Wizards of the Coast are currently inviting feedback on some aspects of their new D&D incarnation. Is anybody else looking at these rules, or the last playtest? What do you think?
My thoughts:
[ul]
[li]Overall, it’s more 3.5 than 4 (the two editions I’ve played). Healing has been made harder, skills can have different levels of training, and the mechanics of each class aren’t as similar.[/li][li]Wizards, once more, are powerhouses, but other classes can get a taste of the action with the Magic User specialism.[/li][li]Speaking of specialisms, they’re a cool addition, as are the backgrounds. I can see them being useful plot hooks for the DM to use.[/li][li]The bestiary isn’t as useful as the 4th Edition one, but it’s early days; hopefully they’ll keep the example groups that the 4th Edition had to create quick bands of bad guys that made sense thematically.[/li][li]The extra die that the Fighter gets for his moves seems like a good way to make them more interesting than in 3rd Edition.[/li][/ul]
I reviewed the first version of the playtest rules, haven’t downloaded the second packet yet. It’s definitely promising, but I think it’s more in line with 2nd Edition in a lot of ways…
Some friends of mine are playtesting and I’ve been watching from time to time. So far I’m a bit skeptical about some of the early claims (e.g. “You can play a whole adventure in two hours!” – not from what I’ve seen so far…), but maybe they’ll come up with something interesting. I suspect I’ll stick with 3.5/Pathfinder, though.
I’d have to search around to find the exact articles I’m thinking of. The gist is that 3E and 4E D&D have much slower combat than previous editions, so the designers have been paying some lip service to the idea that D&D Next will be much faster, and some of the people in the early (closed) playtest commented that it was. But from the (open) playtesting I’ve seen so far, I haven’t noticed that it’s particularly faster than 3E or 4E; maybe they’ve substantially redone the rules since then.
They seem to be taking a page out of Paizo’s book, though this isn’t quite the same as an open beta test. If people in my local group would like to test it out, I’ll perhaps download it.
We haven’t played yet, but our group has been looking at the new rules. They would have seemed like a radical departure from 3.x if 4e hadn’t come first. As it is, it looks like a major rollback. Little of the innovation in 4e has been kept, including some changes that I liked.
From the character sheet, I see that whoever came up with the bright idea in 3rd edition that people might want to see how their AC added up at a glace has been sacked. But there are 19 quarter-page lines on the front of the sheet to write down what your race is, separate from the 17 half-page lines to write down the actual game benefits of that race on the back page. You never know when you might need to consult the flavor text because you forgot what a Dwarf is. And if the actual game effects of the race were on the same page as the combat stats, you might not have to flip the page over constantly during play. Who the hell wants that? Oh, and the same brilliant plan has been applied to Class, Background and Specialty.
I’m glad they finally got rid of that section of the character sheet where lazy jerks could easily look up their skills and applicable modifiers. There appears to be a series of typos in the equipment tables listing something called ‘Range’. But if there were still a range mechanic that you needed to know about, wouldn’t there be a space for Range on the character sheet?
I see that Hit Dice is now a healing mechanic. Well, you know, the term Hit Dice is pretty vague and could mean anything, so it would be completely arbitrary to stick with the range of familiar meanings established over thirty years of practice, right? How is making up a new term better than reassigning an old one to something completely unrelated, I’d like to know. Are we going to let a bunch of Avoiding-Confusion-Nazis drag this hobby down?
I suppose that’s enough snark for one post. I mean, I could mention how awesome it is that the cleric’s armor proficiencies are determined by Domain, but the domains don’t actually say they get those proficiencies, they just happen to have armor in optional equipment packages.
I can’t give you the official answer, but I think the point is that it’s supposed to appeal to players of every version of D&D; it’s not supposed to be just “4th edition D&D + 1”. They made a lot of noise early on about trying to unite players of all editions.
I seem to recall, back in the pre-release furor for 4th Ed, they they said they weren’t going to release a 5th edition. “Honest… please go ahead and buy another entire set of books within the next five years!”
First thing I saw took me way back to the idiotic rules-lawyering of 1st edition: “You are immune to damage and other effects from poison.” I played with people who would say that this meant “You are immune to (a) damage and (b) other effects from poison.” So, they were immune to damage. Sweet!
It doesn’t say. But Hit Dice was a pivotal mechanic in the way 3.x handled that, and that term has been bizarrely recycled. Most of the DM’s guide is how to assign DC to tasks. With the lower skill bonuses and progression, they needed to make it clear that 22 is now the top DC.
I have downloaded and read through both of the sets (although not the latest stuff from this past week, because I was on vacation), but not yet played it. My initial reaction is that it feels like a mix of 3.5 and 4E - the basics of the system feel more like 3.5, with more emphasis on class features, skills and feats, rather than the 4E at-wil/encounter/daily powers mechanic.
I’m expecting combat to be somewhat faster, as one of the biggest things that bogs down 4E combat is players choosing from a plethora of options.
I’m not sure how I feel about the new Hit Dice mechanic - as pointed out above, re-using an existing term in a new way feels odd, and there’s something about it that feels clever rather than elegant (“clever” being the word we use at work to describe things that seem cool in the short term but wind up sucking in the long term).
And the difference is supposed to be in combat mechanics?
I can’t envision anything that could be called “a whole adventure” taking place in two hours even with no combat at all! What the hell is D&D now if such a statement is possible, let alone true?
Somebody tell me how I’m doing the math wrong here:
Rapid Shot allows you to make two attacks, but you halve the damage from each attack. Now the average damage from a 1d8 arrow is 4.5. Now, I did a brute force analysis of the average damage you can expect when you factor in the chance of missing, with an assumption of a bonus of +0 using AC ranges of 10 to 20. I did this for just a single d20 roll, taking the full value for the average of the 1d8 roll except that if you roll a 20 you crit for a full 8 points. I did the same thing for the permutations of two d20 rolls, with the average damage halved and the full 4 points in the case of a crit on either die.
Average expected damage for one attack: 1.525
Average expected damage for two attacks at half damage: 1.525
Explain to me what I’m doing wrong here, or otherwise what use Rapid Shot is except to piss away an extra arrow? Of course, the same issue applies to Two Weapon Fighting, but at least there you aren’t wasting ammo.
It does seem pretty silly… however, it looks like you can target two different enemies. I have no idea what monster hit points look like, but maybe low-hit-point/hard-to-hit monsters might be killed in less than one hit, so you could potentially kill (or finish off) two different enemies…or something? At any rate, it probably shouldn’t take a feat to do that – it should just be allowed as a flavor-adding ability that anyone can do if they want to.
If you have something that procs on hit, like bonus damage dice, this would give you two chances to get the proc instead of one. Not sure if I’d take it, but that could be the rationale.