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This blog has been silent for a little over a month now. Short of the long, I didn't have much to say. I was watching with bated breath all the little tidbits of D&DNext and have been enjoying them. But short of reactions to posts, I didn't have much to say. Well, I can say that I will be going to GenCon, I will be attending the D&DNext presentation, and with any luck getting in more than 1 game of the D&DNext playtest. So afterwards, I should have plenty to say.

And with more luck there will be news of a compatibility license. As excited as I am for the game itself, I am really hoping there will be firm word on a license. If it is just, "Yes, a license is coming and it will be good," I am not going to get all that excited. Reason is because that was the story of the license of the 4E license...

So last week we read in Legends and Lore that Fighters are not going to automatically get better with each level. This is great in my opinion. Finally, you can use a basic orc, goblin, kobold, etc at all levels of the game. But the question is: how do you balance that against the Wizard. In my humble opinion, that's easy: don't make the wizard automatically get new spell levels every other level. Give the wizard other options like being able to cast his existing spells better. 

Take magic missile for example. The playtest had it doing 1 missile at 1st level, 2 at 3rd, 3 at 6th and so on. That's an automatic power increase that the fighter does not get. Here's an alternate: instead of the wizard getting a new spell level, the wizard can choose to make all his spells better. He takes ...

This post is a continuation of Dale's D&DNext Playtest Report, Part 1. See this post if you have not read it. 

It was at this point that a dwarf cleric showed up (aka, another of the group showed up and we just handed him a character sheet, gave him a quick run down of the rules and then back to the adventure). The captured kobold told the players that the next room is very dangerous. It contains a number of rats inside a trash pile. The players asked how the kobolds get through it. The kobold replied that they run as fast as they can.

Encounter 3: The wizard led the charge with burning hands. I said that he got half of the rats in the pile. I didn't bother rolling Dex saves since they each had 1 hp and even half damage was far more damage than they could survive. However, the ...

So we're 1 week away from the release to the Beta Test of D&DNext and I am excited. I'm going to try to talk my regular gaming group into giving this a try. Otherwise, I'll most likely be finding a group of people at my local game store to see if they want to do a one shotter. Either way. I'm excited.

Apparently there's going to be some kind of restrictions on how open us playtesters can be and how much we can talk about the material. I remember the Pathfinder Beta Playtest. It took my group at the time about 30 seconds after reading the beta classes to switch over for good from 3.5. The one thing we wanted was material. I plan to do a little DnDNext Beta material writing (not WotC sanctioned, obviously) for groups that want to make this their regular game right away. I'm not sure yet exactly...