D&D 5E Playing the Game vs. Reading the Rules of the Game

[Mistwell]

I don't really like repeating myself any more than you probably do so we can just leave it at that.

You never replied. Maybe you typed a reply and the "send" never went through? Take a look back throug the thread...there is no reply from you.

 

[Iosue]

I'm also not a particular fan of the game's tone or design principles. The following passage is fairly troublesome to me:

Here’s another secret: You don’t actually have to set the DC before the player rolls the ability check. Decide whether the character succeeds based on the check result. You’ll probably find that your gut feeling (and the player’s) squares pretty well with the set DCs presented here.

A number below 10 is never going to make it unless the task is trivially simple. A number in the low teens is good enough for an easy task.
A number in the high teens will succeed at a moderate task.
And when a player rolls a 20 or better, there’s usually little question that the character succeeds.
Your players will never know.

The emphasis is my own. I generally do not like this cavalier attitude to mechanical resolution. The rather explicit shift to illusionism does the game a disservice in my opinion.

Personally, I don't see it as illusionism, but rather an essential tool in the DM's arsenal.

The advice, as I see it, is not even recommending fudging in the manner that just about every previous edition did. The advice is explicitly telling the DM not to ignore the result of the roll. What it's telling the DM is to not let the game get bogged down in minutia, but to keep it moving. Player rolls high, the task succeeds. They roll low, they don't. If it's easy, 10 or better will do it. If it's moderate, 15 or better will do it. Here they provide helpful guidelines for adjudicating on the fly.

And if you're in a group where players are regularly told target DCs before rolling, it doesn't even apply.

 

[pemerton]

when it comes to non-physical challenges, or more precisely to challenges that are impossible to compare with each other in absolute terms, such as convincing a guard to let you pass "because I am an old friend of the Duke", or to recall the meaning of the 247th arcane symbol you see in a dungeon, the DC are pretty much made up all the time

4e actually has pretty tight mechanics for this.

 

[CleverNickName]

I play-tested this game three times, with the first and second test packets. (That doesn't really count as "several" in my mind, so I voted for the "once or twice" option.) But even with that limited amount of exposure, I was able to get a feel for the flavor and style of the game. And it isn't the style of game that I like to play.

More playtesting would not change that opinion. My problem with the new rules does not stem from a lack of experience playing them, but rather from my abundance of experience playing other things.

 

[Manabarbs]

I played D&DNext a bunch of times (although not the first or last packet, and primarily as a DM), and I'm not sure whether I'm interested. My impression throughout was that each packet contained a mix of ideas that I personally felt were good and ideas that I personally felt were bad, implemented in a mixture of ways some of which I personally felt were effective and some of which I personally felt were ineffective. On one hand, I certainly didn't enjoy the game nearly as much as any of the most obvious alternatives, but on the other hand, I think that many of its biggest issues are not necessarily hard fixes, or are things that I'm pretty sure they're going to figure out how to fix. I was not impressed by the packets in general, but I also believe that it's likely that the final product will be better. (And there's nothing in the packets or supplementary material that turned me off so completely that I think that the system isn't likely to even be worth considering.)

 

[KiloGex]

I suspect there are many people that wished they had done exactly that with the last version. Sometimes trusting your instincts is not only not a bad thing, but actually a good thing.

Without playing 4E, you wouldn't know what you liked and what you didn't like. While overall I disliked the edition, there were a small handful of things that I found intriguing. I don't regret any of it, because it gave me perspective and ideas.

 

[Incenjucar]

While it's certainly true that many people make snap judgments which rob them of experiencing something they would enjoy, it's also true that many people are experienced enough and have enough self-knowledge that they can judge how something would play out.

Personally, at least since my mid-20s, I've been quite good at judging my own reactions ahead of time. I was perfectly right in how much I would enjoy 4e, Savage Worlds, and Legend, no more and no less, and I was quite right on how little I would enjoy other games, such as M:TG.

The thing is, I know very specifically what I like, and very specifically what I do not like, and what rules are required for those to come about, and I have more than enough experience to see whether or not that exists in the rules. It isn't especially difficult for someone to develop an ability to mentally simulate things - nobody here would have a problem figuring out what affect giving all wizards regeneration equal to their Int score would have, eh?

This is especially true for DMs, who have to deal with more of these rules than anyone else at the table, and who have to put the effort into fixing the problems that occur when rules don't get along well.

 

[sunshadow21]

While I haven't played it personally, I've seen enough that i can clearly say that it's not at the top of my active prospects for gaming going forward. There are some interesting aspects to it, and I might thumb through the core book when it comes out, but I really don't see myself having anything more to do with it than that. It's not going to be so dissimilar that they are going to risk upset fans of older editions, making it less useful since I already have plenty of material along that line that I know I like, and the columns about it make it clear that I don't entirely agree with all of the thought processes behind it. In the end, it's not a bad system, it's just not a system that gives most people any reason to try to do more than read through the rules if the rules don't immediately grab their attention. Most of the rules are similar enough to earlier stuff that it isn't all that hard to predict likely play results, and most of the reviews from people who have tried it pretty much confirm what an experienced D&D player/DM could figure out just by reading the rules; there may be certain spots here or there that break the mold, but not enough to really force people to look past first impressions, and that may be Next's biggest problem. It doesn't irritate people, but unless you're already really interested in it, it's not likely going to do anything to create that interest from nothing.

 

[TerraDave]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION], kids eat vegtables. It can happen. But that is the least of the problems with your posts in this thread.

 

[Mistwell]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION], kids eat vegtables. It can happen. But that is the least of the problems with your posts in this thread.

Why don't you tell me what you think are the various problems with my posts in this thread.