D&D 5E New Spellcasting Blocks for Monsters --- Why?!

[Hussar]

I think whatever they can glean from what people do online is useful addenda to their "regular" market research and sales data. Also, my guess is that the cohort that has more recently discovered the game are far more likely to engage with it online, from reddit to tik-tok to whatever else the youngins are doing these days.

This from someone who has been posting about D&D, online, for over twenty years. irony.

@dave2008 - you've obviously given the whole 4e/5e thing a lot of thought. Fair enough. I disagree with your conclusions, mostly because I simply don't see the things your see as being major issues. They are, IMO, mostly design decisions that are based on edition specific assumptions - healing in combat for example is a thing when your combat is assumed to be 5-10 rounds long and much less of a thing when combat is assumed to be 3-5 rounds long, thus, all the stuff around healing surges just doesn't apply to 5e. If combat was assumed to be 3-5 rounds in 4e, then healing surges and tactical combat would cease to be a thing there too. These are applications of design principles, not part of the basic design of the game. The basic design of the game is that characters will have these pre-packaged game units (powers as they are called in 4e, various names that are conspicuously not powers in 5e, mostly to bury the lede) that will be used by the players to overcome challenges. These packages will be largely pre-defined with very little wiggle room, and will almost always focus around combat. Powers that are outside of combat will be far fewer on the ground. The rate at which characters gain these powers is standardized across the classes (at least after 3rd level) with very little variation. This is just one example where 4e leads pretty directly into 5e.

Again, we're not going to convince each other. To me, it's self-evident that 4e leads to 5e and that 3e is largely left on the cutting room floor. Since all three are d20 games, they will share some similarities, but, to me, any similarities to 3e are largely cosmetic. And all three games share virtually nothing with AD&D mechanically.

But, hey, this is very, very far removed from the topic. So, can we drop this and move on?

 

[Reynard]

This from someone who has been posting about D&D, online, for over twenty years. irony.

Listen, pal, I have been posting since I had my first BBS, so more like 30!
My point was that the people who say that "our" (GenXers on EN World) opinions are not representative of the broader audience aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean than NO online discussion is representative.

 

[Hussar]

Listen, pal, I have been posting since I had my first BBS, so more like 30!
My point was that the people who say that "our" (GenXers on EN World) opinions are not representative of the broader audience aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean than NO online discussion is representative.

Well, fair enough.

I think it's always a mistake to couch any argument around the idea that the point is representative of anyone other than yourself. ((Note, I'm not directly this at you @Reynard - just folks in general) . If you cannot make your point without some sort of appeal to the unseen numbers that you have zero idea if they exist or not, then your point is nowhere near as strong as you think it is.

This is why the whole "Well, it's the best selling game, so it shouldn't change" arguments don't work. It became the best selling game BECAUSE it changed. It will remain the best selling game BY changing. Trying to not change is how we wound up with D&D becoming more and more irrelevant in the 90's. It took massively reworking the game to bring it into 3e - making the game completely incompatible with everything that was published previously. It took another massive rework in 5e - making the game completely incompatible with everything that was published previously to make it popular again.

Now, hopefully we don't have to go quite that far with the Anniversary edition. I don't think we do. There's still lots of life in the system yet. But, the idea that we should never change the game or adopt new concepts unless we rebrand as an entirely new edition is just a really bad one. We don't stop calling it baseball every time they move the pitcher's mound or change the ball or change the bat or any of the thousand changes they've made to baseball. We don't stop calling it football when we added the instant replay rules, even though that has had immense changes in how the game is played.

Why would a relatively minor change that only impacts a handful of monsters possibly require a new edition title?

 

[Malmuria]

re: simulationism
There are several ways PCs operate differently from NPCs--death saves comes to mind. There are aspects of monster's that operate by the same logic as PCs, but don't correspond exactly to what a game world would be like. For example, the Ogre statblock has a particular Str score, but that probably doesn't mean that every Ogre has the exact same score. etc. So I don't mind looking at the MM is a collection of game elements, especially the statblocks. And it leads, potentially, to tighter math, thus making CR a bit more useful.

That said, I wouldn't mind if the spell-like abilities were learnable by PCs with the right amount of research. This is where a new DMG could come in, both in explaining how monsters are put together and providing subsystems like spell research. I feel like this would be a niche interest for the dominant style of play, that maybe doesn't include that much downtime, though useful as an optional rule.

 

[Reynard]

Well, fair enough.

I think it's always a mistake to couch any argument around the idea that the point is representative of anyone other than yourself. ((Note, I'm not directly this at you @Reynard - just folks in general) . If you cannot make your point without some sort of appeal to the unseen numbers that you have zero idea if they exist or not, then your point is nowhere near as strong as you think it is.

This is why the whole "Well, it's the best selling game, so it shouldn't change" arguments don't work. It became the best selling game BECAUSE it changed. It will remain the best selling game BY changing. Trying to not change is how we wound up with D&D becoming more and more irrelevant in the 90's. It took massively reworking the game to bring it into 3e - making the game completely incompatible with everything that was published previously. It took another massive rework in 5e - making the game completely incompatible with everything that was published previously to make it popular again.

Now, hopefully we don't have to go quite that far with the Anniversary edition. I don't think we do. There's still lots of life in the system yet. But, the idea that we should never change the game or adopt new concepts unless we rebrand as an entirely new edition is just a really bad one. We don't stop calling it baseball every time they move the pitcher's mound or change the ball or change the bat or any of the thousand changes they've made to baseball. We don't stop calling it football when we added the instant replay rules, even though that has had immense changes in how the game is played.

Why would a relatively minor change that only impacts a handful of monsters possibly require a new edition title?

I actually believe WotC when they intimate that 5E is the "last edition" of the game. probably not the very last, but I would not be surprised if it just stayed "5E" for another 10 years -- or even just stopped referring to editions at all and just regularly and "quietly" made changes like we are seeing.

But who knows? They could announce 6E tomorrow for all I have a finger on the pulse of D&D.

 

[Parmandur]

This from someone who has been posting about D&D, online, for over twenty years. irony.

@dave2008 - you've obviously given the whole 4e/5e thing a lot of thought. Fair enough. I disagree with your conclusions, mostly because I simply don't see the things your see as being major issues. They are, IMO, mostly design decisions that are based on edition specific assumptions - healing in combat for example is a thing when your combat is assumed to be 5-10 rounds long and much less of a thing when combat is assumed to be 3-5 rounds long, thus, all the stuff around healing surges just doesn't apply to 5e. If combat was assumed to be 3-5 rounds in 4e, then healing surges and tactical combat would cease to be a thing there too. These are applications of design principles, not part of the basic design of the game. The basic design of the game is that characters will have these pre-packaged game units (powers as they are called in 4e, various names that are conspicuously not powers in 5e, mostly to bury the lede) that will be used by the players to overcome challenges. These packages will be largely pre-defined with very little wiggle room, and will almost always focus around combat. Powers that are outside of combat will be far fewer on the ground. The rate at which characters gain these powers is standardized across the classes (at least after 3rd level) with very little variation. This is just one example where 4e leads pretty directly into 5e.

Again, we're not going to convince each other. To me, it's self-evident that 4e leads to 5e and that 3e is largely left on the cutting room floor. Since all three are d20 games, they will share some similarities, but, to me, any similarities to 3e are largely cosmetic. And all three games share virtually nothing with AD&D mechanically.

But, hey, this is very, very far removed from the topic. So, can we drop this and move on?

Super minor quibble: the design assumption for 5E is 2-3 Rounds, but much closer to 2 Rounds than 3 on average. Which is what lead to them realizing after 5 years that there cam be a mathematical transparency of Monsters and Spell slots which undergirds the newer design choices.

 

[Parmandur]

I actually believe WotC when they intimate that 5E is the "last edition" of the game. probably not the very last, but I would not be surprised if it just stayed "5E" for another 10 years -- or even just stopped referring to editions at all and just regularly and "quietly" made changes like we are seeing.

But who knows? They could announce 6E tomorrow for all I have a finger on the pulse of D&D.

Yeah, I think they will succeed with that, with slow evolutions over time.

 

[Voadam]

I generally don't use spellcasting monsters because I don't like paging through a PHB during a game to find out what my monsters do, and I don't like the prep work of writing down/typing up a list of what the spells do, either. I sure as heck can't remember what all the spells do anymore (I used to be able to, once). So... I like the new blocks.

I don't see how the Vecna style spellcasting changes the need to look up spells in the PH.

It is still just a list of spell in the new stat blocks, no spell details are in the stat block. The only thing that changed was whether the DM uses slots that can be upcast or tracks X/day for specified spells. If you don't remember the specific details of dominate monster you still have to look it up.

 

[Dausuul]

I actually believe WotC when they intimate that 5E is the "last edition" of the game. probably not the very last, but I would not be surprised if it just stayed "5E" for another 10 years -- or even just stopped referring to editions at all and just regularly and "quietly" made changes like we are seeing.

But who knows? They could announce 6E tomorrow for all I have a finger on the pulse of D&D.

I can't see them releasing 6E, as such, any time soon--not while the current edition is going as strong as it has been. Geese and golden eggs, all that. The 50th Anniversary release may be an overhaul of the game, but Wizards will go out of its way to portray it as a modest incremental update and play up its backwards compatibility*.

However, there will be a 6E sooner or later. Boom times end. New management comes in and wants to make a splash. Whether the goose dies of natural causes or gets its neck wrung prematurely, the one thing you can count on, eventually, is goose pie and golden omelettes.

*Unless 5E falls off a cliff in the next couple of years, in which case the 50th Anniversary release will be portrayed as a revolutionary new version of the game that fixes all the things players didn't like about 5E.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Listen, pal, I have been posting since I had my first BBS, so more like 30!
My point was that the people who say that "our" (GenXers on EN World) opinions are not representative of the broader audience aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean than NO online discussion is representative.

First D&D game I ever played was DMed by the SysOp of the BBS I posted on using a 300 baud dial-up.