D&D 5E Starter Set Character Sheet Revealed!

[RotGrub]

That's odd.

Everybody that I play with thinks 5e is moving away from 4e.

I wonder what the difference is....

For me the glass is half full to stuff I don't want and for you the game is missing half the stuff you're looking for.

 

[RotGrub]

Miniature's Handbook was actually 3.0e, not even 3.5e, though it was valid to take it as a feat in 3.5e and is part of the SRD. Regardless, bottom line, you're wrong about it being late in the 3.5e/4e cycle. It's actually pretty early there. And of course Eberron was a highly popular 3.5e setting book, that also was not late in the 3.5 cycle.



Of course it will have the options you need to play - but the options book for this time around will be the DMG, so you will have to wait a few months before you get them. But yes, they've said outright there will be optional modules in the DMG to allow you to play a 1e, 2e, 3e, or 4e style game, depending on your preferences, along with conversion instructions for each.

Well I'm wrong then. I thought the miniature handbook came out late 3.5e because I never saw it on the shelf at any of my local game shops. Still, I don't recal that book ever being used in a typical D&D campaign.
As for action surge, I'm not really upset with that one... I've played with luck points and other house rules before so I'm not enraged by it.

I guess I need to wait for the DMG.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I still don't get it. With this logic, the actual rule-set you're using is irrelevant, so long as you pretend it's an actual simulation of the game-world's physics. Next is, with this reverse-simulation philosophy, as simulation-driven as Rolemaster, Fate Core, 3e, and 4e.

So why not just extrapolate from there, then? All of a sudden, PC/NPC asymmetry is an observable characteristic of the game world, too. People in the game world don't even need to know why. I mean, people might remark on it, but then again without it, they also know that veterans always come back from wars with all their limbs, eyes, and ears; and that it takes merely a day or two for a farmer to recover from even the worst injury.

Sorry, I don't follow what you're saying at all. The actual rule-set is very important, since it is always a reflection of the game-world's physics. Granted, it's an imperfect reflection, so sometimes you need to fill in the gaps for niche situations that aren't explicitly covered, but it's consistent for everyone in for the things that it does cover.

If you have different rules for PCs and NPCs, then that status is necessarily observable in-game, which would be ridiculous. That's why it's important that, whatever the rules for disability, they apply equally to PCs and NPCs. I like the idea of covering broken limbs with just hit point damage, since that gives PCs an easy out with an in-game explanation: PCs have easy access to healing magic, which is why they never suffer from broken limbs or blindness for any significant period of time. Limbs that are missing entirely would be horrific enough that I'm happy to have them not show up within my fantasy game, even among commoners.

 

[RotGrub]

I feel ya, hoss. At this point, I don't think anyone is able to prove anything. The game hasn't been released yet. From everything I've taken in thus far (both sides of the issue), 5e is a compromise all the way from 1st to 4th edition. It tries taking the best parts of all the editions into account while adding just a couple of new things like advantage/disadvantage and streamlined things that were too unwieldy or inefficient (or dumb, depending on your view) from prior editions like the skill list and healing surges.

Will you be ok with this compromise? Well, that depends on the individual... on you. I've been asking myself that question all day: Am I willing to put up with a few things I don't like in order to play and enjoy the latest edition of the world's original tabletop fantasy roleplaying game? The answer: Probably. Sure, from what I've seen, I like 5e better than 3rd and 4th editions... and with 1st and 2nd it's a mixed bag. There are some noticeable improvements along with some stuff I could really do without.

VS

I really don't know why I would want a compromise edition. I honestly can't compromise too much. I'm looking for 5e to be a modular game that's friendly to the way I've played for years.

 

[RotGrub]

5e isn't like 4e because of one healing ability that they (poorly) tried to implement in 2003 (Minis HB preceeds Complete Warrior) and that worked JUST FINE in Star Wars and other d20 spin offs.

The core rules allow a small amount of HP recovery to fighters. It's not better than Cure Wounds (2d8+2 per spell level vs 1d10+ fighter level). This is also not a warlord shouting up his allies. This is to represent a fighter ignoring the pain once to soldier through and take one last blow. Despite people thinking that a fighter can sit in a tree and regenerate, I wager it's far more limited and isn't putting the cleric out of a job.

Wait until the DMG comes out to decide if you can tweak slower healing to your like. House rule it when it comes out; it is one ability of one class, it's not baked in healing surges were.

Or don't and have fun playing 1e.

Depending on what you roll it can be more effective. I honestly wouldn't mind a temp hit point increase that lasts until the end of the encounter, but real healing outside of magic is just beyond the bounds of my game.

 

[Mistwell]

Giving double action burst to anyone, especially the fighter who has the most attacks in the game (and I havent even contemplated two weapons yet, shudder) is just straight broken. It's broken for spells too, but limiting action surge to fighters only doesnt fix the problem, it just limits it to one class. That class will still be OP as a result in any module without a strict timeframe to keep short rests in check (unless there is a rule about you cant take multiple short rests in a row). Action surge would have been balanced as an extra attack only, and would have still been very good for a level 2 ability.

It doesnt matter that it's in one round. Action surge, by working off a whole action, is going to give the best burst in the game once you attach it to any class. It will add to all other damage calculations. It's a problem, it's broken, on any class, coz it will be the clear best pick for combat effectiveness re damage. Sure save or suck/die will still be an option, but even that gets a boost with action surge - you force the BBEG to save twice.

The devs second (but lesser) mistake was attaching it the class with the most attacks in the game... it's such an obviously broken ability, why oh why would you tack it onto the class with the most attacks! It's pure facepalm.

Someone above already ran the calculations and found your assumptions to be false. It did not result in the type of damage you think it does.

 

[Cybit]

I really don't know why I would want a compromise edition. I honestly can't compromise too much. I'm looking for 5e to be a modular game that's friendly to the way I've played for years.

While the bad news is that you will probably have to wait till the DMG to have the full set of modularity; the good news is that I've seen the type of game you are looking for in the ruleset I've been playing through.

Note; I think it would be valuable to look through some of the changes and pull some of the "compromises" into your own game. My house is full of PF players who hated 4E, and they ended up bringing a lot of the "compromise" mechanics into our 3E style game. I think many of those changes will still be in the DMG.

 

[Remathilis]

Depending on what you roll it can be more effective. I honestly wouldn't mind a temp hit point increase that lasts until the end of the encounter, but real healing outside of magic is just beyond the bounds of my game.

Ok then, change it from "hp healed" to "temp hp". The rest works as is.

#Modularity.

 

[Obryn]

Sorry, I don't follow what you're saying at all. The actual rule-set is very important, since it is always a reflection of the game-world's physics. Granted, it's an imperfect reflection, so sometimes you need to fill in the gaps for niche situations that aren't explicitly covered, but it's consistent for everyone in for the things that it does cover.

If you have different rules for PCs and NPCs, then that status is necessarily observable in-game, which would be ridiculous. That's why it's important that, whatever the rules for disability, they apply equally to PCs and NPCs. I like the idea of covering broken limbs with just hit point damage, since that gives PCs an easy out with an in-game explanation: PCs have easy access to healing magic, which is why they never suffer from broken limbs or blindness for any significant period of time. Limbs that are missing entirely would be horrific enough that I'm happy to have them not show up within my fantasy game, even among commoners.

Where you're losing me is an assertion that a world where the PCs are observably different is somehow more ridiculous than a world where soldiers can swing swords at each other all day, not lose even a finger and never suffer from their injuries unless they're dead.

I mean, that's a seriously weird place to draw a line in the sand, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[pemerton]

since everything that could possibly deal damage was something that was obviously capable of inflicting physical wounds, the proportional wound model was immediately intuitive.

See, this isn't true in AD&D (both psionic attacks and illusions such as phantasmal killer can deal hp damage). This may have influenced my perspective.

Luck/skill/whatever is what allows a fighter with 100 hit points to suffer no worse from a 10hp wound than a 10hp fighter would suffer from a 1hp wound.

My problem with this is that there is no such thing as "a 1 hp wound". Sometimes a 1 hp wound is neglible (eg drop from 10 to 9 hp). Sometimes it is fatal or near-fatal (eg drop from 1 hp to 0 hp). In this respect, a human being taking injury is very different to (say) sanding down a block of wood with sandpaper.

I would favor bundling all of the specific wounds in with abstract hit points. If an NPC can break a leg, then a PC must also be able to break a leg. That's non-negotiable for me. Yet, an accurate model of that would be a major pain in the bookkeeping, and lead to death spirals, so one possibility is to abstract all broken bones into hit point damage that brings you closer to death rather than reducing your movement speed or giving penalties to your ability checks.

The thing is, that's not a broken leg. Something that brings you closer to death in the immediate term, but doesn't impede your performance and can be shrugged off with a few days' rest, is not a broken leg. It's more like exhaustion and/or resignation.

I like the idea of covering broken limbs with just hit point damage, since that gives PCs an easy out with an in-game explanation: PCs have easy access to healing magic, which is why they never suffer from broken limbs or blindness for any significant period of time. Limbs that are missing entirely would be horrific enough that I'm happy to have them not show up within my fantasy game, even among commoners.

In AD&D, at least, Cure Blindness is a 3rd level spell, hence not available until a cleric reaches 5th level.

And by your own measure of adequacy, what you say doesn't seem right, because according to the rules the PCs would heal from that blindness in 4 weeks even without magic. And in the meantime they suffer no penalties to their vision. Saying that a blind person is modelled by low hit points, and that it would be inconvenient to actually model their blindness and so we just let that character keep on seeing things normally, is not an abstraction. It's a nonsense.

It's always been a high fantasy world where people quickly recover from any wound that wasn't fatal

<snip>

That isn't necessarily to say that nobody ever got hurt. It only says that, whatever the physical damage, we don't want to model that in terms of wound penalties and extended convalescence.

I still assert that, if you are happy to treat the injury as purely cosmetic then convalescence can be also. On this approach (which I personally don't like, but you seemed to advocate it upthread) the fighter who use second wind still has a broken leg and the resulting cosmetic limp - you just wouldn't model it because that would be too inconvenient.

I consider anything that treats PCs differently from NPCs to be too far removed from reality to be worth engaging with.

If the PCs in my 4e game had broken legs, then they would need Remove Afliction to heal them magically.

As it happens, though, they are lucky enough not to suffer broken legs. (Because the action resolution rules don't allow for it.)

If you have different rules for PCs and NPCs, then that status is necessarily observable in-game, which would be ridiculous.

Huh? What's observable, in game, is that the PCs are very lucky, and also are always at the centre of the action. And consequently they are powerful. That doesn't strike me as ridiculous - it's an inevitable feature of a character-focused heroic adventure story.

If NPCs can lose limbs, but PCs can't, then that's inconsistent.

PCs totally can.

They don't, at least not as a matter of routine because that interferes with the narrative structure of most campaigns (since it gets in the way of all but the sand-box-iest of playstyles, and is thus too disruptive to be anything but a rare, special occurrence), but they can.

LFK is correct about the "can" issue - the PCs can but they don't.

A parallel - it makes sense for a PC to come up with a plan to mug an victim in the privy, but the reverse couldn't work in any campaign I've played, because only once in 30 years of GMing has a player ever narrated a PC going to the toilet. (In this skill challenge.

Game mechanics are the means through which an unknown outcome is determined.

<snip>

They can't cover every possible event, but what they do cover, they must do so in a fair and un-biased manner.

The issue of fairness and bias is relevant to gameplay. But it's not relevant to me deciding what happens in a fight between some dwarven and hobgoblin NPCs! Nor was the outcome there unknown - I knew what I wanted, namely, a dwarven patrol that had been badly beaten up in an encounter with hobgoblin scouts, but had managed to retreat in good order.

I'm fine with an imperfect model (broken limbs cause no penalty), or an incomplete one (there are no rules for broken limbs, so improvise where appropriate), but I'm not fine with an inconsistent one (broken limbs can only happen when you're not rolling for it).

There is nothing inconsistent about broken legs happening only as a result of non-dice-rolling narration. It is not an inconsistent rule - it is quite easily stated, and easily applied. And it does not produce an inconsistent gameworld - people in the gameworld suffer broken limbs when and only when they fall or are struck in such a way as to break limbs. The PCs are obviously rather lucky - because they never suffer such falls or blows - but that is not inconsistent.

if I'm going to build a world that's internally consistent, then whatever is going on in the background must resolve similarly to how it would happen if we were actually paying attention to it.

"Resolve" here is ambiguous. In the gameworld, the fight between the dwarves and hobgolbins resolved in the way any fight does - the participants in the fight girded their loins, drew their swords and went to it.

In the real world, the fight didn't have to be resolved, because it wasn't an episode of play. It was a stipulated situation to provide background and context for an actual episode of play (namely, an angel of Moradin sending a group of the dwarves to find the dwarven fighter/cleric PC so he could help them).

The outcome of any action cannot rely on which person is performing it, to any degree beyond the real substantive in-game difference between those individuals. Otherwise, you violate causality.

any sort of objective internally-consistent reality must treat PCs and NPCs by the same rules.

In classic D&D (B/X and Gygax's AD&Dcertainly, but I think Cook's AD&D also) monsters and NPCs are governed by morale rules that PCs are not. And monsters have % chances to pursue fleeing opponents, and also rules for giving up pursuit, which do not govern PCs. There is a reaction table to determine the response of monsters and NPCs to encounters, whereas players get to choose how their PCs respond. Etc

The game has always had action resolution mechanics that apply differently to PCs and NPCs, because they recognlse that the PCs have a special significance as being the vehicle by which players engage the game.