So what became of all the old edition war? I hardly see anybody even interested in 4e anymore

Stormwind Fallacy.

I wanna know where I can get a copy of that PHB. My copy has a dragonborn and a human on it. Was this an earlier print? Later?

Happy. I can still play 4e when I want to, but 3.PF is finally getting killed off, hopefully for good.

What in in the literally metaphorical fuck does that mean?

It means you can actually optimize or even minmax a character and still roleplay. Optmiziation/minmaxing=/=no roleplaying.

All this bitching about optimization, rollplaying, edition wars, and more are why I've refused to run anything D&D or d20 based.

My games are actually successful now that people actually play and stick around rather than just testing that new character build or gimmick they read about online, growing bored, then leaving.

Other than odd weab bitching they can't play a moeflake it's been fantastic.

Except the Stormwind Fallacy does not apply to the post you referred to, since it didn't claim that optimization and roleplaying are mutually exclusive but that optimization/mechanical customization is neither prerequisite nor guarantee of roleplaying.

> 3.5 and Pathfinder are still out there for people who put 100% of their thought into character creation mechanics and nothing into making a memorable character.

Uhuh. Sure thing darling.

Why doesn't 5e have a character creator?
That was the main reason i liked 4e. That and hybridizing.

4e is still played by plenty of people.
It has lower discussion because:
1. There's a higher barrier to entry compared to 5e, what with books sold, starter sets, online tools, etc.

2. There's less to discuss. 4e is a 'solve problem', because its design intentions are clear and unambiguous.
Meanwhile, 5e's obfuscation and worse design practices mean you can argue about pointless shit until the cows come home.

You sound silly, because if you haven't noticed, 3.PF remains the 2nd most popular system, 16 years after its release.

This is why all the people with an anti-3.PF agenda look a little crazy, because they think they can just shitpost about it until people stop playing, like it's a game that isn't going to outlive all the games they play.

Disclaimer: an old 4E player who stopped because my group had much more fun with 13th Age as a hack-n-slash system.

> 1. There's a higher barrier to entry compared to 5e, what with books sold, starter sets, online tools, etc.

What? No. The online tools are shit, you can play the game with just a starter set. The only barriers to entry are when asshats start talking about Essentials as '4.5' and finding the errata necessary to make the game playable.

> 2. There's less to discuss. 4e is a 'solve problem', because its design intentions are clear and unambiguous.

No, 4e is not clear and not unambiguous. In fact, I'd say that it's the most confused edition of DnD out there. It wants to be a tabletop RPG, while being much ore like a tabletop tactical combat game. And because of this disconnect, it doesn't really work as either. For an RPG, it's out of combat rules are highly underdeveloped and just do not work as written. For a tactical combat game, the combat takes way too long and without any errata I'd describe it as virtually unplayable. Another issue is that due to the simplicity of its design, there is always one (or maybe two) very clear best options at any point for a given class, and even for certain roles.

In contrast, 5E has a very clear vision: a return to its roots, attempting to take good decisions from all previous editions and meshing them together, and for the most part it does seem to work.

>Meanwhile, 5e's obfuscation and worse design practices

Wow, get a load of these hot opinions.

5e is the most transparent D&D ever made. The DM's guide is basically a walk behind the curtain, while all the mechanics are as simple and intuitive as they can be. The only way they could make it even more transparent is if they printed the Advantage/Disadvantage result curves on the inside cover.

As far as design practices, we can talk about that forever, but I'm afraid that most people would agree that 5e is the best D&D, and one of the best RPGs on the market. The same really can't be said of 4e.

> The DM's guide is basically a walk behind the curtain

Pretty much this. It's one of the best DM guide I've read, with the only clearly better one being the 13th Age one, mostly because I love the boxes with the various interpretations and ways to handle situations by the two lead designers.

4e's skill system is perfectly fine as presented in the Rules Compendium.

5e is the one totally lacking in skill rules.

> 4e's skill system is perfectly fine as presented in the Rules Compendium.

No. The difficulties are completely off, the system is too easily broken and especially out of combat encounter design as written sucks. It encourages scripted, QTE-like sequences over player improvisation, clever thinking and organic resolution of the given problems.

> 5e is the one totally lacking in skill rules.

> What is chapter 7 of the PHB?

Yeah, skills as such are de-emphasized. You don't start out with as many of them and you rely much more on your raw stats, but that's fine. I would've actually liked them to get rid of skills completely and do something with backgrounds as a replacement system, but the system as written works.

>No. The difficulties are completely off, the system is too easily broken

Alright, there are a few ways to break it (like arcana stacking, but that's not inherent to the system itself, but the bloat of redundant magic items, and Mearls' boner for wizards), but I would not call any of them "easy". Nor would I call the difficulties completely off.

> and especially out of combat encounter design as written sucks. It encourages scripted, QTE-like sequences over player improvisation, clever thinking and organic resolution of the given problems.

Did we read the same compendium/DMGs? DMG2 especially is great for non-combat encounter design ideas and systems you can apply.

> What is chapter 7 of the PHB?

You know that 4e also has a chapter on skills, right? Like, 5e isn't ahead of 4e in that respect.

>No. The difficulties are completely off

[citation needed]

>5e is the most transparent D&D ever made.

Tell that to bounded accuracy.

Do you even understand what "bounded accuracy" is?

3.PF is rapidly dropping in popularity. In 2 years 5e entirely overtook it with like 3 books and 3 big adventures. This despite PF churning out books every month at the usual rate. Paizo stuff had been decreasing in quality because of the set release schedule forcing their hands to churn out more and more, and it shows.

Most people are finishing up their 3.PF campaigns and then switching to 5e. Newfags are introduced with 5e. There's nothing 3.PF offers over 5e they could want. Those who just want to play D&D are better off with 5e, those who want the tactical or numbers game are better off with 4e or other derivatives that aren't shackled to a the corpse of a 15 year old game.

Of course, a core group who already sunk a lot of time into it will stay (just like they are staying for 4e). Maybe there'll be a larger group that's playing PF only in name, using 3rd party classes and rules instead in an actually fun game that has basically nothing to do with what was originally published by Paizo (or WotC, for that matter).

Yes. "Wizard with dozens of shortbow-wielding skeletons rolls over combat encounters."

I agree with that being an issue but you are confusing "transparency" with game balance.

A game can be imbalanced as shit, and still be transparent.

Now, is 5e transparent? The DMG may be (I haven't dwelt on it much) but the PHB sure as hell isn't. We haven't had a session so far that didn't have us looking through the PHB and arguing about intent behind the rules, usually ending with me googling the FAQ answer.

This never happened with 4e (admittedly, we played 4e after it was "finished" with all the errata).

> Did we read the same compendium/DMGs? DMG2 especially is great for non-combat encounter design ideas and systems you can apply.

Apparently not. I never got around to buying DMG2, or it wasn't out before I stopped, I can't remember. In DMG1 however, noncombat rules were atrocious. It strongly encourages the DM to build scripted sequences, rather than problems for the players to figure out their own solutions to. This makes these sections feel very much like rail shooters, where players have to hit a certain amount of skill checks before a certain amount of fails in order to succeed at a challenge. They are clunky, unfun and overall were one of the worst design decisions I've ever seen.

> Nor would I call the difficulties completely off.
> [citation needed]

Again: this is RAW DMG1
Level 1-3difficulties are as follows: 5/10/15. This means that with minimal effort on a player's part (IE: 16 in the skill's stat and training in the ability) you have about a 2/3ds change to hit the HARD difficulties, and that's before you add any items or the assistance system which can add extra bonuses. Even the errata-ed difficulties of 7/12/19 don't feel right at all.

> You know that 4e also has a chapter on skills, right? Like, 5e isn't ahead of 4e in that respect.

said there are no skill rules in 5e. I just proved him wrong.

*GASP* You mean that you sometimes need DM intervention so that a player doesn't ruin the fun of the others? Say it isn't so!

Mostly it just got boring and people either choose to stick to 4e or chose not to, just like literally every other edition of D&D before it.
Turns out change happens weather you want it to or not and pissing and moaning about it doesn't do horseshit as you get older and less and less people care what you think over time and less and less people get into what you first got into.
I don't mean this as a good or bad thing, it's just a fact of physical existence; shit changes and you can either find ways to deal with it (by sticking with what you know, but moving on with the change, by doing a mixture of both, however) or sit on your fat ass and pretend like your stubbornness will somehow stop entropy from taking it's course on the hobby like it does with everything else in existence.

It's just hugely unsatisfying to spend literally years shouting and arguing over something and having less and less people pay attention to you for long or even care about what you say not because your arguments or bad but simply because enough time has passed that the argument entire lost the interest for most people.

>Most people are finishing up their 3.PF campaigns and then switching to 5e.

That reasoning might have worked two years ago, but now that the dust has settled, it seems that while 5e will be the big kid on the block, 3.PF really won't be going anywhere for quite some time.

It's a good game with a huge fanbase, and it also serves as a common language among groups of veteran players that branched out to different games.

It's less popular than it was, but it's still more popular than all but 5e, and it's probably going to be another ten years before we see other games start to rival it again.

Which means, you're going to be complaining for quite some time.

As an addendum: I'm not a fan of the scaling difficulties in general. Just give me one list of difficulty levels which allply to all levels. It makes no sense that an epic level thief should have roughly the same change to open a lock as a first level one.

Dude, both difficulty tables and skill challenges have been updated.

4e on release was kinda shitty (shittier than 5e is at what it's trying to do on release for sure), but that really isn't relevant now. Only in the sense that your DMG1/PHB1/MM1 books are basically useless, but if you'd play now you wouldn't get those anyway.

Also
>Level 1-3difficulties are as follows: 5/10/15. This means that with minimal effort on a player's part (IE: 16 in the skill's stat and training in the ability) you have about a 2/3ds change to hit the HARD difficulties, and that's before you add any items or the assistance system which can add extra bonuses. Even the errata-ed difficulties of 7/12/19 don't feel right at all.

Have you read the rationale behind it? People who have their high stat+trained skill are supposed to succeed on their specialty even when it's hard relatively often.

The "median" is the guy who only has the stat or only has the training in the skill, and for him, the hard challenge really is hard.

>That reasoning might have worked two years ago, but now that the dust has settled, it seems that while 5e will be the big kid on the block, 3.PF really won't be going anywhere for quite some time.

It just happened a month ago with my group. PF campaigns can take a long ass time.

You are supposed to scale the challenges too. A high level rogue is probably trying to break into a treasury in the city of bronze, not some goblin's locked treasure chest (which would still be like, DC10 for him. This isn't skyrim where things level up along you).

Essentially, the table gives you a DC you have to find a challenge for. Like "hmm, a hard challenge is DC35 at this level, that sounds like a clockwork lock with some magical wards and maybe a few traps" or something.

I disagree slightly. 3.PF does have at least 200 classes between all its iterations. There's a build to do whatever you could possibly want, although most of them are shit.

That's what I mean by "tactical or numbers game" however I guess in sheer quantity, especially with 3rd party, you are correct.

I'm glad I'm not this autistic. Embarrassing.

> Dude, both difficulty tables and skill challenges have been updated.

> Even the errata-ed difficulties of 7/12/19 don't feel right at all.

> 4e on release was kinda shitty (shittier than 5e is at what it's trying to do on release for sure), but that really isn't relevant now. Only in the sense that your DMG1/PHB1/MM1 books are basically useless, but if you'd play now you wouldn't get those anyway.

Then what would you get? The Essentials starter set, which has so little content that it basically feels like a free tryout box that you have to pay a considerable sum of money for?

> Have you read the rationale behind it? People who have their high stat+trained skill are supposed to succeed on their specialty even when it's hard relatively often.

But with just the abstract 'easy/medium/hard' labels it's very hard to intuit what belongs to which category, especially for new DMs, which is what 4e was intended for.

> which would still be like, DC10 for him. This isn't skyrim where things level up along you).

Not according to RAW.

> Essentially, the table gives you a DC you have to find a challenge for. Like "hmm, a hard challenge is DC35 at this level, that sounds like a clockwork lock with some magical wards and maybe a few traps" or something.

That's a really obtuse and backwards way of creating challenges. As a DM I don't see a challenge rating and think about what would be appropriate. I have a situation in mind and try to find what the difficulty should be.

>Then what would you get? The Essentials starter set, which has so little content that it basically feels like a free tryout box that you have to pay a considerable sum of money for?

Rules compendium and offline character creator + Monster Vault and MM3. DMG1 and 2 for reading (for example the skill challenge, trap, terrain, campaign ideas etc.) is okay, but some parts are out of date, MM1&2 if you need more monsters to convert.

I'd just go pure electronic personally.

>Not according to RAW.

I don't remember the exact wording in the book, but then that RAW is overruled by basically anyone that counts. Not saying it's not an error, but I have literally never seen it played, or suggested to be played like that.

>But with just the abstract 'easy/medium/hard' labels it's very hard to intuit what belongs to which category, especially for new DMs, which is what 4e was intended for.

It requires a different mindset. Either you put that thing in place as a challenge with a purpose (to be easy/medium/hard) or a player does something you didn't expect in which case...

>That's a really obtuse and backwards way of creating challenges. As a DM I don't see a challenge rating and think about what would be appropriate. I have a situation in mind and try to find what the difficulty should be.

... if you find it should be easy/medium/hard you have your DC. If you had set a DC before, and it should still be relevant, use that. If it should be trivial, make no roll and just let it happen, no need for a DC.