4e Pack Lord: Whenever heroes kill one of its allies it can force one of them to hit themselves, it can move multiple allies forwards, grant them extra attacks
5e Pack Lord: Just regular Gnoll but can recharge one ally’s Rampage.
4e was much more combat-oriented. Everyone was OP compared to 5e. It was like playing a tabletop MMORPG.
People hated it, but I really enjoyed it. Not because it was a good version of D&D, but because “tabletop MMORPG” was appealing to me.
(I am not an expert. I played 4e for one campaign.)
I loved 4e combat too. EOT and Scene abilities make combat much more fun and dynamic IMO
It definitely can get bogged down in complexity, but I think it’s usually worth it, and over time, you and your players can get used to it, and start picking up the pace.
Pokemon Tabletop United basically uses the same system, and it also has to contend with multiple Pokemon characters per Player character. The whole group needs to be working together to keep things moving. It’s definqtely a challenge for new players
I had a binder full of moves for my level 8 barbarian.
If you really enjoyed the nuance of
spin in a circle with two one-handed weaponsas a distinct Action from `swing one weapon really hard in a circle” it was a great system.If you just want to play role playing game with some combat, it was a terrible system
Actually, it sounds like a great design choice, D&D has been way more focused on combat than regular rpg, and has never been the proper choice for roleplay, politics, horror, investigation story.
It seems that at least 4th edition was doing combat right
The main thing that kept me from switching to 4e was that it looked to be even more tedious to play combat than 3e. It had so many things to keep track of for me, even though I liked the idea itself.
Came back for 5e mainly because it was slimmed down and attempted to make combat more streamlined and faster to play. I did start doing customized low level creatures by adding an extra thing here or there so they have a bit more variety than the baseline. Especially by giving humanoids common equipment!
Compared to 3.5 it was a breeze to teach to new players.
Also played 4e for like 3 months and enjoyed it. But it felt like a spinoff more than anything, and the game DID feel “game-ier”. I wouldn’t want my long-running campaigns in 4e.
Pro tip: you can change them however you want
I attacked my party with a backhoe that had a bulette’s statblock
