braro > The Wizards Community

braro posted a new blog post.

D&D Next: Playtest Session 2, Feedback and Rubric

So...The wizard's player had nothing good to say about it. Sleep felt...

I agree with everything said here. D&D Next has very few ups (it does feel like D&D) but it just has more downs to be playable, let alone fun, at this stage of the game. I would love to see WOTC just take the game in a whole new direction like they did with 4e. Sure, that would have the potential of not selling to more people, however, I feel if they released D&D Next as is they would lose more.
I do have one thing to add, in regards to the healing. Hit Dice are dumb. I have...

View full comment I agree with everything said here. D&D Next has very few ups (it does feel like D&D) but it just has more downs to be playable, let alone fun, at this stage of the game. I would love to see WOTC just take the game in a whole new direction like they did with 4e. Sure, that would have the potential of not selling to more people, however, I feel if they released D&D Next as is they would lose more.

I do have one thing to add, in regards to the healing. Hit Dice are dumb. I have nothing good to say about Hit Dice. This is probably the most clunky and unrealistic healing system I've ever seen. I propose the following hypothetical scenario:

You are a Cleric of Moradin with the Guardian theme, because you want to be useful in combat. Say you have 25 HP, and your HD is 1d8. Your party is besieged by some force of whatevers and you took 9 damage defending your party in battle. You're not bloodied after the fight, so you walk away with some superficial wounds, maybe some scratches, or your armor came loose a bit and you need to catch your breath before you can fight again. So you take a few minutes to catch your breath, tighten your armor back up. So, you spend 5gp for a usage of a Healers' Kit and roll your HD, and get a 3+con...So you have to spend another 5gp for another use of the healers' kit and roll again, this time you get a 2+con... In order to get to full, you potentially would have to spend anywhere from 5-15gp worth of uses from a healers' kit, and even that might not be enough at higher levels when you have more HP... This seems like a very bad way of doing out of combat healing. If you're going to have it in there, don't make it cost so much for so little. It's almost just not worth using if you're going by the silver standard the game is supposed to run on (side note, it doesn't). It doesn't make sense that a hardened warrior isn't able to just rub his scratches a bit, tighten his armor and be good as new.

Random out of combat healing, that costs considerable party resources when you factor the cost of the Healers' Kits and the number of party members, is just a bad system. The essence of healing surges in 4e was after combat you can take as much time as you need to recover, patch yourself up, tighten things down, collect yourself, then move on. This system ignores the 'taking HP damage doesn't necessarily mean you are bleeding' mentality that WOTC has been implying for awhile now.

Perhaps that's just me, and if it is I'll stand alone on it.

May 31, 2012 6:30 PM PDT