D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[FormerlyHemlock]

That depends on what you're trying to model. If I was trying to model Hercules' toughness, for instance, I don't think spellcasting would be a very good model. Hercules doesn't have to perform a mini-ritual involving verbal and somatic components in order to become tough, with the toughness then lasting only a limited duration.

Nitpick: Hercules' toughness, to the extent he has any, comes from wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion, which is impervious to mortal weaponry. It's not intrinsic. His Str: Infinity is intrinsic though.

 

[MoutonRustique]

[...] that enabled so much of 4e's easy ad-hoc system hacking.

This actually made me laugh out loud. Not in any sort of negative way! But seeing the bulk of the comments on 5e and 4 lately, it really made me laugh. I know this post isn't incredibly relevate or interesting, but meh... I want to post it - and you can just skip ahead with little cost to you, so I'm not feeling over-bad at "wasting forum space".

The feeling you are describing right there is where I believe a great deal of "strife" comes from (or congeals - not sure if it's cause or effect in this case...?)

Many people disliked 4e because they felt constrained by the presentation (the "pretended exactitude") and found it hard to tweek it to preference. 5e obfuscates the underlying constants and variables of the system freeing those same people to modify it at leisure.

Obviously, this is not the case for you. (Nor is it for me - I've been trying to modify [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION]'s Witcher class, and find myself constantly wondering at the effective power/utility and finding no satisfactory answers. In 4e, this sort of thing never happens to me - the whole of it transparent and easy to gage. This is all, of course, IMO.)

This is all said without taking into considerations things like : general feel, default preference assumptions, preferred gameplay styles, etc, etc. Which are all important in choosing an RPG.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Looks to me like 5th edition does all this much much easier.

All you have to do is look at your stats and then do improvisation? What's the difference in a designer coming up with a power and a player coming up with something they want to do while getting the DM's okay followed by an appropriate roll. I don't agree with 4th edition doing it any better because you would then need to go through each and every power and see if there was one that fit and since you were limited to the amount and types of powers you could have, you could be stuck doing basically the same thing over and over again until you finally gained a level and swapped out "one" power.

IMHO the two things are completely different and not at all equivalent. Improvisation is completely different than having a power. Beyond that 4e has an excellent system of improvisation which can be used in various ways vis-a-vis powers. You could improvise some variation on a power use, you could improvise using a power you don't possess, or you could simply combine vanilla power use with some form of improvisation to deal with some situation. The strength of it again is in the orthogonality of the rules for each class and power.

I don't actually understand your statement about 'stuck doing basically the same thing over and over again" because 4e always offered each character many powers. Even a level one PC from PHB1 has 4 powers right off, assuming you don't have class/race/feat options that give you additional ones.

In any case I'm not sure what ANY of that has to do with the idea that 4e's powers are easily equivalent. 4e is a very 'modular' game in the sense that an Exploit and a Prayer are mechanically identical things. There's simply no clear way to even attempt to give a fighter a reflavored version of a character element that is given to a paladin in 5e, but in 4e its utterly trivial.

 

[Quickleaf]

Many people disliked 4e because they felt constrained by the presentation (the "pretended exactitude") and found it hard to tweek it to preference. 5e obfuscates the underlying constants and variables of the system freeing those same people to modify it at leisure.

Obviously, this is not the case for you. (Nor is it for me - I've been trying to modify [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION]'s Witcher class, and find myself constantly wondering at the effective power/utility and finding no satisfactory answers. In 4e, this sort of thing never happens to me - the whole of it transparent and easy to gage. This is all, of course, IMO.)

This is all said without taking into considerations things like : general feel, default preference assumptions, preferred gameplay styles, etc, etc. Which are all important in choosing an RPG.

Thanks for the holler, Mouton; glad to hear you're getting use out of my homebrewing!

I see constraints in both 4e and 5e, but I like both systems and have home-brewed in both systems quite a bit.

Haven't been following this thread (I avoid threads with edition-war/critical titles ), but I can report that the play experience of both 4e and 5e can be dramatically changed based on the design of the classes the players use. Even the difference between a 4e PHB fighter and 4e Essentials fighter was pronounced. It does take some tweaking to get the power balance right, but it's definitely possible to hack classes in both 4e and 5e to change the play experience as you desire. IME both editions are quite amenable to customizing and home-brewing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Many people disliked 4e because they felt constrained by the presentation and found it hard to tweek it to preference. 5e obfuscates the underlying constants and variables of the system freeing those same people to modify it at leisure.

Obviously, this is not the case for you. (Nor is it for me. In 4e, the whole of it transparent and easy to gage. This is all, of course, IMO.)

4e is dead easy to re-skin, making it easy to adapt to far more concepts than one might expect from the fairly consistent class & power formats. It's also easy to 'tweak' in small ways for the reasons you state.

It is just exhausting, though, to try to add to extensively. Creating a new class is a Herculean task. Extensively re-working rules is a minefield, because they are already so neatly balanced.

In classic D&D, extensive re-working or additions were, in contrast, low-risk. One more broken magic item, class, race, or whatever wasn't going to break the game that much more. And, they were readily accepted by players. 5e very successfully aims for those same qualities. Really, the same should have been true in 3.x, and could have been, but for the rise of the Cult of RAW.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

4e is dead easy to re-skin, making it easy to adapt to far more concepts than one might expect from the fairly consistent class & power formats. It's also easy to 'tweak' in small ways for the reasons you state.

It is just exhausting, though, to try to add to extensively. Creating a new class is a Herculean task. Extensively re-working rules is a minefield, because they are already so neatly balanced.

In classic D&D, extensive re-working or additions were, in contrast, low-risk. One more broken magic item, class, race, or whatever wasn't going to break the game that much more. And, they were readily accepted by players. 5e very successfully aims for those same qualities. Really, the same should have been true in 3.x, and could have been, but for the rise of the Cult of RAW.

Oh, please, take your 4th Ed shilling and stuff it up your fat, bearded ass, you creepy bicycle seat sniffer.

 

[Corpsetaker]

IMHO the two things are completely different and not at all equivalent. Improvisation is completely different than having a power. Beyond that 4e has an excellent system of improvisation which can be used in various ways vis-a-vis powers.

I diagree.

They are two different ways of achieving the same result but I feel that one is better.

What happens if you can't find a 4th edition power that enables you to do what you want to do or you just don't have that power chosen?

Remember, just changing a power in 4th edition can have serious issues with balance and you have to be in a group that will allow you because you are going outside the core rules.

 

[D'karr]

I diagree.

They are two different ways of achieving the same result but I feel that one is better.

What happens if you can't find a 4th edition power that enables you to do what you want to do or you just don't have that power chosen?

I believe the same thing happens in either game, except that one has better guidelines. What happens in 5e when you want to do something that is outside the "rules"? The same thing that happens in 4e, the DM makes a ruling. But aided by what? What does he have to make a ruling that is commensurate with how the system operates.

In 4e the powers provide a graduated subsystem that can be used as a simple comparison tool. You want to do something that does something similar to X, look at X and compare. In addition, the DM has very succinct guidelines to make his job making rulings much easier.

I have yet found something comparable in 5e.

Remember, just changing a power in 4th edition can have serious issues with balance and you have to be in a group that will allow you because you are going outside the core rules.

There are no serious issues with balance by altering a power, no more than by altering a spell in 5e. And just like in 5e they are self correcting, the same DM that allowed the change of a power can later curtail it to better fit his idea of balance. This argument of slavish devotion to core rules is a red-herring. If you had a group or rules-Nazis in 4e you probably still have the same issue in 5e, and nothing short of changing the group dynamic or the group is going to change that.

 

[Corpsetaker]

I believe the same thing happens in either game, except that one has better guidelines. What happens in 5e when you want to do something that is outside the "rules"? The same thing that happens in 4e, the DM makes a ruling. But aided by what? What does he have to make a ruling that is commensurate with how the system operates.

In 4e the powers provide a graduated subsystem that can be used as a simple comparison tool. You want to do something that does something similar to X, look at X and compare. In addition, the DM has very succinct guidelines to make his job making rulings much easier.

I have yet found something comparable in 5e.



There are no serious issues with balance by altering a power, no more than by altering a spell in 5e. And just like in 5e they are self correcting, the same DM that allowed the change of a power can later curtail it to better fit his idea of balance. This argument of slavish devotion to core rules is a red-herring. If you had a group or rules-Nazis in 4e you probably still have the same issue in 5e, and nothing short of changing the group dynamic or the group is going to change that.

But in 5th edition we aren't talking about something that is outside the rules, that is all a part of the rules.

I'm not talking about changing Necrotic to Fire types of changes. Straight up changing a power can have serious implications in 4th edition.

All you need in 5th edition is Imagination + Ability Scores to do what you want to do. That is the way the game was designed. If I want to flip over a rail, grab a chandelier and come down on an enemy with my sword; all I need is to roll a Dex check first followed by my attack roll. 4th edition has a hard coded way of handling things because it was specifically designed with the grid in mind while 5th edition was not. Theatre of the Mind gives you a lot more freedom than grid based.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

4e is dead easy to re-skin, making it easy to adapt to far more concepts than one might expect from the fairly consistent class & power formats. It's also easy to 'tweak' in small ways for the reasons you state.

I'm pretty much with you so far.

It is just exhausting, though, to try to add to extensively. Creating a new class is a Herculean task.

Yes and no. I mean if you were to set out to create an entire V-shaped PHB1-style class from total scratch this might be true, but why ever would that be needed? I mean suspension bridges are hard to build, that doesn't mean we don't build culverts over ditches, its a whole other order of thing. With something like 40 classes in existence, and about 20 of them being full-fledged 400+ power major classes with 3-5 builds each, it seems like doing so would be rather unnecessary, wouldn't it? Even if you want a 'new class' it must surely be close enough to an existing class that you can borrow its powers virtually wholesale. At that point is it really more work than adding a class to 2e?

Extensively re-working rules is a minefield, because they are already so neatly balanced.

In classic D&D, extensive re-working or additions were, in contrast, low-risk. One more broken magic item, class, race, or whatever wasn't going to break the game that much more. And, they were readily accepted by players. 5e very successfully aims for those same qualities. Really, the same should have been true in 3.x, and could have been, but for the rise of the Cult of RAW.

The entire illogic of this line of reasoning just bends my mind. First of all what makes it 'higher risk'? The results cannot possibly be worse than most of what already exists in 'classic' D&D, regardless of which system you use. If your choices are to play and homebrew 2e, then sure, its already broken, so how are you gaining vs playing 4e with one somewhat broken piece? Surely its still better.

There are 2 things to consider here: 1st of all 4e certain is already 'broken' in some degree. Charge optimized characters are stupidly ridiculous, Rain of Blows, Twin Strike, and every minor action/reaction easily triggered attack power are already pretty broken. Seriously optimized action denial is broken, so is damage-type focus optimization (frostcheeze, etc). The difference between this and 2e or 3e is its quite obvious. Point 2 here is that the system in 4e is QUITE ROBUST, because despite all the things noted above, it still works quite well, these 'broken' things don't break the whole system to bits.

Contrariwise to what you're saying, adding some bogus overpowered thing to 4e doesn't actually have that much impact. Suppose you added an item that tripled a character's damage output for one attack per encounter. That would be pretty much stupid broken in 4e. Nobody could even begin to argue it wasn't. Yet it still wouldn't break the game. Oh, it would make killing one monster per encounter quite trivial, but the GM would have no trouble simply adding an extra monster! Its hard to even find something comparable to use as an example for 2e where there are probably a dozen items and 2 dozen spells that if they are in play then any hope the GM has of making an encounter that challenges the party is out the window, unless it consists of just 'Save or you die instantly'.

There's barely any 'danger' of anything in 4e. Just add whatever the hell you want to the game and don't worry about it, the whole thing will just keep rolling along. I'm sure you CAN screw it up of course, but you have to go so utterly far beyond the bounds of what is conventional in 4e to do so that even most pretty bad idiot DMs won't go there. In 2e all you have to do is give away any of a number of pre-existing items that already have a chance to show up randomly in low-level play if you go by RAW.