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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6728352" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, edition war stuff isn't the only reason.Summoning spells were kept in line generally by either requiring the caster to take actions (either each turn, or just a single one to command, and then another one to change commands), or by being partially or fully random (e.g. dice decide how they attack) IIRC. I was never particularly interested in summoning so my facts might be a little off on that. It's also worth noting that 4e really didn't do much in the way of summons--only the Shaman and Wizard did all that much with it IIRC.However, on the math front, it's absolutely the case that 4e and 5e are very similar: 5e is just flatter, with a slightly higher relative starting point. Proficiency tracks very well with (level/4)+1; it's not a perfect formula but it's damn close, and that's pretty much just 4e's "half-level" bonus...cut in half again. You get +1 to two stats (or +2 to one stat) every four-ish levels...more or less just like you did in 4e, but with the option to be more focused (+2 = mod increases immediately). By level 20, a 4e character would have 10 (half level) + 4 (stat starts at 18) + 2 (stat boosts at level 4/8/14/18) + 4 (gear) = +20 to their "main stat" rolls. In 5e, at level 20, you have 6 (proficiency) + 3 (stat starts at 16) + 2 (two full ASIs) + 0 (no presumed gear) = +11 to "main stat" rolls. Almost exactly halved progression.As Hussar noted,  @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6787650" target="_blank">Hemlock</a>, 4e definitely put an effort into narrowing the gap between "this is my area of specialty" and "this is my dump stat I don't give a flip about." The half-level bonus is precisely that. In a certain sense, 5e both moved forward and backward on that front. Proficiency is the universal standard, is very nearly quarter-level, and remains low enough that the d20 variance isn't completely overshadowed. But now Proficiency only applies to the stuff you're really good at--meaning 4e characters are better at the stuff they suck at than 5e characters are, relatively speaking (a 5e character that "sucks" at a thing gets maybe +1 to it at high level; a 4e character gets half their level, which makes a big difference). The gap sizes are more analogous at first level because Training (the "other" 4e equivalent of Proficiency) is a static +5, so a starting 4e character can have a skill roll of +11 if they hyperfocus (Background or Racial +2, 18 stat = +4, training = +5, total +11) vs. -1 if it's a dump stat; for comparison, in 5e you have +5 (Proficiency, 16 stat) vs. -1 (non-Prof, dump stat). If we can agree that the "implicit scaling" of 5e is half that of 4e, these gaps are analogous--but they quickly become bigger equivalent gaps in 5e than 4e. At level 20 in 4e, a character "inept" in a particular skill might be able to achieve things a level-1 "expert" could, while in 5e that is flat-out untrue, as an "inept" character never gets any better (by default--and choosing to invest resources in it makes them clearly no longer "inept"!).As for the "monster level ranges" thing, again remember that 4e scales twice as fast as 5e--so it should be expected that the "most natural" range of 5e is about twice as big as that of 4e. This does mean monsters remain relevant for a wider span of levels in 5e, which is a difference. However, 4e's math was so straightforward (once they worked out the kinks) and simple, you could put it on a business card (which people <a href="http://blogofholding.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/mm3businessfront.gif" target="_blank">totally did</a>). AFAIK it was considered universally good common practice, once you'd decided how tough a particular fight should be (NOT the same as deciding that the fight should be/scale to the group's level!!) to tweak the stats of an already-existing creature up, or down, to match the kind of encounter you were creating. Since these changes were pretty simple, once you understood that monsters (essentially) worked on a "add monster's level to stuff" scale, it was even possible to do this by hand--but, as with many things 4e, there was an incredibly convenient online tool that would do it for you on the fly, with any monster ever published! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />This led to some oddities if you made a dramatic change in the monster's level, though. Unlike 5e monsters, 4e monsters DID try to take into account some of the "nasty awful side effect," "special movement modes," etc. stuff in their design--so if you took a dracolich and scaled it down to 1st level, the result often wasn't quite actually a first-level threat, because dracoliches had really nasty conditions and such that first-level parties weren't well-equipped to deal with. (Dracolich, and the needlefang drake swarm, were oft-cited un-favorites among 4e fans; I've never fought either myself.)So...in a certain sense, you could say 4e had a more expansive idea of what "the same monster" meant--in mechanical terms, anyway. Fluff-wise, as with almost everything 4e, the game had a totally hands-off policy. Any given set of mechanical stats was merely that--mechanics. You could dress them in whatever fluff you felt comfortable with. Usually there would be provided fluff, of course, but it was intentionally just a suggestion--and one that the devs explicitly expected people to ignore/change as they liked. By comparison, 5e has a very narrow definition of "the same monster"--it must have exactly the same stats!--but its mechanics allow its definition of "the same monster" to apply over a broad range. The net result is more or less the same, with a difference of "tightness" or "looseness" of balance and different ability to "telescope" things (e.g. 5e relies on a progression of orc/hobgoblin/ogre/giant, whereas 4e allowed each of those to telescope to the DM's desired difficulty).</blockquote>

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