D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[The Crimson Binome]

I think that what I feel is that 5e fundamentally doesn't challenge you to push the fiction. I'm really seeing this in my current game where nothing much really changes. Yeah, you may get better at X, but you keep just doing X! I mean you got better at X in 4e too, its just that the game encouraged the DM to throw X+1 at you, and etc.

That sounds like an issue between you and your DM. I mean, you could still head out to Pandemonium if you wanted to, but it's no longer a requirement that high-level characters need to leave their homeland in order to have their adventures. This edition supports the grounded type of adventurers that weren't really intended (or supported) by 4E - they just assumed that, once you got to high levels, you'd be doing fantastical things and ascending to godhood.

Which gets boring, when that's the baseline default. Just like magic items are boring, when they're assumed. Or casting a spell every round is boring, when everyone can do it.

That's why 5E is setting the baseline as low as possible, so anything that happens will feel special.

 

[pemerton]

Wish I could give XP multiple times for this post. You, sir, have made sense of my limited 4E experience for me. I think it's still not to my taste, but if I'd gone in with expectations framed as you have done in your post I would have been a lot more relaxed about the things that I didn't enjoy.

You're welcome!

 

[Ashkelon]

Yes, I am not entirely happy with 5E, and I could have been happier with something that used the math from 4E but was presented in a different way. As it stands, my best option for this kind of play would be to stick with Pathfinder :-/

Because even though 4E had all of the math set up for this to work out, it then went out of its way to tell you how to change the math to better fit the intentions of the system - in order to prevent me from ever hitting 90% of the time, like the math tells me I should, it would have you replace the level 4 elite with a level 16 minion (or whatever). And if I can't pin down what the actual, true, objective stats for an ogre even are, because they change relative to the level of the party, then I can't use it to model the reality of my game world.

Fair enough. I honestly feel 4e would have been much better if it only went up to 20 levels and the math was half as fast (+1 total bonuses every 2 levels instead of +1 every level). That would have been a nice middle ground with the IMHO stagnant progression of 5e.

 

[pemerton]

The only difference with 5E is they specifically tell you to hand-wave anything that isn't important. They don't want you to waste time rolling to accomplish something unimportant. They don't want you to roll every round for some skill. They don't want you wasting time with DC checks for no reason. That is the only difference in 5E.

Whereas 3E gave a roll for anything from the door to the farmer's house to the castle gates, 5E does not bother. I'm not sure what 4E did. I know that 5E tells the DM to hand-wave unimportant rolls and only use the DC system for things you want to make interesting.

In this particular respect 5e is simply following 4e's lead, although the actual mechanics of implementation are a bit different: 4e uses a combination of "say yes or roll the dice" plus wider DC spreads connected to the sort of sprawling fiction that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has posted about; 5e uses more narrow, arguably "objective" DC spreads, in combination with "say yes or roll the dice".

The result is that, in 4e, quite a bit of the "saying yes" will be in relation to game world elements for which no DC exists for PCs of that particular level; whereas in 5e some of those game world elements do have DCs, but for pacing reasons we don't both to engage them. This makes 5e a bit more like Burning Wheel in this particular respect, I think.

 

[pemerton]

I think the difference is 'badassness' in 4e didn't come from easily passing DCs. The math was largely irrelevant to that. It came from the DM building more and more amazing fiction around the DCs, and from everything else. You might hit a Balor about the same way you'd hit an Orc at the appropriate levels, but FIGHTING a Balor is WAY different. It has an aura, resistances, and powers that have a number of varied effects. The PCs at that level also can do things like get really screwed up by a bunch of effects and then just shake them all off, or fall dead and stand right up again, etc. Even at Paragon you find that your characters really are a LOT more potent in absolute narrative terms than they are at lower levels.

So what I found was that the mechanics 'fall away'. The game becomes highly narratively focused, or at least focused on what the PCs want to DO, and not really on numbers.

Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to convey upthread (post 841). Progression in 4e is not about bigger bonuses, but about a combination of mechanical minutiae (the balrog's aura, etc) and the fiction that accompanies and is generated by that.

I think that what I feel is that 5e fundamentally doesn't challenge you to push the fiction.

<snip>

The fiction in the 4e games seemed to evolve to a much higher degree. There was a real serious difference between levels where by the middle part of the game (paragon) you were thinking "wow, this is a whole different game, its almost a whole different game world!"

I don't see how creating amazing fiction around mechanics is a component of the particular game (especially a game where the fiction is called out as being mutable)... Any good DM can do this with nearly any game

I think the game's mechanics make a huge difference.

I mentioned upthread that every Rolemaster table has a tale of how a double-open-ended roll saved the party's bacon. One that I remember is when the PCs were all down but for one, the martial artist, who was at huge penalties (-70-ish?) inside a fire storm confronting the largely uninjured bad guy. The martial artist's initiative comes up, the player rolls, double-open-ended and so overcomes his penalties and hits the bad guy for an 'E' crit, and then rolls 80+ on the crit: the bad guy is dead, and the PCs saved!

This is a fiction that can't be achieved in any version of D&D, because they don't have the death spiral penalties, nor the crit-rather-than-hit-point mechanics, to make it possible. Part of the appeal of Rolemaster (and similar games - Burning Wheel has some commonalities here, and HARP is a deliberate RM derivative) is that this sort of thing is possible.

The fiction of 4e combat, and especially paragon an epic combat, is something that I think is intimately tied to its mechanics, and hard to emulate in other systems. Especially the sense of digging deep, deep and drawing on everything you've got. The way player resources are allocated and their use rationed is a huge part of this, for instance.

Playing AD&D, for instance, when the fighter player rolls a 19 and hits and kills the Type VI demon the GM can narrate that the fighter drew deep on his/her reserves and won: but the player won't have actually lived that experience. Whereas a 4e player who is invested in the resource management elements of the game will have.

So I can see where AbdulAlhazred is coming from. This also, to me at least, seems to fit with what [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] has posted upthread about the affinity between 5e and classic adventures like Hommlet, Barrier Peaks, etc, which I feel don't push the fiction in the sort of way that paragon and epic 4e does.

That's just added complexity. If the end result is that I'm still going to win with about the same amount of damage, the added complexity is largely meaningless. It's extra fiddly hoops to jump through. Oh it has an aura, well look at all my energy resistance and extra hps. Oh it has resistances, look at my sneak attack damage and my pryomancy feat that lets me ignore that. Oh it has a lot of varied effects that all have the ultimate result of about the same thing that a brute of that same level and monster rank would have in a simpler, more straightforward format.

It's all a wash.

<snip>

It's being a fragile little princess snowflake, and resisting the dramatic and the unexpected.

I have some trouble following this.

I mean, if you strip all the fiction off the mechanics, yes, they are nothing more than minutiae. But that seems equally true of 5e. I mean, how is "Roll with your +3 bonus; you need a total of 12 to succeed" turning into "Roll with your +9 bonus; you need a total of 12 to succeed" some dramatic experience, if no fiction is attached?

But when you attach the fiction, and hence give the mechanical events some sort of emotional weight in the context of the game, then the extra complexity of 4e isn't meaningless - the wizard is flying through the air to escape the fire aura of a balrog! As opposed to, at low levels, falling back a few feet to escape the scimitar of an orc.

As for the unexpected - a roll of 100 on d% is (relatively) unexpected. That's the lottery that RM's open-ended mechanics trade on. But there are other sorts of things that can be unexpected to, like the mechanical synergies that result from deploying complex mechanical resources, and the fiction that accompanies them.

4e is not very lottery-focused, but that doesn't mean that unexpectedness is not an important part of the game!

I don't really feel awesome when I fail to hit a balor half the time, anymore than I felt awesome when I used to miss an orc or a giant half of the time.

To contrast, it does make me feel more awesome when I go from missing an ogre half the time (for 10% of its health) to hitting it 90% of the time (for half its health). Nothing shows progress quite like trivializing what used to be a challenge. When I'm facing a lock that is objectively Hard, and I remember when my chance of success was slim, and now I succeed on a 3 or better, that's awesome.

It's a tautology that, if I roll a d20 and add +3 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed only 20% of the time, and that if I roll a d20 and add +17 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed 90% of the time. That mathematical truth is not, on its own, awesome (in my view). It is only the connection of the maths to some sort of fiction that makes it awesome in the RPGing context.

At around 3rd level, the PCs in my game fought hobgoblins one-on-one. Ten levels later, they fought hobgoblins in phalanxes (statted as huge and gargantuan swarms). That's also mechanics connected to fiction.

I personally feel it's illustrative of the point about expanding scope of fiction that AdbulAlhazred pointed to. I think that's more of an innate tendency in 4e than 5e.

A DM's imagination trumps everyone else's because he's running the game and putting the most work in designing the adventure.

<snip>

So many players don't seem to get how thankless a job DMing is. How the sole pleasure of doing it is the creative process of building a story or encounters.

<snip>

What motivation is there for a person to commit to running the game if not the creativity of it?

I enjoy GMing, but don't think my imagination trumps that of the players. For me, part of the fun of GMing is finding out how the players riff off the fictional and mechanical situations that I frame their PCs into.

A fairly recent example was when the PCs exploited the principle of thermodynamics to seal off the Abyss.

I haven't read many posts that give me a sense of how that sort of thing would work in 5e. In 4e, it relies on a mixture of the DC-setting rules, the relatively abstract architecture of the power mechanics and their somewhat loose fit with the fiction, and the thematic flavour/colour that comes from PC build choices (especially paragon paths and epic destinies).

5e has different DC rules (as we've been discussing), its spells are a bit more traditional (tight packages of fiction and mechanics) and it has, perhaps, a bit less theme/colour in its approach to PC build (most of that is front-loaded via backgrounds).

Any thoughts would be welcome!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I dunno. I don't really feel awesome when I fail to hit a balor half the time, anymore than I felt awesome when I used to miss an orc or a giant half of the time.

To contrast, it does make me feel more awesome when I go from missing an ogre half the time (for 10% of its health) to hitting it 90% of the time (for half its health). Nothing shows progress quite like trivializing what used to be a challenge. When I'm facing a lock that is objectively Hard, and I remember when my chance of success was slim, and now I succeed on a 3 or better, that's awesome.

I don't understand how this is a relevant comparison. In 4e if you were say level 4 you could just about take on an Ogre, barely. A really tough encounter might be a couple of ogres, or an ogre and a couple orcs, etc. When you reach 9th level the same exact ogre will now be hit pretty easily, but it will still be a relevant foe, maybe 5 of them will make you sit up and do your thing. When you're 15th level an ogre will be hit on a 4 or so, it won't hit you so much, its damage will be just slightly annoying, and its hit points will be slim enough that your strikers should one-shot it with an encounter power. At 20th level said ogre will be an auto-hit.

That's progress, and its real, and it exists in 4e. You can put it in a pipe and smoke it, it works. If you now say "but why would I have a level 9 ogre in a level 15 adventure?" That's the same question you could ask in 5e! Its there to showcase your progress pretty much. Now, in 5e maybe it can also act as a 'minion'. OK, though I think the actual 4e minion rules are a bit more convenient, and you could make an ogre into a level 15 minion if you want (same XP value).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It's a tautology that, if I roll a d20 and add +3 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed only 20% of the time, and that if I roll a d20 and add +17 hoping to reach 20 I will succeed 90% of the time. That mathematical truth is not, on its own, awesome (in my view). It is only the connection of the maths to some sort of fiction that makes it awesome in the RPGing context.

Of course! I take it as a given that these numbers mean something because of what they represent. The traditional view of an RPG is that all numbers mean something. If I have +17 to my attack roll or lockpicking, then that's way better than having +3, because those numbers carry inherent meaning.

At around 3rd level, the PCs in my game fought hobgoblins one-on-one. Ten levels later, they fought hobgoblins in phalanxes (statted as huge and gargantuan swarms). That's also mechanics connected to fiction.

But how would they have fared, if your party of level 13 adventurers fought the same dozens (or hundreds) of hobgoblins, statted as they were in the first encounters? The hobgoblins would likely miss 90% of their attacks, but they would be (effectively) immune to single-target crowd control, and they might win through sheer overwhelming numbers. (Maybe. I don't have an intuitive grasp of how HP and damage scaled in 4E, except in that it was virtually impossible to bring down a non-minion in a single hit.)

And that's a problem. When you have two different ways that you can represent the same entity, then the mechanics are no longer inextricably tied to the fiction. Instead, the mechanics are tied to your choice of how to interpret that fiction. And the outcome of any encounter is highly dependent upon that choice. At that point, I honestly have no idea how to proceed, whether I'm a player or the DM.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's just added complexity. If the end result is that I'm still going to win with about the same amount of damage, the added complexity is largely meaningless. It's extra fiddly hoops to jump through. Oh it has an aura, well look at all my energy resistance and extra hps. Oh it has resistances, look at my sneak attack damage and my pryomancy feat that lets me ignore that. Oh it has a lot of varied effects that all have the ultimate result of about the same thing that a brute of that same level and monster rank would have in a simpler, more straightforward format.

It's all a wash. It's a little like those high-level old school modules that were like "uhhh, you can't teleport and divination doesn't work here because uhhhh....it's magic, shut up." Only it's more complicated. The output is the same: the game wants to render these things mostly irrelevant to cleave to the strict balance that it desperately wants. It's being a fragile little princess snowflake, and resisting the dramatic and the unexpected.

Oh, good grief! You can do better than that.

Its not a 'wash', its a genuine change in the narrative fiction. If this is 'a wash' then it was just as much a wash when you did it in 1e or in 5e because in every edition all that happens is you get some bigger numbers and slightly different powers. That's how the game works! 4e just wasn't shy about it.

See, this is a problem for me - mechanics shouldn't fall away. They should support what you're doing. If the mechanics fall away, then screw the mechanics, why don't I just tell this story without these weird dice?

I think you know what I mean. The mechanics ARE there supporting you, they're just not dictating how the game has to develop. There are many different fictions which the same basic mechanics support.

I class this sort of thing in the same category as the old "all 4e characters are the same, they're all wizards" nonsense. It betrays an inability or unwillingness to engage with the qualitative differences in the fiction between, in this case, high and low levels. There really are quite different elements that come into play.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

A fairly recent example was when the PCs exploited the principle of thermodynamics to seal off the Abyss.

I haven't read many posts that give me a sense of how that sort of thing would work in 5e...

Any thoughts would be welcome!

My response would be to hit him with a physics textbook and tell him to come back when he understand the concepts and not just the jargon.

It's not an edition difference, it's about tolerance for technobabble. Like Star Trek letting ships shoot their way out of a black hole with phasers: won't happen in any physics I run, in any system.

An equivalent plan would be demagnetizing the Earth's core in order to destroy north and south as distinct directions, thus collapsing Earth into a rotating disc. It only works if you confuse "no arrow of time" and "no passage of time."

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In 4e if you were say level 4 you could just about take on an Ogre, barely. A really tough encounter might be a couple of ogres, or an ogre and a couple orcs, etc. When you reach 9th level the same exact ogre will now be hit pretty easily, but it will still be a relevant foe, maybe 5 of them will make you sit up and do your thing. When you're 15th level an ogre will be hit on a 4 or so, it won't hit you so much, its damage will be just slightly annoying, and its hit points will be slim enough that your strikers should one-shot it with an encounter power. At 20th level said ogre will be an auto-hit.

And if that's how 4E was presented, and actually played, then I would have significantly fewer problems with it. Really, I only ever had three or four issues (and only one or two dealbreakers) when it came to 4E, but the guarantee that there must be exactly one mechanical representation of any fictional element was right at the top of the list.

If you got rid of monsters that changed stats depending on your level, and the different math for PCs and NPCs - I don't mind if NPCs are simpler, as long as they have the same HP and bonuses - then I would consider the game almost playable.