What "innovations" in D&D 5e actually have their origins in 4e?

WotC realized that no matter how hard they tried and how much they wanted it to, D&D will never become MtG and selling stuff to increasingly aging white guys rather then aiming at emerging demographics is not a stable long-term business program.
So they cut down on a lot of D&D’s staff and reduced their costs as low as possible and made it as accessible as possible to reap maximum rewards for minimal effort.

What’s the point if they alienate their older fans though?

They don’t actually need them per say as long as they can make the money elsewhere, which they have proven that they can through a mixture of aggressive advertising, cost-cutting, and accessibility.
Don’t feel too bad about it user, this was literally always going to happen at some point to you (as to all of us, and eventually will be a part of every aspect of your life. Eventually you stop being the target demographic and the things you want and like no longer really matter to the people who used to produce the things you want and like.

the 3.5/4e/AD&D/etc. purists are an absolutely miniscule market share. They are not worth chasing.

4e was such a marketing disaster that 5e basically had to be a zero risk edition that would be sustainable for the long term.

The biggest problem with 4e (and as a 4e player, it has had problems!) was not inherent to the system. The biggest problem with 4e was that it was not 3e. WotC learned that D&D players are the opposite of apple buyers and are threatened by new things. 5e was then ruthlessly tested to be as inoffensive as possible.

5e also follows design trends. 4e came out near the end of the crunchy trend and entering the narrative era of RPGs. You could say that 4e had the wrong tone for its era, and 5e is a product of that. I'm a little sad to see the crunchy mega-era of D&D go because 2e was before my time, but what can you do?

What does that have to do with my post?

I was just pointing out the weird fact that a lot of people on /5eg/ seem to take it as a personal affront if you start talking about builds or optimal character choices

This leans fluffy over crunchy but the death of the primal and martial power sources.

Rogues and fighters should be tapping into something to make them superhuman. Call it ki or adrenaline or something but the return to the mundane fighterman is a return to my biggest gripes from 3.pf.

Losing out on the primal power source is the same loss of design space as pretending psionics are gone at the start of every edition. If they do bring it back, it's going to connect poorly with the system they have in place while designing around it from the start opens up more and better options.

I came for the cute girl
I don't know what all of this is about

It's weird going from 4e to 5e

Going from 3.5 to 4e I found myself capable of building most of my characters again for the new system. But 4e to 5e leaves me wanting

I can't say I was happy to see the return of the power attack meta

Eh, do remember that 4e left primal out of the PHB and probably had the best handling of it... then again, they also delayed druid/barbarian so I guess I get where you are coming from.

Hit Dice function nothing like Healing Surges. Healing Surges were a fairly hard limit to the amount of healing you could receive in a day, Surgeless Healing was fairly uncommon. You aren't required to spend Hit Dice to benefit from a Cure Wounds spell, but you did have to spend a Surge to benefit from one in 4e.

Hit Dice actually function like 3aboos claimed Healing Surges did, giving PCs out of combat regeneration. Though unlike surges you have to roll them instead of getting a fixed amount of healing.

>Primal wasn't introduced to phb 2
And monks/psionics didn't come back until phb 3.
I will grant that 4e primal wasn't a central design conceit and it could have easily taken barbarians down the martial path and left the druids divine. But having seen the primal source it doesn't make sense to go back. Plus is a design space I really like and wizards should be working to make me happy more than anyone else.

>Characters don't really translate to 5e
I feel ya. There is no good way to remake my warforged warden who wants to become an elemental.

Archtypes are not from 4e- they're from 3.5's Variant class features shown in multiple issues of Dragon Magazine, and varipus splatbooks.

Now that we've got that covered- the simplification of dispel magic comes to mind

>3.5 variant class features
>not AD&D Kits

They could have make the Barbarian (another!) Martial Striker and Druid the Divine Controller, but thank God they didn't.
Now why 5e didn't used Primal baffles me. Or kept Martial renaming (or not) it Military.

Likely a desire to avoid 4e names as much as possible.

stop whining

Death saving throws, short rests, dragonborn and tieflings as core races, and spells that have to be sustained. Fighters' two main features, Second Wind and Action Surge, used to be given to everyone in 4e.

Money, duh

4e had a lot of categorization that ended up being used in few or no game rules. Power source was one of them (because having things react differently to PCs of different power sources was against 4e's design philosophy anyway.) Creature supertypes that told you what plane every monster was from was another such never-used category (this is what led to the very odd description of every undead as "natural.")

Power source did imply access to different effects in 4E, even if it wasn't a hardcoded mechanical rule.

That would justify it being used in the same way as class roles, but that's not how it was used. "Martial" is a keyword that appears on every fighter power; "Defender" is not.

Basically, they fucked up by thinking power source would matter sometimes when their own vision for 4e from the beginning dictated that it never would.

Power sources weren't damage types, they were just catagories to easily group thematicly simmilar classes. All the rules involving them was part of items and feats so they never come up in actual play but are very much present. The majority of magical items care about your power source. There are tons of feats that care about it too, such as the divine classes get access to domain stuff or the martials having different fighting styles which augment their at-wills.

I could have sworn power sources come up with the keywords for powers. It probably interfered with certain builds but never really came up that much besides being thematic.

They are listed on powers, but again, that's only for the sake of items and feats. All Cleric powers are Divine and all Wizard powers are Arcane. But those classes can get things from other sources through multiclassing and so on. Its listed on the powers themselves to premtively stop degeneracy.

If 5e's art is from late 4e, then the difference between early and late 4e is fucking incredible.

>What "innovations" got lost in the translation between 4e and 5e when they tried porting it over?
Roles, both class roles and monster roles, and all they lead to.

Somewhat ironically, 4e's classes that were made to "fill out a grid" like the avenger, the warden, the bard, the warlord...hell, any non-cleric Leader were its best designed.

user, are you unaware that you could spend Healing Surges during short rests in 4e, without limit? It's right in the rules text of short rests on page 263 of the player's handbook.

Of course, the trick in 4e was, as you note, the hard cap of limited surges: sure, you could heal to full between each fight, but it made it more likely later in the day that you'd need a heal, but couldn't get one.

Meaning hit dice are worse than healing surges because they give you less healing when used, their healing value is randomized, AND because using them doesn't impact your in-combat healing resources.

Man, I get that they wanted to make the fighter better and more unique but I just don't think that it's fair that only them get action surges and second wind. I think that this was the main problem that they faced with it.

Hmm. That's not my experience of /5eg/. Like, half the threads I see have at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the thread being people being told "Look, the optimum mechanics for class X have been worked out. Here they are."

The other poster may have been implicitly saying that heavy-crunch/optimization is 'inaccessible". and therefore counter to the spirit of the newest edition, but idk, it's a stretch. He may have mis-linked.

Because it requires thinking about "what's the identity of this role" and "what's the identity of this power source."

You have to think about the thematic and mechanical implications of both of those, and those questions probably helped shape the game.

Everyone should have action surges.
Everyone should have second wind.
Fighters should have ACTUAL ABILITIES that they can use besides "I hit things."

>Everyone should have action surges.
>Everyone should have second wind.
Oh, so you only want there to be one round of combat. Got it.
5e combat is so short because of PC damage output that you gotta be careful how many things PCs can do in a round. If everyone has an action surge, the spellcasters are just gonna go supernova at the start of combat with fireballs and shit. Not good.

>5e combat is so short because of PC damage output
PCs do lower damage in 5E than any other edition.

They had to put a power source and role on clerics and warlocks too, and those were a mess.

gotta agree with , if everyone has action surges and second wind then it just becomes part of the system and everything crashes down.

IMO, the problem with fighters is....they are good at fighting and that is their thing, so, one of the solutions that many people used before was the fighter having access "battle maneuvers" like throwing sand in the eyes, flourish with weapons and that kind of thing, but then again, that would remove the option to other classes use this in a pinch and possibly ruining a very good campaign moment.

Relatively, no. Damage output high, and blasting the meta. Combat is short for that reason.

Just do what the manuevres already do: Let you do X thing, but also smack a bitch while doing it. Anyone can stick gravel in someone's mouth or whatever, but the fighter can do it and then hit him with an axe in the same turn.

Alright, here's my list of "4e things that made it into 5e."

Warlock as a default class.
Dragonborn and Tiefling as default Races.

*Arguable* - The "Eladrin" effect, where there is a more magical breed of Elf, and a more Forest-focused breed of Elf. (There have been tons of Elven subraces across a lot of D&D, of course, but 4e introducing the magical (or "high") elves as their own separate race with explicitly magical racial abilities really drew it into focus, a focus I feel is continued in 5e with their High Elves gaining a cantrip,)

The idea of "short rests" holding mechanical weight.

The mechanical acknowledgement of level consistent tiers of play, pre-Epic. (This ties to a LOT of stuff, such as Paragon paths, proficiency bonuses, 4e's ASIs being universal at levels 11 and 21, etc. etc)

I agree with that as far as I'm aware, the idea of the damage dice of your cantrips/at-will abilities scaling with your level is rooted in 4e.

Hit Dice being a partial reimplementation of Healing Surges

The removal of Arcane Spell Failure chance.

Technically, 4e "Trained" and 5e "Proficient" are closer to 2e's Non-Weapon Proficiencies, just adding bonuses to rolls instead of penalizing them to compensate for the privilege of getting to roll at all.

Fighter gets to keep Healing Surge, and partial retention of "action points" via Action Surge.

Monster stat blocks are a little closer to 4e in design, but they've changed with essentially every edition, so this can be viewed as more of a overall progression.

I would argue that the codification of Lair effects owes something to 4e's "Solo" monster designs.

No, relatively. AD&D is rocket tag, 3E is rocket tag from the word go with basic full attacks carving off half an appropriate enemy's health and SoLs everywhere, 4E strikers could end elites in a single round with the addition of a single leader's buffs.

Are 5e's backgrounds like folk hero and noble original to 5e?

Relative to how long combat lasts, you fucking retard.

>3 round combat is shorter than 2 round combat

Damn it. I forgot that.

No. Backgrounds as mechanical increases were implemented in later 4e, where backgrounds could give you bonuses such as:
Extra trained skills
Using different stats to determine HP,
Extra weapon proficiencies
Bonuses to skills
the ability to re-roll certain skills

etc.

Except that everyone had action surges and second winds in the previous edition and it was fine.

Also, specifically to Fighters are martial artists. Fighting isn't just being "good at using a sword", fighting is a fucking artform.
The battlemaster almost gets it. It's right on the fucking cusp of understanding how a fighter should work. And then it stumbles at the fucking finish lines by choking it with an unncessecary resource mechanic that can and will leave you with your action being limited to "I attack."

A level 1 Rogue vs a CR 1 melee combatant in 3e, 4e, and 5e, using 3e and 5e's Elite array, and assuming full optimization for damage at level 1, and that the bugbear is flanked.

3e Rogue is an elf with 17 Dex, and 14 strength. They have the Weapon Finesse feat, and are wielding a rapier. Their attack bonus is +5, their damage is 1d8+2+1d6, for an average damage of 10. The bugbear has a 17 AC, so the rogue needs a 12 or higher to hit. Rogue's average dpr is 4.7, counting the odds of a crit, against the bugbear's 16 HP. The rogue will on average take 4 rounds to kill the bugbear. (Note: on a crit, on average, the bugbear will simply die.)

4e rogue is a Halfling, with 17 Dex, and 16 Cha., and the Backstabber feat. Their attack bonus is +8, their damage is 1d6+6+2d8, for an average of 18.5 . Goblin Warrior has an AC of 17, so a 9 or higher to hit, for an average dpr of 11.575, against 29 hit points. It will take the 4e Rogue roughly 3 turns to kill the goblin. (note, on a crit, the goblin will survive with 1 hp.)

5e rogue is an Elf with 17 Dex, no other relevant stats, and no access to feats. Their attack bonus is +5, and their damage is 1d8+3+1d6, for an average of 11. Bugbear AC is 16, so an 11+ to hit, average DPR of 5.95, against bugbear HP of 27. It will take an average of 5 turns to kill the bugbear. (Note that a crit will leave the bugbear at 8 hp.)

This is only one example, but it doesn't feel particularly out of line.

A particularly important facet is the relative crit results: 3e had slower combat than 4e, but the crits were more impactful. 5e kept the health of 4e monsters, with the damage dice of 3e.

Further comparisons could be made with rangers, since they're a consistent default class. Spellcasters would be hard to measure with the lack of at-will abilities for mages in 3e.

Can't have Weapon Finesse at level 1 as a rogue. +1 BAB requirement.

4E Rogue's better off wielding a dagger by a miniscule amount of DPR(like half a point). Gives them the handy option of nailing someone in the face with Sly Flourish from range, too.

Damn, you're right. And a closer inspection shows I was actually messing up quite a bit on the 3e math. (Rapiers don't have d8 damage, they have improved crit range, and rogues aren't even PROFICIENT with them! So I need a simple weapon with d8 damage to replace the rapier... or the shortsword with its broader crit range...let me run some numbers.)

So the best melee output for a level 1 rogue is actually a Half-Orc with a longspear. 17 Strength, no relevant feats or other stats.
Damage is 1d8+3+1d6, for an average of 11 damage. Same chance to hit, but a x3 damage on a crit, leads to 5.29 dpr.

The rogue will JUST BARELY need an average of 4 rounds still, as the bugbear will end round 3 with an average of 1.13 hp.

So despite the math errors, the conclusion was the same. (and the results much...stranger.)

average damage of 17.5, extra 5% chance to hit...12.4 dpr.

You undersold it, my friend, it's almost .9 dpr more!

4e was always winning, so it's not immensely important, but thanks for the catch!

>average damage of 17.5, extra 5% chance to hit...12.4 dpr.
.65*17.5+.05*10.5=11.9

4E's crit math in DPR is different from 3.5's and 5E's in that the crit damage is the difference between the average damage dealt by dice,in this case, 11.5, and the maximum dealt by it, 22, as opposed to a multiplier or doubled dice.

The shortsword Rogue's DPR was .6*18.5+.05*11.5 = 11.675

There's a good deal of 4e art, and 4e had a few very distinct artists with very distinct styles which most could easily recognize if they flipped through the books (one liked a "sketchy" design style while another one made this huge, dramatic scenery; one took a really angular approach to his drawings). Notably the second Bard picture (the one with the two dudes) showed up in Heroes of the Feywild, and the Dragonborn picture in races is a Dragonborn-focused splatbook.

Things like stat replacements and proficiencies were only in the earliest versions of backgrounds. After PHB2 they were only skill bonuses, class skill swap, and languages.

4e's Themes are a closer ancestor of 5e Backgrounds.

Generally 4e's Rogue would have 18 Dexterity.

Yes, but that's because 4e uses a more generous stat array than 3e or 5e.

That seems pretty incorrect.

Even using your math, the maximum damage is 26, not 22. (You forgot to account for the extra 4 damage from Backstabber, I think.)

And the average damage is 17.5, not 11.5

So even using your math, it should be (0.65*17.5)+(.05*8.5) which equals 12.055

Looking over all out math, we're all wrong, as the actual result is

(.6*17.5)+(.05*26) = 11.8

I mistakenly used 18.5 as the average in my calculations here. So it equates to an actual increase of 0.225

One thing I think is missing from 5e that i liked in 4e was treatment of Monks. I thought 4e monks, with their weird abilities really gave them a better 'exotic' feel than the half-assed Eastern vibe they have in 3e and 5e.

>Short and long rest recharge. Proficiency bonus is actually a cleverly disguised version of the automatic scaling from levels (just 1/4 instead of 1/2). Scaling cantrips maybe?
>Hit dice as a worse version of healing surges.

Damn thread made me depressed in four lines. 32 goddamned years I've been in this hobby and this is the best we could come up with? Just shoot me in the fucking head right now.

?

>Emerging demographics
Where? The same type of people are playing ttrpgs. There is no new group of players. The time investment in these games will always be too much for a larger audience. TTrpgs will always stay in their niche.

Sadly, we don't have the data to back that up.

No one's released any wide census of TTRPG information since 1999, years before WoW or the Big Bang Theory, or Stranger Things, which all raised RPG's profile in the public conscious. (for better and for worse)

What other patchwork results we encounter tend to agree: broadly, the majority of TTRPG players are in their 20's-30's. There's slightly more teenagers playing than people 40 or older.

We don't know much about gender, and even less about race, though the 1999 survey found that roughly 1/5 of TTRPG players are female.

So, if we know that consistently, it's people in their 20's to 30's who play, then we know that the 20-30 year olds of the 2010s are different from those in the 2000's, and the 90's, and so forth.

So while the demographic may be largely cohesive (mainly male nerds in their 20's and 30's) that group's values and tastes will change. How many nerds do you think wanted grittier settings after Game of Thrones started airing? Shit like that.

Sure, we'll never be a dominant force (even assuming that we've somehow DOUBLED our market share since 1999, we'd still be only 6% of the generally population.), and remain niche. But niches can change.

Statistics is one hell of a thing.

I never thought monks in 4e were wierd. I thought they were an elegant blend of theme and mechanics.

Monks have previously been one of those classes that's just a blob of "thematic" features that isn't good for anything. Monks in 4e actually can move around like a kung-fu movie. 4e also solved the monk design problem of "how do we make a class with shitty weapons not shit?" by making them implement users.

5e made the monk kinda blah again. They did the same thing to the bard and ranger, and it's sad.

Sorry, "Weird" in that their powers worked in a very obviously unique way, with the "full discipline" feature making ability that could be either an attack or a move (or both), which was very different and somewhat confusing at first glance, given the rather static nature of previous 4e blocks.

It was a very cool way to emphasize how important their mobility was as part of their kit, which is why I note that it's sad that 5e didn't continue that kind of idea.

Monster design was so much better in 4e. The Defender Role was incredible and the 5e Fighter has been lobotmized compared to his 4e peers. The Warlord was the best class in D&D history.

That's my experience with it, too. Nearly half the time people are talking about builds or optimization.

This intrigues me. Please explain 4e monks to a 5evirgin?

Well, yeah, they were the first draft, so to speak.

They work a lot like other classes (AEDU powers), with a few differences.

- They are melee implement users. This means they can fight without weapons just as well as with weapons, and that they target defenses instead of AC.
- Their "striker feature" is flurry of blows. They have a number of variants to choose from at first level. This also determines their secondary stat (I think the only secondary stat Monks didn't use was INT) after Dexterity. FoB is essentially a free, always hitting attack, with some effect, the effect was boosted if it targeted somebody other than your primary target, making monks actually pretty okay at dealing with multiple enemies at once.
- They have a system called "full disciple" where their attacks come with a built in movement action. For example, one of their at-will powers tripped the opponent, then they had a Move action they could use to swap places. Or an attack that could be used at the end of charges, came with a move action that punished enemies for making opportunity attacks at you. Sometimes the move action was the "meat" giving you limited flight, or the ability to walk on walls, etc. I recall one that we fluffed as "kneeing someone in the face so hard his soul flies out, then ride it like a surf board".
- Got lots of "Stance" type utilities.
- Some cool feat support that makes monk builds very diverse, ensuring that every single monk you play can be meaningfully different.

Stance and auras are something I wanted to see more in 4e. I don't hate the Essential Fighters and understand why they used stance + encounter damage upgrade, but it misses something.

I really like the concept of aura defenders, but they needed much more tools at higher levels, and possibly better scaling built into both the stances and the encounter powers.

The most fun one right out of the gate for me was the one where you punched a dude so hard he punched himself in the face and it scaled with your Wisdom modifier. The 4e Monk had a lot of ridiculously fun stuff.

I was thinking... Should the Monk really be a Psion? I understand the "need" for a Psi Power Source to fill the PHB3, but I never found the Psionics as something that should exist in DnD.

Would 4e get mad if a retroclone banished that power source and used monk as a Martial Controller?

Healing surges are awful design. With surgeless healing, healing is a party resource. With Healing Surges, healing is an individual resource. This means you can end up with one guy losing all his surges in the first couple of encounters and the adventuring day is over, even though the party hasn’t take above average damage.

It doesn't need to, I reckon. That said, I do find Ardents and Battleminds quite frankly some of the most interesting classes in terms of fluff, so who knows. Besides, the issue with the Monk is that I can't really see it fitting that well. If you're doing a Martial Controller, it should be either a Rogue-esque one or a Ranger-Hunter type thing.
If I'm not mistaken there were powers that allowed you to spend a surge to heal someone.

I wouldn't say it is awful, but maybe it needs improvement.

Some classes have powers that allow to spend teir own Surge to heal someone, and there exists some uncommon surgeless healing. The idea of HS is exactly avoid the 15 min workday in relation to HP, so off course Defenders get more, and off course sometimes the situation you described may occur.

Aside the Vampire, is there any other way to "transfer" HS between PC? Maybe a Ritual could work to diminish this.

Being Jackie Chan was the best part of playing a 4e monk.

Sorry, dude, I was asleep.

But if I can elaborate on Monks were implement users. in 4e, in addition to magic weapons, you had magic implements, which were holy symbols, arcane foci, etc, which gave you bonuses to attack and damage just like magic weapons did. (This was because 4e treated Fortitude, Will, and Reflex as defenses like AC: You didn't have a +6 to Fortitude saves, you had 16 Fortitude.) All monk powers were implement powers, meaning they were, in essence, spells. One cool thing was that the implements monks used were a new item called Ki Focuses, or "Any Weapon with Which They Were Proficient." So monks could channel their magical attacks through quarterstaves, spears, or any weapon, if you got them the proficiency, which let you pull off those "sword monk" style characters without too much fuss: the sword was basically just their magic wand.

-The "Full Discipline" abilities of a monk were a very distinct ability. A lot of the nuances of 4e's powers were lost on first time readers (A lot of fighter powers, for instance, had Reliable, a keyword you had to look up to know that it meant "If you miss all targets with this attack, you regain it immediately." adding a lot of, well, reliability to fighter damage and effects) The full discipline powers were immediately visible as different, because they had 2 action profiles per entry. And their effect was to turn every power into a psuedo-charge effect: you could use the power just for its movement on a turn, just for its attack on a turn, or you could use it for both. Further a LOT of monk abilities had effects like "Move your speed, make this attack against every enemy you pass by" or "This ability can target up to 4 enemies, and you may move 10 feet between each strike." So monks were always jumping, dashing, and bobbing around the battlefield in different ways.

Shrug. You'd probably want a paragraph explaining how Ki, as a natural life energy, is the hidden power source of Martial actions, explaining how monks are generating all these magical effects, but otherwise, it would be fine.

personally, I've never been against Psionics, so it seems unnecessary, but to each their own.

>Mechanics only, less art and GMing advice.
eh.. Better art is really all the Wizards of the Coast takeover brought to the table.

But the art was best in 2e.

I consider this a feature and not a bug. Individual healing means you never need to worry about your healer ratio and you never have to ration out heals. Healing surges also make it so that having high up isn't a liability. Without having a scaling surge value, fighters are punished for doing their job because they will drain more heals to bring them to full.

The issue if one player running out is just part of the strategy of the game. It means everybody should take some risks, which leads to more dynamic gameplay.

>They will drain more heals to bring them back to full

You know, until you said that, I'd never realized that mathematical connection. That IS something to think about.

Having flat heals with no individual healing resource punishes the party for having higher hp.

Defenders in 4e actually have tools to protect the party, so the healing is tuned to reward beefy characters that have a higher surge value and more surges.

From my perspective, as someone who hates builds in ttrpg, it turns it into a video game. Why not just play WoW? You don't have builds in OSRs. I just don't think the core of what makes DnD cool is with building coffeelocks. It's the same with WAAC players in 40k. Unless they're playing in a cutthroat tournament, no one wants to play with that kind of person.

But great, you want to do some stupid build. Fine. Get together other players who also want to do that and do a pvp or something. Like a 40k tourney. But keep that out of other people's games.

>You don't have builds in OSRs
Because you can't do that much in OSRs to begin with via written mechanics.
I'll try to explain what a "build" is, so you can stop sperging about it.
>I want to do X thing
>I am required to take specific pc based resources in order to do X thing
>I plan to take those resources when they are available in order to do X thing

The only time builds become stupid is when the builds only make sense from a mechanical standpoint, rather than a narrative one.

Other than that, I don't see what the issue is. Then again, I'm not an autist or a brainlet who has to choose between having a strong but boring character and a weak but interesting one when there's nothing stopping you from making a strong and interesting character by default.
>You don't have builds in OSRs.
That's because the shit your character could do could fit on an index card and their longevity is equal to that of a roll of tissue paper.

No worries dude, thanks for the responses.
So they're more like Diablo 3 monks than generic Bruce Lee clones? That sounds awesome cause I always find monks the highest class to fit into a world, I feel like they're the only one to obviously come from different cultural cloth to the rest of them.

Martial and Primal power sources? I only know 5E please explain?