D&D 5E The new Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set - and online tools?

[Herobizkit]

Given the descriptions I've heard so far, I can't help but wonder if the Starter Set is going to at all resemble the Dragon Age RPG "starter set" - the boxed one that comes with a game board/map of the known realms and enough info to run low level characters.

If the D&D Starter Set can accomplish what the Dragon Age RPG has done for itself, I feel it will be a dang fine product to try for any level of RP experience.

 

[Ruzak]

I have it on good authority the character generation rules will be available exclusively as short segments interspersed within the Saturday morning cartoon debuting in August.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

[rant]
Regarding the last paragraph, I am a bit confused. The 4e character builder only works on windows with silverlight and is really really slow and creates character sheets that are 4pages at level 1 and quickly increase to 10+ pages. Part of the reason it's so helpful is that there are sooooooo many splatbooks for 4e. There are basically hundreds of feats - per class/race. If you want to update your character, you can't do it on your tablet, you have to start up a windows PC to do it. In addition, it costs 6$ a month to get this.

One of the players in my group used the character builder and created a character that was just ineffective. He had tried to optimize, but there are so many bad options in 4e that it's quite hard as a casual player to get anything out of it. Typically you have to select x class with y power and z1, z2 and z3 feats to be effective. I helped him out, which took something like an hour, sifting through powers and feats to find combinations that actually works well together. With hundreds of feats and powers to go through, there is nothing casual friendly about 4e.
[/rant]

It only costs one person in the group $6/month - indeed it's outright silly to not share an account, because then the DM can't look at your characters and so on!

I agree that Silverlight was a dumb choice, but "OMG FINDING A WINDOWS PC IS SOOOOO HARD!" rings very very very very false to me Every Mac user I know who plays games of any kind has a dual-boot or Wine so you really just need to find "A PC". Yeah, not a tablet, that sucks, they need to do better. It's still good.

As for "one of my players failed to create an optimized PC once", well, dude, I don't buy it. Casual players don't create highly optimized PCs. Period. That's way of the world. So if he's really casual... if not, he should know the trap options. The builder still makes building a PC easier - if he uses the Essentials method, he also won't be bothered by scary giant feat lists and will come out with a perfectly functional PC. This isn't 3E. The difference between a normal PC and an optimized non-exploit-y one is fairly reasonable (exploit-y ones obviously can go far beyond, but it was ever thus in D&D, and most DMs go "Haha no.").

The point is, it's still vastly superior to not having it. Crazy superior. All of my players successfully created their PCs entirely without my help. That's unprecedented. One of them was new to RPGs (all were new to 4E), two others casual-as-hell. I can easily check their PCs after the fact and suggest adjustments, too.

Bolded bit is simply untrue, by the way. Not even arguable. Effective and optimized are not the same thing.

 

[Kinak]

It's been a long time since I had to cannibalize Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur for enough d6s to make characters, but that's definitely the first thing I did with the basic set when I was a kid. That's my first memory of D&D and the one that made me conversant enough about it to join a group years later.

You can hand me a boxed set without adventures, without maps or minis, without dice, without pregens, without character sheets, even without stats for enemies and I'll still cheerfully call it a tabletop RPG. But if you hand me a boxed set without character creation, I'm not entirely sure.

Maybe their solution will knock my socks off, but I find it hard to believe it's better than providing a full-featured game out of the box and moving some of the adventures to downloads.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Mistwell]

Double

 

[Mistwell]

What he's describing is crippleware. I don't buy crippleware.

We've already dealt with this issue. By common parlance, it's not crippleware. By your personal definition, which is not common parlance, it is. OK, fair enough. Let's move on then.

 

[Mistwell]

I was considering buying copies for toys for tots. I'll not buy an add for kids for Christmas.

It's not an ad. Pundit already went to some lengths to explain that.

 

[Morrus]

Source

Mike's tweet said pretty much exactly that, but in only 140 characters.

 

[Mistwell]

I might add, that I as an advocate of the D&D game being made as accessible as possible to regular and casual gamers rather than just marketing to the hardcore fans am very excited about.

Casual almost certainly means something usable (or at least accessible) from a smart phone.

Pundit considers casual gamers to be gamers who don't usually read the rules much, who just show up and play. At least, in a general sense that's what he tends to mean.

While they might be creating an app, I don't think an app is what is being referred to. In fact...I am not even sure what Pundit is referring to has anything to do with an online anything.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Have to agree with you here. But they might not have wanted to go that route. Which to me is understandable with most people connected 24/7 on their smartphones and you therefore have better ways of handling this.


This is 2014 you know, not 1999.

Hopefully you won't require* a computer, but an online device with a browser. For instance a smart phone or a tablet. Even my mother who turns 70 this summer has a smartphone, a laptop and wireless internet. How else do you do your banking, fill out your tax forms, order your stuff from amazon, etc etc? The same is true for all my friends.

If you don't have internet, you can just wait until November when everything is available in DTF (Dead Tree Format), it's not like those three months of extra waiting time will drive away many customers (assuming they have a good internet-strategy, not the half-assed 4e stuff).

*require if you want to run a campaign before november when everything is in printed format.

The starter set is the first impression product for the game.

Tabletop rpgs should be playable with only pencil, paper, & dice. When electronic are required, and not supplementary to playing the game (including chargen) the game has ceased to be a tabletop rpg.

Producing an introductory set that fails to be a an actual tabletop rpg tells me that the company producing it really doesn't GET the most basic concept of tabletop rpgs, which is creating characters and having adventures.

The answer to this apparently is to wait for an expensive 3 volume set from a company that proved on its first release, that it doesn't really understand rpgs and what is most essential to include in one?