Why wasn't it modeled on 4e?

Why wasn't it modeled on 4e?

Community backlash against 4e and the success of Pathfinder.

It is modeled on 4e. Just like 4e is modeled on 3.x, and 3.x was modeled on 2e, et cetera.

It is, in part.

It takes a lot of cues from 4e, but it also takes a lot from 3rd and 2e. It really is an amalgam that takes a lot of the structure of 3rd edition, the feel of the relatively lighter mechanics of 2e, a bunch of the more modern gaming ideas of 4e, and adds some new ideas of its own to produce a product that ends up better than all the parts put into it.

The only edition that might still claim to be better is 2e if you wish to evaluate a game by its lore, but 5e has considerably better mechanics and ultimately it's actually really easy to convert 2e material into 5e.

Because 4e failed so hard that the person in charge was fired three years in a row.

because 4e sucked? and it has plenty of inspo from 4e

But it was the most balanced edition after you fixed some of the monster math.

4e was a sales success by most measures. However, it wasn't an /overwhelming/ success, especially with the failure of the online team (the lead ended up committing murder-suicide). Things like the paperdoll and online table never materialised.

4e is - objectively - the best edition.

Tru. No matter your personal opinion, it was the one edition that had a solid design goal and followed through on it with consistency.

I think I'm going to usher in a new argument. A new argument that might revolutionize how we argue about games.

>"games that are too balanced are boring"

It's radical, I know, and it goes completely against the mantra of "Designers should strive to make the game balanced," but there's so many examples of great games (both tabletop and video ones) that defy that mantra so casually that I've started to suspect that there's something deeper behind the question of "How do I allocate the relative strength within the game?"

4e said "the strength should go to everyone equally."
And this resulted in a rather dull game.

Perhaps the answer should be "the strength should go to the most deserving"?
But then, how do we define the "most deserving"?
In 2e and 3e, it was "whoever knows the system the best and is willing to play the more tedious and complex classes." I don't think that's the right answer.

This. Thread should have ended here.

>In 2e and 3e, it was "whoever knows the system the best and is willing to play the more tedious and complex classes."
That is untrue for 2e. Basic Fighters ripped shit up without any special abilities or gimmicks.
But that was because the number bloat hadn't set in and doing damage was actually worth a shit and could end fights. There also wasn't much a mage could do against damage, so having a big meatwall in front of them preventing that damage was important to the party. Nobody could really replace the other classes except for certain elf multiclasses, which leveled up so slowly that it wasn't even really a problem then.

I have played about 4 different Fighters and 3 different Rangers and they never managed to feel samey, even with Twin Strike and 1 Dual Strike Fighter. Let alone what other defenders/strikers were being brought to the table with their own playstyles.

If your problem is giving every class roughly equal screen time in a session or an adventure, perhaps you should enlighten me on what you think about what a cooperative RPG should be.

>And this resulted in a rather dull game.
If you don't use monster capabilities to the absolute fullest and your level design reminds people of Lament of Innocent, yes.

What's wrong with Lament of Innocence?

There was a wide number of spells that basically made meatshields pointless, and at high levels if you weren't playing a mage, you simply were not playing.

The major saving grace is that it was a hard and slow process to level up a wizard. Even so, 2e still had caster-supremacy issues, and greatly rewarded the players who knew the system best.
My guess is that it largely comes from most of the head designers having a hard-on for wizards, with wizards as their primary characters/self inserts.

>Why wasn't it modeled on 4e?
Well they wanted it to succeed.

It's the holding pattern edition. It exists to keep D&D in print to licence out for more profitable ventures.

I played 4e for 2 years, and tried out upwards of ten different characters of various classes.

Whatever it was, it was boring. You had a different experience, but the various groups I played with ultimately came to reach a consensus that it just wasn't a particularly exciting system and not really worth investing all that time and effort into.

Not a bad game for short stints, but it just didn't feel like a game with any real endurance. But, to each their own.

Not really. There was exactly one spell that made a wizard hard to kill, and there was absolutely no guarantee that you would ever get it (Since the DM had complete control on what spells a Wizard got) and it could be sandblasted away by literally any and every attack.
Saving throws were based on the target, not the attacker and there were no concentration checks worth a damn (One of the optional skill systems lets you make a concentration check if you take 1 or 2 damage to save your spell, and that was it. 3 or more damage would always break your concentration no matter what).
It's a team game and the only class that has trouble contributing to the team at all levels is the Thief, since it was shoehorned in.

> There was exactly one spell that made a wizard hard to kill

There's an entire school of magic that made a wizard hard to kill. And a number of spells from other schools of magic, including Fly and Invisibility.

Fly doesn't help against range and Invisibility doesn't make you quiet and wears off immediately upon casting another spell, attacking in any way, or making noise of any sort.
Most of those defensive spells are better used on another member of the party than yourself as a wizard, because you will always be squishy and they generally aren't (Except the Thief, useless little shit that he is).

Didn't it outsell Pathfinder for a while?

The goal was "make D&D more like WoW" and it was consistently terrible.

Profit =/= revenue

4e was a massive team and in-house programming. Expensive as hell.

5e is a skeleton crew that farms out a significant portion of the work to model basically every business with narrow revenue margins. It not only sells well, but have been a surprising business success for Hasbro - even if it is a tiny sliver of their business.

Shut up.

>This fucking meme will never die
Please just fucking kill me and everyone on this fucking website.

They wanted it to be good.

>confirmed for not knowing 4e or 5e that well.

Maybe it's only because I did only play it in short bursts, but I remember 4e fondly. Much more fondly than 3.5.

Then stop being an edition warring faggot and ignore the edition war threads.

These things always try to be 4e vs 5e and end 4e versus 3.pf and people talking about how 5e isn't bad - or occasionally 2e vs 5e.

Until you go back in time and fix the tiefling and dwarf designs, that meme will never die.

>4e was a massive team and in-house programming. Expensive as hell.
Is that why only one person was working on the online tools?

>online tools at all

What did it really take from 4e?

The adventuring day, ribbons, three pillars.

4e is primarily presented better and has a better MM for the DM.

When playing 3.5 you don't have an SRD open or good old D&D tools for fast searching?
We do.

None of those are really things they took from 4e.

Heck, they even fucked up the thing they DID try to take from 4e. Short Rests not being 5 mins any more.

>Moving goalposts
>Dishonest arguing
>Shitposting for the sake of it
3 strike, you're out!

Shitty bastardisation of healing surges, people sperging about martials doing things, the three pillars approach to dnd (legitimately good stuff), uhhh... sometimes some monsters can do cool things in their lairs too I guess.

>Short Rests not being 5 mins any more.
yeah but you can make them 5 minutes long if you want

I could rebuild the whole game if I want, or I could just play something that works decently straight out the box.

That option proceeds to make Long Rests an Hour long.

Read the DMG

>Shitty bastardisation of healing surges

That one really pisses me off. They took away the ENTIRE POINT of healing Surges and turned them into what people thought they were initially.

Healing Surges were a limitation on how much healing you could have per-day, even if you had a conga-line of clerics and potions. It's what let them have encounter-scale healing.

The 5e ones are 'Everyone gets free healing'

>4e's staff was expensive, and it didn't make enough regardless of units sold.
>But... There was only one dedicated programmer!
>Having one dedicated programmer is still a business expense it couldn't support.
>But... Memes!

I don't even know where to begin with how stupid this is. 4e being too expensive for the units sold is independent of 3.5, and the 3.5 online tools are fan-made.

I have. Short rests being 5 mins is an optional rule, not the base.

Which kinda fucks them up when Short Rests are supposed to be something you could generally do between every single encounter.

The sort of places you can rest for 1 hour but not 8 are kinda limited compared to the places you can go 5 mins between brawls.

Read the DMG

I don't think you understand what a DMG is.

I'm challenging user's argument that there's no use for online tools at all.

>I jumped into the middle of a conversation I sorta followed.

A Dungeonmasters Guide. With tips on 'How to GM' and some optional rules?

I can't help but feel they didn't understand WHY 4e had surges, and why it did the way it did, with tightly-controlled 1/4hp guarantee, different classes having different surges/day, 1/encounter second winds to make healer roles a choice not a necessity, and 5min rests that let you dispense them as you cleaned up after each encounter.

5e's hit dice -kinda- works for 5e in that retro 'we set up camp at noon and patch ourselves up' way, but it's not 4e's healing surges and I wish people would stop equating them as some holy grail of 'but it's got 4e in it!' design.

Shooting off a lot of green text doesn't actually make questions disappear, you know.

Do you only play AL games, or just random online games?

You can't just say that to deflect all criticism.

>There was a question asked

NL is so much better than AL. Wish the Astros didn't switch over.

AL games?

All rules are optional if you're the DM.

I really wish they had gone back to 2e's "Here's a bunch of options for this issue, go ahead and pick one or make your own" style, rather than "Here's the default and here's some options" style that it is now.

I've read all 3 of PHB, MM, and DMG. It's a giant inconsistent mess that still can't clarify what a spell target is.

Healing surges, reduced short rests, etc as literally all in the DMG.

I'm sorry you have comprehension issues.

>I liked 2e where it gave options for a rule/scenario
>I don't like 5e where it gives you the rule and then optional rules

Aren't those two functionally the same?

>All rules are optional if you're the DM.

By that logic there is no problems ever with any game as you can fix them all.

It's very possible to have complaints about the base game and have them not fixed by 'But you can change the rules'.

Check out BRP. Hopefully you at least like how they present the rule even if not the rules themselves.

>By that logic there is no problems ever with any game as you can fix them all.

Congrats. You've now graduated from being a time-wastiing grognard who complains online about what other people play.

No, the difference is that 2e didn't give you a default for most parts of the rules. Even certain class features (Wizard spells at level 1, for instance) had options, but no default.

The way characters spend and regain their abilities (like hit dice) sets the tone and the way the game plays as players interact with the game world through its rules. It's implied that the way they were written in core was deliberate, in that they thought about how the lengths of rests etc impacts upon how the game's narrative develops, how and when players rest, and how characters spend their resources.

Throwing out 'fuck it just make it 5mins/1hr/1wk/whatever, do what you feel like' to me just shows they really didn't think about it too hard, like such a shift wouldn't drastically affect not just the tone of the game but the way adventures run, or how classes are balanced against each other.

Not at all. I'm complaining about the base game.

Yes, a GM can fix any issues a game has. That doesn't mean that they were not issues in the first place.

Because everyone hated 4e until 5e came out and it's now the Contrarian Coolâ„¢ thing to like 4e.

Oh, whoops. I guess you're going to be a grognard for some time longer.

The base game hands you the options to make it how you want. You don't even have to think about it, other than "Do I want this option? Yes, I do."

No, people still generally dislike 4e. It's just that it's gotten to the point where its pitiable and it's actually sad to bully it now.

You can't just toss out the term 'Grognard' because someone has complaints about a system.

> murder suicide

Wut

Technically it doesn't offer 5 mins short, 8 hours long. It's high adventure option is 5 mins short, 1 hour long.

Yes.
And because they only had one programmer on it, it was all lost.
Very stupid.

Grognard is just French for "grumbler."

You grumble.

So did they actually manage to get anything from 4e without fucking up the base idea?

>In 2e..., it was "whoever knows the system the best and is willing to play the more tedious and complex classes."
That really depends on how many splats you're allowing. With just the PHB shit was pretty clean. Fighters carried the party early and by the time they needed to worry about becoming eclipsed they were guaranteed to be minor nobles with retinues and armies. It's only when you start throwing in every single option that you get serious issues. If you get a player asking if he can play a dwarf using the Champion warrior/priest multiclass kit from the Complete Book of Dwarves of the Metalwork priesthood from the Complete Priest's Handbook plus (yada yada...) then just walk away.

I'm with you there.

I enjoyed 4e as a beer-and-pretzels kind of game.

Maybe have a couple of runs every month or so on a weekend with friends: great

Tried playing in 3 different campaigns by 3 different people: it falls flat after the first few sessions

There was just something with the game that made it fun as a scenario driven tactics game but absolutely boring and numb as a campaign/story driven RPG.

I'm not sure what it is about it that causes that for me and about 17 other people in my group.

The implication was not that there is no need for online tools. He was implying that said tools never really came about despite spending money on someone to do it.

Please reread the conversation.

>I'm not sure what it is about it that causes that for me and about 17 other people in my group.

Maybe the fact that 'Jesus Christ you were trying to play a complex game with 17 other people'. It's hard to get that many to manage cards against humanity, let alone an RPG.

Having a default with options allows for a lazy DM to do the whole "just core no splat" approach and not adjust anything for the game.

By making it only a list of options with no "standard" mode the DM MUST make decisions on the game mechanics.

It wasn't playing with all of them at once numbnuts. My gaming group is around 25 people that cycle in and out of running and playing games.
About 17 of us did quite a bit of 4e (4-6 player groups, usually 3 groups/campaigns going) and all had pretty much the same opinion after 4 years.

I have way more pity for 3.5/Pathfinder spergs. Those people are truly lost.

>Playing the two best games of all time with the perfect balance of crunch and simplicity
>Lost
Do people actually believe this?

No we're not! Broken powergame wank fantasies 4 lyfe!

Because there is a God, and he wants us to be happy.

It outsold Pathfinder for it's entire lifetime, plus about a year after they stopped making new content.

Pathfinder basically didn't get ahead in the race until 4e stopped, and it still took a while to catch up.

Did we ever actually get real figures for both games?

>perfect balance of crunch and simplicity
7/10, you almost got me.

What do you mean but modeled on?

I was paraphrasing a video that was supposed to be reviewing BRP but the guy went on and on about how 3.5 was the perfect balance between too simple and too complex and that BRP was too complex (no idea how BRP can be thought of as being too complex).

He was also rather upset that there was no skill called "survival" because it's a really important thing to cover, but not important enough that it should be resolved by just one skill roll.

Weird.
I mean, considering that it's still the 2nd most popular RPG, they really don't need your pity.

>He was also rather upset that there was no skill called "survival" because it's a really important thing to cover, but not important enough that it should be resolved by just one skill roll.
As an eagle scout that makes me upset, but D&D is so friggin full of abstractions that I can almost see where he's coming from.

And Avatar, one of the highest grossing movies of all time, doesn't need our derision.

Who gives a shit that it's popular. It's still shit.