D&D 5E Pew Pew magic......AHHHHHHH! Make martials all day swingers and casters limited per day slingers.

[Manbearcat]

In my ideal D&D Next <snip>

In my ideal D&DNext:

1) Martial characters would only have Dailies. When they use them in the shared imaginary space (LOL?), the actual invocation of the player at the table comes forth through the character in the fiction. For instance, player: "I USE DANCE OF THE DEADLY KNIFE GUY AND RUN AROUND 30 FEET SLASHING DUDES IN THEIR BIG DUMB HEADS, OK...I MISSED, LOOKS LIKE THEIR MEET GOES EVERYWHERE! (see 4 and 6 below).

2) Spellcasters would only have at-wills.

3) Come and Get It will now be the default action (like the current Basic Attack) for every class in the game. However, it would only work on Ranged characters that have no melee weapons.

4) You can ONLY deal damage on a miss.

5) Nothing in the game could be proned except oozes.

6) HP would only be meat and every fight would have buzzards and scavengers circling, gorging off the chunks of flesh hacked off left and right. See 4 and 3 above. Shouting at ranged characters and missing with the soundwave is one of the more common ways for this meat to come flying off of characters.

7) Metagame tokens would be rampant. I mean everywhere. And players could have them whenever they want. Player: "Hey GM can I have a metagame token, I just swilled down a tankard of ale and smashed it no the tavern bar and shouted GRARGH!?" GM: "NO BOB...HAVE 5!!!"

8) It would be an open descriptor skill system. However, you could only apply your skills and invoke your metagame tokens to do things that are outrageously in bad faith. If its not bad faith enough, your character has to go on an atonement quest. For instance, Player: "I USE MY ATHLETICS CHECK TO JUMP TO THE MOON AND SPEND MY METAGAME TOKEN TO GRAB IT AND HURL IT AT THE DIRE RAT!" is sufficiently insincere and genre destroying.

9) The magic item system is player-side. However, they can only use it in the most bad-faith, entitled way possible. GM: "There is nothing in that chest". Player: "OH I BEG TO DIFFER THERE GUY. I'M PRETTY SURE THAT CHEST OPENS TO THE EVERFLOWING FOUNTAIN OF LOOT PLANE, NOW THREATENING TO DROWN US IN VORPAL SWORDS AND PEARLS OF POWER AS IT FLOODS THE CHAMBER?"

10) Post-release errata will NOT be performed by WotC until 3 people flood internet message boards with the same gripe, each at least 5 times. But only if these threads are weighed down deeply by edition war rhetoric. No edition war rhetoric and/or you fail to hit the requisite number of repeat posts on the same subject? No changes. Sorry, those are the rules.

I'm sure there are some other things but those are off the top of my head. 5e without any one of them is an absolute dealbreaker.

 

[Dungeoneer]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] - You forgot a couple!

- Rust monsters would only destroy non-metallic weapons and equipment.
- 'Blind' status would only apply to unsighted creatures.

 

[Umbran]

I don't see the need to make *everything* work the same way.

Some folks prefer magic be a resource-management game. Fine. Make sure there's some magic that resource management.
But also make sure there's some magic that isn't about resource management.

There's room for both types in the game.

 

[TwoSix]

In my ideal D&DNext: <snip>

An excellent list I sadly can't XP!

Also, paladins must have a requirement to bite the heads off babies in a religious ceremony in front of the townsfolk. While they aren't judging, they do approve.

 

[Obryn]

Wizards with crossbows or darts aren't central to my conception of D&D or fantasy. I was happy when reserve feats were introduced in 3.5's Complete Mage, and happy to see them in 4e and 5e.

At will cantrips let you do wizard stuff instead of dart stuff. I'm good with that.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Wizards with crossbows or darts aren't central to my conception of D&D or fantasy. I was happy when reserve feats were introduced in 3.5's Complete Mage, and happy to see them in 4e and 5e.

Reserve feats, notably, are not available to first level characters, and are a choice that some spellcasters make to add on to their characters, not the default mode of casting.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't even see why it's worth anyone's time arguing about it at this point. Attack cantrips survived the year and a half of open playtesting... they aren't going to get taken out now during the closed playtest.

The discussion right now shouldn't be whether attack cantrips should be removed from the game... but rather should the DMG include a fully-playtested module that removes cantrips or moves them to each classes 1st level spell list, and what has to occur or get added to make that balanced.

 

[DMZ2112]

4) You can ONLY deal damage on a miss.

I LOL'd.

I prefer "Grampa Simpson Magic," because you forget stuff that happened three seconds ago.

My story begins in five-dickety-two CY. We had to say dickety because Warduke had stolen our word "eighty." I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six hexes.

...What are you cackling at, fatty? Too many iron rations, that's your problem!

...Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had a ball of bat guano on my belt, which was the style at the time....

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I don't even see why it's worth anyone's time arguing about it at this point. Attack cantrips survived the year and a half of open playtesting... they aren't going to get taken out now during the closed playtest.

I agree. We don't get to see WotC's market research, but I suspect WotC got lots of requests for feeling like a mage all the time. Look at it this way: WotC has gone out of its way to remove a lot of good points from 4e from 5e, but they're keeping at-will magic. There must be some sort of incentive, considering at-will magic isn't really more powerful than options like using crossbows.

Requiring wizards to play a resource management game that non-casters don't have to play was at the center of many complaints about wizards (combat balance and otherwise) in pre-4e D&D. WotC doesn't seem like they're a big fan of long-term resource management anymore. 5e wizards have far fewer daily spell slots per day than in 3e and earlier, for instance, and even 4e dropped some daily resource management from martial characters in Essentials.

The discussion right now shouldn't be whether attack cantrips should be removed from the game... but rather should the DMG include a fully-playtested module that removes cantrips or moves them to each classes 1st level spell list, and what has to occur or get added to make that balanced.

No matter how good the module, if you have a player who wants to play a wizard and feel like a wizard all the time, a balanced option doesn't really work there.

 

[Wulfgar76]

I just want to say first off that I can't stand Pew Pew magic. I don't think there should be any at will spells except maybe read magic. I would like to see casters go back to being completely limited in their spells per day. I think the realm of at will and no limited attacks per day, or even per encounter, should fall solely on the martials.

"I just want to say that I can't stand Boom Gone magic. I think there should always be at will spells including read magic. I would like to see casters remain having at-will magic as an option. I think the realm of at will and no limited attacks per day, or even per encounter, should include spellcasters."

This is my opinion on this subject. I know others have different tastes. I hope the game includes options to accommodate my tastes as well as theirs. Thank you.

What made playing casters interesting and challenging was the fact that you had to use judgement when deciding which spells to use and which ones to save. I feel like that's been lost ever since the addition of Pew Pew magic.

Right, because daily spell resource management no longer exist, and those at-will spells are just game-breakingly powerful.