Ratpick's page

I think I should elaborate on my position why I think advantage/disadvantage is actually preferable to simple modifiers: Advantage/Disadvantage makes it so that a highly trained character gets more mileage out of advantage.

With simple modifiers on a d20, a simple +1 is always equal to a 5% greater probability of success. That means that an untrained character and a trained character with the same advantage would gain an equal boost from advantage.

However, with advantage in use, a character with a higher bonus gets more out of advantageous circumstances. For an example: http://anydice.com/program/1281
This program shows the probabilities of rolling a certain number with advantage, but the first character has a +2 bonus to the roll while the other character has no relevant bonus. What you should be looking at is the At Least section, which shows the probability of hitting at least the given number.

Picking an arbitrary DC for our example, for an example 15, we can see that the character with the +2 bonus on the roll has a 64% chance of success, while the character with no relevant bonus has only a 51% chance. The difference between the two characters' chances of success is 13%. While the character with no training has a pretty good chance of succeeding on checks with low DCs, the character with the +2 bonus is gaining increasing returns. For an example, on a theoretical DC 20 check, the character with the +2 bonus has a 27.75% probability of success, while the character with no training whatsoever has only a 9.75% chance.

The fact is, while simple numerical modifiers always increase your probability of success by 5% for each +1 to the roll, advantage favors those with training. While a character with no relevant modifiers can quite comfortably succeed at checks of up to DC 15 more than half of the time assuming they have advantage, their returns start diminishing by the time they get beyond that point.

Also, advantage/disadvantage puts a cap on what types and DCs of checks a character actually has a chance in succeeding. This means that a character can't just stack situational modifiers in order to fake a greater degree of ability.

EDIT: Furthermore, there is still variety in DCs, which I think are a better way of representing the difficulty of a check than shifting situational modifiers, so you get a bit of both.

Ratpick wrote:

Also, Candyland is for suckers. Hungry Hungry Hippos is a real thinking man's game!

Rock'em Sock'em Robots, hands down. They even made a movie.

You mean Real Steel? I really want to see that film.

However, having a movie based on it is not necessarily a point in a board game's favour. For an example, Battleship.

EDIT: I really wish they would make a film based on Snakes and Ladders. If they went with the original Indian game, they could make it a religious horror film about reincarnation and karma.

Oh and seriously.. If modifier math of addition and subtraction, mostly of single digits, is too hard for you. Your geek/nerd cred is hereby revoked, Candyland might be more your speed.

I disagree. The RPG hobby is not the same as the high school math club. While I am a huge math geek (in spite of being an English major) I know that there are a number of people in the hobby who simply are not good at math. For an example, one of my very good friends can't do single-digit addition to save his life, especially with lots of stacking modifiers. Like myself, he's an English major.

He is also an accredited writer on the subject of RPGs, in addition to which he has translated one RPG, as well as having playtesting credits for 4e and writing credits for a handful of other RPGs. Should his geek/nerd licence be revoked?

Also, as others have pointed out in this very thread, 2d20 drop the lowest/highest has implications on the math of the game beyond what a simple -4/+4 modifier achieves. The reason I love the advantage/disadvantage system is that it changes the distribution of results so that it is no longer linear and more slanted towards either the low or high end of the scale, which I find is a much more mathematically elegant way to quantify advantage and/or disadvantage.

Maybe you should have your geek/nerd licence revoked for not seeing how the advantage/disadvantage system is different from simply adding or subtracting modifiers? ;)

Also, Candyland is for suckers. Hungry Hungry Hippos is a real thinking man's game!

I don't mind rolling the extra d20, but talking about probabilities with a d20 is kind of pointless IMO. The mode of the die is 1-20. If we were talking about 3d6, I could see talking about probability and averages, since that actually has a bell curve of results.

But the point is that 2d20 drop the lowest/highest, while not a curve, is a significantly different distribution from 1d20. I can't believe I'm linking this same thing again: http://anydice.com/program/11fd

I'm wondering how much of that is simply because the rules are still essentially in a draft form. When the full set of rules is released, I'd be very surprised if they were as stripped down as they are currently...

Personally, I don't think it's likely that they'll add that much more complexity into the core rules. Having read a number of forums, the reception to the light nature of the rules has been, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. I personally think they will abide by what they've implied thus far: these are pretty much the core rules of the game, subject to change only so they can work out the math and such, with more complex rules being handled through optional modules.

Which I think is awesome, because I could see myself happily running something in the vein of the current playtest rules.

In one of such statement, Monte named everyone he didn't have a problem with, which was everyone save Mearl, suggesting some bad blood between them.

In his first blog he only mentioned his fellow design team members by name. In the second one he elaborated that his omission of Mearls (who isn't on design, by the way) wasn't to suggest that his resignation had anything to do with him, because many speculated as much based on his first post. He then went on to list all the names of the people, including Mearls, who he'd worked with on D&D Next.

Here's the link to the post in question, just to dispel any speculation of that sort: http://montecook.livejournal.com/251693.html

I'm not really sure if that would result in the following quote:

Pax Veritas wrote:

I am the OD&D, 1E, and 2E crowd.

True, I guess.

To provide a counterpoint: I consider myself part of the "OD&D, 1E, and 2E crowd," whatever the hell that is, due to the fact that I find pre-3e editions of the game to be more to my liking. What I'm seeing in D&D Next caters more to my personal tastes than Pathfinder does, for reasons I've outlined in many other posts.

Also, I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who shares this view: I've heard many a person who identifies more with OSR than modern editions of the game go so far as to say that they think the playtest rules of the game are already vastly superior to Pathfinder.

I won't say that any generalizations can be made based on this: some OSR players will reject D&D Next for a variety of reasons, while some might find in it a good alternative to the various other OSR games and retro-clones that are out there. Personally, I probably won't stop playing OSR games any time soon, but I consider D&D Next a viable choice when I start to look for a new game.

At the risk of sounding like a total heel, I'm so tired of a small and overly vocal group of gamers wanting to make fun games more complicated than they really need to be. If you really need a system that covers every little thing in verisimilitude, then please, just go play FATAL and stop ruining everyone else's fun.

I don't think there's any need to suggest that anyone EVER even look at FATAL, beyond reading one particularly good review of it on RPG.net.

Besides, I hear HârnMaster is very crunchy and verisimilar without being a crime againts humanity.

I'm personally on the side of having as few options as possible and presenting them in such a way that you get a package of stuff instead of having to shop for everything separately. For an example, 3e character creation occasionally feels like a hassle because there are so many different feats and skills to choose from. Too many options lead to analysis paralysis on the part of players and when there are lots of options in play the DM also has more material to keep track of, just to see how it interacts with their game.

Not surprisingly, my favourite character creation method is "Roll 3d6 in order, pick a class that best fits with what you rolled, make some minor adjustments based on class, here's 3d8x10 gp, go crazy."

That said, they seem to have streamlined character creation in Next down to an acceptable level of complexity for me: choose race, choose class, pick a background which gives you skills, pick a theme which gives you feats. The degrees of complexity are the same as in 3e and 4e (Race/Class/Class Features/Skills/Feats), but they've streamlined picking skills and feats into a simple process of "Pick one of these neat packages."

Ratpick wrote:

I think one of the reasons why skill use is not in the How to Play section (beyond saying that you might get to add your skill bonus to your ability checks according to DM discretion) is that they're moving away from having rules for everything and towards a style of game where the DM makes informed rulings based on a set of guidelines.

To use the terms of the Old-School Primer, 3e and 4e are on the rules side, while Next is heavily leaning towards the rulings side.

I definitly see that, but I can't say I'm happy with it. As I DM the most in my group, I really don't want that sort of power. I'm perfectly fine with using the rules to help adjust my rulings or let the rules take over completely in some instances. Without codified rules, you have more DM arbitration, which means more work for the DM. And when that DM is in a bad mood (for whatever reason), good luck getting the Arbiter to say "Yes" to any suggestions of your character.

True, but as I pointed out in my earlier post, the two don't need to be mutually exclusive. It's just easier to build a basic system with lots of room for DM-made rulings and to build more task resolution systems on top of that than it is the other way around. I'm sure there will be rules modules to appease the needs of people who like more crunch with their rules, but a simple task resolution system with lots of freedom for DM arbitration pleases the old-school nuts like me, and as I said, it's easier to start with that as a baseline.

RE: modules. I think their line of thinking is more along the traditional lines, but in addition to that they have talked about trying some more novel things with modules. For an example, campaign modules, that are basically optional sets of rules that you can use to alter the feel of your campaign ever so slightly (campaign modules they've mentioned include low-magic, where cantrips and orisons become 1st-level spells, and high-magic, where all characters get access to a couple of cantrips/orisons). So, modules are not just going to be "Here's a new subsystem and a bunch of classes that make use of it."

I can actually see them doing lots of interesting things with modules, provided they run with this idea wholeheartedly. For an example, an idea that struck me yesterday that could be possible as a rules module would be monster themes: basically like themes for PCs, these could be used to turn the average mook into a different type of creature with a simple template, without having to go through the various steps of monster customization. So, if you wanted to turn an orc footsoldier into a more brutish, heavy-hitting type, you'd just give the orc the Brute theme, make the necessary adjustments and be done with it.

At least I hope they do that with monsters, because a simple system of minor templates that can be added on top of creatures to modify them on the fly would be terrific.

I think one of the reasons why skill use is not in the How to Play section (beyond saying that you might get to add your skill bonus to your ability checks according to DM discretion) is that they're moving away from having rules for everything and towards a style of game where the DM makes informed rulings based on a set of guidelines.

To use the terms of the Old-School Primer, 3e and 4e are on the rules side, while Next is heavily leaning towards the rulings side.

Pax Veritas wrote:

Er... I am the OD&D, 1E, and 2E crowd. No, this will not bring me back. Nor will the other 17 neo-grognards I know; we're playing Pathfinder.

I haven't really given the playtest too much of a look-through yet, but my brief skim has given me the impression that anyone who flatly rejects it in favor of Pathfinder has no right to claim to be a part of the OSR.

I don't think he made any claim towards being part of the OSR. Just that, you know, he's played OD&D, 1E and 2E, having then gone to Pathfinder.

There were a couple of areas of concern – the character sheets showed no consistency in layout and design, the fact that a poor set of stats could create a disparity between characters, the Rogue with Wisdom as a dump stat meaning that Searching (for traps or treasure) has become very tricky (no Skill Mastery and minimum die roll here!). It suddenly makes a Cleric the trap-finder general!

This jumped at me. Do you mean to say that you ran the game without Skill Mastery and the minimum die roll mechanic in use for the Rogue?

That seems disingenuous, given that the entire point of the playtest is to test out the rules as they are written at the moment.

EDIT: Whoops, sorry, apparently you did use the minimum die roll mechanic. Given that, I'm actually at a loss as to what you are saying in the quoted part.

Thirdly, this heavily rewards a Player's "out of the box" thinking or player's who have natural talent to be persuasive or has a natural knack to get people to see their Point of View. IF you don't have these natural characteristics and don't really feel being specifically cleaver all the time, Improv-style games are NOT for you. This doesn't mean that I think smart players should be penalized, but codified rules help mitigate how far they could strech their improvisation.

I personally take no issue with this. I much prefer the idea of challenging the players over challenging their characters.

However, there's no need for a system not to support both: it is much easier to build complexity upon a simple and loose rules set than it is to strip complexity from a complex base system. I'm sure that they will be providing more crunchy and detailed rules for dealing with, say, social encounters and skill use, but as modules, because building those assumptions into the core rules would alienate people who prefer to play it fast and loose.

In the end, it's all about DMs and players being on the same page about these things. I also feel that if the DM only gives the players fast and loose rules, players will be more likely to think outside of the box, while a DM who gives the players more detailed rules will encourage players to look for solutions within the rules. (And I've seen this happen: I've had the pleasure of running both 4e and Labyrinth Lord for one of my friends. In 4e, he stayed within the rules and looked for creative solutions and tricks within the rules, while in Labyrinth Lord he employed a lot of outside-the-box thinking and tried to come up with tricks that were not codified directly into the rules. I think the complexity and assumptions of the system feed into how players act in the game.) Neither philosophy is bad in my opinion, I just happen to prefer the former.

We saw BECMI as the 'kids' game. The fact is it was written as such and was all sorts of goodness and was where I started. Then we progressed, at a worldly 14 years old, to AD&D. Now AD&D was NEVER penned with kids as the target market - aging, beer-bellied men and zit-faced uni students (again more likely male) was by the nature of the author the target market. I still play 1e and find MANY, MANY things as a kid I didn't understand and we never applied. But that seemed not to interfere with the awesomeness of characters or the joy of DMing a game.

I actually think that the full BECMI (or is it BEMCI? I've seen both used.) is quite a complex game, but with a really simple base engine. AD&D is a completely different beast, with lots of complexity.

Personally, my preference for running AD&D-like games is Goblinoid Games' Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion. With Labyrinth Lord you get the 1981 Basic/Expert rules and with the Advanced Edition Companion you get the options from AD&D 1e presented in the style of B/X. The best thing about the AEG is that it doesn't change a damn thing about the base engine, it only adds more options, and you can run a game with Labyrinth Lord race-as-class Dwarfs and Advanced Edition race-and-class Dwarf Fighters in the same group without there being any compatibility issues.

I personally think that BECMI is still pretty much the industry standard for modular design: the Basic/Expert rules provided a simple yet robust rules framework and the later sets didn't change the rules in any way, only added options. The same can't be said for 3.5: I recall somewhere at the end of the line they had hit upon the idea of swift and immediate actions, and upon that realization they went and retroactively changed certain spells (including feather fall) to fit into those new concepts. 4e had a similar issue with backgrounds, presented in PHB2: while the background rules were presented as optional, characters created with using the PHB2 background rules were using explicitly different rules for character creation (although the difference only amounted to "You get one more skill based on your background if you pick one").

I think WotC would do well to take a look at BECMI and, while they're at it, Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion, for examples on how to do modular design properly.

So, um... looking at the thread title there, I seem to have gone on a tangent about something completely unrelated. Carry on.

JoãoFalcão wrote:

Truth be told, when the lead designer leaves the project midrun, somethings actually wrong. Monte is already famous for his work on 3E, being on 5E would glorify him if 5E was a sucess and would put the guy among names like Gygax and Arneson. Some people put him there already.

If he is leaving, well, all leads us to believe that 5E will not be a sucess.

It is a fact that many players were interested on 5E solely because of his presence and now those people are no longer following it.

If a gaming system had to die every time Monte Cook threw a hissy fit, this hobby would be long dead. :p

I don't think hissy fit is fitting in this context. Monte has gone on record to say that he has no problems with the people he's worked with on D&D Next and even elaborated by saying that he has no problem with anyone on the D&D Next team. So, most likely his reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the system and game itself but on company policy.

And to go from your post, Monte was quite down on 3.5 when it came out, even writing an article on why he wouldn't be providing 3.5 rules updates for Arcana Unearthed. It's clear even from the updated, expanded and cleaned up version of the game, Arcana Evolved, that it's still powered by the old 3e engine and not 3.5.

Furthermore, Monte also wrote an entire blog post about what he perceived as the failings of 3e, chief among them being their insistence on providing rules for everything, which he felt empowered players and reduced the power of the DM. Since one of D&D Next's stated design goals was DM empowerement (and I think the results of this goal can be seen quite clearly in the playtest documents), I feel that Monte probably has no problems with the system itself, but with his superiors (above Mike Mearls).

But yeah, Monte being down on 3.5, and 3e in retrospect, didn't spell immediate death for either system.

I really like the backgrounds, and the idea that they give you skills. I hope there will be rules to create your own backgrounds, and therefore skill packages. I'll do it anyway, but having rules for it will help that a lot.

The way things stand, background features seem to be 3-4 skills and one background feature. Making them should be pretty straightforward.

Also, since they've said that backgrounds are optional and there will be the possibility of building your character from scratch, I'm sure there will be some type of background creation system.

Getting your keep doesn't mean "retire". It means you get a whole new set of problems and adventures. :D

I'd like domain management as one of the potential endgames, if players feel comfortable with it. So, at a certain level everyone gets a keep and then you start playing Civilization powered by the D&D system, complete with a hex map of the surrounding wilderness. Including the dungeons where you send hapless adventurers to slay monsters to keep your domain safer.

As an alternate endgame, there'd be climbing to the top of Mount Celestia to give Heironeous the finger and kick his ass.

We don't bring up "Stormwind Fallacy" rants in discussions on Storyteller.

Clearly you haven't heard of Lupus Stargazer Ahroun.

Just kidding. I mostly agree with your points, except for the fact that D&D is, by far, not the most crunch-heavy system on the market. I think that D&D gets weird looks both from players of crunchy, rules-heavy systems (like Rolemaster, HERO and others) and more story and interaction-based systems (like Storyteller and Amber) simply due to its position as the most popular game. The logic being that if it's popular it's because it caters to dumb people, therefore it's dumb.

I don't agree with this assessment myself, but I think there's some truth to the fact that D&D is by far the most by-the-numbers traditional RPG property on the market. It doesn't help that D&D is quite slow to pick-up on modern game design. (D&D got a unified task resolution system in, what, 2000? And only now, with Next, are we seeing some manner of mechanic for story-based benefits for characters beyond "make something up based on your background story." Neither of which are examples of novel game design, except in D&D.)

I'll be happy if some of the customizations for characters involve non-combat aspects, as well as combat. A problem I have with 3.5/PF feats is that almost all of them are directly combat-related.

I run an RPG, not a tactical wargame.

I think this is pretty much a given. As they seem to have abandoned the 4e concept of strict combat roles, it's easy to assume that there may be ways for you to customize your character towards non-combat activities.

Also, the backgrounds are quite novel (at least for D&D) in how they hand out story-based benefits in addition to serving as a skill-delivery system. That already goes to show that the social and story aspects of the game are being considered hand-in-hand with the crunch.

In the early days of the APs I thought Paizo had a great model where new rules would be introduced as part of the current AP only. So if you were playing the AP you had some new crunch to go along with the adventure and if you weren’t you didn’t even know about the alternate rules unless the GM brought them to the game (since players don’t typically have the AP volumes). This could be a great model for DDN where the “rule plugins” come with the adventures or campaign books that use them.

I think this is an absolutely wonderful idea. Instead of selling new rules as, well, rulebooks, incorporate the new rules into campaign setting and adventure material.

However, one potential problem with that would be that people who want certain rules would be forced to buy and adventure or campaign setting they didn't want with it. I know that if I was forced to buy "Warland: The Campaign Setting of Having Wars all the Time" to have the "Wars and stuff" rules for my homebrew setting... well, I might not get furious, but I might be a little peeved.

Another potential problem is that people who enjoy campaign settings for their fluff and not their crunch would get an extra helping of rules with their gazetteers. Another DM might be buying the aforementioned Warland book because he loves the history and personae of Warland, but then he'd hate the book spending so much time on rules on wartime rationing procedures.

I think Paizo should keep what they do best no matter how good D&DN is (and I think it's really good....so far). And what they do best is AP's, modules, & adventures. Something that WOTC, in my opinion, stinks at. In a perfect world, if D&D Next becomes hugely popular as a RPG, they should subcontract Paizo to write adventures for them, meanwhile, Paizo can still write adventures for the still very good Pathfinder RPG. Of course I say this as a consumer, not a businessman/lawyer looking at business models, OGLs, trademarks, or corporate profits...i'd like to have my cake and eat it too. I honestly think that no system can survive on system alone. We lazy DM's (and there are many of us) need that pre-written adventure to even run the game and if there isn't that, then what good is having the game in the first place regardless of how wonderful the mechanics might be.

While I won't put into question the amazing quality of Paizo's adventure paths, they are quite, well, pathy. Given that there are a number of OSR bloggers consulting for D&D Next (including the RPG Pundit as well as Zak S. of Playing D&D With Pornstars fame) who have a thing for sandboxes and location-based adventures, I think the model for D&D Next adventure modules may well be the dungeon sandbox or adventure location, instead of the story-based adventure.

Alternately, they could try doing both to appease all fans. Personally, I prefer location-based adventures and sandboxes over story-based adventures.

Looking at the playtest rules, I think Next has a simple enough framework to at least make converting adventures into it simple, with monsters mainly requiring some eyeballing. Feats and classes, however, I'm not certain of. While the Cleric and Wizard look very much like their 3.5 versions, the Fighter and Rogue are quite dramatically different.

Also, as far as feats go, the feats that the pregen characters get are quite different from standard 3e and 4e feats. Most 3e and 4e feats are numerical bonuses to certain things, while Next feats, based on the pregens, seem to be "Completely new stuff for you to do!"

Which is actually an approach that I vastly prefer to both 3e and 4e. I think character customization should be about gaining more options, not about shifting the math around.

DDN has an opportunity right now to keep players of all kinds happy if it can publish a cohesive enough set of rules at the start, allow and enable the players to master it, then: (this is the hard part) leave it alone. We’ll see.

This is pretty much the opposite of what they intend to do. The intention is to make the game modular, so there will be more material that expands upon the core rules.

However, this is no different than what is usually done with any system: you get the base system and then modules that expand upon the material in the base system.

One of the benefits of the modular approach is that, as far as I understand, all of the modular components will be there according to DM discretion. One of the starting goals of the game, when design started, was to put power back in the hands of the DM. This is clearly visible even in the current playtest rules: a lot of time in the How to DM file is spent on giving guidelines on making rulings.

Also, that's another old-school feather in Next's hat: the insistence on DM-made rulings, not rules that are set in stone.

So, I guess the game will keep getting more and more complex, but only if the DM decides to run it with all the switches on. I don't think anyone who runs the game with just the core set will be running an incomplete game, no more than anyone who runs Pathfinder with just the Core Rulebook and the Bestiary.

One thing that D&D has going for it over Paizo is the wealth of campaign settings. I could see it as a potential deal-maker for many if WotC could leverage all of the various intellectual properties (like Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Planescape and Dragonlance) and produce content for those settings once again. If I can recall correctly, they've implied that there will be assumptions for running Forgotten Realms in all of its ages, so that people who hated the Spellplague and the various changes it brought to the Realms can safely ignore it, while people who liked those changes can keep playing in post-Spellplague Realms.

This all hinges upon what WotC does with those settings and if they decide on the one setting per year model again, they stand to lose.

Runequest and GURPS players generally don't hang out with D&D players on forums. Even on RPG.net there is a separate forum for D&D players.

I think it's got at least something to do with the mentality that D&D, being the most popular RPG, is baby's first RPG. It's often not stated as such, but I assume there is a bit of elitism on the part of players of non-D&D systems towards D&D players, stemming from the idea that "At least we don't play D&D."

I can actually attest to this phenomena: I started role-playing with MERP and Rolemaster, and even though I'd never played D&D it was somehow ingrained in my mind as a less refined RPG than the obviously superior Rolemaster system that we used. I mean, D&D didn't even have critical hit charts and task resolution tables!

I'm really kind of curious how much of the old-school feel is due to the old-school Caves of Chaos module.

I mean, you'd get an old school feel out of playing that thing with 4E.

For me it's largely to do with a number of things: Vancian casting being back, the fact that the game doesn't assume the grid like 3E and 4E, the simple skill system (which, while being based on d20+modifiers vs. DC, is more reminiscent of Rules Cyclopedia's skill system than either 3E's or 4E's in my opinion), and the fact that weapons are back to being mostly differentiated in terms of damage rather than having a number of different special abilities and variable crit ranges and modifiers.

But yeah, the Caves of Chaos module also has something to do with it, as does the fact that the DMing advice given in the module assumes a more old-school philosophy (i.e. all of the combat encounters are not assumed to be balanced for the party and the module underlines the dangers of dawdling in a dungeon filled with monsters). There's also the fact that the module is simply presented as simply an adventure location and not a pre-written story, which is often the case in more new-school adventures.

Based on the playtest files, D&D Next strikes a nice balance of the old-school feel (especially on account of tactical grid-based combat not being the norm) and more new-school character customization (I really like the characters being a sum of Race/Class/Background/Theme, and some of the abilities granted by the Backgrounds are totally sweet).

Then again, I'm not really worried about the future of Pathfinder. Pathfinder has pretty much secured its own place in the crunchy, 3e-based segment of D&D players, and I can see Pathfinder thriving even after Next is released. For me, D&D Next seems closer to my personal preferences.

Anyone else reminded of that Discworld novel? Where the heroes hop backwards on a slippery roof, covering one eye as they shoot an arrow at the dragon's weak spot.

(Since everyone knows that one-in-a-million chances happen nine times in ten - you just have to balance all the factors to get it exactly one-in-a-million).

Guards! Guards! was the novel in question.

I personally think that if you can get 20 different disadvantages on your attack, logic should dictate that you automatically succeed.

True, but he only mentioned the Dwarf's warhammer. ALL the pregens had the die bump.

Nope! Quarterstaff deals 1d8 damage according to the weapon table, so the 1d8 for the elf and cleric are correct.

The halfling's 1d6 damage with the dagger may either be a halfling feature, as you suspect, or a feature of the Rogue we are not being shown, which would be a direct lift from 4e.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:

thejeff wrote:

The other thing about familiars is that they are explicitly summoned creatures. You can summon or dismiss them with an action. The minor ritual doesn't replace the familiar after losing it as it does in PF, but resummons the original.

This will lead to even riskier use of familiars, since there is no long-term risk.

That's what I thought too. Now, instead of the wizard's cat being something to be protected, it's instead the go-to choice for suicide missions.

This is basically an awkward patch. Having it be summoned like a pokemon is likewise dull.

One of the early Order of the Stick strips.

Now this is actually how it works.

Oh my.

D&D Next is Order of the Stick: The Game?!

I like it as a way to make fringe weapons viable parts of the game. One could extend the idea to particular cultures using odd weapons without being mechanically disadvantaged.

Absolutely. It's a simple way to make certain weapons more advantageous to certain races without having to resort to 3.5's and 4e's exotic weapons, which I saw rarely used beyond the dwarves always wielding dwarven waraxes for greater damage if they were proficient in martial weapons.

I hope this is an indication that exotic weapons in general are history. Good riddance, spiked chains and double swords. You won't be missed.

Ratpick wrote:

Yeah, obviously there's no telling at this point if they actually manage to do what they've set out to do. But you've got to admit, there is a lot more ambition in trying to make the perfect D&D by melting it down to its special essence and molding that into a great edition enjoyed by all than in taking an existing rules-system and tweaking it.

That's a mentality they need to lose, they can't do that; please the majority maybe; 100% full aproval rate? Perfection doesn't exist in this world.

I'm sure they have no delusions of being able to please everyone. My post was an exercise in humouristic hyperbole (which apparently failed miserably). ;)

So you think the 2d6 isn't a mistake, Ratpick?

If that's the case, we definitely need more info. I'll be glad when we have the creation package, so these kinds of questions will be answered.

I'm starting to think that it's not a mistake.

I think I can grok it. Since the basic rules for weapons are probably going to remain as is and be simple, if they want to get across the idea that dwarves are good at using axes and hammers, increasing their damage dice by one step is a really simple and straightforward solution. It makes a dwarf fighter with an axe a viable character mechanically: it doesn't just tell you that most dwarfs favour axes and hammers, it shows you that they will kill you dead with axes and hammers.

The other thing I looked at was the stats for the medusa. They're listed as LE, but have an unreasoning hatred for all other life, which sounds rather CE in my book. They also might wander around talking madly to their statues, which sounds more insane than actually evil. And then, instead of any folklore, there's ass-pull "mythology" about them maybe being descended from some woman who the gods cursed for vanity or maybe there's some other origin myth, just make sure you make them all cardboard evil, m'kay?

It's everything I hated about the 4e MM and more. Meh.

Medusas have been Lawful Evil at least since 3e, if not for longer. It's a hold-over from earlier editions.

Also, I don't really see what's so 4e about the bestiary. I also like the fact that the myth about medusas isn't necessarily the true one, and the bit about a dead medusa's gaze still being able to petrify someone (after which the medusa's snake-hairs slither away!) is simply inspired.

In some forums, the basic idea goes from "WotC has no idea where it is going" to "Why the f*** is Mike Mearl in charge?", so quite a few people are doubting about a lot of things.

Yeah, obviously there's no telling at this point if they actually manage to do what they've set out to do. But you've got to admit, there is a lot more ambition in trying to make the perfect D&D by melting it down to its special essence and molding that into a great edition enjoyed by all than in taking an existing rules-system and tweaking it.

Also, as far as Mearls goes, he made Iron Heroes, so he's cool in my book.

(With that said, and I feel that it is necessary to addend my post with this on this particular forum, I think Pathfinder is a vast improvement on D&D 3.5, because all of the little tweaks add up to make a superior game, but most of the ideas in the Core Rulebook aren't very novel.

Now, the Advanced Player's Guide is f%&&ing awesome.)

Anyone still have the old Alpha playtest PDFs from Pathfinder? I missed the first alpha, but I think the first I saw was the second revision. That's how you run an RPG playtest. From my first read-through of those rules I was sold and have loved playing through the Beta and final versions.

I'm just not seeing that with Next.

Personally, I think the two aren't really comparable. Pathfinder was based directly on the D&D 3.5 ruleset, so Paizo already had a framework to start working on, whereas with D&D Next the only framework they had was "All editions of D&D ever."

Taken into account that they first had to identify which parts of the various editions they thought to be part of the core experience of D&D, I think it's okay that the first playtest we're getting is very bare-bones. I mean, unlike WotC with Next, Paizo wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel with Pathfinder. (The wheel, in this case, being Dungeons & Dragons.)

Oh, I totally agree; or at least, D&D won't be a 50 million dollar brand until it's treated as a serious franchise by Hasbro; the D&D movie looked so awful I never went to see it, and I've been drinking the cool aid since I was around 10 years old; that episode of Community was a pretty good portrayal of the highs and lows of a play session, but didn't feature the current edition, so no brand recognition there.

Oh, how I loved that episode.

But yeah, Hasbro has recently got back the rights to D&D video games from Atari. I think there might be hidden potential in getting more recognition for the brand through a successful video game, at least now that Atari's out of the picture. Based on what I've heard, most of Atari's attempts at making a D&D video game were quite terrible.

Potentially, a good video game based on D&D, released close to the launch of Next, may attract enough players to justify D&D as a 50 million dollar brand. Or maybe they'll find some other way to increase brand recognition. Only time will tell.

The thing is, WotC seems to ignore the one strength they have as relates to the OGL: their intellectual property. I'm in for the Next playtest, and will most likely buy the (first few) core rulebooks, but think that WotC couldn't lose by release Pathfinder compatible Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun etc. All the 3.5 players I know would love a WotC name brand Monster Manual containing PF Displacer Beasts, Githyanki and Mind Flayers but can only homebrew a conversion form 3.5 material and say, "It's almost the real thing."

Rat, I agree that anniversary editions every five years would suck, but if WotC would put out a solid rules system, and publish supplements (modules now I guess) for it until...

You raise a number of really good points here. However, I still think it unlikely that WotC can ever make D&D the 50 million dollar brand (with potential growth towards 100 million dollars a year) that they want it to be. I don't think anyone in the entire RPG industry could rake in that much money.

I mean, most D&D players would probably be happy to throw their money at good D&D products, but I'm not sure if there's enough money in the entire hobby (okay, I'm exaggerating) to justify D&D as a 50 million dollar brand.

Ratpick wrote:

So, apparently there's some favored class mechanic, one benefit of which is potentially gaining an increase in hit die type if the class is favored? Curious, I don't really know what to think of it.

One average it is 1 extra hit point per level (5.5 vs. 6.5)

Yeah, I could calculate as much. The reason why I don't know what to think of it is that I'm not really partial to favored class mechanics. I think if the races and their racial abilities support a certain class of character strongly, players of that race will generally gravitate towards those classes. Favored class mechanics are to me another layer of reward for playing according to type, which makes more left-field character concepts less rewarding.

Also, having looked at the pregens again, the Dwarf Cleric apparently deals 1d10 damage with his warhammer instead of 1d8, as stated on the weapon table in the rules. So, maybe dwarfs get to increase their damage dice with hammers and axes? That would also explain the Dwarf Fighter's 2d6 damage with his greataxe, when it says 1d12 in the weapon table.

I really dont believe that the demise of D&D means the demise of RPG's anymore than the death of VHS meant the death of home video or the death of vinyl meant the death of music recording.

While I agree with this, I do want the D&D brand to survive if only because Dungeons & Dragons is such a cool name.

Pathfinder looks like the evidence that OGL is a good base for a buisiness moddel.

For the RPG industry in general, yes. Sadly, WotC is a subsidiary of Hasbro and thus they need to rake in loads of cash to justify their existence. More than is realistic to expect of RPGs, which are already a niche hobby at best.

I don't like the way WotC treats D&D as a brand: while I love a great deal of the material they've produced for the game, D&D as a brand, while the most-recognized in the RPG industry, just isn't big enough to make the sort of overhead that Hasbro wants. I mean, the entire business plan of D&D Next seems to be "Well, if we could only get everyone to stop playing other editions of D&D and start playing ours again, we'd be able to make enough money to justify our continued employment."

As I expressed in another thread, I'm not particularly optimistic about them pulling this off for a variety of reasons. However, I don't think D&D Next failing will spell doom for the brand: most likely outcome is that they will sell the brand to someone else. Worst case scenario is that they just decide to sit on the brand name, not doing anything with it, besides maybe releasing anniversary editions of old books. Which would be terrible.

Malaclypse wrote:

Because the 'good stuff' in the PF rule set is simply the 3.5 rule set. They have that already.

like Cantrips and Combat Maneuvers which I heared are introduced in the playtest?

Well, at-will cantrips were already in 4e, and Pathfinder's combat maneuvers are just stuff you can do in 3e combat put under one unified system.

Also, what may be causing confusion is the fact that, as far as I've understood, the modular combat maneuvers are mean to be stuff you can do in combat by sacrificing some, but not all, of your damage. So, instead of just doing a bull rush, you make an attack, deal damage (but less of it than normal) and also push the opponent.

So, more like 4e's Fighter powers, only not tied to one class, which I think is good. I think characters should be able to do stuff like disarming, tripping and pushing enemies without sacrificing all of their damage output. Dungeon Crawl Classics also has a similar system, I hear.

Not to mention that it's a little silly to label the only company to release an integrated digital tool set and online subscription content delivery model for their tabletop RPG title as pre-21st century. If WotC is in the 20th century, then every other RPG publisher is in the 19th.

Then again, their decision to pull all pdfs from sale was, in my opinion, quite regressive, and has made getting pdfs of older, out of print material impossible to gain legally, which I think is quite silly.

I'd also like to say that I'm a supporter of open gaming, but seeing as most companies in the industry don't support open gaming I feel it's quite silly to single out WotC in that regard.

The immediate implications of this are that Sorcerers and Wizards are going to be worse off at low levels, and Fighters and other classes that don't rely on any sort of daily mechanic at all will be much worse off in general. As a fix, I would give Fighters and Rogues something to compensate for this, as well as giving Sorcerers and Wizards the ability to use cantrips at will, for a very minor power boost.

Other than than, for the most part this is a very elegant and nice idea. However, I'm a bit leery about Wild Shape. It's a very strong ability and even with the number of forms limited to a handful the versatility of a Druid who has unlimited use of that ability make it potentially very dangerous.

Less math is always good. I play to have fun and roll dice, not to do algebra or math, like i'm in school again, or worry about statistics and what my chances are with this or that mechanic. I'm really impressed with alot folks around here ability to break the game down into percentiles and bar graphs and complex math formulas, but that's just not playing a game to me. Therefore, I highly enjoy the advantage/disadvantage rules. I also like the very much so stripped down list of conditions and how hardly any of them give a (+/-) modifier....just 2 or 3 sentences that says what happens and usually disadvantage.

Yeah, the advantage/disadvantage rules at least reduce the amount time spent subtracting and adding modifiers. Time spent not adding up modifiers for various circumstances is always good in my book.

Also, to give an alternate viewpoint: I love statistics and probability, and one of the reasons why I love the advantage/disadvantage system is that, in addition to reducing the amount of subtraction and addition you need to do in game, it ever so subtly alters the probability distribution to make a part-time math geek like myself absolutely giddy. ;)

Talonhawke wrote:

P.H. Dungeon wrote:

this is a bit off topic, but does anyone know why the fighter has a plus 7 to damage?

Don't have my stuff availble right now but I believe he has an ability that gives him a + on damage. Though I also think its still higher than it should be.

He does have an ability that says he gets a +2 to damage, but that +Str still only adds to +5. I couldn't figure out where the other +2 was coming from, so I was wondering it was a mistake on the sheet.

It's either, as you point out, a mistake, or alternately some of the math is still behind the curtain.

Since they raised the hit dice of the wizard to d6, I can see how the fighter's hit die would be a d12.

And it goes along with the general trend of more hit points at low level.

Actually, having now read the first playtest notes on the Wizards site, you were right: the dwarf Fighter has a d12 for his hit die by virtue of his race.

So, apparently there's some favored class mechanic, one benefit of which is potentially gaining an increase in hit die type if the class is favored? Curious, I don't really know what to think of it.

It became an edition war. 1E vs Basic.

I don't think that was ever a result of Arneson vs. Gygax. Both games were produced and supported by the same company, at the same time.

Also, I don't think there ever was a flaming edition war between 1e and B/X players.

maybe they'll even arrive in the 21st century and slap the OGL on D&D Next

I don't understand this point of view. The OGL, when it first came out, was almost completely unprecedented. Still to this day, it is far from given in the RPG industry that any major company would just give an open licence to use its mechanics freely for the sake of producing third party content. The ones that stand out are Pathfinder (which is a given, because it is keeping up the OGL flame), a couple of retro-clones (like Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC, which have their own licences for producing third party content) and a handful of indie games (including FATE in its Spirits of the Century incarnation). I also believe that Savage Worlds has a licence of some sort, but I might be wrong on this.

Most of the major sellers in the RPG industry beyond WotC and Paizo have no such licences, and while you could always produce third party content for, say, The One Ring, you would have to file off all the serial numbers and wouldn't be able to advertise your content as compatible with The One Ring. So, if arriving in the 21st century means more open licences for RPGs, most of the major sellers in the industry have a lot of catching up to do with both Paizo and Wizards.