The differences are enormous. Now, people are gonna jump on my shit for this, but here's my narrative about the editions of D&D.
All of the old classic editions, up through 2e, were a pretty niche hobby for a very different subset of gamers than we have today. 3e/3.5 came out and revolutionized D&D, massively improving it from its older incarnations, and proving extremely popular. But there were still some glaring balance and design issues that make the game drag down, and caused people to burn out on it. Many improvements had been made, but there was still a fair bit of old school cruft from earlier editions that just never really made for a balanced game.
So they took everything back to the drawing board with 4th edition, and pretty much redesigned the entire game, to make things more balanced, easier to DM, and more appealing to players of other types of popular games, like miniatures games, deckbuilding games, and video games. They brought in design elements from every type of gaming to try to fully modernize D&D, while also casting off nearly all of the vestiges of old school Gygaxian unbalanced design. Well, this didn't work out well for them, sadly. All of the people who loved 3.5 absolutely lost their shit, and jumped ship to go to Pathfinder instead (or just kept playing 3.5). 4e did bring in a bunch of new players who hadn't been interested in D&D before, but it wasn't enough to make up for the massive loss of old fans who just couldn't accept the enormous changes to the system.
Thus, the purpose of 5e was clear: bring back those old players, while also making the game so accessible that we can keep bringing in lots of new players to the hobby. So they scrapped almost everything that they had changed in 4th edition, bringing back a lot of that old-school feel (and the Gygaxian cruft, as I call it, that was previously abandoned), while also simplifying the game, reducing player choices and making it very easy for new people to jump in. It was a huge success, drawing back in lots of old players who were happy to see their old familiar (unbalanced) design principles return, and expanding into a whole new, huge audience of players for whom D&D had been too complex and too full of choices before. They kept a few things from 4e (and most of those things, ironically, are very popular elements of 5th edition, as most 5e players don't even know they came from 4e), but mostly they rolled back the balancing and ease-of-DMing innovations that had characterized 4th edition.
5e is without question the most popular edition of D&D ever, and the best edition for the largest number of people. But I think it came at a cost, the cost of bringing back old class imbalance, bringing back difficulty of DMing (prep, encounter design and balancing, challenging the players), and gutting the huge amount of player choice that were present in both 3.5 and 4e.
Player choice in character creation and level up does seem limited, lack of feats and choice of skills (skill choice when leveling up that is). But I do only have BG3 to reference off of for 5e so my view might be off. For 4e I know advantage was in the game but it was just a flat +2 and I don't think there was a disadvantage to it. 4e was different than 3.5 which is were I started and generally why I liked it. It was a different take on the system, which was a nice change of pace, at least for me. I was pretty disappointed to see the nwn series turn into a online mmo though, that was a big let down. Thanks for the reply FSA, interesting read.
Originally Posted by KillerRabbit
Where 1st, 2nd and 5th were designed to be pen and paper editions first and electronic versions second, 5th was inspired by video games and was pretty clearly intended to made into a video game. Like in romantic life, sometimes trying to hard to get the attention of others is counter productive. 5th is probably the hardest edition to make into a video game but has proven to be the most popular. Go figure.
4th --
was combat oriented. Many of the social skills checks that we are seeing in BG3 were demphasized or eliminated.
The standard party roles were hardcoded while at the same time the importance of class was diminished. Instead of thinking of class you thought about role -- Controller, Defender, Leader, or Striker The classes were balanced to the point that they were nearly indistinguishable. This is what caused so many to defect to pathfinder. While 4th was saying "any class can fill this role" 3.75 was saying "you can make you character the way you like, even if it offends the gods of balance".
4th was all about positioning -- to the point that characters became super hero like. Nearly everyone could teleport to different places on the field. Your standard issue eldarin (elf) could bend time and space to show up on the other side of the room. Any differences between teleportation abilities were really cosmetic -- when you teleport do you pass through the realm of shadow or the feywild?
Likewise some "positioning" rules were relaxed to the point that they no longer made sense -- everyone got healing surges for some reason that was never explained very well. Mechanics came first, lore second.
Monsters were greatly simplified. Weird wacko powers were reduced to a handful of core powers to be used in combat (please, please make a video game about us)
Also, they blew up the realms and killed everyone's favorite gods. The tone was even darker than greyhawk -- even bending towards dystopian -- but for some reason the game was based in Faerun.
In 5th, the warlock is the most "4th ed" class. Easy teleportation, largely combat oriented and only a handful of available actions. (it's eldritch blast in the morning and eldritch blast in the evening. If you are doing something other than Hex + EB you might be doing it rong)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but the social skills are in 4e, here's the list of skills from PHB
Acrobatics, Arcana, Athletics, Bluff, Diplomacy, Dungeoneering, Endurance, Heal, History, Insight, Intimidate, Nature, Perception, Religion, Stealth, Streetwise, and Thievery. If its related to DMG I do remember my bro talking about dmg2 being better. Oh crap, ya they did have those titles in the game. They were made just to sum up key roles of what classes were in a few words & interesting that people would drop 4e for pathfinder because of that.
Ya, Eldarin had a encounter power called fey step that tele'd 5 squares (encounters were once per battle). I'm presuming the tele complaint is stretched a bit but ill take your word on it. Probably feywild from the name, fey step.
Healing surge was the cost for some spells/abilities to be cast, each class had so many of them, generally gave a limit to how much you could heal in game an out each day. Every class had a second wind encounter power that you could spend requiring one healing surge. Second wind regained health points and gave you +2 to all defenses until start of next turn.
I'm not going to look up the monsters and lore, ill just take your word on it, spent to much time already on this post.
Last comment is kind of sad, FSA was right though about the card comment, at least for bard. I played a halfling bard in 4e, at least for that class it was pretty close to a card game. I had a pretty solid sized deck full of at-will, encounter, and daily powers. If 5e warlock is one ability, id hate to be any player that plays that class.
Thanks for the comment btw, it was entertaining.
Originally Posted by Taramafor
Hey man, Neverwinter Night's 1 worked fine. 2 did feel underwhelming though. I actually consider how NW1 handles dialogue better then what we have in BG 3 (pluss it's hard not to be impressed when you're doing this with an ice dragon you're not forced to attack and can have a pleasant conversation with). You still have the roll checks but it doesn't force you to do it three times in a row (something BG3 seems to go out of its way to do at times) and you still have the checks but it doesn't shove dice under your nose and force you to do extra steps just to see the result.
They really should have an option for that in the menu. "See dice roll checks or not". That way you could save time just seeing the next conversation (stating successful or failure) without waiting for the dice to "catch up" on the screen.
What! NwN 1 and 2 were the best, you sure you havent taken a few hits in the head in a tavern brawl?!
