D&D 5E Whats your dealbreaker for 5E?

[Shiv]

There's no such thing as a "deal breaker" for me.

I've played several editions of D&D, plus Pathfinder. Plus a wide variety of other games.

If the next edition of D&D is a fun game, I'll play it. So far, I'm enjoying the playtest material. So I expect to buy and play it.

When it comes right down to it, I just like playing RPGs of all varieties.

 

[Shemeska]

Considering the many "Will you buy 5E?" threads and the numerous "no" and "maybe" replies, I wonder why people do not have interest in 5E.

1) If I'm playing an RPG that covers the thematic niche that D&D traditionally does, I have Pathfinder. If I'm playing something outside of that niche, I have other RPGs like Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, etc

2) I was a fan of Forgotten Realms. WotC doesn't appear willing to retcon the 4e Realms, and thus I'm not honestly all that interested. Without it to draw me in, that's a mark against 5e.

3) Real life and career. I'm engaged as of recently, and I have a job that devours my time. My freelancing is relatively limited in scale, and if I'm not invested already in a game system/setting, I don't have the time and creative energy to learn a new system like 5e unless I know that it's going to be worth that investment.

4) After the handling of various settings in 4e it's difficult for me to have full faith in WotC's ability to handle those settings moving forward, even the ones spared the most damage. Additionally, with the pretty massive turnover in staff, most of the people whose work and knowledge of the material I trust and even people whose name I'm familiar with have either resigned or suffered the annual layoff(s). The ones whose work I've enjoyed I'll happily follow on to their next thing (like Cook and Cordell doing Numenera), but WotC largely seems gutted of creative continuity and knowledge of their own long-standing IPs that makes me wary of 5e in a big way after some of the mockery in 4e directed towards some of the material that 5e is now pushing to embrace, or telling us that it's embracing. They lost my trust with 4e, and it's going to be difficult to earn it back. I'm more than open to the effort, but it'll be hard.

 

[exile]

I'll buy 5E for sure, but I have one group of friends that is perfectly happy playing Pathfinder; and another group that has no desire to quit playing 4E in favor of Next.

 

[Stormonu]

My dealbreaker? If the game sucks.

Seriously, I just find it hard to believe I couldn't already find the game I want in one of the existing editions or retroclones or derivatives. Rather than reinventing the game, I wish they'd focus instead on stuff like NEW adventures, monsters, campaign settings and maybe the occasional rules module add-on. I'm sick of the underlying rules changing every so often. So I guess my dealbreaker is if the game is another rule iteration I need to learn. So, in that regard, I'm already out.

 

[Ahnehnois]

For me it's..

1. No need to buy more D&D core rulebooks (I have several)
2. I enjoy Pathfinder
3. They alienated me with 4E
4. They aren't likely to keep the edition around for more than 5 years (WotC never has). [And by this, I mean that the original edition's core books are still the base assumption for support products.]
5. Their products cost more *and* have less content per page than they did in 3.x.

I'm pretty much going to concur with that, except that I prefer 3e mixed with PF. It's not a question of dealbreaking so much as it is a question of them being able to convince me that the purchase would be worthwhile. And they haven't.

 

[PigKnight]

1. I like 3.5e enough already.
2. I don't like how they are pushing varient rules super hard. Core books should have core rules.
3. Personal politics involving WotC.

 

[silverblade56]

For me it would be in order
1) Having enough people interested in buying/playing it longterm or at least giving it a go. If my gaming friends aren't interested, it's pointless for me to buy it. I just don't have the time to add yet another gaming night a week for a new D&D Next group.
2) Price If I have to shell out $100 or so for the basic rules, I can't really afford or justify that, at least for now. I could maybe do $30 worth of pdfs, though.
3) Does it still feel like D&D? After seeing what they did with 4E, I don't want a radically different game just to make it different or to attract a younger video game playing audience. It doesn't look like they are doing this, though.
4) Lack of faith in WotC. A lot of things WotC has done in the last few years really makes me not want to support the company. Badmouthing 3.5 and certain playstyles to promote 4E, effectively killing dungeon and dragon, running 3.5 into the ground with splatbook bloat, rushing out splat books for 4E with obviously little to no playtesting, laying off droves of employees twice a year, etc.

 

[FinalSonicX]

My primary deal breaker will be incompatibility with OGL content. 4e is largely incompatible to the extent that I need to do a lot of work to convert things, so if 5e is more of the same then that's going to be difficult for me. I already have my own homebrew based on the OGL, so I'm not eager to drop it and transition.

Another one will be lack of some kind of open license like the OGL. It doesn't need to be super permissive, just permissive enough that TPPs actually decide to hop on board en-masse like back in the 3rd edition days. I'll take the mountains of terrible content if it means that we get a few gems from third parties. This is especially important since third parties can focus on niche content that Wizards is likely to abandon in favor of the typical "PHB 2", "Complete X", etc.

Another thing will be lack of interesting new content. If all I'm getting is stuff I've had in every edition of D&D ever, I question what the incentive is for an upgrade. I want interesting rules options, classes, backgrounds, spells, monsters, and magic items. They perhaps shouldn't be "core", but I want something more than just the exact same stuff I have reprinted for 3-4 different editions!

Wizards has a mountain to climb, for sure. I'd love it if D&D became my go-to system for fantasy adventure, but I question how they're going to do that without upsetting one group or another.

 

[wilrich]

Cumbersome and bloated monster stat blocks that are not self-contained.

The greatest innovation of 4ed was the self-contained monster stat block. I cringe when I think of DMing mid to high level 3/3.5 and often having to account for (at times) dozens of feats and spells when running a high-level monster. For the most part, 4ed was able to make high-level monsters interesting, fun to fight, and fun to run with a self-contained, one page stat block; I found that approach efficient and elegant. If 5ed goes back to the 3ed style and requires me to familiarize myself with multiple spells, feats, etc. when running a monster, I will not play it.

Sadly, I believe that the above will turn out to be the case. I'm not sure how final the format of the monsters in the bestiary is at this point, but I have noted multiple monsters with 9-level spell lists and some with multiple spells at each level. If the monster manual doesn't have a sidebar to the effect of "If you want to make this monster simpler but still relatively interesting, ignore the spell list and instead replace it with these 2-3 powers or abilities" for those monsters, I am extremely unlikely to be playing 5ed.

 

[Henry]

There is no specific mechanic which could be a deal breaker for me. It's about the whole package and how it feels. I couldn't nail down anything specific. But any given mechanic is just a detail.

Similar for me. It's freakin' D&D; I'll buy it, the core set at least, as I always have, and I'll play it at least once or twice. If the system sings to me, then great; if not, it goes next to 1E, and 2E, and Basic, and 3E, and 4E, and gets used as inspiration, or just as reference until someone says "let's play 5E".