D&D 5th Edition Announced

[AMT]

Meh. D&D's been dead to me since I started seeing what 4e was offering during the design phase.
I'm much more excited for the Exalted "2.5" update that Chung's writing.
Now if I could only get a group and ST to play...

[someone_else]

Is there anyone able to guess what D&D 5 could look like? what steps are they taking to avoid it turning into a major trainwreck like D&D 4?

From the article seems they are asking for feedback and people to join some kind of group. Anyone signed up?

Then again, if they are too stupid to go outside of the "damage dealing appendage" part of their life, there is little reason to choose a pen-and-paper game over a computer one.

This is what I don't get. How could they possibly think they could go in the direction of computer games without people realising that computer games are better on, you know, computers?

It would have made sense for that to be one of the game modes available. That way you would attract different people and convert them to play your game without pissing off the previous game's (significant) fanbase.

Like say the D&D 3.5 mode where you have randomly generated dungeons filled of randomly generated monsters being explored by randomly generated characters only to accumulate XP and randomly generated treasure. Horribly tactical and the RPG element is close to 0.

How stupid is that? But most players I know and also myself started that way.

[Civil War Man]

Sorry if it's tangential, but can you be a bit more specific? Never encountered this issue. Always had issues with wizards. Must be that all Rule Benders players I had avoid cleric like plague, but this never happened to me.

There is a feat in Complete Divine called Divine Metamagic, which allows using Turn Undead attempts to apply a metamagic feat to a spell without increasing the spell level. Combine that with a metamagic feat called Persistent Spell, which increases the duration of a spell to 24 hours. Combine the two with Divine Power, which increases BAB to fighter-levels, adds +6 strength, and 1 temporary hp per caster level. Then combine them with Righteous Might, which increases size category by 1, strength by 4, con by 2, adds +2 natural armor, and DR/evil or DR/good depending on alignment. You are now a better fighter than the fighter with absolutely no detriment to your spellcasting ability.

Druid is in a similar spot. Just twink out the stats, assign high wisdom and con and dump strength and dex, get a bear animal companion, and buy Natural Spell at level 6. When combat starts, wild shape to bear and throw on Greater Magic Fang and Barkskin.

[Spoonist]

Like say the D&D 3.5 mode where you have randomly generated dungeons filled of randomly generated monsters being explored by randomly generated characters only to accumulate XP and randomly generated treasure. Horribly tactical and the RPG element is close to 0.

How stupid is that? But most players I know and also myself started that way.

Dungeon crawling? Huge fun if done right. However, dungeon crawling on the computer - even more fun, since hey - no bookkeeping.

[Simon_Jester]

Then again, if they are too stupid to go outside of the "damage dealing appendage" part of their life, there is little reason to choose a pen-and-paper game over a computer one.

This is what I don't get. How could they possibly think they could go in the direction of computer games without people realising that computer games are better on, you know, computers?

From the sound of it, because they thought the mechanics of computer games were better, or would sell better, than the mechanics of pen and paper. This wasn't totally stupid, they might have been able to work with it, get some of the ideas to work well enough that it would actually appeal to the WoW crowd without alienating the D&D crowd. Which must sound like a great plan to a marketing guy, and rightly so.

They might have done that easily enough, if they'd done the smart thing and gotten together a focus group of gamers from outside the Wizards of the Coast hierarchy to play-test this thing. Hiring a few dozen people from a random convention to play-test 4th Edition for some extended period of time, early enough in the process that they could cancel the release if it turned out to be a non-starter, would have saved them a lot of trouble.

I used to play D&D and AD&D back in the olden days from some 30 years ago. Even back then grinding was a problem, to then build a system that increase grinding was for me a clear sign of insanity. Why go with p&p if I want to play a board game or computer game? It just doesn't make any sense.

Nah, the D&D franchise was dead to us as soon as the Forgotten Realms was in decline.

Meh. D&D's been dead to me since I started seeing what 4e was offering during the design phase.
I'm much more excited for the Exalted "2.5" update that Chung's writing.
Now if I could only get a group and ST to play...

There's a difference between "dead" and "had a crappy release," you know...

[Spoonist]

play-test 4th Edition for some extended period of time, early enough in the process that they could cancel the release if it turned out to be a non-starter, would have saved them a lot of trouble.

Very much agreed. But they did have playtesters, it says so right at the start of the book. Problem being that they had no clue to who their core audience were - they only looked at their new target group the MMO players.

Nah, the D&D franchise was dead to us as soon as the Forgotten Realms was in decline.

There's a difference between "dead" and "had a crappy release," you know...

Uhm??? Isn't the english expression "dead to us"???
*goes checking*
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... %20to%20me
Sure it is. So Simon let's requote that:

There's a difference between "dead" and "dead to us" you know...

[Broken]

Yeah, 4th Edition killed off my interest in D&D releases for a good long while between trying to be a MMO rather then a Pen and Paper RPG and the nuking of the Forgotten Realms (the setting most of groups rampaged through). The idea that the Realms were too complex became such a brainbug and WotC listened to those folks who hated the Realms with a passion, but didn't seem to play in it or know much about it. Hopefully 5th edition will be a better product, too bad I doubt WotC will just blame 4th edition on a complex illusion spell and hit the reset button.

[Simon_Jester]

play-test 4th Edition for some extended period of time, early enough in the process that they could cancel the release if it turned out to be a non-starter, would have saved them a lot of trouble.

Very much agreed. But they did have playtesters, it says so right at the start of the book. Problem being that they had no clue to who their core audience were - they only looked at their new target group the MMO players.

You missed the bit where I talked about where I thought they should get their playtesters from.

Uhm??? Isn't the english expression "dead to us"???
*goes checking*
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... %20to%20me
Sure it is. So Simon let's requote that:

There's a difference between "dead" and "dead to us" you know...

"Dead to me" carries overtones of something like "I hate it, I'll never have anything to do with it again, it is no longer part of my world, as far as I'm concerned it's an episode from my past."

Like, say, the utter asshole family member who robs you of a large sum of money, assaults your spouse, and otherwise betrays your trust and respect to the point where you might say as a rhetorical statement "I have no brother." (Or cousin or sister or whatever).

If it is plausible that you might actually pick up 5th Edition and play around with it if they come up with something cool, then "dead to me" is the wrong word. Only if you have consciously decided to boycott D&D pretty much permanently would it make sense to say "dead to me."

[S.L.Acker]

I wasn't even going there as summoner/blaster wizards aren't always the ones to watch for. It's the Cleric with 24/7 buffs due to burning those worthless turning attempts to keep spells running all day, add in some magic items that seemed reasonable at a glance and you have something that does what the fighter does better and has magic to spare.

Sorry if it's tangential, but can you be a bit more specific? Never encountered this issue. Always had issues with wizards. Must be that all Rule Benders players I had avoid cleric like plague, but this never happened to me.

Ever heard of the term CoDzilla? Wizards end up tame compared to some of the things that can be done with Clerics and Druids. This is due to Clerics being able to use Divine Metamagic and Persistent Spell, if you build a human cleric of the planning and undeath domains (I guess you're a cleric of very long term planning at that stage) you can have one buff always active at level 1. It's costly taking 7 turn attempts per 24 hour spell, but the really tough choice is that fixed range and personal spells are the only things you can. Thankfully the with an hour, some night sticks from libris mortis (+4 turning attempts per purchase), and the spell compendium, you can still find some good items. Toss in an artificer for cheap customizable magic gear and your cleric is better than a fighter even from very low levels.

Mages scouting with divination and using utility wands to bypass traps and locks is yet another way magic made the game break, or a fairly low level dexterity draining spell that worked sort of like Ray of Enfeeblement being able to three hit dragons. Mages weren't broken because they could spam out fireballs and summons, they were bad because they could replace other characters entirely with a very minimum amount of tweaking.

Yes, but that's an issue only if they have wands and/or staves that let them cast the same spell all over again for 50 times at a ridicule cost (and dragons that were never subjected to a Ray of Enfeeblement in their long life and/or are not smart enough to think of a countermeasure in time with their HIGH int score). Which is stating again "wands/staves are broken", not an issue of wizards per-se.
A non-wanded wizard can be better than a thief/scout/whatever, but only 3-4 times a day (if he is mad enough to optimize himself for that task only, and then suck at wizard-only tasks).

If you start putting tasks that only the wizard can do a fuck about, you force him to use up spell slots to be prepared for that "just in case", and that leaves less slots to steal work to others. That's a group game, and the DM does have much more control on what the players do than most imagine.

All divinations that gave them significant bonuses do have some kind of costly component either standard or I added it (with the sad excuse of removing the XP cost ala Pathfinder, so players wouldn't complain ). And when the supply of diamonds for limited wish is LIMITED (who is giving them rewards huh? the DM!), they won't casually cast it to look around corners.

Depends if you're talking high level or not, detect traps and knock are both low level enough to be ever ready once those slots are no longer your main combat punch. If you allow your players to commission custom magic items the wizard could even help the rogue out by giving him thieve's tools that cast these spells. You're also ignoring the fact that a good wizard doesn't need wands, he just needs a safe place to recharge his spells. So at the right levels the Leomund's spells or rope trick allow them to recharge in any situation where time isn't a huge issue. Seeing as even the most dickish DM won't make every task time critical this again makes Mages broken.

As for tasks only wizards can do, you should recall that at high levels it takes him very little of his total xp to craft scrolls. So even if you're shafting him on useful wands he'll still have some utility spells on him at all times. Toss in an artificer and the only way you can stop him from having what he wants is rule zero.

As for divination, starting at level 1 you have things like instant search which allows you to take 10 on a search instantly, by level 2 you have locate object (limited uses, but still a decent tracking tool, again no cost), at level 3 clariaudience/clairvoyance comes into play (no expensive components or xp costs), 4th level starts the scrying fun (One time cost of a nice mirror), you also replace your party scout with a arcane eye (no cost, can be cast anywhere within line of sight meaning arcane eye + fly means you can get that sucker lots of places). This is ignoring any lower level clerical spells such as Augery (25gp of incense for getting a good idea of how an action will work out). Unless you go out of you way to be a dick as a DM a smart fastidious party will always know what's going on.

Making combat more random tends to make the game less fun, because they mean that no matter how smart a player is their character could die to sheer dumb luck. Sure it's realistic, but killing the characters off to something they had no say in and no matter how they prepared couldn't stop tends to be bad game design. Though I suspect it would make fortified armor more worthwhile...

You read the rules linked?

"Wound points cannot drop below 0...
At 0 wound points, a character is disabled and must attempt a DC 15 Fortitude save. If he succeeds on the save, he is merely disabled. If he fails, he falls unconscious and begins dying."

and

"A dying character is unconscious and near death. Each round on his turn, a dying character must make a Fortitude save (DC 10, +1 per turn after the first) to become stable.
If the character fails the save, he dies.
If the character succeeds on the save by less than 5, he does not die but does not improve. He is still dying and must continue to make Fortitude saves every round.
If the character succeeds on the save by 5 or more but by less than 10, he becomes stable but remains unconscious.
If the character succeeds on the save by 10 or more, he becomes conscious and disabled.
Another character can make a dying character stable by succeeding on a DC 15 Heal check as a standard action (which provokes attacks of opportunity). "

Dropping to the ground is relatively easier, but dying isn't that easy for the melee class, high fortitude they have.

No, I honestly didn't care to read about somebody else's house rules. Even so, it sounds like a great way to kill PC's, one lucky hit knocks them to zero and then you finish them next round. The enemies in the game world will quickly learn that things tend to get back up if you let them so they really should aim to keep people down for good. Of course it doesn't solve the problem of PC's just never getting hit thanks to high AC and miss chances, nor does it deal with the fact that front loaded damage means that hordes of little guys drop quickly and likely won't score many hits. Enlarge person and a spiked chain on a fighter with great cleave makes your packs of goblins just so much fodder. If you send in fewer threats it's business as usual again. Then again it sounds like you go out of your way to strictly control everything, that or your players aren't very good at optimization.

Anyway, they do have access to resurrection magic one way or another (and mid-high level encounters are supposed to carry significant risk of killing a few characters even in normal D&D 3.5), now fortified armor's price as some sense, this system allows me to avoid the escalation to Bigger Monsters, Bigger Bigger Monsters, The Mother of Bigger Bigger Monsters, the Avatar of the God of the Mother of the Bigger Bigger Monster... and so on that eventually begins to look stupid.

Nothing in 3.5 means you need to send bigger badder monsters at the party, they gave the option to give monsters class levels or to simply advance them by hit dice. So if you want them to fight orcs for all levels don't make it so even a level 1 ork can deal damage on a crit, give them class levels and say that the orks have been training harder and hiring champions for their cause.

This means that the hits that actually injure them aren't a Gargantuan red dragon's tail sweep, but people with weapons, that on average just injure them and force a retreat at most put them to sleep but not really at risk (so everyone has to rush there and carry away the comrade).

How do you deal with your main tank having stacked miss chances so anything that gets passes his AC, including crits, just miss him 50%+ of the time?

It also means I don't have to dump a fuckton of critters to be a threat and be handled in a smarter way than just "chaaaarge!!!!", so combat when happens is much faster (less opponents to keep track of)

Only if your players suck, you still haven't dealt with the issue of a party that goes all out with front loaded damage. Goliath Duskblades can deal sick damage, sure it's a limited number of times per day, but that's what ropetrick is for, start with 3d6 for a large greatsword + 3d6 for blade of blood + enhancement bonus + 1.5x strength modifier. If he builds as a charger then the damage numbers skyrocket even more. Suddenly you're asking where that challenge you just sent at the party went.

It also makes them more survivable in their first steps into the game, as even the crappy wizard now has around 15 Hp.

That's one positive...

At least to us anyway, the "epic" scale of D&D has already bored everyone in my group (sounds like grinding). There are fantasy monsters, but nothing HORRIBLY out of scale sitting at 10 minutes walk from a populated village just because otherwise the 14th level party would have nothing to do. All serious stuff they encounter now has some kind of class levels on top. And generally an organization of some kind to hide behind.

That works, it doesn't fix the issues of the party knowing where that organization is hiding thanks to scry, nor does it change the fact that a well build party can still make themselves very nasty even with limited resources.

Another positive aspect is keeping them in check. Now they won't survive 10 rounds against the King's personal guard, go figure his 200 6-ish level knights in magic armor. Any 10th level party can easily level the kingdom if you don't start placing silly overpowered guardians that make no sense cost-wise (how did this king of a 50km2 piece of land raise enough funds to buy those adamantium golems?) and archmages at every corner.

If your party is 10th level they'll survive against those guards even with crazy crits active. The parties recon allows them to know where the guards are stationed, they can buff up while the guards have no idea there is a threat, then they send in a few summoned beasts as distractions. Now that you're ready you can use battlefield control spells to ensure that the guards go to the places you want to fight them at. From there you've got them in your kill zone. If things go badly a level 10 party has significant mobility to GTFO.

Lastly, it's wrong to think they have no say, they know that death could come significantly more easily (especially with sneaky sons of bitches... i mean rogues), so alter their tactics to something slightly more sane than "barbarian activates rage and charges Monster". I've started to see people using cover!

Cover doesn't save you from getting crit, it just gives you a bit of an AC boost which a natural 20 ignores anyway. Any cover you take could also be home to a rogue with a potion of invisibility as well. You're also ignoring the fact that it makes any classes that aim to boost crits significantly more powerful and makes more attacks better than strong attacks. Why chip away HP when you can optimize for making as many scimitar attacks per round as you can, take the right feats and you can crit on a 17 with multiple attacks per round! Oops, I guess that breaks your attempt at fixing things...

As for BoNS, most players of martial classes loved it. It meant that, while you still tended to be a guy who hit things in combat and had little to do outside of combat, that you finally had cool things to do in combat that didn't involve spiked chains and trip attacks. I mean mages are allowed to do high fantasy stuff for giggles at higher levels, but fighters are stuck being in low fantasy mode because unless you take some crazy feat path you basically just wail on stuff with a chunk of metal repeating the same style of attack over and over again.

Meh, my group never looked at the fighter class well for its uselessness outside combat.

I guess it depends on playing styles, here combat isn't central (although does play a part). So the fighter would read fantasy comics for say 2/3ths of the session time.

The most melee-oriented guy in the group is a barbarian (using spiked chain), the second is the druid.[/quote]

The Barbarian has the same issues with being useless out of combat as the fighter and a few extra skill points don't fix that. BoNS classes might as well replace the fighter because they get more fun combat tricks and decent skill points.

[Simon_Jester]

S.L.Acker,, this seems like kind of a sidetrack.

There's a fairly well-documented list of 'optimum' ways to build up a 3rd Edition spellcaster or warrior into a superhero who is far more powerful than the game expects him to be. Millions of deeply geeky people have been working on this for ten years, it's not hard to find out how to do it. Lots of people have houseruled to work around it, or just trusted their players not to powergame, and if it works for them, that shouldn't be derided.

[S.L.Acker]

S.L.Acker,, this seems like kind of a sidetrack.

There's a fairly well-documented list of 'optimum' ways to build up a 3rd Edition spellcaster or warrior into a superhero who is far more powerful than the game expects him to be. Millions of deeply geeky people have been working on this for ten years, it's not hard to find out how to do it. Lots of people have houseruled to work around it, or just trusted their players not to powergame, and if it works for them, that shouldn't be derided.

Yeah, that's true enough. I've always just DM'ed in a very go with the flow manner, so long as the PC's were balanced internally things were fine. To me it just seems like a DM should be skilled enough to work within the rules to deal with things that PC's can do. My players would be upset if I suddenly said that the build they're working on is in valid even though everything in the books says it should be fine. They're smart enough to realize that building things best left in the depths of CharOp won't make for a fun game. Even so, the things his house rules and fixes haven't counted on are large enough to ride even a mildly optimized character through.

That gets me to my other thing, something not explicitly mentioned but that seems to exist in the minds of many people. The fact that an optimized character can, in most cases, still be roleplayed. It seems that most people use min-maxer as a dirty word when there is nothing stopping them from also having a well thought out character.

One example of this is the evil half of a game I'm running, the player wants to play a Vow of Poverty, Vow of Peace Succubus, sure you could argue that evil characters shouldn't take those feats, but he's making a character that can't stomach the idea of getting his own hands dirty. He's also very glad to note that the Vow of Peace doesn't exclude mental torture. Some people would look at this and simply say no, I'm just going to need to build a little extra willpower into some enemies and trust that he'll hold back enough to still be challenged by things.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't disagree- but really, this is more or less in the same line of thought that someone_else was talking about.

The short, general-case form: 3rd Edition contains numerous ways to give a character powers and abilities far beyond what the Monster Manual is calibrated to handle (10th level characters who can effortlessly shut down CR 12 opponents, for instance). We all know it, and everyone who plays that game has their own way to cope. Fortunately, 3rd Edition also provides enough flexibility in the construction of opponents, and alternate ways to achieve a given character ability set, that the brokenness of the system isn't imposed on players against their will. You have to break it deliberately, it doesn't come pre-broken out of the box.

[S.L.Acker]

I don't disagree- but really, this is more or less in the same line of thought that someone_else was talking about.

The short, general-case form: 3rd Edition contains numerous ways to give a character powers and abilities far beyond what the Monster Manual is calibrated to handle (10th level characters who can effortlessly shut down CR 12 opponents, for instance). We all know it, and everyone who plays that game has their own way to cope. Fortunately, 3rd Edition also provides enough flexibility in the construction of opponents, and alternate ways to achieve a given character ability set, that the brokenness of the system isn't imposed on players against their will. You have to break it deliberately, it doesn't come pre-broken out of the box.

I guess I just looked at his views on wands being the reason wizards are broken and rolled my eyes. His crit system house rule also seems fairly exploitable and makes the best character the one that gets the most crits per round.

[Spoonist]

You missed the bit where I talked about where I thought they should get their playtesters from.

Just like with Paradox betatesters - it might be better to try to find those who have experience from several different games, icluding one's own, instead of only fans. Othrwisw you'll end up with D&D4e or HoI III.
I do think that we agree overall. More & better test = better product.

"Dead to me" carries overtones of something like "I hate it, I'll never have anything to do with it again, it is no longer part of my world, as far as I'm concerned it's an episode from my past." ...
...Only if you have consciously decided to boycott D&D pretty much permanently would it make sense to say "dead to me."

Yes, yes and yes. Hence the link. Why ever would one play D&D when there are so many other better RPGs around?
If I'd feel for some min-maxing dungeon crawling or similar then I'd go with a boardgame or computer game instead.
We only stayed for as long as we did due to FR anyway.

If I would feel nostalgia creeping up on me I could always bring out my old stuff - no need to get upset over new versions.

[Civil War Man]

I don't disagree- but really, this is more or less in the same line of thought that someone_else was talking about.

The short, general-case form: 3rd Edition contains numerous ways to give a character powers and abilities far beyond what the Monster Manual is calibrated to handle (10th level characters who can effortlessly shut down CR 12 opponents, for instance). We all know it, and everyone who plays that game has their own way to cope. Fortunately, 3rd Edition also provides enough flexibility in the construction of opponents, and alternate ways to achieve a given character ability set, that the brokenness of the system isn't imposed on players against their will. You have to break it deliberately, it doesn't come pre-broken out of the box.

3rd ed is broken out of the box. Even ignoring all the optimization and powergaming stuff, caster classes are inherently more powerful than warrior classes. Mechanics like Spell Resistance and the proto-4th ed Tome of Battle classes were added specifically because of that. It takes almost as much powergaming to make a wizard that doesn't rapidly outpace a fighter as it does to make the classic munchkin builds like codzilla, because you'd have to purposefully avoid the massive array of utility and save-or-suck spells (or, in the case of stuff like enervation and energy drain, no-save-just-suck spells).

[Formless]

For those people who don't understand how war-gamey 4E is, just take a quick look at the party roles the 4e classes occupy. By design, there are only four, and all four are combat oriented-- the Tank (or "Defender" in 4e speak), the Sniper (or "Striker" in 4e speak), the Glass Cannon (or "Controller" in 4e speak), and the Buff Master (or "Leader" in 4e speak). Yes, I chose Troperisms on purpose, because 4e speak is designed to avoid the pink elephant in the room.

Now compare that to the party roles of 3.5-- they are there, the designers just didn't make them the central focus of their design philosophy. From the PHP we have roles like the Scout (Rogues, Rangers, Barbarians, Monks); the Generalist (Bards, Druids-- dear lord the Druid is practically a one man army!); and the Healer (Clerics, Druids, sometimes Paladins and Rangers) Note that last one isn't just about healing HP, but can also treat diseases, poisons, curses, and other afflictions. Also of note is that 4e gives every character Healing Surges, on the theory that Healers are boring to play (and I guess if all you ever heal is Hit Points, they may have a point). Yes, 3.x also has combat roles like Front Line Combatant and Leader (though "Leader" means something slightly different in 3.x...).

Just looking at this one point of comparison, you quickly get the impression that there are 1) more character/party niches in 3.x than 4e 2) those other roles come about because significant attention was paid to the non-combat portions of the game in 3.x 3) 3.x is more about Dungeon delving, 4e is almost exclusively about battlefields.

And that is my problem with the game. I played it once, and it ran just fine. The adventure was pre-made and was mostly about getting from one fight to the next, culminating in a boss battle-- and it should be noted that while I've seen adventures end with a climactic battle before, this was the first time where I thought of the final combatant as a videogame style Boss. That may be due to what kind of adventures I tend to play, though. There was only one skill challenge in the whole adventure, and everyone succeeded or failed it on their own (neatly avoiding the problem of teamwork Zinegata described). For a first level adventure it was kinda fun. But a lot of the nuances of 3.x like "what if the statue is trapped? Who wants to put their hand inside to find out?" or "The town guards are suspicious of us, what are we going to do? Give them the slip? Negotiations? Fight it out and make a big scene? Take hostages?" were not there. Every problem was supposed to be dealt with by hitting it with a sword.

That said, for the few classes which are almost entirely defined by their combat ability like the Fighter, eliminating the non-combat portions of the game balances things a lot. Wizards and spellcasters are no longer Top Tier because of their ability to Sun Tzu that shit and set up situations ahead of time so that they are always in an advantageous position. But I think there are better ways of dealing with the Fighter Paradox than minimizing or eliminating everything in the game irrelevant to stabbity death. Like, you know, making Fighters and other melee classes able to participate in something other than combat, and lowering the sheer flexibility of spellcasting classes.

[Civil War Man]

That said, for the few classes which are almost entirely defined by their combat ability like the Fighter, eliminating the non-combat portions of the game balances things a lot. Wizards and spellcasters are no longer Top Tier because of their ability to Sun Tzu that shit and set up situations ahead of time so that they are always in an advantageous position.

Not really. Unless they are caught in a fight with no spells prepared, casters are still a higher tier.

Consider this:
Round 1
- Fighter: Swings sword at monster. If he rolls X on a d20, monster takes Y damage.
- Mage: Casts a spell. If monster does not roll at least Z on a d20, it instantly dies.

Round 2
- Fighter: Swings sword at monster. If he rolls X on a d20, monster takes Y damage.
- Mage: Casts a spell. If monster does not roll at least Z on a d20, it loses its next action.

Round 3
- Fighter: Swings sword at monster. If he rolls X on a d20, monster takes Y damage.
- Mage: Casts a spell. If monster does not roll at least Z on a d20, it falls unconscious and can be automatically killed by the Fighter next round.

That's why casters is 3rd ed are so much more powerful. It's not just the utility spells. A fighter's ability to defeat an opponent is limited by how much damage they can do and how much damage the opponent can take. A mage can effectively ignore the hit point mechanic, and just throw spells until the opponent fails a saving throw.

And that's the real problem with 3rd ed fighters. They are second tier at best in the thing they specialize in, and functionally useless in everything else. It desperately needed an overhaul, regardless of whether 4th ed did it right or not.

[Anguirus]

Fourth Edition was more of a marketing disaster than a gaming disaster. I never play MMOs, and rarely play CRPGs. 4E was a breath of fresh air that got my whole family back into playing D&D. It's vastly easier to construct encounters and situations as a DM.

Where it really failed was that it became necessarily tactical. They followed a school of thought, that I agree with to some extent, that in a game like D&D most rules should center around combat, and combat should be fun and interesting. Unfortunately, the skills and spells in the game were so anemic that virtually anything outside of combat was left to non-mechanical RPing, or else endless rounds of the Bluff/intimidate/Diplomacy trifecta. But then combat was so slow that it bogged down the game. It's great that 4E can support a complex series of maneuvers, but ANY attempt to simplify and shorten combat broke the system down into a boring exchange of flavorless attacks. Weak monsters had lots of hit points so they could actually exist for more than one round, but this led to such hit point inflation that official tips to deal with it went something like "have them surrender when bloodied" or "halve their hit points behind the scenes when the players' victory becomes inevitable." Minions were a great idea, but there was a large conceptual gap between a minion and a weak monster (these tended to feel like harmless bags of HP).

Of course, there was also the fact that the fundamental math of the system was totally screwed up, leading to patch feats and massive changes to their flagship "skill challenge" system. These could be worked around but felt very bungled, obviously.

I threw myself into 4E full tilt and had a lot of fun, but WotC also bungled later releases by putting out the Essentials line. This did address many player issues (like complex fighters and weird druids) but also introduced a lot of confusion and bad feelings. This caused a chilling effect for new players, which is the opposite of its intention. The last few 4E books have actually been quite good, but few and far between. Players, including me, got bored. The system feels like it ran its course already, because everything new either fees exactly like an existing class or else it is a broken piece of shit.

There isn't a better system for playing a low-level dungeon crawl than 4E, and at this rate there may never be. But it just doesn't feel robust and flexible overall. In my observation we D&D players who grew up with 3E and late 2E like to feel like there is at least some mechanical underpinnings to the whole world of D&D, not just small-unit tactical battles. And as much as I justified it in the name of balance, losing so much flexibility in spellcasters hurt. (At-will spells on the other hand were just what the doctor ordered, as were martial classes that stayed dynamic and useful for 30 levels.)

I'm gearing up for a little Pathfinder, which feels really fun and "new in an old way" as I read. I think 5E could have a lot of potential. On the other hand, lord knows fans don't always know what we want...

[Formless]

Not really. Unless they are caught in a fight with no spells prepared, casters are still a higher tier

Consider this:.

Uh, dude, I didn't mean remove the non-combat portions of a 3.x game and the game magically balances. I meant "redesign the game from the ground up around combat like 4e does and it balances a lot better". There is a difference.

That's why casters is 3rd ed are so much more powerful. It's not just the utility spells. A fighter's ability to defeat an opponent is limited by how much damage they can do and how much damage the opponent can take. A mage can effectively ignore the hit point mechanic, and just throw spells until the opponent fails a saving throw.

Well, there are tripping builds for the fighter that do that too, and everyone I meet is deathly afraid of what a Called Shots mechanic would imply. Even though there totally is a called shots mechanic buried in the descriptions of the Kraken, Hydra, and possibly other monsters; you use a Sunder attack against a limb-- the only problem is assigning an HP value to individual limbs!

I would say the Grapple mechanic is another one fighters can use that ignores HP, but the grapple mechanics are Lovecraftian enough few dare attempt to abuse them.

Edit: oh, and I've heard similar worries from people about what a proper Massive Damage mechanic would do as well. I've heard second hand that the Conan RPG gave a great bit of fun back into melee combat just by lowering the Massive Damage threshold from 50 to 20. But I've never played it myself, so...

And that's the real problem with 3rd ed fighters. They are second tier at best in the thing they specialize in, and functionally useless in everything else. It desperately needed an overhaul, regardless of whether 4th ed did it right or not.

Oh, I know. Worse yet, they are boring to play. As are Monks; Barbarians are borderline. I know why too-- the "Fighter Paradox" is how someone on Giant in the Playground's boards put it (use google, it was an interesting thread). Fighters are defined as combatants. But everyone in D&D is a capable combatant-- fighters don't even shine as a melee oriented combatant when you could just play a Barbarian, Ranger, or Paladin (which my gaming group's melee lovers almost always play). Introduce the Tome of Battle, and even those classes start to pale in terms of Fun.

I think the designer's mistake was the reverse of what they did with the change from the Thief class to the Rouge class-- if you want to be called a thief, steal something. If you want to be called a fighter, get into fights. Oh, wait, everyone already does in this game.

[lance]

4Es Failure is that in the name of balance is killed verisimilitude with abilities like - I can shoot my bow and make the enemy jump back five feet but only once per day because...umm just because? Then it killed twinking for number crunchers. I frankly enjoyed dungeon delving through books to make viable Fighters, Paladins, Experts, Healers, Commoners and Dragon Shamans.

Its one plus is that it reduced rocket tag

Not really. Unless they are caught in a fight with no spells prepared, casters are still a higher tier.

Consider this:
Round 1
- Fighter: Swings sword at monster. If he rolls X on a d20, monster takes Y damage.
- Mage: Casts a spell. If monster does not roll at least Z on a d20, it instantly dies.

That's why casters is 3rd ed are so much more powerful. It's not just the spells. A fighter's ability to defeat an opponent is limited by how much damage they can do and how much damage the opponent can take. A mage can effectively ignore the hit point mechanic, and just throw spells until the opponent fails a saving throw.

Its not just their ability to make the enemy roll a d20 or die, its their ability to do what I call a lock&key system

Grease on a frenzied berserker=a harmless person, as long as you don't walk next to him.
Wizard casts Forcage- Can you Teleport? Y-Wizard goes again. No-You Die. Things like trueseeing, knock, and the like are in a similar vein of powers that are a binary scenario.

Then add in the wizards ability to just say "no" with abrupt jaunt, celerity, feather fall, and a few other spells.

With CoDzilla- the druid and cleric didn't necessarily outshine any fighter, but it did a lot of them. At 1st level a druids animal companion with out any cheese is better than a fighter in most situations, and in combat is better than S&B and TWF archtypes. With cheese added in the only comparative fighter is one that is focused on reach with combat reflexes or ranged combat to step aside of the competition.
A cleric with persistent divine power and righteous might isn't going to be better than a melee focused fighter, but he's gonna be most of the way their, then factor in the cleric has additional options to add in like knowledge devotion and is still 80% a cleric, while being 80% of a fighter.

[Simon_Jester]

3rd ed is broken out of the box. Even ignoring all the optimization and powergaming stuff, caster classes are inherently more powerful than warrior classes. Mechanics like Spell Resistance and the proto-4th ed Tome of Battle classes were added specifically because of that.

Spell Resistance and its antecedents date back to first edition; back then it was "magic resistance."

Of course, in first edition, your enemy could feasibly have a very high saving throw, such that spells would only really bite on them 20% of the time or less, with the caster getting no special way to overcome it by virtue of being high level. In that case, at high level it really could be faster to have the fighter beat the bastard to death with a club than it was for the wizard to throw save-or-die/lose/suck/whatever spells at it. The wizard might even perform better by throwing direct damage spells into the fight, which had a better guarantee of accomplishing something (save for half damage is still half damage). At least then, he and the fighter are trying to achieve the same thing by wearing down the enemy's hit point total, instead of having the wizard routinely go into battle, throw three save-or-lose spells and have them bounce right off, while the fighter only manages to shear away half the enemy's hit point total and is getting pounded on.

This has, as far as I can tell, been changed in subsequent editions.

It takes almost as much powergaming to make a wizard that doesn't rapidly outpace a fighter as it does to make the classic munchkin builds like codzilla, because you'd have to purposefully avoid the massive array of utility and save-or-suck spells (or, in the case of stuff like enervation and energy drain, no-save-just-suck spells).

You're right, this is a problem. I don't think of it as inherently broken, but that's mostly because I don't mind playing wizards as blasters and holding a relative handful of save-or-lose magic in reserve... and a wizard played that way still works kind of the way they always did.

So basically, it's just me and I understand what you're saying. "Broken" implies a system which is unbalanced, in that some choices which are supposed to work don't work as well as others. In that sense, yes, 3rd Edition came pre-broken out of the box.

In mitigation, a lot of people had (and have) fun with the system anyway, and that appears to be an area where 4th Edition falls down. Being less broken didn't make it more fun.

[Zinegata]

A lot of the problems of 4E's paradigm has already been covered, so I won't elaborate further.

I'll just add something that was brillantly pointed out in The Gaming Den (which has one of the better homebrew 3.X systems): A big reason why 4E ran out of steam is because they stopped making interesting classes.

In 3.X, people could live with the SRD and make a huge variety of classes. Want a "Thug" who can take a few hits but also backstab? Do a Fighter/Rogue. Heck, even a single-class Cleric can be a healer, necromancer, or holy warrior depending on the Domains they got.

4E killed this ability to customize by removing 3.X multiclassing with what is essentially just "splashing" abilities from another class; which tended to suck. So if you want a Thug character, you had to wait for WoTC to make one.

But WoTC seriously didn't make that many classes, following the 3E paradigm of adding a handful of new classes per splatbook. So that there are many, many archetypes that people want to play but can't find a character in 4E for. When people realized this after the sample adventures, 4E started dipping until they were forced to come up with Essentials, which only accelerated the rot.

[Uraniun235]

Wow, you guys raced off on a 4e v 3e tangent right quick, didn't you?


I want to speculate about the business strategy behind 5th edition. Do you guys think they've really decided that 4e needs to be superseded by some amazing new system they've been quietly thinking about for awhile now? I can't help but wonder if this is someone's attempt to kick off a cycle where they plan to release a new edition every few years regardless of how much it's needed. Remember, WOTC is owned by Hasbro.


Regardless, I'm not particularly optimistic that 5th edition will be as good as they need it to be.

[Agent Sorchus]

Lets see. We have had a strong continuation of 3.x in the form of pathfinder or Legend Link and probably others let alone the people who never dropped 3.5. We had Saga, which was a mashup of the 3.x and 4e ideas and we have had 4e itself. Just the D20 system market is going to be crowded and as such a 5e is just going to fall flat if they can't come up with a thing to make it really stand up on it's own.

If I were high up in WoTC I would be pushing to have a complete new setting for 5e, not just a generic but fully realized on the release of the system. Make things interesting for people to buy just for the fluff. Sure the rules have to be good but that is going to be too easy to make the general rules flow from the prior editions.

Actually what are the chances that 5e will break with the rules in any major way?

[Civil War Man]

It may end up being like Windows going from Vista to 7, where one of the biggest reasons for the name change is because of negative feelings about the older version.

Even this new version turns out to be, for example, primarily cleaning up and upgrading 4E, it's probably still a better marketing move to do a clean break and call it 5th edition instead of 4.5.