Top 10 changes will 5E D&D have to implement to satisfy you?

[Daztur]

1. Has as good balance as TSR-D&D or better. This really shouldn't be that hard.
2. Has combat that runs at least a good bit faster than 3ed. Doesn't have to be lightning fast, but I don't want to sit around for 15 minutes waiting for my goddam turn.
3. Doesn't have a gazillion sub-systems like 1ed.
4. Doesn't have a gazillion situational modifiers like 3ed.
5. Makes 4ed fans get angry and shout a lot.
6. Game doesn't break if you don't have characters loaded down with a dozen magic items.

I'm not too picky.

[Prak]

1. Less Stigma for playing "monsters", or just flat out more acceptable, easier ways to add such in.
Some people want to play a gnoll. Some people want to play Ted the Flayer. Some people think it'd be cool to just be a troll for a bit. LET THEM! Have a better "This monster is equivalent to this level" system, because LA and ECL suck balls, and monster classes suck at least happy trail. Not everyone wants to play "human, but taller/shorter, and more/less hairy."
1b. Don't make a goddamned big deal about what's going to be changed to a monster and what's going to be in the PHB as a playable race. Cute as the Gnome/Tiefling short was, this is the opposite effect we (ok, I) really want. The Monster Manual should just be stat blocks for use with the opposition, and then a side bar, or the like, saying "This monster is equivalent to level X, they often take levels in Y, and their god offers Domains A, B and C." are some usable culture fluff in the write up.

2.] Stop fucking reprinting info and treating it like it's a full part of the book it's printed in.
If an adventure references some creature, go ahead and reprint the stats. But don't print the exact same damn creature across three fucking books.
2b. DON'T goddamned print "Monster, but with levels of X" in the Monster Manuals.
Include a CD with the book that applies class levels for DMs pressed for time. Have Class Packages in the DMG or on the website that quickly apply a class as if it were a template, sell a Allies and Enemies book, whatever, just keep that shit out of the MMs. If this means the Monster Manual is a 100 page paper back instead of a 300 page hard cover, that's fine. Hell, that's awesome! It means one of the essential books is like $15, at most!

3. Make your shit cheaper and possibly decrease weight.
At least a bit. Put the core rules together, or print them paper back, or something. I'd say combine the three core books into one, but that would make character creation a pain (although putting PrCs and magic items in the PHB would be nice).
And seriously, the books weigh a ton. A large portion of your demographic is going to be carting this stuff around themselves. They could take their bag full of books and get carting them around to qualify as a credit of Weight Lifting.

4. When you have a cool concept, give it stats we can bring ourselves to care about.
Soul Knife. Warlock. Pale Master. Eldritch Knight. Monkey Grip. Playing as a monster (see 1). I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to use these concepts. I can, however, tell you, roughly, the number of times I have. 1-3 each. Except Eldritch Knight. I've never used that, because the first rule of playing a caster is "You don't give up caster level." They're not necessarily terrible the way they were done in 3.5.... except playing monsters. They just... don't keep up.

5. Magic Everyone Can Learn (and by extension, other things too)
This is like the one thing I liked from Runequest. Anyone can learn magic. You don't have to start as a specific class. You don't have to, necessarily, come in weaker than the party mage in the magic you picked up, just limited. This is a good idea. People want their fighter to be able to go talk to the old guy in the tower and negotiate learning Lightning Bolt. And they don't want to have to take a huge hit to power to do it. I guess what this comes down to is that magic should be more horizontal power than vertical. If I'm a sword guy, and I sword good, and I'm all about swording, but then learn that a creepy old man in the tower a day outside of town might be willing to teach me how to throw lightning in combat, I shouldn't have to give up an entire level to do that. I sure as hell shouldn't have to give up FIVE levels to do it. By the same token, Party Wizard should be able to go and learn Swording from the captain of the guard and be able to swing a sword around without waiting for his next feat level so he can blow his one feat for up to the next five levels just so he can swing a sword around and not matter in combat. I'm not saying I have to be Sword Guy with Party Wizard level Lightning Bolt, or that Party Wizard needs to have Sword Guy level Swording, just that we should be able to actually use these abilities in combat and matter in more than just "Oh look, it's 100 kobolds that the challenge system says is a level appropriate challenge for us. A Player Character's abilities should probably never be worse than Cohort level abilities, because then it makes more sense for me to buy Creep Wizard Man's apprentice off of him, and Party Wizard to hire Captain of the Guard to follow us around.

6. Feats of Badassitude.

"I... hit it with my sword."
"Ok, roll to hit."
"35."
"That hits! Roll damage."
"12 normal, and 5 fire."
"...Ok, your sword clangs off the great White Dragon's leg, and the fire singes it a bit."
"...I'm level 18, why the hell can't I sword this thing to death like I'm St. George and it's a misbehaving lizard about to eat a virginal maiden."
"Because you should have played a wizard. Speaking of-"
"Fireball, 90 damage, before vulnerability, so after is 180 damage."
"...The dragon rolls-and fails to get out of the way of your mighty ball of flaming bat poop. With the Fireball you threw last turn, and Sword Guy's 10 damage, it dies."
*Sword Guy's player then beats Party Wizard's player to death with the nearest piece of furniture.*
This is how D&D goes. Could Sword Guy have done more damage? Yeah.. Could Party Wizard have done less? Only if he's an idiot, because he's already being lazy throwing a Heightened Empowered Maximized Fireball. If he wanted to be a dick, there are more powerful spells he could have used. Hell, Sword Guy can actually just sit back and cart treasure around, because Party Wizard could just cast Time Stop and a couple Heightened Delayed Blast Fireballs, without even dipping into extra spells for high int if he's playing an Evoker for shits and giggles. Hell, this makes matters worse, because he could probably pretty easily have an extra 7 Caster Levels for evocation, allowing him to lay two 25d6 DBFs, each dealing 75 damage on average, doubled for cold vulnerabilty of the dragon is 150, and their are two, for 300 damage. The White Dragon (lets say Old), actually has a decent Ref save. Unfortunately, it's so easy to abuse casters, I can do so off the top of my head. Starting key ability of 18. +4 from leveling. +6 from Enhancement Item. +5 from Tome/Wish. He has a 33 without even pulling anything particularly cheesy. This means his Delayed Blast Fireballs have Ref DCs of 30. The dragon has to roll a 16 or better. So, on average, the Dragon dies to a prepared caster (oh, and hey, spontaneous casters, like the sorcerer, actually do even better, because they don't need to know they're going to fight a white dragon) before Sword Guy even does anything.

Let's optimize Sword Guy for this dragon fight.
So, yeah, he has a 33 Str because of the same tricks. That's universal. Hell, he could have a 35 if he's playing an Orc.
He wields a Large Bastard Sword in each hand, using EWP and Monkey Grip to do so one handed and the Two Weapon Fighting chain. So he can make 7 attacks (4 main hand, 3 off hand) and has an attack scheme of +26/26/21/21/16/16/11. The Old Whit Dragon's AC is 31, so hey! He hits with half of those on average. Assuming he's taking no penalties beyond TWF, assuming the Dragon isn't using Mage Armour (it should be) and Shield (ditto). But lets say this white dragon isn't using such simple spells for some reason. Sword Guy, the Half Orc Barbarian 18 (because we're optimizing, and Fighter sucks unless you want to whore feats) can hit the dragon 4 times on average. He's used five feats by this point, and doesn't really need to use Weapon Focus, so lets say he took Power Attack, so he could go Bear Warrior (and is Bar8/Bear Warrior10) and has Improved Critical with Bastard Sword. We're going to also say that bears have the dexterity to wield swords because it's not too much of a stretch when we're already saying that a guy can get so angry he turns into a bear.
I gotta admit, conceptually, this is pretty damn cool. It's even fairly impressive stat wise, what with him gaining +20 str by turning into a Dire Bear when he rages. This has the handy implication of meaning that his attack scheme is actually +36/36/31/31/26/26/21. Wow. He hits the dragon on a 10 or better with any of his attacks. His weapons crit on a 17-20 (20% chance, or roughly 1:5). So, yeah, that's actually pretty awesome. And we're going to say he knew a cold subtype dragon was coming, so he has his best swords for the job, +5 Flaming Burst bastard swords. He now hits on a 5 or better.
So here's what happens when Sword Guy goes against the Old White Dragon.
Round 1. Stick Swords in the Ground, Rage, turn into bear, pick up swords. Full attack, hit with all seven attacks, critting with one on average. He's done 16d8+154 slashing damage and 7d6+1d10 fire. And the Dragon is vulnerable to fire, so double that. Awesome. Average rolls mean he's dealt 226 normal damage and 30 fire. That's honestly pretty respectable. and his swords bypass damage reduction, so, double awesome. Sword Guy has done 256 damage to the dragon, on average rolls. With a lucky player, or a salvo of Alchemists Fire before hand, he's very likely killed the thing in a single round, with less resource expenditure.

But.... *sigh* here's the thing. I pulled from Complete Warrior to optimize Sword Guy. I spent at least twice as much time on d20SRD as I did on Party Wizard. Sword Guy's race comes from the Monster Manual. If Sword Guy's player is have a shit roll day, it doesn't work. And, Sword Guy has to get in "comfortable biting range" to do his thing. And finally, he's spent all his feats to do this.
Party Wizard, by contrast, is all Core, meaning he's easier to get into a game. His optimization was all off the top of my head, with just a few quick checks of the rules to make sure things were working the way they're supposed to. His attack goes off without a hitch 70% of the time, and the remaining 30% of the time, he still does 150 damage. In fact, on average, he'll have three rounds in which to set Delayed Blast Fireballs, and plenty of bonus spells, and can thus do another 75-150 damage. Sword Guy's flat out fails 20% of the time. (forgive my over simplifying percentages, probability isn't my strong suit) If I'm given a choice between "1 Round Kill 80% of the time, Utter Failure 20%" or "1 Round Kill 70% of the time, Two Round Kill 30% of the time," Thanks, turning into a bear because I'm angry is cool and all, but I'll take the "Kill a dragon by yourself 100% of the time" option.

And yes, I know that there will be a party, and working together, Sword Guy and Party Wizard can take down the dragon 100% of the time, and blah blah blah *thbppt* The simple fact of the matter is, if a Sword Guy wants to keep up with a Party Wizard, he has to spend much more time and many more character creation resources to do so. It's like the grasshopper and the ant, except the ant works hard, and still gets eaten by the dragon, while Grasshopper casts a few spells, sits back down in his lounge chair, and watches the dragon explode while he sips his mimosa.*

What should Sword Guy be able to do to the dragon? Well if Party Wizard is making time his dick rag and watching dragons explode form a pool chair, then Sword Guy should be doing this. At least. Without using more books than the wizard. I'm ok with Sword Guy putting more effort into his kills than Party Wizard, the players shouldn't.

Basically, 6 is "Sword Guys should be able to pull off feats as impressive as casters, without the players having to put more effort into it."


*Point made very well: Party Wizard sounds like the much cooler fucking character because he doesn't have to work as hard.

tl;dr Give Sword Guy nice things.

7. Break away from Hasbro. Please?
Yeah, this ain't happening, I know. But it'd be nice if WotC had people who knew how the gaming industry worked in charge, rather than a company that only understands action figures and board games.

8. Dominaria the Campaign Setting. Do it.
People have wanted this since at least 3e. I wouldn't be surprised if there were 2e players who want it. Magic has a pretty cool setting, great art, and npcs we care about. Ditch Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, whatever you need to, just make Dominaria a campaign setting, it can't be that hard.

9. Better guidelines for player generated material
There needs to be an actual guide for creating monsters, including how to calculate CR. The "compare it to a bunch of other shit" method from 3e doesn't work.
Figure out what you want feats to be, stick to it, and give us that guideline explicitly. You want them to be minor things? Then give us more over the course of 20 levels and create a balance point that is actually spelled out in the book. And no, "You get 3 spell like abilities" is not on par with "You get +1 to attacks with a specific type of weapon."
Same with spells and classes.

I'll think of a 10 later.

[Lokathor]

Hopefully magic fights are a little cooler than this:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0456.html

[ishy]

6. Feats of Badassitude.
<loads of text>

What are you actually trying to say here?
That a lvl 19 wizard who takes a feat to attack people in melee is going to suck at it and that that is bad.

Or that non casters need to spend loads of resources so they can do the basics and don't get nice things?

- Edit: ah I read through it a bit too quickly.

But still, if you don't go for the shitty feats and grab boots of speed or smt: EWP / TWF / Monkey grip and just grab a 2h you get a better result with way less resources spend.

[erik]

- Edit: ah I read through it a bit too quickly.

Quickly is the only way you can afford to read it, if at all. I skipped it since it apparently took way too much to make a point.

@ Prak
As for pricing competitively with Palladium, are you seriously comparing crappy soft cover books using crappy non-gloss paper with art that is reused over and over and over, and with amateur-rate editing (if any?)... to hard backed, glossy sheets, lovely art and actual professional editors? Really?

[... checked it on amazon]
The Palladium Ultimate Rules Edition is apparently hardcover, breaking tradition with the usual crappy production values of Rifts books, but other than that, it uses the same material from 15 years ago, even retaining their multitude of errors that a single read-through should have gotten. They seriously did not fix obvious errors 15 years old. This tells me they basically repackaged their same old crap with almost no effort put into the creation and is basically a reprinting. So all they are really paying for is the new hardcover and printing. They could afford to offer it on the cheap.

An actual brand new edition will not get to cut all those corners.

To quote a reviewer from Amazon who confirmed all my expectations:

Steven Warfield[/url]]To continue with the bad, errors abound in the book. Many of these are typos which existed in text copied from the 15 year old first edition of the book. There's at least one instance of columns being randomly switched around, and many errors have the appearance of being things which were overlooked while cutting and pasting from other sources. I have to say the sheer number of errors ranks as the highest I've seen in an RPG product, and I have a collection of between 600 and 700 RPG products. It really gives the whole thing an amateurish instead of "Ultimate" feel. However, I should note that while a multitude of blunders exist, the editors made sure that every trademark and registered trademark symbol is in place. For instance, the Glitter Boy Pilot character class (a character type devoted to piloting a legendary suit of mechanized power armor) may not get the skill to pilot their power armor, but the editors made damn sure to let the reader know that "Glitter Boy" is trademarked by Palladiumbooks, and every use of the word Rifts has a registered trademark symbol next to it. It's nice to see what was considered important in the editing and proofreading process.

[BearsAreBrown]

1. An efficient and useful digital distribution system. All paper copies must include a digital copy. You should also be able to by a standalone digital copy for a reduced price. Sell it in PDF, for kindles/nooks, put it on iTunes, fuck me put them on Steam. If this isn't economically feasible then go the DLC route and make small books but release a ton of them. I'm more likely to buy ten $10 books then one $50 book even if they have the same amount of content.

2. Core must be OGL. My group and every group I've ever met uses the SRD more then all books put together.

3. This is a pipe dream but COMBINE WITH MTG. Since I read that idea on this forum I can't stop imagining how good of an idea this is. MTG's dev team is amazing the the fluff is great. Perfect world this is the default setting, I'll settle for a splat book about playing a Planeswalker.

4 - 10. Coming soon.

[Prak]

- Edit: ah I read through it a bit too quickly.

Quickly is the only way you can afford to read it, if at all. I skipped it since it apparently took way too much to make a point.

@ Prak
As for pricing competitively with Palladium, are you seriously comparing crappy soft cover books using crappy non-gloss paper with art that is reused over and over and over, and with amateur-rate editing (if any?)... to hard backed, glossy sheets, lovely art and actual professional editors? Really?

[... checked it on amazon]
The Palladium Ultimate Rules Edition is apparently hardcover, breaking tradition with the usual crappy production values of Rifts books, but other than that, it uses the same material from 15 years ago, even retaining their multitude of errors that a single read-through should have gotten. They seriously did not fix obvious errors 15 years old. This tells me they basically repackaged their same old crap with almost no effort put into the creation and is basically a reprinting. So all they are really paying for is the new hardcover and printing. They could afford to offer it on the cheap.

An actual brand new edition will not get to cut all those corners.

To quote a reviewer from Amazon who confirmed all my expectations:

Steven Warfield[/url]]To continue with the bad, errors abound in the book. Many of these are typos which existed in text copied from the 15 year old first edition of the book. There's at least one instance of columns being randomly switched around, and many errors have the appearance of being things which were overlooked while cutting and pasting from other sources. I have to say the sheer number of errors ranks as the highest I've seen in an RPG product, and I have a collection of between 600 and 700 RPG products. It really gives the whole thing an amateurish instead of "Ultimate" feel. However, I should note that while a multitude of blunders exist, the editors made sure that every trademark and registered trademark symbol is in place. For instance, the Glitter Boy Pilot character class (a character type devoted to piloting a legendary suit of mechanized power armor) may not get the skill to pilot their power armor, but the editors made damn sure to let the reader know that "Glitter Boy" is trademarked by Palladiumbooks, and every use of the word Rifts has a registered trademark symbol next to it. It's nice to see what was considered important in the editing and proofreading process.

In my defense on both those points, it was late, and I'd been drinking.
On the Palladium thing it was a bot of a case of "D&D books are too damned expensive, and I refuse to back down on this argument."

So, Palladium was a bad example (I'd forgotten about the reused art, it's been awhile), but D&D should price their books a bit cheaper.

On the Feats of Badassitude, basically it's "Swording is boring, give Sword Guy nice things"

[Seerow]

Honestly, if D&D can get their quality back up, the 30 dollar per book price point is fine. I wouldn't mind old fashioned paperback splat books that are cheaper, but have no problem paying for a good quality hard cover.

[Prak]

yeah, if the rules quality were better, sure.

Case in point, MM4. I would not buy that for any amount of cash. I think the price point I'd be comfortable with for that is "1 jar of piss." MM5? MM5 was awesome. I looked through it at the store and I wanted to buy it.

[Seerow]

yeah, if the rules quality were better, sure.

Case in point, MM4. I would not buy that for any amount of cash. I think the price point I'd be comfortable with for that is "1 jar of piss." MM5? MM5 was awesome. I looked through it at the store and I wanted to buy it.

Right, but when your pricepoint is "one jar of piss" WotC won't ever meet it. So basically it's less about the specific price, and more about the quality of work.

[erik]

In my defense on both those points, it was late, and I'd been drinking.
On the Palladium thing it was a bot of a case of "D&D books are too damned expensive, and I refuse to back down on this argument."

So, Palladium was a bad example (I'd forgotten about the reused art, it's been awhile), but D&D should price their books a bit cheaper.

If it is a solid product then I don't mind paying solid product prices. 50 for hardcover and 25 for softcover seems acceptable to me (I'd of course prefer less, but hey), but I'll leave the figuring of what price point gives the best return to WotC. If I like it, I'll buy it. I can certainly understand wanting things cheaper though. Back when I was a destitute college student I and my group of peers did not buy every 3e splat book, but rather we split them up amongst our group.

On the Feats of Badassitude, basically it's "Swording is boring, give Sword Guy nice things"

=-)

[Prak]

yeah, but that's what I'm saying, the quality of MM4 was not worth any amount of money. Bad layout (the new statblock layout did not help things), bunches and bunches of monsters that were MM1 monsters with class levels, templates designed to take up as much space as possible, it was terrible. MM5 at least had interesting ideas, like mind flayers that eat your essence.

[ScottS]

The point is whether doing stuff like OGL, pdf's linked to/separate from physical etc. still requires you to have a robust hardback-fetishist market. They can still sell physical to people that are cuckoo enough to want to replicate their 1/2/3e shelf-space-wasters with every new edition (see 4e), but what portion of their customer base now only cares about the "data"? They're struggling to find a way to continue to farm the fad with people that know what filesharing is. They apparently wanted to do a MMO/sub model with 4e (VTT + some sort of LFG/friend-finder/Gleemax taking the place of the WOW client), and the question is whether they'll try that again now that the VTT is closer to actually being done. Also, is there any way they can do a microtrans "hat store" thing? (selling art/tokens for the VTT? selling chunks of magazine/game content doesn't work because it just gets copied)

It's the ongoing drama of a legacy/analog game company getting forcibly transformed into a computer game company, via the moves they feel they have to make to protect themselves from the internet.

[Neurosis]

... I'm strongly thinking of e-mailing Monte Cook this list.

You absolutely fucking should.

[Prak]

I might as well, once I edit it a bit.

[PhoneLobster]

There are a lot of things I would like but in order to satisfy me enough to play it it NEEDS only two, very simple, very easy things.

1)Unlike 4E it needs to be popular
If people other than MY group are playing a role playing game I might like to join them. As such if 5E is played by ANYONE other than groups of 13 year old boys with one of their dour and slightly creepy fathers being DM I will be rather MORE likely to join and therefore play a 5E game.

2)It needs to be less tedious and dull than 4E
Screw balance, balance would be nice but fuck it, whatever. Screw competent mechanics and reliability, if that was nicer than 4E that would be grand but WHATEVER. I am prepared to overlook imbalances, errors, oversights, and various stupidity. But if the rules set is UNREADABLE and DULL and if the act of making a character is PAINFULLY DEPRESSING and the act of playing the game is BORING I'm right out.

So yeah. If it can actually be FUN and have actual PEOPLE actually PLAYING IT then it will be sufficiently successful that I WILL overlook archaic sacred cows, flawed mechanics, bad art, pandering to the distasteful fan boy/girl group of you choice (WoW, Furries, Vampire Romancers... etc...) and a thousand other flaws.

Because an RPG can survive massive flaws and be playable as long as it has SOME sort of fun core hidden inside. I mean sure we would rather it not HAVE to survive the massive flaws but it CAN. And the authority and convenience of an ACTUAL successful widely played "official" rules set is useful for joining pick up games and recruiting new gamers. It just has to be wide spread and meet the most fundamentally basic Fun tests.

I mean it's going to want to do better than THAT if it's going to expect me to BUY it, and a bit better again if it wants me to actually RUN it in established games with confident gamers where I get to choose my favorite choice of system. But even if I don't like it as much as whatever my own latest homebrew bullshit is I will NOT dismiss it because it didn't read my mind or because of any emotional or even reasonable attachment to some prior edition. It just needs to be BARELY acceptable.

PS. And Fuck you 4E for failing these most basic of tests.

[TheFlatline]

- Strong version of OGL. Not because I care that much about open source culture, but because it was such a strong success factor before.
- Good presentation. Wizards doesn't have a problem in that area so far, but it's easy to start sucking. That includes good editing.
- Verisimilitude. The Den argues the details, but least fire should always burn, and I should be able to dig through walls.
- A good skill system. Dunno how they'll manage that, because no-one else has either, but hey.
- Archetype support. That includes both Dnd archtypes (Raistlin) and fantasy archtypes (Elric).
- Sane and consistent rulings. You know how to do this, because M:tG manages it. Yes it's hard, but it's a lot harder with dartboard-based decisions in the mix.
- Good DM advice. The DMG is sorely lacking.
- Cheap versions. if there were cheap copies of the books, I would personally buy more. Seriously, I am more likely to buy three or four $15 books at one time than a single $30 book. I am also far more likely to buy $15 books to read later ($30 I'll borrow and read first, and only buy if they're useful).
- Solid crafting system. For swords, but also for castles. NWN-style crafting is ass, and 3.x style breaks too easily (though is otherwise okay). Exalted does this well, but dumps most of the burden onto MC fiat, so is basically only half of a system.

Edit:
- A marketing campaign that doesn't make me hate the product before I ever even see it.

Actually, more and more RPGs are cranking out "pocket editions" of the game for about 15-20 bucks (since 40 or 50 is the new base price point, though I think D&D will stick with 30 a pop for the three core books). They're trade or quality paperback size, not full sized like traditional RPG books, and I find them incredibly useful. I wish more game companies would do so.

[TheFlatline]

I have a couple things:

1. Some way to make NPCs that doesn't require grabbing dice and a character sheet and rolling/doing math/purchasing shit for 30 minutes for *one* character.

In other words, I want PACKS for D&D and most of my other games that get to the table.

Christ, I'd pay 200 bucks out of my own pocket for a decent, functioning PACKS system for Dark Heresy.

I have other "I'd like to see" items for D&D, but a PACKS system is almost mandatory. I'm tired of going to the fucking monster manual for combat because it takes too goddamn long to generate NPCs for one single goddamn fight.

As far as new shit, I wouldn't mind seeing kingdom/noble house rules akin to A Song of Ice & Fire RPG, where the armies you could raise and the money you generated were determined by your holdings and how much upkeep you put into those holdings.

[Swordslinger]

In other words, I want PACKS for D&D and most of my other games that get to the table.

Christ, I'd pay 200 bucks out of my own pocket for a decent, functioning PACKS system for Dark Heresy.

What's a PACKS system?

[fectin]

That too.
My point was on monopoly pricing though: they have a monopoly on their books (because copyright). Rational monopoly pricing isn't "as high as possible", because that's stupid. If you're selling complementary goods, higher prices are double stupid.

Remember in 2000, 3E core books were $20. That is a much, much easier entry point, and also means that everyone on the group just buys one. 4E core books are nearly double that. Everyone who is shocked that they sold less well is excused from the gene pool.

[Koumei]

Yeah, I want to know what you mean by PACKS. I mean, fuck, I'd write the damn thing myself for less than 200 bucks, depending on exactly how complicated it is (I'm assuming this is a piece of software of some type).

[TheFlatline]

Isn't PACKS the name of the Shadowrun module for rapid, interesting NPC generation that Ancient_History wrote?

You know, the ability to gen a functional character of an appropriate power level with skills & equipment (that wasn't quite on par with point build but whatever) in a couple minutes instead of 20?

[cthulhu]

Focus on the following relative to 3.5ed.

A) Improved resolution speeds and all sub systems operating on the same basic principles

B) A few, complex classes with a board range of choices in each class. Choices should ideally be made out of session but be very configurable.

C) Simplification of NPC and monster generation and management.

This would speed up gameplay and preperation times for GMs, while giving players a nice range of options tactically.

[Aryxbez]

In other words, I want PACKS for D&D and most of my other games that get to the table.

Christ, I'd pay 200 bucks out of my own pocket for a decent, functioning PACKS system for Dark Heresy.

What's a PACKS system?

I was under the impression it was basically a large set of premade NPC's of all types imaginable, including main antagonists and constructs. Possibly a fast, quick and efficient NPC generation system?

[Parthenon]

What I want are:

1. Explicit statements and examples of what adventures, obstacles and monsters look like at different levels.
2. DMing advice on how to create adventures at these different levels with the correct level monsters and obstacles.
3. All character classes being able to meaningfully contribute to all the above things in (1) at the correct level.
4. Meaningfully different, interesting and clear ways that each class deals with (1), that can be resolved relatively quickly so that combat between 4 PCs and 5-8 monsters can be done in less than half an hour, and out of combat obstacles can be dealt with without argument or solely DM fiat.
5. A quick and easy way to create monsters and/or obstacles on the fly or look them up so that a DM can make stuff up off the top of their head without having to spend twenty minutes creating stat blocks if the players decide to suddenly attack passers by or go somewhere random.