D&D 5E [L&L] Campaigns in D&D Next

[Sage Genesis]

So you're saying that Mearls "slaps" you in the face with is words? That seems rather extreme. I'm curious: how has he slapped you in the face?

No, that is not what I'm saying. I was using hyperbole to show how your words came across to me. Like, holding up a mirror to you. If you then criticize me for showing you something "rather extreme", well...that's kinda what I saw. That is the point.

So the main difference in our views is that you see Mearls as catering to (anti-4E?) edition warriors, and I do not. I fully realize that I could be wrong--and I certainly haven't read every L&L--but I just haven't seen it. What I see is him looking critically at previous editions of D&D, perhaps especially 4E as the most recent and divergent style from the traditional approach, with the intention of creating the best, and most embracing, possible version of D&D yet. Hopefully he's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though.

It isn't about me or what I want, but looking at the larger community - what the general response and feeling is, which seems more towards the idea of 4E games serving the rules more often than they should. The weight of evidence, even if it is anecdotal, is that there wasn't as much meshing going on with 4E as there should have been.

There are lots of people that love 4E, lots that like it or are indifferent, and lots that dislike or even hate it. This is always going to be the case with any edition, but I think the point from a design perspective is to tip the scales more towards the "love-to-like" side of the spectrum than the "dislike-to-hate" side. In a thread a few weeks ago I was taking to task by a couple people for saying that 4E "failed" in this regard, but I do not mean to say that it failed as a game, as a fun version of D&D, but that it failed in that the scale was tipped too much towards collective dislike-to-hate. This has nothing to do with how good of a game 4E was (or wasn't), but how much it inspired and was embraced by the community as a whole. That might not matter to you or I in our respective gaming circles, but it does matter to Wizards of the Coast.

OK, I hear that you want Mearls to "show you the money." But the problem is that if you have a strongly skeptical, even pessimistic attitude, going into it, you're likely to be setting yourself up for disappointment.

One thing that WotC won't be able to do is please everyone. But what I think they're trying to do is incorporate the "best of" various editions into 5E, perhaps with its own unique flavorings. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen, but I think we can safely say that for some it will be viewed as a success, for others as a failure - but the question is how many, and to what degree, of either spectrum. I simply advocate for an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, which allows for some degree of openness. But if you're expecting a snake and a snake-like form appears before you, you're going to see a snake even if its actually a rope (to use an old Hindu analogy). My impression from our brief interaction here is that you are expecting a snake.

I have read every Next-related L&L, as well as watched every livestream of the devs, read their other articles, etc. I have also run several playtest sessions, using the playtest rules in different stages of the process. In short, I have been following this very closely for the past two years.

You make it sound like I walked into this expecting snakes. I would like to correct you on that account: I have consistently found snakes over the past two years, even where I expected to find none. Now I'm pointing at the forest and telling you, "dude there's totally snakes in there", and you think that I am only saying so because of some kind of prejudice. It's experience. For example Mearls dismissed Warlord healing because it can't cause a severed hand to grow back on, a classic piece of edition war rhetoric. (Conveniently ignoring that normal sleep can't cause limb regeneration either, yet it's still allowed to restore hp.) They also dismissed the people who clamored for tighter math like 4e had, and then found themselves flabbergasted that a throwaway encounter with a few ghouls could so savagely annihilate their party on a livestream.

This is all stuff you possibly didn't or couldn't know, and I don't begrudge you for it. But my opinions are colored by my past experiences with this process. And my past experiences are not very good. Yes, I want him to "show me the money" by this stage. It's been a long, strange trip and we have way too little to show for it. If the final game is really good I will happily play it, I have zero judgment on the final product yet. It's just at this point where I think, "come on man, stop telling me how great your modularity is and start showing me some modularity". The ability to make up my own backgrounds hardly qualifies.

All this is somewhat besides the point though. The original issue was whether or not 3e/4e makes players serve them or vice versa. I'm still unconvinced.

If you think the lead designer is an active edition warrior who doesn't like 4e (a game he also helped design by the way), why are you still posting to 5e threads, given it would likely mean you gave up on 5e a while ago?

Because I like to think ENWorld is not an echo chamber and I am allowed to discuss an article even if I don't like the state of Next as it currently stands.

 

[Sadrik]

I don't really care if he is edition warring or not.

Hopefully I can advance this conversation.

From his posting, I think the explanation about trying to use the first few levels as a moratorium on what is working and what is not working is no different from previous editions. Spelling it out like this is the only difference. I am not sure that is helpful or not.

The use of backgrounds is brilliant in campaign design and this is a huge step forward in bringing back what essentially is kits. Now classes can be the basis and the backgrounds can be hugely diverse. Long been the way I like it. Now samurai does not need to be a class, it is clearly a background. More diversity of character types with less unique crunch. My complaint with class design is the wrong juxtaposition of the class features and feats. Also the hard coded nature of classes and subclasses. I actually don't like subclasses because they mix too far into backgrounds. I wish backgrounds and subclasses were the same thing. Backgrounds are my favorite part of 5e.

Having lower math curve in character advancement and scaling actually improves sandbox play in campaigns, something that Mearls has not brought up. So I look forward to that. I worry about the implementation of some of these concepts mathematically but if there are enough options up front with this then it could be passible.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I agree that 4e has a very specific flavor and probably didn't reach the broad market they hoped for. I disagree that this means that in 4e (or 3e for that matter) the players served the rules instead of the other way around. Just because some rules might not mesh with your playstyle doesn't mean you're serving them.

From my experience, you'd be surprised with how many groups will effectively serve the rules by leaving behind their playstyle in the hope of playing the game as written. By making a lot of strong assumptions, 3E and 4E encouraged that. A lot. People will take for granted that their game needs to improve with all that stuff that wasn't there before (they have a group of professional designers doing it, right?), and they'll try to make it work instead of ignoring it or just coming back to their previous edition. Sometimes a whole campaign will happen before they realize that it's not their fault that they think the new game sucks.

As an example, on of my groups generally agrees that our first 3.0 campaign was certainly the best. As the DM, I just wanted to keep playing 2E with refined rules, and that's what we did. I ignored a lot of stuff, from attacks of opportunity to rolls to confirm critical hits, as well as things like wealth by level guidelines. After that campaign, a new player came to our group wanting to DM and he brought with him all the real innovations in the game, like tactical combat and all the stuff we had been ignoring. We came to understand that we had been playing the game wrongly and started playing strictly by the book. At first, we felt good by finally playing the game as designed, but some years have passed and nobody is playing 3E anymore. Some of us, myself included, returned to 2E, some are playing completely different games, but 3E? No, thanks. I tried Pathfinder sometime later, with a different group, but it manages to be even worse. Too much bookkeeping for my taste.

I played with a lot of groups through the years, and my anecdotal evidence is that this happens a lot. People will try very hard to play with the rules as written and will arrive at the conclusion that they must be doing something wrong if they can't have fun with them. And when they finally decide that the players are not the problem, but the engine is, they'll rather abandon it than try to fix what they feel is wrong. I, for instance, could be running 3E games trying to emulate the style of our first campaign, but I run 2E instead.

My conclusion: written rules have the power to make our lives worse while still making us believe that they're improving them. Never underestimate that.

Cheers,

 

[I'm A Banana]

Sounds good.

I like the art, aside from my inherent dislike of the 4e tieflings' handlebars. The fact that it's from 4e just goes to show that they've come a long way since 2000. This sort of "scene" artwork is totally what I'd like to see 5e embracing (as opposed to free-floating characters and objects).

The words sound good. It's a bit vague and high-level, but getting the basics right is important. WotC tends to have a solid group of designers who regularly meet their design goals, it's just that sometimes their goals aren't the best. This goal is a very very good one.

 

[Bluenose]

I don't really care if he is edition warring or not.

Hopefully I can advance this conversation.

From his posting, I think the explanation about trying to use the first few levels as a moratorium on what is working and what is not working is no different from previous editions. Spelling it out like this is the only difference. I am not sure that is helpful or not.

But:

1. Those first few levels are also the levels at which new players are supposed to learn how the game plays, so they're unlikely to "push the limits" of the particular set of options the GM is using.

2. Those first few levels are supposed to be over fast for experienced playesr, who already understand the concepts involved.

I'm inclined to say that testing what works and what doesn't, keeping it simple, and doing it fast, are not easy to reconcile.

 

[Mistwell]

Because I like to think ENWorld is not an echo chamber and I am allowed to discuss an article even if I don't like the state of Next as it currently stands.

That doesn't address my question at all, and is a strawman and appears from my perspective to be you pretending to be a victim when you're not.

I asked you WHY you are still posting to 5e threads, given you have already written the game off? Not why you're still "allowed" to post to such threads. My question had nothing to do with what you're "allowed" to do.

 

[ccooke]

Not questioning because I disagree (I have never DM'd 5E), but because I'm genuinely curious: in what ways are 5E easier to DM than 4E? Of all previously printed editions, 4E has the shortest prep time and fewest obstacles for a GM. I would like to know how 5E improved on that.

There are a few things, really. Obviously, this is my personal list and things may be better or worse for other people, but:

* Bounded accuracy means that the world doesn't have to scale to the players. I spend more time thinking about how I want the world to look and less time translating my original ideas to match the party's current level.
* Advantage/Disadvantage is a great mechanic to reward or penalise the party for their actions. 4e had combat advantage for pure combat, but Advantage can be applied in any situation as a generic "You came up with a good idea that should net you a reward" mechanic.
* Because of bounded accuracy, I don't need to look for more powerful creatures as often. I've used the 4e conversion suggestions that were posted here a while back to convert some creatures that are iconic to one of my campaigns ("Agents of the Eye"). I can keep using those creatures, knowing that I can vary their numbers or allies to get the right encounter. Not that I'm going to make every relevant encounter have one of them, but it means I can add one to an existing encounter down the line and the party will know (or think ) that a particular in-campaign group is involved... and they'll still be useful, even if the party has gained levels.
* Encounter building is no worse than 4th edition, to me - and therefore it is easier (again, to me) than 3e or 2e.
* The exploration rules are nice. If we weren't moving to 5e, I'd be porting them to 4e right now. They're likely going to be yoinked for our 3e games.
* From a design point of view, I find character creation to be more flexible than 4th edition*. As a GM running a lot of 5e one-offs, it's been really good that I can say things like "All of your characters start as members of a thieves guild. Generate any character that has at least one choice that speaks to that." or "Generate any character that's trained in Arcana" in order to start out a short game with a particular style without restricting the players much. (The former was even better when the cleric had the Trickster deity option, although the Paladin of Vengeance they added can work perfectly as a Guild enforcer. I expect the full game will have the Trickster deity again. If not, it'll be easy to houserule).

There's quite a few other things, too, but they're smaller and not all from a pure DM perspective (for instance, the Thaumaturgy and Druidcraft cantrips make me incredibly happy. They're just the sort of thing that my players will use for great roleplay effect, and they're the sort of thing that *should* exist in the D&D world. In fact, my most generic reason for liking D&D Next as a system is exemplified by things like this: In lots of places, the system has loosened up old restrictions or added new capabilities that support the narrative of *being* a character of that race, class or whatever better. Two random things: The way the Fighter and Barbarian classes are both good at combat in different ways (Fighters do more damage on average, while Barbarians *appear* to because they're swingier. Training and skill against ferocity). Or the way that a magic user can choose to leave a slot or two unprepared, then wander off to study a spellbook (or pray) to solve a new problem. It'll take long enough that it's not a workable solution inside combat, but the idea of the cleric praying for a solution to a problem or a Wizard consulting their notes *works*, to me)

... I'm going to stop before my parenthesis-nesting gets worse. Needless to say, there's a ton of stuff I like. It's very much not a case of 4th edition being bad - just that I feel 5e fits my mindset and expectations of how things should work better.

* What I mean by more flexible is that, given the quantity of material in the playtest, I think it's able to create a wider variety of functional concepts at 1st level than 4e would be able to in the same number of pages. Fourth edition has vast amounts more content, of course, and a lot of it is really high quality. But 5e gets more potential variety from fewer distinct elements, I think, because it reuses them cleverly.

 

[Sage Genesis]

That doesn't address my question at all, and is a strawman and appears from my perspective to be you pretending to be a victim when you're not.

I asked you WHY you are still posting to 5e threads, given you have already written the game off? Not why you're still "allowed" to post to such threads. My question had nothing to do with what you're "allowed" to do.

I have written the game off? I quite clearly said: "If the final game is really good I will happily play it, I have zero judgment on the final product yet." I have said similar things many times before. If you think I've written the game off, then you haven't been paying attention.

As for "WHY", well , why does anyone? Why do you? Because it's a topic that interests me?

 

[Mistwell]

I have written the game off? I quite clearly said: "If the final game is really good I will happily play it, I have zero judgment on the final product yet." I have said similar things many times before. If you think I've written the game off, then you haven't been paying attention.

As for "WHY", well , why does anyone? Why do you? Because it's a topic that interests me?

What's your honest assessment as to the odds you will like the final game, given you think the lead designer is an edition warrior with something against a former version which you like a lot more than what you've seen in the playtest version?

 

[Sage Genesis]

What's your honest assessment as to the odds you will like the final game, given you think the lead designer is an edition warrior with something against a former version which you like a lot more than what you've seen in the playtest version?

I'm not sure where you're going with this but I'll answer just the same.

It's not a simple matter of "like" or "dislike" of the game. I already like a lot of what I've seen of Next. I like the ease of character creation. I like some of the class abilities. I like backgrounds. And so on. It's quite rare for me to like or dislike the entirety of a game, the issue is more whether overall I like enough elements for me to justify a purchase. Similarly, I also dislike certain elements of 4e that I think could've been handled better on launch or even still need to be handled better today. It's just that overall I like enough elements to buy and play it.

What the odds are of me liking enough of 5e/Next? I rightly don't know. Maybe around 50-50, but even if it falls to the side of "no purchase", that doesn't have to mean I dislike the entire thing. I expect to still like some elements.

My current annoyance is not so much with the elements of the game I might dislike, though. I dislike some comments and behavior of the development team. I dislike the way modularity is put forth as a grand solution to many ills even though we haven't seen any kind of real modularity yet. Some options and houserule potential, but if that qualifies as "modularity" then a product like Unearthed Arcana is also "modularity". And the d20 days with all its 3rd party supplements and compatibilities would have been much more modular than anything Next is doing.


I should also clarify that I think the dev's edition warrior tendencies are not so much a result of malice and more of marketing. The launch of 4e is pretty infamous because a lot of 3e fans felt that WotC was mocking their beloved game, talking trash about it in order to sell them on the new edition. There was backlash over that and I see the current talks as an attempt to do the same again, just more subtly to prevent as much backlash. Talking garbage about warlords shouting hands back on is in my view meant as an appeal to people who intensely dislike 4e. That doesn't mean WotC doesn't understand how 4e healing actually is supposed work, they're just repeating the sales tactic of before in a way that makes it less easy to call them on it.