D&D 5E And now for something positive

[Rhenny]

VinylTap, nice post. I agree.

I don't even think we'll ever truly see the game in its cohesive, comprehensive form until they publish it. WotC is probably going to throw out option after option after option just to see how they play. They will save the complete game with all of its basic, standard and advanced parts for the launch. Through the playtest, WoTC will gain feedback that will inform their decisions (but ultimately they will make the decisions that best fit their concept of the final product). That's a good method for development. I also feel that the playtest itself will function as a teaser in a way so that many of us will be more interested in buying the final product.

At this point, the feel of the game (core mechanics, backgrounds, specializations, class development) is certainly improving. With every playtest package I've worked with, it is much easier to DM (even easier than 4e, which made great improvements in that domain).

It would be nice if we could see the numbers (and monsters) ironed out sooner rather than later, but I don't think they will really crunch numbers until they have finished designing all of the classes, feats, abilities, etc.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Yeah. I think it's a mistake to move away from the DC numbers used in the previous packets. Sure, increments of five are easy to work with, but they simply aren't granular enough for bounded accuracy.

I've caught this too—Moderate DCs seem a bit high—but I also find myself always reaching for DCs in increments of five when I need to pull a DC out of my ass. So if the math assumes that (and I'm not sure it actually does at this point), that feels like a big plus to me.

And if you want to treat skill checks like Dungeon World rolls, the increments of five look like they would work pretty well:

• Success = Full success, as usual.
• Failure = Partial success, the most likely outcome.
• Hazard = Proper failure.