Do you want anything new in D&DN?

[Li Shenron]

OK so this talk about D&D next is being driven (understandably) about unifying past editions and bringing in modularity.

Modularity is the means, unifying past editions is the purpose, and this is already a new approach... and the resulting system will be new, whether it succeeds or fails at the purpose.

I don't want anything else new just for the sake of new, if this means that the designers will be distracted from the purpose above. It's already terribly hard... designs resources must all be focused on getting the core right (to me it feels they have one shot).

After they get the core right, they can add whatever new shiny thing they want.

 

[Jawsh]

Since fighter powers has been brought up in this thread, I just want to point out that it wasn't entirely novel to 4th Edition. Fighter powers go back to Mike Mearls' work in The Book of Iron Might and Iron Heroes for Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press. A version of fighter powers also appeared in WotC's Book of Nine Swords.

Fighter powers addressed a very real concern among some players who liked having martial characters, but preferred the complexity, flexibility, and sheer power of casting classes. Unfortunately, what 4E did wrong, until Essentials, was fail to give any option for someone who just wanted to swing their sword and nothing else. Essentials solved the problem, but by then it was too late, and rules bloat had set in.

5E will probably incorporate exactly that lesson when it comes to the fighter, by having several tracks you can take as a fighter, of varying degrees of complexity.



As for totally novel concepts for Fifth Edition, you can probably find the seeds of them already in 4th edition products. An example might be the Vampire-style monster class, perhaps extended to various other monsters, and also to PC races, which also serves as a call-back to early D&D's race-as-class mechanic.

 

[harlokin]

The Book of Nine Swords was great.

 

[Nebulous]

Fighter powers addressed a very real concern among some players who liked having martial characters, but preferred the complexity, flexibility, and sheer power of casting classes. Unfortunately, what 4E did wrong, until Essentials, was fail to give any option for someone who just wanted to swing their sword and nothing else. Essentials solved the problem, but by then it was too late, and rules bloat had set in.


As for totally novel concepts for Fifth Edition, you can probably find the seeds of them already in 4th edition products. An example might be the Vampire-style monster class, perhaps extended to various other monsters, and also to PC races, which also serves as a call-back to early D&D's race-as-class mechanic.

am not familiar with Essentials. What are the fighter class builds sorta like? And i would LOVE to see racial leveling again. It worked then, it should work now.

 

[am181d]

I think that, for now at least, we should take WotC at their word that any innovations we see in 5th edition will be based around the concept of streamlining and synchronizing the rules and flavor of previous editions. I would not anticipate any radical changes (say, armor as DR -- as much as I'd be on board for that) but given that the game seems to be conceived as core rules + options, I would guess that we may some new OPTIONS work their way in sooner or later -- either at launch or in the months/years that follow.

 

[donair]

Just like other wants to be better