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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5132693" data-attributes="member: 2067">A return to the dungeon.By that, I mean, a return to the dungeon as the basic element of gameplay.Most of 3e and all of 4e specifies the encounter as the basic element of gameplay. Encounters are designed in detail, and played out in detail (especially combat encounters). Encounters are what you need resources for, and what consumes resources. Encounters are where you do things that need to be done. Encounters are where you play the game.In 5e, it will be the dungeon (or the wilderness path, or the plot of the assassin, or whatever other discrete point-a-to-point-b mission you want to think of). We'll still have encounters, but, for instance, HP (healing surges, whatever) will only return after you complete the dungeon, and each encounter will be one bit of the overall dungeon, and the dungeon will also be made of non-encounters: traps, obstacles, scenery, NPC's, whatnot. Choices that the PC's make will become more important in action, rather than at character creation: it is important to decide what path to take out of this room, to try Door A or Door B, it is not (as) important to pick the right power, or the right race. This will pull the game back a little bit from combat. Big setpiece combats will still be prominent, but your party will also have resources to face things that aren't combats -- divinations and spying for determining which choice is the right choice, resources for recovering from bad choices, etc. These "noncombat things" will directly be the dungeon itself trying to kill your characters, or otherwise make them fail. Dungeons will award treasure, and XP, not encounters. Instead of 10 encounters, it'll be 3 dungeons to gain a level. You will have powers of exploration, and interpersonal skills, based on your class and race, to solve the problems dungeons create, rather than just the problems combats create.As a result, some things will get more abstract. Race will be more of a "template" to lay on top of your class. Your class will be more fluid. You won't be "locked in" from 1-30. It will probably change to 1-15 (plus prestige class?). Combat will not be as specific. One square one way or the other will not matter. Opportunity Attacks will be dropped, and minor tactical foibles like flanking and combat advantage will be made abstract. The game will be made to play on the computer from Day 1, with a gametable, and a way to find groups online, and a way to set them up. WotC will sponsor online tournament play a la the RPGA, and will also develop adventures through this medium. It will still be possible to play on the tabletop, and there will still be "core books" printed, but "splat books" and modules might be mostly online supplements. The core books will be rarer, but bigger, collectors' items, and might come after the online versions (after the bugs have been mostly worked out).If they want to be really interesting, they'll make it the Final Edition, with a continually evolving and expanding ruleset full of individual bits that DM's can assemble in their own campaigns, but I'm not so sure they can envision what that would look like. I think I would like it like that. Specifically, the return to seeing the dungeon as the key element of play would address, I think, 90% of my problems with 4e.And the other 10% might be solved by not hiring enthusiastic 13 year olds to write the names of things. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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