My issue with 4E is that it mistook simplicity in builds for simplicity in gameplay. The 5E classes feel both better thought-out and better differentiated to me.
I also cut my teeth on 3.5E, though, so I may be biased. (For that matter, I prefer lighter-weight systems like Savage Worlds nowadays anyway.) One of my friends got into tabletop games with 4E. Maybe I’ll ask her what she thinks.
I’d argue that 4E suffers from one of my least-favorite “qualities” in RPGs: balance-via-perfect-math. The enemies follow a carefully charted difficulty path; encounter design principles ensure you syphon off X% of party resources each combat, punctuated by Y short rests, until the final encounter with an Elite of class Z to maximize Enjoyment by Theta Gamma Delta. To-hit bonuses, damage scaling, crowd-control capacity, healing, etc., were all engineered perfectly into this glorious Ur-Formula (well, at least after the fixed the fuckups in their math with the Forgotten Kingdoms/Fallen Lands books).
And so you get these different classes who have abilities like Burning Whirlwind of Glorious Sanction and Piercing Skybolt Death-Array that, when you look close, are the same power with a couple of different damage keywords, but either way, you’re gonna deal 4x Weapon Damage + Key Ability Mod to a box 4 map-squares a side and inflict a 2nd-level Status Debuff to everything within that fails a 10 + Key Ability Mod DC Fort Check.
AKA, they mistook needing to “fix” Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard for meaning that everything had to be Perfectly Mathematically Balanced forever. I’d argue that the classes aren’t all that simple at their core–someone above mentioned that building a character past level 3 or 4 without the D&D Insider Character Builder tool was a multi-hour process that would leave a man hollowed out and grey, gasping for his final breaths. Rather, they’re beautifully calculated Difficulty Equalizers, always being perfectly crafted to survive an at-level challenge just barely.
Now on the one hand, all that beautifully calculated crunch makes for a compelling, tense boardgame-like dungeoncrawl experience. GM’ed perfectly, those encounters would provide this razor-thin line of danger-vs-reward from level 1 to 30, never shifting, never varying. Starting to fall behind? Don’t worry, you just hit Level 10, so the GM is gonna make sure you get a Level 12 Magic Item to boost your to-hit so you kill enemies in 3.5 rounds like you should be since they deal 1/5 of your HP in damage per round on average. . .
Sorry. I have. . . Thoughts on 4E.
Evidently, but I’d listen to more of it. I see what you mean, and I think I’m on the same page.
I don’t really like combat in 4e. It’s slow, has lots of hard-to-track status effects, and characters have a low hit chance so there’s a pretty good shot of many turns feeling meaningless. Unlike @ArmandoPenblade though, I like leveling in it. It was fun to choose new abilities all the time. I prefer playing a fighter type, and prefer interesting decisions, so the er… was it Commander? class where you were basically a warrior with battle control abilities was really up my alley.
Mike Mearls (who was the lead on 5e I think) had some interesting thoughts on it somewhere deep in this video. My interpretation is that in playtests they found that their style of writing caused people to more strictly follow the rules. They wrote the 4e rulebook the way a board game rulebook would be written. This coincides with my experience as well. 4e games I played in had a lot less role-playing typically and more focus on combat, which I don’t think was the intent of the design but it’s how it comes across in the rules. 5e rules were intentionally written with natural language, not rules language, which makes players more comfortable ignoring the ones that don’t fit their group, and more confident adding ones that make it work better for their group.
The thing I like best about 5e is how easy it is to modify to fit the type of play a group prefers. It can run survival hex-crawls with crazy dungeons like Tomb of Annihilation as well as it runs a silly city adventure where players open a magic items shop. I think it’s modular design is helpful for less experienced DMs to see the ways in which D&D can be modified for the group. (Which I love, since I don’t play D&D that often.)
I actually do enjoy the leveling precisely because of the added tactical richness you mention, @porousnapkin. . . I just hated how the math of the combat was designed to sort of rob all that of any substance. Sure, I stacked three status debuffs on the enemies, crowd-controlled them into a perfect box shape, and set them up to get wiped out by an area attack from the sorcerer next turn, but. . . all of that was exactly as easy or hard as it was three levels ago, we just took a bunch of extra steps to get there. Like, when I step back and look at the numbers, it kind of robs the inherent coolness of the powers and abilities from them by reminding me that it’s all just part of the Formula, in the end.
I do agree with Mearls’ interpretation of how people reacted to the rules. While giving even “simple” classes like Fighter and Barbarian this raft of awesome, complicated, status-inflicting, area-attacking, damage-increasing powers meant that they had way more to do than “I swing my sword and five-foot-step” every round. . . it also translated to many people I played 4E with assuming their character couldn’t do anything but what their three pages of intricately detailed powers said they could. There wasn’t a “swing from the lantern over the table and dropkick that fucking goblin into the fire” power, so people were somehow scared to try that! Maddening. Their attempts to fix that kinda thing in 5E really do resonate with me.
Then again, my favorite RPG is still Fate Core, so maybe I’m so completely immunized to painfully vague, unspecific rulebooks than 5E’s laissez faire approach doesn’t even phase me now ;-)
Yeah, I remember stocking up on different color rings from soda bottle tops to track conditions. There was just a ton to keep track off. I remember pretty much needing an iPad app to track what reset on encounters, etc.
As noted, combat took for fucking ever. I don’t regret the time I played 4e, and it was interesting watching them try and write something you can use at a con in a 4-hour session.
Back to DND Beyond. I ran a few characters using the web interface on my iPad this weekend and it wasn’t bad. One thing that was weird is at first my guantlets of ogre power didn’t adjust my strength, but when I leveled it did. It’s not updating the stats to my bracers of archery so I have to remember to add +2 to the die rolls. This is a minor quibble, though.
As noted, the character sheet export sucks but they know it and it’s on the roadmap to fix.
1st ed. for life!!!
Man, those tables back then. Tables upon tables. That original DM screen, I’ll never forget it.
I skipped 4e for all the reasons noted above. I read the rules and decided this was not for me. I say that as the most memorable experiences in roleplaying always come from when someone tries something audacious (and likely outside of the rules),and regardless of success or failure the DM makes the result cool.
I really enjoyed the two campaigns of 4e I played in. I loved the characters I made and the shenanigans I got into with my fellow players.
Here’s a question for 5e players and DMs: how do you get or give magic items, and how do you want to get those items? In earlier editions, the items were pretty clear cut. In 4e, the items could have unusual powers, but players knew what they were because they were in the PHB or other sourcebooks, and even unusual things were common. In 5e, magic loot is supposed to be pretty rare and special. Not only are there some unusual mechanics (sometimes it’s a straight +1, sometimes it casts a spell, sometimes it’s something weirder), but the DMG suggests gussying up the magic items up with weird physical characteristics, or tying in other clues to the campaign’s background lore.
I love those ideas. I don’t want to just tell a player, “you got a staff of the adder or pipes of the sewer,” without them knowing what that means. But that means that to get all that across, and to make things as easy for my players as possible, I jot everything down on a 3x5 index card — appearance, little circles to fill in for daily charges, the name of the thing, how it works, the spell’s description, a command word if needed, maybe a sketch of any weird insignias on it — and hand that to my player. Is that enough or too much?
Your technique sounds awesome to me, tbh. Clear and useful, but still a little extra effort to make it feel properly special. The endless hamster wheel of nearly predetermined loot in 4E robbed the items of some of what made them special. I’d argue “wealth by level” in Pathfinder has almost the same effect. Making magic rare, complicated, and unique has always felt better to me unless you’re just running a Diablo style loot piñata campaign for your group.
I play mainly the Adventurer’s League stuff. The magic items are assigned and you either get a certificate, or there is a blurb in the adventure you can photocopy/scan/take a picture.
Man, I remember the first time we tried 4e from 3.5 - the first combat took ages and lost all our interest. We stuck with 3.5 until our DM moved out of state a few years later.
For 5e, I used the item cards (from Paizo, iirc). I wrote out the stats once discovered, and let the players write in the description when given to them.
I ran probably my best campaign on 4e. Story wise, character engagement wise, fun factor. Shame about the combat, that part sucked.
I totally agree with what Armando said. In pursuit of perfect balance, they made the game boring. Every class was the same with a different skin. Combat took forever, and combat in 3.5 already took forever so this was like 3 forevers. At level 11 players and monsters start getting powers that make you miss turns and that’s when we all quit 4e. Waiting 30 minutes to do your round was bad enough now we’re getting stunned and charmed all the time? Fuck. That.
I want to play 5e. My group has invested heavily in Pathfinder books and accessories now, and they don’t want to switch.
I say “now” and we switched to Pathfinder in like 2010.
And part of the downside of all that 4E did wrong is that it had some really, really fucking good ideas.
Giving Fighters (and Fighter-alikes) definitive, awesome, gamescape-altering shit to do other than “I swing my sword” was fucking inspired. Battlefield lockdowns, status debuffs, area swipes, all coming out of the Fighter? Fuck that’s so cool!
Classes like the Warlord who’d not just improve their allies but actually do some genuine battlefield command shit and give them extra attacks and turns with even more bonuses tacked on? Omfg that’s so much better than just stacking a +2 Competence bonus onto their rolls thanks to your Bardic Inspiration. No, you’re out there issuing fuckin’ orders, man! How cool!
And then you’ve got the insane customizability of the classes. Take this Blessing and that Feat chain and suddenly your Control-oriented DIvine caster is rolling DPS, instead. Pick up this item and that Elemental Alignment and your DPS is somehow tanking? I love playing weird-out “builds” of classes (like Melee Sorcerers in Diablo 2), and with enough splatbooks and time, you could really rejigger the fuck out of classes in 4E in really interesting ways. THE COOLEST SHIT
Hell, 4E is one of the first places to describe what they called a Skill Challenge well, clearly, and concisely enough that GMs could just pick up the mechanic of chained-skill-rolls-as-complex-setpiece-action-sequences and roll with it. That’s one of the best bits of baseline GMing advice out there, and they fuckin’ made it central to their conception of non-combat encounters. COOL LEVELS CRITICAL
All of which gets bogged down by the too-perfect-for-its-own-good mathematical balance and the straight-path power advancement railroad and the hours-long slog of combat
Amen brother!
I feel the greatest strength of 5E is that they kept a lot of the 4E good ideas but disguised them in a camouflage of traditional D&D verbiage and concepts so that old school players would accept them. For example the dry 4E breakdown of making every ability usable at-will, or X per encounter, or X per day persists in 5E. They just disguised it with short rests and long rests.
The new Pathfinder game has reignited my interest in the 5th edition, which I do enjoy a lot. I’m thinking about trying an Adventurers League game at my FLGS, either as a player or DM. Is the AL a good thing?
Also, should I play in an AL game before trying to DM? I have some experience DMing home games, but mostly with people I know every well, and my knowledge of the rules is a work in progress. I’ve been playing D&D casually since the late 70s, off and on, but that doesn’t mean I know the rules well!
Yes to both.
The AL adventures are good. They are made to be completed in 2-4 hours depending on the time slot. They are usually light on story, and have about 2-3 encounters. I like them because you don’t have to worry too much about resource management.
Play in a bout 3-4 before you DM. You will get a feel for how the tables expect to be run and the like.
I don’t understand how you guys can store all this information in your head. :(
Could you give an example? I run a 5th edition campaign and I definitely do not incorporate enough skill challenges, let alone encounters. This sounds cool.
@Mark_Crump: Thanks for the advice on the Adventurers League. I’ll try playing in one before DMing, as you suggest.