Inside The Making Of The New “Dungeons and Dragons”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3034062/designing-the-new-dungeons-dragons

by santaclaus • 12 years ago

56 23 12 years ago

snide• 12 years ago

So I've been playing a Pathfinder game for the last year, but a lot of are pretty interested in the "5e" changes. Basically, they simplified a lot of the tedious bits of 3.5 and removed the weird role concepts. The Basic rules, which come as a PDF, are now available[1]. In general it looks closer to 3 than 4, but is still attempts to remove lots of the table calculation from the game.

What this article somewhat mentions and what seems really weird for people that like Pen and Paper and want to play this new edition is that they are releasing the CORE books over the span of a few months. It's kind of weird for players. Sure we get the Player's handbook this Tuesday, but without a DM book and a Monster Manual it makes things a little limited for a few months.

A decent portion of the core audience moved on to Pathfinder and feel pretty comfortable there. It'll be interesting to see if this push can sway us back.

The key part of course is you don't NEED to change. A lot of people still stick to old versions. I play once a month with a group of 5 others. It'll take us a couple years just to get through our current campaign in Pathfinder. Moving to 5E right now will just be a curiosity.

http://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/DnDBasicRul...

faet• 12 years ago

I like that the newer character sheet fit on 1 page +items/spells. It was always a pain trying to get someone on the edge to fill those out. "okay you have 14 dex, which is +2. You need to fill the +2 in here, here, here, here, here and here."

I'd suggest trying the starter box. I think I was able to find it for ~12-14 on amazon and it was fun for many of our new players. Pathfinder is still the goto for many of the vets as it's what they know.

FBT• 12 years ago

What this article somewhat mentions and what seems really weird for people that like Pen and Paper and want to play this new edition is that they are releasing the CORE books over the span of a few months. It's kind of weird for players. Sure we get the Player's handbook this Tuesday, but without a DM book and a Monster Manual it makes things a little limited for a few months.

This is not new. It seems strange, but each and every edition of D&D so far has been released this way, one core book a month for three months.

It's a time-honoured tradition, but yes, a strange one. I just don't know the full details about why.

roedog• 12 years ago

I think Mearls said somewhere that the staggered release was because their copy editing pipeline couldn't handle three releases at once.

cjslep• 12 years ago

I started playing D&D when 4e came out in high school. I switched over to Pathfinder after two years or so when I went off to college. Pathfinder was ditched for GURPS the last year in college and I've been using it ever since, and am now dropping that (and miniature grid-combat entirely) for the Fate system.

I bring this up because, in hindsight, if I had managed to come into 3.5e instead of 4e I feel I wouldn't have become so disgusted with roll-playing (especially in combat). Even Pathfinder's combat seemed to be dominant time-wise, even if combat is comparatively scarcer. I realize this depends entirely on the campaign and players involved and is just my anecdote, but I really do believe that my first experiences being with 4e shaped my perception of grid-combat negatively and is a constant bias. I'm curious if anyone else had their first experiences with tabletop RPGs using D&D 4e, and what kind of experiences they came out of it with?

njharman2• 12 years ago

You should try gridless 5e, it discards a lot of the Math and time suck.

ja27• 12 years ago

Is it just me or does the title seem like it has an extra level of 'meta' to it?

wlievens• 12 years ago

Inside The Making Of The Documentary About How Movies About Film Studios Are Made

Fjolsvith• 12 years ago

I DM'ed 3rd edition and 4th edition campaigns. The author of this article said that 4th edition made combat much longer and that's not true. Once my players got up to speed with the new system, our combat encounters ran about twice as fast as 3.5 did. I also had the impression that 4.0 had been designed with writing computer games in mind (whereas 3.5 would have been a nightmare to code into a game).

ijk• 12 years ago

Oddly, there are many more video games that use the 3.5 rules (D&D Online, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.) and only one that uses the 4th Edition rules (Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale).

njharman2• 12 years ago

4.0 design was based on computer games.

plorg• 12 years ago

Somewhat off-topic, but every time I visit a FastCo page the only thing I see immediately is the slideshow at the top of the page. I often don't even bother scrolling down, because it doesn't seem that there's anything more to the link. This seems like a usability problem to me. I would imagine that it would result in a lot of articles that go unread. Depending how they count pageviews, though, it's probably quite effective at generating ad revenue.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Yes, that happened to me several times as well until I figured out there was content down there once.

alayne• 12 years ago

These rule problems can be a distraction from actual role playing. Might be a good time to try the White Box rules.

bsaul2• 12 years ago

The most promising evolution of rpg i've seen was the microsoft surface table ( the big tables, not the tablet) prototype some guys did. It seemed to be built as a helper for combats and not much more. Obviously you don't want humans to compute bonuses or damages, because that's what computers are for, but you want to keep the freedom and imagination of paper rpgs.

I don't know what the whole thing has become though.

Pamar• 12 years ago

I have been playing the contrarian to this idea since... 1998 I believe? (that was on the Italian usenet RPG group).

My point: unless you want to play an RPG _exclusively_ as a miniatures tactical game, the GM has to be able to "cheat" sometimes in order to adjust things. If you accept this premise, "automated bookeeping systems" like Surface or any other kind of computer assisted combat processor risk becoming a burden: as soon as you decide that the killing blow from (or to) an NPC has to be changed in order not to spoil the fun of your players the system will go out of synch with the shared narrative, and you either have to manually realign it, or accept that yeah, the death really happened, no matter how detrimental to the rest of the adventure.

Also, it tends to negate any attempt at being creative in using spells or even just inventing novel tactics: if the computing model hasn't it hardcoded, there is literally no way to use a decorative mirror on the other side of the room to hit your enemy in the back with your beam weapon, for example.

So, Surface is great for wargames, a complicated and ultimately limiting system for RPGs.

bsaul2• 12 years ago

That's just a matter of fine tuning. You may very well imagine an inteface which lets the gm adjusts computed bonus or even cheat the dices. But imagine having precise maps of every places your characters go into. How many times have you heard a player say "but he can't hit me, because i said was behind that wall ! But the wall isn't there, it can't cover you, etc.."

Or the GM drawing shite last minute maps...

With a table, you have unlimited possibilites for in-game accessories, drawings, sound effects, automation, etc. Then buying a scenario would actually mean something ! You would buy tons of assets, that you could later reuse, etc..

Your concerns ar valid, but seing the table as a helper rather than a simulator would avoid many pitfalls i suppose.

tormeh3• 12 years ago

Pen and paper can never beat computer games at combat mechanics because the rules have to be human-friendly to compute. Pen and paper lives and dies with storytelling, which is why I prefer simple rules a la World of Darkness (apparently mages are really complicated, though).

Retric2• 12 years ago

This 1000 times this. You can condense the rules for a fun RPG game down to a single piece of paper. These companies only make money selling rule books so they want something more complex which does not necessarily mean fun.

tormeh3• 12 years ago

Well, they could always sell monster manuals and pre-canned stories. City maps and politics. Those are the exciting parts, anyway.

e12e• 12 years ago

"Let's assume since you're reading this, you are, or plan to be, a Dungeon Master. By now, you should be familiar with the rules in the Player's Handbook. You've probably already noticed things you like or things you would have done differently. If you have, congratulations. You've got the spirit every Dungeon Master Needs. Curiosity and the desire to make changes, to do things differently because your idea is better than the other guy's -- these are the most important things a Dungeon Master needs. As you go through this rule book, I encourage you to continue to make these choices.

Choice is what the AD&D(r) 2nd Edition game is all about. We've tried to offer you what we think are the best choices for your AD&D campaign, but each of us has different likes and dislikes. The game that I enjoy may be quite different from your own campaign. But it is not for me to say what is right or wrong for your game.

(...)

Take the time to have fun with the AD&D rules. Add, create, expand and extrapolate. Don't just let the game sit there, and don't become a rules lawyer worrying about each piddly little detail. If you can't figure out the answer, MAKE IT UP! And whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of believing these rules are complete. They are not. You cannot sit back and let the rule book do everything for you. Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM , but a brilliant one."

-- Foreword to AD&D 2nd edition's "Dungeon Masters's Guide", David "Zeb" Cook, 2/9/89

Sadly, very few people paid any attention to that foreword (players because the book was off limits, of course ;-).

It's a shame WotC/TSR didn't go forward with the idea of an open rule set, rather than going back to the more traditional model. It is nice to see them borrow some ideas from White Wolf though -- to this day, if I were to recommend a [edit: single] rule set for role playing, it would be something between the old and new World of Darkness rules (aka the Storytelling System).

Inside The Making Of The New “Dungeons and Dragons”

Related Stories