Quote from: Emperor Norton;692665I like the proficiencies idea. Its simple and multipurpose and doesn't bloat up the rules with tons of little subsystems.

It unifies melee/ranged attacks with skills to operate on the same scale.  Good move in my book.

Quote from: Old One Eye;692666It unifies melee/ranged attacks with skills to operate on the same scale.  Good move in my book.

and saving throws

Quote from: Emperor Norton;692665I like the proficiencies idea. Its simple and multipurpose and doesn't bloat up the rules with tons of little subsystems.

I agree - in fact, I liked them all the way back when they were called secondary skills.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;692663Until somebody you game with who has the internet builds a character using what they've read of those guys.

Anyone who comes to my table with a "build" is the sort I don't want there in the first place.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;692675I agree - in fact, I liked them all the way back when they were called secondary skills.

Yeah, you know, those secondary skills, that neatly wrapped up saving throws, skills, attacks, and thief abilities all into one mechanic...

Oh wait, no that wasn't what those did.

Its a bit disingenuous to call them the same thing.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;692664Even the most robust playtest is unlikely to find every possible combination.  Min-maxers who are good at conceptualizing abuses do a great service by uncovering such things BEFORE release.  If designers respected their audience, they'd try to address those issues rather than blame the messengers.  

I like how Google pays hackers who find exploits in their code.  Min-maxers aren't even asking to get paid...  Game companies should take advantage of the free service being provided and look at fixes.  Especially in the internet age, these exploits will become common knowledge.

I think the odds of the min-maxer community doing more good than harm are pretty low.  It's pessimistic, I'll admit, but they have never seemed to me to be the most ethical people.

I think its far more likely to see exploits that the community thinks will be useful go under-reported.

So, I've had a chance to look through it and updated three out of five of the PC's at the table.  I haven't had a chance to run it yet, so obviously every assessment is provisional.   Here's what I'm working with, though.

In the Red Corner, we have one Mimi Appletoad, the Assassin from Kankbottom, riding her noble Pygmy Behir steed Furhorn Darkeyes. Played by my demented wife, Mimi is a halfling paladin honoring the brutal ancestors of her tribe, cast out after a failed coup. She likes licking the backs of elf knees and eats the faces of her enemies.  Did I mention this is Dark Sun?  

Next up is Nok, a half-elf Monk with a penchant for fine coffee and an easy going attitude. Nok has been unconscious more times than Robert DeNiro in Sleepers.  I feel bad for hitting him so often, but whaddya gonna do?

The newest addition is a Mage named Tiberious, an expert at skullduggery and general rat-bastardry. He's a few levels behind the rest of the group, but he still contributes to their survival.  

The other two characters (who I haven't updated yet) are V'Gosh, a gladiator turned statesmen turned reaver, and The Reed, a thri-kreen ranger and the rare voice of sanity in the party. Except for the time he attacked a nobleman over the price of bread.  Long story.

In this game, we've done it all: politics, slaying powerful undead, running merchant empires, taking part in a full scale war between the slave armies and the templar forces of Balic, sabotage, and city crawling.   Currently, they're exploring forgotten Dwarven ruins far to the south of the city, avoiding some assassins and doing some straight up dungeon crawling.  

Now, I haven't always had the system support for all these things: I went to ACKS for merchant and battle rules, and those are just a touch too crunchy for my tastes.

Looking at the differences in the new characters vs. the older versions, we had lots of problems with the monk. As I said, he's dropped in nearly every single fight. I get that he's supposed to be a glass cannon, but unless he expended his ki resources, he was dropping less damage than a wizard, and he usually felt useless and occasionally frustrated. The newer version puts more English on the ball. They get more attacks, attack damage scales, and the unified Proficiency advancement means that he gets to-hit parity with the rest of the party.  He's still fragile, but his slow fall, high speed and Uncanny Dodge make him very mobile, doubling quite nicely as the human trap detector and infiltrator. He's not so dependent on his Ki, but when he uses it, it's a noticeable difference.

Mimi, the paladin, is more of a mixed bag: her big damage dealer, in the past, has always been her Smite ability. Doing an extra 2d8 damage on a hit is great, but it was always a one-off. It required an hour of rest to recharge. Now Smite is effectively a spell, and a spell slot is spent when it's used. This means that the paladin can more easily 'go nova' for a fight, dropping smites every round, but they'll be gassed after it. It changes the dynamic, and we'll have to see how it plays out in the dungeon this Wednesday.  There's also a new host of smites: ones that light them on fire, ones that knock them down, ones that turn the invisible visible. Once my wife learns that her sword can set people on fire, it's all downhill from there. She also loses her Celestial Steed ability, but that's okay, she still has Furhorn Darkeyes.

The mage as a class is unchanged for the most part, but the proficiency system means that having a background as a spy lets him double as an impromptu thief. He can now pick locks with a reasonable degree of success. Between him and the monk, they won't need a thief. Worst case scenario, there's always Knock.

The Reed, our Ranger, has been invaluable in the Hex Crawl. He can effectively ignore heavy terrain, which means they make great time in the rocky badlands, and there's no chance of getting lost.  They've had to deal with heat stroke more than once (the monk and the Wizard have sub-par CON scores), and they've figured out that they have to rest during the day and travel in the evening.  

V'Gosh, the weaponmaster fighter is thinking about multiclassing into the Bard's College of War, playing into the idea that he's this become this statesmen and leader after his time as a gladiator. He loses his Second Wind ability, but it was overpowered. It's now a small temp HP bump, and it doesn't scale very well.  This is fine with me, because it preserves the difference between Fighters and Barbarians.

Having unified DCs makes the game way easier to adjudicate on my end.
The classes are pretty complicated. Not as complicated at a 7th level 3e or 4e character, but significantly more complicated than a B/X character. Its possible to play a less complicated character, but even then the complexity is just sort of hidden.

Running the game is a breeze, now. The monster math has been tweaked, and while I love me some wandering monsters, I need to be able to estimate how difficult any encounter will be at a glance, and it looks like I can do that again.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;692646So TCO is either trolling on purpose (most likely), or he's truly a complete idiot.

A few weeks ago you said he was a D&D expert and we should all accept everything he said about D&D because expert.

Thanks for the run-down on your game, JonWake. Interesting!

Quote from: One Horse Town;692715Thanks for the run-down on your game, JonWake. Interesting!

I concur, the most valuable comment in this whole thread so far. Thanks.

Quote from: soviet;692714A few weeks ago you said he was a D&D expert and we should all accept everything he said about D&D because expert.

When was this?  I'm assuming you're talking about when I said "self proclaimed 4e experts."

Perhaps I should remind you I was talking about the group of 4vengers in general, and not just TCO.

Nice attempt though...

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;692519I'm sure there are corner cases. In general, the way scaling works in 5E it's not going to be the case.

Can a skilled player not learn to identify and exploit and set up those corner cases so that they happen more often than you might otherwise expect? Would this not be an interesting challenge in play?

I posted the content of the original post to a friend of mine. I wasn't around RPing between about 1995 and 2006, so I missed out of 3.x and the introduction of Pathfinder, but he commented thus:

QuoteI reckon you could do much the same in a D20/3E context, though maybe not D20/4E. My feeling, having followed the play test as well as the design and development articles is that this time round is no different from what has gone before. Here is what I wrote when the new edition was announced to be in development:

If this new edition is anything but a continuation of the D20 approach to D&D, "modern design sensibilities" and all, I will eat my hat (not as great a risk as it may sound, as I do not own a hat). Those of you who think this heralds some return to the golden TSR era of Keep on the Borderlands and whatnot need to wake up. Have people forgotten the marketing of 2000 so easily? This is the same old parlour trick with a new magician (and the help of one of the old ones). It will look more like AD&D than D20/4E, but that is not exactly a difficult feat (pun intended). The most likely scenario to my mind is that this is a big step back to D20/3E with a load of talk about TSR era D&D as a smokescreen to cover their retreat. Believe you me, I would like nothing better than to be wrong about this, but those who do not learn from history and all that.

Nothing has really changed in the interim.

How does this curmudgeonly assessment stack up against the experiences in and out of play for other people? I have not really touched 5E playtest, but it looks nice in places.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;693051I posted the content of the original post to a friend of mine. I wasn't around RPing between about 1995 and 2006, so I missed out of 3.x and the introduction of Pathfinder, but he commented thus:



How does this curmudgeonly assessment stack up against the experiences in and out of play for other people? I have not really touched 5E playtest, but it looks nice in places.

I don't see what game mechanics he is complaining about so it hard to judge what the issues the guy has. D&D Next is not the same as D20 nor it is the same as AD&D 1st. It has some similarity to how classic D&D works when you combine Swords & Wizardry and my Majestic Wilderlands supplement. But there are many differences as well.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;692595Don't know about 4e; never played it.  But multiclassing in AD&D worked fine.

I think in AD&D it was a little too powerful.

Remember the XP model in AD&D a 5/5 Figther/MU has the same XP as a 6th level figther not a 10th level one because you double XP between levels.

Now I personally feel a 5/5 Elven Fighter MU is much more powerful than a 6th level human fighter. Yes the fighter has more HP but that is it.

It was another of the fallicies in trying to make AD&D Humancentric by imposing illogical and spurious level restrictions. One one hand you say Humans are more flexible than other races and so can be any class but then you say but demi humans can be 2 or even 3 classes at once which seems to indicate flexibility.

Personally I hate Mutilclassing because it
i) makes classes like professions
ii) encourages min maxing for game reasons and doesn't encourage in setting character development for in character reasons

I would much prefer a model where a fighter could learn to cast a spell by sacrificing something else. So as you level you could opt not to get more HP but instead to learn to cast sleep... Now this might encourage min/maxing as I am sure there are ways to delve into this for charop guys but it seems like the sort of thing that would happen organically through play. As they travel ont heir quest the wizard starts to learn how to use a sword by training with the figther at night etc.
Now I like classes because I like the strong archetypes they create but within that structure I think there is room for players to grow their PCs in different ways.