D&D 5E My Guess - How 5e Will Work
- Thread starter Gansk
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I've played Fantasy Trip, which was a precursor to GURPS? Not absolutely sure.
If the player selects from a menu of alternate class features instead of using points, is it still a GURPS clone?
That doesn't mean a build point approach is the only way this can be achieved. Nor have I seen any other evidence to back this guess at which direction they are going for. I cant say anything conclusively (NO-ONE here can) but I can speculate as to probability and I wouldnt put money on this being the adopted approach.
I agree with the others that this is too "not D&D". I would also add that an approach like this is a min/max'ers wet dream, which doesnt sit well with me. The splat books would come thick and fast.
Also, simplicity is a stated goal. It is possible to go alot simpler than this.
However, I will say I have seen approach's such as this before and they are not entirely without merit. If such a system works nicely for you as a home-brew system, best of luck with it.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
Sorry, I'm jumping ahead to the conclusion, without spelling out how I got there. Let me fill in:
1. Some people have used GURPS (or Hero System) to "play D&D." They've done it several ways, actually, but the way I mean here is use the point system framework of the parent system (e.g. GURPS or whatever) to make some "classes" with "abilities" that are balanced in the parent system. Typically, the GM and maybe one or two mechanically savvy players in the group does this.
2. From then on, they "play D&D" with these constructs. Certainly, they may add on new monsters (built the same way) or tweak things that have been found to not work quite as well as preferred. To do that, instead of ad hoc changes, go back to the parent system and rework.
3. If you take the view that the early D&D classes were built as they were to provide a specific type of play, this can be a very powerful technique. How do you know what to use from the parent system? Well, how do you want the game to play? Build classes that do the things you want, and that's what you'll get. (With magic, this part is even more true in Hero than GURPS, at least through GURPS 3E.) If you want your spellcasters to be by school, have spells that are usable 1/hour, you can do that, balanced with the melee guys. Or anything else. Meanwhile, in play everyone is shielded from this. (This part is more true in GURPS than Hero, though there are tricks you can pull in Hero presentation to bridge most of the gap.)
So what's wrong with all that? Let us count the ways:
1. It makes the underlying framework very complex and subject to all kinds of special balancing issues. That is, there are all kinds of things that you can do to screw up your campaign, many of which are not obvious. Circa Hero 4E and later or GURPS 3E or later, the products had matured enough that you navigate the worst of this with a bit of advice and circumspection, and later versions have refined it. This is many years of hard-won tuning and refinement that a D&D version will not have.
2. But assume that the designers can somehow come up with such a framework in one D&D version, and get around the corner cases by simply leaving that stuff out of the public documents. Meanwhile, they won't publish the framework, but gives us the more polished pieces, whatever those happen to be. That's all great in some sense, but "security by obscurity" does not work. If there are underlying patterns, gamers will discover them, published or not. You can buy a little time with "security by obscurity"--sometimes, but never much. So the real choices are a framework overtly published or a framework discovered patchwork.
3. If you go for patchwork framework route, you'll have all kinds of furor over this or that, misunderstandings, things built improperly, etc. About the only advantage to that is that it will give internet posters something to argue over instead of directing their ire elsewhere.
This however pales to the, err, "irritation" that will result when various people that wanted X discover that X was readily available in the framework, but not provided because it had minor flaw Y--or even worse, because the "high priests" trusted with the framework hadn't got around to it yet. 4. If you release the framework right away, it will have huge problems or holes in it--either stuff not covered, or stuff covered imperfectly. The only real honest way to handle this is to "stub things out"--"Hey, the summoning rules don't really work, and we intend to replace them later. For now, you can use this stuff, which works sometimes, but breaks under pressure. Use at your own risk." The problem with honesty here is that you'll get legions of "fans" with reading comprehension and logic problems that will treat this as "unfinished work".
5. So with 3 and 4, you are "darned if you do; darned if you don't." So maybe you can sort of have a "framework" that that evolves as you need it. It's not consistent enough to be readily reverse-engineered, and everything, by definition, is a bit of a "stub out." This too will have all kinds of problems, but maybe it will seem slick enough in the meantime for those to be worked out in 6E. Better plan on 7E instead, since it usually takes 3 published versions to nail down all the problems.
6. In the meantime, while you are doing all the "game engineering," what is happening with smooth play, flavor, interesting and evocative abilities, etc? Not a whole lot, because all of the above is a lot of work. Your artists are free to do their usual thing. That had better be some smashing art.
7. But mainly, the purpose of an underlying game framework is not to swap out options, but to let each group build the flavor and interest themselves--that is, what they bring to the game. This is why, BTW, that GURPS and Hero can seem bland to a lot of people, and why GURPS sells those supplements with some of the work already done while Hero concentrates on giving you a ton of examples. Yet, the goal of 5E is not to let you play anything you want. Rather, it is to let you easily play D&D in one of several popular and historical styles.
Thus, their design intent does not align with the suggested method of building up abilities by points--which is a framework. Had they wanted to do that, then the proper starting point would have been to take 3E/3.5, which already went a long way towards "regularizing D&D," and build the framework first so that it could roughly produce 3E/3.5, smooth off some of the rough edges, then start adding other options. It's still doubtful that this would have produced something that catered to other playstyles, as framework games inevitably play with their own style, not the genre emulated.
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What would you put your money on? Please give an example of how the two players sit at the same table.
It appears that the mention of the word "points" maybe has peeled back the onion of the design process a little too much. We don't know if the Wotc designers are playtesting builds and filling out sheets that assign points to powers, abilities, class features, etc. Since the process is still more an art than a science, they don't have to admit it when they categorize these things in the books. The only number they might give is for "level".
Apparently Pathfinder's Advanced Race Guide is going to use a point system to help DM's design their own races. Maybe this is an admission of how they designed the core races in the first place?
As far as splatbooks go, the cat is out of the bag. You don't think that eventually all aspects of D&D will be represented in some shape or form in
5e? The simplicity is in the core, but how do you tack on the modules and still keep everything simple? Not everybody wants simple, and lots of players will not switch over until their favorite module comes out.
Thank you for a very intelligent post. I can't possibly argue with your analysis because you clearly have seen it for yourself, while I haven't.
So do you have a guess at how Wotc is going to achieve this "impossible" task?
Isn't their track record to release something that has a few flaws and use errata to make up for it later?
In that vein, would they risk the multi-year approach to perfect the system in the way that you are talking about?
To make a long story short, point-buy systems have been around since the early 80ies. They have clear advantages over class/level systems, but specific drawbacks too. Point buy variants of D&D have existed since the 1980ies too, but never really caught on.
So yeah, if you want to make a D&D point buy, have fun. But it's not going to be 5E, or 6E, or 7E...
So yeah, if you want to make a D&D point buy, have fun. But it's not going to be 5E, or 6E, or 7E...
Take a breath. Relax. You post on forums because you want feedback, and inevitably, some of that will disagree with what you said. You dont have to defend against everyone who disagree's with you.
You could actually put in a post that sais "Wow, alot of people disagree with me, thats interesting and unexpected. Thanks for the feedback.". I did a couple of weeks back. I posted an idea, it got a general consensus poo-poo, so I just said "Ah well, good to know how the forums feel to this idea. Thanks." and that was my last post on the thread. I thought I was on a great idea, others disagreed. I posted the idea because I wanted peoples feedback, and now I have it. If I had of spent the thread arguing the point, it would have just indicated I never wanted feedback in the first place.
As to this particular response...
I dont have anything Im putting my money on at the moment. I dont have to to say Im not putting my money on your idea.
I havent seen enough to know what WOTC is planning on, none of us have, but my gut feel sais this aint it. Hell, you might prove me wrong (As I said...its just a gut feel), best of luck to you if you do.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
Sure you can argue. None of us have seen 5E yet.
(Well, the ones that have can't talk about it in this manner, thanks to the NDAs.) Note that I don't think what you are advocating is impossible to do as a version of D&D. That people have done it with GURPS and Hero System pretty much proves that you can. Given the financial troubles of Hero, if nothing else they could buy that, and use it for a base.
Also, given where early 3.5 was going, it is fairly clear to me that there was some support for this direction in the 3E team. One "3E" guy even said as much. However, I think that there are problems with that approach when it comes to supporting multiple play styles. Moreover, I've read enough of their design musing to suspect that Mike and Monte don't approach design that way. They both seem more geared to the "play experience" than anything else.
If you wanted to make, for example, a "3E-ish" system that you could tweak to simulate, sort of, a lot of disparate fantasy worlds, then you could do worse than go with a framework. If, however, you want to let people play in 1E dungeon crawl, or 1E sandbox exploration, or 2E storyteller, or 3E adventure path, or 4E tactical/epic story mishmash--all with the same system, then your moving parts are different.
I think their attempt to square the circle will be more of a relatively, coarse "gray box" design. It's not, say, BECMI/RC optional "skills" white box design, where the skills are kind of eyeballed by the designer for what you might want. If you want to vary them, you can see their guts hanging out, because they really don't do much. There are a handful of interactions with the rest of the system (e.g. magic), and those are carefully spelled out. But it is also not a "framework" black box design, where every possible skill is carefully spelled out, and are used like Lego blocks--you don't have to use them all, but you are limited to the set at hand, and don't really have the means to easily mess with the interior.
Instead, there is a core bit of logic running through the whole set of skills--tied to ability scores. That's not meant to be touched, but it isn't a "black box" but a scaffold that happens to have fully working contents due to the ability scores. Or, a "gray box". You leave the scaffolding alone, but you can replace or supplement the major working pieces with other options.
The key question, of course, is with all the different pieces, does this work out more like, say, an electric plug, where you can plug any appliance of the correct amperage in, without danger, and a responsible child can do it. Or is it more like a vehicle motor, where technically any number of separate and different motors could replace the current one, but it is not something that most people would attempt.
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No...no it doesn't. It feels like some game that you would like to play instead of D&D.
I think it sounds bloody awful. I specifically play D&D because it DOESN'T have crap like "build points" in it, and so do most people in the hobby. There IS a reason that D&D has consistently been more popular than games like GURPS and Hero.
Quite frankly, I resent the fact that you would even suggest this approach. Most people who play D&D aren't hardcore gamers at all, but people who play once a week or so and then put their books away when they're not at the game table. They don't want to have to go through the procedural equivalent of filing their tax return just to play a Fighter. Why would you seek to alienate these people when there are plenty of games out there that already cater to your rainman tendencies?
Or is this just about having your playstyle validated? Seriously, what is wrong with you and what do you have against new and casual players?
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