D&D versions. Taking (up) the 5th?

[canyonwalker]

I've written before that I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for a long time. I started with the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic rules, aka the "blue box", in the early 1980s; then bought the Second Basic D&D, aka "magenta box" rules, which expanded with Expert, Companion, and Master sets; then graduated to Advanced D&D. From there I followed along to AD&D Second Edition, then (name change) D&D 3rd Edition, then D&D 3.5.

Why so many versions? Well, understand that the companies behind D&D are book publishers. They make money by selling books. What better way to drive book sales than by putting out whole new versions of the rules every 5-7 years? And that's exactly what they've done. Devoted D&D players buy new books all over again every cycle. Except I hopped off the corporate America treadmill after 3.5. I decided I'd had enough.

Partly my choice to stick with 3.5 was frustration with purchasing and absorbing ever more new systems. Partly it's because 3.5 didn't have anything majorly broken with it that I wanted to fix (at the time). And partly it was because the next version, 4th Edition, frankly sucked. It broke with too much of what had made D&D, well, D&D for 3 decades and introduced rules seemingly more tuned to short-attention-span adolescents weaned on computer games.

Fourth Edition wasn't the end of the line. Now there's 5th Edition. Friends tell me it's a lot closer to the style of D&D 3.x than 4. So I'm trying it out.

Hawk and I bought two of the D&D 5e manuals recently. Our impetus was joining a game with younger players. You see, 3.5e was released in 2003. Seventeen years ago. That means there's an entire generation of D&D players for whom 3.5 has always been old. If we want to expand our gaming circle beyond old-school middle-age players we've got to join up with the present day.

D&D 5th Edition is interesting. It's closer to the 3.5 rules than 4th edition was. It fixes one main problem of 3.5: the system of advancement that makes higher level characters basically untouchable by NPCs and monsters more than a handful of levels lower than them.

I see this in my long term game, where we use 3.5 rules. It's particularly a challenge as the characters have risen to high levels (15-20). Their increasing wealth affords them access to magic items which, when combined with their level based bonuses, make it so that even upper-mid level foes can only hit them on a "natural 20" (a 5% chance of success).

This power imbalance casts the game into a particular style. High level PCs are basically superheroes. Attacks from anyone or anything that's not also a "super" just bounce off. That's not wrong in any absolute sense, it's just a particular theme of play— a theme that may not fit with the way the setting and storylines were conceived at lower levels.

How does 5E do it differently? Two things. First, level based bonuses do not ramp up as quickly. Second, magic items have smaller "pluses", and even the lower pluses are more expensive. Together these changes keep higher level characters from being able simply to ignore lower level foes.

I don't foresee migrating to 5E in my long term game. The move from 2E to 3.0 years ago disrupted things in my game that I didn't originally anticipate. I won't repeat that level of disruption with all the years of development invested into that game. But for new games, particularly with younger players, I could see choosing 5th Edition.

At the same time I'm reluctant even to start a new game with D&D 5. It's several years old at this point, having first been published in 2014. One thing we've learned from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro/Whomever Owns It Now is publishers gonna publish. There's a whole never version of the rules every few years to spur sales of a whole new set of rulebooks. I'm reluctant to get too deeply invested— financially or mentally— in 5E. My Spidey Corporate Profiteering Sense warns me there'll be yet-another all-new rules set published soon.

Comments

[lowbeyonder]

I've played & run a lot of high-level 3rd. Less experience with 5th overall, just a few low- to mid-level games and one level 15 one-off, and my impression is that while 5e still has a quadratic power curve, the constants are low enough that you don't tend to be as far off baseline before you hit level 20 anyway, whereas in 3e the takeoff point into crazytown happened somewhere between 8th and 12th level depending on how clever/abusive your players were.

I've also found, though, that the "tiering" behavior of 3e really worked for me, as long as the players were all within shouting distance of each other[1]. The way the game graduates through distinct phases, where certain kinds of encounters shift from impossible to challenging to trivial, helps keep things feeling fresh. I've played more "balanced" games where higher level encounters are basically palette-shifted versions of lower ones, whereas in 3e what "a fight" looks & plays like at level 15 is completely different from level 5.

What I'd love is a game that could capture that feel, still be a crunchy tactical game throughout, and not be a mountain of bookkeeping the way high-level 3e can be.

(Some people have claimed what I'm looking for is actually just 4th and man, I have tried. I hated 4th at release but went back to it multiple times in its lifecycle. I finally had enough good experiences to at least get a sense of what people were enjoying about it, but it still never clicked with me.)

[1] I.e. no one was going on infinite power loops, but they did all show up with full casters, reasonably optimized caster-hybrids, or hideously power-gamed rogues, and no one did anything dumb like take the third level of Fighter.

[jnovak]

4e solved, for me, one problem that had bothered me about the standard D&D family for ages: It gave non-spellcasters just as many options to do something interesting as the spellcasters. I find playing fighters and fighter-types to be soul-numbingly boring in most D&D-type games, and rogue-likes are at best a mixed bag depending on the GM. "Oh, it's my turn? I guess I hit it with my sharp or blunt metal object. Again." And with healing surges, even clerics have the option to be something other than party medic.

If I'm going to run a game for players who are interested in mechanical combat (as I often do, because that's who I game with) then that is worth quite a bit to me-- enough to make me work to overcome the other problems with the system and still call it a bargain. (And if I'm not running a game for players interested in mechanical combat, I'm not running D&D of any variant, because why the fuck would I?)

And there were definitely problems with it:

1) I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it was unbalanced in the sense of class vs class, but it got grindier and grindier in combat as the levels progressed. My strong sense from keeping up with things at the time is that this is because WotC forced the designers into a death march to get the thing released by an arbitrary deadline, and the playtesting was woefully inadequate.

2) In addition to an action economy per round (which was fairly functional) the game was arc-welded to a power-resource-economy which was also fairly functional... if and only if you accepted their notion of how many fights per game day the characters would experience, and how many fights per level they would experience. I'm referring to the whole "daily power" concept, which turns out to be a very stubborn lynchpin in the architecture of the whole game. It can be fixed-- I know it can, because I fixed it, but my fix only reset the balance for my sense of pacing, it wasn't a universal fix.

Those were the big problems. And they compound themselves if you've got to have four-ish major fights per game day and they're getting longer and crunchier every level.

The smaller problems were:

3) Publishing houses gotta publish. And a lot of D&D publishing falls in three branches: Moar Monsters, Moar Settings, and Moar Classes. Moar Monsters and Moar Settings is fine, everyone loves those. The Moar Classes, though.... Man, if you want to define a new class in 4e, you're really signing yourself up to defining the entire class, including all the various options for level feats, right from the ground up. That's a huge amount of material to grind out, if you're not allowed to borrow extensively from existing classes. And every new class consumes a comparatively huge chunk of the mechanical design space. As a consequence, even by the PHB2, some of the new classes were starting to look weird, uninspiring, and weirdly uninspiring. (This, in contrast to 3e, 3.5e, and 5e, where the new classes are other classes with relatively minor modifications. Easier to pump out, equally or perhaps more uninspiring, but less weird.) 4e reached that phase of its existence pretty damn early, by my recollection.

4) 4e was always supposed to be a sort of a subscription deal. Whether that would have been a good idea or a bad idea, we'll never know. It's at least possible that having a certain revenue per month would have broken or modified the publish or perish mindset. It's also possible it would have been a useless money pit that didn't provide value. But we'll never know because the lead designer for the digital subscription tools killed his wife and them himself (the full story is actually horrible) leaving the project basically in limbo because there were no notes and no one else who could carry it forward.

I am told that Pathfinder 2e is supposedly "the good parts of 4e" lifted and put back into a more classical D&D type mechanics system. I have no idea what these people are talking about, though.

[canyonwalker]

PF2 has good critical reviews. I've spent a bit of time reading the rules as a friend is starting a small game. It does appear to take what you like most about D&D 4— all classes have options beyond "roll to hit" in combat— and apply it in a framework a little more similar to D&D 3.x. I'll share what I learn as I get more into it.

[jnovak]

I'm playing in PF2e right now, and it feels absolutely nothing like 4e.

[canyonwalker]

It's not even comparable in the one respect I suggested?

[jnovak]

Not that I've seen, no.

[lowbeyonder]

I have played a little Pathfinder of both editions, and they feel like nothing so much as someone's 3.5 house rules trying to fix the things that personally annoyed them.

I admit I tend to ignore them though. Some of the devs were kinda shitty during the public playtest phase of Pathfinder 1 towards playtesters who were actually trying to do systemic testing (rather than, I guess, they just wanted groups to play it as a vibe check). In the grand scheme of things it wasn't that big a deal, and probably doesn't justify still being vaguely cranky about. But it soured me on the project and there are a lot of other games I can play instead.

[jnovak]

That's a reasonable take, from what I've seen so far.
And there's nothing wrong with that-- if you (generically) were incensed over 4e and just wanted a good, solid 3.5e slightly improved clone, well, here you go.

[canyonwalker]

I had an interesting chat this morning with two of the players in my LT 3.5 game who've also played a lot of D&D5 and PF2 recently. We agreed that the power curve in D&D 3.x is too steep toward the higher end. They cautioned that D&D 5 goes too far the other way. The power curve, including what you get from magic items, is so flat that going up levels feels unrewarding. "It's like you're just doing the same thing over and over." To me that's a cure no better than the illness.