D&D 5E Whats your dealbreaker for 5E?

[Sadrik]

Closed class design. Design where the game is not simple enough at the most basic level.

Class design issues for me:
Too fiddly with class features and feats - too many class features for simple play, feats to simple for complex play
I want to use just abilities instead of skills
Cantrips being a subsystem of spells

The math has to work:
Under the hood stuff has to make sense
I want low scaling, there is a point where it is too much


These are my big ones. There are others too but class design is the big one.

Edit: Ah and ease of monsters more 1e/2e than 3e or even 4e.

 

[Sage Genesis]

I don't really have a "dealbreaker" as such I guess. I approach it from this angle: I already have a ton of RPGs and a large selection of players with which to game who are up for pretty much anything I suggest. So it's up to the game to win me over. Simply having "D&D" on the cover of the book is not a selling point. I'll buy a game if it provides me with something cool that other games thus far haven't really done yet, or not as good.

So far Next hasn't won me over. Judging from the direction of the playtest it's not a bad game, it just doesn't give me anything I don't already have. And that means it's not worth my money.

 

[Aldeon]

I know it sounds really dumb, but I'm going to get it either way. I have always liked Dungeons and Dragons itself from the first time I played it to now-- 3.5, 4e, doesn't matter. I'm going to buy it and play it; if I don't like it, I'll simply shelf it. I've got books for 10+ different systems, including Basic and AD&D 2nd for Wizards stuff. I love collecting RPG books and I've bought $50 books for games that I don't even want to play.

Of course, this is probably why my apartment's furniture is mostly folding chairs and tables. No regrets.

 

[amerigoV]

I do not have a dog in this fight (so to speak) anymore, but my big fear going into this would be the proliferation of splat. While I have not followed Next that close, it seems like anytime a topic comes up the response is "there will be a module for that". So in the past (starting a bit in 1e and ramped up into 2e) we saw a proliferation of PC options (kits, classes, feats, PrCs, etcs). So if there are "OSR, 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e" modules, my big fear would be eventual proliferation of PC options under those would then commence -- so we would go from linear splat to matrix splat.

My other fear would be that if I wanted to run a game that reflected a variety of features from different eras that it would not just be Core + Module, but Core + a bunch of Modules cherry-picked.

Perhaps those have already been addressed, but that would be my dealbreakers if I were in the market for 5e.

 

[Starfox]

My other fear would be that if I wanted to run a game that reflected a variety of features from different eras that it would not just be Core + Module, but Core + a bunch of Modules cherry-picked.

As far as I understand, this is the very point of the "module" model - to make cherrypicking easy. In the past, if you changed rule X, you also had to change rule Z, Y, and Å, and even then you had some issues with rule Ä becoming ambiguous.

Å, Ä, (and Ö) are not oddities here - simply the three last letters in the Swedish alphabet, that is the three letters after Z.

 

[amerigoV]

As far as I understand, this is the very point of the "module" model - to make cherrypicking easy. In the past, if you changed rule X, you also had to change rule Z, Y, and Å, and even then you had some issues with rule Ä becoming ambiguous.

Å, Ä, (and Ö) are not oddities here - simply the three last letters in the Swedish alphabet, that is the three letters after Z.

This will sound cheap (which I am not), but that really creates a big hindrance when you think about players vs GMs. Sure, as GM I will buy what I need, but to ask players to fork out (say) $100 for Core + a couple of splats just to play the game I want is a dealbreaker. So that deal breaker is not for me, but for the group. Plus for me I would rather spend that $100 on something that enhances the game (setting, props, etc).

(again, it really is not a big deal for me personally - my group is set on another system these days, but if I think about it from there perspective I definitely would see that as a hindrance).

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Basically, I'm not ready for Next - I still like 4E and if I want a lighter successor to 4E I would much rather play 13th Age - but my single biggest deal breaker for Next is the monster (and NPC) stat block.

4E nailed this. You don't need to refer to anything else because it's all there on the stat block. Next, IMO (and YMMV), screwed the pooch on this by requiring a DM to look up spells and whatnot as was the case prior to 4E.

That's what killed Next for me. The monsters are still pre-3E boring but they still require you to look things up in play. Not interested.

 

[Weather Report]

but my single biggest deal breaker for Next is the monster (and NPC) stat block.

That's one of my favourites aspects, now I only need to know about fireball, every monster does not needs its own slightly different version of a ball of fire, same with the ridiculous redundancy in Powers in 4th Ed, no thanks, they should have grouped powers by Source, not Class, would have cut done on the bloat; 13th Age has a few nice ideas, but makes my eyes bleed, and the math bloat/treadmill is even worse than 4th Ed.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Basically, I'm not ready for Next - I still like 4E and if I want a lighter successor to 4E I would much rather play 13th Age - but my single biggest deal breaker for Next is the monster (and NPC) stat block.

4E nailed this. You don't need to refer to anything else because it's all there on the stat block. Next, IMO (and YMMV), screwed the pooch on this by requiring a DM to look up spells and whatnot as was the case prior to 4E.

That's what killed Next for me. The monsters are still pre-3E boring but they still require you to look things up in play. Not interested.

I like 4e's stat block, to a large degree, now that I've run a few sessions. But, I have to say, I did feel kinda mislead about "everything being in the stat block." I was expecting it to tell me what things did, not just give me conditions. A single type of enemy could slow opponents with one attack, immobilize them with another, and knock them prone with a third attack. And if you're using three different kinds of enemies in a single combat, then you can easily have around six different conditions. The stat blocks didn't actually tell me what any of this did; I had to memorize them.

Mind you, I can do that kind of thing pretty easily. But you definitely need to reference stuff outside of the stat block unless you memorize it, just like with 3.X. There's less of it to do, but since I also could memorize spell effects pretty easily, it wasn't a big deal for me. I'll happily admit that it's likely easier for most people with 4e, since you basically need one cheat sheet's worth of stuff (and not the last third of the PHB+).

Still, I'd love to see stat blocks that actually included everything you need to run the monster. Conditions are handy, and I think they should be used, but I don't see the harm in including the effect as well most of the time. It'll eat up words, yeah, but I'm okay with more complete stat blocks at the cost of a few variations of gnolls and ogres. Just my two cents, obviously. As always, play what you like

 

[Ratskinner]

As other have mentioned...I don't see very much in the way of "dealbreakers" in the way the playtest shook out, but I also don't see very much in the way of "dealmakers", either. I've picked up 13th Age, and honestly, I like a lot of its solutions better than the way 5e is going. (Not that 13th Age doesn't have its own problems, either.)

I really find myself in a bit of a quandry for a system to run a "D&D" game. Nowadays, I like light games and while 5e seems lighter than the recent editions...it still has plenty of fiddly (which would be okay if it yielded a lot of bang per fiddly, but I don't see that it does.) I'm not really into the whole FFV thing, but I also don't really enjoy the fantasy superhero vibe that seems to pervade 4e and 13th Age. I wish more game systems could find a way to play in that middle ground.

So I look at FATE, which can do a traditional D&D type game...but its not really its wheelhouse. Dungeonworld is very promising, but seems a bit rigid on the classes/character development thing. (I haven't gotten to play enough of it to be certain of that.)

I dunno. I'll probably end up playing 5e at some point, but I'm not exactly thrilled by it right now. ($35/book would put it out of my "on a whim" range, too.)