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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9609471" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Unfortunately no, for three reasons.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The monster design for 5.5e is, to put it bluntly, sloppy (mostly because it was so in 5.0, to be clear). For example, we've gotten leaked info saying that spells, whether used by players or monsters, are "balanced" with some...not entirely wise or fitting ideas (like an AoE spell is assumed to only hit two targets...)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The lack of monster roles significantly hurts the utility of the XP budget process, because it is a lot harder to parse how different monsters' abilities, strengths, and weaknesses interact within their group. You need to know a lot more about each one in order to put together a team that is effective but not overwhelmingly powerful, especially because of the aforementioned spells (and some other abilities) being severely undervalued, or (less commonly) overvalued.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The system is still ultimately CR-based; its XP values are themselves based on the CR of the creature in question, so it's just the CR method with more steps. That linked page, for example, explicitly says not to use too many low-CR creatures, because such creatures don't give XP but still increase the difficulty of the encounter. To have an XP budget system where some monsters literally don't cost any XP is, I should think, a pretty obvious design hole.</li> </ol>It's sort of a "too little, too late" kind of thing. It would be like adding subclasses to every class in the game specifically designed to have the general notion of 4e roles. Maybe, if such a thing had been done back in D&D Next such that it could actually interact with the system as a whole and establish useful patterns and structures, but tacking it on now, over a decade on, with the entire rest of the system still working the old way and this method just being a different coat of paint on that old way, it's just not going to work like 4e did.If I may give a different example: Imagine if they added a new way to look at subclasses, which allowed players to pick one subclass features option from a list of (say) 3-5 at each point where their class gets subclass benefits, and they called this option "Kits". Would that be a true translation of the way 2e kits worked? Or would it just be a very, very slightly tweaked version of just getting a typical 5e subclass, just using the name "Kits" without really expressing the spirit of that mechanic?My position is that that would be a hollow, kind of fake implementation of "Kits" in the 2e sense, which were much wilder and woolier and could heavily remake a class, something subclasses do not do and which it doesn't look like they'll ever do. (WotC has had many opportunities to make subclasses that remove or entirely replace existing class features, and has never actually done it.) It would be wearing the name of "Kits", but it wouldn't be Kits, not even as a translation.As an aside, note my use of the word "translation" here. I fully understand that just ripping a mechanic out of one game and shoving it into another is often unwise and counterproductive, just like trying to rip a phrase out of one language and sticking it into another. Hence I speak of "translating" a mechanic from one edition to another; it needs to account for the different structures of the new system. But just as you can have a deeply flawed and inaccurate "translation" from one language to another, you can have such a thing from one game system to another, where the spirit of the mechanic is abandoned while preserving a superficial shell of similarity. Or, to use the famous (but probably inaccurate/false) example, Bibles poorly translated into Russian that transform "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (=people want to do good, but human failings inhibit them) into the utterly hilarious and completely off-target "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."IMO, the 5.5e XP Budget is a "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten" bad translation of a 4e mechanic. I'll leave the topic there, because I'd rather not be responsible for making this "about" 4e. Just note that this is far from the only place that 4e mechanics were handled so.</blockquote>

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