So You're Just Not "Feeling It" for 5e - What ARE you excited about?

[Celebrim]

I haven't even looked at 5e.

I don't have any feeling for it except that based on what I'm seeing on the boards here it appears to be a better evolutionary path than 4e and probably looks a lot like someone else's house rules for 3e, which isn't a bad thing.

But to the extent I'm excited about anything it's moving to the next chapter of my now almost 4 year old 3.5 edition campaign (probably 500+ hours of play). I have no need to update ruleset in the middle, particularly because I'm now almost completely happy with my own 3e house rules. Maybe in another 4 years if all goes well, I'll be in a position to be excited about running something else.

 

[Lwaxy]

I'm fine with 5e, but am more excited of finally getting a non-Middle Earth One Ring game together.

Not a very big fan of Savage Worlds (exploding dice) but some of the settings are cool enough I import them to d20 lol

 

[Zhaleskra]

I'm curious why you don't like exploding dice. Having said that, I admit I was confused when I first heard the term, thus in my case saying "open-ended" dice initially would have been better.

As I said upthread, I have my own issues with Savage Worlds. One of them I think is related to experience with IronClaw: I don't like die to die comparisons with no modifiers. Can't remember if that exactly happens with SW, but it's my second major complaint with the *-Claw systems. My major issue with SW is the language, calling them "Bennies" just makes it hard to take their existence seriously. My opinion and all that.

 

[Siberys]

5e feels to me like more of the same sort of stuff I already passed up years ago. Not that that's objectively bad, just that it doesn't scratch the itch for me anymore.

4e's at a weird spot for me. It's by far my preferred D&D edition, and I've finally found a group that enjoys it for what it is, but I'm sick of games with long lists of options and heavy prep. Designing engaging combat encounters is hard!

Fate is my go-to game right now. Hackable but still loose. The changes I make are macro-level structural things, not filling out lists of options. Makes it a lot easier to prep for any particular setting.

If I were in charge of making a new edition of D&D, it'd end up similar to Dungeon World - it's as close to my "Platonically Ideal D&D" as I've ever seen. It has the "lists of options" problem, but I find players find games that don't have option lists to be intimidating. DW is much less "traditional" than Fate, but Fate's metacurrency and lack of discrete options make it harder for people to intuitively grasp, IMO.

I'm currently waffling on whether to buckle down and hack DW - a lot of work, but it'd be much more approachable than Fate - or to just stick with Fate.

 

[Lwaxy]

I'm curious why you don't like exploding dice.

Too many dice, when players show up with a whole bag of dice and insist on counting their results even when it is obvious they succeed it becomes ridiculus. I have discalculia, so the more stuff with numbers is out there, the worse it is for me.

Also, we have a bunch of cats, and so has one of the other GMs. The more dice roll, the more cats come running. And then they are really exploding.

 

[Zhaleskra]

Math situation + player situation + cats, I totally get. Thanks for the answer.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

3. Bennies. My players love this and we've incorporated it into our Pathfinder session. Bennies are a concept for granting the players some control over the story. Other games have mechanics like Hero Points and such but they're optional or add-ons. Bennies are ingrained in the SW game and its cool to see the PCs weighing when to spend and when to hold onto a bennie. Also, the GM gets bennies too!

Bennies ruin Savage Worlds for me. I hate the concept of bennies, fate/fortune points, etc. And in SW, they are so ingrained into the rules that I can't easily remove them. Too bad, it's a pretty good game, otherwise.

 

[Darth Quiris]

Just got Age of Rebellion... great addition to the Star Wars rpg universe.

The next new game on my radar is The Strange. I think this one has a game setting that's more intriguing than Numenera's world.

 

[innerdude]

Just got Age of Rebellion... great addition to the Star Wars rpg universe.

See, I'm hearing rumbles of discontent about Age of Rebellion, where EotE players / GMs complain that they're basically paying 60 bucks for a reprint of the EotE rulebook, plus maybe 30 pages of slightly different content. Which was to me exactly my complaint when I heard Fantasy Flight was doing the Star Wars rulebooks this way.

Is there enough change to Rebellion to justify the need for an entirely different book?

Bennies ruin Savage Worlds for me. I hate the concept of bennies, fate/fortune points, etc. And in SW, they are so ingrained into the rules that I can't easily remove them. Too bad, it's a pretty good game, otherwise.

Initially I kind of had the same problem; Savage Worlds makes enough casual "nods to realism" that I had a problem swallowing this benny thing, this purely metagame construct that players can use to "do the awesome," but also function as "hit points."

Until I realized, was it any better than having to justify D&D hit points in any kind of rational fashion that doesn't go sideways with verisimilitude pretty darn quick? (For the record, I don't particularly subscribe to the "Hit points as meat" philosophy.) And two, imagine if in D&D, it became a tactical choice to sacrifice hit points: "I'm gonna sacrifice 30 hitpoints to re-roll that check!" That's basically what bennies achieve (though if you're of the camp that hitpoints are "meat," then that would likely feel problematic).

When I thought about it, I finally just shrugged and became comfortable with it. I still don't know that I love that aspect of Savage Worlds, but I'm comfortable with it. And the fact that I love pretty much everything else about SW makes it a whole lot easier to overlook.

 

[Neonchameleon]

See, I'm hearing rumbles of discontent about Age of Rebellion, where EotE players / GMs complain that they're basically paying 60 bucks for a reprint of the EotE rulebook, plus maybe 30 pages of slightly different content. Which was to me exactly my complaint when I heard Fantasy Flight was doing the Star Wars rulebooks this way.

Is there enough change to Rebellion to justify the need for an entirely different book?

I'd assumed they'd do things the way MWP did with Marvel Heroic, and have an Essentials Edition that would just contain the bits you needed that weren't in the core rulebook.