D&D 5e: For real this time?

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

4e was actually a great system, for one thing.  Separating out the people I would never want to play with.

With an acknowledgement for the small group of people who joined in 4th ed and yet are good at running games (mostly via just eyeballing and homebrewing everything up to and including the core ruleset), 4e 'fans', with their obsessive focus on low power games, endless dice-rolling, 'keeping up' with errata updates, thinking a default setting where races are evil and loot 'drops' from nowhere is amazing, and all the rest of the pointless rage-inducing minutiae and terrible design flaws hailed as manna from heaven for terrible reasons, are just everything I hate about the roleplaying community in specific and nerds in general.

So I like that, because I can hear '4e', listen briefly for the 'but I change everything', and then simply tune that person out of my personal reality forever.

[linklord231]

What 4E design elements? I'm not familiar with the depths of 4E (only the generalities) and I've done little more than skim the playtest packets. I haven't even looked at the higher level spells in the new packet, just levels 1-5 from the previous iterations.

Forcing the same system onto every class, when the original system was just fine; and the general toning down of everything.  I don't really know what else they've done, but those were the biggest things. 

[Libertad]

After looking at D&D Next, 4th Edition looks more appealing to me.

Every Edition had its one unique mechanics and design philosophies.  D&D Next seems mainly to be aping the pre-4th Editions instead of going for its own unique thing, like a Frankenstein's Monster of RPGs.

[McBeardly]

I'm having difficulty getting ahold of D&D Next stuff. Could someone explain why it looks so unappealing.

[Bauglir]

From what I've seen, though this was a packet or two ago, they've latched on very strongly to the idea of a purely mechanical niche defining character. In essence, if you want a character who is good at X, they have to take some particular class, race, or feat, because that's how the designers planned to let you access that ability. The way they're setting up the numbers, it looks like multiclassing is very likely going to be a tacked-on afterthought accessible only at certain points in advancement (a la 4E), for instance. They're still going for a lot of the design-by-feel elements of previous editions, which seems likely to result in the imbalance of 3E and Co., but because they're retaining bits of 4E design philosophy we're likely to get similarly cookie-cutter characters because they don't want to risk unforeseen combinations arising from the mists of CharOp.

As I put it in another thread, they're putting tons of effort into coming up with cool mechanics for a particular character idea, and then saying that you can only have those mechanics if you're playing that particular archetype. Very much an emphasis on letting players play the characters the designers come up with, instead of tools to let the players design their characters. At least, this is the impression I got. It was a playtest, but I can't help but feel if they're cutting out player expression for the sake of reliable (read: standardized) results, they're missing the goal of character creation rules, and they're likely never to move out of that mindset later in development once it becomes the norm.

That's it for me, though. There actually are a lot of cool bits that I might one day set about backporting into 3.5 houserules.

[oslecamo]

As I put it in another thread, they're putting tons of effort into coming up with cool mechanics for a particular character idea, and then saying that you can only have those mechanics if you're playing that particular archetype. Very much an emphasis on letting players play the characters the designers come up with, instead of tools to let the players design their characters. At least, this is the impression I got.

Eerr, isnt that actually a good thing? Isn't it best if the class/archetype "swordman" actually makes for the best swordman?

Because a good chunk of the problems with 3.X is precisely that some classes can blatantly steal the cool tricks of other classes.

Each class/archetype should have its own unique stuff. Otherwise it's kinda pointless to have classes to begin with if you ask me.

[Unbeliever]

If the only way to make a (effective) Swordsman is to take the Swordsman class, then the game is pruning and eliminating a lot of creativity in character creation. 

In 3E, you can make various flavors of X with various different class combinations.  That lithe, agile swordsman could be a conglomeration of random martial classes that give various class abilities, a ToB character, a Rogue, a gishy Assassin, even an Artificer or a Mage.  And, all of those have distinctive mechanical feels and advantages.  The ones with Sneak Attack might be better at single target burst damage whereas the feat-based ones might be better against mobs ... or something.  Side note:  this was also true in AD&D. 

That's not to set aside 3E's failings in various regards.  Notably the fact that some of the ways of realizing a concept -- which are legion -- will utterly suck compared to others.  But, that's the idea:  lots of different, distinct and mechanically interesting ways to realize a concept that you could pick and choose from or create/uncover through interesting combinations.

[oslecamo]

Nobody ever said that those are mutually exclusive. The swordman class would be the best at swordmanning, but other classes could still be solid at stabbing stuff while having other tricks up their sleeves to compensate.

However it's kinda delusional to expect 5e to deliver the equivalent of roughly a decade worth of 3.X splatbooks right away.

A much fairer comparison would be D&D core, and in there no, there's no legion ways of making an "effective" swordman.

[Unbeliever]

I don't have much of a dog in the fight b/c the odds of me playing 5E are vanishingly small from what I've seen.  But, I still disagree with the basic philosophy you're espousing.  Unless you mean "Swordsman" to be a very specific, limited thing as opposed to "guy who hits people with pokey things." 

Even if there's a clear "best" or "right" way to build my earlier example of "lithe, agile swordsman" (which is a bit narrower), I'd say that's a mark against and not for the game.  There should be trade-offs, and situations where one shines more than others, but there should the system should be crafted with an eye towards reaching the concept in mind through many different means.  I would expect more build variability and depth from D&D than I do from Borderlands or Dragon Age. 

[Bauglir]

The biggest problem I have is that it cuts off character concepts not explicitly intended by the designers. In 3E, unforeseen combinations can allow for new niches to arise without houserules. I don't think anybody who wrote the rules actually intended for Lockdown Fighters to crop up as such a relatively effective niche for the class, for instance. If the rules don't allow for new ideas to arise organically from the system, then it's not one I'm very much interested in. Emergent optimization is a good thing.

As far as I can tell, the designers saw Pun-Pun (or whatever) and decided to back away from customization and minimize unexpected combinations of rules so that nothing could prove surprisingly broken, when I think the better decision would have been to embrace it and encourage creative optimization. The problem is, it takes an extraordinarily different paradigm of development to make that work (otherwise, we wind up with volumes of errata quashing combos that get "too powerful"). But that's a rant for a different time, though it reminds me I really do need to get back to work on my own system. >______>

[InnaBinder]

Everything I've seen so far - from the releases and discussions pertaining to them - indicates an apparent design goal of allowing  5 - 7 relative strangers (including the DM) to get together for a D&D campaign, without significant advance discussion and without worrying about whether Pat's character will be incompetent or whether Robin's character will outsize the adventure or make the DM curl up in a corner sobbing in terror.

Whether or not this apparent design goal is attainable while still maintaining the "feel" of D&D and allowing for a variety of character creation choices within each class, remains to be seen.  As I have tried to indicate before, D&D's fan-base may be too large and varied for the game to adequately and simultaneously fill the needs and desires of all those who want to play.

[veekie]

I'd think it's pretty good as a design standpoint actually.

Emergent design is horribly complex to learn and to balance, it requires comprehensive knowledge of the entire ruleset, further complicated by imprecise wording and a lack of standardized ability components. You CAN balance emergent design, but it requires that the pieces you put together be comparable by simple metrics, such as your options being rooted in the same ability structure, consume standard resources and operate within predefined concepts. It is newbie and casual play hostile, and invariably has pitfalls for a player to deprive himself of synergy(as long as you can build for unrestricted synergies, this is unavoidable, some pieces combine for more useful effects).

To a lesser degree, it also means divorcing the pieces from flavor, the more flexible they are to use, the less cohesive their design. You see this all the time in homebrew, the broader and more mutable the concept the more difficult it is to avoid being generic or inconsistent, whereas abilities constructed around a single concept lends it's own fluff to the tale. Taken to an extreme, this can be seen in highly modular systems like Mutants & Masterminds, while it allows you to create nearly any character conceivable, what you end up with is a significantly smaller set, consisting of the basic mechanical archetypes in dressup or variations upon extant characters in the media. It does not inspire characters.

Worst of all, as far as WotC is concerned, is it sets a shorter lifespan on the product. You can quite feasibly fit all the pieces you could ever want to combine into one mega book, or several smaller books. After that you cross the complexity peak, where it becomes increasingly difficult to A) retain any semblance of balance due to the options proliferating beyond designers ability to account for them B) be newbie accessible with the alarming array of options and C) avoid design space depletion without breaking the parameters set originally. And then it's time for a new edition and a new war.

Going the other way they could feasibly go on writing for many times longer, going for increasingly specific character options. And that sells more books.

[Bauglir]

I'll grant you that it's horribly complex to learn and balance, to be sure. Like I said, it requires a fundamental revision of the design paradigm. You can't just have a bunch of guys plugging away at your system until it's done, and then you release an edition that gets updates for a couple of years before you start over. Still, it isn't necessarily the point - I can't reasonably ask a well-established business to upend their entire business model. They don't have to completely embrace the idea and run with it, they just have to avoid retreating so far from it that character creation becomes a sterile character-select screen, which is what 4E felt like in some respects when I looked, and what the philosophy behind 5E started to look like.

Emergent design is one thing, emergent optimization is slightly different; the latter is inevitable in any complex system, and attempting to crush it only leads to a false sense of security that encourages tunnel vision in writers. You don't have to go out of your way to create a generic system, you just have to allow flexibility in the options you do offer. Multiclassing is something I'll never stop harping on because the idea in 3E was spectacular; if the classes had been balanced with one another, it would have been the ideal middle ground between purely single-classed advancement and purely modular abilities, at least in my opinion. 4E butchered it, and 5E looks like it'll be done either in the same way or will be an arithmetic clusterfuck. Or, to be fair, it did when I last looked at it, which was the release immediately following the Sorcerer (the release, that is to say, in which the Sorcerer was redacted so they could focus on the Core Four).

Though I'll grant you the character selection screen is fiscally attractive. No argument there.

[Unbeliever]

I think Bauglir mostly hit upon the things that were important to me.  Put relatively simply, the ideal class-based system for me (caveats below), would be one that has a lot in common with 3.5E but where many of the base classes were actually good at their job. 

What I mean by that is a game where you can find classes that realize common and cool archetypes "off the rack."  Looking for a lightly armored guy inspired by the Grey Mouser?  Look at Ranger and Rogue, those will work fine.  Want a heavily armored tank who can take punishment?  Check out these Barbarian, Knight, and Paladin variants.  I'd like the same thing for spellcasters, too, but D&D I find it easier to describe warrior concepts this way. 

And, all of that would coexist with something along the lines of 3E's mix and match multiclassing system.  So, that someone who is particularly interested in mucking around in the system could achieve those same ends in very different ways with different mechanics, and so on.  To a non-trivial (but highly imperfect) extent, 3E managed this by the end of its life.  A sneaky, agile melee fighter type can be pretty well-realized with a Swordsage (out of the box), an Assassin (again, pretty much out of the box), or more exotic combinations like a Melee-ficer. 

Caveats:  I am a particular kind of player.  I'm going to spend a lot of time working on my character concept and my character build, and I'm comfortable and even prefer talking about a campaign at some length before it starts.  So, I'm sort of the opposite of the strangers get together to play a game comfortably without any fuss model.  If D&D wants to go that way, then they'll leave me behind, and that's fine -- I can understand the appeal of that sort of game. 

That being said, I think it's probably an extremely poor strategy on the designers' part.  D&D has for a long time been just too fiddly, tactical, and mechanics-heavy of a game to be suited to that.  And, I'm not talking about comparing the OD&D style of games to 3E and 4E.  There are a lot of nice games out there that aren't stripped down or even "rules-lite" but that are a whole hell of a lot less fiddly than the previous 3 editions of D&D.  And, that fiddliness has probably been its subtle attraction to a lot of people.

[Libertad]

New Playtest Packet is out.  RPG.net thread about it.

Highlights:

Typical thieving abilities such as picking pockets now require a feat to do.

Druid-zilla is back.

Incidentally, D-Zilla is back in the house, quite literally. A level 7+ Moon Druid can become a Dire Behemoth, whose attacks do 6d6+4 damage which scales up to 15d6+4 at level 20. After all, Deadly Strike (and the Dire Beast equivalent) say you "roll the damage dice twice and add up the results". Behemoths do 3d6 damage. Oh caster supremacy, how I missed you.

Fighter class is heavily borrowing from its 3rd Edition counterpart.  In fact, 3rd Edition seems the most obvious piece of inspiration here.

The 4th Edition Warden class ("martial-based nature dude") is back.  Wardens are just Paladins who have nature-themed spells.  Don't know enough about it or the 4e version to make a judgment.

More Druidzilla, supplied by Sage Genesis:

Here's a thought. Follow me down the road for a moment.

1. Druids can't cast spells in animal shape, but they can maintain concentration on any pre-cast spells.

2. Dire Beasts can do five times dice damage "when you roll damage for an attack". While implied, it's not quite 100% ironclad that this effect is limited to the natural attacks of the animal shapes.

3. Flame Blade has a duration of concentration, meaning it can be cast and carried over into animal shape. (See #1.)

4. Flame Blade does 10d6 damage per hit if you cast it with a 9th level slot.


Ergo, with a bit of creative interpretation, 20th level Druids can do 50d6 damage per round, with an accuracy of +14 to hit (+5 Wisdom, +5 Spellcasting Bonus, +4 Dire Beast bonus).

I call it the Magmasaur build. You're welcome.

(Even if you disagree on the somewhat uncertain rules interpretation, the Dire Behemoth + Flame Blade can still make a Trample attack with a +14 bonus in a 40x10 line for 10d6 damage to every target it hits.)




PS: Flame Blade doesn't specify that the attacks you can make with it are melee attacks. Yes, Druidzilla can now breathe atomic fire.

[Nytemare3701]

Just a friendly reminder: When they put out the first packet for a class, it's almost universally overpowered or underpowered. I don't even think they check for balance, only how the class feels. As the packets matured, they started bringing things in line (not to say it's perfect, but you can see the improvements with each packet)

[Keldar]

So have they bothered making a second class that doesn't use the gods awful martial dice yet?

[Nytemare3701]

So have they bothered making a second class that doesn't use the gods awful martial dice yet?

Wait, how are martial dice bad? I haven't seen a real argument against them yet other than them being too common.

[Bauglir]

They're hardly inherently bad. They're only bad if they're supposed to be Wizards' way of letting Fighters have nice things on par with 3.5E casters, and they're implemented too widely (as you mentioned), rendering them generic and giving the designers too much leeway to attach to them things that have no business being a consumable resource. Unfortunately, I feel like WotC will assume exactly those things are the way to go.

[Nytemare3701]

They're hardly inherently bad. They're only bad if they're supposed to be Wizards' way of letting Fighters have nice things on par with 3.5E casters, and they're implemented too widely (as you mentioned), rendering them generic and giving the designers too much leeway to attach to them things that have no business being a consumable resource. Unfortunately, I feel like WotC will assume exactly those things are the way to go.

It's a consumable resource, but it refreshes EVERY TURN, meaning all it really does is prevent the fighter from using a ton of different reactions in the same turn, since many of them don't use actions at all, but DO take dice.