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

[Iosue]

No, I agree with Obryn, there's a VERY definite "It's crap if it was invented in 4e" (most 4e things DO have 3.5 antecedents but few people are aware of most of them).

This is kind of hard to buy when one of the core features of DDN chargen is the backgrounds and specialties, which are direct expansions of 4e's backgrounds and themes.

I mean, there are precious few things in Next that are direct transfers from any edition. Everything's been tweaked a bit, changed, expanded. Backgrounds/themes become part of the core chargen process. Combat Advantage becomes Advantage/Disadvantage. At-will spells are pretty much like 4e. Everyone says, "Hit Dice healing aren't really Healing Surges." Fair enough. But they are far closer to 4e Healing Surges than anything from any other edition. The very idea of short rests that can restore HP is a 4e innovation. And surely you didn't miss the folks complaining that 5e includes doing damage on a miss? How about casters using Intelligence or Wisdom for spell based attack rolls? How about finesse weapons that allow rogues to use Dex for their to-hit bonus, without spending a feat?

Indeed it looks EXACTLY like there is no more than the most miniscule trace of 4e in DDN, right down to fluff and content. Its very possible some of that may show up at some point, but it is quite telling that not one iconic power name, mechanic, game element (race/class/item/etc) exists in any of the DDN playtests. The message is QUITE clear.

Advantage? Slayer? Backgrounds? Bloodied? Warlock, with encounter powers even? (You did say "any", not "current".) At-will spells? (I'm not sure you can get much more 4e iconic than that.)

I think the message is clear that they're working on stuff that has history they can refer to throughout D&D's history. So, yes, that means 4e classes and races are going to come later. I can certainly understand frustration with having to wait. I don't think having to wait = anti-4e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is kind of hard to buy when one of the core features of DDN chargen is the backgrounds and specialties, which are direct expansions of 4e's backgrounds and themes.

I mean, there are precious few things in Next that are direct transfers from any edition. Everything's been tweaked a bit, changed, expanded. Backgrounds/themes become part of the core chargen process. Combat Advantage becomes Advantage/Disadvantage. At-will spells are pretty much like 4e. Everyone says, "Hit Dice healing aren't really Healing Surges." Fair enough. But they are far closer to 4e Healing Surges than anything from any other edition. The very idea of short rests that can restore HP is a 4e innovation. And surely you didn't miss the folks complaining that 5e includes doing damage on a miss? How about casters using Intelligence or Wisdom for spell based attack rolls? How about finesse weapons that allow rogues to use Dex for their to-hit bonus, without spending a feat?

At-will spells are limited in DDN to 'cantrips', though admittedly they have expanded the definition of what a cantrip can be to a point where they do include something like an at-will 4e power. I'll yield on that point, it was certainly true that many classes in pre-4e days had effectively at-will 'powers', but DDN is closer than previous editions to 4e on that for casters. Still, there's no consistent power system, so from my perspective it is ironically almost as much undermining consistent class mechanics design of 4e as it is introducing a 4e-ism.

Going on from that to the "[things are] tweaked a bit, changed, expanded." The at-will/cantrip thing is a good example of it, yes. I can understand why cantrips can be considered a '4e-ism', but OTOH they are still not part of a consistent class mechanics, so I hope you can see how from my perspective, where that is a high value consideration, they're not a lot like the 4e equivalent.

As for other stuff, it is hard to call all those things 4e-isms. Yes, they are present in 4e, but the terminology and use is often fairly different. Similar things existed in 2e and 3.x as well, again with similar but different terminology etc. 2e had kits, 3e has PrCs, 4e has backgrounds and themes, there are probably other things in 3e as well, I'm a bit weak on all the options there.

Yes, some spells in DDN have attack rolls, this was also true of 3e and they got stat bonuses there too (IE touch attacks and such). I don't see where this is uniquely a 4e-ism. In fact the innovation in 4e was that ALL spell attacks were purely attack rolls against defenses, an architecture which allowed a great deal of simplification and added consistency to the core rules in 4e. This is no longer true in DDN where spells seem to rather arbitrarily require an attack roll, a saving throw, or even both.

I'm not sure I understand how short rests are super unique to 4e. They were never exactly codified before 4e, but parties always 'took a break' after a fight and cracked out their healing/restoration/utility magic as needed. DDN hit dice are again a BIT like Healing Surges, but they are barely recognizable and serve a different purpose. Again, I agree that it isn't always easy to draw exact parallels, its OK if we see things a bit differently here, but at least I think you can see where I'm coming from here?

Advantage? Slayer? Backgrounds? Bloodied? Warlock, with encounter powers even? (You did say "any", not "current".) At-will spells? (I'm not sure you can get much more 4e iconic than that.)

I think the message is clear that they're working on stuff that has history they can refer to throughout D&D's history. So, yes, that means 4e classes and races are going to come later. I can certainly understand frustration with having to wait. I don't think having to wait = anti-4e.

There have always been bonuses for 'advantageous situations" (in AD&D for instance a shield could only block certain attacks and rear/flank attacks got added bonuses, as did surprise attacks, etc). Giving this a specific label 'Combat Advantage' may be unique to 4e, I'm not sure as I am only passingly familiar with 3.x terms. In any case Advantage/Disadvantage is a different mechanic from flanking/CA in 4e, though again you can draw SOME parallel. I don't know about DDN Slayer, but the 4e Slayer was not super unique. Clearly if DDN slayer works almost exactly like the 4e Slayer then it is something of a '4e-ism' but my understanding is that fighter type character mechanics in DDN are QUITE different from those in 4e, nor are all of the 4e slayer mechanics either typical of 4e nor unique to it.

Backgrounds existed in previous editions too. In 1e they were called 'Secondary Skills' and defined your character's previous profession(s). In 2e there were Kits and some other things that at least partly served that purpose. 2e/3e/4e/DDN all have similar but different mechanics for character background. Again, it is hard to compare exactly, but in any case 4e's backgrounds were a fairly minor part of the system. DDN's seem much more significant.

Bloodied... OK, I give you that one. It seems like a mechanic that is emphasized and leveraged less in DDN, but that is the sort of thing that could change or that I just haven't looked at the right class/monster to see it in action.

Again, 4e isn't the first D&D to have 'at-will' 'powers'. 4e had them for ALL classes as a basic feature. They did however exist in a form similar to DDN as cantrips as early as UA in 1e. They definitely existed in 3.x. Again, I agree that you can interpret this various ways, and it isn't entirely ridiculous to see 4e influence. Certainly the DDN cantrips are more potent and useful in a fight than they were in previous editions. Again though, where is the integral power mechanics of 4e? Its not really the same sort of thing mechanically.

This brings us to the real nut of the problem. I see 4e's design as highly integral and holistic. The PRIMARY attribute of 4e design is globally consistent mechanics. I can understand how that's a hard thing to graft on and a big thing to consider accepting, but I think that it is possible to construct 4e-like class mechanics in a way that avoids the objections people had to 4e. I am not really impressed with WotC's design chops that they won't even give it a try when many of us can see real significant advantages to it. In a sense without this sort of design concept DDN can be NOTHING like 4e, inherently. Any one single minor '4e-ism' that happens to be grafted onto a game that is fundamentally almost nothing like 4e doesn't really answer the desire.

 

[pemerton]

I think a big portion of what 4e fans are upset about ("<X> hasn't even been mentioned yet!") is merely because WotC (correctly, IMO) wanted to start with the "Core 4" and work out from there. I mean, if you start there, of course the initial playtests will look like BECMI/2e in fluff.

This doesn't bother me in itself - it's a combination of design priorities plus retro-oriented marketing.

I see a lot more of 4e in the current playtest than they do.

one of the core features of DDN chargen is the backgrounds and specialties, which are direct expansions of 4e's backgrounds and themes.

Backgrounds/themes become part of the core chargen process. Combat Advantage becomes Advantage/Disadvantage. At-will spells are pretty much like 4e. Everyone says, "Hit Dice healing aren't really Healing Surges." Fair enough. But they are far closer to 4e Healing Surges than anything from any other edition. The very idea of short rests that can restore HP is a 4e innovation. And surely you didn't miss the folks complaining that 5e includes doing damage on a miss? How about casters using Intelligence or Wisdom for spell based attack rolls? How about finesse weapons that allow rogues to use Dex for their to-hit bonus, without spending a feat?

Advantage? Slayer? Backgrounds? Bloodied? Warlock, with encounter powers even? (You did say "any", not "current".) At-will spells? (I'm not sure you can get much more 4e iconic than that.)

I don't see a lot in common between Next backgrounds and 4e backgrounds. They seem in many ways closer to 2nd ed kits. And in my view they are far and away the most interesting thing about Next, especially when combined with the stat + freeform descriptor approach to skills. [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] was taking roughly this sort of approach to skills in his 4e game three or four years ago, and I think it makes a lot of sense and has the potential to drive some very interesting roleplay. It also seems to me to have the advantage of being a system that can appeal both to the "old school" strong GM force crowd, and to the "indie" player-driven with GM-introduced complications crowd. (I suspect it may be unpopular among the 3E "don't really like GM adjudication" crowd, though.)

Specialties seem to me to have less in common with themes, or at least to straddle a number of different features of 4e - elements of theme, elements of feats, elements of power selection (including skill powers), elements of paragon paths. Because 4e has so many moving parts it is probably more flexible and allows greater focus in PC building, but that's just a consequence of greater complexity. Specialties in Next neither excite nor irritate me!

Advantage, finesse weapons, mental stats for magical attacks and bloodied all strike me as pretty minor (and mental stats for magical attacks really has its origin in 3E and the stat adjustment to saving throws, I think) - which isn't to say they're objectionable at all, but (a bit like turning THACO into an ascending attack bonus) I find them hard to laud as design innovations - though using advantage-as-reroll in the context of bounded accuracy is undeniably a clever departure from the D&D norm of additive bonuses.

Of the features you mention, at-will spells and hit dice are the ones that come closes to my central concern:

pemerton seems to be the champion of the pacing/adventure design thing. Which I think is particularly vexing, because it would be so hard to retro-fit with a module.

This is what I'm most focused on, because for me this is where 4e just continues to deliver session after session, and to really show its strength.

And at the risk of repeating myself, it shows itself in multiple, versatile ways. There's the in-combat pacing that results from the imbalance beteen PC and monster hit points and damage output, counterbalanced by PC depth in encounter/daily powers and healing resources. This assymmetry is itself a source of tension and drama in play, and the need for players to cleverly exploit the action economy to access their resources adds in another dimension.

But on top of that there's the daily cycle, which can be approached in a range of viable ways - frequent resting (which makes milestones less important and daily use more frequent), limited resting (which makes milestones and healing surges very important and encourages rationing of daily powers) and other, intermediate options. And because of the rough equivalence in player resource loadout over both the per-encounter and the per-day cycles, however a given group tackles this, or if a group's pacing here varies over time, the balance of effectiveness across players remains pretty stable. And the dialling back of the wizard's ability to seize control of recharge pacing (via Rope Trick, teleport and the like) means that the game (at least as I've played it now up to the top of paragon tier) doesn't cause a "default solution" - 15 minute adventuring day - to fall out automatically - but even if it did, the PCs would still be comparably effective.

My biggest concern with Next, from the point of view of 4e-style play, is the assymmetric class design which mandates a particular XP-length "adventuring day" to ensure balance, in combaination with an apparent return to wizard powers that can disrupt this pacing, making for an unhappy contest between player and GM authority over pacing. Wizard at-wills don't seem to me to be a big enough part of the wizard's payload to incentivise things back the other way.

Hit dice I just find a bit weird. They look like healing surges, although harshly rationed compared to 4e. Except you can't unlock them during combat. And out of combat you need a "healer's kit", which (i) costs almost nothing, and (ii) contains 20 uses, and (iii) with each use can permit an unlimited number of hit dice to be spent. I gather this is meant to preserve verisimilitude, but I find the notion of a band-aid's worth of healer's kit being more effective at healing than a cure critical wounds spell hurts rather than supports my suspension of disbelief. If the game is going to abandon "plot point" hit points and the inspirational healing that goes along with that, I'd rather it did it with gusto, and made healing with a "healer's kit" a bit more verisimilitudinous. (I'm thinking RM or RQ, or even the 1d3 from First Aid in the old AD&D proficiency system, which was a bit wonky on 0-level NPCs or 1st level thieves and wizards but was otherwise a token amount that would seem to fit well with most hit point loss being serious meat ablation.)

And as I've been posting on some fo the recent healing threads, I think the uncertainty about healing is reflective of deep uncertainties about how the adventuring day pacing is going to be enforced, and whether or not ingame time is a player resource.

 

[Iosue]

Let me just clarify that my above post was not meant in the sense, "Here's some 4e stuff, so be happy." I can perfectly understand not being as happy with Hit Dice as with Surges, for example. It was in response to AbdulAlhazred saying that 5e is a rejection of 4e, and that its influence on the 5e playtests was minimal. (Incidentally, we can add encounter building to that list. The math hasn't been refined, but the system more like 4e's than any other edition's.)

See, my larger point is that it's like that for every edition. There's nothing in the playtest that you can point to and say, "This iconic mechanic of X edition is faithfully reproduced in 5e." Not even Vancian casting. Everything in Next is kinda-like-but-not-quite-like a mechanic in some other edition. Saves are completely new. Skills are completely new. The Classes are all different. Any innovations of 3e in the playtest, such as the d20 universal mechanic, feats, and movement based on 5' segments were retained in 4e.

I'm not sure I understand how short rests are super unique to 4e.

Because as I noted, it's not just the codified "short rest" (which creates the "Encounter" resource unit), it's the short rest that allows you to non-magically restore HP. That has never been in any edition except 4e. This is what I see in 5e that gives me the patience to wait for the 4e stuff I want to see. By including the codified short rest, they allow groups to adjust healing, modifiying the lethality of the game without having to make across the board changes to damage or monster HP, while at the same time creating a space in which they can design encounter powers for those who want them, as the Warlock demonstrated. The structure is there -- it just hasn't been built on.

 

[pemerton]

There's nothing in the playtest that you can point to and say, "This iconic mechanic of X edition is faithfully reproduced in 5e." Not even Vancian casting.

I think this is true.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[thecasualoblivion]

5E has done more or less nothing to support 4E style play in any way that actually matters. When I look at what 4E is when played at the table, I see:

1. Cinematic Action--the pacing of HP/healing and resource management modules what you see in action cinema.
2. Cool Powers--In 4E you can do powerful and interesting things every turn. Encounter powers enable this, by giving you more powerful abilities than boring at-will spam yet not so powerful they require strict limits like daily powers and give you enough of them that most turns you're using an encounter power. Almost as important is how 4E made encounter powers single use and then expended, as you are not only doing something powerful and interesting each turn, but something different every turn.
4. Tactical Depth--combat develops over time, which requires there to be more than one or two attacks to defeat an enemy or PC. Minor, short term conditions can mean something, and teamwork matters.
5. Modernity--being willing to sacrifice tradition for better gameplay. 4E wasn't a slave to 20 years of AD&D tradition and wasn't afraid to break from the Tolkien/medieval pastiche, or even being unafraid to be innovative on a basic level.
6. Class Balance--4E classes, while not perfect, did a pretty good job of being balanced compared to each other at mechanically fulfilling their assigned role and in terms of delivering roughly equal amounts of fun and cool.

On those 6 things 5E has delivered almost nothing.

 

[Bedrockgames]

5E has done more or less nothing to support 4E style play in any way that actually matters. When I look at what 4E is when played at the table, I see:

1. Cinematic Action--the pacing of HP/healing and resource management modules what you see in action cinema.

One hp an hour is pretty cinematic.

5. Modernity--being willing to sacrifice tradition for better gameplay. 4E wasn't a slave to 20 years of AD&D tradition and wasn't afraid to break from the Tolkien/medieval pastiche, or even being unafraid to be innovative on a basic level.

On those 5 things 5E has delivered almost nothing.

I dont know, Next is looking pretty modern to me. It isnt 4E by any strecth and they are clearly trying to restore some things that were lost, but it is definitely taking a much more modern approach than 3E, 2E or 1E. What it isn't doing is dismissing people who appreciate the traditional asthetic. But my guess is this is going to have plenty of non-Tolkein options in the advanced book. There is no reason you cant have both (in fact I am counting on being able to run a very traditional game using the core but doing somethign wild like wuxia or historical cinematic using the other books). To me, the best case scenario is the edition offers a broad range of styles. They may need to do it over different books, but I am fine with that.

Rght now, I am cautious because I dont know what the release structure is going to be. They have made a lot of decisions I disagree with (one hour healing, fighter dice, etc) but I also get they are trying to satisfy a lot of different people. The unmodified core book isnt neccesarily what many of us will be using.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

One hp an hour is pretty cinematic.

It's really not. Cinematic is dusting yourself off and progressing to the next scene as if getting hurt didnt just happen. Sitting around for hours to heal is not cinematic at all.

I dont know, Next is looking pretty modern to me. It isnt 4E by any strecth and they are clearly trying to restore some things that were lost, but it is definitely taking a much more modern approach than 3E, 2E or 1E. What it isn't doing is dismissing people who appreciate the traditional asthetic. But my guess is this is going to have plenty of non-Tolkein options in the advanced book. There is no reason you cant have both (in fact I am counting on being able to run a very traditional game using the core but doing somethign wild like wuxia or historical cinematic using the other books). To me, the best case scenario is the edition offers a broad range of styles. They may need to do it over different books, but I am fine with that.

Rght now, I am cautious because I dont know what the release structure is going to be. They have made a lot of decisions I disagree with (one hour healing, fighter dice, etc) but I also get they are trying to satisfy a lot of different people. The unmodified core book isnt neccesarily what many of us will be using.

I don't see much modernity at all. I see a rehash of old D&D traditions with a coat of paint on top. Seriously, are bounded accuracy and advantage/disadvantage the most innovative 5E can get?

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's really not. Cinematic is dusting yourself off and progressing to the next scene as if getting hurt didnt just happen. Sitting around for hours to heal is not cinematic at all.

i think healing in a few short hours is absolutely cinematic. It certainly isnt gritty. You see this in action movies all the time where the hero gets beaten up and recovers in a short span. It isnt the only way to do cinematic. A lot of cinematic games also have things like hero points you can use to avoid taking damage or re roll (which helps simulate the dusting yourself off after a house falls on you for example).