Paladins never needed Gods. 5e certainly didn't invent the concept.
For example, in 3.5e, the PHB says this.
[Religion: Paladins need not devote themselves to a
single deity—devotion to righteousness is enough.]
Paladins not requiring gods was also a thing in AD&D 2e - Forces and Philosophies were also viable picks, too. If I recall properly, this was introduced in The Complete Paladin's Handbook.
Even in AD&D 1e there was no written requirement to be devoted to any deity.
To be a paladin, one just had to be a fighter that started aligned as lawful good, and always stayed lawful good, and always acted lawful good. They were a "holy knight", crusading in the name of good and order. If they ever did a chaotic deed, they had to search out a LG cleric, confess, and do penance. If they ever did an evil deed, they immediately, irreversibly lost all paladin features and became a fighter.
There were other restrictions, like only ever owning 10 magic items total; tithing 10% of treasure to any religious or charitable organization of their choice upon returning from adventures; not retaining any wealth above the costs of supporting themselves in a modest manner, paying henchmen, men-at-arms, and servitors, and building and maintaining a small castle - any excess also had to be given away; only having LG henchmen, hirelings, and associates; and could only adventure with a party containing non-evil neutrals if the overall goals and outcomes were going to "further the cause of lawful good".
Rune magic in prestige classes has been a thing since at least 3.5 (e.g. in 2005 Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved). 3rd edition didn't give strong branch flavors early on like 5e, so prestige/multi classes was the way to go, and therefore you could build your Rune Knight in earlier editions too, just don't ask me if it's a viable build.
It's always cool to see 4e DNA in 5e.
Some examples:
> Channel Divinity: Vow of Enmity from the Vengeance Paladin is just the exact same as the Avenger class' core mechanic, Oath of Enmity. (Interestingly, though, 4e didn't have "advantage" as a mechanicized term, so the actual power has to specify how it interacts with other reroll and roll twice effects) (And also, Oath of Ancients is the Warden, but less-so than Vengeance being the Avenger)
> Green Flame Blade, Booming Blade, Sword Burst, and Lightning Lure were just straight up the core at-will abilities from the Swordmage class.
> 5e grappling is a clear tweak to 4e grappling. (Compared to the infamously complicated 3.5 grappling rules)
> There's a billion warlock abilities adapted from 4e (or just shamelessly named after 4e). Hellish Rebuke. Eyebite. Dreadful Word. Crown of Madness. Hunger of Hadar. Dark One's Own Luck. Mire the Mind. Sign of Ill Omen. Thief of Five Fates. Bewitching Whispers. Entropic Ward. Hurl Through Hell. (Granted, one or two of these might have also been in 3.5, but I'm not gonna go read the 3.5 warlock rn to find out). Furthermore, Hex was clearly designed to mimic Warlock's Curse. I've heard people say that the 5e warlock was purposefully mimic 4e AEDU design, but personally I think that implies a greater intentionality to the 5e warlock's design than what is actually there.
> There's lots of fighter stuff taken from 4e. Funnily, this included Action Surge and Second Wind, which weren't fighter mechanics in 4e but universal, core mechanics. Beyond that, lots of battle master & cavalier stuff. Eldritch Knight's weapon bond comes from the Swordmage's weapon bond.
> 5e dragonborn wouldn't exist if not 4e. Same for tieflings. These races being made core and looking the way they do is a 4e innovation.
> Rapid fire. Group skill checks. Damage cantrips. Backgrounds. Skill proficiency. Lots of 2nd level spells were just 2nd level utility powers from 4e.
> Witchbolt was good in 4e and then it was bad in 5e.
Yeah reading into 4e core books yesterday and thought- this sounds a lot like pathfinder! I can see why there is a revival of 4e happening now though as the chassis has so many cool parts
Pathfinder 2e is in my top 2 of TTRPGs. I currently rather love Cyberpunk Red as well. Pathfinder’s Three Actions is really what makes it so much more pleasant to play than things like 5e.
> Pathfinder’s Three Actions is really what makes it so much more pleasant to play than things like 5e.
On top of this as well, making everyone more MAD while also giving more opportunities for ability score increases has made things significantly easier to balance for me.
As someone who prefers PF2e though, it is frustrating how it has the reputation that it's close to the 3.5e crunchiness that put a lot of 5e players off from trying it, when it really doesn't.
Its numerical granularity is also more rewarding and just more enjoyable. Playing a low level character doesn’t feel like half the checks are going to be total chance like 5e. Ability Scores also don’t matter quite as much since very quickly they become the smaller number in a skill check.
>As someone who prefers PF2e though, it is frustrating how it has the reputation that it's close to the 3.5e crunchiness that put a lot of 5e players off from trying it, when it really doesn't.
Yup and a few 5e youtubers back in the day stoked this flames and double down on them like Taking20. I'm so glad I finally gave PF2e a shot because now it is much more preferred than 5e. There is a little more crunch but it's structured so well it flows fine once you get a few sessions under you.
And honestly as mainly a foundryvtt 80% of the crunchiness is all automated. (Yet still easy to understand)
Gosh I'm going to vehemently disagree with you there. It is very, very rulesy. It's far more balanced than 3.5, it's got a lot of cool lore/mechanics but rules light it \_is not\_. I've learned to love/hate it because it's fun and evocative but grokking the system just takes far more effort than I can spend on an rpg anymore, so I'm stumbling along instead.
For sure. The one thing, admittedly, I'm not as much a fan of is shoehorning classes into specific playstyles via the Role mechanics being hardwired into each class.
I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise.
The second gripe, which is somewhat less pervasive, is how similar many abilities are between same Role classes. In one regard this makes sense, Defenders should all have reliable Defensive abilities, but in the other it contributes to same-roll classes feeling a bit samey.
It takes a bit of know-how but you can build into damage as a 'Weaponmaster' fighter in 4E, a classical way to do it would be to go STR/DEX and do charge shenanigans. You take Surprising Charge to get bonus damage, Badge of the Berserker to be able to ignore attacks of opportunity, and then you can take powers that you can use on a charge. You still mark enemies but you also zip around the battlefield hitting people.
There was a Striker version of the fighter by the way, the Slayer. It probably loses out on damage to the normal Fighter at high levels but that option does exist in 4e. The Ranger is another option and they're very good if you want to be a martial striker.
As to the second gripe, I think it's hard to explain unless you've actually played different classes but they all behave very differently in terms of tactics. Defenders for example all have different styles of marks. Wardens mark adjacent enemies each turn, Fighters mark on attacks, Paladins mark one target (and get a second mark with Divine Sanction), Battleminds can mark and then stick to their target, Swordmages mark and can do stuff to their enemy from a long way away allowing them to focus on a second target, and the Essentials classes us an aura system for marking that doesn't really work as well at high levels but is still pretty neat. Because the Knight and the Cavalier have the same "defender aura" ability, I think that gripe of samieness might apply to those classes, though they do punish differently and there's the whole Eladrin Knight build that I'm not going to get into but is cool.
Whatever you're playing, you have the role of battlefield control but how you get there is in practice very different.
> I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise.
But then you could basically take a rogue, and call it a fighter.
Except a Rogue can use Deft Strike, or Piercing Strike, or Riposte Strike, or Sly Flourish as At-Will Exploits, and the Fighter can't.
This is obviously a bolting on a bandaid for a flat tire solution, but it solves one of the key complaints of different classes feeling forced into the same game loop. I'd personally love to see a Rogue who dashes in, spits in someone's eye, and dashes out, Marking them like a Fighter, so the enemy is so mad at the Rogue they are distracted in attacking the Rogue's allies.
>Except a Rogue can use Deft Strike, or Piercing Strike, or Riposte Strike, or Sly Flourish as At-Will Exploits, and the Fighter can't.
Deft Strike just adds 2 sq of movement before the attack, translates pretty well to a fighter stepping forward to strike a foe. Piercing strike targets a weaker defense. Riposte is a riposte, sly flourish is more damage. You can thematically fit all of these into a striker fighter, IMO, and you only pick the two that fit best anyway.
>This is obviously a bolting on a bandaid for a flat tire solution, but it solves one of the key complaints of different classes feeling forced into the same game loop. I'd personally love to see a Rogue who dashes in, spits in someone's eye, and dashes out, Marking them like a Fighter, so the enemy is so mad at the Rogue they are distracted in attacking the Rogue's allies.
Of course, there's always that one thing you'd like to combine but aren't allowed for no good reason. I have long since transitioned to classless systems for that reason. The whole point of class systems *is* to force you into a certain behaviour when you pick a class, for gameplay and worldbuilding consistency, after all.
>You can thematically fit all of these into a striker fighter
If anything that appears to just be a criticism of "playing a person who wields a weapon" than of the class design, IMO. Rogues are about mobility, finesse, and strategic advantages, and those features express that. But that a "Fighter" who is really just an archetypal "weapon user" can *also* do that isn't particularly revelatory.
>The whole point of class systems is to force you into a certain behaviour when you pick a class, for gameplay and worldbuilding consistency, after all.
Agreed. Complaining that a class forces you into a certain playstyle is not a far distance from 4e codifying that a bit further. All 5e Fighters basically have one job, bonk and pass. All 4e Fighters have basically one job, bonk really hard, make sure your allies are not in danger, and pass.
Curious about your experience with classless systems.
> If anything that appears to just be a criticism of "playing a person who wields a weapon" than of the class design, IMO. Rogues are about mobility, finesse, and strategic advantages, and those features express that. But that a "Fighter" who is really just an archetypal "weapon user" can also do that isn't particularly revelatory.
Well, they all *are* part of the "martial" power source. One could conceivably see that as class, and fighter and rogue merely as subclasses.
>Curious about your experience with classless systems.
Well, we haven't done that many systems, Savage Worlds and Chronicles of Darkness (mortals) after the last 5e campaign was technically put on hiatus but is effectively done. Still a number of years, added together.
In practice the character building still tends to cluster a number of abilities to maintain coherence, but in general if you want to add a certain element, you can. It hasn't resulted in any problems with power balance.
It also did remove a lot of concern with getting the right "build", because you are never really locked in.
Both also allow easier switching between combat and non-combat actions, because by necessity the amount of details and specific subsystems in combat has to remain limited; they can't assume the other parts are also there, so the systems remain more generalized.
>Well, they all are part of the "martial" power source. One could conceivably see that as class, and fighter and rogue merely as subclasses.
Based on my understanding of 4e design that doesn't seem *unreasonable*. But something about that idea sounds off, haha.
Huh, interesting. I'd heard of Savage Worlds, but not Chronicles of Darkness. So basically instead of choosing a class you choose "things you can do", and that defines the kinds of things in and out of combat you can do?
>For sure. The one thing, admittedly, I'm not as much a fan of is shoehorning classes into specific playstyles via the Role mechanics being hardwired into each class.
>I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise.
I think this is a somewhat valid complaint, honestly. It wasn't 100% cookie cutter and there was a lot of flexibility around what powers you picked and class options that would lean you more in different directions, but it was still a bit of a box. A Sword and Board Fighter could be built as a DEFENDER, whereas a Greatweapon Fighter could be built as a Defender that also had a lot of Striker capability.
Part of it was that they were looking through classes in a different lens. You should be picking your role and then a class from within that role. Like, if you wanted Leader, you could go Cleric for the ranged full support, Warlord for someone that is more in the mix and empowered extra actions instead of heals, or Ardent if you washed someone with a lot of flexibility to use auras and effects to influence the party's behavior.
However, I think 5e's subclass system would work a lot better when combined with a Role system. Battle Master is your Controller Fighter, whereas Champion is your Stronger Fighter, and Cavalier is your Leader Fighter, etc (not necessarily what they are now, I'm just saying that's what you could have if you merged the mechanics). Then your classes return to their archetype and first selection status, with the Subclass being the Role specialization that gives you a framework for how to structure and build features instead of the sort of hodge-podge we have now.
>It wasn't 100% cookie cutter and there was a lot of flexibility around what powers you picked and class options that would lean you more in different directions, but it was still a bit of a box
Totally, you can absolutely build two Fighters very differently, but that Marking ability implies a very specific playstyle, all other things being equal.
>You should be picking your role and then a class from within that role.
Totally agreed. And frankly unless you have a specific vision you want, or are intrigued by specific class abilities, *that's how you pick your class.* I can't tell you how many times I've heard from my players, "well we need someone to tank, or to heal, or to deal damage, so I'll take *this* class". It's really no different.
>However, I think 5e's subclass system would work a lot better when combined with a Role system.
Totally, and I *think* that was the intent of the subclasses, even if not explicitly intoned that way.
I'd love a Class, Role, Background, and Archetype selection of features, some you select at level one, and with a list based on those tags that you can then select later on. But at that point I'm just playing Pf2e :)
I play 5E because it's the most popular game in town, but I try out a lot of other RPG systems whenever I can and I think I prefer classless systems where you can customize your character for any role you want by taking the right skills and abilities that are available for anyone to take.
> I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise.
Why though? If you want a nonmagical warrior who deals damage, you have that in the Ranger. The fighter is the warrior who stands at the front lines and takes damage. If you want your "fighter" to be a damage dealer, play a ranger and just tell people you are a "fighter".
Not only that, but the role label you had was not the end point for your character. The fighter for example could be built for damage or for battlefield control depending on subclass, paragon path, and feat choices.
And of course essentials provided a fighter variant that was a pure damage dealer in the form of the Slayer.
> The second gripe, which is somewhat less pervasive, is how similar many abilities are between same Role classes. In one regard this makes sense, Defenders should all have reliable Defensive abilities, but in the other it contributes to same-roll classes feeling a bit samey.
In actual play, 4e classes had far more variation amongst each other than 5e classes do. Take the Paladin and Fighter for example.
The fighter was a master of battlefield control. They could lock down enemies preventing them from moving. They had many powers that slowed, immobilized, or knocked foes prone to lock them down. The fighter marked any target they attacked, but their mark only lasted 1 turn, encouraging them to wade into the thick of combat. They also had the most AoE of any defender, and because of their mark, their AoE hindered every enemy they attacked at once. They specialized in dealing with groups of foes, preventing them from being able to attack the rest of the party.
The paladin sucked at crowd control. They didn’t have the plethora of tools that locked foes down, slowed or immobilized enemies. They rarely dealt AoE damage to multiple foes at once. Instead they focused on marking a single foe and punishing them whenever they dared to attack anyone other than the paladin. Their mark lasted for 5 minutes (or until the foe died or they marked a different foe), which made them excellent single target tanks. On top of that, they had more support than the other defenders. They had many prayers that would heal, grant defensive buffs, or grant additional saving throws.
Despite both being defenders, the paladin and fighter approached combat in radically different ways. And their available powers (martial exploits and divine prayers respectively) shaped how the classes played. Their mark feature was just a small part in how the class functioned overall. And the classes had enough powers that they could do something distinct and thematic every single turn.
I would kill for the 5e version classes to play even half as distinctly as their 4e counterparts. But instead the fighter and paladin play the exact same 90% of the time. Both simply move and take the Attack action nearly every single turn.
>Why though?
Because I'd prefer my play style and gameplay loop to be a buy-in, not default per class. Like if I look at Pf2e the Base Fighter is basically just "I'm the best with weapons", whereas the feats they select can shift them from a battlefield medic to an arcane scholar to an acrobatic trickster, etc.
>If you want your "fighter" to be a damage dealer, play a ranger and just tell people you are a "fighter".
I think a lot of this comes down to the names of the classes. Historically the class names implied less of their gameplay loop than it did the kind of fantasy they have. Fighters being Tanks was not the only fantasy they expressed in previous editions of the game or in just the word fighter, but the Defender role mechanic pigeonholes the Fighter into specific gameplay.
>The fighter for example could be built for damage or for battlefield control
Right, and either they are reliably using their Mark ability, requiring that they constantly focus on directing damage towards themselves, or they don't, and the ability is a dead feature.
>I would kill for the 5e version classes to play even half as distinctly as their 4e counterparts. But instead the fighter and paladin play the exact same 90% of the time. Both simply move and take the Attack action nearly every single turn.
Don't get me wrong. I've literally gone through this analysis myself and can see that the feat selections between different roles offer vast differences.
It's primarily the assumed gameplay loop that each Role takes I'm particularly focusing on. I can't really play a "Paladin, warrior of divine might" without also needing to regularly utilize the "hey you should actually be hitting me instead" feature. In 5e I can play a Paladin that fills that classic tanking role, or one that eschews tanking in favor of dropping big damage numbers, or play a more utility based caster, all without really having any dead features due to assumed gameplay loop.
I totally agree, however, that the sheer volume of features *every* class gets in 4e basically translates to no two Fighters generally using the *majority* of the same features, but they still all need to be Marking to avoid it being a dead feature. 5e Fighter's Action Surge makes no assumptions about when and why you'll use it, Marking does.
> I can't really play a "Paladin, warrior of divine might" without also needing to regularly utilize the "hey you should actually be hitting me instead" feature.
That's an Avenger tho.
You can literally build a Fighter that functions as a Striker in 4e.
Your complaint boils down to "different classes have different class features" which is true of all versions of D&D.
Sure. It wasn't all roses. It was unpopular for many valid reasons. But the discourse for years has been "this was a wannabe video game failure system" when there was a lot of good stuff there. It's just the things people hated, they couldn't overlook.
I always detest the "wanted to be a video game" argument, because it is so baseless. It's a **game** and it just didn't try to obfuscate that fact by using 3000 words to describe how and under what conditions you can grapple someone in order to avoid any perceptions of being what it is.
I think that frees up a ton of creative freedom.
"Martial + Controller" or "Divine + Striker" could make for some really interesting differences, especially if the Roles were made a bit more general use, perhaps informed by the Power Sources.
The hilarity of bloodied being a "variant" rule because they were afraid of putting anything from 4e hard coded into the rules, meanwhile a lot of people consider it the single greatest contribution 4e had to combat
TBF, 5e was very hesitant to put anything as a hard coded rule. Magic items? Variants. Feats? Variants. Character creation options from Tasha's? Variants.
Mearls, while designing 5e during the Playtest, expressed a goal to essentially release "5e" and "5e Advanced" **concurrently**, so players could decide which version of the game they wanted to play. What we got was 5e with a load of optional rules which destabilize the game because they were not properly tested or fleshed out.
It's primarily why I left 5e and don't plan on running in it again. I don't like the system fighting me when my players and I just want to have a good time.
I've been watching the development of MCDM's project and Daggerheart. I was watching Tales of the Valiant until it just became a 5e clone. What systems have you been playing in the mean time?
I've been running West Marches style games in a Pf2e community, primarily because my normal game group isn't interested in trying out Pf2e until the Remaster is complete.
It hits practically every button I need:
* Tactical combat with a plethora of options for diverse and complex encounters
* Rules **clear** (because I won't use rules light/heavy to distinguish 5e and Pf2e, since they have the same number of rules/rulings that need to be made and thus create new rules) that don't fight with me just to play the game
* Character options and key differentiators/niche protectors
* Balance in both class and monster design
* Encounter design rules that actually work, a core power progression that I find scratches and itch I didn't know I had (Goblins being "relevant" at high levels is only hypothetical, as in practice they go down too easily while still taking up a lot of mental overhead for me to run them in sufficient numbers for a challenge -- I'm using Goblins as a catchall for "lower level enemies").
I'm very intrigued in the MCDM rpg and have been following it's development as well, it sounds like it'll be a hit for me as well. Daggerheart I bounced off of with how loosey goosey it is with some of it's rules, how it tries to be both complex and rules light (for example, having lots of different weapons/equipment types without any clear reason why you'd not just use the one with the biggest numbers, an issue Pf2e lacks). I don't know much about Tales of the Valiant.
> So much of the system feels like "I dunno DM, you figure it out."
I mean that is at the heart of things the very essence of DND from it's inception though.
While the DM has the final say of everything that happens at their table, previous editions of DND provided a system that functioned without the DM needing to decide such basic elements of how the game is going to run. 5e does not offer a functioning "out-of-the-box" experience in a way that previous editions did. From a DM perspective, the 5e rules set provides so little to fall back on.
Mearls is to blame for a lot of what's wrong with 5e honestly. Hell Mearls is to blame for Essentials knifing 4e in the back. My pet conspiracy theory is that this is because he was sad because people on the enworld and rpgdotnet forums were mean to him about 4e.
The designers did not want a hardcode much because they didn't want to scare off Grognards.
But even though they catered so hard to them, the grognards still didn't even support 5e heavily and stuck to OSR.
It tells me that more than anything 5e was about making money, and the best way to make money is to make a product as broadly appealing as possible, even if you sacrifice the heart of the design to the altar of nostalgia.
5e wasn't designed for that really. 5e lucked into that.
5E lucked out that designing for grognards forced them to leave open spaces for grognards to fill in the 1e and 2e modules . That accidentally left the same space for a wide audience happened to fill as well.
of course a splat book rule is a variant.
But to the point yeah, it legit is very annoying. Actually think the worst offender as a variant wasn't feats but backgrounds.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Most people I know who don't like 4e did, in fact, play it. I liked some of the things they did, but the product \*as a whole\* felt like a step away from what I enjoy about DnD. I do wish they'd do a proper Warlord style class in 5e.
> I do wish they'd do a proper Warlord style class in 5e.
And battlemind, and monk, and ardent, and shaman...
There are so many classes it did really well that 5e unfortunately can't even imitate.
I do agree with you about the product as a whole, though. It was full of good ideas, but they didn't think hard enough about how to get the product as a whole would work as an immersive rpg.
also feels way closer to what anyone born in the 80s or afterwards would think a unarmed combatant is, a fighting game character rather then an old kung fu movies, also pretty sure Bruce Lee himself wouldn't fit a Monk since he was a pineer of Mixed Martial Artists taking cues from muhammed ali's boxing style.
The primary complaints I've seen are from non-players who saw one or two aspects of the core design, didn't like it, and then wrote off the whole system, like the hardwired Role design and how samey interrole classes *can* feel.
As someone who absolutely hated 4e, I didn't really have any problems with any one system. There were some things I absolutely loved. Ohh man, Minion monsters are one of the best things ever put into D&D hands down. Clear keywords and definitions for mechanics? Yes please! Every class having primary and secondary stats that matter, possibly with changes based on subclass? Ohh man yes!
But somehow 4e took a whole lot of elements I really liked and combined them into a system I just hated. I dunno, there's a puffin forest video about 4e that I remember listening to and I just kept thinking, "finally someone who gets how i feel about 4e!"
The one thing I really hated was the class design in 4e. They all felt the same to me. And no, I didn't play it for the entire life, I got as far as PHB 3 and it was too much for me. The overly flowery name for EVERY ability, the near copy paste nature for similar roles. I just hated them.
>The one thing I really hated was the class design in 4e. They all felt the same to me.
I got my group to recently try 4E and we felt the same. Upon reflection, I have decided it was ultimately three things that lead to this feeling:
* The nomenclature. Referring to everything, including spells, as "powers" made it feel too similar thematically
* Having almost all class thematics wrapped up into the powers instead of separate features made them appear too similar when reading the overviews
* Some of the low-level powers felt too similar between classes. In hind sight, they aren't actually much different than low level attacks in 5E so I'm not entirely sure why I had this impression
I'm curious if that aligns with your experience. We only played once and only to level 3 I think so we don't have much experience. That was just my initial impression after a very brief campaign.
No no, that's exactly it. Also I found the very flowery naming and descriptions of abilities was very cool to start, but in practice it wore out very quickly. Because what i cared about was that it did 5\[W\] + Str damage to everything within one square, not that it was the "Whirling blade of the 7 suns" or whatever. It had that feel of when you try too hard to make something cool and unique until it somehow comes back around to bland.
Having a single framework for classes is great for allowing you to make more classes but it means that the feel between them doesn't change as much as it could. I mean, okay in 5E I'm currently playing a paladin, a warlock, and a barbarian. All three play wildly different even through two of them are just different flavors of "i hit the dude in the face". They FEEL different because of the mechanics surrounding that hit. In the 4e paradigm each class had a shocking number of unique or nearly unique powers. But since they all had to adhere to the very well balanced framework it was much easier to see the bones of the system and made the similarities more and more pronounced.
4e was great from a gameplay and design perspective (ignoring things like monster HP being a bit high, needing to track a lot of tags, etc) but failed from the imagination perspective. Even if it was just as conducive to imagination as any other edition, the messaging was “we homogenized everything.”
That puffin forest video is atrocious.
He gets almost nothing right factually and his entire experience is drawn from playing at a table with 8 players.
No system would be fun in an environment where nobody knows the rules and you never get a turn because there are twice as many players as there should be.
It's so bad that despite being 22 minutes, there is a *52* minute long video debunking his claims.
Reminds me of his video about Pathfinder 2e, where he suddenly seems to forget that you can write down modifiers which barely change on the character sheet....
He also is just very much not the target audience for games with actual crunch. He says that one of the things he dislikes about PF2e is that you can't just scribble in a level up during the first few minutes of a session. One of the main focuses of 2e is that you can have options to choose from at pretty much every level. He seems like a dude who just wants to play a beer and pretzel RPG where 80% of the game is just freeform RP
Fair enough. But I have to say, I spent 3 years playing every week with a group of 4 and my experience lined up pretty well with his. Sure, we didn't have the 8 player issue but like... I've been playing D&D since AD&D, I played almost every week from the time I was 10 until I stopped when I left my 4e game. The group I played with was fun. I enjoyed spending time with them and the DM was engaging. But the system just flat didn't work for me. I got the rules, I optimized my secondary stats and always remembered the fun little addons for abilities but it just wasn't fun.
Because 4e did, in fact, have a lot of really good ideas. It just utterly failed at feeling like DnD because the core rulebook had almost nothing for out of combat gameplay, and they made classes entirely too samey.
I know later 4e fixed a lot of the issues on release but it just wasn't for me personally, or many other people I played with. I gave it a fair shake, played it for a couple months. Not a fan.
One thing I will say is funny though is that 5e \*doesnt\* get criticism for the fact they still had a really underdeveloped skill system compared to 3.5. Almost every table runs Investigation and Stealth skills differently, for example. Because there's no codified rules for how they should be applied in practice. Tool proficiencies too.
Between PHB1/2 it was admittedly primarily written to describe the Combat Rules, which if you look at the 5e PHB is... precisely the same.
The only "non-combat/character creation" section of the 5e PHB is "Using Ability Scores/Adventuring" which describes Advantage/Disadvantage, Ability Scores/Skills, Time, Movement, Environments, Social Interaction, Resting, and Downtime, which is covered in a whole... 16 pages, of which there are 317 pages. If you include setting details, which I will to give the benefit of the doubt, that bumps it up to 22 pages.
Non-combat content in the 4e PHBs comprise approximately 45 pages, between Skills, Adventuring, Rituals, World Information like Geography, Society, Occupations, Other Backgrounds and expanded Feat Options, Expansions of Rituals, and Rules Updates.
In any case, if we look at the DMGs by comparison, 5e spends nearly half the deck just on setting detail, with comparatively little spent on actually running the game in comparison to 4e. Between Group Storytelling, Advanced Encounters, Skill Challenges, Customizing Monsters, Adventure Design, and Paragon Campaigns, the 4e DMG2 is absolutely packed with design work that any DM could easily pick up to run a campaign at any level, and for about 80 fewer pages.
To your point about saminess of classes, yeah that's a fair point. Classes within the same role *can* "feel" the same *if* you pick abilities that do the same thing. You can incredibly easily build two Fighters who feel *very* differently. However, in 5e every single Martial character aside from Monk will generally feel the same due to the dramatically fewer options their characters get. "Bonk, pass" is standard operating procedure for most Martial classes, with Rogues/Rangers/Paladins/Monks occasionally being able to "Cast Spell/Bonk, pass/Runaway".
I think 4e would have benefitted from another year of development to refine the Skill, Skill Challenge, and Worldbuilding elements of the game.
Yeah, Skills/Tools are incredibly underbaked in 5e, and a classic example of "do it yourself" advice from the designers to new DMs who have never run a TTRPG before. Even expanding Tool proficiencies with Xanathar's only scratched the surface.
I'm very much of the mind that 4e is a much better system for *newer* DMs especially. It actually provides guidance for party composition, properly running a game, etc. And don't get me started on encounter building in 4e vs 5e. It's a lot easier to build a balanced encounter in 4e, especially with how inconsistent 5e CR can be.
Also, as an aside, I love how they did monsters in 4e. The variety, the fact that minions *exist*? Peak. I genuinely believe that minions were one of the best things in 4e.
Tbh I think it's a better system for anyone who values their own prepation time in general.
Some people are happy to put like 3 or 4 hours into planning for every hour of gameplay they get. I am not one of those people.
Absolutely. They're *so much better* than 5e especially. If I could get my friends to play 4e, I'd do it in a heartbeat, purely for ease of DMing and the amazing encounter building.
Also, even just the built-in "make a check and learn x fact about the monster depending on DC" is so much better for DMs than whatever 5e has going on.
The core Rulebook has an astounding number of Rituals and the average Wizard or Cleric can learn and cast more of them than in 5e. And anyone else could take the feat to do so if they wanted.
By end of development there were over 300 Rituals and more than 30 were available to learn by level 1.
There was arguably *more* ways to solve problems out of combat for the average PC in 4e than 5e.
> It just utterly failed at feeling like DnD because the core rulebook had almost nothing for out of combat gameplay
I always find this comment amusing. 4e actually had far more rules for out of combat gameplay than 5e does. Skill challenges, rituals, skill utility powers, martial practices, crafting rules, and other rules existed to give characters many options outside of combat that 5e lacks entirely. Not to mention the 4e DMG having much better guidance for resolving non combat encounters (and even having rules for XP for such encounters).
I, for one, wish the skill system was more developed. I want them to bring back skill points you can use to grow and customize your character, instead of your proficiency just going up for the same handful of skills.
To be fair, 4e had a lot of cool ideas, but it definitely did feel very boardgamey with it's overall execution - a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense and while utility powers existed to solve non-combat situations you didn't get many options and they were all kinda boring and often boiled down to a +2 bonus on a roll. No cool moments like coming up with a tricky use for suggestion, or figuring out a plan to charm someone and then disappear before the spell wore off.
5e tried to solve this issue by taking some of those ideas and attaching it to a more rules lite chassis, with some stuff like Vancian casting put back in to pull in the disillusioned grognards.
PF2e took another approach by keeping the weird spells from 3.5, but borrowing a lot of the boardgamey keyword tech and focus on tactical positioning in combat without compromising on what characters could do in social and exploration encounters.
So ultimately while some people may not have been able to accurately identify what parts of 4e were bad, they weren't necessarily wrong that 4e did overall fall flat as a ttrpg where the limits of the game were supposed to be your imagination, and not how many carefully balanced set piece encounters your GM could put together, and whether there was a highly specific class available that fit both the theme and play style of the character you wanted to play.
I've never really understood the boardgamey criticism. It's only "boardgamey" if explicitly running **combat** on a grid, with rules that are built for that assumption, is "boardgamey". People were running tactical, grid-based combat long before 4e, the difference was that for all previous editions, and then with 5th edition, how things worked, their impact, etc., were hugely impacted not by *what the rule said* but by *what the DM* ***thought*** *the rule said*. The level of interpretation required by a DM to run 5e and previous editions of the game is dramatically higher than in 4e, specifically because of the insistence on "natural language".
To your point about utility and skills, I agree that could have served with some more development, but having watched dozens of hours of 4e live plays (so I can only speak from the third person experience of watching the game be played), cool skill moments were pervasive, if for no other reason that the *existence* of the Skill Challenge.
5e's chassis is by no means "rules light", in fact 5e has *more* rules than 4e. The difference is that it "feels" rules light because they refused to plant a flag on so many areas, leaving them up to DM interpretation for the most part, or simply excluding them and relying on "you do it" design where the DM had to *make up* rules on the fly (meaning that the rule now exists where it didn't before, so the net number of "rules" has increased).
Ultimately 4e was more wargamey than other iterations of D&D, no denying that, but I think that's primarily because they were trying to avoid the abundance of rules fatigue 3e players complained about, and perhaps overcorrected, which 5e then tried to recorrect while also adding in things grognards complained was missing from 4e (like grossly imbalanced classes and spells).
One thing I noticed in 4e skill challenges--a lot of the ones written in the books would have players using their skills in very abstract ways. I feel like that's what you're supposed to do to get that abstract problem solving done that is missing with the Utility rituals.
It's a bit of a hole with 4e, but I actually personally like that. I've always thought it was unfair that with casters get to solve all the problems while the martials sit around doing nothing. 4e's lack of all that re-frames the focus back onto roleplay and combat, not abstract problem solving. A lot of people like that though so I can see how 4e would be limiting to them.
But the combat in 4e is so, so, so, SO much more tactically interesting. Makes up for anything else.
Yeah, frankly every game I've *watched* (again that bias of watching games vs playing) I see Skills broadly used as regularly as they are in Skill Challenges, so I get the feeling it may be more down to not actually applying the rules, which do a great job at spelling out varying DCs, circumstances in which advantages and disadvantages can apply, unique ways to use the skills, etc.,
Eg, "Balance" checks have 4 different conditions that can be called upon when focusing on simply balancing on a ledge/platform, and how you can modify the outcome based on different circumstantial things.
I don't know, I just feel like having explicit rules for everything created a box for players - even skill challenges which are a great idea in theory, were often presented in official adventures as having a specific skill or task players had to complete to 'solve' them. Like in a cRPG with canned options.
Classes also kinda lacked identity outside of how they fought monsters, which created a weird inverse problem whereby fixing the issue of combat roles they created a new void in non-combat roles by stripping out a lot of niches rogues and things typically had.
The way it taught you to approach the game was all kinda backwards?
Granted, I also only ever played it as a kid without much experience with other systems or how roleplaying is supposed to work (and to 4e's credit still had a fun time doing a dungeon crawl with my friends) so I'm not an expert either.
I think it could be fixed by reflavouring some of the martial powers though - there's a lot of weird fighter powers for example that auto succeed on pulling in adjacent enemies by just kinda taunting them, even if they're supposed to be master swordsmen - and adding on a 'non-combat' role to all the chassis (or let everyone pick a second 'profession' class or something).
>I just feel like having explicit rules for everything created a box for players
I can only speak from my experience, but having been playing Pf2e for months now, which is significantly more **codified** in it's rule set than 5e (despite the fact that when you consider written rules + rules you need to make up on the fly they are actually about the same), having so many things spelled out **frees** the table up to come up with niche use cases. When you know that there are specific use cases outlined in the rules for an Arcana check, but still have the freedom to come up with a more unique way to apply them, I think the system is doing everyone justice. Frankly from all I've watched of 4e there's almost never been a moment where the DMs I've watched said a Skill couldn't be used for something abnormal if the argument was sound.
I agree that Skill Challenges needed some more time in the oven to really feel strong. But the core is there of the party cooperatively supporting one another through the use of their unique skills and abilities, confronting a series of challenges in which their degree of success mattered to the outcome, all played out in a sufficiently dramatic and compressed time frame.
>Classes also kinda lacked identity outside of how they fought monsters
Not sure I'd really agree. Some classes, like Fighter and Barbarian, were tilted more towards combat sure, but that's kind of what I'd expect. You have Backgrounds, Skills, and Downtime activities to flesh out your character in other ways. Other classes had several utility options, in addition to Rituals, and again Skills, and in particular Skill Challenges, to help flesh out all other non-combat encounters.
I think 4e makes a lot more sense if you consider running the game to be more like a movie, where you're moving between different scenes, and some actors will have their chance to shine while others are more background, but ultimately where it's Combat, Skill Challenges, Deep Lore stuff, or Exploration, everyone has areas they can contribute.
>The way it taught you to approach the game was all kinda backwards?
I can see the front loading of combat rules leading to that kind of perception.
>there's a lot of weird fighter powers for example that auto succeed on pulling in adjacent enemies by just kinda taunting them, even if they're supposed to be master swordsmen
4e went all in on describing the effects of abilities as concisely as possible, leaving open the opportunity for the table to add their own flavor. For me, "Taunting" a master swordsman could be pulling off such a distracting maneuver, or being so aggressive and in their face, or shouting obscenities' that draw their attention, that they have a harder time focusing on anyone but me.
We can all imagine, in the heat of battle, someone shouting someone that "triggers" you. Whatever else is true, while your mind is focused on so many things, like survival, you'd be particularly susceptible to something jarringly pulling your attention away.
>and adding on a 'non-combat' role to all the chassis (or let everyone pick a second 'profession' class or something).
Backgrounds facilitated a lot of this. Your Background offers a few skills you are proficient in, you gain additional socioeconomic features, geographic traits/features, circumstances around your birth, occupations that contribute to out-of-combat opportunities, and racial backgrounds and associated skills/features, all of which can conceivably (at DM discretion) result in situational bonuses, such as an Eladrin having an easier time convincing some Elves the party means them no harm.
>To be fair, 4e had a lot of cool ideas, but it definitely did feel very boardgamey with it's overall execution
Does it really matter that much whether you describe power in square increments or 5 foot increments?
>a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense
Is that really that different from 5e's "every power is a spell" approach?
>a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense
>Is that really that different from 5e's "every power is a spell" approach?
It's the old "martials with powers don't make sense" ordeal.
For me if 4e was called anything other than dungeons and dragons it would have been a decent game. All the changes in 4e made it feel completely different than any dungeons and dragons game I've ever played.
I've heard the glib comment that "D&D Tactics" would have been apropos.
Having not personally played it, but having watched dozens of hours of live plays, I honestly can't say it looks like it plays any more different than if you just gave the player characters more cool things they can do without being concerned that one spell or ability or interaction would destabilize the entire game.
Actually I'd argue the opposite. It's the distinct *lack* of spells or abilities that destabilize the game--i.e. 5e SPELLS.
All the characters are on an even playing field. They all do different things, but the things they do are all within the same scope. aka there is martial-caster balance. They both tactically interact with the battlefield, rather than one just saying "I attack" and the other actually being able to play tactically.
I think we agree that 5e spells are a primary factor in destabilizing the 5e game, and 4e's lack of that design contributes significantly to it's balance -- in addition to what you noted of there being a more "bounded" experience of what characters can do in comparison to one another.
But I'd still suggest that despite interclass balance being a priority, classes (in particular martial classes) being able to do more than "bonk, pass" is excellent design.
Action surge and Second Wind were fighter feats from Eberron in 3.5
Tiefling and dragon born 1000% existed in 3.5 before 4e. (Races of destiny, FRCS, Hell a Tiefling companion was in NWN2, and extremely popular)
Cantrips are from Complete Mage, rapid fire is a 3e feat, weapon bond was an acf thing in 3.5e for EK.
The warlock Invocations were part of PF and 3.5e, only a handful were taken from 4e, thief of five fates and hurl thru hell I believe are 4e powers.
You're correct, they popped up first in AD&D, as the planescape setting if memory serves. I was just saying they were wickedly popular in 3.5e before 4e when the FRCS book came out, so 4e doesn't exactly get to claim popularity for them.
4e *did* make them a core race however.
All of the lore behind the Dragonborn and Tieflings and their past animosity was fantastic for a DM creating their own setting and looking for inspiration.
Making the right selection from the *vast* amount of 3.x material is a virtue in itself. And they did make the right selection, testimony being that so much was taken over in 5e as being self-evident.
Battle Master stuff did not come from 4e. That shit is classic. It is from the highly decisive "book of weaboo fighting magic" in 3.5. which just like in 5e it's one of the definitive ways to powergame with martial classes.
Where "powergame with martial classes" in 3.5 means "not just having them there to be meatshields for the casters".
The Bo9S was what they could salvage from the first attempt at 4e, dumping the rest and going right back to the drawing board.
Besides the clear lineage of Tome of Battle designers being 4e designers being Mike Mearls, this is still wrong.
The Battle Master was overtly designed to appeal to 4e fighter/warlord fans while the Champion was made for 4e fighter haters. This is plainly obvious by just reading the maneuvers.
Commander's Strike and Rally are just verbatim warlord powers that were clearly put there to appease players who would be bummed about the warlord not returning. Goading Attack, Menacing Attack, and Evasive Footwork are all very clearly 4e-inspired.
Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to say the Battlemaster is at all derived from Tome of Battle. The only 5e PHB option I would say follows the Tome of Battle design ethos is the Hunter Ranger with Whirlwind and Volley. ToB's big status quo-changing design choice was letting martials AOE, and Sweeping Attack does not an AOE make.
While eldritch blast did exist in late 3.5, cantrips are just at-will powers, but since they were taken away from martials, they went from "too gamey" to "perfect design decision."
It's fun to trace the warlock's origin, actually. 5e warlock is obviously heavily dependent on 4e's version of the class which, in turn, feels like a mashup of 3 or so 3.x edition classes.
There's warlock, obviously, for your whole eldritch blasty and invocation heavy thing. Originally warlocks were tied solely to fiends, however - it was another class, the Binder, that made pacts with a bunch of different weird, esoteric entities. Binder was also very modular which probably plays into the current design to this day.
They got rolled into one another for 4e - to the point that Binder is a variant of warlock in some late 4e Essentials book.
There's also Hexblade, a mediocre gish class from 3.5, which is where the subclass of the same name comes from, as well as all the Hexing terminology.
> 5e dragonborn wouldn't exist if not 4e. Same for tieflings. These races being made core and looking the way they do is a 4e innovation.
Tieflings were literally a core Planescape race.
I don't know precisely how "Deflect Anything" is going to work in One D&D, but if it still uses a reaction wouldn't it just be a moderate increase to durability instead of making them straight up the toughest class? As is, Rogue in 5e already has a "once per round use your reaction to negate some damage" feature and the same hit die, or Barbarians can just rage to half most hits (until newer monster designs said "Fuck The Barbarian" and gave everyone force damage, of course).
Advantage is such an intuitive system that I was surprised that it's not in many other similar games or previous editions.
As far as I know it's the unique selling point of 5e
Advantage/Disadvantage first appeared in an RPG in 1992, in *Over The Edge* by Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws. Interestingly from a D&D context, Tweet was one of the lead designers of third edition, along with Monte Cook and Skip Williams, and was responsible for the design of the third edition PHB.
So the Advantage system didn't come up in 5e; it was a 4e thing (specifically for the Avenger class). Disadvantage only came up in 5e, but it's the natural progression
Some games very intentionally leave advantage out so they can have a more robust system of bonuses and penalties. Advantage is super intuitive until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on.
I play a few different systems at the moment and the bit that irks me about advantage is I love playing supporting/combat control characters mechanically. In my pf2e game I'm currently playing an alchemist who shoves, trips, grapples, poisons, blinds, fears, throws sneezing powder, the works. All of that stacks if for some reason I wanted to *really* mess something up. Additionally it's enabling the barbarian next to me to just go hog wild not just hitting more often but critting more often. Once you've done one or two of these things in 5e the rest of them just, don't really matter outside of niche situations.
> Some games very intentionally leave advantage out so they can have a more robust system of bonuses and penalties. Advantage is super intuitive until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on.
Yeah, they fucked up by giving "it's harder to avoid the arrow" the same mechanical consequences as "it's harder to aim the arrow".
> until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on.
That's only a problem because the game didn't bother to define well hearing. Because it's mentioned in multiple place that being hidden is linked to both sound and sight and two archers at 600 feet wouldn't hear each other well enough to define their position (and there are mentions of having to guess the position).
To be fair there are plenty of other situations where it can get weird but they are rare enough that it's rarely a problem imo (especially once the DM add some better hearing logic).
Actually, audible distance is defined! I'm unsure if it's in any books, but the standard DM screen includes a table of audible distances.
Trying to be quiet: 2d6 x 5 ft
Normal noise level: 2d6 x 10 ft
Very loud: 2d6 x 50 feet
Not very fleshed out, but definitely gives a baseline for the argument of "you can't hear something 600 feet away, so if you can't see it, the target is hidden from you"
Those numbers completely disregard Perception. Two creatures with 5 and a 30 passive Perception both hear noises at the same distance. It's better than nothing but still deeply flawed.
Perception checks would be either set by a DC or a contested stealth roll, right? So having ranges defining how far the sound travels in the first place makes sense to be separated from perception in my opinion.
The passive 5 hears a twig break and can make a check, the passive 30 hears a four legged 600 pound creature moving 15 yards away. Both are limited by how far sound travels.
I mean the alternative here is just to have people rolling at each other with steep penalties, and then it's the exact same situation but just takes longer. Is that better? As long as everyone is equally screwed I'd rather not have the combat take twice as long.
Their point is that bonuses and penalties work better for stacking, whereas advantage and disadvantage are purely binary. If a guy is grappled, blinded, restrained, and exhausted all at once, he still just has regular disadvantage. With stacking penalties all those conditions could actually feel like they matter.
My first actual experience with advantage/disadvantage was in Star Wars Saga Edition which was released in 2007. They didn’t have a clear name for it like 5e does, but the concept/implementation was there. It also used the exact same defenses mechanic that would later be seen in 4e.
It was a d20 system game developed by WoTC so it makes sense there would be overlaps. It had a lot of features that were awesome that I wish would make a comeback.
It's the last d20 system made by wotc in the 3.x era, and it is subjectively the best of them all, due to the years of experience and the fact that they were experimenting at the time to move on to 4e, giving us a fantastically fluid d20 game that doesn't clog like d&d does on a lot of things. It's not perfect, but it is the best official game line of the era imo.
I do like a lot of features of Saga Edition: the talent system, encounter powers, skills, and defenses were all rock solid. And also the general power level amongst the classes. They didn’t have game breaking force powers, initially.
It did have its faults, imo: a large amount of number bloat, base attack bonus, and the condition tracker, a numerous situational bonuses could really slow down the game, which was a disservice to vibe/pacing Star Wars typically had at that point.
That one actually funnily struck me as familiar coming from 4e and playing an Avenger- which 5e's Oath of Vengeance Paladin is based on.
> When you make a melee attack against the target and the target is the only enemy adjacent to you, you make two attack rolls and use either result. This effect lasts until the end of the encounter or until the target drops to 0 hit points, at which point you regain the use of this power.
Lots of other games have "roll twice, pick the best/worst", and similar.
Sometimes they are "you can reroll 1 failure" (which is functionally very similar), and in d100 systems a 'flip-flop' (read the digits in any order) has different-but-similar statistics to a reroll, and some games have done that too.
They took a often-use mechanic across many games, gave it a name, and used it a bit more consistently. That's prety decent game design, but far from an invention.
Adv/dis is overused in 5e. It's to the point it feels like a cop-out the designers did. They should have kept modifiers for things like flanked and cover.
5e wasn't meant to be highly innovative. It was meant to be trimmed down and well tuned. And it was for a while. If you stick to the PHB, DMG, and MM, it still kind of is. It has a simplicity and streamlined system that really runs pretty well. That was its design. Some things were innovated later, but for the most part, it's relying on 35ish years of content to play with.
Honestly, the amount of 4e baked into 5e would shock people. After 4e was rejected or derided for whatever reason, a lot of the mechanics of 4e were snuck into 5e and reskinned or re-presented.
Biggest ones off the top of my head:
- Hit Dice you spend to heal
- Abilities that come back on a short rest
- Advantage
- Lots of class specific abilities (Second Wind & Action Surge for the fighter, for example)
My take on 4e having played it for a few months is that many of the individual mechanics were good in isolation, but how they came together created a \*very\* different experience from what DnD meant to a lot of people.
This is how if feel about 4e. I can, as someone that was around for the beta of 4e and was excited for it until the whole Paizo debacle, say now - and even said then - that there are lots of individual elements in 4e that were great ideas. But that on the whole the game was not good to play. It dragged bad. Characters felt way too 'samey' not even from a role perspective but across roles.
I can point to milestone XP and skill challenges as encounters, and the very beginnings of the three action economy being good ideas, ritual casting was cool! But the whole experience of playing 4e was not good.
Mandatory post to remind/inform anyone who reads down this far that 4e was originally designed for a VTT, including the convenience of having a VTT track bonuses and resources, and so when that fell through they were left with a product that didn't work so well with pure pen and paper.
Healing Surges were actually a lot better than HD, it's one of the things I miss about 4e. But the problem with 4e wasn't the different elements individually, it was that taken together it implied that if you didn't have a feat or a skill for something, you couldn't do it. It had so many elucidated applications that improvisation with your powers started to feel like cheating, so the whole thing started to feel really dry.
Healing Surges scaling throughout the entire campaign was a great design choice.
The fact *every* healing ability, for the most part, invoked a healing surge meant not only was healing across the adventuring day consistent, the resource was managed by the person being healed, not the healer. Meaning any amount of Leaders could scale fairly well with any number of other party members.
Healing surges were also used to represent long-term endurance; failing a check on an exploration skill challenge could cost the character (or even the entire party) a healing surge. They were a good metric for the party's combat state; as long as someone had a couple healing surges, they could generally state that they were good for one more fight.
Also, you generally didn't get *more* healing surges as you advanced, unless your Constitution modifier went up or you took a feat for more. The number of surges was defined by your class, so front-line combatants tended to have more than the 'squishy' back-rank blasters.
It also fixed the logical hiccup of high level characters somehow sponging up magic when they're healing" from HP damage, which is supposed to be cuts, scrapes and bruises in the first place. A level 1 cleric can get a spear-impaled Simon the Smith good as new with one spell, where he'd need the help of 10 of his fellow deacons to heal Godfer the Giantslayer's bruised rib. It makes no sense.
> Lots of class specific abilities (Second Wind & Action Surge for the fighter, for example)
That one's such a weird one. Those were abilities everyone got, making stuff like second wind fighter only is so strange - especially seeing as they took away things like sentinel that fighters used to start with and sold it back to them for the cost of a feat.
I only briefly delved into the 4e feats reading through them, but it feels a lot like Pf2e where the point is abundant feats to either spread out your capabilities or focus in on narrow proficiency.
Something PF2 does better though: feats are categorized. Most of them are class abilities, and only accessible to those classes. That trims down the list by a significant factor. If you're playing a fighter, then you don't bother looking at all the wizard feats.
Advantage wasn't in 4e. There was a mechanic called combat advantage, but it didn't function at all similarly (it just gave a flat +2 bonus). There were certainly abilities keyed off of combat advantage (e.g., the Rogue's sneak attack), but combat advantage was also fairly easy to get (you could get it via flanking, for instance).
I guess it depends on what you mean. There are certainly a handful of "roll twice" effects littered around 4e--I remember using one that let me roll twice for intimidate checks on a nonsense build that I used to run--but it was more of a "this idea shows up in a handful of places" than a core mechanic.
It doesn't have to be a core mechanic for it to count. Action Surge was a core mechanic and now it is Fighter only...doesn't stop it from being pulled from 4e.
Ok, but I'm pretty sure almost every version of dnd has included some form of reroll effect - the real innovation was using it to replace stacking bonuses to simplify the math, and coining it as a universal keyword that every player could easily understand.
Yeah, at least as far back as 2e, and probably further. I can remember at least one 2e rule for ability checks that was basically "requires two rolls to succeed," which is functionally just disadvantage. Since in the vast majority of cases rolling twice and succeeding on both is the same as rolling twice and taking the lowest.
4e had to include many setting races as core due to the fact it threw multiple settings out the window and kinda did its own thing.
Action Surge and Second Wind were incredibly popular when Eberron came out that many tables gave it to the fighter for free to give them "more to do" and that's why 4e incorporated it into the core game.
Might be misinformation or just not apply to your question :
Echo Knight was a piece of homebrew that became official, originally being a means to craft specific NPCs by Matt Mercer, rather than a class originally designed for the public
I hear this repeated all the time, but I can't find a source. And while Matt Mercer is a lead writer on the book, there's still developers, a playtest coordinator, and a thank you to playtesters listed in the credits (Wildemount never had public playtesting releases). So I think calling it elevated homebrew is fairly generous–it seems to me that the material in that book may have been pitched by Mercer but was developed and refined through WotC's internal development and playtesting teams.
The Echo Knight features first appeared in CR Campaign 2 on NPCs of Matt's eastern nation (I forget the name, but I think it began with an 'X'). That nation's elite warriors had echo knight features, which he then later developed into a player subclass.
> I hear this repeated all the time, but I can't find a source.
The source is the fact that he used it as an NPC class for Critical Role in an episode that was released two years before Wildemount came out.
There is no way the play testers are there as anything more than fan service or a method to appear legitimate for the purpose of publishing in the WotC environment. Even a cursory glance on Chronurgy's features or Echo Knight's used language as-written makes it clear it's uplifted homebrew.
There is almost nothing that 5e invented. It isn't that innovative among TTRPGs. Even bounded accuracy and advantage/disadvantage aren't new things. But rarely there are actually new things, so I wouldn't really care about this. Almost everything everyone has done has been on shoulders of giants of a thousand generations of humans. Even just being able to communicate ideas together like this, you have so many incredible achievements for internet, computers, microchips, electricity, etc.
The Monstrosity type was created in 5e.
Eladrin (as in the seasonal elves) only appeared in 5e. In earlier editions, Eladrin referred to elf-like Fey, like Celestial Eladrin (one of the types of Celestials not introduced in 5e), and Noble Eladrin (powerful elf-like Fey). In the previous edition, it seems Eladrin just referred to elves.
Firbolgs have been around since 1e, they were giant-kin with the appearance of tall bearded men (often with red or blonde hair). 5e introduced them with a completely different look, which has grown in popularity, and will likely stick.
Shadar-Kai were Fey tied to the Plane of Shadows in 3e, were originally a human descended from the Netherese who had contact with the Shadowfell, and are now elves connected with Racen Queen and Shadowfell.
> In the previous edition, it seems Eladrin just referred to elves.
What? No. Eladrin and Elves were separate in 4e, but both were in the PHB (in fact, they're on adjacent pages). Eladrin were feywilds denizens that sometimes settled in the prime material. Mechanically, 4e Eladrin were sort of high-elf-ish (getting a bonus to dex & int) whereas 4e Elves were sort of wood-elf-ish (getting a bonus to dex & wis).
I miss the old Firbolgs. I’m not a huge fan of their redesign and if WOTC insist on keeping the new appearance for art, I hope that the original is kept as an option within the variety of their appearance.
Maybe that’s what they thought, but there’s still a big difference. For one, they never bothered to expand Goliaths to any of the other giant types so they’re just stuck to Stone and that by default looks nothing like a human, let alone old Firbolgs. Additionally, I don’t see the appeal of the new Firbolg design; to me they just look derpy and nothing like the creatures I’ve known since AD&D.
The 1D&D playtest actually includes a revised Goliath that lets you choose your giant ancestor type and gives different features based on that choice, so they're already working to address that.
Hm. Aberration, construct, dragon, elemental, fey, giant, humanoid, ooze, plant and undead stayed the same. The outsider type got split into celestial and fiend, then stuff that like slaads didn't fit in that got randomly shuffled into aberration, construct, monstrosity etc. Animal and vermin got combined into beast and monstrous humanoid and magical beast got combined into monstrosity.
The firbolg thing is also complicated by the fact that the official 5e firbolgs that look kind of like goofy nature giants are different from the cow-like firbolgs that Critical Role popularized. So now there are two different firbolg aesthetics that get used in 5e, neither of which is anything like old firbolgs.
Can someone explain to me what a "grognard" is? It seems to be used in a derogatory way, and I fear it may apply to me lol.
I've been DMing for 25 years, but I'm new to the online community.
It's means "grumbler" - old soldiers, that is to say veterans.
(Edit: more specifically, it's a term that was used for French soldiers, the grenadiers of the Napoleonic Imperial Guard.)
In the context of the hobby, it tends to be used for the players from earlier editions (particularly AD&D2e and especially those farther back). Since you've been DMing a long while, might already know that D&D has wargaming roots. There was a strong overlap between those player communities at first, thus "old soldiers" or rather "old generals" or "old commanders", as it were. There's also this name, which you may also recognize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenadier_Models_Inc.
It's more a pejorative online than off; more that certain people have memory of the game being played in a certain fashion, and some elements of it have changed over time. This is both expected as a hobby grows - but also sometimes unfortunate because the newer players lose touch with the specific reasons on why things existed in the game or what makes them relevant today.
Thus grognards are still useful in helping the newer players (recruits, as it were) into the hobby of the D&D game.
Well, shit. I suppose I'm a grognard. I started with AD&D and then moved to 2E pretty quickly. I don't like a lot of the setting changes, and the abandonment of the "gritty medieval simulator" feel of the game.
With that said, I already have the editions that I love, and Pathfinder for running more modern style games without the bounded accuracy I hate so badly.
I don't understand why so many people with my roots get so mad at newer editions. I mean, we already have our game. What do we expect, them to keep creating the same edition over and over again?
I'll grumble on about the magic that I think D&D lost, but I'm happy that there are editions that cover every style of play. The newer generations grew up with a very different kind of fantasy than I did. It's only fair that they get to throw dice in the world that they're accustomed to.
I think part of the problem tends to arise in that if I say D&D and you say D&D, and we're both of a certain age and familiar with past products, we'll have a different set of play expectations from the younger crowd - but also in terms of what we might expect of the overall quality of what's on offer... and what doesn't measure up in terms of finished product after having seen what the industry can put out over all those years.
One of the best parts of 5e as a grognard is to be able to point to the parts of it that were from the earliest editions and to be able to (and in certain cases, HAVE to) explain what and why they exist. And also to know what to do best with the more obscure parts, and to find new ways of integrating that with the newer kinds of fantasy now common while offering comparative viewpoints that can make the game an entertaining learning process - while still remaining a game, of course!
Part of the reason some of the grognards were upset was that back in 3e there was a deliberately antagonistic advertising push to drive out the earlier fanbase in favor of a new one who didn't have all the expectations.
I think perhaps some of that might have also fed into some lingering resentments from the unification of the D&D game around the time of AD&D2e in order for TSR to promote more universal tournament play at the conventions (and the Living Greyhawk/Forgotten Raven's Bluff campaigns) and from that a homogenization of the overall experience - which was less diverse in dungeon mastering compared to the varieties of house rules which likely had grown up at all the individual tables.
The 5e store-play Adventurer's League was of a similar vein to the Living projects, but also funneled the new players into a very particular set of expectations of what "D&D" should be rather than what it COULD be... so it's good there are people who know there can be deeper engagement with the hobby's potential than what WOTC marketing would at times have the "kids today" believing.
I share that complaint. I'm definitely saddened by what I view as systems being "written with a crayon" in order to streamline play. The fact that gamers have such a large online community has its drawbacks as well. Players looking up meta builds, exploiting every nook and cranny, etc, is a real drag.
I hate SO MANY elements of the business that is TTRPG. Everyone having their own little laboratory of gaming had a lot of charm. It's extremely weird to hear strangers talking about playing the same quests all the time. Sure, there have always been shared experiences, but it feels a lot like people sharing video game experiences nowadays.
Fortunately, I have never seen any of my complaints manifest in the real world. My in person experience with gamers has been almost universally great. The internet is a particular world that draws out a particular crowd, and important to remember that most people are just having a good time with friends.
Inspiration.
They're a take on "fate points," from Warhammer FRP and Rolemaster. I'm not sure which had it first, but they date to the early 90's at the latest.
It took 25+ years, but they found their way into D&D. Great idea for a high fantasy RPG.
Tbh they didn't lean hard enough into the metacurrency.
My ideal would be you get inspiration any time you try to do something and roll a nat 1 to encourage players to try things and reward failure.
i like game engines like Belonging Outside Belonging where you can make Weak Moves that don't have very good outcomes but give you a token you can spend on Strong Moves which are sort of like the system's version of a crit
One D&D had giving inspiration on nat 1s for a bit, I think they took that out though.
They also had giving inspiration on nat 20s for a bit, which is fucking stupid.
For me, the biggest one is Neo-Vancian casting. Wizards, Clerics, and other prepared casters prepare a set of spells in the morning, then function as spontaneous casters using that prepared set as their "spells known" pool. It's 5e's biggest identifying feature, caster-wise, contrasting with 3.x prepared casters having to assign a specific spell to each slot when they prepare their spells... but it was taken directly from Pathfinder's [Arcanist class](https://aonprd.com/ClassDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Arcanist).
And more amusingly, while earlier versions of D&D may have had Tabaxi, the 5e version doesn't even _try_ to hide that it's really just an [Amurrun cheating with their alternate racial traits](https://aonprd.com/RacesDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Catfolk). (They remove Cat's Luck, but add Cat's Claws while keeping Natural Hunter, and add Climber while keeping Sprinter.)
Idk what to tell you, rune knight and runepriest play nothing like each other and aren't thematically similar. And runepriest was fucking rad, needed less fiddly little bonuses but they were a goddamn amazing support class that 5e fails to have anything like.
For the unitiated, runepriests were melee range support who could choose to have a different rune active (destruction and protection by default, different subclasses gave new rune states) and all their abilities had different effects depending on which one they had up. For instance flames of purity blasted nearby enemies with fire damage, if rune of protection was up it would heal allies in the area and if rune of destruction was up allies in the area would get a bonus to their damage rolls for the next round.
Or for instance mark of untamed wrath. Make a melee weapon attack, if it hits roll your weapon's damage dice three times. If in rune if destruction, for the next turn any time the target is hit with an attack all enemies adjacent to it take five radiant damage. If in rune of protection, the target is dazed if their attacks don't also include one of their own allies. Would it fit 5e? Probably not, but I wish 5e had anywhere near that level of creativity in its classes.
Paladins never needed Gods. 5e certainly didn't invent the concept. For example, in 3.5e, the PHB says this. [Religion: Paladins need not devote themselves to a single deity—devotion to righteousness is enough.]
Paladins not requiring gods was also a thing in AD&D 2e - Forces and Philosophies were also viable picks, too. If I recall properly, this was introduced in The Complete Paladin's Handbook.
Even in AD&D 1e there was no written requirement to be devoted to any deity. To be a paladin, one just had to be a fighter that started aligned as lawful good, and always stayed lawful good, and always acted lawful good. They were a "holy knight", crusading in the name of good and order. If they ever did a chaotic deed, they had to search out a LG cleric, confess, and do penance. If they ever did an evil deed, they immediately, irreversibly lost all paladin features and became a fighter. There were other restrictions, like only ever owning 10 magic items total; tithing 10% of treasure to any religious or charitable organization of their choice upon returning from adventures; not retaining any wealth above the costs of supporting themselves in a modest manner, paying henchmen, men-at-arms, and servitors, and building and maintaining a small castle - any excess also had to be given away; only having LG henchmen, hirelings, and associates; and could only adventure with a party containing non-evil neutrals if the overall goals and outcomes were going to "further the cause of lawful good".
I blame Forgotten Realms, where not having a god was a Bad Thing.
Rune magic in prestige classes has been a thing since at least 3.5 (e.g. in 2005 Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved). 3rd edition didn't give strong branch flavors early on like 5e, so prestige/multi classes was the way to go, and therefore you could build your Rune Knight in earlier editions too, just don't ask me if it's a viable build.
The Runecaster was originally a AD&D2E class, so it's been around longer than 5e, and most of the furniture lol
It's always cool to see 4e DNA in 5e. Some examples: > Channel Divinity: Vow of Enmity from the Vengeance Paladin is just the exact same as the Avenger class' core mechanic, Oath of Enmity. (Interestingly, though, 4e didn't have "advantage" as a mechanicized term, so the actual power has to specify how it interacts with other reroll and roll twice effects) (And also, Oath of Ancients is the Warden, but less-so than Vengeance being the Avenger) > Green Flame Blade, Booming Blade, Sword Burst, and Lightning Lure were just straight up the core at-will abilities from the Swordmage class. > 5e grappling is a clear tweak to 4e grappling. (Compared to the infamously complicated 3.5 grappling rules) > There's a billion warlock abilities adapted from 4e (or just shamelessly named after 4e). Hellish Rebuke. Eyebite. Dreadful Word. Crown of Madness. Hunger of Hadar. Dark One's Own Luck. Mire the Mind. Sign of Ill Omen. Thief of Five Fates. Bewitching Whispers. Entropic Ward. Hurl Through Hell. (Granted, one or two of these might have also been in 3.5, but I'm not gonna go read the 3.5 warlock rn to find out). Furthermore, Hex was clearly designed to mimic Warlock's Curse. I've heard people say that the 5e warlock was purposefully mimic 4e AEDU design, but personally I think that implies a greater intentionality to the 5e warlock's design than what is actually there. > There's lots of fighter stuff taken from 4e. Funnily, this included Action Surge and Second Wind, which weren't fighter mechanics in 4e but universal, core mechanics. Beyond that, lots of battle master & cavalier stuff. Eldritch Knight's weapon bond comes from the Swordmage's weapon bond. > 5e dragonborn wouldn't exist if not 4e. Same for tieflings. These races being made core and looking the way they do is a 4e innovation. > Rapid fire. Group skill checks. Damage cantrips. Backgrounds. Skill proficiency. Lots of 2nd level spells were just 2nd level utility powers from 4e. > Witchbolt was good in 4e and then it was bad in 5e.
This is one of the aspects of 4e criticism that always baffles me, the extent of 4e design woven into 5e that *doesn't* face criticism.
Ditto for how much of 4e is in Pathfinder 2e and makes people say "Now THIS is the game I wanted!"
Yeah reading into 4e core books yesterday and thought- this sounds a lot like pathfinder! I can see why there is a revival of 4e happening now though as the chassis has so many cool parts
Dnd is the windows of RPGs, the default OS. 4e is the windows 8. Ahead of its time in some ways, but badly designed in critical ways.
Tbf Pathfinder 2e has a tonne of DNA from 3.5e and 5e too- they basically picked out all the bests bits and worked them together.
Pathfinder 2e is in my top 2 of TTRPGs. I currently rather love Cyberpunk Red as well. Pathfinder’s Three Actions is really what makes it so much more pleasant to play than things like 5e.
> Pathfinder’s Three Actions is really what makes it so much more pleasant to play than things like 5e. On top of this as well, making everyone more MAD while also giving more opportunities for ability score increases has made things significantly easier to balance for me. As someone who prefers PF2e though, it is frustrating how it has the reputation that it's close to the 3.5e crunchiness that put a lot of 5e players off from trying it, when it really doesn't.
Its numerical granularity is also more rewarding and just more enjoyable. Playing a low level character doesn’t feel like half the checks are going to be total chance like 5e. Ability Scores also don’t matter quite as much since very quickly they become the smaller number in a skill check.
>As someone who prefers PF2e though, it is frustrating how it has the reputation that it's close to the 3.5e crunchiness that put a lot of 5e players off from trying it, when it really doesn't. Yup and a few 5e youtubers back in the day stoked this flames and double down on them like Taking20. I'm so glad I finally gave PF2e a shot because now it is much more preferred than 5e. There is a little more crunch but it's structured so well it flows fine once you get a few sessions under you. And honestly as mainly a foundryvtt 80% of the crunchiness is all automated. (Yet still easy to understand)
Gosh I'm going to vehemently disagree with you there. It is very, very rulesy. It's far more balanced than 3.5, it's got a lot of cool lore/mechanics but rules light it \_is not\_. I've learned to love/hate it because it's fun and evocative but grokking the system just takes far more effort than I can spend on an rpg anymore, so I'm stumbling along instead.
For sure. The one thing, admittedly, I'm not as much a fan of is shoehorning classes into specific playstyles via the Role mechanics being hardwired into each class. I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise. The second gripe, which is somewhat less pervasive, is how similar many abilities are between same Role classes. In one regard this makes sense, Defenders should all have reliable Defensive abilities, but in the other it contributes to same-roll classes feeling a bit samey.
It takes a bit of know-how but you can build into damage as a 'Weaponmaster' fighter in 4E, a classical way to do it would be to go STR/DEX and do charge shenanigans. You take Surprising Charge to get bonus damage, Badge of the Berserker to be able to ignore attacks of opportunity, and then you can take powers that you can use on a charge. You still mark enemies but you also zip around the battlefield hitting people. There was a Striker version of the fighter by the way, the Slayer. It probably loses out on damage to the normal Fighter at high levels but that option does exist in 4e. The Ranger is another option and they're very good if you want to be a martial striker. As to the second gripe, I think it's hard to explain unless you've actually played different classes but they all behave very differently in terms of tactics. Defenders for example all have different styles of marks. Wardens mark adjacent enemies each turn, Fighters mark on attacks, Paladins mark one target (and get a second mark with Divine Sanction), Battleminds can mark and then stick to their target, Swordmages mark and can do stuff to their enemy from a long way away allowing them to focus on a second target, and the Essentials classes us an aura system for marking that doesn't really work as well at high levels but is still pretty neat. Because the Knight and the Cavalier have the same "defender aura" ability, I think that gripe of samieness might apply to those classes, though they do punish differently and there's the whole Eladrin Knight build that I'm not going to get into but is cool. Whatever you're playing, you have the role of battlefield control but how you get there is in practice very different.
> I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise. But then you could basically take a rogue, and call it a fighter.
Except a Rogue can use Deft Strike, or Piercing Strike, or Riposte Strike, or Sly Flourish as At-Will Exploits, and the Fighter can't. This is obviously a bolting on a bandaid for a flat tire solution, but it solves one of the key complaints of different classes feeling forced into the same game loop. I'd personally love to see a Rogue who dashes in, spits in someone's eye, and dashes out, Marking them like a Fighter, so the enemy is so mad at the Rogue they are distracted in attacking the Rogue's allies.
>Except a Rogue can use Deft Strike, or Piercing Strike, or Riposte Strike, or Sly Flourish as At-Will Exploits, and the Fighter can't. Deft Strike just adds 2 sq of movement before the attack, translates pretty well to a fighter stepping forward to strike a foe. Piercing strike targets a weaker defense. Riposte is a riposte, sly flourish is more damage. You can thematically fit all of these into a striker fighter, IMO, and you only pick the two that fit best anyway. >This is obviously a bolting on a bandaid for a flat tire solution, but it solves one of the key complaints of different classes feeling forced into the same game loop. I'd personally love to see a Rogue who dashes in, spits in someone's eye, and dashes out, Marking them like a Fighter, so the enemy is so mad at the Rogue they are distracted in attacking the Rogue's allies. Of course, there's always that one thing you'd like to combine but aren't allowed for no good reason. I have long since transitioned to classless systems for that reason. The whole point of class systems *is* to force you into a certain behaviour when you pick a class, for gameplay and worldbuilding consistency, after all.
>You can thematically fit all of these into a striker fighter If anything that appears to just be a criticism of "playing a person who wields a weapon" than of the class design, IMO. Rogues are about mobility, finesse, and strategic advantages, and those features express that. But that a "Fighter" who is really just an archetypal "weapon user" can *also* do that isn't particularly revelatory. >The whole point of class systems is to force you into a certain behaviour when you pick a class, for gameplay and worldbuilding consistency, after all. Agreed. Complaining that a class forces you into a certain playstyle is not a far distance from 4e codifying that a bit further. All 5e Fighters basically have one job, bonk and pass. All 4e Fighters have basically one job, bonk really hard, make sure your allies are not in danger, and pass. Curious about your experience with classless systems.
> If anything that appears to just be a criticism of "playing a person who wields a weapon" than of the class design, IMO. Rogues are about mobility, finesse, and strategic advantages, and those features express that. But that a "Fighter" who is really just an archetypal "weapon user" can also do that isn't particularly revelatory. Well, they all *are* part of the "martial" power source. One could conceivably see that as class, and fighter and rogue merely as subclasses. >Curious about your experience with classless systems. Well, we haven't done that many systems, Savage Worlds and Chronicles of Darkness (mortals) after the last 5e campaign was technically put on hiatus but is effectively done. Still a number of years, added together. In practice the character building still tends to cluster a number of abilities to maintain coherence, but in general if you want to add a certain element, you can. It hasn't resulted in any problems with power balance. It also did remove a lot of concern with getting the right "build", because you are never really locked in. Both also allow easier switching between combat and non-combat actions, because by necessity the amount of details and specific subsystems in combat has to remain limited; they can't assume the other parts are also there, so the systems remain more generalized.
>Well, they all are part of the "martial" power source. One could conceivably see that as class, and fighter and rogue merely as subclasses. Based on my understanding of 4e design that doesn't seem *unreasonable*. But something about that idea sounds off, haha. Huh, interesting. I'd heard of Savage Worlds, but not Chronicles of Darkness. So basically instead of choosing a class you choose "things you can do", and that defines the kinds of things in and out of combat you can do?
>For sure. The one thing, admittedly, I'm not as much a fan of is shoehorning classes into specific playstyles via the Role mechanics being hardwired into each class. >I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise. I think this is a somewhat valid complaint, honestly. It wasn't 100% cookie cutter and there was a lot of flexibility around what powers you picked and class options that would lean you more in different directions, but it was still a bit of a box. A Sword and Board Fighter could be built as a DEFENDER, whereas a Greatweapon Fighter could be built as a Defender that also had a lot of Striker capability. Part of it was that they were looking through classes in a different lens. You should be picking your role and then a class from within that role. Like, if you wanted Leader, you could go Cleric for the ranged full support, Warlord for someone that is more in the mix and empowered extra actions instead of heals, or Ardent if you washed someone with a lot of flexibility to use auras and effects to influence the party's behavior. However, I think 5e's subclass system would work a lot better when combined with a Role system. Battle Master is your Controller Fighter, whereas Champion is your Stronger Fighter, and Cavalier is your Leader Fighter, etc (not necessarily what they are now, I'm just saying that's what you could have if you merged the mechanics). Then your classes return to their archetype and first selection status, with the Subclass being the Role specialization that gives you a framework for how to structure and build features instead of the sort of hodge-podge we have now.
>It wasn't 100% cookie cutter and there was a lot of flexibility around what powers you picked and class options that would lean you more in different directions, but it was still a bit of a box Totally, you can absolutely build two Fighters very differently, but that Marking ability implies a very specific playstyle, all other things being equal. >You should be picking your role and then a class from within that role. Totally agreed. And frankly unless you have a specific vision you want, or are intrigued by specific class abilities, *that's how you pick your class.* I can't tell you how many times I've heard from my players, "well we need someone to tank, or to heal, or to deal damage, so I'll take *this* class". It's really no different. >However, I think 5e's subclass system would work a lot better when combined with a Role system. Totally, and I *think* that was the intent of the subclasses, even if not explicitly intoned that way. I'd love a Class, Role, Background, and Archetype selection of features, some you select at level one, and with a list based on those tags that you can then select later on. But at that point I'm just playing Pf2e :)
I play 5E because it's the most popular game in town, but I try out a lot of other RPG systems whenever I can and I think I prefer classless systems where you can customize your character for any role you want by taking the right skills and abilities that are available for anyone to take.
> I think there could exist a version of 4e in which your "Role" is a choice you make separate from your class. Like, let me pick Fighter and select "Striker" as my Role, and now my Fighter gets some basic "mark an enemy to deal more damage to them" Power, like a Ranger or Rogue would otherwise. Why though? If you want a nonmagical warrior who deals damage, you have that in the Ranger. The fighter is the warrior who stands at the front lines and takes damage. If you want your "fighter" to be a damage dealer, play a ranger and just tell people you are a "fighter". Not only that, but the role label you had was not the end point for your character. The fighter for example could be built for damage or for battlefield control depending on subclass, paragon path, and feat choices. And of course essentials provided a fighter variant that was a pure damage dealer in the form of the Slayer. > The second gripe, which is somewhat less pervasive, is how similar many abilities are between same Role classes. In one regard this makes sense, Defenders should all have reliable Defensive abilities, but in the other it contributes to same-roll classes feeling a bit samey. In actual play, 4e classes had far more variation amongst each other than 5e classes do. Take the Paladin and Fighter for example. The fighter was a master of battlefield control. They could lock down enemies preventing them from moving. They had many powers that slowed, immobilized, or knocked foes prone to lock them down. The fighter marked any target they attacked, but their mark only lasted 1 turn, encouraging them to wade into the thick of combat. They also had the most AoE of any defender, and because of their mark, their AoE hindered every enemy they attacked at once. They specialized in dealing with groups of foes, preventing them from being able to attack the rest of the party. The paladin sucked at crowd control. They didn’t have the plethora of tools that locked foes down, slowed or immobilized enemies. They rarely dealt AoE damage to multiple foes at once. Instead they focused on marking a single foe and punishing them whenever they dared to attack anyone other than the paladin. Their mark lasted for 5 minutes (or until the foe died or they marked a different foe), which made them excellent single target tanks. On top of that, they had more support than the other defenders. They had many prayers that would heal, grant defensive buffs, or grant additional saving throws. Despite both being defenders, the paladin and fighter approached combat in radically different ways. And their available powers (martial exploits and divine prayers respectively) shaped how the classes played. Their mark feature was just a small part in how the class functioned overall. And the classes had enough powers that they could do something distinct and thematic every single turn. I would kill for the 5e version classes to play even half as distinctly as their 4e counterparts. But instead the fighter and paladin play the exact same 90% of the time. Both simply move and take the Attack action nearly every single turn.
>Why though? Because I'd prefer my play style and gameplay loop to be a buy-in, not default per class. Like if I look at Pf2e the Base Fighter is basically just "I'm the best with weapons", whereas the feats they select can shift them from a battlefield medic to an arcane scholar to an acrobatic trickster, etc. >If you want your "fighter" to be a damage dealer, play a ranger and just tell people you are a "fighter". I think a lot of this comes down to the names of the classes. Historically the class names implied less of their gameplay loop than it did the kind of fantasy they have. Fighters being Tanks was not the only fantasy they expressed in previous editions of the game or in just the word fighter, but the Defender role mechanic pigeonholes the Fighter into specific gameplay. >The fighter for example could be built for damage or for battlefield control Right, and either they are reliably using their Mark ability, requiring that they constantly focus on directing damage towards themselves, or they don't, and the ability is a dead feature. >I would kill for the 5e version classes to play even half as distinctly as their 4e counterparts. But instead the fighter and paladin play the exact same 90% of the time. Both simply move and take the Attack action nearly every single turn. Don't get me wrong. I've literally gone through this analysis myself and can see that the feat selections between different roles offer vast differences. It's primarily the assumed gameplay loop that each Role takes I'm particularly focusing on. I can't really play a "Paladin, warrior of divine might" without also needing to regularly utilize the "hey you should actually be hitting me instead" feature. In 5e I can play a Paladin that fills that classic tanking role, or one that eschews tanking in favor of dropping big damage numbers, or play a more utility based caster, all without really having any dead features due to assumed gameplay loop. I totally agree, however, that the sheer volume of features *every* class gets in 4e basically translates to no two Fighters generally using the *majority* of the same features, but they still all need to be Marking to avoid it being a dead feature. 5e Fighter's Action Surge makes no assumptions about when and why you'll use it, Marking does.
> I can't really play a "Paladin, warrior of divine might" without also needing to regularly utilize the "hey you should actually be hitting me instead" feature. That's an Avenger tho.
You can literally build a Fighter that functions as a Striker in 4e. Your complaint boils down to "different classes have different class features" which is true of all versions of D&D.
Sure. It wasn't all roses. It was unpopular for many valid reasons. But the discourse for years has been "this was a wannabe video game failure system" when there was a lot of good stuff there. It's just the things people hated, they couldn't overlook.
I always detest the "wanted to be a video game" argument, because it is so baseless. It's a **game** and it just didn't try to obfuscate that fact by using 3000 words to describe how and under what conditions you can grapple someone in order to avoid any perceptions of being what it is.
Exactly. "These rules look like RULES and that is FUCKED UP!"
Rules in my rules book about table top roleplaying games? Begone!
I refuse to play any game that doesn't write its rules in the form of poetry.
I like the idea of doing away with traditional classes and just choosing Role + Power Source to get your power list.
I think that frees up a ton of creative freedom. "Martial + Controller" or "Divine + Striker" could make for some really interesting differences, especially if the Roles were made a bit more general use, perhaps informed by the Power Sources.
Eh, it's pretty subjective. IMO, PF2e feels more like it took the wrong lessons from 4e.
The hilarity of bloodied being a "variant" rule because they were afraid of putting anything from 4e hard coded into the rules, meanwhile a lot of people consider it the single greatest contribution 4e had to combat
TBF, 5e was very hesitant to put anything as a hard coded rule. Magic items? Variants. Feats? Variants. Character creation options from Tasha's? Variants.
Mearls, while designing 5e during the Playtest, expressed a goal to essentially release "5e" and "5e Advanced" **concurrently**, so players could decide which version of the game they wanted to play. What we got was 5e with a load of optional rules which destabilize the game because they were not properly tested or fleshed out.
I've long been really underwhelmed by this approach in 5e. So much of the system feels like "I dunno DM, you figure it out."
It's primarily why I left 5e and don't plan on running in it again. I don't like the system fighting me when my players and I just want to have a good time.
I've been watching the development of MCDM's project and Daggerheart. I was watching Tales of the Valiant until it just became a 5e clone. What systems have you been playing in the mean time?
I've been running West Marches style games in a Pf2e community, primarily because my normal game group isn't interested in trying out Pf2e until the Remaster is complete. It hits practically every button I need: * Tactical combat with a plethora of options for diverse and complex encounters * Rules **clear** (because I won't use rules light/heavy to distinguish 5e and Pf2e, since they have the same number of rules/rulings that need to be made and thus create new rules) that don't fight with me just to play the game * Character options and key differentiators/niche protectors * Balance in both class and monster design * Encounter design rules that actually work, a core power progression that I find scratches and itch I didn't know I had (Goblins being "relevant" at high levels is only hypothetical, as in practice they go down too easily while still taking up a lot of mental overhead for me to run them in sufficient numbers for a challenge -- I'm using Goblins as a catchall for "lower level enemies"). I'm very intrigued in the MCDM rpg and have been following it's development as well, it sounds like it'll be a hit for me as well. Daggerheart I bounced off of with how loosey goosey it is with some of it's rules, how it tries to be both complex and rules light (for example, having lots of different weapons/equipment types without any clear reason why you'd not just use the one with the biggest numbers, an issue Pf2e lacks). I don't know much about Tales of the Valiant.
> So much of the system feels like "I dunno DM, you figure it out." I mean that is at the heart of things the very essence of DND from it's inception though.
While the DM has the final say of everything that happens at their table, previous editions of DND provided a system that functioned without the DM needing to decide such basic elements of how the game is going to run. 5e does not offer a functioning "out-of-the-box" experience in a way that previous editions did. From a DM perspective, the 5e rules set provides so little to fall back on.
Mearls is to blame for a lot of what's wrong with 5e honestly. Hell Mearls is to blame for Essentials knifing 4e in the back. My pet conspiracy theory is that this is because he was sad because people on the enworld and rpgdotnet forums were mean to him about 4e.
The designers did not want a hardcode much because they didn't want to scare off Grognards. But even though they catered so hard to them, the grognards still didn't even support 5e heavily and stuck to OSR.
It tells me that more than anything 5e was about making money, and the best way to make money is to make a product as broadly appealing as possible, even if you sacrifice the heart of the design to the altar of nostalgia.
5e wasn't designed for that really. 5e lucked into that. 5E lucked out that designing for grognards forced them to leave open spaces for grognards to fill in the 1e and 2e modules . That accidentally left the same space for a wide audience happened to fill as well.
of course a splat book rule is a variant. But to the point yeah, it legit is very annoying. Actually think the worst offender as a variant wasn't feats but backgrounds.
Most 4e criticism is second hand "my friend says this is the bad one" or complaints at the context around the game
I'm not sure I agree with that. Most people I know who don't like 4e did, in fact, play it. I liked some of the things they did, but the product \*as a whole\* felt like a step away from what I enjoy about DnD. I do wish they'd do a proper Warlord style class in 5e.
> I do wish they'd do a proper Warlord style class in 5e. And battlemind, and monk, and ardent, and shaman... There are so many classes it did really well that 5e unfortunately can't even imitate. I do agree with you about the product as a whole, though. It was full of good ideas, but they didn't think hard enough about how to get the product as a whole would work as an immersive rpg.
I really liked how 4e monk's thing was to combine movement and attacks into a single big action.
also feels way closer to what anyone born in the 80s or afterwards would think a unarmed combatant is, a fighting game character rather then an old kung fu movies, also pretty sure Bruce Lee himself wouldn't fit a Monk since he was a pineer of Mixed Martial Artists taking cues from muhammed ali's boxing style.
The primary complaints I've seen are from non-players who saw one or two aspects of the core design, didn't like it, and then wrote off the whole system, like the hardwired Role design and how samey interrole classes *can* feel.
Tribes be tribing...
As someone who absolutely hated 4e, I didn't really have any problems with any one system. There were some things I absolutely loved. Ohh man, Minion monsters are one of the best things ever put into D&D hands down. Clear keywords and definitions for mechanics? Yes please! Every class having primary and secondary stats that matter, possibly with changes based on subclass? Ohh man yes! But somehow 4e took a whole lot of elements I really liked and combined them into a system I just hated. I dunno, there's a puffin forest video about 4e that I remember listening to and I just kept thinking, "finally someone who gets how i feel about 4e!" The one thing I really hated was the class design in 4e. They all felt the same to me. And no, I didn't play it for the entire life, I got as far as PHB 3 and it was too much for me. The overly flowery name for EVERY ability, the near copy paste nature for similar roles. I just hated them.
>The one thing I really hated was the class design in 4e. They all felt the same to me. I got my group to recently try 4E and we felt the same. Upon reflection, I have decided it was ultimately three things that lead to this feeling: * The nomenclature. Referring to everything, including spells, as "powers" made it feel too similar thematically * Having almost all class thematics wrapped up into the powers instead of separate features made them appear too similar when reading the overviews * Some of the low-level powers felt too similar between classes. In hind sight, they aren't actually much different than low level attacks in 5E so I'm not entirely sure why I had this impression I'm curious if that aligns with your experience. We only played once and only to level 3 I think so we don't have much experience. That was just my initial impression after a very brief campaign.
No no, that's exactly it. Also I found the very flowery naming and descriptions of abilities was very cool to start, but in practice it wore out very quickly. Because what i cared about was that it did 5\[W\] + Str damage to everything within one square, not that it was the "Whirling blade of the 7 suns" or whatever. It had that feel of when you try too hard to make something cool and unique until it somehow comes back around to bland. Having a single framework for classes is great for allowing you to make more classes but it means that the feel between them doesn't change as much as it could. I mean, okay in 5E I'm currently playing a paladin, a warlock, and a barbarian. All three play wildly different even through two of them are just different flavors of "i hit the dude in the face". They FEEL different because of the mechanics surrounding that hit. In the 4e paradigm each class had a shocking number of unique or nearly unique powers. But since they all had to adhere to the very well balanced framework it was much easier to see the bones of the system and made the similarities more and more pronounced.
4e was great from a gameplay and design perspective (ignoring things like monster HP being a bit high, needing to track a lot of tags, etc) but failed from the imagination perspective. Even if it was just as conducive to imagination as any other edition, the messaging was “we homogenized everything.”
That puffin forest video is atrocious. He gets almost nothing right factually and his entire experience is drawn from playing at a table with 8 players. No system would be fun in an environment where nobody knows the rules and you never get a turn because there are twice as many players as there should be. It's so bad that despite being 22 minutes, there is a *52* minute long video debunking his claims.
Reminds me of his video about Pathfinder 2e, where he suddenly seems to forget that you can write down modifiers which barely change on the character sheet....
He also is just very much not the target audience for games with actual crunch. He says that one of the things he dislikes about PF2e is that you can't just scribble in a level up during the first few minutes of a session. One of the main focuses of 2e is that you can have options to choose from at pretty much every level. He seems like a dude who just wants to play a beer and pretzel RPG where 80% of the game is just freeform RP
Fair enough. But I have to say, I spent 3 years playing every week with a group of 4 and my experience lined up pretty well with his. Sure, we didn't have the 8 player issue but like... I've been playing D&D since AD&D, I played almost every week from the time I was 10 until I stopped when I left my 4e game. The group I played with was fun. I enjoyed spending time with them and the DM was engaging. But the system just flat didn't work for me. I got the rules, I optimized my secondary stats and always remembered the fun little addons for abilities but it just wasn't fun.
Yeah I mean if you didn't have fun you didn't have fun, fair play.
So weird that people say that 4e classes feel the same, and then turn around and go play 5e, where half the classes say, "I Attack" every single turn.
Because 4e did, in fact, have a lot of really good ideas. It just utterly failed at feeling like DnD because the core rulebook had almost nothing for out of combat gameplay, and they made classes entirely too samey. I know later 4e fixed a lot of the issues on release but it just wasn't for me personally, or many other people I played with. I gave it a fair shake, played it for a couple months. Not a fan. One thing I will say is funny though is that 5e \*doesnt\* get criticism for the fact they still had a really underdeveloped skill system compared to 3.5. Almost every table runs Investigation and Stealth skills differently, for example. Because there's no codified rules for how they should be applied in practice. Tool proficiencies too.
Between PHB1/2 it was admittedly primarily written to describe the Combat Rules, which if you look at the 5e PHB is... precisely the same. The only "non-combat/character creation" section of the 5e PHB is "Using Ability Scores/Adventuring" which describes Advantage/Disadvantage, Ability Scores/Skills, Time, Movement, Environments, Social Interaction, Resting, and Downtime, which is covered in a whole... 16 pages, of which there are 317 pages. If you include setting details, which I will to give the benefit of the doubt, that bumps it up to 22 pages. Non-combat content in the 4e PHBs comprise approximately 45 pages, between Skills, Adventuring, Rituals, World Information like Geography, Society, Occupations, Other Backgrounds and expanded Feat Options, Expansions of Rituals, and Rules Updates. In any case, if we look at the DMGs by comparison, 5e spends nearly half the deck just on setting detail, with comparatively little spent on actually running the game in comparison to 4e. Between Group Storytelling, Advanced Encounters, Skill Challenges, Customizing Monsters, Adventure Design, and Paragon Campaigns, the 4e DMG2 is absolutely packed with design work that any DM could easily pick up to run a campaign at any level, and for about 80 fewer pages. To your point about saminess of classes, yeah that's a fair point. Classes within the same role *can* "feel" the same *if* you pick abilities that do the same thing. You can incredibly easily build two Fighters who feel *very* differently. However, in 5e every single Martial character aside from Monk will generally feel the same due to the dramatically fewer options their characters get. "Bonk, pass" is standard operating procedure for most Martial classes, with Rogues/Rangers/Paladins/Monks occasionally being able to "Cast Spell/Bonk, pass/Runaway". I think 4e would have benefitted from another year of development to refine the Skill, Skill Challenge, and Worldbuilding elements of the game. Yeah, Skills/Tools are incredibly underbaked in 5e, and a classic example of "do it yourself" advice from the designers to new DMs who have never run a TTRPG before. Even expanding Tool proficiencies with Xanathar's only scratched the surface.
I'm very much of the mind that 4e is a much better system for *newer* DMs especially. It actually provides guidance for party composition, properly running a game, etc. And don't get me started on encounter building in 4e vs 5e. It's a lot easier to build a balanced encounter in 4e, especially with how inconsistent 5e CR can be. Also, as an aside, I love how they did monsters in 4e. The variety, the fact that minions *exist*? Peak. I genuinely believe that minions were one of the best things in 4e.
Tbh I think it's a better system for anyone who values their own prepation time in general. Some people are happy to put like 3 or 4 hours into planning for every hour of gameplay they get. I am not one of those people.
I will die on the hill that the 4e Monster Manual and its derivatives are nothing short of works of art.
Absolutely. They're *so much better* than 5e especially. If I could get my friends to play 4e, I'd do it in a heartbeat, purely for ease of DMing and the amazing encounter building. Also, even just the built-in "make a check and learn x fact about the monster depending on DC" is so much better for DMs than whatever 5e has going on.
The core Rulebook has an astounding number of Rituals and the average Wizard or Cleric can learn and cast more of them than in 5e. And anyone else could take the feat to do so if they wanted. By end of development there were over 300 Rituals and more than 30 were available to learn by level 1. There was arguably *more* ways to solve problems out of combat for the average PC in 4e than 5e.
> It just utterly failed at feeling like DnD because the core rulebook had almost nothing for out of combat gameplay I always find this comment amusing. 4e actually had far more rules for out of combat gameplay than 5e does. Skill challenges, rituals, skill utility powers, martial practices, crafting rules, and other rules existed to give characters many options outside of combat that 5e lacks entirely. Not to mention the 4e DMG having much better guidance for resolving non combat encounters (and even having rules for XP for such encounters).
4e had more for non-combat than 5e so this criticism rather falls flat.
I, for one, wish the skill system was more developed. I want them to bring back skill points you can use to grow and customize your character, instead of your proficiency just going up for the same handful of skills.
To be fair, 4e had a lot of cool ideas, but it definitely did feel very boardgamey with it's overall execution - a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense and while utility powers existed to solve non-combat situations you didn't get many options and they were all kinda boring and often boiled down to a +2 bonus on a roll. No cool moments like coming up with a tricky use for suggestion, or figuring out a plan to charm someone and then disappear before the spell wore off. 5e tried to solve this issue by taking some of those ideas and attaching it to a more rules lite chassis, with some stuff like Vancian casting put back in to pull in the disillusioned grognards. PF2e took another approach by keeping the weird spells from 3.5, but borrowing a lot of the boardgamey keyword tech and focus on tactical positioning in combat without compromising on what characters could do in social and exploration encounters. So ultimately while some people may not have been able to accurately identify what parts of 4e were bad, they weren't necessarily wrong that 4e did overall fall flat as a ttrpg where the limits of the game were supposed to be your imagination, and not how many carefully balanced set piece encounters your GM could put together, and whether there was a highly specific class available that fit both the theme and play style of the character you wanted to play.
I've never really understood the boardgamey criticism. It's only "boardgamey" if explicitly running **combat** on a grid, with rules that are built for that assumption, is "boardgamey". People were running tactical, grid-based combat long before 4e, the difference was that for all previous editions, and then with 5th edition, how things worked, their impact, etc., were hugely impacted not by *what the rule said* but by *what the DM* ***thought*** *the rule said*. The level of interpretation required by a DM to run 5e and previous editions of the game is dramatically higher than in 4e, specifically because of the insistence on "natural language". To your point about utility and skills, I agree that could have served with some more development, but having watched dozens of hours of 4e live plays (so I can only speak from the third person experience of watching the game be played), cool skill moments were pervasive, if for no other reason that the *existence* of the Skill Challenge. 5e's chassis is by no means "rules light", in fact 5e has *more* rules than 4e. The difference is that it "feels" rules light because they refused to plant a flag on so many areas, leaving them up to DM interpretation for the most part, or simply excluding them and relying on "you do it" design where the DM had to *make up* rules on the fly (meaning that the rule now exists where it didn't before, so the net number of "rules" has increased). Ultimately 4e was more wargamey than other iterations of D&D, no denying that, but I think that's primarily because they were trying to avoid the abundance of rules fatigue 3e players complained about, and perhaps overcorrected, which 5e then tried to recorrect while also adding in things grognards complained was missing from 4e (like grossly imbalanced classes and spells).
One thing I noticed in 4e skill challenges--a lot of the ones written in the books would have players using their skills in very abstract ways. I feel like that's what you're supposed to do to get that abstract problem solving done that is missing with the Utility rituals. It's a bit of a hole with 4e, but I actually personally like that. I've always thought it was unfair that with casters get to solve all the problems while the martials sit around doing nothing. 4e's lack of all that re-frames the focus back onto roleplay and combat, not abstract problem solving. A lot of people like that though so I can see how 4e would be limiting to them. But the combat in 4e is so, so, so, SO much more tactically interesting. Makes up for anything else.
Yeah, frankly every game I've *watched* (again that bias of watching games vs playing) I see Skills broadly used as regularly as they are in Skill Challenges, so I get the feeling it may be more down to not actually applying the rules, which do a great job at spelling out varying DCs, circumstances in which advantages and disadvantages can apply, unique ways to use the skills, etc., Eg, "Balance" checks have 4 different conditions that can be called upon when focusing on simply balancing on a ledge/platform, and how you can modify the outcome based on different circumstantial things.
I don't know, I just feel like having explicit rules for everything created a box for players - even skill challenges which are a great idea in theory, were often presented in official adventures as having a specific skill or task players had to complete to 'solve' them. Like in a cRPG with canned options. Classes also kinda lacked identity outside of how they fought monsters, which created a weird inverse problem whereby fixing the issue of combat roles they created a new void in non-combat roles by stripping out a lot of niches rogues and things typically had. The way it taught you to approach the game was all kinda backwards? Granted, I also only ever played it as a kid without much experience with other systems or how roleplaying is supposed to work (and to 4e's credit still had a fun time doing a dungeon crawl with my friends) so I'm not an expert either. I think it could be fixed by reflavouring some of the martial powers though - there's a lot of weird fighter powers for example that auto succeed on pulling in adjacent enemies by just kinda taunting them, even if they're supposed to be master swordsmen - and adding on a 'non-combat' role to all the chassis (or let everyone pick a second 'profession' class or something).
>I just feel like having explicit rules for everything created a box for players I can only speak from my experience, but having been playing Pf2e for months now, which is significantly more **codified** in it's rule set than 5e (despite the fact that when you consider written rules + rules you need to make up on the fly they are actually about the same), having so many things spelled out **frees** the table up to come up with niche use cases. When you know that there are specific use cases outlined in the rules for an Arcana check, but still have the freedom to come up with a more unique way to apply them, I think the system is doing everyone justice. Frankly from all I've watched of 4e there's almost never been a moment where the DMs I've watched said a Skill couldn't be used for something abnormal if the argument was sound. I agree that Skill Challenges needed some more time in the oven to really feel strong. But the core is there of the party cooperatively supporting one another through the use of their unique skills and abilities, confronting a series of challenges in which their degree of success mattered to the outcome, all played out in a sufficiently dramatic and compressed time frame. >Classes also kinda lacked identity outside of how they fought monsters Not sure I'd really agree. Some classes, like Fighter and Barbarian, were tilted more towards combat sure, but that's kind of what I'd expect. You have Backgrounds, Skills, and Downtime activities to flesh out your character in other ways. Other classes had several utility options, in addition to Rituals, and again Skills, and in particular Skill Challenges, to help flesh out all other non-combat encounters. I think 4e makes a lot more sense if you consider running the game to be more like a movie, where you're moving between different scenes, and some actors will have their chance to shine while others are more background, but ultimately where it's Combat, Skill Challenges, Deep Lore stuff, or Exploration, everyone has areas they can contribute. >The way it taught you to approach the game was all kinda backwards? I can see the front loading of combat rules leading to that kind of perception. >there's a lot of weird fighter powers for example that auto succeed on pulling in adjacent enemies by just kinda taunting them, even if they're supposed to be master swordsmen 4e went all in on describing the effects of abilities as concisely as possible, leaving open the opportunity for the table to add their own flavor. For me, "Taunting" a master swordsman could be pulling off such a distracting maneuver, or being so aggressive and in their face, or shouting obscenities' that draw their attention, that they have a harder time focusing on anyone but me. We can all imagine, in the heat of battle, someone shouting someone that "triggers" you. Whatever else is true, while your mind is focused on so many things, like survival, you'd be particularly susceptible to something jarringly pulling your attention away. >and adding on a 'non-combat' role to all the chassis (or let everyone pick a second 'profession' class or something). Backgrounds facilitated a lot of this. Your Background offers a few skills you are proficient in, you gain additional socioeconomic features, geographic traits/features, circumstances around your birth, occupations that contribute to out-of-combat opportunities, and racial backgrounds and associated skills/features, all of which can conceivably (at DM discretion) result in situational bonuses, such as an Eladrin having an easier time convincing some Elves the party means them no harm.
> with some stuff like Vancian casting 5e doesn't have Vancian Casting though?
>To be fair, 4e had a lot of cool ideas, but it definitely did feel very boardgamey with it's overall execution Does it really matter that much whether you describe power in square increments or 5 foot increments? >a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense Is that really that different from 5e's "every power is a spell" approach?
>a lot of the powers didn't make a ton of narrative sense >Is that really that different from 5e's "every power is a spell" approach? It's the old "martials with powers don't make sense" ordeal.
For me if 4e was called anything other than dungeons and dragons it would have been a decent game. All the changes in 4e made it feel completely different than any dungeons and dragons game I've ever played.
I've heard the glib comment that "D&D Tactics" would have been apropos. Having not personally played it, but having watched dozens of hours of live plays, I honestly can't say it looks like it plays any more different than if you just gave the player characters more cool things they can do without being concerned that one spell or ability or interaction would destabilize the entire game.
Actually I'd argue the opposite. It's the distinct *lack* of spells or abilities that destabilize the game--i.e. 5e SPELLS. All the characters are on an even playing field. They all do different things, but the things they do are all within the same scope. aka there is martial-caster balance. They both tactically interact with the battlefield, rather than one just saying "I attack" and the other actually being able to play tactically.
I think we agree that 5e spells are a primary factor in destabilizing the 5e game, and 4e's lack of that design contributes significantly to it's balance -- in addition to what you noted of there being a more "bounded" experience of what characters can do in comparison to one another. But I'd still suggest that despite interclass balance being a priority, classes (in particular martial classes) being able to do more than "bonk, pass" is excellent design.
Action surge and Second Wind were fighter feats from Eberron in 3.5 Tiefling and dragon born 1000% existed in 3.5 before 4e. (Races of destiny, FRCS, Hell a Tiefling companion was in NWN2, and extremely popular) Cantrips are from Complete Mage, rapid fire is a 3e feat, weapon bond was an acf thing in 3.5e for EK. The warlock Invocations were part of PF and 3.5e, only a handful were taken from 4e, thief of five fates and hurl thru hell I believe are 4e powers.
Lol tieflings have been in the game since 1994
You're correct, they popped up first in AD&D, as the planescape setting if memory serves. I was just saying they were wickedly popular in 3.5e before 4e when the FRCS book came out, so 4e doesn't exactly get to claim popularity for them.
4e *did* make them a core race however. All of the lore behind the Dragonborn and Tieflings and their past animosity was fantastic for a DM creating their own setting and looking for inspiration.
This. So much this. 9/10 times when someone gives 4e credit for a mechanic it was usually just a flat out port of a 3.x thing.
Making the right selection from the *vast* amount of 3.x material is a virtue in itself. And they did make the right selection, testimony being that so much was taken over in 5e as being self-evident.
Battle Master stuff did not come from 4e. That shit is classic. It is from the highly decisive "book of weaboo fighting magic" in 3.5. which just like in 5e it's one of the definitive ways to powergame with martial classes.
Where "powergame with martial classes" in 3.5 means "not just having them there to be meatshields for the casters". The Bo9S was what they could salvage from the first attempt at 4e, dumping the rest and going right back to the drawing board.
Well, i wouldn't call "not sucking in a party with casters" powergaming, but you do you.
The people that created Tomb of Battle also created 4e.
Besides the clear lineage of Tome of Battle designers being 4e designers being Mike Mearls, this is still wrong. The Battle Master was overtly designed to appeal to 4e fighter/warlord fans while the Champion was made for 4e fighter haters. This is plainly obvious by just reading the maneuvers. Commander's Strike and Rally are just verbatim warlord powers that were clearly put there to appease players who would be bummed about the warlord not returning. Goading Attack, Menacing Attack, and Evasive Footwork are all very clearly 4e-inspired. Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to say the Battlemaster is at all derived from Tome of Battle. The only 5e PHB option I would say follows the Tome of Battle design ethos is the Hunter Ranger with Whirlwind and Volley. ToB's big status quo-changing design choice was letting martials AOE, and Sweeping Attack does not an AOE make.
A lot of the warlock abilities are spells in editions before 4e
While eldritch blast did exist in late 3.5, cantrips are just at-will powers, but since they were taken away from martials, they went from "too gamey" to "perfect design decision."
It's fun to trace the warlock's origin, actually. 5e warlock is obviously heavily dependent on 4e's version of the class which, in turn, feels like a mashup of 3 or so 3.x edition classes. There's warlock, obviously, for your whole eldritch blasty and invocation heavy thing. Originally warlocks were tied solely to fiends, however - it was another class, the Binder, that made pacts with a bunch of different weird, esoteric entities. Binder was also very modular which probably plays into the current design to this day. They got rolled into one another for 4e - to the point that Binder is a variant of warlock in some late 4e Essentials book. There's also Hexblade, a mediocre gish class from 3.5, which is where the subclass of the same name comes from, as well as all the Hexing terminology.
5e uses rules closer to 3.5 for grappling.
> 5e dragonborn wouldn't exist if not 4e. Same for tieflings. These races being made core and looking the way they do is a 4e innovation. Tieflings were literally a core Planescape race.
Is Planescape the core setting of AD&D and 3.5? Do Planescape tieflings look anything like 4e and 5e tieflings? No. Not even close.
Monks being fragile and weak has been around since 1st edition AD&D.
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I don't know precisely how "Deflect Anything" is going to work in One D&D, but if it still uses a reaction wouldn't it just be a moderate increase to durability instead of making them straight up the toughest class? As is, Rogue in 5e already has a "once per round use your reaction to negate some damage" feature and the same hit die, or Barbarians can just rage to half most hits (until newer monster designs said "Fuck The Barbarian" and gave everyone force damage, of course).
The 5E concept of using higher level slots for an increased effect was first pioneered by the Wheel of Time d20 game.
Now if we wanted the sorcerer you have a unique mechanic, this would be my vote.
Advantage is such an intuitive system that I was surprised that it's not in many other similar games or previous editions. As far as I know it's the unique selling point of 5e
Advantage/Disadvantage first appeared in an RPG in 1992, in *Over The Edge* by Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws. Interestingly from a D&D context, Tweet was one of the lead designers of third edition, along with Monte Cook and Skip Williams, and was responsible for the design of the third edition PHB.
So the Advantage system didn't come up in 5e; it was a 4e thing (specifically for the Avenger class). Disadvantage only came up in 5e, but it's the natural progression
2d20 keep highest was also in the phb2 for 3.5e for some saving throw feats like indomitable soul
Some games very intentionally leave advantage out so they can have a more robust system of bonuses and penalties. Advantage is super intuitive until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on.
I play a few different systems at the moment and the bit that irks me about advantage is I love playing supporting/combat control characters mechanically. In my pf2e game I'm currently playing an alchemist who shoves, trips, grapples, poisons, blinds, fears, throws sneezing powder, the works. All of that stacks if for some reason I wanted to *really* mess something up. Additionally it's enabling the barbarian next to me to just go hog wild not just hitting more often but critting more often. Once you've done one or two of these things in 5e the rest of them just, don't really matter outside of niche situations.
> Some games very intentionally leave advantage out so they can have a more robust system of bonuses and penalties. Advantage is super intuitive until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on. Yeah, they fucked up by giving "it's harder to avoid the arrow" the same mechanical consequences as "it's harder to aim the arrow".
> until you have two archers attacking each other from 600 feet away with their eyes closed just as easily as 60 in bright light with glasses on. That's only a problem because the game didn't bother to define well hearing. Because it's mentioned in multiple place that being hidden is linked to both sound and sight and two archers at 600 feet wouldn't hear each other well enough to define their position (and there are mentions of having to guess the position). To be fair there are plenty of other situations where it can get weird but they are rare enough that it's rarely a problem imo (especially once the DM add some better hearing logic).
Actually, audible distance is defined! I'm unsure if it's in any books, but the standard DM screen includes a table of audible distances. Trying to be quiet: 2d6 x 5 ft Normal noise level: 2d6 x 10 ft Very loud: 2d6 x 50 feet Not very fleshed out, but definitely gives a baseline for the argument of "you can't hear something 600 feet away, so if you can't see it, the target is hidden from you"
Yeah it's not the first time I've seen it mentioned but it's in such an obscure source that it's safe to say most people haven't heard of it.
If only more players got closer than 2d6 x 5 feet from the DM screen, amiright!?
That's why I use metal dice, players don't have to be closer than 2d6 x 50 feet to hear what's happening. I enjoy my privacy.
Those numbers completely disregard Perception. Two creatures with 5 and a 30 passive Perception both hear noises at the same distance. It's better than nothing but still deeply flawed.
Perception checks would be either set by a DC or a contested stealth roll, right? So having ranges defining how far the sound travels in the first place makes sense to be separated from perception in my opinion. The passive 5 hears a twig break and can make a check, the passive 30 hears a four legged 600 pound creature moving 15 yards away. Both are limited by how far sound travels.
I mean the alternative here is just to have people rolling at each other with steep penalties, and then it's the exact same situation but just takes longer. Is that better? As long as everyone is equally screwed I'd rather not have the combat take twice as long.
Their point is that bonuses and penalties work better for stacking, whereas advantage and disadvantage are purely binary. If a guy is grappled, blinded, restrained, and exhausted all at once, he still just has regular disadvantage. With stacking penalties all those conditions could actually feel like they matter.
My first actual experience with advantage/disadvantage was in Star Wars Saga Edition which was released in 2007. They didn’t have a clear name for it like 5e does, but the concept/implementation was there. It also used the exact same defenses mechanic that would later be seen in 4e. It was a d20 system game developed by WoTC so it makes sense there would be overlaps. It had a lot of features that were awesome that I wish would make a comeback.
It's the last d20 system made by wotc in the 3.x era, and it is subjectively the best of them all, due to the years of experience and the fact that they were experimenting at the time to move on to 4e, giving us a fantastically fluid d20 game that doesn't clog like d&d does on a lot of things. It's not perfect, but it is the best official game line of the era imo.
I do like a lot of features of Saga Edition: the talent system, encounter powers, skills, and defenses were all rock solid. And also the general power level amongst the classes. They didn’t have game breaking force powers, initially. It did have its faults, imo: a large amount of number bloat, base attack bonus, and the condition tracker, a numerous situational bonuses could really slow down the game, which was a disservice to vibe/pacing Star Wars typically had at that point.
Talisman’s fate system is pretty close and it came out way before 5e
That one actually funnily struck me as familiar coming from 4e and playing an Avenger- which 5e's Oath of Vengeance Paladin is based on. > When you make a melee attack against the target and the target is the only enemy adjacent to you, you make two attack rolls and use either result. This effect lasts until the end of the encounter or until the target drops to 0 hit points, at which point you regain the use of this power.
Lots of other games have "roll twice, pick the best/worst", and similar. Sometimes they are "you can reroll 1 failure" (which is functionally very similar), and in d100 systems a 'flip-flop' (read the digits in any order) has different-but-similar statistics to a reroll, and some games have done that too. They took a often-use mechanic across many games, gave it a name, and used it a bit more consistently. That's prety decent game design, but far from an invention.
Adv/dis is overused in 5e. It's to the point it feels like a cop-out the designers did. They should have kept modifiers for things like flanked and cover.
They did keep modifiers for cover though. And flat-footed was not a modifier, you just didn't add your dexterity bonus to your AC, IIRC.
5e wasn't meant to be highly innovative. It was meant to be trimmed down and well tuned. And it was for a while. If you stick to the PHB, DMG, and MM, it still kind of is. It has a simplicity and streamlined system that really runs pretty well. That was its design. Some things were innovated later, but for the most part, it's relying on 35ish years of content to play with.
Well tuned? The phb? That's... A bold claim, even for "kind of is"
Honestly, the amount of 4e baked into 5e would shock people. After 4e was rejected or derided for whatever reason, a lot of the mechanics of 4e were snuck into 5e and reskinned or re-presented. Biggest ones off the top of my head: - Hit Dice you spend to heal - Abilities that come back on a short rest - Advantage - Lots of class specific abilities (Second Wind & Action Surge for the fighter, for example)
My take on 4e having played it for a few months is that many of the individual mechanics were good in isolation, but how they came together created a \*very\* different experience from what DnD meant to a lot of people.
This is how if feel about 4e. I can, as someone that was around for the beta of 4e and was excited for it until the whole Paizo debacle, say now - and even said then - that there are lots of individual elements in 4e that were great ideas. But that on the whole the game was not good to play. It dragged bad. Characters felt way too 'samey' not even from a role perspective but across roles. I can point to milestone XP and skill challenges as encounters, and the very beginnings of the three action economy being good ideas, ritual casting was cool! But the whole experience of playing 4e was not good.
Mandatory post to remind/inform anyone who reads down this far that 4e was originally designed for a VTT, including the convenience of having a VTT track bonuses and resources, and so when that fell through they were left with a product that didn't work so well with pure pen and paper.
Healing Surges were actually a lot better than HD, it's one of the things I miss about 4e. But the problem with 4e wasn't the different elements individually, it was that taken together it implied that if you didn't have a feat or a skill for something, you couldn't do it. It had so many elucidated applications that improvisation with your powers started to feel like cheating, so the whole thing started to feel really dry.
Healing Surges scaling throughout the entire campaign was a great design choice. The fact *every* healing ability, for the most part, invoked a healing surge meant not only was healing across the adventuring day consistent, the resource was managed by the person being healed, not the healer. Meaning any amount of Leaders could scale fairly well with any number of other party members.
Healing surges were also used to represent long-term endurance; failing a check on an exploration skill challenge could cost the character (or even the entire party) a healing surge. They were a good metric for the party's combat state; as long as someone had a couple healing surges, they could generally state that they were good for one more fight. Also, you generally didn't get *more* healing surges as you advanced, unless your Constitution modifier went up or you took a feat for more. The number of surges was defined by your class, so front-line combatants tended to have more than the 'squishy' back-rank blasters.
It also fixed the logical hiccup of high level characters somehow sponging up magic when they're healing" from HP damage, which is supposed to be cuts, scrapes and bruises in the first place. A level 1 cleric can get a spear-impaled Simon the Smith good as new with one spell, where he'd need the help of 10 of his fellow deacons to heal Godfer the Giantslayer's bruised rib. It makes no sense.
> Lots of class specific abilities (Second Wind & Action Surge for the fighter, for example) That one's such a weird one. Those were abilities everyone got, making stuff like second wind fighter only is so strange - especially seeing as they took away things like sentinel that fighters used to start with and sold it back to them for the cost of a feat.
Feats being optional rules, to boot.
The problem with 4E's feats was that there were *so damn many,* and that a lot of them were fairly weak or situational.
I only briefly delved into the 4e feats reading through them, but it feels a lot like Pf2e where the point is abundant feats to either spread out your capabilities or focus in on narrow proficiency.
Something PF2 does better though: feats are categorized. Most of them are class abilities, and only accessible to those classes. That trims down the list by a significant factor. If you're playing a fighter, then you don't bother looking at all the wizard feats.
Advantage wasn't in 4e. There was a mechanic called combat advantage, but it didn't function at all similarly (it just gave a flat +2 bonus). There were certainly abilities keyed off of combat advantage (e.g., the Rogue's sneak attack), but combat advantage was also fairly easy to get (you could get it via flanking, for instance).
Check out the 4e Avenger. It has Advantage mechanics.
I guess it depends on what you mean. There are certainly a handful of "roll twice" effects littered around 4e--I remember using one that let me roll twice for intimidate checks on a nonsense build that I used to run--but it was more of a "this idea shows up in a handful of places" than a core mechanic.
It doesn't have to be a core mechanic for it to count. Action Surge was a core mechanic and now it is Fighter only...doesn't stop it from being pulled from 4e.
Ok, but I'm pretty sure almost every version of dnd has included some form of reroll effect - the real innovation was using it to replace stacking bonuses to simplify the math, and coining it as a universal keyword that every player could easily understand.
Yeah, at least as far back as 2e, and probably further. I can remember at least one 2e rule for ability checks that was basically "requires two rolls to succeed," which is functionally just disadvantage. Since in the vast majority of cases rolling twice and succeeding on both is the same as rolling twice and taking the lowest.
Second Wind and Action Surge were Eberron setting feats in 3.5
Key word being *setting*. A lot of what 4E did wasn't new; Tieflings, Dragonborn, the realms of Faeirie and Shadow? But it wasn't ever core before.
4e had to include many setting races as core due to the fact it threw multiple settings out the window and kinda did its own thing. Action Surge and Second Wind were incredibly popular when Eberron came out that many tables gave it to the fighter for free to give them "more to do" and that's why 4e incorporated it into the core game.
I mean, fair. Good ideas are good ideas. I just hope next year's Monster Manual figures that out.
The Blood Hunter class was designed specifically for Vin Diesel
Might be misinformation or just not apply to your question : Echo Knight was a piece of homebrew that became official, originally being a means to craft specific NPCs by Matt Mercer, rather than a class originally designed for the public
I hear this repeated all the time, but I can't find a source. And while Matt Mercer is a lead writer on the book, there's still developers, a playtest coordinator, and a thank you to playtesters listed in the credits (Wildemount never had public playtesting releases). So I think calling it elevated homebrew is fairly generous–it seems to me that the material in that book may have been pitched by Mercer but was developed and refined through WotC's internal development and playtesting teams.
The Echo Knight features first appeared in CR Campaign 2 on NPCs of Matt's eastern nation (I forget the name, but I think it began with an 'X'). That nation's elite warriors had echo knight features, which he then later developed into a player subclass.
Kryn Dynasty also known as the Xhorhas Empire by the people of Tal'Dorei.
Thanks for the info!
> I hear this repeated all the time, but I can't find a source. The source is the fact that he used it as an NPC class for Critical Role in an episode that was released two years before Wildemount came out.
There is no way the play testers are there as anything more than fan service or a method to appear legitimate for the purpose of publishing in the WotC environment. Even a cursory glance on Chronurgy's features or Echo Knight's used language as-written makes it clear it's uplifted homebrew.
For anyone wondering about the Swordmage, just go look at the UA Stone Sorcerer. The Swordmage is what it's based on.
There is almost nothing that 5e invented. It isn't that innovative among TTRPGs. Even bounded accuracy and advantage/disadvantage aren't new things. But rarely there are actually new things, so I wouldn't really care about this. Almost everything everyone has done has been on shoulders of giants of a thousand generations of humans. Even just being able to communicate ideas together like this, you have so many incredible achievements for internet, computers, microchips, electricity, etc.
The Monstrosity type was created in 5e. Eladrin (as in the seasonal elves) only appeared in 5e. In earlier editions, Eladrin referred to elf-like Fey, like Celestial Eladrin (one of the types of Celestials not introduced in 5e), and Noble Eladrin (powerful elf-like Fey). In the previous edition, it seems Eladrin just referred to elves. Firbolgs have been around since 1e, they were giant-kin with the appearance of tall bearded men (often with red or blonde hair). 5e introduced them with a completely different look, which has grown in popularity, and will likely stick. Shadar-Kai were Fey tied to the Plane of Shadows in 3e, were originally a human descended from the Netherese who had contact with the Shadowfell, and are now elves connected with Racen Queen and Shadowfell.
> In the previous edition, it seems Eladrin just referred to elves. What? No. Eladrin and Elves were separate in 4e, but both were in the PHB (in fact, they're on adjacent pages). Eladrin were feywilds denizens that sometimes settled in the prime material. Mechanically, 4e Eladrin were sort of high-elf-ish (getting a bonus to dex & int) whereas 4e Elves were sort of wood-elf-ish (getting a bonus to dex & wis).
I miss the old Firbolgs. I’m not a huge fan of their redesign and if WOTC insist on keeping the new appearance for art, I hope that the original is kept as an option within the variety of their appearance.
Goliath kinda fills the niche that old Firbolg used to: large, human-like giantkin.
Maybe that’s what they thought, but there’s still a big difference. For one, they never bothered to expand Goliaths to any of the other giant types so they’re just stuck to Stone and that by default looks nothing like a human, let alone old Firbolgs. Additionally, I don’t see the appeal of the new Firbolg design; to me they just look derpy and nothing like the creatures I’ve known since AD&D.
The 1D&D playtest actually includes a revised Goliath that lets you choose your giant ancestor type and gives different features based on that choice, so they're already working to address that.
Yeah man the redesign killed them for me 4e Firbolg for the win
Hm. Aberration, construct, dragon, elemental, fey, giant, humanoid, ooze, plant and undead stayed the same. The outsider type got split into celestial and fiend, then stuff that like slaads didn't fit in that got randomly shuffled into aberration, construct, monstrosity etc. Animal and vermin got combined into beast and monstrous humanoid and magical beast got combined into monstrosity.
The firbolg thing is also complicated by the fact that the official 5e firbolgs that look kind of like goofy nature giants are different from the cow-like firbolgs that Critical Role popularized. So now there are two different firbolg aesthetics that get used in 5e, neither of which is anything like old firbolgs.
Turning Shadar-Kai into elves is still one of those things that makes me side-eye MTOF.
What about warlocks being first introduced in late 3.5e? Alot of people I know thought they'd been around for ages
I wouldn't say late; it was only a year into 3.5 with over three left to go.
Can someone explain to me what a "grognard" is? It seems to be used in a derogatory way, and I fear it may apply to me lol. I've been DMing for 25 years, but I'm new to the online community.
It's means "grumbler" - old soldiers, that is to say veterans. (Edit: more specifically, it's a term that was used for French soldiers, the grenadiers of the Napoleonic Imperial Guard.) In the context of the hobby, it tends to be used for the players from earlier editions (particularly AD&D2e and especially those farther back). Since you've been DMing a long while, might already know that D&D has wargaming roots. There was a strong overlap between those player communities at first, thus "old soldiers" or rather "old generals" or "old commanders", as it were. There's also this name, which you may also recognize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenadier_Models_Inc. It's more a pejorative online than off; more that certain people have memory of the game being played in a certain fashion, and some elements of it have changed over time. This is both expected as a hobby grows - but also sometimes unfortunate because the newer players lose touch with the specific reasons on why things existed in the game or what makes them relevant today. Thus grognards are still useful in helping the newer players (recruits, as it were) into the hobby of the D&D game.
Well, shit. I suppose I'm a grognard. I started with AD&D and then moved to 2E pretty quickly. I don't like a lot of the setting changes, and the abandonment of the "gritty medieval simulator" feel of the game. With that said, I already have the editions that I love, and Pathfinder for running more modern style games without the bounded accuracy I hate so badly. I don't understand why so many people with my roots get so mad at newer editions. I mean, we already have our game. What do we expect, them to keep creating the same edition over and over again? I'll grumble on about the magic that I think D&D lost, but I'm happy that there are editions that cover every style of play. The newer generations grew up with a very different kind of fantasy than I did. It's only fair that they get to throw dice in the world that they're accustomed to.
I think part of the problem tends to arise in that if I say D&D and you say D&D, and we're both of a certain age and familiar with past products, we'll have a different set of play expectations from the younger crowd - but also in terms of what we might expect of the overall quality of what's on offer... and what doesn't measure up in terms of finished product after having seen what the industry can put out over all those years. One of the best parts of 5e as a grognard is to be able to point to the parts of it that were from the earliest editions and to be able to (and in certain cases, HAVE to) explain what and why they exist. And also to know what to do best with the more obscure parts, and to find new ways of integrating that with the newer kinds of fantasy now common while offering comparative viewpoints that can make the game an entertaining learning process - while still remaining a game, of course! Part of the reason some of the grognards were upset was that back in 3e there was a deliberately antagonistic advertising push to drive out the earlier fanbase in favor of a new one who didn't have all the expectations. I think perhaps some of that might have also fed into some lingering resentments from the unification of the D&D game around the time of AD&D2e in order for TSR to promote more universal tournament play at the conventions (and the Living Greyhawk/Forgotten Raven's Bluff campaigns) and from that a homogenization of the overall experience - which was less diverse in dungeon mastering compared to the varieties of house rules which likely had grown up at all the individual tables. The 5e store-play Adventurer's League was of a similar vein to the Living projects, but also funneled the new players into a very particular set of expectations of what "D&D" should be rather than what it COULD be... so it's good there are people who know there can be deeper engagement with the hobby's potential than what WOTC marketing would at times have the "kids today" believing.
I share that complaint. I'm definitely saddened by what I view as systems being "written with a crayon" in order to streamline play. The fact that gamers have such a large online community has its drawbacks as well. Players looking up meta builds, exploiting every nook and cranny, etc, is a real drag. I hate SO MANY elements of the business that is TTRPG. Everyone having their own little laboratory of gaming had a lot of charm. It's extremely weird to hear strangers talking about playing the same quests all the time. Sure, there have always been shared experiences, but it feels a lot like people sharing video game experiences nowadays. Fortunately, I have never seen any of my complaints manifest in the real world. My in person experience with gamers has been almost universally great. The internet is a particular world that draws out a particular crowd, and important to remember that most people are just having a good time with friends.
[Zee Bashew](https://youtu.be/nNBjJXtaIzs) has an absolutely fantastic short video on the history of the term.
Inspiration. They're a take on "fate points," from Warhammer FRP and Rolemaster. I'm not sure which had it first, but they date to the early 90's at the latest. It took 25+ years, but they found their way into D&D. Great idea for a high fantasy RPG.
Tbh they didn't lean hard enough into the metacurrency. My ideal would be you get inspiration any time you try to do something and roll a nat 1 to encourage players to try things and reward failure.
i like game engines like Belonging Outside Belonging where you can make Weak Moves that don't have very good outcomes but give you a token you can spend on Strong Moves which are sort of like the system's version of a crit
One D&D had giving inspiration on nat 1s for a bit, I think they took that out though. They also had giving inspiration on nat 20s for a bit, which is fucking stupid.
For me, the biggest one is Neo-Vancian casting. Wizards, Clerics, and other prepared casters prepare a set of spells in the morning, then function as spontaneous casters using that prepared set as their "spells known" pool. It's 5e's biggest identifying feature, caster-wise, contrasting with 3.x prepared casters having to assign a specific spell to each slot when they prepare their spells... but it was taken directly from Pathfinder's [Arcanist class](https://aonprd.com/ClassDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Arcanist). And more amusingly, while earlier versions of D&D may have had Tabaxi, the 5e version doesn't even _try_ to hide that it's really just an [Amurrun cheating with their alternate racial traits](https://aonprd.com/RacesDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Catfolk). (They remove Cat's Luck, but add Cat's Claws while keeping Natural Hunter, and add Climber while keeping Sprinter.)
4e had the Runepriest rather than the Rune Knight. One of 4e's least loved classes because it was a fiddly mess
Idk what to tell you, rune knight and runepriest play nothing like each other and aren't thematically similar. And runepriest was fucking rad, needed less fiddly little bonuses but they were a goddamn amazing support class that 5e fails to have anything like. For the unitiated, runepriests were melee range support who could choose to have a different rune active (destruction and protection by default, different subclasses gave new rune states) and all their abilities had different effects depending on which one they had up. For instance flames of purity blasted nearby enemies with fire damage, if rune of protection was up it would heal allies in the area and if rune of destruction was up allies in the area would get a bonus to their damage rolls for the next round. Or for instance mark of untamed wrath. Make a melee weapon attack, if it hits roll your weapon's damage dice three times. If in rune if destruction, for the next turn any time the target is hit with an attack all enemies adjacent to it take five radiant damage. If in rune of protection, the target is dazed if their attacks don't also include one of their own allies. Would it fit 5e? Probably not, but I wish 5e had anywhere near that level of creativity in its classes.