D&D 5E My #1 hope for D&D Next

[MerricB]

MiBG is a great adventure, I'm DMing it to my group right now and we are having a blast, we just started (we took our time RPing and goofing off) so I haven't encountered any "flaws" in it, is there any place I can go to for fan made resources for the adventure?

You can find some in the D&D Encounter group: http://community.wizards.com/forums/126381
I've also got reports of my play through the adventure (now a few weeks out-of-date) which may help: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...nd-a-preview-and-now-reports-of-up-to-Stage-2!

Cheers!

 

[Warbringer]

I really wonder how much Bill Slavicsek was to blame.

Blame for what? Bad deign team writing? Essentials? Or 4e?

 

[Gundark]

Have you ever read my post, "How Paizo made me hate 3e?" It was a direct reaction to Age of Worms. And my reviews of parts of Kingmaker and Council of Thieves are rather savage.

Wow, yeah it was Age of Worms that KILLED 3e for us as a group, for a lot of the reasons you listed. I have been playing some Pathfinder as of late, although I find their rules a mess too.

Which is evidence that the APs are the main reason that Paizo is successful. Despite 3e's rules, (which admittedly others find great) Paizo has been quite successful. It also explains why people are perfectly willing to buy books that only slightly different from the ones they bought under the 3e era.

Which also suggests that if 5e produces high qualitly and fun adventures and real good adventure support products (ie. tokens/minis and battlemaps to support the adventures) people will buy in to 5e despite what they say in "dealbreaker" threads.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

LOL. If you think Encounter at Blackwall Keep was out of balance at 3rd level, imagine it at 1st. Our DM said he'd run the AP, and started with that adventure. TPK, first session. We didn't know the plot or expected level, of course, and just thought we'd really screwed up. Then we got stomped in session 2, as well -- I think two characters out of six survived.

I hadn't lost two characters back-to-back like that since the 1E days, and I have to admit -- I had a blast doing it!

 

[MerricB]

LOL. If you think Encounter at Blackwall Keep was out of balance at 3rd level, imagine it at 1st. Our DM said he'd run the AP, and started with that adventure. TPK, first session. We didn't know the plot or expected level, of course, and just thought we'd really screwed up. Then we got stomped in session 2, as well -- I think two characters out of six survived.

3E really increases power incredibly between levels. With the numbers changing so much, it actually makes it very hard to write good adventures which have numerous monsters taking on the PCs - generally, they're too weak. Or too strong, if one or two would make a good challenge. 4E's solution to this was to properly identify that you needed two dimensions to identify challenges: Quantity and Level. Thus, solo, elite, standard and minion were cross-referenced with the creature's level.

This isn't so necessary when the numbers don't increase so much - in AD&D, Armour Class is relatively static, and hit points are the thing that changes. It seems like 5E is trying for a return to that idea, although I'm really not sure how the scaling works per level (some early versions had WAY too much HP escalation between levels).

The mathematics behind the system has a lot of influence on adventure design. A lot of the early 4E adventures would have worked better in previous editions, just because of pacing. Although 4E did do set-piece encounters better than other systems, IMO.

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

Regarding early 4e adventures, I suspect that the 4e design team fell victim to emergent play drift.

<snip>

I think it's generally accepted that 4e's strengths are set-piece Encounters, and related to that is a strong affinity (relative to other D&D editions, at least) for scene-framing. My suspicion, though, is that this was not an explicit goal of the designers. I suspect the designers saw themselves not as redesigning D&D from the ground up, but fixing issues people had with 3e. Thus, from their POV, they still expected the game to be played roughly as it always had. KotS reflected this expectation. Dungeoncrawling is staple of D&D, particularly low-levels. Here's a dungeon to crawl in. And if you liked that kind of thing, it more or less worked at low levels. Particularly if enjoyed mixing it up with dungeon denizens.

But as characters go up in level, this starts to get out of hand.

<snip>

So a great many players who would go on to be 4e's biggest fans perceived a more effective way to play the game. Ratchet up the abstractness for a more narrative, drama kind of play. A chase doesn't depend on movement rates, it's a Skill Challenge. Ditto a fight with lower-level enemies. Don't worry about time keeping and enforcing "short rests" to recover Encounter powers, just move from scene to scene. Save your combats for those Encounters where you can really give full play to the 4e combat system: multiple kinds of enemies, varying terrain, etc.

<snip>

Thus, folks who weren't interested or engaged with this playstyle soon ran into a rut with 4e, and this led to the calls of "not D&D", while at the same time you have 4e folks saying, "Mearls never understood 4e, and his adventures for it prove it." In a sense, both were right. Mearls and the others on the design team intended for the game to be playable in ways it always had been. And for low to mid Heroic, it could be. Once you got to upper Heroic and Paragon, though, you either left the game or adjusted to play to the elements that turned out to be its strengths. Eventually the folks at WotC clued in on this as well, which is why later 4e improved.

<snip>

KotS is pretty much a note for note homage to B2, with more background and story. It even has wandering monsters and denizens that move from one encounter area to another. If you like a tension-filled dungeoncrawl, it's fine, if not particularly inspired. But if you want set-piece encounters that have narrative weight, yeah, it's going to suck.

This is very interesting.

I don't know how much I agree with your hypothesis about design - maybe there were competing design goals. Rob Heinsoo, in an interview that came out before release, drew the comparison to indie design. And I think it's almost self-evident in the skill challenge idea. Mearls also as a long familiarity with the indie RPG scene. And given that DMG2 came out not much more than a year after release, they must have had Robin Laws lined up to contribute to it pretty early on. So I can't believe that they had no conception of what they were doing. (And I'm not sure if that's what you're saying.)

But what's my counter-hypothesis, then? I'm not sure I've got one! - but maybe it's this:

D&D adventure design has a certain historical style. The Delve format developed that in a particular direction. But it's always been about presenting the adventure essentially as a "tourist's guide" to the locations and intended events, with stats for the denizens and perhaps sidebars on encounter advice. But to make 4e work - for the reasons you've given - you have to run adventures in a less traditional way. And that requires writing them in a different way, particular with more direct designer to GM commentary as to the rationale for including certain elements in the adventure, and how the GM might respond to different approaches the players take (these don't belong in sidebars, on this approach - they are the heart of adventure presentation). I think Robin Laws example scenarios in his HeroWars Narrator's Book provide good examples of this; several of the Penumbra adventures, for 3E by Atlas Games, also exhibit this sort of approach to design within the D&D context.

But that would be a huge departure for D&D adventure style. So I'm not surprised that WotC didn't go for it. And I agree with you that trad modules and 4e are not a very good mix.

 

[darjr]

Yet another DM screen doesn't count since I haven't used one since 2e.

In this case though, it is a heck of a DM screen. It fits into the adventure and has tables for the GM to run it sandbox style, and the art and info for the players side is fantastic. Note I haven't looked at it in detail, but I now think every adventure could do with such a screen.

 

[Li Shenron]

3E really increases power incredibly between levels. With the numbers changing so much, it actually makes it very hard to write good adventures which have numerous monsters taking on the PCs - generally, they're too weak. Or too strong, if one or two would make a good challenge. 4E's solution to this was to properly identify that you needed two dimensions to identify challenges: Quantity and Level. Thus, solo, elite, standard and minion were cross-referenced with the creature's level.

This isn't so necessary when the numbers don't increase so much - in AD&D, Armour Class is relatively static, and hit points are the thing that changes. It seems like 5E is trying for a return to that idea, although I'm really not sure how the scaling works per level (some early versions had WAY too much HP escalation between levels).

The mathematics behind the system has a lot of influence on adventure design. A lot of the early 4E adventures would have worked better in previous editions, just because of pacing. Although 4E did do set-piece encounters better than other systems, IMO.

Interesting notes... I really hope that 5e bounded accuracy will also mean lesser requirements on DM's precision when designing her own adventures or encounters.

One thing that I would like to see ideally, is also self-contained adventured that are cheap to buy, easy to prepare, and can be over in a couple of evenings or three at most.

This does not depend only on the adventure itself of course, but it largely depends on the rules systems as well. In 3e my typical experience was: pick up a standard adventure (like the Sunless Citadel series), spend a month reading it and making notes, then start playing and finish it in something between 5-10 evenings of play. Maybe I was too slow as DM, maybe my players were too careful and spent too much on details, but certainly also combat, magic, conditions and environmental rules took up a lot of time.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to pass-by the FLGS, pick up one adventure for 10e (roughly the price of 2 movies rental), spend a couple of evenings preparing it, and then call up friends and play it in 2 evenings. However, I do not want these to be always adventures where everything happens in one day in the fantasy world, but something that would cover longer times (in PC terms). Maybe it's asking too much, but anyway this is my little dream...

Of course this doesn't mean at all that I would like only these types of adventures to be published! Longer adventures and even mega-campaigns should be published too, for the lucky ones who can afford to play them!

 

[delericho]

One thing that I would like to see ideally, is also self-contained adventured that are cheap to buy, easy to prepare, and can be over in a couple of evenings or three at most.

This does not depend only on the adventure itself of course, but it largely depends on the rules systems as well. In 3e my typical experience was: pick up a standard adventure (like the Sunless Citadel series), spend a month reading it and making notes, then start playing and finish it in something between 5-10 evenings of play.

I am convinced (though have no actual evidence) that there's got to be a market for what you describe. Probably in the form of a compilation of such adventures, each of which is designed to be played with little or no prep, which is entirely self-contained, and which is expected to run to about 4 hours. Such a thing would seem ideal for casual players who just want to play a game now and then, for those DMs who suddenly need something for right now, and as a source of ideas for people who just need something to fill a gap.

(Of course, 4e had such a product, and it was generally well received. IIRC, was it not called "Dungeon Delves"?)

One additional aside: this sort of product is the one place where I think the Delve Format for adventures is probably suitable. Although it was pretty lousy to read, and unnecessarily inflexible in use, it does appear to me that if you want something short and to the point, and especially something that requires little or no pre-reading and preparation, then it's pretty ideal - you're sacrificing flavour for utility, true, but you're doing so in what is very much a 'utility' product.

YMMV on that one (and everything else), of course.

 

[Iosue]

This is very interesting.

I don't know how much I agree with your hypothesis about design - maybe there were competing design goals. Rob Heinsoo, in an interview that came out before release, drew the comparison to indie design. And I think it's almost self-evident in the skill challenge idea. Mearls also as a long familiarity with the indie RPG scene. And given that DMG2 came out not much more than a year after release, they must have had Robin Laws lined up to contribute to it pretty early on. So I can't believe that they had no conception of what they were doing. (And I'm not sure if that's what you're saying.)

No, not quite. I think they expected these to be additive features. I think they figured they could add these indie design elements without effecting traditional style play overmuch. In a sense, I think they were expecting more modularity (if not perhaps thinking of that particular term at the time). People who wanted a non-combat XP-earning Encounter could use Skill Challenges. People who didn't need them would not. People who wanted to could refluff their powers however they liked, but there was flavor text there for people who weren't into that. You could keep all monsters at their listed level, or you could re-scale them to fit your needs (the Level 6 Ogre that becomes the Level 20 minion). I've always thought this flexibility was exemplified by page 42. You could, if you were inclined, keep all DCs static. So the 1st level Wizard untrained in Thievery that tries to pick a lock finds it to be a hard DC, but by the time they are 16th level, it's easy. Maybe he's picked up some magical knacks, maybe he picked up some tricks from the party rogue, without formal training. You could also, if you found that unverisimilar, set that same lock at the Hard DC for the 16th level wizard, maintaining his inability to pick locks even as he gained levels. It all depends on whether how you wanted to approach it. (This design, does of course freeze out people who want a close mechanics-as-physics design, so that the lock's DC remains static, as well as the Wizard's Thievery skill, unless he puts ranks into it.)

I'm not exactly sure why this ultimately didn't work. Perhaps it was the tight integration of the game. Perhaps it was presentation. Perhaps it's just that typical bugaboo, the inevitable lack of high level playtesting. For whatever reason, people who tried running 4e for traditional play often felt they were fighting the system. But here's my thing. Both Mearls and Cordell were involved in the design of 4e from a very early stage. If they were freelancers, I'd say, yeah, maybe they didn't understand the system. But they were in-house, they were part of 4e development and playtesting, and they were given the very prestigious job of writing its flagship adventure, the one that introduces the game to people, the one they sent out with the quick start rules. I simply don't buy that both of them were so dense that they went through all that without an understanding of the game. Even if they were, I don't buy that such an adventure would go through the publishing process without someone calling a flag on the play. Sure, sure, if we expect the worst from corporate culture we can say such a thing is plausible. But I think it's more likely that KotS represents what at least one method of play the designers intended to be possible.

Another thing that is perhaps often forgotten is, remember the demo of the 3D virtual table that ultimately never got off the ground? I think that's another reflection that WotC thought that dungeoncrawling would be a primary mode of play for 4e. By no means does that mean that they didn't intend for it to incorporate indie design elements. More like it wasn't until after release that they realized the dungeoncrawling aspects were not as effective as the more indie game-influenced style of play.*

*With the caveat that by indie game standards, 4e is still more D&D than indie game, I think.