D&D 5E D&D Next playtest post mortem by Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson. From seven years ago.

[billd91]

I am 100% behind 5.5/1D&D makeing attacks all based on ANY stat you would like.

I am 100% not. It undermines the trade-offs made when meaningful choices are distributed among multiple attributes. D&D does not need more tendency toward SAD characters.

 

[Ancalagon]

again this is where the warlock is so brilliant. You can defualt to eldritch blast (that is really just different flavor of 'i swing my sword' but you have a few big things that you can pull out when you want to.

I think the warlock is even better when you are allowed to re-flavor it. My last warlock was ROBO the friendly space probe! Eldritch blast? Death ray. Sickening Radiance? Nuclear Core ejection. Fly? small rocket boosters. etc etc etc. I was playing a warlock, yet it felt different

 

[James Gasik]

I think the warlock is even better when you are allowed to re-flavor it. My last warlock was ROBO the friendly space probe! Eldritch blast? Death ray. Sickening Radiance? Nuclear Core ejection. Fly? small rocket boosters. etc etc etc. I was playing a warlock, yet it felt different

Ironically, 3.5 Warforged Warlocks were fun and popular flavor.

 

[glass]

Wow, long thread. Wall of quotes incoming....

1) Our own personal biases of what we individually think D&D is when it is the best colors our reactions to anything else that might be proposed. Is something really bad when it is presented, or is it just that what we personally think is A+ D&D makes it seem like what was proposed is bad... even though what we think is A+ D&D is not something most other players agree with.

Of course they do. Just as true for Mearls and co as the rest of us.

No one wants to play a wizard,

Wait, what? Lots of people want to play a wizard. I want to play a wizard (and have done, many times).

Magic is magic seems like a pretty core feature of D&D. Throw is out and you have a weird superhero game.

Not sure when anyone said magic should not be magic, but anyway D&D is already a "weird superhero game", and that's great!

"I've just be run through with a dozen sword-cuts, but I' just need to pull myself together, and be instantly as good as new".

If a human has been "run through with a dozen sword cuts" they are almost certainly dead (or at least they are close to it, and not recovering without serious medical attention). Fortunately, that does not happen in D&D until you run out of hp.

It's [simple and complex character of the same niche] not a difficult thing for the developers to balance.

I would say it is difficult to balance, but not impossible. And if the designers are not going to do the hard things, what are we paying them for?

Listening to what the majority wants and feedback from playtests is not a cop out

That would require knowing what the majority wants, which in turn would require actual worthwhile surveys rather than useless push-polls.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I am 100% not. It undermines the trade-offs made when meaningful choices are distributed among multiple attributes. D&D does not need more tendency toward SAD characters.

the trade off is punishing a smart wise charismatic fighter over a stronger dumb one...

 

[Jaeger]

I'm of the opinion that 4E and 5E have unnecessarily high HP counts. I think that if every PC had hit points within a range of like 20 to 35 for the entirety of their careers it would make creating balanced challenges easier. Granted, this would need to be coupled with reworked rules for hitting 0 HP and dying... but I'd rather that then trying to grind down PCs that have 100 HP or more every fight. But that's just my feeling on the matter and I know is not close to being a widespread opinion.

So, no growth in HP, no growth in damage, no growth in AC, no growth in features, no growth in skills...

It sounds like you want people to play 1st level characters from the word "go" until the campaign ends. What's the point of that?

Huh. So when I said "I think that if every PC had hit points within a range of like 20 to 35"... you read this not as referring to hit points, but rather referring to hit points, damage, AC, features, and skills. Interesting. I wonder what other posts I have made in the past that apparently had more buried in them than the actual words I used.

I assumed, given you did not mention anything else, that you didn't want to add any growth not present in 5e currently. Which, yes, means essentially no growth (3, perhaps 4 points at most) in AC and a bunch of other things besides.

The designers specifically and explicitly said that HP and damage growth were intended to be one of the only forms of statistical growth in 5e. If you remove that, what is left? Skills. Perhaps features (though, frankly, unless you have spellcasting, most of those features suck.) That's about it. Hence why I said what I said.

I find this exchange interesting in that level up = HP Bloat seems ingrained in the mentality of many D&D players and GM's so much so that they do not mentally separate increasing HP from character advancement.

DEFCON 1's HP bloat solution is nothing more than the static HP model used by Runequest and many other RPG's. And it is a solution that works very well. 5e's bounded accuracy is tailor made for a mod like this. Skills and features are the Primary modes of advancement in other RPG's.

The features (feats/class abilities) in 5e actually do get good if you have fixed PC hp in the 20 to 35 range. Right now all they do is keep the PC on par with their level appropriate HP bloated monsters. 5e's main issue is that they made the traditional attack bonus and skill point advancement tied to the same number. When both of those things used to be one of the primary ways classes were differentiated from each other.

Separate out attack bonus per class, and dole out skill points as a PC levels up - BooM - the issue is solved. And those would not be game breaking hacks to implement...

If every PC has a lower and narrower band of hit points... you can look at any creature and their average damage for each attack and know at a glance "this one will need to hit probably four times against any PC to knock them out" and "that one can one-shot any and all of the PCs with a solid damage roll". And that's when armor class and higher defenses and the like come more into play.

This is how most every other RPG not D&D works. It is much easier to eyeball 'encounters' when PC HP is essentially a static number. HP Bloat is the main reason why WotC D&D has always had scaling issues at high levels.

DnDone could solve a lot of High level play and CR scaling issues simply by going back and adopting the 1-2e AD&D solution: stopping HP Bloat around the 8-10 level range with the rest of advancement occurring as normal.

However, Level = Moar HP is so ingrained into what WotC D&D has become that it will not only never happen - Such a solution will not even occur to the designers or play testers...

I mean, I see new (and by new I mean “have only played 5e”) players complain all the time that D&D has so many books!

Part of the problem there IMHO, is that WotC does everything as shiny hardback releases when in reality most of those books are Adventures and Settings most tables have no need or interest in...

There aren't actually that many "game" books, but a newbie just looking at the shelf just see's a bunch of hardbacks that all look alike at first glance.

 

[Oofta]

...That would require knowing what the majority wants, which in turn would require actual worthwhile surveys rather than useless push-polls.

Why do people insist that WOTC doesn't know what they're doing? They made some decisions you don't agree with, that doesn't make them incompetent.

 

[Oofta]

the trade off is punishing a smart wise charismatic fighter over a stronger dumb one...

You can have a reasonably charismatic fighter if you want, nothing is stopping you.

Meanwhile I think using charisma to attack is just throwing what charisma means out the window.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Why do people insist that WOTC doesn't know what they're doing? They made some decisions you don't agree with, that doesn't make them incompetent.

we just point out that they do not have a prefect track record and that they make mistakes

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You can have a reasonably charismatic fighter if you want, nothing is stopping you.

Meanwhile I think using charisma to attack is just throwing what charisma means out the window.

I guess you never saw a Hexblade then