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What needs to be fixed in 5E?
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5705104" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>Yeah, I get the impression Messrs Mearls & Cook are working on 5e as an evolution of 3e, not 4e. Like 'oops, we actually made a good game there for a couple of years, silly us, we were trying to do D&D...'</p><p></p><p>Anyway, a fundamental improvement that 4e could use would be in the underlying way classes, sources, and roles interact as classes are designed.</p><p></p><p> </p><p>In 4e, classes were each tightly coupled to a role and source, which is fine. The expression of the role and source were /both/ represented in the powers and features of the class. This required each class to have unique features - which, again, is OK, most classes have 3 or so - and to have unique powers (which means 100+ for a basic class). Those powers became a huge design burden.</p><p></p><p>The Essentials solution to that problem was to give up on classes as strong expressions of role and source, and go back to the paleo-D&D aproach of just giving classes abilities to fit their concept, without much regard for role or balance or how coherent the concept is. Poor solution.</p><p></p><p>A better solution, I think, would be to reduce the number of powers needed by using powers to express Source, only. Thus, all classes of a given source would share a common pool of powers - much like classes sharing spell lists in 3e. Role, then, would be expressed by features. This also cleans up the problem with controllers - that their role support is too much in their powers, making controller powers potentially over-powered in the hands of other classes (and there's a lot of features being limitted only to class powers to avoid that - which also causes a lot of reasonable multi-classing to fall flat). Taken to extremes, you wouldn't even need specific classes. You could just have 4 sets of features, one to express each role, and a list of powers for each source. Choose a Source, choose a Role, and you have a 'Class.' Anyway, even if not taken that far, it'd cut the burden of power design by a factor of about 4, and make developing a new class many times easier, since only features need be provided to define a class - the class would simply draw powers from it's Source. Class-specific powers, like Paragon Path powers, might still be an option, of course, but they could be much fewer in number.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>tl;dr: 5e needs to focus the support for Roles in class features instead of powers, and consolidate powers by Source instead of giving each class an often-repetative power list of it's own.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 5705104, member: 996"] Yeah, I get the impression Messrs Mearls & Cook are working on 5e as an evolution of 3e, not 4e. Like 'oops, we actually made a good game there for a couple of years, silly us, we were trying to do D&D...' Anyway, a fundamental improvement that 4e could use would be in the underlying way classes, sources, and roles interact as classes are designed. In 4e, classes were each tightly coupled to a role and source, which is fine. The expression of the role and source were /both/ represented in the powers and features of the class. This required each class to have unique features - which, again, is OK, most classes have 3 or so - and to have unique powers (which means 100+ for a basic class). Those powers became a huge design burden. The Essentials solution to that problem was to give up on classes as strong expressions of role and source, and go back to the paleo-D&D aproach of just giving classes abilities to fit their concept, without much regard for role or balance or how coherent the concept is. Poor solution. A better solution, I think, would be to reduce the number of powers needed by using powers to express Source, only. Thus, all classes of a given source would share a common pool of powers - much like classes sharing spell lists in 3e. Role, then, would be expressed by features. This also cleans up the problem with controllers - that their role support is too much in their powers, making controller powers potentially over-powered in the hands of other classes (and there's a lot of features being limitted only to class powers to avoid that - which also causes a lot of reasonable multi-classing to fall flat). Taken to extremes, you wouldn't even need specific classes. You could just have 4 sets of features, one to express each role, and a list of powers for each source. Choose a Source, choose a Role, and you have a 'Class.' Anyway, even if not taken that far, it'd cut the burden of power design by a factor of about 4, and make developing a new class many times easier, since only features need be provided to define a class - the class would simply draw powers from it's Source. Class-specific powers, like Paragon Path powers, might still be an option, of course, but they could be much fewer in number. tl;dr: 5e needs to focus the support for Roles in class features instead of powers, and consolidate powers by Source instead of giving each class an often-repetative power list of it's own. [/QUOTE]
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