Should 5E be conservative or go balls-out?

[Lago PARANOIA]

So it looks like 4E is on life support right now and is ready to crash in a year or so. Good.


That said, when it comes time to design 5E how do you think that they should do their design philosophy? While I think that 3E is preferable to 4E, there are a ton of sacred cows that need slaying. And while I applaud 4E for doing a lot of work towards sacred cow butchery, the fact is that the cows aren't dead so much as stunned by the butcher's hammer and have the knife pressed to their throat. To make things even easier, I don't think that any of 4E's precepts are sacred cows except for perhaps some classes or as reactions to bullshit 3E did such as getting rid of random hit points.

For example, while I would really like to get rid of plussed magical items and 4E did a long way towards convincing people that plussed magical items are nothing special, should we really go whole hog and eliminate them? Or will people get too upset? Or how about how 4E did attributes. 4E went a long way towards decoupling character performance from attributes, thus making multiclassing (which we want to keep) more palatable but I would prefer to make a character's combat performance stat-agnostic altogether. Should that be done, or do you think people will whine too much in the vein of 'OMG a 14-year old halfling fighter hits as hard as my 28-year old minotaur fighter this sucks!'?

Stuff like that.

[Juton]

Regarding magic swords, 3.5 really sucked a lot of the coolness out of them. Someone's sig mentions that they had to go play Supercontra again to realize how awesome a flaming katana really is.

I think magic swords still need to be in D&D, but should only have a few powers that are either on or off, this +3 and +4 stuff is bs. An ability like flaming should scale with the user, the flat +1d6 is usually inconsequential and flaming should, at the users choice allow an entire attack to be fire damage so a flaming katana should be incredible versus a white dragon. If you want to include more generic swords, allow something like a once per round reroll of an attack roll (accuracy) or ignoring DR (power). We don't want something like 2e's sword of skill or whatever it was called that gave a Wizard a Fighter's THAC0, but maybe an ability, if your BAB is less than 6 it becomes 6.

[Caedrus]

See, I would trade in +X for synergy abilities. You don't quite get "Flaming x3," you get a scaling fire damage bonus right off the bat. Then you can pick up extra abilities like "Flame Burst" that makes area explosions or "Flame Blade" that makes a blade completely out of fire or "Sweeping Inferno" that lets you have a giant sword cone attack or "Flame Blade" that makes your entire damage fire and maybe a touch attack when you feel like it or "Fire and Ash" that makes your blade smoke heavily. Actually, I'm thinking of magic weapons just granting you extra "combat maneuvers," granting you more versatility and cool powers rather than simply expanding numbers. It is also entirely possible that your "nonmagical" classes would have greater capability to access these abilities, since they could link to initiator level.

Or whatever. I'm just making up BS examples off the top of my head.

[CatharzGodfoot]

In a D&D-like game, you could even just base the abilities of the sword on character level. When a weaker character picks up a flaming sword, it just sets stuff on fire. A more powerful character's flames are more powerful, dealing fire damage instead of slashing (while still setting stuff alight). An even more powerful character can cause explosions as you outlined, or use it as a flamethrower, or whatever.

[RobbyPants]

It's iffy. If you get rid of +items and attributes to combat, it will piss people off. I'm just not sure if more people will be cool with it than pissed.

I think where 3E had a problem was that they came up with WBL and priced all the items. Back in 2E and earlier, you just found them. Now, that's going to take DM fiat and/or random item tables, but at least it might make them feel special again. This just gets really weird when you get into crafting, and stuff like that.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Do you think that it's fair to say that player-selected items should actually be considered class abilities?

[Caedrus]

In a D&D-like game, you could even just base the abilities of the sword on character level. When a weaker character picks up a flaming sword, it just sets stuff on fire. A more powerful character's flames are more powerful, dealing fire damage instead of slashing (while still setting stuff alight). An even more powerful character can cause explosions as you outlined, or use it as a flamethrower, or whatever.

This is exactly what I have in mind.

The idea here actually has a number of sides to it.
1) I don't want NONMAGICAL gear to be complete garbage. I'm serious, I think people should be able to go all Jason Bourne and hit people with improvised stuff or whatever and not be -10 behind the curve for it. They should actually be able to kill people like that. If magic weapons aren't providing significant number inflation, they don't do as much to invalidate your other options, like just grabbing a pillar and playing Beholderball.
2) New abilities are more fun than more numbers. I'd rather be able to smash a person with my flaming meteor mace to turn an enemy into a living line damage effect as he soars across the room, leaving a wall of fire trail, than to simply get +20 damage.
3) Also, more readily customizable. Mix and match the granted abilities for fun new items in your campaign world.
4) You don't have to key this to just any level. It could easily be, as I said before, initiator level (or an equivalent). That is to say, The Fighter is more likely to be able to spin his wind halberd to fly or create a wind wall than some Wizard who can't master such fancy weaponplay. Essentially, it's one more tool (of quite a few in my box) for pushing back the shelf life of the "nonmagical" fighter concept.

[Zinegata]

So it looks like 4E is on life support right now and is ready to crash in a year or so. Good.

Don't count your next editions until the body of the current one finally hits room temperature

But yeah this is a good topic.

For example, while I would really like to get rid of plussed magical items and 4E did a long way towards convincing people that plussed magical items are nothing special, should we really go whole hog and eliminate them? Or will people get too upset?

Plussed magic items honestly don't make a lot of sense. I haven't seen a convincing system on how characters, in-universe, describe a +1 sword. Or the difference between a +1 and +2 sword.

If you look at fantasy lore, minor bonuses to damage and accuracy are actually justified by weapon quality. So a "regular" sword forged by the village smith has 0 bonuses, but the sword forged by the Master Tonberry (which has general improvement like "lighter, more balanced, stronger, etc) has something like a +2 or +3 bonus.

Truly magical swords by contrast tend to do something fairly unique. Like setting itself on fire so it can cook the weilder's enemies.

So if you want to keep plussed swords, move them (under fluff) to the weapon quality modifier. So you have crappy swords, regular swords, masterwork sword, supreme mastercrafted swords etc.

Meanwhile, any magical enchanments are more unique and exotic stuff that you can describe with actual words. A Sword of Flames. The Shield of the Medusa. Stuff like that.

It should also present interesting situations like having a sword with a really awesome magical ability (Let's say it casts Harm on the people it hits, for an extreme example) and yet its weapon quality is like "Utter crap and the smith should be hanged and shot" so it gets something like a -10 hit penalty and it has a chance of breaking in two every time it hits anything.

Or how about how 4E did attributes. 4E went a long way towards decoupling character performance from attributes, thus making multiclassing (which we want to keep) more palatable but I would prefer to make a character's combat performance stat-agnostic altogether. Should that be done, or do you think people will whine too much in the vein of 'OMG a 14-year old halfling fighter hits as hard as my 28-year old minotaur fighter this sucks!'?

Eh. People like their agile rogues and strong but dumb fighters. Stat agnostic characters will be unpopular.

[Caedrus]

Plussed magic items honestly don't make a lot of sense. I haven't seen a convincing system on how characters, in-universe, describe a +1 sword. Or the difference between a +1 and +2 sword.

I've managed to do it in my games. People just have trouble with needing to add their own fluff text because there literally is none as far as +X swords go. You could have a wizard say that it was bound with 5 circles of blah blah whatever and just have that is established in the game world as what causes the +5 (number of circle seals). Still think it's crap, but the fact is that you actually can write fluff for it that doesn't make you want to beat the person who says it IC to death.

If you look at fantasy lore, minor bonuses to damage and accuracy are actually justified by weapon quality. So a "regular" sword forged by the village smith has 0 bonuses, but the sword forged by the Master Tonberry (which has general improvement like "lighter, more balanced, stronger, etc) has something like a +2 or +3 bonus.

Sure, if you want to keep plusses, I would like to see a less overtly magical side of weapon quality remain represented. As is, we have something of a joke in our group about the term "Mastercraft" since it represents just about the lowest level of competence a weaponmaker in the whole of D&D-land can actually have. 3rd level clerics and such seriously just take 10 with zero ranks in craft to produce magical things. Every level 2 character is carrying around the work of a "master." Truly, the master put his heart and soul into the creation of this finest of weapons, and isn't mass produced crap from an unseen crafter at all.

So if you want to keep plussed swords, move them (under fluff) to the weapon quality modifier. So you have crappy swords, regular swords, masterwork sword, supreme mastercrafted swords etc.

Agreed. Indeed, this is something that you can just easily and immediately apply to your 3.5e games with a simple and straightforward houserule, save for the fact that Craft rules kinda suck.

Or how about how 4E did attributes. 4E went a long way towards decoupling character performance from attributes, thus making multiclassing (which we want to keep) more palatable but I would prefer to make a character's combat performance stat-agnostic altogether. Should that be done, or do you think people will whine too much in the vein of 'OMG a 14-year old halfling fighter hits as hard as my 28-year old minotaur fighter this sucks!'?

Wait what? Are we talking about the same 4e? Palatable multiclassing? Decoupling characters from stats? Uhm...

[Doom]

+1 weapons aren't terrible in a system where only certain creatures could be hit by them, and even more special in a system where getting +1 to hit (and especially damage) is rather difficult to achieve any other way.

What really killed these 'lame' magic items was making them trivially easy to manufacture with gold pieces...making them no more interesting than gold pieces.

In 4e, where there's absolutely no difference between a 16 strength guy with a +1 sword (or, alternatively, 600ish gp), and an 18 strength guy with a +0 sword, it really stands out how meaningless it is--the 18 strength guy even comes out ahead as being more interesting, since he has something, high strength, that isn't just another pile of gold.

You can get rid of straight up + weapons, but if your system still has easily manufactured items, items that are indistinguishable from just having a different attribute, you'll be in the same predicament. It might be easier to make + items more interesting.

Granted, monsters only being affected by + items is weaksauce...but if D&D5e had a weapon break/wear system, or in general had more interesting things to do than "roll to hit, roll for damage" (eg, parry, riposte, etc), or if it had a system where various weapons affected a given target differently (a la "weapon type vs AC", but more workable), and +'s mattered there, then these things too would help to make that +1 weapon something besides dullness.

[Juton]

Granted, monsters only being affected by + items is weaksauce...but if D&D5e had a weapon break/wear system, or in general had more interesting things to do than "roll to hit, roll for damage" (eg, parry, riposte, etc), or if it had a system where various weapons affected a given target differently (a la "weapon type vs AC", but more workable), and +'s mattered there, then these things too would help to make that +1 weapon something besides dullness.

That's the crux of Fighters getting nice things, they need to get things other than attacking. Although having weapons break or lose effectiveness is bad because its extra book keeping and taking away a Fighter's sword is like taking away a Wizard's spellbook.

The other things that Fighters do should evolve past 4e's lame push and pull mechanics where you move the miniatures 1 square a bunch of times per round. The things that Fighters do should be like how we imagine magic weapons to work, an interesting ability, not just some numbers being thrown around. If think the most basic is you cause one of the enemy's next attacks to miss automatically, but feel free to go into the absurd like hitting someone with a volleyball so hard they turn to stone ala FFX. Since killing things with a pointy stick works fine at lower levels you might want to delay giving them strong powers to early, because if you can kill an Orc in one shot you don't need to blind/paralyze/turn to stone it first.

[Shazbot79]

My vote is to do whatever needs to be done in order to make 5E the best heroic fantasy game on the market.

Grognards will filibuster relentlessly about tradition, but they have OSRIC and most secretly buy every new edition anyways, so we don't give a fuck about them.

First thing is, make damn sure the math works the way it's supposed to. That means that PC's get better as they level, which means that their numbers scale faster than those of monsters.

Second, keep it simple...we don't need something akin to the Hero System right out of the gate. During the initial release, keep the game as simple and intuitive as possible, then gradually add more complexity as time goes on via splats and other sourcebooks.

Third, slaughter any sacred cows that need slaughtering. I've heard strong arguments for getting rid of base stats altogether which might be a good idea. There are more interesting ways to show that Dwarves are tough and Halflings are tricky than just giving them bigger numbers in that area. Besides, FATE does fine without base stats, so we know it can be done.

Fourth, embrace the idea of D&D as a fantasy flavored superhero game. Yeah...there are people who are more interested in low fantasy games with a high character mortality...those people have WHFRP. At higher levels, Fighters should be shoryuken-ing beholders into the stratosphere with impunity like goddamn Hercules...because otherwise they don't work next to reality warping Wizards and Clerics.

Fifth, open the thing up for playtesting at least a year before the print date...and I mean actual, deconstructive playtesting, not Paizo's PR stunt playtesting. Let the gaming community stress test the thing, to see where it breaks. Then again, part of me can't help but wonder if 4E is just a clandestine beta-test for 5E, that WotC actually suckered people into paying for.

Sixth, blow your wad on advertising...get as much product visibility as possible...even if you have to take a loss. Fuck the general publics' face with a constant stream of advertising on every form of media. Get it selling in as many major retailers as you can manage. Sell D&D at Christian Supply if you have to.

Seventh...campaign settings. At least two different and distinct campaign settings at launch. No, not Forgotten Realms and Forgotten Realms-Lite...I mean two with a lot of contrast to one another...like Eberron and Dark Sun, or Dragonlance and Ravenloft.

Eighth...a full suite of online tools. Not one or two with a vague promise that more are in the pipeline...all of them, either working or in beta by launch.

[Username17]

Whenever a new edition comes around there is a bunch of hand wringing about whether people will accept this change or that change. Whether it will stop "feeling like D&D" if Wizards don't roll d4s for hit points or whether it will be a deal breaker for a longsword to stop doing a d8 of damage. All that shit is shit. People will accept any change as long as things basically work and the new edition appears to offer at least as much variety and options as the last.

The truth is that the number of people who actually gave a shit when the Monk stopped being a character class in 2nd Edition or the longsword stopped doing extra damage to large enemies is pretty close to zero. When an edition is overall good, people will get the fuck over whatever fucking flaws they think they see from a grognard perspective. You can force through any change. There is no sacred cow that you can't kill. Fuck, Shadowrun added and removed basic attributes when they went to 4th edition. No one cared.

The six attribute thing is not a deal breaker. The inclusion or exclusion of any class is not a deal breaker. There are no mechanics or spells or relationships between objects in the game that are actually deal breakers. Seriously, none of that shit will actually make people walk.

4e got people pissed off when they cut the Druid and the Bard from the PHB. Not because people necessarily played the Druid or Bard and not because writing an edition that did not have those classes would be a deal breaker, but simply because if you reduce the number of player classes the game as whole seems shallower. And when that happens, the game gets less slack. It's that simple. As long as you have 13 classes in the Core book, it does not matter what those classes actually are!

-Username17

[Sashi]

3E was a lot easier to make classes for than 4E. I don't think any 3E class has more than 10 actual class abilities of their own, with the rest being a pointer at the spell system. It's easy to write a Favored Soul if you choose to write it as the sorcerer analog to the cleric, and it's easy to write a Wizard PrC if you give it 2-3 actual class abilities and just have it advance spellcasting.

I was willing to give 4E the benefit of the doubt on the reduced class list since I knew each one had a full unique power list. It wasn't until I read through them and saw that a level 4 power would be "You deal 2[w] damage and push the target 1 square" while a level 14 is "you deal 3[W] damage and push the target 2 squares" that I was disappointed. It's depressing how many classes have a variation of the "I hit you, now one of us moves and the other moves to the vacated space" power.

There's got to be something between the most relevant class ability being how easy it is to dumpster-dive through the giant pool of spells for the 5 that will let you rule the world and everyone having their own list of redundant powers.

[Zinegata]

+1 weapons aren't terrible in a system where only certain creatures could be hit by them, and even more special in a system where getting +1 to hit (and especially damage) is rather difficult to achieve any other way.

That's kind of the problem though. Aside from magic, there is *no* way to get more accurate or harder hitting weapons.

When Warhammer 40K says "forget the power of technology", they should really be referring to D&D, because technology can never give you anything better than +1 to hit (and no bonus to damage) for weapons via non-magical means.

[Josh_Kablack]

3E was a lot easier to make classes for than 4E. I don't think any 3E class has more than 10 actual class abilities of their own, with the rest being a pointer at the spell system. It's easy to write a Favored Soul if you choose to write it as the sorcerer analog to the cleric, and it's easy to write a Wizard PrC if you give it 2-3 actual class abilities and just have it advance spellcasting.

I was willing to give 4E the benefit of the doubt on the reduced class list since I knew each one had a full unique power list. It wasn't until I read through them and saw that a level 4 power would be "You deal 2[w] damage and push the target 1 square" while a level 14 is "you deal 3[W] damage and push the target 2 squares" that I was disappointed. It's depressing how many classes have a variation of the "I hit you, now one of us moves and the other moves to the vacated space" power.

There's got to be something between the most relevant class ability being how easy it is to dumpster-dive through the giant pool of spells for the 5 that will let you rule the world and everyone having their own list of redundant powers.

Yeah.


During 4e I finally migrated most of my gaming over to a laptop.

Given 4e's massive and "unique" power lists I copied, screen-capped or just typed up the power description for every power and item my character had.

This resulted in the 5-10 page charsheet - which is absurd. that's seriously more abilities and minutiae than you can reasonably expect people to keep track of. And running 4e is even worse, because everyone has these 5-10 page charsheets, full of crap that most of them don't even write down, let alone know, but they are all teensy bits different so the DM has no hope of keeping track of it all.

I seriously think that 50% to 80% of the 4e powers should have been picked off a UNIVERSAL list. Hey let anybody can pick "shift one square then make a melee attack that does 2W damage" as a level 3 encounter or "Move your speed as a minor as a Lvl 6 encounter utility" and if you do it right you both give people more options and also make system mastery easier. The other 20-50% can be class-unique powers to differentiate classes.


Of course, being back in a 3e quasi-tome game, I went ahead and copied all my spell descripts from the SRD into the .rtf file of my charsheet. And that comes in at 5-10 pages easy. But it was a lot harder to notice in the days I was running 3e, because the spell names, DCs and slots all fit on just one page. The pointers hide the complexity. And the use of pointers meant that I when I was running a 3e game I could mostly keep track of what the different classes did, so long as I had read the PHB spell lists in detail for the relevant levels and kept an eye on additional material brought into the game.

So for 5e, I would like to see a hybrid between the 3e and 4e approaches. Have most of the powers that classes can hand out contained in the original core book(s) - divided by power source, power type, class role, level or some other criteria . And then have each classes only hand out a couple unique powers but draw from the existing lists in modular ways that lend to different combos.

Example:
Anyone can get Improved Charge
Any class with the Skirmisher tag (role) can get Leaping Attack, which can be used as part of a charge
Any class with the Arcane power source can get Flaming Weapon Attack, which can be used to augment any single attack with fire damage.
But the Rain of Spears is a unique ability to the Dragoon class which allows multiple attacks with a single thrown spear.

So if you can be an Arcane Skirmisher Dragoon, you can build a combo where you make a leaping charge where you rain multiple fiery spears down on your enemy.

And only one of those abilities requires the DM to look in a book besides the Core.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sort of like this, Josh? http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51596

[ScottS]

Balancing the game around the RNG + assuming that everyone has level-appropriate "plus weapons" as part of the progression = lame, because it forces the whole "expected treasure vouchers" mindset. Either change the balance to something other than "PCs hit 55% of the time, +/- flanking, buffs, debuffs, etc.", or else get rid of the plusses.

[MfA]

How about keeping +X on the weapons only and only adding it to damage and making it automatically overcome certain forms of DR?

A little bit of nostalgia recognition, doesn't fuck with the RNG, doesn't make mundane weapons useless most of the time ... you know, compromise.

[Sashi]

Nope, because it will be either irrelevant (like how a rogue doesn't care if his weapon is a dagger or a longsword, just how many times he can trigger his sneak attack dice) or the best thing ever because literally nothing else is interesting enough to care about (like Iron Armbands of Power in 4E).

Magic items should never just purely add numbers to every single attack you make, because they will nearly always be superior to situational bonuses. Even in 3E adding 1d6 of elemental damage, or 2d6 damage vs. an alignment was only barely worth giving up +1 att/dmg.

[MfA]

What does it matter if it's superior to situational effects? What does it matter if everyone runs around with a level appropriate +X weapon?

It's going to be good, but it won't be overwhelmingly good when it only adds flat damage without fucking with the RNG (which adds percentual damage and will thus explode at higher levels). You can still just pick up another weapon and be nearly as effective.

[Orca]

Whether people need level appropriate bonus weapons or not is a math problem when you set up the new edition. It's not a sacred cow.

The last 4e stuff about magic item rarity is a bad thing for an ongoing game, but it seems to me to make reasonable sense if you're starting a new edition. Basic magic weapons are common and can be bought in shops, these items are uncommon and might be available, these are rare and must be quested for.

[Orca]

To answer the original question, I think that between 3e, officially-printed & bound 3e house rules (pathfinder), & all the other fantasy rpgs, you need something different if you're going to make an impression on the market. That means making sacred steaks.

[Sashi]

What does it matter if it's superior to situational effects? What does it matter if everyone runs around with a level appropriate +X weapon?

Because then everyone's running around with absolutely boring (but mechanically superior) +X items. And if you make the +X items mechanically inferior (like the choice between +1 damage and +1d6 acid damage) then nobody takes them, and there's no point in having them except as a trap option.

[cthulhu]

5th should, and I suspect probably will, go back to a 3.5 ed model except leaned down a bit.