Why didn't we switch to 4e/5e?

[Quertus]

I find 4e has more varied builds that maintain a similar power level, as opposed to the massive gaps that 3.X tends to generate. People who say that 4e characters are all the same have clearly never played, since there are combat viable builds that don't involve attacking (lazy warlords) or doing damage (pacifist leaders or hardcore control casters)

I have played 4e, but I couldn't stand to play it for long. So I never played as or with those builds.

If anyone else I knew could stand to play 4e, and had the errata etc to make it work, I might give it a second chance. So I'll try to keep those builds in mind to Google for should such a miracle occur.

I mean, I'm not sure how much 5e you've played, but I've DM'd close to 700 hours of Adventurers League and played a bunch more, and I'd say this hasn't really been my experience. High-level characters are goddamn steamrollers. Throw a T2 challenge at a T3 party and they're going to crush it like it's nothing.

Ok, let's get some perspective here. I've adventured with or DM'd for characters whose biggest limitation in combat was how many monsters they could reach. Characters who could one-shot things that were too high above their level range to be worth XP. And characters for whom infinity was within reach.

And I've adventured with or as, or DM'd for ninjas, experts, "I'll randomly level-dip 10 different classes", parties that could manage a TPK before encountering a single monster, and Quertus.

Compared to this variety, how would you describe 5e T2 vs T3?

5e has an OGL and a massive amount of fan-made content.

News to me. Thanks for the info. In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

[Ignimortis]

Ok, let's get some perspective here. I've adventured with or DM'd for characters whose biggest limitation in combat was how many monsters they could reach. Characters who could one-shot things that were too high above their level range to be worth XP. And characters for whom infinity was within reach.

And I've adventured with or as, or DM'd for ninjas, experts, "I'll randomly level-dip 10 different classes", parties that could manage a TPK before encountering a single monster, and Quertus.

Compared to this variety, how would you describe 5e T2 vs T3?

Troacctid refers not to the tier system of 3.5, but to the level "tiers" of Adventurer's League. Tier 2 is levels 5-10, and tier 3 is levels 11-16.

Edit: I stand corrected on the levels. Fix'd.

News to me. Thanks for the info. In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

Varies wildly from DM to DM. Same as always, I'd say.

[Telonius]

When 4e came out, I had a massive amount of 3.x books and very little money. (Those two things may or may not be related). When 5e came out, I had slightly more money, but a slightly larger pile of 3.x books (plus a pretty solid list of house rules and homebrews), plus I've been used to playing 3.x for years. I'm interested in the new stuff under the hood, but not enough to get past my natural laziness.

[Seerow]

I actually did switch to 4e for a good year or so. I actually enjoyed it, and have since adapted many of the things I liked about it into my home games and homebrew. But ultimately my group and myself preferred the near infinite flexibility of 3.5, and switched back for that.


Given that huge flexibility is what we liked most about 3.5 it seems pretty obvious nobody was interested in 5e. It's basically DM May I in a 300 page book format. I have watched a few streams of people playing 5e and it honestly isn't as bad as that... but there is a ton of hand waving, and way less room for creativity in character building. Bounded accuracy (the concept and implementation) is also basically the antithesis of the kind of power scaling I expect to see in an RPG. If I wanted an RPG where you progress from competent to slightly more competent, I'd play Shadowrun.

[Troacctid]

Ok, let's get some perspective here. I've adventured with or DM'd for characters whose biggest limitation in combat was how many monsters they could reach. Characters who could one-shot things that were too high above their level range to be worth XP. And characters for whom infinity was within reach.

And I've adventured with or as, or DM'd for ninjas, experts, "I'll randomly level-dip 10 different classes", parties that could manage a TPK before encountering a single monster, and Quertus.

Compared to this variety, how would you describe 5e T2 vs T3?

Well. Okay. So, two of the most infamous Adventurers League modules from the Storm King's Thunder season are "Forgotten Traditions" and "Hartkiller's Horn." They're designed for Tier 2, and they include deadly boss encounters with which I have killed players and TPK'd parties, like, every other run, or something.

One of the later adventures in the season, "Reclamation," is a Tier 3 module that involves a pocket dimension that pulls guardians from across time and space, and when I run that one, I like to replace two of the printed encounters with back-to-back rematches against those bosses from the Tier 2 mods, no rest in between. Without exception, the Tier 3 characters stomp both of them without breaking a sweat.

No, there isn't anything like what you're describing—the closest thing is when a lower-level character somehow gets hold of an overpowered item like a Staff of the Magi and starts running over level-appropriate enemies with it—but the power level difference between the different tiers of play is definitely real.

News to me. Thanks for the info. In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

My experience is mostly with Organized Play, where only officially approved material is allowed, so I can't comment much on this. But you can read the reviews for some idea of the reception the unofficial stuff has gotten. https://www.dmsguild.com/

Troacctid refers not to the tier system of 3.5, but to the level "tiers" of Adventurer's League. Tier 2 is levels 5-9, and tier 3 is levels 10-14.

It's 5–10 and 11–16 respectively, but yes. The Tiers of Play are described in Chapter 1 of the 5e DMG.

[Dimers]

In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

My experience is limited to GitP play-by-post offerings, but I find 5e GMs much more likely to accept, or even offer, homebrew. You can already be anything you want using third-edition rules if you bookdive deep enough. 5e needs the homebrew to fill in the numerous and large cracks, to keep things fresh.

[Quertus]

I'm sure I won't word this well, but I'm honestly struggling to decide whether "we have less content, therefore people are more likely* to create and accept homebrew" is a bug or a feature.

I'm not even sure which I'd prefer**.

EDIT: so, a 5e 16th level party can consistently wipe out two back-to-back 10th level TPK boss fights? Hmmm... I may need to consider researching to reconsider my stance on bounded accuracy...

* in casual play, not in organized play
** lots of content, and a culture of accepting homebrew, obviously.

[Koeh]

Because 4e was very lackluster. We continued 3.5 but after several campaigns we felt like we all attained enough system mastery to take optimisation too far. By the time 5e came out main group fell apart. Currently Working on establishing new groups with new systems.

[Jormengand]

4e read to me as a Herohammer Simulator, more about mashing up mooks (who inexplicably work entirely differently from nonmook monsters of the same type) than anything approaching roleplaying, and the fact that neither the combat system nor the skill system actually function correctly is a turn-off.

5e isn't a complete game: it's not even the idea of a complete game yet. To DM it, you have to make up half the skill system on the spot, and no-one has the damnedest clue what a reasonable DC is so you get ridiculous arguments about "What is the DC to do such-and-such" that you simply would never have got in 3.5. 5e also suffers from the critically flawed idea that you should always have a notable chance at failing at your day job if you're under pressure and that a village full of commoners with longbows should be a hard target for a giant monster through sheer numbers because nothing that the monster can do will change the fact that they can still do reasonable damage to it.

3.5 is a mess and half of it doesn't work, but at least it does something interesting when you apply a little bit of care to it (or a lot of care if your username happens to be "nonsi", but that level of overhaul isn't actually necessary). It's an artifact of a lot of design decisions that I disagree with, and I despair at their end-of-edition efforts to make warriors cooler by giving them "Nonmagical" teleportation. But I would still rather play a game where everyone was a ToB swordmage and not be sure how the rules worked and have to wing it than touch practically any other edition of D&D with a standard-issue 10 foot pole.

[Troacctid]

EDIT: so, a 5e 16th level party can consistently wipe out two back-to-back 10th level TPK boss fights? Hmmm... I may need to consider researching to reconsider my stance on bounded accuracy...

Oh, it's pretty rare for a party to all be at the top of a tier—the average level is usually closer to the middle of the range.

5e isn't a complete game: it's not even the idea of a complete game yet. To DM it, you have to make up half the skill system on the spot, and no-one has the damnedest clue what a reasonable DC is so you get ridiculous arguments about "What is the DC to do such-and-such" that you simply would never have got in 3.5. 5e also suffers from the critically flawed idea that you should always have a notable chance at failing at your day job if you're under pressure and that a village full of commoners with longbows should be a hard target for a giant monster through sheer numbers because nothing that the monster can do will change the fact that they can still do reasonable damage to it.

I've never had that problem with DCs. The DMG has some pretty straightforward guidance on it.

Spoiler: Skill DCs

Show

[atemu1234]

Oh, I did switch to 4E when it came out, mainly because 3.5E annoyed me to tears. It didn't stick, tho, the player base in germany is too small. Looked at 5E and was pretty much unimpressed. There're OSR games that do a better job at it. Broadly speaking, I'm sticking with PF because that's where the most gamers are to be found and I actually do like Golarion as a setting, preferring it to the mess WotC turned theirs into.

Well, part of the problem with that is that there are like five different settings that WotC tried to handle all at once, and made a mess of individually. Golarion was its own thing from the beginning, and didn't have as many writers IIRC.
It's also probably not WotC fault in the first right, they inherited a canonical mess full of authors with various agendas. You were better off finding a single writer's canonical writings and using that as gospel than trying to make sense of the settings themselves.

The PDF is, but we don't have a hard copy at the table.

Do what I did in high school!
Step 1: Buy PDF
Step 2: Go to library
Step 3: Print PDF at 10¢ a page
Step 4: Bring to table

[Jormengand]

I've never had that problem with DCs. The DMG has some pretty straightforward guidance on it.

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

[atemu1234]

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

This just in - because I can board over the hole, the window isn't really broken! If only I knew this when I was a little kid. Imagine the trouble I could have gotten out of.

[Yahzi]

I've written something around 100,000 words of house rules and an entire series of novels set in essentially a 3E world (see my sig).

Plus, 5E completely lost me with the "heal any amount of physical damage overnight, but exhaustion can last up to 5 days" thing.

[Knaight]

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

The guidance says to assess a qualitative difficulty, then convert it to numbers using the table. Doing that requires absolutely no knowledge of what the system looks like. I don't mean that you don't need to understand bounded accuracy - I mean you could hand that table off to a third party with a description of the task, not tell them you were playing D&D (and there are enough similar tables in other games to make that plausible, it could be d6 Fantasy or something), have them give you a number, and plug it in. Bounded accuracy doesn't come into it in that stage.

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.

[Troacctid]

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

I mean...

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.

That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.

[Jormengand]

I mean...

Yeah. Example (Skill used) indeed. Plus, it's not like they don't actually have...

"Climb
DC Example Surface or Activity
0 A slope too steep to walk up, or a knotted rope with a wall to brace against.
5 A rope with a wall to brace against, or a knotted rope, or a rope affected by the rope trick spell.
10 A surface with ledges to hold on to and stand on, such as a very rough wall or a ship’s rigging.
15 Any surface with adequate handholds and footholds (natural or artificial), such as a very rough natural rock surface or a tree, or an unknotted rope, or pulling yourself up when dangling by your hands.
20 An uneven surface with some narrow handholds and footholds, such as a typical wall in a dungeon or ruins.
25 A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall.
25 An overhang or ceiling with handholds but no footholds.
— A perfectly smooth, flat, vertical surface cannot be climbed.
Climb DC
Modifier1 Example Surface or Activity

These modifiers are cumulative; use any that apply.

-10 Climbing a chimney (artificial or natural) or other location where you can brace against two opposite walls (reduces DC by 10).
-5 Climbing a corner where you can brace against perpendicular walls (reduces DC by 5).
+5 Surface is slippery (increases DC by 5)."

Which is leagues apart from:

"Your Strength (Athletics) check covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing, jumping, or swimming. Examples include the following activities:
You attempt to climb a sheer or slippery cliff, avoid hazards while scaling a wall, or cling to a surface while something is trying to knock you off."

[Knaight]

That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.

That's in characters' areas of expertise. If you take the elite array (which doesn't see much use) you get +2/+2/+1/+1/+0/-1 modifiers. The average there is 5/6. You then have proficiency on usually four out of 18 skills, for an average bonus of 4/9. Adding those together gets less than 2, but there's enough miscellany around (attribute bonuses, extra skills for certain classes, etc.) to be worth calling it 2ish.

That represents things that a character can do, but isn't particularly good or bad at. They still fail a very easy check routinely. You can restrict this to only what characters are best at, but even there they fail an easy check 20% of the time. The numbers at the low end are screwy.

[Coidzor]

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

I didn't switch to 4e when it came out because no one in the group had the interest or income to buy in for 4e due to where we were in life at the time, but we had amassed a decent library of 3.5 content between us and got a bunch more stuff for a song when dudes sold off their entire 3.5 collections to switch to 4e.

So we continued playing what we knew and had. I eventually tried out 4e for Adventurer's League and it seemed pretty solid in terms of combat. Skill Challenges were interesting as well.

With 5e, with very few books to start out with and access to the Basic Rules being sufficient for most of the group, there was a much lower barrier to entry, especially since the edition isn't based around a subscription service. Although I think now more people would be socially ready for a subscription-service-based TTRPG than they were in 2009. We played Lost Mines of Phandelver as a short interlude between 3.5 and PF campaigns and found that aside from a couple of wonky places the system was enjoyable enough and had simplified a lot of areas that we found annoyingly complex at times.

So we have largely switched over to 5e after our last Pathfinder campaign wrapped up.

[Endarire]

We liked 3.x more, had more resources, had more experience, and were more excited to play with tools and people with which we were familiar.

[Yahzi]

the last editions of D&D where they have players and monsters playing by the same rules.

This! This too! I play (well, run) D&D for the simulationist angle, not the narrative (unlike many DMs, I am not a frustrated fantasy novelist ).

I actually admire 5E's simplification; but they made the simulation simply impossible. I can't even pretend to build a world that makes sense beyond "because I said so" with 5E.

[Nifft]

I can't even pretend to build a world that makes sense beyond "because I said so" with 5E.

That's true, but it's also true that you can't build a world that makes sense with either 3e or Pathfinder.

Well, not unless you're Emperor Tippy.

That setting makes sense, but it's not really a world in the fantasy genre any more.

[Kurald Galain]

One of the later adventures in the season, "Reclamation," is a Tier 3 module that involves a pocket dimension that pulls guardians from across time and space, and when I run that one, I like to replace two of the printed encounters with back-to-back rematches against those bosses from the Tier 2 mods, no rest in between. Without exception, the Tier 3 characters stomp both of them without breaking a sweat.

There should be more to character growth than dealing enough combat damage to defeat an encounter six levels lower. The 5E forum is just now having a twelve-page discussion on how many monsters are just a "bag of HP"; defeating a bigger bag of HP is not really impressive.

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.

Yes. The issue is not so much that it's difficult for a DM to qualify a task as "easy" or "hard" or whatnot. The issue is that when you do, too often you get ridiculous outcomes like a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task, or an untrained nobody randomly succeeding at an olympic-level stunt.

That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.

Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.

[Jormengand]

Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.

Ugh, yes. When I complained in a thread about 5e that characters like Altaïr and Nilin and real life parkour experts being able to pass moderate climb checks routinely wasn't supported by the system, I got "Well, because Altaïr is a rogue, and if he's level 20, and if he has very high strength, he can just about manage it," with no explanation of how any character who wasn't a high-level rogue (which is why I mentioned Nilin, who probably hasn't maxed out her strength either) could do that. You shouldn't have to be a rogue who is a mad climbing nut to be able to climb stuff routinely.

[weckar]

I've invested 100s of $ into books for 3.5, and was not prepared to do that again when these still worked perfectly fine.

[noob]

Or how a normal person will fail very easy tasks one quarter of the time(I want to climb those stairs (rolls) Oh I can not climb those stairs I guess that is why all the houses in the town have multiple stairs)
Even an adventurer will often fail very easy tasks for which he had training.
like "I just did climb that 100 meter cliff without using tools now I will try to climb that knotted rope(surprise he can still fail climbing that knotted rope)"
Or yet take as an example mathematic calculations.(it is super continuous: there is long chains of stuff that people learns in the order and you can hardly know how to calculate a sum without knowing how to do an addition but here an addition would be very easy and a sum too and you would be able to do fine a sum and then be unable to do an addition while in 3.5 you could have an addition at dc0)

[Troacctid]

Yes. The issue is not so much that it's difficult for a DM to qualify a task as "easy" or "hard" or whatnot. The issue is that when you do, too often you get ridiculous outcomes like a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task, or an untrained nobody randomly succeeding at an olympic-level stunt.


Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.

I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

[noob]

I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

There is also the examples of one given character doing something hard then failing one instant later doing an easy variant of it.
And the examples of people needing multiple stairways in a house because someone coming to their house might find itself unable to climb a given stairway(and that happens very often(one quarter of the time assuming average commoners))
I think this table should have very easy at Dc0 because you do not expect someone average to fail one quarter of the time for an very easy task(it would not be called very easy).

[Florian]

Ugh, yes. When I complained in a thread about 5e that characters like Altaïr and Nilin and real life parkour experts being able to pass moderate climb checks routinely wasn't supported by the system, I got "Well, because Altaïr is a rogue, and if he's level 20, and if he has very high strength, he can just about manage it," with no explanation of how any character who wasn't a high-level rogue (which is why I mentioned Nilin, who probably hasn't maxed out her strength either) could do that. You shouldn't have to be a rogue who is a mad climbing nut to be able to climb stuff routinely.

I think this is more a topic on what to expect of rules (and rules modeling) and how the game part should work based on that expectation.

For example, a game system I regularly play uses these meta rules for skills:
- You don't have to roll if there're no stakes involved.
- You don't have to roll for any activity your character is supposed to be good at.
- You don't have to roll for anything that you have 50+% chance to succeed at.
- Not rolling will always count as one success. You want more successes, you will need to roll.

That system uses margins of success/failure to produce more nuanced results than a simple pass/fail.
So, an Altair would "perform" as expected right from character generation.

Another system I use also uses MoF/MoS, but uses 2d10+mod as core mechanic (1 and 2 being failures, 1 and 2 on both dice being critical failures), with the option to roll "safe" (1d10+mod) or go for "risk" (4d10+mod).

[Ignimortis]

I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

Because a level 20 expertise rogue with a maxed relevant stat isn't an expert. They're supposed to be a demigod of that particular skill. An expert is someone who has maybe +3 in a relevant stat and is level 5. Not even necessarily a rogue.