Something Awful leak.

[The Little Raven]

They are copypasta of old documents.

One of the problems I see as he describes the document is that this only true of pre-4e games, and anything 4e related is written to disassociate it with 4e. Now, it might not be accurate, and things from all editions were modified, but if it is true, and 4e stuff was rewritten to pretend it wasn't from 4e, that just speaks of an incredible bias that seriously reduces this 4e fan's enthusiasm for the new edition.

 

[JonWake]

Except reading through all the stuff up to there, it all looks like an unholy love child of 4E and 1E/OD&D/etc...

And I'm kind of okay with that.

 

[JoesephBear]

I'm not sure it's so much "fake" (though it could be) as "really really super-duper early." The leaker mentions this is info from the 1.0 version, and they're on 1.5-ish by the time of his post. It sounds like a lot of it was derived from earlier books, just pasted all together and given out to people for the first early round of testing.

While true, here's my problem.

v1.0 leak - "Oh it's just super early. Nothing is set in stone."

Internal alpha test - "Ok, so it's still mostly bad, but internal playtesting will fix it."

Beta test - "So the design philosophy hasn't changed at all yet. Don't worry. They'll surely listen to everyone who hates it and make the needed changes."

Release - "So they only tweaked the numbers on some stuff. It's only the first printing. We've still got errata and splat books to look forward too."


We've all seen this happen before. WotC did it with 4e. Paizo did it with Pathfinder. Once a dev team gets going down a specific design path, they aren't going to drastically change it. To do so costs lots of time and money. It's also really bad to tell your investors and your CEO that everything you've done up until now has been a waste and needs to be redone.


The incentive then is to only listen to feedback that falls into the chosen design philosophy. Any criticism that does not follow the chosen core design, or criticizes the core design, no matter how insightful or constructive it may be, falls onto deaf ears and is disregarded.


This leak gives insight into the chosen design philosophy of 5e. We now know that it is geared strongly towards winning back members of the OSR and Pathfinder crowd with a steep 3.5 angle, and traces of 4e are to be cut and minimized wherever possible. I do not see this core ideal changing radically for the final product.

 

[catastrophic]

This is the foundation they are building from. They're not going to radically change their approach, and even if they do, the point they start from will seriously influence the design going forward, and maintain the serious flaws and areas of deliberate neglect the design clearly has.

And the point they started from is one where Fighters do very little, Wizards overtly trivialise the niches of other classes, and you only get to hit in combat if you rolled high on your strength and/or your DM decided to give you a magic sword.

The 'wait for the patch' fallacy can't conceal the problems with that.

And the polls they've done in the last few weeks suggest this trend also- viewed in relation to 1.0 and the feedback they likely got at ddxp, it's clear that a lot of them aren't "What do you think we should do with X", but rather "Here's a colum and poll designed to get support for the option I prefer".

 

[Lanefan]

On the (very uncertain) assumption that any of what's there is real, some of it is rather intriguing and some of it is rather awful.

And some of it doesn't make sense. Ability scores are capped at 20 but you get +1 to your prime ability every 3 levels? If the game goes 1-20 for levels and you use the array thus give your prime stat a 15 to start, it'll hit 21 at 18th...but the cap is...20. Huh.

All in all, though, I think I'll wait to see a newer version before passing too much judgement.

Lanefan

 

[Iosue]

One of the problems I see as he describes the document is that this only true of pre-4e games, and anything 4e related is written to disassociate it with 4e. Now, it might not be accurate, and things from all editions were modified, but if it is true, and 4e stuff was rewritten to pretend it wasn't from 4e, that just speaks of an incredible bias that seriously reduces this 4e fan's enthusiasm for the new edition.

Or, it speaks to WotC listening to a large group of fans who say, "I admit that 4e is a good game, well-designed, but it just doesn't feel like D&D to me." It might also speak to an attempt to design basic rules that fit with using miniatures and grids, but is not dependent on them, and are not described with the grid in mind. I'm as much a fan of 4e as the next guy, but I'm not unsympathetic to the charge that it reads as "game-y".

On an unrelated note, even assuming all of this leak is true, and that the leaker was remembering everything correctly, I'm not particularly worried that the wizard seemed ahead of the fighter. This playtest packet would far pre-date the DDX seminars, and even at that point they were saying they hadn't figured out the fighter yet. So it's no surprise that things would be unbalanced and not fighter-chock-a-block with awesome yet.

 

[The Little Raven]

Or, it speaks to WotC listening to a large group of fans who say, "I admit that 4e is a good game, well-designed, but it just doesn't feel like D&D to me." It might also speak to an attempt to design basic rules that fit with using miniatures and grids, but is not dependent on them, and are not described with the grid in mind.

It's the worst kind of pandering. It's semantics intended to appease a person who would reject something sight unseen because it comes from 4e. It has nothing to do with grids or miniatures or anything like that. It's the fact that they apparently took mechanics directly from 4e and rewrote them to be verbose rather than concise. No difference in function, just drawn out over more words. The rest mechanic, its limitations and its percentage-based healing is practically the healing surges system with the name filed off. The Guardian Fighter mentioned has the exact mechanics of Defender Aura.

It's like they're willing to sleep with 4e, but not willing to be seen in public with it.

 

[Iosue]

It's the worst kind of pandering. It's semantics intended to appease a person who would reject something sight unseen because it comes from 4e. It has nothing to do with grids or miniatures or anything like that. It's the fact that they apparently took mechanics directly from 4e and rewrote them to be verbose rather than concise. No difference in function, just drawn out over more words. The rest mechanic, its limitations and its percentage-based healing is practically the healing surges system with the name filed off. The Guardian Fighter mentioned has the exact mechanics of Defender Aura.

It's like they're willing to sleep with 4e, but not willing to be seen in public with it.

Well, it sounds like you've made up your mind, so we'll have to agree to disagree.

I'll just say, as someone who loves, loves, LOVES the Essentials Knight, that "Guardian" sounds a hell of a lot better than "Defender Aura".

 

[Sunseeker]

It's the worst kind of pandering. It's semantics intended to appease a person who would reject something sight unseen because it comes from 4e. It has nothing to do with grids or miniatures or anything like that. It's the fact that they apparently took mechanics directly from 4e and rewrote them to be verbose rather than concise. No difference in function, just drawn out over more words. The rest mechanic, its limitations and its percentage-based healing is practically the healing surges system with the name filed off. The Guardian Fighter mentioned has the exact mechanics of Defender Aura.

It's like they're willing to sleep with 4e, but not willing to be seen in public with it.

Calling 4e the secret mistress of Wizards isn't that far off from the truth IMO. Honestly as gamey as it was, I loved the more concise descriptions in 4e. I enjoy 3.X greatly, but I HATE having to read through fluffed up, overly verbose descriptions that essentially say: "You heal the target for 2d8." Great, thank you, I don't need to know that some random Joe had to wiggle his fingers and pinch his nose, then do a jig while singing ICP's Toxic Love to figure this spell out.

 

[Kynn]

I'm really, really hoping that they make major changes during the playtest period.