D&D 5E With the Holy Trinity out, let's take stock of 5E

I pretty much love everything they've done with this edition save for one thing: Very little support for new DMs.

As a person who has been DMing for 15 years, I love how much control and freedom I get with the system. No more pages of charts to flip through to know exactly what every check should be. If failing the task doesn't change the plot in any way, I can tell the players they succeed even if they need to climb a cliff with heavy armor. Advantage and disadvantage are wonderful tools that make it easy to figure out how to reward or punish players. Overall, the mechanics of the game get out of the way of the important thing, telling a good story with all of your friends playing the main characters.

That said, I can't imagine picking this up as my first role playing game and being able to run it. The vast amount of responsibility placed on the DM to arbitrate everything would be paralyzing. In this respect, I think WotC might have miss stepped by catering to their fan base at the expense of bringing in a new generation. It would be nice if every new player got to play with a skilled and experienced DM, but lets be honest, bad DMs probably outnumber the good ones by far, and a game like this is only going to exacerbate that weakness.

It's the Dungeons & Dragons Greatest Hits: Remastered album.

Whether or not that's a good thing is up for debate.

Gavriel said:

I pretty much love everything they've done with this edition save for one thing: Very little support for new DMs.

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I can't say for sure, as I don't have it, but I've been told that the Starter Set is very good at supporting/teaching new DMs.

My overall opinion is that it's a good game, and that if a friend wanted to run it, I'd play. I can work with it, and there's enough there that makes me smile that I can do my best to ignore the selective points that I take issue with. Pathfinder however remains my D&D'esque game of choice for numerous reasons.

There are a few ways that I'd have gone in a different direction with the game, but no true game breakers. However in terms of the default flavor and lore (since I'm a huge fan of the game's legacy through 3 editions of it) there's some specific incidents where 4e flavor was retained to the complete exclusion of what preceded it. 4e style tieflings being the only option in 5e is a genuine shame (and in the absence of an actual retcon of the massive changes in 4e, I've drifted away from FR at this point and can't see going back to it).

5E rock and thrives in my circle so for us its a success so far! I have been fortunate enought to take part of the playtest very early on and i've seen it evolve throught its various iterations and i really like the finished product and how it shaped up. I think 5E D&D runs like a charm, is easy to teach and learn and is a ton of fun to play. While i don't have access to such data/info, i truly hope 5E is a financial success to the publisher's eyes.

Blackbrrd said:

Btw, I just bought a Surface 3 pro, downloaded GIMP, downloaded the player maps for the module and ran the Redbrand hideout on it. I added a black layer with 85% opacity on top of the map and used the erase tool to reveal the map as they explored it.

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That takes me back. I did a similar thing with Neopaint on an Atari ST linked by composite video lead to a 26" CRT TV when I was running Shadows in Traveller (for the zillionth time).

Anyway… I don't have any of the books yet but I will get them; I've seen enough that I like in the previews WotC has helpfully splashed around the internoodle. I think 5e is a worthy edition (and yes, I've played and run it occasionally from the first play-tests to the release of the free basic rules) but it hasn't persuaded me to give up on 3e. That remains, for now at least, my D&D of choice.

As far as the game, D&D hasn't been D&D since 2000. And back then 2e edition designers were so misguided about its design I don't know if they had any actual understanding of its underpinnings at all. I think they just went along with it as a kind of unreflected tradition. But at least the numbers put out in products were roughly equivalent enough that the new game content could rather easily be retrofit back on to earlier more functional designs.

Then The Forge had to come along and convert most of the current flock of designers into storymakers, authors, instead of game designers who have entrenched an unquestionable game philosophy that sought to make everything that led to D&D's design some kind of act of heresy. In the meantime 3e came out and was hugely successful. Also confused in design like 2nd ed. the new-made converts needed to "bring it down" to save the hobby. Eventually 4e came out billing D&D as a game about collaboratively creating stories - not mastering the design of a game. Something it had never been before. It created another rift. The older players found a new group, 3e players who kept on playing or took up the OGL clone of Pathfinder. 4e was well designed, probably a better design than for years, but it removed most of the game play and even game sense of D&D from the game.

Now we have 5e and it looks like a sincere desire to unite the fans of D&D together, while not the hobby. The mechanics and game advice are straight out of The Forge and wholly about playing stories again. The mechanics are all in front of the screen and play like 4e rules retrograded to 3e and earlier mechanics but without their sensibility of purpose. However, all these rules do bang together pretty well for what they are. They add up to a tight little game, if not that broad. I expect the breadth will come once again as they follow the Exceptions-based character powers design rather than the old world and system generation mechanics.

It is, dare I say, openly nostalgic. A pejorative word for any game's designed with clear intent to enable strategic play as well as simply any game "pre-Forge" revolution in RPGs. There are design attempts clearly here to address what some online tried to articulate about "what was lost" in 4th edition or any version not preferred. Mystery is being built in as well as many potential add-ons or module mechanics to enable groups to play as they prefer, not as the designers have inferred. Does that mean D&D can be redesigned back in? Given the relationships of the current core mechanics it's highly unlikely. (Given the state of things it's more likely actual D&D is snuck in as a Dungeon! boardgame bulk rule variant.) But 5th edition may have something new to offer D&D given the right perspective.

What is true is that as a storygame 5e is an enjoyable, D&D reminiscent game. It respects its history and holds a vastly improved attitude to its fan base. I cannot honestly say I would run any game after 2nd ed. unless the original design precepts are brought back, but I have played in 5th and enjoyed it. It plays better than 4th and 3rd and will give some challenge to Pathfinder I'm sure. It's biggest hurdle now is adventure designs, not rules module, but I suspect we will get an interesting dose of both in the none too distant future. My favorite thing? The numbers in the adventures published should be much easier to convert to older D&D.

I'll give the game 3 stars out of 5 with another 1/2 star for all its good will and a proviso that it not be confused with the older game with the same name.

5E is an improvement on 4e, and inferior to every other edition. Beyond that, it plays like someone's house rules for 3e and is indistinguishable from a dozen other D20 clones. It brings nothing new to the table, and is not worth purchasing, other than for collecting.

Could you elaborate on what in 5e is inferior to every other edition? Could you explain how 5e is just a houserule of 3e (not having played 3e, myself). Could you list the dozen other d20 clones that 5e is indistinguishable from (not having played a d20 game)?

Your comment would have more value if you provided any support for your statements.

5th edition is a good game but it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Also, I continue to get this feeling that something is missing but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I never had a problem running any other edition, except for 4th edition, so a new edition really wasn't needed for our group. I do like how the books "gave more support" to DM's through encouragement but I never needed a book to give me that information because I did it anyway.

In every edition of D&D I have sifted through and picked what I wanted to use and what I didn't in order to make the game fit into my view of the way it should be for us. I see the game is trying to be like 1st and 2nd edition but I feel like a cleaned up version of the two would have done better than what 5th edition is trying to do. Of course the designers would never go back and revise a previous edition so this is what we have at the moment.