D&D (2024) Hypothesis: Playtest 7 delayed to add elements inspired by BG3

[Mistwell]

Hit point bloat made 4E combat so long, not additional decision points.

That said, making combat longer isn't inherently bad if the combat is interesting, tense and/or fun.

I was a 4e fan, but I definitely found decision points during combat extended combat greatly. And I think combat is already a tad long in 5e. Making it longer even with interesting stuff would not be a good idea. We can have more interesting stuff while not making it longer.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Most groups I play with could not get a 4e fight done in under a hour. But could manage several 5e fights in that time.

At what level, though?

4E was weird because we found it was very easy to get through fights from like, level 1-7, but the nature of the abilities started changing after that, to way more Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions, and so on, and by about 13, sudden we'd gone from easily getting a good fun fight down in 30-40 minutes to taking well over an hour, sometimes far over.

I haven't ever seen an actual, real, honest-to-god, at the table 5E group that can get through "several" i.e. at least 4 non-trivial fights in 1 hour. That's some unicorn stuff.

2? Maybe. Sometimes. 3? Never seen it done (usually we'd be looking more at 1hr 10 mins or more for that) but I could believe it, and I've seen close. More than that? Nah. I've never even seen that in a podcast or Twitch, even with less-RP-heavy groups, where they could get a fight done in full in 15 minutes, unless the fight was literally rated "Easy" by the CR calculation (or maybe "Normal" at the absolute outside).

The problem is it's a bit of false comparison even then. Because even "Normal" was "Easy" by 5E's CR calculations in DND Next, they just changed it last minute to being called "Normal" and added a super-easy even lower than that. So you'd really want to compare 5E Hard or very low Deadly to 4E Normal. And in that case, you're pushing it to get two 5E fights in an hour. You need decisive, engaged players who utterly ready for their turn and never have to look stuff up to make even theoretically possible. Ironically my experience is that 4E was much better at making players decisive and engaged, and the way it did abilities meant people usually didn't need to look them up.

So 5E is faster, and a LOT faster than higher-level 4E (and 5E doesn't slow down that much at higher levels, which is definitely nice and more like 2E than 3E or 4E in that regard, both of which became absolute slogs), but I'm not your example is quite convincing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hit point bloat made 4E combat so long, not additional decision points.

That said, making combat longer isn't inherently bad if the combat is interesting, tense and/or fun.

Well, it was both.

With 4E, the HP bloat introduced by [unnamed WotC exec] at the last minute who just blanket-added 20% to all monster HP absolutely did add nearly an extra round to combat.

But once that got fixed, with the improved monster math (which you could auto-calc with the DDI, note!), that was no longer an issue, and things ran really well and decision points became the main thing. 4E genuinely did have far more decision-points for non-casters. Wildly more. This, in my experience, made players vastly more engaged, including ones who normally glazed over in combat in 2E/3E (and who do again in 5E).

Unfortunately the decision points got out of control in the Paragon tier (i.e. 11+) because you got more and more of your abilities being Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions and so on, which meant you basically had decision points continually, not just on your turns, but on other people's turns, monster's turns, and so on. And lots of them too, potentially - many were very strong abilities tactically as well, unfortunately. Didn't help that the monsters got the same, so the DM was also doing it!

And that did cause absolute bloat. It derailed us playing 4E, despite us otherwise loving 4E.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

Well, it was both.

With 4E, the HP bloat introduced by [unnamed WotC exec] at the last minute who just blanket-added 20% to all monster HP absolutely did add nearly an extra round to combat.

But once that got fixed, with the improved monster math (which you could auto-calc with the DDI, note!), that was no longer an issue, and things ran really well and decision points became the main thing. 4E genuinely did have far more decision-points for non-casters. Wildly more. This, in my experience, made players vastly more engaged, including ones who normally glazed over in combat in 2E/3E (and who do again in 5E).

Unfortunately the decision points got out of control in the Paragon tier (i.e. 11+) because you got more and more of your abilities being Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions and so on, which meant you basically had decision points continually, not just on your turns, but on other people's turns, monster's turns, and so on. And lots of them too, potentially - many were very strong abilities tactically as well, unfortunately. Didn't help that the monsters got the same, so the DM was also doing it!

And that did cause absolute bloat. It derailed us playing 4E, despite us otherwise loving 4E.

Checks out.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Unfortunately the decision points got out of control in the Paragon tier (i.e. 11+) because you got more and more of your abilities being Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions and so on

And a ton of the magic items gave you new actions too, so it wasn't even a case of 'okay, I know what my race+class does'. Juggling all the powers (which we even had on cards!) started getting bothersome before you even hit the teen levels, where it really got out of control.

With 4E, the HP bloat

I tried to solve this (and speeding up combat) by considering every damage die to deal its max. 2d8? 16! Next! It actually helped a lot, and didn't break the game - there were a lot of close situations, but the players did have a lot of options to deal with them, so...

 

[Minigiant]

Well, it was both.

With 4E, the HP bloat introduced by [unnamed WotC exec] at the last minute who just blanket-added 20% to all monster HP absolutely did add nearly an extra round to combat.

But once that got fixed, with the improved monster math (which you could auto-calc with the DDI, note!), that was no longer an issue, and things ran really well and decision points became the main thing. 4E genuinely did have far more decision-points for non-casters. Wildly more. This, in my experience, made players vastly more engaged, including ones who normally glazed over in combat in 2E/3E (and who do again in 5E).

Unfortunately the decision points got out of control in the Paragon tier (i.e. 11+) because you got more and more of your abilities being Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions and so on, which meant you basically had decision points continually, not just on your turns, but on other people's turns, monster's turns, and so on. And lots of them too, potentially - many were very strong abilities tactically as well, unfortunately. Didn't help that the monsters got the same, so the DM was also doing it!

And that did cause absolute bloat. It derailed us playing 4E, despite us otherwise loving 4E.

Another issue was that some of the best powers were the slow ones. So many the Reactions, interrupts, and Ongoing damage builds were powerful and slow. The BIg Dumb Damage builds were twice as fast but a noticeably slower. There were a few bright spotslike Rangers were did tons of damage with "Durr I shoot him 4 times"

The problem was that D&D fans as they got higher level and more experienced picked the more complex powers to show their system mastery. Add in the accidentally inflated HP....

Got help you if you started at high level and the group chose the complex powers.

___________________________

But overal.. NAAAAH.

Adding many BG3 ideas to base 5e would be a bad idea without a full DMG rebuild. And many of the popular ideas don't work on TT.
It's just summertime work drag.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And a ton of the magic items gave you new actions too, so it wasn't even a case of 'okay, I know what my race+class does'. Juggling all the powers (which we even had on cards!) started getting bothersome before you even hit the teen levels, where it really got out of control.

Oh god yes I was blocking that mentally but it could add a lot, and some of them were really beautiful in what they added but not necessarily simple.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

At what level, though?

4E was weird because we found it was very easy to get through fights from like, level 1-7, but the nature of the abilities started changing after that, to way more Reactions, Interrupts, Immediate Actions, and so on, and by about 13, sudden we'd gone from easily getting a good fun fight down in 30-40 minutes to taking well over an hour, sometimes far over.

I haven't ever seen an actual, real, honest-to-god, at the table 5E group that can get through "several" i.e. at least 4 non-trivial fights in 1 hour. That's some unicorn stuff.

2? Maybe. Sometimes. 3? Never seen it done (usually we'd be looking more at 1hr 10 mins or more for that) but I could believe it, and I've seen close. More than that? Nah. I've never even seen that in a podcast or Twitch, even with less-RP-heavy groups, where they could get a fight done in full in 15 minutes, unless the fight was literally rated "Easy" by the CR calculation (or maybe "Normal" at the absolute outside).

The problem is it's a bit of false comparison even then. Because even "Normal" was "Easy" by 5E's CR calculations in DND Next, they just changed it last minute to being called "Normal" and added a super-easy even lower than that. So you'd really want to compare 5E Hard or very low Deadly to 4E Normal. And in that case, you're pushing it to get two 5E fights in an hour. You need decisive, engaged players who utterly ready for their turn and never have to look stuff up to make even theoretically possible. Ironically my experience is that 4E was much better at making players decisive and engaged, and the way it did abilities meant people usually didn't need to look them up.

So 5E is faster, and a LOT faster than higher-level 4E (and 5E doesn't slow down that much at higher levels, which is definitely nice and more like 2E than 3E or 4E in that regard, both of which became absolute slogs), but I'm not your example is quite convincing.

Fair enough, my data is impression based on memory not accurate scientific data.

 

[bedir than]

Looks like the only thing added was something that Crawford has wanted to do for a long time -- the Path of the Totem is now the Wildheart.
He worked with Larian to develop it and rename it, knowing that it would eventually shift to the pen & paper game.

 

[Scribe]

Looks like the only thing added was something that Crawford has wanted to do for a long time -- the Path of the Totem is now the Wildheart.
He worked with Larian to develop it and rename it, knowing that it would eventually shift to the pen & paper game.

Is this a 'dont use real world cultural terms' change? I havent read the Barbarian section yet, or played the BG3 one (Berzerker for life!).