ExploderWizard
Hero
Don't forget:
Bugbear chief-he fights as an ogre
Kobold chief- he is so powerful that he fights with a battle axe!!
Goblin leader (HD 3) and three guards
Cave B Orc leader-fights as a 4 HD monster and has 15 hit points.
I love B2
D&D 5E Another Critical Hits 5E Report
Don't forget:
Bugbear chief-he fights as an ogre
Kobold chief- he is so powerful that he fights with a battle axe!!
Goblin leader (HD 3) and three guards
Cave B Orc leader-fights as a 4 HD monster and has 15 hit points.
I love B2
Alphastream
Adventurer
It depends though, right? We've all seen hour long boss battles that were anti-climactic.
Not being able to share my own experiences, I'll guess that Mike had fun with that battle. If it had not been a positive he likely wouldn't have written it the way he did (which suggested this was a strong benefit).
It depends. I recall many 3E Living Greyhawk high level combats that seemed to be awesome/deadly and then PC spellcasters won initiative and it was over. Preventing that took a lot of work (and could be lots of fun when done right). While 4E combat is generally longer, it varies a fair bit. Most Living Forgotten organized play adventures have 3 combats and several other encounters and the whole adventure runs in 4 hours. That's actually the same structure and duration as most 3E Living Greyhawk adventures.
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Alphastream
Adventurer
A person can only make a best guess given what they see. Me? I believe every edition ends up with broken cheese if you add enough rules. But that doesn't mean the core of a game can't give you great feelings about balance. I like many things about Shadowrun (any edition) but I wouldn't say that the forte is balance nor that any edition has achieved great balance. When spirits can't be hurt by normal weapons... Similarly, Legend of the Five Rings 3rd edition had serious flaws in balance in the basic book. If I look at 4E, balance was one of its really strong aspects... though later releases (notably Adventure Vault) would change that. Again, we can make predictions based on what we see. They may not be right, but they can be informed.
When looking at Mike's comments on balance, keep in mind that very few people see Epic play in any edition. He has really good experience with 4E high level play. He wrote a book about running Epic what, more than a year ago? He has a pretty good feel for the balance issues that took place and his perspective is probably one of looking to see whether the edition points to future balance. While some people think Epic runs fine, many see issues and are unsure of how to preserve the balance. Mike regularly hears from people asking for his advice for dealing with this. His suggestions that D&D Next has positives in this regards... I am very sure he's speaking to that rather than insulting anyone for having a powerful PC. Is Mike right? I doubt the designers of any RPG truly know if their game will be balanced at the highest levels of play. But that's his first take and not an attempt to slam the game he loves to play or to slam 4E players. I've met Mike - he's a very nice person.
As for 5 minutes, I've seen level 1 4E PCs take down a 180 HP elite in a surprise round and before the foe acted. I think Mike is speaking less to alpha striking, though, and more to a cinematic combat at low level. What was taking place? You will have to playtest to see. The only thing I can say as a playtester is A) be a part of the process and B) that everyone at my playtest tables has had a lot of fun.
An NDA is an agreement not to disclose, meaning not to share what isn't known. If something is publicly known to be true, then you can state that you also saw this. Technically you can't actually even say you playtested unless that is public knowledge. Example: In the seminars they discussed a flatter progression and featuring attributes. Greg Bilsland shared pictures of Mike Shea playing. This allows Mike to say he playtested and liked how attributes and flatter progression worked. I think Mike took great care not to exceed the NDA. I'm guessing he actually looked at the disclosed information carefully and then spoke to that.
You know what makes exactly zero math sense to me? Assuming that 5e DCs have anything to do with pre-5e DCs. I can think of dozens of ways you could set DCs or determine attribute modifiers, but we don't know (yet) how they work in this game.
Looking through the thread, I'm pretty sure that there are many people who have decided that they are not going to like 5e no matter what. We know almost nothing beyond some basic design goals and principles, all of which are subject to change, but already people are pointing out how flawed the game is going to be.
Maybe the game will be terrible. Maybe it will be brilliant. Probably it will be somewhere in between. But can we PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF PELOR judge it on its own merits instead of seeing if we can make this Edition War even more divisive than the previous ones?
Sammael
Adventurer
First of all, if you only judge my opinion of 5E through the prism of this thread alone, you are missing the fact that I was very positive about it until the last seminar transcript and the playtest reports started appearing.
Second, it has been confirmed by WotC that the current mechanic is d20 + modifiers vs DC. Now, how the DC is set is not relevant to my complaint. DCs can be completely arbitrary.
We know from the example that Str 15 auto-succeeds on a DC 13 Str check. This can mean three things:
(1) If your ability is higher or equal to the DC, you automatically succeed and the d20 + mods math be damned
(2) You ability modifier for Str 15 is at least +3, and possibly +5. When you take 10, your result is obviously higher or equal to the DC, so you succeed.
(3) You ability modifier for Str 15 is lower, but you no longer take 10 when making checks - you take 12, or 15, or whatever. This is the least likely option.
All three are completely and equally unacceptable to me.
My thoughts:
1. The skill thing could work. Just make a 15 strength a +15 to strength checks. Easy as pie. And it wouldn't cause any meaningful problems that I can think of. It probably should have been done a long time ago. In fact, ability scores probably SHOULD have been dropped down by 10 points, and THEN unified with ability score bonuses. Its ridiculous to have a stat that's really just a seed value for a different stat that does all the heavy lifting.
2. We've had it confirmed by a playtester that a fully healthy PC can be killed all the way dead in a single critical hit. So, bear that in mind as a reference when thinking about the ogre with the slit throat, or the dead paladin.
3. Critical hits that kill fully healthy PCs are probably deal breakers for me. If combat is supposed to be so dangerous that a single crit can kill my PC, then one of two things need to happen. Either the game needs to be non story based, and revolve around disposable characters so that I don't care when they die... or else the game has to be designed such that actual combat almost never happens because the PCs have the tools and inclination to avoid it. I don't for a minute believe that 5e will feature either of these- D&D has been about killing monsters in creative ways for far too long for it to completely reverse course now. More likely this is being included to satisfy those who feel that the potential for death-by-random-number-generation is crucial to their sense of danger in combat. My interests are diametrically opposed to these.
4. 10 foot poles aren't necessarily a deal breaker, but they're a warning sign. I'm not a fan of gotcha games. Hopefully the game will have some clear instructions for DMs on how to use these game elements well. If you put in just one random, unmarked door that HIDEOUSLY PUNISHES the PCs because they forgot to do a door-check routine, you're training your players that in your game they have to do this on every door, always. That gets old fast.
5. When 3e came out, I was able to very easily, very quickly recognize things that 3e would let me do that my previous D&D edition did not. This really excited me. The same was true of 4e. Even just by looking at the leaked 4e character sheets, I could see character concepts and ways of playing that didn't exist under previous editions, or which were supposed to exist... but didn't really exist as viable choices. In both cases this was the major selling point for me. The implicit, "Look at this edition! It lets you do NEW THINGS! Things you couldn't do before! Things that the rules promised but prevented you from doing! Things you always wanted to do! Things you didn't want to do because you never thought of, but now you can!"
I'm not getting that yet from the promotional material for 5e. At least from a marketing perspective, they seem to be aiming it much towards a message like, "Remember all that stuff you USED to do? You can do it again, now with a living, actively supported game!" That marketing strategy isn't going to work on me. In fact, its a bit counter productive. I don't LIKE the tropes of Dungeons and Dragons. The thing I'm most proud of as a DM is my ability to get past those and craft a coherent world and a coherent story. So shout-outs to these things just make me unhappy.
I expect new editions to have things like cleaned up math. So while I'm happy for a sensible skill system, and I'm happy for a flatter math progression, and I'm REALLY happy for the brutal, unmourned death of the +1 sword, I need to hear about what this edition will do for me that other editions won't.
1. The skill thing could work. Just make a 15 strength a +15 to strength checks. Easy as pie. And it wouldn't cause any meaningful problems that I can think of. It probably should have been done a long time ago. In fact, ability scores probably SHOULD have been dropped down by 10 points, and THEN unified with ability score bonuses. Its ridiculous to have a stat that's really just a seed value for a different stat that does all the heavy lifting.
2. We've had it confirmed by a playtester that a fully healthy PC can be killed all the way dead in a single critical hit. So, bear that in mind as a reference when thinking about the ogre with the slit throat, or the dead paladin.
3. Critical hits that kill fully healthy PCs are probably deal breakers for me. If combat is supposed to be so dangerous that a single crit can kill my PC, then one of two things need to happen. Either the game needs to be non story based, and revolve around disposable characters so that I don't care when they die... or else the game has to be designed such that actual combat almost never happens because the PCs have the tools and inclination to avoid it. I don't for a minute believe that 5e will feature either of these- D&D has been about killing monsters in creative ways for far too long for it to completely reverse course now. More likely this is being included to satisfy those who feel that the potential for death-by-random-number-generation is crucial to their sense of danger in combat. My interests are diametrically opposed to these.
4. 10 foot poles aren't necessarily a deal breaker, but they're a warning sign. I'm not a fan of gotcha games. Hopefully the game will have some clear instructions for DMs on how to use these game elements well. If you put in just one random, unmarked door that HIDEOUSLY PUNISHES the PCs because they forgot to do a door-check routine, you're training your players that in your game they have to do this on every door, always. That gets old fast.
5. When 3e came out, I was able to very easily, very quickly recognize things that 3e would let me do that my previous D&D edition did not. This really excited me. The same was true of 4e. Even just by looking at the leaked 4e character sheets, I could see character concepts and ways of playing that didn't exist under previous editions, or which were supposed to exist... but didn't really exist as viable choices. In both cases this was the major selling point for me. The implicit, "Look at this edition! It lets you do NEW THINGS! Things you couldn't do before! Things that the rules promised but prevented you from doing! Things you always wanted to do! Things you didn't want to do because you never thought of, but now you can!"
I'm not getting that yet from the promotional material for 5e. At least from a marketing perspective, they seem to be aiming it much towards a message like, "Remember all that stuff you USED to do? You can do it again, now with a living, actively supported game!" That marketing strategy isn't going to work on me. In fact, its a bit counter productive. I don't LIKE the tropes of Dungeons and Dragons. The thing I'm most proud of as a DM is my ability to get past those and craft a coherent world and a coherent story. So shout-outs to these things just make me unhappy.
I expect new editions to have things like cleaned up math. So while I'm happy for a sensible skill system, and I'm happy for a flatter math progression, and I'm REALLY happy for the brutal, unmourned death of the +1 sword, I need to hear about what this edition will do for me that other editions won't.
It seems that in 5e, the worst class to play, ever, is Paladin.
FitzTheRuke
Legend
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From Mike Shea's article:
... this annoys me, as does the statement "Both (groups) returned to the Keep bloodied, battered, and with a long shopping list of door-spikes, rope, poles, and crossbows."
It sounds less like 4e player entitlement, and more that WotC provided a pregen character sheet without basic equipment. (I mean, really, every adventurer should at least have rope. Door spikes, I've always thought, are pretty stupid.)
... this annoys me, as does the statement "Both (groups) returned to the Keep bloodied, battered, and with a long shopping list of door-spikes, rope, poles, and crossbows."
It sounds less like 4e player entitlement, and more that WotC provided a pregen character sheet without basic equipment. (I mean, really, every adventurer should at least have rope. Door spikes, I've always thought, are pretty stupid.)
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