5e D&D is Vaporware

[Blicero]

@SomethingAwful 5e "leak": Man, I really hope this isn't fake because I am thoroughly enjoying the taste of 4rry tears.

Knock still exists (fuck off Rogues) and in fact opens basically anything. They go so far as to specify that it opens stuff that's welded shut, chains that are used to hold a portal shut are loosened, etc.

WAAAAH the wizard opened a door D&D IS RUINED!!!!!!!!1

Knock is legitimately a problem, and you are a tool for not realizing this. It's an example of magic being arbitrarily better: a generic 3rd level wizard with 12 Int and Knock is now better at unlocking doors than even someone who has dedicated her entire life to the mastery of picking locks. That's bad design, plain and simple. Knock would be especially bad if it works like this playtest sez it does, opening things that even Open Lock would be unable to bypass.

At the very least, Knock should function like Find Traps does: Giving the caster ranks in Open Lock (or Disable Device, since Open Lock shouldn't exist as a discrete skill) equal to his level or whatever.

I would honestly be okay with Knock just going away as a spell altogether, in the name of role protection.

[K]

Knock is legitimately a problem, and you are a tool for not realizing this. It's an example of magic being arbitrarily better: a generic 3rd level wizard with 12 Int and Knock is now better at unlocking doors than even someone who has dedicated her entire life to the mastery of picking locks. That's bad design, plain and simple. Knock would be especially bad if it works like this playtest sez it does, opening things that even Open Lock would be unable to bypass.

The very instant that "picking locks" becomes a focus of your class in a RPG where some classes are summoning door-smashing demons and disintegrating castle gates, that's bad design.

Honestly, everything a Rogue/Thief has traditionally done should be a available to all adventurers.

[JonSetanta]

Knock is legitimately a problem, and you are a tool for not realizing this. It's an example of magic being arbitrarily better: a generic 3rd level wizard with 12 Int and Knock is now better at unlocking doors than even someone who has dedicated her entire life to the mastery of picking locks. That's bad design, plain and simple. Knock would be especially bad if it works like this playtest sez it does, opening things that even Open Lock would be unable to bypass.

But you can only do it X times per day hurf durf

I hate Knock. I've hated Knock since AD&D. It should just die.

Or rather, give Rogues an identical ability at touch range at-will, rather than a skill check.

[Seerow]

Or rather, give Rogues an identical ability at touch range at-will, rather than a skill check.

Open Lock should be rolled in with disable device, and something along those lines should be a benefit that opens up around 7 or 8 skill ranks (going by 3.5. around 4 or 5 if they go the pathfinder route where skill ranks are capped at level instead of level+3)

[Username17]

Actually, quickly and efficiently opening a specific number of doors per day is very different from being able to open an arbitrarily large number of doors with a variable amount of time. Knock is a fine spell and always has been.

The taste of 4rry tears is indeed delicious. 5e is shaping up to be terribad, but the complaints the 4rries have about it are nonsense.

-Username17

[shadzar]

I'm all for toning down the triggered actions because they tend to assume D&D only happens in combat. If you can turn invisible for 1 round when you're attacked, you're likely to eventually want to be invisible out of combat and have to argue with the DM about whether the wizard is allowed to punch you in the face.

this is the problem with 4th from the beginning with its "powers".

4th was a great expanded version of DDM, but it was no RPG. and it WAS in fact 3 versions of DDM prior to the release of so-called 4th D&D.

the spells/powers/whatever were based on a skirmish set as Bill S said that combats should be, and that dropped you right out of the RPG and into a miniature game.

building around combat, means you are building a combat game.

[hogarth]

The very instant that "picking locks" becomes a focus of your class in a RPG where some classes are summoning door-smashing demons and disintegrating castle gates, that's bad design.

Honestly, everything a Rogue/Thief has traditionally done should be a available to all adventurers.

You beat me to it.

I would add that it's totally fine to have a PC (any class) who's able to pick every lock on the planet by, say, level 5.

[JonSetanta]

Actually, quickly and efficiently opening a specific number of doors per day is very different from being able to open an arbitrarily large number of doors with a variable amount of time. Knock is a fine spell and always has been.

When that specific number of doors becomes "unlimited" because you made a custom item with Knock on it (or even just a 50-charge wand), part of the Rogue's sacred cow is dead.

That's murder and unkind.

[souran]

Actually, quickly and efficiently opening a specific number of doors per day is very different from being able to open an arbitrarily large number of doors with a variable amount of time. Knock is a fine spell and always has been.

The taste of 4rry tears is indeed delicious. 5e is shaping up to be terribad, but the complaints the 4rries have about it are nonsense.

-Username17

Or not, 4E players like a game about going into dungeons and killing dragons. The fact that you want a game where the players develop an alternate industrial revolution by making use of the most broken spells in the rulebook in an admittitedly creative but clearly auto-fallacious way does not mean that your view is right and theirs is wrong.

I am the definition of an early adopter. I REALLY LIKE when the company(ies) that make my rpgs make revised/3.5/essential editions of games that take a stab at fixing the problems.

I have never seen a game where I couldn't read the previews and get excited over the plan/direction/ATTEMPT to make a decent game. I lhave always liked to try new editions of games just because they are new and MIGHT be better.

So I have always been an early adopter ....until now. 5E has thus far put out neither enough hard material for me to have any sense of what the game actually is, but on the other hand they have had dozens of supposed leaks, most squashed but all describing games that are clearly terrible. Its amazing, wizards can't even convince me that I want to hear about their new product....

[hogarth]

So I have always been an early adopter ....until now. 5E has thus far put out neither enough hard material for me to have any sense of what the game actually is, but on the other hand they have had dozens of supposed leaks, most squashed but all describing games that are clearly terrible. Its amazing, wizards can't even convince me that I want to hear about their new product....

That's basically how I felt about 4E.

I thought the leak was kind of funny. Imagine -- that 5E might be more like 1E, 2E and 3E than 4E! Someone owes me a new monocle!

[Emerald]

That would be totally fine if your invisibility power is "Minor or Immediate Interrupt" or something, but I don't think the writers will consistently remember to do that / care about doing that. ToB and 4e have plenty of utility stuff that can only be used off attack triggers.

That problem could easily be avoided with a universal rule in the power description section that says "you can use any triggered/off-turn ability on your turn as a minor [or standard or whatever] action without needing to meet the trigger condition." Sadly, 5e seems to be even more exceptions-based than 4e, so that's unlikely to happen, but we can hope.

[sake]

Rogue's sacred cow is dead.

That's murder and unkind.

Well, by that logic I guess Fighters should be the only guys who get plate armor, Rangers should be the only class that can even hold a fucking bow or dual-wield, and Clerics are the game's sole healer. And every party should be exactly made up of a Fighter for tanking, a rogue for traps/locks, a cleric for healz, and a wizard for sheep- I mean, control.

Frankly a much better question than "Why is Knock is now better at unlocking doors than even someone who has dedicated her entire life to the mastery of picking locks?" is "Why has someone who has dedicated her entire life to the mastery of picking locks not learned the goddamn Knock spell as well?" Seriously, high level rogues should just have things like knock invisiblity, slow fall, jump, spider climb, etc as spell like abilities. Magic in D&D should be like tech shit in a cyberpunk game, after a while everybody should know a few basic things about it.

[Ice9]

I'm not even sure how much 5E is "3E like", it mostly just seems "crap like" from what I've seen. To take one example - non-scaling skills. That's a bullshit design goal. Remind me who asked for a system where the veteran master of the acrobatic ninja guild is worse at acrobatics than "Bob, the random peasant who rolled an 18 Dex"? Because that's terribad, especially with rolled stats, but even in general it sucks.

Also, the whole "obfuscate anything from 4E with haphazard description" thing. So instead of Minor/Move/Standard we have a bunch of separate descriptions of the same thing. That's just pathetic.

Could still be a troll, I guess. The fact that my confidence in WotC is low enough that I could easily believe it is a pretty sad state of affairs.

[ishy]

Or rather, give Rogues an identical ability at touch range at-will, rather than a skill check.

Open Lock should be rolled in with disable device, and something along those lines should be a benefit that opens up around 7 or 8 skill ranks (going by 3.5. around 4 or 5 if they go the pathfinder route where skill ranks are capped at level instead of level+3)

Fun fact, in the Rules Compendium book a designer called: Matthew Sernett says the only reason the disable device and the open lock skill weren't combined is because of 2E legacy.

He even goes on to mention that you should have fun putting your skill points in other skills so you won't feel fucked over by knock / a barbarian breaking down doors.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, you were doing the 3E D&D playtest.

About how does that SomethingAwful document compare to your first playtest?

[Sashi]

Also, the whole "obfuscate anything from 4E with haphazard description" thing. So instead of Minor/Move/Standard we have a bunch of separate descriptions of the same thing. That's just pathetic.

Which is amazing, because 4E's codifying of the turn into "Standard/Move/Minor/Immediate/Opportunity/Free" was one of the few genuinely good things 4E has done. Of the numerous complaints leveled against 4E not a single one was that it didn't have overly complicated rules for partial charges, or 5' steps that were move actions except if you took a full attack in which case they were free actions you could do only once.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Personally, I think having immediate AND opportunity actions was a dumb idea, but that's just because 4E D&D had a white-knuckled fear of two defenders putting enemies in a no-win situation and implemented that stupid kludge.

The base combat engine of 4E D&D was one of the things that I can say was a clear improvement over 3E D&D, except for a few things like not having a bonus for higher ground, that healing surge bullshit (complete with getting up at full health), nerfing coup de grace, saving throws, and condensing status effects in such a way that padded sumo ruled the day. Of course your mileage may also vary on stuff like heavily reducing the range and area effect of most powers (I'm neutral on this). Okay, maybe not a clear improvement, but if I was given the choice of which systems to improve on for 5E D&D's basic combat engine I would pick 4E D&D's.

[JonSetanta]

Of course your mileage may also vary on stuff like heavily reducing the range and area effect of most powers (I'm neutral on this). Okay, maybe not a clear improvement, but if I was given the choice of which systems to improve on for 5E D&D's basic combat engine I would pick 4E D&D's.

I was wholly against this whenever I encountered it in 4e material.

It means you can't have wizard tower battles, cross-country teleporting, blasting dragons out of the sky, and all the fun parts of high level abilities.
Nope, in 4e your L30 play style is EXACTLY like your L1, but your powers list is longer. Woo!

In contrast I was doing a writeup for modular spell creation and had the range scale upward to something like 69,120 feet by the high levels (17+), limited by line of sight of course. It cost quite a bit of resources to make a spell of that range but it's possible, and you can slap a plethora of effects including move-and-attack as part of the spell/maneuver. Not sure if this would be good or bad having characters do instant-movement, Fireballing, telekinesis, or teleport at that range, but there it is.

[rasmuswagner]

Also, the whole "obfuscate anything from 4E with haphazard description" thing. So instead of Minor/Move/Standard we have a bunch of separate descriptions of the same thing. That's just pathetic.

Which is amazing, because 4E's codifying of the turn into "Standard/Move/Minor/Immediate/Opportunity/Free" was one of the few genuinely good things 4E has done. Of the numerous complaints leveled against 4E not a single one was that it didn't have overly complicated rules for partial charges, or 5' steps that were move actions except if you took a full attack in which case they were free actions you could do only once.

True. Also, status effects. Pathfinder keeps coming up with ways to waste a standard action putting Dazzled on your enemies, because most of them are morons and SKR is Ralph Wiggum. Fatigued, Exhausted, Dazzled, grappled are all bullshit, and shaken and sickened do not need different fucking effects.

[Username17]

Frank, you were doing the 3E D&D playtest.

About how does that SomethingAwful document compare to your first playtest?

*This info is all from the 1.0 version of the playtest, they're on I believe 1.5 atm, so this may be slightly outdated, but still more concrete than what exists.* Also, I don't have it in front of me now, so it's mostly paraphrasing.

They are stating up front that they are not posting any of the actual materials. So obviously I couldn't tell you if these "materials" match the style list or not. It's at least supposedly some guy remembering stuff he saw in a sort of stream of consciousness fashion.

Now some of the crap he's talking about is kind of incoherent and maybe slightly contradictory, and that's to be expected from a playtest document to be honest. Quite often there will be two versions that differ slightly or wholly and playtesters will be asked to give feedback for the designers to use against each other in arguments about which one to develop and use.

But bottom line: I could bust out some old 3e, 2eAD&D, and BECMI materials and put together a fake leak based around claiming to have a playtest document by throwing random crap from previous editions into the loose framework that Monte and Mearls have put out. That is one of the reason that there are so many fake leaks. Monte and Mearls have written out a sketch of the game so vague and kind of stupid that anyone could make a fake leak for trolling purposes.

To take one example - non-scaling skills. That's a bullshit design goal. Remind me who asked for a system where the veteran master of the acrobatic ninja guild is worse at acrobatics than "Bob, the random peasant who rolled an 18 Dex"? Because that's terribad, especially with rolled stats, but even in general it sucks.

The first and last time the Diplomacy system worked was 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with the Diplomacy Secondary Skill. It essentially did not scale, and it worked at all. You had a reaction roll and that gave creatures you encountered a disposition to you, and you could take diplomacy actions to try to improve that, and the numbers didn't scale so it all stayed on the RNG.

That is a solid design goal you could totally have. The problems with what Monte has described are several:

• Even granted that you want a Diplomacy system where things scale little or not at all to stay on the RNG, why would you give a shit about acrobatics staying on the RNG?
• The "mastery levels" thing is fucking retarded because it blows up even that previous design goal by making the effective bonus scale anyway.
• Also the master levels thing is fucking retarded because it obfuscates your bonus.
• The Auto-success threshold is just fucked, because either your stat is your modifier (in which case the RNG is way broken even at first level), or the rolled modifier scales at some fractional rate to the attribute (in which case high level characters cannot succeed at any test they do not automatically succeed at).

Basically, the skill system that Monte and Mearls have described is shit and cannot be fixed by putting different numbers into it. They have described a level of skill mastery as everything from +5 to the roll to +1 to the roll, and it doesn't fucking matter because there is no set of numbers you could put into that equation that wouldn't be garbage.

-Username17

[hogarth]

The first and last time the Diplomacy system worked was 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with the Diplomacy Secondary Skill. It essentially did not scale, and it worked at all. You had a reaction roll and that gave creatures you encountered a disposition to you, and you could take diplomacy actions to try to improve that, and the numbers didn't scale so it all stayed on the RNG.

For the record:

(1) The 2E DMG actually recommends just picking a reaction instead of rolling, and only rolling when the DM doesn't have an opinion one way or the other.

Once the encounter is set and the DM is ready to role-play the situation, he needs to know how the NPCs or monsters will react. The creatures should react in the manner the DM thinks is most appropriate to the situation.

If the player characters charge a band of randomly encountered orcs with weapons drawn, the DM can easily say, "They snarl and leap to the defense!" Selection of the reaction based on the situation ensures rational behavior and avoids the illogical results that random die rolls can often give.

However, there are times when the DM doesn't have a clue about what the monsters will do. This is not a disaster—it's not even all that unusual. When this happens, the DM can randomly determine an encounter reaction by rolling for a result on Table 59.

(2) There is no "diplomacy" non-weapon proficiency in the core rules, so most games probably never used one.

(3) There is a Persuasion non-weapon proficiency in the Complete Ranger Handbook. But the bonus to reactions it gives is dwarfed by the bonus you get from having a high (16+) Charisma, just like Ice9 is complaining about (they're non-cumulative, and remember that the DM is encouraged not to roll reactions in the first place).

[shadzar]

in addition to what hogarth said....

PO:S&M had a new diplomacy NWP for priests that DID scale...early concept for DCs if you will...

Naturally, the DM can apply a modifier of –8 to +8 depending on what the diplomat’s offer means for the parties involved.

Copyright 1999 TSR Inc.

Secondary skills are much more general than nonweapon proficiencies. They should not be used in combination with nonweapon proficiencies, which are explained later.

Copyright 1999 TSR Inc.

if someone made a diplomat then they were tasked as DM to figure out how it worked, like other secondary skills.

if the previous was a single orc and the 6 adventures ran across it, jumping to attack wouldnt be any more logical than it fleeing.

where the veteran master of the acrobatic ninja guild is worse at acrobatics than "Bob, the random peasant who rolled an 18 Dex"

this is also how real life works. Bob could easily be naturally gifted, but never formally trained, so doesnt have any such "level" of achievement or notice.

How many game design classes did Gary Gygax take?

How many computer programming or design classes did Steve Jobs take?

How many classes in PHP did the inventor of PHP take?

sometimes the most trained professional in the world can be outdone by someone that is untrained and just naturally talented....and sometimes such trained can hold back natural talents.

your ninja learned things the way it had been done for years, while Bob learned things his body taught him about himself and how to move.

[Previn]

How many game design classes did Gary Gygax take?

Gygax was an actuary, so he could do the numbers. He also wan't the only one creating it.

How many computer programming or design classes did Steve Jobs take?

Jobs was never a programmer. He was a designer and a sales man.

How many classes in PHP did the inventor of PHP take?

Ok, tell you what, why don't we just put up a warning that anyone who reads your posts will actually become dumber for doing so?

[shadzar]

Gary was also some sort of degree of archeologist as well. i dont recall what parts Perren came up with for Chainmail, but Dave didnt have classes in game design either. they created something FIRST as it were.

Today's companies want people with classes, failing to understand that until the 90s no such classes in game design existed in any form that would lead to today's designers.

Greenwood, Mearls, Monte, Tweet, etc had no game design classes or formal training of that a ninja master whatever would have had. Noonan maybe had on the job training, but many were just given some ideas and told to run with them within some kind of numbers. not really training. either that were naturally good at it, or good at some part that is the RPG, maybe jsut ideas or themes/stories.

Did Baker have any training in game design before writing eBerron?

Jobs, did you miss where i asked how many design classes he took? then turn around and refute my statement by saying he was a designer?

you obviously dont understand about PHP in relation to the ninja master v natural talent.

people are seeing just the numbers. strictly gamist, but an RPG outside of computers DOESNT WORK LIKE THAT. it isnt bound by just the numbers so Bob the dirt farmer doesnt have formal training, but still has training, self-training on how to USE his 18 DEX.

that is the part the DEX shows in regards tot he ninja master. what is his DEX? 16? his training cant compensate for the natural ability another has or the physical body of lesser potential he has, while Bob has more potential.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How many classes in PHP did the inventor of PHP take?