We've been doing a lot of talking about Next recently, and I wanted to give a mechanical perspective/running commentary about the character I am playing in my Wed night game. I won't be talking about all of the classes or races, and I won't be doing a whole lot of describing the story of our adventure. Rather, I wanted to give a perspective of how we're finding out how the fighter class works from a mechanical viewpoint, as compared to other editions.
Disclaimer: I haven't really played 4e, so I will not be making any comparisons there. If I make a comment like, "which hasn't really been done before" and it was in 4e? Forgive me. I will also be using the standard rules of Next (backgrounds and specialties as opposed to no feats but a +1 stat bonus)
Character Creation: Right off the bat, creating a fighter in Next using the standard rules is more complex than in AD&D, and only slightly less complexity than 3e. For initial character generation anyway. The first thing I did was determine archetype, which I always do: halfling fighter/assassin type. I rolled my stats (4d6 drop lowest). Assigned stats. Looked at the racial abilities and noted them on the character sheet. Adjusted any stats. So far, just like every version. Then I chose a class: fighter. Adjusted abilities again, and jotted down abilities. Here's were there is more complexity than AD&D. You actually get to choose one of three abilities for a defensive expertise trait, and one of three for an offensive expertise trait. I chose deep wound and nimble dodge. As a fighter, I have 2d6 of expertise dice I can use every encounter. If I use nimble dodge, my AC goes up by the result of one of those d6. If I chose to use a usage on deep wound, I increase damage by 1d6.
To fit my theme, I chose bounty hunter as my background and noted the skills on my character sheet. You can really try any skill by making an ability check, but if you're skilled in it, you get an extra d6 to add to the check. Not as complex as other editions because your skills are packaged. You don't have to pick and choose which ones to put points into. In fact, you don't put points into any of them.
Next, I chose the skulker specialty, which comes with the Hide in Shadows feat. So I jot that down on my sheet, and add "sneak" to my skills. As a fighter, I also get a martial feat at 1st level. In this case, I chose weapon specialty, which means when rolling for damage with a weapon, I roll two dice and take the highest result. At level 1, this is much like 3e. The difference is when you gain levels, you don't get a bunch of bonus feats for a fighter to pick and choose. They are packaged into specialties so overall, less complex than 3e with much less char op.
Finally I got equipment.
Conclusion: It wasn't a difficult character to make. About 10-15 minutes all told, and that would be much less once I become familiar with the rules more. With expertise and a specialty, it certainly feels like my fighter is much more customized than my AD&D fighter; a class that's pretty much just "wear armor and use weapons" as class abilities at low level. In fact, it feels like I have more options than my 3e fighter (whose feats are typically just straight adds to "to hit" and "damage"). The way expertise dice feel to me is, "You can push through with that extra effort much like a sports athlete, but because it is an extra effort, you can only do it twice every encounter before you need to rest a bit (either a short rest, or taking one of your actions to gain a use back)."
To me, that fits in with my verisimilitude. My fighter isn't doing anything crazy like leaping 50' across the battlefield instantly. His maneuvers just help add damage or increase dodging.
Next UP: The fighter in combat
Quote from: Sacrosanct;651372We've been doing a lot of talking about Next recently, and I wanted to give a mechanical perspective/running commentary about the character I am playing in my Wed night game. I won't be talking about all of the classes or races, and I won't be doing a whole lot of describing the story of our adventure. Rather, I wanted to give a perspective of how we're finding out how the fighter class works from a mechanical viewpoint, as compared to other editions.
Disclaimer: I haven't really played 4e, so I will not be making any comparisons there. If I make a comment like, "which hasn't really been done before" and it was in 4e? Forgive me. I will also be using the standard rules of Next (backgrounds and specialties as opposed to no feats but a +1 stat bonus)
Character Creation: Right off the bat, creating a fighter in Next using the standard rules is more complex than in AD&D, and only slightly less complexity than 3e. For initial character generation anyway. The first thing I did was determine archetype, which I always do: halfling fighter/assassin type. I rolled my stats (4d6 drop lowest). Assigned stats. Looked at the racial abilities and noted them on the character sheet. Adjusted any stats. So far, just like every version. Then I chose a class: fighter. Adjusted abilities again, and jotted down abilities. Here's were there is more complexity than AD&D. You actually get to choose one of three abilities for a defensive expertise trait, and one of three for an offensive expertise trait. I chose deep wound and nimble dodge. As a fighter, I have 2d6 of expertise dice I can use every encounter. If I use nimble dodge, my AC goes up by the result of one of those d6. If I chose to use a usage on deep wound, I increase damage by 1d6.
To fit my theme, I chose bounty hunter as my background and noted the skills on my character sheet. You can really try any skill by making an ability check, but if you're skilled in it, you get an extra d6 to add to the check. Not as complex as other editions because your skills are packaged. You don't have to pick and choose which ones to put points into. In fact, you don't put points into any of them.
Next, I chose the skulker specialty, which comes with the Hide in Shadows feat. So I jot that down on my sheet, and add "sneak" to my skills. As a fighter, I also get a martial feat at 1st level. In this case, I chose weapon specialty, which means when rolling for damage with a weapon, I roll two dice and take the highest result. At level 1, this is much like 3e. The difference is when you gain levels, you don't get a bunch of bonus feats for a fighter to pick and choose. They are packaged into specialties so overall, less complex than 3e with much less char op.
Finally I got equipment.
Conclusion: It wasn't a difficult character to make. About 10-15 minutes all told, and that would be much less once I become familiar with the rules more. With expertise and a specialty, it certainly feels like my fighter is much more customized than my AD&D fighter; a class that's pretty much just "wear armor and use weapons" as class abilities at low level. In fact, it feels like I have more options than my 3e fighter (whose feats are typically just straight adds to "to hit" and "damage"). The way expertise dice feel to me is, "You can push through with that extra effort much like a sports athlete, but because it is an extra effort, you can only do it twice every encounter before you need to rest a bit (either a short rest, or taking one of your actions to gain a use back)."
To me, that fits in with my verisimilitude. My fighter isn't doing anything crazy like leaping 50' across the battlefield instantly. His maneuvers just help add damage or increase dodging.
Next UP: The fighter in combat
Good stuff; having not played the latest iterations this is an interesting read. Do you feel like Expertise dice slow things at all?
Combat: For this part, I'll be reflecting on several encounters. Keep in mind this game was played on Roll20 in a Google hangout. If we were in person, I imagine it would have gone faster. As it was, we had a half dozen combat encounters that we were able to complete in about 3 hours, including role-playing, a town visit, etc. It felt like it moved about as quickly as AD&D.
1st encounter was with 2 orcs. I snuck up to their area, but before I could do anything, they were alerted by the rest of my party coming up. As one of the orcs moved past me, I attacked. Because I was hidden, I had advantage on the roll. I hit, and decided to use my deep wound expertise to add d6 damage to the roll. The orc was wounded pretty well. On it's attack, he attacked me, naturally. He hit AC 19 (which would have hit me), except I used my last expertise die to roll a d6 and add it to my AC, which was enough to make him miss. Now both of my expertise die were used up, and combat went like any other combat in every other version as a fighter.
That was a pretty easy encounter. The 2nd encounter was when we got ambushed in a cave by 4 orcs. My sneak didn't work because the DM said that there was only darkness, no cover in the cave, and the orcs have darkvision. I stayed back and fired arrows while the other two fighter types were on the front line. By the end of this encounter, I'm noticing two things: 1) the lucky trait for a halfling (reroll 1s on attack, ability check, and saving throw rolls) and 2) roll 2 dice for weapon and take the highest result are HUGE. I don't reroll 1s for damage, but with weapon mastery and taking the highest of two rolls, it's like I never get a result of a 1 between the two of them. I don't know if it will be nerfed in later releases of Next, but it was a definite advantage, and saved my bacon more than once. Especially the rerolling 1s for attacking.
The blackguard player did go down in this combat. If you go below 0 hp, you have to make a con check or you lose more hp. At -10, you're dead. The cleric was able to stabilize him, however.
The third encounter was in a cave of stirges. Again, sneak didn't work (I began to feel like it was a worthless skill if any creature with dark vision can still see you, which is every creature in caves). Had to use ranged weapons here.
The 4th encounter was against giant centipedes and fire beetles. There were many, so I used my deep wound my first two rounds to kill two of them. Unfortunately, the sounds of battle alerted another group of stirges, and I had no more uses of expertise to use so it was standard hack and slash time. The blackguard went down again, and two other members were wounded pretty badly by the time it was over.
The next encounter, I was sneaking again and peaked around the corner. Keep in mind I had a 24 as my sneak result, which is outstanding. As I peaked around the corner, I took an ogre's club to the face. The DM said it had night vision, and heard the rest of my party earlier so my sneak result wasn't applicable (I'm starting to wonder at this point if the sneak skill is worthless, or if I just have a mean DM ;)
Anyway, the ogre hit, and even if I used my expertise of nimble dodge, I couldn't have avoided it since he hit my by better than 6. Took 15 points of damage, which put me at -2. I failed my Con check so I was at -3. The next round I rolled a natural 20 on my con check, so I went back to -2, and later got stabilzed and healed.
Overall: Most of the combat went like I was playing an AD&D fighter. I.e. standard attacks and whatnot. I like the expertise dice because it gave my additional options, but was a limited resource. Sort of like a mundane vancian spell casting system. I'll get a third usage per encounter at level 5 I think. As mentioned, the lucky trait and weapon mastery made me very effective in combat.
The only issue I had was with sneak. In a cave, as written, it's virtually useless. The other thing I didn't like was that due to the style of play (very old school DM), the players ended up making spot and listen checks every single round because they got paranoid. That slowed things down. I would have preferred that we just tell the DM (like I did when I entered), "I'm sneaking at half movement rate, and looking and listening for things." and then just had the DM make the check behind the scenes when appropriate, rather than have players make checks every round only to be told 90% of the time, "You don't hear or see anything."
Thanks for the info.
So would it be too early to say 5E is 3X with a more limited feat structure?
The big question I have, is how does it feel when you play?
Do the rules fade into the background?
Quote from: thedungeondelver;651374Good stuff; having not played the latest iterations this is an interesting read. Do you feel like Expertise dice slow things at all?
Not at all. I just posted the combat rounds. All you're really doing with expertise is rolling a d6 and either adding it to damage or adding it to your AC. Very simple.
Quote from: Bill;651380Thanks for the info.
So would it be too early to say 5E is 3X with a more limited feat structure?
Yes and no. It seems that way for the fighter. For other classes, my impression is that it plays out no different than an AD&D class that has class abilities (like the ranger or paladin or monk). The big difference is that feats in Next are packaged by theme, much like an AD&D class, whereas in 3e, you have more feats that you get, and more freedom to customize them. Definitely not a char op feel in Next like I have with 3e. Just my opinion mind you, but Next feels like you're building your character around a visualized theme. Not that 3e doesn't allow you to do that, but 3e tends to turn into building your character around DPS instead.
QuoteThe big question I have, is how does it feel when you play?
Do the rules fade into the background?
They would have if the DM played like I play when I do AD&D. For example, the skill checks. Listen and Spot are checks I'd do as the DM behind the scenes, that way the players aren't always saying they are doing that every round. Also, we did not play with heavy grid or movement rules. We estimated about how far we could move and it worked good. In that regard, it played just like my AD&D sessions.
*Edit* I will say having roughly one PC go down in nearly every battle
felt a lot more like AD&D 1st level characters than in 3e ;)
Sounds good; I will have to pay more attention to 5E.
Would you say, from this perspective, that most creatures in the world are unusually large?
It is instructive!
Quote from: Exploderwizard;651388Would you say, from this perspective, that most creatures in the world are unusually large?
har har ;)
Actually, my halfling is very large for a halfing. Not taller, but....rounder...
Quote from: Sacrosanct;651398Actually, my halfling is very large for a halfing. Not taller, but....rounder...
LOL Awesome. That's my kind of halfling. :D
It seems to me that advantage dice are similar to having Skill Levels in Hero System, and choosing to put them into OCV or DCV. But variable instead of fixed.
In Hero (at least starting with v.5 and going all the way back to Champions), you might buy 3 overall levels. During combat, you might commit two of those levels to a nominal OCV* of 9, and DCV* of 7, so you'd wind up with a total OCV 11/DCV 8. You do this on a round-by-round basis, though.
This seems similar, but more complex in one direction (rolling a die to see how many points to allocate) but easier (you allocate it once at the beginning of the encounter and that's it).
I'll be starting a Next campaign in a week, so thanks for the run-down. One thing I haven't been able to find in the playtest package: what happens when you have multiple instances of a skill? For instance, your background and class ability both give you sneak?
Quote from: Haffrung;651410I'll be starting a Next campaign in a week, so thanks for the run-down. One thing I haven't been able to find in the playtest package: what happens when you have multiple instances of a skill? For instance, your background and class ability both give you sneak?
I ran into the same thing. I got the sneak skill for being a bounty hunter, and got it as part of the hide in shadows feat for being a skulker. We decided that you just get to chose a replacement skill. In my case, I chose climb as it fit the overall theme.