D&D (2024) Does anyone else think that 1D&D will create a significant divide in the community?

[Parmandur]

If you use a 2014 race and a 2024 background you should get both the ASIs from your race and the ASIs from your background, there is no reason you shouldn't, the ASIs are part of the race and part of the background. This is not like TCE where they put in a rule that changed the way to apply racial ASIs.

To be honest I don't think the ASIs in the background will survive to the final version. Considering that you can make a custom background, tying them to background is meaningless - If you want to be an acolyte but with strength and constitution ASIs, just make a custom background to do that.

The packet specifically says that if a Race grants an ASI, the player chooses whether they get to keep that ASI or trade them for the ASI in the Background. It calls out Race options from any 2014 compatible book as working that way. One or the other, not both.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If you use a 2014 race and a 2024 background you should get both the ASIs from your race and the ASIs from your background, there is no reason you shouldn't, the ASIs are part of the race and part of the background. This is not like TCE where they put in a rule that changed the way to apply racial ASIs.

To be honest I don't think the ASIs in the background will survive to the final version. Considering that you can make a custom background, tying them to background is meaningless - If you want to be an acolyte but with strength and constitution ASIs, just make a custom background to do that.

Read the Origins playtest doc again. It explicitly states that if you use a race that grants an ASI and a background that does so, you choose one or the other, you don't get both.

As for the background ASIs, I think the design paradigms of 5e suggest that they will have ASI tied to something, and background is less problematic than race. With background, the rules arent say that your strength comes from your race at all, it comes from how you were raised or what trade you learnt or whatever.

 

[MNblockhead]

I've used the Dread rules for entire games in my D&D campaign

Glad to know I'm not the only one!

I used it when the party traveled to the Fey Wild in my first campaign and I wanted it to feel very different from the Prime Material.

 

[The Myopic Sniper]

Other than the changes to backgrounds and races which are pretty much locked in due to larger cultural issues, there is a good chance that most of the stuff that is being playtested won't make the targeted survey numbers and will get changed to something closer to 5e. They aren't going to change something with only 65 percent approval unless every other option that they are testing comes in with less unless it was on an issue that was perceived as a large issue in the 2014 edition. Some things that are quality of life issues for designers of further content like maybe making subclasses all have a similar power budget and work similarly across classes might get further retests and refinements until they get that to work, but I imagine a lot of stuff will be reverted to 2014 standards in the end.

If WOTC stick to that approach I think most of the blowback will be minor in the long run. Except on issues that align with certain social justice concerns, I don't think that WOTC has the courage to rock the boat up too much. If something like the new exhaustion rules came in with 95 percent approval, the new rules might make the cut, but I don't think they are going to change things that aren't generally perceived as problems unless it has a lot of support. Still, they might as well use this playtest period to test concepts to see if anything hits the level of support they are looking for. Why wouldn't they?

 

[TheSword]

Other than the changes to backgrounds and races which are pretty much locked in due to larger cultural issues, there is a good chance that most of the stuff that is being playtested won't make the targeted survey numbers and will get changed to something closer to 5e. They aren't going to change something with only 65 percent approval unless every other option that they are testing comes in with less unless it was on an issue that was perceived as a large issue in the 2014 edition. Some things that are quality of life issues for designers of further content like maybe making subclasses all have a similar power budget and work similarly across classes might get further retests and refinements until they get that to work, but I imagine a lot of stuff will be reverted to 2014 standards in the end.

If WOTC stick to that approach I think most of the blowback will be minor in the long run. Except on issues that align with certain social justice concerns, I don't think that WOTC has the courage to rock the boat up too much. If something like the new exhaustion rules came in with 95 percent approval, the new rules might make the cut, but I don't think they are going to change things that aren't generally perceived as problems unless it has a lot of support. Still, they might as well use this playtest period to test concepts to see if anything hits the level of support they are looking for. Why wouldn't they?

65% approval is massive. That probably means 10-20% are ambivalent and 15-25 disapprove. That’s a 40 to 50 point majority in favour of something.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If WotC are going primarily by approval percentages in 2022 then 1D&D is going to be a complete and utter mess, frankly.

Grown-ups running a company with hundreds of millions of turnover should not be basing design decisions on percentages from a poorly-written survey, and if they are, god help us all. The percentages are of interest, sure, but ultimately the right design decision is the right design decision, whether or not the LITERAL sub-1% of the playerbase who answered the survey approve of it or not. People are against design by committee, and the only thing worse than that is design by a tiny percentage of the playerbase/fans.

Realistically whether 1D&D creates a significant divide or not is going to depend a lot less on the rules, and a lot more on the marketing, pricing, accessibility of the new rules, and so on on. It's also going to depend on hard-to-control and somewhat irrational perceptions about whether rules are "better" or "worse", which are something WotC are going to need to finesse towards the end of the playtest (but which is largely immaterial at this point).

As an aside, an awful lot of people who actually run/play D&D are unaware of the 1D&D playtest right now, outside of the "extremely online" types. For example, my most rules-attentive and generally up-to-date-on-D&D player? He didn't know about it until last weekend when I told him. My friend who regularly runs D&D for his kids and their friends, and is a long-time player, and buys a lot of 5E stuff? He didn't know until even more recently, and again, only because I told him. These people are representative of more "typical" D&D players, I would suggest, and they know nothing about it.

I don't follow Critical Role or the like, but unless they're talking about 1D&D, I doubt their fans will have heard of it either. I suspect we'll see a huge increase in the number of people aware of it in the last few months before release.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Some RPGs are closer to or farther from D&D, they do all have D&D in their DNA, but an RPG is an RPG, but D&D is specifically D&D.

If you don't find it a useful descriptive term you don't, but I've found it quite the useful shorthand over the years for telling people "13th Age is in the D&D-sphere where Magic World is a BRP derivative". Objecting to it does not change its utility.

 

[Thomas Shey]

At the end, as long as the story is good and the game is fun, who cares?

The "as long as" in that sentence is doing some heavy lifting, however. A fair number of people can find mechanical process in games helps or hurts their fun.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, not to pick a nit, but Old School Essentials is literally a reformatting of B/X D&D. What does that count as?

As a sidenote - at least according to the Vintage RPG podcast, isn't Traveller the only RPG that doesn't have D&D as an antecedent?

Only if "was aware of the existence of and might have known vaguely the kind of rules it had" is enough to count as an antecedent, because there were absolutely some other early games that only fit that (most of them haven't survived to the modern period, but in the modern period there are all kinds of games that you have to view what they're doing in very broad strokes to show much influence).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Aah so - in example, is the BASIC thief class identical to the ADVANCED one? The ADVANCED just adds druids and illusionists and whatnot?

Exactly.

The Advanced Fantasy book adds (in addition to the BASIC stuff, which is included in the big corebook version): acrobat, assassin, barbarian, bard, druid, illusionist, knight (a renamed cavalier), paladin and ranger, as well as race-as-class versions (and the option to split races and classes) of drow, duergar, gnome, half-elf (I think -- maybe this is in the basic version, too), half-orc and svirfneblin.

The level of commitment to include duergar, which I think five people ever played back in the 1E era, is impressive. Half-ogre from Dragon was far more popular in my experience.