D&D 5E My Current DND5 Ideas

Keep the Maneuvers but drop the XD dice in favor of just extra standard actions at higher levels. The play-testing is showing that XD, while fun, takes too much time when the dice are rolled and selected and accounted for. Keep the 1 reaction out of turn. Turn Parry and Protect as well as other Maneuvers into regular standard actions or reactions.

Don't use Weapon, Magic and Save Bonuses, just offer ability increases at higher levels and base all attacks only on abilities. Offer only +1 to any ability every 4 levels or so.

Shy away from complete immunity in favor of Advantage and Disadvantage. But use this sparingly. Don't include Advantage and Disadvantage in everything. That is why we still have situation modifiers.

Use a more historical armor and weapon list but translate it into English.
Have long staff weapons do less damage but add to armor class.

Have a dice roll format. Some of the Monk powers have saves without DCs.

int vs int
intDC vs intSave
intSkill vs DC

Separate Spells and Prayers. They're different.
Have no similar spells or prayers. Make them all very unique and powerful. Think of all the things you could do with the spell during an encounter or role-playing to help new players expand their imaginations. How could Web be used for example.

Have no similar Maneuvers either. Just offer them to multiple classes if it seems plausible. Situational Maneuvers and Feats never get chosen over more powerful ones. How about making them more general and powerful. Just strike out the word Feat and combine the Feats with Maneuvers.

Do away with Spell level and just organize spells and prayers by Class level requirements.

Many DM's like to have the players be all similar levels during play. So consolidate the experience point table and level-up rewards.

If Mike and Designers are going to ditch the XD because it takes a long time to roll all the dice and chose the highest, then they could just turn the Maneuvers into standard actions and reactions.

1st level, 1 main, 1 off-hand, and 1 reaction
5th level, an additional main action (a maneuver)
10th level, an additional off-hand action
15th level, an additional reaction

Recharge for monsters really sucks. First you have to roll to see if the monster can do that, it takes a lot of time.

Spells per day suck because everybody tries to take extended rests after every encounter to heal-up and gain their "dailies" again.

Just make them all Spells or Prayers per encounter and adjust each power with that in mind. Area spells and charms make good encounter only powers. Non-Area or charm spells make good at-will powers.

Offer Squares and Miniature Flanking and Opportunity Rules, or more free style Feet and Meters as two options meeting two playing styles.

I like the way skills are shaping up.

Please don't bring back 4E damage conditions that extend past the end of the victim's next turn. They are hard to keep track of without a computer. Turn ongoing damage into just a flat extra damage bonus. Keep the stun, blinded, other conditions down to a minimum. Make them rare.

Replacing expertise dice with extra actions won't speed things up at all. You'll just add more time for people to decide what to do with their extra actions... and then they'll have to roll more dice anyway.

Expertise rolls: 1d20, weapon die, expertise die/dice
Extra action rolls: 1d20, weapon die, 1d20, weapon die, 1d20, weapon die, etc...

Replacing attack and magic attack bonuses means armor would have to be overhauled to not apply an AC bonus. Personally, I don't mind that... but I doubt WotC will be willing to break tradition like that.

Staffs that add to AC would be better off as a feat or other type of ability, not equipment. Keep the equipment list short and simple, and just give options for more ways to use that equipment. That way people who want a simpler game don't have to go through the list and pick out which bits of complicated equipment they don't want to use.

All of the Monk abilities that allow saves have a DC of 10+Wisdom+Class DC bonus. It says that right in the Monk's feature list.

Situational maneuvers get chosen all the time. Each Expertise class gets a non-situational maneuver right off the bat, and pretty good ones. This leaves plenty of room for whatever maneuvers you think are interesting.

Recharge abilities aren't common, and will more often appear on boss-type monsters, not mooks. Rolling one extra die per round won't kill you, and in a big boss battle, the utility gained far outweighs the effort taken.

You can only take one extended rest per day. If your players can get away with doing one encounter every 24 hours and still complete their quest... there's something wrong with the quest. That's up to the DM to fix: add some time-sensitive objectives, or have the dungeon denizens fortify their defenses or launch a raid on the PC's camp while they're resting and distracted.

Combat options like flanking rules and feet/meter based measurements are going to be a separate rules module that you can add on to your game. It's coming, but it's not the sort of thing they're testing right now. Remember, we're very very early in the playtesting process.

You have some good comments there. But I disagree with the expertise dice comments. Play testing extra actions per turn and play testing expertise dice takes about the same amount of time.

XD adds unneeded complexity to the game. Since both require the same amount of time, might as well just give extra actions per turn.

All extra actions give you are longer downtimes between player turns.

Instead of five players cycling through their turns bang-bang-bang (so the downtime between turns is short)... those extra actions now extend each player's turn to much longer durations as they have to not only decide how to spend them, but then also complete them. So while a player might get to do three or more full things during his turn... it's going to be three times as long before he gets to do anything again.

Is there a complexity comparison between 1 action with Expertise Dice versus 3 or more actions? Possibly. But there is definitely a loss of entertainment value in my opinion in waiting for each player to try and figure out how they're going to spend all their actions.

I'm not convinced.

If multiple actions per turn are such a problem then why does almost every monster in 5th edition have Multi-Attack?

Why do characters have reactions?
Why do they have two weapon fighting?
Why are there maneuvers?

All of these things are extra actions per turn or out of turn.

ren1999 said:

If multiple actions per turn are such a problem then why does almost every monster in 5th edition have Multi-Attack?

Why do characters have reactions?
Why do they have two weapon fighting?
Why are there maneuvers?

All of these things are extra actions per turn or out of turn.

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These are really good questions that the Next team should look closely at.

Actually, I don't even know why I'm arguing against XD expertise dice. I still get the multiple actions I campaigned for. If designers want XD or extra actions, it doesn't matter. I can deal with either. Neither slows the game because of compound damage. Parry and Protect slow the game a bit but it favors character survival!

Current Binding Suggestions
Maximum Magically Enhanced or Monster Armor Class AC20
Maximum Humanoid Natural Armor Class AC17
Maximum Magically Enhanced or Monster Ability 20(+5)
Maximum Humanoid Natural Ability 17(+3)
Maximum Character Level and Monster Hit Dice 20

Suggested ToHit Stacking
Minimum Maximum Ability Modifier -5 to +5???
Minimum Maximum Magic Bonus -3 to +3
Minimum Maximum Situation Modifier -3 to +3
Minimum Maximum Feat, Level, Magical Effect -3 to +3

Suggested Action Limits
In a 6 second metagame turn, 1 move action, 1 main action, 1 off-hand action, 1 minor action or maneuver, endless free actions

Anytime out of turn, 1 reaction.

Suggested Character Builds
Martial fighting only classes start with constitution score+12 and gain 1d12 or 6 hit points per level-up. They do 1d12 damage with a main weapon and 1d10 with an off-hand weapon. They can wear plate armor. Their power consists of Maneuvers with few but high die expertise dice to simulate their strength and focus.

Rogue classes start with constitution score+10 and gain 1d10 or 5 hit points per level-up. They do 1d10 damage with a main weapon and 1d8 with an off-hand weapon. They can wear leather armor. Their power consists of rogue Skills and Maneuvers many but low die expertise dice to simulate their speed and multi-tasking.

Martial fighting and casting classes start with constitution score+8 and gain 1d8 or 4 hit points per level-up. They do 1d8 damage with a main weapon and 1d6 with an off-hand weapon. They can wear up to chain armor. Their powers consist of both moderate Prayers/Spells and moderate armor and weapon damage.

Casting only classes start with constitution score+6 and gain 1d6 or 3 hit points per level-up. They do 1d6 damage with a main weapon and 1d4 with an off-hand weapon. They can wear bracers and use magical shields. As a trade-off, caster only classes get limited encounter area Spells that do damage to many targets.

I...kinda...agree that XD are doing to much, and involve, well, too much dice.

You could still have maneuvers with flat bonuses, etc, and save the dice for deadly strike or other things that need them. (as an aside, I would not add more actions beyond those in the maneuvers).

TerraDave said:

I...kinda...agree that XD are doing to much, and involve, well, too much dice.

You could still have maneuvers with flat bonuses, etc, and save the dice for deadly strike or other things that need them. (as an aside, I would not add more actions beyond those in the maneuvers).

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We could do both. If a player wants to roll, then let her. Make it a little more worth just using a flat bonus. But if she doesn't feel like rolling, let her take the flat bonus.