D&D 5E Advanced D&D or "what to minimally fix in 5E?"

[Shardstone]

I'm not saying 5e races are all balanced perfectly.

What I am saying 5e doesn't support a race with +8 Strength +4 Con or gets 4 feats. That isn't 5e.

Oh yeah, ok, that makes more sense. I argue you could and it'd still be 5E, but it'd be something like "5E Demigod rules" etc etc.

 

[Steampunkette]

Whereas with third party material, it depends on whether or not another person knows about said material. Not everyone who knows about Level Up collects or has read its' 3pp material. So, I can now see where @W'rkncacnter is coming from.

However, having first person content such as the core books doesn't always mean a person is going to remember a particular fact such as the Tyrannized culture providing resistance as well. When you brought up how you can get a resistance from your heritage and another resistance from your culture, I made a Knowledge check and remembered the Desert Hierarch culture from MoAR: Complete. It didn't occur to me to look elsewhere after that. Nor did I know that I was going to start a discussion about first-party content vs. third-party content. For Level Up, I consider the works of @Steampunkette, @PJ Coffey and @Timespike to be just as good as first-party content. They did work to help produce Level Up after all, and their work does appear in the Gate Pass Gazette.

I would like to note my only work on the core of Level Up was playtesting monsters.

But I do appreciate the sentiment!

 

[Minigiant]

Oh yeah, ok, that makes more sense. I argue you could and it'd still be 5E, but it'd be something like "5E Demigod rules" etc etc.

Sure but again it would need new CR and check rules etc. A host of supplemental rules. And that pulls you out of 5e

 

[Shardstone]

Sure but again it would need new CR and check rules etc. A host of supplemental rules. And that pulls you out of 5e

I don't think so, you just need to say how things are adjusted to CR "Use harder challenges" doesn't make it less 5E.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No one can agree on what 5E is or where the line is that takes something "out" of 5E. Every person's opinion on the matter is going to be different.

Which is exactly the issue we have here. None of us know where the line is that turns something from "modded and fixed 5E" into "a new game".

 

[Lanefan]

About no magic item pricing.

Nope, you've banned it in your thesis statement.

"For a while now I've been frustrated by the lack of a product that enhancens and deepens 5E without shooting off and making a new game."

Making magic items commonly purchasable will drastically change the game, setting different expectations about monster math and character advancement math.

The addition of a magic-item price list does not necessarily mean or imply that said items will be or become "commonly purchasable". 3e and 4e had them commonly purchasable, sure; but 1e did not and yet still had a fairly comprehensive (for its time) price guide in the DMG....which, by the way, is exactly where said price guide should be kept: it should not be player-side accessible.

The primary benefit of item pricing for me as both player and DM is that it allows for party treasury division to be made more fair and equitable between the characters.

 

[Vaalingrade]

No one can agree on what 5E is or where the line is that takes something "out" of 5E. Every person's opinion on the matter is going to be different.

Which is exactly the issue we have here. None of us know where the line is that turns something from "modded and fixed 5E" into "a new game".

It's kind of weird that the orthodoxy of 'This is D&D' has now focused down to 'This is 5e'.

 

[Shardstone]

No one can agree on what 5E is or where the line is that takes something "out" of 5E. Every person's opinion on the matter is going to be different.

Which is exactly the issue we have here. None of us know where the line is that turns something from "modded and fixed 5E" into "a new game".

IMO the question doesn't even matter. D&D is a completely different experience using the same rules but different DM. I have had radically different experiences, from political thrillers to meat grinders to dungeon crawling, all using base 5E and all using no rules modifications. I honestly think a very vocal part of the playerbase is obsessed with this "IT doesn't feel like D&D!" argument and it reeks of them trying to enforce their will on others.

 

[Lanefan]

You miss my point.

I don't want a new game. I want to play 5E with added options.

Fair enough.

Keep in mind, however, that adding those options (no matter what they are, with one exception noted below) will very likely have knock-on effects the fixing of which would require a deeper delve into the existing game structure. It's a drawback of unified rather than subsystem-based design: you can't change or augment one thing without affecting other things.

Your proposal of a second go-round of sub-classes at 12th level, for example. Sounds simple at first read, until you consider the knock-ons: you now have to rewrite and rebalance pretty much every sub-class the game already has in light of the new ones you'd have to invent; and that opens up a Pandora's box. Do the new/revised sub-classes need or force a tweak to the resting rules? Do the new/revised sub-classes need or force a review of the root classes? Do the new/revised sub-classes make high-level characters more powerful overall, thus forcing a reworking of higher-grade monsters and foes to allow them to keep up? Etc.

The exception is magic item pricing in that, being a discrete standalone subsystem, it doesn't really touch anything else in the mechanics and thus can probably be added in without much fuss.

 

[Lanefan]

The issue here is that 5e also retains players.

Now that's an interesting question: does 5e in fact retain a lot of its players, or is WotC simply very good at drawing in new players to replace those who are cycling out?

In the early 80s lots of people played 1e for a while and then cycled out; and the mid-80s dropoff showed that TSR at the time wasn't all that good at bringing in new players to replace those who had left. WotC seem to have found the magic sauce here, though whether by good luck or good work who can tell.