Mercurius
Legend
0. Disclaimer
I want to try to integrate some thoughts from various threads, both about what I think about D&D 5E, as well as when we might expect to see it. Please bear with me as this is long, somewhat rambling, and very, very subjective.
1. Why I Feel Hopeful (about 5E)
Let’s start with this quote from an article by David Ewalt on Forbes.com, published May 24 of 2013:
Here we see that D&D, going forward, is not about the edition or specific rule set, but about the “feeling that you get playing Dungeons & Dragons.” This, to me, means that their focus is not on creating the perfect rule set that can simulate any possible scenario, but one that facilitates imagination – the feeling of the game.
To put that another way, they are putting the horse back before the cart. Now a word from Mike Mearls in that same article:
This is not to say that rules aren’t important, but that their primary purpose is to serve the story, the character, the “feeling” of D&D – as “a means to an end,” the end being the experience of enjoyment that we all get from That D&D Feeling.
2. Scylla & Charybdis: Where 3E & 4E Erred
So let’s back up a bit. Before anyone gets upset or thinks I'm trying to start an Edition Skirmish, let me be clear on one thing: Not only do I see myself as an advocate of any particular edition of D&D, but I enjoyed both 3E and 4E when they came out. My favorite edition of D&D is generally whatever edition I'm playing, with a tendency to veer towards the most recent one. I like change, I like my beloved game ("the feeling") taking on new forms. I see "D&D" as being less of a specific set of rules and more of a Platonic Form that evokes a feeling, and that can manifest in different iterations.
Back in the late 90s I hadn’t played D&D for a few years. This was partially because I was largely not playing RPGs for a few years, but also because I felt that RPG design has passed D&D by – AD&D 2E seemed clunky and anachronistic, a product of 1970s game design slightly revamped for the late 80s. Meanwhile, the RPG world had been taken by the Indie revolution, with innovations in design spear-headed by games like Ars Magica and White Wolf’s various games. Yet D&D was always in my heart, always central to my love of gaming. When I heard rumors of a new edition of the game, I scoured the internet and found a little website called Eric Noah’s Unofficial 3rd Edition News, in glorious red letters on black background.
I followed updates, and was excited when 3E came out. I loved the game – loved the streamlined core d20 system that made D&D relevant again as an RPG design, yet also retained the “D&D feeling” that I had grown up with, but in a modernized, higher quality format.
And then the bloat began…Not only from Wizards of the Coast, but from the two-edged sword that was the Open Gaming License. I loved the fact that anyone could warm up their printer and create a D&D book, but 3E got swamped under a deluge of mediocre products. When 3.5E came out, the WotC bloat began in earnest. I ended up going on another hiatus from gaming shortly after 3.5E came out in 2003, but I remember leaving the game thinking that it was getting a bit out of hand, that something had been lost in all of the complex rules and sub-systems.
My interest was rekindled, once again, in late 2007 when I heard news of 4E coming out. I became interested and was excited about a new edition. When the game came out I wasn’t as wowed as I was with 3E, and in a way a bit confused as to why 4E was the way it was, but I was open to change and when the opportunity arose, got a group together. We played on and off for about three years, but then our campaign dwindled away. While I had learned to somewhat minimize the dreaded Grind, I never could conquer it, and I became disenchanted with a lot of the qualities of 4E - from the monotony of combat to the homogenization of powers, but especially the disconnect that the rules seemed to encourage (more on that in a moment).
I haven’t played D&D for about a year, but find myself excited about getting a game started again in January using the 5E playtest rules, with the hope that the actual rule books will be out sometime in 2014 (more on that in a moment). My hope is that 5E will be a game that doesn’t have the problems of 3E and 4E, which I will summarize as follows.
Both 3E and 4E were too much. They went too far along different paths towards the same goal. 3E took the path of endless customization – a relatively simple core game that allowed, encouraged even, endless variation. That is a good thing in and of itself, but by the time 3.5E came around, it was clear that the simple core was fused to a much more complex game. You couldn’t really just play the simple core, or at least WotC didn’t provide guidelines to do so. The downside of all of these options was a hugely complicated game that encouraged munchkinization and rewarded systems mastery. Not to some extent munchkinization will always be part of the game - let’s face it, its fun to optimize your character as much as possible; the problem is when you end up being left behind if you're a casual player amongst a group of uber-diehards. Systems mastery is also part of any game; but the problem is to what degree 3.5E became intertwined with these aspects.
4E tried to address some of these problems by making a more balanced game. The problem that arose, however, was that the balance led to homogenization. Furthermore, 4E took a step away from the simulationist approach of 3E and decided to embrace a more “gamist” approach – and this led to a degree of removal from immersion, from being “in the world” and in character, that many found off-putting. I remember someone, either on a forum or in my group (or both), saying that 4E felt like two games: in combat (and on the battle-mat), and the “real D&D” of being in story, in our shared imaginations. The transition from one to the other was too jarring.
So in a way 3E veered too far into simulationism and 4E into gamism. We could worry that 5E runs the risk of veering too far into narrativism, but from what I’ve seen so far, Mearls & Company are trying to re-orient and re-configure the game to include all three elements, yet with narrativism – with story-telling, and the “feeling” element – as central. From that point, from the feeling of D&D, different groups can augment and adjust towards more simulationist detail or more gamist tactics, or any number of optional approaches. But the key, and where I think Mearls has it right, is making the Feeling central.
In a way, I think that 5E is going to be like a simpler 3E-esque d20 game, for which you can add on whatever customizations and options you want, and for which 4E-style play is one avenue you might take to your game.
3. Why I Think We’re Closer Than Some Think
So when can we expect D&D 5E to be published? Of course we don’t know, although in another thread I’ve heard predictions ranging from January of 2014 to sometime in 2015. I think January is highly unlikely - usually there’s an announcement first, and that’s just two months away. It may be that we get the big announcement in January, however, as that marks the 40th anniversary of the original D&D box set being published. In other words, "Hey, its the 40th anniversary! Guess what? 5E is coming out later this year! Here's our first preview..."
There are a lot of hints and clues, but nothing really solid to go on. But here’s another quote from the Forbes article, from Mr. Mearls:
That was from May. Yes, May – as in six months ago. “Filling in the gaps for the DM,” mainly. High level characters. Bringing the system into setting. Here’s another quote from the same article:
So right now the areas where we still need more feedback are just individual subsystems for DM’s. But in general, the player stuff is looking really solid. There’s still some tweaks we want to make, but our attitude has been that once the players are happy with it, then we’ll be happy with it. We don’t really want to run into a situation where we’re running out of runway, or where the game is shipping half finished.
So they don’t want to rush it but as of six months ago, they were pretty close to set with the “player stuff.” This leads me to believe that the play-tests since then have been about working out relatively minor details and now, the external play-test being finished, is less about another long process of beta play-testing, but more about final tweaks and putting it all together into a publishable project – especially considering what Mearls said above, that the feeling is more important than the specific rules. This not only takes the pressure off needing to create One Edition To Rule Them All, but also gives them freedom to further adapt and develop the game further along.
Without pinning myself down to specific dates, I think we’ll hear an announcement sometime early in the year, possibly even January, with a series of previews and hype leading up to a major release—either an introductory set or the three core rulebooks—sometime in the summer, and a further major product at GenCon and a relatively heavy publishing schedule from late summer through the end of the year.
Whatever the specific dates are, I have a hard time believing that by this time next year, many or most of us won’t be playing 5E. And hopefully it will be a wonderful iteration of the Greatest Game In The World.
Make it so, Mearls.
I want to try to integrate some thoughts from various threads, both about what I think about D&D 5E, as well as when we might expect to see it. Please bear with me as this is long, somewhat rambling, and very, very subjective.
1. Why I Feel Hopeful (about 5E)
Let’s start with this quote from an article by David Ewalt on Forbes.com, published May 24 of 2013:
All of these products are being developed in tandem with D&D’s core developers in an effort to create a unified whole, says Nathan Stewart, brand director for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast. “I think the future of Dungeons and Dragons is not the D&D Next rule set or even the tabletop RPG, but it’s this feeling that you get playing Dungeons & Dragons, no matter where you do it.”
Here we see that D&D, going forward, is not about the edition or specific rule set, but about the “feeling that you get playing Dungeons & Dragons.” This, to me, means that their focus is not on creating the perfect rule set that can simulate any possible scenario, but one that facilitates imagination – the feeling of the game.
To put that another way, they are putting the horse back before the cart. Now a word from Mike Mearls in that same article:
I think we’re finding consistently that it’s the story element, it’s that idea of what a character is, that’s really important. And the mechanics, as long as they are easy to understand and easy to use, they just kind of have to go in the background. What people really want is to be able to make an evocative character. To play through an interesting story, to be really engaged in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The mechanics are really just a means to an end. So having like powers versus feats versus whatever other new thing we could add doesn’t really interest people anywhere near as much as the feeling of being able to create a really cool dungeon, or exploring and having a great time and making a really interesting funny story.
This is not to say that rules aren’t important, but that their primary purpose is to serve the story, the character, the “feeling” of D&D – as “a means to an end,” the end being the experience of enjoyment that we all get from That D&D Feeling.
2. Scylla & Charybdis: Where 3E & 4E Erred
So let’s back up a bit. Before anyone gets upset or thinks I'm trying to start an Edition Skirmish, let me be clear on one thing: Not only do I see myself as an advocate of any particular edition of D&D, but I enjoyed both 3E and 4E when they came out. My favorite edition of D&D is generally whatever edition I'm playing, with a tendency to veer towards the most recent one. I like change, I like my beloved game ("the feeling") taking on new forms. I see "D&D" as being less of a specific set of rules and more of a Platonic Form that evokes a feeling, and that can manifest in different iterations.
Back in the late 90s I hadn’t played D&D for a few years. This was partially because I was largely not playing RPGs for a few years, but also because I felt that RPG design has passed D&D by – AD&D 2E seemed clunky and anachronistic, a product of 1970s game design slightly revamped for the late 80s. Meanwhile, the RPG world had been taken by the Indie revolution, with innovations in design spear-headed by games like Ars Magica and White Wolf’s various games. Yet D&D was always in my heart, always central to my love of gaming. When I heard rumors of a new edition of the game, I scoured the internet and found a little website called Eric Noah’s Unofficial 3rd Edition News, in glorious red letters on black background.
I followed updates, and was excited when 3E came out. I loved the game – loved the streamlined core d20 system that made D&D relevant again as an RPG design, yet also retained the “D&D feeling” that I had grown up with, but in a modernized, higher quality format.
And then the bloat began…Not only from Wizards of the Coast, but from the two-edged sword that was the Open Gaming License. I loved the fact that anyone could warm up their printer and create a D&D book, but 3E got swamped under a deluge of mediocre products. When 3.5E came out, the WotC bloat began in earnest. I ended up going on another hiatus from gaming shortly after 3.5E came out in 2003, but I remember leaving the game thinking that it was getting a bit out of hand, that something had been lost in all of the complex rules and sub-systems.
My interest was rekindled, once again, in late 2007 when I heard news of 4E coming out. I became interested and was excited about a new edition. When the game came out I wasn’t as wowed as I was with 3E, and in a way a bit confused as to why 4E was the way it was, but I was open to change and when the opportunity arose, got a group together. We played on and off for about three years, but then our campaign dwindled away. While I had learned to somewhat minimize the dreaded Grind, I never could conquer it, and I became disenchanted with a lot of the qualities of 4E - from the monotony of combat to the homogenization of powers, but especially the disconnect that the rules seemed to encourage (more on that in a moment).
I haven’t played D&D for about a year, but find myself excited about getting a game started again in January using the 5E playtest rules, with the hope that the actual rule books will be out sometime in 2014 (more on that in a moment). My hope is that 5E will be a game that doesn’t have the problems of 3E and 4E, which I will summarize as follows.
Both 3E and 4E were too much. They went too far along different paths towards the same goal. 3E took the path of endless customization – a relatively simple core game that allowed, encouraged even, endless variation. That is a good thing in and of itself, but by the time 3.5E came around, it was clear that the simple core was fused to a much more complex game. You couldn’t really just play the simple core, or at least WotC didn’t provide guidelines to do so. The downside of all of these options was a hugely complicated game that encouraged munchkinization and rewarded systems mastery. Not to some extent munchkinization will always be part of the game - let’s face it, its fun to optimize your character as much as possible; the problem is when you end up being left behind if you're a casual player amongst a group of uber-diehards. Systems mastery is also part of any game; but the problem is to what degree 3.5E became intertwined with these aspects.
4E tried to address some of these problems by making a more balanced game. The problem that arose, however, was that the balance led to homogenization. Furthermore, 4E took a step away from the simulationist approach of 3E and decided to embrace a more “gamist” approach – and this led to a degree of removal from immersion, from being “in the world” and in character, that many found off-putting. I remember someone, either on a forum or in my group (or both), saying that 4E felt like two games: in combat (and on the battle-mat), and the “real D&D” of being in story, in our shared imaginations. The transition from one to the other was too jarring.
So in a way 3E veered too far into simulationism and 4E into gamism. We could worry that 5E runs the risk of veering too far into narrativism, but from what I’ve seen so far, Mearls & Company are trying to re-orient and re-configure the game to include all three elements, yet with narrativism – with story-telling, and the “feeling” element – as central. From that point, from the feeling of D&D, different groups can augment and adjust towards more simulationist detail or more gamist tactics, or any number of optional approaches. But the key, and where I think Mearls has it right, is making the Feeling central.
In a way, I think that 5E is going to be like a simpler 3E-esque d20 game, for which you can add on whatever customizations and options you want, and for which 4E-style play is one avenue you might take to your game.
3. Why I Think We’re Closer Than Some Think
So when can we expect D&D 5E to be published? Of course we don’t know, although in another thread I’ve heard predictions ranging from January of 2014 to sometime in 2015. I think January is highly unlikely - usually there’s an announcement first, and that’s just two months away. It may be that we get the big announcement in January, however, as that marks the 40th anniversary of the original D&D box set being published. In other words, "Hey, its the 40th anniversary! Guess what? 5E is coming out later this year! Here's our first preview..."
There are a lot of hints and clues, but nothing really solid to go on. But here’s another quote from the Forbes article, from Mr. Mearls:
Probably most of the work that’s still to be done is filling in the gaps for the DM. Things like rules resolving clashes between armies, or what happens if a character wants to start a domain and have a castle. Also the story arc elements for high-level characters… it’s really taking the abstract layer of game design, which we focused on the past few months, and bringing it into the setting of the world of Dungeons & Dragons, creating an ecosystem that makes sense regardless of what angle you’re looking at it from.
That was from May. Yes, May – as in six months ago. “Filling in the gaps for the DM,” mainly. High level characters. Bringing the system into setting. Here’s another quote from the same article:
So right now the areas where we still need more feedback are just individual subsystems for DM’s. But in general, the player stuff is looking really solid. There’s still some tweaks we want to make, but our attitude has been that once the players are happy with it, then we’ll be happy with it. We don’t really want to run into a situation where we’re running out of runway, or where the game is shipping half finished.
Without pinning myself down to specific dates, I think we’ll hear an announcement sometime early in the year, possibly even January, with a series of previews and hype leading up to a major release—either an introductory set or the three core rulebooks—sometime in the summer, and a further major product at GenCon and a relatively heavy publishing schedule from late summer through the end of the year.
Whatever the specific dates are, I have a hard time believing that by this time next year, many or most of us won’t be playing 5E. And hopefully it will be a wonderful iteration of the Greatest Game In The World.
Make it so, Mearls.
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