D&D 5E (2024) How I would do 6E.

[Horwath]

i agree with the rest of your post but i think i'd go in the other direction here, IMO besides cantrips casters ought to have less offensive capabilities and focus more on utility, leave the combat to the martials, you bring a caster because of all the things magic can do that you can't ordinarily do, breath underwater, talk with animals, create portals, they'd keep some offensive capability but every damaging spell they'd have would in some form also be utility, wall of fire is field control, magic missile hits intangible enemies and so on.

I would say that a mage that focuses on offensive spells and features must be biggest damage dealer.
No armor, lowest HP, you know, glass cannon build.

 

[Minigiant]

that is the point.
spell should land most of the time, except on most resistant targets.

This is poor design because D&D spells are so strong.

Attacks take several hits to meet the death flag.

Spell fail. GG. Time for cleanup.

 

[Horwath]

This is poor design because D&D spells are so strong.

Attacks take several hits to meet the death flag.

Spell fail. GG. Time for cleanup.

problem with spells is that so much of them is so binary.

do you make encounters where you count on them to land or to fail on target?

if you have spells in the game at all, then make them succeed most of the time with reduced effect if the fail to land on target. Like damage spells.

if a spell that succeed 100% of the time is too strong, then it should not be in the game at all, save or no save for it.
also degrees of failure/success could be used to balance the spells out more.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I would say that a mage that focuses on offensive spells and features must be biggest damage dealer.
No armor, lowest HP, you know, glass cannon build.

oh yeah, or that, you're either utility, or blaster, you don't get this best of both worlds nonsense, pick one or the other.

 

[Eubani]

Martials need more stickiness, you shouldn't be able to ignore or waltz past a martial character specially if he makes you his business.

 

[Horwath]

oh yeah, or that, you're either utility, or blaster, you don't get this best of both worlds nonsense, pick one or the other.

I mean, you could take some utility instead of offense, but that will hurt you in attacking department.

take two feats:
1. you learn 5 rituals from any class, when you level up, you can exchange one ritual for a new one. max level is half your character level, round up.
you cast rituals as 1 minute casting time.

2. add +1 to any damage dice roll of your spells

 

[Horwath]

Martials need more stickiness, you shouldn't be able to ignore or waltz past a martial character specially if he makes you his business.

we had more AoO in 3E for any movement past 5ft and multiple AoOs per round vi Combat reflexes feat, but it was deemed to complicated for us 5E players.

Edit: forgot 4E, even there it was possible to make 1 AoO per turn(anyones turn) and still keep your reaction for a really good effect.
1 basic melee attack is not that special.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So this is a how I would do 6E thread. An actual 6E not a revision of 5.5. That might be a 5.75 thread.

I woukd use the 5E engine. Perhaps with a stretched bounded accuracy going to +6 to +11. Why reinvent the wheel? Everything else would be up for consideration.

Basically I woukdld survey for certain things. Hard decisions need to be made and some have to be done early. Eg game engine and complexity level.

Question 1. Complexity level.
This is self explanatory. B/X is a 1 or 2, 3.5 and 4E are an 8 or 9. Clearly explain the difference and pros and cons of both.

Question 2. Should D&D be a 10 level game (at launch). Magic would top out at 5th level spells. CR 20 would be the new toughest monsters. Otherwise 20 levels.

3. Archetypes. Should they stay or go? Partly related to 1.

4. Some spell effects would be revised or go away. Simulacrum and wish get revised. True polymorphism, shadechange go away.

5. Hit point and damage totals. Point out that 5.5 characters might deal lots of damage but monsters have bloated HP.

6. Poll for nasty effects using energy drain as an example. I wouldnt bring back old school energy drain but using exhaustion levels instead could be used.

7. Saving throw revision. Poll on if players like the current set up or want better scaling saves. Also point out monsters get them as well. Use pre 3E and 4E as examples. 3E and 5E are the odd ones out here.

8. Potential overhaul of defenses vs magic. Expanded use of greater magic resistance and landing severe debuffs might require debuffing opponents first.

9. Overhall damage dealing spells. Potentially go back to 3.5 suto scaling damage dealing spells. Or upcasting +2d6 vs 1d6 damage. This will overlap with 5. If players vote for less hp spell damage may be reduced as well. Basically look at buffing damage and nerfing save or sucks with 8 and 9.

10. Be clear designers can veto a survey. But mostly if its an impossible or contradictory results.

So basically looking at some big mechanical changes that 5E added. However they may be popular enough you really want to poll about getting rid of them.

Could potentially end up with a simple or complex version of D&D. At first glance it nay look like 5E eg skills but fears, classes, spells, races may all be revised or even cut.

Personally, I think any 6e approach needs to start from declaring certain things that will be part of it, both in the near-term and in the long-term, even if that might mean some people say "okay then that's not for me", because one of the bigger stumbling blocks of 5e's design has been its need to try to please absolutely everyone all the time, and thus ending up being pretty middling on a bunch of things, or defaulting to what was merely familiar, regardless of whether it was good. Familiarity wins surveys, but doesn't win design. I'm specifically thinking of stuff like psionics--and the need to stake a flag rather than trying to let a fractious and squabbling community determine which of the 7 different paths will be taken.

Once a core ethos has been established, it then needs a clear timetable. TONS of time got wasted during the D&D Next playtest. There need to be limits for how much time gets invested into various things. E.g. the Fighter cannot take a year and a half bouncing around between six ideas before it finally settles on something--if you want to test lots of ideas, awesome, but be ready to WORK HARD to test that much, because design time is VERY VERY finite, and a bunch of the stuff 5.5e had to fix was almost directly because of classes or subclasses getting rushed out the door because they ran out of time. Experimental stuff, really wild out-there ideas, can be saved for a supplemental book later--the focus has to be hard, sharp, continuous, and always moving forward.

Finally, hire a statistician and a survey designer. If you're going to be using surveys and doing statistics-based game design, have people on staff whose expertise is surveys, and separately, statistics. (Don't try to make one person do both, it won't go well.) I'm not saying either person needs to have some kind of technocratic veto power or whatever. I just think that you need someone on staff whose training and experience is in these two things, because they are essential for getting the task done and NOBODY on the Wizards staff is trained in this stuff. I genuinely went looking, long ago, into the educational history of WotC's employees. Of the ones I could find, three quarters were some variation of Communications, Journalism, Literature, etc.--and all BA, never BS. The closest I got to "math" was that I think one person had a BA in Philosophy, which should've included some classes in things like set theory and logic. Point being, if you're gonna design something that depends on a mathematical, and specifically statistical, structure...it's probably a good idea to at least have ONE person who knows how statistics work.

 

[Eubani]

we had more AoO in 3E for any movement past 5ft and multiple AoOs per round vi Combat reflexes feat, but it was deemed to complicated for us 5E players.

Yeah they need to stop making games for the lowest common denominator and trust players to handle more complexity we are not dimwits.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I mean, you could take some utility instead of offense, but that will hurt you in attacking department.

take two feats:
1. you learn 5 rituals from any class, when you level up, you can exchange one ritual for a new one. max level is half your character level, round up.
you cast rituals as 1 minute casting time.

2. add +1 to any damage dice roll of your spells

i mean, DnD's magic design has kind of created a system where you only really need a small handful of offensive spells to get you through all your combat situations and utility spells are so reliably efficient you don't actually need to dedicate casting mods to them like you do attacking spells, so you can just go all in on buffing your few damage spells and fill the rest of your spell list with utility and get the best of both, so no, i'd be drawing a line and say your either a damage caster or a utility one, pick a lane, because otherwise it just all ends up with casters being overpowered masters of all.