• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

Essentials and the future of D&D

Didn't one of the editions of Neverwinter Nights support a DM? Even if not, the forst one definitely had a create your own adventure aspect that at least tended in the direction of moving the table-top experience online.
Neverwinter Nights 1 supported on the fly DM tools, never tried them myself but I do know some people in the forums did use it that way.

NWN2 mod tools were full blown 3d modelling toolset and not for casual use.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

5th edition:

Mages are as awesome and versatile as they were in 3rd edition, yet still balanced with everyone else and every other class is still fun to play. The ultimate balance is reached and everyone who loved 3rd for 3rd and 4th for 4th unites in the great gamer revolution.

Consequently they bring back kender as a main PHB race much to the chagrin of DMS worldwide.

It's funny, but I never wanted to play as a mage/wizard all through AD&D 2e and 3e; perhaps it's because I only played computer versions of D&D, and didn't know the fun that could be had with mages. Anyway, I always viewed mages as blaster/bomber types--a sort of fantasy demolition expert. I preferred the paladin class (my handle comes from Baldur's Gate 2), because they seemed like the classic picture of the hero.

But 4e changed that with one addition to the wizard class: the cantrip Prestidigitation. This was a small addition of flavor that captured my attention, and for the first time I saw the D&D wizard as something akin to what a wizard is in popular folklore, and something I wanted to try out.
 



But not as something that could be done whenever the wizard wanted.

In 2e, it sucked because you gave up Magic missile to do this. Still, 1st-level slots weren't exactly a hoarded resource after about 3rd level.

In 3e, my arcane casters weren't using their 0-level slots for anything effective anyway, so they might as well use Prestidigitation.

So, if you were a super-conservative player who never wanted to spend even your most expendable resources in any way that wasn't directly contributing to party success in challenges, yeah, Prestidigitation was probably too much cost for too little benefit.

But in every 3e game I played at least (2e never made it to high enough level to matter), it might as well have been free.

Still, for those conservative players, putting it in its own silo is a gooooood idea. :) I'm just making the point that the effect has always existed, and always been very cheap (though, yes, not free like the 4e version), so if you that was the one thing keeping from being a folklore-flavored wizard, you may have been limiting yourself, rather than having the system limit you.
 

Cantrip (2e's Prestidigitation) also lasted 1 hour per level, meaning by the time 1st level spells weren't an all-valuable resource, (5th-6th level), 1 cantrip spell lasted 5-6 hours! That is an awful lot of cheap parlor tricks a 2e mage could do!
 


So here would be my timeline:

2012-13 - revised core rulebooks
2015ish - 5th edition
2020-2030 - rapid developments in virtual technology and aging of Gen-Xers leads to steep decline of tabletop RPGs.
2025ish - 6th edition - the first entirely non-paper D&D (perhaps to coincide with the 50th anniversary in 2024?).
2050 - the Singularity finally occurs and 95% of the population downloads into computers; a few stray luddites and old school gamers remain, clutching their dice bags into the grave.

2187 - A fad for old-school tabletop gaming causes a resurgence of the D&D brand. Of course all the people who play the game now are robots. The subsequent edition wars are quite lethal, and render what remains of earth a radioactive husk.
2306 - A small group of roving mutants discovers a copy of Gamma World and decides it must be a lost scripture of ancient prophecy.
 

2014 - Pathfinder 2e drops the OGL, and the new edition moves away from swingy combat and resource management. It sells nearly ten thousand copies and becomes the dominant game on nearly two message boards, prompting Pathfinder fans to declare their 5th straight year of victories over D&D in the RPG market.

This totally made me LOL :D
 


Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top