Aetrimonde

Every character class in 4e (until some of the later books) used the same resources: creating a character of a new class didn’t require you to learn brand-new systems. Compare this to D&D 3.5e, in which many of the later-released classes featured novel systems shared with few or no other classes. (See: Binders, Truenamers, Incarnates, Martial Adepts.) 5e is much better about it, but playing, say, a Champion Fighter doesn’t exactly prepare you to play any kind of spellcaster.

• To be fair, having classes without resources, or with minimal resources, offered a simpler entry point for new players, who were often advised to play a fighter. However, I think there’s a happy medium between 3.5e’s extremely simple fighters and far more complicated spellcasters, where new players can still jump right into playing a spellcaster if that’s the kind of character they want.

With few exceptions, the character taking an action made all the relevant rolls: instead of attacks vs. AC and saves using Fortitude, Reflex, or Will, you just had attacks vs. AC, Fortitude, Reflex, or Will. Knowing that when they took an action, they would almost always be the one needing to roll dice for it made the game easier for new players to get the hang of.

• This does actually complicate writing rules for certain kinds of action. If a spell creates a patch of slippery ice, it’s simple for the rule to be “a creature entering the ice must make a save or fall prone.” Without saves, the equivalent rule needs to be along the lines of “when a creature enters the ice, make an attack vs. its Reflex; if it hits, the creature falls prone” which is both longer, and requires the spellcaster to do things when it’s not their turn. Personally, I think that having everything be an attack simplifies the basic rules enough to be worth some spells getting more complicated in response.

3.5e gave non-spellcasters very few things they could do that weren’t some variation on a weapon attack. (See: Sneak Attack, Power Attack, Trip, Manyshot, etc.) But, because they didn’t have resources comparable to a spellcaster’s spell slots, these options were balanced around being more or less equivalent to a regular attack.

Spellcasters, by comparison, had spell slots that they regained every day, and their spells were far more powerful than any weapon attack (especially at higher levels). In theory, this would be balanced out by spellcasters eventually running out of spells, while a non-spellcaster would be able to make weapon attacks all day long. In practice, players would often stop to rest once the spellcasters were out of spells, or even just running low.

5e is much better about this! Not all classes get a resource mechanic allowing them to do interesting things like spellcasters, but they do all at least have a subclass that allows them to if they want.

Prior to 4e, combats tended to be relatively static: there were few effects that would push characters around, and they tended to be hard to use unless a character focused on them, so a typical combat would see a lot of movement in the first few turns, and then everyone would stay stationary until they had killed off whoever they were fighting. 5e has kept 4e’s increased emphasis on forced movement, for the better.

3.5e had introduced, late in its lifecycle, the Immediate action, which it used mainly to allow for casting spells like Feather Fall when it wasn’t the caster’s turn. But because it wasn’t an original part of the system, there were few spells or other abilities that actually used it, and in fact if nobody at the table had the books using it, they might not even know it existed. 4e included the Immediate action from the start and vastly expanded the range of things that could be done with it; 5e has backed off of that slightly but still retains the concept in the form of the Reaction.

Okay, this isn’t exactly an ideal application of behavioral economics, but that’s what I studied instead of psychology.

Behavioral economics tries to explain why economic agents sometimes make decisions that our theories say are suboptimal. One of the key concepts here is salience, which I will describe here as “feeling significant.” Actual people have a limited mental load they can carry, and so they sometimes ignore things that aren’t salient when making decisions.

In RPGs, situational bonuses tend to get forgotten if they aren’t salient. To make a bonus salient, it helps if it is some combination of:

• Self-Only: Bonuses that another character gives you feel less salient than ones you give yourself.
• Large: Large bonuses are more likely to make a difference than small ones, and thus more salient.
• Reliable: Situational bonuses that you get in common situations are more salient than ones you only get once in a blue moon.
• Consistent: Giving a bonus a name makes it more salient. 4e had a mechanic of combat advantage, which you could get from many sources but always gave a simple +2 bonus to attack rolls.

4e was good about making situational bonuses one of those four things: it contained large bonuses that other characters could sometimes give you, and small bonuses that you could easily get from other characters, but not small bonuses that other characters only occasionally gave you.

Bonus types in 3.5e included ability, alchemical, armor, circumstance, competence, deflection, dodge, enhancement, insight, luck, morale, natural armor, profane, racial, resistance, sacred, shield, and size. Like in 4e, you could only count one bonus of each type, but with so many types, that often didn’t help much.

Some of these bonuses were incredibly fiddly. Consider one bonus of being a dwarf:

“Dwarves are exceptionally stable on their feet. A dwarf has a +4 bonus on ability checks made to resist being bull rushed or tripped when standing on the ground (but not when climbing, flying, riding, or otherwise not standing firmly on the ground).”

This bonus made it harder to push dwarves around or make them prone, but only applied to certain kinds of effect (bull rush or trip) in certain circumstances (standing on the ground) and only if the effect worked in a specific manner (via ability check). Also, a +4 bonus sounds significant, but at higher levels in 3.5e, might not actually have made a difference. Dwarves are Medium creatures; bull rush and trip attempts already gain a +4 bonus for each size category larger than the target the attacker is. At high levels, that +4 would not go far to negate the +16 that a Colossal enemy has, not to mention its likely very high Strength…

4e’s bonus types included enhancement, proficiency, racial, class, feat, item, and power; of these, the only ones that would usually be situational are power and maybe racial and class. Since you could only “stack” one bonus of each type, this meant you basically only ever had to think about three types of bonus in the middle of the game. 4e was also better about ensuring that bonuses remained relevant even at high levels.

5e has actually improved on 4e in this regard, with the introduction of its advantage/disadvantage mechanic as a replacement for a lot of situational bonuses. (For more on this, stay tuned for my upcoming post on Resolution Mechanics.)

3.5e and 5e both rely on the Challenge Rating (CR) system for designing encounters. In theory, a monster’s CR is the level that a party of 4 characters would need to be for the monster to be a reasonable encounter. In practice, that’s not an easy system to use, since encounters with single monsters would get very boring very quickly. The guidelines for working out the effective combined CR of a group of monsters can be very misleading, and so encounter design in both 3.5e and 5e tends to involve a large amount of guesswork on the part of the GM.

As far as setting appropriate DCs goes, 3.5e took the approach of defining what the DC should be for specific tasks (like climbing a brick wall, or swimming in choppy water) but didn’t give particularly good guidelines on what DCs would be appropriate to expect PCs to handle at various levels.

5e instead gave a single table of DCs ranging from Very Easy to Impossible, and because skill bonuses don’t change hugely from low level to high level in 5e, this works out reasonably well.

Neither edition has a great system for designing non-combat encounters using skill checks, and it’s something I hope I can improve on when writing a Game Master’s Handbook.