Why no Classplosion in 5e?

[mlangsdorf]

The mechanical core of 3e and 4e is decent, if not great: roll 1d20 + bonuses versus a target number to check for success. In combat, you act in order of descending fixed initiative, and on your turn you a standard action, a move action, and a minor action, with the ability to trade the standard for a move action and a move action for a minor action. A lot of of the terms for conditions and statuses (like combat advantage and bloodied) are useful, even if the mechanical implementation is often weak.

5e would have been a lot better if it had been an attempt to take the lessons learned from 4e, synthesize it with the better parts of 3e like character creation, and produce a new edition that was an evolution of the two. Instead, we got a hare-brained OSR hack, but that doesn't mean that good things weren't possible.

[OgreBattle]

What?
What part of 4e is not bad?

AC/FORT/REF/WIL defenses all working the same way
Skill proficiency instead of points
Bloodied state and various mechanics that interact with it
There's also minor things like "Aid another" not requiring a roll to hit AC10.

Things like that. I'd almost say that the way 4e handles grappling being something that targets ac/fort/ref defenses is a lot easier to grasp than what subsystems 3e or Pathfinder does, but 4e has the problem of making those powers tied to certain classes instead of making them universal maneuvers anyone can try. But the base system is already there so me writing "a list of special maneuvers anyone can use" where you target fort/dex to immobilize and push people is not difficult.

Something like...

Grab: "Make an attack vs Reflex to immobilize, if you beat opponent's defense by 5 they are restrained"
Bull Rush: "Make an attack vs fortitude, you can push target back an additional 5 feet for each 5 points by which you beat the opponent's defense by."
Feint: "Make an attack vs Reflex to have combat advantage on your next attack against the target
Disarm: "Make an attack vs AC to weaken (they now do 1/2 damage), if you beat their defense by 5 they drop a held item"
Sunder: "Make attack vs AC+2 to deal damage to specific equipment"
Lure: "Make an attack vs AC to shift opponent 1 square adjacent to you"
Aid Another: your friend gains either a +2 bonus on his next attack roll against that opponent or a +2 bonus to AC against that opponent’s next attack (your choice), as long as that attack comes before the beginning of your next turn.

Then the Fighter's "Signature Moves" class feature lets you pick three of the above as things you can do with a minor action. Basically do the opposite of exception based design and have consistency so a fighter and frost giant's bull rush attacks follow the same rules. Heck a wizard's thunder wave would use the rules for bull rush too.

[MGuy]

I like the idea behind rituals. There's nothing wrong with wanting something like a Skill Challenge and the whole thing where characters have to digivolve into another class has been pretty popular 'round here (though not particularly to my tastes). So 4E had decent ideas just bad implementation.

[ishy]

What?
What part of 4e is not bad?

AC/FORT/REF/WIL defenses all working the same way
Skill proficiency instead of points
Bloodied state and various mechanics that interact with it
There's also minor things like "Aid another" not requiring a roll to hit AC10.

Things like that. I'd almost say that the way 4e handles grappling being something that targets ac/fort/ref defenses is a lot easier to grasp than what subsystems 3e or Pathfinder does, but 4e has the problem of making those powers tied to certain classes instead of making them universal maneuvers anyone can try. But the base system is already there so me writing "a list of special maneuvers anyone can use" where you target fort/dex to immobilize and push people is not difficult.

Turning Fort/Ref/Will in defences was obviously a bad idea and is worse than keeping them as saving throws, so I have to disagree there.

Skills are an obvious example why starting anew is perhaps for the best. 4e's skill system is very very bad. Skill points are probably a better idea than proficiency though.

The way bloodied condition was implemented in 4e, greatly punished people even more for not focus firing. Can't say I think it is any good.

The in-combat version of Aid another is bad in both 4 and 3e. Though not needing to hit ac10 is probably better.

4e has grappling rules? Which book introduced that? I played 4e 'till essentials came out, but never seen any grapple rules.

[Username17]

4e lacks a basic math engine. There are numbers, but there are neither inputs nor outputs. It's very odd.

In 4th edition D&D, you want to climb a wall. The game tells you what the DC would be to climb a "7th level wall," but the rules do not tell you what a 7th level wall actually is. And perhaps more damningly, the actual DCs it puts out have little to do with what 7th level characters can actually accomplish as far as generating athletics tests.

Rewiring 4e is more than just writing new classes and new monsters. You have to write all the challenges. From picking locks on doors to balancing on slippery ground. People make fun of 4e for not being a role playing game, but there's important ways in which that's actually true. 4e does not have a procedural generation system that allows you to create rules matrices from world features. That's mind boggling, but there it is. And it was of course, completely deliberate. 4e was designed to be totally incomplete and require a constant stream of written Official D&D Content to go anywhere or do anything.

There are some individual good ideas in 4e, but the implementation in all of them is atrocious. And more importantly, they are floating in the void of a game that cannot spontaneously generate content to fill holes. It simply needed classplosions and terrainsplosions and challengesplosions and monstersplosions and treasursplosions and explosions of everything else because the game's one singular guiding principle was to make sure that they could never run out of things to plausibly write for the game that they could sell for money.

nWoD of course had completely different problems.

The core WoD book is actually quite complete. The skill list doesn't expand and you can pretty much figure out what you need to roll to generate anything you can imagine. Now, the system is very bad, in that it doesn't have degrees of success or meaningful difficulties. But my complaint about Midnight Roads was not that all the skill uses were required to play the game, but that they were completely useless. All of that shit from the book was something you could pull right out of the core system.

oWoD also lived in a very different place from 3rd edition D&D as regards its classes. As mentioned earlier, a lot of Vampire clans were conceptually bad. People were legitimately ready for an "Ultimate Vampire" where the shitty parts of the setting were excised completely and the system was rewritten to be less shitty. The fans genuinely wanted to have classes cut out of the game, because people knew that a lot of the classes were conceptually bad. D&D players just wanted "Thieves" to be renamed "Rogues" and for the classes to get better mechanics. But World of Darkness players actually wanted a new edition that didn't have literal racist Gypsy scoundrel stereotypes and whatever the fuck the Kiasyd were supposed to be in it.

If nWoD had actually brought out 5 playable clans and some strong political plot building shenanigans, it could have easily brought things forward with just five clans. But they lacked the talent or the ability to self criticize needed to do something like that. There was simply no way that Justin Achilli was going to be able to accept that enough of his ideas were bad to actually pare down WoD to something that was better than a sprawling kitchen sink that fans could sift through themselves.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

What's so great about having Aid Another? It's one of those things that doesn't care whether you're an important person or an insignificant peasant, isn't it? The buff is small enough in these games that you probably won't bother to designate skeletal minions to do it for you, but that also means it's so small, doing it can still feel like a waste of a turn when that's all your character can contribute.

Turning Fort/Ref/Will in defences was obviously a bad idea and is worse than keeping them as saving throws, so I have to disagree there.

This statement also confuses me. What am I missing?

[Josh_Kablack]

Yeah, converting F/R/W into defenses that worked the same as other defenses was one of the very few objectively good changes that 4e made from 3e, instead of the piles of worse (class design layout, fewer classes, fewer viable class/race combinations, increased tracking of short-term, fiddly little modifiers), bad in a different way (critical hit damage formulae, opportunity attacks, RNG breakage, magic item allocation, skills, multiclassing, status ailment recovery, healing magic, magic durations), and arguable from either side ( standardized power schedules vs using power schedules to differentiate classes, padded sumo vs rocket launcher tag, PC monster symmetry vs balance of monstrous PCs ) changes that 4e made.

[Aryxbez]

Because that's actually important, having a system that covers hit points and what you roll and what the difficulties are for X, Y and Z. That also takes up loads of words and loads of time (and is the most daunting thing for people new to the game, which for a new game is "everyone"). That bit is huge, and you need to make sure you don't fuck up at that level while making it cover enough ground that people don't discover gaps everywhere yet not being so massive that people are scared to look at it.

Frank did make a decent model for HP/Soak values fighting progressively more enemies over time. I guess the escalating amount of threats made it not as practical? Otherwise I suppose could just use something similar to that for HP system. While Difficulties bit I thought was easy enough, just the numbers will come a bit later once figure out the RNG. Lastly, I thought part of the whole bit of RPG's being too massive, could be easily solved by optimizing Word-count to be concise and brief?

In fact, I thought the biggest issues, was making sure it would get the notice it deserves. As well as Kingdom management, Social system minigames, and scaling-capability of Skill checks.

But on the flip side, it means you can put in things like...into parts of the core rules,

Things do get more heroic the more we abscond unneeded details, and rewrite in more empowering ability to do cool things in the system. I imagine lot of stuff of that would fall into skills instead, which may mean skills run the risk of becoming massive reads to go through for most people?

[Stubbazubba]

Yeah, converting F/R/W into defenses that worked the same as other defenses was one of the very few objectively good changes that 4e made from 3e

Why is this such a good change? Is it just because it's one less resolution mechanic to worry about when they all work the same? Or is there some aspect of it that I'm not seeing?

[Username17]

Yeah, converting F/R/W into defenses that worked the same as other defenses was one of the very few objectively good changes that 4e made from 3e

Why is this such a good change? Is it just because it's one less resolution mechanic to worry about when they all work the same? Or is there some aspect of it that I'm not seeing?

First of all, it puts things on the same side of the DM Screen. A 3e Wizard who only prepares good spells (that is: Save or Lose and Buffs) could literally go the whole game without ever rolling a die. That simply isn't how things should work. By switching to an attack roll model, that particular bullshit doesn't happen.

Secondly, it makes things easier to explain. There's just one less mechanic to worry about.

Thirdly, it puts numbers on the same scale. Getting a wand of +2 to death spells has a totally comparable meaning to getting a sword of +2 to stabination. An even more important facet of this is the "touch AC" and "flatfooted AC" shenanigans. In 3e, some of the alternate attack modes were way off the RNG compared to the others. And in 4e, they aren't. Switching from AC to Reflex is an adventage, but it's not the kind of RNG breaking advantage that makes the flask rogue be playing such a different game to the Barbarian.

Now the drawback of course is that the RFW defense model meant that the game couldn't elegantly handle determining whether character fell down holes and such. But that hardly mattered, because the game lacked a challenge system full stop.

-Username17

[Koumei]

For that aspect of things, you could probably just have environmental attack rolls where you show a table of the most likely examples that spring to your mind ("a pit has an attack roll of +1 just for existing, with a +4 bonus to that if it's a sudden thing opening under you or there's a cleverly-placed rug over it or whatever, and +1 for each extra 5' square across that you have to leap", "Tetanus attack rolls are +0 for this kind of environment, +5 for this land of rusted shit-covered nails"). Then say "For things we haven't covered, find the closest match here and figure out something similar. A falling cow is pretty similar to a falling boulder when it hits you from a hundred feet in the air."

As long as you, and this bit is important, do what 4E didn't do and actually include that fucking chart so people know what attack roll the cave-in will actually be making.

[Orion]

The trouble with environment attacks is that it puts the die roll in an unsatisfying place. When players cast Finger of Death, they like rolling a die to see if it works and hate having the MC roll a die and tell them it didn't work. As a child and teenager, I prefered damage spells over save-or-lose for years because of this. Players also like to roll a die to see whether they fall in a hole. They hate having the MC roll a die and tell them they fell in a hole.

[RadiantPhoenix]

@Orion: So, what you're saying is, PCs should have WARF saves, while NPCs should have WARF defenses, with the conversion set to mathematically equivalent numbers?

[Kaelik]

Yeah, converting F/R/W into defenses that worked the same as other defenses was one of the very few objectively good changes that 4e made from 3e

Why is this such a good change? Is it just because it's one less resolution mechanic to worry about when they all work the same? Or is there some aspect of it that I'm not seeing?

First of all, it puts things on the same side of the DM Screen. A 3e Wizard who only prepares good spells (that is: Save or Lose and Buffs) could literally go the whole game without ever rolling a die. That simply isn't how things should work. By switching to an attack roll model, that particular bullshit doesn't happen.

Secondly, it makes things easier to explain. There's just one less mechanic to worry about.

Thirdly, it puts numbers on the same scale. Getting a wand of +2 to death spells has a totally comparable meaning to getting a sword of +2 to stabination. An even more important facet of this is the "touch AC" and "flatfooted AC" shenanigans. In 3e, some of the alternate attack modes were way off the RNG compared to the others. And in 4e, they aren't. Switching from AC to Reflex is an adventage, but it's not the kind of RNG breaking advantage that makes the flask rogue be playing such a different game to the Barbarian.

Now the drawback of course is that the RFW defense model meant that the game couldn't elegantly handle determining whether character fell down holes and such. But that hardly mattered, because the game lacked a challenge system full stop.

-Username17

Another unmentioned benefit, is that it makes AoE spells have a consistent power, instead of a variable power that sometimes spares one of identical enemies. That is an extremely minor benefit, but in my mind, it is one.

[Insomniac]

Do you think it is time to do away with class racial abilities to scores and do something more holistic like, pick a physical and a mental, pick 2 physical, pick 2 mental, etc?

4E had an early start with few classes and the class combos that were viable became largely racially dependent, or at least that is what I have read here and heard from others.

Especially with the different power paths and how things were never 2W+Mental of Choice but always Int, Wis, Cha or the corresponding physical things, too. That decision had a lot to do with putting people into mechanical straightjackets of "viability" and "optimum races" and all that.

[Stubbazubba]

@Orion: So, what you're saying is, PCs should have WARF saves, while NPCs should have WARF defenses, with the conversion set to mathematically equivalent numbers?

That was my next thought, as well. If you want to keep everything the same for the players, have them roll everything, both attacks and defenses, and have the GM never roll except damage. The difference between the bonus and the static score is always just 10, so everything is reversible.

This runs into weird scenarios where a player is rolling fistfuls of dice and looking for 1s on their defense, and it's conceptually a bit weird because the GM would still likely roll for some things for the NPCs (like ending on-going status effects) but not attacks and spells, but other than that no immediate problems with it spring to mind. I don't know if those trade-offs really make it better than either the 3e or 4e method. Perhaps it's better to re-complicate things and have both passive and active defenses, but make spells and any effect coming from another combatant against passive defenses, while active defenses are generally only used against environmental effects. That's less conceptually weird, even if it does lose the uniformity.

Edit:

Do you think it is time to do away with class racial abilities to scores and do something more holistic like, pick a physical and a mental, pick 2 physical, pick 2 mental, etc?

4E had an early start with few classes and the class combos that were viable became largely racially dependent, or at least that is what I have read here and heard from others.

Especially with the different power paths and how things were never 2W+Mental of Choice but always Int, Wis, Cha or the corresponding physical things, too. That decision had a lot to do with putting people into mechanical straightjackets of "viability" and "optimum races" and all that.

Replace racial ability mods with class ability mods. Classes should give you what you need to be successful simply by leveling in them, you shouldn't need to reverse engineer the entire system to be level appropriate. Any game that champions its diversity of options, when in fact large swaths of those options are unplayable next to other options, is probably worthy of scorn. Avoid that outcome at all costs.

[mlangsdorf]

Do you think it is time to do away with class racial abilities to scores and do something more holistic like, pick a physical and a mental, pick 2 physical, pick 2 mental, etc?

My group had a house rule that every PC got an another +2 racial bonus to a stat of their choice. It meant that everyone was on the same playing field as prime stats, and the difference between optimum and okay wasn't that much.

If you were an eladrin wizard, you get +2 Dex, +2 Int, and probably +2 Con for survivability. If you were a dwarf wizard, you get +2 Con, +2 Wis, and +2 Int and you're about as viable as the eladrin. If you were a human wizard, you get +2 Int and +2 (Dex or Con or Wis) and you get an extra skill and a feat.

It was a simple house that really could have made it into 4th edition, and probably should have made it in as a "lesson learned" from 3rd.

[Lokathor]

Another unmentioned benefit, is that it makes AoE spells have a consistent power, instead of a variable power that sometimes spares one of identical enemies. That is an extremely minor benefit, but in my mind, it is one.

Did you play 4e that you roll one attack roll against all targets and hit with all or miss with all?

[Kaelik]

Another unmentioned benefit, is that it makes AoE spells have a consistent power, instead of a variable power that sometimes spares one of identical enemies. That is an extremely minor benefit, but in my mind, it is one.

Did you play 4e that you roll one attack roll against all targets and hit with all or miss with all?

I didn't play 4e at all, but presumably you roll one attack roll on your fireball and hit everyone that would hit, and miss everyone that would miss.

Or alternatively 4e is (even) stupid(er).

[pragma]

The RAW says that you roll a separate to-hit roll for each target and then a single damage roll.

[Kaelik]

The RAW says that you roll a separate to-hit roll for each target and then a single damage roll.

Like I said, I don't play 4e, and never have, and haven't read the rules in uh... many many many many many years.

So I just assumed that it took the not shitty route of reducing unnecessary rules, and reducing variant power attacks.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Is there a convenient way of resolving Fireball against a crowd of basically identical elves that doesn't involve at least one of:

• Rolling a huge pile of dice
• Doing division at the table
• Either all the elves survive or all of them die

[rampaging-poet]

Roll one die and use a pre-compiled lookup table approximating the results of actually rolling for every elf? I don't know if it counts as convenient, but it would be possible to make a series of tables for each (Attack Bonus - Defence Bonus) consisting of Roll x Number of Creatures Struck with Failed / Saved in each cell. For a d20 you would need about forty such tables. Alternatively there could be 20 (Attack Bonus - Defence Bonus) with ~40 entries each and your role tells you which table to look on, but I think that would require more page flipping.

I'd have to give the most convenient representation of what is essentially a 3-dimensional table some thought, but this should successfully avoid all three operations you wanted to avoid.

[Koumei]

Please tell me that was intended satirically.

[Previn]

Is there a convenient way of resolving Fireball against a crowd of basically identical elves that doesn't involve at least one of:

• Rolling a huge pile of dice
• Doing division at the table
• Either all the elves survive or all of them die

Well, what do you consider a huge pile of dice? 1 per possible target?