Will 5e Suck Harder than 4e?

[No Big Deal]

First, I'm new here, so maybe there's already a thread for this, but the question is kind of obvious.

Based on the information we have (Mike Mearls leading, incorporating everyone's feedback) its going to suck. So will it suck more than 4e did?

Also, what mechanics do you hope for/expect?

[CapnTthePirateG]

I hope for a cool system in which every class has cool world-affecting powers and I don't have to self-nerf. I expect the stupid complexity system to make characters completely unbalanced, create lots of trap options, and return to the good old days when you could create invulnerable incantatrix gods to journey alongside worthless sword and board fighters.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Probably not. I mean, the flaws of the game were pretty well identified by previous designers and the fanbase. Also, considering how vilified WoW and Diablo were in relation to the product and the further fact that there's not been really any other Hot New Game to ape, I do have some serious hope that they'll focus on the TTRPGs strengths.

Then again, Mike Mearls is leading the team. But, eh, he can't be much worse than Collins or Slavicsek. In the end, it depends on how much serious playtesting the whole game gets. Even 4E D&D could've been saved from the crap pile with some proper playtesting.

You already know what mechanics I hope for. As for what mechanics I expect, that's a more complicated question. But I have been trolling the 4E D&D boards and listened to some complaints, so here's a list of things I expect that they will get around to in the game in no particular order.

[*] They will have a lot more skills in the game. Monte Cook loves pontificating about skills and some of the strongest '4E D&D is WoW!' are in reference to the neutered skill system.
[*] Attributes become even more pointless than they already are. Good.
[*] They either switch to full-on random/DM fiat magical items with a tiny token variety you can buy like they tried to do in Essentials or magical items become a min-max paradise where players get exactly what they want whenever they want with the only restrictions being item amount and level. My money is on the latter, because that sells more books, but I have real hope that Monte Cook will do the former; though hopefully there won't be bullshit they had last time where there was such a thing as +6 swords for sale, even if they're 'common'.
[*] Minions are definitely staying in. I hate them as a mechanic because they smack of laziness, but in almost all 4E D&D games I've run the players loved the fucking shit out of them.
[*] Characters are probably going to be as overcomplicated as they are now. Meaning, a 1st level character will have their choice of race, class, background, feats, theme, powers, and skills. Gotta move product somehow.
[*] 5E D&D mechanics will definitely hype up the more action-oriented gameplay. I don't exactly see how they will actually do that since people have an unwarranted aversion to Save-or-Sucks and no one seems smart enough to realize that Save-or-Sucks work better without critical existence failure. I mean, even Mutants and Masterminds d20 got that one right.
[*] 5E D&D will have more classes at the outset than 4E D&D. Going to market without a druid, monk, and barbarian really effed them in the A.
[*] 5E D&D will have a more workable and less punitive multiclassing system of some sort. Expect hybrid classing to be in the basic book even.
[*] Expect rituals to either be really boosted in effect or usability or be taken out of the game entirely. If the latter happens, the probability of it being recycled back into character's utility powers or, god forbid, giving combat effects a non-utility function is really goddamn low.
[*] The classes in the core book will have a variety to them about as diverse as the classes offered in 4E D&D near the tail end of the lifespan. Meaning that the spread will be more like 4E Battlemind / Wizard / Scout / Warlord / Original Assassin / Runepriest / Paladin / Monk / Slayer / Cleric in terms of inter-class diversity.
[*] The role system is staying in. It will probably be better defined and have different names to it, though. Instead of something like Striker / Defender / Leader / Controller it'll probably something that has a less MMORPG-ish visceral reaction like Protector / Mastermind / Assaulter / etc.
[*] Martial classes get knocked firmly the fuck back to Conan tier. However, because balance will be the huge thing, the other classes will be brought down to Conan tier either explicitly or with some kind of cognitive dissonance shellgame that 4E D&D did.
[*] 5E D&D will not have anything resembling a decent default campaign setting. Mike Mearls has punted on the issue every chance he gets because he is a stupid fuckstick who doesn't realize that a decent campaign setting is the thing to ensure loyalty and smooth over ruffled feathers. Expect either a rehash of something that was already detailed like Eberron or Forgotten Realms or some retarded 'points of light' crap that will be no more detailed than Ninter Fail Vale if they even bother.

Basically, I expect to see 5E D&D be 4.5E D&D with some facepaint. As in, all of the fixes internal to 4E D&D they should have had at the outset (such as a better magical item and skill challenge system) will still be in the game. I very much doubt that 5E D&D will look more like 3E D&D because of Pathfinder and also the fact that fixing 3E D&D would take much more effort than fixing 4E D&D. Well, fixing as in having something that will appeal to casual gamers, not the best TTRPG that there can be. I also strongly doubt that 5E D&D will be a totally new system either. Unless they have a design team much larger than what they officially put out they won't have the time to create and playtest something from scratch.

Unless... unless Mearls was working on 5E D&D for a long time before the announcement.

[fectin]

the other classes will be brought down to Conan tier either explicitly or with some kind of cognitive dissonance shellgame that 4E D&D did

Could you expand on that? I don't disagree, but I didn't follow.

[Blicero]

the other classes will be brought down to Conan tier either explicitly or with some kind of cognitive dissonance shellgame that 4E D&D did

Could you expand on that? I don't disagree, but I didn't follow.

I imagine that it's in reference to how the fluff for highlevel spells was like "You rip a hole in reality and then shoot your enemy into it, crushing his soul and draining his very will to live," but then the effect was like 4d10+Int+stun damage.

[tussock]

Basically, I expect to see 5E D&D be 4.5E D&D with some facepaint.

No way did they get Monte Cook on as chief designer to make another 4e.

[Swordslinger]

From the articles I've read about it, it sure seems like 5E is gonna suck worse. 4E is at least a coherent rules set with a design goal. People may not like that it's a bunch of low powered stories with a dungeon crawl theme, but it's there.

5E seems to be this odd attempt to try to cater to everyone with modular rules bullshit. But not even modular rules where the table decides on what rules they're going to play, this is modular rules where one guy is running around with a huge character sheet and another guy has a really simple one.

With those kind of goals, I just can't see the edition being anything other than a train wreck.

[Username17]

Mearls has never finished a working subsystem in his life. He announces that the new game is going to have three or four alternate competing subsystems for every single thing. Basically, he seems to have figured out how to do his Mike Mearls thing (pumping up a subsystem so that people try it, but crapping out long before said system could possibly be considered finished and even longer before said system works well in order to go work on another thing) on a scale so large that it literally ruins the entire edition.

We're talking about him making non-functional and non-interacting gobbledegook for every single part of the game. And using the fact that he "has" to make two or three competing subsystems of varying complexity to justify why he abandons work on each one to go do another half-assed writeup. We're talking about Magic "working" like the Iron Heroes Arcanist. There will be tokens that move around. It won't make any fucking sense. There will be spell failure backlashes, but Force Cage will be a fucking first level spell. That sounds like crazy hyperbole, but that is the magic system he actually released when he last made a haf-assed magic system for Iron Heroes, and now he is promising to quarter ass the magic system.

Now I predict that people trying as hard to like 5e as people tried to like Iron Heroes will tell you that if you use Complexity 2 Combat with Complexity 3 Magic and Complexity 1 Social Rules with Complexity 2 Treasure with Complexity 3 Skills and Complexity 1 Titles and Complexity 4 Monsters and 300 pages of house rules to get all that shit onto roughly the same page that you have something that sorta kinda works. But that is bullshit.

4e was a game that I did not want to play. 5e is shaping up to be a game that no one will be able to play at all.



-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'd have a lot more hope for 5E if I could see where they're going with this 'optional complexity' rules set. This is pretty much praying for a miracle here, but I hope that it either turns out to be nowhere near as bad as it sounds or early playtesting deletes it right from the game.

One small glimmer of hope that I have is that Mike Mearls is not working alone in this endeavor. He has a couple of good workhorses on his design team and hopefully one of them will be able to pick up the pieces and turn his batshit into fireworks. I mean, a lot of his base ideas sound good and oftentimes they are good, he just sucks at putting them into practice.

I suppose it depends on how attached he is to 'his' mechanics. That is, would he rather have people use his proposed mechanics in the pursuit of pursuing his goals or does he not care who actually writes up and executes his ideas as long as the base ideas are carried out?

[Krusk]

Its hard to be worse than 4e. I get the feeling it will be.

[OgreBattle]

4e is pretty cohesive in being what it is though, and I enjoy the 4e campaign I'm in (Theme+Backgrounds opens up a lot of flavorful character concepts).

I can see 5e being worse in the sense that it lacks a sense of identity.

[Josh_Kablack]

Its hard to be worse than 4e.

Sadly, no.

Just listing games I actually own:

• 1st ed TMNTaOS RPG (also: Heroes Unlimited)
• Imagine Roleplaying System
• Champions: New Millenium
• First two editions of Mekton
• 2e D&D (yes, I went there)

are all less playable and have more problems than 4e.

And then there are net-infamous systems like Senzar, Sinnabar and FATAL which are supposedly even worse than those on my list.

[NineInchNall]

Warhammer FRP is worse, too.

[MfA]

[*] Minions are definitely staying in. I hate them as a mechanic because they smack of laziness, but in almost all 4E D&D games I've run the players loved the fucking shit out of them.

That would probably single handedly make it impossible for them to get the players they lost to PF back.

[Kaelik]

Maybe the reason why people playing 4e like minions is because it's the only way for them to end a goddam combat. So maybe if they played 3e and fireballed a bunch of Kobolds with a 10d6 fireball, they would enjoy that too.

[tussock]

You can have 5 hp "Minions". Have all PC attacks do 1dx+4 or better, and kill them. Have all misses do 4 hp or less, so don't kill them. Tada, minions. You can even scale it all with level.

And no, 5e shouldn't suck worse than 3e. Monte Cook's the lead designer, he's building the rule systems, and he's the man who turned 2nd edition AD&D into d20/3e.

If you can turn 2e into 3e, you can turn Mike Mearls' ideas into something playable too.

[DeadlyReed]

Actually, SenZar is really playable. It's Synnibar that's a clusterfuck.

[ModelCitizen]

Maybe the reason why people playing 4e like minions is because it's the only way for them to end a goddam combat. So maybe if they played 3e and fireballed a bunch of Kobolds with a 10d6 fireball, they would enjoy that too.

Yeah, that. People like minions mostly because they lack the ability to look at rules in context. Show them a less kludgy way to make one-shottable monsters and they'll like that instead, even if they don't understand why.

It's pretty obvious minions are a kludge for overinflated monster HP, but they're also a kludge for a level progression that's too damn long. In 4e you can theoretically fight something up to 5 levels lower than you. It's easy to write the core math so that a level 6 PC can oneshot a level 1 monster, but when you use a level 30 PC and a level 25 monster it doesn't work.

[Swordslinger]

It's pretty obvious minions are a kludge for overinflated monster HP, but they're also a kludge for a level progression that's too damn long. In 4e you can theoretically fight something up to 5 levels lower than you. It's easy to write the core math so that a level 6 PC can oneshot a level 1 monster, but when you use a level 30 PC and a level 25 monster it doesn't work.

Even if the HP system scaled that way, low level monsters would still be boring simply because they couldn't hit shit.

The main issue with "minions" in 3E was that they were useless. They went in there, threw a bunch of dice and missed on anything other than a natural 20. Fuck that's boring. 3E's handling of minions was flat out terrible.

While the 4E system isn't perfect, at the very least it creates a minion that contributes to combat. 2E handled minions the best of any edition. It scaled AC a lot slower which kept monsters like ogres and trolls threats even at higher levels and HP didn't scale like crazy either so you conceivably could care if a gnoll got a few lucky hits.

[ishy]

That is also why you had aid another, debuffing, touch attacks and using them for traps or just plain cannon fodder in 3e..
Yes they won't be very effective in direct melee combat, but should they be?

Wouldn't it be better if you just improved the aid another mechanic for example and make it clear they are supposed to not fight directly?

[FatR]

Even if the HP system scaled that way, low level monsters would still be boring simply because they couldn't hit shit.

The main issue with "minions" in 3E was that they were useless. They went in there, threw a bunch of dice and missed on anything other than a natural 20. Fuck that's boring. 3E's handling of minions was flat out terrible.

Please stop pulling things about 3E out of your ass.

[Daztur]

Well a problem in 3ed was that PC AC scales pretty damn fast so that low level monsters can't hit higher level PCs, even if the difference in levels vs. CR was relatively small. It'd be easier to just keep PC AC from scaling so fast rather than make up new categories of monsters.

[No Big Deal]

Well a problem in 3ed was that PC AC scales pretty damn fast so that low level monsters can't hit higher level PCs. It'd be easier to just keep PC AC from scaling so fast rather than make up new categories of monsters.

I haven't played a plot of really high op games, but there are definitely tricks to let monsters hit high ACs. The key is to have the DM use better monsters.

Back on topic, Mearls modular systems actually seems like a great idea, though it would be fucking hard to do right. You'd probably want just two or three tiers, each adding rules instead of changing them (i.e. tier one is combat is attacking and movement, tier two is AoOs, tier three has disarm, trip and the like). I just don't trust them to balance the options it would take to use this system.

[Murtak]

Well a problem in 3ed was that PC AC scales pretty damn fast so that low level monsters can't hit higher level PCs, even if the difference in levels vs. CR was relatively small. It'd be easier to just keep PC AC from scaling so fast rather than make up new categories of monsters.

AC doesn't scale that fast actually. But tons of effects stack and are available at different levels, for different classes and sometimes for money. Hence AC (and pretty much everything else) varies wildly. You can seriously alter self into something with a double digit natural AC, put on some plate mail and a shield and run around with 30 or more AC at level 3. Meanwhile another caster will have twice your HPs thanks to false life and have a couple of mirror images. And the party fighter of course can't afford to spend money on armor yet, so he runs around with scale mail and an AC of 15.

How fast AC scales after this point is nearly irrelevant. What matters is that anything that can miss the fighter can not hit caster no 1. Repeat this scenario for saves, immunities, skills and so on. And yes, among other things this can make lower CR opponents completely useless.

[Username17]

Under basic rules, AC doesn't scale with level at all in 3e. There are various items, feats, class features, and spells that increase AC and stack in various ways, so it is increasingly easy to get a very high AC as you go up in level. If that is something you want to do. But unless you actually invest in it, going up in level raises your to-hit bonus and doesn't raise your AC. It works like that in AD&D too. In 3e there absolutely nothing weird about getting to level 10 with an AC of 15.

That is why one of the major innovations of 3e is Power Attack. Where Fighters were given the option to trade some amount of their attack bonus (which scales with level and which they do not always need because it goes against a defense that doesn't scale with level) for damage (which is generally always good). Any claim that trash mobs were worthless in 3e because they couldn't hit ACs is just ignorant. That's 4e thinking. 3e does not work that way.

3e players didn't respect groups of low level enemies because the CR system didn't scale fast enough for low level critters. That is: the suggested encounters were just too small. 8 Ogres at level 9 is a light snack. 16 Minotaurs at level 12 is a fucking joke. But that's just that the numbers appearing were too small. 4e didn't throw down enough minions either. D&D authors of the 21st century are just way over cautious about putting down huge numbers of enemies. I think it is an over reaction to the halcyon days of AD&D when Orcs came in groups of "40-400" and had siege weapons and shit.

-Username17