Mearls New Campaign

[Scribble]

You could even eliminate race as an option and assume everyone is human in the base game. Races get added in the next layer of complexity.

Yep.

Or races are mostly fluff and/or background/social related rather than affecting the primary class functions.

For a really wacky variant, everyone starts genetically human, but the class you take can change you. Elves aren't elves because they are born that way. Elves are humans that mixed fighting and spellcasting. You'd need to come up with parallel rationales for dwarves and halflings. (If you run around in bare feet, you wear out a lot of your height? If you drink a lot of beer and let your beard grow out, you get stocky?) But at least then we wouldn't need to come up with a good name for the fighter/magic user hybrid.

Well- everything is flavor until you attach a rule to it.

 

[rogueattorney]

Class: Cleric

Appearance: Slender, pointy ears, etc.

or...

Class: Elf

Background: Raised/trained in a temple. Technically what humans would call (in their limited understanding) an ordained priest.

My version: Use cleric spell and turning charts and weapons list. Is an elf in all other respects. BOOM! Done. That took me all of 15 seconds. Next.

When I run my B/X games, I generally treat the 7 classes in the book as "a good start." I encourage random generation of characters and playing what the dice give you. But I'm completely open to players with "non-core" character concepts and have had gnomes, half-elves, monks, paladins, druids, demi-human thieves, cavemen, and all sorts of other stuff in my games.

In my experience, kludging together other class options is fairly common in B/X campaigns that run for any extended period. In the game where I'm a player instead of DM, one of my characters is a goblin, for example.

Not having other options and being able to slap together your own versions of whatever other options your campaign might need is never something I've seen as a negative, but rather "the point."

I'd far rather have that svelte 128 pages of core rules that I can add to at my whim than the bloated 900 page monstrosity that D&D has become. I know I'm far, far in the minority on that point. I figure there's an outside chance that 5e D&D will have a core product that is to my tastes, but I'm not horribly hopeful.

 

[paladinm]

I was just looking over my copies of OD&D.. You know, splitting race and class for elves, dwarves and hobbits began with the Greyhawk supplement, which also introduced thieves and paladins. So the "race as class" idea is not really that much a part of OD&D.. it was really more BD&D. Just sayin'..

I don't like race-as-class either. But I also don't want to see dwarf wizards. There should be some reasonable guidelines.

 

[Mallus]

I'm all for a simpler base in D&D Next.

But I don't want race-as-class and I do want any-race-can-be-any-class (plus unrestricted multiclassing).

 

[Steely_Dan]

I've been wanting to do this sort of thing for a while, soon after 4th Ed came out I got a hankering to start a Basic, 1st or 2nd Ed campaign and tweak it.

Some of my best campaigns have been when they are a real amalgamation, my Basic/1st/2nd Ed campaign (we used Basic/Rules Cyclopedia, and the 1st and 2nd Ed PHB and DMG etc), and by early 2008 I had a campaign that used 3rd Ed as a base, with Unearthed Arcana variants, stuff ported over from Star Wars Saga, and a few bits from the Skirmish game.

I have been working on what I call 4th Ed AD&D.

 

[Sunseeker]

I don't like race-as-class either. But I also don't want to see dwarf wizards. There should be some reasonable guidelines.

Realistically though, some do. Why should the rules say one way or the other? Telling your players up front "dwarves can't be wizards in this game" is a pretty simple solution. Why limit every game to the same?

 

[Steely_Dan]

I like the idea of Race as Class (there was something really cool about the Basic Elf, IMO) as Basic/Core, but with an option to be any non-racial Class.

 

[Mark CMG]

I find it interesting to see what Mike Mearls has chosen as his base set of rules and that he plans to add house rules to give the 'feel' of 5e.

If you were using a stripped down framework to play the 5e rules would it resemble Basic DnD?

Do you think he kept the races as classes or house ruled them out for other classes?

This is the office campaign of the Senior R&D person. How much influence will this have on his staff and their own ideas?

General thoughts?

Seems pertinent to repost what I posted in this thread here -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/319392-how-wizards-coast-could-slay-profit.html

This essentially speaks to the problem of gutting the institutional memory of a company where on the one hand their branding is tied to tradition and on the other hand their success dependent on leveraging the technology of the present and the future.

Bringing Monte Cook back on board was a good idea in principle (only the final product of 5E will speak to whether they took full advantage of his experience) but they might have gone a bit further, hiring on some of the early designers as consultants. They could have done so if for no other reason then to have those veterans run games using some of the original rulesets for the 5E designers as a form of research.

In a limited way, toward achieving the same goal, they might even make sure that their core designers attend some old school conventions (like Gary Con later this month) and be sure that they are playing in the games being run by the old vanguard. If that is part of the plan, they haven't mentioned it as such and I am unaware of any agenda along these lines but we'll see what the next three weeks bring. Running the old rulesets in-house with the current mindsets and modern gamer sensibilities simply won't yield the same results and is unlikely to capture the sense of wonder and tradition older rulesets engendered.

All of this leads me to believe that tying 5E to the OGL and making the old materials available again via the PDF model are the only viable way to reach out to lapsed players or multi-system players who wish to find any support for the old rulesets from WotC directly or indirectly. They might be able to do so in other ways (producing new materials for old rulesets, tying the old materials to DDI, etc.) but not without fundamentaly changing their approach to addressing how they are anchoring the brand once again in the traditions it originally propagated.

 

[trancejeremy]

I was just looking over my copies of OD&D.. You know, splitting race and class for elves, dwarves and hobbits began with the Greyhawk supplement, which also introduced thieves and paladins. So the "race as class" idea is not really that much a part of OD&D.. it was really more BD&D. Just sayin'..

I don't like race-as-class either. But I also don't want to see dwarf wizards. There should be some reasonable guidelines.

Indeed, even before the Greyhawk Supplment, Elves simply picked whether they were fighters or MUs before an adventure. Dwarves and Hobbits were simply fighters (as opposed to just Dwarves of Hobbits)

Holmes Basic D&D sort of splits the difference between the original D&D and Greyhawk, letting Dwarves and Hobbits be fighters or thieves, and Elves being Fighter/Magic-Users, not like the Greyhawk rules (which essentially had full multi-classing like in AD&D, if not quite as broad)

I would guess it was the Moldvay 81 set that started the Elf/Dwarf/Halfing as class stuff...along with no multiclassing. The Holmes Basic D&D was meant to be a starter set for AD&D (and directly references it several times), while the later BD&D was meant to be a separate game.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I like Race as Class. It makes perfect sense to me that different races would have a different take on stuff. A dwarven fighter should be different from a human one.

Ah, but there's a lack of options? I think that should be addressed by making it easier to make classes. If I could do that, then it would be easier to model how a halfling would view clerical activities in my campaign.

In 3e+ D&D has dealt with this with feats, but why not eschew feats and make a way for us to create balanced classes reasonably well? Other than the fact that it would cut into the need to buy new books if they came up with a way to do it.