7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?

When asked what he was working on, WotC's Chris Perkins revealed a couple of juicy tidbits. They're not much, but they're certainly tantalizing. Initially, he said that "Our marketing team has a big reveal in the works", and followed that up separately with "Right now I'm working on the next seven years of D&D stories". What all that might mean is anybody's guess, but it sounds like there are plans for D&D stretching into the foreseeable future! Thanks to Barantor for the scoop!

 

[Hussar]

Iosue - I'd agree 100% with all of that.

 

[Shasarak]

Fixing how?

The primary complaint about Healing Surges was that it made HP unbelievable. Characters could go through a fight, get wounded, and then six seconds later be entirely healed. It made HP unbelievable.

So, what is the difference here? You go through your fight, get wounded, spend Hit Dice (which require absolutely no in-game explanation) and you are back to full HP.

Other than you have lower numbers to play with, there's essentially no difference here.

Or, to put it another way, what is happening, in game, when someone spends Hit Dice and how is that different than spending Healing Surges?

I never really heard that complaint about Healing Surges.

The biggest problem I found was the percentage healing closely followed by limiting healing by the number of Healing Surges both of which are nicely solved by Hit Dice.

 

[pemerton]

Now you're just trying to make his head explode.

if that's what I did, it wasn't on purpose - I'm just trying to compare the play of the two systems!

While it would make sense to re-state a low-level standard vs a high level PC, it could also just be hand-waved, or tediously played through.

That's true, but I don't think that's what 4e defaults to (certainly not the tediously playing through - maybe the handwaving is truer to its spirit).

Maybe a skill check would be a better example?

Your example works for me, but I still want to say it tells us more about story than mechanics.

Because the default approach in 4e is that, when you've gained those 20 levels that turn a DC 21 lock from Hard to Easy, you won't be confronting the same lock anymore, at least not in the context of resolving any sort of meaningful challenge or crisis. Because you'll have progressed from the Heroic to the Epic tier, the things you confront are expected to be different. Even if you find yourself back in the same geographic location, the expectation is that something about that location will have changed to make it pose Epic rather than merely Heroic challenges.

Whereas I don't see the same expectation in 5e. It seems to me that in 5e characters grow in capability very dramatically, but the default assumption is that the world with which they engage doesn't change very much at all. Hence characters of double-digit levels still trouble themselves with orcs counted out on an individual basis (as opposed to as part of a horde or swarm, 4e-style).

It seems to me that when people say that bounded accuracy is different from 4e, it is this story feature that they are pointing to.

Now 4e could do that too, if you reskinned all the monsters as orcs and kobolds. Then the treadmill really would be a treadmill, and the level-based DCs would just look silly.

I also know that some people stripped the +0.5 per level off everything in 4e and ran it that way. I imagine that that provided an experience not too dissimilar to 5e (with stats and items picking up the slack of 5e's proficiency bonuses).

But stripping +0.5/level from everything isn't a mechanical change of any depth - the relevant maths (eg % chances of success) all remains the same. What it changes is the story, because now some of the things that are challenging you in combat are kobolds rather than (say) trolls and giants.

Am I making any sense?

 

[Hussar]

I never really heard that complaint about Healing Surges.

The biggest problem I found was the percentage healing closely followed by limiting healing by the number of Healing Surges both of which are nicely solved by Hit Dice.

Healing surges replace about 25% of your HP/surge, meaning you could replace your HP about 2-3 times/day, if you spent all your surges.

In 5e, you gain 1 HD/level. When you spend your HD, you gain that die plus con per die spent. IOW, on average, you can heal yourself 1/day, fully, by spending Hit Dice.

What problems are being solved here? Other than you got more healing in 4e than 5e, but then again, in 5e, you have a LOT more healing in the party - several classes can cast multiple healing spells per day. At the end of the day, it's pretty much a wash. Again, 5-8 expected encounters per adventuring day. Double the number that was expected in 3e. The pacing expectations are largely the same between 4e and 5e.

 

[pemerton]

I do think 5e owes a lot to 4e. They're both exception-based d20 systems with a strong math underlay. The difference is that 5e is presented much differently than 4e. 4e was finely tuned for a particular kind of play, and it was presented to encourage people to play that style. 5e, OTOH, loosens the tuning a bit, and encourages people to play whatever kind of style they want.

I agree that 5e is presented quite differently from 4e.

Turning to "encourage" - that is a word that can have multiple meanings. It can refer to a speech act - ie uttering (or, in this context, writing) words of encouragement.

And it can refer to a facilitative act - ie providing someone with the means to do something.

Obviously the twos sorts of acts can coincide, but also one can occur without the other.

My sense is that the jury is still out on the sort of play that 5e facilitates. For instance, I don't think the implications of the Inspiration mechanic have been fully explored at all (at least in public) - it's a huge new thing for D&D (it certainly wasn't part of 4e!, though perhaps it should have been) and I've seen hardly any discussion of it, to date, in terms of its contribution to the 5e play experience.

 

[Shasarak]

Healing surges replace about 25% of your HP/surge, meaning you could replace your HP about 2-3 times/day, if you spent all your surges.

In 5e, you gain 1 HD/level. When you spend your HD, you gain that die plus con per die spent. IOW, on average, you can heal yourself 1/day, fully, by spending Hit Dice.

What problems are being solved here? Other than you got more healing in 4e than 5e, but then again, in 5e, you have a LOT more healing in the party - several classes can cast multiple healing spells per day. At the end of the day, it's pretty much a wash. Again, 5-8 expected encounters per adventuring day. Double the number that was expected in 3e. The pacing expectations are largely the same between 4e and 5e.

The main problem with Healing Surges is that they heal a fixed percentage of your Hp (plus whatever bonus your Healer gives you of course) where as the random nature of Hit Dice gives you more of a feeling of being able to walk off some of the damage without totally negating the damage you have received.

And by taking healing off the arbitrary fixed daily cap you no longer have to worry about your healing potion not working after a couple of hard fights.

 

[billd91]

And by taking healing off the arbitrary fixed daily cap you no longer have to worry about your healing potion not working after a couple of hard fights.

That is one of my most welcome changes as far as PC-healing resources go. Running healing potions off a PC's own surges was one of the things that irritated me in 4e.

 

[pemerton]

I don't see how other games are relevant as they aren't claiming to be part of the "D&D tradition."

Some are. For instance, 3E claims to be part of the D&D tradition, though over time, as I learn more about and think more about in comparison to 1st ed AD&D and other classic versions of D&D, I find it to be a greater and greater departure from the core of those games.

I didn't mention OSR games, but obviously they claim to be part of the "D&D tradition".

And then there are OGL/SRD games, of which I mentioned one - Trailblazer - which obviously claims to be part of the D&D tradition, in much the same way as PF does.

A game like Rolemaster is also within the D&D tradition, thought it's a different (and perhaps now largely extinct) branch of the tradition - it has classes (like D&D) and a spell system based heavily on the D&D one, and is intended to appeal mostly to people who enjoy the basic fantasy tropes and outlook of D&D but want something different from (taking the RM perspective, the phrase would be "sophisticated than") D&D's mechanics (eg robust skill system, less strict class definitions, more nuanced and gritty combat - ie much of the stuff that Monte Cook brought to 3E).

In light of 3E it's easy to look back at a percentile system like RM and see it as obviously not D&D, but when RM was written (early 80s) D&D wasn't a d20 system. Thief skills used percentages, clerical turning used a d20 in AD&D but 2d6 in B/X, and Moldvay's examples of improvisation involved assigning percentage chances - [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION] will be able to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the idea of a stat test rolled on a d20 was introduced in the Expert rules rather than Basic.

And in view of ICE's TSR-style demise in the late 90s, and its current existence which is really at best a lingering on, it's easy to dismiss RM altogether - but in the late 80s ICE was the a big RPG company (on the back of its Middle Earth licence), with full-page ads on the cover or splash page of nearly every Dragon magazine (more info here).

Then there are systems which mechanically depart from D&D but set out to capture (and perhaps improve on) what was, for the designer, a key part of the D&D experience. Burning Wheel, for instance, references AD&D 2nd ed in its designer influences, and also references 4e in a more recent volume. And the designer (Luke Crane) is quite overt in explaining what features of D&D his sorcery system and Faith system are intended to emulate.

TL;DR - there are lots of games that have, in the present or the past, presented themselves as "alternative visions" of D&D. They haven't all created edition wars of the sort you're talking about, though.

D&D before 4E had a long, 34-year tradition, which many viewed it as breaking from.

I don't find the language of "breaking from tradition" very helpful, though. It is very normative, but on no very clear foundation.

For instance, 3E changed the rule that hit dice and CON bonus stopped at name level. It changed the rule that a wizard can't use a sword (s/he can, just with a -4 (?) to hit). Conversely, 4e harks back to Gygax's essays on the metaphysics and game-mechanics of hit points and saving throws.

All revisions to D&D involve changes. But classifying them into ones that break with tradition and ones that don't is fraught. Frankly, it strikes me as ex post projection onto the past.

Imagine if, instead of dropping 3.5 for 4E in 2008, they had instead come out with a separate line called D&D Empowered, or something like that, which was basically 4E.

It probably would have fizzled - at least, that's my guess. 4e was promoted as a core system, with all the market support that brings with it (organised play, DDI, etc).

Then they gradually taper 3.5 off for another couple years until them come out with the new edition, which resembles something akin to what 5E is, in 2011 or 2012. I'm not saying this is what I think they should have done, nor what I wish they would have done, just that it is an interesting thought experiment.

I can only assume that tapering 3.5 off was not feasible for them, because if it was they would have done it. It's not as if they weren't configured to produce 3.5 material!

And we did get something akin to 5e in 2011, namely, Essentials! The degree of kinship is of course a matter of contention - Essentials as a design somewhat falls between two stools, and it suffers further from non-design issues to do with how the content was put together and marketed. (About 3 books worth spread over 5 volumes.)

Everything about 5e's design suggests to me that WotC took seriously what it learned from its market reserach. And I agree with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] that they used the playtest very effectively to shape and manage, as well as respond to, consumer demands.

 

[Iosue]

I agree that 5e is presented quite differently from 4e.

Turning to "encourage" - that is a word that can have multiple meanings. It can refer to a speech act - ie uttering (or, in this context, writing) words of encouragement.

And it can refer to a facilitative act - ie providing someone with the means to do something.

Obviously the twos sorts of acts can coincide, but also one can occur without the other.

To clarify, then, I'm referring to both. The game facilitates a certain style of play, and the advice in the DMG, justifiably, encourages the game to be run that way -- the infamous "Get to the fun!" for example.

I think there's a lot of hidden "modularity" in 4e. Different ways to handle DC scaling, for example, and how that might affect the fiction. HP/HS modification to facilitate certain styles. Heck, short rest duration. I'm sure you can think of a number of more. But that wasn't really called out -- at least in the Core 3. Inherent bonuses, for example, should have been in DMG1, IMO.

My sense is that the jury is still out on the sort of play that 5e facilitates.

You crackin' wise, pemerton?

For instance, I don't think the implications of the Inspiration mechanic have been fully explored at all (at least in public) - it's a huge new thing for D&D (it certainly wasn't part of 4e!, though perhaps it should have been) and I've seen hardly any discussion of it, to date, in terms of its contribution to the 5e play experience.

Frankly, my impression is that default 5e essentially facilitates much the same kind of play that 4e facilitates: generally cinematic playstyle, going from encounter scene to encounter scene, facing level-appropriate encounters of varying difficulty, but even with difficult encounters it's easy to go down, but difficult to actually die, creating climatic fights that are suspenseful and interesting, but weighted just enough that the heroes triumph. Combat is much swingier at low levels, and 1st level characters in particular are somewhat fragile, compared to 4e, but on the whole much of the game plays like the above. If you're new to D&D, and don't really know what you want from the game, that's generally the kind of game you'll get.

But that's default. One can largely abandon or stretch the idea of level appropriate encounters and increase the lethality accordingly. Or even maintain using those encounter guidelines but reducing the available healing using variant rules to create a grittier game, if not quite a more lethal game. 5e makes an attempt to facilitate many kinds of play, at least to some degree.

 

[Shasarak]

The most obvious claim to the DnD tradition is how easily you can convert your character from one edition to the next.

Obviously the jury is still out about how closely 5e follows in that tradition.