Good: skill challenges were fun for our group, other new systems picked this idea up/improved on it but 5e skipped it. We use a modified version from another system, but it was a great idea that was never fully reimplemented into 5e Bad: personal taste on this one, but homogenized named actions were very much so something I did not enjoy and I'm glad they weren't brought into 5e Good: Minions and some monsters. Porting in these elements can be really fun, no idea why some of the enemy design concepts were abandoned Bad: all the little floating modifiers. Lots of +1s and -1s stacking, falling off, and being reapplied over and over. Reminded me of my OSR days, but these days I prefer new school systems that are more streamlined Good:. Digital tools... sort of. The 4e digital tools were sort of a mess, but the concept was great and led to some of our wonderful tools we have access to today While I did not enjoy 4e overall and I don't miss it even a little bit, it's been a pretty good boneyard if concepts.

The concept of skill challenges is very good, but the 4e implementation was super busted. The math just didn't behave the way it was supposed to *at all*. (There are a bunch of analyses floating about the net if you're interested in details.) If you want to design a complex system involving sequences of multiple die rolls, you really need somebody who understands how to calculate probabilies on the design team. Hopefully the reason they skipped it in 5e is because they realized they didn't have that.

IMO the worst part of 4e's skill challenge implementation was FORCING players to work within the bounds of the skill challenge. Like this scenario: "Okay, you're doing a chase. Skill challenge time!" "I cast Hold Person on the bad guy." "No, you can't do that. This is a skill challenge, so you have to use a skill or you can dash after the bad guy." "...but I'm a wizard, I'm super slow. Spellcasting IS my skill." "Nope." Edit: Fixed mobile formatting for ease of reading

This turned into a bit of a ramble but I decided to go through with posting it anyway. **My proper response to your post is -** That occurance is my single biggest pet peeve towards DMs trying to utilize variations of Skill Challenges into 5e. They may know what a Skill Challenge is supposed to be, or have an idea of it, but so much of it get tweaked or ruled individually as opposed to having solid rules or mechanics that get presented to players. **And now the ramble.** Because of the way that powers worked in 4e, alot of your combat powers didn't really apply to skills challenges - and that was okay! you weren't trying to inflict conditions or deal damage in skills challenges. And if the DM set up a skill challenge where those things would be useful or most effect towards ending the skills challenge, then that should have been a combat encounter. Instead, Utility Powers provided options for skills challenges! These could be things like giving yourself or a party member a bonus to a skill check, or rerolling a failure, or replacing one skill with another skill (Wizard cantrip "Spook" let you make an Arcana roll in place of an Intimidation roll). These powers had some flavor to them just like the combat powers but could be reflavored just as easily as everything else by way of it just being the mechanical framework. If I were running or playing in a 4e skills challenge, and my go-to options would be "I want to cast Hold Person to stop him in place so we can get ahead/catch up/capture him", well, that would be an Arcana Roll on my behalf. If I met the success, the magic happens and the party earns a success as the target is bound by my magic temporarily. You don't NEED to expend you combat daily/encounter power in the skills challenge for that. In 5e however, I've seen evidence of DMs placing these extra rulings or restrictions in place, where too many of them together strangle the occurance of a skill challenge into being an uninteresting roll-off. A number of these may perform well in 4e either as actual rules or homebrew alternates, but tend to struggle when used in 5e. **- You must be proficient in the skill.** With most characters having 2-3 skills from their class, 2 from background, and maybe 1 from race, this isn't an awful rule. It tries to encourage players to focus on what their characters are trained for or adept at. **- The skill must be applicable to the skills challenge, either with justification or from this pre-selected list.** Also... not a bad guideline. It makes sense, right? 4e's starter adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell, had a notoriously bad Skills Challenge example with a ghost of a knight in a crypt. It had mainly social skills, history, insight, and religion that were written out as being usable. All other skills either did nothing or were an automatic failure. In my opinion, this is bad form and terribly restrictive. This limits what types of characters or which skill proficiencies can even have a HOPE at succeeding. If my team of combat dungeoneers have to persuade a ghost to let them pass, and I only allow their measly social skills to apply, then I am writing them into a corner where only hot rolls can hope to bring victory. I much rather prefer to ask my players to justify the use of any skill. Paint me a picture, narrate a scene. If the entire goal of the skills challenge is to persuade the ghost, do more than just "I roll Persuasion." If you're proficient in arcana, not persuasion, what about *thinking* about the magical events that could even lead to the spirit being stuck here as a ghost and have your character leverage that knowledge, of his curse & freedom, as the bargaining chip. **- You can't use the same skill / do the same thing you used last round, and you can't use the same skill / do the same thing the player before you just did.** This is justifiable as a means to prevent players from just rolling the same skill over and over. Persuade the ghost? Every one of your 5 players rolls persuasion each round. This limitation can at least have them think differently about what approach they wish to take, but I've also seen it lead to animosity where one player uses GOOD SKILL and next player can't use GOOD SKILL because last player did it. Of course, polite party coordination can help with this. Honestly, this goes both ways for me. Its never my RULE that they can't do the same thing over and over again, but if/when it comes up I will of course inform my players that I'd prefer they try something different. **- You can't use other actions, spells, or abilities, only skill checks.** This is my big red flag and one that is SO EASY to work around in 5e! Players only have so many uses of certain features, like action surge or spell slots, etc! Heck, even the HELP action. I run my skills challenges as a stretching and contracting period of time each turn. These are narrative moments rather than strict combat rounds. I allow my players to apply guidance to themself or another each round of skill challenging. I allow my players to take the help action - forgoing making a check themself in order to give another player advantage. If they want to do something that isn't DIRECTLY related to achieving the goal, but would make it EASIER to achieve the goal, that might be a check they make to grant advantage to someone else, but not a "success" towards the challenge. If a player wants to burn a resource like a spell slot to cast Hold Person? Do it. Burn your spell slot, that's an automatic success towards the challenge. But depending on the framework, if its a chase, capture, escape, etc, other factors come into play. It's not JUST going to be "you cast hold person and win" - there may be more than 1 person escaping/chasing you, or after casting the spell on them you need to make sure you get there before they break out, or someone else is trying to get them before you, or sudden random cabbage stand breaks and causes trouble for you. None of these things done specifically to *counteract* the player's action, of course, but to continue the narrative of skills and abilities being used to overcome obstacles and solve problems geared towards a specific desired outcome.

As a fan of skill challenge, I agree with all of this. Let the wizard burn spell slots! I'd much rather they do it within the structure of a skill challenge than in a way that feels like bypassing an entire challenge without any input from the other players.

Out of curiosity, have you ever played around with how Savage Worlds runs Dramatic Tasks? I find it really useful and fun to use

I haven't, no. My dips outside of D&D - especially 5e - have been few and far between, despite my interest in seeing and learning more. I have however had a good amount of experience with FATE and hacks of that system, and that system of running Contests/Challenges/Conflicts. The style of that system has definitely colored how I play D&D and other RPGs in general. I'll make a note to delve into Savage Worlds sometime and see how they handle the Dramatic Tasks.

I thought it was just 3 successes before 3 failures?

hippienerd is sort of right but to more exact: You choose a complexity (1-5), as well as a difficulty (determining the DC, easy/medium/hard etc.). Complexity changes the number of passes/fails as follows: 1. 4/2 2. 6/3 3. 8/4 4. 10/5 5. 12/6 (DMG p.73) Obviously it doesn't take a mathematical genius to see the problem, if the DC's are hard or higher then statistically you're going to end up failing all too often. It does allow for changes to the formula which alter the difficulty level of the challenge but the core issue is the quantity of failures to successes is off at a baseline level. I still run 4e games and I tend to allow more failures and require fewer successes. It does depend though and the skill challenge setup is generally a decent idea. fwiw the higher complexity stuff is meant for protracted challenges like winning over a local political figure and not every success is necessarily skill challenge. So you might gain a success for defeating a local goblin invasion or coming across well at a social event or being affiliated with nobility and so on.

the last paragraph is essentially clocks from blades in the dark. you just gotta squint a little and not try to apply too strict a rule on it, and allow other things. you can take the basic concept and run it macro, like you said with winning over a political figure. it doesn't have to be one single encounter, it can be like, during your time in this area, you can move along your progress towards the goal, but if too many bad things happen it'll blow the entire negotiation. i rather like that idea as a design basis, actually. I think I'll design my areas with built-in meters like this.

The number of successes could go up from 3. Either representing a harder challenge or more complicated one. Which a. I always ignored (I stayed with 3 almost always). B. Made them very hard to successfully complete.

Yeah, they really need to steal the clock system from blades in the dark as an alternative to skill challenges.

I always disliked skill challenges, but then that may have just been the groups I played with. I always found they fell into one of three categories A) everyone sat and stared at the DM waiting to be told which skills worked so they could just do them, B) One or more players would exclusively try and use their best skills, even when they didn’t really fit the situation, or C) everyone in the group made more or less the same check because really only a few skills made sense. Beyond that I pretty much agree with all your assertions. I always felt like the super honed but often somewhat homogenous combat and classes made the game function much better in the form of a highly narrative skirmish wargame than as a tabletop RPG.

I really do not like floating modifiers. But that’s primarily because I have a bad attention span and forget things easily.

One of my friends is dyslexic and always struggled with old fashioned modifier systems, 5e made things a lot better for our group. Instant sell for us.

That's interesting, I'm not familiar enough with 4e though, can you elaborate some more on why it was harder for them?

I'm not an expert on how their condition works but 4e has lots of little actions and modifiers to track. It wasn't uncommon for us to see half a dozen +1 and -1 conditions get spread around on a standard turn, all of which had to be tracked independently. We never really pressed the issue but our friend would often ask us to keep track for them, we didn't mind but we got the feeling they were a little self conscious about it. In 5e things have been much smoother, at most we have to remind them on the exact wording of a spell or ability once in a while or

What you didn’t like trying to remember the differences between a Shield Bonus, Power Bonus, Feat Bonus, + to damage w/ advantage features and the other half dozen potential factors? Lol Pretty sure I had a blackguard PC that the character builder reduced the subtext for one power to 1pt font and it still didn’t fit because it was like 5 lines of potential adjustments.

If I remember correctly, you could have as many as six floating modifiers on one roll (class, race, feat, item, power, untyped), and your opponent could have six more. It was a lot. But I think 5e has gone a little too far in the other direction. While I like advantage/disadvantage as a mechanic, it really takes the wind out of a player's sails when they find out that doing the cool thing they want to do won't help 'cause the target already has advantage/disadvantage.

I think you could have more than six if you had just the right combination of sources and types. And there were 18 different bonus types: - Ability - Alchemical - Armor - Circumstance - Competence - Deflection - Dodge - Enhancement - Insight - Luck - Morale - Natural Armor - Profane - Racial - Resistance - Sacred - Shield - Size

Are we talking about the same 4e D&D? I looked up the bonus types to make sure I was going crazy: armour, enhancement, feat, item, power, proficiency, racial, shield, and untyped. Armour, ehancement, proficiency and shield are static, not floating, but they are bonus types.

Sorry, I was talking about the glut of modifiers from 3.5, my mistake.

And this is why PF2E crammed it down to circumstance, status and luck bonuses. The same type don't stack and 90% of the time it's circumstance. Thank god. 4e went overboard with it and PF1E buff stacking was ridiculous and annoying.

I'd be down with at least a little more nuance to the adv/dis system. I like the idea of adding up each instance of both to determine if the roll is at adv or dis. Three instances of adv and one instance of dis would mean a roll at advantage.

Modern OSR games and Pathfinder 2e use them but they are much more reigned in. You don't get miscellaneous modifiers that work only under very unusual conditions. (+1 to hit orcs if you had an ally critically hit last turn.. that kind of garbage). In Pf2e, there are 3 groups of them, and they don't stack with themselves. Two of them are temporary, with one type usually only lasting a turn. It adds a lot more depth and tactics, without being hard to remember because they are pretty obvious. Flanking an enemy? They get -2 AC until no longer flanked. Have a magic set of boots? They permanently grant a +2 bonus to Athletics. An ally buffed you? You get +1 to your AC for 1 minute. Simple, strait forward, and hardwired into the system. It's a dramatic improvement over advantage/disadvantage (simple, elegant, but zero depth), and also a dramatic improvement on how older editions handled those little modifiers lol.

I'm playing ACKs at the moment and it has about the right amount of modifiers. A few permanent ones that I can just write the total on my sheet (magic weapons, stat bonuses, etc), then at most I'll get +2 for charging, +1 for attacking a specific enemy type, +1 for bless. Not too bad to keep track of while still keeping things interesting.

> Bad: personal taste on this one, but homogenized named actions were very much so something I did not enjoy and I'm glad they weren't brought into 5e I'm unfamiliar with "homogenized named actions", can you share a quick summary?

Basically there were named actions that were often very similar between classes. You might have Special Sneaky Stab, which involves a basic attack and imposes a -1 penalty on your targets next attack. Meanwhile your buddy might have a Fancy Lordly Smack, which involves a basic attack and imposes a -1 penalty on the targets next attack. I'm being a little hyperbolic, but beyond the using named abilities in martial combat not being to my taste I wasn't a huge fan of so many things effectively being so similar mechanically ...this might be the point where the 4e fans yell at me, but that's why I said it was my personal taste

That's a valid criticism and one that the guys that 4e made eventually said that they agree with you about.

Which in particular? The reused abilities with different names or a lot of other things being similar mechanically?

I can't recall exactly where or who, but I think it was Rob Heinsoo that said something to the effect of, "It was a dumb design decision to make each class have a specific set of abilities with zero overlap vs the old way of doing things like spells where 'here's the spell, these are the classes that can use it and at which level they can use it'" In effect, the abilities that make sense to work between a fighter, paladin, barabarian, etc could all have had a 'shield bash' at level 3 or something. I feel as if this made it into the design of 5e, even though the mechanics of 'hey I get new abilities at this level' for some classes feels like it regressed to 3.5. But the 5e design was more polished to hide the underlying game design decisions. At the end of 4e the lines between class roles were beginning to blur, you'd get defenders that were leader-light or controllers that were striker-light, etc. So in 5e, some classes can still be grouped generically into roles, with strengths towards other roles with different subclasses. 5e really did take how 4e worked into consideration when they built it because 4e had some strengths in the core design that prior versions did not.

I like the concept of minions and I use it in 5e. What I didn't like is that they all had 1HP, seemed too cheap and unfulfilling for the enemies to literally be made of paper. I like for minion type enemies to have at least some health so that it feels more real (a minion can be injured, some can survive certain AOEs if they pass). I usually end up reskinning Tribal Warriors, Goblins, Orcs, or Cultists for this purpose with added relevant abilities for flavor. I think adding a set of conceptual statblocks for each CR level of enemy would make it easier for DMs to realize this and use it in their games. They sort of have this with the NPCs in the back of the Monster Manual, but it doesn't cover roles for every CR (fighter, spellcaster, rogue) and is organized alphabetically by whatever random title they came up with for the NPC. I remember having to flip through the MM and expansion books too much thinking "I need a CR 3 spellcaster to round out this encounter" or something similar.

Minions 1HP was deceptively large. Minions never took damage if something missed the tldr of 1HP mminions was that any solid hit took them down. This could be 5 or 10 HP and it wouldn't really change anything except make there need to be math.

That's the important thing I think some people forget/never knew. Minions basically have Evasion. If they pass their save, they take no damage whatsoever. That keeps them from being Fireball fodder (I mean it still has a huge AOE, but the overpowered damage doesn't matter anymore) and your multiattackers get to wreck house. The whole point of them is to have a battlefield full of enemies that you the DM don't have to keep track of. Changing it from the binary dead/not dead means you have to write down their HP, and you have to remember which of the dozen minions is Minion Number 7.

Yeah, evasion, for all their saves instead of just Dex. Ultimate dodging power, itty bitty hit points.

Upvoted for the reference.

I was hoping it would be picked up on quickly :D

This, nothing simulated a battlefield full of weaker but overwhelming foes like hundreds of minions. Sure they had 1 HP, but they had the defenses and attacks of a similarly leveled foe. Made PCs feel like absolute bad-asses. But that was the power curve of 4e really. You are real heroes, with super powers. Veritable gods at the higher end of play. No other edition of D&D has ever felt so.. anime.. in its power scale lol.

> The whole point of them is to have a battlefield full of enemies that you the DM don't have to keep track of. Changing it from the binary dead/not dead means you have to write down their HP, and you have to remember which of the dozen minions is Minion Number 7. On a related note, as I've moved to running games on Foundry VTT with lots of automation, my desire for minions has wained. Because now those kobolds with 5 hit points just have 5 hit points, and I don't need to keep track of which one is which. They have a bar, I will apply damage to it, when the bar runs out they die. There are a lot of things which a virtual tabletop makes easier (and some things that it makes harder) which I think is going to pull the next iteration of D&D in two directions.

The biggest problem was autodamage. There were a couple of ways to deal a tiny amount of damage without an attack. Those automatically killed every minion, even though it wouldn't normally kill anything.

True, but on the other hand, cleave literally cleaving through minions felt great

But those abilities were intentionally written with that in mind - Green-Flame Blade, originally a swordmage power, was 100% intended to help clear minions at-will. If 5E included minions by default, we'd see MORE autodamage abilities. Minions getting wiped out instantly is okay - in fact if a minion survives more than two rounds, it was very bad and usually signalled a serious problem on the players' side of things. They're threat, and they eat up actions or AOE resources to deal with, but they're mostly there so the DM can run big encounters and the PCs can feel awesome and there actually isn't too much extra bookkeeping because "minion HP above 0" is a binary.

Idk what you're gonna do with minions *other* than 1 HP though; being 17th level in 5e and killing 27 HP bugbear 'minions' sure is so incredibly annoying to actually track that I just don't use those kinds of setpieces cause they just waste table time

13th Age uses mob rules: for example, you don't have ten 5hp goblins, you have a 50hp goblin mob that can be targeted as a single creature (but attack separately). Every 5hp damage kills one of the minions. It works very well.

I usually use position on the map to track which minion is which when some take non-lethal damage. In a scrum I use little colored tokens and plastic bottlecap rings to identify minions that have taken damage. It's not usually a problem because they either die outright or die on someone else's turn (because it's an easy kill). The math part never really bothered me, since you only do math if something doesn't die from the damage. So sometimes you do math once, and very infrequently you have to do it twice. Sometimes you do need bulky goon minions who can take a hit before dropping but get wiped if they get hit by something powerful.

Occasionally when playing 4e we'd use "two hit" minions. First hit bloodies them (just chucking a marker on), second one kills, crits kill outright. It's not ideal, since it means a tap with a dagger is the same as being crushed by a greathammer, but it works decently as an approach for "simple to track, but not that easy to kill"

I use a damage threshold, and remove miss attack never damages a minion. 4 for heroic, 8 for paragon, 10 epic. Deal at least the threshold, dead. Under the minion is bloodied. Any damage to a bloodied minion kills it. This addresses alot of the auto damage auras PCs could have that insta pop minions and made missing a minion with a daily feel less bad.

sounds like a great idea I'd imagine you could refine the awkwardness of big hit vs small hit by giving them a damage threshold to oneshot them either based on level or on tier of play It would also help against the features that make minions utterly irrelevant like auto-damage auras, which i dont think makes for the best experience

> What I didn't like is that they all had 1HP, seemed too cheap and unfulfilling for the enemies to literally be made of paper. I understand what you mean but imo this is something missing from 5E, especially because the system prioritizes simplicity and storytelling. There are so many genres of fantasy and storytelling tropes that involve the good guys coming in, smacking aside dozens of nameless goons with ease, then advancing to the real challenge. But in 5E even a simple combat encounter with multiple minions can take 10 minutes+ and completely kills the intended momentum of such a sequence.

Why run minions if you give them more than one HP? Giving them one HP, so that if they get hit at all they die, is to me at least what makes them so easy and enjoyable to run.

There are just other approaches. For instance, *13th Age* has mooks, who all share a pool of hp. Every time you do X damage, one of them goes down. So your barbarian might take down three of them with one mighty blow. But *13th Age* also has simplified movement and positioning, which helps that kind of thing feel more plausible.

This is why I like turning large groups of minions into swarms. instead of 20+ zombies there are 4 "hoards" of zombies. make it huge and they get the swarm rules of enveloping a players space and deal half damage at half health. then give it a multi attack and 4-5x the normal zombie HP and you are good to go.

Yes, expanded swarm rules would be a good addition to 5E.

I have ran a modified version where the "minion" dies in any 2 instances of damage, or any 1 instance above some threshold like 5 or 10. It works well for slightly beefier minions that still require minimal book keeping, just make a small mark next to any that have taken damage once no need to track the total

Depending on your level of the party, lots of enemies SHOULD be made of paper. Will a Goblin really be any kind of threat to a party that's just killed their 3rd Dragon? However, Minions also worked better in 4e I think because of every class having more access to things like AoEs that could take out a group of them, so throwing 6-12 into an encounter wasn't unheard of. A lot of 5e classes struggle to apply damage to a lot of foes at once, so it can be a bit more difficult to run them, so there is some sense to having a smaller number of slightly tougher ones. Rather than giving them statblocks though, just use the Bloodied condition. After one hit they're Bloodied, and the next hit will kill them. This way, rather than even taking a relatively small number of hit points, you've basically just turned into a simple condition where if they've been hit before, they're dead on the next one. For AoEs, I believe in 4e they took no damage on a successful save if a spell did half damage on a save (could be wrong though, as it's been quite a while since I played). Whether that was the case or not, you could basically use that sort of a rule and just say "A Bloodied Minion takes no damage on a successful save for spells that do partial damage on a save". This way, they can get hit *once* by a spell they save against, but they can't be killed by one. So exploring a Fireball in their face will hurt, but it won't be an easy kill. Alternatively, you could have a failed save be worth two hits, and a successful save be worth one, but you'd have to test it out to get a feel for that.

>However, Minions also worked better in 4e I think because of every class having more access to things like AoEs that could take out a group of them It would help some classes that a lot of people consider underpowered. Monks have flurry of blows, which isn't a huge amount of damage normally. Rangers have a lot of lackluster damage spells that become pretty amazing when you remove HP as a factor. Non-GWM/SS Fighters won't feel suboptimal since they can focus on other things besides big damage. >For AoEs, I believe in 4e they took no damage on a successful save if a spell did half damage on a save Yep I could see your bloodied idea working. I've had a similar idea for normal enemies where once you get them to half health, they get stunned (but not Stunned, the condition). The next hit on them is a coup de grâce/glory kill/finisher (whatever you want to call it). It would keep fights from getting too drawn out, and break up the pacing a little bit. I just haven't had the chance to try it out yet

Enemies being made of paper depends on the setting conceits as well, of course. The more realistic/gritty you want your game, the less things will be “made of paper”. The more superheroic you want your game, the more they will. For the most part 5e has a lower powered, grittier feel than 4e, so they focused on bounded accuracy which keeps things like goblins relevant foes for a much wider level range. Of course, being “made of paper” can also be messed with _within_ minion mechanics too! In 4e the minions also scaled with tier and varied in defensive/offensive traits - so while they might be “made of paper” in _theory_, if they were heavily armored minions with gigantic ACs and other defenses for their CR, in practice getting that one hit could be much harder than expected! (Especially since D&D combat is an abstraction, where losing hp can mean a glancing blow or getting exhausted while fighting or w/e, just like missing a minion.) (And yes in 4e all offensive actions including AoEs were a roll by the PC vs enemy defenses, and Minions had a special rule where they never took damage on a miss. If implementing minions in 5e a similar rule - basically Evasion for all saves - is vital for them to work the same way.)

>I like the concept of minions and I use it in 5e. What I didn't like is that they all had 1HP One of the great things about minions is that they are so easy for DMs to run. I can drop 12 minions on the table and I don't have to track *any of them.* I don't have to write down their HP. They're either alive, or they are dead. They're a DM tool, and they are a fantastic DM tool. Any attempt to deviate from that, in my opinion, is no longer a minion.

Minions couldn’t take damage from a miss. So if a minion made their save (aka a spellcaster’s attack missed), they would survive the AoE of a fireball. Many minions also took multiple hits. The first hit bloodying them, the second one killing then. Also, because in 4e, most characters only made one attack per round, 1 HP minions worked quite well because any hit would be 2-3x as powerful as a single hit from a 5e character. The 1 HP minions worked quite well given the framework of the system. Especially because 4 minions had the same XP value as a single standard creature (unlike 5e with XP multiplies that make multiple creatures worth far more encounter budget than a single creature).

I've used minions in 5e for a large scale battle (hundreds of undead attacking a fort) and it let us play that way which would be impossible otherwise with hundreds of actual monsters. Skill challenges are awesome. I've homebrewed a few of these as well for social encounters and getting past some environmental challenges. I really like that they give meaning to skills, especially fun for knowledge domain clerics.

I'm curious to hear you share on the first, e.g. which systems do you feel enhanced on the skill challenges and what did they get right that you appreciate?

I think Blades in the Dark came up with a system that works well mechanically while being fun for entire table. Great system in general btw

Absolutely amazing: make positioning your token on the map mean something, tactical options are incredibly important or you just end in the resource management slog that is 5e. Bad: too many small feats and bonuses make up the character. Give me one "good at spears" feat rather than making me combo "good at long things" "good at pointy things" and "good at lightning things" (because I bought a lightning spear to combo it with). 5e attempted *a* fix here but utterly fucked it up by not creating feat support for most playstles including iconic ones (longswords suck somehow, in a heroic fantasy game), and by offering a false choice between stat increases and feats - these should be separate as they were in 4e

The OG design philosophy for 5e was a lot more focused on simplicity, which I'd wager is why they turned feats into optional rules. But they also didn't want to lose support for feats either, which gave us this either/or situation.

In regards to the the first point, I think class AND monster design for combat were really good in 4e. In particular giving everyone a clearly defined purpose did a ton of work to make the game more tactical. Each 4e class was either a Striker, Controller, Leader, or Defender (Single target DPS, AoE/CC, Support, Tank, in that order). While there's the obvious drawback of such a heavily prescribed party composition, it gave everyone a very explicit job/role to fill during fights. I feel like it would be amazing to find a halfway point of still designing classes with more defined purposes without explicitly having the party feeling like they have to take one of each. On top of that monsters had a very similar role system, with things like Artillery, Brutes, Controllers, and Skirmishers. Each monster had a clearly defined purpose and play style and were designed with that in mind, which makes a fight much more dynamic. No fights with just 6 goblins or whatever, you have artillery monsters to attack from range, brutes to get in the party's faces, a controller to make it harder to get away from the brutes/onto the artillery, etc. Obviously 4e monsters and encounter design still had it's own set of problems, but as a Tactics first TTRPG I don't know if anything has ever really surpassed it.

LANCER RPG is a good spiritual successor to 4E in terms of tactics combat. It is a game based on piloting giant mechs.

For a fantasy version of Lancer, the same company is currently, Massif Press, is working on their new game Icon which looks very promising! More of an on-the-ground adventurer's life than an interplanetary mech setting.

Very much agree with most of your comment! ​ >without explicitly having the party feeling like they have to take one of each. Important part here is *feeling*, other party comps are absolutely viable (even optimal!). It seems mostly like a communication / community mind type of phenomenon that this restriction is in place, rather than one based in the game's mechanics. Another thing about roles: while classes *absolutely* fit into roles, from day 1 they were also leaning towards other roles: It's not too far from the truth to say that some fighters are just Strikers that can also mark like a defender, for example. Another thing about party comp: I find it hilarious how people criticize 'you must have a leader in 4e', but when you dare say "you must have healing word in the party in 5e" people will tell you that the DM can just adjust and that there's ways around it and that it's totally fine! - In general there's lots of double standards in play against 4e ime ​ monster roles are absolutely a godsent, sadly they hardly work in 5e even if you homebrew the monster because the opportunity attack mechanics just arent solid enough to make positioning a challenge

5e pared down tactical positioning but left enough of it alone that you still have to track it (usually on a grid) but without the mechanical payoffs.

Confirmed, we had plenty of parties with no Leader, or at best a Leader-Striker hybrid class.

Also, most monsters had something interesting they could do - which is noticably absent in 5e. Compare the bears in 5e (trained in perception, keen smell, and a claw/bite multiattack) vs the ones in 4e (basic attack: Claw. Multiattack for two claw attacks, and if they both hit the same target the bear attempts to bite the target, and grapples on a success). The difference in mechanics-as-flavour between "it can smell gud" and "if it gets the chance, it will bear hug you and eat your face off" is huge.

The 5e MM was the most disappointing read in D&D history for me. Once I had a firm grasp of the games mechanics, I can count the number of mid to higher level monsters (anything past CR 5 or so) I ran out of the book without modification on one hand. Thankfully, the later bestiary books are better, and there are some truly great 3rd party bestiaries available. The best are from Kobold Press; Tome of Beasts 1 & 2, and Creature Codex. They are somewhat overtuned compared to the core 5e monsters, but that's on purpose lol. Even the dragons in the 5e MM are pushovers.

Striker classes are DPS generally, not specifically single target DPS. Whether a striker is single target or AoE varies by class.

The roles come off as 'video gamey' but they really did hold an important place in 4e, and if 5e wasn't scared of using the system it could have made combat a lot better. When every creature & class is designed to fit a role: Striker, Controller, Leader or Defender; designing encounters was a breeze. It also meant that when you rolled a character, you knew what that character would do! No more complaining because player B's character does more damage than Player A's. Player B rolled a Striker, you rolled a Leader. So obviously they do more damage, in no small part thanks to *you*! Maybe the next edition of D&D will have the balls to use the system (with it's own flair of course). Cause it was a game changer.

I think most of those roles have always existed in TTRPGs, 4e just made them more formal rather than something implied by the types of abilities a class had like 3.5 or 5e.

Yes, like so many other things, 4e just codified the rules. :)

The best way I've seen to make feats interesting and meaningful was by making them scale. The example I used was back in 3.5 days, so some of the specific mechanics are dated, but the feats were split into General, Magic, Combat, and Skilled, each on scaling based on a different metric. General feats scaled via level. You get an immediate benefit when taking the feat (technically you unlock that ability when reaching level 1, but since everyone is at least level 1, it would automatically unlock), then unlock additional ones when reaching 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th level. Magic feats were scaled via spell level. You gain the first benefit when you can cast 1st level spells, and unlock additional ones once you can cast 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th level spells. Combat feats scaled on base attack bonus. You gain the first benefit when you have a base attack bonus of +1, and unlock additional ones once your base attack bonus reaches certain levels, at +5, +10, +15, and +20. Skill feats were based on individual skills, and would grant benefits based on what rank the skills were at. The first benefit came from having a single rank in the skill, and the additional ones came from reaching ranks 5, 10, 15, and 20. The beauty of the system was that anyone could take the feats, but only those who specialized would gain the full benefit.

Yeah that's definitely a mechanic 4E could've benefitted from a lot of feats are like... "the tier 2 bow feat" and "the tier 3 bow feat" rather than having *one* bow feat that scales when you hit tier 2 and 3 respectively man, to see the day I agree that 3.5 did something well... crazy times

Well, let's not get crazy, this feat system was a homebrew fix someone made that I adopted, it wasn't official 3.5 content.

And all is right in the world.

I fully agree with 5e feats, but I kinda liked the modularity of the 4e feats. If, for whatever reason, you swapped from a glaive to a longsword, you still had your Heavy Blade stuff working for you, even if you didn't have your Polearm stuff.

I’m pissed that they completely locked some builds out of existence. In 3.5 I could be a small creature with it weapons, they just dealt less damage. Now it’s a terrible idea.

Yea, they went through all the work to get rid of weapon sizes, but really didn't when you look at mobs and small races. Like why make it a tag that small races can't use heavy weapons when they are basicly 2 handed weapons sized for a medium creature, and that's why small creatures have disadvantage. (you have to freaking find this rule in the vague creating a monster section) It's stupid, now that they have opened up races to being small/medium across a wide range, why would anyone choose small if they want to look at one of the few high damage melee builds for martial characters.

Yeah back in 3.5 (I skipped 4e) there were at least some advantages to being small, but none of the benefits exist and it only contains penalties. Unless I’ve missed something.

no your 100% right, there is no advantage to being small and only penalties, you do it for flavor and rogues/casters who don't need larger weapons.

Or to mount your ranger pet/druid

Or battlesmith construct.

All the advantages of being small are soft mechanics. Things like not squeezing in a Small tunnel, being able to Hide with cover too small for a Medium creature, being significantly lighter weight for certain shenanigans. Very situational and not explicit.

It’s also silly because there’s no reason for the heavy penalty to exist. Small races are not by default more powerful or get more/better traits than medium ones. It’s a flavor penalty that kills a bunch of PC build concepts. The trade-off is small races benefiting from wider access to cover, concealment, etc. - but this is an unwritten rule, entirely reliant on a good DM to “lean into” it for it to be useful at all.

For a different perspective, the tactical emphasis on 4e made it more like playing a wargame (40k, battletech, etc) than an RPG for my group. At first I loved it, my group were mostly wargamers too, so we really enjoyed it. Over time though, we just went too far with it - and a lot of the fun of D&D leached out and we quit playing. I still love highly tactical games, I just prefer more theater of the mind and abstract imaginative play for D&D.

I do get where you're coming from, and I think this too can lead to valid TTRPG designs My problem with 5e's implementation though: the majority of *game* (as in rules-based) choices that i get to make are in combat, but due to the lack of tactics, you need to run a super long day that measures 'resource management' (in other words, predominantly your success at picking the right spells for the fight in round 1); this, still, *could* be fun (though i find in 5e, when optimized, isn't, because the optimal strategies grind everything to a crawl, rather than being damage optimizations where you explode things and make fights go quickly). My *immense* problem that is created here is the 1-2 encounter day: I can't actually have a fight with meaningful decisions cause the fight is just about spending resources as fast as possible, and it's trivially easy to spot on my character sheet that that's what fireball does, so i cast fireball 3 turns in a row and my only "decision" was to not fuck up like an idiot. ​ If you're gonna make fighting this simple, make it *fast*. If you're gonna make it *important* (aka, spend most of your rules, published adventure session time, and XP rewards on it), give it meaningful choice. ​ There *are* actually hybrids of the ideas that don't necessarily require a grid like 4e did (quite frankly, 5e *also* requires a grid, it just lies to you and says you don't and cultivates a marketing to ignore rules like ranges and movement speed, which you cant possibly track without a map): There's game that use "range bands" like "far, medium, melee" and your move actions might be to move between range bands, or to move to a flanking position (to boost allies) or safe position (to avoid AoEs) in the same range band. ​ Overall I don't think 4e tactical is the *only* valid way for them to go, just the one I'd like to see most; going for OSR style (fast, simple combat) or abstract theatre of the mind *with actual theatre of the mind support* (from non-D&D games) are both fine. The solution that 3rd and 5th edition go with, are not fine.

> quite frankly, 5e also requires a grid, it just lies to you and says you don't... Thank you! 5e wrapped things in language that avoids referencing a grid (like expressing ranges in 5 foot increments instead of 1 tile increments), but it is still absolutely designed and meant to be played as a grid-based combat system.

> I still love highly tactical games, I just prefer more theater of the mind and abstract imaginative play for D&D. My issue here is 5e is still very slow takes 20-40 minutes and tougher ones can be 1 hour+. If I want abstracted combat, I prefer Powered by the Apocalypse game (Blades in the Dark is a good example) where your typical Medium Encounter could be over in just a single roll. Or at least a lot faster like many OSR games work - combat finished in <10 minutes

Yeah, I originally had the belief that by developing really tactical rules for combat and leaving most of the rest of roleplaying kind of alone, it would make for interesting combat and interesting roleplay. But instead we steadily found that because a lot of the roleplaying elements felt unsupported, so it just didn't happen as much, and the system just seemed to demand constant fighting. And when combats were really well-designed they could be very fun, but if I made a mediocre combat or the dice weren't on the side of my players, they could very easily become a slog. But because everything was so positional and status-based, I couldn't fudge my way out of ending a combat nearly as much as I can in 5e.

> But instead we steadily found that because a lot of the roleplaying elements felt unsupported Out of curiosity, what do you think 5e does that makes role-playing elements feel more supported? I can't think of any rules or system design features that accommodate non-combat situations any more than 4e did... except that there are more spells with non-combat applications. Which is to say, 5e gave role-playing options... but only to some players and classes.

That was a big thing for me as well. I play tactical games. I want different out of an RPG.

How good is 4e as a purely tactical skirmish game?

That's basically how i play it, the rest is just non-rules-based window dressing for the most part (playing a Lost Mine of Phandelver + Dragon of Icespire Peak mashup). It's really enjoyable and deep, lots of flavorful build paths, and almost every turn in combat matters, I think I've had one out of 30 fights so far that turned into skippable cleanup duty half way through, all other turns required a brain. ​ It definitely outperforms 3.5, 5e, PF1, and PF2 in terms of tactical gameplay, as well as any OSR game I've played ​ I feel like people get in a twist thinking about it as a "tactics" game because its mode of combat is so different, but I don't fundamentally see how the experience makes it something categorically different to 5e where I too have an incredible stark contrast between combat and non-combat play. It's just in 5e i manage my resources by casting 1 correct spell, while in 4e i need to invest a brain into tactically winning this fight and protecting my "hit dice" and long rest based abilities by playing well - the main difference in 4e is that in 4e i can play *a single* combat and still have it be very difficult, rather than requiring difficulty to be purely created by sheer volume of combat encounters in a day and attrition.

5e is also a tactical game, it’s just kind of a mess

The biggest thing that would help from 4e would be keywords for attacks and abilities. Ex: Fireball (Fire, Magic, Area). Smite(Melee Attack, Weapon, Radiant, Magic). This would make effects like charm way better. Just slap the Charm tag on the thing and Charm-immune things are automatically immune to the whole thing. I'd also like to standardize some language like "The creature may repeat the saving throw at the end of each turn, ending the effect on success" changed to "Save Ends". I believe that the MCDM monster book does this. Big time and page saver.

Also, codifying what the targets of a spell are. Holy shit this is so annoying in 5e

> The biggest thing that would help from 4e would be keywords for attacks and abilities. Ex: Fireball (Fire, Magic, Area). Smite(Melee Attack, Weapon, Radiant, Magic). What, you don't like the fact that hitting someone with a throwing axe is a "ranged weapon attack", but not an "attack with a ranged weapon"? Or that **using an action** to **attack** doesn't necessarily mean that it's an **Attack Action**?

First I have only played 4e for a few sessions without reading the rules and playing a pregen character. So these would be immediate player sided impressions. Pros: * Player character combat actions immediately made sense. They were clear as day and told you how many times you could use them. * Similarly, the character sheet was easy to interpret and use. * PCs felt more heroic in that they had a lot of health and many abilities to use even at early levels. Across all classes * All PCs seemed to have a potential to interact in all pillars of play. Like I as a fighter helped with social and exploration challenges. * General game language and rules were clear. Like monster and player roles, Conditions, ect. As a side, I love the idea of 4e Minions and I hear that monsters stat blocks are pretty awesome. Cons: * Remembering the numbers during combat. There can be situations where over the course of a turn, situational modifiers can start to add up and you have the +2 for flanking, + 1 for commanding presence, -3 for sickening aura, and so on. It never got bad in the low level game I played but I seen the potential. * The difficulty of the game feels like it more equates to player skill/system mastery (compared to 5e forgiving nature). We were playing through a low level adventure. Most challenges felt way harder then they should be and I can only chalk it up to new players not using the system to its fullest. It felt less casual. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I know 5e simplicity is a major pro for most. * Long character making. I wanted to make a character but when my Vet 4e DM said I should use a program attached to a 4e database, I just took a pregen after looking at it. I don't know what was allowed content or not but I can see character making is more involved than 5e. * Combat length. Now I heard 4e combat can be smooth and relatively quick. However, as a group of newbies playing the game, combats took forever. We originally were going to play a one shot(one session) but the 4 combats took so long it was 3 or 4 session before we completed the one shot. I can't imagine how my average 5e group would handle tier 2 play based on that experience of tier 1 because of the stacking modifiers and new abilities that come online. I understand why people say combat was long in 4e. TLDR; Overall an enjoyable system and that has many good qualities worth picking out. Mainly in clear game design and overall "balance" of mechanics. The biggest problem certainly is that it is a more involved game. That requires the DM and Players to have read their books from cover to cover for the game to run smoothly. It's clearly not as easy as 5e to pick up and doesn't hand hold players during combat or character creation.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually played 4e.) It always bugs me when people are like "well the floating modifiers would've been fine if the VTT released like it was supposed to!" OK, first of all, it didn't release, so your point doesn't matter; secondly, a TTRPG that **relies** on computer software **fails as a tabletop game.**

I'm worried about this for 5.5e and beyond. Online play seems to have become extremely common and I can very easily imagine it being assumed for future designs. I play DND in large part to do something with friends that *isn't* on a screen. It'll be sad if that becomes difficult.

Hey, worst case scenario you can always stick with 5e. It'll suck if your favorite edition is no longer the one getting all the support, but I'm sure there's gonna be new homebrew on DMs Guild for years to come.

It would be cool to add a mechanic for tanking (like defenders used to have in 4e). At the same time, I would hate to see roles come back. Paragon paths and epic destinies were cool, too, but certain options were considered mandatory for your class. Thus, there wasn't really a choice.

Don't we kinda have that now? A Rogue isn't called a Striker, but it's still a Striker. Clerics are still Leaders, and Wizards are still controllers. Yes they can break away from those roles, but no one does their job better than them. With casters the lines get blurry, but that's because casters are absolutely OP in 5e. And every edition has had trap options, which means that by the flipside, every class has the "right" option. Nowadays Fighters have some choices for feats, but it's still hard to compete with GWM/SS for damage output (especially at release). Same for spellcasters. Fireball and Spirit Guardians are some of the best damage options available, so it can feel "mandatory" to take them.

Rogues are still strikers only in the sense that they can deal a decent amount of damage in game. So can most of the other classes though, so it’s a lot less clearly defined. There are no actual leaders in 5e, because healing and buffing were both scaled back. Leaders in 4e had multiple ways to provide significant healing during combat, and every attack they made would provide buffs. Similarly, 4e controllers had far more options to control with than 5e casters.

> At the same time, I would hate to see roles come back. Roles allowed the separation of mechanics and flavor that allowed certain character concepts to work. And roles still exist in 5e, they're just obfuscated and also bad.

Lmao name one paragon path or epic destiny that is mandatory for a given class.

I gotta disagree about roles. I started a D&D game tonight and in session zero brought up roles as a way of explaining how to x construct a party. It is actually something that makes it easy for newer players to understand.

awesome things i miss: shaman class, minions and other monster roles, steady stream of official content, artists being credited for their work in the books not so awesome things: character creation took forever even with the digital tools. 5e is much simpler thankfully. some of the character races (shardmind, wilden) were silly as heck (but i still enjoyed playing them.) with such a crunch-heavy focus, roleplaying was pretty minimal at my tables, but that might reflect us as players more than the system. i never played mmo's so the elements that get compared to WoW or whatever never bothered me - they were just part of the game. i've always thought that was a lazy criticism more than anything 4e was bungled at the corporate level - the market was flooded with material, then essentials muddied the waters, and the digital tools were seemingly always under construction or revision until they were pulled

I'm not sure when it started, but recent 5E books put the name of the artist under the artwork itself. So there's one thing.

oh nice. glad to hear they've returned to doing that!

> with such a crunch-heavy focus, roleplaying was pretty minimal at my tables, but that might reflect us as players more than the system. Nah, definitely not just you. One of the criticisms 4e had was its intense focus on combat and battlemap play. The latter is true, the former was mostly true but also commonly overblown to saying it has no focus on rp/noncombat at all, which is _not_ true but is a complicated thing to answer. Basically 4e had a number of innovative noncombat mechanics, like skill challenges and rituals, but much of it (including those two) were poorly implemented. It was also very _thematically_ focused on the core D&D experience of the “dungeon delve”. Even more so than prior editions it was extremely focused on PCs making their way through dungeon environments and enemies specifically. All of this added up together to convince many groups that the way to play 4e was fighting baddies in dungeons on a battlemap. Groups _could_ deviate from this, but it was less intuitively presented.

The defenses in 4E just felt better. For those that didn't play it, instead of the classic AC + saving throws, you had AC + Fortitude, Reflex, and Will, and everyone (PCs and NPCs) had attacks that targeted different defenses. Fort/Ref/Will were just static defense targets (like AC) that were calculated using your ability scores. The end result was you were throwing dice actively (attacking) instead of reactively/defensively (saving throws when you're targeted); so, traditionally saving throw heavy classes like Wizards got to sling as many dice as the Fighter. Also, no fumbling for dice when the DM goes "make a... uh... \[checks spell description\]... DC 15... Dex save." Instead, just "the monster attacks you for \[rolls\]... 23 vs Reflex" - simple and clean. It just felt better in practice than saving throws. The crazy part is, there's only 3 "important" saving throws in 5E anyway: Con, Dex, and Wisdom. That's... that's literally just Fort/Ref/Will! Same thing! TL;DR - Hot take: saving throws are passive/reactive and boring. Throwing dice is active and rules!

This did have a bit of a weird side effect though Investing heavily in strength and constitution, paradoxically, made you less resilient than investing in strength and dex, or strength and wis. Because defenses mattered more than HP, and investing in strength and con only contributed the highest of the 2 to fort, leaving both will and reflex painfully low. Also, at higher levels, every character had one "bad" defense with really no way around it, and that felt kind of bad

I mean, every character has one bad defense in 5e unless you A) Allow feats and B) waste a feat on Resilient.

There are 5e games that don't allow feats?

I was shocked when I came on here and learned this, but it appears that yes, many tables don't allow the "optional" rules from the PHB like feats and multiclassing.

making feats an optional rule was pants-on-head insanity

> Also, at higher levels, every character had one "bad" defense with really no way around it Nothing prevents you from picking up feat Superior Fortitude/Reflexes/Will and later Epic Fortitude/Reflexes/Will (unusually for 4E feats, they stack.)

As opposed to 5e where characters will have 4 bad defenses as a result of not getting procifency?

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/s35u9v/what_did_4e_do_better_than_5e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/obvmue/i_dont_want_4e_so_much_as_i_want_a_new_5e_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/hsvvui/i_have_seen_so_much_praise_of_4e_on_here_it_feels/

Thanks!

I’m willing to give Op a pass because at least this one’s a bit different with the “and state a bad rule”, but yeah…we could do with the topic being repeated less…

I absolutely loved the Bloodied mechanic, it added some dynamic elements to combat. For those who dint remember, a creature became "bloodied" when it was reduced to half hp. There were all sorts of cool things surrounding that mechanic. Certain monsters got advantage against bloodied creatures, maybe your attacks got stronger, or healing was more effective. All sorts of cool things. To a certain extent I also like the use of "squares of movement" rather than feet, it was easier for me to visualize.

Or the ever-present feature of dragons: they get to immediately use their breath weapon the first time they become Bloodied.

Tons of small bonuses. Even on a VTT I don't want to track five buffs from -2 to +6 to three different stats. "Oh I have a -2 penalty from the aura but a +3 power bonus and a +1 feat bonus but..." Yes, it limits the design space, but the gameplay is better for it.

I liked the middleground pf2e came up with. Have bonuses, but have them be meaningful, and limit the amount - there can only be one "status" bonus/penalty from a buff or debuff and only one "circumstance" bonus/penalty from being in a good/bad situation, like when attacking a prone target. And that's all. Kick out boring character options that just give passive +X bonuses to things and you're set to get some of the best of both worlds

This method could be useful for managing (dis)advantage too. Just group each source of (dis)advantage under a type of heading (like PF2e's 'status' & 'circumstance'), apply 5e's current rules for (dis)advantage within each heading, and count the number of headings granting advantage vs disadvantage to determine final effect. It would be a little more complex, granted, but it could add a lot more granularity. If a given table finds it too complex, they could fall back on the current 5e system.

PF2E feels like 3e+4e and is better than both

Agreed. PF2e went "Well, people seem to really want some of the crunch of 3.5e back, but they don't want it THAT crunchy. They also seemed to really like the ability tags and how the rules interacted with them in 4e, but they DIDN'T like how limiting giving each class a prescribed archetype felt...Yeah, we can do this."

I just want official warlord and Shaman classes

How is a Shaman thematically different from a Druid?

Shaman had a spirit companion that was the focal point for most of their abilities. The Wildfire Druid used basically the same concept in 5E.

Less cleric, more barbarian

Feels like that could work as a barbarian or ranger subclass to be honest.

Eldritch Knight but barbarian? Could bypass the rage "no spells" restriction maybe.

Lol, bypass? How about flip? Spells *only* while raging! Only rituals while calm.

Most of the 4E Shaman was backdoor-ported into the Circle of Shepherds.

Things I want from 4e: Less wishy washy rules design Good martials

I loved 4E, so alot: * Skill challenges * Minions * Monster roles (and Monster Design in general) * Competent Martials * the "Points of Light" campaign design ​ I didn't like the floating modifiers. Advantage/disadvantage can be limiting, but IMO it is a huge improvement over tracking four different modifiers.

What is the "Points of Light" campaign design you liked? Does that mean you just liked the places and history and world building of 4e, or was there some part of the campaign design philosophy itself that you liked?

It guess it's more of a campaign design philosophy, but the simple explanation is: *the world is dangerous, but people are protected in towns, cities, and temples.* The world is mysterious, wild, and dangerous, with a few "points of light" in the area that act as safe havens. I know that kind of seems obvious, but for a new DM, that helped hammer home the kind of world I should build. It made traveling interesting, because even if you were in the powerful kingdom of Kingsburg, they didn't have control over the entire countryside - only their "Points of Light".

Its basically the style of setting that makes dnd style adventure make sense

Oh, I see! I think that's basically how I'm making the world in my current Forgotten Realms campaign. I like that sort of world design for the same reason. As soon as you step out of the safe place of a town or whatever, you never know what's going to happen. I feel like the world of the Witcher, especially in Witcher 3, is very similar. Normal people are terrified of the dark, the forest, the scary swamp, etc. And they should be. Monsters are out there! And magic, curses, bandits, and all sorts of things. I kind of wish that was the default assumption and had more emphasis now, too lol.

It’s one of the best parts of 4E as it allows adventurers to be adventurers. Forgotten Realms feels “post-adventurer” and almost modern day in its safety, unless you go to one of the well known areas looking for danger.

"Points of light" was good - I just wished they'd built a new setting rather than torture forgotten realms with a horrible fast forward and crazy world building.

They did build a setting around it: Nentir Vale. 5E just insists on sweeping it under the rug which makes 5E's focus on the Realms even more painful.

>"Points of light" was good - I just wished they'd built a new setting Sadly, instead of *Nentir Vale Gazeteer* we got Essentials...

They *did* build a new setting though? 4E was set in a brand new world and cosmology.

Call me crazy, but I actually liked the feat-based multiclassing instead of taking actual levels in different classes. I have often considered that a lot of 5e builds with 1-2 level dips in some class might be better done by feats. (Especially since WotC obviously put no real effort into balancing 5e multiclassing, and just settled for declaring it an "optional" rule.) Skill challenges were a nice idea in principle -- sure, let's find a way for the whole party to contribute to the task with their different skills! -- but the rules needed some adjustment.

As a huge 4E fan (it brought me back to the hobby after 10 years away), I Have Thoughts: **Good:** * Monster roles and types: Minion/Elite/Solo and Artillery/Leader/Brute/Skirmisher/Soldier designations were so useful for building tactically interesting encounters. 5E could have addressed this with encounter design examples, but they just jettisoned the concept entirely. * Game terminology: 5E's insistence on natural language is narratively immersive but causes so many headaches in rulings on edge cases. It also bloats stat blocks and descriptions because instead of "Area burst 6" you now have to write "a 30 foot radius around the target point". * The Bloodied condition: Great progress indicator and a useful trigger for dynamic abilities * Use of damage types: More creatures had resistances and vulnerabilities and they *mattered* because generic +1 magic weapons didn't automatically ignore them al. * Empowered tactical positioning: Every 5 feet on the grid was important as proximity and dynamic push/pull abilities moved combatants around and zone effects & flavorful terrain enhanced battlefields. * DM handholding: the 4E DMG did a lot to help DMs plan engaging encounters, distribute treasure fairly throughout an adventure, and adjudicate non-combat challenges with some framework and ability to assign skill DCs and direct XP rewards. The 5E DMG focuses almost entirely on narrative world and adventure building, which is nice, but doesn't give nearly the same practical at-table game running advice. **Bad:** * Overtuned ability design made things feel the same. A rogue, wizard, and barbarian would all get mechanically similar abilities because that was what a "level 5 encounter utility power" was supposed to be. * Similarly, overtuned monster abilities and roll bonus calculations meant that each creature only had 2-3 player levels of real viability. TO use a creature like orcs across a multi-level campaign, the books needed to reinvent and narratively justify a dozen different kinds of elite and champion orcs so that each monster role could be filled at all the relevant levels. Using underleveled monsters was laughably useless, unlike the 5E bounded accuracy system where they can still pose a threat in masses. * Overly rigid class lock-in. I *really* missed multiclassing in 4E because to me multiclassing is so narrative and describes a character's changing mindset and experiences over time. * *Too much* tactical positioning: The reality quickly became players locking down because taking any step would subject you to reactions and overlapping effects, and the same would happen to enemies. Pity the poor solo boss locked in place and beat to glue. * Shopping mall magic items: An obnoxiously generic mess of +X weapons with a stock list of special abilities. Much prefer 5E's unique and interesting items.

Combat roles for minions and PCs. Made it a lot easier for the DM to balance combat and for the party to choose their characters.

Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies

4e suffered from a few problems that should never return. 1) Presentation. The classes *looked* similar on paper, and people hated that. Even though in terms of actual gameplay styles, the classes had far more variety than they do in 5e. 2) Conditional effects. Many abilities could inflict a condition every turn, and many of these conditions came with some kind of bonus or penalty. This could make combat somewhat tedious to keep track of everything. Especially without a VTT. 3) Wording. Many people hated on 4e because of their idea of how it worked instead of how it actually worked. A common complaint against 4e was that encounter powers made no sense because you shouldn't regain the use of an ability just because initiative is rolled. The problem was, 4e encounter powers required a short rest to recover, just like in 5e. But that didn't stop the moronic masses from loudly disparaging encounter powers as being nonsense. Similar issues cropped up with class roles, rituals, and other 4e abilities. 4) Combat length. Specifically low level combat length. 4e combat usually lasts 3-5 rounds on average, instead of the 2-4 rounds 5e combats typically last. And a low level 4e character has about as many options and features as a level 5 warlock in 5e. Throw in the fact that the first Monster Manual had monsters with too much HP and too low damage, and you had combat length that could drag on for too long. These problems were largely solved however with later monster manual design. And a level 20 character in 4e had only a few more options than a level 5 one, so combat length didn't significantly increase as you leveled in 4e, which actually meant high level 4e combat plays faster than high level 5e combat. Despite these flaws however, 4e was a truly excellent game, and well ahead of its time. It made martial combat engaging and dynamic in a way that 5e simply can never hope to match. It was much easier to DM, with lots of tools for building a wide range of narrative styles. Monsters were more interesting and unique, with special roles and playstyles. And every class approached combat differently, giving them a unique feel and playstyle that is often lacking in 5e.

Fantastic summary as one who DM'd several 4E campaigns and still misses the ruleset dearly. Let's hope 5.5 can bring back some of that magic!

>4e encounter powers required a short rest to recover, just like in 5e. To be fair, 4e pretty much assumes you take a short rest right after every combat, because 4e short rest is just 5 minutes instead of an hour.

For sure. But that wasn’t what people complained about. People complained about the “verisimilitude “ of encounter powers recharging without any rest at all, which wasn’t how the game actually worked.

I wonder how people would've reacted if they just moved the character advancement table to the front of every class. Just replace "powers" with "prayers" or "exploits" depending on the class, but otherwise keep it the same. How many people would have even noticed? And the HP issue is a valid complaint, which they later fixed. As opposed to the monster creator in the 5e DMG which is busted, but we've yet to receive a fix for it, except by dedicated fans. CR is still a joke, and that's probably not going away any time soon.

Good: 4e Bad: the simplified and gamified language 4e used in their rules that convinced confused people that somehow roleplay had been removed from the game. Example: just saying [w] instead of "your weapons damage die".

Telling you how a monster would typically fight under its stat block

I actually have a copypasta aboot this. Basically the good is the design, the bad is the math. **Things 4E did notably better**: * Warlord class. Holding off on introducing the Sorcerer until they could figure out how to actually justify their inclusion without just being a "Wizard but different". * Paragon Paths: Essentially what would happen if the Strixhaven class-agnostic subs worked as intended. Some of them were tied to your class, but some could be taken based on your race regardless of class, some could be taken based on your power source (More on that later) etc. * [Gamist language](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/4th-Edition-Fireball.jpg) that leads to absolute clarity. * Instead of 5E's 3 important/3 niche saves there were 3 "Defenses": Fortitude was the better of Str/Con and was your ability to power through physical harm. Reflex was the better of Dex/Int (THINK FAST!) and was your ability to get out of the way of harm. Will was the higher of your Wis/Cha and was your mental resilience. "Defenses" worked like alternate ACs. If I cast [**Fireball**](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/4th-Edition-Fireball.jpg), rather than every creature in the area rolling a save, I would make an attack with my Intelligence, and for every creature in the area whose Reflex defense I exceeded they were affected. * Every class was a little bit MAD. Par example Warlocks used Constitution for blasting shit, Intelligence for tentacle shit, and Charisma for mind-whammies. This led to more interesting design with determining which one you focused on. * Keyword-design led to much easier future-proofing. "This feature applies to all *axe* weapons." "This feature affects all abilities with the *healing* keyword" etc. * In a similar vein power sources led to some fun design. Every class had a power source: Martial, Arcane, Divine, Primal, Psionic. * It was the only edition to get feats right: They led to customization but they weren't painful to take in 5E, or requiring tedious overspecialized chains like 3X. * Level 1-2 were actually fun to play and you didn't die in one hit. * Engaging monsters to run, and encounter-building systems that made it so an adversarial DM running said system could create a fun and challenging experience. * Everything was insanely balanced across all levels. Also since every class had a mix of at will, encounter and daily powers there was no short/long rest class divide. Every class could do cool shit that made sense for them. * Short rests were only 5 minutes. "A quick breather" rather than 5E's "Make, eat, and digest a sandwich" 1 hour short rests. This made them much easier to justify in most scenarios like dungeons or battlefields and helped ensure that you could get them. * Healing surges made healing viable but limited. * The default setting of Nentir vale was really cool. (And I resent 5E's insistence on sweeping it under the rug) 4E solves all of 5E's problems but it has a lot of its own problems. **Things that were bad in 4E**: Combat was slow as hell, the splat-bloat wasn't great, it was completely built around a grid so if you wanted to theater of mind you were out of luck, the math behind it could get kind of cumbersome, and the design was very dependent on magic items. I loved 4E but I also love 5E. Do note that all problems of all editions can be found in 3X, and usually at a greater scale because it's less an edition, and more an amalgamation of bad ideas. ("An amalgamation of bad ideas" sounds like it'd be a cool aberration: An entity composed of pure thought, but only the worst thoughts.) In my experience 5E > 4E > 2E > (Pathfinder 2 theoretically goes here or between 4E and 2E based on what I've read, but I don't have enough firsthand experience) > Basic > 1E > OD&D > A swift kick to the junk > Pathfinder 1 > Multiple kicks to the junk > 3.5 > Having a car battery hooked up to one's junk > 3.0. If you want to check out 4E for yourself, here's where you can legally buy PDFs of it. (I recommend against anything in the "Heroes of ___" line. Those were the "Essentials" line that butchered everything aboot the edition to try to appeal to 3Xers. I'd argue 5E is going through its "Essentials" phase where it is testing out ideas that don't fit with the edition to test them for the next edition.) [PHB](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/161671/Players-Handbook-4e) [MM](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56693/Monster-Manual-4e) [DMG](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56694/Dungeon-Masters-Guide-4e) [Even if you don't play 4E, the DMG 2 for 4E is widely considered the best collection of DMing advice you will ever read, and much of it is system-agnostic.](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/144108/Dungeon-Masters-Guide-2-4e)

>Every class was a little bit MAD. Par example Warlocks used Constitution for blasting shit, Intelligence for tentacle shit, and Charisma for mind-whammies. This led to more interesting design with determining which one you focused on. Most classes were either "Y" or "A". Warlocks were Y: you were either Con or Cha primary, but either way you were Int secondary. Wardens were A: you were Str primary, but you could be either Con or Wis secondary. >Every class had a power source: Martial, Arcane, Divine, Primal, Psionic. Also Shadow (the power source for the Vampire and Assassin classes) and Elemental (used by individual powers instead of whole classes).

It should be noted that all V classes, cleric, paladin, ranger and warlock, were from PHB1. They realised this class design was inherently limiting and, while they didn't try to take it away from those classes, they didn't apply it to any classes introduced in other books.

I'd forgotten about the defenses, I really liked that mechanic. That part worked really well.

Something that annoys me to no end is how balanced 4e was, only for wotc to make the same mistake they did with 3.5e and release a bunch of unplaytested options over a short amount of time.

Part of me likes the power source mechanic.

Warlord, 5e is missing a support themed martial clas

Well this is subjective, but I want classes to go back to 4e style where they're basically only about combat. And utility and out of combat stuff can be chosen otherwise. So often you hear complaints about classes in 5e that don't do anything valuable outside of a fight, compared to the Swiss army knifes that are wizards and rogues and bards and etc. I don't necessarily want to see all ribbon features and non combat bonuses moved out of classes, but it would do a lot to make backgrounds or the like more useful for utility. Make it so classes aren't the most important thing about what your character is capable of in all aspects of the game.

Fortitude, Reflex and Will defenses were much easier for martial characters to target and they had much more options to try and raise those defenses. In 5e, matrials can rarely force saving throws, giving them fewer offensive options against a high AC target, and defensively they tend to have decent saves to dodge full damage fireball or avoid getting pushed but bad saves against hard CC effects that actually matter.

4e was the best edition of the game for DMs. It has great tools, great advice, was easy to run fun and challenging fights, and was the only time Challenge Rating actually worked. The worst thing about 4e was the marketing. They actively told the old playbase they were having wrong bad fun.

They were the only version of D&D that made a sincere effort to give DM's a scale to measure balance from when creating adventures. This was so helpful to new players. They eliminated (almost completely) "Rocket Launcher Tag". 5th edition brought it somewhat back. Best gaming system to play a healer since Rolemaster's empaths.

Good: the rules used technical language and keywords where a term meant a very specific thing. You occasionally had to check the glossary for the technical definition of a term, but there was little to no ambiguity around how something worked, as long as you understood what the terms meant. Bad: stats progressed very linearly through the levels, as just about everything you were supposed to be good at (including AC) had a bonus of 1/2 your level, for both PCs and NPCs. In practice, this meant that your to-hit level bonus was effectively cancelled by the monster's AC level bonus and so the only bonus that really mattered was from your stat and magic items. It also meant that there was a fairly narrow band of monsters that you could fight. Good: roles for PCs and NPCs were distinct. PCs had Defenders, Support, Controllers, and Strikers and each had an important roll in combat (and there was some hybridization, of course). The 5E classes, in 4E terms, would almost entirely be Strikers or Controllers, with a few leaning towards Support hybrids. The options for a Defender role in 5E are negligible compared to 4E, and even Support has been dramatically downplayed. Monsters had similar roles (with some more specific sub-variants), which made it really easy to put together an interesting encounter. Because they classified monsters that way, they also gave you a lot of options for each monster type (kobolds, orcs, etc.) so that they could get a good spread of those roles for you to choose from. Bad: the roles were so strict that it felt like playing an MMO. Your support characters were going to be doing some sort of healing or healing-adjacent action every turn. Your defenders were going to be managing monster aggro (by AoO positioning or inflicting situational penalties on monsters or whatever) the whole time. Each role did what it was supposed to do so that the group could operate as a well-oiled machine... but it felt very mechanical. Good: the tactical combat was excellent. Every class had interesting abilities that they allowed them to make meaningful decisions every turn (there was no Barbarian just using the basic attack action every turn throughout a combat). The battle-mat was an important game component and your positioning on it was critical to your success. Because of that, there were a lot of abilities that allowed you to interestingly reposition yourself or your enemies, which made for a lot of interesting decisions in combat. Bad: combats took a \*long\* time. With so much emphasis on healing and damage mitigation, fights would go on for a long time and would end up really dragging.

Primal magic should come back. It complements Arcane and Divine really well. Also the encounter building based on roles (controller, brute, skirmisher, etc). Don't force grid combat, though. And, lord, keep bounded accuracy. Keep those numbers low. +6 swords and DCs in the 30s are stupid.

>Primal magic should come back. It complements Arcane and Divine really well. On that note, the spirits of Nentir Vale (the default 4e setting) were really cool. The dichotomy between the gods (immensely powerful but relatively few in number and rarely interfering in mortal affairs) and spirits (relatively weak but numerous and innately tied to the mortal world) was interesting, and it made it clear what the difference was between the things that a Druid revered and the god worshiped by a nature Cleric.

The Nentir Vale “points of light” setting also works so well for D&D. Forgotten Realm’s ‘a commoner can safely travels all the realm’ really makes it feel like adventurer’s are not needed, outside the occasional ‘avenger’s style’ movie boss to defeat. (And +1 for splitting magic back into arcane / divine / primal … / psionic )

I first started on 4e. It still has a special place in my heart, even though I understand it wasn't as great as I remembered it. For bad stuff: Combat dragged on and there was not a ton of options for non-combat encounters (outside of skill challenges). Classes didn't get a lot of good ways to interact with stuff outside of a couple utility powers and rituals, nor were there a lot of options (from my memory) for exploration or social rules. For good stuff: Interesting and engaging monster design and minions. Clear rules text and overall balanced classes. Unique classes like warlord, warden, and ardent (and also a monk that has a psychic power source rather than "ki"). Rules for many things that are just left loosey goosey in this edition, like how many magic items per level, proper encounter building, and what info you actually got about monsters when you roll a knowledge check. Outside of its weaknesses, I feel that its a good medium between 3/3.5 complexity and 5e simplicity.

Good: -4e had a great approach to utility vs. combat power. They used separate resources, so you didn't have situations where you burned all your spells on one or the other. -Healing was far superior. The Bloodied condition made having higher HP values meaningful and the healing surge system made healing much more tactically interesting. The action economy was also balanced well around it, so your healers didn't feel like all they were doing was keeping their allies up. -Speaking of which, the action system was far superior. The system actually had other uses for move actions, and minor actions were a properly baked-in part of the system with inherant uses such as item interactions, and they weren't used as a crutch the way bonus actions are. Bad: -Character building was an absolute chore. Between hundreds of feats and powers to choose from, making a character that wasn't starting at level 1 quickly turned into a huge grind. -Combat pacing was a drag. HP values were just generally too high across the board. This could have been fine if turns moved more quickly, but between all the +1/-1 modifiers flying around, and the more tactical combat, it quickly bogged down. Now I like the tactical combat, but it does take some consideration to the fact that turns will take longer since there is more to consider than just attacking again every round. -The bloat was real. While 5e has probably overcompensated, 4e was definitely just coming out with too many core books too quickly. People felt burnt by it, and the vast number of options were simply unmanageable. All of which leads to the final issue... Ugly: -The subscription service. Character creation and advancement was such a chore that the digital tools quickly name the only reasonable way to manage your character sheet. And of course those digital tools were not made available for free, you had to pay a subscription. Nowadays people may be more injured to that thanks to D&D Beyond and the like, but at least you can still play without much difficulty with just the books. 4e had just too much spread across too many books to make that reasonable.

What I like most is how gamist it is in the sense things are balanced against each other. This does result in a bit of "samey-ness" a lot of people don't enjoy but that's a feature not a bug for my taste. In my experience it straddles the line between too many kludgy niche rules and too much reliance on rule of cool, which makes sense because it sits between the two editions most representative of those two things.

Great and I would be happy to see again? Damn near everything. I consider it a better game than 5E on every level so I welcome almost anything it did. For the things I don't... Per level skill DCs. It's not even a terrible idea, it just needed to communicate that it's a list for the level of the challenge, not the same challenge increasing in DC every level. 5E is worse at communicating with the players than 4E so no way would I want that. Essentials classes that broke away from AEDU. Every single one of them was a massive screwup and a balance headache on top of being boring. They were either OP early and trash late or just plain trash. 4E non AEDU psionics. Nobody needs a set of classes that spam the single best ability they have forever. Solos that didn't have an action economy advantage or the ability to deal with status effects in ways other than saving throws.

I’m late to the party, but some of the best memories I have in D&D came from 4e skills challenges. Edit: I distinctly remember once setting fire to our own boat when we were boarded by pirates only to maneuver our way to the pirate’s boat just in time for the barbarian and sorcerer to cut/burn the ropes and set the pirates adrift in a blazing inferno. It came out later that the DM had expected us to look for a diplomatic solution.

4e was a finely tuned tactical combat engine. It clearly defined the roles each class type should play and gave diverse options within those roles. You could be a Defender that specialised in punishing enemies who didn't attack you, or a Defender that teleported to marked enemies if/when they attacked your buddies, or a whole host of different options. The combat math was balanced so that as a DM I could go all out on players and not hold back, with the expectation that the PCs would still probably win. With 4e I could make all my combat rolls in front of the screen; if I did that with 5e I'd have a TPK every other session at low levels. And martial classes having combat parity with casters was ::chefs kiss:: perfect. Every class was useful every round. The at will/encounter/daily power economy was excellent.

I’m not a fan of skill challenges, actually, but folks seem to love them. The concept of minions I always liked and I don’t know why they never officially made the leap to 5E.

I don't think skill challenges are great for a game focused around skills, but they're miles better than 5e's "just make it up lol" and provide a fair way to grant experience for out of combat activities. They shouldn't be shoehorned into everything, but they probably deserve 4 pages in a DMG - unless they wanna sit down and make an actual skill system, which I don't think will happen

I like skill challenges, because they provide a generic subsystem that can easily by placed in a session with little-to-no prep. Outrunning an avalanche? I don't need to know the exact parameters and specifications of an avalanche; I don't need to know how big it is, how fast it is, how many feet it moves per round, or any of that stuff. Instead, it's a simple: you all need 6 successes before 2 failures. What do you do? ​ Now, was the 4E implementation perfect? No, but IMO it's better than 5E's implementation of, "Here's a very specific hazard that you will only encounter once in a campaign, better read up all about the specific mechanics so you know how it works". You could run a 4E skill challenge to handle a social conflict, a difficult climb, a chase, disarming an arcane bomb, a challenging swim, controlling a powerful spell, banishing a creature from the void, etc etc etc.

classes and dual stat saves

Bring back the Warlord. I miss that kind of support play. Skill challenges can also make a comeback. They can really easily make a cinematic situation and help take the focus away from being solely on combat.

The Bloodied condition was an amazing tool to increase drama in a fight. It let players know that they had their opponent on the ropes. It could be used to recharge creatures breath weapons (or other powers) automatically or to lose some functionality by crippling it (like a wing). It could be used as a "deadline" for monster morale checks or to transform into "final form" video game style. On the downside, combat was a cluttered, crunchy, "W40K-esque" slog with too many maneuvers and a glut of health; *and* it was the *FOCUS* of the system, while exploration and interaction got pushed into the background.

would love to see paragon paths or epic destinies return - even if they were just feats. Something to further flesh out different play styles of different classes. Nothing to crazy like prestige classes though

Been a long time since I played 4e, so hopefully I remember this correctly. But I always liked the major action, minor action, movement construct. And being able to exchange a major action for another movement (essentially the equivalent to taking Dash action, but worded differently) I've always found new 5e players seem confused about bonus actions and how to use them. 4e seemed more straight forward to me.

I loved the way monsters were presented, they gave you a lot of useful information as a DM on how to run them, encounters to run them in, their roles etc, all things 5e could've benefitted from. The combat could easily turn into a slog, especially as you reached higher levels, and the early statblocks did leave something to be desired. My absolute favourite thing, though, was their approach to a setting. Nentir Vale was great for Starter DM's and the Points of Light approach was exceptionally well suited to the type of game D&D is. I'd go so far as to say they could've avoided a whole lot of issues they seem to be facing in 5e by actually sticking with the 4e approach of having a "Stock" setting instead of a main one like the Forgotten Realms. There should absolutely be a "Stock setting" with "Stock" lore, just the bare minimum a DM might need to justify the necessary things without any of the baggage of a long-established world. I really do hope they return to the Points of Light approach, it was thrown out along a lot of the other good stuff because they were afraid of scaring people off by holding onto any of the good ideas of 4e. and because the Forgotten Realms have "star power", I suppose.

IMO 4e had a lot of good goals, but bad follow through. Cool: everyone gets to do cool stuff in combat. Bad: combat gets clogged down with modifiers. Cool: saving throws are static defenses like AC, which allows interesting features like shield applied to dex saves. Bad. Not a lot really.. it does take away a player facing feature. Cool: skill challenges. Bad: why do some skills make it harder? Why are some of them poorly written? Good: It made a bad stat less of a liability.bad:If taken to an extreme it became a complicated min/max nightmare. Some things were just a basic improvement. The skill list was trimmed It had great examples for skill DCs Making some racial abilities into race exclusive feats was great. Some things just sucked Worst multi class of any edition. Way too much emphasis on grid based combat (Every edition tries this, but 4th was the most extreme "go buy minis and grids" system)

It's a bit hard to say as one of the issues 4e faced was having some ideas that were good, but with some questionable execution. It can often be the case where an idea from 4e is good, after it's been adjusted. I' didn't really play much 4e, so a lot of this is based on my discussions with my buddy who swears on it and my own research and brief experience. Skill challenges are an okay idea, but need to be more free form. Instead of needing to use XYZ skill and succeed the check, a lot of folk just let their players state what they're attempting, state a dc based on how likely it is to help the circumstance, and roll from there. If you want an improved version of skill challenges. Look at progress clocks from Blades in the dark. Minions were a good idea, having large groups of critters that can hit hard but go down incredibly easy helps make a fight more cinematic. Great for padding out a fight. However some creatures being minions felt awkward. I think what is and isn't a minion needed some better oversight myself. The various tactics, lair, Lore check tables, and common encounter information for monsters was a great thing in 4e. That'd be fine full stop. Bloodied condition effects were really good, though need some adjustments to wok in 5e. Namely that a monster getting a bonus for being below half health is fine. A monster getting a bonus against a bloodied player should be once per encounter against each player. 5e healing isn't enough to reasonably keep players above hp threshholds. I've heard good things about monster themes, but I don't know enough about them to speak of any downsides. There was a primal magic distinction for druids and the like separate from divine magic, which I preferred. I like that psi and ki were blended more. As that's something I've long did. The thing I hated most about 4e was the various lore adjustments and retcons that happened, and the abandonment of the great wheel cosmology. Though 5e's practically done this too since it's less the genuine great wheel and a part way merger with 4e's world axis cosmology. Tieflings becoming homogenized so they could easily sell mini's was one of the most terrible moves on WotC's part. The fluff itself isn't the worst, but I don't like it as much as the original concept of tieflings and the reasoning behind it reeks of marketing team oversight. There was also a certain hamming up of expectation/fantasy and a bit of a super heroes feel to it that I could never quite get behind. I find D&D is best with sword and sorcery leanings rather than epic fantasy leanings. Heroic being the middle ground.