D&D 5E What I want out of 5th edition and my thoughts on what we have so far.

[The Human Target]

Does every thread have to get locked due to Mistwell and Ahnehnois and a few other people squabbling?

Its getting old fast.

 

[Halivar]

Maybe you have me confused with someone else? I note that Halivar used that argument, maybe you have me confused with Halivar?

Why, sir, being confused with Halivar is the highest honor and complement a gentleman can receive, IHMO!

 

[SteveC]

I don't think the rogue needs to really contribute in those cases. However, this is a special case because there was never really a strong rationale for rogue abilities not working against undead in the first place. They should, albeit not for balance reasons but because undead do have discernable anatomies and catching them by surprise and using selective targeting ought to be effective.

But there are plenty of other cases where characters are rendered useless for extended periods of time, and it's fine. If you go somewhere where spellcasting is banned, your wizard turns into a smart commoner, and that's okay. If you go into town, your fighter likely has no one to fight. If you go into any civilized area, your barbarian is unlikely to be satisfied and probably can't use any of his abilities in most situations. These things are okay. Urban intrigue is for the skill guys.

Conversely, if you're tracking some demon across extraplanar boundaries using divinations and plane shifting spells, it's probably going to be all wizards and clerics for a while, because mundane characters don't know how to do that. Which again, is fine.

If the structure of a campaign renders a character completely useless, there's probably a point at which something needs to change, either the player needs a new character or the DM needs to change the rules of engagement. But I think it takes quite a while to get to that point. Normally what happens is every character has their good weeks and bad weeks and the player is mature and patient and takes this in stride.

This is a great reply, but when I read it I couldn't disagree with it more. In (just about) every D&D game, combat is a major part of the game, taking up at least a third of the session. It's usually more than that, but I'm content to describe it as a third of the game along with the three pillars concept that's been talked about with Next.

The thing is: have any character marginalized for a third of the play session because of an arbitrary rules concept has fallen victim to some bad rules. I used the example of the halls of the zombie king, but it could just as easily been "the duke's dress ball" for a fighter character, or "exploring the isle of dread" for that matter.

The point is (and this is a point the designers themselves have talked about with the three pillars concept) that everyone should be able to do something in each major aspect of the game. To knock anyone out of the game for a major portion by the rules is, to my mind, bad design.

Now, as you said: when you're going plane-hopping, the non-magical characters are likely to take a back seat to a certain extent, but even in that case, there should be something for them to do, to contribute to the game, so that we've not playing "spellcasters and their not so amazing friends."

Why is it an issue? I can tell you for me it's because playing D&D has an opportunity cost in my life. I loves me some RPGs, but where I am in my life, I have a lot of things I like, and probably would be better served by doing instead of gaming. I'm gaming because I place an importance on that, and am willing to pay the cost for it because it brings the fun.

If I were the rogue, and the halls of the zombie king had a lot of zombie combat (which I'd expect, pretty much regardless of the edition) and my character would not be contributing, I'd question if I should be doing something else.

And I'm an incredibly patient and tolerant person, who loves it when other characters get their time in the spotlight. I shudder to think about the 16 year old kid who'd rather be playing Call of Duty...

 

[Li Shenron]

What I want out of 5th edition is less emphasis on combat. I do not judge a class by how much DPR it does. I see any action whether it's in combat or out of combat as being useful. I don't need there to be a certain number achieved in order for it to be considered useful. I also don't want universal combat where every combat action effects all creatures (SA for instance effecting undead etc..).

IMHO, the last playtest version of 5e is less combat-centric than 3e and much less so than 4e. The rules of combat are much slimmer, and this combined with DM's adventure and encounter design should allow you to have a combat-light game. True that a lot of character abilities and spells are about doing damage, and while it's easy to pick non-offensive spells, it's less easy to avoid damage-dealing class features.

Ultimately the real problem that will prevent you to play a combat-light game, will be your players not wanting the same and therefore picking combat abilities all the time.

I also don't want a lot of hand holding when it comes to death. I don't need there to be a long complex system of keeping me alive. I like a simple -10 hp and I'm dead. I know we now have hit dice instead of Healing Surges and I want that gone. Call it what you will, it's the same thing and I never liked it.

Dying rules are always doomed to fail, because there is no one size fits all. The only way out, is throw the official rules in the garbage as soon as you've tried them and dislike them, and then make your own.

I like the idea of the feats and backgrounds but to be honest, the feats seem more like backgrounds and less like feats.

I agree with this, and they lost a valid system when they decided to change from feats & Specialties to mega-feats (i.e. old Specialties are the new feats). But they won't change back.

I've given a look at the monsters and I'm not too happy with some of them. You have skeletons and zombies with an intelligence and they specifically understand common. I would rather them understand commands only through the magic that animated them. Same goes with Golems.

In this case, I think it's good to wait for the final books. It might be that they won't change much, but it might also be that they've shown us total drafts instead of the real monsters so far.

I like how some of the classes were done but there are a few I would like to have seen changed. I would have liked to have seen the ranger with either spell known or actually abilities instead of prepared spells. I also hope they keep a rein on the spells. They can sometimes get out of hand the more of them that come out.

You can be optimistic about this, because the current class framework (class+subclasses+feats) leaves a lot of space for new versions of everything later on, or for designing your own versions with relative ease. Thanks to the proficiency system which eliminates class-specific progressions such as BAB and ST, replacing class features and making custom subclasses should be easier than in previous editions.

I wish the races didn't give you stat modifiers. I would like to have seen only the classes give you these. I would like for the game to get away from the optimal race and class combo.

Yeah I agree also... unfortunately I don't think they even took this into consideration ever.

At least, the stat cap will make the combo relevant only for the first few levels.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

I am merely observing that he's repeatedly cited the fact that rogues are popular in Pathfinder and trying to connect that to a concept of players are not bothered by sneak attack immunity, but he's failing to appreciate the fact that sneak attack immunity is one of the very things Pathfinder decreased. It's highly relevant if he's going to make that argument.

I am using Pathfinder because it's a game that I have experience with when it comes to organized play. The rogue from PF is very very like the one from 3.5. What I can tell you when it comes to the 3.5 rogue is that a lot of people I knew from cons, local shops, and personal games, played rogues. There was always a rogue or two present in the games. They were fine with SA not affecting certain creatures because they knew they just needed to switch tactics.

 

[Mistwell]

I am using Pathfinder because it's a game that I have experience with when it comes to organized play. The rogue from PF is very very like the one from 3.5. What I can tell you when it comes to the 3.5 rogue is that a lot of people I knew from cons, local shops, and personal games, played rogues. There was always a rogue or two present in the games. They were fine with SA not affecting certain creatures because they knew they just needed to switch tactics.

XunValdol, the Pathfinder Sneak Attack is very similar to what's proposed for D&D Next. The concept is closer to D&D Next than it is to 3.5. Pathfinder eliminated the immunity from a LOT of creatures. People who are opposed to the vast immunity from 3.5 ARE fine with "certain" creatures being immune, it was just the mass of immunities by type (rather than by creature) from 3.5 that was the issue, which Pathfinder addressed.

So, by arguing for Pathfinder as the example, you appear to be arguing against your prior position. The Pathfinder rule appears to be similar to the Next model. So for example, like Pathfinder (but unlike 3.5), zombies will be subject to sneak attack. So will skeletons, and ghouls, and ghasts, and plants, Otyughs, and Xorn, and tons of creatures that had immunity in 3.5.

And there is a reason both Pathfinder, a game playtested heavily with an open playtest, and also Next, a game playtested heavily with an open playtest, seem to be addressing this issue in a similar manner. It seems like a majority of people didn't like all the blanket SA immunity from 3.5.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Here is a conclusion that I've come to.

Balance and DPR: Now I'm not talking about a rules balance where someone finds a way to get infinite attacks or does 500 points of damage at level 1 (which still doesn't bother me because no sane DM is ever going to allow something that has obviously abused the rules). I'm talking about this balance between classes with regards to damage. The fun argument doesn't apply because it's absurd. If you really want to go there then we could do the old "I'm not having fun if I don't win, I'm not having fun if I can't have the equipment I want, I'm not having fun if I ever get killed, so let's only allow legitimate arguments. It's unnecessary to be perfectly honest. If you want to run around doing massive amounts of damage then you play a barbarian or fighter or whatever. People seem to have this notion that if the barbarian does a hell of a lot more damage than the fighter then everyone will just play a barbarian. Not true, just like everyone doesn't play wizards. I will tell you what this style of game promotes, glut. It promotes option glut such as feats, spells, magic items, and backgrounds. By focusing on combat and DPR, people begin to think that only a few combat feats, in a specific combo, are the ones that are worth taking and the others are not. I knew plenty of people that used to take those certain feats that weren't optimal, but helped their character have that specific concept. This type of selection was frowned upon and made it seem like your choice was wrong. Wizards of the Coast did nothing to tone down this type of behaviour because all they did was come out with more and more combat related options and less out of combat ones. In my opinion, combat balance is not that important as some make it out to be.

 

[Mistwell]

Here is a conclusion that I've come to.

Balance and DPR:

To be clear, while some people think these are the major issues with large scale sneak attack immunity, others have different reasons. Including myself, and including the article from WOTC.

To many, the idea that rogues are anatomy experts seems absurd. It makes more sense, to those who advocate this view, that they are simply sneaky tricksters who know how to take advantage of a situation where a foe is distracted, better than others can take advantage of such situations.

Which means, while some individuals might have immunity to such tactics, whole types of them (like "all undead") would not.

So, not about balance or damage per round or any of that sort of stuff, just about believability and what makes sense to people for the type of character that a rogue is supposed to ironically represent. I just don't like the image of rogues studying tomes of vital anatomical points for thousands of creatures before kicking off their career as rogues at first level. It makes less sense to me than the alternative.

 

[billd91]

Again, one of the changes made by Pathfinder was to allow for sneak attack to apply to a lot more creatures than it applied to with 3.5 D&D. So...are you seeing maybe at least a correlation between the class becoming more popular with Pathfinder, and the fact that is probably the most major difference between those two versions of the game for that class?

I don't think that's very likely. The number crunchers in the PF community are still whining about how weak the rogue is. What I think is going on is people still value the rogue's skill-based contributions to the game, even if they aren't heavies in combat. That suggests to me that the internet debates on balance and combat balance and optimization really don't reflect the overall gaming community very well, nor do they reflect how characters stack up against decently made modules - which will find ways to make lots of skills (knowledge skills in particular) useful to the point that players will give up a little power to cover skill options.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This is a great reply, but when I read it I couldn't disagree with it more.

Well, that was...oddly polite. Always appreciated.

In (just about) every D&D game, combat is a major part of the game, taking up at least a third of the session. It's usually more than that, but I'm content to describe it as a third of the game along with the three pillars concept that's been talked about with Next.

I buy that. I think there's a lot of variance, but I suspect the average group spends more than a third and less than half of their game time on fighting. IIRC that's where the ENW polls on the subject usually land.

The thing is: have any character marginalized for a third of the play session because of an arbitrary rules concept has fallen victim to some bad rules.

See this is where I get off. I don't think having a character marginalized is necessarily bad, nor the rules fault. As I stated, I do think the rogue abilities should be useful against undead. However, in general, I think that characters are not perfect and that some situations will naturally apply wherein their usefulness is reduced or completely negated.

The point is (and this is a point the designers themselves have talked about with the three pillars concept) that everyone should be able to do something in each major aspect of the game. To knock anyone out of the game for a major portion by the rules is, to my mind, bad design.

And I don't agree with that. I get tons of requests from players to play non-combat characters. Conversely, I see characters that are basically combat machines and whose players are perfectly content to participate on a reduced level when the game is not engaging them in whatever expertise they've chosen. I don't think specialization is bad.

Certainly, it's a norm both in fantasy fiction and in episodic television (which mirrrors D&D sessions in structure) that some characters will just fade out for a while and become borderline irrelevant, whereas others will get moments in the spotlight. Typically, the spotlight is shared, but it won't be shared with perfect equality, nor is getting to be useful and the center of attention always the goal. There are many great supporting characters, and there's nothing wrong with being one in D&D.

Why is it an issue? I can tell you for me it's because playing D&D has an opportunity cost in my life. I loves me some RPGs, but where I am in my life, I have a lot of things I like, and probably would be better served by doing instead of gaming. I'm gaming because I place an importance on that, and am willing to pay the cost for it because it brings the fun.

Sure. I don't want to waste time either. However, this is how I see gaming. It's like a story, but sometimes you get to change the course of the story. As a DM, I expect that I'm telling a story that people would listen to even if they were not participating at all. However, in D&D, the listener adopts the perspective of a character, and tells me what he thinks the character should do, and that affects the story I end up telling. By their input (and that of the dice), the end product is more dynamic and reflects a more diverse perspective than a simple narration by one author.

However, the story, not the participatory element, is what's really making this a worthwhile use of time. The ability to affect the narrative is a cool feature that adds to the experience, not a responsibility of the DM and certainly not of the rules. Sort of like those choose your own adventure books, or like playing in any good cRPG, though in D&D it's much more open-ended what can happen.

This has had a significant effect on my games. For example, I used to go by the old dogma of "don't split the party up", but now I split them up all the time. I ran one short CoC campaign wherein the three players were in the same geographical area experiencing the same event, but never met or had any direct influence on each other. I do this on a smaller scale all the time, intercutting between different people's stories. The players that aren't involved are still active listeners and cheerleaders for their fellow PCs.

Moreover, any player in my games knows that there will be times when their PCs are rendered useless by enemies or situations that subvert whatever they are designed to do. Moreover, it's pretty much given that at some point they will be stunned, ability damaged, captured, enchanted, or killed. Stuff happens. They know that their character sheets will often be useless, and their decisions often meaningless. They also know that sometimes their abilities will be useful and their decisions will have meaning. To (loosely) quote Vince Lombardi: "This game is going to be decided by two or three plays, but I can't tell you which ones, so you're going to have to play hard on all of them". To a good player, feeling less powerful than other characters or feeling useless in general isn't a disincentive to keep playing, it's a source of motivation.

If I were the rogue, and the halls of the zombie king had a lot of zombie combat (which I'd expect, pretty much regardless of the edition) and my character would not be contributing, I'd question if I should be doing something else.

If I were that rogue, I'd be doing one of two things. One, looking for alternative ways to contribute. Two, looking for alternative quests. From an in-character perspective, I do agree: if my character sucks at zombie hunting, why am I doing that for a living, assuming I have any choice in the matter?

And I'm an incredibly patient and tolerant person, who loves it when other characters get their time in the spotlight. I shudder to think about the 16 year old kid who'd rather be playing Call of Duty...

So do I.

To me, though, D&D isn't competing against shooters or cRPGs or games in general. It's competing against watching movies, reading books, going to plays, and other forms of engagement with the narrative arts. In terms of instant gratification, D&D loses badly when compared to a sport wherein you can see yourself physically accomplishing something, or a computer game where you can see an outcome on screen right now. D&D is all in your imagination. It takes a cerebral person to appreciate this hobby.

Given that there are many, often non-nerdy people who will sit down for days at a time and marathon serialized TV shows, or obsessively devote themselves to popular novel series that the author takes years to finish, I think that there are people out there that are patient enough to enjoy D&D.

That being said, this hobby is about human interactions, and to me it is wise for the DM (not the rules, the DM), to throw the players a bone and show them why his campaign is going to be enjoyable for them.