Why didn't we switch to 4e/5e? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Elder_Basilisk

2018-01-08, 02:39 PM

I played 4e for a while. It was a flawed execution of a bad premise. The bad premise was that the game would be better if every class and monster was the same. All classes get different powers that use the exact same model of resource management and the exact same mechanism to determine if they hit. That's not a terrible model--I like Descent 2e for example which has a lot in common with 4e D&D--but it's not as interesting to me as the prior edition D&D model where different classes have different resources and a fighter or rogue can do their thing forever until they run out of hit points but a wizard only has so many spells per day and his utility spells compete with his combat spells. The flawed execution had to do with the bad math that led it to be harder to hit and harder to boost your defenses the higher level you got.

5e? I've played it a bit but not enough to know if they got the bounded accuracy math right this time. Regardless, I don't want bounded accuracy to begin with. I want a 20th level fighter to miss less often than a first level fighter.

So, 3.5 and Pathfinder are where it's at for me. The last editions of D&D before they decided to try to shove bounded accuracy down my throat. And the last editions of D&D where they have players and monsters playing by the same rules.

Troacctid

2018-01-08, 02:44 PM

Hey, speak for yourself, I totally switched over. 4e and 5e are great.

5e? I've played it a bit but not enough to know if they got the bounded accuracy math right this time. Regardless, I don't want bounded accuracy to begin with. I want a 20th level fighter to miss less often than a first level fighter.
I can tell you haven't played much 5e! Enemy AC doesn't scale for crap, and +X weapons are relatively easy to find, so high-level characters eventually just stop missing.

Goaty14

2018-01-08, 02:47 PM

3.5 has more options available, IMO

Mate, we have a PrC for skydiving dwarves and a feat that lets you turn Turn Undead into Rebuke Hippos in this game.

Nothing is out of reach of a 3.5 character.

BloodSnake'sCha

2018-01-08, 02:54 PM

I never played 4e so I can't say a word about it.

I played some 5e games, I felt like I can't do everything and it felt bad to play like this (even when I made sone homebrew with the DM).

I play 3.5e a lot and I love the ability to do everything I want.

I never played PF so I can't say a single word about it.

Darrin

2018-01-08, 02:55 PM

Dimers

2018-01-08, 03:05 PM

I play 2e, 3.X, 4e and 5e, mostly because I find games that sound neat which happen to be in different systems. I haven't tried Pathfinder. My favorite is 4e but 3.X ranks high too.

I wouldn't recommend "switching" sight-unseen; 4e or 5e might be better for a particular player but worse for a different player. Each has its highlights and its flaws.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-08, 03:09 PM

Because of out-of-combat options, and character progression.

4E effectively has no out-of-combat rules other than "roll your best skill and make something up" (or rituals, which boil down to "pay money to roll your best skill"). You can definitely have fun improvising this, but you get zero support from the rules doing so.
5E's skill resolution is utterly random, because ability/proficiency modifiers are tiny compared to the 1d20 spread. This means you either don't use the rolls and improvise everything, or you do use the rolls and nobody can reliably do anything (the "nuh-uh!" / "yuh-uh!" on this is probably the biggest controversy on our 5E forums).

4E character progression is canceled out by scaling DCs and monsters at the same pace as you do, meaning that high-level play is pretty much the same as low-level play. I've fought an elder dragon which was level 1, and a regular city guard which was level 15, in both cases because that was our party's level.
5E character progression is canceled out by bounded accuracy (which ensures that the same skill checks or ACs that were problematic at level one are only marginally less problematic at level ten) and almost all higher-level class features are numerical bonuses to things you could already do.
I actually like that gameplay at low level is fundamentally different than at high level, and both 4E and 5E are designed to prevent this from happening. This is what WOTC calls "the sweet spot": gameplay is best around level X so let's make the entire game resemble level X only. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but really not my preference.

I get that 3E/PF is far from flawless in these areas, but at least it's trying. And in practice, most of the oh-so-often-repeated issues with it are actually pretty rare at the game table.

Hunter Noventa

2018-01-08, 03:11 PM

Palanan

2018-01-08, 03:26 PM

I played 3.5 for five long years before 4E came out, and I saw no reason to switch.

Fact is, 4E was almost incomprehensible to me—and the bits I did understand seemed more like an MMORPG than a tabletop RPG as I understood it. Absolutely nothing about 4E appealed to me, and I didn’t see the point in spending a lot of time and effort learning a completely new system that I didn’t even like.

As for 5E, by that time I was playing Pathfinder, and once again didn’t see the point in shifting to a new system. I hear good things about 5E, and wish all those players well—but with over forty hardbacks from 3.5 and Pathfinder, plus any number of modules and APs, I’m pretty well committed to 3.P.

Vhaidara

2018-01-08, 03:26 PM

I personally HAVE switched to 4e. I consider 3.5 something that's more of an art than a game, I enjoy the theory op builds, stuff like what Iron Chef and tippy's monk challenge produces, or builds like Chuck E Cheese crossing the entire continental U.S. and setting it on fire in a single round. For actually playing, though, I find 4e has more varied builds that maintain a similar power level, as opposed to the massive gaps that 3.X tends to generate. People who say that 4e characters are all the same have clearly never played, since there are combat viable builds that don't involve attacking (lazy warlords) or doing damage (pacifist leaders or hardcore control casters)

WesleyVos

2018-01-08, 03:29 PM

Troacctid

2018-01-08, 03:35 PM

5E character progression is canceled out by bounded accuracy (which ensures that the same skill checks or ACs that were problematic at level one are only marginally less problematic at level ten) and almost all higher-level class features are numerical bonuses to things you could already do.
I mean, I'm not sure how much 5e you've played, but I've DM'd close to 700 hours (http://www.adventurersleaguelog.com/users/726/dm_log_entries) of Adventurers League and played a bunch more, and I'd say this hasn't really been my experience. High-level characters are goddamn steamrollers. Throw a T2 challenge at a T3 party and they're going to crush it like it's nothing.

Recherché

2018-01-08, 03:37 PM

I started with 4e before finding pathfinder, but I found pathfinder to be much more satisfying. I really like having lots of out of combat options and abilities that can be used creatively for things they were never meant to do. 5e... I'm not terribly fond of the simplified math and some local edition warring has made led to some really bad associations with the local 5e players so I just ignore that entirely.

Inevitability

2018-01-08, 03:40 PM

IRL, I basically only play 5e now, because my fellow players aren't that into the tiny finnicky rules of 3.5, nor into the amount of optimization necessary for a viable character.

I still spend time on this forum because I like the incredible wealth of options in 3.5, as well as the methodical, almost academic approach to the game.

creakyaccordion

2018-01-08, 03:43 PM

The point has been hit on already, but the major issue I've had with 5e is the lack of specialization due to the cap on stats and the slow way that proficiency bonus scales. It certainly can balance out the party and make it so the Big beefy fighter can try to sneak along next to the rogue and maybe have a chance at not being spotted at the high levels, but I feel 3.5's narrative strength is in its differences. Because the big beefy fighter can't sneak along with the rogue, they have to come up with some other plan of action to assist the whole party. No one truly shines in 5e because the system is too afraid to let anyone be better than anyone else at something.

(Also the way intelligence ended up being changed made me really mad)

Razade

2018-01-08, 03:55 PM

3.5 has more options available, IMO

But...it's been out longer?

BearonVonMu

2018-01-08, 03:55 PM

atemu1234

2018-01-08, 03:57 PM

But...it's been out longer?

3.5 also has a very active consumer base, OGL allowed more third-party content, and in general Wizards doesn't produce as much contents for its editions anymore. 4e will probably never catch up, 5e may or may not, but probably will not catch up either.

Pleh

2018-01-08, 04:08 PM

I honestly prefer 5e. I just don't have anyone but 3.x friends

KarlMarx

2018-01-08, 04:20 PM

What's been said about variety and versatility definitely goes for me too, with one caveat:

I like the fact that some options are straight up worse than others in 3.5. The ability to choose a couple of fun, narrative things to shoot myself in the foot with, and then need to optimize around to get back on par with my low optimization group, lets me get the best of both worlds.

Also, I first started using the D&D rulesets in the Neverwinter Nights games, so 3.5e has a lot of sentimental value. I actually switched to it from 4e, which was the first edition I found rulebooks for.

BWR

2018-01-08, 04:25 PM

I prefer PF. There are a few things I think 3.5 did better. There are things I think 2e or BECMI did better. PF, on the whole, works best for me.
4e is not really worthy of the name D&D. It might be a great system for those who like MMOs on tabletop, but it isn't for me, and the nonsense they pulled with the established settings was hard to forgive.
I'm not interested in switching to 5e because some of the basic design concepts rub me the wrong way (the proficiency/skill/whatever it's called) bonus, primarily. I could definitely give it a shot if someone I knew wanted to run a game, but I don't see myself preferring it to PF.

Troacctid

2018-01-08, 04:38 PM

3.5 also has a very active consumer base, OGL allowed more third-party content, and in general Wizards doesn't produce as much contents for its editions anymore. 4e will probably never catch up, 5e may or may not, but probably will not catch up either.
5e has an OGL and a massive amount of fan-made content.

Cosi

2018-01-08, 04:38 PM

4e and 5e are just not very good games. Don't get me wrong, 3e has flaws, but it's still a great deal better.

4e (particularly at release, but even later) had big problems with the math, which was particularly devastating for a game that sold itself on the basis of "the math just works". Fights in general, and in particular fights with boss monsters, were boring grinds where you sunk a lot of turns into an outcome that was already determined by the ends of the first few rounds. Skill Challenges didn't work, and after something like a dozen revisions still don't work. Since "fight things" and "participate in skill challenges" represent 90%+ of the rules 4e claims to provide, the fact that those two systems don't work makes convincing people to play the game difficult. You can tell this is true, because after 4e's release "some dude's houserules for the previous edition" became a major player in the RPG landscape, something that has not happened before or since.

I will note that 4e does have a lot of good ideas. Skill Challenges were a good idea. The implementation sucked, but the idea was good. Ditto Tiers, Paragon Paths, and some of what they did with monsters.

5e on the other hand is just not D&D. Bounded Accuracy invalidates the possibility of the PCs ever saving the world because it means nothing can threaten anything large enough to field its own army. Also, it too lacks huge chunks of mechanics (notably, stealth rules).

Both games have way less content than 3e, which is not entirely a bad thing, but is probably a strike against them on balance.

Zanos

2018-01-08, 04:47 PM

3.5 has more stuff.

Also I'll just straight up admit I like playing nearly broken characters.

More specifically, though:

4e and 5e are not very big on fleshing out the more simulationist parts of the game, and don't really do much of anything for out of combat options. 3.5 definitely lacked options for martials do to cool stuff, but I really enjoyed using spells in 3.5 for high level casters to make flying castles or otherwise permanently warp the landscape. Also, bounded accuracy sucks.

Rageagainst

2018-01-08, 05:19 PM

I enjoy Pathfinder but intensely dislike 3.5. I'm in a 5th game as well, and it's a lot of fun because none of us take the game super seriously, it's a fun campaign that we're there to play for... Fun. Yeah. My very first experience with 3.5 was joining a campaign in progress. Spent all day building a viable bard-based character, got into the game, and it's the session that the warlock decides to betray the party. Who does he go for first? You guessed it. He one-shots me with... Something, don't honestly remember. Eldritch Blast? Iunno. His comment right after? "That shouldn't have happened, this isn't even a broken build." Yeah, I developed a very bad taste. On top of that, the fact that there's more books in 3.5 than in my college career is a huge turn-off. Someone commented about needing 6-7 books to make a character do everything they needed to do. In video game terms, that's buying a game and then needing 5 or so DLC to finish it. That's dumb. Really, really dumb.

That being said, I'm here because I'm DMing a World of Warcraft RPG game. I was desperately trying to find a system to convert the setting to, but since there are already books, the group decided to just use the normal system, and I am enjoying it- partially for the setting, partially because I've politely asked them not to break the game. It also helps that I don't need the 5000 3.5 books to play it, just the 10 or so WoW books.

Crichton

2018-01-08, 05:24 PM

Regarding 5e:

-I don't like the idea of bounded accuracy, at least not as it's implemented. The less said about that, the better.
-I really really don't like the 'handwave and just make it work' mentality that's almost a core concept of 5e. It puts 'too much' power in the hands of the DM. In 3.P, there's a rule for almost anything, and as a player, as long I know what limits the DM and the group as a whole have set (limits on sources, optimization, etc), I can be confident in knowing what actions my character can take, and what the probable outcomes will be. I hate that in 5e, pretty much anything I do is subject to DM fiat, outside of basic attack rolls and such. I love that in 3.P a clever player can invest some time into finding interesting ways to gain new advantages for their character. The wealth of source material provides multiple possible solutions to just about anything. Your rogue wants to SA more reliably? Let me introduce you to bags of marbles, eggshells full of dust, etc. I don't have to ask my DM if the marbles make my opponent flat-footed. The circumstances in which they do or don't are spelled out in the rules, so I can be confident that they'll work when they're supposed to work. I don't want to have to ask my DM if a thing will work, I want there to be a mechanic for it, so I can trust that it will or wont work.

Sure, 5e might be 'balanced' but I think that balance can be way overrated. A player who invests time to research options for their character SHOULD be rewarded by a character who is significantly more powerful than the character of a player who just shows up and rolls attacks on their base fighter/ranger/whatever.

/rant

Pugwampy

2018-01-08, 05:32 PM

4th edition was a complete alien concept when I read up the handbook . There was no half Orc race . Half orcs have been a race option since literally the beginning . Yes I know half orcs came in later rule books but too late . This was not Dnd as far as I am concerned.

I never really gave 5 th edition any chance because it has 4 rules elements in it .

GrayDeath

2018-01-08, 05:41 PM

Only one of my preferred systems is D&D, and I want it to FEEL like D&D, with all its strengths and weaknesses, as thats the reason I play it, when I play it.

Neither 4th nor 5th feel like that, and in addition I have a good modicum of experience with 3.p.

Mind, only about 1/4th of my games overall are D&D. I usually prefer non CLass Systems, including a well worn Homebrew.

daremetoidareyo

2018-01-08, 05:57 PM

3.5 also has a very active consumer base, OGL allowed more third-party content, and in general Wizards doesn't produce as much contents for its editions anymore. 4e will probably never catch up, 5e may or may not, but probably will not catch up either.

but think of the comparison threads about 6th edition when it comes out in 2021

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-08, 06:11 PM

I tend to think of 3.5 as the "Hot Mess" girlfriend/boyfriend or a heavily customized hot-rod. It's a jaw-dropper with sizzle and wicked curves, astonishing complexity and depth underneath the hood, and it is excited and eager to go anywhere and do anything you can imagine. It's got some deep structural problems and crippling mechanical issues in some spots that will leave you crying and blubber-faced in a dark corner or stranded in a bad neighborhood every once in a while, but you keep coming back because the engine is solid and reliable, the quirks are manageable, and it's still really fun to drive it into new places.

I understand to a limited degree what the designers were trying to accomplish with 4E, but I tend to think of it as an "instructional failure". It was important to spend some time away from 3E and understand why it wasn't working out in some areas. The design was much more balanced, calm, measured... but it also took a lot of the sizzle and spunk out of the engine. Overall, 4E came off to me as feeling sterile and generic. Every class was essentially a blaster wizard with the same maneuver deck, just refluffed the cards with different names. They had taken the big ugly lumps out of the mashed potatoes, if you will, but the result was bland, mushy, and plain. It had no heart, no soul.

I have recently started a 5E game as a player, and I'm still getting used to it. I like it, as it's got some of the flavor from 3E that I liked but thought was missing from 4E, but it both impresses and infuriates me. It's got some of the streamlined "less is more" design from 4E, but it's also got a lot of the sizzly and crinkly bits from 3E spread through it. I keep looking for the complexity and the quirkiness of 3E in it, and the system keeps smirking at me, saying "Will you quit worrying about whether or not you get a +1 and +2 and just roll the dice? All those fiddly bits aren't that important!" I keep looking for things in 3E that I want to see in 5E, and they just aren't there, they've been folded into a proficiency bonus or an ability score increase, or just flat-out ignored. Weapon sizes? "Don't worry about it, just roll already." Every time I think I've run into a problem that we had a rule for in 3E, I sit down to just play and... the problem just isn't there anymore. I haven't quite put my finger on it... I think they somehow made "Handwave it and move on already" as part of the mechanics, but I'm not entirely sure what they've done or how they did it. All I know is it seems to be working, and I'm getting a lot of the same sizzle I got from 3E.
I pretty much agree with all of this. I like the fiddly crunchy bits of 3.5/PF, and it's great at letting you play with a lot of very distinct, often wonky and exploitable mechanics, but it's just... not a good game for most players. You need a whole group full of people who get really into the crunchy side of things; if you don't have that, 5e is one hundred percent a superior option. It cuts and prunes and steamlines away virtually all of 3e's excessive fiddliness without really ruining the traditional feel of D&D. You've got your Fighters swinging battleaxes and your fireball-slinging Wizards and your Barbarians hacking away in a screaming frenzy; it's all there.

That said, I'm happy to play both. 3e is for connoisseurs, of which I am one; 5e is for anyone who likes pretending to be an elf, which includes most of my friends.

(Also note that it's really easy to hack Bounded Accuracy largely out of the system-- add Proficiency again (or some level-based value; you could use a 4e style "1/2 character level") to attacks, DCs, saves, AC, and skills and you bring back a lot of the "he's just too good" scaling).

But...it's been out longer?
No excuse. The 5e PHB came out in July 2014; since then there have been 5 full non-adventure path releases: the MM, the DMG, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Volo's Guide to Monsters (aka "MM 2") and Xanathar's Guide to Everything (aka "PHB 2"). Adventure paths bring that up to 14 books.

In the first three and a half years of 3.5, they released 71 full-length books.

Only 10 of those were adventure paths. The list includes every Complete ___ book except for Champion, every variant magic system (ToB, ToM, MoI, XPH), four of the five environmental books (Frostburn, Sandstorm, Stormwreck, Cityscape; Dungeonscape misses by about a month), the full set of Races Of ____ books, the PHB and DMG 2, Dragon Magic, and Heroes of Horror. There's really only one more year of publications to go.

"3.5 was out longer" is not an excuse.

(Based off the list I found here (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?259706-3E-%28and-3-5%29-WotC-books-by-release-date&p=4874355&viewfull=1#post4874355))

JNAProductions

2018-01-08, 06:12 PM

Yes, 3.5 is clearly the better system. That's why there's over 30 threads of "How does RAW work?" and 9 threads of rules dysfunctions.

Now, part of that is just sheer quantity-there's more in 3.5, in total, than there is in 5th. But just in general, 3.P is not especially well designed. It's fun-but it takes a lot of work to make it work.

As for why didn't I switch... I did. I went to 4th, and then to 5th, and had a ball.

I still play 3rd a reasonable amount, but I'd consider my main D&D to be 5th.

Sheogoroth

2018-01-08, 06:36 PM

Morcleon

2018-01-08, 07:16 PM

5e takes D&D in the exact opposite direction that I wanted, so I have no reason to switch. I hate bounded accuracy with a passion, and the simplistic nature of the system itself often lets me down in terms of character creation and options in-game.

I love 3.5e specifically for the incredible amounts of complexity and power that it can provide. It is a bit of a shame, since I highly doubt any future D&D editions will follow a similar paradigm.

Darrin

2018-01-08, 07:32 PM

No excuse. The 5e PHB came out in July 2014; since then there have been 5 full non-adventure path releases: the MM, the DMG, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Volo's Guide to Monsters (aka "MM 2") and Xanathar's Guide to Everything (aka "PHB 2"). Adventure paths bring that up to 14 books.

I haven't been really following WotC's release schedule, so I can't quite figure out if the slower pace of sourcebooks is due to a business decision or a design decision. Maybe it's a bit of both? Without getting into the glut of 3rd-party stuff, the shear amount of sourcebooks for 3E was both part of its massive success and a problematic curse. Having new fiddly bits to play with was awesome, but the increased complexity drove away new and casual players. The multitude of options created *WAY* too many suboptimal "Trap" choices, not necessarily through bad design but mostly due to just the volume. Massive creativity at your fingertips, but you had to dig a lot deeper through the crap to find the gems... essentially, the flexibility and scope of the system continued to grow, but the system mastery required to get a decent play experience out of the system also rose at a pretty steep rate.

RoboEmperor

2018-01-08, 07:38 PM

I like playing unconventional unique characters. Golem masters, demon masters, shadow masters, etc. 3.5 is literally the only system that supports this.

4e and 5e are standard conventional non-unique stereotypes. If I have to play a normal character like a wizard who throws fireballs only or a fighter who just bashes things, I rather play Skyrim than deal with crybaby DMs who homebrew their world into their personal fetish world which is also a knock off of random obscure fantasy books no one has ever.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-08, 07:52 PM

I haven't been really following WotC's release schedule, so I can't quite figure out if the slower pace of sourcebooks is due to a business decision or a design decision. Maybe it's a bit of both? Without getting into the glut of 3rd-party stuff, the shear amount of sourcebooks for 3E was both part of its massive success and a problematic curse. Having new fiddly bits to play with was awesome, but the increased complexity drove away new and casual players. The multitude of options created *WAY* too many suboptimal "Trap" choices, not necessarily through bad design but mostly due to just the volume. Massive creativity at your fingertips, but you had to dig a lot deeper through the crap to find the gems... essentially, the flexibility and scope of the system continued to grow, but the system mastery required to get a decent play experience out of the system also rose at a pretty steep rate.
I mean, like so much else about 3.5, it's a bit of both: the system's biggest strength (sheer volume of material) is also its biggest weakness (too much stuff with way too wide a power range).

I like playing unconventional unique characters. Golem masters, demon masters, shadow masters, etc. 3.5 is literally the only system that supports this.

4e and 5e are standard conventional non-unique stereotypes. If I have to play a normal character like a wizard who throws fireballs only or a fighter who just bashes things, I rather play Skyrim than deal with crybaby DMs who homebrew their world into their personal fetish world which is also a knock off of random obscure fantasy books no one has ever.
Have you played Mutants and Masterminds 3e at all? That's been far and away the best system I've played for making weird characters.

Florian

2018-01-08, 08:01 PM

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

Oh, I did switch to 4E when it came out, mainly because 3.5E annoyed me to tears. It didn't stick, tho, the player base in germany is too small. Looked at 5E and was pretty much unimpressed. There're OSR games that do a better job at it. Broadly speaking, I'm sticking with PF because that's where the most gamers are to be found and I actually do like Golarion as a setting, preferring it to the mess WotC turned theirs into.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-08, 08:03 PM

Largely I don't bother as much with D&D 3e as I used to, but 4e really put me off with its treatment of lore and its over-reliance on abstraction. I could still go on lengthy rants about the treatment of the Forgotten Realms in that edition. Admittedly D&D 3.5e in its later years was not exactly innocent of that, but most of that is easy enough to single out as being the specific lead-up to the utter destruction of the setting wrought by D&D 4e.

D&D 5e is a welcome return to form in many ways, including casting a raise dead on the Forgotten Realms, but I've got to echo what many people have said about it. There just isn't enough there for me to justify sticking with it. I do like many elements of it, I just wish there were, you know, more elements of it.

Currently I've retreated back into AD&D 1e/2e for the most part but dabble in 3e on occasion given its breadth of interesting options.

death390

2018-01-08, 08:12 PM

for me 4E was just the same thing with a different cosmetic behind it. and 5E felt like they tried to simplify it too much that it became "DND for dummies"

honestly 3.5/P is my favorite beat'm up(?) lots of great fights, customization, and even more content. meanwhile i have played many different systems. i'm only 27 but have played D20 and D6 starwars, call of Cthulhu, doctor who, supernatural, cyberpunk (and kid), bubblegum crisis, TMNT, LoTR, rolemaster (several versions), rifts (awsomeness!), nightspawn, robotech, Hero System, and more.

personally my favorite overall system is Palladium: rifts/nightspawn/ect. the actions per round combat, dodge or be hit, and the psionics system are awesome. but i have problems with the magic system (its funny), and for the most part everyone is pretty set in stone at character creation. there is no good way to alter your character concept unless you reset your character/ DM fiat.

best roleplaying system? oddly none stand out. doctor who has a decent adjucation system for non-combat "encounters" but is very flawed overall. my best roleplaying experiences are in DND and cyberpunk though.

best simulationist system. is 3.5/P DND with palladium right behind it.

best customization? Hero system. it is literally build your own abilities out of a large selection of ability types. though it does have some issues.

JNAProductions

2018-01-08, 08:32 PM

The same reason I play D&D instead of Gloomhaven, because one is a Roleplaying game and the other is, at the end of the day, a complicated board game. It can be the best board game in the world, but it doesn't afford one much freedom.

It's much more challenging(for me at least) to have fun when my backstory is written for me(5e) or my character progression is predetermined(4e).

And building a character that feels wholly and completely unique and mine as underpowered or overpowered as I want to make it half the fun for me.

How is your backstory written for you in 5E? There are suggested backgrounds, but literally nothing forcing you to take them. Hell, customizing backgrounds (the mechanics, not just the fluff) is literally page 125 of the PHB.

Hecuba

2018-01-08, 08:38 PM

To a certain extent, I did: I play them less frequently and I haven't invested the time to have an equal degree of system mastery as I have for 3.5, but I find both to be enjoyable games.

I will note that 4th does not feel like D&D to me. The design is fine, but the fundimental tactical changes were profound and the character builds were effectively unrecognizable. I find I like the game much more is I treat it the same way I do, for example, Exalted: where I can say "and now for someone completely different."

I'm finding 5th edition preferable for beer and pretzel games, and a couple of the groups I play with that use that tone are starting to use it as we filter in new campaigns.

Wall of text

I do find both are far less interesting games to discuss than 3.5.
4th edition created well-defined mechanical rails and kept it's role design on those rails well enough that there is little to discuss in the way of game designer principles. They got some of the fiddley bits wrong, but they rarely got themselves into a bit place where they contravened their design principles. For example: I think they overshot the cost and time sink for rituals, but there basic design clearly tracked with the apparent goals. The degree to which monster design really does adhere to the profiles of the MM3 on a business card - and the lack of interesting digressions from it to use as counter examples - makes it quite difficult to have interesting conversations about monster design.

The tactical complexity makes encounter design an interesting conversation, but at the same time basically makes you happy it with a grid may in front of you if you want to discuss it in detail.

5th edition, seems like it's starting in the direction where there will be something I find interesting to discuss online. I've not really dig into Volo's or Xanathar's yeta, but the basic premises seem promising. Previously, the degree of streaming in the core rules put some limits on how interesting I found such discussions.

Ualaa

2018-01-08, 09:21 PM

Our group switched from 1st to 2nd, when they discontinued 1st. We switched to 3.0 and then 3.5, after 2nd edition was discontinued. We played 4E after 3.5.

When they cancelled 4E, and had announced 5E, Pathfinder was the game that was still in production. TSR/WotC/Hasbro has the pattern of getting a new owner, discontinuing the current edition and creating the next.

Pathfinder is similar enough to 3.x, which we all enjoyed... and only switched from because it had been discontinued. If we wanted new material, we needed to move on... but Pathfinder has not ended, so there's no reason to switch to 5E.

4th was balanced well, compared to anything previous or since. It was an excellent game, and very tactical too, which is nice. The books didn't really mention roleplaying much, but that doesn't stop it from being as much of a roleplaying game as any other edition.

We're currently playing Pathfinder, with some limited 3rd party content. We use Ultimate Psionics and Path of War (plus Expanded). We also use Spheres of Power (and Might once it comes out).

legomaster00156

2018-01-08, 09:41 PM

We're currently playing Pathfinder, with some limited 3rd party content. We use Ultimate Psionics and Path of War (plus Expanded). We also use Spheres of Power (and Might once it comes out).
You do know Spheres of Might (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/223758/Spheres-of-Might) is out, right?

Quertus

2018-01-08, 09:49 PM

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

3e was mildly less entertaining than 2e, and made character creation much more of a chore, but it mostly made up for it with breadth of content (I don't need homebrew to play a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot, for example) and clarity of rules (BAB vs THAC0, anyone? Touch Attack vs "AC 10"? Need I go on?)

But 4e? 4e gave me nothing over 3e. The characters were all boring and same-y. If I'd wanted monochrome stats with no joy, I'd rather play point buy. 4e was horrible for world building, for that v-word, and even took a dump on the Forgotten Realms*. It felt like it was D&D, as made by people who hate D&D. :smallyuk:

I tried 4e and hated it. But the more I hear about 5e, between Bounded Accuracy, mother-may-I, and "magic items? What are those?", the more I think I'll wait for sixth.

* Not that I particularly like FR, mind you, but it's evidence that 4e was created by someone who doesn't actually understand and love the game.

Ignimortis

2018-01-08, 10:13 PM

Everything's been said already, but...
4e, from my experience, is a wargame with bits of an RPG tacked on - it might be interesting in a combat encounter, but I'm not here only for combat, am I? There are multiple problems with it, but I never got really deep into it, so I'll leave them to those who have.

5e is a game that never moves out of LotR/Conan range of adventures and lacks content. Bounded accuracy is bad. Skill system runs on handwavium. People I play 5e with think it's a strength, I think that I'll try another build (Hexblade/Battlemaster mix), finish my current campaigns, and stop playing 5e and wait till we get back into Shadowrun or something. In three years I've seen everything this system can offer. I've been dealing with 3.5e for seven years and I can still think of a dozen builds/character ideas I'd want to play someday.

Andreaz

2018-01-08, 10:24 PM

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

4e is fun. 5e less so. Neither has the tactical complexity (esp the latter) that I enjoy about the mechanical side of d&d. If I want to focus on something else i'll play another rpg too.

Ualaa

2018-01-08, 10:24 PM

You do know Spheres of Might (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/223758/Spheres-of-Might) is out, right?

The PDF is, but we don't have a hard copy at the table.

skunk3

2018-01-08, 10:28 PM

4th edition was crap and I didn't enjoy it at all. I hate MMOs (primarily because I am so big on 3.5 and how open-ended it is) and once I played a bit, I wanted to go back to 3.5.

5th edition doesn't seem terrible but I haven't had the chance to play it. From what I know of it, however, I am not a big fan of how equal everyone is and how items and stats matter less than simple roleplaying and rolling dice to see what happens. I can see why some might like that, but meh...

For me, the draw of 3.5 primarily comes from the huge amount of content available. I LIKE pouring through tons of books and spending a lot of time coming up with really interesting and flavorful characters that are actually supported by numbers. While 3.5 isn't perfect, I think with a little houseruling it can be made about as perfect as it needs to be, which pretty much everyone I know agrees with because nobody I've ever played with plays WITHOUT some sort of houseruled changes, big or small. I like thinking of armor and weapon enchantment packages, I like thinking about what skills I'll get good at, I like optimizing (to a sane degree), etc. I WANT my character to excel at whatever I decide I want it to be excellent at, whether that's being a party face or an assassin or a buffer or a skill monkey or ranged support, et al... 3.5 has enough official material out there to make damn near anything you could want and there's also splatbooks galore by third-party publishers as well as homebrew content online, so there's no lack of options.

In short, one of the best (and worst things) about 3.5 is that it rewards people who have done their homework. I've never messed with Pathfinder so I don't know what's different about it from 3.5 but to me they seem very similar so I'd probably like it.

Quertus

2018-01-08, 10:29 PM

I find 4e has more varied builds that maintain a similar power level, as opposed to the massive gaps that 3.X tends to generate. People who say that 4e characters are all the same have clearly never played, since there are combat viable builds that don't involve attacking (lazy warlords) or doing damage (pacifist leaders or hardcore control casters)

I have played 4e, but I couldn't stand to play it for long. So I never played as or with those builds.

If anyone else I knew could stand to play 4e, and had the errata etc to make it work, I might give it a second chance. So I'll try to keep those builds in mind to Google for should such a miracle occur.

I mean, I'm not sure how much 5e you've played, but I've DM'd close to 700 hours (http://www.adventurersleaguelog.com/users/726/dm_log_entries) of Adventurers League and played a bunch more, and I'd say this hasn't really been my experience. High-level characters are goddamn steamrollers. Throw a T2 challenge at a T3 party and they're going to crush it like it's nothing.

Ok, let's get some perspective here. I've adventured with or DM'd for characters whose biggest limitation in combat was how many monsters they could reach. Characters who could one-shot things that were too high above their level range to be worth XP. And characters for whom infinity was within reach.

And I've adventured with or as, or DM'd for ninjas, experts, "I'll randomly level-dip 10 different classes", parties that could manage a TPK before encountering a single monster, and Quertus.

Compared to this variety, how would you describe 5e T2 vs T3?

5e has an OGL and a massive amount of fan-made content.

News to me. Thanks for the info. In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

Ignimortis

2018-01-08, 11:07 PM

Telonius

2018-01-08, 11:09 PM

When 4e came out, I had a massive amount of 3.x books and very little money. (Those two things may or may not be related). When 5e came out, I had slightly more money, but a slightly larger pile of 3.x books (plus a pretty solid list of house rules and homebrews), plus I've been used to playing 3.x for years. I'm interested in the new stuff under the hood, but not enough to get past my natural laziness.

Seerow

2018-01-08, 11:29 PM

I actually did switch to 4e for a good year or so. I actually enjoyed it, and have since adapted many of the things I liked about it into my home games and homebrew. But ultimately my group and myself preferred the near infinite flexibility of 3.5, and switched back for that.

Given that huge flexibility is what we liked most about 3.5 it seems pretty obvious nobody was interested in 5e. It's basically DM May I in a 300 page book format. I have watched a few streams of people playing 5e and it honestly isn't as bad as that... but there is a ton of hand waving, and way less room for creativity in character building. Bounded accuracy (the concept and implementation) is also basically the antithesis of the kind of power scaling I expect to see in an RPG. If I wanted an RPG where you progress from competent to slightly more competent, I'd play Shadowrun.

Troacctid

2018-01-08, 11:30 PM

Ok, let's get some perspective here. I've adventured with or DM'd for characters whose biggest limitation in combat was how many monsters they could reach. Characters who could one-shot things that were too high above their level range to be worth XP. And characters for whom infinity was within reach.

And I've adventured with or as, or DM'd for ninjas, experts, "I'll randomly level-dip 10 different classes", parties that could manage a TPK before encountering a single monster, and Quertus.

Compared to this variety, how would you describe 5e T2 vs T3?
Well. Okay. So, two of the most infamous Adventurers League modules from the Storm King's Thunder season are "Forgotten Traditions" and "Hartkiller's Horn." They're designed for Tier 2, and they include deadly boss encounters with which I have killed players and TPK'd parties, like, every other run, or something.

One of the later adventures in the season, "Reclamation," is a Tier 3 module that involves a pocket dimension that pulls guardians from across time and space, and when I run that one, I like to replace two of the printed encounters with back-to-back rematches against those bosses from the Tier 2 mods, no rest in between. Without exception, the Tier 3 characters stomp both of them without breaking a sweat.

No, there isn't anything like what you're describing—the closest thing is when a lower-level character somehow gets hold of an overpowered item like a Staff of the Magi and starts running over level-appropriate enemies with it—but the power level difference between the different tiers of play is definitely real.

News to me. Thanks for the info. In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?
My experience is mostly with Organized Play, where only officially approved material is allowed, so I can't comment much on this. But you can read the reviews for some idea of the reception the unofficial stuff has gotten. https://www.dmsguild.com/

Troacctid refers not to the tier system of 3.5, but to the level "tiers" of Adventurer's League. Tier 2 is levels 5-9, and tier 3 is levels 10-14.
It's 5–10 and 11–16 respectively, but yes. The Tiers of Play are described in Chapter 1 of the 5e DMG.

Dimers

2018-01-08, 11:32 PM

In your experience, how receptive are 5e GMs to such homebrew and 3rd party content compared to 3e GMs?

My experience is limited to GitP play-by-post offerings, but I find 5e GMs much more likely to accept, or even offer, homebrew. You can already be anything you want using third-edition rules if you bookdive deep enough. 5e needs the homebrew to fill in the numerous and large cracks, to keep things fresh.

Quertus

2018-01-09, 12:48 AM

I'm sure I won't word this well, but I'm honestly struggling to decide whether "we have less content, therefore people are more likely* to create and accept homebrew" is a bug or a feature.

I'm not even sure which I'd prefer**.

EDIT: so, a 5e 16th level party can consistently wipe out two back-to-back 10th level TPK boss fights? Hmmm... I may need to consider researching to reconsider my stance on bounded accuracy...

* in casual play, not in organized play
** lots of content, and a culture of accepting homebrew, obviously.

Koeh

2018-01-09, 12:56 AM

Because 4e was very lackluster. We continued 3.5 but after several campaigns we felt like we all attained enough system mastery to take optimisation too far. By the time 5e came out main group fell apart. Currently Working on establishing new groups with new systems.

Jormengand

2018-01-09, 01:02 AM

4e read to me as a Herohammer Simulator, more about mashing up mooks (who inexplicably work entirely differently from nonmook monsters of the same type) than anything approaching roleplaying, and the fact that neither the combat system nor the skill system actually function correctly is a turn-off.

5e isn't a complete game: it's not even the idea of a complete game yet. To DM it, you have to make up half the skill system on the spot, and no-one has the damnedest clue what a reasonable DC is so you get ridiculous arguments about "What is the DC to do such-and-such" that you simply would never have got in 3.5. 5e also suffers from the critically flawed idea that you should always have a notable chance at failing at your day job if you're under pressure and that a village full of commoners with longbows should be a hard target for a giant monster through sheer numbers because nothing that the monster can do will change the fact that they can still do reasonable damage to it.

3.5 is a mess and half of it doesn't work, but at least it does something interesting when you apply a little bit of care to it (or a lot of care if your username happens to be "nonsi", but that level of overhaul isn't actually necessary). It's an artifact of a lot of design decisions that I disagree with, and I despair at their end-of-edition efforts to make warriors cooler by giving them "Nonmagical" teleportation. But I would still rather play a game where everyone was a ToB swordmage and not be sure how the rules worked and have to wing it than touch practically any other edition of D&D with a standard-issue 10 foot pole.

Troacctid

2018-01-09, 01:17 AM

EDIT: so, a 5e 16th level party can consistently wipe out two back-to-back 10th level TPK boss fights? Hmmm... I may need to consider researching to reconsider my stance on bounded accuracy...
Oh, it's pretty rare for a party to all be at the top of a tier—the average level is usually closer to the middle of the range.

5e isn't a complete game: it's not even the idea of a complete game yet. To DM it, you have to make up half the skill system on the spot, and no-one has the damnedest clue what a reasonable DC is so you get ridiculous arguments about "What is the DC to do such-and-such" that you simply would never have got in 3.5. 5e also suffers from the critically flawed idea that you should always have a notable chance at failing at your day job if you're under pressure and that a village full of commoners with longbows should be a hard target for a giant monster through sheer numbers because nothing that the monster can do will change the fact that they can still do reasonable damage to it.
I've never had that problem with DCs. The DMG has some pretty straightforward guidance on it.

https://i.imgur.com/3w4upMz.png

atemu1234

2018-01-09, 01:43 AM

Oh, I did switch to 4E when it came out, mainly because 3.5E annoyed me to tears. It didn't stick, tho, the player base in germany is too small. Looked at 5E and was pretty much unimpressed. There're OSR games that do a better job at it. Broadly speaking, I'm sticking with PF because that's where the most gamers are to be found and I actually do like Golarion as a setting, preferring it to the mess WotC turned theirs into.

Well, part of the problem with that is that there are like five different settings that WotC tried to handle all at once, and made a mess of individually. Golarion was its own thing from the beginning, and didn't have as many writers IIRC.
It's also probably not WotC fault in the first right, they inherited a canonical mess full of authors with various agendas. You were better off finding a single writer's canonical writings and using that as gospel than trying to make sense of the settings themselves.

The PDF is, but we don't have a hard copy at the table.

Do what I did in high school!
Step 1: Buy PDF
Step 2: Go to library
Step 3: Print PDF at 10¢ a page
Step 4: Bring to table

Jormengand

2018-01-09, 01:46 AM

I've never had that problem with DCs. The DMG has some pretty straightforward guidance on it.

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

atemu1234

2018-01-09, 01:56 AM

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

This just in - because I can board over the hole, the window isn't really broken! If only I knew this when I was a little kid. Imagine the trouble I could have gotten out of.

Yahzi

2018-01-09, 02:28 AM

I've written something around 100,000 words of house rules and an entire series of novels set in essentially a 3E world (see my sig).

Plus, 5E completely lost me with the "heal any amount of physical damage overnight, but exhaustion can last up to 5 days" thing.

Knaight

2018-01-09, 02:32 AM

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

The guidance says to assess a qualitative difficulty, then convert it to numbers using the table. Doing that requires absolutely no knowledge of what the system looks like. I don't mean that you don't need to understand bounded accuracy - I mean you could hand that table off to a third party with a description of the task, not tell them you were playing D&D (and there are enough similar tables in other games to make that plausible, it could be d6 Fantasy or something), have them give you a number, and plug it in. Bounded accuracy doesn't come into it in that stage.

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.

Troacctid

2018-01-09, 02:37 AM

Yeah, and the guidance is "Make something up which fits with your idea of how the broken garbled mess which is bounded accuracy might possibly be supposed to work." Just brilliant.

I mean...

https://i.imgur.com/P64xtP8.png

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.
That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.

Jormengand

2018-01-09, 02:44 AM

I mean...

https://i.imgur.com/P64xtP8.png

Yeah. Example (Skill used) indeed. Plus, it's not like they don't actually have...

"Climb
DC Example Surface or Activity
0 A slope too steep to walk up, or a knotted rope with a wall to brace against.
5 A rope with a wall to brace against, or a knotted rope, or a rope affected by the rope trick spell.
10 A surface with ledges to hold on to and stand on, such as a very rough wall or a ship’s rigging.
15 Any surface with adequate handholds and footholds (natural or artificial), such as a very rough natural rock surface or a tree, or an unknotted rope, or pulling yourself up when dangling by your hands.
20 An uneven surface with some narrow handholds and footholds, such as a typical wall in a dungeon or ruins.
25 A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall.
25 An overhang or ceiling with handholds but no footholds.
— A perfectly smooth, flat, vertical surface cannot be climbed.
Climb DC
Modifier1 Example Surface or Activity

These modifiers are cumulative; use any that apply.

-10 Climbing a chimney (artificial or natural) or other location where you can brace against two opposite walls (reduces DC by 10).
-5 Climbing a corner where you can brace against perpendicular walls (reduces DC by 5).
+5 Surface is slippery (increases DC by 5)."

Which is leagues apart from:

"Your Strength (Athletics) check covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing, jumping, or swimming. Examples include the following activities:
You attempt to climb a sheer or slippery cliff, avoid hazards while scaling a wall, or cling to a surface while something is trying to knock you off."

Knaight

2018-01-09, 02:46 AM

That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.

That's in characters' areas of expertise. If you take the elite array (which doesn't see much use) you get +2/+2/+1/+1/+0/-1 modifiers. The average there is 5/6. You then have proficiency on usually four out of 18 skills, for an average bonus of 4/9. Adding those together gets less than 2, but there's enough miscellany around (attribute bonuses, extra skills for certain classes, etc.) to be worth calling it 2ish.

That represents things that a character can do, but isn't particularly good or bad at. They still fail a very easy check routinely. You can restrict this to only what characters are best at, but even there they fail an easy check 20% of the time. The numbers at the low end are screwy.

Coidzor

2018-01-09, 02:47 AM

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

I didn't switch to 4e when it came out because no one in the group had the interest or income to buy in for 4e due to where we were in life at the time, but we had amassed a decent library of 3.5 content between us and got a bunch more stuff for a song when dudes sold off their entire 3.5 collections to switch to 4e.

So we continued playing what we knew and had. I eventually tried out 4e for Adventurer's League and it seemed pretty solid in terms of combat. Skill Challenges were interesting as well.

With 5e, with very few books to start out with and access to the Basic Rules being sufficient for most of the group, there was a much lower barrier to entry, especially since the edition isn't based around a subscription service. Although I think now more people would be socially ready for a subscription-service-based TTRPG than they were in 2009. We played Lost Mines of Phandelver as a short interlude between 3.5 and PF campaigns and found that aside from a couple of wonky places the system was enjoyable enough and had simplified a lot of areas that we found annoyingly complex at times.

So we have largely switched over to 5e after our last Pathfinder campaign wrapped up.

Endarire

2018-01-09, 02:48 AM

We liked 3.x more, had more resources, had more experience, and were more excited to play with tools and people with which we were familiar.

Yahzi

2018-01-09, 03:34 AM

the last editions of D&D where they have players and monsters playing by the same rules.
This! This too! I play (well, run) D&D for the simulationist angle, not the narrative (unlike many DMs, I am not a frustrated fantasy novelist :smallbiggrin:).

I actually admire 5E's simplification; but they made the simulation simply impossible. I can't even pretend to build a world that makes sense beyond "because I said so" with 5E.

Nifft

2018-01-09, 03:43 AM

I can't even pretend to build a world that makes sense beyond "because I said so" with 5E.

That's true, but it's also true that you can't build a world that makes sense with either 3e or Pathfinder.

Well, not unless you're Emperor Tippy.

That setting makes sense, but it's not really a world in the fantasy genre any more.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 03:51 AM

One of the later adventures in the season, "Reclamation," is a Tier 3 module that involves a pocket dimension that pulls guardians from across time and space, and when I run that one, I like to replace two of the printed encounters with back-to-back rematches against those bosses from the Tier 2 mods, no rest in between. Without exception, the Tier 3 characters stomp both of them without breaking a sweat.
There should be more to character growth than dealing enough combat damage to defeat an encounter six levels lower. The 5E forum is just now having a twelve-page discussion on how many monsters are just a "bag of HP"; defeating a bigger bag of HP is not really impressive.

Where bounded accuracy does come in is the numbers being poorly fit to the qualitative difficulties. The typical character's typical attribute+proficiency is around +2 at first level for most things. That leaves them a 10% failure chance on "very easy", a 35% failure chance on "easy", and a 60% failure chance on "moderate". The table desperately needs to be downshifted 5 points or so on the easy end, probably with a transitional term between moderate and hard.
Yes. The issue is not so much that it's difficult for a DM to qualify a task as "easy" or "hard" or whatnot. The issue is that when you do, too often you get ridiculous outcomes like a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task, or an untrained nobody randomly succeeding at an olympic-level stunt.

That's proficiency alone, with no attribute. A proficient skill in your primary stat typically has a +5 bonus at level 1, or +7 with Expertise.
Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.

Jormengand

2018-01-09, 04:11 AM

Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.

Ugh, yes. When I complained in a thread about 5e that characters like Altaïr and Nilin and real life parkour experts being able to pass moderate climb checks routinely wasn't supported by the system, I got "Well, because Altaïr is a rogue, and if he's level 20, and if he has very high strength, he can just about manage it," with no explanation of how any character who wasn't a high-level rogue (which is why I mentioned Nilin, who probably hasn't maxed out her strength either) could do that. You shouldn't have to be a rogue who is a mad climbing nut to be able to climb stuff routinely.

weckar

2018-01-09, 04:18 AM

I've invested 100s of $ into books for 3.5, and was not prepared to do that again when these still worked perfectly fine.

noob

2018-01-09, 04:23 AM

Or how a normal person will fail very easy tasks one quarter of the time(I want to climb those stairs (rolls) Oh I can not climb those stairs I guess that is why all the houses in the town have multiple stairs)
Even an adventurer will often fail very easy tasks for which he had training.
like "I just did climb that 100 meter cliff without using tools now I will try to climb that knotted rope(surprise he can still fail climbing that knotted rope)"
Or yet take as an example mathematic calculations.(it is super continuous: there is long chains of stuff that people learns in the order and you can hardly know how to calculate a sum without knowing how to do an addition but here an addition would be very easy and a sum too and you would be able to do fine a sum and then be unable to do an addition while in 3.5 you could have an addition at dc0)

Troacctid

2018-01-09, 04:33 AM

Yes. The issue is not so much that it's difficult for a DM to qualify a task as "easy" or "hard" or whatnot. The issue is that when you do, too often you get ridiculous outcomes like a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task, or an untrained nobody randomly succeeding at an olympic-level stunt.

Oh, and counterexamples always involve only skills based on your primary attribute, and always only rogue characters. That's very limiting in and of itself.
I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

noob

2018-01-09, 04:37 AM

I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

There is also the examples of one given character doing something hard then failing one instant later doing an easy variant of it.
And the examples of people needing multiple stairways in a house because someone coming to their house might find itself unable to climb a given stairway(and that happens very often(one quarter of the time assuming average commoners))
I think this table should have very easy at Dc0 because you do not expect someone average to fail one quarter of the time for an very easy task(it would not be called very easy).

Florian

2018-01-09, 04:42 AM

Ugh, yes. When I complained in a thread about 5e that characters like Altaïr and Nilin and real life parkour experts being able to pass moderate climb checks routinely wasn't supported by the system, I got "Well, because Altaïr is a rogue, and if he's level 20, and if he has very high strength, he can just about manage it," with no explanation of how any character who wasn't a high-level rogue (which is why I mentioned Nilin, who probably hasn't maxed out her strength either) could do that. You shouldn't have to be a rogue who is a mad climbing nut to be able to climb stuff routinely.

I think this is more a topic on what to expect of rules (and rules modeling) and how the game part should work based on that expectation.

For example, a game system I regularly play uses these meta rules for skills:
- You don't have to roll if there're no stakes involved.
- You don't have to roll for any activity your character is supposed to be good at.
- You don't have to roll for anything that you have 50+% chance to succeed at.
- Not rolling will always count as one success. You want more successes, you will need to roll.

That system uses margins of success/failure to produce more nuanced results than a simple pass/fail.
So, an Altair would "perform" as expected right from character generation.

Another system I use also uses MoF/MoS, but uses 2d10+mod as core mechanic (1 and 2 being failures, 1 and 2 on both dice being critical failures), with the option to roll "safe" (1d10+mod) or go for "risk" (4d10+mod).

Ignimortis

2018-01-09, 04:45 AM

I mean I feel like those are the counterexamples you should expect if you're talking about the case of "a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task"?

Because a level 20 expertise rogue with a maxed relevant stat isn't an expert. They're supposed to be a demigod of that particular skill. An expert is someone who has maybe +3 in a relevant stat and is level 5. Not even necessarily a rogue.

Mordaedil

2018-01-09, 04:48 AM

I'll be honest, a lot of what hooks me is in the presentation.

Sure enough, I was brought into D&D from video games like NWN and the like, sure, but I don't think I'd pick it as a hobby if I hadn't seen those books and be absolutely intrigued by how they actually looked like tomes, with art inside them to invoke a very distinct style was stylistically old-fashioned, graphs written almost as if sketches in someones notebook and ornate pages that looked expensive to print and therefore like worth every penny I put into buying the books.

When 4th edition came out, I watched the trailers with some trepidation, but still bought the core books expecting them to be every bit as engaging as any previous edition. But the art of 4th edition was very clean, modernistic, obviously drawn on a computer with modern drawing techniques and everything looked as if it was a print-out of art from a video game manual, on pages that had about as much character as a printer manual.

I also later came to not really like how it lacked options for the wizard or how getting a flaming dagger turned all of your damage output into fire damage, meaning that it was necessary to pack more weapons to bypass damage resistances as well now. Already a problem invoked in 3rd edition by the inclusion of cold iron, silver and adamantine weapons. I'm sure they fixed this in some later supplements, but it wasn't really encouraging me to even try to use them at any point.

Then again, it took me years to even try my hand at DMing and by then Pathfinder was already out.

noob

2018-01-09, 04:52 AM

I think this is more a topic on what to expect of rules (and rules modeling) and how the game part should work based on that expectation.

For example, a game system I regularly play uses these meta rules for skills:
- You don't have to roll if there're no stakes involved.
- You don't have to roll for any activity your character is supposed to be good at.
- You don't have to roll for anything that you have 50+% chance to succeed at.
- Not rolling will always count as one success. You want more successes, you will need to roll.

That system uses margins of success/failure to produce more nuanced results than a simple pass/fail.
So, an Altair would "perform" as expected right from character generation.

Another system I use also uses MoF/MoS, but uses 2d10+mod as core mechanic (1 and 2 being failures, 1 and 2 on both dice being critical failures), with the option to roll "safe" (1d10+mod) or go for "risk" (4d10+mod).
Those are actual rules.
It is homebrew.
Which is encouraged by 5e but it is still homebrew.
In 5e if a commoner wants to climb stairs he have one chance on four to just fail.

Florian

2018-01-09, 06:11 AM

Those are actual rules.
It is homebrew.
Which is encouraged by 5e but it is still homebrew.
In 5e if a commoner wants to climb stairs he have one chance on four to just fail.

That's mainly a stance on "what do rules do?" and therefore, "how to use rules?".

Grim Reader

2018-01-09, 06:44 AM

Never tried 5e. When 4e arrived, one of the people here was very enthusiastic about it and ran a campaign.

4e literally made me weep tears of frustrated creativity. The whole character design and development part of roleplaying has always been a big outlet for my creativity, such as it is. 4e just didn't offer any release there.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-09, 08:04 AM

That's true, but it's also true that you can't build a world that makes sense with either 3e or Pathfinder.

Well, not unless you're Emperor Tippy.

That setting makes sense, but it's not really a world in the fantasy genre any more.

The somewhat more broken nature of D&D 3e rules that leads to everything turning into the Tippyverse is pretty much exactly why I actually more or less why I stick with older editions. Or more or less treat D&D 3e like everything technically still works like it does in AD&D and thus is actually still a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting. This isn't actually all that difficult, and mostly relies on house-ruling a couple of spells (astral projection, for instance) and basically ignoring the most ridiculous RAW interpretations.

D&D 4e is actively worse in every respect when it comes to feeling like you're playing as part of a fantasy setting.

D&D 5e is technically somewhat better at its job than D&D 3e but feels a little too modern and clean. Also, again, there's not really all that much of it and the pace of material has been effectively glacial. In three and a half years we've only had the three core rulebooks, two supplementary books (VGtM, XGtE), one setting book (SCAG), a bunch of adventures, and a drip-feed from Unearthed Arcana that maybe adds up to a third supplement.

Florian

2018-01-09, 08:14 AM

Pex

2018-01-09, 08:41 AM

I didn't switch to 4E because "it wasn't D&D". More seriously because it was boring. Everyone was the same. Not exact carbon copies, but same enough. Almost every power of any class was the same formula: X[W] damage of Type (color) + (Condition or Someone Moves). If Condition = Bad, save ends. X is 0 for non-damage spells. W is weapon or spell.

Daily powers were encounter powers of a greater X. Non-Weapon magic items were Daily Powers. Magic Weapons only change the color of the damage. For example, a flaming sword has you do fire damage instead of martial damage. No bonus to hit. No extra damage. The weapon does absolutely nothing for you except for the once in a while instance a monster is vulnerable to fire. Otherwise it's just a sword with fancy flavor text.

Every class, every magic item uses the same game mechanic.

Rituals are a treasure tax. Depending on context they take too long, but that's subjective. For example, if pursuing an amphibious enemy who jumps into a deep river taking the 10 minutes to cast Water Breathing is just as bad as not pursuing at all. He gets away.

I do play 5E while also playing Pathfinder. I have gripes against 5E, but I can get over them. There are particulars of 5E I like more than Pathfinder though Pathfinder is my preference over all. I could play 3E again, but in truth I'd rather player Pathfinder. Pathfinder improved the 3E paradigm.

Melcar

2018-01-09, 08:50 AM

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

There are multiple reasons, but I'll try to answer them all. The first 4 is about 4th ed, the remaining is about 5th ed.

1) We had an ongoing campaign which we all liked, which did not merit any change or switch since this would make playing the current campaign impossible, save for some massive conversions, which none of us wanted to even try at. So we continued playing 3.5.

2) When we realized the the clumsy and honestly terrible retconning the spell plague brought to Forgotten Realms we were like "**** this, we are not paying the retards at WotC any money for that crap"

3) That brings me to the economic point. We had since year 2000 invested a lot of money in buying 3.x books. We had no inclination of those books becoming obsolete and spending a ton of money on, in our view, an inferior product.

4) When we all realized that all classes had access to magic and magic was severely nerfed, we immediately disliked the rules. To us, being more old school, D&D was not WOW, where everyone had to be equal in power. Some are strong men swinging a piece of steel, some are manipulators of the very cosmos. We actually like that difference. To us that was part and parcel of a high fantasy setting. So we did not want to play with such, to us, kids - almost politically correct-feeling rules.

5) So at this point we are too lazy to learn new rules. We like 3.5 with all its flaws, some of which we have corrected by a bit of house rulings and homebrew.

6) We still don't want to make all of our books obsolete and we are not really keen spending money on a new set of books.

7) After 4th ed, we don't really care what WotC are putting out. We have no use for it. Did they ever start republishing 3.5 we would buy it, and use it.

I think that's about it. All of us in the group have different takes on it, but basically it comes down to the level of system mastery we have, we like the d20 rules, dont want to spend the money and still have fun playing the 15 year old campaign, so why change???

noob

2018-01-09, 09:15 AM

I think there should be efficient conversion guidelines for turning dnd 3.5 content in 5e content so that we can do weird dnd 3.5 characters in 5e.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 09:40 AM

I think there should be efficient conversion guidelines for turning dnd 3.5 content in 5e content so that we can do weird dnd 3.5 characters in 5e.

That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't take a lot of levels for a 3.5 character to become substantially more powerful than a 5E character.

For example, in terms of skills, a first-level 3E character is at the same competence as an eighth-level 5E character; whereas a seventh-level 3E character (of any class) is a match in skills for an eighteenth level rogue or bard in 5E (and well beyond any non-rogue or bard class).

JNAProductions

2018-01-09, 09:43 AM

That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't take a lot of levels for a 3.5 character to become substantially more powerful than a 5E character.

For example, in terms of skills, a first-level 3E character is at the same competence as an eighth-level 5E character; whereas a seventh-level 3E character (of any class) is a match in skills for an eighteenth level rogue or bard in 5E (and well beyond any non-rogue or bard class).

Well, DCs are different too. You can expect to succeed sometimes with no modifier to a skill in 5E, whereas the same in 3.P is utter trash.

Just comparing straight numbers is not going to be fully accurate.

noob

2018-01-09, 09:46 AM

That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't take a lot of levels for a 3.5 character to become substantially more powerful than a 5E character.

For example, in terms of skills, a first-level 3E character is at the same competence as an eighth-level 5E character; whereas a seventh-level 3E character (of any class) is a match in skills for an eighteenth level rogue or bard in 5E (and well beyond any non-rogue or bard class).

I spoke of converting the content.
So the classes after conversion would give skills the same way as they do in 5e.
You would get the same spell progressions as in 5e(So a converted caster who gets sixth level spells would do it at the same way as a 5e caster who get sixth level spells)
And so on.
You understand the concept of conversion is not it?

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 09:46 AM

Well, DCs are different too. You can expect to succeed sometimes with no modifier to a skill in 5E, whereas the same in 3.P is utter trash.
No, it's not. Whatever gives you that idea?

For a random example, swimming through rough water is DC 15 in Pathfinder, or a 30% chance for any untrained character with no modifier. That's clearly not "utter trash".

JNAProductions

2018-01-09, 09:49 AM

No, it's not. Whatever gives you that idea?

For a random example, swimming through rough water is DC 15 in Pathfinder, or a 30% chance for any untrained character with no modifier. That's clearly not "utter trash".

Okay, slight exaggeration. (Do note that ACP would apply to that, though, twice over, so if you have even -3 ACP you physically cannot succeed at that.)

Point is, you can reasonably expect to contribute on some tasks with no modifier or a low modifier in 5E, whereas that pretty quickly stops being true in PF or 3rd. You can completely "fall off" the skill system if it's outside your area of expertise in 3rd, whereas you can't in 5th.

That's not inherently bad, by the way-some people like that sense of greater progression, and prefer having specialized characters that non-specialists can't contribute. It's just personal opinion.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 09:56 AM

Point is, you can reasonably expect to contribute on some tasks with no modifier or a low modifier in 5E, whereas that pretty quickly stops being true in PF or 3rd.
The idea that all DCs scale with your level comes from 4E, not 3E. Indeed, there are numerous common tasks in 3E that have a fixed DC (not a scaling one) that you can easily do with a low or no modifier, by e.g. taking 10 or grabbing a MW item or having somebody do aid another on you.

JNAProductions

2018-01-09, 09:58 AM

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 10:32 AM

Yes, but are you expected to continue doing those tasks at high level?
Probably not, but it's rather odd to assume that high-level 5E campaigns will feature climbing walls and high-level 3E campaigns will not.

For instance, climbing a rough wall. DC whatever. In 5E, there's no check called for unless it's excessively difficult to climb (sheer or slippery or something), but if it is, you're expected to be making that check at level 1 as well as level 20.
That's another slight exaggeration; in 3E, there'd be no check either unless it's excessively difficult. Nobody plays games where you have to make a spot check to see a tree in front of you, either.

So suppose you want to make a character that can reliably climb sheer or slippery walls. In 3E any class can learn to do this with minimal investment - you invest some skill points, buy a cheap MW item, done (the known issue is that a few 3.5 classes have too little skill points, but PF has fixes for that). In 5E, you either have to play an 18th level rogue, or you have to accept randomly failing a lot.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 10:46 AM

I keep looking for the complexity and the quirkiness of 3E in it, and the system keeps smirking at me, saying "Will you quit worrying about whether or not you get a +1 and +2 and just roll the dice? All those fiddly bits aren't that important!" I keep looking for things in 3E that I want to see in 5E, and they just aren't there, they've been folded into a proficiency bonus or an ability score increase, or just flat-out ignored. Weapon sizes? "Don't worry about it, just roll already." Every time I think I've run into a problem that we had a rule for in 3E, I sit down to just play and... the problem just isn't there anymore. I haven't quite put my finger on it... I think they somehow made "Handwave it and move on already" as part of the mechanics, but I'm not entirely sure what they've done or how they did it.

If I have to be honest with you, the reason why 5e is like that is it made everything possible, even totally stupid stuff, so it had to be less reliant on bonuses, you can still make cool builds, I am currently playing a swash 3/shadow warlcok POC, Peter Pan character, you can play a fun 2 weapon dual wielder mounted combatant 8 fighter/12 swash for a cool pikemen, and I gotta say, my group focuses a lot on the fiddly bits, if you really want a fun experience where you get to see all the fiddly, play a version of a character in media that you like. You can make them, I gurantee it.

BWR

2018-01-09, 11:03 AM

The somewhat more broken nature of D&D 3e rules that leads to everything turning into the Tippyverse is pretty much exactly why I actually more or less why I stick with older editions.

You know that base Tippyverse is perfectly possible in earlier editions of D&D, right?
It's just harder/impossible to pull off the anti-RAI, questionably RAW infinite loops and arbitrarily high numbers,

Pleh

2018-01-09, 11:11 AM

The somewhat more broken nature of D&D 3e rules that leads to everything turning into the Tippyverse is pretty much exactly why I actually more or less why I stick with older editions. Or more or less treat D&D 3e like everything technically still works like it does in AD&D and thus is actually still a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting. This isn't actually all that difficult, and mostly relies on house-ruling a couple of spells (astral projection, for instance) and basically ignoring the most ridiculous RAW interpretations.

See, Tippyverse is really more a result of internet forum communities than the system itself. I have literally never seen 3.5 actually use ANYTHING fron Tippyverse after more than 10 years of playing that system.

I think there should be efficient conversion guidelines for turning dnd 3.5 content in 5e content so that we can do weird dnd 3.5 characters in 5e.

Well, it's sort of already there: you just strip everything down. You can mostly just reflavor core 5e content to play any of the 3.5 variations.

3.5 didn't have a large scope of flavorful concepts. It just took 3 or 4 synonyms for a concept and created class full of mechanical benefits for each.

3.5 might have been better if it had just made all the various base classes into ACFs for the core classes.

noob

2018-01-09, 11:18 AM

See, Tippyverse is really more a result of internet forum communities than the system itself. I have literally never seen 3.5 actually use ANYTHING fron Tippyverse after more than 10 years of playing that system.

Well, it's sort of already there: you just strip everything down. You can mostly just reflavor core 5e content to play any of the 3.5 variations.

3.5 didn't have a large scope of flavorful concepts. It just took 3 or 4 synonyms for a concept and created class full of mechanical benefits for each.

3.5 might have been better if it had just made all the various base classes into ACFs for the core classes.

So totemist would be a variant of which class?
And crusader?
And truenamer?
And binder?
And psion?
Each of those class is in 3.5 because it uses a different system.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 11:25 AM

Several reasons.

I love the options that 3.5e has. It's the only system (it seems) where you can make almost any concept come to life. Some house-ruling might be necessary to make it effective, but the base concept can be created.

I love that class is just a name in 3.5e, and that it is easy to rewrite fluff to suit a character.

I love the world-building 3.5e does, giving us the depth of information that the other two don't seem to.

I hate 4e's blandness and video-game-like quality. I want class balance, not class equality.

I hate 5e's advantage system. I'd rather get static bonuses than have to worry about making two dice rolls all the time for every little thing.

I love 3.5e's skill system, in which there is a skill for everything (though I'd argue for a skill point increase for certain classes...).

I hate 4e and 5e's attempt to make all levels of play the same. I don't mind having danger at all levels, but high-level play is supposed to feel different than low-level play.

I love the ability to really optimize a character in 3.5e, which seems to be lacking in 4e and 5e.

I love 3.5e for making monsters and characters play by the same rules - if I want to play a monster as a character, there is an easy way to do that.

Finally, I own all the 3.5e books, there is the OGL as well as various internet resources, and I don't want to spend a crap ton of money on a system that is "meh" at best.

That's a good start as to why I never switched.

1. nah, 5e is known for its STUPID builds, like a half-orc wizard, sure not the most viable, but possible

2.5e is more for building your own worlds

3.I agree

4. advantage is really fun IMO, it allows for a new condition anyone can use, leading to some bogus multiclass options, like how a reckless attack javelin can get sneak attack

5. they do have skills for everything, 5e is more like ¨there is a skill you can probably apply,¨

6.I dont get this, constant bonus actions multiattacking highscale combat, massive class bonuses, high level is SO different from low level

7. optimized characters just need more creativity in 5e, with multiclassing archetypes, advantage, and rarer feats,

8. 5e has monster races

9. 5e is REALLY FUN. and I ownly own a free pdf monster manual and I use the wiki! it aint hard to find info with a bit of internet sleuthing, if you want to enjoy 5e, you gotta have a good world builder DM, and have a really bonkers character concept, those are fun, like my PURE FIRE Phoenix Sorcerer, he only has fire/acid spells, or how about my enchanter wizard, using glyphs he can put charges of spells in weapons! This game is great and I encourage you to try out some wierd concept.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-09, 11:25 AM

You know that base Tippyverse is perfectly possible in earlier editions of D&D, right?
It's just harder/impossible to pull off the anti-RAI, questionably RAW infinite loops and arbitrarily high numbers,

Many of the spells necessary for Tippyverse shenanigans have much higher and impossible to overcome costs in AD&D, or in fact don't exist at all.

noob

2018-01-09, 11:32 AM

Such as for example simulacrum.
Oh no the simulacrum is nearly the same as in 3.5.
And it costs only snow and one year of life time(and have 90% of the original abilities after some time of waiting).
Guess what now the simulacrum you created will use that spell on you over and over and spend his life time.
There is a lot of shenanigans that works just fine in ad&d.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-09, 11:37 AM

Such as for example simulacrum.
Oh no the simulacrum is nearly the same as in 3.5.
And it costs only snow and one year of life time.
Guess what now the simulacrum you created will use that spell on you over and over and spend his life time.
There is a lot of shenanigans that works just fine in ad&d.

You know that being forcibly aged a year causes you to have to make a save or die using a system shock roll, right?

System Shock states the percentage chance a character has to survive magical effects that reshape or age his body: petrification (and reversing petrification), polymorph, magical aging, etc. It can also be used to see if the character retains consciousness in particularly difficult situations. For example, an evil wizard polymorphs his dim-witted hireling into a crow. The hireling, whose Constitution score is 13, has an 85% chance to survive the change. Assuming he survives, he must successfully roll for system shock again when he is changed back to his original form or else he will die.

It's not a particularly high chance of death even with an average constitution score (a 70% survival rate at Con 10), but it's high enough that you don't want to be risking it all that often.

Psyren

2018-01-09, 11:52 AM

5e's "you only have to roll if its difficult" is a fine mindset, but I think they take it too far, because they don't do a good job of giving your GM tools to evaluate difficulty. Sure a rough wall with handholds should be easy to climb (no roll), but it can be if other factors are at play, like being weaker due to poison/drain, high winds, rain, carrying an ally on your back etc. In 5e, you have to gauge whether all that stuff makes your wall "Medium", "Hard" or "Very Hard", and whether to apply Disadvantage, with very little in the way of guidance or examples.

Compare to 3.5/PF, which gives you a flat number for that wall (DC 10) to which you can then layer on all the other factors and modifiers. The "no need to roll" metric is much clearer - if the DC is 10+modifier or lower, it's considered easy for you (since you can take 10 and clear it.)

I didn't switch to 4E because "it wasn't D&D". More seriously because it was boring. Everyone was the same. Not exact carbon copies, but same enough. Almost every power of any class was the same formula: X[W] damage of Type (color) + (Condition or Someone Moves). If Condition = Bad, save ends. X is 0 for non-damage spells. W is weapon or spell.

Daily powers were encounter powers of a greater X. Non-Weapon magic items were Daily Powers. Magic Weapons only change the color of the damage. For example, a flaming sword has you do fire damage instead of martial damage. No bonus to hit. No extra damage. The weapon does absolutely nothing for you except for the once in a while instance a monster is vulnerable to fire. Otherwise it's just a sword with fancy flavor text.

Every class, every magic item uses the same game mechanic.

Rituals are a treasure tax. Depending on context they take too long, but that's subjective. For example, if pursuing an amphibious enemy who jumps into a deep river taking the 10 minutes to cast Water Breathing is just as bad as not pursuing at all. He gets away.

I do play 5E while also playing Pathfinder. I have gripes against 5E, but I can get over them. There are particulars of 5E I like more than Pathfinder though Pathfinder is my preference over all. I could play 3E again, but in truth I'd rather player Pathfinder. Pathfinder improved the 3E paradigm.

This sums up very well my problems with 4e. I do still dream of running a tabletop version of several video games in it though, notably Diablo.

Pleh

2018-01-09, 12:02 PM

So totemist would be a variant of which class?
And crusader?
And truenamer?
And binder?
And psion?
Each of those class is in 3.5 because it uses a different system.

Incarnum is interesting because it might just be one of the few splatbooks that actually made something halfway new-ish. That one might need some actual translation into 5e.

Truenamer, Binder, Psion are all just casters and you could play a standard caster with specific spell lists to get the same basic effect.

Truenamer: you are a wizard with limited spell selection, but you only need verbal components ever.

Psion: you are a sorcerer and at the exclusion of nonpsionic schools, you can use psionic magic at will.

Binder: you are a warlock that sacrifices the benefits of having a single patron for the versatility of swapping between vestiges.

Crusader is basically a paladin/cleric/knight/holy champion. Again, you can easily just reflavor the concept and use a core mechanic to achieve the same result.

My point is that there is no need to use a different set of rules for each class concept (especially concepts that are simply synonymous for core class concepts).

CharonsHelper

2018-01-09, 12:15 PM

I like parts of 5e - but there's too much "GM may I" written into the rules for my taste.

4e lost a lot of the asymmetry that I enjoy about RPGs. It did it to fix the balance issues - but symmetry is the most boring (and probably laziest) way to balance. Plus - a LOT of the mechanics are dissociated - something done only by the player rather than the character.

I do actually play other TTRPG systems, but to me Pathfinder is still "D&D".

Knaight

2018-01-09, 12:20 PM

The idea that all DCs scale with your level comes from 4E, not 3E. Indeed, there are numerous common tasks in 3E that have a fixed DC (not a scaling one) that you can easily do with a low or no modifier, by e.g. taking 10 or grabbing a MW item or having somebody do aid another on you.

3e still does have a different scale than 5e. Notably:
https://i.imgur.com/P64xtP8.png
https://i.imgur.com/3w4upMz.png

The big takeaway is that the very easy to nearly impossible scale went from 0-40 to 5-30. It shrinks significantly, while also shifting the low end up. The 3e scale broadly works better for the game it's in, although there are exceptions there due to just how ridiculous skill optimization gets (where two players both trying to make an X-expert at a given level can easily end up with a difference in 40 points in X without even invoking particularly heavy optimization).

As someone who mostly plays stat and skill based games, D&D in general tends to produce skill systems that look hilariously bad to my eyes. I find 5e least annoying in that regard, but it's still in point-and-laugh territory.

Esprit15

2018-01-09, 12:42 PM

So totemist would be a variant of which class?
And crusader?
And truenamer?
And binder?
And psion?
Each of those class is in 3.5 because it uses a different system.

Psions are being added to 5e.

Crusaders are pretty close to warclerics. Maybe a Warrior/Cleric multiclass.

That said, I like the inherent power gap in 3.5. I’m okay with a wizard being more versatile than the barbarian. I like having a low floor and a high ceiling in a system that leaves room to learn.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 12:49 PM

As someone who mostly plays stat and skill based games, D&D in general tends to produce skill systems that look hilariously bad to my eyes. I find 5e least annoying in that regard, but it's still in point-and-laugh territory.

Oh yes, WOTC pointedly learned nothing in this regard from decades of RPG design.

Highlights include that no character normally learns new skills as they advance (in 4E/5E, at least); pretending that getting +1 on 1d20 is a Really Big Deal (all three systems, really); resolving complex tasks with a single yes-or-no check; a hilariously bad implementation of "fail forward" (i.e. failure does exactly the same as success but you get a minor penalty in the next battle); and the idea that even the most ludicrous action works 5% of the time (which isn't quite what the rules say, but it's a common interpretation).

I mean, White Wolf's skill system isn't great either but it's hands down better than all of these.

Knaight

2018-01-09, 01:07 PM

Oh yes, WOTC pointedly learned nothing in this regard from decades of RPG design.
Not learning from decades of design in the rest of the industry is WotC's specialty, after all. Finding mechanics twenty years after everyone else and hailing them as revolutionary is a close second. Advantage and Disadvantage are a great example here - they're roll and keep systems, and primitive roll and keep systems at that. L5R came out in 1995, and that's just the oldest one I can remember off the top of my head.

I have a simple rule about revolutionary RPG mechanics - if a new game comes out with what they claim is a revolutionary mechanic, and said mechanic is older than I am, it's not revolutionary. This might scrape by on that metric, but I doubt it.

I mean, White Wolf's skill system isn't great either but it's hands down better than all of these.

Pretty much, and when there's negative comparisons being made to the mess that is WoD you know something's gone wrong somewhere.

Pex

2018-01-09, 01:12 PM

martixy

2018-01-09, 01:19 PM

Because it doesn't support the game I wish to play. High-power heroics and high-LA monstrous races.

The others already brought up all relevant points like the limited advancement, the asymmetry between monsters and players and simply the lack of material, all of which directly affect the ability to create such a game.

9. 5e is REALLY FUN. and I ownly own a free pdf monster manual and I use the wiki! it aint hard to find info with a bit of internet sleuthing, if you want to enjoy 5e, you gotta have a good world builder DM, and have a really bonkers character concept, those are fun, like my PURE FIRE Phoenix Sorcerer, he only has fire/acid spells, or how about my enchanter wizard, using glyphs he can put charges of spells in weapons! This game is great and I encourage you to try out some wierd concept.

Your bonkers character concepts seem bland and uninspired to me. I want to play such things as a tsochar trallherd, a mimic monk, an illithid bard, a body-hopping telepath, or even a regular literal dragon.

Celestia

2018-01-09, 01:44 PM

From what I can tell, it's all based on one poor business decision. No one had any problems switching from 1st to 2nd or from 2nd to 3rd. We just took their word that it was better and worth it, and we switched no matter how much the rules were changed. But then, when they were coming out with 4th, they advertised it too hard. Not only was it an improvement over the previous editions, but the others sucked. They went too far and insulted the previous editions, thereby insulting those who played such games, i.e. the very audience they were trying to reach. They trampled over our good will and fractured our loyalty.

That's the biggest reason we were so hesitant to change, and those who did check it out were in the mindset to pick apart every flaw. 1st through 3rd were flawed, too. In fact, 3rd was so flawed that they had to release an update to fix things. However, we liked those editions despite their problems because we were able to look past them. We gave no such law at to 4th, and thus, it sunk. It was no more flawed than any other edition, but now people were looking to hate it. I'm sure if WotC hadn't gone too far in the marketing, we would have gladly "upgraded" just like with every previous edition.

The fact that there was no OGL also didn't help ingratiate themselves to a fan base who thought they had been betrayed.

Incidentally, this is also the explanation behind Pathfinder and the frosty reception of 5th. When 4th failed out of the gate, people were looking to stay with 3rd but still wanted fresh material. Pathfinder happened to come along and be in the right place at the right time to snatch up that dangling market share by being "basically 3rd but with new content," exactly what everyone wanted.

5th failed to reclaim the gold partly due to the success of Pathfinder playing to nostalgia and hogging the 3rd fans and mostly because they refused to acknowledge their mistake with 4th. They tried to go backsies and say that 5th was an appeal to the old players, but they still put the new mechanics in, as well. They tried to have their cake and eat it, too. It didn't work, though, because they failed to mend the rift of broken loyalty with those who felt betrayed by 4th.

Florian

2018-01-09, 01:44 PM

Oh yeah, another thing I didn't like about 4E. The difficulty of a task cared about your level. If you wanted to swing on a chandelier somehow that chandelier knew you were level 15 instead of 2 so had a higher DC.

That critique is funny, as are the ones about minions and monsters using different rules than characters. That edition dropped any pretense of simulation, which is stupid in D&D anyways.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 01:46 PM

like my PURE FIRE Phoenix Sorcerer, he only has fire/acid spells, or how about my enchanter wizard, using glyphs he can put charges of spells in weapons! This game is great and I encourage you to try out some wierd concept.

Since when is a PURE FIRE sorcerer a weird concept? :smallbiggrin:

I mean yeah, they're great, I've played a fire-based caster in 2E and 3E and 4E. So clearly the concept of a fire caster is unique and innovative to 5E. :smalltongue:

Ratter

2018-01-09, 02:35 PM

So totemist would be a variant of which class?
And crusader?
And truenamer?
And binder?
And psion?
Each of those class is in 3.5 because it uses a different system.

Totemist would be a wizard varient, with the whole ¨Taking on some animal attributes,¨ being enhance abilities, or a druid variant with some of the wizard spells

I dont have the 3.5 books so I dont know crusader rules, but from what I read in the GitP guide for it is you should take warmaster fighter and hexblade

there is a psionic unearthed arcana

BWR

2018-01-09, 02:42 PM

Many of the spells necessary for Tippyverse shenanigans have much higher and impossible to overcome costs in AD&D, or in fact don't exist at all.

The base of the Tippyverse, as stated by Tippy on several occasions, is at will large scale teleportation. Teleportation Circle in 3.5, but can be achieved by other means. In 2e the cost would be one point of Constitution, which, if you are evil, you don't have to pay yourself. That isn't even messing with the rules the way the other high op stuff is.
As I said, the very/infinitely large numbers stuff is harder/impossible to pull off.

Florian

2018-01-09, 02:50 PM

The base of the Tippyverse, as stated by Tippy on several occasions, is at will large scale teleportation. Teleportation Circle in 3.5, but can be achieved by other means. In 2e the cost would be one point of Constitution, which, if you are evil, you don't have to pay yourself. That isn't even messing with the rules the way the other high op stuff is.
As I said, the very/infinitely large numbers stuff is harder/impossible to pull off.

The base of the "Tippyverse" is treating the "crunch" as more important than the "fluff". If an established setting tells you that "Teleportation Circle" is not a thing, but the mechanics tell you otherwise, we get into a decision point on what trump what.

noob

2018-01-09, 02:51 PM

Totemist would be a wizard varient, with the whole ¨Taking on some animal attributes,¨ being enhance abilities, or a druid variant with some of the wizard spells

I dont have the 3.5 books so I dont know crusader rules, but from what I read in the GitP guide for it is you should take warmaster fighter and hexblade

there is a psionic unearthed arcana

Except you would have none of the mechanical variety that way: a totemist is not equivalent to casting spells: you get to use weird powers all day and change the meldshape every day while you can not do that with a low level caster(you need a level 18 wizard(no other caster can do that) for being able to spam abilities all day) and you have nothing equivalent to level 9 spells.

Crusader is nothing similar in any way to a warmaster fighter(you get tons of stances and maneuvers to use with each of them having a mechanical effect and you do not chose which ones you get) he is not similar to an hexblade either: the crusader do not use up his spells: he use maneuvers and immediately gets other maneuvers from the fact of using them and the maneuvers are usually not similar to spells as they are ex and have different effects.(such as making a melee attack that ignore hardness with a weapon (it corresponds to no spell))

Psionic classes are not alternatives of non psionic base classes: there is even psionic base classes in 5e(such as the mystic)

Cosi

2018-01-09, 02:52 PM

Crusader is basically a paladin/cleric/knight/holy champion. Again, you can easily just reflavor the concept and use a core mechanic to achieve the same result.

I don't think that captures the resource management of the Crusader. Its WoF deal is fairly unique within the game, and I don't think you can discard that and call the class the same. Overall your post seems to be missing a big part of what noob was talking about:

Each of those class is in 3.5 because it uses a different system.

He's not just asking about mimicking the flavor, he also cares about the resource management, which your replacements don't seem to capture.

My point is that there is no need to use a different set of rules for each class concept (especially concepts that are simply synonymous for core class concepts).

I don't think that's true at all. Distinct resource management systems make classes interesting, and the 3e splats that introduced classes with new resource management systems were very popular. People like Tome of Battle, Magic of Incarnum, and the Expanded Psionics Handbook. Yes, there are reasons for that beyond the new resource management systems the classes in those books have, but I don't think you can claim those systems are irrelevant.

IMO, every class should have its own resource management mechanic, preferably one that compliments the class's flavor. Barbarians should get stronger as they take and deal damage. Scouts should be rewarded for moving around. Warlocks should damage their own bodies by channeling powers beyond any mortal. Artificers should prepare new contraptions every day. Because that's cool.

https://i.imgur.com/3w4upMz.png

One thing that always amuses me here is that a "moderate" task is DC 15, meaning that untrained people fail these tasks 70% of the time.

(where two players both trying to make an X-expert at a given level can easily end up with a difference in 40 points in X without even invoking particularly heavy optimization).

I won't dismiss this out of hand, but I don't think you can really say that 40-point swings are possible without invoking optimization I would consider heavy (or assuming near-zero optimization on the part of the other party). I suppose it also depends on level.

As someone who mostly plays stat and skill based games, D&D in general tends to produce skill systems that look hilariously bad to my eyes. I find 5e least annoying in that regard, but it's still in point-and-laugh territory.

If I may, how would you want to improve D&D's skill system, if you were in charge?

resolving complex tasks with a single yes-or-no check

Skill Challenges tried to fix this. They were really bad, but there was an effort (there was also a thing in 3e's Unearthed Arcana). If you change them slightly (time limits instead of failure counts, gradations of success), you get something that is pretty good. Particularly if you write some abilities for people that change how skill challenges work (e.g. "you get a +5 bonus for your first roll on a new skill" or "you can skip N rounds for X auto-hits" or whatever).

the idea that even the most ludicrous action works 5% of the time (which isn't quite what the rules say, but it's a common interpretation).

I agree that this is bad, but is it really fair to blame the game for it? You admit that it isn't a part of the rules.

Advantage and Disadvantage are a great example here - they're roll and keep systems, and primitive roll and keep systems at that. L5R came out in 1995, and that's just the oldest one I can remember off the top of my head.

In fairness, I think "roll many, keep one" would be generally identified as rerolls rather than roll and keep. IIRC roll and keep has a step where you aggregate your kept dice, which seems fairly central to the concept.

From what I can tell, it's all based on one poor business decision. No one had any problems switching from 1st to 2nd or from 2nd to 3rd.

Several poor business decisions, really. As you mention, badmouthing old versions was stupid, as was killing the OGL. But so was dumping a huge chunk of content from the core game (gnomes, Bards, Sorcerers, and more). Of course, the game was also bad, which doesn't help.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 02:58 PM

Because it doesn't support the game I wish to play. High-power heroics and high-LA monstrous races.

The others already brought up all relevant points like the limited advancement, the asymmetry between monsters and players and simply the lack of material, all of which directly affect the ability to create such a game.

Your bonkers character concepts seem bland and uninspired to me. I want to play such things as a tsochar trallherd, a mimic monk, an illithid bard, a body-hopping telepath, or even a regular literal dragon.

I dont know what you mean by a mimic monk, unless you mean to say you are a mimic, in which case you totally can by going 3 sorcerer, enough of any caster to get polymorph, and then eventually polymorphing yourself into a mimimic and using extended metamagic to keep you that way for longer than a long rest, effectively making you a mimic forever, same shtick with a dragon, or, if you dont want even an hour where you arent a dragon/mimic, then invest in warding glyphs that polymorph you once every hour, turnong you into a were human, and, with a dm varient of dominate person, become a body hopper, although the mimic and telepath one is kinda iffy upon if your dm likes you

Celestia

2018-01-09, 03:05 PM

Several poor business decisions, really. As you mention, badmouthing old versions was stupid, as was killing the OGL. But so was dumping a huge chunk of content from the core game (gnomes, Bards, Sorcerers, and more). Of course, the game was also bad, which doesn't help.
Considering just how many source books 3rd had, it was expected for them to continue that trend. I'm sure if 4th hadn't generated such ill will right off the bat, people would have been patient enough to wait for that stuff to come out later. As for the mechanics, again, if people were willing to accept it, they could have voiced constructive criticism rather than hateful bile. That could have caused them to release an update like with 3rd, and those issues could have been fixed with a 4.5 version. It was the attitude and negative response generated by the perceived betrayal that caused all minor, fixable foibles with the edition to blossom into huge, unmanageable problems.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 03:05 PM

Since when is a PURE FIRE sorcerer a weird concept? :smallbiggrin:

I mean yeah, they're great, I've played a fire-based caster in 2E and 3E and 4E. So clearly the concept of a fire caster is unique and innovative to 5E. :smalltongue:

Nah, its just people saying that everyone feels the same in 5e, so I was trying to give an example of pure fire (ie, almost pure damage) and an enchanter (ie almost no damage)

Kurald Galain

2018-01-09, 03:11 PM

That could have caused them to release an update like with 3rd, and those issues could have been fixed with a 4.5 version.
They did. It... didn't work out too well.

Nah, its just people saying that everyone feels the same in 5e, so I was trying to give an example of pure fire (ie, almost pure damage) and an enchanter (ie almost no damage)
Vos said, emphasis mine, "I hate 4e and 5e's attempt to make all levels of play the same. I don't mind having danger at all levels, but high-level play is supposed to feel different than low-level play." His comment was not about (lack of) class diversity, but about lack of character progression as you level up.

Celestia

2018-01-09, 03:16 PM

They did. It... didn't work out too well.
Huh. I have not heard of that. I guess it really must have been bad to be so obscure. Or maybe I just live under a rock. :smalltongue:

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-09, 03:24 PM

One thing that always amuses me here is that a "moderate" task is DC 15, meaning that untrained people fail these tasks 70% of the time.
I did a bunch of math once on 5e numbers, and I'm convinced that there were at least two different people working on them who got their wires seriously crossed. If you have Expertise and a good ability modifier, the DCs work out alright: you have about a 65% success rate on moderate tasks at level 1 that scales pretty smoothly up to a 65% shot at a very hard check at 20th-- paralleling attack rolls pretty well, which also give you about a 65% chance of hitting an equal-level foe pretty much across the board. I dunno if DCs were picked with the expectation of Expertise, or Expertise was thrown in as a patch after the fact, but either way, it's not great.

(In my home games, I offer "double Proficiency to skills" across the board, and replace the Bard/Rogue features with "Advantage, and use Proficiency in place of an ability modifier if you want.")

Skill Challenges tried to fix this. They were really bad, but there was an effort (there was also a thing in 3e's Unearthed Arcana). If you change them slightly (time limits instead of failure counts, gradations of success), you get something that is pretty good. Particularly if you write some abilities for people that change how skill challenges work (e.g. "you get a +5 bonus for your first roll on a new skill" or "you can skip N rounds for X auto-hits" or whatever).
5e could really use a "Tome of Skills" or something. The newest book had some good stuff for Tools, but it would be really awesome to get a chapter that goes through Ability-by-Ability with example DCs, special things you can do with skills, expanded rules for things like crafting and social combat, that sort of thing. Maybe general Skill Challenge rules (though it's not easy writing good ones; believe me when I say I've tried) and skill tricks. I started brainstorming something like that at one point...

I dont know what you mean by a mimic monk, unless you mean to say you are a mimic, in which case you totally can by going 3 sorcerer, enough of any caster to get polymorph, and then eventually polymorphing yourself into a mimimic and using extended metamagic to keep you that way for longer than a long rest, effectively making you a mimic forever, same shtick with a dragon, or, if you dont want even an hour where you arent a dragon/mimic, then invest in warding glyphs that polymorph you once every hour, turnong you into a were human, and, with a dm varient of dominate person, become a body hopper, although the mimic and telepath one is kinda iffy upon if your dm likes you
"I'm a human who can eventually cast a spell that gives me the stats of a dragon, and like a dozen other spells" is very different than "I'm a dragon." Not that 3.5 is particularly good at letting you play a dragon either, given how LA/RHD work, but it's at least theoretically an option.

noob

2018-01-09, 03:25 PM

Incarnum is interesting because it might just be one of the few splatbooks that actually made something halfway new-ish. That one might need some actual translation into 5e.

Truenamer, Binder, Psion are all just casters and you could play a standard caster with specific spell lists to get the same basic effect.

Truenamer: you are a wizard with limited spell selection, but you only need verbal components ever.

Psion: you are a sorcerer and at the exclusion of nonpsionic schools, you can use psionic magic at will.

Binder: you are a warlock that sacrifices the benefits of having a single patron for the versatility of swapping between vestiges.

Crusader is basically a paladin/cleric/knight/holy champion. Again, you can easily just reflavor the concept and use a core mechanic to achieve the same result.

My point is that there is no need to use a different set of rules for each class concept (especially concepts that are simply synonymous for core class concepts).

Well the truenamer first is a partial caster who did not just get a limited spell selection:he does not use the same pools for all his spells.
It would more be a wizard that capped at level 6 spells and who instead of using spell slots could use each of his known spell a limited number of times per day but could use each of his spell in two ways.
Also there is a whole lot of truenamer spells which are not unbalancing but which got no equivalent in the wizard spell list(read: nearly 80% of them)
Then there was the limit of having only one occurrence of a spell active at a given time and of having most of his spell single target until he got the power of making his spells work on multiple targets if they have a common point.
Look it is very different than a wizard: if you made that sub class it would be so long to describe it would be nearly as long as creating a new base class.
And that is if you decide to make it not skill based(which honestly is mandatory if you want to play with bounded accuracy: a skill based system will not work with bounded accuracy).
None of this is similar to vancian spellcasting.
It is not similar to sorcerer spellcasting since you do not have slots which can be used for any spell you know of a given level.
It is not similar to warlock either(it is not having a bunch of spell slots all of the same level for casting spells you know)

The binder is not a warlock in any way: he does not gets spells and instead have a bunch of abilities per vestige most of them being immunities, passives and resistances and maybe one or two active abilities per vestige.
If you wanted to keep the same game play for binder then you would nearly need to rewrite 100% of the binder class into the description of the alternate warlock(since most of the text of the binder is a description of how to bind vestiges and a list of the vestiges).

Crusader is not based on perishable resources: it keeps going on if you refill it with hp just like a fighter unlike most of the classes to which you compared it.(the only exception for it is his smites and it is a very secondary thing)
and it is not similar to a fighter because even the archetype that gets maneuvers did not get nearly as much variety(and it does not gets stances)

If you did put side to side a regular crusader and a paladin deformed into looking like a crusader and then make them fight stuff for three hours you will see the difference as the regular crusader can endlessly fight while the mutated paladin will quickly run out of spells

Velaryon

2018-01-09, 03:38 PM

When 4e was announced, I was reluctant to switch for several reasons that had nothing to do with the system itself:
1. I spent a lot of money on 3.X rulebooks, and had no desire to start buying a new system all over again. Plus I was unemployed at the time so couldn't justify the expense.
2. I spent a lot of time learning 3.X, and wasn't motivated to learn a new system since I really don't like reading rulebooks.
3. I was pretty happy with 3.X and didn't feel the need for a new system. I felt then (and still do) that there is a whole lot that can be done in this system that I haven't explored yet.
4. WotC did a really poor job of marketing the new edition, and the insults directed at people who liked the older editions were completely uncalled for.

Then I actually got a look at the 4th edition books when a friend of mine bought them, and was unimpressed. My top gripes at the time:
1. Previously core options like the gnome and half-orc not being included (apparently they came out in later books, but I had already decided not to play 4e by then).
2. Homogenization of gameplay mechanics and resource management from different classes makes them all feel too similar for my liking.
3. The general look of the books was unappealing to me. The art was less interesting and the overall aesthetics reminded me more of school textbooks than RPG supplements.
4. Rather than an evolution of previous editions, it struck me as a completely new game system that resembled the D&D I knew in name only.

I've never particularly embraced Pathfinder, but I've been in 3.P games where some material was brought in, and it seems much more like what I wanted. I've made a little bit of use of Pathfinder, but I tend to treat it more as 3rd party content for 3.5 than as its own system.

When 5th edition was announced, I was skeptical for several reasons. At this point I recognized the flaws of 3.5 better than I previously had, but I felt plenty capable of working around them, so I still didn't feel like I needed a new system. However, from what I saw it at least looked like WotC had started taking notice of why they lost half their market to Paizo, and were taking steps to at least make the new edition more recognizably D&D than 4e.

Some friends whose opinions I trust got in on the 5e playtesting and reported that they enjoyed it. Then awhile later, I had an opportunity to run the 5e starter set as a paid presenter at a library program, so I learned enough of it to play for an hour or two and get paid. The person who offered me that option soon also invited me to play a 5e campaign with him, so I decided to give it a try.

Now I play a mix of 3.5 and 5th. I still prefer 3.5 because even though it has significant flaws, I'm familiar with the system and I enjoy its extreme flexibility. I like working with the fiddly bits of character design and combing through tons of options to make a character unlike any I've played or seen before. I do get frustrated that certain options are not viable, at least not without significant amounts of optimization, but overall 3.5 is like an old pair of shoes that I've broken in and can comfortably walk a few miles in, even if they aren't pretty.

The game play of 5e bothers me sometimes because I feel a bit restricted, though this has eased a little bit as more material has come out (still not as much as I'd like though). There's a lot less there to interest me in terms of crunch, and I rarely get that feeling of excitement that I get from 3.5 when I hit a certain level and get a new class ability, feat, or prestige class that I've been waiting on. It pretty much only happens when I get to open up whatever subclass I pick for my character, and no longer feel like Generic Wizard/Rogue/whatever #3,693,280. Leveling up in 5e often feels anticlimactic to me, since there are rarely choices to be made or new options that radically change how my character plays. Admittedly this was a problem sometimes in 3.5 with dead levels, but I rarely encountered those.

Given the choice I always pick 3.5 over 5th, but I will usually play what the group wants to play at that time. I still don't feel very comfortable DMing 5th, but that probably has less to do with the system itself and more with my not wanting to take the time to master the system to the degree necessary for me to feel comfortable in charge.

Pleh

2018-01-09, 03:58 PM

Luccan

2018-01-09, 04:08 PM

3.5 was what my group was playing when 4e came out. One of us bought the PHB and while it looked cool, none of us were willing to move our games over to 4e (we were also playing d20 modern games at the time, it made sense to stick with systems that mostly matched). After that group fell apart I didn't play for awhile, then 5e came out, but I didn't have the books or anything. Next time I played was with a 3.5 group.

I like what little I've played of 5e, but I think it lacks the breadth of options 3.5 has. To its benefit, perhaps, but there are things you flat out can't do in 5e that you can do in 3.X. The systems have different strengths, so I'll probably never fully switch over, so long as I can at least find 3.5 games online.

Psyren

2018-01-09, 04:10 PM

Huh. I have not heard of that. I guess it really must have been bad to be so obscure. Or maybe I just live under a rock. :smalltongue:

Essentials was... uh...

Hey look everyone, 5th edition!

Morcleon

2018-01-09, 04:17 PM

You're getting too hung up on details.

If you insist on making 5e classes match 3e mechanics and management, why are you playing 5e?

If you're moving a class from 3.5 to 5e, the mechanics are not the goal of the translation. Just the character concept, most of which weren't that unique.

5e not matching 3e mechanics is one of the big reasons why I didn't switch over.

And if I wanted to move a character concept over, I'd want the mechanics to still support the fluff, which gets a lot harder in 5e.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-09, 04:26 PM

Essentials was... uh...

Hey look everyone, 5th edition!

Seeing some of the discussion of Essentials and the reasoning behind it in the online Dragon Magazine issues was utterly hilarious and sad.

From Dragon #389.

As we moved forward with 4th edition, it became increasingly clear that we could produce classes with different rates of class feature and power acquisition without harming the game. The psionics power source in Player’s Handbook 3 pointed the way. In that book, we introduced a system by which psionic characters had access to at-will powers that they could boost using a pool of power points. By spending power points, an attack could deal more damage or gain an additional effect. After each short rest, a psionic character regains power points.

When the first psionic classes hit the pages of Dragon magazine, we were happy with the positive reaction to the system. Players liked that psionics felt different and offered a new type of character to play. Once we saw the reaction, it was clear that players liked having classes that were new, different, and interesting.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 04:27 PM

Vos said, emphasis mine, "I hate 4e and 5e's attempt to make all levels of play the same. I don't mind having danger at all levels, but high-level play is supposed to feel different than low-level play." His comment was not about (lack of) class diversity, but about lack of character progression as you level up.

Oh, I misunderstood, sorry

Seerow

2018-01-09, 04:29 PM

You're getting too hung up on details.

If you insist on making 5e classes match 3e mechanics and management, why are you playing 5e?

If you're moving a class from 3.5 to 5e, the mechanics are not the goal of the translation. Just the character concept, most of which weren't that unique.

This would be acceptable if the mechanics were at least their own interesting variant. Most 5e mechanics are dumbed down to the point of not even really being mechanics. Any player who wants to play something mechanically distinct from another player in a similar role is going to have a hard time making it work.

CharonsHelper

2018-01-09, 04:29 PM

johnbragg

2018-01-09, 04:32 PM

There should be more to character growth than dealing enough combat damage to defeat an encounter six levels lower. The 5E forum is just now having a twelve-page discussion on how many monsters are just a "bag of HP"; defeating a bigger bag of HP is not really impressive.

WAnted to point out that most of the posters are taking the "No they're not" side of the argument.

Yes. The issue is not so much that it's difficult for a DM to qualify a task as "easy" or "hard" or whatnot. The issue is that when you do, too often you get ridiculous outcomes like a so-called expert repeatedly failing an easy task, or an untrained nobody randomly succeeding at an olympic-level stunt.

That's not a 5th edition problem. That's a d20 problem. If it's really a problem, you could always go 3d6 instead, and figure out a workaround for crits and crit-range-extenders.

johnbragg

2018-01-09, 04:42 PM

Or how a normal person will fail very easy tasks one quarter of the time(I want to climb those stairs (rolls) Oh I can not climb those stairs I guess that is why all the houses in the town have multiple stairs)

I think I can argue the other side here.

Let's say I'm a 1st level character with no ranks in Climb. So those stairs are a DC 5. If they're in my house, I'd say I should have a +2 for familiarity, for a DC 3.

If there's no stakes, then there is no reason to roll. I take 10 and go up or down the stairs like I do several times a day.

But when there are stakes? When I hear my kid say, weakly, "Daddy?" and then the sounds of barfing, I'm going up those stairs at speed. DC 3 means a 15% chance I stumble going up the stairs, have to take an extra step and I don't make it there this "round." That's not so far off, is it?

If I'm staying at your house, where I don't know where the stairs are, maybe a 25% chance of getting there in quickly.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-09, 04:43 PM

This would be acceptable if the mechanics were at least their own interesting variant. Most 5e mechanics are dumbed down to the point of not even really being mechanics. Any player who wants to play something mechanically distinct from another player in a similar role is going to have a hard time making it work.
I mean, I could just as easily say that most 3.5 mechanics are overcomplicated to the point of being unusable, and that any player who wants to play something that's not a [your desired point of balance here] is going to have a hard time making it work.

Each edition, I think, is shaped largely in reaction to the one before. 4e emphasized balance and stopping high level characters from trampling over plots because that's what people complained about most in 3.5. 5e is screaming "look at me! I'm D&D! No splat bloating at all!" because that's what people complained about most in 4e and PF. 6th edition will probably have a strong emphasis on power growth because that's what people complain about most in 5e. It's all reactionary.

thelastorphan

2018-01-09, 05:04 PM

I generally defend 4E largely because it is what lots of players asked for. A balanced game. It just didn't have the same trappings as were used to. I still love the art direction. It felt distinct to me. I like the power system and will always defend the editions focus on simple mechanics. The onus of fluff and creativity was pushed 100% to the player and I liked that.

All that said I think some of the mechanics that were mishandled include multiclassing, skill challenges, and rituals.

3.E just has too much variety for any system to really catch up to in any reasonable amount of time. And learning a new system inside and out is a gargantuan task.

I like things about 4e but it doesn't hold a candle to my love for PF, 3E's successor.

Knaight

2018-01-09, 05:30 PM

That's not a 5th edition problem. That's a d20 problem. If it's really a problem, you could always go 3d6 instead, and figure out a workaround for crits and crit-range-extenders.
It's a 5e problem. The problem isn't the d20 on its own, it's the combination of the d20 with some pretty piddly modifiers. If you swap proficiency out with proficiency dice, where each skill is 1d20+att+prof(d6), suddenly the issue with proficient skills largely goes away, and it creates a new variable that lets you represent variation in skills beyond proficient or not. Expanding the range 3e style also cuts out the problem in 5e.

I don't particularly like the 1d20 for skills, but it's bounded accuracy as implemented that broke the system. It was clearly built for the combat system first, where it works just fine - and where multiple dice rolls are expected, thus mitigating swinginess of the d20 and making the modifiers count for. It was then lazily exported to the skill system, at which point it started causing problems.

I mean, I could just as easily say that most 3.5 mechanics are overcomplicated to the point of being unusable, and that any player who wants to play something that's not a [your desired point of balance here] is going to have a hard time making it work.
You can and you should. This board could use more pushback to the idea that rules heavy games aren't just preferred by people, but inherently and objectively better than lighter games. It could also use some pushback to the idea that the complexity of rules you favor in an RPG is actually a meaningful indicator of mathematical skill, let alone general intelligence.

Doctor Awkward

2018-01-09, 05:32 PM

AD&D/2e: "Here's what you can play. Make your character concept conform to the given abilities."

3.0/3.5: "The entire mechanical construction of you character is a moving part. Build your character to meet your concept."

4e: "So there were some balance issues with the last edition. We fixed that by making everything the same."

5e: "Hey guys? ...We're really sorry about... anyway here's a new edition... please love us again... please?"

The truth is, thanks largely to the OGL, there is far more support for 3rd Edition than any of the other ones. This is evident to me by being the ruleset which Paizo, to this day, still chooses to rip off adapt when creating their own edition.

As for my personal opinion, I greatly enjoyed 2nd edition when it was all that was available. 3.0/3.5 fixed a lot of the issues I had with the system, as well as opening up more robust choices for character creation.

I bought the first release of the 4th Edition core set, and it was an atrocious read for me. To this day I've not yet played a 4e game, and I have no intention to.

I haven't paid any attention to 5th Edition because a) I've been tricked once already, and b) I don't have the time to learn another new D&D system, when there are so many other systems out there I want to try, nor do I have any desire to throw more money at WotC than I already have.

Troacctid

2018-01-09, 05:34 PM

Incidentally, this is also the explanation behind Pathfinder and the frosty reception of 5th. When 4th failed out of the gate, people were looking to stay with 3rd but still wanted fresh material. Pathfinder happened to come along and be in the right place at the right time to snatch up that dangling market share by being "basically 3rd but with new content," exactly what everyone wanted.

5th failed to reclaim the gold partly due to the success of Pathfinder playing to nostalgia and hogging the 3rd fans and mostly because they refused to acknowledge their mistake with 4th. They tried to go backsies and say that 5th was an appeal to the old players, but they still put the new mechanics in, as well. They tried to have their cake and eat it, too. It didn't work, though, because they failed to mend the rift of broken loyalty with those who felt betrayed by 4th.
5e is more popular than PF.
https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/38060/top-5-roleplaying-games-spring-2017
http://blog.roll20.net/post/167058851665/the-orr-group-industry-report-q3-2017

Nifft

2018-01-09, 05:38 PM

So basically people were happy to finally have some significant asymmetry?

There always was significant asymmetry in how 4e classes played, even if it wasn't immediately evident from their power progression.

It's true that there was a lot of symmetry in presentation, but that's a rather superficial layer to get hung up on.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-09, 05:42 PM

It's a 5e problem. The problem isn't the d20 on its own, it's the combination of the d20 with some pretty piddly modifiers. If you swap proficiency out with proficiency dice, where each skill is 1d20+att+prof(d6), suddenly the issue with proficient skills largely goes away, and it creates a new variable that lets you represent variation in skills beyond proficient or not. Expanding the range 3e style also cuts out the problem in 5e.

I don't particularly like the 1d20 for skills, but it's bounded accuracy as implemented that broke the system. It was clearly built for the combat system first, where it works just fine - and where multiple dice rolls are expected, thus mitigating swinginess of the d20 and making the modifiers count for. It was then lazily exported to the skill system, at which point it started causing problems.
Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)

You can and you should. This board could use more pushback to the idea that rules heavy games aren't just preferred by people, but inherently and objectively better than lighter games. It could also use some pushback to the idea that the complexity of rules you favor in an RPG is actually a meaningful indicator of mathematical skill, let alone general intelligence.
The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).

It's true that there was a lot of symmetry in presentation, but that's a rather superficial layer to get hung up on.
"A rather superficial layer to get hung up on" describes I think a significant amount of 4e criticism.

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear)

ExLibrisMortis

2018-01-09, 05:48 PM

Knaight

2018-01-09, 05:55 PM

Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)
The "three pillars" claims are hilarious in their inaccuracy. A two pillar system (combat and magic) is plausible, but the presented three? No. Just no.

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).
I'd even split these out a bit - the amount of crunch you like in play and the amount you enjoy for theorycrafting and homebrewing can easily diverge. I tend towards actually running and playing lighter games, but when it comes to homebrew, well, the ones that get finished are light. They're vastly outnumbered by systems that have pages of math and more recently Octave scripts for fine tuning a ton of variables.

As a big fan of these things, I nominate this as my reason for sticking with 3.5.
It's an excellent reason.

Nifft

2018-01-09, 05:59 PM

Entirely agreed. Despite marketing and fan claims, like all editions of D&D 5e was pretty obviously designed for combat first, everything else a distant second. (Like... 4e, I'd argue, had more effort put into noncombat things, albeit poorly.)

4e did spend effort on non-combat mechanics, including stuff like Rituals (which got preserved somewhat in 5e as the "Ritual" tag), and with restricting non-tactical movement to non-combat timescales (e.g. Teleport Circle), and integrating non-combat penalties into resource management and combat accounting (e.g. losing a daily Healing Surge if you failed a wilderness-scale check).

4e also tried to handle non-combat challenges in a uniform way using their Skill Challenge format, which would have been great if it didn't suck -- the idea that the whole party got to participate in a Diplomacy or Trap encounter was a pretty awesome idea. (It's just that the implementation sucked, since it was mathematically easy to find the one optimal method, and the optimal method didn't involve the whole party actually helping in any creative way.)

5e's approach to non-combat challenges is "uniform" in that it's uniformly under-cooked. As a seasoned DM across many editions, I can easily compensate, but I don't envy those DMs who got started with 5e.

== == ==

In terms of 4e as a reaction to 3.5e, the numerical bonus scaling in 4e was basically a codification of the truth that we all knew in 3.5e / PF -- you needed to attain bigger base numbers, and you needed them on a schedule.

5e was very easy to envisage from that standpoint. You looked at 4e's lock-step advancement of monster defenses vs. PC attacks, and you had to ask: "What if we just... didn't?"

5e turned out pretty well, I think, except insofar as 5e was scared to pilfer 4e's innovations.

EDIT:

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear) Agreed.

Early 4e monsters did have problems, and those problems did include HP bloat.

That got fixed as of MM2 -- which was very early.

As an aside, I have heard the exact same complaint leveled against 5e.

Coidzor

2018-01-09, 06:20 PM

The level of crunch you like in an RPG really only correlates to one thing: how much you enjoy rules-crunch in its own right (houseruling, homebrewing, theorycrafting, arguing about it on the internet, etc).

Yeah, a big motivator for the change over for our group was being able to save time due to not having to spend a few hours making NPCs with class levels or finding where other people had statted them out already. Although after about a month or two, the limitations in 5e with customizing people-type NPCs started to become apparent.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-09, 06:22 PM

"A rather superficial layer to get hung up on" describes I think a significant amount of 4e criticism.

(Not all-- I remember being disappointed with the lack of non damage-dealing powers (much less noncombat abilities) and with early monster design suffering from hit point bloat, and there were definitely early issues with skill/skill challenge math and presentation, but "it's an MMO lol" is just frustrating to hear)

Honestly my biggest problems with D&D 4e were never rules-based. I didn't like the rules, but I was perfectly willing to get on board with the new edition as long as the lore and settings that I'd grown to love from the previous editions were continued on in a proper form that was treated with at least some measure of respect by the designers. More even than the actual game, I'd become a fan by way of the lore and worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, especially the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, by way of various novels.

Literally the first Dungeons & Dragons rulebook I ever picked up was the D&D 3.0e version of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

To say that D&D 4e was disappointing in these respects would be something of an understatement.

martixy

2018-01-09, 06:48 PM

"I'm a human who can eventually cast a spell that gives me the stats of a dragon, and like a dozen other spells" is very different than "I'm a dragon." Not that 3.5 is particularly good at letting you play a dragon either, given how LA/RHD work, but it's at least theoretically an option.

Ditto to part 1. And at least with 3.5's symmetric design it's a dang sight easier to make it work.

I dont know what you mean by a mimic monk, unless you mean to say you are a mimic, in which case you totally can by going 3 sorcerer, enough of any caster to get polymorph, and then eventually polymorphing yourself into a mimimic and using extended metamagic to keep you that way for longer than a long rest, effectively making you a mimic forever, same shtick with a dragon, or, if you dont want even an hour where you arent a dragon/mimic, then invest in warding glyphs that polymorph you once every hour, turnong you into a were human, and, with a dm varient of dominate person, become a body hopper, although the mimic and telepath one is kinda iffy upon if your dm likes you

One of the PCs in my game is literally a mimic with monk class levels. This is what I mean.
In 3.5 all I have to do is fudge a number or two to make it work - adjust LA/RHD.
In 5e, I'd have to start inventing new rules, or port older editions to a system that wasn't meant to work with them.

Also, +1 for that samey feel.

Pex

2018-01-09, 07:14 PM

Seeing some of the discussion of Essentials and the reasoning behind it in the online Dragon Magazine issues was utterly hilarious and sad.

From Dragon #389.

So basically people were happy to finally have some significant asymmetry?

I heard a lot of 4E fans hated Essentials. I have no idea what it's about since I've long since stopped caring about 4E when it came out, but from the tidbits I did hear of it how ironic that I think I might have actually liked it, such as the Psion.

Mike Miller

2018-01-09, 07:40 PM

I never switched to 4e because my regular group dissolved right around when 4e was released. Then I went on an involuntary D&D hiatus until early last year. I have the 5e core books, but I've never actually played with them. I just went back into what I know and love, 3e! I definitely echo the above comments about customization with 3e.

mattie_p

2018-01-09, 08:58 PM

I had 30 3.5 books at the time 4e came out. I now have a few more. I have a game that meets my needs and I have all the rules I need.

johnbragg

2018-01-09, 09:03 PM

I said this a few threads ago on basically the same topic.

3rd edition was a quantum leap over 2nd, introducing the unified d20 mechanic, and introducing skills, feats and level-by-level multiclassing. Not to mention the OGL enabling a wild proliferation of 3rd party content. It was great, and we appreciated it. We appreciated it so much that, just a few years later, we paid WOTC for new 3.5 PHBs, DMG and MMs.

4th edition did not offer the same quantum leap, and at the same time it obsoleted our 3.5 libraries. Not to mention that the 4th edition ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, and what we saw of 4th we didn't like. So Paizo and PAthfinder happened, and 4th edition was replaced fairly quickly by 5th.

4th edition taught us that we didn't have to migrate to the new edition. So we didn't.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 09:16 PM

I did a bunch of math once on 5e numbers, and I'm convinced that there were at least two different people working on them who got their wires seriously crossed. If you have Expertise and a good ability modifier, the DCs work out alright: you have about a 65% success rate on moderate tasks at level 1 that scales pretty smoothly up to a 65% shot at a very hard check at 20th-- paralleling attack rolls pretty well, which also give you about a 65% chance of hitting an equal-level foe pretty much across the board. I dunno if DCs were picked with the expectation of Expertise, or Expertise was thrown in as a patch after the fact, but either way, it's not great.

(In my home games, I offer "double Proficiency to skills" across the board, and replace the Bard/Rogue features with "Advantage, and use Proficiency in place of an ability modifier if you want.")

5e could really use a "Tome of Skills" or something. The newest book had some good stuff for Tools, but it would be really awesome to get a chapter that goes through Ability-by-Ability with example DCs, special things you can do with skills, expanded rules for things like crafting and social combat, that sort of thing. Maybe general Skill Challenge rules (though it's not easy writing good ones; believe me when I say I've tried) and skill tricks. I started brainstorming something like that at one point...

"I'm a human who can eventually cast a spell that gives me the stats of a dragon, and like a dozen other spells" is very different than "I'm a dragon." Not that 3.5 is particularly good at letting you play a dragon either, given how LA/RHD work, but it's at least theoretically an option.

I assume you start at level 17 at least if you wanna play a dragon, get true polymorph, it does that forever, or just have a guy polymorph in your background, but really, playing a dragon would be SO unbalanced, you could reflavor the draconic sorcerer, thats what I would do.

SnugUndies

2018-01-09, 09:22 PM

D&D is something I play for a story and character roleplaying. The rule system around it is kind of just a vehicle for that. So if I have books for/know how to play one system, why change to a different one? Anytime sometime tries to say "5th edition is less complex; it's easier to learn!" I have to counter with the fact that it can't be, since I don't know the system for 5th but I do for 3rd. Why learn a whole new system for essentially the same purpose?

Plus, I like picking minutae across a dozen different books to make a cohesive and synergistic whole. There, I said it.

Ratter

2018-01-09, 09:26 PM

Ditto to part 1. And at least with 3.5's symmetric design it's a dang sight easier to make it work.

One of the PCs in my game is literally a mimic with monk class levels. This is what I mean.
In 3.5 all I have to do is fudge a number or two to make it work - adjust LA/RHD.
In 5e, I'd have to start inventing new rules, or port older editions to a system that wasn't meant to work with them.

Also, +1 for that samey feel.

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?! also, all you have to do with 3.5e is make up a couple of race things, just like 5e, 5e and 3.5e are fairly ok at just being able to make unique, however, the idea that you can make stuff easier in 3.5e is, in my experience, false, homebrew in 5e is SO MUCH EASIER TO MAKE! you have to take far less things into consideration.

Nifft

2018-01-09, 09:51 PM

4th edition did not offer the same quantum leap, and at the same time it obsoleted our 3.5 libraries. 4e solved the problem of letting me run a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party, from level 1 through 30, and both of them feeling able to contribute to every encounter.

Not necessarily equally in every encounter, but both of them should feel useful all the time, and both of them should be contributing in roughly equal proportion over several encounters.

Class inequality was the biggest problem with 3e and PF -- and looking at this forum, it still is.

Not to mention that the 4th edition ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, and what we saw of 4th we didn't like. So Paizo and PAthfinder happened, and 4th edition was replaced fairly quickly by 5th. In addition to provoking fans into jumping ship for Pathfinder, WotC also made some bad financial decisions during the run of 4e.

For example, you could get all published content for a small monthly subscription price, which was only necessary for one player per group to have in order to create and level-up characters using the WotC online character tool.

They had counted on both selling the books and getting all players to subscribe, but their own (cheaper and more convenient) online subscription service viciously cannibalized book sales, and this was at a time when WotC was publishing supplementary materials faster than ever before, while declaring all supplementary material "Core".

Both of those were each a major flaw of WotC's sales planning -- but it wasn't actually a flaw of 4e as a game.

5e's rigorously enforced dearth of online tools and 5e's slow splatbook cycle: both are reactions to 4e.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-10, 01:58 AM

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?!

One would assume that a creature with near-unlimited shapeshifting ability has the capacity to account for that by simply creating the limbs it needs.

Like so;

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/MM35_gallery/MM35_PG186.jpg

Mordaedil

2018-01-10, 02:30 AM

Ok, HOW! a mimic doesnt have arms or legs! how do they monk!?!?! also, all you have to do with 3.5e is make up a couple of race things, just like 5e, 5e and 3.5e are fairly ok at just being able to make unique, however, the idea that you can make stuff easier in 3.5e is, in my experience, false, homebrew in 5e is SO MUCH EASIER TO MAKE! you have to take far less things into consideration.
All you need to make a playable race in 3.5 is printed right in the monster manual, though? If you want to play it from level 1, you just have to look to Savage Species and use savage progression and boom, you're set.

It's literally as easy as playing with lego.

Ignimortis

2018-01-10, 02:39 AM

4e solved the problem of letting me run a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party, from level 1 through 30, and both of them feeling able to contribute to every encounter.

Not necessarily equally in every encounter, but both of them should feel useful all the time, and both of them should be contributing in roughly equal proportion over several encounters.

Class inequality was the biggest problem with 3e and PF -- and looking at this forum, it still is.

3.5e did it too. "The fighter" is a warblade and "the wizard" can be a wizard or a sorcerer or a fixed-list caster, depending on how close you want them to be in balance.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 02:52 AM

In addition to provoking fans into jumping ship for Pathfinder, WotC also made some bad financial decisions during the run of 4e.

For example, you could get all published content for a small monthly subscription price, which was only necessary for one player per group to have in order to create and level-up characters using the WotC online character tool.

Oh, it gets funnier.

To enable this paid online character tool, WOTC first had to kill their own free offline character tool (a change which did not make fans happy), AND they made it in Silverlight (which several common browsers just don't support), AND at more-or-less the same time they thoroughly slashed the amount of rules content in Dragon magazine (reducing the need for such a tool), AND it took them about half a year to get the bugs worked out.

Aside from that, there are quite a number of 4E books which WOTC loudly announced and then quietly canceled a few months later. As far as I know this has never happened with 3E or 5E; heck, even TSR didn't do that.

Grim Reader

2018-01-10, 07:13 AM

Oh, it gets funnier.

To enable this paid online character tool, WOTC first had to kill their own free offline character tool (a change which did not make fans happy), AND they made it in Silverlight (which several common browsers just don't support), AND at more-or-less the same time they thoroughly slashed the amount of rules content in Dragon magazine (reducing the need for such a tool), AND it took them about half a year to get the bugs worked out.

Wasn't there a murder/suicide that eviscerated the IT development plans? A large professional company should be able to replace key personell regardless of circumstance but I am willing to cut them some slack on that one all the same. TSR/WoTC was never very professional in their management anyway.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 07:21 AM

Wasn't there a murder/suicide that eviscerated the IT development plans? A large professional company should be able to replace key personell regardless of circumstance but I am willing to cut them some slack on that one all the same. TSR/WoTC was never very professional in their management anyway.
To be clear: when 4E was first released, there were plans for a digital tabletop. The suicide you mention put an end to that, and this is tragedic.

Unrelated to this, and several years later, a different group of people (since the 4E design team had already been sacked twice) made decisions about a different piece of software (i.e. the character builder). This turns out to be a series of poor decisions by people who really should have known better. When I wrote "it gets funnier" I am, of course, only referring to this issue.

Mordaedil

2018-01-10, 07:26 AM

Jesus, that is tragic.

Vhaidara

2018-01-10, 07:30 AM

Honestly, having been playing/running 4e for about a year now, Skill Challenges have been one of my favorite things about the system. The key is to allow player creativity. Religion to request miracles, Arcana to emulate all the out of combat spells people complain are missing (and the ones that never even got printed), Streetwise is the "I know a guy for that" skill. I've had Athletics used to suplex a train, Diplomacy/Nature to tame a fire beetle so the party princess could have an animal companion (against her own will), and Endurance to rip a chemical tube out of a Bane analog and just drain the damn tank.

Skill challenges presented a way to incorporate skills into a combat. One DM I played under had an enemy who rendered you weakened (half damage) and prone until you were able to impress him with your skills. I've run fights where you're up against a super powered enemy (the aforementioned Bane analog) and you have to choose between fighting him directly (using powers and such) or an in combat skill challenge where you disable his drug injectors, which make him incredibly powerful.

In my experience, it has led to far more memorable combats than I ever encountered in 3.X, where it quickly came down to "I full attack the guy. He dies. I pounce the next guy. He dies."

I also really like how 4e standardized the action system. Standard>Move>Minor. As opposed to 3.x's "Standards are king, but Move and Swift are...complicated in where they place". And making Immediates their own action led to a lot more interactivity, while splitting them into Reaction and Interrupts made timing much clearer.

Grim Reader

2018-01-10, 07:34 AM

To be clear: when 4E was first released, there were plans for a digital tabletop. The suicide you mention put an end to that, and this is tragedic.

Unrelated to this, and several years later, a different group of people (since the 4E design team had already been sacked twice) made decisions about a different piece of software (i.e. the character builder). This turns out to be a series of poor decisions by people who really should have known better. When I wrote "it gets funnier" I am, of course, only referring to this issue.

Sorry, I didn't much remember the sequence of these things. It was just the thing that stuck in my head about the whole debacle. Didn't meant to imply you thought it was funny. That they sacked the design team several times does not come as a surprise. Was it TSR that would sack their staff before Christmas and rehire them in January to avoid Christmas bonuses?

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-10, 07:43 AM

I assume you start at level 17 at least if you wanna play a dragon, get true polymorph, it does that forever, or just have a guy polymorph in your background, but really, playing a dragon would be SO unbalanced, you could reflavor the draconic sorcerer, thats what I would do.
Like I said, no edition of D&D that I've seen is as good at monstrous PCs as, say, Mutants and Masterminds, but 3.5 would at least let you say "sure, here's a dragon-type monster with a LA, meaning it's legal for player use, and also you can be an Ambush Drake using these rules (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20060728a) over here."

Cosi

2018-01-10, 08:02 AM

Considering just how many source books 3rd had, it was expected for them to continue that trend. I'm sure if 4th hadn't generated such ill will right off the bat, people would have been patient enough to wait for that stuff to come out later.

Sort of? The reaction when 4e announced that it was dropping without Monks, Half-Orcs, and Sorcerers was that people would wait until it had those things. But of course, by the time it did have those things, the jig was up and it was clear to everyone the game wasn't very good.

As for the mechanics, again, if people were willing to accept it, they could have voiced constructive criticism rather than hateful bile.

But the mechanics would still suck. You could fix that, but it would just mean doing a new edition.

If you insist on making 5e classes match 3e mechanics and management, why are you playing 5e?

I guess it depends on what you believe the point of a new edition is. Is 5e trying to be "3e (and 4e and 1e and 2e) but better" or a different take on the heroic fantasy genre? I think that people's expectation is that a new edition of D&D will provide an experience that draws on the best parts of previous editions, plus some new innovations, to create a more coherent whole. I think 4e and 5e failed to do that, and that expectation is why noob is looking to get direct mechanical correspondence.

If you're moving a class from 3.5 to 5e, the mechanics are not the goal of the translation. Just the character concept, most of which weren't that unique.

Character concept reflects mechanics. The Dread Necromancer's character concept involves having a lot of necromancy powers. If your system can't deliver a character with a lot of necromancy powers, you can't port a Dread Necromancer. Similarly, character concepts reflect things like resource management. The fact that a Warblade recharges his powers by taking a turn of not using them makes him play differently than he would if he had at-will or daily powers.

I generally defend 4E largely because it is what lots of players asked for. A balanced game.

No, it's not. It still has the Orbizard. It still has trap classes. Those classes aren't exactly the same, but they're there. Saying "at least 4e was balanced" is how you get stupid arguments like "balance is bad because 4e".

4e solved the problem of letting me run a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party, from level 1 through 30, and both of them feeling able to contribute to every encounter.

Sort of? You can now write "30" on your character sheet and have a balanced-ish Fighter and Wizard. But those characters are clearly not the equivalent of 30th level characters in 3e. They're closer to 10th level characters (and frankly, that's probably pushing it). You could make a 10th level Fighter (or Fighter type) that was balanced with a 10th level Wizard in 3e, particularly by the end. All 4e was cut out everything above that, slow progression, and substitute "Fighter" for "Warblade".

For example, you could get all published content for a small monthly subscription price, which was only necessary for one player per group to have in order to create and level-up characters using the WotC online character tool.

How do you reconcile calling this a failure with the success of Pathfinder's decision to offer all their content online for free?

A large professional company should be able to replace key personell regardless of circumstance but I am willing to cut them some slack on that one all the same. TSR/WoTC was never very professional in their management anyway.

WotC has a structural problem retaining top level IT talent because they are in the same area as Mircosoft and cannot afford the same pay or prestige as Mircosoft. As a result, their digital offerings tend to be disproportionately terrible (looking at you MTG Online).

Honestly, having been playing/running 4e for about a year now, Skill Challenges have been one of my favorite things about the system. The key is to allow player creativity. Religion to request miracles, Arcana to emulate all the out of combat spells people complain are missing (and the ones that never even got printed), Streetwise is the "I know a guy for that" skill. I've had Athletics used to suplex a train, Diplomacy/Nature to tame a fire beetle so the party princess could have an animal companion (against her own will), and Endurance to rip a chemical tube out of a Bane analog and just drain the damn tank.

Skill challenges presented a way to incorporate skills into a combat. One DM I played under had an enemy who rendered you weakened (half damage) and prone until you were able to impress him with your skills. I've run fights where you're up against a super powered enemy (the aforementioned Bane analog) and you have to choose between fighting him directly (using powers and such) or an in combat skill challenge where you disable his drug injectors, which make him incredibly powerful.

Almost none of that sounds like it involves any use of the mechanics 4e provides. What would stop you from doing this in 3e?

Like I said, no edition of D&D that I've seen is as good at monstrous PCs as, say, Mutants and Masterminds, but 3.5 would at least let you say "sure, here's a dragon-type monster with a LA, meaning it's legal for player use, and also you can be an Ambush Drake using these rules (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20060728a) over here."

Some types of dragons (mostly the metallic ones) have innate alternate form abilities. Or you could play a were-Wyvern (admittedly, that takes some fudging, but only in terms of ignoring the restrictions on the Lycanthrope template).

Vhaidara

2018-01-10, 08:27 AM

Almost none of that sounds like it involves any use of the mechanics 4e provides. What would stop you from doing this in 3e?

4e provides standard skill DCs for Easy, Medium, and Hard tasks at each level. 3e has no such guideline for skill DCs, and even if it did, skill optimization is so ridiculously borked that it wouldn't matter. I made a character who was reliably able to hit Diplomacy DCs of around 40 as early as level 6 (I forget exactly when he hit it, it's been a few years, but the core of the build was Warlock 1/Marshal 1/Binder 1).

Basically, 3e's skill system doesn't support the creation of this kind of encounter, because the numbers are completely off the rails and there is no baseline DC provided for the checks.

Mordaedil

2018-01-10, 08:29 AM

Almost none of that sounds like it involves any use of the mechanics 4e provides. What would stop you from doing this in 3e?
Nothing at all, it is one of the things we've back-adapted for our campaign and one of the ideas my group liked about 4th edition.

Heck, rituals are also a neat idea, but both of them are really badly implemented, so we use 3.5 with both of these rules as "optional" additions. They are pretty heavily house-ruled though.

Ignimortis

2018-01-10, 08:46 AM

4e provides standard skill DCs for Easy, Medium, and Hard tasks at each level. 3e has no such guideline for skill DCs, and even if it did, skill optimization is so ridiculously borked that it wouldn't matter. I made a character who was reliably able to hit Diplomacy DCs of around 40 as early as level 6 (I forget exactly when he hit it, it's been a few years, but the core of the build was Warlock 1/Marshal 1/Binder 1).

Basically, 3e's skill system doesn't support the creation of this kind of encounter, because the numbers are completely off the rails and there is no baseline DC provided for the checks.

Except there is? Each skill has DCs for its' uses listed. Also, Diplomacy is an outlier - it's a badly designed skill, where you get really strong results for easily achievable checks. But skill optimization is a good thing, because it actually lets you make an expert who will never fail at a simple task.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 08:52 AM

noob

2018-01-10, 09:18 AM

Except the pathfinder fix is even weirder: you can still diplomance the people as normal the only difference is that it lasts a few minutes.
Then there is unchained diplomacy which is weird too since it does not explicitly forbids diplomacy stacking(for up to two steps of change) and allows a change long enough for the 24 hours cool-down to refill.
And then the prcs that allows to get everybody to like you more at first(I believe that you could nearly reach the point where everybody is your friend and where when you go in front of the evil wizard who usually kills any trespasser in his tower he just does not likes you very much)
You might find yourself having interest failing in diplomacy in some cases: for example there is someone who dislikes you and that you want to annoy.
Fail diplomacy and he becomes hostile temporarily.
Bully him.
Then the duration ends and the shift is reverted and he is back to disliking you.(with most gms that would not fly but with the rules as written it would make sense)

Vhaidara

2018-01-10, 10:20 AM

Except there is? Each skill has DCs for its' uses listed. Also, Diplomacy is an outlier - it's a badly designed skill, where you get really strong results for easily achievable checks. But skill optimization is a good thing, because it actually lets you make an expert who will never fail at a simple task.

And how about for the non-listed uses of the skills? 4e also has listed uses for skills, and then a table for level based DCs of non-listed skills.

Yes, I picked diplomacy, which is a particular outlier, but there are any number of skills that are eminently breakable in 3.x.. Built in Rules for +30 such items, spells like glibness giving obscene bonuses that make any printed DC irrelevant, etc

And you can still make a character who never fails at simple tasks. An Easy DC skill check (a simple task) scales from 8 to 24 when going from level 1 to level 30, a shift of 16 points. Since 4e skills add half of your level (round down), your modifier will increase, with no further investment, by 15 in the same time. A trained skill gets +5, so if you have training in a skill and NO other bonus, even from stat mod, you have about a 10% chance of failing the simple tasks. If your ability modifier is just +2, or if you pick up a +2 from anywhere else (themes, backgrounds, items, and feats are not uncommon sources) you become unable to fail easy DC.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 10:38 AM

And you can still make a character who never fails at simple tasks. An Easy DC skill check (a simple task) scales from 8 to 24 when going from level 1 to level 30, a shift of 16 points. Since 4e skills add half of your level (round down), your modifier will increase, with no further investment, by 15 in the same time. A trained skill gets +5, so if you have training in a skill and NO other bonus, even from stat mod, you have about a 10% chance of failing the simple tasks. If your ability modifier is just +2, or if you pick up a +2 from anywhere else (themes, backgrounds, items, and feats are not uncommon sources) you become unable to fail easy DC.

Yes, commonly failing at easy tasks is a 5E problem, not a 4E problem.

Of course, SCs were controversial right from the beginning and throughout the entire run of 4E, so there's probably some other problems there :smallsigh:

Anyway, things that I like to have in a hypothetical skill system is (1) trained characters can more-or-less match real-world athletes at low level, which includes auto-succeeding on easy tasks; and clearly surpass them at higher level; (2) characters can learn new skills as they advance, without spending feats or similar resources on that; and (3) even at low level you can make a character that reliably succeeds at checks that untrained characters cannot make (because that's what professionals do in real life, and I want fantasy characters that can be better than that).

Cosi

2018-01-10, 11:11 AM

4e provides standard skill DCs for Easy, Medium, and Hard tasks at each level. 3e has no such guideline for skill DCs,

Yes, it does. It was posted in this thread. I think twice. Yes, it doesn't have them per-level, but I think that's a good thing because it makes it objective. You don't go from a hard 1st level check to a hard 10th level check, you go from a difficult task to an impossible one, which is character progression.

Except the pathfinder fix is even weirder: you can still diplomance the people as normal the only difference is that it lasts a few minutes.

Diplomacy badly wants there to be a skill challenge system for it to plug into for major issues. As it is, everything from "convince someone to give you a deal on gear" to "convince someone to die for you" uses the same mechanism, which is dumb.

Anyway, things that I like to have in a hypothetical skill system is (1) trained characters can more-or-less match real-world athletes at low level, which includes auto-succeeding on easy tasks; and clearly surpass them at higher level; (2) characters can learn new skills as they advance, without spending feats or similar resources on that; and (3) even at low level you can make a character that reliably succeeds at checks that untrained characters cannot make (because that's what professionals do in real life, and I want fantasy characters that can be better than that).

I think that (somewhat ironically) the problem with the skill system is that it is trying to use the same mechanic for too many different things. There are a lot of different types of things that are covered under the skill system, and it doesn't really make sense to cover all of them under the same rules. For example:

1. Things that don't have gradations of ability, or things where PCs don't care about gradations of ability, or things where the game tracks gradations of ability in some way other than the skill itself. The obvious example is Speak Language, but things like Profession probably fall into this category as well. We don't care if you speak Dwarvish at a 9th grade or 10th grade level, and we probably shouldn't care how good you are at bartending. These should run off of a proficiency system of some kind where you can pick up new languages or professions (and probably weapons as well) with minimal effort between levels.
2. Things that have gradations of ability, but are not obviously correlated with level. It matters whether you know what kind of damage a White Dragon's breath deals, or when the portals to the abyssal realm of Orcus open, or what the difference between Orcish and Goblin court etiquette is, but there's no obvious reason why knowing those things should require you to be 10th level. The obvious answer is to remove level caps for these skills, but that only goes so far, and you need to thread the needle between "the sage you consult to learn the ancient prophecy is a 20th level Wizard who could do the adventure for you" and "everyone knows everything about everything".
3. Things that have gradations of ability that are obviously related to level in some fashion. Generally this means opposed skills. You should be able to sneak past low level guards easily at high level, and that involves having a Stealth modifier that scales with level. The current system is semi-okay for this, but it has two problems. First, the bonuses you get for level are piddly. No one cares about a +1 marginal bonus to Climb. Second, the bonuses you get from other stuff are absurd. jump gives you a bonus to your Jump check equal to the entire RNG. So you need to make level bonuses bigger and non-level bonuses smaller (and probably constant, so characters don't diverge wildly at high levels).

So when you try to do all of that in one system, you end up in a space that is non-optimal for each of the particular kinds of skill.

There are some other things to consider with skills too, of course. How many skills is a big one. The idea of rank or level based unlocks of skill-related powers is a cool one. You could probably have different degrees of level related scaling for different skills. There's also the problem of skills that generally require group participation to work (for example, if your whole party can't sneak at least passably well, the Rogue using Stealth means splitting the party). You also really should have a skill challenge system.

Quertus

2018-01-10, 11:19 AM

Oh yeah, another thing I didn't like about 4E. The difficulty of a task cared about your level. If you wanted to swing on a chandelier somehow that chandelier knew you were level 15 instead of 2 so had a higher DC.

Unless that's "the difficulty goes down as you level", that sounds like another reason to never play 5e to me.

That critique is funny, as are the ones about minions and monsters using different rules than characters. That edition dropped any pretense of simulation, which is stupid in D&D anyways.

Why do you believe simulation is stupid in D&D? :smallconfused:

No one had any problems switching from 1st to 2nd or from 2nd to 3rd.

I did have issues switching to 3e. 3e was the "successful attempt to simplify mechanical presentation & homogenize mechanics, and a foolish desire to sacrifice fun in a failed attempt at game balance" edition. I would have liked 3e better if it had just stuck to the first half. I still prefer 2e.

That's the biggest reason we were so hesitant to change, and those who did check it out were in the mindset to pick apart every flaw.

I mean, I went in blind, missing the ad campaigns entirely. I was foolishly optimistic that 4e had put the fun back in. Boy, was I ever disappointed.

1st through 3rd were flawed, too. In fact, 3rd was so flawed that they had to release an update to fix things. However, we liked those editions despite their problems because we were able to look past them.

3.5 broke more than it fixed. And I'm not much of a "look past the flaws" kinda guy. I get upset at my inability to roleplay a character 100% correctly, even when that character is me.

We gave no such law at to 4th, and thus, it sunk. It was no more flawed than any other edition, but now people were looking to hate it. I'm sure if WotC hadn't gone too far in the marketing, we would have gladly "upgraded" just like with every previous edition.

Yeah, no. I missed the marketing, and judged 4e the bland grey boring edition all on my own. 6e will really need to wow me to get me back.

5th failed to reclaim the gold partly due to the success of Pathfinder playing to nostalgia and hogging the 3rd fans and mostly because they refused to acknowledge their mistake with 4th. They tried to go backsies and say that 5th was an appeal to the old players, but they still put the new mechanics in, as well. They tried to have their cake and eat it, too. It didn't work, though, because they failed to mend the rift of broken loyalty with those who felt betrayed by 4th.

5e also failed in its own right, with things like no expectation of cool magic items, bounded accuracy, etc etc.

You're getting too hung up on details.

If you insist on making 5e classes match 3e mechanics and management, why are you playing 5e?

If you're moving a class from 3.5 to 5e, the mechanics are not the goal of the translation. Just the character concept, most of which weren't that unique.

How about I make a new, simple RPG. The mechanics are really simple: you declare am action, roll a d20, and, if you roll 15+, you succeed.

I start with just Fighter class. But you want to play a Psion. So, fine, I create the new "Psion" class: you can now write "Psion" on your character sheet in the class session.

If the mechanics are in no way the goal of the class, have I not just successfully allowed you to play a Psion?

This would be acceptable if the mechanics were at least their own interesting variant. Most 5e mechanics are dumbed down to the point of not even really being mechanics. Any player who wants to play something mechanically distinct from another player in a similar role is going to have a hard time making it work.

Does anyone disagree, or should I add that to my list of reasons to never play 5e?

AD&D/2e: "Here's what you can play. Make your character concept conform to the given abilities."

Hey, now, let's be fair. 2e had Skills & Powers, plus "rules" (such as they were) to create new classes from whole cloth.

Ignimortis

2018-01-10, 11:43 AM

Unless that's "the difficulty goes down as you level", that sounds like another reason to never play 5e to me.

Note that the post you're quoting refers to 4e, which had a different problem (the DC scaled up to your level), but in 5e the DC stays the same. It's just that you're never good enough to accomplish a DC20 task without a chance of failure, unless you're a level 20 rogue or bard.

Does anyone disagree, or should I add that to my list of reasons to never play 5e?

Do it. It's pretty much true. You either play as someone with casting or someone without casting. Both have miscellaneous buttons, which are useful and sometimes even fun, but once you've played a caster, a STR-based martial and a DEX-based martial of a different class, you're done. Yes, there are different spells and different class abilities, but they all use a chassis of either "per short rest" or "per long rest".

Necroticplague

2018-01-10, 11:49 AM

1. I started RPG’ing after 4e was out, so it’s not really a ‘move on’ for me.
2. I play 4e and 3.5e (as well as pathfinder).
3. Haven’t picked up 5e because the part of the game that interests me (character creation and formation of interesting combos) appears to have been reduced in favor or stronger archetype support, from what I’ve heard. I’ve figured this problem will remedy itself once it has more content (and thus, options), so I’m sure I’ll come around eventually.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-10, 11:57 AM

5e also failed in its own right, with things like no expectation of cool magic items, bounded accuracy, etc etc.
5e doesn't require magic items in the same way that 3e/4e does; that doesn't mean you're not expected to have them. The "starting equipment at higher levels" table in the DMG says that even low magic campaigns should have a few; if you follow the guidelines for treasure hordes, you wind up getting way more than that. And because they're not part of the expected level scaling, and there's not a baked-in assumption that you can just walk into a city and buy a bunch of magic items, they actually feel more cool and special. Finding even something as dull as a +2 sword is exciting because it'll mean you're ahead of the curve for the entire game. 5e does magic items right.

Does anyone disagree, or should I add that to my list of reasons to never play 5e?
I do. 5e mechanics aren't as fun as 3.5 mechanics to theorycraft with, but I'd argue that (for the most part) they're superior to play with. They're much better at getting out of your way and letting you actually pretend to be an elf or whatever. Apart from skills not having fixed DCs (which, in all honesty, I suspect many GMs have never noticed), there's really not much more adjudication required than in previous editions.

AnimeTheCat

2018-01-10, 11:58 AM

Do it. It's pretty much true. You either play as someone with casting or someone without casting. Both have miscellaneous buttons, which are useful and sometimes even fun, but once you've played a caster, a STR-based martial and a DEX-based martial of a different class, you're done. Yes, there are different spells and different class abilities, but they all use a chassis of either "per short rest" or "per long rest".

I mean, at the heart of it everything in 3.5e is "Per Long Rest". There isn't any "Per Short Rest". The only outliers are the per week, per month, per year random abilities that are out there. All spellcastings in 3.5e are "Per long rest" and things like rage and smite are "Per long rest".

I tried both fourth edition and fifth edition and they both seemed too simple to me. I think I just like all the finicky little fiddly bits. The "Imbalance" of 3.5e doesn't irk me as much as not being able to play what I want to play. I know that 3.5e has been out longer, but by this stage of 3.5e's life, there were a lot more books with a lot more information out. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a new splat. I enjoy the multitude of books because there's no rule that says you have to use them all (and in my experience when you try to use them all things get to the unplayable level of inbalance).

I can agree amoung friends not to powergame, but I can't convince the DM that they need to make this laundry list of changes to a class, race, feat, skill, etc. to make my character concept viable. If I, as the player, can do it under my own power then it is done and unless the DM says "no" then I'm fine and within the rules.

I think what I like about 3.5e versus 5e is that there are so many rules, and while they don't all work in chorus they can serve as a pretty solid framework to tweak. 5e does leave a large amount up to the DM. For the DM, this can be great. For the player, this can really really suck.

noob

2018-01-10, 12:02 PM

I mean, at the heart of it everything in 3.5e is "Per Long Rest". There isn't any "Per Short Rest". The only outliers are the per week, per month, per year random abilities that are out there. All spellcastings in 3.5e are "Per long rest" and things like rage and smite are "Per long rest".

I tried both fourth edition and fifth edition and they both seemed too simple to me. I think I just like all the finicky little fiddly bits. The "Imbalance" of 3.5e doesn't irk me as much as not being able to play what I want to play. I know that 3.5e has been out longer, but by this stage of 3.5e's life, there were a lot more books with a lot more information out. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a new splat. I enjoy the multitude of books because there's no rule that says you have to use them all (and in my experience when you try to use them all things get to the unplayable level of inbalance).

I can agree amoung friends not to powergame, but I can't convince the DM that they need to make this laundry list of changes to a class, race, feat, skill, etc. to make my character concept viable. If I, as the player, can do it under my own power then it is done and unless the DM says "no" then I'm fine and within the rules.

I think what I like about 3.5e versus 5e is that there are so many rules, and while they don't all work in chorus they can serve as a pretty solid framework to tweak. 5e does leave a large amount up to the DM. For the DM, this can be great. For the player, this can really really suck.
There is in 3.5 the binder whose best abilities are per 5 rounds(and he gets one per vestige).(and none of his stuff is per long rest)
Then the crusader which have his abilities when he use different abilities(so you can control access to abilities by spending abilities faster or keeping in reserve the abilities you think might be more useful later)(basically that is a spellcasting you can use continuously and which have each given power be per random)(and none of his stuff is per long rest except for his smite attempts which are entirely negligible compared to the rest)
Then there is the warlock who gets his spells at will.(and none of his stuff is per long rest)

Cosi

2018-01-10, 12:04 PM

5e does magic items right.

5e does them better. I don't think any system where a magic items powers can begin and end with "you get a numeric bonus to a stat" can be said to be doing things right. Your magic weapons should be Lightning Whips or Earthquake Hammers. Your magic armor should be Hurricane Plate or Shadow Helms. At no point should you be expected to get excited about "and now your numbers are bigger".

I mean, at the heart of it everything in 3.5e is "Per Long Rest". There isn't any "Per Short Rest". The only outliers are the per week, per month, per year random abilities that are out there. All spellcastings in 3.5e are "Per long rest" and things like rage and smite are "Per long rest".

Binder Vestige abilities are (IMHO) are per-encounter, at least the once per five rounds ones. Maneuvers also are sort-of on that timescale, in at least some cases.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 12:08 PM

AnimeTheCat

2018-01-10, 12:12 PM

There is in 3.5 the binder whose best abilities are per 5 rounds(and he gets one per vestige).(and none of his stuff is per long rest)
Then the crusader which have his abilities when he use different abilities(so you can control access to abilities by spending abilities faster or keeping in reserve the abilities you think might be more useful later)(basically that is a spellcasting you can use continuously and which have each given power be per random)(and none of his stuff is per long rest except for his smite attempts which are entirely negligible compared to the rest)
Then there is the warlock who gets his spells at will.(and none of his stuff is per long rest)

Binder Vestige abilities are (IMHO) are per-encounter, at least the once per five rounds ones. Maneuvers also are sort-of on that timescale, in at least some cases.

Right, so there's no "recharge" time or mechanic. I know that there are oddballs, and I acknowledged that. The vast majority of things however "recharge" per day, which is essentially a long rest. 5e Has that kind of stuff too, such as Cantrips.

I suppose I should rephrase what I said to "At the heart of it, NEARLY every mechanic in 3.5e is 'Per Long Rest'".

Velaryon

2018-01-10, 12:58 PM

That's just marketing talk, though.

3.0 does require magic items, in the sense that certain monsters can only be hit by a +X or better magical weapon. 3.5 and PF have removed this rule, and for good reason. Forum talk notwithstanding, this means that they can be played just fine with little or no magic items. 4E has explicit rules ("inherent bonuses") to run campaigns without magic items, and IME it even plays better that way.

In all these games, it must mathematically be true that EITHER the DM has to compensate encounter difficulty depending on the amount of magic items, OR those magic items just don't do a whole lot other than flavor. It is clearly true in 3E/4E that a DM can hand out more magic items and not compensate, and then the players will be ahead of the curve for the entire game. It also clearly true in 5E that a DM can hand out more magic items and compensate, and then the players will NOT be ahead of the curve. This is simple math, it has nothing to do with differences between the games.

"You can play without magical items!" may sound innovative until you realize that that's what pretty much every non-D&D RPG has done since the 1980s.

Technically, 3.5 doesn't require magic items, but DR/magic is pretty common and without magic items, martials can't bypass that without a buff from casters. Meanwhile, spells bypass DR automatically, even if all they're doing is dealing damage (poor design choice IMO). So if you play without magic items then you're actually increasing the caster/martial disparity. 3.5 D&D doesn't handle "low magic" games all that well unless you stick to low levels, ban casters, or exempt the PCs from the "low magic-ness," because monsters are all designed under the assumption that you're following WBL guidelines. You certainly can play that way, but doing so gimps fighters et. al. pretty badly against a lot of encounters.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 01:08 PM

Technically, 3.5 doesn't require magic items, but DR/magic is pretty common and without magic items, martials can't bypass that without a buff from casters.

DR doesn't mean you can't hurt the monster. DR means you'll deal five points less damage. Most fighters and barbarians can just smash through that with Power Attack. By the time you see monsters with DR 10 (which should be pretty high level) you deal enough damage to get through that as well.

So I'm really not seeing the issue here. 3.5 works just fine with little or no magic items.

Velaryon

2018-01-10, 01:14 PM

I'm away from books right now, but I'm pretty sure there are a LOT of things with DR higher than 5. Yes, they can just do more damage to still hurt them, but lacking magic items means that any martial who doesn't have either Power Attack or some form of precision damage is going to be a lot less effective, while casters are affected much less.

So yes, you can do it if you don't mind that it hurts the characters who are already less powerful more than it hurts the ones who are already most powerful. YMMV whether that counts as "just fine," I suppose.

Darrin

2018-01-10, 01:15 PM

Yes, commonly failing at easy tasks is a 5E problem, not a 4E problem.

But the DCs are set by the DM, so... I realize it's Oberoni territory, but can't the DM just set the DCs lower for the easy stuff?

Admittedly, I've only played about 4 sessions of 5E, and I suspect the DM is using the "Did you roll low/middle/high?" Task Resolution System (i.e., the "Eyeball" method) rather than actually using whatever DC might be in the book.

From a historical standpoint, D&D has *always* had a very klunky skill system:

In AD&D, it was a hodgepodge of obscure tables, the percentile system used by thieves, and basic "wing it/seat of your pants" kinda thing.

2E had Non-Weapon Proficiencies... but I don't remember how they worked.

3E finally had a formal skill system with skill points, but could quickly get extremely wonky if you weren't paying attention to it. You get some very bizarre results, like 20th-level rogues who can't find/disarm traps, or a 4th level commoner riding around a battletitan dinosaur. Among other things, the 3E skill system has scaling issues... can +0 through +23 really cover all the possibilities between mundane tasks and legendary superheroes? To use the "hot mess/hot rod" analogy... if you weren't paying attention to it, it could be unexpectedly vindictive and viciously punitive, but if you *really* knew how to push the right buttons, you could use it to rob a bank with a paperclip.

Pathfinder tried to split the "have it/eat it" cake between a skill-point system and a class-assigned skill list... and except for a few wrinkles, evened out a lot of the wonkiness from 3E. Classes were innately "good" at certain things, but there was enough optimization options that you still had enough room to differentiate between casual experts and legendary specialists.

4E tied everything to class level, and locked down the skill choices at 1st level. So they took the Pathfinder system and... made it worse? (I never played 4E, so I'm not that familiar with it.)

5E tries to split the difference between Pathfinder and 4E, and then attempts to cover up the really ugly spots with a lot of handwavium. 4E's "add your class level to everything" is still sorta there wrapped up into the Proficiency Bonus, and they've attempted to compress the scalability issues, but have loosened up on skill choices by abandoning the "you can't pick anything, you'll just f*** it up" mentality from 4E. I'm still new to 5E, but I think I might call it "Tolerable, just so long as you don't look *really* closely at it."

Of course, SCs were controversial right from the beginning and throughout the entire run of 4E, so there's probably some other problems there :smallsigh:

I think Skill Challenges in some form are a good tool to have in your system toolkit, but it sounds like 4E's toolkit was so limited, it quickly turned into a "If you only have a hammer..." problem.

Anyway, things that I like to have in a hypothetical skill system is (1) trained characters can more-or-less match real-world athletes at low level, which includes auto-succeeding on easy tasks; and clearly surpass them at higher level; (2) characters can learn new skills as they advance, without spending feats or similar resources on that; and (3) even at low level you can make a character that reliably succeeds at checks that untrained characters cannot make (because that's what professionals do in real life, and I want fantasy characters that can be better than that).

I'm not sure there's any ideal system that can seamlessly bolt the entire breadth of mundane human capabilities to a level system that goes from Level 1 "I'm afraid of house cats" to Level 20 "I wiggle my fingers to make buildings explode." There's going to be some lumps in the gravy.

Ignimortis

2018-01-10, 01:16 PM

Right, so there's no "recharge" time or mechanic. I know that there are oddballs, and I acknowledged that. The vast majority of things however "recharge" per day, which is essentially a long rest. 5e Has that kind of stuff too, such as Cantrips.

I suppose I should rephrase what I said to "At the heart of it, NEARLY every mechanic in 3.5e is 'Per Long Rest'".

There are no "fun" recharging mechanics in 5e. In 3.5, warblades have to hit an enemy to get their maneuvers back, and crusaders have their come back at random each round. In PF-based Path of War, every class regains maneuvers in their own way - kill an enemy, take a risky action, and so on. Binders and DFAs just recharge quickly, factotums get their powers "per encounter" (which doesn't work out to the same as "per short rest", because short rests are rarely useful). Warlocks and Truenamers are just at-will for everything, not only cantrips - even powerful effects like Greater Invisibility or AoE damage+debuffs.
Meanwhile, in 5e the best recharging mechanic is sorcery points, which are designed in a way that makes using them for spell slots a rarely useful thing. Other mechanics are...nonexistent, except for "if you've got nothing at the beginning of combat, gain one" at high levels. 3.5e/PF mechanics are always in play, from level one.

JNAProductions

2018-01-10, 01:19 PM

DR doesn't mean you can't hurt the monster. DR means you'll deal five points less damage. Most fighters and barbarians can just smash through that with Power Attack. By the time you see monsters with DR 10 (which should be pretty high level) you deal enough damage to get through that as well.

So I'm really not seeing the issue here. 3.5 works just fine with little or no magic items.

Okay. A level X PC is supposed to have a 50/50 chance of soloing a CR X monster, correct?

So let's take, say, a Greater Air Elemental (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/elemental.htm) (CR 9). Can you build a Fighter that has a reasonable chance of soloing this guy, without any magic items?

Pex

2018-01-10, 01:27 PM

Unless that's "the difficulty goes down as you level", that sounds like another reason to never play 5e to me.

In 5E the DC depends on who is DM that day. One DM says you just do it, no roll needed. Another DM says it's DC 10. A third DM says it's DC 15. A fourth DM says you can only try if you're proficient in Acrobatics, which would be officially against the rules since 5E does not distinguish between proficient/not proficient to do some task but is a common distinction added in by DMs.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 01:48 PM

Okay. A level X PC is supposed to have a 50/50 chance of soloing a CR X monster, correct?

You're missing the point.

What I am talking about is that 3E (and 4E and PF) are easily playable with little or no magical items. You appear to be talking about the relative balance between classes, which is a different topic entirely.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-10, 01:55 PM

You're missing the point.

What I am talking about is that 3E (and 4E and PF) are easily playable with little or no magical items. You appear to be talking about the relative balance between classes, which is a different topic entirely.
Playable, yes. Easily playable, no-- you have to adjust every encounter for weaker-than-expected characters (unevenly weaker ones at that, given how screwed up balance is in the game), and you have to examine each monster you want to use to make sure that it's still going to be as difficult as originally intended-- does it have a lot of DR/magic? Are its defenses too high for unboosted attack rolls to get through? Is it incorporeal and thus immune to half the party?

Ratter

2018-01-10, 02:01 PM

All you need to make a playable race in 3.5 is printed right in the monster manual, though? If you want to play it from level 1, you just have to look to Savage Species and use savage progression and boom, you're set.

It's literally as easy as playing with lego.

and all you need for a dnd 5e race is 2 stat increases, an ability you make up, and whether or not they have darkvision, they are both very easy to use.

Calthropstu

2018-01-10, 02:01 PM

I love this explanation. I also absolutely love the archaeology aspect of PF/3.5, of needing to dive through six or seven books to make the character do everything they need to do and have all of the features they need.
4th edition is a bit of a sticking point with me. When it first came out, I was in a remote location and had great difficulty getting the books. I managed to get them, though, since my circle of friends back home were playing it. I had about twelve or so books in the end, and spent almost three days poring over them to create a cleric for the ongoing game I was to join. I made the power cards by hand, filled out the sheet by hand, all of it.
When I sat at the table, everyone else has pre-printed power cards. No big deal. Clearly they all just used the same generator. I say this because I had not heard about the online character creator. When I went to use a power, I got told that it did not work like I thought it did. That it had been nerfed and hit with errata.
I was shown the online tool and was shown that it took five minutes to make a character from scratch. That not only were my painfully tracked down overpriced books unnecessary, but also wrong.
I vowed to never give them another dollar.

4th itself is not so horrible. I will play it. 5th edition is also okay. I will play it. I will not run either of them because I am still angry at the publishers.

Same reasons for me. If i buy a book, I am using the book. I am not going online to look up how every one of my abilities should be used. I'm not getting nerfs. I paid for a book, not an rpg update system. Paizo, for the most part, seems to understand that. Most of its errata are odd case scenarios, clarifications on oversight or flushing out things they missed.

AnimeTheCat

2018-01-10, 02:05 PM

Eldariel

2018-01-10, 02:09 PM

Okay. A level X PC is supposed to have a 50/50 chance of soloing a CR X monster, correct?

So let's take, say, a Greater Air Elemental (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/elemental.htm) (CR 9). Can you build a Fighter that has a reasonable chance of soloing this guy, without any magic items?

The encounter would much depend on the circumstances (e.g. open areas make Air Elemental's mobility quite fearsome and it has the Whirlwind + reach advantage which makes it an annoying opponent particularly if its feats were picked reasonably. However, damage-wise you could just smack stuff together. Dragonborn [Races of the Dragon] Water Orc (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/races/elementalRacialVariants.htm#waterOrcs) (Wings), 22 Str, 24 with level-ups, Power Attack, Shock Trooper [Complete Warrior], Leap Attack [Complete Adventurer], Headlong Rush [Races of Faerun], Battle Jump [Unapproachable East], Power Lunge [Ghostwalk], Mw. weapon and the numbers are 9 BAB, 7 Str, +1 weapon for +17. +19 on Charge, +1 higher ground. You could further ride a Pegasus or whatever, put your ranks in Handle Animal to train it for combat riding to give you more mobility and make it easier to deliver your damage. Even at -2 base, you'll have +10ish by level 9 which enables you to take 10 on the training. Note, you need Jump too so you need some Int.

You're privy to Dragonborn of Bahamut Diving Charge when you Dive from above if we use a Piercing weapon (ride your Pegasus/Whatever above the target and dive, also triggering Battle Jump - you have enough movement in a single action). We can take Law Devotion [Complete Champion] for +3 to ensure we hit on 4 or higher and higher ground bonuses let us hit on 3 or higher. Take e.g. EWP: Greatspear, damage on Charge is (2d6+14+27)*4 = 192 average, which kills a Greater Air Elemental in one hit on average. Now, this is using the weird Leap Attack math the errata causes; the probably intended math would lead you down to 36 Leap Attack damage being easily more than enough to kill. We're talking 8 feats here, so there's room for 1 more even without flaws.

1. Battle Jump
F. Power Attack
F. EWP: Greatspear
3. Law Devotion
F. Power Lunge
6. Headlong Rush
F. Shock Trooper
F. Leap Attack
9.

You could of course e.g. Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization or Aberration/Deformity feats for reach to avoid the attack of opportunity or play a natively Large race (add Half-Minotaur or Half-Ogre to the character for instance) or whatever to further improve on it, but damage is something Fighters are certainly quite competent at when sourcebook diving.

Psyren

2018-01-10, 02:48 PM

Admittedly, I've only played about 4 sessions of 5E, and I suspect the DM is using the "Did you roll low/middle/high?" Task Resolution System (i.e., the "Eyeball" method) rather than actually using whatever DC might be in the book.

Gods above, why have a skills system at all then?

Well, that's not exactly correct. The DMG just says that a CR 9 creature is supposed to be a "good challenge" for a group of 4 9th level characters. So, if "good challenge" is 100% chance of success for you, then a Fighter 9 should have a 25% chance of success, but if "good challenge" is less that 100% chance of success, then that chance of any single character succeeding is going to be lower as well.

The DMG doesn't really outline challenges for individual characters, but for parties.

This, and also - CR/APL includes WBL, so "go build a fighter without magic items" makes no sense.

Pleh

2018-01-10, 03:11 PM

Gods above, why have a skills system at all then?

This, and also - CR/APL includes WBL, so "go build a fighter without magic items" makes no sense.

It's been years since I played 5e, but what I remember the game seems to rather encourage tables to be a bit more liberal with their application of Freeform elements of RPGs.

Having a skill system still gives us the satisfaction of rolling dice and adding numbers, even if the DCs aren't as almighty and powerful as they once were.

The "go build a fighter without magic items" is a tricky concept. Yes, you are supposed to have approximately WBL to count as being at appropriate power level, but having Optimal magic items was never guaranteed, either. Without just outright using the Magic Item Creation rules (which the fighter needs a friendly caster to help with), you can have your entire WBL and then some, only to find yourself not all that much better off for it because the particular arrangement of items was sub-optimal.

atemu1234

2018-01-10, 03:24 PM

Calthropstu

2018-01-10, 03:31 PM

I'd vastly prefer it if this thread doesn't develop into deeply-intrenched arguments over the 'edition war'. I just wanted to get other people's reasons why they prefer 3e/3.5e/PF over other systems, if indeed they did. All systems have strengths and weaknesses.

Ummm, the whole basis of "edition wars" is exactly people stating why they like editions over others.

Ignimortis

2018-01-10, 03:38 PM

Actually, I just realized something. Why write a long text if I can just do this:
In 3.5e/PF I can play this as a character:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjVY0a0rxXg
Combined with this as a setting/storyline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j5v8jlndM
And it will work mechanically and not seem implausible at any point, unless we dive into Tippyverse. 5e won't let me be Vergil, not even at level 20. And Bahamut doesn't work with bounded accuracy.

Florian

2018-01-10, 03:45 PM

I'd vastly prefer it if this thread doesn't develop into deeply-intrenched arguments over the 'edition war'. I just wanted to get other people's reasons why they prefer 3e/3.5e/PF over other systems, if indeed they did. All systems have strengths and weaknesses.

The informative part is looking at what people actually did with their game system and then checking what other systems "rubbed them the wrong way".

Grek

2018-01-10, 03:48 PM

I didn't like 4e. But I've found that 5e is good for some kinds of games and 3.5 good for others. As an example, I'd much rather run Ravenloft in 5e and Planescape in 3.5 than the other way around. Pathfinder is my preference for Eberron, though.

Psyren

2018-01-10, 03:55 PM

Having a skill system still gives us the satisfaction of rolling dice and adding numbers, even if the DCs aren't as almighty and powerful as they once were.

The point of a skill system is to reduce randomness. If I'm good at something, I'm supposed to succeed more than I fail, though I might still be able to fail occasionally (depending on circumstance or luck.) If I've optimized to where I can succeed on a 6 or a 3, I've often paid for that specialization elsewhere in my build and should be allowed to.

By leaving it wholly up to chance (i.e. "did he roll low, medium or high?") his DM is invalidating the system entirely. When you're at the whim of the dice to that degree - particularly the even distribution of 1d20 - modifiers and thus character creation become meaningless.

The "go build a fighter without magic items" is a tricky concept. Yes, you are supposed to have approximately WBL to count as being at appropriate power level, but having Optimal magic items was never guaranteed, either. Without just outright using the Magic Item Creation rules (which the fighter needs a friendly caster to help with), you can have your entire WBL and then some, only to find yourself not all that much better off for it because the particular arrangement of items was sub-optimal.

Maybe "optimal" items are not, but there is definitely a minimum expectation, even by WotC/Paizo themselves. The Big Six (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20070302a) are the most commonly cited baseline, and #6 on the list of why players pick them from that article is even labeled "Required to Play." If your GM is not going to guarantee even that much, they need to tone the encounters you'll face down severely, especially for martial characters.

Darrin

2018-01-10, 04:09 PM

Gods above, why have a skills system at all then?

It's a "roleplay heavy" group with mostly novice players, and everybody is having fun. The DM is good at keeping the story going and waving away the rules when they don't need to be there. So far it's not bothering me all that much. If I really need to know the DC for something I'm rolling, I can look it up and adjudicate it myself if need be.

Florian

2018-01-10, 04:22 PM

Gods above, why have a skills system at all then?

That is a good question and I´d wager a lot of people can't give a clear answer to it.

Psyren

2018-01-10, 04:26 PM

That is a good question and I´d wager a lot of people can't give a clear answer to it.

I answered it myself actually ("The point of a skill system is...") - my objection was more to the ones that let a flat distribution without modifiers decide success or failure.

Zanos

2018-01-10, 04:54 PM

I answered it myself actually ("The point of a skill system is...") - my objection was more to the ones that let a flat distribution without modifiers decide success or failure.
Yeah, doesn't this make investing in any skill modifiers effectively pointless?

I think this is one of my problems with 5e's design in general, DMs should be prepared to deal with PCs succeeding or failing, not handwaving their rolls so they fit whether or not their expectations of success or failure.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-10, 05:05 PM

Yeah, doesn't this make investing in any skill modifiers effectively pointless?

Yup. This is probably the longest perennial debate on the 5E forums :smallbiggrin:

Darrin

2018-01-10, 05:13 PM

Yeah, doesn't this make investing in any skill modifiers effectively pointless?

I think I explained this badly. I believe the DM is eyeballing the situation, such as a Rogue making an Acrobatics roll or a Ranger making an Athletics roll, and based on what he knows about the characters (1st level Rogue with high Dex, 1st level Ranger with moderate Str), and for the purposes of expediency, is making a judgement on whether the PC needs to roll low, medium, or high to succeed. So decisions that the player has made (race, class, skills, expertise, etc.) are being accounted for, but in a very informal way. If what's at stake is very low, then the DM can tell at a glance if a low roll or high roll is something where he needs to come up with a complication or an unexpected deviation, or just declare a simple failure/success. If the rolls are for higher stakes, then the players tend to ask about specific modifiers or DCs before rolling, and then he can calculate a more specific DC.

However, it's largely anecdotal, and pertains only to my particular group. I'm not sure it's really worth arguing about as indicative of 5E.

vasilidor

2018-01-10, 06:43 PM

for me, I played 4th edition, found it OK. played 5th, found it OK. had fun playing them, but felt no cumpulsion to switch over. made the jump from 3.5 to pathfinder though as I was already deeply entrenched in 3.5, and I liked the changes.

Quertus

2018-01-10, 07:02 PM

5e doesn't require magic items in the same way that 3e/4e does; that doesn't mean you're not expected to have them. The "starting equipment at higher levels" table in the DMG says that even low magic campaigns should have a few; if you follow the guidelines for treasure hordes, you wind up getting way more than that. And because they're not part of the expected level scaling, and there's not a baked-in assumption that you can just walk into a city and buy a bunch of magic items, they actually feel more cool and special. Finding even something as dull as a +2 sword is exciting because it'll mean you're ahead of the curve for the entire game. 5e does magic items right.

Does it? Did it have items as cool as the Wand of Wonder, the Amulet of Caterpillar Control, or the Gem Bow? Have you seen GMs describe items created out of a shaft of sunlight, solidified hatred, or unicorn hair? Does it have rules for crafting your own items that involve collecting butterfly dreams?

Do the items have character, or are they merely math?

I do. 5e mechanics aren't as fun as 3.5 mechanics to theorycraft with, but I'd argue that (for the most part) they're superior to play with. They're much better at getting out of your way and letting you actually pretend to be an elf or whatever. Apart from skills not having fixed DCs (which, in all honesty, I suspect many GMs have never noticed), there's really not much more adjudication required than in previous editions.

If I'm not mistaken, the thread of thought here wasn't about how fun the rules are, but, rather, how mechanically diverse different characters can be. Or, more accurately, how mechanically diverse different characters with the same "role" can be.

The assertion was, all strikers / tanks / bfc / whatever play the same in 5e, in a way that wasn't true of 3e characters with similar roles.

I can agree amoung friends not to powergame, but I can't convince the DM that they need to make this laundry list of changes to a class, race, feat, skill, etc. to make my character concept viable. If I, as the player, can do it under my own power then it is done and unless the DM says "no" then I'm fine and within the rules.

I think what I like about 3.5e versus 5e is that there are so many rules, and while they don't all work in chorus they can serve as a pretty solid framework to tweak. 5e does leave a large amount up to the DM. For the DM, this can be great. For the player, this can really really suck.

This. In 3e, I can make the character be whatever it needs to be to fit the party. This works so much better than relying on a GM to fix things.

That's just marketing talk, though.

3.0 does require magic items, in the sense that certain monsters can only be hit by a +X or better magical weapon. 3.5 and PF have removed this rule, and for good reason. Forum talk notwithstanding, this means that they can be played just fine with little or no magic items. 4E has explicit rules ("inherent bonuses") to run campaigns without magic items, and IME it even plays better that way.

In all these games, it must mathematically be true that EITHER the DM has to compensate encounter difficulty depending on the amount of magic items, OR those magic items just don't do a whole lot other than flavor. It is clearly true in 3E/4E that a DM can hand out more magic items and not compensate, and then the players will be ahead of the curve for the entire game. It also clearly true in 5E that a DM can hand out more magic items and compensate, and then the players will NOT be ahead of the curve. This is simple math, it has nothing to do with differences between the games.

"You can play without magical items!" may sound innovative until you realize that that's what pretty much every non-D&D RPG has done since the 1980s.

I'm confused. In 2e and earlier, monsters had "immune to damage unless from a weapon of X or better". It was a very hard "you must be this tall".

In 3e, monsters straight out of the MM could have things like DR 50/+3. Still a clear case of "my first fighter" having no chance.

3.5 changed that. IIRC, DR caped out at around 15 pre epic.

So, before 3.5, clever strategies, heavy optimization, or the McGuffin +x was required to pass. Adding items was like handing out keys to locked doors.

After 3.5, even moderate optimization beyond "my first fighter" could allow a character to bypass DR.

I'm also confused by the text in the middle, which seems to read, "the GM has to maintain balance... unless he doesn't". What were you intending to get across?

In 5E the DC depends on who is DM that day. One DM says you just do it, no roll needed. Another DM says it's DC 10. A third DM says it's DC 15. A fourth DM says you can only try if you're proficient in Acrobatics, which would be officially against the rules since 5E does not distinguish between proficient/not proficient to do some task but is a common distinction added in by DMs.

So, my character's history will be horribly inconsistent, as he travels from table to table? Yeah, no thanks.

Playable, yes. Easily playable, no-- you have to adjust every encounter for weaker-than-expected characters (unevenly weaker ones at that, given how screwed up balance is in the game), and you have to examine each monster you want to use to make sure that it's still going to be as difficult as originally intended-- does it have a lot of DR/magic? Are its defenses too high for unboosted attack rolls to get through? Is it incorporeal and thus immune to half the party?

Or, you can just play the world as a CaW simulation, and put the burden on the players to choose what to engage and what to run from, instead of forcing the world to be "CR Appropriate".

Granted, it doesn't make for as fun of a game when either a) players don't know going in that certain classes are "hard mode"; or b) your concept determines whether you're playing easy mode or hard mode, rather than your conscious choice to do so.

Pex

2018-01-10, 07:14 PM

I think I explained this badly. I believe the DM is eyeballing the situation, such as a Rogue making an Acrobatics roll or a Ranger making an Athletics roll, and based on what he knows about the characters (1st level Rogue with high Dex, 1st level Ranger with moderate Str), and for the purposes of expediency, is making a judgement on whether the PC needs to roll low, medium, or high to succeed. So decisions that the player has made (race, class, skills, expertise, etc.) are being accounted for, but in a very informal way. If what's at stake is very low, then the DM can tell at a glance if a low roll or high roll is something where he needs to come up with a complication or an unexpected deviation, or just declare a simple failure/success. If the rolls are for higher stakes, then the players tend to ask about specific modifiers or DCs before rolling, and then he can calculate a more specific DC.

However, it's largely anecdotal, and pertains only to my particular group. I'm not sure it's really worth arguing about as indicative of 5E.

It kind of is. Because the DC of everything is whatever the DM feels like, at some point a DM gets tired of having to think of a DC for every single instance a player wants to do something. It's easier to base success if the player rolled high or low. If it's in the middle the DM might factor in if the character is proficient or not or then bother to think on it. If he didn't want the thing to happen, the player had to roll high or else.

Scots Dragon

2018-01-10, 07:28 PM

Does it? Did it have items as cool as the Wand of Wonder,

I don't actually like D&D 5E all that much personally, but I do have to defend it here.

Not only does it literally have the Wand of Wonder, with it being described on page 212-213 of the DMG and in fact also having an illustration...
https://media-waterdeep.cursecdn.com/avatars/thumbnails/7/486/1000/1000/636284784520399817.jpeg
... the magic item stuff is actually pretty solid and contains not only some really cool options but some pretty amazing illustrations, such the ring of spell storing being a ring that goes over two fingers and is made to look like a scroll;
https://media-waterdeep.cursecdn.com/avatars/thumbnails/7/364/1000/1000/636284761492570136.jpeg
Or the sun blade more or less being a lightsabre;
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P8zkMVQmqeA/VIMvoeZzjTI/AAAAAAAACjI/F8Cog4JO8L4/s1600/162sunblade.jpg

Granted this is really just doing what the edition ought to have been doing to begin with when it comes to magic items, and continuing the traditions of previous editions.

Troacctid

2018-01-10, 07:48 PM

Note that the post you're quoting refers to 4e, which had a different problem (the DC scaled up to your level), but in 5e the DC stays the same. It's just that you're never good enough to accomplish a DC20 task without a chance of failure, unless you're a level 20 rogue or bard.
Level 11 Rogue, thank you very much.

Alabenson

2018-01-10, 07:56 PM

Personally, when I first took a look at 5th edition I thought it was a tremendous improvement from 4th and was actually pretty excited to make my first characters and start playing. However, the more I read the rules, the more I found I had issues with the rules and design of the game. Things like bounded accuracy, the gutting of the skill system, the lack of meaningful character creation options, bounded accuracy, the overly onerous concentration mechanics and bounded accuracy.

Overall, I simply decided that there wasn't any point in trying to bludgeon 5e into being the system I wanted when 3.5e already worked perfectly fine.

Also, in case I haven't made myself clear I absolutely hate bounded accuracy on a level that is difficult to properly express without violating forum rules on profanity. It is a rancid pile of noxiousness that was born out of laziness on the part of the designers and module writers and which robs me of an element of the game from which I derive a large part of my enjoyment of the game.

Velaryon

2018-01-10, 09:07 PM

3E finally had a formal skill system with skill points, but could quickly get extremely wonky if you weren't paying attention to it. You get some very bizarre results, like 20th-level rogues who can't find/disarm traps, or a 4th level commoner riding around a battletitan dinosaur. Among other things, the 3E skill system has scaling issues... can +0 through +23 really cover all the possibilities between mundane tasks and legendary superheroes? To use the "hot mess/hot rod" analogy... if you weren't paying attention to it, it could be unexpectedly vindictive and viciously punitive, but if you *really* knew how to push the right buttons, you could use it to rob a bank with a paperclip.

Often both phenomena occur on the same character sheet, since the system rewards specialization. Most characters put max ranks into the skills they most want/need and nothing into any other skills (with some exceptions). So you end up with a character whose Spot is so high they can count someone's nose hairs at 50 paces, but whose Sense Motive is so bad they can't tell that the pickpocket they caught was lying when they claim to be the king in disguise.

Pathfinder tried to split the "have it/eat it" cake between a skill-point system and a class-assigned skill list... and except for a few wrinkles, evened out a lot of the wonkiness from 3E. Classes were innately "good" at certain things, but there was enough optimization options that you still had enough room to differentiate between casual experts and legendary specialists.

I think my ideal skill system would be something like Star Wars Saga with a few more fiddly bits, and the ability to pick up new skills at higher levels without having to increase your Int modifier. Does Pathfinder come anything close to this?

Same reasons for me. If i buy a book, I am using the book. I am not going online to look up how every one of my abilities should be used. I'm not getting nerfs. I paid for a book, not an rpg update system. Paizo, for the most part, seems to understand that. Most of its errata are odd case scenarios, clarifications on oversight or flushing out things they missed.

WotC do love their errata for the sake of errata. Always have, going back to the days before they even bought TSR.

TotallyNotEvil

2018-01-10, 09:08 PM

and all you need for a dnd 5e race is 2 stat increases, an ability you make up, and whether or not they have darkvision, they are both very easy to use.
And that's half the problem for me: that's downright bland.

Ultimately, 3.5 treats classes as tools, 5E treats classes as concepts.

And the whole bounded accuracy thing that's been debated over and over already.

Doctor Awkward

2018-01-10, 09:50 PM

Same reasons for me. If i buy a book, I am using the book. I am not going online to look up how every one of my abilities should be used. I'm not getting nerfs. I paid for a book, not an rpg update system. Paizo, for the most part, seems to understand that. Most of its errata are odd case scenarios, clarifications on oversight or flushing out things they missed.

How recent is this revelation?

The last time I bothered to look at Pathfinder the rules were in a near constant state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff all the time-- often without announcement or blog messages to notify players.

Crichton

2018-01-10, 10:52 PM

The point of a skill system is to reduce randomness. If I'm good at something, I'm supposed to succeed more than I fail, though I might still be able to fail occasionally (depending on circumstance or luck.) If I've optimized to where I can succeed on a 6 or a 3, I've often paid for that specialization elsewhere in my build and should be allowed to.

By leaving it wholly up to chance (i.e. "did he roll low, medium or high?") his DM is invalidating the system entirely. When you're at the whim of the dice to that degree - particularly the even distribution of 1d20 - modifiers and thus character creation become meaningless.

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Worse than being at the whim of the dice, is being at the whim of the DM. There's no excuse for failing at something on one check, then succeeding at a check of that same thing later, in similar circumstances, on the same d20 roll.

As for getting good at something, the 5e system of 'you can always fail' is horrible with most skills. If I do something every day, for months or years on end, then OF COURSE I'm going to get so good at it that I fail less than 5% of the time (i.e. rolling a 1). So why shouldn't my character be able to get so good at something that the only possible way to fail at the task is a crit-fail on my roll?

I believe the DM is eyeballing the situation, such as a Rogue making an Acrobatics roll or a Ranger making an Athletics roll, and based on what he knows about the characters (1st level Rogue with high Dex, 1st level Ranger with moderate Str), and for the purposes of expediency, is making a judgement on whether the PC needs to roll low, medium, or high to succeed. So decisions that the player has made (race, class, skills, expertise, etc.) are being accounted for, but in a very informal way.

I guess I don't believe the DM should be able to just 'make a judgment.' I need consistency, not informality, in the ACTUAL MECHANICS of the game. If the DM wants me to fail, or have a higher chance of failure, then they need to be able to explain why this skill check has a higher DC than the last time I skill checked for this very same thing.

Mendicant

2018-01-10, 11:21 PM

For me, the appeal of 3/3.5/P is the way it simultaneously constrains and enables world-building for me as a DM. I tried so hard to like 4E, I really did, but the out of combat rules support was just too minimal. There weren't enough ways for my players to manipulate the setting I created other than negotiating with me. With 3rd's design theory, it worldbuilding feels like playing with legos. With most other systems I've played, including 4e, it's more akin to painting a picture. The legos are 3d. Once I build my castle or whatever, my friends can play in it, they can take pieces off and move them, or add stuff. The legos are a toy, and they're much more fun to play with than a finished drawing.

The other piece is just sunk cost. I've put a lot of time and effort into my setting and my homebrew, and they're heavily linked to the assumptions of low-level 3.P. I haven't played 5e, but I suspect that if and when I do it will be fun enough but I'll mostly just be looking for interesting bits to loot and carry home to my set of 3.P houserules.

TotallyNotEvil

2018-01-11, 12:40 AM

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3E finally had a formal skill system with skill points, but could quickly get extremely wonky if you weren't paying attention to it. You get some very bizarre results, like 20th-level rogues who can't find/disarm traps, or a 4th level commoner riding around a battletitan dinosaur. Among other things, the 3E skill system has scaling issues... can +0 through +23 really cover all the possibilities between mundane tasks and legendary superheroes? To use the "hot mess/hot rod" analogy... if you weren't paying attention to it, it could be unexpectedly vindictive and viciously punitive, but if you *really* knew how to push the right buttons, you could use it to rob a bank with a paperclip.

See, here's the rub. The bolded part? That's a feature, not a bug.

Who says rogues have to be able to find and disarm traps? Why can't a rogue be an assassin or a social butterfly? Or both, but learn the need to learn how to disarm traps also?

Ever if the game lets me pick an archetype, I'm then locked with that progression and those abilities. What if I want to dabble a bit? My character progression, while often mostly planned out, does have it's odd "I learned Neutralise Poison" moments, I want for the adventure to be able to affect my character's growth.

So maybe the sneaky, trap disarming rogue let his one true friend die, because he just couldn't cut it when fighting. Or he tried talking their way out of a pickle and just dug himself deeper.

Ultimately, 5E tries to dictate the characters through its bounded progression, and that just kills it for me.

The fact the archetypes are fairly stereotypical and don't mix well doesn't help any.

Mordaedil

2018-01-11, 02:04 AM

and all you need for a dnd 5e race is 2 stat increases, an ability you make up, and whether or not they have darkvision, they are both very easy to use.

And you see no problem with this? That's extremely bland compared to something like playing a Mindflayer in D&D 3.5.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-11, 02:36 AM

So, before 3.5, clever strategies, heavy optimization, or the McGuffin +x was required to pass. Adding items was like handing out keys to locked doors.

After 3.5, even moderate optimization beyond "my first fighter" could allow a character to bypass DR.
Precisely my point. 3.0 and earlier editions literally require magical items. 3.5/PF/4E do not. So the idea that 5E is innovative because it doesn't require magical items is clearly marketing hype.

I'm also confused by the text in the middle, which seems to read, "the GM has to maintain balance... unless he doesn't". What were you intending to get across?
I was pointing out the contradiction that (according to some people) if in 3E the characters end up with more magical items than normal, that's a balance issue that the DM needs to compensate for; whereas if in 5E the characters end up with more magical items, that's great because they'll be "ahead of the curve" for the entire campaign.

Florian

2018-01-11, 03:36 AM

And you see no problem with this? That's extremely bland compared to something like playing a Mindflayer in D&D 3.5.

Personally? No. A problem with 3E that we can see over and over again is that the underlying math for monsters is based on them being intended to challenge a party of 3-5 characters, so they are by default more powerful. To compensate the difference in power, the LA rules had to be implemented. This is also the point when things like poly morphing into a Hydra will get out of hand, as the Hydra runs on monster design principles, not player character design principles - making the transparency here a bit of an illusion. So, no I don´ tree a problem with player characters running on player character rules, no overlap with other areas of the system.

Yahzi

2018-01-11, 05:56 AM

That's true, but it's also true that you can't build a world that makes sense with either 3e or Pathfinder.
I respectfully disagree. Check out Lords of Prime and Merchants of Prime (both free on DriveThruRPG, see my sig) and see if you still think a feudal medieval world with magic and superheroes is still inconsistent.

I do change one small rule rather dramatically: XP becomes a tangible resource, like gold; but that change makes everything else make sense. I also changed the XP curve to double every level, but that's only to justify kingdom populations in the 100,000+. If you are happy with populations of 10,000 you don't even need to do that.

It really is amazing how much tangible XP fixes things.

Kurald Galain

2018-01-11, 06:27 AM

The last time I bothered to look at Pathfinder the rules were in a near constant state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff all the time-- often without announcement or blog messages to notify players.
That hasn't happened for at least five years now.

Often both phenomena occur on the same character sheet, since the system rewards specialization. Most characters put max ranks into the skills they most want/need and nothing into any other skills (with some exceptions). So you end up with a character whose Spot is so high they can count someone's nose hairs at 50 paces, but whose Sense Motive is so bad they can't tell that the pickpocket they caught was lying when they claim to be the king in disguise.
Given that D&D is a team game, I don't see a problem with that. It's like having an olympic athlete who doesn't know the first thing about computer programming, or a Nobel prize winning scientist who is terminally shy and cannot talk to people. Those are certainly workable character concepts.

As for getting good at something, the 5e system of 'you can always fail' is horrible with most skills. If I do something every day, for months or years on end, then OF COURSE I'm going to get so good at it that I fail less than 5% of the time (i.e. rolling a 1). So why shouldn't my character be able to get so good at something that the only possible way to fail at the task is a crit-fail on my roll?
Yep. I want my RPG characters to be potentially better than I am in real life, not automatically worse.

AnimeTheCat

2018-01-11, 07:58 AM

Personally? No. A problem with 3E that we can see over and over again is that the underlying math for monsters is based on them being intended to challenge a party of 3-5 characters, so they are by default more powerful. To compensate the difference in power, the LA rules had to be implemented. This is also the point when things like poly morphing into a Hydra will get out of hand, as the Hydra runs on monster design principles, not player character design principles - making the transparency here a bit of an illusion. So, no I don´ tree a problem with player characters running on player character rules, no overlap with other areas of the system.

Personally, I don't find the character/monster system to be a bad system, I find the polymorph et all spells (an the magic system as a whole) to be bad. That's just my opinion, FWIW. I handle it in my own way when necessary, but most of the time it's not a problem in my gaming groups.

Darrin

2018-01-11, 08:31 AM

See, here's the rub. The bolded part? That's a feature, not a bug.

I agree! I really enjoy the capability to crank up the modifiers to do obscenely silly things like slip through a wall of force, or the freedom to build a character that is deliberately bad at something they should be good at.

But to a casual player, the 3E skill system can be an impenetrable wall of complexity that literally kills people, as they may make assumptions about what skills their character should be good at without having the mechanics to back it up. Even in the hands of a veteran optimizer, qualifying for a particular PrC or feat may leave you starved of skill-points in a certain area that makes the PC fundamentally weaker or less effective in certain situations.

I love the fiddly-ness of the 3E system, but I also like the Pathfinder system where the classes are naturally competent at things they are normally expected to be competent in without having to think too hard about it or invest a lot of time into optimizing it.

Pex

2018-01-11, 08:51 AM

I agree! I really enjoy the capability to crank up the modifiers to do obscenely silly things like slip through a wall of force, or the freedom to build a character that is deliberately bad at something they should be good at.

But to a casual player, the 3E skill system can be an impenetrable wall of complexity that literally kills people, as they may make assumptions about what skills their character should be good at without having the mechanics to back it up. Even in the hands of a veteran optimizer, qualifying for a particular PrC or feat may leave you starved of skill-points in a certain area that makes the PC fundamentally weaker or less effective in certain situations.

I love the fiddly-ness of the 3E system, but I also like the Pathfinder system where the classes are naturally competent at things they are normally expected to be competent in without having to think too hard about it or invest a lot of time into optimizing it.

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

Vhaidara

2018-01-11, 09:04 AM

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

<citation needed>

And apparently that's not 10 characters?

Scots Dragon

2018-01-11, 10:13 AM

That's going too far with the 3E bashing. 3E has never killed anyone!

You obviously missed the first round of conflict over Pun Pun. I can still remember the screaming... Oh the terrible screaming.

Grod_The_Giant

2018-01-11, 10:58 AM

5e is basically E6 turned into a 1-20 game. You get competent and powerful, enough so that you can fight off dozens or hundreds of normal soldiers, but never so much that you completely leave the mortal world behind. )They did it weirdly, mind you, with hit points being the primary scaling mechanic, but in their defense doing otherwise would have meant radically changing the HP mechanic.) You're not meant to depart substantially from the "classic" D&D experience, be that reaching "I'm a demigod; mortals are my toys now" levels of power or creating semi-impenetrable "I'm a Tauric Mimic Monk 2/Dungeoncrasher Fighter 1/Disciple of Jubillex 5/Tattooed Monk 1/Ur-Priest 2/Disciple of Jubillex +2" mashups.

Does it? Did it have items as cool as the Wand of Wonder, the Amulet of Caterpillar Control, or the Gem Bow? Have you seen GMs describe items created out of a shaft of sunlight, solidified hatred, or unicorn hair? Does it have rules for crafting your own items that involve collecting butterfly dreams?

Do the items have character, or are they merely math?
I mean, flipping through the "magic items" section of the DMG, it's got all the classics. Here's your Apparatus of Kwalish, there's your Dust of Dryness, over yonder is a Robe of Useful Items... my point about raising the "a +2 sword is useful the whole time" wasn't that the items are all about math (which they very much are not), but that you can give a character a spear made out of solid sunlight at 5th level without worrying that it will become obsolete by 10th.

The crafting rules released in Xanathar's actually do involve "collecting butterfly dreams," charmingly enough. It's not just "have a feat, spend time and gold"-- you're required to go on an adventure to track down an exotic material, and there's supposed to be a decent chance that some sort of further adventure hook crops up partway through the time you spend working.

If I'm not mistaken, the thread of thought here wasn't about how fun the rules are, but, rather, how mechanically diverse different characters can be. Or, more accurately, how mechanically diverse different characters with the same "role" can be.

The assertion was, all strikers / tanks / bfc / whatever play the same in 5e, in a way that wasn't true of 3e characters with similar roles.
5e is not as good as 3.5 is at enabling weird character ideas, no questions asked. But "all characters of a given role play the same" is much more of a 4e complaint than a 5e one. Spellcasters and martials play in broadly similar ways, because the game hasn't gone half as far as 3.5 did in exploring weird mechanics, but there's still enough differences that a Barbarian and a Fighter feel distinct*, as do a Cleric and a Druid** or a Wizard and a Sorcerer. (Heck, they do a better job of the Wizard/Sorcerer split than 3.5 did, I'd argue.

*A Totem Barbarian is a high risk, high reward character-- you hit hard, but you get hit all the time, surviving by damage resistance rather than defense-- who operates primarily on a long-rest resource (Rages/Day). And who has to keep attacking, or at least being attacked, if they want to keep raging. A Battle Master Fighter, on the other hand, is more of an expert combatant type. They don't hit as hard, but they make more attacks each round, and they have a set of short-rest based maneuvers that let them do things like extend their reach, trip enemies they just hit, reply to attacks with an opportunity attack, and so on.
**Their spell lists are very different-- Clerics have a lot more buffs and damage-over-time effects, while Druids have a list focused more on control. (5e does a lot more to differentiate casters by spell list than 3.5 did, and there are fewer ways around it)

Velaryon

2018-01-11, 11:13 AM

Given that D&D is a team game, I don't see a problem with that. It's like having an olympic athlete who doesn't know the first thing about computer programming, or a Nobel prize winning scientist who is terminally shy and cannot talk to people. Those are certainly workable character concepts.

Up to a point I agree, but there's also something to be said about a minimum level of competence tied to character level as well. Let's take the example of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith, one of the quintessential examples of why they instituted the 1/2 character level bonus to skills in SWSE. During the chase scene with General Grievous, Obi-Wan rides the (pauses to check Wookieepedia) varactyl through an extended chase sequence that undoubtedly would have required at least a few Ride checks. Were he a 3.5 D&D character, Obi-Wan would almost certainly have failed those checks and failed to keep up with Grievous, because given the other abilities we've seen him demonstrate more often, it's unlikely that he has invested into the Ride skill. Yet that scene was possible because Obi-Wan got a certain bonus to his skill just for being a high-level character. He likely would have fallen short of someone specialized in riding mounts, even if they were substantially lower level, but at least he wasn't so bad at this particular skill that he had to wait for someone to come pick him up and drive him to the battle.

Granted, it's personal preference whether you want a system that allows for a respectable level of competence purely based on level or a system that allows you to be really, really bad at something if you haven't trained in it. There are also other ways to look at this as a problem, such as 3.5 probably having too many skills, splitting up things like Hide and Move Silently that arguably should be one skill, screwing over a lot of classes by barely giving them any skill points to spend, and just the concept of class vs. cross-class skills in general.