D&D 5E What would 5E be like if the playtest's modularity promise was kept?

[James Gasik]

I agree with all of these except the first and last points, mostly because that would require changing bounded accuracy to a certain extent. I think limiting stat increases to 18 and putting a level cap at around 14 (like B/X did) could achieve these results while keeping different genre rules working within the same mathematical range.

I do wonder why you think de-bounding accuracy is needed for an old-school feel, though! My impression was that 5E got the idea for bounded accuracy from earlier editions and their limited range in the first place.

An AD&D game is intended to span over a long career of players constantly facing new challenges. You cut your teeth on orcs and goblins, progress to bugbears, maybe ogres, then trolls, eventually you're facing bulettes and wyverns, then various species of giant, dragons, and by this point, you're world-beaters ready to hit the outer planes and tackle fiends and potentially demigods.

You will amass a great many magic items in this time, granting you powers and abilities beyond those of your character class, with only Wizards continuing to gain new powers until the high teens.

You might have crazy multiclass schemes, be dual classed Fighter/Wizards, have ability scores in the 20+ range, and possibly even wield artifacts.

At this level of play, the numbers are so inflated that combat becomes more about tactics and tricks than die rolls; a high level warrior isn't going to miss anything save for a roll of 1, and will be all but invulnerable due to super good saving throws, the lowest AC allowed, and various magical enhancements- your cloak of displacement will protect you from the first attack of the day, no matter what it is, your scarab of protection will let you save against effects that normally don't allow saving throws at all, and you have a double fistful of Ioun stones orbiting you at all times.

And unlike modern gaming, there are several good adventures for this tier of play, where you foil the schemes of demon princes and gods, and become legendary heroes...

Or maybe you died in a pool of your own blood at level 1 to a lucky goblin arrow. AD&D is a game of majestic mountains and seemingly endless chasms.

It's not easy to play. It's not easy to run, but it has it's own strange allure, like the sirens of myth.

As much as each edition since has promised to maintain that incredible endgame experience, something was lost in the translation. 3e shifted to being more about personal power, and most high level magic items are devoted to giving you immunities, big numbers, and mobility options- the real meat was in a plethora of strange abilities and feats which combined to create a sort of infernal Rube's Goldberg machine; when everything aligned just so, you were unstoppable. But often these builds proved delicate, and could be foiled rather trivially, much to the chagrin of their creators.

Organic development was shunted to the wayside; you now needed to plan out your character from levels 1-20, because deviation had a serious cost.

4e offered a taste of truly epic game play, but due to it's linear curve of development, combat felt mostly the same at every level- I love 4e, but it seemed like every new power was only a little stronger than the one it replaced, and the monsters had strange, bizarre abilities from the very earliest levels.

So by the time you get a Daily that lets you attack an enemy three times and leave them dazed until the end of the next turn, dazed (save ends) and stunned (save ends), enemies could have multiple hit point pools, transformations, and auras that prevented you from regaining hit points, along with immediate interrupts to teleport 10 squares away and stun you (save ends) for attempting to do anything so foolish as to attack them in melee.

With it's flattened math, feats, multiclassing, and magic items declared optional (and even beyond this, suggestion to limit magic items to a small amount), 5e characters may be fighting enemies with the same names as their nemeses of yore, but they won't feel anywhere near as powerful as those 20th-level AD&D heroes.

 

[Ondath]

An AD&D game is intended to span over a long career of players constantly facing new challenges. You cut your teeth on orcs and goblins, progress to bugbears, maybe ogres, then trolls, eventually you're facing bulettes and wyverns, then various species of giant, dragons, and by this point, you're world-beaters ready to hit the outer planes and tackle fiends and potentially demigods.

You will amass a great many magic items in this time, granting you powers and abilities beyond those of your character class, with only Wizards continuing to gain new powers until the high teens.

You might have crazy multiclass schemes, be dual classed Fighter/Wizards, have ability scores in the 20+ range, and possibly even wield artifacts.

At this level of play, the numbers are so inflated that combat becomes more about tactics and tricks than die rolls; a high level warrior isn't going to miss anything save for a roll of 1, and will be all but invulnerable due to super good saving throws, the lowest AC allowed, and various magical enhancements- your cloak of displacement will protect you from the first attack of the day, no matter what it is, your scarab of protection will let you save against effects that normally don't allow saving throws at all, and you have a double fistful of Ioun stones orbiting you at all times.

And unlike modern gaming, there are several good adventures for this tier of play, where you foil the schemes of demon princes and gods, and become legendary heroes...

Or maybe you died in a pool of your own blood at level 1 to a lucky goblin arrow. AD&D is a game of majestic mountains and seemingly endless chasms.

It's not easy to play. It's not easy to run, but it has it's own strange allure, like the sirens of myth.

As much as each edition since has promised to maintain that incredible endgame experience, something was lost in the translation. 3e shifted to being more about personal power, and most high level magic items are devoted to giving you immunities, big numbers, and mobility options- the real meat was in a plethora of strange abilities and feats which combined to create a sort of infernal Rube's Goldberg machine; when everything aligned just so, you were unstoppable. But often these builds proved delicate, and could be foiled rather trivially, much to the chagrin of their creators.

Organic development was shunted to the wayside; you now needed to plan out your character from levels 1-20, because deviation had a serious cost.

4e offered a taste of truly epic game play, but due to it's linear curve of development, combat felt mostly the same at every level- I love 4e, but it seemed like every new power was only a little stronger than the one it replaced, and the monsters had strange, bizarre abilities from the very earliest levels.

So by the time you get a Daily that lets you attack an enemy three times and leave them dazed until the end of the next turn, dazed (save ends) and stunned (save ends), enemies could have multiple hit point pools, transformations, and auras that prevented you from regaining hit points, along with immediate interrupts to teleport 10 squares away and stun you (save ends) for attempting to do anything so foolish as to attack them in melee.

With it's flattened math, feats, multiclassing, and magic items declared optional (and even beyond this, suggestion to limit magic items to a small amount), 5e characters may be fighting enemies with the same names as their nemeses of yore, but they won't feel anywhere near as powerful as those 20th-level AD&D heroes.

Having never experienced this myself, it's something I really wish newer editions replicated more efficiently (or at least at all, given that support for 5E above Level 13 is basically nonexistent). 4E's Epic Destinies seem to offer this outside of combat, with things like some classes giving you the power to literally walk to another plane because you're that good at finding paths. I think there's potential to replicate this with 5E's core engine (bounded accuracy means sufficiently high stats could get you to the "numbers are so inflated it's about tactics and not die rolls" territory), it's just that the rules never expanded on these ideas sufficiently.

Have you played high-level Basic D&D as well by any chance? I wonder how the Companion-Master-Immortal rules compare to the high-level AD&D play you described.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Frankly? I don't think they could have achieved what they wanted. People talk up how much of D&D has stayed the same over the years, but honestly, making a singular core that can legitimately support 1e-style gritty Gygaxian "naturalism"/"FFV" play, BECMI gonzo ultra-high-level galaxy-spanning play, and 4e-style rigorous tested balance and player-empowerment, just by toggling on or off certain features, is going to have very little in it, and yet that's where all classes have to be. It's a noble goal but I'm not sure it can be done. (Note, I left out 3e not because I'm neglecting it, but because honestly you can't capture 3e-as-is without intentionally making a broken game, which WotC would not do.)

 

[James Gasik]

Having never experienced this myself, it's something I really wish newer editions replicated more efficiently (or at least at all, given that support for 5E above Level 13 is basically nonexistent). 4E's Epic Destinies seem to offer this outside of combat, with things like some classes giving you the power to literally walk to another plane because you're that good at finding paths. I think there's potential to replicate this with 5E's core engine (bounded accuracy means sufficiently high stats could get you to the "numbers are so inflated it's about tactics and not die rolls" territory), it's just that the rules never expanded on these ideas sufficiently.

Have you played high-level Basic D&D as well by any chance? I wonder how the Companion-Master-Immortal rules compare to the high-level AD&D play you described.

I have played an Immortal character, and the experience was...odd, to say the least. You have a host of abilities, but advancement basically requires doing favors for other, more powerful immortals, and at least as I experienced it, it was far less about actually using your immortal powers to get things done as it was making alliances and backstabbing lesser immortals (and preventing new immortals from rising to challenge you).

 

[Minigiant]

I feel that a modular system could have been done and done well. The issue that that sides would not get 100% of what they wanted.but more than what current 5e provides.

A base system with a base assumption of swappable parts on each class and race. With variant for death, health, magic level, tactics, survival, and conversation.

For example, the killer of modular fighter was that there was no real swappable class feature. So there was no choice of +X damage as the default and a choice of Y superiority dice or Z special attack.

Basically the aspects of TCOE could have been built in the base system's design and math from the start. Instead they went with a "Good enough for most people" version and attempted to has mods on the backend.

 

[James Gasik]

The funny thing about 3e is, really, the reason it was busted was it had lots of classes and feats that seem as if they were never meant to coexist, but WotC never came out and said so.

Like, if the Samurai and Swashbuckler were just different brands of Fighter, and ditto for the Knight, they were probably fine coexisting with the Fighter. The Warblade, not so much.

What the Hexblade was trying to do, the Duskblade did better. Many of the later caster classes were actually a downgrade from their predecessors (with the exception of the Archivist; I'm mostly talking about Favored Soul, Warmage, Dread Necromancer).

The Rogue might be able to coexist with the Scout and the Ninja, but it's dubious if they were meant to coexist with the Spellthief, and certainly not meant to hang out with the Factotum. The Beguiler has a funny place in this paradigm as well, being technically a more balanced caster class, but accidentally doing pretty much everything you'd expect a Rogue to do, but better.

And that's not even getting into all the setting specific stuff that just sort of ended up bolted onto characters without a care- I really really really doubt you were meant to combine nutty Forgotten Realms content with deliberately gonzo Eberron content- but people did it, and we all saw the results.

Basically WotC left the decision of what to allow and not allow to the DM, but didn't give the DM any real guidance on how to make decisions. A simple complexity or power level rating would have done wonders.

Then once they started tinkering with different kinds of resources later in 3.5, like the very conservative Warlock (and his slightly better cousin, the Dragonfire Adept), Binders, and the Tome of Battle, everything got thrown out the window.

And meanwhile, the core casters remained top shelf, since at no time did they ever stop getting new options and spells.

I remember the conversation I had with a player who refused to admit that the Warmage was any weaker than an Evocation specialist. First I had to explain to him that Evocation was a weak school, and the Warmage's best spells were Conjuration. Then I had to point out all the crowd control, buffing, and defensive spells the Warmage lacked.

And then finally, I had to point out that the Wizard has a huge spell list that keeps getting improved, while the Warmage is basically set by what spells were in the PHB and Complete Arcane that the developers decided to give it, without much guidance for how/why/should you add more spells to the classes' list.

Was 3e busted...yes, but it didn't have to be. You could easily assemble a game of variable power levels from it's pieces, but you lacked a "how to" guide.

 

[James Gasik]

I feel that a modular system could have been done and done well. The issue that that sides would not get 100% of what they wanted.but more than what current 5e provides.

A base system with a base assumption of swappable parts on each class and race. With variant for death, health, magic level, tactics, survival, and conversation.

For example, the killer of modular fighter was that there was no real swappable class feature. So there was no choice of +X damage as the default and a choice of Y superiority dice or Z special attack.

Basically the aspects of TCOE could have been built in the base system's design and math from the start. Instead they went with a "Good enough for most people" version and attempted to has mods on the backend.

Yeah they decided to focus on Subclass as the source of variable class features until very recently. And you get new subclass abilities pretty rarely, with a lot of the later ones (depending on the class) feeling like they really aren't worth it when you finally get them.

It's a weird decision. Like, I get they wanted initial complexity to be fairly low, but surely they must have known that players would be ready for more after a few years?

 

[Minigiant]

Yeah they decided to focus on Subclass as the source of variable class features until very recently. And you get new subclass abilities pretty rarely, with a lot of the later ones (depending on the class) feeling like they really aren't worth it when you finally get them.

It's a weird decision. Like, I get they wanted initial complexity to be fairly low, but surely they must have known that players would be ready for more after a few years?

They let the playtest surveys dictate too much and handcuff them. And they didn't realize what the responses they wanted really meant. This is why the playtest responses and the current 5e fanbase visions don't match. Pouring all options in feats and subclasses and NO NEW CLASSES meant group would take too long by default to reach the point where they can use them. Especially with little guidance on customization of options for DMs.

That or they wanted to keep page number down or not produce a options supplement so early.

 

[Oofta]

Good grief. At one point someone overpromised something that could not realistically be delivered. To me, this is one of the most flexible and easy to play versions of D&D ever. Maybe not as flexible as 1E but that was because the oldest versions were more of a framework for a game than an actual ruleset.

No game can be everything to everyone while still having a coherent set of rules that is easy to grasp. Unless you have a build-a-game system, it's just not going to work. Look at all the people complaining because we have rulings instead of rules (the core of flexibility) and want to be told how to run everything from detailed stealth rules to explicit social interaction rules. This is the most successful version ever, and people are complaining? Because they listened to feedback and delivered what the majority of people actually want, not what a vocal minority demanded?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Monte Cook's statement about 5E's modularity has been proven true and has been proven false, depending entirely on who is making the statement and how much of their preferred game they needed to have represented for them to consider 5E's modularity a success.

There are people who merely care about the essence or spirit of their preferred system... and by taking or using only parts of 5E that they want... their itch got scratched. 5E's rules were modular enough to give them what they felt they wanted in their preferred D&D. Using just the Basic Rules might have been all that was needed to give them a 1E type of feel, whereas adding in all the special combat rules in the DMG of Disarm, Marking, Flanking, and re-writing spell blocks to be just the mechanical expression without all the natural language fluff around it might be all that was needed to give someone a 4E feel. If you only took the parts you wanted from the three books and created your game from them, the essence could be brought forth for those people.

Whereas other people wanted and want an almost exact replica of their preferred edition... the same numbers in equal levels and amounts, the same classes and what they can do, the same types of rules that allow them to move their characters the same way they do in their preferred edition. And of course 5E could not and can not accomplish those things because different editions had complete opposites in many of these rules. For example, there's no way to have a single game which has their baseline mechanics have both the low amounts of numbers of BECMI and the exceedingly high numbers and modifiers of 3E, no matter how "modular" you might want to try and make the game. And thus that right there automatically makes Cook's statement an impossibility for some people.

I mean just the fact that there was no specific "Warlord" class in 5E automatically made some people think they were lied to about 5E's so-called "modularity". And it doesn't matter how many subclasses or Battlemaster maneuvers you could take to create the essence of what a Warlord might possibly do... no Warlord Class means 4E cannot be made and thus 5E modularity is complete and utter BS.

And at that point, all WotC can do is put up their hands and say "Yep, you got us. 5E is not going to have the modularity you were expecting or demanding. It is its own game that cannot and will not completely match your experiences or expectations of your preferred edition. Sorry." And I get it might be disappointing to hear that... but at the end of the day, it just forces a person to decide what is really more important to them... moving to 5E because it's the one currently supported and can find the most willing players (even if a lot of the rules don't match their preferences)... or sticking with their preferred game so that they can play the game they want-- but just have to put in a little more work finding new players and creating/adapting new material to use for their game.