the "a wizard can in a pinch obviate the need for a rogue". I'm not saying rogues, fighters, etc aren't fun to play or that they can't participate in a significant way in the game, THAT is reserved for 3.5, but if you really play with the full "what can I do with my magic to change the rules of the game in my favor?" kind of mentality, then casting is head-and-shoulders above swordplay.

Invisibility is a Concentration spell, broken by making an attack; only so useful. Honestly, the theory craft might suggest that, in a white room scenario, but actual play...eh, not so much?

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[Imaro]

Well, bows are nice but I can be invisible or take other measures. Not that any of that is totally sovereign against melee attacks, but its pretty good. Worst case I can get a shot at SODing your notional battlemaster into a goldfish or holding him, or petrifying him or a couple other options.

Okay assuming an 8th level wizard that has a 16 CON (and this is being extremely generous)... that's 50hp's on average...

Longbow Battlemaster (level 8) with a 20 Dex (and archery style) is doing 1d8+4/1d8+4 per round or roughly 8.5+8.5= 17 damage per round at 600 ft away... But throw 5 superiority dice on there + Menacing Attack so your Wizard can't move closer to him (what spell has a 600ft range??) and that's 17 +5d8 (22.5) = 39.5 points of damage total... but then throw Action Surge on there and that's 2 more attacks at 1d8+4/1d8+4 so total of 56.5 points of damage on average... that's your fighters SoD right there from 600 ft away in 1 round... He's Dex based and can just as easily take the Alert feat... so he's murdering you before you get your fancy tricks off.

The key to being a REALLY bad-assed wizard is, you never get into the situation where a fighter is in your grill. If you got there, you already failed. You have so many levers on a situation, there's just no need for that. The measure I often go by is to ask, "which is more potent, 5 wizards or one wizard, one cleric, one fighter, one rogue, and a ranger?" Well, at higher levels you'd almost always be a more powerful force as 5 wizards, or maybe arguably 3 wizards, a cleric, and a bard in 5e but certainly 5 full casters. The overall strategic and operational options available to that party means they simply won't often need a fighter type, and 5e really hasn't dealt much with the "a wizard can in a pinch obviate the need for a rogue". I'm not saying rogues, fighters, etc aren't fun to play or that they can't participate in a significant way in the game, THAT is reserved for 3.5, but if you really play with the full "what can I do with my magic to change the rules of the game in my favor?" kind of mentality, then casting is head-and-shoulders above swordplay.

I'm talking about a ranged fighter... 600ft away... he isn't in your grill. He can choose his battleground just as easily as you can yours and with training in stealth... he's as good or better than your invisibility spell...

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying Wizards don't have a breadth advantage over fighters (though I don't think it's as wide as some seem to think it is in 5e if rules like concentration, components/foci, etc. are followed)... but to claim they would dominate not only one fighter but a party of them easily... not buying it.

 

[cavalier973]

As an experiment, could someone play out a string of encounters between fighters and a wizard?
We need a double blind test, of course, and a control group of players who knows what is going on.

 

[Parmandur]

As an experiment, could someone play out a string of encounters between fighters and a wizard?
We need a double blind test, of course, and a control group of players who knows what is going on.

Calling [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] if I recall correctly?

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[Tony Vargas]

I don't actually know what the 'haters' arguments were

I'm glad I could help educate you on the unfortunate history of the edition war, then.

However, if the ONE point (not 'plays' as you put it...) I am making was indeed one of the points they raised, it does at least prove that labelling someone a 'hater' or indeed a 'fanboi' does not automatically invalidate everything they are saying, it is merely a lazy and dismissive attempt to make it appear so.

By the same token, the mere fact that something false you've repeated is dismissed with the reference to it being an oft-disproved h4ter talking point doesn't double-reverse make it true somehow. It's still a false statement, no matter how much pain & indignation you display in reaction to the way the mistake was pointed out.

I regard the overall crunch approach taken by 4th Edition to be an outlier in the evolution of D&D over the decades.

Not the point I was replying to, and not an absolutely false one, though perhaps couched in misleading terms: Yes, D&D had gone to a clearer, more consistent presentation of 'crunch' in 4e (not exactly a major change of direction from 3e, but substantial move none the less), and the result was better-balanced than other editions (which is not actually saying a whole lot). You could call that an 'outlier' or a 'pinnacle' or a 'nadir' depending on your perspective and how much you valued or abhorred those system qualities.

H4ters wanting to dismiss 4e as "not really D&D," would, of course, prefer your wording.

Well, bows are nice but I can be invisible or take other measures.

Really? PvP to illustrate a point about relative class balance?

I mean, it's amusing that your party had a moment of terror when you turned against them, but that's really pretty likely with any PC. PCs are a lot scarier than monsters in some ways.

but if you really play with the full "what can I do with my magic to change the rules of the game in my favor?" kind of mentality, then casting is head-and-shoulders above swordplay.

It simply has more options to work with, sure.

Invisibility is a Concentration spell, broken by making an attack; only so useful. Honestly, the theory craft might suggest that, in a white room scenario, but actual play...eh, not so much?

It's easy to dismiss analysis of the actual system (in as much as it can be divined from the natural-language presentation of the rules) as 'theorycraft,' but it's at least trying to be quantitative or objective about it. Conversely, in actual play, the DM's rulings matter so much more than the rules that, ironically, it illustrates nothing much about those rules, at all.

(Hey, kinda makes you wonder why we debate the rules so much, huh? Apart from the fact there the only objective (in the sense they're in the book in B&W, not in the sense they're not open to wildly varying interpretations) thing we have to debate, that is.
Habbit left over from the 3.x RAW-uber-alles zietgiest, I suppose. )

 

[Parmandur]

I'm glad I could help educate you on the unfortunate history of the edition war, then.

By the same token, the mere fact that something false you've repeated is dismissed with the reference to it being an oft-disproved h4ter talking point doesn't double-reverse make it true somehow. It's still a false statement, no matter how much pain & indignation you display in reaction to the way the mistake was pointed out.

Not the point I was replying to, and not an absolutely false one, though perhaps couched in misleading terms: Yes, D&D had gone to a clearer, more consistent presentation of 'crunch' in 4e (not exactly a major change of direction from 3e, but substantial move none the less), and the result was better-balanced than other editions (which is not actually saying a whole lot). You could call that an 'outlier' or a 'pinnacle' or a 'nadir' depending on your perspective and how much you valued or abhorred those system qualities.

H4ters wanting to dismiss 4e as "not really D&D," would, of course, prefer your wording.

Really? PvP to illustrate a point about relative class balance?

I mean, it's amusing that your party had a moment of terror when you turned against them, but that's really pretty likely with any PC. PCs are a lot scarier than monsters in some ways.

It simply has more options to work with, sure.

It's easy to dismiss analysis of the actual system (in as much as it can be divined from the natural-language presentation of the rules) as 'theorycraft,' but it's at least trying to be quantitative or objective about it. Conversely, in actual play, the DM's rulings matter so much more than the rules that, ironically, it illustrates nothing much about those rules, at all.

(Hey, kinda makes you wonder why we debate the rules so much, huh? Apart from the fact there the only objective (in the sense they're in the book in B&W, not in the sense they're not open to wildly varying interpretations) thing we have to debate, that is.
Habbit left over from the 3.x RAW-uber-alles zietgiest, I suppose. )

I imagine the emotional "this doesn't feel like realz D&D!!!1" reaction is a reflexive way of trying to express "well, these rules don't quite fit my play style, that's unfortunate." That can be pretty jarring if your play style is your wholr experience of D&D, and 3.x warts and all managed to be a big tent for play styles, if nothing else...

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Invisibility is a Concentration spell, broken by making an attack; only so useful. Honestly, the theory craft might suggest that, in a white room scenario, but actual play...eh, not so much?

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Yeah, I'm not working on theorycraft. I played the character all the way through. Casting is POWERFUL, it grants you really extensive plot power, and the added advantage of ritual casting is pretty nice too. Again, its not really a matter of the isolated white box situation of "you're stuck in a room in combat with a battlemaster, too bad you're obviously not his equal in combat!" that matters to me, THAT is theory craft!

What matters is the totality of play. OTOH, to be perfectly frank, my transmuter wizard, a mountain dwarf with a high con, ain't really afraid to mix it up in melee combat all that much. His AC is 18 to start with, and he's got a Staff of Defense, so he can pretty well cast Shield at will (certainly enough times a day that calling his AC22 is quite fair). Sure, he's not going to stand face-to-face in melee with a battlemaster, or even the rogue, but they aren't going to even hit him automatically by a long shot, and that's assuming they DO get face-to-face, which again is already tantamount to failure on my part.

In the party he was part of all the characters did various memorable and interesting things in combat, and often it was the battlemaster, the EK, or the Rogue, that did the big stabby-stabby, but it was more often likely to be true that the wizard did a lot of damage and provided some key aspect of the situation with a spell that made victory possible, or animated an entire plan of action that allowed us to prevail over odds that weren't amenable to hacky-hacky.

I think 5e doesn't do badly in terms of giving everyone a degree of capability in a fight, certainly FAR FAR more so than any version of classic D&D. It is still less true than it was in 4e, which is definitely a key aspect of the 'feelz' of 4e. In 4e it was likely that the Rogue might have a utility power or even a combat power that would change the equation (Hide in Plain Sight for instance is a good example of one that could really change things). 5e tends, more than 4e, to restrict those things to casting, though it does provide half-casting subclasses of fighter and rogue that get at least a limited amount of the fun stuff. Tellingly in our group we ended up with a cleric, a wizard, an EK, and an Arcane Trickster as our lineup, and the battlemaster, who actually was an elf and had access to a cantrip (fire bolt IIRC).