D&D 5E How Can D&D Next Win You Over?

[Crazy Jerome]

In addition to what Balesir said, to really win me over the design has to display a few characteristics:

• I'm convinced that the designers have a clear vision.
• The mechanics and flavor are unified in pursuit of that vision.
• The development is tested and works.
• The advice is congruent with the game produced.
• The examples, adventures, tools, etc. support it well.
• No obvious padding and bloat. (Options done well that I don't need but that other people want are not padding or bloat. They are options that I don't personally care about. But even these I want done well, for the sake of good craftmanship.)

Do all of that for even a slice of D&D that I care about, and we'll talk. Of course, given the stated goals of Next, it will have to be broader than a slice to meet the designers clear vision. But the point here is that if they, say, find out late that "plane hopping" doesn't really work for some reason, but other things do, I don't want to see some sloppy adventure pretending that plane hopping works. No used car salesman tactics.

I've reached the point where incoherent vision, sloppy design and development, covered up with a coat of paint just really isn't fun for me. it creates the same kind of reaction that I had hunting a house, when I went in to a particular "show house" in a neighborhood by one builder and saw that they had tried to cover up bad carpentry and sloppy wiring with inexpert trim, with slopped on paint. If it's so bad that a guy like me who tinkers with it but isn't a professional can see it at a glance, then what is under the walls that I can't see? Once I start asking that question, I really can't relax and enjoy a game entirely. I don't trust it.

So tl;dr: Make a game I can trust to be what it says it is.

 

[Dausuul]

• Easy to learn and play.
• Easy character generation which encourages concept over build. (In other words, I imagine the character I want, pick the options that support my concept, and don't have to worry about ending up with a weak or overpowered PC as a result.)
• Robust but easily understood rules for common situations.
• Simple, versatile tools to help the DM adjudicate oddball corner-case situations.
• Works well in low-magic settings with economic and social systems bearing a passing resemblance to historical reality. (It does not have to provide such a setting, but when I build one, I don't want to be fighting the rules every step of the way.)

Please note that I only require 5E to support all of the above. If that means picking modules X, Y, and Z, while disabling A, B, and C, that's fine. I do not demand that 5E mandate my style of play for everybody. It just has to do it well for me.

This is a stretch goal, but my ideal 5E would also be able to switch smoothly between what I'll call "skirmish mode" and "set-piece mode." The former is theater of the mind combat, fast-paced and loose, capable of resolution in 10-20 minutes; BD&D-style. The latter is the grand showdown, with battlemat and minis and all the tactical trimmings, possibly taking an hour or more to complete; 4E-style. I'm sure there will be modules to support both of these, and that's fine, but what I would really love would be if I could use them both in the same adventure. So the little fights would be skirmish mode--kill a few goblins, gank a sentry, et cetera--but for the big boss fights we would go to set-piece.

 

[Black Knight Irios]

I don't need to be won over.

I will buy the 3 core rules anyway because I want to see the new rules 1st hand. And its new and shiny.

This has been the case so far for 3.x and 4E. Because no edition so far has ever felt perfect, so testing the next edition never seemed like a bad idea.

The one thing that is absolutely mandatory to keep my group and me playing the new edition is: An even more streamlined combat resolution system than 4E had.

 

[WheresMyD20]

To begin with, D&D Next would have to fulfill its promise of letting me easily recreate the style of play from my favorite edition.

If things like at-will spellcasting and the character-engineering stuff (like having to deal with backgrounds, feats, themes, etc.) are hard-wired into the game system, then it's a non-starter.

 

[innerdude]

In addition to what Balesir said, to really win me over the design has to display a few characteristics: ....snip....

So tl;dr: Make a game I can trust to be what it says it is.

Somebody XP Jerome for me. That's a great statement--I want to trust a game to be what it says it is.

 

[Badapple]

Here's what I'd like to see:

I want at least one new character class in the core Player’s Handbook that has never been released before.

No matter what character class I play, I want some resources to manage and several meaningful options to choose from in a given round of combat.

I want monsters to be able to do nasty things to characters beyond hit point damage. I want to fight some monsters and be in genuine awe and surprise, and a little afraid, at what they can do.

I want all character classes to be relatively balanced and interact synergistically with each other in combat at all levels of play.

I want it to be easy to design and run adventures. I want to be able to completely wing it, let players make sweeping decisions, travel beyond preset corridors and whether my players square off against the Royal grand wizard, an emissary from another plane and his abyssal bodyguards, or the thieves’ guild I can say “Are you kidding me? Wow I never would have predicted this. Ok give me five minutes” and be able to set up virtually any battle or challenge that the story would dictate face the players and scale that battle to an appropriate challenge level from cakewalk to suicide mission.

Most of all I want something new. I don't want to go backwards and feel like I'm playing first edition again. I don’t want a game that is built on the foundation of a previous edition, any edition for that matter. I want a brand new game that is a new edition that completely stands on its own merits. I don’t want sacred cows. I want those cows turned into steaks and burgers and grilled and slathered with bbq sauce. I want a game that is not afraid to take some chances and anger some of it's fanbase in the hopes that the remaining players, and newcomers, will find it a better game than what has come before.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Most of all I want something new. I don't want to go backwards and feel like I'm playing first edition again. I don’t want a game that is built on the foundation of a previous edition, any edition for that matter. I want a brand new game that is a new edition that completely stands on its own merits. I don’t want sacred cows. I want those cows turned into steaks and burgers and grilled and slathered with bbq sauce. I want a game that is not afraid to take some chances and anger some of it's fanbase in the hopes that the remaining players, and newcomers, will find it a better game than what has come before.

In other words, you want D&D to not be D&D.

 

[Obryn]

Next has to be both different and good.

I don't look at editions of D&D as being improvements, per se, though I think that's often an element in their design. I look at them as entirely new games. 1e, 3e, and 4e are all completely different games that just happen to share similar tropes; 3e didn't replace 1e/2e, it just offered a different way to play. Ditto, 4e.

I want Next to do two things.

(1) Be good at stuff that no previous edition is good at. Give me a new way to play and enjoy D&D that I didn't have before.

(2) Do it well, and do it whole-heartedly. I don't want the kind of half-measures that we're seeing with a lot of the Next design - where the company is worrying more about "iconic" than "good."

I love the D&Disms and callbacks to the early days of the game - I've been playing since they were fairly new - but I'll be frank. If it's not AD&D 1e, I think a lot of those D&Disms are just pretending anyway.

(3) Be easy and quick to DM. Without this, I have zero interest.

If I want to run one sort of game, I have 4e. If I want to run another sort of game, I have 1e. I love both of these games, and I love both playing and running them. If Next doesn't let me play games that are fundamentally different from either, it will lose me out of the gate. If it tries to do what 1e or 4e did and isn't a substantial improvement, it will lose me.

So yeah. I think all this talk of "better" is divisive. I'd rather talk about "different."

-O

 

[Obryn]

And just to note, I'm not against it working with 4E stuff, it's just not on my priority list.

Frankly, 90% of WotC-published 4e adventures range from "bad" to "execrable", so even as a fan of 4e, I'm right there with you!

I even want to add to my list....

(4) Good published adventures that actually use the DMing advice in the DMG and which highlight the things the system is best at rather than shine a big spotlight on all their flaws. I like using published adventures for my first forays into a system, and the HPE series seemed specifically designed to drive people away from the game.

-O

 

[Nyronus]

As is Next looks like a fairly good game. Simple, straightforward. Somewhat iffy on a few points, but its still in beta, so there is always hope for a more polished final product. Its not something I can dislike on objective merit alone. This I won't deny.

That said... I see little hope of "winning me over" unless their "rules module" concept blows my goddamn mind, which none of the random hashing and preview material seems to indicate that it will. Before we even get into all of the little things which will more or less be instant turn offs for me, watered down fantasy GURPS stapled onto Castles and Crusades isn't my cup of tea, more or less.

Even if it was, we have to get past the fact that, while not objectively bad, Vancian Spellcasting has always been counter-intuitive for me, 3.x multiclassing IS an objective cluster- of Yog-Sothothian proportions, and all of the petty political B.S. that tempered the tone of the first four months of the game's life (Rarity rules to limp-wristedly single out Non-Tolkien fantasy as badwrong, hilarious anti-4e polling biases) will leave a bad taste in my mouth.

So, no, it probably won't win me over unless they do something to defy my expectations. I'll still play if offered and maybe even buy it, but I see little chance of this becoming my new BEST GAME EVER.