So what happened to 5e anyway?

[Mistborn]

So 5e is still a thing that exists.

-How terrible is it right now

-LWQW status update how are they failing to solve the fighter/wizard problem this time

-Is their any chance they'll surprise us by releasing something not

-Who is it that's fucking it Merles, 4e fans, Grognards, all of the above.

-What happens when the 3e/3.5/PF players they wanted back fail buy in and the edition flops.

-Is it time for a D&D postmortem what happened to make these unfortunate events take place.

[Ice9]

In answer: Pretty bad, by being really vague about what high-level spells do, not what?, Mearls and maybe grognards - 4E fans are out of luck, no idea, and maybe.

I thought I was apathetic about 4E, but 5E is like new heights of "meh". It looks like it manages to be as boring as 4E, but without the design focus, and running in terror from anything non-traditional. It's like the worst of both worlds.

[Krusk]

I started hate following mearls on twitter a bit ago. He dropped some gem ( this week *edit) about how they aren't testing balance yet, so there is that.

It's also been forever since the last play test.

My (unsubstantiated) thoughts? They got their money cut and were told to stall for a year while someone frees some up for next year. They will get that line again next year and the smarter (relatively speaking) ones will leave the project to "pursue other interests". Eventually (2-3 years from now) someone will just buy it from hasbro and scrap all the stuff done so far.

[CapnTthePirateG]

New packet tomorrow.

But overall shitty, uninspired retread.

[Seerow]

New packet tomorrow.

But overall shitty, uninspired retread.

Pretty much this. We'll have new things to laugh at tomorrow at least.

[Stubbazubba]

I thought I was apathetic about 4E, but 5E is like new heights of "meh".

Sigged

[sabs]

So with D&D 5e being doa, and shadowrun 5e's Jason Hardy looking like he wants to oust Mike Mearls from the top spot as most incompetent gme designer evah...

is this the year rpg's die?

[Previn]

So 5e is still a thing that exists.

-How terrible is it right now

It's about as bad as any given d20 clone from some minor or indy publisher. It's mostly playable, but nothing about it makes you want to play it.

-LWQW status update how are they failing to solve the fighter/wizard problem this time

They are trying to solve it by cutting down spells for casters, both in number cast per day and by removing the biggest balance offenders. Even if that was a good solution, splats will break that solution.

-Is their any chance they'll surprise us by releasing something not

There is always a chance in the technical sense. In reality? No.

-Who is it that's fucking it Merles, 4e fans, Grognards, all of the above.

I'd say mostly Merles at this point. Most of what Grognards like isn't really in this edition, and 4e fans aren't really getting much from their edition in at all. I'm really seeing 5e as the way 3.0 could have gone wrong in the move from 2e.

-What happens when the 3e/3.5/PF players they wanted back fail buy in and the edition flops.

It lingers on for a couple years, Mearls gets canned, and a new team tries to make a new edition. They continue to fragment their own player base with multiple editions too quickly without any direction for D&D as a brand to really recover as the powerhouse of TTRPGs.

-Is it time for a D&D postmortem what happened to make these unfortunate events take place.

They lacked competent designers, lacked a vision that's wasn't just following market fads and lacked the ability to trash out stupid ideas. Crowdsourcing design is a sure path to failure.

[Juton]

It's inevitable that there will be a new version of D&D. The IP is too valuable to just sit on. But as things drag on I'm wondering if Mearls will be the one to design it. From what I understand Mearl's primary skill is office politics and not game design, which explains how he is still employed.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there will be a big change with 5e's development team right before Gencon. So they either fire or demote Mearls depending on what incriminating photos he has and bring back in Monte Cook or anyone else with name recognition and even the meanest design skills. Remember they aren't releasing anything until 2014, so they would have more than enough time to change up the team and warm up 3.5's left overs and have that out for Gencon '14.

[Ghremdal]

It sucks so many bags of dicks that almost anyone with a moderate amount of GM experience and a month of time would do it better.

[hogarth]

So they either fire or demote Mearls depending on what incriminating photos he has and bring back in Monte Cook or anyone else with name recognition and even the meanest design skills.

Speaking of which: Is Numenera a thing that still exists? How terrible is it right now? Is it time for a Numenera postmortem?

[Username17]

So they either fire or demote Mearls depending on what incriminating photos he has and bring back in Monte Cook or anyone else with name recognition and even the meanest design skills.

Speaking of which: Is Numenera a thing that still exists? How terrible is it right now? Is it time for a Numenera postmortem?

The table top game exists only in potentiae, and the fact that it might exist is being used as the justification to make a computer game. That computer game has a budget of several million dollars, so there's that.

-Username17

[Ice9]

How to succeed in kickstarting, quick version:
1) Be Monte Cook.

Given how well the Shadowrun video game kickstarter did, perhaps this advice is somewhat generalizable (be connected to an RPG people liked in the previous millenium), but sadly still inapplicable to most people.

[infected slut princess]

Mike Mearls is a smelly dumbfuck. He's probably still a virgin. There are potato chip crumbs trapped in his chest hair from two months ago.

Remember that feeling of excitement, looking through D&D monster books, the classes, and spell books, and getting your imagination all pumped up and wanting to play the game?

Those days are dead. 4e, while it was BAD, suffered from an even WORSE flaw: it was boring. You didn't even WANT to play it long enough to realize how much ass it sucked.

Now, 5e too is boring. Look at the spells. Look at the HIGH LEVEL spells. They are lame. You can't DO cool stuff in the game. At high level, or at any level.

Look at the class abilities. Most of them are seriously lame.

The Monsters are fucking stupid. Dragons need to seriously run home to and cry to mama if 10 villagers show up with pitch forks. Asmodeus, most powerful monster in the game, attacks with spells that do... 17 damage on a failed save. You don't want to level up to kill high level monsters because they are pathetic and you aren't interested in wasting your time.

There is no cutting edge design ideas being demonstrated for 5e. There are no great minds with great inspiration working on it. It's lame, "eh", boring, unexciting.

You can house rule a game to make it better, but only if it gets you excited enough to want to play. 5e is NOT exciting.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Looking at the new packet.

I cannot be assed to give a shit. There's some new fluff crap which is basically a pile of D&D cliches, druid, ranger, and paladin - and they all look like they're 3.5 rejects. High level spells are still boring as fuck and every spell that wasn't an evocation got nerfed hardcore. It's not good, it's not interesting, it's just kind of a crap pile.

[Wrathzog]

From what I've seen, the Core System has improved but the actual content is pretty half-ass.

[Seerow]

So get this. The Fighter in the new packet now has encounter powers. The expertise dice got separated from the martial damage dice in the last few packets, and got made so they require an action to refresh one die in combat, or a short rest to get them all.

But they left the maneuvers basically exactly the same. Seriously. No joke, maneuvers that were bad knock offs of already bad 3.X feats (see Lightning Reflexes and company, Dodge and company, and Weapon Focus) now have randomized benefits (1d6 in all cases) and require expenditure of these expertise dice.

Yeah, it's that bad.

[Surgo]

The worst part about this whole thing, I think, is how Wizards of the Coast have fucked up at such a steady level for such a long time that I can no longer bring forth a fuck to give at anything they create. I probably will not be a 5e customer, even if the game itself turns out to be about as good as 3e was. They have simply exhausted my reservoir of fucks.

[fectin]

The table top game exists only in potentiae, and the fact that it might exist is being used as the justification to make a computer game. That computer game has a budget of several million dollars, so there's that.

-Username17

I blame it on the folks who previously made the best game ever made have gotten the band back together. That it's set in Numenera is interesting, but completely beside the point. Torment is the thing which made me care about Numenera, not the other way around.

[Voss]

Looking at the new packet.

I cannot be assed to give a shit. There's some new fluff crap which is basically a pile of D&D cliches, druid, ranger, and paladin - and they all look like they're 3.5 rejects. High level spells are still boring as fuck and every spell that wasn't an evocation got nerfed hardcore. It's not good, it's not interesting, it's just kind of a crap pile.

What is really annoying is the rewrote everything that isn't a wizard or cleric and, but everything is sort of similar. Instead of measured damage scaling, its various weirdness. Fighters just roll extra dice for weapon attacks at 5th level and it increases after that (rather than getting a +5 at each tick). Which is a shame, because it means that once again, big weapons are the only ones that matter. You could actually build light-armor shortsword guy last time around, but now he'll always be strictly inferior to greatsword guy because xd6 is always inferior to xd12 in a way that 1dx+Y isn't.

It is a relatively minor loss all told (given the larger problems), but it is fucking stupid that they keep throwing out the entire class design with each iteration and start over. They don't change the shitty stuff and test again, they just chuck everything out.

And the spellcaster crap is damn stupid. 1/day you can regain a first level spell after a short rest. (this later becomes 2/day, and one of those times can be a 2nd, and then 3/day and one can be a third). This is a clumsy ass way of giving more spells. Just add fucking +1 to first, second and third level spells at the given levels. It makes no meaningful difference except you don't have to spend 30 minutes masturbating over the course of the day to get the extra spells (back).


Ugh- seerow is right about the fighter's encounterish nature. That is pretty terrible. The mundane characters are almost entirely worse than they were in the last packet, casters are largely the same, and the paladin and ranger are the same hybrid bullshit that they've been. Though they get spells at level 1 now.

But it is the same terrible shit the cleric gets for the most part, as in +1 to AC or +1 to attack/damage.

A paladin and cleric are barely distinguishable at first level. +1 attack, +1 spellcasting, 2 spells. Course the paladin gets to use his charisma for any save (everything but dex or str is a dump stat!), and the cleric gets meaningless god bullshit, but they need to have a serious think about role protection.

Well, yep, this killed it for me. The last packet was deeply flawed but had some potential for non-spellcasters. This gutted it and piled on bullshit.

Here's a thing that pretty much sums things up, amongst the revision list:

Two actions have been cut: disarm and push. Both of these options are now handled by feats

Yeah. Shoving a dude (5 feet) requires special feature training. Seriously, I could shove someone my size when I was fucking five. I didn't even need to hit them to do it.

[Korwin]

The table top game exists only in potentiae, and the fact that it might exist is being used as the justification to make a computer game. That computer game has a budget of several million dollars, so there's that.

-Username17

I blame it on the folks who previously made the best game ever made have gotten the band back together. That it's set in Numenera is interesting, but completely beside the point. Torment is the thing which made me care about Numenera, not the other way around.

Yeah, I'm in the Torment Kickstarter too, but not in the Numenera one.

[K]

So they either fire or demote Mearls depending on what incriminating photos he has and bring back in Monte Cook or anyone else with name recognition and even the meanest design skills.

Speaking of which: Is Numenera a thing that still exists? How terrible is it right now? Is it time for a Numenera postmortem?

The table top game exists only in potentiae, and the fact that it might exist is being used as the justification to make a computer game. That computer game has a budget of several million dollars, so there's that.

-Username17

Well, the table-top game has a budget of half a million dollars, so Monte could actually just pay someone to write Numenera if his own skills are lacking.

[Voss]

The table top game exists only in potentiae, and the fact that it might exist is being used as the justification to make a computer game. That computer game has a budget of several million dollars, so there's that.

-Username17

I blame it on the folks who previously made the best game ever made have gotten the band back together. That it's set in Numenera is interesting, but completely beside the point. Torment is the thing which made me care about Numenera, not the other way around.

Careful with that- the new Torment only has about a quarter of the band. Fargo and a couple others are at inExile, but Avellone and Fergus are at Oblivion, and then a bunch of others are still off scattered to the wind.

But yeah, while Cook's history is pushing Numenera to a degree, Torment is what is going to really sell it initially, but both projects have a lot of potential for utter failure.

[hogarth]

So nobody knows anything about the crunch of Numenera? Okay, threadjack over.

Have they added any more high level 5E spells to the playtest list? If so, are they all slight variations on fireball/lightning bolt?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Everything I hear about 5th Edition D&D makes me think that rather than realizing that they created a turkey with 4E D&D, there was something ineffably wrong that somehow offended the customers. Like, they really did create the best damn game ever and while they're willing to make some cosmetic changes they're in denial about what's really wrong with their core self. And you're going to love 4th Edition 5E D&D as-it-is no matter what complaints or suggestions you make.

5E D&D is the MRA permavirgin of D&D. And Mike Mearls is VH1's Mystery: The Pick-Up Artist.