Miss 4e D&D

[Moak]

If we're at the point of trading anecdotes, the majority of people I talked to in the early 4e era thought skill challenges were unenjoyable even after the math hotfix, and considered rituals a waste of page space.

To me, the concept of the skill challanges opened up a new way to see non-combat encounter. It was obviously a "me" problem, but it was like this:

the single campaign that better draw out from me the same "anything can happen" feel that I had as a child with BEC(never arrived to level up to the M I part), was played in 4e.

When playing in 3/3.5/3.P/3.Homebrew, every spellcaster rushed to search for the right spell for that non-combat encounter. No-one, unless we had a rogue in the party, ever prompted me for skill use. I had always to ask people for the rolls.

Playing 4e with new players, and making some skill challenges here and there, changed that. I don't know if it was the mental starting idea by the players that the "powers" were "combat powers", but they tried to engage more in the skills, and to try to synergize together. And then they started to propose creative "out of combat" use for the powers to complement the skills.

I also liked a lot the condensed skill list (even if I missed the skill points), and I'm always torn about using it in 3.5 (but I'm not confident enough to be able to port the skill points number and the proficiencies to adjust for it, and when I've looked, I never found an homebrew for something like this that didn't was part of a bigger, larger, skill system full rebuild).

4E got problems, and when we started playing it, I missed the hyper customizability of 3E full splat book madness, and I'm still waiting to find a group to play a monstrous gestalt campaign to go crazy with races/classes combination but...

I still miss the offline Character Builder, and the Adventure tools. They prompted me to work on some code for a treasure generator for 3.5.

I LOVED the combination and interaction during combat. It could go long? Maybe... but I STILL miss a warlord like class in 3.5.

I hadn't played or GMmed 5E except for some one shots, and I don't have any kind of mastery of that system. It seemed... good? I loved the advantage/disadvantage things, and the inspiration points (we did used something like that... I think destiny point? Something that a friend of mine suggested from a saint seiya gdr as a way to encourage role playing. They were reroll/auto success or smth like that)

But now? If someone ask me for a dungeon crawling, combat heavy campaign, I usually go to 4e.
If (like my current campaign) they ask me for a more political/full interpretation oriented/we don't want to fight many encounters I go for 3.5E but I use "skill challenges lite" as a system to plan for non combat encounters. It helps me to analyse and plan for alternative approaches to situations and they serve me well.