D&D 5th edition announced

If your opinion isn't worthy of discussion, then there was no value whatsoever in sharing it.

Well, no value in sharing it with a pedantic asshole like you anyway.

D&D's reliance upon hitpoints is a well enough establish paradigm that I don't feel the need to get dragged into an endless internet debate to justify my opinion to a troll with a low post count and a chip on their shoulder. Maybe head over to Qt3 if you're looking for that.

Were you polite in your initial reply or if I knew who you were you might get a different response. As it stands I find your choice of handle apt, and have nothing further to say to you.

My understanding is that you'll still have the same difficulty hitting the guards you did at level 1, and they'll still hit you the same as they did at level 1, but maybe you now do 4x the HP and do 2x the damage. So you only have to hit them half as often as you used to in order to win, and it's unlikely they'd actually kill you because their damage compared to your HP makes them no longer much of a threat.

It does seem like this makes fights take longer, as there will be significantly more missing in this system. If HP and Damage are the only ways to adjust relative difficulty then the system will require some padded, inflated values to prevent small random fluctuations of luck allowing the proverbial Caveman to defeat the Tank.

The only opinion of value in this thread will be "5th edition is shit".

Anything else is grognard pandering.

I disagree, but whatever floats your boat.

What I read in the playtest is so barebones, though, it wasn't even worth playing. My group all got the same materials and agreed there was potential but as is, is barely a game. It's on par with Og the Roleplaying game.

If they can truly layer complexity into the rules via expansions it could be great. Adapt your game to the group's desire for crunch, and it works at all levels of player experience.

It's not a game. It's a playtest of specific ideas and concepts. We don't even have full character gen math. I personally like where 5th ed is going conceptually, but it's still in no way ready for primetime.

We're older guys who have been playing D&D forever, so there just wasn't enough there to make us want to playtest it. It was good bathroom reading for a couple days, gave us a half-hour's worth of discussion over beers, and that's about it. We didn't want to take a night off from our Pathfinder campaign to try it, we felt we'd have more fun continuing our campaign.

They want guys who grew up with D&D testing this and giving feedback so they need to offer more. I hope there's some more meat in the next test round, if there is one.

It could mean more hitting too if AC isn't allowed to be as extreme; D&D has always been very rough in the corners... Whether it's shorter or longer will come down to the implementation details I suspect.

I have other problems with focusing on hitpoints:
- An increased reliance upon hitpoints will magnify D&D's typical problem of there being no consequences or danger in a fight, short of a full party wipe.
- It also magnifies the unheroic and anticlimactic "head back to town for supplies" effect when you run low on healing magic, as everything you face will grind you down.
- It feels strange to have more experienced warriors be no better at landing blows; it was bad enough that D&D already had AC mostly decoupled from skill.
- Sure, hitpoints are supposed to be an abstraction of "defense", but that always felt wrong because they don't return after a fight, and are instead recovered by wound-healing magic and bed rest. 4th edition's "healing surges" did sort of ameliorate this though.
- Centering your design on hitpoints and damage smacks too much of an MMO.
- The bigger problem I see is the inflation of bonuses from magic items in a typical D&D game once you reach mid level. The "paper doll" one magic item per slot effect.
- I'd prefer something more like Mongoose's Conan D&D spin-off -- less hitpoints, less magic-item inflation, armor that reduces damage instead of adding AC, AC that increases with skill, etc.

I appreciate some of their concerns, e.g. with respect to out of whack power curves as you level, I just think they have a weak grasp of the core problem and so have hit upon a poor solution.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is removing opportunity attacks, as I fear they'll replace it with something lame like taunting in MMOs.

That's fair - them trotting out a renamed section of B2 didn't really thrill me either the way it did some people. To state the obvious, it's eventually going to come down to execution. I think their concepts for 5th are solid (at least for me, since I somehow missed the ongoing OSR craze), so there's a nice little come to Jesus Pelor(?) feel with what they're saying. I liked what I saw in the play test (advantage/disadvantage system, death of 4th ed style skill checks and saving throws), but I also can't be arsed enough to skip a campaign session and run a playtest session either, so there is that.

Ah. That's good to hear at least; experimenting is good!

They want to recapture that old school D&D feeling and I get it, but I'm not sure that's what we want. Yes I fondly remember the days of the red box, where everything was new and amazing and the very concept of theater of the mind was new and exciting to me. I was also 10 years old.

There's a lot of games right now that are filling the "retro-clone" niche (and doing it well, google Dungeon Crawl Classics), and 5th Ed needs to go a lot further to keep us playing and buying supplements.

I really dig this article because as a marketing/graphic design wonk, I love the whole "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" stage of development with branding and logos. I think if any of those make it into development, it'll be #9 because of its resemblance to the previous logo, just with a smooth gradient instead of texturing the type. I can't help but crack up at #13 because it makes me think of a breakfast cereal. But I'd be really interested in seeing #17 as a direction for branding of D&D - a cleaner, more sophisticated looking layout could be a great way to modernize the brand.

Thank you for elaborating.

Unfortunately, 5.5e's healing system is due for a "complete overhaul," according to Mike Mearls, so it is impossible to say whether it will work well. He has claimed that there will multiple options to tweak in that regard, but it is quite possible that none of them will suit your needs.

Having experienced warriors not gain accuracy is weird, but because of the way hit/AC bonuses have greatly distorted impact in edge cases, it is simply much more practical to effect predictable durability changes via HP and minimize the number of effects that impact AC and to-hit. Note that it may be possible that characters will gain to-hit bonuses through progression anyway; they would just have to be extremely limited.

Mike Mearls has confirmed that there is an effort underway to add opportunity attacks back in that take the form of a free attack, rather than an abstract means of locking enemies in melee such as a taunt.

Most of this information has been gleaned from a reddit wherein Mike Mearls is answering questions.

For those not really into all that newfangled stuff, WoTC is making classic D&D/AD&D available to download:

www.dndclassics.com/


Article here.

Were there any 4 ed video games?

No, which is funny because 4e seems like it was designed around being easily converted into a video game.

I suppose there was that 1 for XBLA, I think maybe it was 4e? It seemed like it was more a Marvel Ultimate Alliance game with D&D names on skills you put dots in. Also, it was terrible.

WoW doesn't count?

I think 4 Ed was a WoW clone, not the other way around.

It is kind of crazy it took them so long to get back to selling the old game PDFs - I have a ton of them from the original ESD project, but at some point someone saw some of them floating around on a torrent site and shut the whole thing down.

Not really. 4e haters liked to throw WoW around as a pejorative in edition wars all the time, but if there's a game that was similar to 4e, it was Guild Wars (1).

Do Facebook games count? There was one (Heroes of Neverwinter) for a while but I think it has gone away now.

Wise fwom your gwave

Did anyone get a chance to play 5e this weekend at Pax? They released the latest ruleset last Wednesday in preparation for this con. I played 2 games, and signed up to run a game Saturday night.

Overall I'm feeling much better about where 5e is headed. I especially enjoyed playing the fighter, but I feel the expertise mechanic needs more tuning. Regaining your points after just a short rest meant my fighter had them available for almost every encounter, except the 1 time the DM wouldn't let us take a rest after a fight. The wizard felt about right, with some useful repeatable offense. Turn Undead and Sleep are both incredibly powerful, and basically win encounters when you use them.

I would strongly recommend signing up for the D&D Next playtest so that you can send in your feedback. They just revised the expertise system, so I suspect that they could use some constructive criticism of it. The other benefit to signing on for the playtest is that you get access to the whole raft of playtest resources (including everything you need to run a few adventures with the current ruleset).

Is there still such an emphasis on status effects and bonus/penalties? My group got fed up with 4e because it was such a chore to keep track of all that and it would turn even the most basic encounter into an enormous time sink.

We've been experimenting with the Edge of the Empire game for a few weeks now and I think I like the dice pool system and the emphasis on cinematics/storytelling even if I don't really like Star Wars as a setting. But the system keeps everyone engaged and lets even players make up stuff about what happens. It's a lot more fun than "Okay, a 21 hits him. I swing my sword and do ...ten points of damage."

There are status effects but they're not nearly as ubiquitous. In 4e almost every power applied some status to your enemy. In 5e it's back to the old style where they're rare, and they suck. In the games I played the wizard's reusable attacks could apply some minor status effects, like speed reduction and action loss, but you could safely remove those and the wizard will still be fine because he's a goddamn wizard.

Other than that, one time a player got blinded in combat. He got a saving throw, and it was because he did something stupid.