D&D 5E Does anyone who got an mm at Gencon want to offer up spoilers to us?

[charlesearth]

Spoiler 0: The best thing, Hit Points of monsters is way jacked up over the last playtests. These monsters can take hits! My biggest playtest complaint was that monsters died too easily.

Spoiler 2: I was surprised at how different a monster's Hit Dice were from its Challenge Rating. For example: an Ogre is Challenge Rating 2, but has 7d10 Hit Dice. I guess since AC and Hit are flat, all the difficulty comes from the HP and Damage. There are monsters that have Hit Dice over 20. There are a bunch of monsters that have stat scores over 20 also.

I think WoTC seriously underestimated low level characters damage output. At level 3 almost every class can deal huge amounts of damage per turn, even if limited to a few times a day.

 

[pemerton]

Lore is interchangeable. If you don't like what they're doing with it, change it.

Sure. But this advice is equally applicable to [MENTION=11697]Shemeska[/MENTION]. And it is not relevant to WotC's decisions as to what lore to include.

It seems to me that wotc went through a lot of trouble to figure out what the majority of players preferred.
You may disagree with how they came to their conclusions, but if the 4e changes are in fact your preference in lore, sadly it looks like you're in the minority.

Why so? Succubi aren't demons. And Rakshasa come from the Hells (which is the plane they were associated with in 1st ed AD&D). It is Shemeska who is complaining about the 5e lore, not me.

I'd dare to say that most of the 4e players outside of those inclined to post to forums are largely unaware or indifferent to most the lore differences, whereas those lost players from other additions are more inclined to dislike or be confused by some of the greater changes.

If lost players from other editions are confused by lore changes, or dislike them, why would 4e players - who presumably are customers that WotC is hoping to retain, on the "bird in the hand" principle - not be confused by, or dislike, lore changes?

 

[Thaumaturge]

*cough-monster-sorter-cough*

http://mouseferatu.com/index.php/news/august-20-2014-another-dd-gift/

Check for yourself, my friend.

Whole categories of questions I don't have to answer!

And to the one who asked: it appears unicorns are, in fact, the lowest CR legendary creatures.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Tazawa]

*cough-monster-sorter-cough*

http://mouseferatu.com/index.php/news/august-20-2014-another-dd-gift/

Check for yourself, my friend.

Thank you very much! This answers so many questions I had.

Happy gaming!

 

[bogmad]

Sure. But this advice is equally applicable to @Shemeska. And it is not relevant to WotC's decisions as to what lore to include.

Why so? Succubi aren't demons. And Rakshasa come from the Hells (which is the plane they were associated with in 1st ed AD&D). It is Shemeska who is complaining about the 5e lore, not me.

If lost players from other editions are confused by lore changes, or dislike them, why would 4e players - who presumably are customers that WotC is hoping to retain, on the "bird in the hand" principle - not be confused by, or dislike, lore changes?

My point was, I think you're overestimating the degree that 4e players would dislike or be confused by the lore changes. Now, if you're saying they might be confused by the spell system or action economy I'd probably agree with you since I've seen that at the table with people I've played with who never played earlier editions.

Most 4e players haven't spent the time with the lore that older lapsed players have, nor are there as many of them with as strong opinions on lore [outside of forums!] as there are players of other editions.

Of course, that's only my opinion based on my small anecdotal sample size, and may not reflect other's (also-anecdotal) evidence

 

[pemerton]

My point was, I think you're overestimating the degree that 4e players would dislike or be confused by the lore changes.

<snip>

Most 4e players haven't spent the time with the lore that older lapsed players have, nor are there as many of them with as strong opinions on lore [outside of forums!] as there are players of other editions.

Fair enough.

For what it's worth, I think that older player forum-ites are probably more concerned with lore than older players more generally. Of the group I play with, all but 1 of the 6 of us has been playing since the early 80s. But I suspect that I'm the only one who even knows what plane a Rakshasa has come from in past editions, and for me the association was The Hells (from MM2), not Acheron (from Planescape).

I don't even know if my players noticed succubi moving from demons to devils - in my experience they tend to think of demons and devils as somewhat interchangeable bad guys, at least until some particular decision in play turns on the details of some particular NPC/monster's origin.

 

[Roger]

I'm not sure if there's any way to answer this without typing up the power, but I'll ask anyway: What does the shrieker's shriek actually do? If it's just sort of a handwaved "yeah monsters might show up in they're hanging around nearby" then that's fine.

 

[Thaumaturge]

I'm not sure if there's any way to answer this without typing up the power, but I'll ask anyway: What does the shrieker's shriek actually do? If it's just sort of a handwaved "yeah monsters might show up in they're hanging around nearby" then that's fine.

The shriek is audible for 300' and continues for 1d4 rounds. Repercussions seem left up to the DM.

Thaumaturge.

 

[TwoSix]

For what it's worth, I think that older player forum-ites are probably more concerned with lore than older players more generally. Of the group I play with, all but 1 of the 6 of us has been playing since the early 80s. But I suspect that I'm the only one who even knows what plane a Rakshasa has come from in past editions, and for me the association was The Hells (from MM2), not Acheron (from Planescape).

I think it's a big jump to say that the fact that most veteran players know "something" about the Great Wheel necessarily leads to "all 1e, 2e, and 3e material ever published for the planes must be respected."

There are some broad concepts in the Great Wheel that are pretty critical to the lore of D&D as a whole and should be respected. There's a plane for every alignment and for the in-between alignments. Devils live in the Nine Hells and are Lawful Evil. Demons live in the Abyss and are Chaotic Evil. Celestia is a big mountain with angels in it, and is Lawful Good. (Oh wait, angels are actually any good and live all over the place, and there's a different kind of angel that lives in Celestia. Because reasons.)

But other than that, none of the material is so evocative and memorable that it can't be retconned. The important thing is to preserve that which has made the most impression on the gestalt memory of D&D fandom as a whole. The origin of one particular race of supernatural baddies in a game with a hundred races of supernatural baddies is a concern only of comic-book level pedantry.

 

[gyor]

Looking at Mousefortu's monster sorter there is a celestial CR 4 creature, the Coutl, and a CR 5 Creature, a Unicorn!

I was expecting the Unicorn to be fey, not a celestial, is there any edition of d&d where the unicorn is a celestial instead of fey?