D&D 5E Thoughts on 6-7-13 Playtest Packet

[MJS]

I think the assumption that "Animate Dead" is inherently evil implies that the casting of the spell, for any reason, pulls negative energy into the world, strengthening the forces of darkness, and that this use of neg-e is evil in itself. If fireball doesn't have a morality issue, neither should any other spell. So it must be a physical law.

There are lots of things in D&D that are effectively universal physical law in a game world using these rules. This is one of the tricky parts of D&D worldbuilding.

Well, there is clearly more to Animate Dead's wickedness than that, although I interpret it as circumstantial, and not the spell itself. It just so happens that its most commonly used in an evil way, often accompanied by maniacal laughter.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You wouldn't allow the party to Ready An Action to react to a verbal command and hustle or charge when the leader yells RETREAT or CHARGE (presuming they have the feat here) ? Yet this is something that happen IRL and that we see frequently in fiction...

I wouldn't allow someone to react to THEMSELVES. Mainly because that defeats the point of initiative, really. The point is that everything is happening simultaneously. When you yell out "RETREAT!" and everyone runs away on their own individual turns, it means initiative is working as intended. They aren't sitting around waiting to run away, initiative just determines how fast people are able to react to your command.

I always visualize it as everyone running away at the same time, even though everyone gets their own action.

Also, I visualize readying an action as being prepared for something very specific to happen and preparing half your action in advance. Like, if you ready to shoot a bow at someone you nock an arrow and point in a specific direction and wait until your trigger happens, then you just let go.

Which is why I hate ambiguous ready actions. I've always made players specify very specific triggers and actions:

"I shoot the first creature to come through that door with my bow" is a valid ready action.

"I will either move away or attack if I hear anything" isn't.

I'd allow everyone in the group to ready a retreat when the order was called. However, the person calling the order either has to do it during their own turn or has to retreat based on a different ready condition. Something like "When an enemy reaches the front lines, I'll yell retreat and then back up."

Delaying and changing init when readying was removed from D&D Next to simplify things. If you only have to write down initiative once at the beginning and it doesn't change every round, then keeping track of it becomes much easier. I like the concept. I find fiddling with delays and readies one of the most time consuming portions of a battle.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the assumption that "Animate Dead" is inherently evil implies that the casting of the spell, for any reason, pulls negative energy into the world, strengthening the forces of darkness, and that this use of neg-e is evil in itself. If fireball doesn't have a morality issue, neither should any other spell. So it must be a physical law.

There are lots of things in D&D that are effectively universal physical law in a game world using these rules. This is one of the tricky parts of D&D worldbuilding.

You call it 'tricky', I call it 'limiting'. lol. I never liked that aspect of earlier editions. I really preferred the way there was no specific necessary linkage in 4e. You could create a setting where using shadow magic, necromancy, etc was inherently evil and build your story with that in mind (IE the good guys reject you and try to destroy you for this sort of action), OR you could leave as morally irrelevant (though potentially repugnant to some cultures). That way 'evil' isn't a set of mechanics, it is a way of behaving and possibly a cosmic force with setting-specific ramifications. The default setting is of course then free to sidebar in whatever conventions are normally followed.

 

[Savage Wombat]

You call it 'tricky', I call it 'limiting'. lol. I never liked that aspect of earlier editions.

Oh, I'm not establishing a good/bad opinion. I just think that a lot of D&D is actually an established convention of world-building rules, and that the game designers are holding to that tradition. The game assumes a four-element system, for example, and not the eastern five-elements. You can change it easily, but the basic rules have the underlying assumptions as core.

I don't think it's right or wrong, but I don't think they'll change it lightly. The undead will probably always have an "evil" foundation in the rules system.

 

[Kobold Stew]

The discussion about Animate Dead is interesting. Though there are no formal limits on the spell, the flavor text is explicit. In fact, it reminds me of the August 2012 play test package, when there was a specialty available that was the Necromancer.

The Necromancer was awesome: it was flavourful; it was not restricted to a single class; it had no alignment restrictions of any kind. Not all were evil, but they may encounter prejudice. All that I'm fine with, and I'll admit that I am really sorry that it has been removed from the playtest materials, since it would have been great to see this develop. But, and this went almost entirely without comment at the time, it had a truly terrifying first-level ability.

Aura of Souls:
When you slay an enemy, you reach out to seize its departing soul, converting it into your own vitality.

Prerequisite: Able to cast at least one spell

Benefit: As an action, you can capture the fleeing life energy of a creature that has died within the last minute, transforming it into a spirit that hovers near you. The creature’s corpse must be within 50 feet of you. You can have no more than two such spirits at your disposal at any given time. These spirits dissipate after 1 minute.

When you cast a necromancy spell, you can destroy one of these spirits to give yourself advantage on one attack roll you make with that spell, or give one target disadvantage on a single saving throw made against that spell.

The mechanical benefit was modest: comparable to the Guidance spell. But look at that flavour text!

The Necromancer could seize a departing soul, and then destroy it!

This was (a) a first-level ability, that (b) was not called out as necessarily evil, even though (c) it would apparently (if we take the flavour text literally) prevent raising from the dead, resurrection, etc.

Compare this to the furore over Animate Dead, where the spell merely bestows undeath upon a pile of bones or a corpse and we see how small these stakes really are.

Indirect language that says nothing about destroying souls. It uses something called "undeath" with no actual sense of interfering with the deceased and her divinity (if any).

Animate Dead is, in comparison, lame in its shock value, and doesn't come close to violating the bounds of good and/or law in the way that Aura of Souls did.

Here, then, are two extremes in the approach to Necromancy spells. The right solution is somewhere in the middle. A Necromancer Specialty (available to all spell casters), that provided some special abilities without reference to necessarily evil acts, and similarly without reference to de-protagonizing options for other characters (where something might happen to their characters because of flavour text rather than the actual mechanical effects that have been defined) is both logical and could be made available within the current playtest parameters. That's what I'd want.

 

[SkidAce]

And why the Leader leading his troop couldn't retreat or charge with them? Its something we all see IRL like i said...You dont see the commander staying behind because he cannot react to his own command.


Anyway my concern was more with the removal of initiative shifting after a readied action is taken rather than if verbal command can be used as trigger. From 3E to 4E to D&D Next up until this last packet, your initiative would change to before the creature's turn on which the readied action took place and there was a reason for that, to prevent a PC from possibly acting twice in a row.

The leader's not reacting to his action, he's yelling charge and moving. The others are reacting to him.

I'm not opposed to what you are saying. Just trying to clarify. Its all terminology I suppose.

 

[zoroaster100]

I think Animate Dead is considered generally evil because many think that being turned into a zombie or undead skeleton is a fate worse than death (note how in many zombie movies the heroes have a pact to kill each other if necessary rather than let themselves end up in the horrid fate of existence as a flesh eating zombie). Thus, inflicting that fate on another person for your own use is generally considered evil.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, I'm not establishing a good/bad opinion. I just think that a lot of D&D is actually an established convention of world-building rules, and that the game designers are holding to that tradition. The game assumes a four-element system, for example, and not the eastern five-elements. You can change it easily, but the basic rules have the underlying assumptions as core.

I don't think it's right or wrong, but I don't think they'll change it lightly. The undead will probably always have an "evil" foundation in the rules system.

Yeah, I didn't really think you were coming down on one side or the other. I was jumping off from your starting point. I agree there's some degree of traditional "evil is a cosmic force" as part of D&D meta-setting. OTOH, especially in early editions, the meta-setting wasn't IMHO intended to be an iron-clad built-in pervasive cosmology. Even though 1e for instance had a "known planes" diagram and some brief cosmological material that was default it was also very much a toolbox where the assumptions didn't seem to be too deeply embedded. Over time the cosmology has however become a larger and larger part of the game. Nowadays you can see with 4e for instance that even though it is pretty agnostic about things like the nature of evil a LOT of the material is tied to a default cosmology. Its not hard to change -easier than in 3.x- but I'd rather things went a bit the other way. So it would be nice if there was LESS cosmology, and that its relation to the rules remained more abstract like in 4e.

Of course I'm all for a nice 'WoG' setting or something where all the classic cosmological and philosophical standards of 1e/2e/3e can be explicated in full and the DM can get instructions on how to play up evil as a cosmological force, etc. Honestly I doubt DDN is going to go to any big extremes WRT alignment and cosmology anyway.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The discussion about Animate Dead is interesting. Though there are no formal limits on the spell, the flavor text is explicit. In fact, it reminds me of the August 2012 play test package, when there was a specialty available that was the Necromancer.

The Necromancer was awesome: it was flavourful; it was not restricted to a single class; it had no alignment restrictions of any kind. Not all were evil, but they may encounter prejudice. All that I'm fine with, and I'll admit that I am really sorry that it has been removed from the playtest materials, since it would have been great to see this develop. But, and this went almost entirely without comment at the time, it had a truly terrifying first-level ability.

Aura of Souls:
When you slay an enemy, you reach out to seize its departing soul, converting it into your own vitality.

Prerequisite: Able to cast at least one spell

Benefit: As an action, you can capture the fleeing life energy of a creature that has died within the last minute, transforming it into a spirit that hovers near you. The creature’s corpse must be within 50 feet of you. You can have no more than two such spirits at your disposal at any given time. These spirits dissipate after 1 minute.

When you cast a necromancy spell, you can destroy one of these spirits to give yourself advantage on one attack roll you make with that spell, or give one target disadvantage on a single saving throw made against that spell.

The mechanical benefit was modest: comparable to the Guidance spell. But look at that flavour text!

The Necromancer could seize a departing soul, and then destroy it!

This was (a) a first-level ability, that (b) was not called out as necessarily evil, even though (c) it would apparently (if we take the flavour text literally) prevent raising from the dead, resurrection, etc.

Compare this to the furore over Animate Dead, where the spell merely bestows undeath upon a pile of bones or a corpse and we see how small these stakes really are.

Indirect language that says nothing about destroying souls. It uses something called "undeath" with no actual sense of interfering with the deceased and her divinity (if any).

Animate Dead is, in comparison, lame in its shock value, and doesn't come close to violating the bounds of good and/or law in the way that Aura of Souls did.

Here, then, are two extremes in the approach to Necromancy spells. The right solution is somewhere in the middle. A Necromancer Specialty (available to all spell casters), that provided some special abilities without reference to necessarily evil acts, and similarly without reference to de-protagonizing options for other characters (where something might happen to their characters because of flavour text rather than the actual mechanical effects that have been defined) is both logical and could be made available within the current playtest parameters. That's what I'd want.

Well, the interesting part IMHO is the way this power is structured in a highly reskinnable way. It is very much like most 4e powers where the actual narrative component could be altered. It certainly is evocative of 'soul eating', but depending on for instance the setting's assumptions about death, life, undeath, and the components of a person, you could easily spin this in more or less 'evil' ways. You could for instance restructure this as a blessing from a divine source instead of a sacrifice. A DM might also consider allowing deeper reworking, such as applying the mechanics to different types of spells or something like that, again very similar to the way things can be easily rewritten in 4e (and noting that just as in 4e it is possible to effect balance in some cases).

I really hope that DDN is pervasively structured in this way to maximize flexibility and reuse of mechanics.

 

[Hussar]

On the point about yelling and charging.

The reason we don't allow the leader to react to his own yell is that speaking (and yelling generally) isn't limited to initiative. I'd actually not allow a yell to trigger an action by and large for exactly this reason.

If the party can all ready an action to move when my PC yells, I can yell at any point in the initiative order and they get their action.

I'd say that the readied action has to key off of my charge. When I charge, then everyone else does.