D&D 5e Basic Rules

[sparkletwist]

So, rather than simply telling people to "make a thread," I'll just make one myself.  :grin:

Personally, I'm not that impressed with it. This is probably not a huge surprise, as "sparkletwist has a negative opinion about a D&D product" is not exactly a new phenomenon around here. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really in the target audience, and I'm not likely to buy it or play it or anything, so my opinions aren't exactly the most relevant. That being said, I really don't like the sheer amount of "development" for 5th edition that was just obvious backpedaling, casting raise dead on sacred cows. Or maybe more like create undead.

For example, they brought back the old alignment system. The one that drove people nuts and led to endless pointless debating as to what it even means. I have to ask, what was so good about it, other than it's "traditional" and it's what Pathfinder still uses (because it's what D&D 3 used, because it's what AD&D used) that warrants bringing it back rather than trying to take a step in a different directly like 4th edition at least tried to? I'm not actually asking; that question is rhetorical, and I don't really want to turn this thread into a debate about alignment. But, yeah, we're back to the old system of alignment. They brought back randomly rolling for ability scores as the primary method of character generation, too. For that matter, they brought back rolling for hit points. And they brought back Fighters being crappy at everything except doing hit point damage, too, because we needed that.

Combat, in general, feels pretty nebulous. Like, on some level, I can't complain about this too much, because it's definitely taking a step back from 4th edition and its overly tactical approach. On the other hand, part of "playing D&D" was always having a certain level of crunchiness to the combat, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of combat maneuver system or whatever. Spellcasters can cast spells, mostly, while mundane characters can... attack. Rogues can sneak attack when they have Advantage, and one big way to get Advantage is through Inspiration, which is basically "the DM gives it to you because of good RP" or something so even sneak attack starts to feel really arbitrary and disconnected from actual crunch.

In general, the whole idea behind having codified personality traits and Inspiration and whatever sort of feels like a halfhearted attempt to move a little bit towards FATE-style aspects and roleplay-based rewards, but not really because it's D&D and that isn't a thing that D&D is known for doing. Personally, I think they should've either gone for it or not bothered, because the current system feels tacked on.

I'll be curious to see what they do with feats. By making them equivalent to an ability score increase, the opportunity cost is clear-- and it is high. Most feats from earlier editions simply wouldn't be worth it by this metric. I suspect that char-op types will have a vigorous debate as to whether it is worth it to ever take a feat, and eventually some splatbook will come along with a very power-creeped feat that is obviously worth taking, and, yeah, here we go again.

I sort of like the skill system they decided on for its simplicity, but I think the idea of tool proficiencies is pretty stupid and it's doubly stupid that it takes 250 days (and 250gp) to train to become proficient in... whatever. Regardless of whether the tool is handy or just basically fluff. It kind of reminds me of Sean K. Reynolds and his water balloons. Anyway, it also raises the question as to whether a 100 year old elf would start play with a whole lot more proficiencies than a 20 year old human. Unless you somehow rule that for the whole extra 80 years the elf never managed to scrape up 250gp or... something. I don't even know. The wildly different lifespans of different races juxtaposed with "everyone starts at level 1" was silly in D&D anyway, and this makes the problem worse.

So yeah. I don't think it's awful or anything, just a whole lot makes me shrug my shoulders and say "meh." (Which is no fun, because a small part of me kinda sorta wanted to get all excited about it)

[Lmns Crn]

An unfortunate speculation I heard on the subject, is that WotC is rolling back changes to try to court fans of earlier editions, and in doing so is going to lose out twice. Once by alienating the 4E fans that were brought into the market by that edition and its wider accessibility, and again by not making the new revisions drastic enough to really get to what the grognards want. (And those grognards are probably happily playing AD&D or Pathfinder or whatever at this point, and have no real good reason to switch editions.)

[Polycarp]

In general, the whole idea behind having codified personality traits and Inspiration and whatever sort of feels like a halfhearted attempt to move a little bit towards FATE-style aspects and roleplay-based rewards, but not really because it's D&D and that isn't a thing that D&D is known for doing. Personally, I think they should've either gone for it or not bothered, because the current system feels tacked on.

This seemed interesting so I decided to look it up, having never bothered reading about 5e in the past.

As you say, D&D traditionally hasn't dealt much with roleplaying-as-mechanics.  You can choose abilities, skills, feats, equipment, etc. to serve a character concept, but a brilliantly roleplayed 5th level rogue and a 5th level rogue with no evident goals and the personality of wallpaper paste are pretty much mechanically identical.

I don't have any problem with that - perhaps it's the effect of being raised on D&D, but the separation of character capabilities and character behavior never bothered me.  When I played it was under the assumption that people would roleplay as much or as little as they wanted, and rules that interacted with roleplay would only interfere.  So I come from a position that's more skeptical of FATE-style aspects, but nevertheless I think you've hit the nail on the head here - it is a departure from "traditional" D&D (not necessarily bad), and it does seem rather halfhearted or tacked on.

Actually when reading about the things that grant you Inspiration like "Ideals" and "Bonds" I was reminded most of Riddle of Steel's spiritual attributes.  In that system, you'd get an advantage-like bonus when performing actions in pursuance of or service to those spiritual attributes like faith, loyalty to a certain person/thing, a unique destiny, and so on.  Those were central to the system, however - they were even how your character advanced, in lieu of something like XP.  This, in contrast, seems wholly modular, and appears to be just a convenient way to form a generic character concept (they even offer "packages" for various archetypes like acolyte or folk hero) and a simple method to encourage GMs to give out "roleplay rewards" that they've probably been doing in one way or another since 1st edition.  It's just not a very attractive or interesting addition.

But, yeah, we're back to the old system of alignment. They brought back randomly rolling for ability scores as the primary method of character generation, too. For that matter, they brought back rolling for hit points. And they brought back Fighters being crappy at everything except doing hit point damage, too, because we needed that.

:weirdo:

[Steerpike]

We definitely don't need an Alignment debate, but I do like that they brought back the old Alignments.  Alignment is a pretty terrible ethical/philosophical system but can be a pretty cool little roleplaying tool, I think, and I preferred the 9 Alignment system.  It just feels like D&D to me.

The random generation also doesn't bother me because it's trivially easy to house-rule and I can almost guarantee they'll provide half a dozen alternate character generation methods in later products for those who dislike randomness in character generation.

I agree that the Traits/Personality thing feels a bit like a grab for the indie/storygamer crowd, although it's not without precedent in D&D, especially in a lot of d20 off-shoots.

With combat, I think they're trying to hearken back to the old school, which encouraged wildly improvised combat manuevers whose rules had to be improvised on the fly by the DM.  I don't like this approach particularly, but I like that a lot of 4E's very dissociated, abstract, and sometimes non-sensical combat mechanics are gone (the Fighter still has some, though... maybe some other classes that I haven't read as thoroughly), and I'm somewhat hopeful that the actual Player's Handbook and/or the modules in the DMG might make crunchier combat possible.

Like I mentioned in the tavern, my biggest complaint remains bounded accuracy, which I think is just dumb.  The simulationist in me much prefers a system with sizably scaling skills, ACs, and abilities but minimal HP increases to the converse.

"Half-hearted" is probably a good way to describe it overall, sparkletwist.  It''s definitely trying to please everyone.  Frankly I'm just not bowled over by anything the PDF presented, and I didn't expect to be.  Which rather begs the question what the "point" of the new edition - I mean, as a product to actually spend money on - is.  I can find literally dozens of RPG systems to go dungeoneering with catered to pretty much any style of gaming I want.  13th Age, Pathfinder, Lorefinder, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Iron Heroes, OD&D, 4th edition, GURPS, FATE, Riddle of Steel, Legend of the Five Rings, Dungeon World, AD&D, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, True 20/Blue Rose, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, HackMaster, Rolemaster, Savage Worlds, HARP, Runequest, and Demogorgon knows how many others I'm missing.  Did we really need yet another generic fantasy game that's basically just a slightly different mix of rules from its previous iterations?

[sparkletwist]

I agree with you, basically, about alignment. The problem is that it's pretty well baked into the assumptions built around D&D-- there are "evil races," there is magic that is based on the alignment system, there are whole planes and afterlives and whatever that hinge upon it, and so on-- so it is being used as the ethical/philosophical system for the game and, yes, it is terrible at that.

I'd say "trivially easy to house-rule" is not really a defense of a bad rule. Even trivial house rules still have to be noted and discussed, and lots of trivial house rules still add up. Nobody wants (or at least, nobody should want) to go back to the AD&D days where just about every single group had a gigantic list of their house rules. Or they didn't have this list, because the house rules were created by table discussion and ad hoc DM rulings and just existed in the group's common mental space, and too bad for the new player trying to join and expecting to know how anything worked.

Making it "feel like D&D" is hardly a good reason, in my opinion, although with the amount of backpedaling and sacred cow necromancy that has gone on I wouldn't argue that's probably the real reason they did it. I agree with you-- what's the point-- and I think LC is right that they're trying to somehow win back those 3e players that jumped ship to Pathfinder long ago. Or, for that matter, try to somehow appeal to grognards that just never stopped playing AD&D. I don't see it happening, though.

[Polycarp]

The fact that WotC is seemingly running back to basics ("inspiration" notwithstanding) at the same time that Paizo just announced a supplement intended to dump "backwards compatibility" and move further away from 3rd edition is pretty interesting to me.  Maybe they're both going for each others' markets, though there's obviously much more at stake for WotC (as this concerns the course of their whole flagship product, whereas Pathfinder Unchained is just a supplement).

[LordVreeg]

WotC felt like they lost too much of the market with 4e, and yes, obviously, they want some of the market back from Pathfinder as well.   Making it 'feel like D&D' is probably a good thing and the idea of customizing the classes using the traits is frankly a very good idea that gets rid of a central problem with the game. 
And I have always hated alignment, specifically for reasons like 'Evil Races' and 'Evil Relgions'.

[Steerpike]

I agree with you, basically, about alignment. The problem is that it's pretty well baked into the assumptions built around D&D-- there are "evil races," there is magic that is based on the alignment system, there are whole planes and afterlives and whatever that hinge upon it, and so on-- so it is being used as the ethical/philosophical system for the game and, yes, it is terrible at that.

Oh, yeah, totally.  D&D only gets away with it at all because ultimately it's just not very interested in ethics most of the time, it's interested in spellslinging, axe-throwing murderhobos butchering Kobolds and taking their stuff.  If you want to do anything more advanced with D&D and ethics you kind of have to either ignore Alignment or work around it in some very awkward (though sometimes amusing) ways, i.e. Planescape.

I'd say "trivially easy to house-rule" is not really a defense of a bad rule.

I guess agreed... but I'd still say that a rule that's bad but is easily house-ruled is considerably less offensive than one that's bad but very difficult to house-rule (like, if you don't like the class/level system in D&D, that's going to be more challenging to house-rule than if you don't like random character generation).

I'd also suggest that random generation does hold a genuine appeal for some people, so I'd hestitate to call it "bad" in the same way I'd call some rules bad.  Personally I always use Point Buy, though.

Making it "feel like D&D" is hardly a good reason, in my opinion, although with the amount of backpedaling and sacred cow necromancy that has gone on I wouldn't argue that's probably the real reason they did it.

I completely agree, but then I think that sacred cow necromancy is pretty much the only name of the game here - I really think there's no actual point to producing yet another D&D other than for Wizards to turn a buck.  They'd just rather rely on their brand than take a risk.  That doesn't mean the game is going to be bad, but it's definitely gratuitous.  Overall 5E feels like it's really going for nostalgia over originality; I think they're very gun-shy about new things after 4th edition more or less crashed and burned.

[HippopotamusDundee]

 :cry:

I agree with you, basically, about alignment. The problem is that it's pretty well baked into the assumptions built around D&D-- there are "evil races," there is magic that is based on the alignment system, there are whole planes and afterlives and whatever that hinge upon it, and so on-- so it is being used as the ethical/philosophical system for the game and, yes, it is terrible at that.

Oh, yeah, totally.  D&D only gets away with it at all because ultimately it's just not very interested in ethics most of the time, it's interested in spellslinging, axe-throwing murderhobos butchering Kobolds and taking their stuff.  

This reminds me of an entertainingly snide observation made in an article on horror roleplaying:

"Just remember this: your players want to be scared. They have shown up on Halloween to play a horror game. If they don't, they should go play a roleplaying game where they get to be the serial killer.

You know. A game where they wander around murdering everything in sight, plundering from the dead bodies and moving on without any consideration for the life they just took or the moral consequences on their conscience, becoming more and more powerful with every murder they perform.

That game would be really scary."

[Xeviat]

As one of the resident D&D fans around here, I've wavered back and forth with my opinions of 5th edition. I loved 3rd, and I loved 4th even more, but even I recognized that 4th "felt" different. It was definitely a tactical roleplaying game, which was how my group played 3E, but something changed enough that it felt differently. During the playtest, I was not happy with 5th; monsters went down in one hit, the fighter didn't do anything interesting (except kill weak monsters on a miss), and the concept that magic items weren't going to be part of the system math (just fun unbalanced bonuses!) left a bad taste in my mouth.

As I saw the classes come together, I was more interested. When the basic document came out, my excitement grew. While I didn't really care for the goals of "bounded accuracy", I thought I could give it a try. Then I got the starter set in my hands. CR 1 monsters do enough damage to drop level 1 PCs in one hit. Fantasy Vietnam is back, with a vengeance, yet it goes away after the first couple of levels. Sure, this is a playstyle that people want, but that seems more like a playstyle that should be supported by modules, not by making the first two levels harder than the rest of the game.

I do like the D&D alignment system, though, as long as you take a moment to understand it a little differently. The way I take it, and the way I've encorperated it into my games, is that your alignment says less about what you do/think/feel than it does about how you feel when you do the opposite. A good person feels bad when they do evil, and an evil person feels like a sucker when they do good. Neutral people get around those bad feelings, but they also don't get the warm fuzzies for doing things in support of their alignment. The existence of "always evil" monstrous races is a setting caveat, though, and one that doesn't have to exist in ever setting (Eberron). Also, there's no alignment based magic (yet) in 5th; it's just a roleplaying aid.

As for the "easily houseruled" parts of 5th Edition, I don't want to start calling 5th "Oberoni Edition" with all the frequent citations of the Fallacy that bears the name Oberoni.

[sparkletwist]

I'd also suggest that random generation does hold a genuine appeal for some people, so I'd hestitate to call it "bad" in the same way I'd call some rules bad.

I'd call it "bad" because of the unbalancing and disempowering effect it has on a game that is so based on choosing and optimizing character options. If we're both building Sorcerers and choose different spells known at first level, one of us may have chosen "better" spells according to char-op wonks but each Sorcerer is going to have unique capabilities and a possible chance to shine. On the other hand, if we're randomly rolling stats and one of us gets an 18 Cha and the other only gets a 16, the character with an 18 is going to just be flat out better than the one that got 16, even if they're otherwise identical and all choices made were the same.

You can get all the appealing aspects of random generation without these problems by just having the DM roll up an array (or multiple arrays, and let players choose one) and it seems like nothing but a pointless nod to the grognards that 5e doesn't do it this way.

the fighter didn't do anything interesting

In my opinion one of the biggest missed opportunities of 5th edition is the way they rolled the paradigm back to "fighters suck." I mean, in 4th edition, you can complain how fighter mechanics were dissociated and kind of samey but at least they got interesting abilities that were comparable to the kinds of stuff that everyone else was doing. It's just that it was 4e so a lot of us weren't crazy about "what everyone else was doing." I would've liked to see a game that embraced the idea of a powered-up standard fighter in a game where that "what everyone else was doing" was more like 3e instead of 4e.

As for the "easily houseruled" parts of 5th Edition, I don't want to start calling 5th "Oberoni Edition" with all the frequent citations of the Fallacy that bears the name Oberoni.

+1  :grin:

[LordVreeg]

I'd call it "bad" because of the unbalancing and disempowering effect it has on a game that is so based on choosing and optimizing character options. If we're both building Sorcerers and choose different spells known at first level, one of us may have chosen "better" spells according to char-op wonks but each Sorcerer is going to have unique capabilities and a possible chance to shine. On the other hand, if we're randomly rolling stats and one of us gets an 18 Cha and the other only gets a 16, the character with an 18 is going to just be flat out better than the one that got 16, even if they're otherwise identical and all choices made were the same.

You can get all the appealing aspects of random generation without these problems by just having the DM roll up an array (or multiple arrays, and let players choose one) and it seems like nothing but a pointless nod to the grognards that 5e doesn't do it this way.

certainly a good point.  For people who prioritize a balanced game, or if the players are newer, Point buy can avoid unpleasantness.  And in a game where people want to be predetermined roles, point buy is great. 

The reasons random maintains popularity can be looked at as well.    I like this recent post to describe one thing, the ability to create a character as opposed to determine one is what part of the attraction is.  Creating something unusual, a moderately intelligent but super healthy wizard, or other non-optimized characters happens often with random rolls.
Also, as player skill increases in almost any hobby, the idea of the challenge comes in.  So often in my games and others I have heard about, the thrill comes from succeeding from a less advantaged situation.  The most memorable ones are the ones that are unusual and substandard.

Your mileage may vary either way.  But having either as an option is the best.

[sparkletwist]

The reasons random maintains popularity can be looked at as well.

I actually wasn't criticizing random stat generation as a whole. I agree it can have its benefits and it can lead to characters with abilities that point buy characters don't incorporate nearly as well. My post was criticism of the detrimental effects on the game created by the method used in D&D where everyone rolls their own randomized array.

Anyway, it seems like you're talking about not just rolling stats but rolling them in order, which, yeah, is a good method to get quirky characters but not good for much else. And, honestly, if you just want a quirky character, there are a lot of different ways to get one. 3d6 in order, all 12's, stand outside a school and your stats are the ages of the next 6 kids that walk by...

My personal favorite character generation method for games that aren't really concerned with balance is the "just assign whatever stats you feel like" method.  :grin:

[Steerpike]

I'd call it "bad" because of the unbalancing and disempowering effect it has on a game that is so based on choosing and optimizing character options.

I guess I'll put it like this: if your players are really into optimization, and are worried about balance to any significant extent, go with point buy.  If they're not fussed about optimization or balance, it probably matters less.

Like I said, I go with point buy just to be safe.  I just know that some people really love old-school random attribute generation for a variety of reasons.  It looks like 5E is slightly less char-op heavy than 3.X could be.

I almost guarantee that either the full Player's Handbook or a the very least the DMG will include like 6 different characte generation methods or (multiple point buy methods, arrays, several random methods, etc), and anyone who's played an earlier edition and is now using the PDF will be aware of these methods already, so on the scale of design sins this one just feels very forgiveable to me.

I understand the reason you don't like it, though, I just think 5th has more prominent flaws.

[LordVreeg]

I understand the reason you don't like it, though, I just think 5th has more prominent flaws

Yes.  Being better than 4e is false praise.
I'm an outlier in that I don't like to run systems created for generic settings by companies these days, but I still buy them to read through and stay current with design ideas and philosophy. 

I do like the simplicity of using the traits and adding them to classes to get rid of the feel of generic classes, at least to some degree.
And thinking about your comment about making a buck, yes, this is all about making a buck, but also in the 'long-term survival' theory for WotC, and hopefully gaining back market share lost to PF before it is too late.

I hate the idea of Inspiration, as it goes against  a lot of what I consider roleplaying, and is kind of kicking Gygax in the nuts beyond the grave.  But most of all, as you say, there is nothing earthshaking here, no real reason to go out to buy it to find something new, more of their attempt to reverse their sales trend.