D&D 5E (2024) What Improvements Would You Want with 6E?

[Tony Vargas]

How would one design D&D and how would one sell D&D are identical propositions.

Not remotely.

 

[Parmandur]

Not remotely.

The telos of game design is to make games that appeal to people and get played. Designing a game is about selling a game, exact identity in terms.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The telos of game design is to make games that appeal to people and get played. Designing a game is about selling a game, exact identity in terms.

not for every game. Not even for most games. But for D&D, you’re absolutely correct. After D&D, the big boy in the room, dropped from the top spot (an unthinkable concept during the first 35 years of the industry), I can bet dollars to donuts that the #1 requirement of the 5e design team was to come up with a game that would put D&D back in the top spot.

 

[Parmandur]

not for every game. Not even for most games. But for D&D, you’re absolutely correct. After D&D, the big boy in the room, dropped from the top spot (an unthinkable concept during the first 35 years of the industry), I can bet dollars to donuts that the #1 requirement of the 5e design team was to come up with a game that would put D&D back in the top spot.

Well, true, not every game has "become a massive international hit" as the specific goal, but "get people into playing and having fun" always has to be central to solid game design. Otherwise it isn't game design, it's a math exercise.

 

[Arch-Fiend]

i havent read many of the ideas brought up here so i dont know if this has been mentioned, but i wouldn't radically change the way D&D is, maybe radically changing it is the best option, 5e was a departure from 4e, and 4 from 3, but im mostly just going to focus on a problem that i think D&D has had for the last 3 editions. ironically started by my favorite edition, but i can criticize that which i hold most close.

feats.
feats are not a very good method of giving players mechanical character diversity while also trying to cater to every kind of D&D game that could be ran. typically D&D games will focus into a few different avenues of gameplay depending on what kind of story a dm wants to run, but one fundamental divide is a game where plot a characters progress through combat vs a game where plot and characters progress through non-combat skills and ability application creates one massive problem for feats attempting to cator to both, that problem is players not having experience or simply not knowing what kind of game they are going into when choosing feats.

now a simple solution is simply letting players change the feats they have when they took those feats under an incorrect perspective of what the game would be like. however this is an imperfect solution to a problem that doesent even need to exist, AD&D didint have this problem, because AD&D had weapon proficiencies and non weapon proficiencies and regardless of what class you took, you never got zero of one of these proficiencies, meaning by design a character should always have an ability that is useful to whatever kind of game a dm is running.

now im not saying we copy AD&D exactly, but it shows a good trend to be thinking along with regard to how we implement character customization mechanics other than classes, which is minimize the risk of a player making NO good chances and increase the chance they make good choices when given so many options.

combat feats and noncombat feats, why not? i think characters should get an equal amount of both regardless of what class they take unlike the way AD&D implemented it, basically characters would get them at a rate much like ability score increases are gained every few levels in 5e. also obviously dont make players choose between feats and ability score increase. just balance the game against players getting all this stuff.

 

[jgsugden]

Greetings Professor Gygax

Hello

This 6E is a strange game.
The only winning move
is not to play.

How about a nice game of 5E?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Broken character classes are a core feature that makes D&D.

If they let a player play the desired archetype, and have fun, without making fairly casual or “low system mastery” players notice the system in a negative way, it isn’t broken.

5e has no broken classes.

 

[Parmandur]

If they let a player play the desired archetype, and have fun, without making fairly casual or “low system mastery” players notice the system in a negative way, it isn’t broken.

5e has no broken classes.

Even the Ranger is viable, though easily the least well done.

 

[S'mon]

I don't, and I don't think it's particularly rational to assume that, to be honest. I strongly suspect the vast majority of people who run those books (probably a small minority of people who actually run D&D) actually do not run them as 5-8 encounters per day. I've played in plenty of groups, and podcasts and streams and so on pretty much universally reflect a lower number of encounters on the vast majority of days. It also only allows for extremely narrow "intense but not that intense"-type design of the adventuring day, and doesn't at all support how D&D and other RPGs have been played historically and continue to be played.

It's bad design.

EDIT - It's also circular logic. They designed the game for 5-8 encounters/day (which was seemingly already an assumption when they started playtesting, I note - I wonder where this came from?), and then playtested with weird little dungeon crawls as literally the only kind of adventure they were playtesting, and designed the entire game around 5-8 encounters/day and because they've done that, they release adventures with 5-8 encounters/day. So is it any surprise they remain satisfied with their own logic? Yeah, if you design for a ridiculously high number of encounters/day, and then release adventures that fit that, unlike the adventures humans actually write and run, sure, you're bound to be "satisfied". It's just totally circular logic, though.

A paranoid man might wonder if it they made it intentionally incompatible with how people normally run games, in order to make it so their own weirdly-designed adventures worked! Almost like DRM or something. But I suspect it's more likely to just be a weird fetish based on a dungeon obsession. It's downright hard to write a wilderness or urban adventure with that many meaningful, resource-draining encounters/day though.

Even when I run 5e dungeon crawls, I very rarely see the mythical 6-8 fights/day. It tends to be more like 3-4 before the PCs are looking to exit the dungeon for a long rest.

I did finally get to the 6-8 encounters per LR, but it was by putting LR at 1 week and running wilderness expeditions where LR in hostile territory was basically not an option.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

i havent read many of the ideas brought up here so i dont know if this has been mentioned, but i wouldn't radically change the way D&D is, maybe radically changing it is the best option, 5e was a departure from 4e, and 4 from 3, but im mostly just going to focus on a problem that i think D&D has had for the last 3 editions. ironically started by my favorite edition, but i can criticize that which i hold most close.

feats.
feats are not a very good method of giving players mechanical character diversity while also trying to cater to every kind of D&D game that could be ran. typically D&D games will focus into a few different avenues of gameplay depending on what kind of story a dm wants to run, but one fundamental divide is a game where plot a characters progress through combat vs a game where plot and characters progress through non-combat skills and ability application creates one massive problem for feats attempting to cator to both, that problem is players not having experience or simply not knowing what kind of game they are going into when choosing feats.

now a simple solution is simply letting players change the feats they have when they took those feats under an incorrect perspective of what the game would be like. however this is an imperfect solution to a problem that doesent even need to exist, AD&D didint have this problem, because AD&D had weapon proficiencies and non weapon proficiencies and regardless of what class you took, you never got zero of one of these proficiencies, meaning by design a character should always have an ability that is useful to whatever kind of game a dm is running.

now im not saying we copy AD&D exactly, but it shows a good trend to be thinking along with regard to how we implement character customization mechanics other than classes, which is minimize the risk of a player making NO good chances and increase the chance they make good choices when given so many options.

combat feats and noncombat feats, why not? i think characters should get an equal amount of both regardless of what class they take unlike the way AD&D implemented it, basically characters would get them at a rate much like ability score increases are gained every few levels in 5e. also obviously dont make players choose between feats and ability score increase. just balance the game against players getting all this stuff.

Id like to see you elaborate further. Im interested in seeing a further progression of this line of thought.