D&D 5E I have the DMG!

[birdchili]

I'd be rather grateful for details on how the Horn of Fog works.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I prefer "how many bees could a beholder hold if a beholder could hold bees?"

I'm pretty sure its over 9,000!

 

[Iosue]

I'd be rather grateful for details on how the Horn of Fog works.

Makes you hum "Camptown Races" while pulling pranks on dogs and chicken hawks and wooing widowed hens?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

What I'm struggling with is how 5e is so dramatically different. Start out as an elf wizard with criminal background. Bam: you're a sword-wielding, longbow-toting spell-caster with proficiency in Stealth and Thieves tools. Pretty good for 1st level. Let's rock on.

You gain XP. You wish to multiclass. You take 2nd level in rogue. This is consistent with 1e. You're going to "level up" in thief (rogue) first. Take 3rd level in fighter. Take 4th level in wizard. Etc. Or, alternatively, stick with fighter and rogue levels, and subclass into eldritch knight or arcane trickster. 5e has improved the multiclassing rules, such that your proficiency bonus (and hence your "thieves skills" and "spell power / DCs") are always going up with total character level. This avoids the old 3e trap of having absolutely useless abilities from your secondary or tertiary classes at high levels.

"...but Lancelot, your approach means that I'll need obscene amounts of XP to get to 3rd level wizard!" Sure, but you needed them in 1e as well. At the same time your elven F/MU/T was hitting 2nd level in wizard (7,500 XP, split three ways), the party druid was already 4th or 5th level.

"...but Lancelot, your approach means that I'll never get high level spells!" You weren't getting them in 1e either, unless you were rockin' Unearthed Arcana and had basically removed the wizard level caps from the elves. Most non-humans were limited to mid-level fighter, mid-level spell-caster, and unlimited in rogue. With the exception of (say) Unearthed Arcana gray elves, you were never going to be casting the 9th level slots. That was for the human magic-users only. Also, with the 5e approach noted above, and assuming you eventually subclass into eldritch knight and/or arcane trickster, you could be seeing something like the following in 5e: Fighter 6 / Rogue 6 / Wizard 8. Based on the multiclassing table, you add a third of your arcane trickster and eldritch knight levels to your wizard level, for a total effective spellcasting level of 12th. That's good for 6th level spells, which is about as good as a 1e elf ever got.

The problem with the spells in that example is that you won't have 6th level spells. You'll have 4th level spells with 6th level slots. I don't care about slots if I can't cast higher-level non-combat spells in them. It's not about boom--it's about being mage enough to plane shift into Baator and fighter enough to chop up devils with your sword.

If I want a fighter/mage who can cast 7th level spells I have to take 13 levels of wizard, leaving only 7 levels of fighter. That's 13 levels of d6 HD, and all the spellcasting I'm getting out of eldritch knight is two cantrips and one 8th level spell slot (to use for 7th level or lower spells).

Yes, it was a clunky system and I don't want to see them attempt to recreate it with all of its arbitrary restrictions and limits. I do want to see them attempt to capture the feel and benefits, which means feeling like a competent member of two classes at once. Obviously I wouldn't want them to be as vertically powerful as a single class character. I'd prefer something more along the lines of 70% of the vertical features of a single class in exchange for flexibility.

Given you can achieve a broadly comparable experience to 1e (as described above) with the current 5e rules, I still don't see the point in taking valuable space from the DMG for this extreme corner case. Worse yet, this is clearly an area where there is almost no codified response that is going to satisfy the minority who want some kind of gestalt 1e multiclassing variant. What can they conceivably do, that would be balanced?

Some kind of points-buy system, where you can "buy" skills or spells from the class of your choice, each time you level? That's not 1e multiclassing - that's 2e "Skill and Powers" splatbook stuff, and that was pretty widely reviled at the time as being a munchkin's delight.

Maybe break up each level of each class into halves or thirds, so you can take a half-level of fighter and a half-level of wizard each time you level up? That's incredibly finicky, and massively complicates the design of the game. That'd be dozens of pages of material, simply to describe how to do it for every class.

Maybe double or triple the XP requirements to level (much like 1e, which split your XP in half or thirds), and then you gain a level in each class when you hit the threshold? That's functionally similar (and clearly inferior) to the current 5e method.

I'd honestly be interested in hearing an alternate "gestalt / multi-classing" method from one of its proponents.

I would too. That's why I have to wait for a article that hopefully comes sooner than later. I have done something that worked well enough in 3e, and I can do something for 5e, but I don'twant to have to. I guarantee it can be done in under a page.

I'm okay with it being moved to web articles, but I hope it comes out within the first half of the year.

 

[Derren]

Heh.
The book's not even out yet and we've gotten all of four or five posts of content reviews. A full two or three paragraphs describing the book. And already people are claiming it's a disappointment and full of broken promises.

Yeah... there might be a bias.

Defending the book with this none argument after many reports that promised content is not there. There might be a bias.

Two things were promised right from the beginning till shortly before release. Pillars and modularity. If those are missing, and it looks like it, then it it a rather big breach of trust.

 

[Guang]

What does the structure of the planes look like? They mentioned that they were thinking "Great Wheel". Did they end up going with that? Is it different from Planescape at all? If so, how? (especially elemental planes - are there 1, 4, 6, or 16?, and fey/shadow/dream planes?)

 

[Undrhil]

Makes you hum "Camptown Races" while pulling pranks on dogs and chicken hawks and wooing widowed hens?

Very clever. I see what you did there.

What does the structure of the planes look like? They mentioned that they were thinking "Great Wheel". Did they end up going with that? Is it different from Planescape at all? If so, how? (especially elemental planes - are there 1, 4, 6, or 16?, and fey/shadow/dream planes?)

The layout of the planes is in the back of the PHB.

 

[Guang]

Very clever. I see what you did there.



The layout of the planes is in the back of the PHB.

But I seem to remember them saying they were going to go into more detail in the DMG

 

[Celtavian]

Add me to the list that wants to know about traps. How well do they cover them in the DMG and are they going to scary again?

 

[Morte]

Does the DMG have an answer to: if I'm starting a campaign at level 5, how much starting gold do I give the players to buy gear?