D&D 5E Live Q&A with D&D R&D

[Kobold Avenger]

I think a 30 minute short rest is ideal, 8 hours is fine for long. But natural healing during long rest I'd make it so the PC have to spend HD to heal, and limit the number of HD spent to heal during short rests down to 1 or 2.

 

[Nemio]

This cracked me up, definite flinches there. Trevor also said something at the end about (para-phrasing) not having much time to do another Q&A before products come out?

Haha, it's true.

Check their reactions at 1:05:10 and 1:09:12

 

[fjw70]

Haha, it's true.

Check their reactions at 1:05:10 and 1:09:12

That was an interesting comment and flinch. Are they going to spring a starter set on us with very little notice (e.g. 3-4 weeks)? Maybe a starter set could help launch the hype leading up to Gen Con. But probably not.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I think it's funny that Chris mentioned the DMG, and Mike flinched at that one. I can imagine Chris thought the inclusion of the three core was so obvious that it wasn't revealing anything, but Mike has carefully avoided giving us names and numbers for the core books.

 

[Gundark]

It sounds like that Mass Combat is going to be in the core rules. I found it interesting that they are treating units like characters. I had secretly hoped that it would look like the War Machine from BEMCI, although that should be easy to work in.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It sounds like that Mass Combat is going to be in the core rules. I found it interesting that they are treating units like characters. I had secretly hoped that it would look like the War Machine from BEMCI, although that should be easy to work in.

I imagine they are using a variant of the swarm rules from 4e.

SO I have 35 spearmen, and you have 18 mounted calvary, you crash into us, you make an attack roll and 'hit' the AC so you roll 1d8 damage. you roll a 5, so I loose 5 spearmen, then I roll a counter attack and 'hit' and roll 1d8 for damage and roll a 7 so you loose 7 calvary.

make it abstract not every guy you loose is killed, some are just hurt bad some are killed some flee or surrender.

 

[Li Shenron]

It sounds like that Mass Combat is going to be in the core rules. I found it interesting that they are treating units like characters. I had secretly hoped that it would look like the War Machine from BEMCI, although that should be easy to work in.

I also liked that War Machine mechanics very much, but honestly I don't think we really need them in core. Only a very few DMs ever run battles at the armies level, and with those rules your PCs are not exactly part of the battle but rather are those responsible for setting up armies and making large-scale tactical decisions, not exactly a regular feature of a D&D games.

Instead, they sometimes mentioned another set of rules, aimed at the somewhat intermediate case of the PCs fighting a large number of monsters, e.g. 20 orcs or 50 goblins, while still playing typical D&D adventures. I think this is much more useful that true mass battle rules, I'd rather have solid rules that allow me to handle those orcs or goblins in groups of 5 or 10, so that I don't have to roll 50 dice each turn, and still end up with results which are reasonably affected by how many monsters are there. The rules might be based indeed on swarms of previous editions.

Ideally, I'd like to have both in the core, but the second IMHO is much more frequently useful.

 

[Blackbrrd]

...Instead, they sometimes mentioned another set of rules, aimed at the somewhat intermediate case of the PCs fighting a large number of monsters, e.g. 20 orcs or 50 goblins, while still playing typical D&D adventures. I think this is much more useful that true mass battle rules...

Great post! Skirmishes with those type of numbers is just what I want for my game. Big battles with hundreds of participants just doesn't work too well in my opinion. Mostly due to large AoE spells.

 

[Li Shenron]

Big battles with hundreds of participants just doesn't work too well in my opinion. Mostly due to large AoE spells.

Yes, and I think those problems have never been investigated fully by game designers...

While it is reasonable that 100 goblins surrounding your party cannot all attack you in the same round (probably not even with ranged weapons), IIRC AoE spells have typically been assumed to work properly. But is it really? Most AoE damaging spells allow a Dex ST for less or no damage, and Dex ST generally benefits from cover. So why should the same Fireball really affect those 100 in the area normally, why can't some of those 100 benefit from the others around covering them for example?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes, and I think those problems have never been investigated fully by game designers...

While it is reasonable that 100 goblins surrounding your party cannot all attack you in the same round (probably not even with ranged weapons), IIRC AoE spells have typically been assumed to work properly. But is it really? Most AoE damaging spells allow a Dex ST for less or no damage, and Dex ST generally benefits from cover. So why should the same Fireball really affect those 100 in the area normally, why can't some of those 100 benefit from the others around covering them for example?

my example idea also works well with that, 5d6 damage would only remove 5d6 combatants form the fight...