How is 5th Edition...

It's probably because 4e used them as a near-absolute daily limitation for all healing, which is awful and counter-intuitive. It makes sense from the perspective that they wanted to have encounter healing powers (which would break the game if there was no daily limit to how much a person could heal), but over all it was a very clunky system that made DMing harder and playing more arduous.

5e hit die are basically just "everyone can heal between battles", which is a nice way to reduce dependency on magical healing. It's the best part of 4e healing surges, without the additional headaches of 4e trying to have them be a resource that could be expended to make other people's powers work.

No, I remember the old arguments clearly, the complaints being made were about how healing surges gave everyone "free healing". As if anyone could spend healing surges at any time to recover health, and then healing spells and potions were available on top of that.

If the old complaints were like your complaint, it wouldn't bother me, it's just a matter of taste. But they were based on misinformation, and now that the system they had imagined up to complain about actually exists, everyone's somehow okay with it

>still holding the torch of ancient edition wars

C'mon now.

>now that the system they had imagined up to complain about actually exists, everyone's somehow okay with it

Wouldn't you call it misinformation to say that the system they had imagined up to complain about exists, when 5e isn't "anyone could spend [hit dice] at any time to recover health"?

It's a very stripped down 3.5 with very low number scaling(except for HP, because fuck you, I guess) and 4E-esque combat in terms of rounds.
>It's still a very young system,
It's almost three years old you fucking liar.

5e is a very safe and familiar game. After the backlash at the attempt at innovation in 4e, WotC went back to people who could make a very iterative sequel. It adds almost nothing new to the series and mostly focuses on refining and streamlining elements from previous editions into a package that's quite easy to use and understand.

Personally I'm kinda sad they didn't do more to capitalise on some of the great new ideas they had in the playtests, but it's clear I wasn't their target audience given how well the damn thing is selling.

5e's the best thing that WotC has come out with in years. So, of course, they give it fuck-all for support.

It winds up being more narrative because they dropped a lot of what they did in 3e and 4e for trying to make a complicated and detailed system of fightan'. That has the benefit of making things like combat maneuvers, grappling, tripping, pushing, etc. very simple and accessible for characters, instead of trying to make every possible combat action something that you need to specialize in.

This means that the traditional "Fighter jumps on a chandelier, hops over a Bannister, and then pushes the bad guy out the window" is something that literally any character trained in Athletics can do, which IMHO leads to much better narrative support than earlier editions.

It feels a lot like 2e, in this case. It's all about what you can think of to do, instead of trying to tell you every single thing you can do.

Three years old still makes it pretty young, especially when we've got people still playing games that are over three decades old.

the most false post on Veeky Forums right now

>This means that the traditional "Fighter jumps on a chandelier, hops over a Bannister, and then pushes the bad guy out the window" is something that literally any character trained in Athletics can do, which IMHO leads to much better narrative support than earlier editions.

This was true in 4e, though? They had rules for improvised actions in the DMG with almost exactly this as the given example.

I'd also kinda dispute that less rules innately makes something 'more narrative'.

5e is kind of a mixed bag. It's not as mechanically in-depth as older editions and it's a bit lacking in content. What it does have however, is a simpler ruleset that doesn't try to invent a rule for everything like 3.pf, and one that supports multiple styles of play. It's a system that (rightfully) leaves much of the minutiae to the DM so there's less flipping through books and more actual playing.

Three years old is fucking fetus-tier in tabletop years.

>This was true in 4e, though? They had rules for improvised actions in the DMG with almost exactly this as the given example.

It's a damn shame those improvised actions were pretty mediocre mechanically, and got worse as the slow power creep of the system rendered them just about useless. While you can't deny the option was available to improvise, the issue is that the options were effectively discouraged by the game mechanics rendering them as a 2nd or 3rd best option at best.

I guess that depends on how optimised the game was? I've mostly played in low op games, so the improvised actions were always useful, since they were still better than an at will or basic attack.

Which means literally less than nothing when his point was that 5E doesn't have material because it's new. That's complete fucking bullshit - 3.0, 3.5, and even PF had mountains of new material within the same time that 5E has been out. 90% of 4E came out within a 2 year span, so obviously it's not because it's a new system.

Recent 3.5 convert here, get ready for a rant

All cards on the table:
-I always have and will continue to love 3.5 to death, but I will acknowledge that it was certainly not perfect.
- I think pathfinder is *alright*, but super bloated from all the 3rd party crap. Plus, not a fan of the power creep between it and core 3.5
- Been playing at the tabletop for years, but only can find groups that want to play D&d, so that's what I'm experienced with.

That being said, when I look at 5e for what it is trying to be, I can say that it very much succeeded. 5e is quicker to set up, fun to play, and easy to GM. There are virtually no barriers to play in the mechanics, the game will never slow down to crunch the numbers like it could in the past. There are no "trap" options; you'd have to be trying to build an unplayable character in 5e. New players can learn RPGs in the system well and veteran players (especially from 3.5) can slide into the game no problem.

And the magic! Spells are fuckin' rad in 5e at every stage of the game. Cantrips being unlimited use was SUCH a good idea, and most spells scale well enough that lower level spells are still useful in late game. Overall, martials and divine characters are scaled up at about the same rate as the new arcane casters, which is a welcome change from the casters being unstoppable war gods from 3.5. Prepared casters no longer have to prepare individual castings of spells, which is also a great change. Material Components are now ALL treated like a focus, so now they're one-time costs. If there's one thing that I would say is the best in the edition, their magic system is beautifully executed.

continued

The saving throw system used to be awful. Come mid to late game, nobody was failing a save against anything. I like the new saving throws, which are based around core abilities. Individual saving throw stats are gone, which were admittedly an unneccesary step of complication, I'd admit. ACs are also kept to be manageable numbers. Pretty much nothing short of dietic figures or endgame monsters is going to have an AC even approaching 30, let alone 30+. Good change.

However, I still have a few gripes. Advantage vs. Disadvantage, on PAPER, sounds great: a quick change that drastically alters your chances while still allowing for fluke success/ extreme failure. In practice, I think a important amount of nuance that was present in older editions of the game is missing. E.g. Oh, so your character is wounded in their leg and has to outrun the bad guys? Disadvantage. You're exhausted, wounded, in unfamiliar territory, and its pouring rain in the same case? Disadvantage. I understand that the simplicity of advantage vs. disadvantage and the nuance of older numerical modifiers are diametrically opposed to each other, but I don't necesssarily consider either to be perfect.

Class Archetypes, also on PAPER sound like a good idea. I definitely miss the ability to micromanage the build of my character with 3.5's feats. Archetypes feel kinda like an illusion of choice. Like, sure, there's archeypes already there for the most common builds, but if I want to deviate from those I don't want to homebrew a new class, I'd want to just take the feats. Granted, feats are still a thing, but they've been made nonessential to character creation. I'm not sure; maybe I'll grow to see this differently, but for now I miss the intricate character creation and the power that it gave me as a player.

Overall, It's neat. I'm warming up to it more and more as I play it more.

New System + New release strategy.

Also, the general point is that if your main issue with the system is that it doesn't have as much content as the older editions, than the simple remedy for that is time, especially because they've put a fair amount of effort into restructuring the 3rd Party production.

There's also a lot of effort being put into porting over older edition material into 5e, since it's all generally compatible.

>than the simple remedy for that is time
When there's barely any material getting printed and 3rd party content is very rarely allowed? No it's fucking not.

>There are no "trap" options
bladelock

There's plenty of content coming from over the horizon, and there's plenty of material that's being published without getting printed, including a number of additional class archetypes, adventures, and the like. I understand that many people are just hungry for more though, but it really seems like giving the system time to develop has been working out for the best, since what does get printed is of fairly decent quality.

It's a lot worse than [edition you like], but much better than [edition you hate]. As intended by the marketing division.

Player-side, the system is pretty meh. None of 3.5's customization, none of 4e's clarity, none of 2e's uniqueness and none of OD&D's simplicity.

GM-side, it's 3.5 all over again. CR system is a broken mess, monster design is arcane and prep in general is a slog.

"plenty" only by shithouse indie standards. It's basically nothing by any edition of D&D's standards.

FWIW I use to like 4e, possibly more than 3.5 (I started with 2e and dad's old 1e grog group that had been running games since college, 3.5 gave my borderline innumerate ass options paralysis while 4e at least gave me the impression that the choices were going to work with each other well enough)

2e lasted well over a decade, 1e was actually still in dev for like 5 years after tsr launched 2e, and 3.5 had nearly as much time as either AD&D edition alone.

And AD&D itself was essentially one very long running system as you could more or less use 1e statblocks in 2e without significant pain - I was still using dad's MM2 to plug holes in junior high.

That's a warlock thing, right?

I'm still not knowledgeable about that class yet. Can you tell me about why that is a bad choice?

Again, see It's not about how old the system is, it's about people using "but it's new!" as a fig leaf for its release schedule when this is obviously bullshit if you know anything about any other edition of the game. At least be honest and say "they want a slower release schedule".

I find the Champion Fighter more egregious.

The slow release schedule makes sense. 5e has a shoestring budget at this point. It's a holding pattern by Hasbro to keep the brand occupied and alive while they look at making money off other uses of it.

Fragile melee caster that does significantly less damage than their ranged equivalent.

I've found the CR/Challenge system of both 5e and 3.5 to be actually far more useful compared to similar systems of other games, with only a paltry few being better. Aside from a few minor exceptions, they are pretty decent guidelines, and I don't really get why people persist with trying to force this odd meme about them being broken when it mostly sounds like they didn't read the full explanation of how to construct challenges presented in the DM's guides.

It's still a fantastic class for dipping into, especially because they can provide a second attack with only a three-level dip.

CR 1/2 save or dies. Low CR monsters with immunity to non-magical weapons. Low CR casters with area save or sucks.

I've not much experience of 5e's so I can't comment on that, but 3.PF's CR is a fucking minefield of monsters with abilities or spells that completely throw encounter balance out of whack but aren't reflected in their actual challenge rating. It's like they based it almost entirely on HP, defences and attack damage rather than the parts of the system which are really dangerous.

i wasn't around for the playtests, can you elaborate a little bit on what you're talking about regarding the new ideas? Thanks in advance.

An ogre is not equally threatening to a party as a monstrous crab.

Every martial(and battle Clerics) was basically a Battlemaster with dice that refilled every single round.

There's a few key examples I can think of. The biggest one? The fucking Dragon Sorcerer.

Sorcerers operated on a spell point system, able to spend points from their pool to cast spells, paying more points for higher level spells. A pretty simple variation on the classic limited casting style. The awesome twist?

They also had a set of passive abilities that they unlocked as they spent more spell points. Other Sorcerer types would have their own, but the example Dragon Sorc developed draconic strength, scales and stuff that made them, by the time they were out of spell points, a decent second line fighter- Not as good as the main guy, but by no means useless. It was thematically awesome and a really interesting solution to the five minute adventuring day, where as you ran out of spells instead of just not being able to do anything you transitioned into a different role.

Martial characters were also fucking awesome. IIRC one Fighter archetype gets a shitty toned down version of expertise dice that refresh every rest. the playtest fighter got those dice every round, giving them a reliable resource they could spend to just do extra damage or assign to a variety of effects. They never quite nailed the balance but it was such a great concept, giving martial characters actual interesting choices to make and making them fun to play- Something which published 5e mostly abandoned. Even if martials work in that system, they're still dull as dishwater to play.

By "watered down" he means he hasn't read the entire core rules, despite a 5th edition general being posted with mega links at least once a day.

If "there are not explicit rules for saves against wand attacks while falling down stairs in full armor" is watered down for you, you can rest easy in the knowledge that the RAW core books provide all the tools necessary to create such cumbersome bullshit if you really want it.

The best part about 5e is that, if you bother to fucking read the CORE RULES, you know that you can play an easy-to-understand RPG or use the system to handcraft your own autistic paradise with tons of guidelines, tables, and advice on how to craft your own magic items, spells, creatures, NPCs, encounters, and even rules to very deep levels of complexity.

And that's from just three books. That isn't even touching the Unearthed Arcana, additional splat/errata books, or SRD/ORG material that is officially supported by WotC.

Funnily enough, today they put out a new test document with a lot of new toys for Warlocks. There are some pretty compelling bladelock options in here now (though there should also be some sort of scaling built into the Blade Pact to make it a *little* more commensurate with Eldritch Blast's)

that sounds really cool, why'd they get rid of it?

Impossible to say. How they handled the playtests was also a total clusterfuck, with them deleting forum posts, rigging polls and other stuff, basically making it clear that the player feedback side was an utter farce.

>Martial characters were also fucking awesome. IIRC one Fighter archetype gets a shitty toned down version of expertise dice that refresh every rest. the playtest fighter got those dice every round, giving them a reliable resource they could spend to just do extra damage or assign to a variety of effects. They never quite nailed the balance but it was such a great concept, giving martial characters actual interesting choices to make and making them fun to play- Something which published 5e mostly abandoned. Even if martials work in that system, they're still dull as dishwater to play.

that sounds fucking terrible. they really should have tried harder to balance that. seems like it could have been really cool.

>with them deleting forum posts, rigging polls and other stuff

what the fuck?

>5e's the best thing that WotC has come out with in years.
>It feels a lot like 2e
As someone who started out with 2e, I couldn't agree more.

3/3.5e was a super abusable munchkin system. Just take a look at Pun-Pun.
4e was absolute shit IMHO.

I started out with 2E and 5E feels nothing like any game of 2E I have ever played on any level except vaguely similar fluff.

At and above 5th level it was be a big pain in the ass, especially if there was more than one martial. A few reasons from my own experience:
- at fifth level most martials get their Extra Attack, which is compounding the number of extra rolls if you prudently threw an extra die in per attack roll
- it threw the math into a woodchipper when one of the design tenets was and is "bounded accuracy"
- Many players would be reticent to dole them out, effectively using them to make things more boring rather than more exciting or interesting
- If you DO spend all your resource and roll super shitty, it *feels* super shitty.

It's a good idea, but not necessarily in that form.
That's the same reason why they ended up moving away from "proficiency dice" and went with static values. More predictable and less opportunities for players to feel like they got fucked over by capricious chance.

I say bolt a version of it onto Champion fighters to give them another tool in their scant toolbox. You'd have an interesting mechanic while also giving Champion a bit more flavor and granularity.
You can add it to any attack roll you make, expend to reduce damage as a Reaction to getting attacked, add it to any saving throw as a Reaction, or add to the Second Wind feature's healing.
3rd level: Champion Die at d6
7th: increases to d8
10th: can expend it after an attack connects to add it to the weapon's damage (and as weapon damage it also gets doubled on a crit)
15th: increase to d10
18th: gain an additional Champion Die

It's pretty good, and stands out as being particularly approachable to new players. There's flaws of course, and everyone seems to have some house rules to patch things up, but I wouldn't have a group if it wasn't for 5e. So I'm fond of it.

Except you paid for your extra attacks with your dice.

Not always--it depends on which revision we're talking about. I'd have to get onto my laptop to find which one exactly, but there was definitely a phase where the Expertise/Maneuver system happened alongside extra attacks.

so after they took away the dice per round and made it per encounter, did they give something new to compensate for the loss?

No.

why would I play this then?

Well, to a degree they did add something, in the terms of more flat numbers.

Martials in 5e aren't worthless like they were in 3.PF. The combat is better structured and they are both significantly tougher than other characters and do a lot of reliable damage.

The just have almost no interesting options or actual complexity to them, which sucks if you compare it to the depth of options every class had in 4e.

Then again, some people like simple martial characters. I don't really get it, the idea of designing an entire class to be mechanically simple as some sort of tutorial choice is kinda baffling, but apparently for 5e's primary demographic it's what they wanted.

The only thing that would make me care about 5e is if they published a Tome of Battle equivalent for it, though. The ToB (and later Path of War) are the best fucking things about 3.PF.

yeah, i'd hate to have one or more characters be reduced to full attack bots in any of the games I GM so i'll probably wait for some equivalent of ToB like you mentioned before I deviate from what I'm using now and go back to D&D.

It's fine. It's the second best version.

After?

Whichever one you prefer.

That's 5e's strength, the core of its design. No matter what edition of D&D before was your favourite, even if it doesn't replace it it will be the second best.

4e>5e>BECM/RCI>2e>1e>3.P>O

That's pretty much what I'd go for, the only change is I'd switch 5e and BECMI/RCl, but both are super close in how good they are. The real gap is between 1e and 3.x.

It's a great edition for people either just getting into tabletop or just looking to play sort of fast and loose with certain aspects. It's my go to system

>Normie system

it's a wargame with bare minimum roleplaying

It makes everyone angry, but it's mostly okay.

Glad you more or less agree, user

Monks should have just been based off of 3.5 swordsages. With fighters having an archetype choice that effectively makes them warblades

I'm sort of dissapointed, but then again I wasn't expecting much. It's not particularly distinguishable from any other 3.PF d20 SRD game save for a few improvements. Granted, all of these changes are almost universally improvements, but a polished turd is still a turd.

It's pretty cool! I enjoy it.

Some people seem to need, or at least think they need, this option. Anything more than "I move then attack" is too much.

It always strikes me as so fucking bizarre.

personally it's my second favorite edition after 3.5/pathfinder it's a lot simpler and has less stuff at the moment but it's easy to pick up and interesting enough

Combat is worse than 4e, the monster math is all fucked up, and the saving throw system is retarded.

It's great. Me and my group love it. It's simple to play, and there's enough options. The UA release cycle has been very welcome, hopefully these shittards will quit crying about it and actually submit some playtest feedback so it ends up in a book.

I like the idea behind the saving throw system, but the actual usage of it is awful

The vast, vast majority of saves are con, dex or wis, to the point of their only being 7 abilities in the game that require an intelligence saving throw, 3 monster abilities, 1 class feature, and 3 spells

which all line up with the old reflex fortitude will saves
old habits die hard I guess

What makes it worse is that 4e fixed the stupid thing about wisdom and charisma, by having wisdom and charisma both apply to Will, it meant that charisma, which had always been fluffed as "force of will" now actually applied to your willpower

Then they changed it back in 5e, with spells like charm person, suggestion and hypnotic pattern requiring wisdom, not charisma, saving throws

I will never understand this

I personally like options, but I know certain players who literally just want to toss dice and look at special abilities as needless clutter.

Also, if you're playing without minis, some options really can be a pain to play with, and often aren't that useful in practice

I always thought charisma was more force of personality than force of will
a person with a lot of charisma could be very weak willed at the same time you know celebrites and such

It's fine

you can watch the recent acquisitions inc stuff if you want to see it in action

Damn, a lost brother with my own taste.

This
>What people think it means
Oh man, all the stats are useful against magic now!
>What it actually means
Every single character under the sun has a gaping weakness, oh and the stats that are most commonly targeted are EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME AS IN 3E WHY?!

youtube.com/watch?v=MSrTnWDTdwI

>Basic above Advanced
What's it like, being wrong?

There was an updated improvisation table to bring them more in line in the compendium IIRC. Of course, optimized characters (especially essentials characters with optimized at-wills) will outscale them still, but it's easy to just always use the best values/increase the effect by a few levels (about as much as you need to increase the encounter levels for them to stay challenging) and call it a day.

The combat mechanics are the same miniature based bullshit as 3/3.5/4, but with all of the useful examples and pictures removed.

I wish, they removed everything that made 4e combat fun.

Fuck, they removed most of the things that made 3.5 combat fun that weren't in 4e.

The flip side of this is that the game is barely a notch of an Asterisk World game using a D20. Except in combat, where it is simply a dumbed down version of the miniatures combat system from 3/3.5/4

People who are saying it's the most straightforward have obviously never played anything before 3.5.
Give b/x or a retroclone a go (Labyrinth Lord if I may reccomend), you might just have more fun.

>The flip side of this is that the game is barely a notch of an Asterisk World game using a D20

Nope. Those games have actions that serve a purpose mechanically and narratively. I'd hence argue that the 5e stat/skill system is a step below.

Oh, yeah it's incredibly shitty, but I'm sick of theater-of-the-mind faggots pretending the game doesn't have a fucking short and fucking specific list of allowed actions in combat and nothing else is allowed.

That's fair enough. You have a higher opinion of Asterisk World than I do. My time with 5e so far has convinced me that I'm better off making a 3.5 clone for a project than writing a supplement for 5e.

>You have a higher opinion of Asterisk World than I do

Well, I prefer when mechanics/skills/etc serve a well defined niche.

Like, as shit as OD&D Thief was, its % skills very obviously served a singular purpose (as shoddily as they did). 5e skills don't really do much. They don't (on a systematic level) give you new things to do, they just make you slightly better at things you already could. A good DM can circumvent that, but it still sucks.

Am I the only one that doesn't mind that 5e hasn't gotten a whole lot of new content since its release? I mean one of 3.PF's biggest problems was that it had way too much shit, and like 90% of it was poorly balanced one way or the other.

I'd still like a PHB2, DMG2, and some new Monster Manuals though.

With the huge amount of previous editions adventures and lore to use, I don't care either.