April 3rd, Rule of 3

[Dragonblade]

The part that DOES worry me is the mention of at-will magic. The ability to blast off a magic missile every round is very video-gamey, I'm not interested in that.

Honestly, the whole daily spell slot resource management mini-game has always felt more video-gamey to me. Its never made sense to me that a mage runs out of magic. I've hated it since 1e. It also causes lots of balance issues. Either you guessed correctly which spells to memorize and the rest of the party is useless. Or you guessed poorly and your caster PC is useless.

I think limited resource magic is ok for big boom spells and world/narrative affecting stuff, but casters should always have some basic magical stuff they can do, including some attacks. Casters should never have to pull out a crossbow.

 

[Ahnehnois]

A lot of dubious assertions in this one. Nothing damning, but I am likewise concerned about nonmagical healing, class balance, and a number of other principles mentioned that have the potential to derail a game.

 

[sheadunne]

This is the first article that has shied me away from 5e, even if only a little. As someone who loves the healer the idea of non-magical healing being standard is a little deflating. It's early yet, so maybe they'll figure out a way to make it work, in a way that doesn't make the cleric just another fighter. It was bad enough with cure wands (3x) and every other class getting as much healing (3x/4x), I don't want that trend carried over into 5e. Bring back the cleric as the primary healer with very very minor healing coming from elsewhere (maybe a con save during a short rest for 1d4 hp or something). I want to love the cleric again.

My pathfinder friends lean toward the 1 on the 1-10 scale for the amount of 4e they want in 5e. I'm on 3 or 4 list myself and it was nice to see a few of those items were in the article. I really hope they can make rituals work.

 

[RangerWickett]

You say video game. I say Harry Potter. Swish and flick, with no spell slots.

Or it's like Avatar: The Last Airbender, where you know a few magic tricks and can do them constantly.

Or it's like Magic: the Gathering. You might not be able to do the same thing over and over (since you can only have 4 of a given card per deck), but you're casting spells every turn.

 

[Knight Templar]

Honestly, the whole daily spell slot resource management mini-game has always felt more video-gamey to me. Its never made sense to me that a mage runs out of magic. I've hated it since 1e. It also causes lots of balance issues. Either you guessed correctly which spells to memorize and the rest of the party is useless. Or you guessed poorly and your caster PC is useless.

I think limited resource magic is ok for big boom spells and world/narrative affecting stuff, but casters should always have some basic magical stuff they can do, including some attacks. Casters should never have to pull out a crossbow.

You do have a point there, I've always preferred the spell-point rules. I actually very rarely use memorization as presented in the Core Rules because it logically doesn't make sense, but I usually have a variant that does the same thing. In my current campaign one of the ways a wizard can cast a spell (along with alchemy, diabolism, item creation, or anything else a creative player can come up with) is through Astral Runes.

An astral rune is tied to a specific alignment of stars and is good for a specific 24 hour period. Preparing an astral rune takes 10 minutes per spell level (as per memorization time in 2e) and takes the same amount of time to cast as the spell created. Thus, mechanically it is identical to standard spell-casting but thematically makes much more sense to me.

Vancian magic gives me something that, as a DM, I feel like I can work with. Pew-pew magic missile every round magic is something I'd just have to throw in the trash, and players get upset when they can't have something that's in the PHB.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I realize they said they'll get to the others later, but that sort of design philosophy I've seen in action before, it doesn't produce good results.

It's kind of a fair cop, right? 3e focused on the "core four," so we had a lot of classes that were "Like X, but sucks more."

But when you follow the logic, you see there's a few ways they can solve the problem.

So, why could no other class challenge the "core four" in 3e? Party balance -- nothing could, forex, heal remarkably better than the cleric, since the cleric was the "default healer."

4e's solution was roles -- now you can have many "default healers" -- clerics or runepriests or warlords or whatever.

What if 5e's solution is to house the roles in each character? So you don't need a "default healer class" -- ANYONE can be the default healer. Say, use the Heal skill to recover HP. So what if everyone fills all the default roles all on their own? You don't "need a Defender" or "need a Fighter," since your any character can distract opponents and boost their own AC for a turn if they want to. You don't "need a Striker," since every character gets a boost of damage.

You get class flexibility, you don't have any class design limitations (every character is functional out the gate), you retain teamwork elements (you can heal and defend and strike, but only one at a time, and if you're defending maybe someone else should heal you, and the other two should kill stuff), and you retain the "don't need a cleric" aspect of 4e (and to a certain extent earlier editions).

So in this way, starting with the core four isn't limiting. It's just a starting point. Get these working right, because they're the most important, and then get the other things to work right. You avoid the earlier pitfalls that occurred when starting with the core four.

This also meshes with what Rodney is saying about non-magical healing: everyone will be able to serve as a basic healer. Magical healing might be a bigger spike, but you never NEED someone to play a healer, since even a party consisting entirely of fighters and rogues can function just fine with the Heal skill (or somesuch).

 

[Knight Templar]

They should go back to subclasses. A ranger is a sub-class of fighter, they can do some things a fighter can't do but they also have some weaknesses a core fighter doesn't. I liked how in 2e every single class other than fighter, cleric, thief, and magic user was optional. I think that's the route they're going, 2e with no optional rules was actually an extremely simple game (far simpler than 1e, even simpler than the Rules Cyclopedia version of basic). However, there were a myriad of optional rules with which a DM could build his house rules and the game could be as complex as the group wanted it to be.

2E Rules!

 

[KidSnide]

They continue to realize my worst fears...

A laser focus on a "core game" built for the fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue team with only humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings as the races is a terrible way to go about the designing the game and building it to leave room for more race and class concepts. The "we'll just write the variant rules later" approach is not the way to build a modular game. If you want modularity and flexibility, the only way is to build in all the major modules and the needs of those modules into the game from the very beginning.

I don't think that's right. If you want modular add-ons to work right, you need to know what those add-ons could be and how they are supposed to fit in, but you can still experiment with a core without building out an iteration of every module for each iteration of the core.

The real problem is that it takes a lot of time to write a "whole game" and WotC doesn't have the resources to do that dozens of times. Instead, WotC says that it will concentrate on a core game and let folks playtest that before expanding to every other race and class. That seems like a great idea to me. This way, WotC has a chance to receive feedback on the core rules before they have invested so much in them. I think this greatly increases the chances that they will change the game based on playtester feedback.

Would I prefer playtesting a complete game? Sure. I just fear that, once a complete game has been written, there will be too much commitment to too the core assumptions of the game. I'd like a chance to playtest those core assumptions.

-KS

 

[BryonD]

The text in the OP sounds like really bad news.

The text in the actual article is so vague as to say almost nothing.

 

[Dausuul]

I really, really hope that Rodney is using "healing" loosely here. I like the ability to recover some resources after an encounter--I just dislike 4E's implementation. If the only choice is "Do it 4E-style, with no long-term injury and the word 'healing' plastered all over abilities that are clearly not healing," or "Do it 3E-style, with no resource recovery between fights unless you have a healbot along," I will be an unhappy camper. Can we please, please, please have some other option, like a wound/vit system?

So, why could no other class challenge the "core four" in 3e? Party balance -- nothing could, forex, heal remarkably better than the cleric, since the cleric was the "default healer."

Your premise is faulty. None of the "core four" in 3E was beyond challenging. The barbarian runs neck and neck with the fighter; the bard edges out the rogue; and none of them can lay a finger on the full casters. The druid is generally accepted as being on par with the cleric. Most folks view the wizard as being stronger than the sorceror, but it's by no means an "out of sight" comparison, especially at lower levels where Quicken Spell doesn't enter the equation.