D&D 5E Will there be such a game as D&D Next?

[UngainlyTitan]

@Iosue, the 1 hour durations make me tense - based on my own past experience, they generate an imperative to track time between encounters that pushes against an encounter focused game.

It don't bother me, I have never in 30 odd years of running and playing D&D seen this stuff tracked in great detail. It was generally handwaved. Not saying there were no people who did. Just making the point that this is trivial to handwave. What bother me more is that there are no player resources to up the tempo in a given encounter. In 4e action points, dailies and healing surges all gave player the option to up the tempo of their efforts and effect the pace of the encounter. This was a strategic consideration since dailies and action points were limited resources, they did give the 4e encounter their unique feel and made them more like (IMHO) movie scenes. With out this is every encounter in Next going to be pretty much like the last one with only the casters having the option to change the tempo?

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=28487]ardoughter[/MENTION], I agree with your point about player resources and encounter tempo. On the duration/pacing issue, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s post above yours captures my concerns pretty well.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], I understand your concerns and but I do not fully share them on 2 of the 3 issues. I believe the spell duration issue could be handled by social compact and I really do not seethe skills as an issue. The general skill resolution system is the attribute mod is the skill modifier and the attributes cover all skills. So every adventurer has some basci competence in all adventuring skills. The narrow skills like rogue with spot and search are more akin to 4e skill powers, A specific that trumps the general rule.
On the other had the lack of player resources to affect encounter tempo is a real concern. While action points and second wind could be fairly trivially house ruled in, the real meat in this was the action point coupled with a back to back daily in a single player turn that could chance the tide of battle, and of course outside of caster there are no dailies.

 

[pemerton]

The general skill resolution system is the attribute mod is the skill modifier and the attributes cover all skills. So every adventurer has some basci competence in all adventuring skills. The narrow skills like rogue with spot and search are more akin to 4e skill powers, A specific that trumps the general rule.

I quite like backgrounds and the approach to skills they support, but think overlaying the 3E-style skill descriptions isn't making the most of that framework. If my background is "Knight of the Realm" that should feed into my skill checks on its own, without needing to mediate through those narrow skill descriptors.

To put it another way, if you're going in the "free descriptor" direction, go all the way!

 

[Garthanos]

While action points and second wind could be fairly trivially house ruled in, the real meat in this was the action point coupled with a back to back daily in a single player turn that could chance the tide of battle, and of course outside of caster there are no dailies.

Yes having abilities with climactic battle turning impact which are cross class would be nice .. fighters cant have those, its just not allowed.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I quite like backgrounds and the approach to skills they support, but think overlaying the 3E-style skill descriptions isn't making the most of that framework. If my background is "Knight of the Realm" that should feed into my skill checks on its own, without needing to mediate through those narrow skill descriptors.

To put it another way, if you're going in the "free descriptor" direction, go all the way!

I agree, you can see this in 13a's case where IIRC you can make up pretty much anything to be 'skills' that fit with your background, but the effect is mostly in terms of story, there are no 3e type narrow skill list type skills. The thing is DDN is trying to avoid default incompetence by just saying "no, no, there's no list" but that doesn't really do it. Plus narrow skills just suck for story-telling.

I have an anecdote for that, I decided to run a CoC scenario for my online group. Hadn't run that game in years, but we always had fun with it. Ugh, it was bad. I mean the scenario and material were fun, but the BRP engine that CoC uses? Wow I'd forgotten how bad that was. You have all these random skills, all at like 50/50 success chance or worse. Every character is some weird hodge-podge of super narrow skills, of which there are about 100 listed. Its harder than hell to be sure which one would apply in a given situation (is it fast talk, bargain, or psychology, lets see....). The skills don't help define the character, they're too narrow and the result is a character that can jump, hide, bargain, and knows Sanskrit moderately well. He's not good enough at ANY of those things to lay a plan on making a check, and the game rules are written around old fashioned binary pass/fail without any clue how to actually use the "rp skills" nor how or when they should work. The result was of course predictable, the PCs constantly tried to do things but failed checks all over, causing every plan to go awry. If I gave them clues to investigate they inevitably botched some check or other and got stumped. Either you have to build in a LARGE amount of redundancy in everything you do, or eventually just stop using skill checks. I finally just used PACE instead of BRP/CoC rules and it was MUCH better.

The problem with DDN skills is exactly the same one in terms of pass/fail. They need to at least make very sure they explain the concept that skills should be a player resource and should only determine whether you had 'more consequences' or 'less consequences'.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Yes having abilities with climactic battle turning impact which are cross class would be nice .. fighters cant have those, its just not allowed.

Because shrugging off a blow before attacking and killing an enemy isn't climactic?

 

[Bluenose]

Because shrugging off a blow before attacking and killing an enemy isn't climactic?

When that blow is meaningless unless it reduced you to zero hit points, and the blow that killed the enemy was the seventeenth of the fight? I regard that as climatic only in the sense that it might come at the end.

 

[Ahnehnois]

When that blow is meaningless unless it reduced you to zero hit points, and the blow that killed the enemy was the seventeenth of the fight? I regard that as climatic only in the sense that it might come at the end.

So you think it would be more dramatic if damage was more meaningful than hp currently is?

 

[Bluenose]

So you think it would be more dramatic if damage was more meaningful than hp currently is?

Yes.

I would be perfectly happy to see a damage/hit points/wound system where being hit actually reduced character abilities. The Condition Track from SW Saga was a step in that direction. Two people battering each other nearly to standstill before one finally stops the other seems more dramatic than one where two people who carry on operating at perfect efficiency no matter what keep smacking each other until one falls down.

I'd even buy into a "Wound Table" where you'd be expected to roll after a character was reduced to zero hit points, with what body parts you end up missing and the consequences of that spelled out.