D&D General Why is D&D 4E a "tactical" game?

[Neonchameleon]

I've never played D&D 4E, I quit D&D when it was released, but I have noticed it is frequently referred to as a "tactical" game, more so than other versions of D&D. Why is that? 3.x was a very tactical game, combat was pretty much designed to take place on a battle map with minis. Is something else meant by 4e being tactical or were a battle map and minis even more of a requirement?

I thought I'd give a few actual illustrations here of what's meant. Picture a fairly incidental battle taking place on the side of the docks between the PCs and a handful of people foolish enough to try and mug them. It's a minor fight, not a big one so no one is reaching for their top level spells. How's it going to go down in the various editions:

• In TSR-era D&D if they can't avoid the fight (and they only are really encouraged to in XP for GP editions) the fighter and the cleric are going to rush the thugs, and the wizard is going to support them by throwing darts. It basically goes the same as any other fight against low level opponents and is over in a few dice rolls and they're more or less going to keep pounding on the enemies until they go down. The edge of the dock might as well be a stone wall for blocking foes.
• In 3.X the wizard is going to be using a crossbow and the fighter is, rather than simply attacking, going to be spamming whatever their feats have put together whether it's a power attack/cleave or a spiked chain trip. They've one big trick and they are going to use it and although it's flashier than the TSR era fights it's going to be the same basic approach as any other fight unless the wizard breaks out a low level spell or two. It's slightly more tactical because there's the possibility of flanking, but that's about it - and at mid level the fighters get nailed to the floor by the threat of losing iterative attacks.
• In 5e the hit points have inflated significantly so it's going to take more rolls. The wizard is now throwing around firebolts rather than relying on a crossbow. But it's basically the same as any other fight.
• In 4e? A lot of subtle but important things are different.
  • A lot of characters have at least some attacks with forced movement attached that don't require you to give up almost all your damage - and a group of dock thugs will probably also have some. What this means is that as they are attacking the characters are also trying to push each other off the docks and some characters are either going for a swim or going to be prone on the edge of the dock clinging on to avoid the swim. And who gets pushed in is dependent on positioning as well as luck. That it's a dock and who's near the edge of the dock matters.
  • Every character has short rest abilities and a short rest is five minutes. Even if trying to preserve their most powerful abilities for the big fight the fighter's going to unleash a variety of attacks like sweeping blow and the wizard might not be casting sleep but they'll be able to cast a burning hands so they aren't just spamming firebolt or, worse, crossbow or dart attacks.
  • When you combine the previous two points you get teamwork in a way you just don't see in other D&Ds (which isn't to say they are without teamwork). Both teaming up to make team-pushes because none of you have big enough pushes on your own and combining push attacks with AoE attacks so you push the bad guys into position to drop the AoE on all of them
    • To take a relatively skilled team in the dock fight brawl, the fighter looks at the map and sees that the five bad guys are spread out over a 20ft by 20ft area. He could rush in and try and push one off the docks - but instead he uses Tide of Iron (an attack which comes with a 5ft push) to attack the bad guy the furthest from the docks and from the other guys pushing them into bunching up now into a 15ft by 15ft square. This sets up the wizard to Thunderwave every single one of the bad guys off the docks at the same time because the fighter set things up for the wizard.
    • As part of this the wizard might have had to take an opportunity attack to get into position. But because the fighter was in the target's face and mechanically had them marked when they made an attack roll there was a penalty to hit. And then one of the Fighter abilities the Sentinel feat was based on (Combat Challenge) but that in 4e requires the target to have been marked by the fighter kicks in and the fighter gets a free attack against this foe. High level 4e tacticians sometimes deliberately provoke opportunity attacks to give their fighters free attacks.

Anyway I hope that explains in detail why 4e is a lot more tactical - and also why it makes the setting it is played in far more relevant than other forms of D&D which, I find, enhances the roleplaying and makes other D&Ds feel like the characters are acting against a green screen while 4e is on location.

 

[Lyxen]

I have totally explained it in terms of how the world works. That it is a combat technique and largely functions as such doesn't lessen it or somehow make it less a roleplaying game.

Please describe what the combat technique looks like in storytelling tems that make sense, for example, what did you do in terms of swordplay that make someone not even seeing you and being bothered up close by all the other adversaries still bothered more than you than all the rest ?

As for the DM's role, you really, really should read the DMG of both versions. I'll just put the first words of the introductions, guess which is which:

• It’s good to be the Dungeon Master! Not only do you get to tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in which these stories live.
• 1Most games fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS have a winner and a loser, but ® Roleplaying Game is doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do. The players all cooperate to achieve success for their characters. The DM’s goal is to make success taste its sweetest by presenting challenges that are just hard enough that the other
  players have to work to overcome them, but not so hard that they leave all the characters dead.

So guess which one is the one about telling stories and which one is about presenting challenges ?

All the rest follows from it, including the first words on the sections about being a DM:

• A competitive sport has referees. It needs them. Someone impartial involved in the game needs to make sure everyone’s playing by the rules. The role of the Dungeon Master has a little in common with that of a referee. If you imagined that all the monsters in an encounter were controlled by one player and all the adventurers by another player, they might need a referee to make sure that both sides were playing by the rules and to resolve disputes. D&D isn’t a head-to-head competition in that way, but the DM does act simultaneously as the player controlling all the monsters and as the referee.
• The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story.

So guess which edition is about the world and which is about the rules ?

After that, lots of words appear, but guess which stay in your mind ?

Once more, it's not a question of value, buit the design intent is totally obvious when you actually read the books.

I dunno, are Free League games freeform? I've played my share of those. But I find this to be meaningless when we are talking about 4E and 5E. In this case, I think having more rules to grant better structure are actually more helpful than having some rules rules because you have to adjudicate many more. If we were talking about freeform games, sure, but we're not: 5E is fairly crunchy, but to me not enough to really get the benefit of the crunch. It's like just under the threshold, where it could use a bit more structure to actually get more out of the system.

5e is way less crunchy than 4e. Combat rules take 1/3 of the pages for example (10 pages in 5e, 30 pages in 4e). You obviously like crunchy and structure, I used to but I got bored by it, etc.

The thing is that the "freeform edition" is anything but. Like, it's a system that has skills, so it's definitely not as freeform as some of the previous editions. Rather, to me it sits just outside the sweet spot of rules crunch for what it has: the lack of rules in places comes off like blindspots more than anything.

Again, there are blindspots because you want rules everywhere. There are people clamouring for social rules in 5e for example. I've never felt the need for that.

While not everything needs to be within the system, it's nice to have the characters be able to interact with what their characters can do in tangible ways rather than just relying on GM fiat. If you want to do that, fine, but I don't think not relying on that makes a game less of an RPG.

Or, you know, you can just let players interact collaboratively without needing someone to hold them by the hand, or rules to guide them. I should invite you to an Amber Diceless RPG or Nobilis game, some day.

Bounded accuracy doesn't meant there isn't DC per level, because monsters absolutely work on that principle.

And once more, you are wrong, there are no monsters per level. Bounded accuracy means that goblins stay dangerous at any level (you just probably need more of them).

In any case, this is pure bad faith on your part, you said that there was a table about DCs per level according to easy/medium/hard in 4e, I just pointed out that there is exactly the same thing in 4e, a table with DCs for easy/medium/hard, it's just that, thanks to bounded accuracy, it's not per level...

Like, a ladder at 30th level won't be a higher DC

Of course it will. Climbing a ladder is easy, which means DC 5 in 5e, but which means DC 19 if you are level 30, which means that it's way harder if you happen to have a commoner with you at the time.

but if I wanted to set a DC for something that I think will be a challenging climb for them (like scaling a volcanic cliff during an eruption), I have a starting point to look at for difficulty and damage. That's the point: with a level-appropriate challenge I actually have guidance rather than haphazardly trying to slap numbers together.

And, once more, this shows that you don't understand 5e rules. The guidance is there, page 238 of the DMG, actually way easier than in 4e because it's not a table per level.

This is not really a reason not to give guidance on what DC a hazard should be or how much damage it should do. In fact, the fact that they give an idea of how much a monster should at a given CR really goes against your point. The whole idea is that you have a rough idea of the difficulty and how it relates to your player's level, whether it be at, above, or below it. Not having such guidance just makes things more difficult because you have to guess at how this might affect your players now or later.

Once more, you should really read and understand the 5e rules, you have no understanding of what bounded accuracy means.

Here's the thing: having less rules can make things more complex

Yeah, right, tell that to the 10 times more players of 5e than 4e who could actually understand and play the game not that it is no longer a pure complicated geeky things.

5E has a ton of spells and rules that are only used for one spell, action, monster, etc... that means adjudicating edge cases can be a headache. That's not to say having more rules is always the answer, but having efficient rules is better. And 4E rules are fairly efficient compared to 5E, at least in my opinion.

The problem is that, as efficient as they are, it still does not compensate for the fact that they are long, complex, prescriptive and need to be all mastered properly to play the game as written.

Whereas I can take to heart the introduction of 5e where it says "To play D&D, and to play it well, you don’t need to read all the rules, memorize every detail of the game, or master the fine art of rolling funny looking dice. None of those things have any bearing on what’s best about the game." and use the rules to run a game with my 5 years old grandson who does not even know how to read, much less apply any of the complicated. imbricated rules of 4e.

More than that, the lack of things certain characters can do is just stunning. You talk about lack of imagination, but the lack of mechanical interaction for, say, a fighter is just bad.

That's because, coming from a system that restricts your thinking to what the rules tell you you can do, your imagination is stinted. D&D does not have to be a mechanical, technical tactical game, it can be mostly a storytelling game with a few rules support, so you don't NEED any sort of mechanical interaction to make a character interesting.

don't care what a GM can make up for them to do, the fact that they basically have to is a flaw with the rules. And I feel like there's a lot of that with 5E: there's enough rules to be fiddly, but not enough to be clear. Rather than focusing on making an efficient ruleset, they were more concerned with getting a certain aesthetic, and I think that's nice but doesn't make up for some of the simpler mistakes they made.

Yeah, right. At this stage, I don't think there is anything more to add. Please try some almost ruleless games. Amber has 4 attributes and the highest one wins, no dicerolls (since it's diceless), no mechanics, and still we played extremely satisfying multiyears campaign. It's waaaay more fuzzier than 5e.

 

[soviet]

What a game says it does is irrelevant. What matters is what it actually does.

 

[Oofta]

I thought I'd give a few actual illustrations here of what's meant. Picture a fairly incidental battle taking place on the side of the docks between the PCs and a handful of people foolish enough to try and mug them. It's a minor fight, not a big one so no one is reaching for their top level spells. How's it going to go down in the various editions:

• In TSR-era D&D if they can't avoid the fight (and they only are really encouraged to in XP for GP editions) the fighter and the cleric are going to rush the thugs, and the wizard is going to support them by throwing darts. It basically goes the same as any other fight against low level opponents and is over in a few dice rolls and they're more or less going to keep pounding on the enemies until they go down. The edge of the dock might as well be a stone wall for blocking foes.
• In 3.X the wizard is going to be using a crossbow and the fighter is, rather than simply attacking, going to be spamming whatever their feats have put together whether it's a power attack/cleave or a spiked chain trip. They've one big trick and they are going to use it and although it's flashier than the TSR era fights it's going to be the same basic approach as any other fight unless the wizard breaks out a low level spell or two. It's slightly more tactical because there's the possibility of flanking, but that's about it - and at mid level the fighters get nailed to the floor by the threat of losing iterative attacks.
• In 5e the hit points have inflated significantly so it's going to take more rolls. The wizard is now throwing around firebolts rather than relying on a crossbow. But it's basically the same as any other fight.
• In 4e?A lot of subtle but important things are different.
  • A lot of characters have at least some attacks with forced movement attached that don't require you to give up almost all your damage - and a group of dock thugs will probably also have some. What this means is that as they are attacking the characters are also trying to push each other off the docks and some characters are either going for a swim or going to be prone on the edge of the dock clinging on to avoid the swim. And who gets pushed in is dependent on positioning as well as luck. That it's a dock and who's near the edge of the dock matters.
  • Every character has short rest abilities and a short rest is five minutes. Even if trying to preserve their most powerful abilities for the big fight the fighter's going to unleash a variety of attacks like sweeping blow and the wizard might not be casting sleep but they'll be able to cast a burning hands so they aren't just spamming firebolt or, worse, crossbow or dart attacks.
  • When you combine the previous two points you get teamwork in a way you just don't see in other D&Ds (which isn't to say they are without teamwork). Both teaming up to make team-pushes because none of you have big enough pushes on your own and combining push attacks with AoE attacks so you push the bad guys into position to drop the AoE on all of them
    • To take a relatively skilled team in the dock fight brawl, the fighter looks at the map and sees that the five bad guys are spread out over a 20ft by 20ft area. He could rush in and try and push one off the docks - but instead he uses Tide of Iron (an attack which comes with a 5ft push) to attack the bad guy the furthest from the docks and from the other guys pushing them into bunching up now into a 15ft by 15ft square. This sets up the wizard to Thunderwave every single one of the bad guys off the docks at the same time because the fighter set things up for the wizard.
    • As part of this the wizard might have had to take an opportunity attack to get into position. But because the fighter was in the target's face and mechanically had them marked when they made an attack roll there was a penalty to hit. And then one of the Fighter abilities the Sentinel feat was based on (Combat Challenge) but that in 4e requires the target to have been marked by the fighter kicks in and the fighter gets a free attack against this foe. High level 4e tacticians sometimes deliberately provoke opportunity attacks to give their fighters free attacks.

Anyway I hope that explains in detail why 4e is a lot more tactical - and also why it makes the setting it is played in far more relevant than other forms of D&D which, I find, enhances the roleplaying and makes other D&Ds feel like the characters are acting against a green screen while 4e is on location.

What about that point in the 5E (or other non 4E editions) fights when someone gets pushed off the docks? The fighter grapples the enemy, decides to risk an OA to get to the guy in the back getting ready to cast off with the McGuffin, the paladin has to decide whether to cast Compel Duel or save the resource for a smite, people focus fire to take out one opponent quickly or the rogue tries to hide behind some crates to get advantage or any number of other things.

Sure it can be just run in, smack people. Sometimes it is. Just like in 4E it could just be someone playing a card like it was a board game. But to say that 4E somehow elevated people into tactical analysis geniuses while the other versions they're just "pounding on enemies" is hyperbole.

 

[Oofta]

Except they are an immediate threat, because they attacked you. That's the point: it's modeling an abstract but understandable idea that people defend themselves when attacked, even when it might be disadvantageous. And I'm okay with a ranged attack, too; it's a little more abstract, but it works in context of you taking fire. Think of someone being suppressed by having an arrow fly too close by.

So the other 5 enemies attacking are not a threat? Just that one guy 30 yards away that missed you with an arrow?

Whether you like the game element or not, it is just purely a game rule made for game balance and supporting the role of the fighter. There is no logical explanation for it that works across the board. Just like Come and Get It, which was a popular fighter power and from a game balance standpoint perfectly legit was in no way justifiable in the fiction as anything but supernatural. Somehow I can insult a pack of wolves so much that they feel compelled to attack me? How does that work? Your pack mate just had a litter of kittens? Same way that there was no way to have a power that was awesome that my totally mundane, non magical fighter could only pull off once per day. Not because of circumstances, not because the scenario presented itself. Nope, just game balance. Which, from a design perspective is fine. At least with battle master we can justify their maneuvers as requiring a certain amount of stamina above and beyond what they could normally do, if you have the superiority die left you can use that lunging strike multiple times per combat if it's called for.

The lack of logical in-world explanation is not a problem in and of itself. I just wish people would accept that for a lot of people it was simply that the fluff explaining how it worked was so flimsy that it felt like borderline sarcasm. That's why to a lot of people it felt like a board/card game. Being able to envision what combats look like, having it look like something other than an anime cartoon in my head is part of why I personally prefer 5E. Marking and opponent was just one of those things that I simply couldn't justify most of the time. Didn't make it a bad game, just one of the aspects of the game that doesn't really work for me. If it improves your enjoyment of the game, cool.

 

[Oofta]

Given the poster that poster was responding to was claiming something didn't exist which is present in the Rituals system, that was a factual correction and assuming them unfamiliar with the game was the charitable assumption, the alternative being they were deliberately misrepresenting it.

I went back through the comments, I don't see anyone claiming that rituals didn't exist. People have stated things about how the game felt, their impressions and opinions but that's pretty much it. If I missed it feel free to provide the quote.

 

[Neonchameleon]

What about that point in the 5E (or other non 4E editions) fights when someone gets pushed off the docks? The fighter grapples the enemy, decides to risk an OA to get to the guy in the back getting ready to cast off with the McGuffin, the paladin has to decide whether to cast Compel Duel or save the resource for a smite, people focus fire to take out one opponent quickly or the rogue tries to hide behind some crates to get advantage or any number of other things.

Sure it can be just run in, smack people. Sometimes it is. Just like in 4E it could just be someone playing a card like it was a board game. But to say that 4E somehow elevated people into tactical analysis geniuses while the other versions they're just "pounding on enemies" is hyperbole.

The difference between "whether to cast Compel Duel or save the resource for a smite" is the sort of thing I think of when I think "abstract resource management". And hiding behind $random scenery (whether it's a doorway, crates, a wall, or a table) is one step away from generic. Focus fire is tactical - but it is tactical that does not engage with the specifics of the environment (and is elementary tactics). It's just a step in the normal "chew through the enemy's abstract hit points until they stop moving".

And in 4e I am still making every one of these choices you list. Rogues hide and ambush in 4e behind random terrain. Focus fire is very much a thing. The paladin has to decide whether to cast dailies or save them. Every single thing you mentioned as options (a) happens in 4e and (b) does not make this battle different from any other - or anything where we're actually fighting against a green screen with zero terrain. What I focused on was what makes 4e both different to and more tactical than other editions. Just saying that "you can do these things as well" when you do the exact same thing in 4e is not pointing out anything that's different.

On a tangent there are forced movement abilities in other editions but when it happens in other editions than 4e it's amazing, outstanding, and vanishingly rare outside setpieces. In 4e this is normal. The big difference is that although bull rushes and spells like Gust of Wind exist you almost exclusively have to give up all your combat damage to do them. Which means if they don't have a full effect of taking a foe out of action they do diddly squat. In 4e (and very occasionally in 5e) they are built into your normal abilities. And a dock is a very specific thing that is in that fight but possibly not any others in an entire campain.

This is why in editions that aren't 4e I find myself chipping away at enemy health bars with no meaningful consequence until they drop like it's a computer fighting game taking place against a backdrop that might be different stage to stage but is effectively a green screen. In 4e I'm actually engaging with the specifics of the game world and the way my character works. In other words, while you might be picking powers from a hand of cards I'm roleplaying in combat in a way I'm simply not in other D&D editions.

If you get to talk about how for you 4e is like a card game despite the fact that there have been cards produced for casters in most editions then I think I'm vastly more justified in pointing out that 4e has more, richer, and deeper tactics and makes me feel like we're actually on location and part of the environment rather than playing an abstract computer game chipping away at an abstract health bar the way combat in other versions of D&D does to me.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Please describe what the combat technique looks like in storytelling tems that make sense, for example, what did you do in terms of swordplay that make someone not even seeing you and being bothered up close by all the other adversaries still bothered more than you than all the rest ?

That their form is so good, how it he managed to cut through your guard with such grace that even as he backed off you were still worried about him lunging back in with his rapier?

Or that the crash of his greataxe against your shield was so rough that if he tried again, it'd cleave you in two. Even if he's not in front of you, the savageness of the attack still sits in the back of your head?

Like, are we just talking about creating fancy justifications in-world for it? I could do that all day. You ask why not the rest, but why is only the Bear Barbarian the one who causes people to be at disadvantage if they aren't attacking him (unless they are immune to fear)? Why do certain martials get to attack more than others? We carve out exceptions because exceptions are how we create classes. I mean, why do Barbarians in 5E not get Fighting Styles, but Rangers/Paladins/Fighters do?

As for the DM's role, you really, really should read the DMG of both versions. I'll just put the first words of the introductions, guess which is which:

• It’s good to be the Dungeon Master! Not only do you get to tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in which these stories live.
• 1Most games fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS have a winner and a loser, but ® Roleplaying Game is doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do. The players all cooperate to achieve success for their characters. The DM’s goal is to make success taste its sweetest by presenting challenges that are just hard enough that the other
  players have to work to overcome them, but not so hard that they leave all the characters dead.

So guess which one is the one about telling stories and which one is about presenting challenges ?

Both, but 4E is honest about the decades-worth of problems with adversarial GMing? Like, the first is just meaningless boilerplate. The second is actually useful in explaining what a GM does and what they are meant to do by explicitly outlining it.

All the rest follows from it, including the first words on the sections about being a DM:

• A competitive sport has referees. It needs them. Someone impartial involved in the game needs to make sure everyone’s playing by the rules. The role of the Dungeon Master has a little in common with that of a referee. If you imagined that all the monsters in an encounter were controlled by one player and all the adventurers by another player, they might need a referee to make sure that both sides were playing by the rules and to resolve disputes. D&D isn’t a head-to-head competition in that way, but the DM does act simultaneously as the player controlling all the monsters and as the referee.
• The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story.

So guess which edition is about the world and which is about the rules ?

After that, lots of words appear, but guess which stay in your mind ?

Once more, it's not a question of value, buit the design intent is totally obvious when you actually read the books.

Again, the 5E is meaningless boilerplate while the 4E is actually useful in that it is forcefully and immediately trying to confront the misconception of the adversarial GM. You talk about how 5E is a cooperative game, but you posted two big paragraphs where 4E is hammering home the idea of how D&D is meant to be cooperative even if the GM is sometimes meant to be put against the player. 5E doesn't mention anything like that at the start. It just assumes you know what you are doing... which feels like a lot of the problems of 5E, honestly.

5e is way less crunchy than 4e. Combat rules take 1/3 of the pages for example (10 pages in 5e, 30 pages in 4e). You obviously like crunchy and structure, I used to but I got bored by it, etc.

I mean, it's less crunchy in certain ways and way more crunchy in others. Look at spells, multiclassing, etc. There's a whole bunch of (likely unintended) crunch in how you dive into other classes and which order to do it in.

Again, there are blindspots because you want rules everywhere. There are people clamouring for social rules in 5e for example. I've never felt the need for that.

No, please don't put words in my mouth. I specifically said I don't want rules everywhere, but I do want more rules in certain places. I don't need rules everywhere, but it's nice to have some guidelines for specific things.

Or, you know, you can just let players interact collaboratively without needing someone to hold them by the hand, or rules to guide them. I should invite you to an Amber Diceless RPG or Nobilis game, some day.

That's great if you have players that do that. I've found, especially with players coming from older editions, that they are more hesitant to do such things because they are used to a more adversarial GM. You know, the misconception that 4E first addresses when talking about how to GM it. I've found giving them structure to play in is actually really helpful because having structure can help focus their ideas and imaginations in certain ways. Being able to do that stuff on their own rather than just having to ask me helps them not only feel empowered, but also allows them to prepare most of this stuff beforehand without me.

And once more, you are wrong, there are no monsters per level. Bounded accuracy means that goblins stay dangerous at any level (you just probably need more of them).

In any case, this is pure bad faith on your part, you said that there was a table about DCs per level according to easy/medium/hard in 4e, I just pointed out that there is exactly the same thing in 4e, a table with DCs for easy/medium/hard, it's just that, thanks to bounded accuracy, it's not per level...

The only bad faith part here is you, because CR is absolutely a thing and I have to believe you are being deliberately obtuse to deny it. Bounded accuracy doesn't mean that you can't have enemies who aren't suitable for your party, though this is more a problem with being above their level rather than lower; just because you have bounded accuracy doesn't suddenly mean your party can take on an Adult Dragon at 5th level.

And the one in 5e is not really the same: there are 3 levels for DCs, which are only given by vague ideas. The damage is given by level, but it's also across many more levels: 4d10 is a very different kind of deadly to 1st than it is to 4th, just as 10d10 is very different for a 10th level character compared to a 5th level character, but they are in the same band. That's... not good design, in my opinion. These bands cover 4-6 levels each, while 4E's cover the equivalent of 2 each. The amount of specificity is way different.

Of course it will. Climbing a ladder is easy, which means DC 5 in 5e, but which means DC 19 if you are level 30, which means that it's way harder if you happen to have a commoner with you at the time.

That's not how that works, and I can't really assume you are arguing in good faith if you are making these sorts of comments. Having a DC19 is something easy for someone at 30th level, but doesn't mean every easy task is that. You'd have to be a moron to assume that. Instead, they are telling you that scaling a castle wall is an easy task at that level, while at 7th-9th level that's a hard task.

The "level DC" is meant to give an idea of how challenging something is for the players, rather than be applied to everything they do. The DC of tasks in the world remains the consistent to what they are, but now the GM has a good way of measuring their difficulty relative to where the players are. I've literally had this argument a dozen times on the PF2 forums: I am totally a believer in things having their DC set by the world. The nice thing about those tables is that I can easily cross-reference them to know exactly how difficult it will be for my players if they come across them.

And, once more, this shows that you don't understand 5e rules. The guidance is there, page 238 of the DMG, actually way easier than in 4e because it's not a table per level.

I've seen that. That's not good as guidance, because it's generalized and vague. Like, telling me something is "Hard" versus "Very Hard" just leaves me to eyeball it in terms of who and what can do something. Those are just vague terms which can mean different things to different people and if you're not good with calculating probabilities might cause you to over or underestimate how difficult a task is. I'm good with math so this isn't much of a problem for me as it is an annoyance, but it's all over the system itself.

Once more, you should really read and understand the 5e rules, you have no understanding of what bounded accuracy means.

I do, but shouting "Bounded Accuracy, Bounded Accuracy" like an incantation doesn't really address what I'm talking about. It's not a solution for everything and can honestly lead to problems if you think it will. It's as weak an argument as boldly asserting that I need to read the rules again when I've run the system since it came out. Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I'm missing something, it means I'm disagreeing with you.

Yeah, right, tell that to the 10 times more players of 5e than 4e who could actually understand and play the game not that it is no longer a pure complicated geeky things.

I mean, it still is a purely-complicated geeky thing. Again, spellcasting is way more complicated than 4E, as are learning different classes and their individualized systems, as well as competently multiclassing. Heck, character building to avoid trap options is way more of a concern and demands way more system knowledge.

4E's problem was not that it was complicated, but that it was different. It's a different idea, and we're in a conservative hobby that doesn't like too much change, and 4E was a whole lot of it.

The problem is that, as efficient as they are, it still does not compensate for the fact that they are long, complex, prescriptive and need to be all mastered properly to play the game as written.

Whereas I can take to heart the introduction of 5e where it says "To play D&D, and to play it well, you don’t need to read all the rules, memorize every detail of the game, or master the fine art of rolling funny looking dice. None of those things have any bearing on what’s best about the game." and use the rules to run a game with my 5 years old grandson who does not even know how to read, much less apply any of the complicated. imbricated rules of 4e.

I mean, I know people around here have talked about running 4E with young kids, so trying to pull that card is meaningless. Just because you don't think it can be done doesn't mean it can be, nor does it suddenly eliminate the complexity inherent in 5E's design, particularly in its character building. You can push your grandson off to a simpler class, and if he picks a trap option you can GM around that, but they still exist.

This is the point: just because there are fewer rules doesn't make something simpler: rather, when you create a bunch of individualized and unique systems for everything from spells to classes, it creates a lot of unspoken complexity there. 4E has complexity, but it's also tied to a bunch of universal mechanics and systems, so everything is tied into the same language in a way that most of 5E just isn't.

That's because, coming from a system that restricts your thinking to what the rules tell you you can do, your imagination is stinted. D&D does not have to be a mechanical, technical tactical game, it can be mostly a storytelling game with a few rules support, so you don't NEED any sort of mechanical interaction to make a character interesting.

Ah yes, my imagination is "stinted". Totally my problem, totally my fault. I simply cannot see the majesty of the game.

Yeah, no. I've played plenty of games with differing levels of complexity. My imagination is fine, but I find having guidelines to be nice because it sets expectations rather than having to negotiate them constantly. If you are someone who is naturally shy and conflict-averse, it's very nice to not have to hash out details about how things work, especially when you have argumentative players. And when you have creative players, it's nice to give them guidelines that they themselves can see rather than me having to give it to them, because then they can do that on their own rather than have me need to rule on each one.

Yeah, right. At this stage, I don't think there is anything more to add. Please try some almost ruleless games. Amber has 4 attributes and the highest one wins, no dicerolls (since it's diceless), no mechanics, and still we played extremely satisfying multiyears campaign. It's waaaay more fuzzier than 5e.

That's great, but I don't really care because we are talking about 5E and 4E and not Amber. Like, you keep talking about other systems and I keep saying

because I'm not talking about more freeform systems, I'm talking about a pair of fairly crunchy rules. One is crunchier than the other, but less so than you'll likely admit.

Sure, I could go play Dungeonworld and I'd probably be pretty okay with that because it has a different level of crunch compared to 5E and they probably are better adapted to using that lack of crunch than 5E is. That's been my point: I don't think 5E is a good balance for that while I think 4E hits the level of crunch it wants to do in a way more satisfying way. To me, 5E is just a bunch of half-measures trying to please everyone, paying lip service to being freeform but in fact not really being that or executing on it in any sort of satisfying way. Rather, it just decides not to include things that would be useful, because it thought "less rules" simply meant not writing some of them down instead of actually designing a game that used fewer rules.

 

[Lyxen]

What a game says it does is irrelevant. What matters is what it actually does.

Since a game is just text on paper, the ONLY thing it does is "say something" to the reader, it will never DO anything on its own.

 

[Lyxen]

So the other 5 enemies attacking are not a threat? Just that one guy 30 yards away that missed you with an arrow?

And for some reason, you need to attack him, not protect yourself from him ?

The lack of logical in-world explanation is not a problem in and of itself. I just wish people would accept that for a lot of people it was simply that the fluff explaining how it worked was so flimsy that it felt like borderline sarcasm. That's why to a lot of people it felt like a board/card game.

Exactly. Once, more, it's a question of design. D&D invented fireball by saying, this is a ball of fire because it looks cool in the world that magic-users should be able to create them, now let's see how to model them using our rules and design philosophy. Most of the 4e powers feel exactly the other way around, this is a tank, so he needs to be able to attract attacks so let's design the power technically so that it works and you know what, no-one reads the fluff anyway, so let's not even bother.