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

[Grod_The_Giant]

This would be acceptable if the mechanics were at least their own interesting variant. Most 5e mechanics are dumbed down to the point of not even really being mechanics. Any player who wants to play something mechanically distinct from another player in a similar role is going to have a hard time making it work.

I mean, I could just as easily say that most 3.5 mechanics are overcomplicated to the point of being unusable, and that any player who wants to play something that's not a [your desired point of balance here] is going to have a hard time making it work.

Each edition, I think, is shaped largely in reaction to the one before. 4e emphasized balance and stopping high level characters from trampling over plots because that's what people complained about most in 3.5. 5e is screaming "look at me! I'm D&D! No splat bloating at all!" because that's what people complained about most in 4e and PF. 6th edition will probably have a strong emphasis on power growth because that's what people complain about most in 5e. It's all reactionary.

[thelastorphan]

I generally defend 4E largely because it is what lots of players asked for. A balanced game. It just didn't have the same trappings as were used to. I still love the art direction. It felt distinct to me. I like the power system and will always defend the editions focus on simple mechanics. The onus of fluff and creativity was pushed 100% to the player and I liked that.

All that said I think some of the mechanics that were mishandled include multiclassing, skill challenges, and rituals.

3.E just has too much variety for any system to really catch up to in any reasonable amount of time. And learning a new system inside and out is a gargantuan task.

I like things about 4e but it doesn't hold a candle to my love for PF, 3E's successor.

[Knaight]

That's not a 5th edition problem. That's a d20 problem. If it's really a problem, you could always go 3d6 instead, and figure out a workaround for crits and crit-range-extenders.

It's a 5e problem. The problem isn't the d20 on its own, it's the combination of the d20 with some pretty piddly modifiers. If you swap proficiency out with proficiency dice, where each skill is 1d20+att+prof(d6), suddenly the issue with proficient skills largely goes away, and it creates a new variable that lets you represent variation in skills beyond proficient or not. Expanding the range 3e style also cuts out the problem in 5e.

I don't particularly like the 1d20 for skills, but it's bounded accuracy as implemented that broke the system. It was clearly built for the combat system first, where it works just fine - and where multiple dice rolls are expected, thus mitigating swinginess of the d20 and making the modifiers count for. It was then lazily exported to the skill system, at which point it started causing problems.

I mean, I could just as easily say that most 3.5 mechanics are overcomplicated to the point of being unusable, and that any player who wants to play something that's not a [your desired point of balance here] is going to have a hard time making it work.

You can and you should. This board could use more pushback to the idea that rules heavy games aren't just preferred by people, but inherently and objectively better than lighter games. It could also use some pushback to the idea that the complexity of rules you favor in an RPG is actually a meaningful indicator of mathematical skill, let alone general intelligence.

[Doctor Awkward]

AD&D/2e: "Here's what you can play. Make your character concept conform to the given abilities."

3.0/3.5: "The entire mechanical construction of you character is a moving part. Build your character to meet your concept."

4e: "So there were some balance issues with the last edition. We fixed that by making everything the same."

5e: "Hey guys? ...We're really sorry about... anyway here's a new edition... please love us again... please?"



The truth is, thanks largely to the OGL, there is far more support for 3rd Edition than any of the other ones. This is evident to me by being the ruleset which Paizo, to this day, still chooses to rip off adapt when creating their own edition.

As for my personal opinion, I greatly enjoyed 2nd edition when it was all that was available. 3.0/3.5 fixed a lot of the issues I had with the system, as well as opening up more robust choices for character creation.

I bought the first release of the 4th Edition core set, and it was an atrocious read for me. To this day I've not yet played a 4e game, and I have no intention to.

I haven't paid any attention to 5th Edition because a) I've been tricked once already, and b) I don't have the time to learn another new D&D system, when there are so many other systems out there I want to try, nor do I have any desire to throw more money at WotC than I already have.

[Troacctid]

Incidentally, this is also the explanation behind Pathfinder and the frosty reception of 5th. When 4th failed out of the gate, people were looking to stay with 3rd but still wanted fresh material. Pathfinder happened to come along and be in the right place at the right time to snatch up that dangling market share by being "basically 3rd but with new content," exactly what everyone wanted.

5th failed to reclaim the gold partly due to the success of Pathfinder playing to nostalgia and hogging the 3rd fans and mostly because they refused to acknowledge their mistake with 4th. They tried to go backsies and say that 5th was an appeal to the old players, but they still put the new mechanics in, as well. They tried to have their cake and eat it, too. It didn't work, though, because they failed to mend the rift of broken loyalty with those who felt betrayed by 4th.

5e is more popular than PF.
https://icv2.com/articles/markets/vi...es-spring-2017
http://blog.roll20.net/post/16705885...report-q3-2017

[Nifft]

So basically people were happy to finally have some significant asymmetry?

There always was significant asymmetry in how 4e classes played, even if it wasn't immediately evident from their power progression.


It's true that there was a lot of symmetry in presentation, but that's a rather superficial layer to get hung up on.

[Grod_The_Giant]

It's a 5e problem. The problem isn't the d20 on its own, it's the combination of the d20 with some pretty piddly modifiers. If you swap proficiency out with proficiency dice, where each skill is 1d20+att+prof(d6), suddenly the issue with proficient skills largely goes away, and it creates a new variable that lets you represent variation in skills beyond proficient or not. Expanding the range 3e style also cuts out the problem in 5e.

I don't particularly like the 1d20 for skills, but it's bounded accuracy as implemented that broke the system. It was clearly built for the combat system first, where it works just fine - and where multiple dice rolls are expected, thus mitigating swinginess of the d20 and making the modifiers count for. It was then lazily exported to the skill system, at which point it started causing problems.

Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)

You can and you should. This board could use more pushback to the idea that rules heavy games aren't just preferred by people, but inherently and objectively better than lighter games. It could also use some pushback to the idea that the complexity of rules you favor in an RPG is actually a meaningful indicator of mathematical skill, let alone general intelligence.

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).

It's true that there was a lot of symmetry in presentation, but that's a rather superficial layer to get hung up on.

"A rather superficial layer to get hung up on" describes I think a significant amount of 4e criticism.

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear)

[ExLibrisMortis]

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc)

As a big fan of these things, I nominate this as my reason for sticking with 3.5.

[Knaight]

Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)

The "three pillars" claims are hilarious in their inaccuracy. A two pillar system (combat and magic) is plausible, but the presented three? No. Just no.

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).

I'd even split these out a bit - the amount of crunch you like in play and the amount you enjoy for theorycrafting and homebrewing can easily diverge. I tend towards actually running and playing lighter games, but when it comes to homebrew, well, the ones that get finished are light. They're vastly outnumbered by systems that have pages of math and more recently Octave scripts for fine tuning a ton of variables.

As a big fan of these things, I nominate this as my reason for sticking with 3.5.

It's an excellent reason.

[Nifft]

Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)

4e did spend effort on non-combat mechanics, including stuff like Rituals (which got preserved somewhat in 5e as the "Ritual" tag), and with restricting non-tactical movement to non-combat timescales (e.g. Teleport Circle), and integrating non-combat penalties into resource management and combat accounting (e.g. losing a daily Healing Surge if you failed a wilderness-scale check).

4e also tried to handle non-combat challenges in a uniform way using their Skill Challenge format, which would have been great if it didn't suck -- the idea that the whole party got to participate in a Diplomacy or Trap encounter was a pretty awesome idea. (It's just that the implementation sucked, since it was mathematically easy to find the one optimal method, and the optimal method didn't involve the whole party actually helping in any creative way.)

5e's approach to non-combat challenges is "uniform" in that it's uniformly under-cooked. As a seasoned DM across many editions, I can easily compensate, but I don't envy those DMs who got started with 5e.

== == ==

In terms of 4e as a reaction to 3.5e, the numerical bonus scaling in 4e was basically a codification of the truth that we all knew in 3.5e / PF -- you needed to attain bigger base numbers, and you needed them on a schedule.

5e was very easy to envisage from that standpoint. You looked at 4e's lock-step advancement of monster defenses vs. PC attacks, and you had to ask: "What if we just... didn't?"


5e turned out pretty well, I think, except insofar as 5e was scared to pilfer 4e's innovations.


EDIT:

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear)

Agreed.

Early 4e monsters did have problems, and those problems did include HP bloat.

That got fixed as of MM2 -- which was very early.

As an aside, I have heard the exact same complaint leveled against 5e.

[Coidzor]

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).

Yeah, a big motivator for the change over for our group was being able to save time due to not having to spend a few hours making NPCs with class levels or finding where other people had statted them out already. Although after about a month or two, the limitations in 5e with customizing people-type NPCs started to become apparent.

[Scots Dragon]

"A rather superficial layer to get hung up on" describes I think a significant amount of 4e criticism.

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear)

Honestly my biggest problems with D&D 4e were never rules-based. I didn't like the rules, but I was perfectly willing to get on board with the new edition as long as the lore and settings that I'd grown to love from the previous editions were continued on in a proper form that was treated with at least some measure of respect by the designers. More even than the actual game, I'd become a fan by way of the lore and worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, especially the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, by way of various novels.

Literally the first Dungeons & Dragons rulebook I ever picked up was the D&D 3.0e version of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

To say that D&D 4e was disappointing in these respects would be something of an understatement.

[martixy]

"I'm a human who can eventually cast a spell that gives me the stats of a dragon, and like a dozen other spells" is very different than "I'm a dragon." Not that 3.5 is particularly good at letting you play a dragon either, given how LA/RHD work, but it's at least theoretically an option.

Ditto to part 1. And at least with 3.5's symmetric design it's a dang sight easier to make it work.

I dont know what you mean by a mimic monk, unless you mean to say you are a mimic, in which case you totally can by going 3 sorcerer, enough of any caster to get polymorph, and then eventually polymorphing yourself into a mimimic and using extended metamagic to keep you that way for longer than a long rest, effectively making you a mimic forever, same shtick with a dragon, or, if you dont want even an hour where you arent a dragon/mimic, then invest in warding glyphs that polymorph you once every hour, turnong you into a were human, and, with a dm varient of dominate person, become a body hopper, although the mimic and telepath one is kinda iffy upon if your dm likes you

One of the PCs in my game is literally a mimic with monk class levels. This is what I mean.
In 3.5 all I have to do is fudge a number or two to make it work - adjust LA/RHD.
In 5e, I'd have to start inventing new rules, or port older editions to a system that wasn't meant to work with them.

Also, +1 for that samey feel.

[Pex]

Seeing some of the discussion of Essentials and the reasoning behind it in the online Dragon Magazine issues was utterly hilarious and sad.

From Dragon #389.

So basically people were happy to finally have some significant asymmetry?

I heard a lot of 4E fans hated Essentials. I have no idea what it's about since I've long since stopped caring about 4E when it came out, but from the tidbits I did hear of it how ironic that I think I might have actually liked it, such as the Psion.

[Mike Miller]

I never switched to 4e because my regular group dissolved right around when 4e was released. Then I went on an involuntary D&D hiatus until early last year. I have the 5e core books, but I've never actually played with them. I just went back into what I know and love, 3e! I definitely echo the above comments about customization with 3e.

[mattie_p]

I had 30 3.5 books at the time 4e came out. I now have a few more. I have a game that meets my needs and I have all the rules I need.

[johnbragg]

I said this a few threads ago on basically the same topic.

3rd edition was a quantum leap over 2nd, introducing the unified d20 mechanic, and introducing skills, feats and level-by-level multiclassing. Not to mention the OGL enabling a wild proliferation of 3rd party content. It was great, and we appreciated it. We appreciated it so much that, just a few years later, we paid WOTC for new 3.5 PHBs, DMG and MMs.

4th edition did not offer the same quantum leap, and at the same time it obsoleted our 3.5 libraries. Not to mention that the 4th edition ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, and what we saw of 4th we didn't like. So Paizo and PAthfinder happened, and 4th edition was replaced fairly quickly by 5th.

4th edition taught us that we didn't have to migrate to the new edition. So we didn't.

[Ratter]

I did a bunch of math once on 5e numbers, and I'm convinced that there were at least two different people working on them who got their wires seriously crossed. If you have Expertise and a good ability modifier, the DCs work out alright: you have about a 65% success rate on moderate tasks at level 1 that scales pretty smoothly up to a 65% shot at a very hard check at 20th-- paralleling attack rolls pretty well, which also give you about a 65% chance of hitting an equal-level foe pretty much across the board. I dunno if DCs were picked with the expectation of Expertise, or Expertise was thrown in as a patch after the fact, but either way, it's not great.

(In my home games, I offer "double Proficiency to skills" across the board, and replace the Bard/Rogue features with "Advantage, and use Proficiency in place of an ability modifier if you want.")


5e could really use a "Tome of Skills" or something. The newest book had some good stuff for Tools, but it would be really awesome to get a chapter that goes through Ability-by-Ability with example DCs, special things you can do with skills, expanded rules for things like crafting and social combat, that sort of thing. Maybe general Skill Challenge rules (though it's not easy writing good ones; believe me when I say I've tried) and skill tricks. I started brainstorming something like that at one point...


"I'm a human who can eventually cast a spell that gives me the stats of a dragon, and like a dozen other spells" is very different than "I'm a dragon." Not that 3.5 is particularly good at letting you play a dragon either, given how LA/RHD work, but it's at least theoretically an option.

I assume you start at level 17 at least if you wanna play a dragon, get true polymorph, it does that forever, or just have a guy polymorph in your background, but really, playing a dragon would be SO unbalanced, you could reflavor the draconic sorcerer, thats what I would do.

[SnugUndies]

D&D is something I play for a story and character roleplaying. The rule system around it is kind of just a vehicle for that. So if I have books for/know how to play one system, why change to a different one? Anytime sometime tries to say "5th edition is less complex; it's easier to learn!" I have to counter with the fact that it can't be, since I don't know the system for 5th but I do for 3rd. Why learn a whole new system for essentially the same purpose?

Plus, I like picking minutae across a dozen different books to make a cohesive and synergistic whole. There, I said it.

[Ratter]

Ditto to part 1. And at least with 3.5's symmetric design it's a dang sight easier to make it work.



One of the PCs in my game is literally a mimic with monk class levels. This is what I mean.
In 3.5 all I have to do is fudge a number or two to make it work - adjust LA/RHD.
In 5e, I'd have to start inventing new rules, or port older editions to a system that wasn't meant to work with them.

Also, +1 for that samey feel.

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?! also, all you have to do with 3.5e is make up a couple of race things, just like 5e, 5e and 3.5e are fairly ok at just being able to make unique, however, the idea that you can make stuff easier in 3.5e is, in my experience, false, homebrew in 5e is SO MUCH EASIER TO MAKE! you have to take far less things into consideration.

[Nifft]

4th edition did not offer the same quantum leap, and at the same time it obsoleted our 3.5 libraries.

4e solved the problem of letting me run a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party, from level 1 through 30, and both of them feeling able to contribute to every encounter.

Not necessarily equally in every encounter, but both of them should feel useful all the time, and both of them should be contributing in roughly equal proportion over several encounters.

Class inequality was the biggest problem with 3e and PF -- and looking at this forum, it still is.

Not to mention that the 4th edition ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, and what we saw of 4th we didn't like. So Paizo and PAthfinder happened, and 4th edition was replaced fairly quickly by 5th.

In addition to provoking fans into jumping ship for Pathfinder, WotC also made some bad financial decisions during the run of 4e.

For example, you could get all published content for a small monthly subscription price, which was only necessary for one player per group to have in order to create and level-up characters using the WotC online character tool.

They had counted on both selling the books and getting all players to subscribe, but their own (cheaper and more convenient) online subscription service viciously cannibalized book sales, and this was at a time when WotC was publishing supplementary materials faster than ever before, while declaring all supplementary material "Core".

Both of those were each a major flaw of WotC's sales planning -- but it wasn't actually a flaw of 4e as a game.

5e's rigorously enforced dearth of online tools and 5e's slow splatbook cycle: both are reactions to 4e.

[Scots Dragon]

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?!

One would assume that a creature with near-unlimited shapeshifting ability has the capacity to account for that by simply creating the limbs it needs.

Like so;

[Mordaedil]

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?! also, all you have to do with 3.5e is make up a couple of race things, just like 5e, 5e and 3.5e are fairly ok at just being able to make unique, however, the idea that you can make stuff easier in 3.5e is, in my experience, false, homebrew in 5e is SO MUCH EASIER TO MAKE! you have to take far less things into consideration.

All you need to make a playable race in 3.5 is printed right in the monster manual, though? If you want to play it from level 1, you just have to look to Savage Species and use savage progression and boom, you're set.

It's literally as easy as playing with lego.

[Ignimortis]

4e solved the problem of letting me run a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party, from level 1 through 30, and both of them feeling able to contribute to every encounter.

Not necessarily equally in every encounter, but both of them should feel useful all the time, and both of them should be contributing in roughly equal proportion over several encounters.

Class inequality was the biggest problem with 3e and PF -- and looking at this forum, it still is.

3.5e did it too. "The fighter" is a warblade and "the wizard" can be a wizard or a sorcerer or a fixed-list caster, depending on how close you want them to be in balance.

[Kurald Galain]

In addition to provoking fans into jumping ship for Pathfinder, WotC also made some bad financial decisions during the run of 4e.

For example, you could get all published content for a small monthly subscription price, which was only necessary for one player per group to have in order to create and level-up characters using the WotC online character tool.

Oh, it gets funnier.

To enable this paid online character tool, WOTC first had to kill their own free offline character tool (a change which did not make fans happy), AND they made it in Silverlight (which several common browsers just don't support), AND at more-or-less the same time they thoroughly slashed the amount of rules content in Dragon magazine (reducing the need for such a tool), AND it took them about half a year to get the bugs worked out.

Aside from that, there are quite a number of 4E books which WOTC loudly announced and then quietly canceled a few months later. As far as I know this has never happened with 3E or 5E; heck, even TSR didn't do that.

[Grim Reader]

Oh, it gets funnier.

To enable this paid online character tool, WOTC first had to kill their own free offline character tool (a change which did not make fans happy), AND they made it in Silverlight (which several common browsers just don't support), AND at more-or-less the same time they thoroughly slashed the amount of rules content in Dragon magazine (reducing the need for such a tool), AND it took them about half a year to get the bugs worked out.

Wasn't there a murder/suicide that eviscerated the IT development plans? A large professional company should be able to replace key personell regardless of circumstance but I am willing to cut them some slack on that one all the same. TSR/WoTC was never very professional in their management anyway.

[Kurald Galain]

Wasn't there a murder/suicide that eviscerated the IT development plans? A large professional company should be able to replace key personell regardless of circumstance but I am willing to cut them some slack on that one all the same. TSR/WoTC was never very professional in their management anyway.

To be clear: when 4E was first released, there were plans for a digital tabletop. The suicide you mention put an end to that, and this is tragedic.

Unrelated to this, and several years later, a different group of people (since the 4E design team had already been sacked twice) made decisions about a different piece of software (i.e. the character builder). This turns out to be a series of poor decisions by people who really should have known better. When I wrote "it gets funnier" I am, of course, only referring to this issue.

[Mordaedil]

Jesus, that is tragic.

[Vhaidara]

Honestly, having been playing/running 4e for about a year now, Skill Challenges have been one of my favorite things about the system. The key is to allow player creativity. Religion to request miracles, Arcana to emulate all the out of combat spells people complain are missing (and the ones that never even got printed), Streetwise is the "I know a guy for that" skill. I've had Athletics used to suplex a train, Diplomacy/Nature to tame a fire beetle so the party princess could have an animal companion (against her own will), and Endurance to rip a chemical tube out of a Bane analog and just drain the damn tank.

Skill challenges presented a way to incorporate skills into a combat. One DM I played under had an enemy who rendered you weakened (half damage) and prone until you were able to impress him with your skills. I've run fights where you're up against a super powered enemy (the aforementioned Bane analog) and you have to choose between fighting him directly (using powers and such) or an in combat skill challenge where you disable his drug injectors, which make him incredibly powerful.

In my experience, it has led to far more memorable combats than I ever encountered in 3.X, where it quickly came down to "I full attack the guy. He dies. I pounce the next guy. He dies."

I also really like how 4e standardized the action system. Standard>Move>Minor. As opposed to 3.x's "Standards are king, but Move and Swift are...complicated in where they place". And making Immediates their own action led to a lot more interactivity, while splitting them into Reaction and Interrupts made timing much clearer.

[Grim Reader]

To be clear: when 4E was first released, there were plans for a digital tabletop. The suicide you mention put an end to that, and this is tragedic.

Unrelated to this, and several years later, a different group of people (since the 4E design team had already been sacked twice) made decisions about a different piece of software (i.e. the character builder). This turns out to be a series of poor decisions by people who really should have known better. When I wrote "it gets funnier" I am, of course, only referring to this issue.

Sorry, I didn't much remember the sequence of these things. It was just the thing that stuck in my head about the whole debacle. Didn't meant to imply you thought it was funny. That they sacked the design team several times does not come as a surprise. Was it TSR that would sack their staff before Christmas and rehire them in January to avoid Christmas bonuses?