The General D&D thread

The developers of 5E may be idiots, but they're not THAT stupid.

Charming.

It's just a punchline ;P

Really, most of the "problems" with 5E are just preference issues. The point buy issue is outright bad, and I guess there are some class balance issues here and there, but I mean, I don't like 5E's methodology, but I at least understand why it is what it is.

It's true.

I actually kind of hope they use Fourth Edition as the basis for a new gameline, because I think there's still a lot they could do with the format.

Unless there's a 4E Pathfinder, I doubt it. So many people just had a gutteral repulsion towards 4E because it wasn't what they "expected" out of a tabletop game, or something.

13th age is 4E inspired, only without grids and more like Essentials.

There's also Gamma World which uses 4E mechanics.

edited 20th Aug '14 7:39:16 PM by Ghilz

Not out of a table top, out of D&D.

By itself, if it lacked for the baggage of its heritage, I suspect 4e would be less hated.

13th Age is only very very loosely 4E inspired. It uses vancian magic still. PD and MD are based off of 4E handling of non-armor defenses though, yeah.

edited 20th Aug '14 7:58:36 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

My problem with 4E is that it was like playing an action movie.

Which is neat. But not what I want out of Dn D.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

More like a videogame, especially a... whaddya call 'em? MOBA? Or maybe a MORPG (first M left out intentionally).

edited 20th Aug '14 9:19:17 PM by Knowlessman

i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby

Eh... I wanted to make the MMO comparison, but I felt like that would piss someone off.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

WotC make something 4esque as a completely different brand, like MtG is. Call it, Dungeoncraft. Ah yeah.

Bill it as something with all/alot of the flavoring of D&D but with much easier to swallow rules, more grid based, with tiles and pieces and shit.

@Tomu I still disagree with you about the point buy thing but I will drop it.

As for 4e. I think it would be more liked if it was called something else. It's a good game though not my style, combined with the fact it just did not feel like D&D to me. (Which feels kinda of odd to me given that I only got into D&D after watching a 4e game online.)

You look happy, I can change that if you want.

4E is a very solid system for reasonably balanced (there's still a huge amount of things wrong here, but they're pretty easily addressed) gameplay. In order to accomplish that, they made it so that the system has to be run in "scenes" or "encounters." In addition, they moved away from verisimilitude in a number of ways (instead of a lock having a DC 20 thievery, any given lock in any given scene will have a DC set by the DC table for easy/medium/hard D Cs for characters of any given level, for instance). These are all things that make it much easier to have a robust yet relatively balanced system, but that may take away from the image of Dungeons and Dragons as exploring dungeons.

In particular, I think the background of D&D having dungeons as purchasable models (Tomb of Horrors) really reinforced the need for, say, static D Cs. "A fish is a fish is a fish" is a rallying cry if you're used to running through dungeons and the dungeons not changing in "difficulty" based on character level. In part this may have developed from 2nd edition and earlier, where characters were virtually never all the same level. In 3rd Edition, we had rules for characters being different levels (though XP distribution got clumsy if they were), but unless someone died or wasn't there to get XP at some point, generally, you all were the same level (or ECL). 4E basically just said "stop this antagonizing crap where one person isn't having fun and just make everyone the same level." Again this is a gameplay balance decision, but one that may rub people who are more invested in the background idea of what it means to play Dungeons and Dragons the wrong way.

That last sentence was tortured. But I digress.

Personally, I've never played Dungeons and Dragons AS Dungeons and Dragons. I've run a few Forgotten Realms campaigns, but even then, it's always been more about the sweeping dramatic plots than it has been dungeon delving or what have you. So it makes sense that I took well to 4E. 4E is perfect for cinematic play. It's pretty bad at developing a roguelike.

And yeah, the concept of encounters is very video gamey. But that's not because it's actually video gamey, so much as because it's a model that video games happen to also use, because it's convenient. IRONICALLY, when people complain about 4E feeling like an MMO, they're LESS accurate than when they call 4E a video game. 4E doesn't get translated well to an MMO at all-why do you think Neverwinter Online looks virtually nothing like 4E rules wise? Because MM Os aren't about encounters or scenes, with the exception of dungeon bosses. They're about, well, dungeons. Granted, encounter powers are closer to powers with cooldowns than they are, say, vancian magic, but they're probably closer to vancian magic than they are spell points.

I find the opposite to be true. It may just be different definitions of "cinematic", but one of my problems with 4E is that there's an enormous wall between "combat" and "non-combat" in the rules. That's what a lot of people mean when they say it feels "video game-y" — it has a very curated feel, where you can only use [ability] on [valid target] for [described effect] and there's no support for doing anything else. All 4E says about hitting things with a Fireball is "3d6 + int mod fire damage", with one sentence of flavor text that amounts to "you throw a fireball at them and it explodes for damage". 3.5 describes the look and feel of the spell (you point at where you're aiming and a small glowing bead of energy zooms to the target before activating, which generates a burst of flame but not an actual "blow things across the room" explosion) in addition to its base mechanical effects (1d6/level fire damage). That's much more "cinematic" to me. In 3.5, if you want to set a wizard's study on fire, tossing a fireball in the center of the room will certainly do it. In 4e, it's less clear, because it only mentions the specific mechanical effects for the intended use case (ie, attacking enemies). The additional info allows the DM to better paint a picture of what actually happens when the player says "I cast fireball" and allows players to find more creative uses for the spell outside the obvious one of causing damage in combat.

The focus on 4E is in the tactical wargame-style combat, which is why the designers made decisions like having bare bones mechanics-only ability descriptions and making the use of a combat grid basically mandatory (as opposed to 3.5, which has a lot more flavor ability descriptions and allows you to fudge your way through combat without a grid if you want to). This makes 4E feel more like a video game because entering combat means breaking out the minis and shifting playstyle significantly, whereas it was possible to play 3.5 without that sort of thing. "Cinematic play" to me means (in this context) that everything flows seamlessly together. 3.5 isn't great at this, but it's better than 4E, which has an enormous gap between "combat" and "everything else".

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. Some people I game with like 4E over 3.5 precisely because its rules are clear and simple, compared to 3.5's more verbose, ambiguous descriptions. It's just a matter of preference. If I were interested in combat for combat's sake, I'd like 4E more than 3.5 — but I tend to play tabletop RPGs for the setting and stories, with combat merely an extension of the plot (my groups almost never do anything to the effect of "there's a dungeon, go clear it"), which I feel that 3.5 (and now 5e) supports better than 4E does.

edited 21st Aug '14 9:32:21 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

And 5th is arguably better than 3.5 at that; hell, using a grid at all is presented as a variant rule, as opposed to the default.

i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby

Yeah, as someone who (on the rare occassions I get to be the GM) tends to have combat as something that's extremely rare, but also extremely brutal, 4E doesn't work for me. Because I need to give my players a way out of it. I need them to be able to say "Look, maybe I can convince this evil warlock that we're actually on her side." And maybe I didn't look hard enough, but it seemed like a right pain in the ass to make that happen in 4E. And when they're not in combat (which is most of the time) I need them to have the ability to use their... abilities for other things.

To me, the appeal of Dn D is the versatility of the mechanics, and using those mechanics to create a story. 4E... never really seemed to let me do that.

This is why I'll probably see what new 5E rules I can make work for me in 3.5 and leave it at that.

edited 21st Aug '14 11:34:40 AM by Mukora

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

Cinematic as in scene based. 4E's rules structure is based on the concept of scenes.

4E works best when you make roleplaying mostly rules free, and use the system for combat.

edited 21st Aug '14 3:41:24 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

About MMOs not being about encounters or scenes... I don't know about many of them, but I've watched my brother play one popular one, Final Fantasy XIV, and there aren't many resources that really carry over between encounters in a dungeon. The game really is about individual encounters most of the time and the specifics aside from victory/defeat of an encounter doesn't really have much of an effect on the next.

It's not really something I'm too fond of personally; I like it when games use short(encounter-level), medium(dungeon-level), and long(game/character-level) resources effectively. Unfortunately, outside of Rogue-likes, there aren't many video games that do this.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.

I guess that's another reason I don't like it. I prefer all the roleplaying to be the thing most affected by rules. Combat is what I like to be looser.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

Have you checked out the phb. I think 5e does a better job then 3.5 does.

edited 21st Aug '14 4:07:57 PM by Saya1

You look happy, I can change that if you want.

Cinematic as in scene based. 4E's rules structure is based on the concept of scenes.

I think that's what makes people feel that it's video-gamey: 4th. ed. (from my impression) plays a bit like a videogame (not MMO neccessarily) in that there's gameplay, then a cutscene telling the story, then gameplay, then another cutscene...

Now, all combat-oriented stuff has that to some extent, but 4th. ed. was more so.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

x2 I read a short liveblog about it. As I said before, I really like the whole backstory mechanic.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

Seeing as how I think the best storytelling has always come from CRPG, I am happy with a system that "feels video gamey."

But, again, I'm not going to denigrate others for not feeling the same way.

You should still probably check out the actual product.

You look happy, I can change that if you want.