Rarely does a week pass without someone trying to innovate something for 5e only to be told they are ‘reinventing 4e’... the implications are often that all we need to do is find the lost light and return to the fold of 4e, and we’d live in a land of Exciting Combat and Player Choice.
Now, to be fair, the basics of the accusation aren’t always that outlandish. My latest class—the Paragon—is certainly not helping me beat the allegations of reinventing 4e. In fact, I’d agree that’s largely what it is: a 4e style class reinvented for 5e.
But there’s that important qualifier—reinvented. As in, reforged from the basic concept into something that is entirely new, because there is a lot of filtering you have to do if you want to capture the vision people have of 4e without subjecting them to the reality of it.
What we are often in reinventing something is to bring back the memories of it. The stories people tell and retell of it. The feelings it invokes or the design principles that get appealed to a decade later… but not so much the conveniently forgotten reality, since that includes a lot of grit we are mostly happier playing without.
Crunch vs. Grit (Again)
I’ve brought up the idea of crunch vs. grit in previous blog posts, so I won’t re-litigate it too much beyond giving my definition again in broad strokes: Crunch is choices the player makes. Grit is the mechanical debt that needs to be accounted for in the resolution mechanics. They are often related, and some people would rather not have either, but in general the goal of someone that wants to add depth to a system should be to add Crunch with as little Grit as possible.
This is a test 4e fails spectacularly. I’m sorry, I realize that these days it's cool to say that 4e was a lost gem that just needs to be brushed off and put on a pedestal, but there’s still some people that actually played it and remember what resolving each round was like. While it has strong points, efficient combat resolution mechanics is not one of them.
The version of 4e people remember—or have inherited memories of via the stories they’ve been told—are of epic features that allow you to do a bunch of cool things. Charge into a group of enemies, heroically leap to your allies aid, taunt a horde of enemies with a roar… these are all things you could do… but it’s worth asking what the actual mechanics behind those narrative moments were, because usually it was a +2 or -2, and a bunch of a reactions you had to remember to take (and usually didn’t until just slightly too late) and maybe moving some enemies around (…in ways that probably triggered some of those reactions).
Floating modifiers are a resolution nightmare—they are pinnacle of grit that treats the DM like an encounter resolving computer (there is a solid argument that 4e was only designed that way because it was designed to be resolved by a computer, but that’s a topic for another day, today we are dealing with the reality of what we got).
This is stuff 5e very wisely curtailed—it’s far from perfect, but 5e combat is vastly easier on the DM. But its fair to ask… if its supposed to be so much better, why are people still casting fond glances 4e’s way?
It’s simple: they’ve forgotten the tedious grit, but remember the glorious crunch. They forget the tedious calculations and turn length, but remember having choices to do cool things. That’s what reinventing 4e is about: filtering the crunch from the grit.
The Challenge of Creating Crunch Without Grit
This idea has a higher DC than it sounds. Imagine you want to make two versions of attacking: an aggressive slash and a defensive slash. In a world of floating modifiers, this is super easy: you give the aggressive slash +2 to hit, and the defensive slash gives the enemy a -2 to hit. But how do you recreate that in 5e? Giving advantage/disadvantage is 5e’s version of it, but that’s far more powerful—roughly twice as powerful. That’s a big lever to pull, particularly when its your only lever.
This is the difficult 5e 2024 weapon masteries ran into—the smallest reasonable unit of power is a very large unit of power that warps combat quite a lot, and there simply wasn’t enough of those levers, leaving a lot of them just various versions of ‘do more damage passively’—the one thing martials didn’t really need.
It’s worth remember that advantage is also supposed to cover situational bonuses, so things that give nearly permanent advantage crush an important dimension of gameplay and combat, since they reduce the drive of the player to interact with the world to find ways to get advantage naturally.
The solution, I think, is to ignore the version of 4e that actually existed, and work to reinvent the version people remember. Go bigger and use something flashier. It’s what people remember anyway, and it resolves under 5e’s system much better.
You probably cannot make an effect that applies on every hit that doesn’t introduce a lot of grit, and it probably isn’t worth doing globally—all it really does is feed to the optimization engine as people engineer which option is the best one. You’ll constantly be wrestling with grit and balance. But you absolutely can make a cool ability that is used once per combat.
Focusing on bringing back the idea of encounter powers (or 1/short rest abilities in 5e parlance) solves most of our problems. While you still don’t want to literally port over 4e encounter powers (...they are still loaded down with those floating modifiers…) it’s now totally fine if the encounter power is stronger than your other passive options—it should be! It’s now not a problem if you inflict disadvantage or a more potent die based debuff or a condition. Doing something big and flashy was what people are going to remember about that combat anyway. That’s the 4e they remember.
Bringing This To Life Under 5e Ideology
As usual, I’ll use my attempt to do this as an example—not (just) to promote what I make, but simply because I have it on hand as an example, and it’s in part what brought this to mind: Active Martial Feats.
Are these a 5e idea or a 4e idea? The answer is both and neither. They are the memories of 4e brought to life in the 5e game engine. They are reinventing 4e under the big tent design of 5e. They don’t inflict themselves on players that just want to bonk with their bonking stick, but they are there on the shelf for any player that wants more tactical options and depth to combat.
You can have two players playing side by side—one selecting typical optimization feats that increase their DPR and one selecting active martial feats, and they will both be valuable contributors that are playing the same game differently.
Since each power is only used once a fight, it can afford to have a dramatic and flashy effect—it can attack all enemies in an AoE without a compromise, it can have spell-like impacts because it's effectively a martial spell… yet by being independent short rest resources it reinforces the martial role in the adventuring day of being able to unleash these powers every fight without reservation or conserving their resources for a rainy day.
This is obviously not the only way to go about it, but ticks all the boxes: it's not disruptive to 5e’s design, it can play alongside bog standard 5e characters, and it brings to life the part of 4e that people remember—when someone looks at these and things ‘Why are you reinventing 4e again?’ I consider that a rousing success. It means that I’ve brought the memories to reality despite cutting out all the parts that didn’t work.
Of course, for those that find 5e to have insufficient feats to solve the problem through feats, I’d recommend Variant Martial Progression to go hand in hand with deploying a feat-based-solution to the the problem.
Designing Crunch for 5e is Hard
For those that are going to take this back to their own game design efforts, there’s something we need to talk about in all of this: writing encounter powers for 5e is much harder than writing them for 4e. Grit may be bad for the game, but it makes a designer's life much easier—it’s the natural side effect of giving yourself more granular levers in combat.
There is a going to be a constant tension between what would be easy for you the designer (in terms of instilling themes and balancing a feature) and what will be easy for the DM to run down the road, but the cold hard truth remains is that the DM’s ease of life far more important than the designer’s. It’s the designer’s job to cater to the DM, not the DM’s to deal with the designer’s bullshit: if you make the game more complicated to run, they are just going to not use your content.
We must always start from the origin point of the game that exists and ask ourselves if the feature we are adding is ‘worth it’.
Be exceptionally cautious about any feature that debuffs or deals damage over time to another creature. Where possible, use disadvantage instead of a flat penalty. Not only is it far easier to resolve, it automatically prevents stacking debuffs. Where you cannot use a disadvantage, try to use a die—a die might sound more complicated than a traditional floating modifier, but in practice they are easier to track since they have a tactile representation.
If you find yourself in a place where a feature could really use a -2 or +2, step back and see how you got there. Is the feature being used too often to apply disadvantage? If so, does it need to be? Can it be instead buffed into a short rest feature?
Looking to 4e or 3.5 for ideas is a perfectly reasonable approach, but the mechanics themselves aren’t what you are there for—read the feature and think ‘what does someone remember about this feature?’
The Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords is perhaps an even better example than 4e of being absolutely chock full of things that boil down to ‘+1 to something’, but people remember it as being full of cool choices, because they were named cool sounding things and used to build cool characters.
You can just take that name—or take inspiration from it—and design a 5e feature as long as adhere to the principles of giving players choices to do cool things, they’ll think you’re stealing from it—and that will be a good thing, because you’ll know its mechanics won’t worth stealing, but that you successful ignited their memory of how it worked.
‘Congratulations, You’ve Reinvented 4e’
Those infamous words now become your badge of honor. If you’ve done it right, they won’t even notice that the content isn’t all that much like 4e. It’s like the 4e they remember fondly—or more likely it's like the 4e they’ve been told they should remember fondly, since most people saying that never played, you know, played 4e.
Now so armed, go forth and loot all the ideas you can get your hands on—there is a cornucopia of ideas out there unplundered. Pulling them successfully into 5e (or your game of choice) will be challenging, but now you know what needs to be done. You just need to clean off the grit and see what crunch can be salvaged.
This is largely going to hold try when pulling from 3.5 as well, though its sins are somewhat different. Perhaps that’ll be a topic for the future.
5e is a big tent—you can fit some 4e in there too. Just keep in mind the DC of stealing the crunch without getting the grit is pretty high. It is going to take a discerning eye and steady hand to get away with it.
