D&D Next: Anyone try this yet?

[TigerShark]

I have to say, I'm disappointed to see a step backward in D&D development. D&D Next feels like some bizarre hybrid of 2e and 4e, skipping the most popular edition's best components. Nothing really needed to be changed from 3.5e rule sets. Why bother with a brand new system?

4e had the complaint that combat was the center of the game and that's obviously true. Classes didn't have very many distinctions and tended to do the same damage at every level, just with different names attached to the skills. The introduction of vancian magic seems to have given some distinction and a "work for it" feel to the mage/clerical classes. This is especially true at higher levels where "encounter" powers would have multiple castings per battle.

I truly dislike the step away from variable character races, as I enjoyed some of the oddities that were possible in 4e. Githzerai, Gnolls, Revenants, etc. were rather interesting to play and I feel more "restrained" by the humanoid-only policy.

It (D&D Next) feels very retro and geared toward the 50-somethings players who remember the "good old days". I think that's fine, since they're appealing to a base, but there has to be a new generation of players being brought in and the younger crowd won't remember or care about "how it was back in X edition." There were some glaring problems with the old systems that either had horrible weaknesses or incredibly strong, min/max classes like the 2e Cleric.

[Diplominator]

I got to play it a bit at PAX 2012. My group liked it more than 4e, but that should be taken with a pretty big chunk of salt because we had a great DM and we were happy to be playing anything at all because we hadn't done that in ages.

Still, it didn't seem too terrible. I wasn't a big fan of 4e's power system (although I do see the appeal, I don't think it's a great fit for every class), so Next's system appealed to me more.

That was a while ago, though, and I haven't payed much attention to it since.

[Istal_Devalis]

As someone who thought 4th Ed was the best iteration and scratched most of my itches, Next's 'toss out the baby with the bathwater' return to a lot of old conceits doesnt exactly strike me with glee.

[rebs]

If it's not Pathfinder/3.5 compatible, it simply will suffer from most people I know not playing it.

[TigerShark]

If it's not Pathfinder/3.5 compatible, it simply will suffer from most people I know not playing it.

This. With Pathfinder already popular, why not simply build on what works and what people enjoy? Adding At-Wills like the Cantrips to wizards is a brilliant idea and would fit right in with 3.5e rules. For example, the Magic Missile keeps the wizard from being a useless, 1d4 Hit Point target at level 1.

Also, why not keep the same character races and stratify them according to "rules levels."

Beginner: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling
Advanced: Dragonborn, Tiefling
Campaign-Specific: Githzerai, Gnoll, Wilden

...and so on.

[Orin J.]

as someone that played a lot of 2nd ed. D&D and has read/used more of the books then i will ever admit to anyone, i ask why anyone would want to go back there.

If it's not Pathfinder/3.5 compatible, it simply will suffer from most people I know not playing it.

3rd .ed's rule set was open game license so they couldn't simply keep a stranglehold on all the material release for profit. while i can see the merit in doing it, explaining that the big wall o' stuff related to your product that isn't giving money to you to investors is probably.....sticky to accomplish.  #P

unfortunately, that meant they had to toss out an easy to understand system and build from scratch, which is hard, and then make it more popular than the preceding system, which is harder. looks like 4th didn't accomplish what they wanted so far, so they're *cough* reworking the system.

[TS_Hawk]

I lost interest in DnD when 3E came out. 4E was different and Pathfinder reminds me alot of 3E DnD wonder why? anyways I heard about next and the couple of people who are doing the demos even though its not ready yet say they like it because of the 2E and 4E combination.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

as someone that played a lot of 2nd ed. D&D and has read/used more of the books then i will ever admit to anyone, i ask why anyone would want to go back there.

Some people enjoy playing a game that has self-contradictory and counter intuitive rules for everything.

unfortunately, that meant they had to toss out an easy to understand system and build from scratch, which is hard, and then make it more popular than the preceding system, which is harder. looks like 4th didn't accomplish what they wanted so far, so they're *cough* reworking the system.

Eh, 4th Edition has had a 5 year run and produced a lot of books.  Possibly even more than 3.5 edition (which lasted the same amount of time) did.  With the nature of the game, the company has to either produce a new edition every few years or else turn their product into a huge, bloated monstrosity that's riddled with so many errors and inconsistencies that there's no fixing it.

[rebs]

This. With Pathfinder already popular, why not simply build on what works and what people enjoy? Adding At-Wills like the Cantrips to wizards is a brilliant idea and would fit right in with 3.5e rules. For example, the Magic Missile keeps the wizard from being a useless, 1d4 Hit Point target at level 1.

Also, why not keep the same character races and stratify them according to "rules levels."

Beginner: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling
Advanced: Dragonborn, Tiefling
Campaign-Specific: Githzerai, Gnoll, Wilden

...and so on.

as someone that played a lot of 2nd ed. D&D and has read/used more of the books then i will ever admit to anyone, i ask why anyone would want to go back there.

3rd .ed's rule set was open game license so they couldn't simply keep a stranglehold on all the material release for profit. while i can see the merit in doing it, explaining that the big wall o' stuff related to your product that isn't giving money to you to investors is probably.....sticky to accomplish.  #P

unfortunately, that meant they had to toss out an easy to understand system and build from scratch, which is hard, and then make it more popular than the preceding system, which is harder. looks like 4th didn't accomplish what they wanted so far, so they're *cough* reworking the system.

The various resets have a lot more to do with pleasing shareholders now than keeping the rules straight and consistent within a given edition. 

I may be in a minority here, but I actually kind of miss playing 2nd...    at least it was easy to make use of all my 1st ed stuff.  I was the first person I knew to own a Manual of the Planes (at the ripe age of 13), and dammit, I loved that book.  We combined both editions all the time. 

But 3.5/Pathfinder has been good to us.  With it being open source, the corporate boards and shareholders don't see the rewards as much, but the players get a richer experience because content can be added so simply.  Small companies can find it easier to start up going though open source, but seeing anything resembling huge profits is harder without the back-up of a whole new edition that is not public domain.

Kind of a catch-22, but at least we all still have ready access to the editions and styles we prefer.  And still, I don't know if a 4.5 or 5th edition was necessary.  Want back to basics?  Use the old red rulebooks :) 

[TigerShark]

Wouldn't "shareholders" be just as pleased with a 3.75? Re-printing an old book for minimal cost to the company and with minor/major fixes to loopholes? Seems like cutting cost is better than hiring a full staff of writers to "engineer" a new system from the ground up.

I may be sounding like Negative Nick here, and I did like D&D in all of its iterations. I just believe that 3.5 was what the game "needed to be." Players agreed and migrated en masse to Pathfinder.

Heck, look at the Virtual Table Top they made and didn't commit to. It just seems to be what WotC is about these days: Short runs, then giving up on it and moving on.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

From what I heard, the reaction to the Virtual Tabletop was pretty negative.  It's not like Wizards would have much incentive to keep supporting something after it'd flopped.

And while 3.5 was a very good system, look at what was happening at the end.  I stopped buying books before 4th Edition was even announced: it'd just reached the point where I had a huge mountain of sourcebooks I wasn't using already so I didn't feel any need to shell out more money, especially since half of them were things that didn't fit my playing style or had really weird or annoying rules (like that Incarnum junk).  If they'd released the Pathfinder rules as 4th Edition or 3.75 Edition, I probably wouldn't have bought it, and I'm guessing that a lot of other people wouldn't have either, a large part of Pathfinder's success was really due to negative reaction to 4th Edition.

[TigerShark]

...But you did buy Pathfinder (presumably; I'm assuming that from your post) and it was just 3.5 in a new book. :)

[Istal_Devalis]

From everything I've heard, Hasbro really doesnt care about DND at all. It's a drop in the bucket compared to MTG. If anything's involved in the change, it's not them.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

...But you did buy Pathfinder (presumably; I'm assuming that from your post) and it was just 3.5 in a new book. :)

Nope.  Looked at it, but decided that it was way too much money for a new book that was really close to 3.5.  Especially since my last gaming group had broken up before then.  I have played the game a couple of times, but that group only had one person who'd actually bought the books and everyone else just borrowed them.

[pensiveswetness]

This. With Pathfinder already popular, why not simply build on what works and what people enjoy? Adding At-Wills like the Cantrips to wizards is a brilliant idea and would fit right in with 3.5e rules. For example, the Magic Missile keeps the wizard from being a useless, 1d4 Hit Point target at level 1.

Also, why not keep the same character races and stratify them according to "rules levels."

Beginner: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling
Advanced: Dragonborn, Tiefling
Campaign-Specific: Githzerai, Gnoll, Wilden

...and so on.

PFS was/is for people* who did not want to give up on 3.0/3.5 rules. i dont comprehend how's & whys of 4.0 but the one time i played it, i was soiled from the experiance. 4.0 was TSR's attempt to draw in the World of Warcraft (and DDO and other MMPG-type games) into D&D though i also viewed TSR's efforts to change the game every ten years to kill off Royalty payments from previous versions of the game.

*and me, too.

[TigerShark]

From everything I've heard, Hasbro really doesnt care about DND at all. It's a drop in the bucket compared to MTG. If anything's involved in the change, it's not them.

Not going to jack my own thread with this, but I hate even having M:tG and D&D in the same sentence. One is a time-honored RPG system that's the grandfather of (pretty much) all modern RPGs. The other is a cash scam backed with "official" tournament rules meant to con people into buying new sets every 6 months. ("You can't use that set. It's Revised 8th edition and not legal! You have to use X edition and Y expansion sets only!")

You can at least pick up an original AD&D book and still find players willing to jump in and quest with you, at a bare minimum of cost.

[RunandFindOut]

PFS was/is for people* who did not want to give up on 3.0/3.5 rules. i dont comprehend how's & whys of 4.0 but the one time i played it, i was soiled from the experiance. 4.0 was TSR's attempt to draw in the World of Warcraft (and DDO and other MMPG-type games) into D&D though i also viewed TSR's efforts to change the game every ten years to kill off Royalty payments from previous versions of the game.

*and me, too.

Same here, I still play 3e.  I checked out 4e and was instantly struck by the incredible mechanical similarities between it and an Asian MMO I did Alpha-Testing and Localization for.  Not saying that it didn't have good ideas, I was also shocked to find that some of the mechanical shortcuts I'd developed and implemented as house rules were rather similar to tweaks made in 4e to speed up the game.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

People said exactly the same thing about 3.0 when it came out except they compared it to Everquest and Ultima.  Bury it and move on, it's not adding anything to the conversation.

For pretty much every version of D&D prior to 4th, if you weren't playing a spellcaster your two options in combat were "Ranged Attack" or "Melee Attack."  Sure, they had a couple other things you could try, but the rules for those (grappling, sundering, tripping) were complex and typically stacked in favor of the monsters anyway.  Giving fighters and rogues something else they can do was a good thing.

[Orin J.]

Heck, look at the Virtual Table Top they made and didn't commit to. It just seems to be what WotC is about these days: Short runs, then giving up on it and moving on.

to be fair, that thing was gonna cost a LOT, and they were probably hoping for a lot of other backers to see it & hop on.....

[RunandFindOut]

People said exactly the same thing about 3.0 when it came out except they compared it to Everquest and Ultima.  Bury it and move on, it's not adding anything to the conversation.

I'm not doing a 'derp just like on de computer, herp derp.'  I've played the game since Original Edition, played through 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e.  I liked them all each one more than the last and shrugged off people comparing them to Everquest and such.  I'm saying that as a person who Alpha-Tested and did English Localization for one of the Chinese MMOs when it went International that the Attack Powers system of that particular MMO was very similar mechanically to the Power system of 4e.  In and of itself that's not bad, but in the process they radically changed the magic system from all prior editions.  And for me that was a game breaker, the changes they implemented in 4e changed the game in ways that made me not want to play it.  So instead my DnD money goes to Pathfinder.

For pretty much every version of D&D prior to 4th, if you weren't playing a spellcaster your two options in combat were "Ranged Attack" or "Melee Attack."  Sure, they had a couple other things you could try, but the rules for those (grappling, sundering, tripping) were complex and typically stacked in favor of the monsters anyway.  Giving fighters and rogues something else they can do was a good thing.

And there were people out there who liked the pre-4e setup.  I'm one of them.  Non-casters could stay relevant into epic levels, it was just clear they did different things than casters.  Instead 4e sacrificed 30 years of game dynamic to create 'balance' that stomped all over many of the iconic themes of DnD magic-users while turning all the classes into 'casters by any other name.'

[TigerShark]

to be fair, that thing was gonna cost a LOT, and they were probably hoping for a lot of other backers to see it & hop on.....

"Fair?" Memberships were sold for D&D Insider on the promise of beta testing the new table top system. That they pulled it made a lot of people angry, regardless of cost.

If it costs too much, charge more. I'm sure people will pay it.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I'm not doing a 'derp just like on de computer, herp derp.'  I've played the game since Original Edition, played through 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e.  I liked them all each one more than the last and shrugged off people comparing them to Everquest and such.  I'm saying that as a person who Alpha-Tested and did English Localization for one of the Chinese MMOs when it went International that the Attack Powers system of that particular MMO was very similar mechanically to the Power system of 4e.  In and of itself that's not bad, but in the process they radically changed the magic system from all prior editions.  And for me that was a game breaker, the changes they implemented in 4e changed the game in ways that made me not want to play it.  So instead my DnD money goes to Pathfinder.
And there were people out there who liked the pre-4e setup.  I'm one of them.  Non-casters could stay relevant into epic levels, it was just clear they did different things than casters.  Instead 4e sacrificed 30 years of game dynamic to create 'balance' that stomped all over many of the iconic themes of DnD magic-users while turning all the classes into 'casters by any other name.'

There's nothing inherently great about the Vancian spellcasting system.  Keeping it around just because D&D has always used it really isn't much of an argument.  It was artificially constraining for no real purpose and tended to punish people who didn't want to use the standard combat spells of each level.  At low levels, spellcasters tended to be too weak to contribute much, while at high levels they utterly dominated, the balance between classes was nonexistent.  There really isn't a good reason to keep something in the rules just because it's a sacred cow, especially when the cow is as ugly and unwieldy as D&D's spellcasting system is.

[TigerShark]

There are a lot of folks who get attached to things because it's the way it's always been. You find that in every walk of life. BattleTech forums are like a shrine to that pattern of thought.

I think the Vancian magic was broken at one point but, like I said, the additional Cantrips acting like "at-wills" more than make up for it. I haven't tested it out past a few games, but spellcasters are probably going to be über strong with these new rules.

[William J. Pennington]

I'll look at it, and if theres a good sourcebook to borrowfor Fantasy Hero, thats about the extent of my concern.  If Next still uses classes, levels, feats, armor class and hit points, I won't be interested in it.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Then you're doomed to disappointment.

[William J. Pennington]

Then you're doomed to disappointment.

Well, as long as it generates good setting and other sourcebooks to borrow from. 

The last edition I really liked was the players option books from 2e. 

[Istal_Devalis]

People said exactly the same thing about 3.0 when it came out except they compared it to Everquest and Ultima.  Bury it and move on, it's not adding anything to the conversation.

Most of the people I recall were comparing it to Diablo. Not helped by them actually putting out a Diablo supplement at the time...

[Wrangler]

I been gaming with people play testing 5E, they said its enjoyable while not willing reveal details. 

I've played most editions of the game, dabbled with Pathfinder when i could find someone who wasn't stuckup about it being Pathfinder.

Frankly i'm tapped out on it.   I want to play, but having to relearn all these differient variants of the game is braindamaging at times.
Fortunately, i'm going back to Nostalgia-ville this weekend since Frank Mentzer running Original D&D at convention i'm going to this weekend. I'm curious if he been asked by folks developing D&D Next for some input.

[rebs]

Well, as long as it generates good setting and other sourcebooks to borrow from. 

The last edition I really liked was the players option books from 2e.

I walked a few miles with the old group the day I first picked up the Wizard's and Priest's Handbooks.  Between everyone, we had all the sources covered.   The 1st ed stuff was easy to adapt because only a few things were really changed once you'd assimilated 2nd ed with knowledge of 1st ed.  Compared to other systems, yes it's arcane and tied to traditions as set by the Gygax, therefore, unwieldy and poorly tested at high level.  But it was the common ground because not everyone liked GURPS (my only problem with it was after a while, everyone was using a variation of the same character revolving around the Mastermind ability and a few others tied in under and around it), and there weren't very many good alternatives at the time for high fantasy. 

The Viking, Celt and Crusades books were fun too, though rarely used.  The Draconomicon was a surprise all time favorite of DnD books.  Drow of the UnderDark was a good one too.

[Orin J.]

There's nothing inherently great about the Vancian spellcasting system.  Keeping it around just because D&D has always used it really isn't much of an argument.  It was artificially constraining for no real purpose and tended to punish people who didn't want to use the standard combat spells of each level.

i never had that issue, but then i didn't utilize wizards as a combat class so much as a problem solver class. it's very much a system meant to downplay magic being just another tool and use it more as a special thing, which in the current market doesn't fly...

Most of the people I recall were comparing it to Diablo. Not helped by them actually putting out a Diablo supplement at the time...

hahah, i remember that horrible book, most of it was the build-a-random weapon table right?