D&D 5E Have you moved on yet? Has Wizard's handled this properly?

[FireLance]

Have you tried this? I think this would break the game (since all the XP targets are based around the PCs starting every fight at full).

Well, obviously someone will have to play a cleric. I thought that was a given.

There's more to pre-4e D&D than "wizards with only daily spells." The main problem that the old-schoolers (myself, anyway) had with 4e was that it was designed around the combat encounter as the basic unit of gameplay, which does not support an old-school playstyle (e.g., in my experience, you can't really do a proper dungeon crawl in 4e). For 4e to appeal to old-school gamers, it would need to have quicker combats with fewer and simpler decisions (which would require a redesign of all the content), and core rules that emphasize combat-as-war (which would require a redesign of the core rules) -- basically, a different game.

One solution that I have toyed with is to change the default time frame of the game: whatever you previously would have regained with a five minute rest now requires an eight hour rest. "Daily" abilities now require a week's rest in a comfortable environment. This shifts the emphasis back to at-will abilities and resource management over the course of an adventuring day. The monsters that you would normally fight in a single encounter would now be spread out over the course of the day, so each fight is shorter and you could have more encounters since five fights with individual monsters is easier than one fight with the same five monsters encountered at the same time.

Unless there's some element of dungeon crawling and the old-school playstyle that I'm missing, balancing 4e around the adventuring day instead of an encounter is simply a matter of changing the time that the PCs need to rest to get their abilities back, and adjusting the level of challenge accordingly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's more to pre-4e D&D than "wizards with only daily spells." The main problem that the old-schoolers (myself, anyway) had with 4e was that it was designed around the combat encounter as the basic unit of gameplay, which does not support an old-school playstyle (e.g., in my experience, you can't really do a proper dungeon crawl in 4e). For 4e to appeal to old-school gamers, it would need to have quicker combats with fewer and simpler decisions (which would require a redesign of all the content), and core rules that emphasize combat-as-war (which would require a redesign of the core rules) -- basically, a different game.Have you tried this? I think this would break the game (since all the XP targets are based around the PCs starting every fight at full).

Bah, people who talk about DIY and experiments and such don't get to talk about "oh gosh tweaking a few things would break the XP system", lol.

As for dungeon crawls and the organization of play. How you organize play at your table has FAR more to with what you want than how the game is written. It could certainly be presented in a more old-school fashion, and I agree that things can be streamlined for faster play. However, none of that is even faintly outside the realm of what can be accomplished within the box of basically 4e design. Depending on how much you want to bend it will determine the best approaches and how far you can go in some directions, but I fail to be convinced that a new (and IMHO far less capable) new set of core rules is required.

Even at the extreme, if I were rewriting 4e as much as I wanted, it would STILL be FAR more like 4e than like DDN. In any case I did a billion zillion dungeon crawls 36 levels deep. I have NO USE for another set of rules which are focused on dungeon crawling. If that's all D&D can ever do, then the game is already walking dead, just shoot it in the head, reprint 1e, and let the whole R&D team go, you're done.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm curious how many DIY people there potentially are now compared with games of the past. DIY in 3.x/Pathfinder was/is just not possible for me because I just don't have the time. However, I loved designing worlds and plots all through 1E and 2E (when I was a teenager and then in College). I also don't want to houserule things on the fly because I'm not good at remembering what I did last time.

Nowadays, I wouldn't even have time for DIY using a simpler 1E/2E ruleset because of work, raising my family, etc.

I wonder what % of D&D (all editions)/Pathfinder GMs are DIY vs. only using published adventures and how the figure of today compares with the figures of yesterday.

Its a good question. Speaking for myself I don't do DIY rules. I have my own setting that I built MANY MANY years ago (hint it is considerably older than WoG), but for me as a rule system 4e works great. It has a light DM workload, creates reliable interesting and cinematic challenges and rules don't matter much for the rest anyway (but 4e still gives the players enough RP options to stick on their characters and we can always make up stuff if we need to at the table).

Overall to me DIY is "make up fun adventures and run them." I don't WANT endless tinkering with rules. I have been running RPGs for 37 years now, I could care less about rules. I want a set that is logical and clear and easy to understand and covers all the likely situations that come up to a first approximation and is easy to ad-lib at the table when it doesn't. 4e is pretty close to the ideal of that system. I could improve it, but I want to PLAY.

 

[Nellisir]

The DIY guys want a product that is easy to hack into and experiment with. But they want more than that--they also want a community of gamers who are open to houseruling things and experimenting. They want the intense "rules as written" debates to go away. They want the snide dismissals consisting of "you can do it if you want, but it's just a houserule and should be discussed in a separate forum so the rules forum can be kept pure" to go away.

I think DDN is still in a position to deliver what the DIY guys want.

Dude. Yes. This is me.

I've got some affiliation with the OSR, but it's because of the simplicity, not the strange little font types. I specifically hang with the S&W crowd because it's about as stripped down as you can get, and they're OK with modification and add-ons.

I house-ruled 1e, 2e, and 3e. I rewrote the classes, quite a few monsters, spells, and all the races, repeatedly. I just don't have the time anymore for something that complex.

I don't disagree with 4e being more balanced, or any of the other virtues people cite, but it is not, IMO, any easier to hack & house rule than 3e, unless your house-rules are exclusively of the "don't use this" variety. Mine never are. The ease of DMing and the prepackaged monsters was really nice, and I think it'll carry through into Next.

 

[Nellisir]

Considering that I run a homebrew world and I just rewrote the 3e base classes to fit in with my melange of d20 variant rules and I run things fast and loose at the table, I'm going to say I'm DIY-ing 3e.

I rewrote the base d20 classes with material from The Black Company, Arcana Evolved, Thieves World, and Dawnforge. Primarily. Awesome but exhausting.

I routinely take out halflings and half-orcs, and add in moulder dwarves, leshii, troldfolk, fuah, and jotunkin.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Dude. Yes. This is me.

I've got some affiliation with the OSR, but it's because of the simplicity, not the strange little font types. I specifically hang with the S&W crowd because it's about as stripped down as you can get, and they're OK with modification and add-ons.

I house-ruled 1e, 2e, and 3e. I rewrote the classes, quite a few monsters, spells, and all the races, repeatedly. I just don't have the time anymore for something that complex.

I don't disagree with 4e being more balanced, or any of the other virtues people cite, but it is not, IMO, any easier to hack & house rule than 3e, unless your house-rules are exclusively of the "don't use this" variety. Mine never are. The ease of DMing and the prepackaged monsters was really nice, and I think it'll carry through into Next.

IMHO 4e's huge virtue is that with the way the rules are all put together in a common platform way it is very easy to generate CONTENT. If you want to have a new power that does something a little different, or a new item, or a new monster with some cool power, etc you can just steal unabashedly and refluff. I can make anything into something else and it just works. No fiddling with inscrutable numbers and hoping the are sane. Making a whole new class might be time consuming, but you really just never need to go that deep. The great part is you're never spending time wondering about what you just did. It is already 99% tested. You KNOW it will work, certainly well enough for a home game. Most of the hacks we did on 1e and 2e didn't work right at all.

 

[Obryn]

IMHO 4e's huge virtue is that with the way the rules are all put together in a common platform way it is very easy to generate CONTENT.

And reskinning - we can't lose sight of that. When your goal is to balance mechanics with mechanics, changing the trappings is easy enough - much like magic in Savage Worlds.

Just today, I saw a really impressive reskin of a Genasi Wizard into a Hydromancer. A few keywords were changed, along with flavor text and spell names, and it was overall pretty damn brilliant.

-O

 

[GX.Sigma]

In any case I did a billion zillion dungeon crawls 36 levels deep. I have NO USE for another set of rules which are focused on dungeon crawling.

Granted, but if you release a game called "Dungeons & Dragons," and it can't do a dungeon crawl, you've failed on a pretty fundamental level. That's my perspective, anyway.

One solution that I have toyed with is to change the default time frame of the game: whatever you previously would have regained with a five minute rest now requires an eight hour rest. "Daily" abilities now require a week's rest in a comfortable environment. This shifts the emphasis back to at-will abilities and resource management over the course of an adventuring day. The monsters that you would normally fight in a single encounter would now be spread out over the course of the day, so each fight is shorter and you could have more encounters since five fights with individual monsters is easier than one fight with the same five monsters encountered at the same time.

Sounds interesting, but I question how much it would actually change the game as played. This elaborate set of house rules looks promising, but again, if you have to go that far, you might as well make a new game altogether.

 

[Jack99]

Um, it would be impossible for the number of playtesters to go down (once anyone has done so, they can be considered a playtester), so saying the number of playtersters is increasing really isn't saying much.

Heck, one could also say the number of 4E (or 1E) products purchased continues to rise!

Did you read the article? Because he specifically mentions people "leaving" the playtest. While you are certainly right in your statement, I think he just means that the number of people providing feedback is increasing. YMMV OFC.

 

[Nellisir]

IMHO 4e's huge virtue is that with the way the rules are all put together in a common platform way it is very easy to generate CONTENT. If you want to have a new power that does something a little different, or a new item, or a new monster with some cool power, etc you can just steal unabashedly and refluff. I can make anything into something else and it just works. No fiddling with inscrutable numbers and hoping the are sane. Making a whole new class might be time consuming, but you really just never need to go that deep. The great part is you're never spending time wondering about what you just did. It is already 99% tested. You KNOW it will work, certainly well enough for a home game. Most of the hacks we did on 1e and 2e didn't work right at all.

I also didn't, and don't, like WotC's rejection of the OGL for 4e. Didn't do anything to motivate me to 4e, however. I like sharing what I create, and I liked doing so legally, not in a winky "WotC won't mind if I only do it on their boards" or "I'm just an amateur on my blog" sort of way. But that's a different kettle of fish, and not about the mechanics.

I hear what you're saying, but it just didn't work for me. No harm, no foul. The setup was too different and required too much of my time to build up familiarity. The thirty level setup, and the emphasis on material for all levels of play, was a major turnoff. I wanted fewer levels, not more. The similarity between powers, particularly in the beginning, was also not a bonus. And I'm not convinced that creating new classes is just a matter of refluffing, even in 4e. It certainly didn't look that easy when it came out.

Breaking something wasn't ever really a concern. It's more about a flow, about something feeling organic and natural to the character. If something mechanical tests out to be broken, I fix it. That's easy.

Anyways, it's cool that it works for you. I think I might enjoy playing a game, but I haven't had that sort of time for 4 years, and I like DMing more than playing, so...it just didn't scratch my itch. Next is looking better.