D&D 5E My D&D Next Experience at DDXP

Oni

First Post
With all the talk about how fans of different editions would feel about the new game, I've been thinking a bit about it. Since I have played and loved every edition of D&D (other than OD&D). As much as anyone can I will attempt to rate the base game from the perspective of a fan of each edition. Again, this is MY impression of the game mechanics and play, based on a single 4 hour session (and my experiences with/memories of the previous editions). Individual mileage may vary.

  • Basic D&D: Familiar, but has a lot of confusing rules, and lots of stuff to sift through on the character sheet. I don't get what's going on with healing. What's up with these ability checks? 3/10
  • 1E: Not a bad game, it comes close to having the heart of D&D, but there is too much dice rolling. The healing situation is weird. What's up with these ability checks? 4/10
  • 2E: Close, but no cigar. The combat is pretty good, but the healing is a mess. It seems to bring back to many of the messy elements of 1E I disliked. Don't get me started on healing. What's up with these non-weapon proficiencies? 3/10
  • 3E: Pretty good, but I miss customization. Spellcasters are busted. There are still a lot of elements that don't "feel" like D&D to me, but MOST have been purged. WTF healing? What's up with these skills? 5/10
  • 4E: The characters are unbalanced and I don't feel like I am doing cool stuff. The healing situation makes me nervous. What's up with these skills? 2/10

I get the strangest sense you did not like the healing mechanics. :p


I find it interesting you only pegged spellcasters being messed up from a 3e perspective.


I also get the sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you feel like a lot getting to do cool stuff in 4e stems from the power system and having powers that let you do specific cool things.
 

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With all the talk about how fans of different editions would feel about the new game, I've been thinking a bit about it. Since I have played and loved every edition of D&D (other than OD&D). As much as anyone can I will attempt to rate the base game from the perspective of a fan of each edition. Again, this is MY impression of the game mechanics and play, based on a single 4 hour session (and my experiences with/memories of the previous editions). Individual mileage may vary.

  • Basic D&D: Familiar, but has a lot of confusing rules, and lots of stuff to sift through on the character sheet. I don't get what's going on with healing. What's up with these ability checks? 3/10
  • 1E: Not a bad game, it comes close to having the heart of D&D, but there is too much dice rolling. The healing situation is weird. What's up with these ability checks? 4/10
  • 2E: Close, but no cigar. The combat is pretty good, but the healing is a mess. It seems to bring back to many of the messy elements of 1E I disliked. Don't get me started on healing. What's up with these non-weapon proficiencies? 3/10
  • 3E: Pretty good, but I miss customization. Spellcasters are busted. There are still a lot of elements that don't "feel" like D&D to me, but MOST have been purged. WTF healing? What's up with these skills? 5/10
  • 4E: The characters are unbalanced and I don't feel like I am doing cool stuff. The healing situation makes me nervous. What's up with these skills? 2/10

Is your Basic D&D comment about ability checks based on playing BX basic which had no ability checks or playing BECMI (with Gazeteers)/RC which had an optional skill system consisting of "Make an ability check; add your skill bonus if you have one"?

Because I'm not sure whether your comment is supposed to be interpreted as:


  • WTF! The ability checks I'm used to are missing!
  • WTF! Ability checks are different to how I remember them!
  • WTF! Someone's added ability checks!


Because from everything I've heard, the new skill system is more close to BECMI skills/ability checks than it is to any other edition.
 

pemerton

Legend
I truly think the fact that 4E works so well for you is a happy coincidence.
They trumpeted things like "ease of DMing" over and over in 2008. They didn't sell the ideas that you praise.

<snip>

their primary goal didn't work, and they lost a lot of existing fans for their trouble. But they also made a specific niche of fans very happy. I'm not sure if you are an outlier from that niche or just a corner case within it. But either way it clearly worked out great for you.
Whereas I don't think it's a coincidence. Which isn't to say they set out to please me. But I don't think it's a coincidence that a game designed to be an attractive newbies game, where people would sit around having fun pretending to be elves, is good for me. What would such a game involve?

I'd start with limited operational play (check), because it's tedious (check), and limiting it will facilitate robust scene framing (check), so that the challenges confronting the players via their PCs are clear and easily engaged (check), with action resolution that will produce satisfactory pacing for those challenges built in (check) so that people will have fun pretending to be elves (check).

And I'd clearly frame the role of the GM as one of building the challenges (check) but leaving it up to the players to choose how they'll engage them (check) and also leaving it up to the players to build the PCs they want to use as their vehicles to engage those challenges (check). Because magic items are part of PC build, players will be mostly in charge of them too (check).

This "player empowerment" will mean that players want to set their own goals/quests (check), so we'd better make on-the-fly encounter eyeballing and action resolution pretty easy (mostly check - battlemaps can be hard to draw up on the spur of the moment, but maybe we'll sell some dungeon tiles).​

Where did they drop the ball? Well, (i) the maths is a bit dodgy, both in combat, out of combat (DC revisions), and in the fact that the two don't mix as well as they should; and (ii) power bloat and especially feat bloat is so obviously built into the system maybe something should have thought from the start about how to regulate and/or contain it.

And (iii) there are also some infelicities in the way player and GM interaction is set upA, despite the fairly clear attempt to delineate roles: players are in charge of central story elements (player-chosen quests, paragon paths, epic destinies) but the GM is expected to set up the relevant encounters (eg destiny quests) and no guidelines or machinery is given to facilitate this.

And (iv) the advice on how to run skill challenges is criminally inadequate, given the rules text for HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling that they could have drawn upon. Related to this, (v) the useful information about the role of keywords in establishing fictional positioning is buried in a DMG discussion of affecting objects, whereas it should have been central to page 42.

Still, I think they did a pretty good job, and as I said I don't think it's coincidence that their conception of a game for new roleplayers also supports the sort of vanilla narrativism that I enjoy. All that it takes is to take the colour that the game empowers the players to bring in (via the story elements over which they have control) and beef that up a bit, and to compensate from my own know-how for the lack of GM advice on how to respond to this stuff.

What makes me think that they may be capable of squaring the circle with D&Dn is that 4e squares a circle to some extent. Played exactly as written, I think 4e is probably incoherent, because of that missing advice to the GM and players on how the distribution of authority over story content and scene framing is meant to work. But drifting to a workable solution is trivial. You either downplay the fictional content, leave it primarily in the hands of the GM and treat it as mere colour when the players introduce it, and you have the notorious "4e as boardgame". If you ignore the keywords on powers and abilities, you can even check fictional positioning (and page 42 with it) at the door if you like. Alternatively, you drift in something like the way I do, and you get coherent vanilla narrativism. And I'm sure there are other functional driftings possible as well. The squared circle.

What's missing from the game, from the point of view of a stereotypical author stance, immersion-oriented simulationist or Gygaxian gamist player? I'm probably not the best person to answer this, but my answer would be this: 4e lack an expectation that players will treat with the fiction only via their PCs' ingame actions, and furthermore it has mechanics that give the players a chance to shape the fiction at the metagame level (and a lot of the time isn't even very coy about them).

The challenge for D&Dn, that makes it harder (in my view) than 4e is that it is precisely committed to bringing back in this sort of expectation, while at the same time making 4e play - however drifted - viable.

I'm not worried that D&Dn won't let me inject theme into play. Any RPG can do that (although mechanical alignment rules, if they exist, generally have to be purged), because it's mostly just a question of story elements. So even if my 4e game is unusual in its narrativist focus, that's not a big deal on its own. It's the mechanical features of 4e that make it driftable to a range of non-sim games that are the big deal. For me, they're the features that let me keep theme, rather than (say) strategy, at the forefront of play. Those same features let a 4e boardgamer playing Lair Assault keep combat tactics, rather than operations and strategy, at the forefront of play.

So I don't think it's just me who is getting more from 4e than easy GMing.
 


Herschel

Adventurer
True, but the world is full of little areas. GenCon is about trying the newest games and meeting the movers and shakers of the gaming industry. (or at least that's what it says on the website.) I'm not sure that's indicative of what people are playing in their living rooms, kitchen tables, and front porches.
It's more indicitive than going by what happens at some local con. That said, it's also anecdotal, it's just pointing out a huge flaw in taking what someone saw at their local con as any sort of market indicator. I live in a pretty good sized metro area and you see differences from store to store which edition seems more favored. 4E seems favored by the clients at most of them and the Pathfinder stuff still sells well. Both versions are getting play, but WotC wants to get those early edition players who have never given them a dime to buy in.

Heck, I bought the 3.0 PHB and that's it until the miniatures skirmish game. I played in 5 3E groups at times but never bought in to the system. 4E brought me back as a more regular player AND a paying customer.
 

Majoru Oakheart

Adventurer
Yet if you go back to the earlier days of the hobby all the way up through AD&D it's my general impression that each table tended to be unique. They were each playing the base game but usually ignoring or altering huge swathes of the rules in the books. But D&D seemed to get on just fine then. The question then is, why is that?

In my case it was because I had never met another D&D player outside of our group. There was no internet and the first group I joined had 13 people in it. We played weekly, and we had over 15 different games running at once, we'd vote to see which one we'd play each week and switch 3 different times during one session. We played from noon until 3 am each week.

I never had any reason to even want to find other D&D players. I had my group of friends and we knew our own house rules. In fact, it wasn't until nearly a year later that I learned we were using house rules. Everyone told me verbally what the rules were and I didn't bother reading the books to see if that was correct.

We only had small glimpses of how other people played. Our group downloaded the Netbook of Spells from BBSes(because none of us had internet access, only University students really did at this point). It was filled with broken, way too powerful spells that nearly ruined the one game that it was allowed to.

Then I had a falling out with my group and started my own group, I read the rules completely and realized we weren't even following the rules of the game. But we didn't have THAT many house rules. My game eliminated almost all of them.

Periodically, I ran into D&D players that weren't in my group(some guy at my high school, someone on the bus who saw my books, etc). Nearly every one of them described their D&D game in terms that made me think "Wow...how can you play like that? That doesn't sound like D&D to me at ALL. I'm glad I'm not playing in your game." We had an impossible time finding new players for our game. Most of the time we'd have to find someone who has never played before and teach them to play because anyone who HAD played before would play our game for a session or two and then decide that it wasn't the same way they played and quit.

The internet came out but I didn't really think of using it to talk about D&D at all. That was, until the announcement of 3e and my first visit to Eric Noah's 3e News Site. That's when I realized that it was because everyone played the game so differently that everyone was so excited about 3e. It proved to be an edition to finally unite all of us. Maybe they'd finally have rules for all those things that DMs had to make up, and therefore create some standardization in games. Maybe when we said "We're playing D&D", we actually were playing the same game as the people down the street and we could talk about it without talking past each other.
 

BryonD

Hero
Whereas I don't think it's a coincidence. Which isn't to say they set out to please me. But I don't think it's a coincidence that a game designed to be an attractive newbies game, where people would sit around having fun pretending to be elves, is good for me.
I think I was agreeing with that point.
Yes, I called in coincidence. But I agree that it is a natural outcome. It is simply a coincidence that it happens to be a natural outcome. :)

So I don't think it's just me who is getting more from 4e than easy GMing.
Again, I agree. There is a niche 4E serves very well.
 

R

RHGreen

Guest
With all the talk about how fans of different editions would feel about the new game, I've been thinking a bit about it. Since I have played and loved every edition of D&D (other than OD&D). As much as anyone can I will attempt to rate the base game from the perspective of a fan of each edition. Again, this is MY impression of the game mechanics and play, based on a single 4 hour session (and my experiences with/memories of the previous editions). Individual mileage may vary.

  • Basic D&D: Familiar, but has a lot of confusing rules, and lots of stuff to sift through on the character sheet. I don't get what's going on with healing. What's up with these ability checks? 3/10
  • 1E: Not a bad game, it comes close to having the heart of D&D, but there is too much dice rolling. The healing situation is weird. What's up with these ability checks? 4/10
  • 2E: Close, but no cigar. The combat is pretty good, but the healing is a mess. It seems to bring back to many of the messy elements of 1E I disliked. Don't get me started on healing. What's up with these non-weapon proficiencies? 3/10
  • 3E: Pretty good, but I miss customization. Spellcasters are busted. There are still a lot of elements that don't "feel" like D&D to me, but MOST have been purged. WTF healing? What's up with these skills? 5/10
  • 4E: The characters are unbalanced and I don't feel like I am doing cool stuff. The healing situation makes me nervous. What's up with these skills? 2/10

This reminds me of something.

Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest and lost.
 



lkj

Hero
Whereas I don't think it's a coincidence . . .
So I don't think it's just me who is getting more from 4e than easy GMing.

I agree it's not just easy DM'ing, but I think it's worth noting that the easy DM'ing is related to the 'driftability' of 4e.

What made 4e work for me was the fact that it was freeing. It handled all the nitty gritty in a way that I (mostly) didn't have to worry about it. It gave me the freedom to focus on story and narrative that I felt I'd been losing.

As I mentioned in another thread, I came to 4e out of a high level 3.5 game-- a game I very much loved incidentally-- But that game was starting to stress me out. I spent all my time prepping the mechanical elements (big baddies and such) that I never had time to engage the story. When 4e came along, I felt free in a way I hadn't since 1e-- I built a whole raft of unique and fun 35th level solos over a few hours one evening. I had the ease of 1e with the mechanical balance and elegance of 4e. It was awesome.

So I embraced 4e wholesale-- because now I was back to being the story guy rather than the guy who was combing through all the supplements trying to make sure I could keep up with my players.

But, as I've said elsewhere, not all my players did. Some got hung up on the overt visibility of the mechanics (roles, power structure, finely tuned level advancment). They all came around eventually, after a lot of fun play. But I do understand why they hesitated. I do get what bothered them.

I have high hopes for D&DN partly because-- for me-- the details of how they implement the mechanics don't matter to me so long as they work smoothly. I'm fine, even excited, to see them bury those mechanics inside the story elements. I think that's a very achievable goal.

In a way, it's interesting for me to realize that the details of the mechs don't matter to me. I don't really care if there are healing surges or powers or the same action economy or roles or anything else. It just needs to work cohesively-- and elegantly-- as a whole. I'd even rather they made the mechanics a bit less overt (though I still want access to how they work . . . I'm funny that way).

By the way, Permerton, I think it might be cool if you explicitly defined what you mean by 'operational' play and its opposite. I think I get what you mean. And I think it's a very interesting way to look at the game. I'd be interested to have you spell it out. I think it might be useful for discussion, as I've not heard it described quite that way before (I'll admit to being a novice at game design talk).

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pemerton

Legend
By the way, Permerton, I think it might be cool if you explicitly defined what you mean by 'operational' play and its opposite. I think I get what you mean. And I think it's a very interesting way to look at the game. I'd be interested to have you spell it out. I think it might be useful for discussion, as I've not heard it described quite that way before (I'll admit to being a novice at game design talk).
I picked up the phrase from [MENTION=18280]Raven Crowking[/MENTION], who used to post on these boards but doesn't anymore. He defined the level of operational play as inbetween pure strategy, at one end, and pure tactics, at the other. I think the model he had in mind was (Advanced) Squad Leader - and that is not a surprise, given the prominence of that game among the wargamers who invented D&D!

I'm not quite sure what strategy means in an RPG, so I'll leave that to one side.

Tactics I think of as concerned with resolving an encounter (in the 4e sense - so a present challenge, combat or non-combat). You bring to bear your player resources (which may or may not also be PC resources - depending how metagamey the mechanics are) on the situation. So PC build rules - that give you those resources - meet up with action resolution rules - to work out what happens. For me, this is where the action in an RPG is, but not everyone agrees. (I think everyone agrees its important, but not so important relative to other things as I do.)

When I think of "operational" play, I think of stuff that lies outside the encounter, but still matters to PC build and action resolution. Buying the right gear. Remebering to iron spike the door so that you don't get mauled in your sleep. Packing, and then using, a 10' pole. Keeping close track of the passage of time (especially important to be fair to players with 10 min/lvl or 1 hr/lvl spells on their PCs). Basically, all the stuff that Gary Gygax in the 1st ed AD&D books tells you is really important to being a skilled player and a skilled GM!

Personally, I find all that stuff tedious, but I know some other people really like it.

What I think is the challenge for WotC in a unity edition is that to make operational play important - to make it a challenge to the skill of the players - you have to use techniques like wandering monsters, keeping track of time, putting spells into the game that depend upon keeping track of time, put options into the game that depend on making sensible decisions about risking wandering monsters, etc.

But once the mechanics that make those techniques important are put into the game, my own experience tells me they can be the death of an attempt to run a game where the encounter is the thing - because all those long durations, need to track ammunition and torches, etc, etc, make it hard to transition from encounter to encounter without either (i) the GM just fiating, which in my view is very close to cheating, or (ii) paying attention to all this detail that then suddenly drags the focus of your play from the encounters to operational matters.

Final comments:

(1) The fact that I don't like operational play doesn't mean that I will never pay attention if the PCs don't spike the door shut. It's just that - depending on what else is going on in the game - I might use that as the pretext to present a particular encounter - whereas if the PCs made some other choice, I'd present an encounter turning on that. But the players are no worse off either way. Either way they're going to get an encounter that reflects (in story terms) the choices they've made and builds upon those choices.

(2) The above paragraph doesn't mean that the players' choices don't matter to the challenges that they face. But it focuses those choices to choices made within the context of the encounter. The consequences that flow across encounters will be thematic or story consequences, not more-or-less-likely-to fail consequences. (4e has a little bit of the latter - daily powers, APs, healing surges - but far less than most mainstream fantasy RPGs, and very tightly constrained in the ways that they work.)
 
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