D&D 5E Can an elf rogue be a decent archer in (Basic) D&D 5th edition?

[Starfox]

Baur and Winter on their experience writing the upcoming adventures for 5e

This is the strongest 5E endorsement I've read so far.

 

[The Hitcher]

For my sins I just read through this entire thread. Well, most of it - I skipped some parts of the really long and nitpicky posts. At the risk of adding to an already long and tedious argument and flogging a horse that has already all but decomposed, I have to strongly agree with those who are championing 5E as the more flexible and improv-friendly system.

I bought 4E when it came out, and I think it's a beautiful thing - it's this tightly constructed clockwork of rules that work to construct these exquisitely balanced tactical combat situations. I read the books and they made me happy (even if the power lists were a bit tedious to plough through). But then I played the game, and I realised the monumental problem that the 4E rules create: because the entire system is organised around balancing classes and powers and combats, everything else becomes secondary. If you fully engage with the core of the system, then it is (as others have said) counter-productive to do weird improvisational stuff. Normally, I love a really good tactical combat game (you guys should definitely check out Card Hunter - it's similar in many ways to the combat of 4E, and is bloody excellent), but to me an RPG is an entirely different animal. And when I play D&D, I want to exist in an infinite possibility space, not one where everything is codified and presented like a menu at a Vietnamese restaurant.

You can cite page 42 all you want. Page 42 is not a rule that fits into the complex clockwork of the game. It's a concession to the fact that D&D is an RPG, and that "yes, sure, you can make up your own rules if you want to. But mostly you won't have to". But the rest of the system does absolutely everything it can to push you into rational, tactical thinking and away from a purely creative frame of mind.

Of course some people are able to be creative even inside that system. And I salute you, I really do. It's fantastic that others have managed to have great times inside a system that almost immediately made me feel claustrophobic and frustrated. But I think you'll find that my response (and the similar responses of several others on this thread) reflect one of the major reasons why so many people bounced off 4E and went looking for their RPG experiences elsewhere. And it is most definitely one of the major things that Mearls and co have been trying to address since day one of the 5E playtest (as they've stated in various forms over the last couple of years).

It's a huge problem for many people (like me) who tried and wanted to like 4E, perhaps even THE problem. And it amounts to far more than can be solved by simply saying "you're doing it wrong - check out page 42".

 

[The Hitcher]

I'm also very much down with the idea that the classes are balanced across three pillars of gameplay instead of one. It immediately gives importance to roleplay and exploration, encouraging players to conceptualise the game as something with a very different focus and scope to a tactical combat game. IMO, balance in D&D should be about making each of the classes equally fun to play, not balancing equations. In this context, damage-per-round is merely one detail among many, and it's nonsense to obsess over it to such a degree. It just doesn't matter that much. Mearls has specifically commented something along the lines of "game balance is an illusion in an RPG", and I totally agree - especially in one that takes the more freeform/less codified path that 5E is taking. When a player can improvise an action at any moment, and a DM can tinker with a modular ruleset to their heart's content, small differences in the RAW numbers mean relatively little.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It's a huge problem for many people (like me) who tried and wanted to like 4E, perhaps even THE problem. And it amounts to far more than can be solved by simply saying "you're doing it wrong - check out page 42".

And there's nothing wrong with admitting that the particular roleplaying style that is enhanced by the game mechanics of 4E is not one you are completely comfortable or happy with. Every set of mechanics will either be a boon or a hindrance depending on your way of doing things. 3E works fabulously for some people, but not for others. BD&D the same way. Vampire: The Masquerade is the greatest set of mechanics for a specific set of roleplayers out there. And yes... 5E will be the be-all-and-end-all for Dungeons & Dragons game mechanics for a certain slice of the population.

But if any of us think 5E will be that game for everybody is fooling ourselves. I guarantee you that when the book is finally released that there will be a large swathe of the playerbase that is going to find the "looseness" of the rules unsatisfying. The specificity will be lacking for them. It won't be what they want in a D&D game. But then again... there's nothing wrong with that way of thinking either.

The only reason there is an issue is because too many people still get caught up in the idea that their preferred method of D&D should be and is THE method of D&D. Any other edition isn't "real D&D" and they spend hours on end railing against it, cluttering up threads on message boards trying to make the rest of us listen to their "words of wisdom" on the subject. A subject which the rest of us all know to be absolutely baloney, but trying convincing those people otherwise. Can't be done.

 

[Starfox]

But if any of us think 5E will be that game for everybody is fooling ourselves.

I just hope it becomes good enough to serve as a common platform and introduction for new players. It would be nice to have a "basic" system most gamers are at least somewhat acquainted with. Which is unlikely without making it open content to some degree.

Teaching someone new to RPGs 3.5 was a hard sell.

 

[The Hitcher]

I get that. D&D is not even close to being my favourite RPG, system-wise - there are so many great indie games out there now. But I do have a sentimental attachment to it, and there are certain things that I think it does rather well. I write replies like this more for the satisfaction of articulating my own thoughts than from any real hope to convert others to my way of thinking. I'm a game designer and teacher of game design by trade, and I find it useful to lay things out in this way.

I was (thankfully) absent from this corner of the interwebs for the end days of 3E and the birth of Pathfinder and 4E, so I missed out on a lot of that awfulness, although I've been hearing the echoes of it ever since. I bought 4E about a year after it came out, loved reading it, hated playing it, and then stepped away again until part-way through the 5E playtest. At that point I ran a couple of one-offs and began to fall in love with the game again. I'm now REALLY excited about the upcoming edition, and I honestly care very little what anyone else thinks of it, as long as I get to play!

But hey - I was super-excited about both 3E and 4E before this, and I found both to be wanting in the end, so we'll see how it goes this time around...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And it amounts to far more than can be solved by simply saying "you're doing it wrong - check out page 42".

Why the Straw Man? No-one has remotely suggested that. I brought up Page 42, among other things as an example of how 4E was actively trying to get people not locked into AEDU tunnel-vision, not it fixed everything everyone disliked.

No-one has refuted that. What I've seen, instead, have been vaguely (or not so vaguely!) edition-war-y assertions about how 4E was "incapable of" or "antithetical to" what is clearly implied to be "real" D&D, or Page 42 being said to be wildly over or under-powered (pick one, guys). Your post is not entirely wrong - but the issues you note are somewhat overblown and overstated. "I'm stuck in a rules-box!" is the LFQW of 4E, I fear. A real problem for some, but not the consistent game-breaker it's played as.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I just hope it becomes good enough to serve as a common platform and introduction for new players. It would be nice to have a "basic" system most gamers are at least somewhat acquainted with. Which is unlikely without making it open content to some degree.

Teaching someone new to RPGs 3.5 was a hard sell.

Eh. I don't think using the most basic version of 3.5 was any more difficult than any other edition. Different maybe, sure. But not hard. The starter sets of 3E, 3.5E, 4E, and what I'm sure 5E will be, all were fairly basic in introducing the game... because let's face it... NO edition's 1st level characters are all that complex in the grand scheme of things. Provided of course that the DM teaching the game isn't making it more difficult by adding in all the weird crap and books his or her particular campaign is using.

THAT'S when things go off the rails... when the DM starts saying things like "Okay, so you have a sword, a shield, and this Toughness feat for an extra 3 hit points. But let me tell you that *if* you want to play this Prestige Class over here when you reach Level 8, you're going to want to make sure you have these three feats here, and align things this way so that you can take X, Y, and Z. Here's these four books here that have a bunch of options you may want to look at that probably would be a better choice than that Toughness feat. What's that? What's a "feat"? Okay, well here, let me describe to you all these things you won't really deal with for several months until you reach this specific level, but since I love the game and want you to love it too, it'll only take me 20 minutes to describe what's going to happen, and then at that point we can start playing."

If we really want players new to RPGs to get into the game... any edition will work fine. Just so long as the DM gets out of their own way and let the person just play the game.

 

[Mistwell]

Why the Straw Man? No-one has remotely suggested that. I brought up Page 42, among other things as an example of how 4E was actively trying to get people not locked into AEDU tunnel-vision, not it fixed everything everyone disliked.

No-one has refuted that. What I've seen, instead, have been vaguely (or not so vaguely!) edition-war-y assertions about how 4E was "incapable of" or "antithetical to" what is clearly implied to be "real" D&D, or Page 42 being said to be wildly over or under-powered (pick one, guys). Your post is not entirely wrong - but the issues you note are somewhat overblown and overstated. "I'm stuck in a rules-box!" is the LFQW of 4E, I fear. A real problem for some, but not the consistent game-breaker it's played as.

None of that matches the response I gave you on Page 42, and which several people agreed with.

I said there were so many player options on the character sheet, that in my experience players simply didn't think much outside the character sheet. They didn't feel compelled to think "There is a chandelier I can swing on, and then attack my foe at the end of the swing" because they had 12 powers in front of them (in the form of cards for my games), many of which moved foes and damaged them during that move, anyway. So Page 42 simply rarely came up in our games because of the quantity of options the players already had on their character sheets.

And a lot of people agreed with me in that.

And none of that is about 4e being bad (it's a game I loved overall), or Page 42 being over or under powered (it worked fine, when it actually came up, which was rarely).

It's that Page 42, as an expressly DM tool to deal with times when players did something outside the stated rules, was NOT actively encouraging it's use, but passively doing so purely as a DM reaction. If it were actively doing so, it would have been in the PHB, and it would have printed out as a power or series of powers on those cards created by the DDI character sheet generator, and it's use would have been repeatedly encouraged and referenced in the player expansion books.

I know of groups who did just that, adding a power card that amounted to "Do something awesome", but those were house rules. There was nothing "active" about the way Page 42 was presented in the game, as it was not player-focused - it was purely a passive presentation described as a reactive thing for DMs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There was nothing "active" about the way Page 42 was presented in the game, as it was not player-focused - it was purely a passive presentation described as a reactive thing for DMs.

I don't agree - the DM was encouraged to use Page 42, to put in interesting terrain, etc. - all this was active design encouragement away from AEDU-only focus. I don't buy that unless the players are directly encouraged, it somehow "doesn't count".

By the way, has any edition explicitly, actively encouraged the PCs to ignore their sheets?

Further, the post I responded to is still a Straw Man.