D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[I'm A Banana]

My concern is that most of that is looking like mere colour.

Well, so far, it's not looking like mere colour to me.

A fighter has a unique package of active abilities (maneuvers). An archer has a distinct package of unique abilities (feats that make them better at archery). A blacksmith...is a little weaker, but all it really needs is an item creation ability ("you can make an item out of metal during an extended rest at a location with a forge for 1/2 the GP cost").

Not quite perfect yet (some Archery feats are kind of fiddly, the background needs a bit more of an active ability), but certainly on the way.

The key about 4e's options was that they mattered in action resolution.

I can't even remember what my current character's feats or powers are without looking them up. I assume they're heavily oriented toward the "expertise-" style feats. I do know he's a bladesinger and so can do auto-damage when he hits with a secondary magic effect, but that's about the core class behavior, not about the specific powers or feats I chose.

It's easy, with a list of jargony terms, to forget what these things can do.

 

[TwoSix]

Since we have very little to go on as to what this column actually means, I'm going to focus on the idea that "Precise Shot bad, Archer good."

Since there's only so many concepts that can be communicated with natural sounding terms, I wonder if that means there's going to be more focus on top-level development and less focus on creating granularity. We know that themes and specialties are supposed to be plug and play at the Basic end, and separated into discrete feats at the Advanced end. I wonder if there's a focus change here on not making Themes and Specialties easily modular, and rather on making them more holistic.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I find that hard to accept when they speak of removing major styles of D&D from Next, like removing the idea of numerous supplemental material that has been a mainstay of D&D for the past 12 years.

Okay. It is an issue of practicality. They cannot please everyone and doing a line of splats to baically keep the optimization/customization crowd happy is an expensive and time consuming strategy that will take away from satisfying other styles of play. If they went the other way, i would be saying the same thing (in fact, until this article I assumed we would get the same line of splats). Either way though, it is a design choice and he isnt lying. he is being quite honest about what they plan to do (and I appreciate it, even when I disagree with their design choices---which I often do). Count me among the people who view this latest L&L column as a welcome and refreshing statement.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I dont really want to derail this with another debate about 3E and balance, but my experience was I didnt really encounter huge issues with the game until people started bringing in builds based around many of the feats and prestige classes in the complete books. You are certainly entitled to believe 3E is a bad base, but plenty of people have been using it now for thirteen years and still love it. I myself am just starting up a new 3.5 campaign after a few years away. Re-reading the phb and dmg I have to say I am a lot more impressed this time around, and I think it is actually a incredibley well done system in many respects. If you use the complete system you tend to run into fewer problems in my opinion (I still think there are some issues with the magic, but nothing I cant deal with).

See, the thing is, I compare 3e and 4e here and think about what I learn from that. 3e has a much less regular rules structure. Class design in particular is all over the place. I don't seek to get into debates about past editions either, but CLEARLY without any real effort or often even meaning to a player can make a level 6 Druid or Cleric that is just insane, way more capable than most of the other characters at that level. Clearly this lead to plenty of issues, but that's not my main point. The issue is that everything that followed from that initial point in 3e's PHB inherited those problems. It all had to be built around the fact that you could MC and cherry pick ANYTHING, and that class mechanics were all over the map, etc. That may have been a wonderful game for you, that's fine. It was CLEARLY not a wonderful game for supplement developers. The whole history of 3e illustrates that. They spent the next 2-3 years wrestling with these issues, with 3e's supplements generating an every increasingly unstable mass of rules, until finally there was obviously an awareness that the whole system was just collapsing under its own weight so to speak. 3.5 was the result of that, but obviously nothing short of a total rewrite was going to deal with those issues.

And then we have 4e. There are things in the 4e PHB that don't quite work perfectly. There were some 'broken' powers and combos and etc, but everything was built on a platform that allowed designers to clearly understand what they were doing. If you made a new class you HAD to define how it fit functionally into the game by defining roles and a power source. You had clear examples of class mechanics that supported various thematic and mechanical goals. There was no vast concern you needed to have IN GENERAL with the interaction of things with the rest of the game because the fact that your mechanics were designed around a template allowed the core rules to regulate that. As a result, even though 4e released a vast blizzard of material over a SHORT period of time (consider, 4e really has released relatively little in the way of player options in hardcover since 2010, so most of it was done in 2 years), they were able to keep the game WORKING. You can combine all that material and play a game with literally no house rules or material restrictions of any kind and it will work as intended from levels 1-30. 3e is not even close to that.

So then when we consider 5e, and I see a game that is once again built around a chaotic jumble of class mechanics, and presumably if we are to believe comments made here and there 3e-style MCing, then how would anyone expect that it won't crumble under its own weight just like 3e did? In fact the same fundamental issues exist, they are inherent in the philosophy of rules design used in 3e. We can even go back to 2e and see how it suffered the same issue where all the options and things created a monstrous swamp of rules that the DM had to constantly prune and rework if he expected them to produce a coherent game that wasn't all over the place. I mean I don't have a problem with the possibility existing to go out and just do wild things with the system when and if you want to. I just don't see how a core system that provides the solid results that we got from 4e, where it worked even after 20 supplements, can hurt things. I mean nothing stops one from just grafting any sort of mechanical superstructure on top of something very similar to 4e to produce whatever results you want. How hard is it to drop on Vancian casting and the 2e spell list? Old style fighters ala 1e? Crud you can most certainly import the class mechanics of any class from AD&D right into 4e with no more than slight mechanical rewiring. Of course it isn't going to be exactly a 4e style class, but that would be the point...

It seems to me that the way things are developing is bass-ackwards as we say in these parts. The stuff that should be DDN's OPTIONS are the core and (well apparently not) the core stuff is options!! All I can do is roll my eyes, and that takes me right back to 3e where the day I cracked the PHB I was rolling my eyes...

 

[Bedrockgames]

I am not going to debate you on this. But I deinitely disagree with your assesment, and I think a lot of gamers are split on this issue. It is far from settled and a lot more complex and nuanced than either side usually admits. And to me, 4E style parity and symmetry is not a good solution to those percived issues

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I dont think they are being dishonest. He clarified that they will still be doing the rules modules, they just are not going to go splat crazy. Obviously they can't please everyone. But they can release like three different core books to accomodate a range of style, then followup with largley flavor material. I dont see that as lying.

Yeah, I think the 'lying' talk is ridiculous and mean-spirited. Nobody is lying. There may be an element of self-delusion or just deep misunderstanding of what some people want, and maybe some deep misunderstanding of what was really the issue with the current edition. They certainly won't please everyone no matter what, and shouldn't try to do that perfectly in the core game. I think the problem now is IMHO that we're coming to the consequences of changing course. Mike simply lacks the resources to build an extensive system like 4e all over again. WotC/Hasbro is hardly likely to put the investment into DDN. It is going to be a MUCH smaller scale effort. Even if in principle there was a strong desire to cater to every niche of the D&D family with some rules and content they're going to be lucky to put out enough 5e stuff to catch ANYONE's interest, and they're likely going to be on a short short leash as far as being able to experiment. If a book isn't a sure thing it isn't coming, that's the most likely situation as I see it. We may well see nothing more than a book a year and a couple adventures a year from now on. WotC has seemingly reduced itself to the scale of its peers.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I am not going to debate you on this. But I deinitely disagree with your assesment, and I think a lot of gamers are split on this issue. It is far from settled and a lot more complex and nuanced than either side usually admits. And to me, 4E style parity and symmetry is not a good solution to those percived issues

Gamers are split on the issue. The problem is that a game intended to appeal to the widest section of D&D players possible shouldn't be picking favorites.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Gamers are split on the issue. The problem is that a game intended to appeal to the widest section of D&D players possible shouldn't be picking favorites.

I dont think it is. This edition is a mix of different things. There is deinitely a lot that doesnt appeal to me in next. I think what we will see is two module books following the core and those will satisfy a broad range of styles. The core is simpe enough that they should be able to tweak it enough for people with more advanced options. I dont see any reasons why aedu-like powers and healing surges couldn't be layered onto this in an advanced rule book.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I still think there will be splatbooks, it's obvious they can't fit everything about even the core standard classes into the PHB. I certainly remember filling out some survey about prestige classes that existed in 3e.

I think what's possibly meant is they're going to try some of these different options right the first time, pick only the interesting ones (that weren't filler, and offered something storywise) and try not to do something like Splat Subject Vol. 2.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, so far, it's not looking like mere colour to me.

A fighter has a unique package of active abilities (maneuvers). An archer has a distinct package of unique abilities (feats that make them better at archery). A blacksmith...is a little weaker, but all it really needs is an item creation ability ("you can make an item out of metal during an extended rest at a location with a forge for 1/2 the GP cost").

Not quite perfect yet (some Archery feats are kind of fiddly, the background needs a bit more of an active ability), but certainly on the way.



I can't even remember what my current character's feats or powers are without looking them up. I assume they're heavily oriented toward the "expertise-" style feats. I do know he's a bladesinger and so can do auto-damage when he hits with a secondary magic effect, but that's about the core class behavior, not about the specific powers or feats I chose.

It's easy, with a list of jargony terms, to forget what these things can do.

Since we have very little to go on as to what this column actually means, I'm going to focus on the idea that "Precise Shot bad, Archer good."

Since there's only so many concepts that can be communicated with natural sounding terms, I wonder if that means there's going to be more focus on top-level development and less focus on creating granularity. We know that themes and specialties are supposed to be plug and play at the Basic end, and separated into discrete feats at the Advanced end. I wonder if there's a focus change here on not making Themes and Specialties easily modular, and rather on making them more holistic.

I think these 2 things are related parts of a whole. 4e is pretty good for picking and choosing options that can allow you to create a quite coherent whole, but it DOES require that you study the options and be able to visualize how the would synergize and produce the whole effect. A LOT of these things ARE reasonably obvious, it isn't like 4e is totally cryptic by any means. If you want a fighter that hits people hard you can use the FWT 2-handed fighter option and there are some powers and feats which are rather clearly going to support that (IE Fullblade Proficiency, Reaping Strike, Brute Strike, etc). However there are also likely to be aspects that escape the casual/new player like how it is actually better to emphasize your Combat Supremacy feature, which adds effective damage but also enhances the character's defender function, etc.

So clearly in this context we can think about the "Precise Shot bad, Archer good" statement. We can see clearly that the emphasis in DDN is on presenting CONCEPTS and not mechanics. The mechanics can be there, and could be in principle identical to 4e mechanics, that isn't really material to the discussion. The point is they will be packaged via backgrounds and specialties, and maybe other things, in ways that are instantly recognizable and usable as ready-made instantiations of character archetypes. Instead of the 4e process of taking certain class options, feats, and powers to make your dwarven axe warrior, you can do it by just being a dwarf and a weapon specialist: Axe, and then maybe from there you have some further choices as you level up that let you customize things in different ways, or chances are you can just go with the defaults (maybe basic is only defaults) and its pretty much like playing Basic or 1e where you only make a couple choices at 1st level and the rest is all story.