D&DNext: Playtest Review

[tussock]

Missed this first bit.

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.

What the fuck are you talking about? This isn't 3e or 4e. There's no battlefield control at all. If you want to move through an occupied space, you just do. You can't block the corridor. 5' of Caltrops just makes them take 5 extra feet of movement. You don't move at half speed for the whole turn, you move half speed for that five foot square.

5' less move means they can't catch you and attack, as far as I can find only Orcs can charge (while I and everyone else seems to take it as a general case, charging sucks vs a Moradin Cleric anyway). With cover, like a table or door, their melee attack is over cover, for disadvantage, you carry the table further away or back to the next door on your turn and shoot past it fine as a ready action. Haw haw.

And no, occupied by enemies there's no rule for moving through, so you just can't. Occupied by frozen friends is difficult terrain, -5 move, thus no move and attack. Obviously I need a proper full front line across the doorway or corridor, but there's corridors everywhere and everyone's always free to move back to them.

Movement in 5e is so generous that you might as well not play with a mat. If you freeze one enemy in place, the other enemies can just move through the square. They don't even have to slow down. There are no threatened areas, no opportunity attacks. The closest thing to area control in the game is to dump out a bag of ball bearings: that covers a 10' square with DC 11 or fall down.

I assumed frozen people are difficult terrain, how could they be otherwise? Narrow gaps obviously force your enemy to form a conga-line, because MTP FTW. It's easy to create such narrow gaps.

Basically, sounds like you were making unwarranted assumptions based on how D&D is really obviously supposed to work rather than going by what 5e actually says.

I agree, but I can't follow the actual rules because they disagree with each other all over the place, it's like believing in the literal truth of the bible, there is no possibility of any such thing, you cannot play this game by the rules. However, as I tried to let the rules do the things that the character sheets seemed to describe, like Rogues being stealthy and hiding behind dorfs, I could easily find ways to let that happen, by ignoring the bits that forbid it.

My only assumption is the monsters can't really be aware of you when you're around the corner, because otherwise the players are all going to be "I'm aware of all the things I can't see too!" and shit. Better to let the hobbit hide, assuming I'm supposed to let it work despite the rules as much as anything.

Wow. That is a huge assumption. You changed it from "Your enemies are automatically aware of you if you attack and you need to take an action to hide again in a point where they can't be 'looking at you'" to "your stealth automatically succeeds without a roll if your move takes you behind a solid object after your attack each round".

There is rolls. Hobbit 16-26, Orc 0-19. Not a lot of overlap, usually only one will spot you if any do, so you kill one that didn't, usually true even if you can't tell. Maybe there's never surprise at all because one saw them, maybe we can have arguments about how people were totally aware of things they can't see. Maybe stealth doesn't work, but fuck that, I'm sick of stealth not working.

Like, I know there's a stupid-ass rule says that ability doesn't work. But I'm pretty sure they put it there so that it would. It makes more sense to duck around a corner than it does to "take an action" when you're hiding behind a dorf anyway.

[Winnah]

The space creatures occupy is covered in the DM guidelines. It would be more intiutive to have it in the combat section of the How to Play booklet, but whatever.

There are rules for squeezing through spaces. It is not clear if you can squeeze though a space occupied by a creature, though the example of a human blocking a doorway in the Creature Size section on page 4-5, indicates you can only move through a space with permission from the occupant. Cue discussion on the offensive connotations of 'consent.'

[TheFlatline]

The biggest problem with the 5e playtest is that it is playable.

Interesting point. Can you play the game for a dozen sessions before it gets stale?

Or is this a design feature? The game gets stale after an adventure or two, intentionally, since 90+% of games only last for an adventure or two, if they're lucky.

[ModelCitizen]

Here's how I think the stealth rules are supposed to work. I'm not trying to go all Oberoni on this thing, most of this is my own inferences about poor writing and mushy-headed logic. However, I do think these stealth rules are closer to being playable than 3e or 4e's. (And probably AD&D/BECMI too but I barely remember them.)

I'm not gonna try to figure out the facing problem. It's not like the facing rules are confusing or contradictory, they're just not here. These rules are incomplete for sure but I'm just trying to make sense of what we have.


Stealth
Hidden is Absolute. Hidden is a buff that you absolutely have or don't have. You can't be Hidden from one creature and not from another. I know that's contradicted in two different places, but having a separate Hidden vs each creature doesn't work. You keep the same stealth check as long as you remain Hidden and you use that same check vs different creatures. If Hidden is relative then you can roll a 20 on a stealth check and keep that roll forever as long as you never meet that specific creature again. Hidden *has* to be absolute even though the writers don't seem to get why or get that there's even a difference.

Hidden doesn't mean Undetected. Hidden is pointedly not the same as "no one knows you're there." You can be Hidden even when everyone knows exactly where you are, because you made a stealth check behind a pillar in the middle of combat. You can also not be Hidden even if you're trying to be stealth and no one can see or hear you. More on that stupidness later.

Obscurement is Relative. You have to have Obscurement against all nearby creatures to maintain Hidden. Obscurement is relative to each creature. It has to be because you can gain Obscurement from cover.

You lose Hidden when a creature sees/hears you. They have to actually see or hear you, it's not enough just to know you're there. (I think we can cut the writers enough slack to say it's supposed to be when an enemy sees/hears you. As in, creatures who detect you can choose to let you keep Hidden, and you can't roll your stealth check until a creature actually tries to remove Hidden. The rules should be explicit about that but I'm not harping on it.)

You *also* lose Hidden as soon as you stop having Obscurement vs at least one creature. This is the dumb part. Even if you're sneaking up on Helen Fucking Keller you lose Hidden as soon as you step out from behind a bush. Same applies against a creature who is unconscious or has its back turned. (E: removed a line about Ambusher proving that this is what what the writers intended, which isn't necessarily true.)

You need Hidden to Sneak Attack. You *don't* automatically gain Advantage against creatures who can't see or hear you or don't know you're there. To sneak attack Helen Keller you have to be behind a bush.


Perception
Make One Check on First Contact. When an enemy tries to gain Hidden or a Hidden enemy comes close, you make a Perception check vs their Stealth check. This isn't an action and happens automatically.

You can make more checks by searching... somehow. Actively "searching" for a hidden creature lets you make another Perception check. This is probably some kind of action but we have no idea what kind or how long it takes.


Rogue Feats and Shit
Hobbitstealth is fine, but it's not immediately obvious why. Lidda's racial ability to hide under Mailee's skirt actually does do something. You can't normally hide behind creatures that are moving or fighting. It took me awhile to notice, but the only other reference to hiding behind creatures explicitly requires that the creature be immobile.

Something must conceal you, perhaps a large object, a piece of terrain, or an immobile creature of an appropriate size, such as a slumbering dragon.

Ambusher is retarded Ambusher *sometimes* lets Lidda gain Advantage when she'd otherwise lose it to the Hidden vs unaware weirdness. It also *sometimes* lets her not worry about MTP facing in combat. It's an inept kludge that obscures weaknesses in the basic stealth rules. It probably shouldn't exist, at least until the core rules are finished.

[TheFlatline]

Frank, I'm starting to like rules light systems more and more. Could you tell me why rules light games are bad for long campaigns? Is it because the rules aren't consistent or what? Don't write too much or anything unless you want to.

Rules-light games aren't necessarily a bad thing, as long as they are comprehensive to the game they are adjudicating. Look at Go for example: there's like 5 rules, 2 of which are special scenarios. But those rules encompass everything you can do within a game of Go.

In a game where you're supposed to mimic real life to a plausible degree of acceptance you need fairly comprehensive rules. We don't need to stat out blue balls and BDSM (though that actually has happened before in D&D...), but we do need to have an answer for pretty much anything you commonly will *want* to do within the scope of the game. And in D&D, that's a *lot* of stuff you'll want to do.

The problem with defaulting to "let the DM decide" is a few-fold. One, it's fucking lazy. We're paying money for a game system, and "figure it out yourself" and then charge 30 bucks for that smacks of hubris. Two, rules are supposed to be neutral mediums between the DM and the players. You can rely on a longsword doing a d8 of damage because that's the goddamn rules. If the DM (or a player) wants to make Uber McGee swordsman of doom and let him do 4d8 with a longsword, that kind of stinks. Three, without solid rules, common sense stops being common sense. In a MTP heavy system, every time the DM pulls something out of his ass, he has two options: one is to codify it, write it down, and have that become reality, a touch-point. If he does that enough, his rules-light system isn't rules-light any more, it's an encyclopedia of exceptions. But his other option is to not codify DM calls, so that the very same door, depending on the whim and memory of a DM, might have a different open lock DC. It might even have wildly varying DCs if the DM is a prick enough. Without that touch-point, common sense goes out the window. Can you pick the lock of the door? Well that depends on the DM's mood at that very moment. How can you plan, or even figure if you're a good lock-picker, if you have nothing to base that on?

DM Fiat, which seems to be a core tenant of D&DNext, has historically, at least in my experience, been a kludge. It's a jumpstart to get a stalled game moving again.

[ishy]

The space creatures occupy is covered in the DM guidelines. It would be more intiutive to have it in the combat section of the How to Play booklet, but whatever.

There are rules for squeezing through spaces. It is not clear if you can squeeze though a space occupied by a creature, though the example of a human blocking a doorway in the Creature Size section on page 4-5, indicates you can only move through a space with permission from the occupant. Cue discussion on the offensive connotations of 'consent.'

In combat, an ally lets you move through the space he or she occupies, but a hostile creature does not. You must maneuver around your foes.

Seems pretty clear to me.

[Winnah]

It's not clear.

Does a paralyzed or grappled enemy block movement? What about an ethereal enemy? What about an unconscious or dying enemy? What about a creature which is neither an ally, or hostile?

If surrounded, can you use the Squeeze option to move out of the area? Gelatinous Cube pinball anyone?

What happens if a big creature grapples or pins a character, especially when all egress points require them to move out of a creatures space? Seriously, what happens if a dragon or another large flyer lands on top of a character?

That is not clear at all.

[hogarth]

Not really. Those are big and complicated systems that are playable.

The 5e playtest is small and playable simply because it doesn't try to be a complete game, and that is going to lead WotC down the wrong path in future design decisions.

Making a game that is supposed to last 100 adventures is far different from one designed to last one adventure and leads to far different design decisions.

That's the problem with playtests. The first 20% of the game gets 80% of the playtesting and the last 80% of the game gets 20% of the playtesting (if that).

[ishy]

It's not clear.

Does a paralyzed or grappled enemy block movement? What about an ethereal enemy? What about an unconscious or dying enemy? What about a creature which is neither an ally, or hostile?

If surrounded, can you use the Squeeze option to move out of the area? Gelatinous Cube pinball anyone?

What happens if a big creature grapples or pins a character, especially when all egress points require them to move out of a creatures space? Seriously, what happens if a dragon or another large flyer lands on top of a character?

That is not clear at all.

Grapple is not described at all (other than strength check to break free, or dex check to escape). So whatever it does is entirely mtp.

Creatures are described as either ally or hostile, so any other is MTP.

You can't Squeeze through an enemies space because you can't move through a hostile creatures space.

There are no rules for flying at all (just the stirge flies I think?). So we can assume default rules apply -> can move through allies space not through enemies.

[GâtFromKI]

Frank, I'm starting to like rules light systems more and more. Could you tell me why rules light games are bad for long campaigns? Is it because the rules aren't consistent or what? Don't write too much or anything unless you want to.

Because MTP-RPG is completely free.

I also like light systems, and I also tend to allow special-MTP-actions when I'm the MC. I just don't need to buy MTP-RPG: if there is a clear subsystem for some action, then I can decide to not use it for some reason and use MTP-RPG instead, but the reverse isn't true.

[Username17]

Frank, I'm starting to like rules light systems more and more. Could you tell me why rules light games are bad for long campaigns? Is it because the rules aren't consistent or what? Don't write too much or anything unless you want to.

TheFlatline covered this pretty well. As you run into scenarios that the rules do not cover adequately, you can have the DM issue spot rulings. But as you issue DM rulings, you develop a set of precedents. When you make future rulings, you can either stay consistent with those precedents, or you can make new rulings that are not consistent with previous edicts. This is a simple lemma with only two solutions:

• If you adhere to the old rulings, then you are in effect making new rules. Make enough of them and you aren't playing a ruleslight system at all, you're just playing a game where many of the important rules are not written down and may in fact be secret, known only to the players who managed to make it to the game at the pizza place when Greg's house wasn't available because he had family over. This is the original D&D - the "rules" filled a couple dozen pages, but the secret rules could have filled huge binders (and for many groups, they did).
• If you don't adhere to the old rulings, it's doubtful that you're playing a game at all. Because apparently you do the same action and can expect different results like you were in the mind of a crazy person or reality itself was run by someone who was incredibly dickish.
  
  -Username17

[deaddmwalking]

[*] If you don't adhere to the old rulings, it's doubtful that you're playing a game at all. Because apparently you do the same action and can expect different results like you were in the mind of a crazy person or reality itself was run by someone who was incredibly dickish.

-Username17

This may be the best argument for a rules-light system I've ever heard for people that want 'simulationist' games. Hasn't everyone else felt that reality seems to be run by someone who was incredibly dickish a time or two?

[Seerow]

• If you adhere to the old rulings, then you are in effect making new rules. Make enough of them and you aren't playing a ruleslight system at all, you're just playing a game where many of the important rules are not written down and may in fact be secret, known only to the players who managed to make it to the game at the pizza place when Greg's house wasn't available because he had family over. This is the original D&D - the "rules" filled a couple dozen pages, but the secret rules could have filled huge binders (and for many groups, they did).

Ugh my first long time D&D game was like this. I joined an existing group whose DM had been running games on and off for like 20 years. He ostensibly claimed to be running D&D 3.5, but in the end it was almost enough to scare me off from the hobby forever, because he had house rules for literally everything, and never had them written down anywhere.

And I don't just mean little house rules like "this is a +3 instead of a +2" no, I mean like a starting character had hp numbered in the hundreds at least (I believe it was something like add up all your attributes, multiply it by 10 as your baseline hit points), magic items were rarely below artifact quality. After playing for over a year I still couldn't tell you how damage was resolved, because that seemed to change literally every time it came up. Skills and feats were one in the same, so your skill points every level were spent on feats, and you could take multiple levels of feats. There were hundreds of feats and skills that he had made up on the spot at some point years before I started playing that I'd only find out about when he or one of the players said "Hey why aren't you using this?". One particularly absurd example was 'trains of thought', which cost a single skill point but gave you the ability to cast an extra spell as a part of a standard action, as long as it had no verbal or somatic components.



tl;dr: God I hate games like that. Almost as much as I hate games with excessive use of riddles.

[John Magnum]

Mearls on the Playtest

For the races, we decided to use a mechanic that improves a weapon's die to indicate a racial affinity for a weapon. This cuts down on math at the table and also means that you need to look only to your abilities and class for modifiers.

While I suppose it's LESS awful to lock specific races to specific weapons than the 4e system of locking specific races to specific classes, it's still pretty derp.

Nobody can hide in bright light or without an obscuring element unless they are invisible.

Rogues and other stealthy monsters and characters can hide in shadows or if they are partially obscured.

Anyone can try to hide in darkness or if they are fully obscured from view.

And somehow that got turned into the mess that actually ended up in the rules.

Combat: The big change here is slicing things down to one action and a move. We've found that this really speeds up play by cutting down on the number of decisions each player must make. That pace was overwhelmingly popular in our playtests, though we'll see how it holds up in the public eye.

Eugh. More positive reactions that are entirely based on novelty, unfamiliarity. Once people aren't all shocked at things going FASTER than 4e, they'll notice that it's somehow even more tedious. Watch out for Mearls to cut the number of decisions down to "zero" and for people to still be excited the first time they play it.

Paladins now cannot be frightened, and by extension they ignore effects that frighten creatures and do something else. The same applies to charmed for elves.

Buh? Fine, whatever. I guess you've written your spells to be "This frightens the target, AND AS A CONSEQUENCE has this additional effect". Natural language! Makes things easier to read and write!

The big change here is in the spell description. We wanted something that was fun to read, so we decided to fall back on plain language rather than a formal stat block. You read through the spell and do what it says under its effect. That's it.

Of course, the typical use case for reading a spell description isn't reading through the entire thing. It's looking it up on the spot to adjudicate the effect. So having a well-laid-out stat block that has important key terms and game-mechanical concepts is much easier to read. If all I need to know is the range of a 3e spell, I look up the "range" entry. If I need to know the range of a 5e spell, I have to read an entire paragraph. This is a problem.

[hogarth]

The big change here is in the spell description. We wanted something that was fun to read, so we decided to fall back on plain language rather than a formal stat block. You read through the spell and do what it says under its effect. That's it.

Of course, the typical use case for reading a spell description isn't reading through the entire thing. It's looking it up on the spot to adjudicate the effect. So having a well-laid-out stat block that has important key terms and game-mechanical concepts is much easier to read. If all I need to know is the range of a 3e spell, I look up the "range" entry. If I need to know the range of a 5e spell, I have to read an entire paragraph. This is a problem.

I think you're underestimating (at least from my point of view) how useful it is to have a rule book that a newbie can sit down and read. If I had to read through the 4E Player's Handbook as a kid instead of the 1E PHB, I doubt I ever would have gotten hooked on playing D&D and, more importantly, from the point of view of the people publishing D&D, buying D&D books.

[ishy]

Conditions: Our condition list is a little slimmer than it has been in the past. We decided that a condition should represent a physical change to a character in the world, and we will usually rely on the specific spell or monster ability to give a few other effects to fully model what's going on. For instance, a mind flayer's ability to dominate a creature might charm it and also cause an additional effect that we describe in the ability.

We chose the names of the conditions to allow for better wording. Paladins now cannot be frightened, and by extension they ignore effects that frighten creatures and do something else. The same applies to charmed for elves. Going back to the example above and looking at how to implement it somewhat differently, the mind flayer's domination might not refer to charmed because it isn't magic based on deceit or manipulation, but instead a brute force attempt to seize control of a creature's mind.

So let me get this straight. We have conditions, but those are incomplete on purpose so you can model conditions better. And if they aren't magic based we may ignore conditions completely because ....?

This would mean that anything that refers to a condition still needs to spell everything out and a dominate spell might have entirely different effects from a mindflayers dominate I guess.

[Username17]

The trend has been to longer and longer books, and it has been hurting the hobby. I've commented on it before. The core rules should be shorter than Moby Dick. I know people are more literate now than they were in 1851, but that's ridiculous. I don't just mean that the PHB should be shorter than Moby Dick, I mean the entire core rules should be shorter than Moby Dick. If you can't get the PHB and DMG together into less than 187,000 words, you aren't trying hard enough.

So radically rethinking things and cutting text way the fuck down and asking questions like "Is this necessary? Could we do with less?" are things that have to happen. But Mearls and company have proved time and time again that they can't make a functional, finished product to save their jobs - so I have no hope.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't mind a long rulebook as long as the bulk of the wordage is spent on things either that you (and probably the customer) want people to spend a long time browsing through like magical item catalogs or powers or if the wordage is spent on things you're only supposed to cull from a small selection like monsters. Furthermore, if words are spent in things like comic strips I feel that is also okay, but only Exalted has even a notable amount of word bloat from that method.

Absent catalogs like that, however, I agree: the core rulebooks should be less than 100,000 pages.

[Lago PARANOIA]

We chose the names of the conditions to allow for better wording. Paladins now cannot be frightened, and by extension they ignore effects that frighten creatures and do something else. The same applies to charmed for elves. Going back to the example above and looking at how to implement it somewhat differently, the mind flayer's domination might not refer to charmed because it isn't magic based on deceit or manipulation, but instead a brute force attempt to seize control of a creature's mind.

If Mearls paid attention to the editions he worked on previously he would have realized that a keyword system that 3E and 4E D&D inched towards would solve a lot of these fucking problems without making him look like a Gygaxian fuckwit.

[Korwin]

Absent catalogs like that, however, I agree: the core rulebooks should be less than 100,000 pages.

Haha, hilarious typo. Not even the Wheel of endless Time has 100k pages.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Whoopsie daisy.

[hogarth]

If Mearls paid attention to the editions he worked on previously he would have realized that a keyword system that 3E and 4E D&D inched towards would solve a lot of these fucking problems without making him look like a Gygaxian fuckwit.

From my experience, the 4E PHB is by far the worst PHB to pick up and browse through compared to any previous edition, and the keywords aren't helping the readability.

Remember -- the most important thing is for people to buy the books. Whether people actually use the books for actual playing is a secondary concern. (Yes, I'm joking. But just barely.)

[Desdan_Mervolam]

In a game where you're supposed to mimic real life to a plausible degree of acceptance you need fairly comprehensive rules. We don't need to stat out blue balls and BDSM (though that actually has happened before in D&D...), but we do need to have an answer for pretty much anything you commonly will *want* to do within the scope of the game. And in D&D, that's a *lot* of stuff you'll want to do.

How many scenarios does a game need to prepare for in advance? 70%? 80%? 100% is clearly fantasy, you can't foresee every single thing a party will want to do with the rules, and how often are you really going to need rules for swordfighting during freefall from orbit? Hell, how often will you need rules for orbital freefall at all?

And every rule you write slows down game. Each rule needs to be referenced, adjudicated, and probably have dice thrown at. Even systems that are used regularly have this. What do you think resolves faster, D&D 3.X's combat system where you roll to hit vs a set difficulty, and if you hit roll damage, or oWoD's where you roll to hit vs a set difficulty, then your opponent has the option to dodge, then you roll damage, then your opponent has the opportunity to soak? Old Edition D&D weapon speed rules were probably more 'realistic' than running without them, but seriously were a pain in the ass and better left out.

The point is that one of the reasons writing a game is hard is that you have to find a balance between a rule system complicated enough that resolving a situation is satisfying, and a rule system that is easy enough to understand and use that the rules get out of the way of the game. Go too far in one direction and the game becomes frustrating because not everyone understands how the rules work and it's taken all night to kill five zombies. Too far in the other direction and it's frustrating because the GM has to MTP half the things people want to do which leads to inconsistent rulings and people not sure what could reasonably happen when they do a certain task.

And you decide what point you aim for because of your design goals. What do you want players to be able to do in the game? As discussed elsethread, game based on Star Trek needs a really solid system of dealing with diplomatic and political encounters, but you can probably get away with skipping the grid-based tactical minigame, because in this kind of game you want combat to be the fallback solution not the Plan A. Almost exactly the opposite is true in D&D where the assumption largely is that the party is going to go from location to location kicking in doors and killing shit, and where making it so you can easily talk monsters into standing down, giving over their treasure and finding somewhere else to be gets old seriously fast.

Edit: TL;DR: Rule Complexity is beside the point. How many rules a game has is less important than how well the rules make the game do what people want it to do.

[Lago PARANOIA]

From my experience, the 4E PHB is by far the worst PHB to pick up and browse through compared to any previous edition, and the keywords aren't helping the readability.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

[hogarth]

From my experience, the 4E PHB is by far the worst PHB to pick up and browse through compared to any previous edition, and the keywords aren't helping the readability.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

I mean, a newbie who picks up the basic rulebook and flips to a random page should be enticed into reading that whole page. Then the next page. And then the next page.

If you flip to a random page in the 4E PHB in the Powers or Magic Item sections, it's like reading stereo instructions because the ratio of jargon to natural language is too high. It doesn't suck you in at all.

You never noticed this?