D&D 5E D&D Next Blog: Beyond Class & Race

[Charwoman Gene]

Oh, the mighty theme, how you have fallen.

I love the mechanical concept. Show prepackaged abilities but allow full swap out. If they work to keep the options balanced on an individual level, it could be pretty awesome.

But I hate that they are reducing "Theme" which was a crazy flavorful idea in Dark Sun, to roughly "starting build"

I think there needs to be something maps to 4E Darksun type themes or 2e Planescape Factions.

 

[Savage Wombat]

1. Even if players prefer to customize characters, themes such as these can be a boon to DMs for generating NPCs. It also makes it easier (potentially) to put stat blocks in a published module.

2. In Champions, if you take a "package deal" for your character, you get a slight price break. But the price break effectively pays for the nearly-useless skill you take as part of the package (Professional Skill: Lawyer) so it's almost free role-playing points. Is this sufficient for your purposes?

3. Yes, prepackaged builds should be effective as well as flavorful. WotC needs to be careful with that.

 

[Dausuul]

Exactly. I think the big mistake that often gets made is assuming that "I don't want to deal with lots of fiddly character building stuff" is equivalent to "I don't care how effective my character is". They are different sentiments, and I think the former is a lot more common than the latter.

DnD is a game where character power is the primary determinant of a player's power over the story. And it seems to me that the players that tend to not care about fiddly build mechanics also tend to be the ones that care most about shaping the story. Handing them gimped prefab characters is just a recipe for frustration.

And if the prefabs aren't gimped (which would, frankly, be miraculous), and are well designed using the custom build rules, then you just ruin the fun of the optimizers. If the best characters come printed in the book, not many people have fun putting effort into coming up with creative ways to produce inferior characters.

The solution is that prefabs should be different from custom builds, but still similarly effective. Then, the storytellers can use the prefabs, and play effective characters, while the powergamers can have fun playing with the custom build system.

I already XP-ed your earlier post and so cannot XP this one, but this sums up everything I was trying to figure out how to say.

 

[El Mahdi]

I'm not a huge fan of being able to customize everything. Everyone will end up doing so and themes and backgrounds will become meaningless.

You mean everyone except those gamers who want simple character building and tracking...?

Those people do exist, and that's whay it's designed this way.

Not everyone will do that, which is why we have the edition/fan splits we have. If everyone ended up using the more complicated customizations, these splits would not currently exist.

I could see giving the pre-made Backgrounds and Themes a little something extra that can't be gotten using the "custom build" rules, to make up for the power of being able to build towards synergies with custom builds.

For example, the Essentials fighter is a lot less customizable than the original PHB Fighter, but is a competitive choice partly because it does things that the PHB Fighter can't do.

Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!

Giving the preset ones "extras" is a bad thing in my opinion. You should not be penalized for actually going the extra mile on your character.
I understand not everyone likes to tinker or spend more time on a character, but they shouldn't be rewarded for it.

Exactly!

[MENTION=70707]dkyle[/MENTION] One of the purposes of D&D Next is to allow players of different styles to exist at the same table, while still being compatible and balanced. Giving one type style a reward over another is contradictory to that effort. It would defeat the entire goal of 5E.

 

[Greg K]

Maybe you like most of the things in the "arcane student" background (I made that up, but it makes sense that we might see something similar) but you don't care about that familiar ability or that at-will spell-like ability. Just change those out for something else as you progress..

As you progress? If by progress, you mean level, no thank you. For myself, it would have to be the ability to switch out the familiar for another option at the start or the designers to not include the familiar in the background at all.

 

[Incenjucar]

Want to turn into a wolf? There's a theme for that.

Of course, if they actually put a "you turn into a wolf" feat into the game, then they may just have something here.

 

[El Mahdi]

But it's an IMPORTANT confirmation, which makes me happy.

I don't think we're going to see many themes, as described, that cross classes. You can't build a theme for "melee specialist" that works for wizards, for example.

The question is whether "archer" can be taken, as is, for fighters and rangers and rogues, or just fighters.

My hope is that these themes (preset lists of Feats and Skills put together to form a theme/backround) would be listed with each class and provide bonuses unique for that class. And then make the same Feats available seperate from themes/backgrounds so that any character can take them but with lesser bonuses (and possibly prerequisites).

That way, the classes that are supposed to be the best at something, remain the best at those things, but everybody has the option of getting any skill they envision for their character.

That could significantly mitigate, or maybe even eliminate, the need to multiclass in most situations.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I also believe, a custom build should also have some limits. Even if a custom build for the fighter may only reproduce fighter themes.
But a fighter may chose a magic theme, which could not be reproduced by customizing.

Also there could be little things like an extra language or something. Or a special feature that is not available through a custom feat. Not more powerful, but different. Like in 3rd edition, when you select a prestige class. You sacrifice customizability to gain unique features.

 

[EmbraCraig]

Oh, the mighty theme, how you have fallen.

I love the mechanical concept. Show prepackaged abilities but allow full swap out. If they work to keep the options balanced on an individual level, it could be pretty awesome.

But I hate that they are reducing "Theme" which was a crazy flavorful idea in Dark Sun, to roughly "starting build"

I think there needs to be something maps to 4E Darksun type themes or 2e Planescape Factions.

Isn't this just a terminology dislike then? You don't like it as it has the name of a feature you currently like in 4E?

Not saying the term is right/wrong/good/bad, but using the word Theme for this doesn't preclude there being something that serves an equivalent funtion to the 4E Themes somewhere else that they've not talked about yet (probably optionally, as they were in 4E).

As you progress? If by progress, you mean level, no thank you. For myself, it would have to be the ability to switch out the familiar for another option at the start or the designers to not include the familiar in the background at all.

That's pretty much directly what the custom themes in the original blog describe, so I think you're good there - Trevor's response was to questions about whether things would end up being locked in after chargen.

 

[Incenjucar]

Why on earth would you want to add arbitrary limits and sacrifices?

All that does is narrow the possibilities and reduce the number of stories people can tell.

It's like saying "Fighters can have animal companions but they cannot be bears." All that does is remove a lot of honey and hibernation jokes.