There are a number of issues here, not the least is your misunderstanding of what the healing surge system was meant to do, but what valid complaints you have all greatly diminished as 4e's run went on.
Of course, if they lost you with the PHB you'd (and others like you) never found out about the stuff they did with later classes.
I think 4e is probably the most solid system for any version of D&D. I also think it was one of the worst presented since the early days, and it doesn't have the excuse of basically creating the genre out of whole cloth.
It's good that it got better! I recall that Healing Surges were an attempt to 1) reduce the "need to have a Cleric", and 2) Reduce the amount of healing accessible to the characters. I did waste 10 minutes trying to find the original Wizards.com article, but I wasn't able to track it down, sorry.
The short rest/long rest system seems like a better way to make healing less of a chore without being too accessible.
@Goumindong I don't need to use semantics to hide my bias. I don't like 4e very much for a multitude of reasons that don't necessarily make it a bad game, just not one I particularly enjoy. There you go. I'm biased.
Yes, everyone can trip as a basic mechanic in 4e and 5e. In 4e and 5e they've reduced its effectiveness as a tactic, in my opinion. It wasn't terribly useful in 3.x unless you took certain options, but those options were there and were not bad.
I don't know enough about 4e to say that tripping was a horrible, useless mechanic. I played mostly core, before all the ____ Power books came out, and I can't remember tripping coming up outside of power based abilities. You've made a case for tripping in 5e, but I feel that it's a corner case ability.
Reducing an ability to the point where it's not useful is the same as removing it, in my opinion.
Tripping as a combat maneuver should be a sub-optimal choice for anyone that isn't trained at making it good. I don't understand how or why it would be otherwise.
Tripping and other combat positioning mechanics were far more valuable in 4e (which had many more zone spells and environmental damage effects (that mattered) than they were in 3.5 though the tripping mechanic was far less valuable this was more because people tended to pick forced movement powers.
When I suggested you were using the "abstractionism" to hide your bias I meant from yourself.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Never understood people's obsession with things like tripping and similar. Just hit things and kill them faster so we can move on.
Tripping and other combat positioning mechanics were far more valuable in 4e (which had many more zone spells and environmental damage effects (that mattered) than they were in 3.5 though the tripping mechanic was far less valuable this was more because people tended to pick forced movement powers.
Movement was crucial to power use in 4E; I'm not sure how important movement is in 5E from what I've read so far. I think the intent was to de-emphasize miniature use since many players don't use them, but I'm not sure.
5E pretends that maps and minis aren't necessary anymore, but the game mechanics still use distance and positioning as much as and in the same way as every edition of D&D before it.
Tripping as a combat maneuver should be a sub-optimal choice for anyone that isn't trained at making it good. I don't understand how or why it would be otherwise.
I agree, which is why I prefer 3.x's way of doing it, where I could get specific tripping options and be good at it, as opposed to 5e's 'you have to be a fighter, or you only get to do it once a fight'. If there were a line of feats or something that made tripping as a general action better, I'd be happy with that.
Movement is still pretty important unless you ignore cover, 3/4ths cover, and AOE spells and also have flat featureless combat spaces and never worry about whether or not the fighter can stop movement towards the wizard and so forth. Cover is simultaneously more and less important (more in that the roll effects are more important, less in that you can take a feat to ignore it)
There are probably more spells that create effective zones but fewer that are quite so important as the big wizard Dailys. More importantly, bounded defenses mean that non-magical cc effects like goo bags and nets start being a lot more powerful as should and zone based cc
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Tripping as a combat maneuver should be a sub-optimal choice for anyone that isn't trained at making it good. I don't understand how or why it would be otherwise.
I agree, which is why I prefer 3.x's way of doing it, where I could get specific tripping options and be good at it, as opposed to 5e's 'you have to be a fighter, or you only get to do it once a fight'. If there were a line of feats or something that made tripping as a general action better, I'd be happy with that.
Spending a bunch of feats to do something that has few meaningful consequences out of advantage crit fishing is a guaranteed trap option. 5e doesn't even have the ability to take advantage of an enemy being prone anywhere near as much as what 4e can do, because prone in 4e is a heavy penalty to your movement, while on 5e it is barely worth it because an enemy merely sacrifices half the movement to stand up.
Time wasted tripping an enemy as I mentioned is much better spent just hitting them. To 5es credit, it seems to have acknowledged that. I am kind of confused what your argument even really is, because tripping really is a gigantic waste of time compared to "Is this guy on 0 HP and can't do anything again ever?" as a status effect. Needing to take a bunch of feats better spent on literally anything else to make it work isn't a great feature - it's a massive poorly designed game design trap. Especially in 5e where the solution to say, the packs of advantage wolves is a dragon flying 5+ feet off the ground (you are immune to being knocked prone when hovering, FYI).
And IMO classes in 4e feel much more distinct than 5e. You have fight guys who just attack every round and then you have casters who usually make a fairly ineffectual ranged attack or cast some spell every round. It feels like you have two classes at the table just about every time and the lack of tactical nitty gritty really emphasises this problem.
For all of the criticism of 4e AEDU system, it at least produced many variations and concepts within that framework. 5e honestly feels much more homogenized to me, especially because every spellcaster is pretty much using stuff off the same spell lists in many ways.
I don't think you played a trip fighter in 3.5e. That shit was hardcore. PF made it even better, as you could get a shield that gave you a free trip attempt when you shield bashed. Basically you'd get five hits off, two of which gave free trips on a hit, and also an additional free trip attack. And you could replace regular attacks with trips. If they stood up, you got AoOs which could also trip.
Basically it gave the fighter some form of CC before 4e added in their defender mark, which was pretty interesting.
How fast are the combats in 5E? It seems to be one recurring theme and seems a plus.
I hear they take forever in 4e but I played only in one game I joined in the low and finished in upper teens. Combat did take forever but it was really a player kind of issue as one or two players reading through all their powers every turn will drag it out. I guess if I have the same kind of player choosing a wizard in 5e, the combat length issue would be pretty similar?
I'll be playing in a 5e game this January and can't wait to actually try the game. Thinking about a warlock fey with chain pact, the voice invocation and the actor feat.. so many possibilities to be a dick? Invisible sprite talking with my voice imitating other people with advantage in Deception and all that with unlimited range. 10 gp to replace it if it dies!
Other option is barbarian but I feel like just throwing a d20 every round for raw damage isn't that exciting. Sundered Dwarf butcher folk hero! Tenderizing the countrysides but kind of limited standard attacks, rage and passive buffs once combat starts..
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
How fast are the combats in 5E? It seems to be one recurring theme and seems a plus.
Very slow in my experience because the group is quite new, so 90% of time is wasted looking up spells. In fact looking up spells is arguably the single biggest time sink I experience. One of the reasons I started making my own spells for monsters was because continuously looking them up was grinding my game to a halt every time.
Now if only I had a PDF or something and could just print the fucking spells...
And when you get to high levels and summons come into play it's a god damn black bog of time wasting.
I saw them played, where they were spectacularly useless until they finally got their thing going. Where instead of being useless, they were mostly a time sink and I still found them frequently useless (depending on what the monster is).
I am basically not enthused with it over "Just kill things much faster", which IMO is always the best possible option.
You move forward but can't make it 30 feet to hit an enemy. Rather than taking a ranged attack you read an action to trip. Enemy moves>1/2 its speed towards you, you trip him when he enters your space. He can't get up for a full round without dashing(which might not work), has disadvantage on all attacks he makes, and has advantage on all melee attacks against him for an entire round.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited December 2014
Actually, I don't agree that's a valid perceptible trigger because how fast something moves is not known to a PC inherently. "Moves next to me" is, but specifically moved over half it's movement is not. The player would entirely have to guess if the creature had moved more than half it's speed - not rely on it as a guarantee.
I still think that's generally a waste of an action and it won't always have much (if any) effect as some creatures don't give a shit if they are prone when they attack (anything that inflicts a saving throw for example, like breath weapons, possession etc). In fact in my game, that would help them immensely because over half the party was a ranged character and the disadvantage on attacks would make life very hard. Also every character has some kind of ranged attack, so doing damage is always the priority (especially because most of my changes have been to speed up 5es surprisingly slow combat).
Well i mean you eyeball it, just stop about 20-30 feet from a creature but yea if you're all ranged its terrible
edit: Also 5e's combat should not surprise anyone its slow. Its 3.5 style HD with out any of the 3.5 massive damage modifiers or number of attacks or cheeze or magic items or save or die spells. While reducing spellcasters effective save power and reducing the raw power of spells in general because of no caster level scaling except on cantrips and of course fewer spells overall
I clearly missed a couple weeks in this thread. Last time I was here, one of the big things people liked about 5e was that the combat was fast. That was a whole centerpiece of their marketing, even.
Is that still a position people hold, or is this a scenario where the speed of play slows down dramatically as you move up in level, and the new 5e campaigns have now leveled up enough to notice?
How fast are the combats in 5E? It seems to be one recurring theme and seems a plus. I hear they take forever in 4e but I played only in one game I joined in the low and finished in upper teens. Combat did take forever but it was really a player kind of issue as one or two players reading through all their powers every turn will drag it out. I guess if I have the same kind of player choosing a wizard in 5e, the combat length issue would be pretty similar?
I'll be playing in a 5e game this January and can't wait to actually try the game. Thinking about a warlock fey with chain pact, the voice invocation and the actor feat.. so many possibilities to be a dick? Invisible sprite talking with my voice imitating other people with advantage in Deception and all that with unlimited range. 10 gp to replace it if it dies!
Other option is barbarian but I feel like just throwing a d20 every round for raw damage isn't that exciting. Sundered Dwarf butcher folk hero! Tenderizing the countrysides but kind of limited standard attacks, rage and passive buffs once combat starts..
Combats in 4E take exactly however long you and your players want them to take. If you are sitting around and bullshitting, they take longer. If you all know your characters and what they are capable of, and spend the time between turns thinking about what you are going to do on your turn, combat is pretty quick (to me). A well played group that knows their characters can probably crank through an encounter in 45 minutes or so. If you are pissing around, could take an hour and a half to two hours. Also depends on the size of your group; one more player isn't just one more piece, it's at least 2, as the DM needs to boost the encounter to compensate for the added person. My IRL game bullshits a lot, so it's usually closer to 1:15 or 1:30 per encounter (which is fine, because it's also guy's night, so bullshitting is encouraged), but I've seen one of my roll20 groups that tend to know their characters better run encounters much quicker.
I've found that the majority of the time in D&D 4th combat is players checking the status of other players, like who needs healing, who has the best positioning for a +2 bonus, who can attack before the monster gets to go, stuff like that.
Which I consider a good thing: it means that the players are thinking about the party as a whole, not just, "On my go I'm going to hit this guy."
Absolutely. And most of that stuff is stuff they can think about off their turn, so once their turn actually comes up everything goes quickly.
Edit: I find making a cheat sheet with all of your powers separated by action to be immensely helpful with figuring out what you can do, since it's easy to go to the section with whatever action type you still have available to use. And great off-turn if you have Immediates to use so you have all of them in one place.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Combat to me takes a fair amount of time for two reasons:
A) People looking up spells (which requires fiddling with a PHB, getting to the right spot, looking at the spell etc). This is caused directly by a lack of electronic tools or a PDF that should make this process painless. For now this is caused by the fact I don't bother remembering every spell in the PHB and my players are all fairly new, so even "iconic" spells are still fairly novel. Plus some things are easily missed like some spells being cast as bonus actions (EG Healing Word).
The fact monsters have plain whacky amounts of HP at times. Kuo-Toa whips IIRC are CR 1 and have about 63 HP or something like this. They really need to take a severe beating to be put down, while my players are usually rolling 1d8+4 for damage. You can guess how long this makes everything (spoiler: A lot).
I am unsure if B is caused by my refusal to allow adventuring to boil down to a simple 5 minute work day and thus allow the PCs to dump all of their best stuff at once then rest. I am honestly wondering if this system is designed around giving up and just saying "players are going to do it anyway".
I am beginning to get on top of B with 13th Ages Escalation Rules, which mean players hit more, hit harder and thus kill things faster as a combat wears on. I am getting much less grindy boring battles like I was before and now getting interesting up front fights for the first 2-3 rounds and then once it is clear the PCs are going to win the monsters just die faster and more efficiently after this point. Works entirely as I wanted it to basically, which I am still super duper proud of and again, my players love this rule (and really, that's the most important part to me: A rule that satisfying to everyone).
Ironically, even though I have been adding more rules generally to the tactical side of the game, like changing how opportunity attacks work to prevent the idiotic "Dancing" effect present in 5E inherently, this hasn't really slowed up combat that much. I will say I am dreading getting back to high levels again, because those severely slowed down due to multiple attacks and in particular, summoned creatures (these grind the game to a terrible halt very quickly). Hopefully my "You take 1d6 damage per summoned killed" rule will be enough to mitigate players wanting to summon tarpits of low CR monsters.
Not that the D&D Open was the gold standard of 4e play or anything, but to further drive the point home, if you took more than 1 hour in a combat, you were DQed.
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I don't think he's saying balance in a game is a bad thing. I am pretty sure what he's saying is that since 5e is inherently unbalanced (from the design level on up, perhaps), that expecting balance from it is going to give you a disproportionately negative view of it.
The same as if I put out a country music album and you lambasted it for never dropping the bass. Lack of balance is certainly something worth discussing, but I think he's asserting that a large part of people's negative opinion of 5e is overvaluing mechanical balance.
But, if people value mechanical balance, if that is something that they need to find a game worth playing and to develop a positive opinion of it, why is having a negative opinion of 5E because it's not balanced out of the question? Are you implying it's only acceptable to have an opinion of something if you first accept that only their intended design metrics should be valued?
To go with your analogy, releasing a country album and being lambasted that it's... not electronica, is the equivalent of us complaining 5E isn't... a video game. Which isn't what we are doing. What we are doing is more equivalent to you releasing a country album and us complaining that this new album you are too twangy, or your tone is too much about love, where your old album was more mellow or neutral in tone.
But, if people value mechanical balance, if that is something that they need to find a game worth playing and to develop a positive opinion of it, why is having a negative opinion of 5E because it's not balanced out of the question? Are you implying it's only acceptable to have an opinion of something if you first accept that only their intended design metrics should be valued?
To go with your analogy, releasing a country album and being lambasted that it's... not electronica, is the equivalent of us complaining 5E isn't... a video game. Which isn't what we are doing. What we are doing is more equivalent to you releasing a country album and us complaining that this new album you are too twangy, or your tone is too much about love, where your old album was more mellow or neutral in tone.
I'm not actually making that argument, I just thought it was pretty clear he wasn't saying balance was bad.
But, if people value mechanical balance, if that is something that they need to find a game worth playing and to develop a positive opinion of it, why is having a negative opinion of 5E because it's not balanced out of the question? Are you implying it's only acceptable to have an opinion of something if you first accept that only their intended design metrics should be valued?
I think it's valuable to evaluate a given game from both an objective and subjective point of view.
Ironically, these are counterintuitively backwards in my mind. An objective evaluation would compare games against each other across metrics established by the evaluator. A subjective evaluation would compare a given game against the design goals for said game.
I clearly missed a couple weeks in this thread. Last time I was here, one of the big things people liked about 5e was that the combat was fast. That was a whole centerpiece of their marketing, even.
Is that still a position people hold, or is this a scenario where the speed of play slows down dramatically as you move up in level, and the new 5e campaigns have now leveled up enough to notice?
'cause, I mean
3rd and 4th play pretty fast at level 1, too
I can tell you that my midtier game (they just hit 14) plays *much* faster in 5E than it did in 4E. Paragon tier 4E combat was very slow compared to how our 5E combat goes now.
I clearly missed a couple weeks in this thread. Last time I was here, one of the big things people liked about 5e was that the combat was fast. That was a whole centerpiece of their marketing, even.
Is that still a position people hold, or is this a scenario where the speed of play slows down dramatically as you move up in level, and the new 5e campaigns have now leveled up enough to notice?
'cause, I mean
3rd and 4th play pretty fast at level 1, too
I can tell you that my midtier game (they just hit 14) plays *much* faster in 5E than it did in 4E. Paragon tier 4E combat was very slow compared to how our 5E combat goes now.
I could see this being mostly true, depending on DM prep. Even if 5th slows down from having to look up spells/etc, 4e also slowed down in paragon from more people having to look up what their powers did at various levels (and this is variable, some groups had a preparedness level that saw little to no slow down).
The difference is that in 5th you only have one action to slow down that way. In 4e, by mid paragon, you could easily have multiple powers to choose from for all three of your actions, and then have some sort of additional action (immediate actions, free/no actions, action points), such that you had effectively 4 actions each round, as opposed to the 1-2 you have in 5th. So yeah, naturally it's going to go faster.
Combat in any d20 game is as fast as your players are prepared when it is their turn. Nothing more, nothing less, because none of them deviate in any meaningful way from the "roll to hit, roll damage, apply effects" model.
You can't really ignore the importance of expected round count. All else being equal, a game with combat that typically ends in two rounds is twice as fast as a game with combat that typically requires four.
Then there's all the fiddly bits, like how much extraneous temporary data you have to track, how many entities the DM is generally expected to control, and even how many dice you have to roll and add up.
Player preparation and attentiveness is probably the most important factor, but it's also the factor that remains pretty steady within a group between games. It's the other factors that groups really notice when they switch the game they're playing.
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The number of reasons not to play with an Escalation Die in this day and age are approaching zero, but sure. There's some variability in encounter length, but nobody sits down and goes "I think we can make combat rounds take at least 15 more minutes!"
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
That is one thing I will say against 5e in particular, is because they don't have things like scaling minions and such you are expected to just use bunches of low level chaff to fill out later encounters. Naturally, this works terribly in practice as they cat scratch heroes, don't have the abilities to challenge high level players and simply make combats take longer due to me needing to decide what to do with them (the answer is always tarpit the nearest hero btw).
Also they're just sacks of HP anyway. 60 HP is about 1.5 rounds of actions by a 4 attack fighter. So if you don't dump AoE spells on em it will take forever to chip that
I've found the lengthiest combat with my group tends to come from them forgetting important and simple tactical advice like "Focus on one target at a time". This happens no matter the system, in my experience, and despite my efforts, I still have to remind them damn near every session that just maybe, it'd be a good idea to kill the dude who is already hurt over dealing some damage to the other enemies.
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It's good that it got better! I recall that Healing Surges were an attempt to 1) reduce the "need to have a Cleric", and 2) Reduce the amount of healing accessible to the characters. I did waste 10 minutes trying to find the original Wizards.com article, but I wasn't able to track it down, sorry.
The short rest/long rest system seems like a better way to make healing less of a chore without being too accessible.
Yes, everyone can trip as a basic mechanic in 4e and 5e. In 4e and 5e they've reduced its effectiveness as a tactic, in my opinion. It wasn't terribly useful in 3.x unless you took certain options, but those options were there and were not bad.
I don't know enough about 4e to say that tripping was a horrible, useless mechanic. I played mostly core, before all the ____ Power books came out, and I can't remember tripping coming up outside of power based abilities. You've made a case for tripping in 5e, but I feel that it's a corner case ability.
Reducing an ability to the point where it's not useful is the same as removing it, in my opinion.
When I suggested you were using the "abstractionism" to hide your bias I meant from yourself.
Movement was crucial to power use in 4E; I'm not sure how important movement is in 5E from what I've read so far. I think the intent was to de-emphasize miniature use since many players don't use them, but I'm not sure.
I agree, which is why I prefer 3.x's way of doing it, where I could get specific tripping options and be good at it, as opposed to 5e's 'you have to be a fighter, or you only get to do it once a fight'. If there were a line of feats or something that made tripping as a general action better, I'd be happy with that.
There are probably more spells that create effective zones but fewer that are quite so important as the big wizard Dailys. More importantly, bounded defenses mean that non-magical cc effects like goo bags and nets start being a lot more powerful as should and zone based cc
Spending a bunch of feats to do something that has few meaningful consequences out of advantage crit fishing is a guaranteed trap option. 5e doesn't even have the ability to take advantage of an enemy being prone anywhere near as much as what 4e can do, because prone in 4e is a heavy penalty to your movement, while on 5e it is barely worth it because an enemy merely sacrifices half the movement to stand up.
Time wasted tripping an enemy as I mentioned is much better spent just hitting them. To 5es credit, it seems to have acknowledged that. I am kind of confused what your argument even really is, because tripping really is a gigantic waste of time compared to "Is this guy on 0 HP and can't do anything again ever?" as a status effect. Needing to take a bunch of feats better spent on literally anything else to make it work isn't a great feature - it's a massive poorly designed game design trap. Especially in 5e where the solution to say, the packs of advantage wolves is a dragon flying 5+ feet off the ground (you are immune to being knocked prone when hovering, FYI).
And IMO classes in 4e feel much more distinct than 5e. You have fight guys who just attack every round and then you have casters who usually make a fairly ineffectual ranged attack or cast some spell every round. It feels like you have two classes at the table just about every time and the lack of tactical nitty gritty really emphasises this problem.
For all of the criticism of 4e AEDU system, it at least produced many variations and concepts within that framework. 5e honestly feels much more homogenized to me, especially because every spellcaster is pretty much using stuff off the same spell lists in many ways.
Basically it gave the fighter some form of CC before 4e added in their defender mark, which was pretty interesting.
I hear they take forever in 4e but I played only in one game I joined in the low and finished in upper teens. Combat did take forever but it was really a player kind of issue as one or two players reading through all their powers every turn will drag it out. I guess if I have the same kind of player choosing a wizard in 5e, the combat length issue would be pretty similar?
I'll be playing in a 5e game this January and can't wait to actually try the game. Thinking about a warlock fey with chain pact, the voice invocation and the actor feat.. so many possibilities to be a dick? Invisible sprite talking with my voice imitating other people with advantage in Deception and all that with unlimited range. 10 gp to replace it if it dies!
Other option is barbarian but I feel like just throwing a d20 every round for raw damage isn't that exciting. Sundered Dwarf butcher folk hero! Tenderizing the countrysides but kind of limited standard attacks, rage and passive buffs once combat starts..
Very slow in my experience because the group is quite new, so 90% of time is wasted looking up spells. In fact looking up spells is arguably the single biggest time sink I experience. One of the reasons I started making my own spells for monsters was because continuously looking them up was grinding my game to a halt every time.
Now if only I had a PDF or something and could just print the fucking spells...
And when you get to high levels and summons come into play it's a god damn black bog of time wasting.
I saw them played, where they were spectacularly useless until they finally got their thing going. Where instead of being useless, they were mostly a time sink and I still found them frequently useless (depending on what the monster is).
I am basically not enthused with it over "Just kill things much faster", which IMO is always the best possible option.
You move forward but can't make it 30 feet to hit an enemy. Rather than taking a ranged attack you read an action to trip. Enemy moves>1/2 its speed towards you, you trip him when he enters your space. He can't get up for a full round without dashing(which might not work), has disadvantage on all attacks he makes, and has advantage on all melee attacks against him for an entire round.
I still think that's generally a waste of an action and it won't always have much (if any) effect as some creatures don't give a shit if they are prone when they attack (anything that inflicts a saving throw for example, like breath weapons, possession etc). In fact in my game, that would help them immensely because over half the party was a ranged character and the disadvantage on attacks would make life very hard. Also every character has some kind of ranged attack, so doing damage is always the priority (especially because most of my changes have been to speed up 5es surprisingly slow combat).
edit: Also 5e's combat should not surprise anyone its slow. Its 3.5 style HD with out any of the 3.5 massive damage modifiers or number of attacks or cheeze or magic items or save or die spells. While reducing spellcasters effective save power and reducing the raw power of spells in general because of no caster level scaling except on cantrips and of course fewer spells overall
Is that still a position people hold, or is this a scenario where the speed of play slows down dramatically as you move up in level, and the new 5e campaigns have now leveled up enough to notice?
'cause, I mean
3rd and 4th play pretty fast at level 1, too
Combats in 4E take exactly however long you and your players want them to take. If you are sitting around and bullshitting, they take longer. If you all know your characters and what they are capable of, and spend the time between turns thinking about what you are going to do on your turn, combat is pretty quick (to me). A well played group that knows their characters can probably crank through an encounter in 45 minutes or so. If you are pissing around, could take an hour and a half to two hours. Also depends on the size of your group; one more player isn't just one more piece, it's at least 2, as the DM needs to boost the encounter to compensate for the added person. My IRL game bullshits a lot, so it's usually closer to 1:15 or 1:30 per encounter (which is fine, because it's also guy's night, so bullshitting is encouraged), but I've seen one of my roll20 groups that tend to know their characters better run encounters much quicker.
Which I consider a good thing: it means that the players are thinking about the party as a whole, not just, "On my go I'm going to hit this guy."
Edit: I find making a cheat sheet with all of your powers separated by action to be immensely helpful with figuring out what you can do, since it's easy to go to the section with whatever action type you still have available to use. And great off-turn if you have Immediates to use so you have all of them in one place.
A) People looking up spells (which requires fiddling with a PHB, getting to the right spot, looking at the spell etc). This is caused directly by a lack of electronic tools or a PDF that should make this process painless. For now this is caused by the fact I don't bother remembering every spell in the PHB and my players are all fairly new, so even "iconic" spells are still fairly novel. Plus some things are easily missed like some spells being cast as bonus actions (EG Healing Word).
I am unsure if B is caused by my refusal to allow adventuring to boil down to a simple 5 minute work day and thus allow the PCs to dump all of their best stuff at once then rest. I am honestly wondering if this system is designed around giving up and just saying "players are going to do it anyway".
I am beginning to get on top of B with 13th Ages Escalation Rules, which mean players hit more, hit harder and thus kill things faster as a combat wears on. I am getting much less grindy boring battles like I was before and now getting interesting up front fights for the first 2-3 rounds and then once it is clear the PCs are going to win the monsters just die faster and more efficiently after this point. Works entirely as I wanted it to basically, which I am still super duper proud of and again, my players love this rule (and really, that's the most important part to me: A rule that satisfying to everyone).
Ironically, even though I have been adding more rules generally to the tactical side of the game, like changing how opportunity attacks work to prevent the idiotic "Dancing" effect present in 5E inherently, this hasn't really slowed up combat that much. I will say I am dreading getting back to high levels again, because those severely slowed down due to multiple attacks and in particular, summoned creatures (these grind the game to a terrible halt very quickly). Hopefully my "You take 1d6 damage per summoned killed" rule will be enough to mitigate players wanting to summon tarpits of low CR monsters.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
I think you're going to have to walk me through this one
Slowly
1) Firstly, have you been reading the same books as the rest of us? Balance is not something they had in mind developing 5e.
2) Why is balance in a game a bad thing?
The same as if I put out a country music album and you lambasted it for never dropping the bass. Lack of balance is certainly something worth discussing, but I think he's asserting that a large part of people's negative opinion of 5e is overvaluing mechanical balance.
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TBQH I read the post like 4 times and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
To go with your analogy, releasing a country album and being lambasted that it's... not electronica, is the equivalent of us complaining 5E isn't... a video game. Which isn't what we are doing. What we are doing is more equivalent to you releasing a country album and us complaining that this new album you are too twangy, or your tone is too much about love, where your old album was more mellow or neutral in tone.
I'm not actually making that argument, I just thought it was pretty clear he wasn't saying balance was bad.
I think it's valuable to evaluate a given game from both an objective and subjective point of view.
Ironically, these are counterintuitively backwards in my mind. An objective evaluation would compare games against each other across metrics established by the evaluator. A subjective evaluation would compare a given game against the design goals for said game.
I can tell you that my midtier game (they just hit 14) plays *much* faster in 5E than it did in 4E. Paragon tier 4E combat was very slow compared to how our 5E combat goes now.
I could see this being mostly true, depending on DM prep. Even if 5th slows down from having to look up spells/etc, 4e also slowed down in paragon from more people having to look up what their powers did at various levels (and this is variable, some groups had a preparedness level that saw little to no slow down).
The difference is that in 5th you only have one action to slow down that way. In 4e, by mid paragon, you could easily have multiple powers to choose from for all three of your actions, and then have some sort of additional action (immediate actions, free/no actions, action points), such that you had effectively 4 actions each round, as opposed to the 1-2 you have in 5th. So yeah, naturally it's going to go faster.
Then there's all the fiddly bits, like how much extraneous temporary data you have to track, how many entities the DM is generally expected to control, and even how many dice you have to roll and add up.
Player preparation and attentiveness is probably the most important factor, but it's also the factor that remains pretty steady within a group between games. It's the other factors that groups really notice when they switch the game they're playing.
Especially in DnD where a creature with 1hp hits as often and as hard as a creature with full hp.