D&D 4E Where was 4e headed before it was canned?

[Garthanos]

Because its more fun to have big swaths of character incompetence and its appropriate for level to mean next to nothing

 

[Garthanos]

Or you can keep on shooting for the comedy gold with tiny success chances both extremes are fun.

 

[Parmandur]

Because its more fun to have big swaths of character incompetence and its appropriate for level to mean next to nothing

Level means plenty, just not everything.

 

[Garthanos]

Level means plenty, just not everything.

Hyperbole of course, massively less than in Pathfinder(even more so from the looks of PF2 and 4e and for many things it literally can mean nothing where it used to be of some real impact. You are now no better at evading loss of hit points (ac) at level 20 in your chainmail or plate mail armor than you were at level 1 that feels fundamentally less important.

Being basically guaranteed of having a major saving throw if not 2 (feats are optional) where you are no better at level 20 than level 1 sure makes it feel like level is really down graded.

 

[Garthanos]

The lack of Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies in 5e make the characters seem less too...

 

[Hussar]

Okay @Hussar let's review exactly where our conversation goes off track shall we??

/snip

Huh, still not seeing anywhere in my replies that it was easy, or that anyone could do it or that it was the same as break dancing.

So, anyway, we agree that it's something you need training to do. Actually, funnily enough, we don't even agree on that to be honest, since, according to you:

I disagree... the difference is In the extremes not the baseline... In 5e a 1st level character can have a chance, however small to accomplish some of the objectively hardest tasks in the game world DC 25. In 4e however a 1st level character can't even come close to succeeding at the objectively hardest tasks in the game world... DC 32-42.

EDIT: That's the difference between bounded accuracy and the treadmill.

A first level character can accomplish the objectively hardest tasks in the world. Give me a 20 stat and yup, I can do the hardest tasks in the world. So, running up a wall counts as the most difficult task in your game world? That only a trained person could possibly do? Oh, but, wait, no he can't. Because he needs to be trained in order to do that.

So suddenly your 1st level character cannot actually have a chance of doing anything the DM walls off behind genre.

Which is it? Is it an objective difficulty or not? If it's an objective difficulty, then training doesn't matter. It's the same difficulty if I'm trained or if I'm not trained. That's what an objective difficulty means. Which means that being trained shouldn't matter. So long as I reach that DC, my level of training does not matter in the slightest.

 

[Garthanos]

A first level character can accomplish the objectively hardest tasks in the world. Give me a 20 stat and yup, I can do the hardest tasks in the world.

My longtooth shifter could hit a 38 athletics during shifting and 40 if I had an appropriate common item (
another item might give 43 once a day). Arguably the ability to massively front load skills might not actually be a good thing but there it is.

Edit ooops one more thing...
Various powers may also boost my skills some of them are only available at level 2 (the earliest) but others are still class specific and can add 5 to my best achievement some of these boosts will be like the item boost mentioned above only once a day others are once an encounter and others are at-will if you use this power.

Note the situational application of powers also means the player has higher agency over reaching the greatest extremes,

So yes in 4e you definitely do have ways to reach the most difficult stunts
roll 20, attributes (+5), Race(+2) + background(+1) + feat(3 focus to +5 situationally) + item( 2 to 5) + power (5 depending on power/class and sometimes situational choice or specific skill application ).

Some things like the utility power boost are only when doing athletics function X but sometimes they arently limited that way. Some are at-will and others are expending encounter powers and others dailies.

It was mentioned earlier that one couldn't use skills as though they were attack actions because they didnt have the same ranges well.... there may be another reason.

Oh and this is also a demonstration of how even though level is very important in 4e yes a number of things combine to at least match the benefits of level

 

[pemerton]

Well another difference is 4e's scaling of DC's with PC level.

The flattened math from the Bounded Accuracy approach, primarily: Very Hard is DC 25 at Level 1 and Level 30.

This is a difference between 4e and 5e D&D, but I don't think it's a relevant one in the context of how DCs are set and how "freeform" that is. In 5e there's a chart. In 4e every time the PCs level up you replace the old chart with a new chart. At the actual moment of adjudication both require choosing a DC from a chart expressed in the language of difficulties.

Also, the less defined approach as to what counts in each catagory and leaving it entirely up to the DM.

The crux of the matter is whether "Difficulty" (in most of these games) is correlated to some aspect of the fictional positioning. How difficult is it to Jump 10'? The more closely-defined the DCs are, the more "locked in" the system is to the particular genre it will create.

4e isn't nearly as loose as 5e in this regard, but it does "lock in" the system fairly well with its suites of powers and expectations for those actions. If anything, the complaint about 5e not allowing martials to have nice things, is based on the comparative lack of such specification.

Jumping is a curious example in this context, as the 5e rules lock that in pretty tightly!

But I don't agree that 4e "locks in" the system via powers and expectations in a way that differs from 5e. Those powers, for martial PCs, may create an opportunity to bypass the GM's interpretive and difficulty-setting function - just as spells frequently do in 5e. But I don't think this changes the approach to DC setting. After all, 5e has spells which produce the same "locking in" - which is something that has come out in this thread.

I think 4e D&D has a much clearer sense of genre and associated tropes and expectations than 5e - via its tiers of play - but that doesn't make it less freeform. That would be an example of how freeform works as per Imaro's discussion of the role of genre in adjudication upthread.

 

[pemerton]

There are significant problems with the 4e math when it comes to defenses and skills, largely due to the way ability boosts skew the math over time and the monumental difference between untrained, trained, and skill focus.

I think this may be table-relative.

Defences at upper levels can very widely between good and bad, but at my table this hasn't created problems - it's been treated as part of the tactical context. (I don't know if that's what the designers intended.)

Skills can vary a lot, but what I have found is that the use of the advantage rules for skill challenges found in the RC, plus the use of action points which I think I first encountered in a post by Keith Baker but is then set out in the DMG2, makes a big difference here. In skill challenges I find that players make action declarations for skills their PCs are not good at because that's what the fictional positioning demands, given their goals for their PCs, and this is not hopeless. And the skill challenge framework means that one PC's big bonus can't just swamp the maths and win the challenge.

The only bit of the skill system I have found to be broken, or close to, is the +6 to knowledge skills for the Sage of Ages. As a GM I've been able to handle the auto-successes this gives rise to, but it's not ideal. I think a "roll two and take the best" mechanic probably would work better.

 

[pemerton]

In 5e a 1st level character can have a chance, however small to accomplish some of the objectively hardest tasks in the game world DC 25. In 4e however a 1st level character can't even come close to succeeding at the objectively hardest tasks in the game world... DC 32-42.

EDIT: That's the difference between bounded accuracy and the treadmill.

The Level 20 PC can still face down Pit Fiends, while the Level 1 cannot. The Level 20 PC will be capable of plenty the Level 1 is not, but the power curve is manageable now.

A 1st level fighter in 5e has no realistic chance to take down a pit fiend face-to face: the AC of 19 means about 1/3 or so of attacks hit, yielding DPR of around 2 to 3 hp per round. That's around 100 rounds to take down the pit fiend. Each round the pit fiend makes 4 attacks at +14 whose combined damage is 78 hp. If the fighter's AC is 17, that's a 90% hit rate so about 70 DPR.

I haven't tried to calculate the actual odds of a PC victory but the numbers I've set out make it clear that it's absolutely unlikely - many many zeroes to the right of that decimal point.

Whereas on the DC 25 skill check, the chance of success, if greater than zero, can't be less than 1 in 20.

I think this is the disparity that @Campbell may be pointing to. 4e avoids this by a combination of level-scaled DCs and associated "scaling" of the fiction, so that non-combat escalates thematically in the same sort of fashion as combat.

Some people (eg me) think this is a very strong virtue of 4e. Others don't like it. Either way I don't think it bears on the question of whether 4e or 5e is (or is more of) a freeform system.