6th edition / One D&D

[Wumpus]

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1310-fa ... al-digital

https://www.dndbeyond.com/one-dnd

this is super vague, but it sounds like they are going to do some interesting things with virtual tabletops.

I'm a little dubious how backwards compatible this will actually be, but I suspect this will be "close enough" like trying to play first and second edition AD&D together, when 3rd was entirely different but 3.0 and 3.5 and maybe Pathfinder were all sort of compatible with one another if you squinted.

I don't expect anything particularly revolutionary on the game rules front - if there's any innovation it'll be on the computer-aided-gaming front. But I hope they do that well, all the virtual tabletop stuff I've played thus far is... clunky.

[PseudoStupidity]

I saw the 21-page UA playtest doc. It looks like they're keeping Bounded Accuracy, and they have introduced a rule where you fail skill checks on a 1 and succeed on a 20 (I don't remember if that was in 5e). So...fixing none of the problems and seemingly adding some new ones. I do like that they're giving everyone level 1 feats so they're no longer an optional rule.

The virtual tabletop stuff might be good, but I bet it'll be tied to the ruleset and thus still worse than Maptool.

[Dogbert]

Could anyone with a wizards' account upload the document somewhere? I really don't want to boost their metrics.

[PseudoStupidity]

Do you mind if it's a direct link to the PDF? It's unlikely they can track it (outside of hits/downloads) as this isn't an HTML document or anything, just a raw PDF (which I, a person who has no Wizards account, can access): https://media.dndbeyond.com/compendium- ... rigins.pdf.

Funny thing I noticed when I looked for the PDF again, dwarves can't be small, but humans can.

[deaddmwalking]

I doubt that it will require 'flailsnails' to convert. After a few rounds of this, I think it's pretty clear that backward compatible in TTRPG means 'not at all compatible, but we didn't change much, so it basically works the same'. Which is really just a refresh - we'd like to sell you basically the same things, in the same format, but now we assume you have more feats, two new base classes, and we've 'adjusted' a few abilities.

I do think that 5E is generally a pretty easy entry point into the hobby, which is not at all a bad thing. I think it's possible to have an advanced D&D that includes more tactical options and things than 5e natively supports (an Advanced D&D perhaps) that works on the general framework. But once you have some characters with advanced options and some without, they're not playing in the same world.

I've been reading some of the archives from almost a decade ago and with 4th edition, Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2.0, D&D 5e it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to get what I wanted - something that kept what was good about 3rd edition (and I can provide a list), but addressed some of the fundamental balance issues that really locked the game to ~7th level.

[Dogbert]

Everything can be compatible with the old rules when there were NO old rules.

So far, most of what I read falls under "too good to be true" (for 5E standards, that is).

You know what happens when something looks too good to be true.

[pragma]

Eh, I don't know. This seems like a modest improvement on the 5e that was with a few boneheaded ideas mixed. You do have to want to play 5e for this to be interesting at all, but I've found that it's a good system to teach and to plan for if you have limited time.

Good thing 1: less racism -- They've taken a firm stance that Orcs and Drow aren't always evil, and race is no longer associated with attributes.

Good thing 2: fewer short rest abilities -- The balancing act between short rest and long rest classes has been tenuous throughout the run of the edition, and the community consensus on GITP is that you need to run a certain number of encounters in a certain order to make the two play the same. This is an unforced error on the designers part, and replacing short rest refreshes with PB/LR use abilities allows for much more flexible pacing.

Good thing 3: less Athletics in combat -- The bonuses you can rack up to skill modifiers were much higher than the bonuses you can gain to attack modifiers, so monsters were singularly unprepared for luchador bards in 5e. D&Done seems to be scaling that back by making grapples into attack rolls that inflict the grappled condition. (Some details of the action economy are improved too -- grapples and shoves are unarmed strikes, so monks get to do a lot of them, and escape attempts don't require an action, so grapples are less devastating.) The fact this takes nice things away from martials, in particularly an option to target something other than AC, is hopefully tempered by class redesign. I rate the change as overall positive because the numbers mismatch was quite silly.

Neutral thing 1: a bunch of nonsense related to inspiration -- stop trying to make inspiration a thing, Gretchen! Overall I don't think that putting player metacurrency a bit more front and center will hurt, but it's not a fix anyone asked for either.

Bad thing 1: No monster crits and much reduced effect on player crits -- critical hits are a player facing option, which removes some tension from fights, and critical hits only affect weapon dice, so their effect is muted except at low levels. No pocket smites when you roll a 20 anymore. Monster redesign may ameliorate half of this concern.

Bad thing 2: Ability checks auto-succeed on 20 and auto-fail on 1 -- I understand the impulse to make all d20 die rolls work the same way, and that concern may be more important than my tastes, but this takes away some of the perks of having a very high skill + reliability at higher levels. This also just makes the GMs job harder because they have to say "no" more often. That said, I think this rule reflects the game as it is played on streams, so maybe this is just a little acquiescence to reality. Class redesign may ameliorate this concern.

Obviously, more details are coming down the pipe, and details of how they redo banner feats (like polearm master and great weapon master) and classes, will matter a lot to assessing the final product. For instance, taking damage out of bonus actions (which may be where they're going) would make the game smoother, which I appreciate aesthetically. However, my taste for elegance aside, 5e is already probably a little too smooth; I feel like I'm running out of interesting system corners to explore after only one campaign. More interesting monsters, which they've hinted at (perhaps misleadingly), would go a long way towards getting me excited.

[deaddmwalking]

So I'm reading the playtest document, specifically Feats. The document says that the power-level of the various rules drafts is going to be subject to change, but I think Savage Attacker is pretty lame. When you roll weapon damage, you roll twice, then choose which one to use (presumably the higher). So under normal circumstances, if you're rolling 1d8, your average roll is 4.5 and you have a 12.50% chance of any result (1-8 with equal probability). With this Feat your average is 6 (+1.5 damage).

That seems really weak. Show me I'm wrong.


Edit- I'm not in to 5E but I've played it. Based on the abilities in the linked document, I'm thinking something like this would be better:

Savage Attacker: When you have advantage, you may add your proficiency bonus to Weapon Damage rolls. You may use this ability a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

[pragma]

Feat power levels are all over the place in 5e, and I don't particularly trust the devs to do better in 1D&D. Savage attacker is a particularly bad feat in the current edition. It is identical in 1D&D, so it's not clear that they're waving the balance wand at the right things. However, this is designated as a first-level feat, which means that any character can start with it, so maybe the anemic power level is reflective of that ready access. That said, it's competing with Alert, Lucky and Magic Initiate, all of which are way better than Savage Attacker as written, so most likely some innumerate dev just really likes the idea of re-rolling damage.

[deaddmwalking]

So the document includes 17 'backgrounds'. All backgrounds follow the same formula; choose 2 abilities (+2, +1), two skills, one tool, one language, one feat, up to 50gp in equipment.

These can essentially be randomized and you can call it whatever you want. Obviously, it makes sense to 'fit a theme' but anyone that's making a character is probably going to want to do that. So they have 17 examples that you can modify as you desire (ie, if you like Gladiator but you don't want to take Orc as your language, take a different one). Since some of them are obviously bad (both Gladiator & Soldier include Savage Attacker as the feat selection), I assume that this exists only to procedurally generate page count rather than actual content. Having 3-4 examples might be okay, but it really looks like they're planning on exhaustively detailing the difference between Farmer and Herdsman.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It looks like they're keeping Bounded Accuracy, and they have introduced a rule where you fail skill checks on a 1 and succeed on a 20 (I don't remember if that was in 5e).

I'm going to fucking kill myself.
Next thing you'll tell me is that they made Concentration even more restrictive and unfun.

[deaddmwalking]

It looks like they're keeping Bounded Accuracy, and they have introduced a rule where you fail skill checks on a 1 and succeed on a 20 (I don't remember if that was in 5e).

I'm going to fucking kill myself.
Next thing you'll tell me is that they made Concentration even more restrictive and unfun.

The auto-fail/auto-success assumes that the TN is at least 5 and at most 30, and that the success is still limited to 'possible situations'. Ie, if you can jump 40 feet, you can jump 40 feet with a Nat 20. It doesn't mean you actually succeed in jumping to the moon 5% of the time.

But it's a lot of work to figure out if the roll you needed a 25 on should count if you got a 20 because the question is whether it was possible or impossible first, then and only then does the natural 20 mean anything. So I'd say it qualifies as a bad rule, even if the attempt is to make d20 checks work consistently.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

At that point it would just be smarter to take a page out of Ye Olde Fire Emblem's book and make it so nobody can crit on attacks without a specific ability. Or a Gamble attack where you take -5 to hit but crit on a 16+ or something. Anything is better than nat 1s failing on skill checks.

[tussock]

Have they done that well on the cleaning up the whole race thing?

Like, can't help but note Orcs are still bred for war, Gnomes are still supernaturally cunning trickster illusionists, Elves are still the old biblical folk created and fallen from grace that still live for centuries and yearn for times past, all unlike humans who just exist and have explicitly varied curtures ....

I'd still go with "Body" that you're choosing, because then you can keyword it to spells and such, and whatever you should be able to flip out with a polymorph is what you should get for your race/body. All that cultural shit should obviously just be elsewhere, right? Set a couple feats with your born body, if you need the cantrips and lucky and dashing and whatever to stick through curses and polymorphs (which, do you really?).

Just, sort of randomly look at 1st edition, which had almost no cultural trappings in the player section on race, but did have tiny stat mods, with penalties that mostly didn't do anything mechanically.

--

And yeah, 3e/4e style stat mods were terrible, where Grey Elf wizards were just better, mechanically it's good to dump that regardless, and it's nice they're trying, but like, there must be a better way to arrange all this stuff.

Even 2nd edition books got onto letting Dwarfs that grew up in Human towns just take Human proficiencies and kits and shit. Like, they were still slow, and short, and had +1 con, but, ... people gave them all sorts of personalities and it was fine. 3e let them be decent Wizards, and everyone was happy.

And in 6e, their race is ... hidden +2 Con and good at being a sloppy drunk. I mean, tremorsence is cool, but, is the rest of it better, fluff-wise?

[deaddmwalking]

I don't know if Tremorsense is good or not - I don't know that knowing where other creatures are is helpful in any way. For example, if a creature is invisible, but they're standing on the ground (and the ground is stone), the dwarf uses tremorsense as a bonus action, well, what then? Can you target the invisible opponent with melee attacks? Do they have any advantages to defense?

[pragma]

Assessing tremorsense requires and exigesis of the vision, obscurement and hiding rules, which are a bit baroque. The upshot of the derivation below is that tremorsense is great against monsters that hide, goblins being the prime candidates. It's flavorful for dwarves without being a game changer, so I think it's pretty well designed.

Getting there requires the following rules observations:

• There are a few states of detection in the game, which I am paraphasing better than the book does: detected, unseen and hidden.
• Detected is the default: every opposing enemy knows where a detected creature is
• Unseen is a surprising state: when a creature is unseen, every other creature knows where it is. However, attackers have disadvantage to attack the unseen creature, and the unseen creature has advantage on attacks if it can also see its target. Being unseen also affects many magical effects, which target "a creature you can see." It is comically easy to become unseen: Fog Cloud is sufficient to make it happen, but so is invisibility or any heavy obscurement (thick fog, a big bush, etc.). However, being unseen doesn't make you hidden (see below), so monsters can still attack you. Even worse, if you're unseen because of heavy obscurement, you also count as blindness, which cancels out all of the advantage/disadvantage from unseen.
• Hidden is the gold standard in stealth: when you are hidden other creatures don't know where you are. If an attacker is attacking a hidden creature, the attacker needs to guess what square the hidden creature occupies. Becoming hidden requires you to take the hide action, so hiding in combat is only really efficient for creatures that can hide as a bonus action: PC rogues and goblins.
• My read of tremorsense is that it effectively cancels the hidden condition because you know where tremorsensed creatures are. That's nice, but not a killer app. Notably, tremorsense doesn't allow you to target spells (it explicitly doesn't count as "seeing" the tremorsensed creature). So it's a fun perk in cluttered environments, for cheap scouting, or for sneaky enemies.

Edit: remembering to address DeadDM's hypothetical

A dwarf is standing next to an invisible creature that is not hidden. The dwarf knows the hidden creature is there. The dwarf is capable of swinging an axe at it at disadvantage. Using tremorsense doesn't change that equation by RAW, though I think many GMs will rule the invisible creature is no longer unseen by the dwarf. If the invisible creature were hidden, tremorsense would reveal it to the dwarf.

[Omegonthesane]

Based solely on the snippets provided and with no particular awareness of the broader context (and biased by fond memories of when I was fixated on Crawl which among other things expected you to sometimes fight an invisible enemy when you didn't yourself have See Invisible) I would say that a dwarf using Tremorsense to detect hidden foes sets them to "unseen but not hidden", and similarly that this is how someone being invisible but next to you should work. After all, Tremorsense won't give you full information about their footwork, let alone what their hands are doing, so you'd be at some kind of sigh disadvantage to attack them.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Call me if they commit to rewriting the Monster Manual. Preferably with monsters built on the same class+level math as PCs and abilities to actually fulfill their roles in the setting, but *any* kind of consistent design goals or editorial oversight would be an improvement. If all they're doing is RAW-ifying a few house rules from their home games I don't give a shit.

[Grek]

It looks like they're keeping Bounded Accuracy, and they have introduced a rule where you fail skill checks on a 1 and succeed on a 20 (I don't remember if that was in 5e).

I'm going to fucking kill myself.
Next thing you'll tell me is that they made Concentration even more restrictive and unfun.

Auto-success on a 20 only matters in situations where the DC is so high that bonus+20 would still otherwise fail. Auto-fail on a 1 only matters in situations where the DC is so low that bonus+1 would still otherwise pass. Those strike me as situations where the GM should not be calling for a roll in the first place.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Yeah, exactly. For some fucking reason, the people I play with like it so much they'll be backporting it back into 5e. Fucking hell. Math is hard.

[Krusk]

Auto-success on a 20 only matters in situations where the DC is so high that bonus+20 would still otherwise fail. Auto-fail on a 1 only matters in situations where the DC is so low that bonus+1 would still otherwise pass. Those strike me as situations where the GM should not be calling for a roll in the first place.

An auto 20 auto success and 1 auto fail means my -1 mod will still auto succeed when I roll a 19. It also means the expertise rogue specialist gets a 20 on a rolled 1, and auto fails on the same DC 20 check. (maybe your high level PC is slumming it for a session or something? Or you remember the DC from a previous game where you tried the same cool trick. )

In practice, telling the DM not to call for a roll when its impossible to fail/succeed requires the DM to know each players current skill bonus for every skill, and any potential buffs they may apply before they call for a roll. It also requires the DM to decide what is/isn't possible and very directly limits the PCs to regular human stuff, limited by what the DM thinks is "possible". Is the max limit for a PC what a schlubby nerd can do? An Olympic athelete? Captain America? Superman? Who knows, and its going to change DM to DM, player to player, and instance to instance.

[PseudoStupidity]

Auto-success on a 20 only matters in situations where the DC is so high that bonus+20 would still otherwise fail. Auto-fail on a 1 only matters in situations where the DC is so low that bonus+1 would still otherwise pass. Those strike me as situations where the GM should not be calling for a roll in the first place.

An auto 20 auto success and 1 auto fail means my -1 mod will still auto succeed when I roll a 19. It also means the expertise rogue specialist gets a 20 on a rolled 1, and auto fails on the same DC 20 check. (maybe your high level PC is slumming it for a session or something? Or you remember the DC from a previous game where you tried the same cool trick. )

In practice, telling the DM not to call for a roll when its impossible to fail/succeed requires the DM to know each players current skill bonus for every skill, and any potential buffs they may apply before they call for a roll. It also requires the DM to decide what is/isn't possible and very directly limits the PCs to regular human stuff, limited by what the DM thinks is "possible". Is the max limit for a PC what a schlubby nerd can do? An Olympic athelete? Captain America? Superman? Who knows, and its going to change DM to DM, player to player, and instance to instance.

Krusk is correct, and there's one other glaring issue with the "20 succeeds, 1 fails" rule: opposed checks. If my PC in full plate and an 8 Dex rolls a nat 20 on Stealth to sneak by a regular guard who also rolls a nat 20 who wins? What if the guard doesn't get a natural 20 but still beats my check, which I rolled a nat 20 on? What if the guard rolls a nat 1 to spot me (autofail) but I roll below the result of his check without a nat 1? What if we both roll nat 1s?

Introducing auto-success on nat 20s and auto-fail on nat 1s for skills causes all sorts of stupid outputs in all sorts of situations, and doesn't even have a benefit (if it was achievable the nat 20 would be a success, and if it was impossible to fail the nat 1 would still produce a success). There is no good reason to introduce such a rule, it appears to be entirely stupid.

[Pedantic]

Introducing auto-success on nat 20s and auto-fail on nat 1s for skills causes all sorts of stupid outputs in all sorts of situations, and doesn't even have a benefit (if it was achievable the nat 20 would be a success, and if it was impossible to fail the nat 1 would still produce a success). There is no good reason to introduce such a rule, it appears to be entirely stupid.

It's definitely just a sop to the use of 20s and 1s in actual plays and memes. It would be an even worse rules to codify critical success and failure on 20s and 1s, but that's the zeitgeist, so we're getting an attempted "middle-ground" which isn't really any better.

[Krusk]

It hadn't even dawned on me to consider what happens with opposed checks in this dumb rule. Let's play how bad of a rule can you come up with?

[deaddmwalking]

It hadn't even dawned on me to consider what happens with opposed checks in this dumb rule. Let's play how bad of a rule can you come up with?

We already played that game. Good times!