Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

Let's have a thread about 4e.

I've started to gravitate back toward the system recently because I never quite gave it a chance in between Pathfinder and 5th Edition. I liked the AEDU system and regardless of whether it "feels" like Dungeons & Dragons or not I think it accomplishes the objective of giving every player something interesting they can do every turn.

What have your experiences been in running and playing it? Share some stories, homebrew ideas, houserules, whatever you like, and please keep it civil.

>Thread stays civil and dies after Thread devolves into edition wars and shitposting and goes to bump limit

I've recently taken up running the game again after a spell of storygames. I'm rediscovering and re-evaluating the latter stuff, post-essentials. Reavers of Harkenwokd is a great little module and there are tons of juicy bits of lore scattered here and there. Plus, I'm actually having a ton of fun in prepping and running the game instead of feeling like work.
The only thing I can't stand is that still, 10 years later, we have constant shitposting.

As for house rules, I run the game basically RAW - I still hold that the infamous math issues are more a meme than a problem, and the game works well enough with just a little care.
The one thing I do is doing away with the milestones. Players get one AP per encounter, and no limits on magic item use. The items are not a problem, as I usually use the Inherent Bonuses variant, and keep strict control on what the players get. Having more action points is a slight increase in power, but saves us the hassle of remembering who used one, and doesn't carry over from one encounter to the next. If we ever get to Paragon, I'll see if more APs become a problem, but I ran other games in the past and didn't see a real difference.
I'm also experimenting with the Escalation Die from 13th age. So far it's a noticeable increase in speed of resolution and the players feel better. I tied monster recharge times to the die, but I haven't tried anything more interesting.

I'm in a perpetual loop where I run 4E and want to run a rules-lite game to get through combat faster, and then want to swap from the rules-lite game to 4E for juicy combat.

I know that feel, man.

BTW this isn't a knock on 4E, I've had combat run marvelously, but my group of the past few years always ummms and ahhhs no matter what I try to speed them up.

In the last years I've begun planning my games with an endpoint, usually no further than six months or so ahead. So I alternate between storygames and crunchy beasts, with a turnover of players, and keep things fresh (for me and them). It's been working great, and I'm a lot happier than when I was trying to stretch games beyond my forces.

>my group of the past few years always ummms and ahhhs no matter what

Been running 4e for years. Never had a chance to play it, but that's just the way it is. 4e presents its own design challenges, but there are elegant solutions to them, and I wouldn't take any other RPG over it now.

The first thing I do is use a printer. You can copy and paste attacks from the compendium into a word document, strip away the big colored blocks that are a waste of ink, and print it out. It turns out that a more minimal presentation is just as readable.

There are many safety valves that let players avoid dying if possible, and dailies reward players for extended rests. As a result, you have to make a decision about whether your session is going to be survival-driven or plot-driven. If the adventure is survival-driven, then you have to assume 15-minute adventuring days if you don't give a good reason for the players to keep going.

All that said, this provides a fantastic opportunity to take a page from majora's mask or pikmin. In these games, the players aren't concerned about immediate death, they are concerned about a bigger picture. A side-benefit of running this kind of a game is that the players are encouraged to become engaged with the NPCs and their environment, because survival and general paranoia isn't the driving force.

I haven't changed much in house rules, but I do follow all of the errata and only use monsters and traps from more recent books. The difference between 4e on release day and near the end of life is basically edition 4.5.

A lot of DMs talk about handing out free feats willy-nilly just because a few of them are considered feat-taxes. It's easy to go overboard, and a more elegant solution I use in my game is I model these feats as "grandmaster training" and make them a quest reward that takes up an item slot. Expertise and improved defenses go here. There is no need for a third training slot. The bonus they provide is still a feat bonus.

Looks like it'll be a case of the former this time.

Did it annoy anyone else how inflated the economy got in 4e? I know the power level is supposed to be higher but hauling in millions of gold pieces just seems a bit ridiculous to me.

Eh, the values in all editions of D&D are retarded, so who cares?

Always nice to see a 4e thread around. I enjoy the system, both playing and running, but along with that I'm one of the poor bastards working on his own 4e heartbreaker, which raises a question-

Superior weapons. It's really cool to have a super special thing that does something cool, but are they actually a valuable addition to the game? On the one hand, having a selection of exclusive weapons and implements on offer is nice, but on the other hand it does kind of devalue all the others that exist, since if you can spare the feats for it a superior weapon or implement is almost always a straight upgrade.

Would you remove them? Would you change their implementation?

We're currently pondering a tag based weapon system, so people can build their own, with Superior weapons getting the most tags, but that does make it something of a feat tax, a straight up 'You'll eventually want to get this'. From that, I'm wondering whether you could straight up fold it into progression. Maybe at the end of Heroic tier, everyone unlocks a Superior Weapon or Implement, but might that seem a little odd and arbitrary? I'm still pondering it.

That's why you get to astral diamonds as currency from a certain point on.
But yeah, the numbers don't look good.

Good question, but I feel the answer is kinda.
4e already has a tag system, and it makes sense that some of the effects require a cost because they are more powerful (see brutal). You could skip the middleman and just bind the effect to the feat, but then you find yourself with little reason to differentiate between weapons.
It's one of those areas that is mid-way between top-down and bottom-up design. All in all, for me it's fine to keep it, if only for aesthetic reasons.

Superior implements though are kinda shit. Too obscure and too contrived.

One way to fold it into progression would be to have the number of tags a weapon gets be determined by its level.

What I'd do in my hypotetical 4.5e would be to fold every kind of numerical bonus in the progression, getting it to a straight +1 per level, and either do away with feats completely (maybe adding a bit more meat to themes), or give out only a few of them but with broader effects, 5e style. This way, you could skip superior weapons entirely, because you get some damage increases from the progression, and the cooler effects (high crit, dual wielding) can come from feats/themes.

4e Forever DM is probably the most enjoyable Forever DM I've found. Fluff-wise, it's probably the most mechanical thing I know.

Having the effects come directly from feats is weird though, since they're pieces of equipment, not inherent parts of your character.

We are going in a similar direction though, less feats with more impact per feat, and removing all the boring plus numbers feats.

*maleable thing I know
Goodness gracious, what is up with my head today, nothing I write comes out right.

I know what you mean, but stuff like "brutal", "better criticals" or "wield in off-hand" are not *that* hard to wrap around as some sort of combat style. Even "use a bigger die for this weapon" has some precedent in D&D history. I'm not saying that you need to do this, I'm just spitballing, but really, when you start to think about it hard enough, it's all just numbers.

It is, but I guess what worries me is a loss of identity for equipment if you move all its interesting properties away. Picking your gear is something people enjoy in D&D, a part of character customisation people see a lot of value in, and making that part of the process unsatisfying could hurt a lot of peoples impressions.

Can someone give me a rundown on how skill challenges are supposed to work?

While admittedly, messing around with your equipment is a time honored D&D tradition, I fell like it had been moving more and more away from that sort of play. Just look at the "adventurer's kit", and how weapons don't really have any tags anymore in 5e (and yes, I know 5e is in general a return to form and is really a sort of anti-4e in that sense, it was made with mass appeal in mind).

Here's my line of though if you don't want to relegate equipment to being a secondary concern:
1. You want equipment choice to be meaningful. If the choice isn't meaningful, you may as well just have different skins for the same weapon and call it a day.

2. You want equipment to be something that the character can, and should occasionally change; if it's something that your character wants to stick with 100% of the time as part of a build, it's basically really no better than a feat or some other modifier inherent to your character, with the edge cases of a disarming enemy possibly ruining your shit straight up.

- For equipment choice to be meaningful, it has to be high impact. Being high impact however leads to basing your build around it, and not wanting to switch out.
- Being situational leads to people hobbling round a golf bag of weapons. You can limit this with proficiency (which is a bag of snakes on its own) and encumbrance (which is
something also inherent to D&D so you may as well think about it).

One thing I really liked about 4e is how varied equipment choices were. Since it was all but assumed PCs would be swimming in magic items, you could very easily find the perfect weapon and armor for the kind of character you wanted to make.

I honestly don't think your logic in 2 holds up. While it's technically accurate, having a signature bit of equipment is tangibly satisfying to a player, but statting it up as anything other than a bit of equipment would just feel strange. Equipment being mostly things people stick with isn't a problem, IMO.

You are going to get 10 different answers, but what I do is this:
Set beforehand the complexity and the endgame. What is the goal, and what happens if PCs fail. Skill Challenges are in the hands of the GM, so you prep for them at least a bit.
I usually announce them when it's clear that the specific scene has started. Then I go around the table asking each PC what he does and take notes. Have them describe the action and then call the roll, it's OK if they find ways to use the best skills as long as it makes sense.
You are occasionally going to get some "I don't do anything" or "I just help him". That could be fine too, but try to lead everybody in taking action.
Remember that skill challenges are a pacing device for complex scenes. Work your way towards the endgame following your PC's leads, but try not to paint yourself in a corner. Published SCs are often too rigid, but you don't have to be. And let the narration lead the rolls.

You could probably replace "gold coin" with "silver" as well as bump the other currencies up and have everything make more sense.

I would make superior weapons specific items that function as a weapon but with extra features. For instance, a bastard sword is a superior version of a longsword, or a katar is a superior version of a short sword. The only prerequisite to using them would be proficiency with the base weapon.

Any optimization ideas you lot have had recently? I've experimented with trying to squeeze as much as I can from an Elemental Warlock and its vulnerability-inflicting Curse. Best I've done is Dwarf Warlock|Artificer.

Maybe unlock at char level, so a Paragon Fighter unlocks Weapon Supremacy that allows him one extra tag for its weapon.
Basically making default the feat tax it would have been, without removing a cool feature.

Legend did that with its Monk, who got 5 properties added to their fists, could apply two of them to any weapon they carried, and each time they got an extra weapon property on their fists from leveling they'd be able to apply an additional one to a weapon too, but then again, Legend also doesn't have weapon-specific feats the way 4E does.

I think a 4e inspired game could focus on the tactical combat and remove the golf bag aspect or the over specialization problem of never giving a sword (to be used instead of sold) because the fighter is good only with axes.

By abstracting the whole weapon list you save space and allow crazy weapons, like a rogue that uses cooking utensils or a ranger that uses an oriental fan. But this removes a great deal of rewards that players (not necessarily the PCs) want - shiny new toys.

It's a fine balance.

Did they ever stat out mithral armor in 4e?

Yes, but the way items work in 4e, it's treated as a specific enchantment, it's in Adventurers Vault. S materials for armor are assumed to be part of the creation of higher-level items, there is no "I make this armor out of darksteel so I get extra effect".
Fun fact: there is also an elven chain magic item that you can wear under light armor.

I think you can make shiny toys, just not weapons; or possibly, weapons that are shiny besides of what they are, like magical shit giving you extra powers to use or stuff like that.

And it's insane on swordmages

It's possible for a swordmage to boost their AC so high that Bahamut has a hard time hitting it

I was just reminded of the way gamma world does it. Broad categories (light, one-handed, two haded), and then you can add one layer of tags (axe, blade, blunt), with the special effects going into feats/progression.

and they also made +4 proficiency weapons, to fuck weapon balance even harder

Eh well, gamma world wasn't necessarily the most solid game mathswise, it was meant to be a filler. Still, I think that there are some things that could have been backported to the main game. The simplicity of "mash together two half-classes to get the character" was fascinating.

how is that simpler than having singular classes?

Well, that gave you the whole of your character over the 10 levels of the game.

Oh so it has the 5e problem of you make one choice and then that decides your entire character for the whole game?

Or are you trying to say something else? I'm very confused, do you have a pdf?

I'll take a step back. I'm talking about the 4e-based version of Gamma World, that came out in 3 boxed sets around the time of Essentials. It was marketed as a sort of "4e-lite" pickup game, where you could roll the characters in minutes and start playing wacky adventures, but with an underlying system that was very close to 4e. It had a relatively high mortality rate, so character turnover was expected.

Basically what you did was to roll on the mutation table for two different origins, and combine them. Each origin gave you a skill bonus, some traits, and an at-will power. Then, you had mutation powers that were drawn from a deck of cards and changed every once in a while. The origins also determined your progression, but the game only got up to level 10, so each one had just a page on this small-format booklet.

Now, the game did what it said, so it wasn't really meant for deep, long campaigns or detailed character creation. What I like about it though is that it took the 4e framework in a lighter direction that was still more interesting and varied than most Essential classes. I'm not saying that the main game should have worked exactly like that, but imagine if, say, races were expanded to give you stuff over the course of all heroic tier, taking away feats (which are my least favorite part of 4e). It's all hypotetical, I know, but I often think that another year or two of 4e (and no Mearls) could have given us a lot more interesting stuff.

Oh ok

I think I understand, however that sort of game sounds like it takes one of my favourite elements of 4e, the character building, and discards it. I think what you want out of 4e and what I want out of it are very different things

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Gamma World should take the place of regular 4e. But after all these years of running the game, I've come to appreciate the fact that there are some simpler options to go with the regular ones, and some parts (mostly the feats) sometimes feel too fiddly for little benefit.
I probably won't ever get around to actually making an homebrew, but my 4e heartbreaker would do away with feats and make races work more or less as themes do now. Class power selection is enough choices for me.

Not him, but my idea of heartbreaker would follow the D&D Next idea of modular complexity: default options with modules opening up customizations and showing the gears that move the simpler options so players can tink with it.

I remember it being downright broken on Wardens as well.

Cause instead of having 30+ classes, you got like 10 that you can combine in any way.

I honestly like that approach. It's like starting with hybrids, and developing the game from there. It's trickier to balance than the normal class based systems, but exponentially increases player choice.

One of the benefits of the Inherent Bonuses is that it disconnects magic Items, wealth and game math from each other. So if you use them, you can still operate in dozens and hundreds of GP even at highest levels

That's not 100% true, due to classes like sorcerer that rely on item enhancement bonuses for extra damage independant of inherent bonuses. And in some ways it actually harms the game's math scaling, as by allowing all attacks to receive the inherent bonus it means that dual wielders like rangers, which tend to already be the highest damage options in the game, are now stronger due to not having to double up on buying weapons

The difference though is negligible unless you are Touhoufag.

Why does Touhoufag get conflated with "the entirety of the old 4e CharOp crew who crunched out all those weird hybrid builds and encounter novas"?

Is it because Touhoufag was the only one who posted to Veeky Forums?

You go and say "Math isn't important" until you see your first vulnerability abuse encounter nova.

Because he is the one who posts 5 walls of text every time somebody dares mention that maybe 4e can be played without being anal about numbers.

I'm not saying that math isn't important. I'm saying that it works well enough straight out of the book (not forgetting the updates).

does anyone got this tool that has pretty much everything related to mechanics in it? i got it from some dude in a roll20 game a long time ago and lost it. i can't find it anywhere. it's a very simple java program that basically has all the type of info you'd find on the pfsrd for example except for 4e and entirely local

4e math is important, man.
Don't be a dick. Give out that free Expertise. Don't think the numbers are okay out of the book.

Pimarily because he's the one who fails to comprehend the fact that some groups don't have optimizing autismos and won't be doing any ridiculous combos unless they stumble upon them accidentally (which is impossible for the kind of optimization THF gives advice on)

Suppose someone was working on a 4th edition retroclone.

What would be your wishlist for things that made it in?
What would you hope would be left out, or revised?
What changes would you want to see made?

Most of the old 4e CharOp guys gather together on Roll20 and play whole parties of optimizing autismos.

If anything THF is self proclaimed "I don't even optimize as much as THESE guys" compared to the old 4e CharOp dudes.

I'm pretty sure their games are, like, the majority of the 4e games still going on Roll20.

>Don't be a dick. Give out that free Expertise. Don't think the numbers are okay out of the book.

They are though. Look, I've been running the game since day one. The latest batch of expertise feats are often the most interesting options, so there's no need to give them out for free. And the math holds up: sit down and draw a graph, like I did. Monster stats go up in a straight line, PCs go up and down but are always close there until deep into Epic, and even then it's trivial to keep them up without weird builds.

That's one subset.

My LFR group had a lot of people who were incredibly active in the CharOp board.

One of them would always play what I would describe as "flavor first" characters. He came up with an idea, and then optimized it to hell and back. Because the purely optimal characters are kind of boring.

As long as you stick a 18 in your primary, keep the items updated (or use inherent bonuses), and don't take stuff that has riders that you can't trigger or that doesn't stack, you are good to go. That's all you need in 4e, you don't ever risk being the fighter in a party of five black bears by accident. 4e optimization is masturbatory.

4e optimization is like solving a crossword puzzle

Problem is the puzzle's already been solved. So it's a bit boring now

I think this is part of why 4e's following after new material stop being published died off.

4e was a very mechanics driven game. And a lot of the interest was in seeing how this still living game was going to change now. New mechanics, new ways of playing the game, were coming out regularly.

And then it all stops. And excitement dies down.

Add onto this that once the excitement is gone you can pull back, look at the game, and see that it's kind of weirdly incomplete it takes a lot out of you. There are some flaws in 4e's design that never really got addressed.

What you've got in the end is this mostly solved game, with some mechanical flaws, that doesn't have anything that really drives it forward. and this leads to a fairly weak fan community.

None of this is helped by that WoTC shuttered their forums, leading to a kind of shattered community.

And if you solve the puzzle hard enough, you'll get a party of strikers/minion-clearers who BTFO everything with encounter novas in the first turn.

Weird how it didn't happen to 3.5, despite 3.5 being just as mechanically focused and having deeper flaws. Momentum of popularity I guess?

Still, 4e retains one merit. It's still the best tactical RPG out there

3.5 did basically die, though. No one really gave a shit about playing 3.5 after it's death. However, it had pathfinder. Pathfinder took over that part of the conversation because it was able to basically carry that momentum into a new project.

Ultimately, it's that 4e never got its pathfinder. And I think it's too late to try to make one now. Time has passed, energy and enthusiasm are gone.

3.5 has so much stupid shit in it and has a massive homebrewing community.

I don't know - there was a lot to 4e besides the supplement treadmill: new lore, weird situational subsystems, modules, and of course a ton of mechanical material. The game might be solved, if you consider that solving it was the only draw, but I contend that it wasn't.
Then again, I'm one of the few people still posting here. But I do believe that the viciousness of the edition wars, and the trolling that is still going on, contributed more to shutting down any discussion than any intrinsic quality of the game.

Unfortunately 4e, unlike 3.5, was well made, so remaking it would require a fuckton more effort than Paizo has put into Pathfinder, and no one is willing to do that. Especially not when it risks a lawsuit from Hasbro

Not to mention that 4e was both difficult to homebrew for, and that Wizards had taken an incredibly hostile attitude towards homebrew that basically choked out any kind of post-edition survival. Which, arguably, was good for them.

We don't have a 4e pathfinder, and 5e is wildly successful.

Well made or not, the critical difference between 4e and 3.5, the single thing that gave us Pathfinder and not a spiritual successor to 4e, is the OGL.

4E isn't difficult to homebrew for, it's just that 4E has actual content standards and that makes bad homebrew stick out like a sore thumb.

Some shitty homebrew class or spell for 3.5 will blend in just fine with the shitty classes and spells 3.5 officially had.

Well, I sort of touched on that regarding the closing of the WoTC forums. The WoTC forums were basically the only place you were allowed to really discuss 4e without the discussion getting bogged down with people coming in to edition war at you. This was where you could discuss the game itself, and not have to constantly deal with people going "4e is so bad why are you even playing 4e stop having bad wrong fun just play pathfinder instead, blah blah blah"

Because there was really only one place these discussions were happening, when that closed, there really wasn't a place to go after this.

>it's easy to homebrew if you just refluff all the powers and call them different stuff
>just be careful not to give any bonuses to attack or anything because you'll fuck the match since it's so tightly dialed in that there isn't any give at all for anything new
Content standards=Too "balanced" for any flexibility at all.

...The fuck are you talking about?

I have tons of homebrewed stuff for my games. I had a long-running 4e game set in MtG's Dominaria, and all players had a custom-made theme and paragon path. the math is tight, true, but again, not *that* tight, and you have a ton of official stuff to use as benchmarks.
Please, please - stop repeating memes blindly.

Shut the fuck up, you don't know what you're talking about you brainless retard.

No? There is plenty of areas for homebrew to be added. I mean here, some 4e homebrew:


>Summon Guardian Drone - Artificer Attack 5
>You release a small ball that unfolds into a mechanical dragonfly with a welding torch.
>Daily ⬥ Implement, Arcane, Summoning, Fire
>Minor Action Ranged 5
>Effect: You summon a Small guardian drone in an unoccupied square within range. Choose yourself or an ally as the character the drone guards. The drone has speed 4, fly 6(hover) and a +3 bonus to all defences. You can give the drone the following special commands. On the turn you summon the drone, you give the first command as part of using this power.

>Standard Action: Melee 1; targets one creature; Intelligence vs. Reflex; 1d8 + Intelligence modifier fire damage, and the target is marked by the drone until the end of your next turn.
>Immediate Interrupt: Triggered when an enemy adjacent to the drone makes an attack roll against the character guarded by the drone; melee 1; targets the triggering enemy; Intelligence vs. Reflex; 1d8 + Intelligence modifier fire damage, and the target takes a penalty to the interrupted attack roll equal to your Wisdom modifier.
>Programmed Effect: If you haven’t given the drone any commands by the end of your turn, it moves its speed to a square adjacent to the character it guards. If it ends adjacent to any enemies, those enemies are marked by the drone until the end of your next turn.

Adding to the Artificer's summoning subtheme.

It is hard to homebrew though.

Let's say you wanted to make a new class. In order to make the class "complete", you have to make the powers for the class. Assuming you do the bare minimum in making a class and one paragon path, and only one power that can be taken at each level, you're making 24 powers to go from 1-30. Add onto this that you're going to have to include class features, and paragon path features, and you're going to want to make more than one power to select from at each point, and you're going to end up with a lot of labor you're putting into one class.

Homebrewing classes is not the only thing you can do and there are things you can do to lighten the load.

That's not 'Hard'. It just requires you to put actual work in. The guidelines and rules you're operating within are quite clear and straightforward, it just takes actual time and effort to make something worthwhile.

Yeah but by the same token, that's literally the hardest thing you could make for 4e. There is a lot of room for stuff less complex than that to be easily homebrewed.

But yeah, classes are a lot harder in 4e because each class is more personalised. Rather than 'Don't have spells' or 'Has a spell list made from prefab options' as your homebrew stuff in 3.5. 4e it's more like making a spellcaster with a completely unique spell list in option.

I've run a small campaign (up to lvl 12) when it released with a few friends, mostly RAW. Three Dragonborns and a Drow (Warrior, Warlord, Sorcerer and Warlock), the banter was pretty good and the fights quite interesting despite the hp bloat.
The main reason we stopped playing it was because one player moved to another city, but we never went back to it and the other players and me switched to other games. We're playing 5e from time to time, it's more to our liking, but since we started with the release of 3.0 it's hardly surprising.

>Warrior
You were playing WoW?

...Really?

That's weird, I started with 3.5, and 5e feels so wildly different from 3.5 or 4e. They outright killed practically all the optimization, and what's left is really uninteresting.

5e to me feels more like D&D FATE edition, not bad but, well, if I wanted that, I'd just play FATE

Fighter, my bad.
Which optimization? Combat you mean? My players (and me) like out of combat roleplay as much as a dungeon delve, and 5e reminds us more of 3.X. We despise PF for the character options bloat, for reference and there's now quite a lot of options in 5E with all the UA they've released.

>What would be your wishlist for things that made it in?
Everything pre-Essentials
>What would you hope would be left out, or revised?
Essentials
>What changes would you want to see made?
Not including Essentials.

Really? Weird, 5e works a lot more like 4e out of combat than it does like 3.5. With the exception of "I win this non-combat encounter" spells being back and making everything less fun for everyone

>What would be your wishlist for things that made it in?
Post-Dark Sun themes, especially the generic ones from Dragon Mag. Rituals. Skill Challenges.

>What would you hope would be left out, or revised?
I actually do like Essentials but a few of the classes just didn't work or were not interesting to play. But the big thing, as I've already said ITT, are feats: there are too many of them, with too small effects.

>What changes would you want to see made?
Feat and math fixes baked into the regular progression, themes and/or races expanded to work as "heroic paragon paths".

Well, you were saying they killed the optimization in 5e, to which I explain to you that we don't care since we don't spend all our time in combat and there now many options with the UA.
Out of combat is mostly roleplay or a skill check, it's combat and character building that makes the difference, and to us 5e is more like 3.X for this.

Which flaws? Sincerely asking. Working on a retroclone of my own

...I am extremely confused

Character building is where 5e is furthest from both 3e and 4e. Putting much more emphasis on ease than on optimization and creativity.

Are you just a fan of Vancian magic?

>optimization and creativity
What's to optimize outside of picking the prestige class you want to play, max the two good stats it requires and pick the three feats you needed to be alright at your job? In 5e you pick the archetype you want to play, max the two good stats you'll need, pick a feat and that's it
Apart from less feats it feels very similar to me. I really don't see what you mean, unless you're talking about munchkining.

Different user, I am generally more flexible with them, using them as replacements for set pieces where a lot of shit is going on and the plarty has a defined goal.
I quickly scribe up shit in my head, and determine what needs for what in order for the party to succeed, then narrate out the rolls they make.
Hell, the last challene I did, the party failed, and ended up trampled by a mob some 200 strong, losing 1d4 healing surges (course I rolled max).

I did both, fuckwad, whatchu gon' do about it?
That said, I always run enemies at least 2 levels above the party, and do not care as much about making fights "fair".

Since we're talking about houserules, importing the escalation die from 13th age is a lot cleaner than giving out free stuff.

Bad idea, still doesn't account for tiers, and the die becomes overkill at 4 to 6 when everyone is hitting on a 2+.

Try it before you knock it.

In other words, stop being an autismo.

I'm playing with THF right now. Surprisingly good roleplayer, but he issued a ban list on stuff on his games (including: elemental weapons, anything|Warlord, Paladin|Warlock, chargespam) on the basis that he won't control himself because he doesn't see the purpose in not playing in the most perfect of ways.