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Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6879877" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>FORM WALL OF TEXT!!!</p><p></p><p>The attitudes of the edition war were still going strong through the playtest, and not all of the negatives, nor many of the misconceptions of that unfortunate era are entirely gone, either. </p><p></p><p>Case in point...</p><p></p><p>That's fine. It'd be nice if it were more tunable without extensive modules and house rules adding to the rules to put back in options and interest. One of the quiet failures of 5e is that it too often went with opt-in rather than opt-out, and make up from whole cloth rather than ban. I guess it was a matter of limited resources and wanting the base game to be reminiscent of the limited explicit options of the classic game. I can see the positives of the approach: Making the new edition familiar and attractive to long-time and returning players of the older editions; saving design resources; re-emphasizing story over content to avoid bloat; and establishing the need for a DM willing to make rulings and add/mod rules to undercut player empowerment and RAW obsession and bring back DM Empowerment as a community zietgiest, not just a written policy (like Rule 0). None of those things actually contributed to a combat being a 'drawn out slog' and none of them were absent in the editions immediately prior to or following 4e. The main difference was that any class could avail themselves of the range of options implied by those 'problems' - movement/range/area/positioning mattered to everyone, not just to casters tossing AES; in-play choice of defined, dependable, high-impact options was available to everyone, not just casters; off-turn actions mattered to everyone, not just those casting an immediate-action spell. The same was true out of combat, 4e's systems tended to involve everyone. Involving everyone does lead to slower overall play, and longer waits for your turn than marginalizing players based on choice of character concept in combat or exploration and/or those who are less assertive in RP situations.</p><p></p><p>It's not, IMHO, too high a price to pay for greater engagement and inclusion at the table. If you are engaged or entertained by other players' turns, at all, it's not even really a price, at all. </p><p></p><p>5e, BTW, though it does return to the unfortunate tendency of marginalizing some player choices in combat, does compensate for the phenomenon by offering fewer such choices, and making them numerically effective (reprising 2e's partial solution to the problem), and it hasn't turned the clock back much out of combat. Backgrounds give even marginalized classes some potential to have a plausible role out of combat, and Bounded Accuracy lets anyone chime in with a check that might get lucky in almost any situation. </p><p></p><p>5e calls for about twice as many encounters as 4e and has no formal structure that can be adapted to the full range of non-combat challenges. So, yes, there's a potential - if you tend towards the 5MWD and have fewer combats than expected, and speed up out-of-combat resolution by focusing on specialists' contributions - to 'get more done' and for the players getting that more done to enjoy more play time than others.</p><p></p><p>Whether that's good depends upon the dynamics of the group. Some groups do have wallflowers who would rather avoid the spotlight, and are OK getting in just a fraction of the participation and glory that more assertive players hanker for. Other groups are relatively uniform in their levels of assertiveness, system mastery, and interest (or lack thereof) in playing concepts that happen to map to top-Tier classes (some even have that magical combination of system-masters interested in tweaking out low/mid-Tier classes and casuals playing unintentionally nerfed top-Tier ones).</p><p></p><p>If it's boring or trivial, can it really be over too fast? 5e requires 6-8 encounters (typically combats, it doesn't have much in the way of non-combat 'encounter' structure or guidelines) per day, with 2-3 short rests, to maintain balance among it's resource-differentiated classes (it's less an issue if you have nothing but neo-Vancian casters, or nothing but BMs, Monks & Warlocks, or nothing but Champions & Thieves/Assassins). It doesn't have the huge amounts of between-combat healing that 4e had or 3.x/PF has, so it's a matter of attrition, not individual-encounter-challenge, and many of those combats will have to be 'trivial.' Getting them over with quickly (or even spending more play time avoiding them) only makes sense.</p><p></p><p>Yes, there are potential problems in the mechanics. There's also less of a culture of sticking to the mechanics no matter what, and actual encouragement to just overrule the mechanics whenever they're less than ideal.</p><p></p><p> Epic worked as neatly as Heroic & Paragon - though PCs could take on more/bigger challenges over the course of the day. So it could get a little too easy if you didn't keep ratcheting up the scope as you changed Tiers.</p><p></p><p>Simply having a leader could compensate for that initial perceived 'Math' problem, as did the ever more potent crits of high level characters (might be the damage potential you're talking about). There were some crazy high-damage exploits here and there, but the pre-essentials ones (like the Fey Charger, for instance) were all 'updated' away.</p><p></p><p>I rarely ran an unmodified monster in 4e, because the off-line tool, balky as it was, made modding them very easy, and I could just print out the actual monsters I was using. Very convenient. Absent the tools, re-skinning and less extensive on-the-fly mods were the easier way to go. And they were very easy. I don't mod 5e monsters - not proactively, anyway - CR guidelines aren't dependable for placing or designing monsters, so it's more expedient, and, again, very easy, to keep them behind the screen and mod/fudge on the fly to make each combat come out just right.</p><p></p><p>That seems like a substantial mod. I can see modding 5e to get where you want though, even if where you want is also pretty close to 4e, as it's always easier to work with the current edition, especially compared to an edition with virtually no support (as opposed, say to 3.x, which has PF & other 3pp support via the OGL/SRD, or classic eds, which have OSR material to lift from). You have a more vibrant community to spark off of and an easier time finding interested players.</p><p></p><p>That sounds good. What did you do to get there? 'Tactical' module, I assume, but what else?</p><p></p><p>I can't imagine how you avoid it without fudging (which is perfectly legit) or creating a novel mechanic to consolidate them. Bounded Accuracy's effects seem inescapable. Unless the gap is just huge, and PCs have absolute maximum ACs compared to less-than-CR 1 monsters, I suppose. </p><p></p><p>How many is that? I don't suppose it's hundreds? If you ever do want to handle a really large battle, adapting swarm style rules to large groups of humanoids - 3e and 4e both did it - can let you have hundreds or even thousands of enemies in a battle, and it side-steps the problem of Bounded Accuracy and large numbers. (If a unit of archers just pounds a beaten zone for save:1/2 piercing damage, or a pike hedge just makes one attack per enemy at a higher bonus & damage than one of it's individual members, for instance, all the BA and logistical issues with large numbers of enemies vanish.)</p><p></p><p>Builds like that are more theoretical than practical, though (and, again, the pre-essentials ones often got properly updated with extreme prejudice). The gold standard for an optimized striker was taking a Standard, not a solo, in 1 round. You could intentionally run a one-off with a character like that, but in the last 3rd of an actual campaign you're not going to see it. </p><p></p><p>If you were dealing with known-broken builds and unaware of the updates that fixed them, I'm not surprised. Demolishing a solo in one round was the kind of thing that got a build nerfed hard. </p><p></p><p>Sounds like you did it the hard way. One nice thing about 5e is that it sets us up to do things the easy way, but creating that expectation of DM rulings before everything. Present a broken build based on an obviously bogus interpretation, and arguing 'RAW' won't get you anywhere. ;></p><p></p><p>I believe 5e calls that 'Deadly.' <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I guess it's like 'decent' in that it starts with 'D.' In 4e, fights were often challenging enough - standard encounters vs ordinary characters, harder vs optimized ones - to /drop/ individual PCs in the course of the fight, but ending a battle with multiple PCs dead/dying was aiming pretty far beyond the expected mark in either 4e or 5e (or 2e, out of lower levels, for that matter). I'm surprised you didn't stick with 3.x or go PF. </p><p></p><p>Closer to 65% for PC attack rolls, typically, IMX. Saves are entirely another matter. Checks are often even easier. 5e isn't shy about throwing out DC 10s.</p><p></p><p>There is one big, unlimited way to mitigate randomness: not calling for rolls. I'm not just talking about not calling for checks, but also not rolling damage, or rolling dice behind the screen strictly as a 'placebo.' I know those aren't solutions you can implement, as a player, but they are solutions your DM can use, if he shares your perception of the issue.</p><p></p><p>Those are DM decisions that'll have that effect, they're not strictly speaking "5e's fault," - aside, of course, for empowering DMs in the first place. With higher DCs, proficiency, and especially expertise, are more important, specialists will tend to step forward for a specific skill and others to not participate, much as in 3e. That /does/ give you an opportunity to define your character and powergame a little by maxxing a skill here or there.</p><p></p><p>But what party lacks any kind of AoE? Every full caster has 'em even Bards.</p><p></p><p>If you want a specific feel to that challenge, sure. But that's always been the case.</p><p></p><p>/IF/ a party covered all 4 roles, and wasn't overly optimized, sure, but I've run for plenty of 'aberrant' parties that required some customization - either to challenge, or to avoid overly brutalizing. Sometimes that's just an on-the-fly adjustment to tactics, though. Using 'bad tactics' in a party that lacks a Defender & Controller, for instance.</p><p></p><p>5e combats aren't meant to be dynamic, just fast. </p><p></p><p>Yes, 5e CR is more like 3.x CR, that way. The assumption is the party having numeric superiority. It's an important assumption, due to both Bounded Accuracy, and the fast combat mandate. A single monster means the DM has one 'turn' and it's shorter. Fast combat isn't just about spending less time in combat, overall (or 5e wouldn't have twice as many combats/day recommended), it's about cycling turns faster, <em>particularly</em> the turns of the monster(s) and the lower-agency (and, ironically, more DPR-focused) classes.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 6879877, member: 996"] FORM WALL OF TEXT!!! The attitudes of the edition war were still going strong through the playtest, and not all of the negatives, nor many of the misconceptions of that unfortunate era are entirely gone, either. Case in point... That's fine. It'd be nice if it were more tunable without extensive modules and house rules adding to the rules to put back in options and interest. One of the quiet failures of 5e is that it too often went with opt-in rather than opt-out, and make up from whole cloth rather than ban. I guess it was a matter of limited resources and wanting the base game to be reminiscent of the limited explicit options of the classic game. I can see the positives of the approach: Making the new edition familiar and attractive to long-time and returning players of the older editions; saving design resources; re-emphasizing story over content to avoid bloat; and establishing the need for a DM willing to make rulings and add/mod rules to undercut player empowerment and RAW obsession and bring back DM Empowerment as a community zietgiest, not just a written policy (like Rule 0). None of those things actually contributed to a combat being a 'drawn out slog' and none of them were absent in the editions immediately prior to or following 4e. The main difference was that any class could avail themselves of the range of options implied by those 'problems' - movement/range/area/positioning mattered to everyone, not just to casters tossing AES; in-play choice of defined, dependable, high-impact options was available to everyone, not just casters; off-turn actions mattered to everyone, not just those casting an immediate-action spell. The same was true out of combat, 4e's systems tended to involve everyone. Involving everyone does lead to slower overall play, and longer waits for your turn than marginalizing players based on choice of character concept in combat or exploration and/or those who are less assertive in RP situations. It's not, IMHO, too high a price to pay for greater engagement and inclusion at the table. If you are engaged or entertained by other players' turns, at all, it's not even really a price, at all. 5e, BTW, though it does return to the unfortunate tendency of marginalizing some player choices in combat, does compensate for the phenomenon by offering fewer such choices, and making them numerically effective (reprising 2e's partial solution to the problem), and it hasn't turned the clock back much out of combat. Backgrounds give even marginalized classes some potential to have a plausible role out of combat, and Bounded Accuracy lets anyone chime in with a check that might get lucky in almost any situation. 5e calls for about twice as many encounters as 4e and has no formal structure that can be adapted to the full range of non-combat challenges. So, yes, there's a potential - if you tend towards the 5MWD and have fewer combats than expected, and speed up out-of-combat resolution by focusing on specialists' contributions - to 'get more done' and for the players getting that more done to enjoy more play time than others. Whether that's good depends upon the dynamics of the group. Some groups do have wallflowers who would rather avoid the spotlight, and are OK getting in just a fraction of the participation and glory that more assertive players hanker for. Other groups are relatively uniform in their levels of assertiveness, system mastery, and interest (or lack thereof) in playing concepts that happen to map to top-Tier classes (some even have that magical combination of system-masters interested in tweaking out low/mid-Tier classes and casuals playing unintentionally nerfed top-Tier ones). If it's boring or trivial, can it really be over too fast? 5e requires 6-8 encounters (typically combats, it doesn't have much in the way of non-combat 'encounter' structure or guidelines) per day, with 2-3 short rests, to maintain balance among it's resource-differentiated classes (it's less an issue if you have nothing but neo-Vancian casters, or nothing but BMs, Monks & Warlocks, or nothing but Champions & Thieves/Assassins). It doesn't have the huge amounts of between-combat healing that 4e had or 3.x/PF has, so it's a matter of attrition, not individual-encounter-challenge, and many of those combats will have to be 'trivial.' Getting them over with quickly (or even spending more play time avoiding them) only makes sense. Yes, there are potential problems in the mechanics. There's also less of a culture of sticking to the mechanics no matter what, and actual encouragement to just overrule the mechanics whenever they're less than ideal. Epic worked as neatly as Heroic & Paragon - though PCs could take on more/bigger challenges over the course of the day. So it could get a little too easy if you didn't keep ratcheting up the scope as you changed Tiers. Simply having a leader could compensate for that initial perceived 'Math' problem, as did the ever more potent crits of high level characters (might be the damage potential you're talking about). There were some crazy high-damage exploits here and there, but the pre-essentials ones (like the Fey Charger, for instance) were all 'updated' away. I rarely ran an unmodified monster in 4e, because the off-line tool, balky as it was, made modding them very easy, and I could just print out the actual monsters I was using. Very convenient. Absent the tools, re-skinning and less extensive on-the-fly mods were the easier way to go. And they were very easy. I don't mod 5e monsters - not proactively, anyway - CR guidelines aren't dependable for placing or designing monsters, so it's more expedient, and, again, very easy, to keep them behind the screen and mod/fudge on the fly to make each combat come out just right. That seems like a substantial mod. I can see modding 5e to get where you want though, even if where you want is also pretty close to 4e, as it's always easier to work with the current edition, especially compared to an edition with virtually no support (as opposed, say to 3.x, which has PF & other 3pp support via the OGL/SRD, or classic eds, which have OSR material to lift from). You have a more vibrant community to spark off of and an easier time finding interested players. That sounds good. What did you do to get there? 'Tactical' module, I assume, but what else? I can't imagine how you avoid it without fudging (which is perfectly legit) or creating a novel mechanic to consolidate them. Bounded Accuracy's effects seem inescapable. Unless the gap is just huge, and PCs have absolute maximum ACs compared to less-than-CR 1 monsters, I suppose. How many is that? I don't suppose it's hundreds? If you ever do want to handle a really large battle, adapting swarm style rules to large groups of humanoids - 3e and 4e both did it - can let you have hundreds or even thousands of enemies in a battle, and it side-steps the problem of Bounded Accuracy and large numbers. (If a unit of archers just pounds a beaten zone for save:1/2 piercing damage, or a pike hedge just makes one attack per enemy at a higher bonus & damage than one of it's individual members, for instance, all the BA and logistical issues with large numbers of enemies vanish.) Builds like that are more theoretical than practical, though (and, again, the pre-essentials ones often got properly updated with extreme prejudice). The gold standard for an optimized striker was taking a Standard, not a solo, in 1 round. You could intentionally run a one-off with a character like that, but in the last 3rd of an actual campaign you're not going to see it. If you were dealing with known-broken builds and unaware of the updates that fixed them, I'm not surprised. Demolishing a solo in one round was the kind of thing that got a build nerfed hard. Sounds like you did it the hard way. One nice thing about 5e is that it sets us up to do things the easy way, but creating that expectation of DM rulings before everything. Present a broken build based on an obviously bogus interpretation, and arguing 'RAW' won't get you anywhere. ;> I believe 5e calls that 'Deadly.' ;) I guess it's like 'decent' in that it starts with 'D.' In 4e, fights were often challenging enough - standard encounters vs ordinary characters, harder vs optimized ones - to /drop/ individual PCs in the course of the fight, but ending a battle with multiple PCs dead/dying was aiming pretty far beyond the expected mark in either 4e or 5e (or 2e, out of lower levels, for that matter). I'm surprised you didn't stick with 3.x or go PF. Closer to 65% for PC attack rolls, typically, IMX. Saves are entirely another matter. Checks are often even easier. 5e isn't shy about throwing out DC 10s. There is one big, unlimited way to mitigate randomness: not calling for rolls. I'm not just talking about not calling for checks, but also not rolling damage, or rolling dice behind the screen strictly as a 'placebo.' I know those aren't solutions you can implement, as a player, but they are solutions your DM can use, if he shares your perception of the issue. Those are DM decisions that'll have that effect, they're not strictly speaking "5e's fault," - aside, of course, for empowering DMs in the first place. With higher DCs, proficiency, and especially expertise, are more important, specialists will tend to step forward for a specific skill and others to not participate, much as in 3e. That /does/ give you an opportunity to define your character and powergame a little by maxxing a skill here or there. But what party lacks any kind of AoE? Every full caster has 'em even Bards. If you want a specific feel to that challenge, sure. But that's always been the case. /IF/ a party covered all 4 roles, and wasn't overly optimized, sure, but I've run for plenty of 'aberrant' parties that required some customization - either to challenge, or to avoid overly brutalizing. Sometimes that's just an on-the-fly adjustment to tactics, though. Using 'bad tactics' in a party that lacks a Defender & Controller, for instance. 5e combats aren't meant to be dynamic, just fast. Yes, 5e CR is more like 3.x CR, that way. The assumption is the party having numeric superiority. It's an important assumption, due to both Bounded Accuracy, and the fast combat mandate. A single monster means the DM has one 'turn' and it's shorter. Fast combat isn't just about spending less time in combat, overall (or 5e wouldn't have twice as many combats/day recommended), it's about cycling turns faster, [i]particularly[/i] the turns of the monster(s) and the lower-agency (and, ironically, more DPR-focused) classes. [/QUOTE]
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