If I were involved in D&D Next

[Josh_Kablack]

This is a response to the One Hour challenge in the other thread.

Unlike Mearls and crew, I would not try to re-invent the wheel and would focus on iterating 3e and 4e into a next edition that borrowed from and improved on both. Unlike Mearls and Crew, I would tell the fans of 1e and 2e to fuck the hell off and get out of their grandkids' basements - that shit is just creepy. You might think that's bad marketing, but I'm pretty sure that fans of 1e and 2e AD&D are not actually going to buy new editions of D&D anyways, and telling them off is probably worth points with the people who will. Any "nostalgia" mechanics would be limited to flavor swiped from OD&D, and reprinting to d20 vs 3d6 bell curve charts.

The core book would have 7-12 races - but the races would draw much more heavily from more recent fantasy sources than from Tolkien. The core book would have 12-15 classes, with names cribbed from earlier editions of D&D. The classes would be sorted into some sort of related groups that would look vaguely like 4e "roles" but this would be just to help new players learn via chunking and not really expected to matter.

Then going down my list of 3e/4e comparisons for nitty-gritty bits

• The power schedule would be between late 3.5 and 4e. Vancian casting would be gone, but not all classes would get the exact same power usage schedule.
• Characters would have the much softer death threshholds of 4e
• The Bloodied status (half max HP) is retained as a key building block for triggering effects
• Serious effort should be put into standardizing durations. Most things on duration timers should last at least the 5 minutes for an encounter -- if something is too hosey to last that long then it belongs on a "save ends" timer, not a duration timer. Most things on durations should last a day or less -- week,month, season or year durations will be longer than many campaigns and can mostly be replaced with "until dispelled"
• The range of bows and ranged spells should be greater than 4e's "you get one shot before they are in charge range" but less than 3e's "to scale, you can fireball them while their mini is out the door, across the street and down the hill"
• scaling ??
• The 4e idea of weapon proficiencies provide a bonus is retained over the pre-4e idea of non-proficiency penalties. However unlike 4e, all weapons have the same proficiency bonus. (the other option would be to apply proficiency to damage but not to-hit)
• Skill DCs for each and every skill need to come in both static and opposed varieties. DMs should be encouraged to adjudicate unusual uses of the skill by comparing it to an existing static DC chart.
• All skills need to have a described combat use. Stealth sets up sneak attack damage, Perception prevents that setup, Bluff allows for Feinting, Intimidate allows imposing Morale penalties, Ride allows faster combat movement/better charges, Knowledge skills need to open up specific counter moves (like knowing to hold an alligator's jaw shut)
• Critical hits need to be more standard and less stupid that both 3e and 4e. They should have a confirmation roll and a confirmed crit should deal max damage plus a predefined status ailment. By max damage, I mean that all damage components of the attack are maximum, and no additional non-maximized random damage components are added. This status ailment needs to be universal to all crits with all weapons against all opponents.
• The action sequence would be 4e's Move, Minor, Standard, can trade action types down. Out-of-turn actions need to be more streamlined than both 3e and 4e, collapsing 3e's immediate action and attacks of opportunity as well as 4e's immediate reaction, immediate reaction, and opportunity action into a single out-of-turn action per go-round.
• All combat powers would be on one of the following use schedules: *
  • At-Will (and most PC at wills have a few options in the style of Divine Power domain feats)
  • Encounter (usable once per 5 min)
  • Any single power from this set is usable once per Encounter (5 min recharge for whole group)
  • Takes an action to Recharge (type of action can vary)
• The power progression would be between 3e and 4e. As they leveled up, characters would get improvements to old powers and more frequent use of old powers (similar to 3e); however characters would also get options to swap out low-level powers for higher level powers (similar to 4e)
• Status ailments need to be easier and less obscure to cure than 3e. Having all of five spells than cure Insanity is in fact insane. They also need to harder and slightly more specific to cure than 4e. Being able to cure anything that isn't death or petrification by waiting 5 minutes strains suspension of disbelief. I would suggest 3 tiers of ailments, cured by 3 tiers of powers.
• The game would be closer to 3e's wealth-by-level than 4e's "letters to santa / we have no idea", however it would be stressed than WBL is a suggestion and roughly correlates to the random treasure tables. Care would be taken that characters are capable of facing level appropriate opposition without any particular equipment, and any class that was expected to fight with swords would get abilties like "make sword count as +X" at the same time monsters with "only hit by +X or better weapons" show up.
• Also, the idea of equipment providing numeric bonuses that influence the combat RNG probably needs to go. If +X swords are mandatory for D&D, they can add +X to damage, or +X additional uses of powers from the "any one of these per encounter" pool or something else that isn't on the d20 roll..

That's not anywhere near a complete outline, and that's only 45 minutes, but that's all the time I have for now.

[Korgan0]

No dailies?

[Josh_Kablack]

The downside of dailies is that they encourage the 5-minute workday.

The upside of dailies is that they allow the tactical decisions involved in resource management to carry from one encounter into subsequent encounters.

That's really not much of an upside, and it can be simulated in the framework I outlined by packing waves of encounters closely together inside less than 5 minutes or it can be simulated by having monsters which hand out status ailments which are above the tier or ailments that PCs of that level can cure.

In short, there is no upside to dailies which cannot be handled in at least two other ways, and there is a notable downside. Therefore the very idea has no place in the game.

Heck, even if people do want to keep fixating from poorly translated ideas from pre-1980 fantasy novels, it's decades beyond the time to realize that Jack Vance wrote a lot more than just the Dying Earth series.

[tussock]

1: People want to buy D&D when they're buying D&D. They fucking hate new races. They really do want to play boring-ass Dwarves and Elves. Over and over and over again. You get one new race, like Eberron did with Robots, but in core it has to be an actual classic D&D race, like Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobgoblins, or Wererats.

Bipedal dragons with tits did not set the player base alight with joy. It doesn't work.

2: 7-12 and 12-15 are too many choices. Choices are always 7, +-2. You can do more as sub-classes or high level splits, so your Fighter can become a Paladin, Ranger, Bearsark, or whatever. Races though? People hate the Elven sub-races, a lot, especially Drow, and books have been set on fire because of gully-Dwarves.

AD&D's gestalt-style multi-classing works far better than the 3e or 4e versions. Just say'n.

3: You need to work really hard on your encounter-power fluff. Half your player base will burn you in effigy if they even read the word "encounter" in a bit about durations and refresh. Note: it's really easy to say spamming your combat tricks is done at a penalty because even mindless undead see it coming the second time, and spells are "magic" so who cares. Just be careful.

4: You probably want a pseudo-vancian caster or three. You simply arrange that most of their "vancian" spells can be re-cast once every combat, or even spammed freely, with that very careful fluffing which does not offend butt-hurt 3etards. Give them an option to "daily" out their encounter spells for tiny amounts of extra power and they'll be in heaven. The 3e Wizard works quite well, mechanically, from the player end.

5: The game really does not need out of turn actions. Just ban monsters from running past the Fighters in one round, and give Rogues a class feature which ignores that.

6: Kill opposed skill checks and all scaling DCs. People should be allowed to get good at things, to the point of being perfect at erstwhile impossible tasks.

[erik]

1: People want to buy D&D when they're buying D&D. They fucking hate new races. They really do want to play boring-ass Dwarves and Elves. Over and over and over again. You get one new race, like Eberron did with Robots

and Changelings and Shifters.

As your example with "one new race" being successful was actually offering 3 new races (I'm not counting Kalashtar), I think people can tolerate more than just one new race. Especially if they aren't totally out there.

2: 7-12 and 12-15 are too many choices. Choices are always 7, +-2. You can do more as sub-classes or high level splits, so your Fighter can become a Paladin, Ranger, Bearsark, or whatever. Races though? People hate the Elven sub-races, a lot, especially Drow, and books have been set on fire because of gully-Dwarves.

Ehhhh, the high side doesn't seem that high. 12 races isn't too bad. And 15 classes is alright as well.

Classes... if you get rid of multiclassing you could totally have dozens and dozens. 15 in your first book isn't too bad. 9 classes is so few. Hell, even 3e had more than that, plus intended multiclassing, so I don't know where your 7+/-2 is even coming from.

Your notion that Drow are hated and awful... wah? Is this a "Nobody goes there because it is so crowded" flavor of reasoning?

Now, generally sub-races are total shit, granted, High Elves, Sun Elves, Wood Elves, Wild Elves, Bullshit Elves... but Drow have serious traction. Hell, it'd be a hard call if you had to get keep just one elf type, vanilla or mocha. I have no problem getting all races down to just 1 version, with an exception for dark elves.

I could easily pare down races to 2 elves and 1 sub-race apiece (depending upon whether a few things count as a sub-race of humans) and still pull in a dozen with traction.

[tussock]

@Changelings and Shifters.
Don't you love how being wrong on the specifics shows how right I am on the general point?


The 7 +/-2 thing is choice theory. When you give people a list of 20 things to chose from they will be much less happy with their choice than if you gave them a list of 6 things to chose from. This is because when choosing things our brain only really chooses between about seven of them, and the rest get ignored in a way that makes us feel bad about making poor choices.

Games with a great many classes are less popular. Always have been, always will be.

Further, people who are very familiar with the subject can ramp that up to 9, and people who are a bit lost can only do 5. So you maybe only want 5 classes in the beginner box, 7 in the main game, and another couple in expansions.


Fortunately, you can break that choice down and iterate it for people, so if you let them choose 5 classes with 5 sub-classes each, everyone will still be fairly happy and you'll secretly have 25 classes. If you delay that later choice it's like a bonus.

It's the same reason you can have 7 races and 7 classes and 8 spells per spell level (and 8 schools of magic, 7 damage types, 7 conditions, and all sorts of things).


@Drow, yes, people play Kender too, you know, while everyone else hates them. Divisive shit like that is bad for the game. Maybe just a local thing.

[MGuy]

Tussock what the actual fuck are you talking about? You apparently can't imagine the number of people who want to play things out of the fucking monster manual much less the number of different pointy eared people pthat players are able to accept. Have you seen eberron, faerun, dragonlance? You know the popular settings? Each of those has at least 3 different kinds of elf. And that's before getting to dwarves, gnomes, goblins, orcs, minotaurs, humans, halflings, bird people, elemental people, demon people, angel people, etc etc. People aren't going to think less of your game for having less races in fact they are more likely to lose their shit if you don't have enough classes and races.

[Username17]

Choice theory gives very different answers for snap decisions (like taking an action in combat) and deliberated decisions (like selecting a character class). Character classes are more akin to catalog shopping than it is to making a test selection. When they reduced the number of classes to 8 in 4e, players were livid. And rightfully so.

For a new edition, I would say that the absolute minimum number of acceptable character classes would be 12. If you make a new PHB that doesn't have more character classes than the Pathfinder book, people are just not going to even give your game a fair a shake. We know this to be true, because 4e ran into exactly that problem before people had even figured out that the game itself sucked ass.

That being said, I think it is genuinely valuable to be able to get new players playing the game quickly. And for that, you want to be able to present a series of choices that can be presented quickly. But since those choices are by definition presented serially, it still gives no real upper limit to how many races or classes your book can include. All it means is that if you have more than 8 races or more than 8 classes that you need to divide them up into some arbitrary categories.

So if you have say 18 classes, you'd need to ask someone whether they wanted to play a Martial, Magic, or Hybrid class and then give a short list based on that choice (or ask about Roles or Power Sources or whatever). If you have 10 or more races, I think you could divide them into Alliance and Horde or some shit.

-Username17

[tussock]

]When they reduced the number of classes to 8 in 4e, players were livid. And rightfully so.

We seem to agree, but that's a deeper issue. The 4e Fighter is a quarter of the class the 3e Fighter was at best, and they were already promoting the idea of holding back some classes and options for the PHB2 and class splats. A Fighter on a Horse, or Fighter with a Bow, two weapons, tripper, mobility-reach-AoO guy, none of those were there, but it was obvious they were going to sell you books full of options to enable that for every single class individually. They'd also left out classics for new ones to keep prime content for later books. Not to mention the endless white space and large-print fonts for old blind people, it was all pretty clearly a scam.

They could have folded the 3e Barbarian, Fighter, and Knight into one 4e class, done the Paladin and Ranger with multi-classing and paragon paths, and had 8 classes in the book that covered more conceptual space than 3e did with 30. The power system is superbly suited to that. But they didn't, it's an extremely thin book that way.

Gah. Must not launch into yet another rant about 4e. Soooo disappointing.


@Mguy, the monster manual is a great place to hide your fourty additional player races. For reals. Dead serious. Campaign settings can add some detail to their favourites. All good. But the PHB needs to be something people can play with, now, not after they've spent twenty years learning about D&D's crazy-inclusive history of multiple ancient mythologies with random rubber monsters and in-jokes.

[Username17]

The 4e character classes were too limited to the point that if you had revealed that fact before the game was printed people would have assumed you were hyperbolically ranting rather than making a fair point. The very idea that not only would an individual Rogue be locked into the choice between dagger and rapier for their whole lives but that the choice to be a Rogue with a morningstar or sap would not even exist is so extreme that no one would have believed it before seeing it.

But before people even ran into that problem they balked at the paucity of nominal classes. The 4e PHB dropped having cut five of the 11 classes in the 3.5 PHB. And a lot of people simply waited to even look at 4e until they felt that it had "enough" classes. Now as it happens, in the extra year or so of people waiting for more classes to drop the word of mouth that was circulating was... not good. But even if it had been, the lack of nominal classes clearly hurt their initial delivery and market penetration.

Now in principle, it's perfectly possible to reduce the number of classes to four (like the "base classes" of 2nd edition) or even eliminate them entirely. I don't know if players would be willing to accept a system where the "warrior" class had options for Rage or Sacred Shield (thus subsuming both Paladin and Barbarian). But if you're going to have a separate Ranger class and you have less than 11 total classes in the initial PHB, people will hold off on buying in.

-Username17

[tussock]

Ah. The "Gnome problem". When only 10% of people care about something in the game, you can lose up to 50% of your market by excluding that thing from the core, because those people are spread out in a lot of different groups and it will be a deal-breaker for some proportion of them.

At least, that's WotC's theory, thus 5e must include everything for everyone.

But yeh, promising you will deliver what they want in three or four years via an arbitrarily large number of "core" books: that could totally make people wait until after everyone figured out how crap it was before they thought about buying it.


That's my other theory. D&D has always been crap, only an excuse to let poor socialisers hang out with friends regularly (or porn stars hang out without sex getting in the way, or emotionally challenged people pretend to be awesome in their secret sadness), it's just so complicated that it sometimes becomes a huge hit before anyone notices.

[ishy]

But before people even ran into that problem they balked at the paucity of nominal classes. The 4e PHB dropped having cut five of the 11 classes in the 3.5 PHB. And a lot of people simply waited to even look at 4e until they felt that it had "enough" classes. Now as it happens, in the extra year or so of people waiting for more classes to drop the word of mouth that was circulating was... not good. But even if it had been, the lack of nominal classes clearly hurt their initial delivery and market penetration.

-Username17

I have seen complaints about classes & races from 3.x not making the cut in the 4e PHB1, but I don't think I have seen any about the amount. Not that I'm doubting your words, since I didn't check around for that kind of thing back then, but could you link a few threads?

[Username17]

I don't think I can. WotC's forum got reorganized to put all "complaints and criticisms" of 4th edition into one forum for the H4ters to fight it out with the 4vengers. Then they reorganized that again, to remove that entire forum. As far as I can tell, the entire body of complaints about 4th edition between 2007 and 2010 have been quietly erased and dumped down the memory hole.

Enworld does something different. Their 2008 threads certainly exist, but their actual thread lists only go back a few months. So you can easily use google-fu to find a bunch of people making Bards, Monks and such in June of 2008 - and by extension you can figure that people really felt that those classes were missing. Heck, you can even bring up the fact that the only successful GSL book was an attempt to bring back basic character classes in an unofficial book.

But I can't go through their archives and show you the mountains of threads from back then. The memory hole seems too eager to devour the pain and anguish of early 4e releases. But yeah, the official forums were all crawling with angry people who supposedly weren't going to pick up the game until Bards/Monks/Druids/Barbarians/Sorcerers/Gnomes/HalfOrcs were included. The 4vengers insisted that these people were deluding themselves and that they'd come crawling back inside of a year. But of course it is historical reality that most of them never did.

-Username17