D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[thecasualoblivion]

Doesn't 5e suggest that you start at 3rd lvl if that is what you want? At least that was a suggestion by one of the designers if it is not in the actual books. By 3rd lvl you are far beyond the capabilities of commoners and quite heroic. Of course how you define "heoric" is important as different people have different ideas. I expect your view of a hero (or being heroic) is different than mine.

At level 3 in 5E you start being less fragile, and as you level you become somewhat less mundane than before. Fragility and the old school meat grinder levels are a separate issue from mundanity. Mundanity is more about spamming "I swing a sword/cantrip" and taking actions the average person could do. However, 5E PCs are very mundane compared to PCs in 4E, 3E, high powered 2E(high stats, many magic items), or non-D&D systems like Vampire. It bears saying that this goes beyond combat, as for example in 4E I could start level 1 with +11 or better in a skill, which in context puts you outside the realm of the mundane.

 

[jayoungr]

How exactly is 5E back to the story? When did the story ever leave?

I think--or at least I hope--that people here weren't really trying to say that 4E didn't have story or that it was impossible to roleplay in it. But, how should I say it ... in 5E, the assumed story is allowed to influence the combat rules in ways that it wasn't in 4E.

For a start, 5E is explicitly designed with the goal of making combat simpler and faster than it was in 4E. So it is designed with the assumption that a smaller percentage of time spent at the table will be spent on combat.

And then there are things like fireball being more powerful than other spells of its level, just because it's such a "signature" move for the spellcaster. Flavor over balance.

The same goes for monsters having flavorful but swingy abilities, like the banshee's wail. They have them because (it is felt) the abilities serve to enhance the story.

That's what I think was probably meant above by "back to the roleplaying." Others may feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I think--or at least I hope--that people here weren't really trying to say that 4E didn't have story or that it was impossible to roleplay in it. But, how should I say it ... in 5E, the assumed story is allowed to influence the combat rules in ways that it wasn't in 4E.

After all the drama during the 4E era and the 5E playtest, I'm a lot less inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. This thread has only reinforced that, and the post I was responding to was a pretty clear example of why.

For a start, 5E is explicitly designed with the goal of making combat simpler and faster than it was in 4E. So it is designed with the assumption that a smaller percentage of time spent at the table will be spent on combat.

Even I think 4E combat took too long. The trouble is 5E threw the baby out with the bathwater, and went way too far in the other direction. This is kind of par for the course when it comes to D&D editions, as 3E, 4E and 5E could all be called overreactions in a lot of ways.

 

[jayoungr]

After all the drama during the 4E era and the 5E playtest, I'm a lot less inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. This thread has only reinforced that, and the post I was responding to was a pretty clear example of why.

*shrug* We'll see if anyone comes along and disagrees.

Even I think 4E combat took too long. The trouble is 5E threw the baby out with the bathwater, and went way too far in the other direction.

In your opinion.

 

[Herobizkit]

I think--or at least I hope--that people here weren't really trying to say that 4E didn't have story or that it was impossible to roleplay in it.

Not me. When I said 4e was combat-centric, I meant that the system/engine's focus is deliberately written to highlight combat and the tactical encounter as the 'meat' of the game. In my experience, it doesn't simulate a fantasy 'reality' well, something that many players turned up their noses by stating that 4e was "too videogamey" - more Diablo/WoW, less Lord of the Rings.

Personally, I see 4e as more superheroes/X-Men than traditional fantasy D&D. thecasualoblivion's comment about (and I'm paraphrasing here) how low-level 5e characters are scrubs while 4e starts the players as Big Bad Heroes out of the gate is correct - 1st level 4e guys are equivalent to level 3-4 characters in other editions.

Put in a different context, he may have what I call the "low-level blues".

That's what I think was probably meant above by "back to the roleplaying." Others may feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

When I say 'back to the role-playing', I mean that 5e's design focus seems to be more on the character's role in the game 'world' over what he can DO in said world.

As you proceed through character creation in 5e, there are a lot of questions asked to help a new player create a persona. When they pick a race or class, there are suggestions as to why they became a Ranger, or where they got their Wizard training. Background, Ideals, Flaws; all additional tools to round out your persona. Max scores for level 1 are 15 before mods with point buy. Feats and multi-classing are optional. All of this designed to take your head out of the mechanics of the game and into your ROLE.

In my experience, 4e gives you a paragraph about your class and then 3-5 pages of "here's all your powers and how they work in a fight." Here's all your actions and how they help you fight. Here's how you can use your skills in a fight. Here's how you roll multiple skill checks in order to beat a non-combat encounter like it was a fight. Here's a a rack of feats to help you fight better. And the worst part, no matter how much you played with the mechanics, the players often fell behind in scale compared to the monsters (prior to the 'monster math' fix and the inclusion of Essentials/Heroes of X books) to make those fights LONGER.

To be fair, my DM insisted on adding massive chunks of story to his game, so much so that games went by where we didn't roll dice at all - the exact opposite of 4e's design/intent.

As a graybeard, I think back on 1/2e's wonky imbalance and remember that it didn't matter, the story and the adventures with friends were all that mattered. I feel that 5e is now swinging back to that middle ground where combat and story can be married and have equal shares of attention.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Even I think 4E combat took too long. The trouble is 5E threw the baby out with the bathwater, and went way too far in the other direction.

In your opinion.

It is an opinion whether or not it was a good thing. I would however argue that combat has been de-emphasized to a degree greater than any previous edition.

4E--5E combat being de-emphasized compared to 4E is fairly obvious

3E--De-emphasized compared to feature rich 3E isn't really a question. Compared to vanilla 5E, 3E's combat is slower and more feature rich, the magic system is more decisive, and the power curve is much steeper as you level up

AD&D--This one is a little less obvious. AD&D wasn't optimized for speed at the expense of all else, compared to 5E. 5E has more options than AD&D, but the lack of bounded accuracy in AD&D and the increased risk in AD&D added a level of drama to combat that doesn't exist in 5E. 5E has also de-emphasized magic items compared to AD&D, and like 3E the AD&D magic system is a lot more decisive.

As somebody who likes to fight monsters more than anything else in D&D, I find 5E to be the definitive worst edition for this.

 

[dave2008]

At level 3 in 5E you start being less fragile, and as you level you become somewhat less mundane than before. Fragility and the old school meat grinder levels are a separate issue from mundanity. Mundanity is more about spamming "I swing a sword/cantrip" and taking actions the average person could do. However, 5E PCs are very mundane compared to PCs in 4E, 3E, high powered 2E(high stats, many magic items), or non-D&D systems like Vampire. It bears saying that this goes beyond combat, as for example in 4E I could start level 1 with +11 or better in a skill, which in context puts you outside the realm of the mundane.

Unless I missed it we where talking about being heroic, not less "mundane." It seems you have made a slight twist to the goal post; though it could be our different views on heroism and what is heroic. It seems, please correct me if I am wrong, that you want characters that are super "humans", who can do things above and beyond the normal. I don't have any issue with that and find it fun as well; however, I don't necessarily find that heroic. I find it more heroic when a simple "mundane" farmer picks up a sword or staff or whatever to fight for what he/she believes in. A hero, to me, is someone who fights despite be "mundane." It is less heroic to me to play as a superhero; after all, the cards are already stacked in your favor.

Still, I think your concept of mundane play comes down to play styles and less the system. I know people who are much less mundane in an open system like 5e than they are in a more codified but expansive system like 4e. And I have seen just the opposite as well. Some people thrive with clearly defined options and others do with a less restrictive rule set. To be clear it is not like you couldn't improvise in 4e, but some felt like they had to use their "powers," and thus did not improvise. And in my experience the most un-mundane (spectacular?) actions have occurred when improvising, no mater the edition/system.

 

[dave2008]

As somebody who likes to fight monsters more than anything else in D&D, I find 5E to be the definitive worst edition for this.

Why is that? They are too easy, too hard, die to quickly? Or is it about the PCs and not the monsters?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have to second this. The assertion that all systems are the same or that system doesn't matter does not match my experience. Take me and this thread. This whole thread is about my approach to gaming not being as well supported by 5E compared to earlier editions.

Which'd be a failure of the 'big tent'/'support for more playstyles' goal of 5e. Especially considering that you consider two prior editions - 3e & 4e, themselves very much at odds during the edition war - to both be adequate to your needs.

5e is DM-empowering and classic-game evoking, certainly, but I don't believe it's as atavistic as you fear. With the right DM, using the right modules and the right approach, the kind of experience you're looking for can certainly be delivered by 5e.

I get that you're probably going to come back with 'but my approach requires DM-independent support' or something like that. All I can offer is that whether your options feel DM-independent depends very much on the attitudes at the table (which, yes, are influenced by the attitudes of the broader community). So, yes, it may be hard to find/foster more player-empowering attitudes/styles in 5e circles, but not because the system, itself, makes it impossible, just because there's been a pendulum swing away from player-empowerment and towards DM-empowerment. Perhaps ironically, but conveniently, a DM can use the latter to re-emphasize the former.

That in and of itself is at odds with the assertion that system doesn't matter.

Discussion of a system is at odds with the assertion that system doesn't matter. I don't think even AoB meant to take it that far. He was just saying that D&D wasn't particularly more combat-oriented than other 'big name' TTRPGs (and he included Storyteller in that). The only objective measure of combat-orientation is the relative amount of the system devoted to combat - page count, for instance. D&D devotes a large proportion of it's rules to combat - especially considering that you have to include combat spells in that count. Storyteller games treated combat as just another 'dramatic system,' (WWGS hated to admit they actually produced games with actual resolution systems, no matter how intentionally bad they made them) the relative amount of the system devoted to combat vs non-combat 'dramatic systems' in most storyteller games was noticeably less than D&D. Even so, combat probably received a longer more nearly complete treatment than any other single 'dramatic system' in Storyteller.

I've tended to gravitate towards combat proficiency in my PC in just about every system I've ever played, and the results have been very different system to system.

Combat's different in different genres and sub-genres, and the degree to which an RPG models genre vs modeling the setting where a genre story might take place (but probably won't happen to your PC), also varies. A combat scene in FATE or other 'narrativist' RPGs will look/feel and resolve a lot more like an action scene in a book or movie.

This thread is huge.

I dipped in and out and what I got is this:

Easy mistakes to make.

thecasualoblivion loved 4e because 4e's design was inherently combat-centric. 4e Encounters games were "enter these 5 rooms boxed together and murder everything for 3 hours" as a co-op/team effort.

He liked 3e & 4e because they were player-empowering. They had mechanics that clearly defined what a character was capable of - because of RaW-uber-alles zietgiest in the case of 3.x/PF, because of clear/above-board mechanics in the case of 4e. He liked using those to build combat-oriented characters. And, yes, sure, D&D has always been and remains combat-centric, but that's not part of the issue, since it's more or less a constant.

5's design is "let's get back to the role-playing side of gaming".

No, it's really not that narrow, it's DM-empowering. A DM can use that to emphasize RP to whatever extreme suits him, right up to and including never touching dice. He can also very easily use 5e to run an old-school dungeon crawl where there's no point naming, let alone RPing, your character until you're out of apprentice tier.

How exactly is 5E back to the story? When did the story ever leave?
.

It's not a tagline, like 'Back to the dungeon!' was for 3.0, but it's a thing that Mearls has come right out and said if not in those words. And the 'proof' is right there in the release schedule: Two Adventure-path books/year, rolling out almost as fast you can play them. Only one book so far with additional player options, and they were pretty sparse, with mostly setting background ('story' elements) padding it out.

Why is that? They are too easy, too hard, die to quickly? Or is it about the PCs and not the monsters?

Yes

I did an adventure in 4e with my regular group where we took away all the power cards. They only had basic attacks (casters too). The players had to make up every attack, action, spell and I just adjudicated as DM. For some of them it was completely liberating, others not so much. However, the freedom of do-whatever-you-want lead to some of the most exciting and heroic actions we ever had for those who like to play that way. But it that is not your thing, I've seen how it doesn't work as well.

You ran your whole 4e campaign by page 42? That's kinda awesome, actually.

Did you have anything defining what a given character might be capable of? (For instance, a very similar approach was taken by Mage: the Ascension, but it did have 'spheres' that categorized the kinds of effects that were possible, and characters could combine spheres to do basically anything).

At level 3 in 5E you start being less fragile... However, 5E PCs are very mundane compared to PCs in 4E, 3E, high powered 2E(high stats, many magic items), or non-D&D systems like Vampire. It bears saying that this goes beyond combat, as for example in 4E I could start level 1 with +11 or better in a skill, which in context puts you outside the realm of the mundane.

Obviously, and spell caster becomes less mundane very quickly, and every class can use spells in some way, with only a handful of sub-classes getting nothing at all in that regard.

Starting at 1st level does create a first impression of every character involved being both vulnerable and mundane, and, particularly, that sense of vulnerability can stick with the character from then on, even though, rationally, you know it's become nigh-unkillable.

I think--or at least I hope--that people here weren't really trying to say that 4E didn't have story or that it was impossible to roleplay in it.

People really were trying to say that. It was called the edition war. It sucked.

But, how should I say it ... in 5E, the assumed story is allowed to influence the combat rules in ways that it wasn't in 4E.

You'd have to say 'encouraged' instead of 'allowed.' In 5e, the DM is encouraged to dictate resolution notwithstanding the rules (possibly in service to the story, but ultimately in service to any agenda he values). In 4e, as in all RPGs, the DM is also allowed to do so.

For a start, 5E is explicitly designed with the goal of making combat simpler and faster than it was in 4E. So it is designed with the assumption that a smaller percentage of time spent at the table will be spent on combat.

Less time on a given combat - 5e also assumes twice as many combats per day as 4e tended to.

And then there are things like fireball being more powerful than other spells of its level, just because it's such a "signature" move for the spellcaster. Flavor over balance.

I'm not sure that's the case. Dictating flavor with mechanics isn't exactly the most flexible approach.

That's what I think was probably meant above by "back to the roleplaying." Others may feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Overpowered fireballs and random character death = 'roleplaying?' ;P

 

[jayoungr]

People really were trying to say that. It was called the edition war. It sucked.

*sigh* I know people have said it in the past. I was referring specifically to a couple of people characterizing the approach of 5E as "back to the story."

You'd have to say 'encouraged' instead of 'allowed.' In 5e, the DM is encouraged to dictate resolution notwithstanding the rules (possibly in service to the story, but ultimately in service to any agenda he values).

No, I said allowed and I meant allowed. At the design level. There are swingy/unbalanced spells and monster abilities that are written into the rules of 5E, and they would not be there if the designers had not felt that the flavor they brought was more important than balance.

Anyway, I really don't wish to get sucked into this sub-thread of discussion, so that will probably be my last post on the subject. I feel like I've added the perspective that I wanted to add. Feel free to disagree if it doesn't convince you.