D&DNext: Playtest Review

[Seerow]

As for the to-hit bonuses listed on the character sheets, one thing I've heard that seems to fit is you get a +2 bonus to hit for having proficiency with the weapon you're wielding. So the Halfling with +3 dex mod gets +5 to hit, that fits. The only outlier really is the Fighter, who has an extra +1 to hit, probably as a class feature. (The Fighter also seems to have a bonus +2 to damage on top of the +2 from Weapon Focus, lacking any better explanation).

Hrm... okay the Pelor Cleric seems a bit off as well. It doesn't have a proficiency bonus for its Quarterstaff, and does seem to have one for its Radiant Lance.


Edit: Apparently speculation is the change to staff to be finessible is new, because the numbers match a +2 to hit for proficiency if it's using the -1 str instead of the +1 dex. Which makes sense given the -1 damage on the sheet as well.

[Juton]

If I had to produce the Aboleths & Asperger's Public Playtest by next Friday, I could do it.

This is possibly the greatest and most accurate name for any RPG product ever, it's a shame you're not bringing it to market.

[Sashi]

(though I'm assuming permanent DA until they swap for something real)

I suspect the weapon becomes an Improvised weapon and you don't get bonuses for it.

You mean like no +stat to attack/damage?

[ModelCitizen]

Hrm... okay the Pelor Cleric seems a bit off as well. It doesn't have a proficiency bonus for its Quarterstaff, and does seem to have one for its Radiant Lance.

Those are both covered. Clerics get +2 to hit with spells from their "Magical Attacks" class feature, and they're not proficient in the quarterstaff because it's a finesse weapon. Nameless Laser Cleric uses one anyway because with his Str 9, Dex 15 it's still better than any of the basic weapons.

[Username17]

What I really want to know is why they didn't release everything that they had when they allowed the SA guy to play it. I mean I totes understand if they tightened the scope and had mechanics that weren't originally in the D&D Experience playtest, but I hardly see anything 'big' that's in here that wasn't alluded to then. Hell, it looks like they ended up removing a bunch of things.

They removed a lot of things. One of the biggest ones of course is that they stepped back basically all of their "big revelations" in skills. There are no mastery levels, and even the whole "you automatically succeed on DCs of your stat or less" got scaled back so much that it might as well not even be in there.

Remember: that was the big thing they were previewing in the early invitationals. And while I casually pointed to math that showed it couldn't possibly work, it was the thing that they were so proud of in February. And well, in May it has been changed to "you automatically succeed at DCs of 10 or 5 less than your stat, whichever is more". The same problems are there, but because it doesn't even exist as a rule for people with less than a 16 in the attribute, you'd never know. The new rule is really fucking weird, and basically gives "take 10" like mechanics to characters in the following way:

Your Stat	Your Minimum Roll
8-9	11
10-11	10
12-13	9
14-16	8
17-18	9
19-20	10
21-22	11
23-24	12
25-26	13
27-28	14
29-30	15

Yeah, the autosuccess bottoms out in the 14-16 range of attributes that most players have. This is retarded. The only reason for this situation is that Mearls got confronted with the reality that his master plan of stat based auto-successes was unplayably horrible. And then rather than accept that it was stupid, he doubled down exactly like the skill challenge fiasco, by putting in a 5 point DC shift to keep it from being so painfully obvious to all the players.

But like the 4e Skill Challenge math fix, this still isn't a fix. The entire concept is still hot garbage, and nothing he has done changes that.

-Username17

[ishy]

Hrm... okay the Pelor Cleric seems a bit off as well. It doesn't have a proficiency bonus for its Quarterstaff, and does seem to have one for its Radiant Lance.

Those are both covered. Clerics get +2 to hit with spells from their "Magical Attacks" class feature, and they're not proficient in the quarterstaff because it's a finesse weapon. Nameless Laser Cleric uses one anyway because with his Str 9, Dex 15 it's still better than any of the basic weapons.

It does seem likely that they changed the weapon list at the last minute.
Pelor cleric would have attack at +1 (+2 prof, -1 strength) | 1d8 -1 if using a strength based weapon she was proficient with.
New cleric would have +2 (+2 dex)| 1d8 +2.
No proficiency bonus since clerics don't get those for finesse weapons atm.

Wizard has the same problem, would go from:
+1 | 1d8 -1 to :
+3 | 1d8 +1

---

Is it me or is Strength also shafted quite a bit?

You can just do attack and damage with dex if you grab a finesse weapon.
You pay a bit of weapon damage but gain Armour, init, reflex saves, perhaps even want a shield, and most important your ranged weapons won't suck (well only important if we get fly or something like that)

You need to bullshit your DM into making fort saves instead of strength ones.

You'd suffer on swim and jump checks though I'll guess

[Lago PARANOIA]

14 months is certainly more than enough time to fix themselves if Mike Mearls pulls his head out of his ass. If Hasbro fired Mearls and put Cook back onto the project (and fired Cordell, too, but that's just a little bit TOO ballin'), they could certainly make that deadline.

But seriously, it's been four months since the Something Awful leak and there's no substantive new content. If this is the pace they're going at, the game is just plain not going to look very different at its release date. And 14 months is an extremely conservative estimate, too. That's just too long of a timeframe to sustain any kind of hype, even if the product was in fact quality.


Frank: What exactly about 4Erry complaints do you guys not like? I mean, I'm a mean old cuss and I certainly can't resist the spite and irony of laughing in someone's face when they used the excuse of 'this is how D&D is now, deal with it' they're dissatisfied with new changes. But I'm sympathetic to the vast majority of their complaints. A 5E D&D character is more shallow, more MTP, and less tactically interesting than a 4E D&D character. There's no hypocrisy involved in a 4E D&D fan disliking 5E D&D for being too shallow; even though Jon Hunstman is a craven, bootlicking toady for the overclass he's also totally justified in claiming that Rick Santorum is a dangerous wingnut whose ideas will destroy Amurika.

[sake]

If I recall that crap correctly, they did basically blame a lot of 5E's bad features on it being somehow intended to appease 3E/2E players, instead just saying "yeah, this is a total pile of shit, and instead of pointing fingers at each other, we should all join together and blame the hack developers who wrote this tripe."

Yeah, I dunno either...

[koz]

If I recall that crap correctly, they did basically blame a lot of 5E's bad features on it being somehow intended to appease 3E/2E players, instead just saying "yeah, this is a total pile of shit, and instead of pointing fingers at each other, we should all join together and blame the hack developers who wrote this tripe."

Yeah, I dunno either...

This is actually very easy to understand - 4rries are some of the biggest purveyors of the 'designers know better' fallacy. I mean, come on - why do you think ENWorld are both WotC's greatest fans and also 4rries left, right and centre? The two sets overlap so much they might as well be equivalent.

[souran]

I am just curious:

Will people who are depicting the demise of D&D over this recant when it doesn't happen?

There are plenty of things I don't like in the playtest, but the D&D forums are filled with people who generally like the game and the biggest complaint(s) from 4E people are

1) Save or Die's are back and thats not so great?
2) The fighter and the rogue are boring.

And generally the game is getting outpourings of support from patherfinder/3.x/2e types.

Its not going to unite the playerbase, but it could kill pathfinder and 4E isn't OGL and so might get its playerbase dragged along because it becomes the defacto game dejoure.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Will people who are depicting the demise of D&D over this recant when it doesn't happen?

Well, sure, but why do you think that the success of 5E D&D is more likely than its failure and torpedoing of the line? D&D right now has one foot in the grave and the other foot in intensive care. 4E D&D died after, what, 3 and a half years? That's fucking pathetic. With no new products on the way and the existing product losing to a 3.5E kitbash, the fanbase will continue to bleed fans in the 14-month gap between D&D Experience/GenCon and now.

5E D&D is already going to start from a much worse position than 4E D&D did. To make things significantly worse, 5E D&D also has a worse design team than 4E D&D. Seriously, the person who has the most experience writing important D&D material on that team is Bruce Cordell. The second one is James Wyatt. The third-most is Mike Fucking Mearls. Yeah, the Wyatt/Noonan/Collins/Heinsoo/Stark 4E D&D design team was rather dodgy, but at least they had a lot better pedigree than the current team.

The playtest right now looks significantly worse than the 4E leaks. Seriously, go back a few years and read some of the previews. They were skeptical (such as races taking a more important role or damage multiplication being built right into the [W]) but at least they didn't instantly fill us with loathing. Right now, we're seriously questioning whether 5E D&D can get DCs right at first level. Nothing 5E has shown so far is to work strictly better than 4E D&D. For fuck's sake, they have randomly rolled hit points.

Yeah, sure, if D&D survives 5E D&D I'll recant. But I am extremely confident that short of some major mid-stream overhaul (which, hey, they have time to) it's going to crash and burn even more spectacularly.

And generally the game is getting outpourings of support from patherfinder/3.x/2e types.

The initial impression and leaks of everything in the history of everything, especially when it's telegraphed ahead of time, almost always has higher levels of support than after it's curdled for some time. For fuck's sake, people were making apologies about Star Wars Episode I and Star Trek: Enterprise. The people who are making noise right now are the equivalent of people who own Jar Jar cock rings being asked what they thought of Attack of the Clones after being shown a few previews. Like, fucking chill.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think it's the death of D&D. A tactically unsound move? That I agree with.

The fact is that 4th edition didn't meet the expectations Wizards of the Coast had. It failed, and it continues to fail. Third edition had a decent run - 2000 to 2008; it should have been longer, but there was a lot of product released during that period and it did serve to reunite the base. Even people who weren't playing D&D were mostly playing D20 systems. Great games like BESM and Deadlands ended up releasing D20 versions because that's where the market was.

After 4th edition came out, that ended. Nobody was playing the same game. A lot of people stuck with 3rd edition, some moved to 4th edition, some moved to Pathfinder; some heavily tweaked their own version of 3rd ed, and some went to totally different systems.

Fifth edition (or D&D Next) has a tall order to fill. It has to get the genie back in the bottle. While that's a tall order, it is possible. When 3rd edition came out in 2000, we were looking at a market that was just as fractured.

From what we've seen, 5th edition probably isn't strong enough for people to move from Pathfinder, for example. A big part of that will probably be poor adventure support. WotC released only a handful of modules for 3.0 and the adventures they released for 3.5 were 'super' adventures - hardback books that cost way too much.

If WotC doesn't allow 3rd party support, companies like Paizo are going to keep eating their lunch. I haven't bought any Paizo products since the 2nd module in 'Second Darkness', but I do know that they make quality adventures.

If WotC can't even get the damage figures right on their Public Playtest, they're not going to be putting out adventures that are at Paizo's level of quality.

A lot of people at WotC seem to think the Open License was a bad idea - I disagree. They need a new version of the Open License to kill (or convert) some of their competition... Since nobody has talked about that, I'm guessing it won't happen. And if it doesn't happen, 5th edition will be re-booted even faster than 4th edition.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think it's the death of D&D. A tactically unsound move? That I agree with.

Complete and total death of the IP without it being resurrected in some form now or in the future? No. D&D as we've known it for the past 5 editions dying? Yes. I can totally see the TTRPG D&D lying fallow for several years after the last 5E D&D product and/or being later resurrected by a completely unrelated design team with little connection to the D&D industry with a brand spanking rules-set and design philosophy. You know, much like the Video Game Crash of 1983 in North America where the 3rd Generation console market ended up being nothing like the 2nd Generation console market except for some vestiges. Sure, by the time Super Mario Bros. 3 came out the industry was leaps and bounds healthier than it had ever been (and would continue being so, up to and including today), but the 1983 Crash killed off the North American video industry as we knew it.

I see and predict something much like that happening to D&D -- TTRPGs and wargames in general, in fact, since the entire friggin' industry is moribund.

[Korwin]

So what?
Why should I care about the NA tabletop market?

The tone of your post sounds like I should care...

[Username17]

Frank: What exactly about 4Erry complaints do you guys not like? I mean, I'm a mean old cuss and I certainly can't resist the spite and irony of laughing in someone's face when they used the excuse of 'this is how D&D is now, deal with it' they're dissatisfied with new changes. But I'm sympathetic to the vast majority of their complaints. A 5E D&D character is more shallow, more MTP, and less tactically interesting than a 4E D&D character. There's no hypocrisy involved in a 4E D&D fan disliking 5E D&D for being too shallow; even though Jon Hunstman is a craven, bootlicking toady for the overclass he's also totally justified in claiming that Rick Santorum is a dangerous wingnut whose ideas will destroy Amurika.

They complained that:

• Effects like Charm exist.
• Effects like Knock exist.
• Effects like animate dead exist.
• Save or Die effects exist.

Those are all stupid complaints. When they get all butthurt that the game is "catering to 3etards" because effects like charm allow characters to have actual effects on the world outside of the tactical minigame, they are showing themselves to be the vile and pathetic parasites on gaming that they are. 4e ruined D&D and destroyed the franchise because it catered to people who thought that Wizards being able to improve the disposition of an NPC or open a door was too powerful and that everyone should be shooting each other with fire bolts instead.

That 5e doesn't seem to have usable rules for opening doors, making friends, or raising the dead is secondary. That wasn't even part of their complaint. They were arguing from first principles that Wizards shouldn't be able to do interesting things.

-Username17

[tussock]

So, reading the past now, they've been steadily nerfing charm, knock, sleep, animate, and SoD type spells to keep the 4rons in the earlier playtest happy, to the point they are now less use than zap cantrips, but the 4rons who were out of the loop can't see the nerfs because they can only compare with 4e, where all Wizards do is ... nothing.


Oh, and the early playtest didn't have multipliers on the monster hit points, so the minotaur had 6d10 HD, often 27 or less hp, and the fighter was doing 2d6+7 (max on a crit) +1d10 (crit die bonus) +1d6 (charge feat) = dead minotaur.

Which people hated, so x4 hit points as a playtest response. Mathematical archaeology.


As for them not being able to progress this into a game, what little I ever saw of the early 3e work was just as much of a hot mess. This thing's well on the way.

[sake]

Hell, I've seen ENworld 5E threads where people actually complained about Wizards having Light as an level one at-will ability "because it solves the party's dungeon illumination problems too easily and make torches worthless".

Frankly at this point I'm not sure what those sorts of people want casters to actually do.
[/i]

[John Magnum]

It seems like some people honestly want a caster who spends most of the time hanging around plinking away with a crossbow, and then every once in a while when the party is in dire need of a huge effect they whip out a huge spell. Or something. I mean, that at least would be sort of cool except for the fact that it would be ten times as stupid as it is cool.

Maybe people really do want the wizard to be "Archer, except the arrows are glowy elemental shit and not real physical arrows".

[Username17]

So, reading the past now, they've been steadily nerfing charm, knock, sleep, animate, and SoD type spells to keep the 4rons in the earlier playtest happy, to the point they are now less use than zap cantrips, but the 4rons who were out of the loop can't see the nerfs because they can only compare with 4e, where all Wizards do is ... nothing.


Oh, and the early playtest didn't have multipliers on the monster hit points, so the minotaur had 6d10 HD, often 27 or less hp, and the fighter was doing 2d6+7 (max on a crit) +1d10 (crit die bonus) +1d6 (charge feat) = dead minotaur.

Which people hated, so x4 hit points as a playtest response. Mathematical archaeology.


As for them not being able to progress this into a game, what little I ever saw of the early 3e work was just as much of a hot mess. This thing's well on the way.

This is not new territory for them. Consider the early releases of 4e, this was my actual response to reading their Rogue and Paladin previews:

Math time!

A Rogue has about 24 hit points at first level.

A 1st level "Brutal" Rogue probably has a Strength Mod of +2 and a Dex mod of +3. If he opens combat with his Sneak Attack / Tortuous Strike he inflicts Weapon (d6? + Strength) * 2 + Strength + Dex + 2d6. So that's 4d6 + 9. That's an average of 23. If level bonuses round up instead of down, that's 25 points. And if you can manage a +3 Strength mod with 4e's higher attributes you can be throwing around 26 or more.

In short, an optimized first level Rogue who wins initiative at another optimized 1st level Rogue gets a one-per-encounter chance to drop his opponent on the first round with a single d20 attack roll.

Succeed and Win. Saw: it's the new SoD.

-Username17

That was just four months before the actual release of the product. During that time they removed modifiers from the [W] multiplier, and removed the level bonus altogether from damage calculations. Instead of being able to drop a level-appropriate enemy in one shot in 4e, we ended up with a padded sumo that dragged on forever.

But yes, we're seeing that again. They opened up with something gonzo: automatic success for most available DCs coupled with damage outputs bigger than even the boss monsters could take. A 33 hit point Minotaur got hit with a charge and just red misted in one round. Their response? Nerf the player damage output and jack up all the hit points. And now we're back to 4e's Padded Sumo release.

The problem here is that they are using exactly the methodology that made 4e shitty.

-Username17

[Parthenon]

Frankly at this point I'm not sure what those sorts of people want casters to actually do.

They want casters to be like Gandalf from The Hobbit. As in do absolutely fuck all magic, setting fire to some wargs and hitting goblins with swords. Yet also allowing the player to brag that they have the option of bringing out their arcane angelic powers of awesome and special artefact rings since they are super special wizards.

[John Magnum]

I'd be interested in seeing Drain Wizards that can stack a bunch of debuffs on themselves to power their attacks. Especially if Fighters or some other class actually gets some area control and it's possible to protect an exhausted wizard for a while without just relying on the MC to be a gentleperson and not send the monsters over to sodomize the fragile caster.

D&D has experimented with so many weird magic variants; has that ever been one of them? Some UA variant somewhere?

[Sashi]

Instead of being able to drop a level-appropriate enemy in one shot in 4e, we ended up with a padded sumo that dragged on forever.

But yes, we're seeing that again. They opened up with something gonzo: automatic success for most available DCs coupled with damage outputs bigger than even the boss monsters could take. A 33 hit point Minotaur got hit with a charge and just red misted in one round. Their response? Nerf the player damage output and jack up all the hit points. And now we're back to 4e's Padded Sumo release.

The problem here is that they are using exactly the methodology that made 4e shitty.

the amazing thing is that 4e then saw 4 years of walking 5e padded sumo back: PCs saw a steady increase in power and damage output (splatbook power creep) while monsters saw their default arbitrarium values for HP drop and damage increase.

they obviously want boss monsters to be "big" but they just keep going for the lizard-brain response of "more numbers" when a boss Minotaur should be chasing the PCs through a trap-laden maze in an actual INTERESTING ENCOUNTER.

I'm also truly flabbergasted at just how shifty the 5E "skill" system is. Considering Mike Mearls had literally FOUR skill systems to reference and steal from (3e, pathfinder, 4e, iron heroes) one of which he wrote himself. Instead he went for a needlessly complicated system that throws 15 years of evolution out the door in favor of a nonsense system with useless math that is impossible to use or understand.

I mean, you take the 3e skill system (which has actual definitions and guidelines for what it means to roll a 15 on he die with a +5 modifier) reduce the number of available skills a-la pathfinder/4e and let players invest in "skill groups" so that, like Iron Heroes, fighters don't feel like shit for having 2 points/level to invest in a list of 20 skills. Do the 4e "skills are trained or not" so that players don't have to do bookkeeping to stay level appropriate/character bonuses dont deviate by an entire RNG.

Then you give the played "skill points" (or skill feats, really) that they can spend to augment those skills in ways that a: increase competence without changing the mod. Like "always advantage on stealth checks" "treat all strength based skill checks as having rolled a 10 or the die result, whichever is better". Also let them spend the points on abilities like "missing an attaack while hiding eosnt reveal your location" "you can stealth so hard you walk through walls" "you can climb so well you can walk on ceilings" or "you're so knowledable its almost impossible to lie to and people have automatic disadvantage when attempting to".

[Username17]

The key is that, in most cases, magic items give more options, rather than improvements to existing options.

Strictly speaking, the fighter with no items is less powerful than the fighter with a ton of items, yet if the campaign tends toward few or no items, the game still functions fine. For instance, the math behind monsters looks to magic items only for the static bonuses that they grant.

Primarily, the benefits conferred by magic items are useful in specific situations or they cater to specific tactics. Many also are limited in scope, such as providing a benefit for the length of one encounter per day.

The important thing to remember is that, in monster and math design, only the static benefits had an effect on the math. If you change how items work, everything works out fine as long as you are consistent wtih that change. We've shifted away from making some classes, like the fighter, heavily gear dependent, while others, like the wizard, don't need it as much.
__________________
Mike Mearls - Lead Developer, RPG R&D

Sounds like part of 5e, doesn't it? That's Mike Mearls from January 25th, 2008, explaining how the magic item system for 4th edition is going to be awesome.

The thing to note here is that the fallacies he was throwing around at the beginning of 4th edition are things he is still throwing around today. Not only is he still mysteriously in a position of power, but he's still really making all the same mistakes he made before. He hasn't actually learned anything, and asking him to save D&D is laughable.

-Username17

[tussock]

One might suggest 3.5 was already trying to fix all the same problems.



As an aside, some quick playtesting showed stealth easy enough to use. Walk ahead hidden at 16+, most things will die via the surprise sneak attack, as you've only seen the front one thus far you can walk back and hide again. As the rest come forward to hunt you the fighters smash them with readied crossbows, and Thief can "unhide" from behind those fighters to get another kill.

Advantage is /huge/, totally worth seeking out, and never worth giving away. Wizard mostly freezes to slow the melee swarms, cleric lasers any leftovers.

The moradin cleric is pretty useless besides his defender trick, though it shows the Fighters need to chuck that greataxe and use a shield. AC 15 is bad news and they mostly have damage to spare. Pretty sure Dex fighters would indeed rule, though the class includes +1 Str, so they're tougher to build.

Against huge bunches you just have to kite them. Move back and ready attacks, missiles until they can close, freeze to lockup the corridor and slow their advance. Use a corner to hide the Thief for extra fun. If I was to carry caltrops, burning oil, and mobile cover like a table, it'd be a joke XP farm.

Seems that when you can just casually back-pedal out of contact without cost it's impossible for the monsters to gain any advantage from their numbers. Definitely should be disadvantage to fire into melee, otherwise it gets even more silly.

[hogarth]

I am just curious:

Will people who are depicting the demise of D&D over this recant when it doesn't happen?

5E D&D won't last forever; that's a given. So whenever it reaches the end of its product cycle, one can just point to that and say "See? I was right, give or take a year."

It's like the joke about economists predicting 9 of the last 5 recessions.