D&D 5E When will we be able to run a campaign with D&D Next?

[Abstruse]

It really depends on their release schedule. Right now, you can run the Caves of Chaos as a campaign, but it won't take very long (the pregens are only leveled to 3rd), there's no character creation rules, and frankly the rules just aren't ready to support a long-term game yet.

You're going to have to wait for 1) character generation rules, 2) higher levels available for PCs, 3) more monsters, and 4) tighter edits and more finalization on the core rules. And that's at a minimum. Since WotC hasn't given us a firm timeline for when they plan to release what beyond the "we hope to have chargen by the end of the summer" stated above, there's just no way of knowing right now.

You could theoretically run a game now with it, but it would require a lot of house rules and a lot of attempting to extrapolate things from the pregen characters - basically figuring out what the Race, Class, Theme, and Background do specifically and how they're affected by level. And if you wanted to stay current on the rules, you'd have to be willing to scrap everything you've done and starting over when they change something.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Use the kind of Killer DM style, restart at 1st level when dead, that I started with before I knew any better, and you could run a long campaign with what we have thus far. It was a looonnng time before anyone made it past 3rd level in those days, and I even had the Red and Blue boxes to use.

 

[deadwor1d]

When I first started playing D&D, all we had was one of the earlier Basic sets. I didn't even KNOW the game went past 3rd level! I felt kinda dumb when I discovered this cool fact... "Wait...there's an Expert set?"

All we would NEED right now to make a campaign would be character creation rules. Because reverse-engineering what little we've been given makes my brain hurt with modifiers coming from who in hell knows where.

We're a huge community with a TON of collective experience. I'm sure we can come up with moar spells, moar monsters, and so on on our own.

 

[Mercule]

It all depends on your willingness to improvise -- and how much you care about matching up with DDN a year from now.

I've been GMing for almost 30 years, so I'd be okay going with what was provided, if I really had something gnawing at me. It would look an awful lot like 1e, with some extra perks, but it'd work. I'd rather wait a couple iterations, though, to get a better feel for advancement and another couple examples of feats. My guess is that Aug-Sept would be a time frame for running 5e "comfortably". That said, I'm just kinda happy to be playing a low-stress/low-expectation game, at the moment. My group badly needed something we weren't going to take too seriously. So, I plan on waiting for the formal release before doing anything other than the play test.