D&D 5E With the Holy Trinity out, let's take stock of 5E

[evilbob]

With the DMG out* and the Holy Trinity finally assembled, what's the verdict? Is the most play-tested version of D&D a creative success? Does it bode well for the future of the edition? Is this the One Edition to Rule Them All? Given the seemingly overwhelming accolades for the Trinity as a whole, will 5E be a wild financial success? And while we're at it, another round of...What next? Where to now, WotC? The DMG is out, we want to know what else is coming down the pike!

Now that the DMG actually is out, I found that upon first glance it didn't actually answer pretty much any of the questions we've had from the last few months. How long do poisons last if they don't already list a duration? How can you train skills in downtime? There are a few optional rules that everyone said, "Just wait for the DMG!" but it hath not provided. Ah well. Hopefully it will do more for me when I can sit down and give it the time it deserves.

That said, I think the 5.0 ruleset is probably the best one to date. 4.0 is a different game altogether, and it's honestly hard to compare them - and if you like 4.0 for one thing and 5.0 for another, that's perfectly fine. But yeah, the relatively-fast (for D&D: super-fast), relatively-simple (for D&D: super-simple) rules are awesome. Looking forward to exploring it more over the next few months to find out more about it.

That said: the complete lack of PDF support is still killing the game for our group. I can't believe they don't have non-picturey PDFs of the core books out right now - they should have come with the books - and a complete spell chart and maybe even magic item chart sortable by anything you could possibly imagine. I don't care about having more splat books if I can't get the core books organized to the point where they are as easily used as every other game we play.

(Also a little surprised the "Basic" rules haven't been updated at all.)

 

[howandwhy99]

Yet this objective is not stated anywhere. The AD&D PHB says this about the objective of D&D (pp 7, 8, 18):

Challenging and using metrics to test role playing as games are designed to do is the basis of all role playing games. The quote you give is Gygax's point of view, but there is no contradiction here.

CUT
...just as actual paying experience really increases paying skill. Imagination, intelligence, problem solving ability, and memory are all continually exercised by participants in the game. . . .

D&D as a code breaking game (the very act of game play) tests all these areas of players' actual performances as they play the game. How on earth can one do this in "the fiction" - the non-game portion of storygames except ironically? Knowing that none of it has any game design behind it? For me this is a smoking gun quote.

The objective that this present is one of increasing your character's power by successfully and skilfully meeting the challenges posed by the game (through the medium of the Dungeon Master). Class dictates the role adopted to meet those challenges, but there is no suggestion that class either (i) changes the nature of the challenges, nor (ii) determines what counts as successfully meeting them. And the DMG experience rules are class-neutral (ie all classes equally gain experience for defeating monsters and for findng treasure).

Yes, AD&D's DMG guidelines sometimes needed more baking in the oven. It's too uniform in XP rewards for the classes. Thankfully they aren't the rules of the game no matter what attempt to make them so for convention tournament purposes in the Introduction (or was it Foreward?).

I think that Gygax and Moldvay are better authorities than you as to what RPGing really is about, or how classic D&D is meant to be played. Neither you nor anyone else is under any obligation to follow their advice, but you can't just ignore what they wrote while setting yourself up as some authority on the true nature of the game.

Gygax told people to fudge their die rolls in AD&D. You can do this in wargames too. How about during a tournament of world class players? How about a Vegas craps rolls for money?

People knew and know there is bad advice in some of those books. Some advice which simply stems from misunderstanding in a confusing hobby. Advice to run a game brokenly is not evidence the "true game" is a "and then just make it up" story game. It's evidence of bad advice obviously contrary to the whole design effort. Why write 100,000s of words and then say "Nobody needs any of this"? That isn't his message. He's openly suggesting cheating to make the game more fun when players are struggling. He's isn't admitting to what he was openly against, treating the game as he called a "theatre game"

With respect, this is all just verbiage. I'm not sure that "conformed to the players' description based on what the game can do in its preset design" is even a meaningful phrase of English. I certainly don't know what it means. (For a start, the game can't do anything - it is neither an agent nor a machine.)

If you don't care to learn, I cannot help you. I'm not here to "convince" you, but inform you. Go back, break down the very important elements of what I just told you, the very answers to your questions, and we can continue. What do you understand? What don't you?

I presented a concrete ingame situation:
...
You have not explained how either situation is to be adjudicated

I just answered quite succinctly. Reread it, as it is core to the design of the game.

The idea that all this must be created before play is absurd. How many adventures have been written in which there are tables with mugs on them? Hundreds, probably thousands? How many of those adventures specified rules for breaking the mugs in question? Few or none. But since 1974 it has been a completely legitimate action declaration for a player to say "I throw the mug to the ground so that it shatters and makes a bang". How is the success of that action to be determined? In OD&D and B/X there are no rules. In AD&D the GM has to choose whether to use the "fall", "normal blow" or "crushing blow" column of the item saving throw table (on DMG p 80 - another counter-example to your claim upthread that this is all about AC and hit points), to decide whether the character's to hit and/or damage bonus for STR is a penalty to the saving throw, etc.

All modules require the DM to convert them prior to play. That means change the adventure to fit what the rules can do, the scope of the code, prior to play. Your demand of absurdity is flying in the face of innumerable books which support the act of what I'm saying. Not "powers" books in 3ed (some in even 2e). Rather books and adventure modules that even give example new rules when they present new materials (e.g. monsters, treasure, traps, etc.)

As [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] has stated upthread, the whole premise of an RPG is that the players aren't limited in their action declarations to certain preset moves.

The "whole premise" of an RPG is players can score points for their role playing in a game. That players are limited to their current creative skill marks the boundaries they have. Like people's real world strength or speed. D&D is a design test to give resistance (complex codes) to those who want to improve their actual creativity and imagination. Playing it does so like sports have designs which test and improve one's athleticism.

And the GM is expected to adjudicate novel action declarations as part-and-parcel of running the game. Many players of RPGs call this aspect of GMing "improvisation". Being able to do it effectively is a core GMing skill.

The GM checks the map, sees if the player's piece can perform the action according to the design, makes the movement whatever the result, and describes these results back to the player(s). That's D&D. DMs are NEVER to improvise. This is essential to the playing of an RPG. It is essential to even a game be a game.

H&W99, why do you think that Gygax would be "mocked" for claiming that RPG's need some sort of random determiner of events, typically dice?

Because he knew none of the dice rolls in D&D were resolution mechanics. They are expressions of the game design. Randomizers aren't necessary for games which use resolution mechanics. The Jenga tower isn't a randomizer for example.

 

[howandwhy99]

Yes, there was. Several games used the term before the mid 90's. Likewise, MegaTraveller and 2300AD both used "Task Resolution" - the early discussion that eventually lead to the bat-excrement that is the "big model" was observational, grounded in what was already being seen.

To be blunt: most things predate the terms which describe it, and the Usenet Rec.Games.FRP model† was descriptive, not prescriptive. It classified what already existed; it did not invent anything but the classification groups.

Thank you. That's good to know. It sounds like Usenet did what the agenda-driven Forge failed to understand, that reference works are meant to report what people *believe* games to be. NOT what a single "Hallelujah! we found the truth!" one-true-way philosophy purports these "actually" are.

The vast majority of the Big Model was written by a clearly skilled logician who is trapped in Post-Structuralist camp of philosophy as a true believer, a kind of forgotten cultural warrior who doesn't have -theories- (maybes) about games and RPGs, but absolute certainties. Make a website where you are the administrator, can delete and run out all dissenters, and conform a community to your beliefs, especially in a hobby which is confused and misunderstood as to what it is, and you too can change the future and rewrite people's own history and memories in the process.

D&D was a mess of levels of resolution

Actually it is a suggestion to DMs for a massive variety of pattern expressions which lend boatloads of diversity to a game making it much more interesting. Not the uniform stuff we've been getting. The systems behind the stats from which they were derived was never to be revealed to players except through play. To be clear, none of those things have to do with so-called "resolution mechanics".

D&D still is a mess of different resolutions, but, since the introduction of NWP's in late AD&D 1E, it's always included a consistent method for resolving a bunch of types of action, and made it clear that it was OK to use it as a discrete action resolution as well as a larger scale process resolution. It was a system of resolution that really broadened the game's utility.

Skills, i.e. your discrete resolution mechanics, aren't part of D&D as the battle against GURPS in the 80s as not an RPG stands testament to. Again, D&D has no resolution mechanics of any kinds. It is a game. It is a code to decipher, not rules for who's story gets to be told next. That was hugely controversely when Edwards suggested it (on this board?) around 2001. Now it is cultural dogma and the biggest impediment to understanding and enjoyably playing about 4000 games in our hobby.

And a game is rightly bounded by its rules - on this we agree – but note that the whole point of rules is to provide a framework in which to have a reasonable number of choices to pick from.

Again, they aren't rules. They are NEVER told to the players. Players never know what they are capable of doing as a character except by playing experience in a game. And that is each single game as the code changes campaign to campaign.

Humans as a whole do not deal with wide open choices all that interestingly, let alone creatively. Creativity works best within a constrained space. (This is an axiom within education - you get the best creative writing by limiting student choice of subject.) The point of the game rules is to narrow the choices down to manageable levels. That they are extensible by inferential reasoning (if A≈B and A≈C, and D≈C, then whatever resolves A, B, and C should likewise be similar, so resolving D can be done by modifying the process for A, B and C...)...

This is a good point, but something that makes D&D such a ground-breaking game. Players aren't restricted in what they can do. What they learn in response from their attempts is altogether different however. The DM's response is not infinite and unbounded. There is a design underlying every single response the DM is allowed to give. A design the players can game. One they can even stretch out and master as they play never quite knowing the boundaries. Powerful game mastery as traditionally understood (wargame/Chess mastery) is heavily rewarded, but so is thinking creatively, trying new things, getting wildly creative. It's all specifically supported in the design.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Thank you. That's good to know. It sounds like Usenet did what the agenda-driven Forge failed to understand, that reference works are meant to report what people *believe* games to be. NOT what a single "Hallelujah! we found the truth!" one-true-way philosophy purports these "actually" are.

Apparently you either have not understood the Forge or did not read it. That's the opposite of both the Forge approach and the very purpose of GNS - which was largely saying "There are multiple good ways. Here's what we are interested in - and these ways are good as well even if not our cup of tea".

The vast majority of the Big Model was written by a clearly skilled logician who is trapped in Post-Structuralist camp of philosophy as a true believer, a kind of forgotten cultural warrior who doesn't have -theories- (maybes) about games and RPGs, but absolute certainties.

An interesting description of a theory that falls apart in an absolute mish-mash because it can account for most things, including many that are logically impossible and has no predictive power at all.

GNS had precisely two insights - but both of them were good things. The first is that Gamism is a legitimate mode of play (rather than deprecated as in the 90s) and the second is that games should produce much better stories than they were.

Make a website where you are the administrator, can delete and run out all dissenters, and conform a community to your beliefs, especially in a hobby which is confused and misunderstood as to what it is, and you too can change the future and rewrite people's own history and memories in the process.

And yet the Forge was quite happy to tell Edwards where to stick it over his Brain Damage comments.

Skills, i.e. your discrete resolution mechanics, aren't part of D&D as the battle against GURPS in the 80s as not an RPG stands testament to. Again, D&D has no resolution mechanics of any kinds.

Apparently Supplement 1: Greyhawk was never published. And the Thief class doesn't exist. And spells do not solve problems. Casting knock is a mechanical resolution. There also has never been a bend bars/lift gates chance attached to strength.

Three different forms of mechanical resolution, all in D&D since the very earliest days.

Again, they aren't rules. They are NEVER told to the players. Players never know what they are capable of doing as a character except by playing experience in a game.

This is extremely atypical in my experience. And it's something that published rulesets make not happen. When designing a GURPS character I know exactly what they can do physically.

This is a good point, but something that makes D&D such a ground-breaking game. Players aren't restricted in what they can do.

"Players never know what they are capable of doing as a character except by playing experience in a game."

Apparently players are restricted by the capabilities of the character they are playing. Next.

The simple facts here are that the way you describe RPGs is in direct contradiction to how literally everyone else I have ever read from Gygax onwards describes them.

 

[aramis erak]

Apparently you either have not understood the Forge or did not read it. That's the opposite of both the Forge approach and the very purpose of GNS - which was largely saying "There are multiple good ways. Here's what we are interested in - and these ways are good as well even if not our cup of tea".

Except for the fact that Ron Edwards repeatedly claimed that anything other than narrativism is bad gaming, undeserving of the term Role-playing.

There was an awful lot of one-true-way-ism from Ron and his inner circle. In Ron's case, I just presume the man's crazy due to too much exposure to bat guano rotting holes in his brain, causing him to say things that disprove his own prior claims. As for the rest of his inner circle, they spiraled down into cult-type mentalities, especially: "anything that doesn't agree with us is a lie."

Having been told by Ron himself on the forge that I was wrong about what I liked and disliked, let alone why, I'm reasonably entitled to call on this claim of yours. (specifically, it was in a playtest forum for a game by a third party. Said playtest soon moved back to email, as Ron was interfering with, rather than enabling, the playtest on the Forge.)

 

[DaveMage]

With the DMG out* and the Holy Trinity finally assembled, what's the verdict? Is the most play-tested version of D&D a creative success? Does it bode well for the future of the edition? Is this the One Edition to Rule Them All? Given the seemingly overwhelming accolades for the Trinity as a whole, will 5E be a wild financial success? And while we're at it, another round of...What next? Where to now, WotC?

The verdict: A fantastic edition of D&D. The best version ever for new players. For players who like 3.x/Pathfinder, well, it's a more complicated answer.*

Creative success? Yes!

The future: Regarding the tabletop RPG, this fully depends on licensing. With the right partners, I think this edition will thrive. With the wrong partners, it will slowly fade.

Is this the one edition to rule them all? No, but it will rule most of them. I think it's a better ruleset than OD&D, BECMI, 2E, and 4E. I see it as a 2E/3E hybrid and I think it fits nicely between them.

Will 5E be a wild financial success? Not sure how this is defined, but compared to previous editions, maybe. It depends on successful licensing. It will not be much of a "wild" success if it stays an in-house operation as there are not enough people on the D&D staff to make it so. If WotC wins its film rights lawsuits, the D&D brand may indeed see financial success beyond any it has seen before, but the tabletop RPG maybe not so much.


*Some things are better, some are not.

 

[howandwhy99]

Apparently you either have not understood the Forge or did not read it. That's the opposite of both the Forge approach and the very purpose of GNS - which was largely saying "There are multiple good ways. Here's what we are interested in - and these ways are good as well even if not our cup of tea".

There is a disclaimer at the beginning of one of the Big Model articles which claimed it was simply theory. But whatever that meant to the community in practice was altogether different. [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION]'s experience and so many of anyone's experience the last decade at places like RPG.net speaks otherwise. I like Post-Structuralism. I'm a huge proponent. But it's like a lot of things people really love (like even Love), when it's made a religion of, an absolute, the tolerance of its believers can go south really fast. No matter how insightful what they were saying was.

GNS had precisely two insights - but both of them were good things. The first is that Gamism is a legitimate mode of play (rather than deprecated as in the 90s) and the second is that games should produce much better stories than they were.

1. "Gamism" is more or less the act of treating something as a game. It's not a mode of play, it's the act of game play.

2. Games are not designed to tell stories. That's a wholey different manner of being. That's invention, not deciphering to achieve an objective. Games must be made beforehand so people can play them. Making stories simply requires the capacity to create.

And yet the Forge was quite happy to tell Edwards where to stick it over his Brain Damage comments.

The conversations on the Forge by the community, the level of intellect and learning made it one of the shining areas of intelligent thought on the internet. The determining of what RPGs were after the 90s needed to be done. That they threw him out for his behavior, but not the ideas is sort of like people who still hold to a religious past, but no longer consider themselves religious or true believers. This is all a good thing, but the "common knowledge" the hobby in mass holds to is still whitewashed history by a largely malicious act from one person.

Apparently Supplement 1: Greyhawk was never published. And the Thief class doesn't exist. And spells do not solve problems. Casting knock is a mechanical resolution. There also has never been a bend bars/lift gates chance attached to strength.

Three different forms of mechanical resolution, all in D&D since the very earliest days.

The Thief class needs more work than any other to fix it. But that's far from the worst design of the class. It's a class that is built to be non-cooperative (Assassins are XP'd for anti-cooperative acts) in a game built for cooperative team strategies.

This is extremely atypical in my experience. And it's something that published rulesets make not happen. When designing a GURPS character I know exactly what they can do physically.

We can at least agree that the long history and hobby of D&D is a game where the DM's guides, the Monster Manual, and all adventure modules were understood for decades as never to be shown to the players. This is not a delusional practice from the 70's from a community of "people who didn't know what games were". It was to enable the playing of the game at all.

As I said before, GURPS wasn't even considered a role playing game by the faithful or even much of a game at the time.
(But I like a lot of stuff early GURPS had in it too)

"Players never know what they are capable of doing as a character except by playing experience in a game."

Apparently players are restricted by the capabilities of the character they are playing. Next.

My mistake. The quote you made should be "Players aren't restricted in what they can [-]do[/-] attempt.

The simple facts here are that the way you describe RPGs is in direct contradiction to how literally everyone else I have ever read from Gygax onwards describes them.

My digging into history, especially the huge wealth of wargame thinking about game design from the 60's and 70's, supports more of what I'm suggesting. I'm not afraid to be wrong, but when everything in the 4000 games before storygames looks like a hammer and then people denigrate it and burn the hobby claiming "these are horrible bicycle seats! What are we here to do but ride bicycles?"

2ed. advertising, especially the DMG ed., should never have confused D&D as being about narrative following not game play. No matter how successful the Dragonlace novels were when they decided to make the switch. (Post-Gygax, Jan 1 1986 or sometime soon thereafter to remove his work from the game)

 

[aramis erak]

There is a disclaimer at the beginning of one of the Big Model articles which claimed it was simply theory. But whatever that meant to the community in practice was altogether different. [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION]'s experience and so many of anyone's experience the last decade at places like RPG.net speaks otherwise. I like Post-Structuralism. I'm a huge proponent. But it's like a lot of things people really love (like even Love), when it's made a religion of, an absolute, the tolerance of its believers can go south really fast. No matter how insightful what they were saying was.

1. "Gamism" is more or less the act of treating something as a game. It's not a mode of play, it's the act of game play.

a few items...
Ron Edwards Owned the forge. It was his private property. And when the forgites started to try to ignore him, he shut down the forge as a discussion BBS.

Gamism as one of the modes of play is "I'm using the rules, realistic or not, whether they fit the narrative well or not."

As one of the design areas, it's "It doesn't need to be focused on driving the narrative, and it doesn't need to be realistic, because it's just a game artifact"... key example of gamist design space is in the AD&D combat system. It's not realistic, it makes no serious attempt to simulate, and it's not very good at promoting story; further, it has some elements that inhibit colorful descriptiveness (the abstract nature of HP, the all or nothing effects of armor, the one minute combat rounds with movement rates suited for 20 seconds)... all of which are best defended with "It's just a game"...

The truth is that GNS as absolutes don't exist in any game with a theme, let alone any RPG. But they describe a nifty design space which can be used as a triangular region to illustrate the tradeoffs in various focuses of RPG design. (Which, when mentioned on the forge, it got deleted, but not before being told by a dozen people that that was absolute crap. Funnily enough, it's a common theme on RPGGeek...)

 

[pemerton]

AD&D's DMG guidelines sometimes needed more baking in the oven. It's too uniform in XP rewards for the classes. Thankfully they aren't the rules of the game no matter what attempt to make them so for convention tournament purposes in the Introduction (or was it Foreward?).

<snip>

Why write 100,000s of words and then say "Nobody needs any of this"? That isn't his message.

But it seems to be yours.

Either the rules are relevant or they're not. If they are - which is my view - then I don't see how you can claim that you know better than Gygax and Moldvay what the game was really about.

Again, they aren't rules. They are NEVER told to the players.

Except that players can read many of them in the PHB. For instance, p 28 describes (including a worked example) the consequences of failing a pick pocket check, which is one of the examples that [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION] referred to.

In the case of Moldvay Basic, it is typical for a player to have read the whole book, including the DM chapter. And of course many AD&D players have read the DMG, if for no other reason than that they also GM games of their own.

I just answered quite succinctly.

<snip>

All modules require the DM to convert them prior to play.

<snip>

The GM checks the map, sees if the player's piece can perform the action according to the design, makes the movement whatever the result, and describes these results back to the player(s)

You haven't answered at all. "The GM checks the map" is not an answer. Checking the map will tell me that there is a portcullis there. On 9 maps out of 10 it won't even tell me which side of the portcullis the mechanism is on - I'll have to read the adventure text. And when I do that, it won't tell me the chances of a PC breaking the mechanism with a hammer and piton.

Similarly, the map might tell me there is a 10' wide pit, but it won't tell me whether or not a given PC can clear it in a jump.

Also, the notion of modules needing "converting" is not one I have encountered anywhere else, and is contrary to the general purpose for which people buy and use modules (ie to avoid creating material on their own).

something that makes D&D such a ground-breaking game. Players aren't restricted in what they can do.

When I asserted this upthread you denied it, describing permissible player moves as "bounded".

In any event, it is true that players aren't restricted in the actions they can declare for their PCs. Hence the need for the GM to adjudicate previously unanticipated action resolutions. You have not actually given any example - either hypothetical or from actual play - of how you think this is to be done.

When posters talk about the need for the GM to improvise, it is this sort of on-the-fly, ad hoc adjudication that they have in mind.

 

[pemerton]

Ron Edwards repeatedly claimed that anything other than narrativism is bad gaming, undeserving of the term Role-playing.

Quote?

Ron Edwards on gamism in 2003:

References to Gamism tend to be dismissive, superficial, and often backhanded ("except for the Gamists," "my inner Gamist," etc). With respect to the members of the RFGA discussion group, I think they categorized Gamist play mainly in order to sweep it out of the realm of further dialogue, in order to concentrate on issues that I would now primarily identify within Simulationist play. I also think that most, although not all, subsequent discussion has been similar. Yet that exceptional bit, here and there over several forums, indicates far less consensus out there than might have been expected or assumed.

I'm going for a real look at the category for its own sake. In some ways I'm kind of a case study of the problem, but I hope also part of the solution as well; my own views have changed immensely since I referred to Gamist players as "space aliens" years ago on the Gaming Outpost. . . .

Competition is best understood as a productive add-on to Gamist play. Such play is fundamentally cooperative, but may include competition. That's not a contradiction: I'm using exactly the same logic as might be found at the poker and basketball games. You can't compete, socially, without an agreed-upon venue. If the cooperation's details are acceptable to everyone, then the competition within it can be quite fierce. . . .

Gamist-inclined players tend to be unashamed regarding their preferences. Their role-playing is easily understood, diverse in application, unpretentious, and often perfectly happy with its role relative to the person's social life at large. The Gamists have a lot to teach the rest of the hobby about self-esteem.

Some folks seem to think that Gamist play lacks variety, to which I say, "nonsense." Scrabble is "always the same," and it's fun as hell; simple games do not mean simplistic, shallow, or easy. What matters is whether the strategy of the moment is fun. Well-designed, multiple-edged Step On Up activities with fully-developed competition are endlessly diverting and provide an excellent basis for friendship. Anyone who thinks that such things in role-playing necessarily cannot be fun and will necessarily destroy social interactions is badly mistaken​

I don't think that is conssitent with your claim.

Ron Edwards on simulationism in the same year:

Simulationist role-playing has a great deal of power and potential. . . .

Here's a quick overview of existing diversity in Simulationist play. I'm focusing on fun, functional, coherent play - none of the following is a criticism or indictment. . . .

For play really to be Simulationist, it can't lose the daydream quality: the pleasure in imagination as such, without agenda. For game design to promote this goal, it must be openly valued and its virtues articulated, not assumed (as it often is) to be "good role-playing" by anyone's standards and hence left unstated. Design should be inspiring and elegant in its own right, promoting the desire to see this Setting or Character unfold, or to see this System do its stuff.​

That isn't consistent with your claim either. As someone who played and GMed Rolemaster for nearly 20 years, and whose favourite one-shot games during that period were various BRP-derivatives (Runequest, Stormbringer etc) I think Edwards absolutey nails the essence of those systems (both their strengths and potential problems) in this essay.