Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Now your playing with Playtests!

[Scots Dragon]

Another thing to consider on top of that is that eladrin were in the previous editions as an entire sub-group of extraplanar beings alongside such beings as angels, archons and guardinals. The idea that they were the new high elves with increased connections to the fey therefore erased the inhabitants of an entire plane from existence. And then the Feywild was introduced as a replacement, but for fans of Planescape that was just another poke in the eye.

And then someone had the bright idea that if eladrin are the new high elves, then maybe they're the new moon elves and sun elves as well. So then Evereska, Myth Drannor and Evermeet, completely and utterly iconic to the elves of the Forgotten Realms, are now eladrin nations instead. Seriously. Go check the Forgotten Realms campaign guide.

Complicating matters are the eladree and celadrin concepts, both of which are elven/eladrin hybrids. Only, the elves they are hybrids with are in fact now eladrin, and the eladrin they're hybrids with no longer exist.


Seriously. Bugger the eladrin.

[DefKab]

Personally, I very much prefer 4th Edition to 3.5, and I've played 3.5 since the beginning. Really, the only reason I can play DnD at all is because I'm a dirty, pirating bastard. Both 3.5 and 4 suck. And that's simply because you have no synchrocity in the books people have. 3.5 was worse, having over one hundred books you could purchase, but 4E had it to.

This is one thing I would hate to see in 5th...

And it seems, by the rules of the playtest, that I'm going to continue to dabble in both 3.5 and 4, without switching over, simply because it IS so much like all the other editions. If I wanted something similar, well... Hell, I'd play the other editions, because odds are, I already own it.

No, I like it when a game system does something rediculously new, because it's a lot better than doing reload after reload just to get the same point. That same point is "Not everyone likes this..."

So. Not everyone is going to like Next, no matter what they do with it. Why not try something radical and new? They did it with 4th, and to say they failed would be a blind lie. People LIKE 4th edition, just not everyone. They made money off of it, and they pulled people into the game that wouldn't play if they just re-hashed 3.5, because that's not what they like.

So... Hate on 4e if you want, but at least it was a daring step. And I do hate you 3.5ers, for bullying WOTC back into doing the same old stuff, and making them look like fools for ten more years with DnD Next....

[Scots Dragon]

Funnily enough, myself, Yora and Scowling Dragon, all three of us most recently posting, have been shown to be more prominent fans of 2nd edition than 3rd edition in recent threads due to the wealth of setting information. Though not always mathematically.

So you're hating on... who, exactly? I mean, it can't be us. We're 2e fans, and while I can't vouch for Yora and Scowling Dragon, I know I'm not exactly someone who's singing the praises of 3.5e.

[Scowling Dragon]

Im a fan of 2es fluff (Its classic yet well written), and Im making my own homebrew system.....SO uh.....yeah. Im not sure where I fit in.

I just dislike 4e from a mechanics standpoint and a fluff standpoint.

[Nightmarenny]

Another thing to consider on top of that is that eladrin were in the previous editions as an entire sub-group of extraplanar beings alongside such beings as angels, archons and guardinals. The idea that they were the new high elves with increased connections to the fey therefore erased the inhabitants of an entire plane from existence. And then the Feywild was introduced as a replacement, but for fans of Planescape that was just another poke in the eye.

And then someone had the bright idea that if eladrin are the new high elves, then maybe they're the new moon elves and sun elves as well. So then Evereska, Myth Drannor and Evermeet, completely and utterly iconic to the elves of the Forgotten Realms, are now eladrin nations instead. Seriously. Go check the Forgotten Realms campaign guide.

Complicating matters are the eladree and celadrin concepts, both of which are elven/eladrin hybrids. Only, the elves they are hybrids with are in fact now eladrin, and the eladrin they're hybrids with no longer exist.


Seriously. Bugger the eladrin.

They should have done something different with the FR, and they should never of considered the idea of Half-breeds between the Eladrin and Elves(Though I really hate the idea of them in the first place) but the Eladrin were a tiny no name race that had almost nothing on them in the MM and were probably not very popular. Considering the complete restructuring of the planes anyway I see no problem with giving them that name. Seriously I know they took out a race you really liked but they barely existed for most DnD players. I would discover that there were Eladrin in 3.5 until about a year ago.

They arn't really a premier DnD race.

Also calling the Eladrin High Elves really wouldn't have solved one of the problems of 3.5s lore which was that it was constantly more of the same.

More Elves

More Dwarves

More Gnomes

At least 4th editions lore took the game in new places while still giving every thing required to play with the old races.

[Scowling Dragon]

I really don't get your logic train Nightemarenny.

[Nightmarenny]

I really don't get your logic train Nightemarenny.

Which part?

[Kurald Galain]

This reminds me of the 4E marketing department again, with their videos about how utterly stupid gnomes are and how much the game would be improved by killing them.

(and then of course they put them back in the second PHB)

[DefKab]

Funnily enough, myself, Yora and Scowling Dragon, all three of us most recently posting, have been shown to be more prominent fans of 2nd edition than 3rd edition in recent threads due to the wealth of setting information. Though not always mathematically.

So you're hating on... who, exactly? I mean, it can't be us. We're 2e fans, and while I can't vouch for Yora and Scowling Dragon, I know I'm not exactly someone who's singing the praises of 3.5e.

Actually, I find, even tho I cared little about the edition wars before (as I said, I play 3.5 and 4, and if I was old enough then, I probably would've played 2nd), but I find those praising 5th edition are only saying it's good because "Oh, it looks just like _____!" And I think that's a horrible, horrible reason to like an edition in DnD's life.

Now. I like Mutants and Masterminds. And when 3E came out for that, I expected simply more of the same, because, well. That's all they had going.

But DnD's editions were hardly similar. All included huge changes to the ideas within, obviously, or else we wouldn't have such strong edition wars. I think they need to take their next step, their next big change, and see what comes out of it...

So... Really.... I hate Nexters, before the game is already out, because what they SEEM (I may be wrong) to want is more of the same...

[Scowling Dragon]

I don't get your argument of Pro-Past fluff destroying and introducing new fluff that just fractures the fanbase.

The argument that "at least its new" is a very poor one.

"Transformers may be a sin against art, but hey at least its new from the past series"

[Scots Dragon]

Oh wow. Eladrin as a 'tiny no-name race'.

They were the inhabitants of Arborea and Olympus and Arvandor. They were like angels and demons and devils, creatures beyond simple classification as a 'race'; they were a category, and in many ways the physical extraplanar embodiments of the chaotic good alignment much as devils were lawful evil and archons were lawful good. They were as much a category as demi-human and humanoid, extraplanar beings who had many different forms and subtypes. Just because the lacklustre 3rd edition barely managed to include them doesn't dilute the fact that they were pretty damn major in their own way.

And were, in fact, the central point of several story arcs. These story arcs are now, as a consequence, rendered invalid. Hell, the settings that they were a part of are also rendered at least partly invalid as a result. Would you enjoy it if some of your favourite stories and settings were completely retconned away by some bunch of people in marketing thinking about what's 'popular'?

[Nightmarenny]

Oh wow. Eladrin as a 'tiny no-name race'.

They were the inhabitants of Arborea and Olympus and Arvandor. They were like angels and demons and devils, creatures beyond simple classification as a 'race'; they were a category, and in many ways the physical extraplanar embodiments of the chaotic good alignment much as devils were lawful evil and archons were lawful good. They were as much a category as demi-human and humanoid, extraplanar beings who had many different forms and subtypes. Just because the lacklustre 3rd edition barely managed to include them doesn't dilute the fact that they were pretty damn major in their own way.

And were, in fact, the central point of several story arcs. These story arcs are now, as a consequence, rendered invalid. Hell, the settings that they were a part of are also rendered at least partly invalid as a result. Would you enjoy it if some of your favourite stories and settings were completely retconned away by some bunch of people in marketing thinking about what's 'popular'?

In 3.5 the Eladrin are absolutely a no name race.

When you say story arcs do you mean the books? Because I honestly don't care about the way changing the RPG's fluff effects the books but I certainly can sympathize with you if you feel you've lost something there.

At the same time I can say I wouldn't at all feel the same way. For you see I am a comicbook fan. One of the first things you learn in comics is to appreciate a story by itself even if later book decide it "didn't happen"

Your last sentence is somewhat misleading however since it was more likely someone in design going "alright, we can have both these races both be Elves since were trying to cut down on making iteration after iteration of the same creature. What can we call this? Well Eladrin currently isn't taken in our new setting and it sound like it fits them. Lets take that."

I don't get your argument of Pro-Past fluff destroying and introducing new fluff that just fractures the fanbase.

The argument that "at least its new" is a very poor one.

"Transformers may be a sin against art, but hey at least its new from the past series"

Ok well the first thing we need to cover here is that I don't think that 4th editions fluff was bad. It was a bit thin that times but I found I preferred it leaps and bounds over 3.5 which gave me a ton of info none of which I found useful in creating my campaigns.

I liked the Eladrin and the general divide between them and Elves, I really liked the Deva and their connection to the (Tiger head guys, sorry can't remember the name off the top of my head and I wanna sleep) and I like the idea of Tiefling being truly a race instead of a half breed.

That said no I don't think that change is good if its bad change but it is better to at least try. take what worked last time and tinker with what didn't. They did that with the conversion between 2nd and 3 as well.

[Craft (Cheese)]

What do you think would have worked better? Going to a points-based system instead of a class-based one?

Nah, no need for points. A "quick" (as in, quick in description, not in implementation) fix for classes/powers:

- Remove class restrictions on powers. Anyone can pick anything at the appropriate level. You can still have roles by tagging powers as Leader powers, Striker powers, etc. but there's really no point in forcing the player to straightjacket themselves into a single role.

- Less repetition in powers. Just have one version of a power that everyone can pick.

- Scale everything as much as possible. Every power should do something truly unique: If you just want the numbers to get bigger, implement it in the power's description (like how at-wills and some class feature powers already work) instead of making a clone.

- Implement "power isotopes" to reduce repetition even further. An Isotope is a minor variation of a power. You can pick multiple isotopes of the same power, but it counts as multiple powers. (Like, the same power targeting either Reflex or Fortitude.)

- Toss out ability scores. 4E already assumes that each class has one or two main attributes being buffed as high as possible and the rest being dumped. Their only other purpose is skills, and these already have dubious purpose within 4E's framework. Just use static numbers and you gain lots of flexibility with that "anyone can pick anything" shtick without losing all that much.

- Dailies. Toss 'em out. They already went with the route of dousing the long-term consequences of things as much as possible, and resource management over multiple encounters was really only retained because previous editions were built around it.

I have some more stuff to say about this, but I've got to leave now. I'll be back later to finish.

[Scots Dragon]

Even in comic-books, the central icons remain the same. Even in a retcon-heavy setting, the various central icons of the DC Universe have remained the same so far as behaviour and theme go.

Superman is always a super-strong paragon of truth and justice.

Batman is always an obsessed genius avenging the deaths of his parents

Wonder Woman is always the daughter of the Amazons.


Certainly some characters have changed over the years, like Green Lantern and the Flash, but even those cases are instances in which a different character takes up the torch from the previous one. Such as Barry Allen replacing Jay Garrick, Kyle Rayner replacing Hal Jordan. They never went so far as to retcon it in the mainstream universe so that Superman had always been an evil supervillain who went on random killing sprees (Silver Age tendencies notwithstanding). Or that Batman had a case of lycanthropy and was plotting to murder his parents.


While I admittedly have my problems with 3rd edition, it wasn't the one that changed entire races and species and concepts to something completely different or even opposite to what it once was.

[Scowling Dragon]

Well 4es fluff was all about making things more killable.

So you don't feel guilty about killing all those Silver dragons.

[Scots Dragon]

Well 4es fluff was all about making things more killable.

So you don't feel guilty about killing all those Silver dragons.

And as an utterly hilarious note of irony, silver dragons were actually left out of 4e's first Monster Manual because of this shift towards EVERYTHING IS EVIL NAO!

Funnily enough, even 2e had possiblities for good red dragons and evil silver dragons in many of its supplementary material. They were in fact called 'rogue dragons', and were detailed to a degree in Council of Wyrms and 2e's own Draconomicon.

[Scowling Dragon]

I am disliking nextes(**** it) 5es direction towards EVIL monsters. I prefer to keep EVIL monsters to only creatures of pure evil.

[Scots Dragon]

I tend to see it as more of a societal trend than anything else. Many bugbears are at once rebellious and malevolent, so 'chaotic evil' fits, for instance, but you'll almost always find exceptions. I don't really think that anything should be fully bound by its alignment even given outer planes types, but the system is useful to have, especially given its thematic importance to Planescape.

[navar100]

Personally, I very much prefer 4th Edition to 3.5, and I've played 3.5 since the beginning. Really, the only reason I can play DnD at all is because I'm a dirty, pirating bastard. Both 3.5 and 4 suck. And that's simply because you have no synchrocity in the books people have. 3.5 was worse, having over one hundred books you could purchase, but 4E had it to.

This is one thing I would hate to see in 5th...

And it seems, by the rules of the playtest, that I'm going to continue to dabble in both 3.5 and 4, without switching over, simply because it IS so much like all the other editions. If I wanted something similar, well... Hell, I'd play the other editions, because odds are, I already own it.

No, I like it when a game system does something rediculously new, because it's a lot better than doing reload after reload just to get the same point. That same point is "Not everyone likes this..."

So. Not everyone is going to like Next, no matter what they do with it. Why not try something radical and new? They did it with 4th, and to say they failed would be a blind lie. People LIKE 4th edition, just not everyone. They made money off of it, and they pulled people into the game that wouldn't play if they just re-hashed 3.5, because that's not what they like.

So... Hate on 4e if you want, but at least it was a daring step. And I do hate you 3.5ers, for bullying WOTC back into doing the same old stuff, and making them look like fools for ten more years with DnD Next....

We hate you too for forcing WOTC to ruin a fine game in the first place, firing us as customers, fracturing the D&D community, causing inflamed debate requiring message boards to have monitors to curtail emotions, and killing bambi's mother.

[Scots Dragon]

Hey now, many of those complaints are fine and dandy, but Bambi's mother had it coming.

[Kurald Galain]

I hear that Bambi's mother is listed as chaotic evil in 5E.

[The Troubadour]

I like the eladrin and the Feywild simply because they're much closer to mythology and folklore than the old laughable "fey" D&D had. Of course, I had been using the fey as such in my home games for a long while, but it was nice to see D&D not treating faeries as a laughingstock.

And as an utterly hilarious note of irony, silver dragons were actually left out of 4e's first Monster Manual because of this shift towards EVERYTHING IS EVIL NAO!

Actually, it was a shift towards more ambiguous morality and less black-and-white, everything is either Good or Bad with no room in-between morality.
You know, like real-world mythologies, instead of the self-referential, pidgeon-holed "fantasy" D&D had become.

That's probably the most sensible way to do it - but if they'd been taking that approach, they should have made the Spellplague FR a separate setting in the first place, rather than doing a hatchet job onto the old FR to try and force it into a 4e shape.

I agree. I never liked the Forgotten Realms, especially since the whole Time of Troubles debacle, but I think WotC made a mistake when they basically changed the entire Realms setting. I mean, don't get me wrong, I much prefer the new Realms, but if I were a fan of the old one, I wouldn't have liked seeing what they did with it either.

[hamlet]

I hear that Bambi's mother is listed as chaotic evil in 5E.

I'd say she was CD: chaotic delicious. Mmmmm . . . venision.


Anyway:

I just over the weekend finished a readthrough of the stuff more thoroughly in between various holiday parties. I can say that the only thing I truly dislike, and by dislike I mean unqeuivocably hate, is the healing and rest mechanism. That's just flat out foolish, IMO. You can get run through by a great sword, nearly slain, but after a nice 8 hour rest you're back up as if nothing happened. Sorry, that's just foolish.

The method for healing during a short rest is, on the contrary, not too bad a thought. The problem comes up in that they don't, or won't, differentiate between HP's as plain old luck bumps and bruises, and HP as physical durability. A simple kludge is that you can heal all that damage, but only up till your CON score or some such. After that, it does represent your physical damage and it takes longer to heal. Something sort of like the old Star Wars D20 version did.

Can't say how the thing runs, yet. Hopefully either this Saturday, or some other day in the near future I'll gather some victims and start actually playing it. I suspect that what we've been given will tend to work well together as there's just too little to go wrong here.

The adventure looks good and fairly faithful to the original. Have to add back in the Keep and some of that surrounding area, but that's not that big a deal. It does seem somewhat strange that WOTC would leave that out since it's the perfect place to test out their social type interactions in a non-hostlie environment.

[oxybe]

nah. bambi's mother was never in a pre-4th monster manual so you can be sure she won't show up in 5th.

[Anecronwashere]

Actually, it was a shift towards more ambiguous morality and less black-and-white, everything is either Good or Bad with no room in-between morality.
You know, like real-world mythologies, instead of the self-referential, pidgeon-holed "fantasy" D&D had become.

um what?
I saw the exact opposite. Returning to blatant "Kill Evil, you are Hero/Anti-Hero"
If things were less black/white then there would have been more Good and certainly not the exclusion of Lawful and Chaotic as inherent alignments themselves (as opposed to Ultra Good or More Evil as it came across as)

[noparlpf]

Just a quick question, can you not make the wizard a specialist wizard that unlocks low level spells? Pick one school and can only use from that school except at level X you get access to cross-school level 1 and slowly going up the ladder.

Its not perfect but Im wondering if an experienced player can tell me why this wont work.

That kind of idea appeals to me. It still leaves casters with a lot more options than mundanes, because even within one school you have lots of spells, but it's better than now.

Because wizards were never originally designed as specialists outside of having a separate illusionist class introduced in the AD&D 1e Player's Handbook. The rest of the ideas for specialist classes didn't turn up until late into AD&D 1e, and were only really made fully explicit at the beginning of 2e; and Basic D&D never adopted specialists at all. If you're going to unite the editions, shoehorning in concepts that don't need to be there would be a bad idea, I think. Especially since generalists are the 'baseline' concept in many of the more popular campaign settings, like the Forgotten Realms, and people were already pissed off enough by the Spellplague. Doing that again would be a bad idea.

Personally I prefer the concept of a specialist wizard. If I'm working with fire spells for my first few levels, with Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, and whatever, how do I suddenly gain access to powerful necromantic magic (a 4th-level necromancy spell) when I go up a level?
I might just be the odd man out here, but I feel like working primarily on one kind of magic and building up on that feels much more natural than picking random spells with no relation and being able to cast them all.
So maybe not restrict a character to a single school, but restrict options for higher-level spells. Say you can only learn spells if they share a school or an energy type or something with a lower-level spell you know; you're building on existing knowledge, and higher-level spells require a foundation.

Even if it's not following the legacy of older editions, it has precedents. Gandalf used mostly fire magic. If I remember from "The Sword in the Stone", Merlin mostly shapeshifted.

[MReav]

I'd say she was CD: chaotic delicious. Mmmmm . . . venision.

I thought animals could only be True Delicious.

[The Troubadour]

um what?
I saw the exact opposite. Returning to blatant "Kill Evil, you are Hero/Anti-Hero"

Really? The fact that angels could now be servants of evil deities didn't clue you in on the fact that you couldn't simply assume a monster was evil or not based on its appearance?

[Saph]

Personally I prefer the concept of a specialist wizard. If I'm working with fire spells for my first few levels, with Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, and whatever, how do I suddenly gain access to powerful necromantic magic (a 4th-level necromancy spell) when I go up a level?
I might just be the odd man out here, but I feel like working primarily on one kind of magic and building up on that feels much more natural than picking random spells with no relation and being able to cast them all.

I've always preferred that way of doing it too. The magic system in the books I write uses separate magic types for different casters - a fire mage can use fire spells, a life mage can use life spells, a time mage uses time spells, etc.

There's always been a tradition in D&D of generalist spellcasters who can do everything, though, so I don't imagine that'll ever change, even if it does inherently make it much harder to balance.

[Org]

Well, had a partial run of Caves of Chaos, and I thought it was pretty good. We didn't have too many problems, although the Fighter was pretty bored. Everyone else was good.

We did run into one question, although I'm not too sure if I can ask. I forget what we can't talk about with the playtest...or whatever. Anyway, if a creature is prone and the attacker is using a ranged weapon and adjacent to the prone target, does the attacker still roll for Disadvantage?