First Impressions?

[Kelvor Ravenstar]

I like the inclusion of Combat, Habitat and Society, and Legends and Lore with the monster entries, but I dislike the formatting of the monster stat blocks. Its very much a return to 3e style monsters, with special abilities separated from the stat block, and a few of the monsters using the spells from the rules.

The character sheets are alright for showing you wear they got each piece of the character, but for actual play I think they're going to be less useful. For instance, the rogue's thieflike skills are on the second page, since they come from his scheme.

 

[YRUSirius]

On page 4 of how to play it says your hp are your con score plus your hit dice roll or your con bonus (whichever is higher)

You're talking about the total hit points. I'm talking about the hit dice.

-YRUSirius

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I absolutely love the 'Intoxicated' condition, if you haven't read it..

 

[Raith5]

I like the feel of the monsters, equipment, the skills information (forbidden lore FTW!)

But I think it going to take me awhile to get used to spells. I am just used to seeing casters roll their attacks.

The fighter looks an 4th ed essentials fighter - which I am not sure sure is a good thing!

Not sure about advantage or hit dice

 

[Ainamacar]

Oh and the rules about rolling hit points and your Constitution - sounds like a really neat trick on paper, but screws high hit die classes? I can't decide.

I really like this part, it's a good compromise between 4e and earlier editions. And using the averages will be dirt simple for anyone who hates rolling. I'd even let different players in the same campaign choose what they do at character creation.

I don't think it will screw the high HD classes. At 20th level (chosen only to be illustrative) a 10 Con character rolling a d6 will average 80 hp, but would average 130 hp if he had 20 Con instead. If that same character were a d10 class he would average 120 hp and 170 hp, respectively. Those are numbers I can live with. I'll probably take a look at the confidence intervals later, to see what profoundly lucky or unlucky rolls would do, and how often we could expect to see them.

I misread the rules in my haste, and calculated the wrong thing. For the 20 Con characters the correct values are 123.3bar and 150, and the lower HD creatures do in fact gain more, both in terms of total additional hp from high the same high Con score, and from an even larger than before percent increase of their total hp. These also make it more difficult to use the averages instead, since they will not, in general, be an integer or half integer.

Thanks to Szatany for pointing this out.

 

[Raith5]

You're talking about the total hit points. I'm talking about the hit dice.

-YRUSirius

Ah. Good question. Maybe you spotted an error.

 

[YRUSirius]

Btw no boxes for 8th and 9th level spells on the character sheets.

-YRUSirius

 

[Reaper Steve]

I'm glad to see people have the Packet. The email I received with the link to download it instead takes me to the custhelp page. I wonder what went wrong and more importantly, how long it will take to fix. They don't start taking phone calls for another hour.

 

[Daztur]

And Command has been returned to its rightful state. All is well with the world.

Seriously, I'm loving the number of no-roll things, little bits of awesome that you can just DO without having to roll a damn d20 for them, stuff like dwarves being immune to poison end of story. As much as I love 1ed having the dwarf poison bonus be equal to Con score / 3.5 is a bit insane. I'll take that over a +2 bonus to in X situation any day of the ing week.

 

[Daztur]

How to get file:
Go to the customer service tab that says My Stuff, then go back to the search thingie and search for D&D next playtest and then it shows up.