What would it take to make 6e not garbage?

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What would it take to make 6e not garbage?

Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Pretty self explanatory. I can't see Mearls and the interns (who all is even left?) producing anything remotely interesting or competent. The fanbase is still splintered with the 4e diehards on Something Awful, the Pathfinder crew, and whoever the hell migrated over to 5e.

I'm not sure anything less than someone else acquiring the IP at this point is going to make it any good, but who exactly would we trust with that?
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Post by Grek »

Copyright reform. 5e exists because Hasbro has to put out an edition every so often or let D&D fall into public domain. They don't have to make that edition any good, but they do have to make something that is technically an edition of D&D. Until that changes, you aren't going to get any good D&D games ever again and you should move on to some other system that isn't being used strictly to lend brand appeal to video game tie-ins.
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Post by Voss »

Grek wrote:Copyright reform. 5e exists because Hasbro has to put out an edition every so often or let D&D fall into public domain. They don't have to make that edition any good, but they do have to make something that is technically an edition of D&D. Until that changes, you aren't going to get any good D&D games ever again and you should move on to some other system that isn't being used strictly to lend brand appeal to video game tie-ins.
Yeah... the turnaround on copyright isn't that quick. It was originally (at least in the US, as the original period was short to drive innovation), but they could seriously sit on the license for decades at this point. The video-game tie in is just baffling, because they made fuck all of those recently. Refurbished 2e games get more attention and actual releases than 5e does or 4e did.

It really doesn't answer the question either.

But in addressing that... the theoretical 4e diehards don't matter at all, as they were completely fucking ignored within years of existing- Mearls and company gave more weight to the 2e diehards, and they should arguably matter less.

Personally I think it has to thread the difference between the massive bloat of trivia that characterizes Pathfinder, and dearth of content and hard rules that characterizes 5e. Skills have to do shit and be clear as to what that shit is (with real numbers for each skill, rather than a general DC chart buried in the useless DMG), and more classes have to exist to support things people actually want to play. Monsters need to interact with the world and whoever derives the math has to, well, have the basic competence of a high schooler so it can actually function. This last is a special challenge for the current folks at WotC and Paizo alike

I can give exactly zero names to give it to, as the industry at the moment seems to be nothing but careless incompetents. Or rules-light morons who've never even picked up an RPG, but want to make a couple hundred books on a self-publishing trend that actually died years ago.
Last edited by Voss on Wed Feb 14, 2018 3:18 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Archmage Joda »

There are 4e diehards?
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Post by souran »

Hasbro is meeting its sales targets for 5e so probably has no desire to to go through the development of a new edition.

A 5e actually doesn't do to bad at having the appropriate complexity level for beginning players. So starting with 5e's complexity and trying to fix some of the holes would probably be were they would decide to begin. I just don't see Hasbro ever deciding that 3.x level of complexity will sell ever again.

As just my opinion to what would make a not garbage edition

1) Combat should be quick and offer players of every character class 2-4 options each round that are effective

2) Combat should be built around reducing foes to 0 hp by dealing damage. Save or sucks should all offer saves every round. Hp in general should come down so that combat is faster.

3) 16 would be the new 18. Don't let people start with more than a +3 stat modifier.

4) I don't mind a system like 5e's proficiency bonus but skills need to have clear rules on how they work. Additionally, as has been discussed elsewhere the skill rules need to acknowledge and have a way of handling roles where a pass/fail is seemingly pointless. Basically skill rolls need to give information on "what happens" and most of the time skills are invoked success is guaranteed anyway, rolls should still be relevant even in that situation.

5) character classes need to offer a choice every time you go up a level. You should be picking something every time you level or leveling is pretty pointless. Also a character class cannot pull a pathfinder and have an ability central to the concept show up at level 14+.
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Post by hyzmarca »

First, you must construct a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge.

If you can do that, then you can make a version of D&D that is not garbage.

If you can't do that, then you just have to accept that there has never been a n actually good edition of D&D, and that the whole thing is a massive kludge full of legacy crap that you can't strip out without destroying the game's D&Dness.

You also need to accept that you're never going to please everyone, because different players want different things and these are often mutually exclusive. The necessary core is to decide on the feeling that you want for the game, and go from there.
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Post by Slade »

Can't they just remake 3.5 (without calling it that), building on what works between that and 5E.
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Post by Username17 »

Archmage Joda wrote:There are 4e diehards?
That statement surprised me too. The 4rries stopped invading this board years ago, and I pretty much thought they had admitted defeat when their cherished edition did. But it's certainly possible that Grognards.txt is still attacking me with various incoherent rants. I wouldn't know, because I wrote them off as having anything useful to say about anything more than five years ago.

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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Something Awful tg is still sworn to 4e, yes. Usually the 5e thread collapses into whining about how much better 4e than is 5e, but how the blind grognards couldn't see it. Amusingly they haven't figured out every single thing in 5e was built in opposition to 4e.

I haven't seen it anywhere else.
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Post by Dogbert »

My Two Cents:

1) Sack Mearls and clean house.
2) Get people actually interested in game design (as opposed to cargo cult design).
3) You'll never "fix" d&d since it's broken on a concept level (magical "haves" and "have nots" in the same group), so just focus on making all classes "fun enough" to play and fill the books with enough stuff.
4) Splat books early and often... if anything, as many muggle-oriented splatbooks as possible (since muggles are inconsequential anyway, so you can power-creep them six ways into Sunday).
5) The promised (and never delivered) "pillars" modular system: Hard (yeah, who knew? It's like you had to pay a professional to do it), but by no means impossible. Split the game into "Tiers" and add optional rules for tuning either the Awesome or Shitty dials up to taste. WFRP already does it with WH40k and Star Wars, so you might as well just do it with d&d too so basket weavers have their E6 and leave the rest of us alone (also, this would require a perhaps not fully functional, but at least serviceable end game).
6) Trendy writers to do the new generation of d&d fiction. People like Jim Butcher for novels, or Bendis for comics (also, comics with marvel could branch out into finally having a d&d movie that doesn't suck).

Now, clearly this won't make it "perfect," but at least it wouldn't suck a barrel of cocks.
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Post by Koumei »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Something Awful tg is still sworn to 4e, yes. Usually the 5e thread collapses into whining about how much better 4e than is 5e, but how the blind grognards couldn't see it. Amusingly they haven't figured out every single thing in 5e was built in opposition to 4e.

I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Here and there (on the Internet) I see hold-outs of support. It really looked (for a while at least) like PR's rant about "It could be about gay ponies in Bavaria and you'd love it because Mearls told you to" was false, with them decrying it as being just like the evilbadflawed 3E that they hated and a straight-up betrayal of 4E fans (the latter part of that is probably a valid complaint, but I'd try to ditch them as well).

But then they either... quietly accepted 5E, or took their 4E books and went home and basically stopped interacting online. I imagine the latter - it kind of seems like everyone has just picked the existing edition they want and decided they can't be fucked even arguing about it any more.
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Post by Username17 »

The situation with magic haves and have nots is relatively easy to solve. Indeed, workable solutions have been in the core rules of several editions. The fact that the Fighter is a character concept that peaks at fighting giants that are like 20 feet tall and Wizard is a character concept that has not peaked even when the giants are the size of mountains is only a problem if the characters continue to gain levels until Mountain Sized Giants are a reasonable opposition, and the fighter character is still a Fighter at that point. If Fire Giants are the upper end of presented opposition or the Fighter has graduated to being a Witch King or a Demigod.

So both the plan of making everything small and low power AND the plan of having mandatory paragon classes or Immortals levels would both work. Very tellingly, for all the very real problems that 4e had, characters who started life as non-magical being intrinsically incapable of competing at the deep end of the pool is not one of them. Wasn't an issue in BCEMI either.

It is not only easy to imagine D&D having an edition where the players were fighting death gods and the sword guy isn't left behind, D&D has managed exactly that feat more than once.

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Post by Emerald »

FrankTrollman wrote:So both the plan of making everything small and low power AND the plan of having mandatory paragon classes or Immortals levels would both work. Very tellingly, for all the very real problems that 4e had, characters who started life as non-magical being intrinsically incapable of competing at the deep end of the pool is not one of them. Wasn't an issue in BCEMI either.
Yeah, the real trick to getting the grognards and "fighters shouldn't be able to do anything a mundane guy with a sword can't" people onboard with fixing various perennial D&D issues in a new edition, I think, is making explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes.

"You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work, but "We're bringing back the Master and Immortals rules, you get to have armies and divine powers now!" would. As long as you go out of your way to justify any change in those terms, you could probably go pretty far afield from whatever base edition you started with and still keep the "feels like D&D" cred.

Sure, it'd feel like a big mishmash of multiple editions crammed together that you'd have to massage and tweak to make it feel like your favored edition, but that was 5e's marketing pitch and plenty of people fell for that.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

A good campaign setting that grabbed the imagination and was different than what had gone before.

All of the other stuff that people mentioned are Nice to Haves, but 6E D&D could come out with a clone of 5E or 3E or even 4E D&D's basic rules but so long as the basic campaign setting was good enough the edition would succeed.
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In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Voss »

Eh. I know I've griped about 5e only being loosely attached to the FR Sword Coast until now, but of the problems 4e had and 5e has, 'not having a campaign setting' is way down on the list. Especially not one that's 'different from what has gone before'- that pretty much definitionly doesn't have much pull. Or you get random crap for the sake of adding random crap, like Dark Sun or Eberron.

By contrast I wouldn't say Pathfinder sells because of its terrible setting, with its Cheliax and fetid, generic, and terrible expies of randomly anachronistic Earth countries. And gypsies. Especially the generic and terrible gypsies.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Off the top of my head...

1) An app that makes learning, character creation, game finding and organizing really easy

2) Rules that are easy to learn while also maintaining consistency from table to table

3) Launching with a good variety of classic character options

4A) Launching with good modules/campaigns to jump right into

4B) App launching with a single player mode that's like a choose your own adventure digital novel to teach people mechanics and give an impression of what the game is like

5) A virtual tabletop that makes organizing grid based play convenient

6) Board/skirmish games that come with terrain tiles and fair quality painted miniatures that follow the same basic ruleset. They come with codes that give you cosmetic stuff with the app.

7) Vin Diesel appearing on Chinese social media to promote the games.

For technical details on gameplay keeping the D&Disms while making it smooth to pick up...
HP's are in
Core 6 attributes are in, they're also your core defenses and basic skills for world interaction. So instead of an "acrobatics" skill having a high DEX makes you do acrobatics stuff better. I'm fine with some attribute defenses being uncommon like INT. Animals have low INT so you can fool a tiger with a mask on the back of your head. Some attacks can also be resisted with more than one attribute, the important part is to have consistency.

Attributes are written in terms of modifier instead of "18, 15" etc.

Magic needs to be built with the core skill system in mind, so entangling someone with magic tentacles follows the same logic as an octopus grappling you, a fireball follows the same logic as a molotov, a ray of frost follows the same logic as being exposed to the elements, the important part is to have consistency.

In addition to the 6 core attributes functioning as skills, having about a dozen at most separate skills. Like...

Combat
Thievery
Stealth
Survival

Performance
Animal Empathy
Bluff/Feint

Engineering- dungeoneering, building stuff in downtime
Rigging- macguyvering stuff, building simple traps, using ninja tools
Healing

Arcana
Religion

STR- Athletics
DEX- Acrobatics
CON- endurance, focus
INT- misc. knowledge stuff
WIS- Perception
CHA- diplomacy, intimidate

Let anyone who picks up religion and arcana do simple cantrips and prayers. Have downtime rituals be based on skills and open to anyone with the skill.

I like the idea of skill challenges where you aim for X successes in Y terms, that should be the core skill system but of course you keep on repeating "Rule 0!" in side bars so grognogs don't have a stroke.

Also define how skills are used actively, during short downtime, and long downtime. Let a warrior spend his downtime doing weapon katas to gain a bonus for his next encounter while a wizard memorizes spells and so on.
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Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:A good campaign setting that grabbed the imagination and was different than what had gone before.

All of the other stuff that people mentioned are Nice to Haves, but 6E D&D could come out with a clone of 5E or 3E or even 4E D&D's basic rules but so long as the basic campaign setting was good enough the edition would succeed.
I don't think this is really true. There are straight up licensed games, and the only ones that do particularly well are Star Wars and Warhammer 40K. And those have the advantage of not actually competing against much because there is no established industry leader in Science Fiction RPGs.

If Wheel of Time, Dragon Age, and fucking Game of Thrones could never propel an RPG to the top slot, I don't think fantasy setting can be said to be a make or break for an edition. Having strong ties to a setting I want to read about is obviously a good way to get me to want to read secondary and tertiary books, and 4th and 5th edition's decision to basically not bother writing setting materials was almost incomprehensible. But at the end of the day that rant about how the bean counters at WotC found that people didn't buy the Silver Marches book because crunch sells and fluffdoes the other thing is still mostly true.

Good fluff obviously sells goodly. And a compelling setting is probably important. But I doubt it's as important as "good cover art" or "legible fonts" in terms of production values and promotion.

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Post by maglag »

FrankTrollman wrote: If Wheel of Time, Dragon Age, and fucking Game of Thrones could never propel an RPG to the top slot, I don't think fantasy setting can be said to be a make or break for an edition.
Well Game of Thrones is the kind of settings that's interesting to read about, but not really interesting to play in, because half the story is that the world's full of shit and whatever healing magic exists sucks so an infected wound, a bad fall or drinking from the wrong place can cripple your character.

This is, Jaime was like the top martial dude of the story for some time, then he got captured, lost his sword hand and suddenly he can't fight his way out of a paper bag. It makes for an engaging story, but not really a great selling point for people to want to replicate Jaime.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

I think that what the next edition is like depends on what demographic they choose to chase for it. 5e is pretty well-aimed at new players and fans of the early editions of D&D. If they do a new one, I think they would more than likely aim to capture that market again, since they don't seem to be willing to compete with PF for crunch-heavy 3/3.5 style games.

Personally, I think it would need a good, easy to learn core system, good marketing, and online aids that are easy to use for people. Maybe even a video game concretely based on the mechanics as a way to get expand the playerbase.
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Post by Iduno »

They'd need to decide, up front, if they want to be rules-heavy or rules-light (probably medium, like D&D usually is). Then stick to it. If it takes you almost 1,000 pages to make a rules-light game, you are bad at game design. Give people rules and options to come up with interesting solutions to puzzles, or have Zargon tell you when there's a chaos warrior to stab.

They also need to determine how much or how little magic people have, and give it to them through being magic (mages/clerics) or having magic items, so everyone can handle magic threats. D&D has never had a functional enough skill system that "skills" can be a class ability in the same way "casts spells" is (Star Wars and Shadowrun really don't either, but are at least closer).

Marketing is the only thing 5e has, so we know Hasbro will be hitting that hard. And it doesn't make 5e not garbage.
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Post by Username17 »

I think that what the next edition is like depends on what demographic they choose to chase for it.
That seems to imply that D&D will have designers that are skillful enough to adjust their game design towards a target market and have that have generally successful results. That does not seem to be in evidence.

What does 5e actually do that is any good for people who want a rules lite game? It's a thousand pages long, and explanations of even the simplest actions are split into multiple sections that are dozens of pages apart. It's a presentational nightmare.

It's not just that questions like "How do I hide?" have no answer, it's that you have to look up four different page citations, one of which isn't in the index to find out that is the case.

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Post by Chamomile »

I'm pretty sure 5e's most effective advertising isn't actually stuff that 5e put out. Stranger Things and Critical Role are probably getting more people to buy whatever edition of D&D happens to be in print right now than anything Hasbro is actually paying for.
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Post by saithorthepyro »

FrankTrollman wrote:
I think that what the next edition is like depends on what demographic they choose to chase for it.
That seems to imply that D&D will have designers that are skillful enough to adjust their game design towards a target market and have that have generally successful results. That does not seem to be in evidence.

What does 5e actually do that is any good for people who want a rules lite game? It's a thousand pages long, and explanations of even the simplest actions are split into multiple sections that are dozens of pages apart. It's a presentational nightmare.

It's not just that questions like "How do I hide?" have no answer, it's that you have to look up four different page citations, one of which isn't in the index to find out that is the case.

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They did make a deal about getting advice from both Pundit and the muffin, so I think they were trying to make the edition attractive to 2nd edition players, but then decided to go in another direction and make it more rules-lite.
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Post by Blicero »

saithorthepyro wrote: They did make a deal about getting advice from both Pundit and the muffin, so I think they were trying to make the edition attractive to 2nd edition players, but then decided to go in another direction and make it more rules-lite.
Zahk Ess does not play second edition. I don't think the pundit does either, but, honestly, no one cares what he does.
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Post by Username17 »

Yeah, Pundit is an OSR grognard and shitmuffin is a weird muti-edition homebrew guy who doesn't know the rules for any specific edition and relies on a lot of DM whimsy and mind caulk.

The point of Mearls getting Monte Cook (a big 3e name), Pundit, and Shitmuffin on board as "consultants" was to try to sell people on the idea that they were reaching out to fans of every edition and making an edition of unity. Like everything about 5e, it's just a clumsy attempt to avoid the failures of 4e by doing the exact opposite of 4e. Where 4e made the Tiefling and Gnome video to tell fans of previous editions that things were changing and you can get on board or suck dust - the 5e design team trotted out a bunch of consultancy name checks from people whose name was recognizable to various past-edition groups.

That obviously none of those people knew anything about the final product and contributed little of any value is so beside the point as to be wholly irrelevant in Mearls town. The purpose of making a show of listening to Pundit's "concerns" was simply to advertise the edition to the OSR crowd. And the fact that Mearls immediate stopped talking to him as soon as the book hit the shelves tells you everything you need to know about how sincere that was and how much the cares of the OSR movement actually matter to the people left working at WotC.

Whihc is only like six people and a dog, but still.

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