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

[Parmandur]

The 4E MM was an abomination on every level, due to choices made by its lead designer.


He chose to leave out the interesting bits. He chose to leave out "regular" monsters because he wanted more of a Fiend Folio feel. He also used at least three different iterations of the earlier monster design rules to create stat blocks instead of the relatively final - until MM3 - version of those rules that appeared in the DMG.


The 4E MM is an outlier, as was Heroes of Shadow when the same lead writer demonstrated that, despite everyone else in the company growing in their 4E design skills, he had not.


But read the other books. Yes, the rules sections are written as reference manuals because that provides both clarity and cogency. But to this day, I am continually surprised at how many nuggets of interesting lore can be found in the 4E books that will spark an idea for an encounter, an adventure, and/or a campaign.

Which designer was that?

Heard good things about some of the latter monster books; unfortunately, first impressions can make or break something like a whole system.

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Curious, not really familiar with anybody IRL that hasn't embraced 5E as the new standard: it's sort of the ultimate expression of my experience of D&D, at any rate.

I think there are few people who HATE 5e, there really is little about it to hate, though some things do bug me quite a bit. Still, 2e had PLENTY of things that bugged me as well, it was still an improvement over 1e in most respects. 5e likewise improves on 2e, but it kinda is just going sideways otherwise. It is kind of an ultimate expression of the trends and desires of people who were playing D&D in the late-1e/2e time frame when the purely Gygaxian approach to the game kinda lost its wheels. In that sense its a quite good reprise of many elements of 2e, finally recast in a much more sensible and friendly form. It just doesn't do action-adventure anything like as well as 4e did, IMHO.

I think there are a lot of people who, oddly enough, consider 3.5 to still be within the realm of classic D&D, but that don't see a point to 5e's clear departure from that realm (particularly in terms of spell-casting I assume, since 3.x fighters are already pretty much totally different from 2e ones). Anyway, I can't speak for those people, I merely observe that many people I knew that were playing 3.5 and didn't buy 100% into 4e, even if they played it and really enjoyed it, simply went back to 3.5 and haven't bothered with 5e. I can't even get into a 5e game, unless I go play with people I don't know. Its popular enough, in general, but seems to be far from universally lauded as some would have you believe.

We had a lot of combat in our games; it was just short, dirty and quickly resolved with some crazy die rolls. Positioning and tactics were not important, though in 3.x (like 5E), it could be.

I just didn't find 5e combat that INTERESTING. It was usually pretty much obvious what the next move was, and any real cleverness would happen at other levels of the game.

For example, when we played through Phandelver we of course came upon the Dragon, and said dragon then (after the module ended) tried to thwart my character's scheme to build a new barony seated at the old Castle Cragmaw. Our characters of course were entirely unable to confront this, being maybe 3rd level or so at the time. There simply was no tactical option or merely tactical/operational trick that was going to make dealing with a high CR creature feasible. Honestly this would have been pretty much true in 4e as well, but 5e is singularly silent in terms of presenting any framework for achieving any OTHER sort of success besides combat.

Instead we went on to another adventure, which involved gaining entry to a tower which was warded by an utterly impenetrable magical barrier. Except persistence eventually allowed us to find a procedure for entering and exiting. Being clever we managed to repurpose this dungeon into a giant unescapable dragon trap. This was entertaining, and we got rid of the heinous worm this way, which was cool and fine. It just illustrated that 5e didn't really provide any tactical options, whereas 2e might well have done so (difficult and perilous though they might have been). Its just a remarkably non-tactical game!

Another consideration to the "feels" of 4E versus other editions: the books were set up as reference manuals without a lot of fun reading potential. See the 4E MM versus the 5E one, more stats, less flavor. That focus on everything feeding into tactical, systematically complete systems was a somewhat new take, that did not fit everyone's tastes.

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Now, see, I had a lot of fun reading the 4e MM1. I thought it really had a good bit of lore. It tended to allow a lot of things to be mostly implicit though, a power often speaks directly to the nature of a monster without a lot of excess verbiage. Part of the problem with older editions was that often there was NOTHING mechanically about a monster which supported its 'fluff' at all! 4e tended to be the opposite, the nature of the beast was explicit! I also liked the way MM1 provided additional lore check results, something that later MMs inexplicably excluded.

4e's DMG certainly seemed quite readable as well, being a fairly good treatise on DMing (at least assuming you accepted some of its assertions about the nature of D&D adventuring in 4e). The PHB was definitely intended to be a reference manual, though it does NOT lack in flavor text (actually I recall doing an analysis of this point and discovering it compares favorably with the 3.5, 2e, and 1e PHBs in this respect, all of them being very roughly a 50/50 mix of flavor and other elements).

I would just add that I personally find 5e's DMG and PHB to be incredibly annoying documents which detract constantly from my enjoyment of the game, as their organization is actively antithetical to providing references when you need them, leading to a lot of "I throw up my hands, the rule for A is simply not evident, just do X" followed next week by someone finally finding the obscure place where the rule for A was finally uncovered lurking at the end of some paragraph of fluff in a different section of the book. Gah! I routinely read and discard entire systems for this sort of crime. At my age I simply don't have time and patience to thoroughly memorize rulebooks or keep rereading them just to find every little element. In fact this is actually my #1 beef with 5e, particularly as a DM.

 

[Parmandur]

I think there are few people who HATE 5e, there really is little about it to hate, though some things do bug me quite a bit. Still, 2e had PLENTY of things that bugged me as well, it was still an improvement over 1e in most respects. 5e likewise improves on 2e, but it kinda is just going sideways otherwise. It is kind of an ultimate expression of the trends and desires of people who were playing D&D in the late-1e/2e time frame when the purely Gygaxian approach to the game kinda lost its wheels. In that sense its a quite good reprise of many elements of 2e, finally recast in a much more sensible and friendly form. It just doesn't do action-adventure anything like as well as 4e did, IMHO.

I think there are a lot of people who, oddly enough, consider 3.5 to still be within the realm of classic D&D, but that don't see a point to 5e's clear departure from that realm (particularly in terms of spell-casting I assume, since 3.x fighters are already pretty much totally different from 2e ones). Anyway, I can't speak for those people, I merely observe that many people I knew that were playing 3.5 and didn't buy 100% into 4e, even if they played it and really enjoyed it, simply went back to 3.5 and haven't bothered with 5e. I can't even get into a 5e game, unless I go play with people I don't know. Its popular enough, in general, but seems to be far from universally lauded as some would have you believe.


I just didn't find 5e combat that INTERESTING. It was usually pretty much obvious what the next move was, and any real cleverness would happen at other levels of the game.

For example, when we played through Phandelver we of course came upon the Dragon, and said dragon then (after the module ended) tried to thwart my character's scheme to build a new barony seated at the old Castle Cragmaw. Our characters of course were entirely unable to confront this, being maybe 3rd level or so at the time. There simply was no tactical option or merely tactical/operational trick that was going to make dealing with a high CR creature feasible. Honestly this would have been pretty much true in 4e as well, but 5e is singularly silent in terms of presenting any framework for achieving any OTHER sort of success besides combat.

Instead we went on to another adventure, which involved gaining entry to a tower which was warded by an utterly impenetrable magical barrier. Except persistence eventually allowed us to find a procedure for entering and exiting. Being clever we managed to repurpose this dungeon into a giant unescapable dragon trap. This was entertaining, and we got rid of the heinous worm this way, which was cool and fine. It just illustrated that 5e didn't really provide any tactical options, whereas 2e might well have done so (difficult and perilous though they might have been). Its just a remarkably non-tactical game!



Now, see, I had a lot of fun reading the 4e MM1. I thought it really had a good bit of lore. It tended to allow a lot of things to be mostly implicit though, a power often speaks directly to the nature of a monster without a lot of excess verbiage. Part of the problem with older editions was that often there was NOTHING mechanically about a monster which supported its 'fluff' at all! 4e tended to be the opposite, the nature of the beast was explicit! I also liked the way MM1 provided additional lore check results, something that later MMs inexplicably excluded.

4e's DMG certainly seemed quite readable as well, being a fairly good treatise on DMing (at least assuming you accepted some of its assertions about the nature of D&D adventuring in 4e). The PHB was definitely intended to be a reference manual, though it does NOT lack in flavor text (actually I recall doing an analysis of this point and discovering it compares favorably with the 3.5, 2e, and 1e PHBs in this respect, all of them being very roughly a 50/50 mix of flavor and other elements).

I would just add that I personally find 5e's DMG and PHB to be incredibly annoying documents which detract constantly from my enjoyment of the game, as their organization is actively antithetical to providing references when you need them, leading to a lot of "I throw up my hands, the rule for A is simply not evident, just do X" followed next week by someone finally finding the obscure place where the rule for A was finally uncovered lurking at the end of some paragraph of fluff in a different section of the book. Gah! I routinely read and discard entire systems for this sort of crime. At my age I simply don't have time and patience to thoroughly memorize rulebooks or keep rereading them just to find every little element. In fact this is actually my #1 beef with 5e, particularly as a DM.

Can't directly speak to anything pre-3.5_ which I started in high school/college. Most of my experience is either third or fifth edition, really, as most of the people I know found 4E combat too involved to be entertaining; the quick and dirty combats of loose 3.x play or by the book 5E are more our speed. Way quicker play in 5E, as we don't need to even consult the books during play anymore (particularly since we started using spell cards).

4E books were just...dull to read: walls of abilities written in gamey jargon just don't float my boat. Whereas I read 5E books for fun and entertainment. They are small enough books, with the actual rule content being small, that excessive reference is unnecessary, even easy to just memorize.

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, I played Champions! enough to have a healthy appreciation for hexes. The square vs hex debate's an old one. Not an important one, IMHO, but some folks have a strong preference. :shrug:

Anyone who played any significant amount of wargames has a healthy appreciation for hexes, but they are NOT by ANY means superior to squares in a tactical system like D&D. Its a giant pain in the ass to use them indoors. Any rectilinear (IE almost any) layout will be filled with half and quarter hexes, which you then need to decide how to play. Squares admittedly don't do much better on diagonals, but a 45' diagonal on hexes is REALLY ugly too, so its not like you EVER gain anything there. Nor do they really show much advantage in this kind of scenario. They are quite nice in outdoor sorts of settings, but is it really worth the fairly modest advantages there vs the big disadvantages indoors, which frankly is most D&D action. You could try to present rules for both, but any system close to as detailed as 4e will have a lot of trouble doing so and waste quite a lot of mechanical excess on the effort, to again marginal advantage. I considered this option when I wrote my own combat system for HoML, and discarded it quite quickly, along with any notion of using hexes in lieu of squares.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Can't directly speak to anything pre-3.5_ which I started in high school/college. Most of my experience is either third or fifth edition, really, as most of the people I know found 4E combat too involved to be entertaining; the quick and dirty combats of loose 3.x play or by the book 5E are more our speed. Way quicker play in 5E, as we don't need to even consult the books during play anymore (particularly since we started using spell cards).

4E books were just...dull to read: walls of abilities written in gamey jargon just don't float my boat. Whereas I read 5E books for fun and entertainment. They are small enough books, with the actual rule content being small, that excessive reference is unnecessary, even easy to just memorize.

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Yeah, each to his own on that one. I find 5e books modestly readable as books, but not greatly more so than 4e ones. I found 4e powers to be a fairly tedious to wade through in quantity, but then there wasn't really a NEED to do so, you could just read the powers of the class you played at the levels you had picks from and that was enough. I certainly wouldn't even think of reading the 5e spell lists either.

I think the trick that we found to 4e combat was dynamicism in encounter building. If you build fairly 'flat' encounters, much like the majority of what is in the dungeon in KotS for instance, you will be sorely disappointed, but then you're missing the actual strong point of the game! (And it is QUITE telling that Mr Mearls utterly missed it, almost beyond utterly in fact).

Every combat I set up and ran in 4e brought with it some real element of conflict into which players had bought their characters. Something mattered to them. At the very least the combat had significant implications for the tactical/operational situation. Usually it included some degree of internal plot, things DID NOT remain static. This obviates the potential issue of a bogged down slugging match, which otherwise could easily happen in 4e despite the plethora of ways to gain mobility. You didn't just stand around fighting the hobgoblins, because the dike you were all fighting over was crumbling! You didn't stop to reduce the level+1 soldier to 0 hit points, because the object of the fight was to get past him before time ran out, not to fight some kind of steel cage death match. I freely admit, there were a few notable times when things did devolve into a slug fest. I can remember two encounters from my first campaign in particular. Once a party got ambushed by an owl bear in a dark cavern, which was supposed to be a frightening sort of hit-and-run blind fight, but they pinned the stupid thing in a corner right off and it became a long bloody slugfest. It actually WAS tense, the party barely survived and almost lost 2 characters, but that fight taught me in spades to make sure there was some way to avoid that kind of fate in the future.

So, MY 4e campaigns, turned into a sort of super heroic crazy Indiana Jones style thing over time. Something was coming out of left field, or the whole place was coming down around your ears, or the clock was ticking, etc. It just never let up, at least in action sequences. Luckily 4e provided SCs which were a pretty nice way to handle the other kind of significant scenes where combat wasn't involved.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Curious, not really familiar with anybody IRL that hasn't embraced 5E as the new standard: it's sort of the ultimate expression of my experience of D&D, at any rate.

I and a few gamers I know have stuck with 4e, or transitioned to other games. One of them was loving 2e last time I talked to her. Which, coincidentally, was my first edition and introduction to tabletop role playing. I found that 3e was less fun to read but more fun to play than 2e, and that 4e is again more playable and less readable. It's a shame that 2e's lavish prose seem to be a thing of D&D's past, but ultimately I buy game books to play rather than to read -- and 4e is the most playable edition yet.

I haven't bought or had occasion to try 5e, because I've played at least three editions now -- depending on how you want to define an 'edition' -- and I've learned to identify what I want in a game. Thanks to the playtest and the basic pdf rules, I saw what 5e is about and realized it's not for me. I like 4e's attention to balance, consistency, and playability, so I've stuck with it.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, each to his own on that one. I find 5e books modestly readable as books, but not greatly more so than 4e ones. I found 4e powers to be a fairly tedious to wade through in quantity, but then there wasn't really a NEED to do so, you could just read the powers of the class you played at the levels you had picks from and that was enough. I certainly wouldn't even think of reading the 5e spell lists either.

I think the trick that we found to 4e combat was dynamicism in encounter building. If you build fairly 'flat' encounters, much like the majority of what is in the dungeon in KotS for instance, you will be sorely disappointed, but then you're missing the actual strong point of the game! (And it is QUITE telling that Mr Mearls utterly missed it, almost beyond utterly in fact).

Every combat I set up and ran in 4e brought with it some real element of conflict into which players had bought their characters. Something mattered to them. At the very least the combat had significant implications for the tactical/operational situation. Usually it included some degree of internal plot, things DID NOT remain static. This obviates the potential issue of a bogged down slugging match, which otherwise could easily happen in 4e despite the plethora of ways to gain mobility. You didn't just stand around fighting the hobgoblins, because the dike you were all fighting over was crumbling! You didn't stop to reduce the level+1 soldier to 0 hit points, because the object of the fight was to get past him before time ran out, not to fight some kind of steel cage death match. I freely admit, there were a few notable times when things did devolve into a slug fest. I can remember two encounters from my first campaign in particular. Once a party got ambushed by an owl bear in a dark cavern, which was supposed to be a frightening sort of hit-and-run blind fight, but they pinned the stupid thing in a corner right off and it became a long bloody slugfest. It actually WAS tense, the party barely survived and almost lost 2 characters, but that fight taught me in spades to make sure there was some way to avoid that kind of fate in the future.

So, MY 4e campaigns, turned into a sort of super heroic crazy Indiana Jones style thing over time. Something was coming out of left field, or the whole place was coming down around your ears, or the clock was ticking, etc. It just never let up, at least in action sequences. Luckily 4e provided SCs which were a pretty nice way to handle the other kind of significant scenes where combat wasn't involved.

Yeah, I guess In could see that being fun, if you like that sort of thing; but my experience and knowledge of combat is that is undynamic, quick, random and not "interesting" in that fashion: more like 5E style than that set piece 4E style you are rocking. Just feels more "real" and fun to me.

I do actually read the spell descriptions for fun; there's good stuff in there!

Keep on the Shadow fell and a single one-shot are about the extent of my 4E experience; the adventure was fun, the mechanics of combat were just too tactical and board gamey: but going for a "D&D Tactics" style board game it works, and I have enjoyed the board game version of those rules...qua board game.

And that is interesting, that 4E broadly succeeded tin what it set out to do from my view: it just was on a different track from what I wanted to do.

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[Tony Vargas]

Any rectilinear (IE almost any) layout will be filled with half and quarter hexes, which you then need to decide how to play.

Oh, yeah, I came up against that constantly - try to have a decent Bond-villain type underground base, for instance.

You could try to present rules for both, but any system close to as detailed as 4e will have a lot of trouble doing so and waste quite a lot of mechanical excess on the effort, to again marginal advantage. I considered this option when I wrote my own combat system for HoML, and discarded it quite quickly, along with any notion of using hexes in lieu of squares.

I used a hex map a few times in 4e games. Once when the party faced a Morkoth in it's lair, a couple of times in a short Far-Realm themed epic game. In both cases, they lent an air of the area being alien and confusing.

I think there are few people who HATE 5e, there really is little about it to hate, though some things do bug me quite a bit. Still, 2e had PLENTY of things that bugged me as well, it was still an improvement over 1e in most respects. 5e likewise improves on 2e, but it kinda is just going sideways otherwise. It is kind of an ultimate expression of the trends and desires of people who were playing D&D in the late-1e/2e time frame when the purely Gygaxian approach to the game kinda lost its wheels. In that sense its a quite good reprise of many elements of 2e, finally recast in a much more sensible and friendly form.

I've heard a few rave reviews of 5e that call it the best thing since 2e or otherwise make it clear that 2e is their vision of D&D, and 5e delivers on that vision. I've never heard /anyone/ comment that 5e compares to 3e or 4e that way, and rarely hear the OSR types waxing quite so rhapsodic, either. In a way, it's logical timing, the OSR thing has been going a while (starting with Hackmaster and Munchkin, in a light-hearted way, really), so the next cohort of D&Ders needed to be appealed to, right?

But, there are folks who reject every new edition, and even hate it, and stick with the last one. As we see in this sub-forum, there are folks striking with 4e and giving 5e a pass. They're just talking about it here, not edition-warring against 5e in forums devoted exclusively to it.

I found that 3e was less fun to read but more fun to play than 2e, and that 4e is again more playable and less readable.... but ultimately I buy game books to play rather than to read -- and 4e is the most playable edition yet.

Interesting. Storyteller games, I found, were very readable, you could sit down and read one cover-to-cover almost like you'd read a novel, sometimes. It was futile to try to look up something you needed in play, though. So either memorize it or wing it.

I haven't bought or had occasion to try 5e, because I've played at least three editions now -- depending on how you want to define an 'edition' -- and I've learned to identify what I want in a game. Thanks to the playtest and the basic pdf rules, I saw what 5e is about and realized it's not for me. I like 4e's attention to balance, consistency, and playability, so I've stuck with it.

The players I know who haven't adopted 5e have either stuck with PF or moved to 13th Age. I see the appeal in each, but 5e mostly matches them - and it's D&D. (Those still paying 4e, like myself, are /also/ playing 5e.)

For instance, 5e is tuned to resolve combat quickly: characters hit more often, do more damage, spells have more dramatic effects, monsters go down faster (so do PCs when the odds are against them). But that kind of tuning is the kind of thing a DM can easily work around. You don't /have/ to put a 5e party through 6-8 trivial fights a day, you can challenge them with larger more complex ones, and just make appropriate rulings & tweaks when the system creaks under the load. You've always been able to do that kind of thing, though. Under the RAW-uber-alles zietgiest of 3.5 you might more player push-back if you got creative on the fly; similarly, you could run quick/trivial fights in 4e, but your players might be disappointed and keep looking for the 'real challenge.' Expectations are a very important factor, and what you have to work with has a lot to do with that. 3.x and 4e lent themselves to quite-customized 'builds' so players could form a lot of expectations about how their characters might perform and develop in play. In the classic game, you more likely had to sit back and see what the DM tossed your way. The items (or as an MU, spells), tricks, traps, monsters, curses, and whatnot that the DM placed would shape your character far more than the decisions you made at chargen and (if any) level-up.

 

[Manbearcat]

Alright, an actual post.

The "feelz" of 4e comes together from the below synthesis.

1) Combat is about:

a) provoking/rewarding movement
b) battlefield interaction
c) team synergy
d) the heroic rally (especially that of being inspired by a comrade but also that of "getting off the canvas" as a result of one's own steely will).

Think Wesley vs Inigo, Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men, the LotR and The Hobbit (the movies to a higher degree than the books).

2) Noncombat scenes are about:

a) dangerous situations that are
b) PC-relevant and
c) conflict-charged where
d) the situation changes dynamically until
e) there is no drama left to be had.
f) Failure is a snowball rolling downhill...not an endpoint.

Mechanically cemented endpoints following Freytag's Dramatic Structure (Exposition > Rising Action > Climax > Falling Action > Denouement). Action-adventure tropes from the same fiction as above except include Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

4e is a scene-based, action-adventure game that gives players unprecedented PC theme-flags to fly (and expects the GM to observe them throughout the tiers), unprecedented narrative control (a lot of author stance and even director stance features), with and an engine and GMing tools that are high utility yet not burdensome from a cognitive workload perspective (the math works, encounter budgeting works, the recharge mechanics work). If you follow the game's basic principles, rules, and advice (go to the action, engender dynamism in fiction and decision-points, failure is not an endpoint), genre coherent fiction and well-paced play will ensue.

That being said, the game isn't given nearly enough credit for its "driftability" (genre/table aesthetic and play-outcome-wise). Most folks that don't like it or didn't give it a legit try just don't understand its toggles and levers. Deft leveraging of (i) the recharge mechanics (particularly Long Rest), (ii) the unique attrition model (the pressure points of Healing Surges, Dailies, Milestones), (iii) "Up-Leveling", and (iv) the Condition/Disease Track can turn the game into a daunting (in-fiction and mechanically) affair that will support darker tropes and more strategic play.

 

[MwaO]

Curious, not really familiar with anybody IRL that hasn't embraced 5E as the new standard: it's sort of the ultimate expression of my experience of D&D, at any rate.

I think three things are really wrong with 5e:
Boring PCs. My favorite aspect of 4e is how weapon-using, non-caster PCs are not locked into some weird 'hey, you can only do damage unless your DM is nice to you' routine in combat. 5e basically stomps all over that idea, with how short rests work, lack of the really fun Zone/Mobility options, lack of utility powers, etc...also, the lack of gotcha options. In 4e, having an option to make someone 'helpless' is a really big deal. In 1e-3e, being 'helpless' and getting targeted is basically instant death. 5e? You take a little extra damage and it is available all over the place. And in 5e, there are a lot of 'enemies no longer are functional' spells and without thinking about the consequences, how many targets are available increases as you go up levels. This turns even moderate level 5e into rocket tag unless you actually have 6-8 encounters per day. And by 9th, that's it - rocket tag forever after - unless the combat is expressly designed to make it really difficult for melee only non-casters by spreading out targets over a large area. 4e made Stunned(5e's incapicitated) and Helpless(5e's Helpless) really difficult to obtain. Pretty much ever for Helpless. 5e hands them both out as if they were candy.

Math problems. The bound for skills is too small, making them really strange in practice - the 1st level Fighter who opens a DC 15 Door 55% of the time compared to the 8 Str Wizard who opens it 25% of the time. Or vice-versa for the Arcana check. Yet Reliable Talent or Expertise in a skill eventually destroys the practical play usefulness - "I like to be good at Deception for the thrill!" Level 10 Rogue might have a +10, so hits DC 15 80%, DC 20 55%. Level 11 always succeeds at DC 20 checks. It doesn't appear that the person designing the magic item distribution system talked to people about how magic item distribution worked(you average a +3 item to hit over 20 levels - which really breaks the CR chart with the -5/+10 damage feats)

Adventurer's League's magic item distribution system. That might sound odd to bring up, but I've already had multiple mods spoiled in some way by a player looking for an item to make sure there wasn't a conflict. I absolutely hate sitting down at a table with someone who is cheating and at the same time understand fully why they might have cheated. And I don't want to tell a DM that I want to move tables for some unspecified reason. Especially if my PC would benefit from moving tables. "Hi, a cheater just told me that we're both likely going after the same item. Can I move to another table where I could then get the item without conflict. Not because I'm a cheater, but I hate sitting with cheaters. Even if I benefit."