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4 months ago ::
Jan 24, 2013 - 7:02PM
#121
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Date Joined:
Aug 16, 2012
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With D&D you only get what you put into it. The mechanics of the system alone don't make game.
Well, yes, that's true. However, you're going to end up rolling dice eventually, right? Storytellers can always tell stories, but if you're going to try to tie those stories into a gaming format... you'd best be pickin' a good game, partner.
Gonna be rollin' dem bones...
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4 months ago ::
Jan 24, 2013 - 10:33PM
#122
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Date Joined:
Dec 13, 2006
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Considering you have no idea when their deadline is, I'm not sure why I should care whether you see that happening by their deadline or not.
I'll admit, I was assuming summer of next year; I cannot recall where I had read that, but upon closer investigation it seems that I had mistakenly thought they had announced an approximate (Summer of 2014) when they have done no such thing. Looking at what has been done so far, I cannot decide if they are nearing a finish on a beta set of basic rules (meaning release of the game could be early next year possibly), or if they are only finishing up an alpha build that they plan on expanding upon significantly (setting that release date further and further away from early next year). I don't think the design team themselves has quite set out how much they will be adding in, as they are still building the central core and want to find out how long that will take them before they start promising things that will push their deadline too far back.
In either fashion, I really disagree that all they are doing is data hunting right now. I'm more or less positive that the features we see in the game - the classes, the basic way those classes operate, the way feats work, the way defenses and spells and expertise dice and basically all the primary working mechanisms - are the general version we will be seeing, at least in spirit. Maybe there will be more expertise dice, maybe less; maybe the skill list will change, and maybe skills will become entirely detached from classes, but we're still gonna get a fixed skill list and skill dice in some manner.
In this fashion, I feel comfortable in saying that how I currently see the basic game evolving is not something that I feel is congruent with a new, progressive iteration of D&D - perhaps a solid build of rules that could be a functional, if supremely basic table-top RPG, but nothing new and exciting.
I will easily concede, however, that they may be able to pull something off with the modular rulesets they will be releasing (in splatbooks? in core? in core splatbooks?) that may be much more ingenuitive and closer to the idea of something new and exciting. (As I further analyze this, I begin to suspect that the real game-changer that 5e will bring to the industry is this super-modular approach).
Want the tl;dr of my posts? Read the bold text; I put it there to highlight the main points for ease of skimming.
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4 months ago ::
Jan 24, 2013 - 10:40PM
#123
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Date Joined:
Aug 16, 2012
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Wasn't the release to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons?
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4 months ago ::
Jan 24, 2013 - 10:49PM
#124
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Date Joined:
Dec 13, 2006
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Wasn't the release to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons?
If it is, I don't see any official announcement, just (logical) supposition. I could definitely see that being their timeframe for release, no matter how much content they have, with the goal of making a finalized, shippable basic version by that time.
Want the tl;dr of my posts? Read the bold text; I put it there to highlight the main points for ease of skimming.
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4 months ago ::
Jan 24, 2013 - 10:52PM
#125
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While the conversation has ranged far afield concerning what exactly DDN is (and I have misgivings still concerning where it is going, I'm committed to staying in the playtest to represent my viewpoint but I actually couldn't bring myself to open the last playtest package before 12/17).
That said, I do still see things that give me hope and some innovations (I hesitate to say that some of the following are new strictly speaking (but they are innovative)).
1: Skill parity (barring some racial stuff and the rogue): putting the skills you get under backgrounds for everybody was brilliant.
2: Advantage/Disadvantage: While I appreciate the simplicity this has opposed to a wide range of fiddly bonuses, I still dislike the mechanic due to its swinginess, but that's my preference, I'd probably be satisfied with a flat bonus alternate rule of around +3/-3.
3: The Expertise/Martial Damage Die: I roundly embraced this when it was first introduced and I'm glad to see that they are going to scale it back from this packet's iteration although I'm not sure how I feel about it being set at the value of the weapon the character is useing, going to want to try to find a way to test the heck out of that.
4: The Skill die: Currently this reminds me to much of the Cortex (Serenity) RPG which I hate mechanically although we do have the attribute bonus to help alleviate some of the issues I dislike in cortex (although the bonuses feel to low to me right now, but I haven't gotten to really wring that out yet either, my shift change at work has resulted in my having lost the ability to fill time at work with DDN fiddlings).
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4 months ago ::
Jan 25, 2013 - 1:15AM
#126
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Date Joined:
Jun 21, 2012
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If I were designing D&D right now, I'd view all this diversity as an interesting puzzle. One that I wouldn't try to solve, exactly, but it's one that I'd like to explore. I don't generally see revisions as progress so much as rejection. Basically we've got a thing that works well but a lot of folks are starting to reject certain ideas within it. We all come to our own solutions, share them with each other, certain things manage to spread and people keep disagreeing but the germ is there and certain ideas start to carry more weight than others in the dialogue. Eventually, someone comes out and offers something more complete than an idea. They put a product out that actually comes out and says what some are thinking, some are saying, and some understand the sentiment even if that's not their particular solution. To use a far more meteoric and influential example, Manet's Olympia wasn't really about Manet coming out and rejecting the the whole artistic world and the institutions it was built around on his own. His work was motivated by a large movement happening on the fringe and the acceptance of Olympia into the Salon was the result of a growing sentiment of rejection. If that collective sentiment hadn't existed there would have been no revolution - or at least not then, and Olympia wouldn't have been the symbol of that revolution. D&D's editions similarly express rejection. 2e rejected the hypercomplicated To Hit roll, races as classes and other things that people had difficulty dealing with or found overly proscriptive. 3e rejected the idea that character creation stops from a mechanical standpoint at level 1, the use of ascending and descending scales for checks and other things people had difficulty dealing with or found overly proscriptive. 4e rejected the idea that the system should reward people for learning it with better characters, established as the actor as the one who should roll to hit and, again, cleaned up other things people had difficulty dealing with or found overly proscriptive. DDN so far is doing exactly what the other editions did and its creators are doing what creators do: they reject ideas, clean up things folks have a hard time with, and loosen restrictions folks find overly proscriptive. The progress exists in the rejection, because not all of the new ideas are rejected even if they're expressed differently. 4e did not reject the idea that character creation should continue past level 1, for example, but it did reject the idea that the system should reward people for learning it and so it tried to keep the decision points of 3e with feats, power selection, and paragon paths. These ideas are not evil malicious attempts to take our freedom away, but a compromise had to be struck between virtually freeform character building and not rewarding system mastery. In essence, the acceptance of character options being in the hands of the player was embraced with an attempt to place reasonable limits on those decisions in order to limit the need for system mastery. Not all statements of rejection are well received. Olympia's exhibition was one of the most profitable of the Salons in its time because people would pay to go simply so they could spit on the painting. People were willing to pay for the priviledge of debasing and smearing what they didn't like, and while I'm not saying that 4e is anywhere near as revolutionary or influential as Olympia, it's similar in that regard as well. The active dislike people have, the willingness to take time out of their day to rant on about how awful it is, mirrors the image of folks travelling to the museum, paying the entry fee so they can smear and abuse the object of their dislike. But it endured. DDN will reject a lot of things in 4e because that's what creators do: they look around them and see problems to be fixed. If they're circumspect then they recognise that there are good things to preserve, but it's the rejection of ideas that spurs creativity on and prompts new creations. People will pay to spit on DDN, just like they paid to spit on 4e, but it will endure the same way 4e will endure and the same way AD&D endures. It's made its mark and nothing can take that away.
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