D&D Part V: The Unification Wars
Admit it, you’ve been waiting to see that headline for like five years now. The nerdy parts of the internet are burning down, of course.
Hundreds of thousands of words are spilling across the internet about the announcement today, and that’s not even counting message boards. I’m not going to echo the many things that have already been said, but no self-respecting game site can just ignore this. It’s big news! So big that it made a bunch of mainstream news sites. You can read more at the New York Times, Forbes, and CNN. You can find word from the Wizards of the Coast mothership, too.
Maybe it’s the journalism nerd in me, but the thing I’m most curious about is how Wizards and their PR company orchestrated this. Let’s be honest, in the grand scheme of things, a new edition of D&D a tiny morsel of pop culture flotsam. Yet several major media outlets are covering it, and all on the same day. Interesting.
There are some very cool things to be excited about this 5E announcement:
- Modular design. I love modular stuff. Use the pieces you want. Add exactly the amount of complexity you need.
- Open playtest process. This worked for Pathfinder. It didn’t work for 4E (probably because they ignored all the feedback from outside playtest sessions). Wizards has a lot of creative, insightful people on staff (the ones they didn’t lay off right before Christmas, anyway). But they have access to a literal army of experienced, enthusiastic RPGers. Maybe this time we won’t have to errata the stealth rules immediately.
The one thing I’m a little concerned about is talk of unifying the various D&D factions. That’s hugely important and an admirable task, but the path is littered with landmines. Part of me thinks the smartest (and evillest) thing Wizards could do would be to steal D&D back from Pathfinder by simply releasing an updated version of 3.5. In general terms, I think “unification” means finding the elements of all the various editions that people love and working to fit them together. Modular design means the thing about AD&D that some group in Sheboygan loves doesn’t have to be part of my campaign if I hate it. The language of the announcement also suggests that the campaign worlds are going to be less tied to specific events and timelines — 4E Dark Sun seemed to show that they’d learned this lesson, and access to various eras of the Forgotten Realms is something a lot of people will enjoy.
With no reservations, snark, sarcasm or irony, I can say I’m really excited about D&D 5E. They’ve got a really talented team of game designers working on it. They’ve got a really great attitude about how to approach it. I’m going in with full optimism that it can and will be something great.
January 9th, 2012 3:21 PM
Agree with you on the seemingly Sisyphean task of unification, but at least if they stick to their word no one but the community will be to blame. But the real thing to consider is…oh who am I kidding, take all my money now I don’t care and please fill the sucking void in the “shiny new version of the shiny new object” hole in me that has swallowed everything from die-cast Transformers to Spyro Skylander toys. Me want.
January 9th, 2012 3:29 PM
Please let there be quick and dirty combat. Please let there be quick and dirty combat. Please let there be quick and dirty combat.
January 9th, 2012 8:37 PM
Just let everything have less health. Having played a few sessions of epic tier D&D 4e now I can tell you that many epic tier dailies can’t oneshot a level one fighter without good damage rolls. These are guys who KILLED A GOD RIGHT AFTER THIS! How come the biggest things they got doesn’t just squish him? That aside, I’d like some way to make combat take less realtime. Two combats was a four hour session, simply because nothing dies ever. Also, gods need to deal more damage. I find it hard to believe that Orcus is only capable of doing 3d12 + 12. That’s not even enough damage to reliably break through and epic tier swordmage’s thing that prevents damage dealt to allies by creatures he has marked. He just had nothing to hurt anyone.
January 9th, 2012 9:36 PM
I agree the best thing an RPG can do is make combat more lethal. Do away with HP, create a condition track. One hit, stung; 2 hits, injured; 3 hits serious injured, with lasting consequences; 4 hits, dig a grave. Doesn’t need to mean that everyone has disposable characters, but that everyone thinks very hard before they start swinging steel around.
January 9th, 2012 10:37 PM
Modular design. You want lethal combat? Buy the “Grim & Gritty” book. You want psionics? Buy “Psionics.” etc etc. Amen.
January 10th, 2012 12:25 PM
My take on modularity: It won’t work on core systems. It will work okay for things like opportunity attacks or grappling. It won’t end up working well for skills. Here’s my reasoning – they need to support this with lots of other products. They’ll need to have NPC’s, new player options, monsters etc. If they support the optional systems, then people who don’t use them will feel cheated when X% of the book they paid for is useless. If they don’t put them in, people won’t use them for lack of support.
It makes for a screwed up stat block. If you put it in the middle, then it screws with the people who don’t use it, but makes it easy for those that do use it. If you put it in a seperate section, then you make it hard on the people who use it. Or do you sell multiple versions of your products, splitting the market and starting the inter-edition wars?
And there are power issues. If your optional systems change the power curve, people will find it and argue the differences. Once again – inter-edition wars.
Resource allocation. If one version uses stat rolls for skills, another uses 10 skills and another has the ability to define any skill you want, how do you allocate skill points? Does one group get more points? If so, what if they spend them all on “adventuring skills” and are better than the group with less skills. Does every class have to support every system?
Compatibility. If I build a character with one set of modules, how easy will it be to convert it to a different set of modules? How likely is it to break the character? For example, if opportunity attacks are a module, then a character built on maximizing opportunity attacks will be hard to convert and probably broken. But most characters won’t be affected. If it’s skills, then it’s many more characters that are broken.
January 10th, 2012 3:08 PM
I don’t know, I tend to see the modularity question as one of detail. 3/3.5 had a lot of detail in the mechanics that could easily start to feel unwieldy. making a monster/NPC with all the feats etc. was a pain to do. But if the modularity is like closing the hood so you can’t see the engine run, that should work fine. That’s what I had thought was happening in 4e until I looked at the math (again dealing with monster creation). 3rd used all of the monsters abilities to modify attacks/damage etc. I thought that would still be going on in 4th, just that it wasn’t reported. instead the monster’s stats had little effect on the other stats at all. There was no real reason to do it that way. to my mind it was pointless and frustrating. That can be fixed now.
looked at another way, way back in 1e, when you looked at say a hobgoblin they had 1+1 HD meaning they rolled a d8+1 for HP. why? was that because they had a 15 con? or was it just ‘because’ – nothing more than arbitrary numbers? AC is another example. If a humanoid monster had a 6 AC, was it because it was wearing studded leather with a shield? or leather with a 16 dex? scale mail alone?or perhaps just a tough hide? what if I want to put him in chain mail? how does that affect his AC? As I understand, that was what caused the trend towards transparency in monster stats in 3e, but then they threw it all away in 4th going to arbitrary stats for the monsters based on nothing other than level and role. Talk about regression.
January 10th, 2012 3:37 PM
It is hard for me to say what there should be in a modular game without seeing their ideas for a core rules set. I don’t think the entire game should be modular, but I think there should be a lot more built-in flexibility than there was in 4e.
For example, do away with set powers by class. If you want martial maneuvers, have a section of the book devoted to them that ALL martial classes can choose from. Same with spells. My sorcerer should be able to cast magic missile if she wants to use a spell slot for it. My swashbuckling rogue should be able to push back his enemy with a Tide of Iron if he’s invested the strength necessary to perform that maneuver.
Bring back useful multiclassing. Get rid of paragon paths and epic destinies, or add them in as an optional module (they are optional anyway, but mandatory in that a character suffers from not taking one). No more feat taxes to cover up for bad monster math!
Develop better monster templates. I liked the monster templates in the back of the 4e Monster Manual, but they seemed to be ignored after that. Instead of having a ogre skeleton taking up space in the book, just give me an Animated Skeleton template I can drop on an actual dead ogre like in 3rd edition.