D&D 4E What Aspects of 4E Made It into 5E?

[The Crimson Binome]

Healing surges are no longer connected to virtually every source of healing in the game. That's a complete game-changer to me.

How many healing spells were you even casting in a day? Was it really the case that you would previously cast seven healing spells on the same character in one day, and now you couldn't because they only had six healing surges?

Maybe it's just because we never played clerics in AD&D or 3E, but we always just did our best to avoid taking unnecessary damage. Spamming cure spells was never a thing at our table.

The squishy skulkers (warlocks, rangers & co) must now emerge to take on a few hits. Why? To spread the damage evenly among all party members. This also felt utterly artificial.

In that regard, 4E and 5E are identical. If your squishy skulkers aren't running forward to absorb some damage, then all of their free self-healing that they get every day is going to waste. The party still has to stop adventuring for the day as soon as the first character runs out of Hit Dice and the healer doesn't have any discretionary healing left, so it's imperative that you spread the damage around if you want to get the most out of each day.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

One thing I kinda wish 5E had taken from 4E is the simplified area of effect rules. Blasts, bursts, walls, and zones are much faster and easier to adjudicate on a grid than cones and spheres. The latter are more realistic, but making nearly all AoEs into squares and cubes was a convenience I miss (although I guess "cube of cold" doesn't have the same ring to it).

 

[Zardnaar]

One thing I kinda wish 5E had taken from 4E is the simplified area of effect rules. Blasts, bursts, walls, and zones are much faster and easier to adjudicate on a grid than cones and spheres. The latter are more realistic, but making nearly all AoEs into squares and cubes was a convenience I miss (although I guess "cube of cold" doesn't have the same ring to it).

My favorite was firesquare.

 

[AtomicPope]

Well, "bloodied" is just the generic term carried over from 4e. Personally, I try to tailor it to the situation.

If they are fighting stone golems, I describe it as becoming visibly cracked and bits breaking off as they hit it now.

If they are fighting oozes and slimes - it starts leaking cytoplasm or losing cohesion

If they are fighting wraiths and spectres - they begin showing tears and rents in their manifested form, and/or leak ectoplasm.

Or I just say "it looks "bloodied" now" - with finger quotes because I'm not feeling that creative.

I described Skeletons at half hit points or lower as "bonied."

 

[the Jester]

Saves as duration started in 3.5 with Hold Person. They didn't really work because Save DC could still be so inflated. Actually, repeated saves go all the way back, just not in quite such a clear way.

That's true! Forgot about hold person in 3.5. And I guess things like the way charm person worked back in the day are the real OG version.

Though, to be fair 4e didn't do away with saves as avoidance, it just inverted them to make attacks that used to force saves work mechanically like other attacks, a significant simplification that 5e reversed.

Yeah, but those weren't saves anymore, they were defenses. That inversion changed how they felt more than how they worked, but it definitely took them out of the hands of the defender.

 

[the Jester]

By my recollection, WotC did a lot of market research.

Even so, back in the day, I predicted 4Ed would be the “New Coke” of D&D. And like the actual New Coke case, I suspect that no amount of research (of which there was LOTS) would have revealed how the market as a whole would react, or at least, how the reaction would break along certain demographics (particularly based on gaming experience).

An open public playtest certainly would have.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If and only if the playtest explicitly revealed the game being tested would replace 3.5Ed, and was not merely a new RPG WotC had in development.

It would also have to get into the right hands. To clarify, if the group I was in had been part of the playtest, the data WotC got back would have been horrible. I don’t mean that it would have been mostly anti-4th- which it would have been- I mean that the data would also have been low quality (for a variety of reasons). What we sent them would not be reliably predictive of anything.

Too many groups like ours and...well...who knows?

 

[Tony Vargas]

An open public playtest certainly would have.

Possibly. It depends on the interest, demographics of participation, and self-reporting on those playtest surveys. 4e did take on what had long been held to be serious problems with D&D. Doing so in a playtest might have gotten a great deal of praise from the kinds of folks who love playtests and surveys, and still run aground on the preconceived notions and abhorrence of change out there among those who don't. Even if the negative feedback had come in, the proportion of negative responses might not have captured the virulence with which they might be advanced once a balanced/accessible version of D&D became a reality rather than a test.

And what would've been the best case scenario? A '4e' that wasn't much different from or better than 3.5? It would have been derided and warred against as another 'cash grab' and failed to meet the sales goals it needed to at least as dramatically. D&D was just between a rock and a hard place with Hasbro in 2007.

One thing I kinda wish 5E had taken from 4E is the simplified area of effect rules. Blasts, bursts, walls, and zones are much faster and easier to adjudicate on a grid than cones and spheres. ... making nearly all AoEs into squares and cubes was a convenience I miss (although I guess "cube of cold" doesn't have the same ring to it).

It still alliterates.

And, 5e spreads work a bit like 4e bursts - not to the point you count squares and end up with cubes, but otherwise similar.

Oh, and Thunderwave kept it's cube-shaped blast 3 and push, just spelled out to the foot.

 

[Bradley Hindman]

One thing I kinda wish 5E had taken from 4E is the simplified area of effect rules. Blasts, bursts, walls, and zones are much faster and easier to adjudicate on a grid than cones and spheres. The latter are more realistic, but making nearly all AoEs into squares and cubes was a convenience I miss (although I guess "cube of cold" doesn't have the same ring to it).

. . . and I have exactly the opposite opinion; I'm glad the references to squares are largely gone. I am sure this is primarily because our group never uses miniatures or a grid. I don't envy game designers. Its hard to walk the thin line which annoys the fewest players by the least amount.

 

[Tony Vargas]

. . . and I have exactly the opposite opinion; I'm glad the references to squares are largely gone. I am sure this is primarily because our group never uses miniatures or a grid.

While I'm fine using a grid (or hex) or not, one thing I was rather surprised to find is that squares (or rather cubes) snapping to a grid, are a lot easier to visualize relative positioning with ("who's caught in the blast?" type questions) than are distances in feet & a wider variety of geometric shapes, or hexes once you get into three dimensions (since cubes tessellate space, and dodecahedrons don't), especially if you're not counting diagonals differently, it gets /very/ simple.

I don't envy game designers. Its hard to walk the thin line which annoys the fewest players by the least amount.

It's not even the same line. ;P

Seriously, though, 5e had kinda the right idea: include options for both TotM and grid play. It just didn't do either very well, mainly because it was /also/ harkening back to the classic game, so put everything in feet, which isn't optimal for either. TotM's simpler with range categories like 'close' vs 'distant' & arbitrary/random means of determining who's in a given AE, without much considering exact units of measure. Grids are simpler when counting squares 1:1, and not worrying about 'real' distances.