D&D 5E The Door, Player Expectations, and why 5e can't unify the fanbase.

[Lanefan]

Really?

"Yeah, I walked up to the meta-physical personification of the wickedness of the fallen elves, of hatred, jealousy, and envy made incarnate, passing through her realm in all its twisted, chaotic stasis, and I cut her head of with a sword."

The mind boggles, because that is some pretty out-there stuff.

What's even more out-there is that this metaphysical personification of the blah blah blah only has 66 h.p. to begin with; combine that with an AC that a decent level Fighter ought to be able to get through somewhat regularly, and yeah - Q-series Llolth is kinda pathetic.

Lanefan

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

What's even more out-there is that this metaphysical personification of the blah blah blah only has 66 h.p. to begin with; combine that with an AC that a decent level Fighter ought to be able to get through somewhat regularly, and yeah - Q-series Llolth is kinda pathetic.

Yeah, that always kinda weirded me out.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I know it's been a while since the OP, but...

TL;DR: The 3e and 4e max power levels are vastly different from each other and that's why unification is impossible.

Tiers-As-Treasure Solves All Your Problems.

Want to be able to melee bears forever? Go low tier and stay low tier.

Want to fly over them eventually? Welcome to a higher tier.

DM gets to decide what tier everyone's at, and everyone's in the same boat so there's no linear/quadratic problems.

Bippiddy boppiddy boo.

 

[billd91]

What's even more out-there is that this metaphysical personification of the blah blah blah only has 66 h.p. to begin with; combine that with an AC that a decent level Fighter ought to be able to get through somewhat regularly, and yeah - Q-series Llolth is kinda pathetic.

Lanefan

Perhaps, but given that's how she's defined, perhaps it's the assumption that being the metaphysical personification of the blah blah blah means something more that is the flaw here.

There are many different assumptions about gods in mythology, not all being that the entity is the metaphysical personification of anything. Some gods are surprisingly mortal, aging or even dying like in Norse and Egyptian myth. Some are a lot more abstract like in the Abrahamic religions. But Lolth, as she is defined, is clearly not the latter.

 

[Mallus]

"Yeah, I walked up to the meta-physical personification of the wickedness of the fallen elves, of hatred, jealousy, and envy made incarnate, passing through her realm in all its twisted, chaotic stasis, and I cut her head of with a sword."

The mind boggles, because that is some pretty out-there stuff.

You left out the part about Lolth living on a spider-shaped TARDIS (at least according the original Queen of the Demonweb Pits).

Yup -- pretty far out there.

 

[MarkB]

I've seen a few examples of 4e Epic-scaled obstacles that didn't ring true - for instance, our last session, playing through one of the official WotC modules, featured an Epic pit trap whose depths were filled with a silvery mist. Rather than taking falling damage, a character entering the mist was teleported to a pocket plane which would attempt to 'eat' them by inflicting radiant damage until they escaped.

However, this is hardly new stuff. I was seeing similar gimmicks in Epic-level play in 3.5e ages ago. As a for-instance, a temple we needed to explore used a random sprinkling of 'special' bricks in its walls, charged with Force barriers, anti-magic emanations or pockets of wild magic, specifically to foil intruders attempting to slip in ethereally. And I don't think we saw a single enemy stronghold that wasn't liberally sprinkled with anti-scry and anti-teleport defenses anywhere past the early teen levels.

The fact is that, if characters really do reach levels where no wall or door can stop them, that pretty much eliminates dungeons of any sort as a challenge. That's half the core game concept gone. So, regardless of edition, module builders and DMs find ways to keep those game elements relevant, because they're too useful to abandon.

The fact that 4e provided clear guidelines to help do so makes it somewhat more user-friendly in that regard, but it doesn't make it fundamentally different from the prior editions.

 

[Harlekin]

I'm going to start by quoting the "Bounded Accuracy" article.



I think this quote helps illustrate why 5e is not going to be able to unify both sides of the edition war.

In the thread NeonChameleon started about bringing 5e players to 4e, he pointed out that one of the editions's strengths was making it so that wizard spells don't obviate skills. But I think this is part of the problem. The fact that in 4e, things you do don't really change. A 1st level band of noobs runs into a wall. They need to climb it to cross it. A 30th level band of an epic archmage, a badass warrior dude who can randomly walk out of the afterlife, another dude who is a living divine avatar, and a demigod, faced with a wall, are going to climb it. It doesn't make it that much more epic when the 30th level guys are climbing a wall of space force or whatever, they're still stuck on the same basic challenge: can we climb a wall? And the answer is usually going to be some sort of climb check. And that's a problem a lot of 3.X players have with the system. In 3.X you could do all sorts of crazy crap, like burrow under the wall, smash it, fly over it, phase through it, and whatnot.

You misunderstand the skill system of 4ed. If the wall encountered by the PCs can easily be flown over, smashed of phased through, it is not a meaningful challenge for epic level PCs and thus should not require any kind of check. A wall that is a challenge for such characters may be the wall of a fortress from the dawn war that has been around forever and is protected by immortal magic. Such a wall cannot be passed simple magic, otherwise it would have been razed aeons ago. In 3.5 such a wall would have antimagic, DR 25 and whatnot and thus would require more than just casting the right spell.

Obviously, such walls need to be extremely rare, but if they exist 4ed tells you what you need to roll to climb them.

I think this post clearly shows what [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] described in an other thread. Some players don't want to look under the hood and see how DCs are calculated, even if exactly the same calculations were in previous editions; they just weren't made explicit.

 

[B.T.]

Okay. So what does the example of Diomedes wounding* Aphrodite tell us?

* Non-fatally, on the arm, a particularly pacifistic goddess.

It shows that high-level fighters can beat up the physical manifestations of gods (though they probably need a magic sword to do so).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The people who want a game to do things in the highlighted section are better off not playing D&D. D&D has never had these things possible, and I'm not interested in playing a game where they are possible. If I wanted to play that kind of game, I would play Exalted.

Well, then Fighters should stop levelling at Level 10 and get some spellcasting abilities, because otherwise, Fighters at high levels will end up feeling useless and left behind.

But, to be fair - 4E did not require Fighters to split mountains to be comparable to Meteor Swarm and Flying Wizards. Meteor Swarm and Flying was just not quite as easy as it was in 3E.

 

[Nagol]

Well, then Fighters should stop levelling at Level 10 and get some spellcasting abilities, because otherwise, Fighters at high levels will end up feeling useless and left behind.

But, to be fair - 4E did not require Fighters to split mountains to be comparable to Meteor Swarm and Flying Wizards. Meteor Swarm and Flying was just not quite as easy as it was in 3E.

In my games, the fighters are the go-to guys if the group wanted something dead right now. In my last core-only 3.5 game (ended at ~19th level) they were regularly inflicting 30-50 pts per blow multiple times per round each with a typical round having a critical for 100+ damage.

The reasons fighter begin to feel dependent (not useless) is all the out-of-combat abilities especailly the divinatory, travel, and environmental survival capabilities the spellcasters develop. If the fighter want to travel 50 miles underground to the lost dwarvern citry, they can eithr (a) convince the spellcasters to take them in a minute or (b) prep for a week-long expedition, gear up for N wandering monster combats, and hope nothing develops to turn them around in the next week or so.

Pre-3e, I was able to compensate by including a fair amount of such magical treasure for the groups to find and a moderate amount of social support via NPCs and organisations.

3e reduced my ability to compensate via treasure which placed more emphasis on supporting NPCs and organisations than I prefer.