So I know a lot of people have their favorite systems and that there is quite a bit of worry that WotC will not deliver a product true to the D&D line with 5e especially after what many people consider a disappointment with the changes they made in 4e. I've been messing around with the playtest and trying to stay up to date on a lot of the discussion across various sites while doing my best to approach the new edition with an open mind.

Lets start by taking a look at previous systems and what about them could have used improvement, and then later see how Next approaches a lot of those areas. And let's keep the discussion mature and constructive and not simply dissolve into edition wars.


Basic D&D
The game that started it all. At the end of the day though the basic game had very little variety and a lot of things boiled down to chance or randomness. The game was designed to send players off to explore some dungeons and didn't focus much on what players might want to do before or after the dungeon, or that they might not decide to go to a dungeon at all. This edition spawned the whole genre, a slew of other games and content from other publishers, and numerous video games and CRPGS, but it could strive to be so much more.

Advanced D&D
AD&D moved the game forward and dumped a whole new mess of races, classes, spells, a more sound combat system, and more mechanics in general. But of course with more content comes more complexity and it wasnt destined to last long. Combat became needlessly time consuming and everything now took too many steps making things hard to imagine, spell casting multiple steps and by the time you were done things could have already changed, and most people felt THAC0 needed to be removed. Outside of that, the designers tried too hard to make the game more realistic and while it failed in some places in others it worked to well causing issues like innate sexism in things like ability scores. Overall the system was mostly just too complicated so that most people never effectively understood how to play and reference books were frequently needed to be flipped through.

2nd Edition
Second edition brought roleplaying forward to become a much more prominent aspect of the game. It also allowed for much more customization of your character and the basis of the skill points system was starting to take shape. However many of the vices from the previous rule sets still plagued it: THAC0 was still and issue and made the game complicated and mathy even for intermediate players and while the class system was starting to take shape as well, there just wasn't enough content to allow characters to become mechanically different than any other member of their class.

3rd Edition / 3.5 Revision
This section could easily be larger than every other section combined, but I'll try not to ramble. And before you burn me at the stake for heresy though know that 3.5 is my favorite system. That said, its not without its own flaws, some of them glaring. When WotC bought the rights to D&D they went about trying to right rules to iron out any and every uncertainty that a player or DM might come across but in some regards they just didnt know when to stop. There are a lot of good things about this edition; The class list finally rounded out to include all the 'core' classes we think of in RPGs today, skill checks swapped from being percentile based to using the d20 system that was used for attacks and saves, with the picking from tons of feats or slotting your skill points allowed you to make unique characters even at level one, and with the various classes and prestigue classes one could hone their character to be much more niche than the standard base classes. The problem though, is that while the core system became less complicated and more streamlined with the d20 system turning the game into "roll a d20, add a number, see if your number is higher than another number", the rules seemed to want to capture every single aspect you could ever encounter and then slap a ruling to it, rather than DMs being able to have some wiggle room when it came to some things now every action normally involved flipping through a pile of books to find the exact ruling for that situation because there was an official one somewhere. Too many specific rules, too many keywords, too many dead levels, and just a ton of math in general bogged things down even though the system allowed for so much creativity. Declaring an attack was easy, making sure that all your math was correct, especially at higher levels, could often become a nightmare, especially if you were doing anything outside simple hitting something with a sword. The game was unnecessarily large and the more that was added the more than it became unbalanced. 3.5 was created to help smooth the balance issues but a lot of the issues above still remained.

4th Edition
This edition often receives a lot of flak for basically not being 3.5, it often gets tagged with being called "WoW on paper" or "Not True D&D" but a change to the gaming license by WotC also ensured that this edition just didn't receive the followership from both players and publishers as it could have had. WotC saw what a convoluted amount of math 3.5 had become and decided to steer away from that and they basically succeeded but in doing so they also seemed to lose a bit of the roleplaying crowd along the way. It was a simple edition that was easy to get into, easy to understand, and powers could be printed out on cards so that even the newest of players could look down and for the most part know what they were capable of. But the game became more or less became solely about combat; the skill system remained but much like WoW's it became neutered to a point of simply getting trained in a few skills at character creation and then leaving it at that, even spells that shouldn't rely on combat now often required combat to work as seen in numerous healing spells that required you first hit an enemy, and most classes were broken down into a few simply little archtypes that spelled out exactly what your job was and what you'd be doing for the life of that character. Though the system fixed the inflated math of 3.5 it essentially meant that every few levels you'd gain one point to attack but enemies would gain a point to armor class. At levels where players would be getting new magic gear, new ability points, and new bonuses... enemies likewise increased in attacks and defenses at the same rate. And while this meant a sort of balance, it also meant that the game was more or less the same at each teir; your chance to hit successfully never really went up, and while your damage increased, so to did the monsters HP which mean that the percentage roughly remained the same.

<Breath>

The skill system looks nice on paper but once you start taking scaling DC's into account things become if more troublesome as the scaling attack/defense conversation above. The way DCs scaled up as you leveled you were never more likely to succeed at a task than you were at level one. And thats assuming that you're trained, if you weren't trained in a particular skill, since they were only based off your ability score as you leveled you actually became less and less likely to succeed at a task. There were feats and options out that that allowed you to put a dent in this problem by increasing your non combat prowess or letting you train more skills and such, but due to the whole system centering on combat taking this was essentially shooting yourself in the foot when it came time to face a solo monster or a tough encounter. Everyone else would be combat centered and min/maxing, and if you didnt you quickly became an encumbrance to the party.

Now lets take a look at Next and see how it tackles some of the stuff above.

5th Edition
This edition exists because once people started figuring out the math involved with 4e the game essentially became a numbers crunching game, even more so than 3rd edition. It was about combat rather than roleplaying and many characters were nothing more than a stats sheet that was shallow outside of a combat environment, but lessons were learned from it.

The first lesson is that the game needs to focus on the three main pillars of an RPG not just one. Combat should be important, but should share the spotlight with roleplaying and exploration of the world. All classes should offer abilities that cater to all three pillars of the game. In 5e backgrounds allow characters to have complete customization of who they are while retaining the same base abilities.

The second lesson is to make the math not only balanced but simple. Keep the combat moving along by keeping things easy to understand but also make players feel that as they level they're actually getting stronger. 5e really shines in this regard; AC stays relatively the same while attack increases giving players the feeling of advancing as hereos and becoming more and more proficient as they accomplish more and more. 5e also takes the skill / DC system and turns it into multiples of 5 from 5 to 35 and keeps most checks between 10 and 25. Suddenly the DM can choose one of those tiers for any task and feel confident that not only does he know that is how hard the task is regardless of the players involved but that as the players level up they will become more and more proficiency at the same tasks eventually gaining access to some tasks that they wouldnt not have been capable of as greenhorn adventurers but now have earned the greatness to do so. Rather than having several dozen bonuses involved with combat it's broken down into simply 'half cover', 'three quarters cover', 'advantage' and 'disadvantage'. The only rules players have to learn is +2 AC, +5 AC, roll two d20s and take the higher, or roll two d20s and take the lower. That's it. DMs can put those rules into any given situation and it will work.

There are of course other improvements as well: Choosing between +2 ability point and feats means that feats can define a playstyle as well as varied customization. Flaws, Strengths, and Bonds allow you to fit your character into the group better from the start even if you're brand new to roleplaying. Mechanics focused on down time allow you character to expand into activities while not crawling through dungeons like business or management or recruiting new allies. And spells not scaling with level means that preparing them is easier, your slots dictate your power, and that high level spells can be way overpowered but that okay due to the limitations put on them.


5th Edition has a lot of potential and hopefully as more content is added it stays balanced and gets better and better. It should be a game that keeps things smooth and fun, allows new players to learn and participate easily yet still allows old players to customize and explore the system, and allows for a game to be more than constantly referring to the rulebook. I hope people can put aside edition prejudice, or simply hating on a system because it's new, and give it an honest try and a mature critique.

How can anyone like 5th edition? I mean how can it hope to stand up to the purity that was 3.5 edition? I joke of course. A nice write-up and an interesting read. I admit I haven't played a great deal of 5th Ed yet but from what I saw it seemed a solid enough edition; a decent combination of the balance and simpler rules of 4th ed with the flexibility and variety that 3.X ed brought to character creation. I'm really going to have to grab the latest rules pack and give it another read through - see whats changed and whatnot.

Haha. Thanks for the read!

I didnt think it would be such a text wall at first but apparently summing up 40 years of a game takes some keystrokes. Hopefully some good discussion comes of it.

Just a note : The public playtest is no longer available for download from the WotC site. The edition itself should be out in around July but until then you gotta either read the rules from forum writeups, use the rules from the Encounters book, or ...well yeah.

I did a small playtest with D&DNext on the forums here, but we didn't get to go very far with it. It was a decent balance of 4E and 3.X as I recall.

~SE++

I really wish that game had gone on a bit longer so that we could have seen more of the combat, we only got a few rounds in.

Initially I didnt much like the look of things as I was trying to slap a character together, it was rushed and I was confused a times. A think a lot of it would have made more sense if I had played the earlier editions that its tries to draw from. Once we got up and running through, after a few questions to the DM on what to add and when, I was good to go. The more I see other players playing it as well things sorta start to fall into place. Between the Acquisitions Inc games which has Chris Perkins explain a bit of the rules, WotC's recording of the devs playing Scourge of the Sword Coast, and just random groups playing it on Roll20 it nice to actually pick up some of the rules in context rather than just reading through a PDF.

It does seem to avoid the massive rules and math of 3.5 without going to the extreme simplicity of 4e.

I really want to try the system out in person, but I think I'm going to have to settle for either Roll20 or PBP.

Having received the updated play test material I would like to add one thing to my previously positive outlook. As of the materials I have at this moment Kender are still an available player race. Why would you do that D&D 5th Ed? I thought we were friends.

Shout out to TSR ?

While that may indeed be the case of all the things they could add as a shout out why Kender? I mean ever if you were going to stick to Dragonlance specifically there were over 30 race options at one point or another (even if most were variations of dwarf or elf). Why pick what would pass in most D&D realms as a racist characterture of a halfling? Especially in a system that already has halflings. It boggles the mind.

Hey, you're talking about a group of people who will eventually add the Drow as a playable race even though they're basically born at level 3 and are completely evil.

~SE++

Actually Drow are already a playable race under the same heading as Kender and Warforged (that is to say the 'ask your DM if he'll let's you play one' section). Also everyone knows drow aren't evil - they are all chaotic good rebels seeking to throw off the reputation of their evil kin. While dual-wielding terribly named scimitars.

And not at all based on a character from a certain book.

Maybe I'll try to put together a D&D Next game once it comes out... I promise not to abandon it.