If you were designing 5E...

[Lago PARANOIA]

Not to mention the majority of the stuff you listed just makes me go "This doesn't sound like D&D at all".

Is that really a bad thing? D&D is dying under the weight of bloated grognard carcasses right now. The tropes are stale and overused, people keep in legacy mechanics not because it makes a better game but because they can't imagine anything different, hell people are actually PROUD of clunky-ass shit like counting squares and counting skill points and Vancian spell-casting.

4E D&D is on its last legs. 3E D&D was successful but was run into the ground. Why do we actually want to go back to that? Stupid bullshit like racial segregation and triple-digit hit points are hallmarks of those systems and getting rid of those almost necessarily means 'not feeling like D&D'. So? I mean the big 'thing' right now for the 4E DDI bullshit is 'returning D&D to its roots'. No one has actually asked if those roots are any good though.

It might be fine as a separate game, but as a new edition of D&D it sounds even worse than 4e tbh.

From a 'mechanical' standpoint or a 'get your government hands off of my Medicare' standpoint?

There are a ton more things than that I didn't want to go in. I for one would love to get rid of cursed magical items, rubber forehead alien races, and poison but the contribution of those things to the game are rather minor. I'm aware that people want things that they're comfortable with rather than good which is why I kept my hands off as much shit as possible, but you have to draw a line. A lot of D&D's stuff is not only grating (whether they realize it or not) to its own rapidly shrinking customer base but also to non-TTRPG nerds. If D&D moved to abstract zones and was able to be played without battlemaps that would be a ginormous help lowering the barrier of entry to play and making $$$. If D&D got a new campaign setting that wasn't 'LotR with some spot changes yes that includes you Eberron' that would also help enormously.

But D&D grognards scream like raped apes if you suggest moving away from a lot of contradictory/inefficient/difficult bullshit, which after enough 'nos!' just makes me think we're better off ignoring them.

[Chamomile]

Lago, God of War is a video game, and the demographic that plays video games includes pretty much every male under the age of 35. The upshot is that when someone tries to stigmatize a AAA video game, it doesn't work, because the demographic playing that game is already huge. TTRPGs are a totally different market appealing to a much smaller playerbase, and BADD-style boycotts totally can wreak havoc with sales. This is why GTA laughed all the way to the bank but D&D caved in pretty thoroughly even though GTA the controversies surrounding GTA were, for the most part, perfectly accurate. You really do regain health by bedding prostitutes in GTA, but you aren't encouraged to cooperate with demons or devils in any way by 1e D&D.

[RadiantPhoenix]

After a little bit of consideration, I think that, after 4e, what is needed is something to reassure people, rather than something that will scare people again; a distillation of what people liked, built into something that works, rather than an attempt to make a completely new game.

If 5e is done like that and done well, 6e will have some legroom to try to be different.

[Josh_Kablack]

Everyone is on Winds of Fate. PCs use the Green Arrow version, monsters use the 1dX version.

Lago, there is all of one person in existence to date who has both produced and run all of a single D&D session with a single character using WoF. I fucking wrote the action report on that myself. And while I understand and somewhat sympathize with your desire to shake things up and move beyond pointless legacy mechanics, you of all people should know what games where Josh got to be a major part of inadequate playtesting efforts look like.
It's not unworkable, but it's also not anywhere near adequately playtested.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That said, I object to the 'no humans' idea.

I think that it's an easy and fruitful way to make the campaign setting feel different. For one, people aren't so wedded to the thought of playing humans as they used to be. When people imagine World of Warcraft things like Dranei and Orcs and Night Elves come to mind.

For two, the big problem with humans is that they're used as a vanilla filler everyman race. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case though, like in WH40K but it often is. That kind of thing shoots your product in the foot because a lot people are going to select the Ridiculously Average Race when they can't think of anything better. Repeated enough time for PCs or NPCs and it makes your product bland.

I'm strongly of the belief that human beings are the number one reason why heroic fantasy settings feel so similar to each other. Having races that are just some variant on human (elf, dwarf, orc, halfling) only makes that problem worse. Now you can have a 'protagonist' race in the game, but you can't have a 'vanilla' race. That way leads towards madness.

Also, custom ability guidelines should be in the core rules, with a pointer to a book with more details.

Well, two things come to mind.

The first one is that you could probably sell a book that had nothing but this in it, so why use up precious space? However, the other thought is that making such a system a 'splatbook' would reduce its legitimacy in the eyes of players who wanted it.

I say that kind of thing should be the highlight of a PHB2. You can make it more legitimate by using the PHB2 to introduce a lot more mainstream shit like new races and classes, some fixes to mechanics that didn't quite work out, some magical items, etc..

I don't think the false value that stigmatization would generate in the minds of 12-16 year olds would outweigh the social turnoff it would be to every other potential market. D&D has expanded its market a lot, and putting up social barriers to entry like that is not going to help the brand grow. A game can certainly be made to cater to adult stuff, but D&D is the poster child of all TTRPGs, and it's not in it's best interest to find an even narrower niche to fill.

Well, sure, in the really long run it hurts sales if you can't really sell a Vecna action figure to Little Johnny, age 9 or a Gelatinous Cube lunchbox to Little Timmy. That's a concern for universal brands like Batman and Sonic the Hedgehog, though; during the audience-growing phase you want to be seen as edgy or titillating. Once you've soaked your current audience of everything they've got then you can start sanitizing your product to make backpacks and whatever the fuck.

[Seerow]

Not to mention the majority of the stuff you listed just makes me go "This doesn't sound like D&D at all".

Is that really a bad thing? D&D is dying under the weight of bloated grognard carcasses right now. The tropes are stale and overused, people keep in legacy mechanics not because it makes a better game but because they can't imagine anything different, hell people are actually PROUD of clunky-ass shit like counting squares and counting skill points and Vancian spell-casting.

*snip*

tl;dr: You want to capitalize on the D&D brand recognition, but release a completely unrelated game. If that's what you want, make a new game! I might even play it. But don't try to pass off something THAT different as D&D.

Mechanics can change. Overarching themes can even change. I have no particular attachment to Vancian magic, for example. But I do think that any game that calls itself D&D should have a generalist wizard, who has some form of limitation on how much he can do in a day. I do think any game that calls itself D&D should at least maintain Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Priest as core classes, even if the mechanics behind each of those classes is drastically different from what it has been in the past. I do think that any game that calls itself D&D should have Humans, Elves, and Dwarves as a part of the same system. I do think that D&D should have magic items that last a long time, not constantly being drained and tossed aside like some diablo game. I do think that if you're playing D&D Resurrection should be available to mid-high level players, and death, even failure, should be possible. I do not think that any version of D&D should 100% require multiclassing. Save points should not be a part of ANY tabletop RPG. I could go on.


Seriously, about half the things you want are things that are not just different, but antithetical to any current or previous incarnation of D&D. The D&D brand name comes with certain expectations, and if you try to subvert all of those expectations because you think being different is the way to turn shit around, then what you're going to end up with is a lot of disappointed customers. Seriously, even with all the shitty changes 4e went through, they at least tried to hold onto the core of what D&D was, the majority of its problems were mechanical ones.

[Seerow]

I think that it's an easy and fruitful way to make the campaign setting feel different. For one, people aren't so wedded to the thought of playing humans as they used to be. When people imagine World of Warcraft things like Dranei and Orcs and Night Elves come to mind.

For two, the big problem with humans is that they're used as a vanilla filler everyman race. This doesn't necessarily have to be the case though, like in WH40K but it often is. That kind of thing shoots your product in the foot because a lot people are going to select the Ridiculously Average Race when they can't think of anything better. Repeated enough time for PCs or NPCs and it makes your product bland.

I'm strongly of the belief that human beings are the number one reason why heroic fantasy settings feel so similar to each other. Having races that are just some variant on human (elf, dwarf, orc, halfling) only makes that problem worse. Now you can have a 'protagonist' race in the game, but you can't have a 'vanilla' race. That way leads towards madness.

And that's fine for an offshoot setting. But you're talking about changes for core 5e rules, and wanting to make this setting the default. Not having humans in your core rules is not a good idea. You want to make a new campaign setting on the side to release a little after, fine. You can even put all your sexual stuff that you wanted in there. But you don't do that kind of shit to a core book.

[Gx1080]

What Seerow said. The huge shit-fit for swapping Gnomes for Tieflings and Half-Orcs for more Elf flavors proves that people have a list of expectations on any product with the D&D brand.

[Wrathzog]

* Change the Core Mechanic to use 2d10 instead of 1d20.
* Keep the Core mostly Vanilla. That means Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs. Beyond that is up to Setting/Flavor books.

* Keep Base Attributes system.
* Reduce Hit Point Scaling. Higher level characters should be harder to kill but are not necessarily tougher.

* Absolutely keep a Class system.
* Classes should be very strongly defined mechanically, but loose as far as flavor.
* A new class should bring an entirely new mechanic to the game. If it doesn't, then you create a Kit to an existing class.
* Prestige Classes should have their functionality incorporated into Tome Style feats.
* Absolutely keep VMH's.
* Force Casters to specialize.
* No level limit, but with a soft cap of 20.
* Unsure if multi-classing is necessary. It's fun and it's cool, but it adds a lot of work to balance and testing.

* Combine 3&4E's skill systems. You can Tag Skills at chargen. Tagged Skills automatically improve at 1 skill rank/1 character level. Non-Tagged Skills automatically improve at 1 skill rank/2 character levels.
* Do not explicitly link a skill to a single attribute. Do link specific actions you can perform with a skill to a single attribute.
* Consolidate Skills some more
* Skill DC's are generally Static.

* 3E's Feat System + Tome Style Feats.

* Strongly Typed bonuses.
* Keep track of that shit in a database or something. When you create a spell that lets people do crazy shit, you need to know.

* Combine Action Points and Healing Surges into Action Surges (or Edge or Will Power or whatever you want to call this)
* Each Class should allow for an alternate method of spending and maybe regaining Action Surges.

[DrPraetor]

• A serious nerf on total hit points, yes, below even 3rd edition levels.
• Hybrid spellcasting. Everyone casts spells like Sorcerers, but in addition Wizards and Clerics have a small number of Vancian spells per day, which are prepped from scrolls. Wizards can only Vancian their specialty school, Clerics can only Vancian spells from their alignment list.
• Lots of core classes to start.
• The number of Sorcerer spells you cast per day is basically determined by your character level, not your class level. Non-spellcasters get special abilities that "use" spell slots (as do things like Turn Dead, Smite and Laying on Hands.) This make multiclassing attractive for spellcasters. Multi-classing would be the norm, at least for PCs.
• Only Rogues, Bards and Rangers make meaningful skill selections. Other skill selections are generally fixed, although feats sometimes come with extra skills. Different skills are not expected to be balanced 1:1 they are class features.
  Bard: Full Appraise, Bluff, Decipher Script, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Know (History, Local), Listen, Perform (any three), Sense Motive Half Concentration, Know (All Others), Search, Spellcraft, Spot, Use Magic Device. Also two rogue skills at Full and two rogue skill at Half.
  Cleric: Full Concentration, Heal, Know (Religion); Half , Diplomacy, Listen, Ride, Search, Spellcraft, Spot.
  etc.
• You do get a few extra skills from your background. A noble background gives you Know (Nobility) and Ride, while a common background gives you a Profession or Craft and Know (Local).
• Craft pools that basically fix the number of McItems you make. Rather than exchanging XP and money back and forth in some complicated money, spellcasters simply get some $ discount on magic items which only applies to magic items which they nominally create.
• Proper handling of fractions in bonuses.
• Various balance fixes to the spell-lists. A serious reduction in the breadth of spells available to Clerics and Druids, but you get most of the spells actually required to fill a religion function (Consecrate, things like that), for free just for existing.

[Grek]

Base classes are all 10 levels long and are named as follows: Fighter, Cleric, Psion, Beguiler, Warmage, Rogue, Ranger and Barbarian. At level 10, everyone goes into a prestige class. You can't take levels in a base class after level 10, and you can't take levels in a prestige class before level 10.

Mutliclassing is free and simple. You just take levels in other classes. BaB, saves and other per level stuff are directly dependant on level, and you use whichever of your classes you have the most levels in to decide which progression you get.

Alignment still exists as a thing, but is no longer based on Good/Evil/Law/Chaos. Instead you get one "religious" alignment and one "secular" alignment (need better names for this). Your religious alignment is a plane of god of your choice, while your secular alignment is a government or political faction of your choice.

Implements get enchantment bonuses like weapons and basically act like magic weapons for your magic attacks. Also, wizards start wearing armour because fuck this noise about armour interfering with magic. Likewise with them having to hit normal AC like everyone else. None of that touch AC crap.

Everyone gets the power to spend 5 minutes doing a class appropriate behavior (maintaining weapons, praying, doing magic, w/e) to get GWM, GMV and all of those other boring number boosters that are required for balance.

Magic items are no longer buyable for money. You get them for doing things that please other members of your alignment. They can be crafted only using rare materials that cannot be gotten with money or magic. Magic item crafting is open to any character, regardless of class.

Skills get reverted back to 2E style NWP and become based on attributes, rather than on class. If you have an Int mod of +5 and a Str mod of +2, you get 5 knowledges and 2 strength skills. Con gives you NWP points that can be put anywhere.

People get minions by default, like with leadership. They don't get a cohort, just a pile of followers for their castle. These are based on the character's secular alignment. High level people get a planar cohort, based on their planar alignment, who they can send off on missions on their behalf but who does not follow them into battle. High wizards have a demon familar they can send after their enemies, but they don't get to bring the demon to battle with them.

The diplomacy/social combat/talking to people minigame is in, and features prominantly in combat. Almost all fights end with one party or another running away or surrendering, as appropriate for whether they think their enemies will be merciful or not. Non-lethal damage is no more difficult to inflict than lethal damage, and has the effect that your enemies will surrender to you instead of running away if you win the social combat aspect of the fight.

[Seerow]

careful... your grognard is showing....

heh.

[K]

If I were making 5e.... I'd get paid.

[Daztur]

double post

[Daztur]

It depends am I making it to please myself, marketability be damned or am I making it to make as much money as possible? I'm assuming the later, so here's what I'd go for (note: this wouldn't really be my ideal game):

Goal: unite the warring 3.5ed and 4ed clans and kill Pathfinder until it dies. So we need to make stuff that'll please 3.5ed and 4ed people and mostly tell the TSR-D&D people to go get stuffed as we probably won't make as much money catering to them.

Basic design framework: SWSE without some of the stupid bits (yes, I know there are a lot of stupid bits, but it makes for a good compromise between 3.5ed and 4ed and is generally well thought of by most of both camps).

Class design: like in SWSE classes get Trait Thingies based on class when they gain levels that can be plugged into various Trait ladders/trees. Have ladders have various steps and you need all of the previous steps to get the next one. Have various trait ladders no really synergize that well. Also have each trait need a certain character level (CHARACTER LEVEL, no CLASS LEVEL) to get it. So this way you can do something like be a fighter/wizard and take alternating traits in each class and be a good (but narrowly-focused) fighter and a good (but narrowly-focused wizard) instead of sucking at both. Balance comes in by the multiclass characters having to deal with the action economy so they cant' do wizard shit and fighty shit at once.

Spells: let wizards be knot-cutting MacGyvers for fuck's sake, none of that stupid 4ed shit. Nerf them in other ways to make up for it (notably let them be a lot easier to interrupt in various ways so that fighters can be linebackers for the wizard quarterbacks).

Not being stupid re: testing: rely on smart people from the CharOp boards (Radical Taoist etc. etc.) for beta testing, not random suck-ups from organized play. Do testing properly and do half-ass stuff or rush things.

Not being stupid re: generating good will: for fuck's sake put any old edition books that you think would sell back into print. The D&D player base is already hopelessly divided so at least make money over those divisions, this will generate good will, sell some books to old people who have no intention of playing D&D for the nostalgia factor and make you some money. Also suck up to Paizo and do whatever it takes to make them get on board with 5ed, a lot of people like them and you'll need them on board no matter what you have to do to do that.

Splat book bloat: lots and lots of new trait trees for the most part. Instead of making weeaboo classes, make weeaboo trait ladders that can be taken by the existing classes, etc. etc.

As far as the game I actually want to play, (but which'd probably sell like crap) it'd be more Castles and Crusades without the stupid shit, with sort of a 2ed proficiency system turned up to 11 for character customization and skills and whatnot, and a lot more dead sacred cows (armor is DR, cleric is scrapped as a class, far far far gentler power curve, Oregon Trail D&D gameplay baked into the system in a big way, etc. etc.).

[A Man In Black]

Class design: like in SWSE classes get Trait Thingies based on class when they gain levels that can be plugged into various Trait ladders. Have ladders have various steps and you need all of the previous steps to get the next one. Have various trait ladders no really synergize that well. Also have each trait need a certain character level (CHARACTER LEVEL, no CLASS LEVEL) to get it.

This is a clusterfuck in both SWSE and Pathfinder. In SWSE, each "class" is meaningless; all you have are talent trees that multiclass kinda well together. It's full of trap options (chiefly, not climbing your tree), and is the worst aspects of both classes and feats.

Plus, it's redundant with feats, both thematically and mechanically. This is where Pathfinder falls down, but Star Wars had the same problem. You have a new menu of random choices of varying quality, which are sometimes but not always comparable with feats and sometimes but not always fungible with feats.

I'm not opposed to options on how you build your character, but it'd be very easy to run into the trap option minefield of SWSE or the bookkeeping nightmare of Pathfinder.

[fbmf]

[TGFBS]
I tried to separate out the Latest Edition War into its own thread.
There was some overlap between a few posts. Sorry.
[/TGFBS]

[Daztur]

Class design: like in SWSE classes get Trait Thingies based on class when they gain levels that can be plugged into various Trait ladders. Have ladders have various steps and you need all of the previous steps to get the next one. Have various trait ladders no really synergize that well. Also have each trait need a certain character level (CHARACTER LEVEL, no CLASS LEVEL) to get it.

This is a clusterfuck in both SWSE and Pathfinder. In SWSE, each "class" is meaningless; all you have are talent trees that multiclass kinda well together. It's full of trap options (chiefly, not climbing your tree), and is the worst aspects of both classes and feats.

Plus, it's redundant with feats, both thematically and mechanically. This is where Pathfinder falls down, but Star Wars had the same problem. You have a new menu of random choices of varying quality, which are sometimes but not always comparable with feats and sometimes but not always fungible with feats.

I'm not opposed to options on how you build your character, but it'd be very easy to run into the trap option minefield of SWSE or the bookkeeping nightmare of Pathfinder.

I mostly agree with you here, but it'd sell a hell of a lot more books than Lego's ideas Note that it's not the version of D&D I'd like to play the most by quite a bit.

What I'd do is nix feats completely and then do better playtesting to weed out the trap options, classes would mostly be differentiated by the base stats (hit points etc.) and the talent trees would be mostly thematically unrelated grab bags with anything even remotely related to "hits people with big pieces of meta" shoved into the fighter class, for example.

[shadzar]

example talent tree?

isnt a talent tree just as bad to create "character builds" as 3rd, then 4th?

3rd you get stuck with some early on ability or something to gain its later component in the tree. there is NO guarantee you will survive long enough to reach that part of the tree, so something else early on would be better.

why not just go back to the roots then and take players options character points, and leave the ability and such open as you level to spend points on?

that way you dont have to waste "points" early on in order to have a prerequisite to climb the right path on the tree, but actually get to design your character based on abilities you want, and if you need one early on then you can get that, and still have the ability to get an ability later on?

[Daztur]

example talent tree?

isnt a talent tree just as bad to create "character builds" as 3rd, then 4th?

3rd you get stuck with some early on ability or something to gain its later component in the tree. there is NO guarantee you will survive long enough to reach that part of the tree, so something else early on would be better.

why not just go back to the roots then and take players options character points, and leave the ability and such open as you level to spend points on?

that way you dont have to waste "points" early on in order to have a prerequisite to climb the right path on the tree, but actually get to design your character based on abilities you want, and if you need one early on then you can get that, and still have the ability to get an ability later on?

Very very simple example of a talent ladder:
1st Rung: can cast 1st level necromantic spells.
2nd Rung: can cast 2nd level necromantic spells.
3rd Rung: can cast 3rd level necromantic spells.

The basic intent is to let multiclassed character keep up by letting them climb (say) one fighter ladder and one wizard ladder, while a single-classed fighter can climb multiple ladders at once. So a fighter/wizard couldn't cast spells from as many schools as a straight wizard but would be (mostly) as good at casting the (fewer) spells he could cast. Keeps multiclassed characters from getting segregated to the lower level abilities, without hurting d20 player's brains too much (I'd prefer a variant of TSR-D&D multiclassing personally).

As for why not point buy, well:
1. This would be more familiar to people used to d20.
2. Segregates powerful abilities to higher levels.
3. Avoids option paralysis.

isnt a talent tree just as bad to create "character builds" as 3rd, then 4th?

In a lot of ways yes, but I'm trying to get my head in the space of "make a game that 4ed and 3ed fans would like," which is going to result in a lot of things as bad as 3ed and 4ed. The version of D&D I'd like to play the most would just have proficiencies for customizing within a class and would be a LOT more like what you're proposing, I'm just don't think a game I'd love the best would sell the best.

[Username17]

The question of how to go about making sure that players get level appropriate abilities without compromising their ability to pick things off of lists to customize their characters is a complex one. But ability trees are not the answer. Ability trees will never be the answer, because what they do by definition is to restrict the number of level appropriate options available to you to a subset of the total available options based on choices you made at previous levels. That's literally all they do. Fuck. That.

-Username17

[hogarth]

I'd probably start with a 3.5/Pathfinder-ish base, and nerf quite a few spells (not quite 4E-level nerfing, though).

[Swordslinger]

Spells: let wizards be knot-cutting MacGyvers for fuck's sake, none of that stupid 4ed shit. Nerf them in other ways to make up for it (notably let them be a lot easier to interrupt in various ways so that fighters can be linebackers for the wizard quarterbacks).

The problem is that knot cutting involves avoiding combat, so by definition you don't need someone to protect you. Knot cutting isn't being a quarterback, it's finding some rules loophole that enables to you to score from the sidelines.

[echoVanguard]

But ability trees are not the answer. Ability trees will never be the answer, because what they do by definition is to restrict the number of level appropriate options available to you to a subset of the total available options based on choices you made at previous levels. That's literally all they do. Fuck. That.

-Username17

They encourage specialization. That's something.

echo

[MfA]

Fighters also get tanking abilities.

So either you give up rules uniformity between PCs and NPCs (and lose the 3e crowd along the way) or you make mind control even more common than usual, with players losing control over their character way more than they like.