D&D 5E Legends & Lore 4/1/2013

[I'm A Banana]

That's not my criticism. That's a strawman, but I'm kind of used to it by now.

You said, and I quote:

without going through the process...that seems an awful lot of a process to go through

But, hey, if your complaint isn't about the process you have to go through, lets find out where the goalposts shifted to.

I'm saying that it makes sense to me that the "default D&D experience" should start at 1st level. I don't know why this is a radical take on the issue? I know and understand it's an issue of aesthetics. I'm trying not to present it as anything otherwise, but that's challenging when people like yourself are setting up strawmen around my concerns to knock down.

Everyone's got their thing. If NEXT was going to use collectible elements as a core assumption, forex, I'd be out for equally arbitrary reasons. You don't have to like it.

But Mearls doesn't say "default" anywhere in the article. The closest he gets to even suggesting that is this:

Adventurer tier covers most of what we consider to be the standard D&D experience. Most experienced groups will simply jump straight to adventurer tier.

I understand "we" to mean people in "most experienced groups" who design the game and regularly visit the D&D website (as contrasted with the "beginners," "non-player characters," and "quick games" that he identified as the audience for the apprentice levels), "standard" to mean most typical (ie: average, mean, median).

Or, put another way, "Adventurer tier is more complicated than apprentice tier, and so will naturally be a fit for more experienced groups like those likely reading this article. So that these groups don't have to wade through three weeks of newbie junk to get to the meat, there's solid guidelines for starting here."

So does it make sense that the typical D&D experience for people already familiar with the game starts at 3rd level? Because that's pretty much what I think he's saying here.

But hey, my preferred way of handling tiers is still Tiers As Treasure. D&D has always been a game that changes as you gain levels, though, in one way or another, so the archetypal D&D experience is probably one that changes over time as you play.

 

[Blue]

[...] I don't like this "apprentice tier" thing at all. If they really want to support "apprentice" characters, they should have optional rules for playing 0th level characters.

I've been waiting for this since 3.x! With that edition's multiclassing there was a lot of cherry-picking up one level for skill points, class skills, and weapon/armor proficiency. If you split those over three levels instead smooth out multiclassing into something that takes investment and you take it because it makes sense, not just picking oen level of a bunch of things for what it gives you.

If calling it "Apprentice, 0th, 1st" will satisfy both of our wants I'm all for it, but I ask looking at what this means elsewhere instead of just rejecting it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I spend more of my time--as a DM and as a player--at the upper end of the spectrum, and I hope the finished D&DN has more than five levels at the legacy tier.

This isn't a critique of the pacing per se. As Mike points out in his column, changing the "sessions per level-up" is straightforward. I can stretch those five levels into as many sessions as I like.

I want more than five "ding!" moments as I leave my legacy, though, and i doubt I'm alone.

There's another, more mercenary, reason to have more than five levels in the legacy zone. Even if you never play at those high levels, there's an aspirational quality to those spells, magic items, and monsters. You think, "Oh, I can't wait until I get that sword" or "Imagine fighting one of those..." I want more than five level-bands of legacy awesomeness to drool over/dream about.

And yeah, I want all that in the core books, on day one.

--Dave.
nnnooner.blogspot.com
Twitter: @davidnoonan

My 4e Epic Tier experience taught me that there was one real flaw with 4e Epic, it lasted WAY too many levels. Epic is there to be the 'gonzo' part of the game, where the PCs can reshape the world, grasp hold of world-shaking destinies, rise above the limits of mere mortals and do things that even the gods take notice of. It just somehow loses its drama after 3-4 levels. I can see a 5 level Epic where each level is an act in a 5-part story arc. Past that it just gets old and redundant pretty fast, and believe me DMing it can be pretty draining. Its FUN, but not IMHO the sort of thing that should be a greater part of the game.

Obviously some groups will find some form of epic play that works for them as a drawn out part of the campaign itself, but if I could go back to 2006 and tell the 4e designers to do something different, the 10/10/10 tier split 30 level design would be #1 on my list to warn them away from. I think something like 9 'heroic' levels, you become 'name level' and somewhere in that process pick a PrC/Paragon Path/whatever you want to call it. Then you can a have a set of 'paragon' levels that can go from 10 to 15, you can do your castle building, whatever, and then bust loose for 3-5 levels at the end and reach the character's apotheosis.

 

[Obryn]

You said, and I quote:

But, hey, if your complaint isn't about the process you have to go through, lets find out where the goalposts shifted to.

Ah hah. So when I said "process" you read that as "OMG HARD." Instead of, "man, this sounds like a weird process to get to a normal D&D game." Not that it's hard, simply roundabout and unnecessary.

So it started as an understandable miscommunication, but you decided to straw man it, making it less understandable. Got it. Glad we're clear.

Everyone's got their thing. If NEXT was going to use collectible elements as a core assumption, forex, I'd be out for equally arbitrary reasons. You don't have to like it.

But Mearls doesn't say "default" anywhere in the article. The closest he gets to even suggesting that is this:

I understand "we" to mean people in "most experienced groups" who design the game and regularly visit the D&D website (as contrasted with the "beginners," "non-player characters," and "quick games" that he identified as the audience for the apprentice levels), "standard" to mean most typical (ie: average, mean, median).

Or, put another way, "Adventurer tier is more complicated than apprentice tier, and so will naturally be a fit for more experienced groups like those likely reading this article. So that these groups don't have to wade through three weeks of newbie junk to get to the meat, there's solid guidelines for starting here."

So does it make sense that the typical D&D experience for people already familiar with the game starts at 3rd level? Because that's pretty much what I think he's saying here.

Okay. That's not at all how I read it.

-O

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Or, put another way, "Adventurer tier is more complicated than apprentice tier, and so will naturally be a fit for more experienced groups like those likely reading this article. So that these groups don't have to wade through three weeks of newbie junk to get to the meat, there's solid guidelines for starting here."

So does it make sense that the typical D&D experience for people already familiar with the game starts at 3rd level? Because that's pretty much what I think he's saying here.

I just think it is weird and obtuse that you're expected to start playing the game at level 3. Call it a visceral reaction or whatever you want, but I think players will feel awkward about that and people will always feel like somehow there was some part of the game that they should be playing that got missed. I mean talk about the most basic fact of the game, it is that the game starts at level 1 and you normally start there. Granted I'm sure we've all probably started at higher than level one at least now and then, but it definitely feels wrong to me to have that be the normal assumption. It feels like its starting to break down THE most basic assumption of the game, the progress through levels, which IMHO is more core to D&D than any other element.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

3E multi-classing is borked from the start, and it really has nothing to do with whether this Next apprentice levels will work or not. Applied to 3E mc, you might be able to fudge some of the problems at the start, but the real problem with 3E mc is that it's built with two mutually exclusive but hard-wired assumptions:

A. Classes gain power linearly, so that you can simply stack levels.
B. Classes gain power exponentially, so that a character 2 levels higher is twice as powerful.

If you assume B, then you need something akin to 1E mc (or some alternate built on similar principles). If you assume A, then you need to change what the power of gaining a level means. Ironically, 4E went hard-core after this problem, but it's basis is a more acceptable starting point for A but not B than 3E's is (since power starts higher and rises more slowly).

Whereas this proposed idea deals with the problem of scaling things that start around zero, 1, the lower end of the scale, being difficult to work out in a clean, easy manner. There's just not usually as big a difference between 3rd and 4th level in D&D as there is between 1st and 2nd. I'd be quite happy if they started "real heroes" at 5th, as this would pretty much remove the whole "lower end of the scale" problems from the easy game math.

 

[Falling Icicle]

From the article: "Not everything shifts in this manner. For example, a wizard's spell progression still matches the current rules, but you instead gain one cantrip at 1st level, an extra one at 2nd level, and then another at 3rd level. You don't gain your tradition until 3rd level, reflecting that you cannot truly specialize in magic until you have mastered its basics."

I am not very fond of this. For one thing, wizards are only getting 3 cantrips, and I think casters get too few of those already (especially with the "cantrip tax" that is read magic).

The other thing that bothers me is that you don't get a tradition until 3rd level. To me, that makes no sense. Your tradition is supposed to reflect your style of magic, how you were trained, where your individual talents and focus are, and other such things. Why wouldn't you have a tradition while you are an apprentice? Should all apprentices be the same, despite having different masters, attending different academies, belonging to totally different magical societies, etc.? If my apprentice wizard joined a cabal of necromancers to learn their dark arts, shouldn't he be a necromancer from the very beginning? What else would he be?

[Edit] Another thing, this also means multiclass spellcasters can't have a specialty unless they have 3+ levels of wizard. Yuck.

I'm also interested to hear how this affects specialties. Do you not get a feat until 3rd level now, or do you still pick your specialty at level 1?

 

[Zardnaar]

I like 3rd ed multiclassing in concept. Pathfinder and SWSE kind of fixed the problems with it.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I like 3rd ed multiclassing in concept. Pathfinder and SWSE kind of fixed the problems with it.

I agree. I've always liked third edition multiclassing. I have never wanted to start as a multiclass character. Instead, as the game progresses, my character decides to study something else for a while. Third edition multiclassing better reflects this.

 

[GX.Sigma]

The other thing that bothers me is that you don't get a tradition until 3rd level. To me, that makes no sense. Your tradition is supposed to reflect your style of magic, how you were trained, where your individual talents and focus are, and other such things. Why wouldn't you have a tradition while you are an apprentice? Should all apprentices be the same, despite having different masters, attending different academies, belonging to totally different magical societies, etc.? If my apprentice wizard joined a cabal of necromancers to learn their dark arts, shouldn't he be a necromancer from the very beginning? What else would he be?

Even in 3e, a Necromancer didn't raise zombies from level 1. I think there's enough room in spell choice for characters to be diverse. It makes sense that you have to master spellcasting before you can specialize in a certain kind of spellcasting.

(But yeah, that paragraph you quoted is messed up. I'd rather casters started with more cantrips and only one daily spell--aren't cantrips supposed to be easier to master?)

Another thing, this also means multiclass spellcasters can't have a specialty unless they have 3+ levels of wizard. Yuck.

Why's that so bad? I don't want to get saddled with the complicated/advanced part of a class just from taking 1 level in it. Learning to be a Wizard means you can cast spells. Anything else is just a bonus, and it seems fine that they withhold that bonus until a slightly higher level.

I'm also interested to hear how this affects specialties. Do you not get a feat until 3rd level now, or do you still pick your specialty at level 1?

I hope this means you don't get a feat at level 1. That really bogged down character creation for my new-to-D&D group. "Not only do you choose your race and class, but you also have to choose one tiny benefit from this giant list!"