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

[Florian]

And you see no problem with this? That's extremely bland compared to something like playing a Mindflayer in D&D 3.5.

Personally? No. A problem with 3E that we can see over and over again is that the underlying math for monsters is based on them being intended to challenge a party of 3-5 characters, so they are by default more powerful. To compensate the difference in power, the LA rules had to be implemented. This is also the point when things like poly morphing into a Hydra will get out of hand, as the Hydra runs on monster design principles, not player character design principles - making the transparency here a bit of an illusion. So, no I don´ tree a problem with player characters running on player character rules, no overlap with other areas of the system.

[Yahzi]

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

I respectfully disagree. Check out Lords of Prime and Merchants of Prime (both free on DriveThruRPG, see my sig) and see if you still think a feudal medieval world with magic and superheroes is still inconsistent.

I do change one small rule rather dramatically: XP becomes a tangible resource, like gold; but that change makes everything else make sense. I also changed the XP curve to double every level, but that's only to justify kingdom populations in the 100,000+. If you are happy with populations of 10,000 you don't even need to do that.

It really is amazing how much tangible XP fixes things.

[Kurald Galain]

The last time I bothered to look at Pathfinder the rules were in a near constant state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff all the time-- often without announcement or blog messages to notify players.

That hasn't happened for at least five years now.

Often both phenomena occur on the same character sheet, since the system rewards specialization. Most characters put max ranks into the skills they most want/need and nothing into any other skills (with some exceptions). So you end up with a character whose Spot is so high they can count someone's nose hairs at 50 paces, but whose Sense Motive is so bad they can't tell that the pickpocket they caught was lying when they claim to be the king in disguise.

Given that D&D is a team game, I don't see a problem with that. It's like having an olympic athlete who doesn't know the first thing about computer programming, or a Nobel prize winning scientist who is terminally shy and cannot talk to people. Those are certainly workable character concepts.

As for getting good at something, the 5e system of 'you can always fail' is horrible with most skills. If I do something every day, for months or years on end, then OF COURSE I'm going to get so good at it that I fail less than 5% of the time (i.e. rolling a 1). So why shouldn't my character be able to get so good at something that the only possible way to fail at the task is a crit-fail on my roll?

Yep. I want my RPG characters to be potentially better than I am in real life, not automatically worse.

[AnimeTheCat]

Personally? No. A problem with 3E that we can see over and over again is that the underlying math for monsters is based on them being intended to challenge a party of 3-5 characters, so they are by default more powerful. To compensate the difference in power, the LA rules had to be implemented. This is also the point when things like poly morphing into a Hydra will get out of hand, as the Hydra runs on monster design principles, not player character design principles - making the transparency here a bit of an illusion. So, no I don´ tree a problem with player characters running on player character rules, no overlap with other areas of the system.

Personally, I don't find the character/monster system to be a bad system, I find the polymorph et all spells (an the magic system as a whole) to be bad. That's just my opinion, FWIW. I handle it in my own way when necessary, but most of the time it's not a problem in my gaming groups.

[Darrin]

See, here's the rub. The bolded part? That's a feature, not a bug.

I agree! I really enjoy the capability to crank up the modifiers to do obscenely silly things like slip through a wall of force, or the freedom to build a character that is deliberately bad at something they should be good at.

But to a casual player, the 3E skill system can be an impenetrable wall of complexity that literally kills people, as they may make assumptions about what skills their character should be good at without having the mechanics to back it up. Even in the hands of a veteran optimizer, qualifying for a particular PrC or feat may leave you starved of skill-points in a certain area that makes the PC fundamentally weaker or less effective in certain situations.

I love the fiddly-ness of the 3E system, but I also like the Pathfinder system where the classes are naturally competent at things they are normally expected to be competent in without having to think too hard about it or invest a lot of time into optimizing it.

[Pex]

I agree! I really enjoy the capability to crank up the modifiers to do obscenely silly things like slip through a wall of force, or the freedom to build a character that is deliberately bad at something they should be good at.

But to a casual player, the 3E skill system can be an impenetrable wall of complexity that literally kills people, as they may make assumptions about what skills their character should be good at without having the mechanics to back it up. Even in the hands of a veteran optimizer, qualifying for a particular PrC or feat may leave you starved of skill-points in a certain area that makes the PC fundamentally weaker or less effective in certain situations.

I love the fiddly-ness of the 3E system, but I also like the Pathfinder system where the classes are naturally competent at things they are normally expected to be competent in without having to think too hard about it or invest a lot of time into optimizing it.

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

[Vhaidara]

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

<citation needed>

And apparently that's not 10 characters?

[Scots Dragon]

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

You obviously missed the first round of conflict over Pun Pun. I can still remember the screaming... Oh the terrible screaming.

[Grod_The_Giant]

5e is basically E6 turned into a 1-20 game. You get competent and powerful, enough so that you can fight off dozens or hundreds of normal soldiers, but never so much that you completely leave the mortal world behind. )They did it weirdly, mind you, with hit points being the primary scaling mechanic, but in their defense doing otherwise would have meant radically changing the HP mechanic.) You're not meant to depart substantially from the "classic" D&D experience, be that reaching "I'm a demigod; mortals are my toys now" levels of power or creating semi-impenetrable "I'm a Tauric Mimic Monk 2/Dungeoncrasher Fighter 1/Disciple of Jubillex 5/Tattooed Monk 1/Ur-Priest 2/Disciple of Jubillex +2" mashups.

Does it? Did it have items as cool as the Wand of Wonder, the Amulet of Caterpillar Control, or the Gem Bow? Have you seen GMs describe items created out of a shaft of sunlight, solidified hatred, or unicorn hair? Does it have rules for crafting your own items that involve collecting butterfly dreams?

Do the items have character, or are they merely math?

I mean, flipping through the "magic items" section of the DMG, it's got all the classics. Here's your Apparatus of Kwalish, there's your Dust of Dryness, over yonder is a Robe of Useful Items... my point about raising the "a +2 sword is useful the whole time" wasn't that the items are all about math (which they very much are not), but that you can give a character a spear made out of solid sunlight at 5th level without worrying that it will become obsolete by 10th.

The crafting rules released in Xanathar's actually do involve "collecting butterfly dreams," charmingly enough. It's not just "have a feat, spend time and gold"-- you're required to go on an adventure to track down an exotic material, and there's supposed to be a decent chance that some sort of further adventure hook crops up partway through the time you spend working.

If I'm not mistaken, the thread of thought here wasn't about how fun the rules are, but, rather, how mechanically diverse different characters can be. Or, more accurately, how mechanically diverse different characters with the same "role" can be.

The assertion was, all strikers / tanks / bfc / whatever play the same in 5e, in a way that wasn't true of 3e characters with similar roles.

5e is not as good as 3.5 is at enabling weird character ideas, no questions asked. But "all characters of a given role play the same" is much more of a 4e complaint than a 5e one. Spellcasters and martials play in broadly similar ways, because the game hasn't gone half as far as 3.5 did in exploring weird mechanics, but there's still enough differences that a Barbarian and a Fighter feel distinct*, as do a Cleric and a Druid** or a Wizard and a Sorcerer. (Heck, they do a better job of the Wizard/Sorcerer split than 3.5 did, I'd argue.

*A Totem Barbarian is a high risk, high reward character-- you hit hard, but you get hit all the time, surviving by damage resistance rather than defense-- who operates primarily on a long-rest resource (Rages/Day). And who has to keep attacking, or at least being attacked, if they want to keep raging. A Battle Master Fighter, on the other hand, is more of an expert combatant type. They don't hit as hard, but they make more attacks each round, and they have a set of short-rest based maneuvers that let them do things like extend their reach, trip enemies they just hit, reply to attacks with an opportunity attack, and so on.
**Their spell lists are very different-- Clerics have a lot more buffs and damage-over-time effects, while Druids have a list focused more on control. (5e does a lot more to differentiate casters by spell list than 3.5 did, and there are fewer ways around it)

[Velaryon]

Given that D&D is a team game, I don't see a problem with that. It's like having an olympic athlete who doesn't know the first thing about computer programming, or a Nobel prize winning scientist who is terminally shy and cannot talk to people. Those are certainly workable character concepts.

Up to a point I agree, but there's also something to be said about a minimum level of competence tied to character level as well. Let's take the example of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith, one of the quintessential examples of why they instituted the 1/2 character level bonus to skills in SWSE. During the chase scene with General Grievous, Obi-Wan rides the (pauses to check Wookieepedia) varactyl through an extended chase sequence that undoubtedly would have required at least a few Ride checks. Were he a 3.5 D&D character, Obi-Wan would almost certainly have failed those checks and failed to keep up with Grievous, because given the other abilities we've seen him demonstrate more often, it's unlikely that he has invested into the Ride skill. Yet that scene was possible because Obi-Wan got a certain bonus to his skill just for being a high-level character. He likely would have fallen short of someone specialized in riding mounts, even if they were substantially lower level, but at least he wasn't so bad at this particular skill that he had to wait for someone to come pick him up and drive him to the battle.

Granted, it's personal preference whether you want a system that allows for a respectable level of competence purely based on level or a system that allows you to be really, really bad at something if you haven't trained in it. There are also other ways to look at this as a problem, such as 3.5 probably having too many skills, splitting up things like Hide and Move Silently that arguably should be one skill, screwing over a lot of classes by barely giving them any skill points to spend, and just the concept of class vs. cross-class skills in general.

[Calthropstu]

How recent is this revelation?

The last time I bothered to look at Pathfinder the rules were in a near constant state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff all the time-- often without announcement or blog messages to notify players.

I've looked at the message boards as well as the faq and errata. There really isn't much there that actually alters text. The worst of it is a few price changes. There's a few proposed changes, but nothing too major.
It's not like 3.5 or other wotc systems where they change half the items. PFS may be another story. I know pfs nerfs things all the time without explanation, such as boots of the earth. And many people take pfs rules changes as errata... but that is simply not the case.

Up to a point I agree, but there's also something to be said about a minimum level of competence tied to character level as well. Let's take the example of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith, one of the quintessential examples of why they instituted the 1/2 character level bonus to skills in SWSE. During the chase scene with General Grievous, Obi-Wan rides the (pauses to check Wookieepedia) varactyl through an extended chase sequence that undoubtedly would have required at least a few Ride checks. Were he a 3.5 D&D character, Obi-Wan would almost certainly have failed those checks and failed to keep up with Grievous, because given the other abilities we've seen him demonstrate more often, it's unlikely that he has invested into the Ride skill. Yet that scene was possible because Obi-Wan got a certain bonus to his skill just for being a high-level character. He likely would have fallen short of someone specialized in riding mounts, even if they were substantially lower level, but at least he wasn't so bad at this particular skill that he had to wait for someone to come pick him up and drive him to the battle.

Granted, it's personal preference whether you want a system that allows for a respectable level of competence purely based on level or a system that allows you to be really, really bad at something if you haven't trained in it. There are also other ways to look at this as a problem, such as 3.5 probably having too many skills, splitting up things like Hide and Move Silently that arguably should be one skill, screwing over a lot of classes by barely giving them any skill points to spend, and just the concept of class vs. cross-class skills in general.

Actually, jedi get a competence bonus to skills due to being jedi. The fluff is the fact they feel out how to do things via the force.
So... magic essentially.

[Ignimortis]

my point about raising the "a +2 sword is useful the whole time" wasn't that the items are all about math (which they very much are not), but that you can give a character a spear made out of solid sunlight at 5th level without worrying that it will become obsolete by 10th.

Agree completely otherwise, but this - if the spear is important, make it an artifact. If it's just another magic item with a cool look - who cares? If the player does care, give them a sidequest to make it more powerful. This is, of course, a use of Oberoni fallacy, but I feel that it's justified in this case, because the system was designed with a radically different approach in mind.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Agree completely otherwise, but this - if the spear is important, make it an artifact. If it's just another magic item with a cool look - who cares? If the player does care, give them a sidequest to make it more powerful. This is, of course, a use of Oberoni fallacy, but I feel that it's justified in this case, because the system was designed with a radically different approach in mind.

The systems were designed with different approaches, but I think 5e's (magic items are rare and special) fits the sort of stories one expects out of a fantasy-adventure system a lot better than 3.5 or 4e's "right, here's your third incrementally better magic sword."

[Scots Dragon]

The systems were designed with different approaches, but I think 5e's (magic items are rare and special) fits the sort of stories one expects out of a fantasy-adventure system a lot better than 3.5 or 4e's "right, here's your third incrementally better magic sword."

Just about the only problem I have with D&D 5e's magic item system is that it's not quite as good as that of AD&D as it's a bit weighed down by the D&D 5e rules in other areas. Not helping matters is the attunement limitation that feels really artificial to me. I understand why it's there but I feel like the game's existing rare-and-special approach to magic items already balances out that element.

[Knaight]

Precisely my point. 3.0 and earlier editions literally require magical items. 3.5/PF/4E do not. So the idea that 5E is innovative because it doesn't require magical items is clearly marketing hype.

They don't require it, but it's clearly still pretty baked in. 3.x in particular essentially uses gold as a secondary XP system spent on things as a sort of side character advancement, and while it's relatively easy to replace the side of that which is just driving up numbers it's harder to do that for all the new abilities. Can it be worked around? Yes, but that doesn't mean much. You can run a pulp game in GURPS, that doesn't mean you're not fighting the system to do so.

5e not requiring magical items is a change in D&D. As for whether it's an innovative mechanic in general, I return to my previous ridiculously generous metric - if the idea is older than I am, it's not innovative. Pendragon is a fantasy game involving fantasy characters likely to never so much as see a magic item. It was made in 1985, and thus fails that metric. I'm a little unimpressed by the idea that 5e is innovative for doing something a game did 29 years before it came out.

[strangebloke]

I did switch to 5e, and I dragged my players kicking and screaming with me. And to be clear, I loved playing in 3e.

DMing in 3e, though, was a nightmare. I printed out a three page document of fixes that was full of sweeping changes like "Everyone in tier five (see attached document) can gestalt with other tier five classes." as well as super basic fiddly stuff like "Monks are now proficient with unarmed strike."

Even then, I had to work to make everyone feel useful. I had to arbitrate all sorts of silly situations like. "No, Bob, you can't play a fighter/paladin, Joe's playing a wizard and Carl's a cleric and this game is at 11th level!"

So many times some player would come forward with a PRC from a splatbook that I had never even heard about saying, "Hey, it's cool if I go Planar Shepherd, yah?" Then it would turn out months into a campaign that one player had been completely ignoring some tiny (but critical) thing while leveling up, and his character now had a billion hitpoints or a DC 45 dominate person SA.

Added to that, when I left college I found myself saddled with tons of new players who had never touched 5e before. The sort who need to be told often that 'your attack roll for your cantrip is proficiency plus CHA' more than once a sesssion. They eventually got the idea, but I can't even contemplate what teaching them 3e would have been like.

Loot tables, magic items, linear/quadratic problems...

Oh, 3e was fun to play though! The combat was really short (in terms of rounds) and punchy. Getting dropped to zero hitpoints in a single round (or doing the same to the hydra) was a really satisfying experience. Character creation was a joy, and reading through all those huge handbooks and splatbooks was just awesome.

[Velaryon]

Actually, jedi get a competence bonus to skills due to being jedi. The fluff is the fact they feel out how to do things via the force.
So... magic essentially.

In what system? I'm familiar with Saga Edition and the older d20 Star Wars, and I've never heard of a rule like that.

Saga gives everyone the relevant ability score + 1/2 character level + 5 if they're trained + 5 if they have skill focus, and sometimes a small equipment bonus. There isn't any inherent bonus for being Jedi or otherwise using the Force, unless it comes from a Force Power.

The older d20 Star Wars editions were even worse because they made most Force powers into skills, meaning that Jedi were on average worse at most non-Force skills because their ranks were spread thinner.

[Grod_The_Giant]

5e not requiring magical items is a change in D&D. As for whether it's an innovative mechanic...

Oh, I wouldn't call anything in 5e INNOVATIVE, to be sure. I'm just grateful they did make said changes.

[Troacctid]

Of course, magic items then ended up becoming ludicrously plentiful in Adventurers League play anyway.

[Darrin]

Oh, I wouldn't call anything in 5e INNOVATIVE, to be sure. I'm just grateful they did make said changes.

Well, WotC learning from their previous mistakes is kind of innovative... to a limited degree, you might say.

[Knaight]

Of course, magic items then ended up becoming ludicrously plentiful in Adventurers League play anyway.

The treasure tables as written hand them out heavily too, although this I'd attribute more to D&D module designers having decades of practice with D&D modules (mostly in terms of playing them before writing them), and thus being very used to their particular style of play. Lots of killing, lots of loot, lots of crappy boxed text.

[Ignimortis]

The systems were designed with different approaches, but I think 5e's (magic items are rare and special) fits the sort of stories one expects out of a fantasy-adventure system a lot better than 3.5 or 4e's "right, here's your third incrementally better magic sword."

Personally, I like Eberron's abundance of low-power magic and almost no high-power magic, including magic items as a design concept. If there's a lot of wizards in the world - surely they will craft some magic items. But powerful magicians are rare, and so are their creations.

[Eldariel]

Personally? No. A problem with 3E that we can see over and over again is that the underlying math for monsters is based on them being intended to challenge a party of 3-5 characters, so they are by default more powerful. To compensate the difference in power, the LA rules had to be implemented. This is also the point when things like poly morphing into a Hydra will get out of hand, as the Hydra runs on monster design principles, not player character design principles - making the transparency here a bit of an illusion. So, no I don´ tree a problem with player characters running on player character rules, no overlap with other areas of the system.

Eh, they don't actually challenge parties of 3-5 though. A big party annihilates lone monsters way above their CR (it's quite common to be able to beat up on CR ~5-6 above party level things come mid levels in a Tier 1 party) precisely because of the action economy. Pathfinder is different with the monster templates, but 3.5 uses uniform rules for both and far as the real classes (that is to say, non-martials) go, CR/ECL are pretty close together and using the Pathfinder rules for playing monsters at their CR, aside from Party Killer designs (Beholder & al.), works pretty well. But it's true that you have to figure out the design intent of a creature.

Closet trolls (Beholders, Hydras, etc.) are the only category of monsters that tend to be problematic PCs since they have disproportionate offense but are quite weak defensively by default, but PCs can negate the drawbacks making them steam engines. Most monsters are just combinations of essentially PC attributes and a PC can easily enough reach similar numbers albeit with slightly different restrictions.

[Zanos]

That's explicitly now how the CR system works. A CR = APL encounter is suppose to deplete 25% of the daily resources of a 4 person party.

4 level 10 fighters vs. 1 level 10 fighter is a CR = APL encounter.

For expected risk of death you have to go to higher CRs.

[Chaosticket]

Late to the thread.

Long debated is difficulty compared to PC growth. If you always face threats with the same relative difficulty then what is the point of growing?

Dead Island is a videogame that with RPG elements. You gain levels, but so does every enemy. So level is only meaningful for two things, equipment effectiveness fading forcing you to constantly replace equipment, and Skill points for special abilities.

If enemies or player characters dont radically change then what is the point?

[Luccan]

Late to the thread.

Long debated is difficulty compared to PC growth. If you always face threats with the same relative difficulty then what is the point of growing?

Dead Island is a videogame that with RPG elements. You gain levels, but so does every enemy. So level is only meaningful for two things, equipment effectiveness fading forcing you to constantly replace equipment, and Skill points for special abilities.

If enemies or player characters dont radically change then what is the point?

To be fair, you don't have to rubberband enemies, so to speak. Nothing in the rules forces every encounter to be what's expected at every level, that's really more of a suggestion.

Yes, I know what the Oberoni Fallacy is, but if someone refuses to do minor tweaks (and it really requires almost no work in this case) to improve their game, I suspect they'll get more dissatisfied players than satisfied ones.

[BassoonHero]

I agree! I really enjoy the capability to crank up the modifiers to do obscenely silly things like slip through a wall of force, or the freedom to build a character that is deliberately bad at something they should be good at.

But to a casual player, the 3E skill system can be an impenetrable wall of complexity that literally kills people, as they may make assumptions about what skills their character should be good at without having the mechanics to back it up. Even in the hands of a veteran optimizer, qualifying for a particular PrC or feat may leave you starved of skill-points in a certain area that makes the PC fundamentally weaker or less effective in certain situations.

I love the fiddly-ness of the 3E system, but I also like the Pathfinder system where the classes are naturally competent at things they are normally expected to be competent in without having to think too hard about it or invest a lot of time into optimizing it.

When you say that you like the "fiddly-ness" of the system, what do you mean?

I've complained about the 3.5 skill system being "fiddly", by which I mean that players are forced to make a large number of individually inconsequential decisions. When you allocate a skill point, most of the time the only effect is that a number goes up by 1. There's no real feeling of advancement or of making progress toward a larger goal -- yet you have to allocate several of these points each level.

On the other hand, I do like complexity and options; I wouldn't like an "autopilot" system like 5e's.

[Chaosticket]

I may not be thinking the same thing as you when I read "rubberband" enemies. I meant mean problems in general. If you have a party clearing regular enemies, then throw in special ones like immune to physical or magic, or that you have to talk to to complete a challenge, instead of just making level 15 goblins.

As for skills, I like the Pathfinder system better. No cross-skill penalty. Depending on intelligence and class you might make a character capable of using all skills or pick a few really high ones. It's unfortunate in any game if you get into situations where you have one chance to succeed making it "pass-or-die". At low levels you generally MUST min-max to have even a 50-50 chance unless the difficulty is low enough to autopass.

[Darrin]

When you say that you like the "fiddly-ness" of the system, what do you mean?

I like the complexity, options, and the breadth of oddball things you can pull off if you know how to optimize the skill system.

However, I also like the idea that there's a "safety net" in Pathfinder that allows a casual player to not think too much about the skill system but can still be good at his class's intended role in a pinch.

I can't quite tell what the designers for 5E were trying to accomplish yet. Mostly I'm just happy they consolidated the skills into broader groups. What doesn't make me happy is having a higher Int does absolutely *nothing* for you if you're not using it for spellcasting. No bonus languages, no bonus skills... WTF?

[Grod_The_Giant]

I like the complexity, options, and the breadth of oddball things you can pull off if you know how to optimize the skill system.

However, I also like the idea that there's a "safety net" in Pathfinder that allows a casual player to not think too much about the skill system but can still be good at his class's intended role in a pinch.

I can't quite tell what the designers for 5E were trying to accomplish yet. Mostly I'm just happy they consolidated the skills into broader groups. What doesn't make me happy is having a higher Int does absolutely *nothing* for you if you're not using it for spellcasting. No bonus languages, no bonus skills... WTF?

I suspect that one of the main development goals was an attempt to downplay the importance of the character creation minigame-- both to reduce imbalance, which has been a persistent complaint, and to make the game more approachable to new players. The binary choice is quick, easy, gets you back to the game faster, and... honestly, it roughly parallels a lot of what I've seen in 3.x: most characters pick a few skills and keep them roughly max'd out, with the exception of dropping dribs and drabs here on things like prerequisites. BassoonHero's point about "individually inconsequential decisions" is well-taken too, methinks; there's something inherently unfriendly about a game that repeatedly asks you to make character-creation choices that are both irreversible and which only matter when pooled across months of play.

(And to say that "Int does nothing" is something of a misnomer, I think. Like most of the other ability scores, it's not involved in anything other than its associated skills. Being able to dump just about any ability score without significant penalty is a nice feature of 5e)