D&D 5E 5E: A chiropractic adjustment for D&D (and why I'm very hopeful)

[Li Shenron]

Nice thread!

Now it may be that one of the main reasons 4E was so controversial is that it didn't take this approach. It started with a lot of variations on traditional fantasy and D&D--both in terms of fluff and crunch--and then had to back-track a bit to include some of the traditional aspects of the game. In other words, it got off on the "wrong" foot, or at least a foot that cleaved too far from expectations and tradition.

In my personal view, I would rephrase this by saying that 4e delivered me a feeling that they were presenting an innovative game with new functional ideas and new narrative twists to old ideas, but unfortunately it was peppered with the "badwrongfun" remarks and the whole message I received (whether it was what they intended to send or not) was "this is our game, like it or leave it" and so I decided to leave it.

5e delivers me a completely different message, that "this is your game, we're just here to help you set it up". That, together with the fact that the starting point i.e. "core" is simple enough so that I don't need to build any system master, strongly got me onboard since the beginning of the playtest!

With 5E, the designers seem to be both "adjusting" the game back to its core traditions, but also providing variant streams that can be taken in a toolbox galore style. Or so I hope. It won't "out 4E 4E"--or OD&D or 3.5, etc--but it does seem to be covering both important polarities in as strong a manner as possible: presenting a relatively simple, traditional D&D game that can be customized in as many ways as individual DMs can dream up--and providing the tools to do so.

Yes, and I agree it's a great idea.

Addendum: There is no way around the fact that 5E won't be for everyone. That's OK. But from what I've gathered, most of the criticisms of the game will be small (e.g. Why doesn't the PHB include my favorite sub-sub-race or spell?) and/or misplaced (e.g. why isn't 5E more like X edition?). As the saying goes, you can't please everyone all of the time - but with 5E, I'm thinking they've done as good a job as humanly possible with pleasing as many people as they can, most of the time. To be honest, in a way I'm rather curious as to what the major criticisms will be - both in the community as a whole, and for myself. We gamers are an ornery bunch

IMHO the main possible criticism to the edition itself may come from gamers who want absolute balance during combat, or absolute balance in each pillar separately. That is not how 5e is built, and those people should probably stick with 4e, because 5e is built instead with the idea of balance across all pillars.

There are other practical issues preventing people from joining 5e, e.g. having lots of 3e/PF or 4e books and wanting to still use them, or having a long-term campaign ongoing and not wanting to update it to new rules, but these are not themselves criticism of the new edition.

 

[Li Shenron]

This is all well and good (I agree with most of it), but we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. The hard fact is that the final rules are not here yet and it is way too early to start making such defining statements about the game.

WotC's Mike and Rodney have said that the final game is pretty much the same as the last playtest packet, except what was announced in L&L articles (Sorc & Warlock, Bard changes...), plus monster math and some specific adjustments to (sub)class abilities.

 

[Manbearcat]

In my personal view, I would rephrase this by saying that 4e delivered me a feeling that they were presenting an innovative game with new functional ideas and new narrative twists to old ideas, but unfortunately it was peppered with the "badwrongfun" remarks and the whole message I received (whether it was what they intended to send or not) was "this is our game, like it or leave it" and so I decided to leave it.

5e delivers me a completely different message, that "this is your game, we're just here to help you set it up".

I think is a fascinating point here and one we've seen several times. There is another, more recent, parallel to this in the gaming industry that I became aware of in the last year. Dungeon World uses Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World engine to power a (truly wonderful) D&D hack of the original. However, the tone and style of the two book's rules and principles are subtly (or perhaps not so subtly?) different. I've seen many people (and know one personally) who loved DW but who were turned away from AW merely because they felt AW's authorial intent was to be patronizing and/or rough/harsh (or something akin to that) while DW was the opposite. When I first heard that opinion, my response was a collection of and . Then I read back through each of them, consciously looking for this purported difference, and I realized that there was indeed an aesthetic difference and I'm probably just typically either aloof to it or unaffected by it when I read new rulesets because I'm honing in on very specific things and looking solely to assimilate the system's intent, its resolution mechanics and the coherency twixt the two.

It appears that many feel that 4e's authorial intent (or at least its product) was written more in the tone of AW than DW. I often wonder if it was written as DW and bared the same GMing principles/moves in the same general way (as they are utterly applicable to running 4e), how much that would have mitigated the initial backlash against 4e from those who responded viscerally to the aesthetics of the text (as some folks have responded to AW). I'm not talking about the other complaints. Just that one which definitely had the effect of the horse leaving the barn for more than a few (same as AW).

 

[Blackbrrd]

On a slightly similar note, something that happened with 4E is that WotC improved in its mastery of the 4E rules over the life of the edition. With 3.xE, their rules-fu radically declined to the point where I considered the rulings of the certain members of CharOp crowd on the WotC boards or certain posters here at ENWorld as being far more authoritative than official WotC opinions.

Hopefully by starting with a simpler base and adding modules to it, 5E will see in a 4E-like growth in system mastery by WotC and not what happened with 3.xE (or, arguably, 1E and especially 2E).

I am currently playing in two concurrent 4e games. One is stuck in 2008 and the other one uses post MM3 monster/stats/character builds. The pacing has completely changed in combat and the mechanics for both monsters and characters works a lot better.

The evolvment of 4e rules is completely opposite of what we got in 3E, where the core game works fine (for the most part), but the splat books and such just drowns it. It went so far that the latest 3.5 game I ran, I only let the players use the PHB. This let me focus on role-playing instead of the rules.

For 5e, I think the OP really nails it. It feels "more D&D" than 4e, but keeps what they learnt along the way as they fixed it. I think the problems with 4e really highlighted to the developers what they needed to do with the next edition and what made 3.x and earlier so popular.

 

[Morrus]

N"this is our game, like it or leave it" and so I decided to leave it.

Whether the end product was good or not is a side-issue. You just described the fundamental process of art. And it's important that that be encouraged. Design by committee is one method, but single vision is important too. That's where great creations come from. Don't discourage it!

 

[Remathilis]

In my personal view, I would rephrase this by saying that 4e delivered me a feeling that they were presenting an innovative game with new functional ideas and new narrative twists to old ideas, but unfortunately it was peppered with the "badwrongfun" remarks and the whole message I received (whether it was what they intended to send or not) was "this is our game, like it or leave it" and so I decided to leave it.

I've said this before (and gotten jumped for it), but 4e felt the best when I pretended it wasn't D&D.

When the game involved a dwarf fighter, a human cleric, an eladrin wizard, a halfling rogue, and an elven ranger, it didn't feel right. It was too different, too removed from the comfort zone. The names were there, but they didn't mean what they used to mean. It felt off.

When the game was a dragonborn warlord, a genasi swordmage, a deva invoker, a tiefling warlock, and a shifter avenger, it stopped looking like D&D, and it was enjoyable on its merits. It still needed something (the math would be finally fixed later) but once we let go our our nostalgia for how it "used to be", the game got more enjoyable.

 

[Texicles]

I think nostalgia vs. hindsight is an important aspect of what's going on here.

I feel like 5e is drawing on elements of past editions at a time when the community has nostalgia for those editions they loved, but enough hindsight to see the warts on all of them. For pre-4e editions, this makes perfect sense, but even fans of 4e (myself included) generally seem to recognize flaws. My best guess is that it has something to do with the last WotC 4e materials (maps/tiles notwithstanding) being published over 2 years ago now.

For whatever the reason, I feel like the community has reached a point where it's willing to compromise some nostalgia in order to avoid the bulk of flaws of previous editions. From the playtest, it appears that 5e will provide the kind of compromise. Sure, there are some holdouts who love X edition, warts and all, and some who find X feature's presence or lack thereof to be abhorrent, but I'd wager they're in the minority.

I'm very optimistic about 5e, and wouldn't be surprised to see it last a decade or more. Heck, with a solid, simple core, modular options and quality adventure/setting material coming regularly, they might keep this edition alive forever.

 

[Li Shenron]

Whether the end product was good or not is a side-issue. You just described the fundamental process of art. And it's important that that be encouraged. Design by committee is one method, but single vision is important too. That's where great creations come from. Don't discourage it!

Heh, it's a huge tangent here, but I do agree with you about the art comment. I once read a huge book on music composition, where the author spoke of "folk composition" vs "art composition" as the difference between trying to identify what people like or "what are the rules of taste" and then composing accordingly (folk) VS come up with your own (possibly unprecedented) new rules, propose them to the public and see how they like it (art). That's how the author described being an artisan VS being an artist, and it was really enlightening to me! (Note 1: "folk" was just his term for the attitude, nothing to do with "folk music"; Note 2: there was no connotation of superiority of the terms "art" and "artist" over "artisan").

That said, I didn't appreciate D&D going "artistic" at the time of 4e. I had the feeling that perhaps part of the gaming base was getting bored, and wanted a new spin/twist on a variety of things. But I wasn't getting bored at all! Furthermore I used to think of D&D as the main RPG stream (yep, the "mainstream") from which other, more artistic branches would form, so for me 4e felt like leaving the main course for a side branch, which could have hit a lot of people including me, but unfortunately didn't. That's the risk of art, but presentation (or attitude) is also important: an artist who, in order to promote his (perhaps good) novelty ideas, insists too much in saying how bad his predecessors were, is raising the stakes at his own risk. But for some reason I had this idea, that D&D is the main RPG setting the course for everybody else, and if it goes too narrow then it becomes just another RPG. (Also I almost had the additional feeling that the designers were thinking "this is how we want you to play D&D for now, if you don't like it don't worry, just buy it and play it, we'll make another one later".)

So all in all, I would not at all have wanted to "discourage" 4e to be a creative branch of D&D. But the idea of being a replacement, and throw away the past, didn't sound right to me.

(But that's too long and too late, forgive my tangent post here... and let's talk about 5e instead!)

 

[Morrus]

That said, I didn't appreciate D&D going "artistic" at the time of 4e.

4E was committee, not art. But even if it had been art - one of the things about art is that some people don't like it. It's polarising by definition. My wife hates Goodfellas; I consider it one of the best films ever made.

A world without Goodfellas is a lesser world.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The evolvment of 4e rules is completely opposite of what we got in 3E, where the core game works fine (for the most part), but the splat books and such just drowns it. It went so far that the latest 3.5 game I ran, I only let the players use the PHB. This let me focus on role-playing instead of the rules.

I have to completely disagree... 3e worked better at the end of the game then at the beginning. I found that a group of 4 PCs being a Warlock, Warblade, Marshal, and Ninja was way more balanced then a wizard, fighter, cleric, and theif...

the basic 3e rules allows a druid that can shift into a bear, have a bear best friend, summon more bears, call down lighting from the sky, and if need be heal... or the fighter who can get an average of +1hp per level and over 10 level maybe 3-4pts to attack... yea no problems there