Understood. Making things up is half the fun, after all. But there comes a point when it makes little sense to houserule EVERYTHING, when a different system already has such rules in place.
And, to be fair, that was not my only issue with 4e. Rather than go through that extensive list again, the final descision rested with my players, who wanted to stay with 3.5e.
Understood. Making things up is half the fun, after all. But there comes a point when it makes little sence to houserule EVERYTHING, when a different system already has such rules in place.
And, to be fair, that was not my only issue with 4e. Rather than go through that extensive list again, the final descision rested with my players, who wanted to stay with 3.5e.
You misunderstand. You literally have a guide in the book on how to make iconic monsters without going throw the long drawn out process in 3.5E. You could literally throw together the monster in just a few minutes looking at the guideline charts. The only house rule would be the awaken spell ritual scroll...not much for an adventure...
The only house rule would be the awaken spell ritual scroll...not much for an adventure...
And the druid class. But, as I said, I had other issues with 4e and its presentation. If I had to start a new campaign tomorrow, I'd probably choose Pathfinder and the Cerulean Seas supplement run via MapTool.
The only house rule would be the awaken spell ritual scroll...not much for an adventure...
And the druid class. But, as I said, I had other issues with 4e and its presentation. If I had to start a new campaign tomorrow, I'd probably choose PF.
its cool. I was just hoping you didn't throw 4E down because of a 10 minute playtest or something. As long as you gave it a real chance I can't gripe...
Default/Hard to Excise Grid Requirement. Let me make one thing clear: I like using the battle grid. Sometimes. But I also like the ability to play a pick-up game with character sheets, a dice bag, and some sort of box lid to roll on, and have had some pretty amazing sessions that only worked because I was able to run TotM combats. Threat: Negligable. Devs seem focused on supporting TotM
Default/Hard to Excise Encounter Paragdim. I like the freedom to be fluid with encounters, something that I didn't feel 4e did a good job of delivering. The push to distinct, bite-sized encounters with the ability to rest between each one a standard expectation put a crimp in the style of active dungeons. Threat: Low. "Short Rests" are in but right now only for HD-based healing. Devs seem to be focusing on adventure-as-unit
"Dude, Where's my GDSM and Amulet of Reflection?" ~or~ Magic Items as part of Character Build. The game should be playable without magic items. Characters should not plan ahead for *specific* magic items even in campaigns where magic loot of some description can be safely anticipated. If Magic Items are part of Character Build and I somehow run the system anyway, I will have Santa Claus show up to deliver the Player Progression Loot like a scene out of Narnia (but played for spiteful humor) Threat: Low. There's been a lot of talk about flat math and magic items being magical, not math fixes. However, I think that's kind of been a "love it or hate it" proposition, with some demanding exactly what I don't want to see. Time will tell if the devs change their tune.
Critical Mass of Stuff That Makes My Brain Hurt. Proning oozes. Bleeding Skeletons. Burning Fire Elementals to death. The sort of things that shouldn't even work with magic involved (I'm not going to dip so much as a toe into the martial versus magic logic argument here). A little of this isn't a dealbreaker; It's practically inevitable as the rules make a lot of round holes and specific situations throw out a lot of square pegs. A lot of it is. Threat: Moderate. Current design talks the talk ("For conditions, we want to think first about what's going on in-universe") but doesn't quite Walk the Walk (Ray of Frost versus Flyers, for instance).
Everybody Resource Manages the Same. A more accurate way of stating the complaint that "All classes are the same" under early-4th ADEU. Different classes, or at least different castes of classes (Power Sources, if you will) should have different mechanical skeletons on which they're built. Especially with Themes and Backgrounds providing a lot of your surface differences, the classes need to be unique to their cores. Threat: Moderate. Right now we have Vancian (Wizard), Weirdo psudeo-Vancian (Divine), and ??? (Martial), but I'm prety sure there's a ton of support to sliding towards ADEU, and I'd really like to see Arcane and Divine drift farther apart...
Great list. I'll add:
Thousands upon thousands of feats, and any other game element choice that further complicates the game by inducing analysis paralysis.
Monsters being designed with arbitrary attack, defense, ability and damage scores based on their level and role instead of their physiology, training, surroundings, natural abilities, etc. In short, monsters designed to "challenge" X number of PCs at Y level by expending approximately Z% of their daily resources.
Skill points. Never again.
PCs with ability scores that go up to 30. No more silly anime D&D, please. I'm completely fine with and do want that stuff in supplements such as the Epic Level Handbook and Deities and Demigods. Just keep that stuff out of the core.
Two dozen classes. I'm tired of the class bloat. I don't know of any classes outside of the ones found in the various PHB 1s from each edition that really need to be a fully realized class in 5e. Even a fair few of those have never really justified themselves, but it's no use fighting a losing battle on that subject.
The "everything is core" philosophy. This won't keep me from playing really, but I would hate to see it adopted again. It just waters down everything to the point that nothing is ever special and wondrous anymore.
Failure to properly implement the promised bounded accuracy system. I really hope this plays out like you've made me envision it. I really hope I never see an attack bonus, saving throw or skill check over +11.
Deal breakers would be if the printed material was of poor quality. I am looking for a hard cover book that will last years and endure a lot of usage.
Content wise I would be dissappointed with a staggered release of all the potential character classes, I want 1 players handbook with every class that will ever be there included at the start. Release options for these classes in the PHB at later, fine, but don't make me wait to play a formerly iconic class.
Not releasing the 3 traditional core books at once would be frowned upon.
Making core rules beholden to online content, huge deal breaker.
I'll second the "it has to be fun" deal breaker. But of course, that is too generic to be fair, so here is a better list:
1) Not balanced: The options available to all the players at my table have to be within the same ballpark in terms of usefulness. I never want to see two players able to take two ways of solving the same problem where one of these ways is almost always going to be better. For example, picking locks as a skill vs. the automatically successful Knock spell or the feat that lets me choose several languages vs. the Comprehend Languages spell.
2) Extra work for the DM: As the main DM for my group, I have enough on my plate creating interesting adventures and interesting encounters (not always combat) for my group. I don't need more work to create NPCs, monsters, or being hounded at the table by players wanting me to make decisions about how effective their narrative description is or how I ruled such a situation several sessions ago.
3) Lack of online tools: The DDI tools, while not perfect, were a wonderful thing compared to what we had to use before. The character builder was a great tool (compared to not having one) and it made making characters so much easier (and easier to read since I didn't have to write out all of the stuff for my character, like the who knows how many spells my 3.5e Druid had that I used most often). The compendium was also very useful since it allowed me to find what I was looking for without having to go through a large number of books.
4) A split definition about what gets to be gritty realism and what gets to be fantastical. I want everything in the book to be moving in a similar direction where either gritty realism is what we are trying to achieve (low-levels of healing even if you have a Cleric, generally mundane characters with no one having especially epic feeling abilities, etc.) or fantastical (healing is spread between a large number of sources and characters can self-heal, everyone can do things that feel epic based on character sheet information). Previous editions allowed too much of the forced gritty realism stuff, such as low levels of healing and long travel times, be trumped by self-contained caster classes.
Mind-control fighters, who can somehow non-magically compel an enemy to attack the guy wearing plate armor instead of the sorceress with no armor to speak of.
Has that ever happened? Because I can't think of any edition where that's ever happened, and I've seen no indication that it'll happen in DDN. That sounds like the kind of thing that people say about 4E when they have never actually read 4E.
Anyway, the major deal-breaker for me is going to be ease of encounter-building as a DM. 4E is absolutely amazing when it comes to how easy and straightforward it is to build and customize encounters. I don't have to do any wacky math, adjusting monster level is simple, and everything that I need to run an enemy is right there in its stat block. I cannot and will not go back to the days of 3E where running a mildly complex encounter required maneuver around the clunky encounter numbers table, adjusting monster level was clumsy and time-consuming, and running enemy spell-casters required endless book-flipping.
Another deal-breaker is going to be lack of interesting races or lack of support for them. For whatever reason, race is a big deal to me in D&D, and more of my character concepts center around playing a cool character of Race X than of Class Y. If the core only includes Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human as many have suggested, or if other races are monster-manual-only and thus get no comparable support, then I'll probably be waiting for more options to come about before picking up the new edition. Hopefully, since they said that they're including every class that's been in a PHB, they'll do the same thing with races, meaning that I can play cool stuff like Dragonborn, Half-Orc, and Tiefling right from the start.
Speaking of things that were badly designed, please check out this thread for my Minotaur fix. What have the critics said, you ask? "If any of my players ask to play a Minotaur, I'm definitely offering this as an alternative to the official version." - EmpactWB "If I ever feel like playing a Minotaur I'll know where to look!" - Undrave "WoTC if you are reading this - please take this guy's advice." - Ferol_Debtor_of_Torm "Really full of win. A minotaur that is actually attractive for more than just melee classes." - Cpt_Micha
Also, check out my recent GENASI variant! If you've ever wished that your Fire Genasi could actually set stuff on fire, your Water Genasi could actually swim, or your Wind Genasi could at least glide, then look no further.
Finally, check out my OPTIONS FOR EVERYONE article, an effort to give unique support to the races that WotC keeps forgetting about. Includes new racial feature options for the Changeling, Deva, Githzerai, Gnoll, Gnome, Goliath, Half-Orc, Kalashtar, Minotaur, Shadar-Kai, Thri-Kreen, Warforged and more!
Monsters being designed with arbitrary attack, defense, ability and damage scores based on their level and role instead of their physiology, training, surroundings, natural abilities, etc. In short, monsters designed to "challenge" X number of PCs at Y level by expending approximately Z% of their daily resources.
I don't get the distinction. From a DM's perspective, everything the players encounter in the world is chosen by me. Every monster they ever fight was placed there by me, every NPC they could suddenly challenge or attack was placed there by me. I choose how strong or how weak to make the monsters they fight and I also get to choose their reactions (does the ultra-power NPC the party wasn't ready to challeng slaughter them all or walk away laughing at their pitiful attempts).
When I choose monsters to place in the path of the party, I want the clearest way possible to know how that monster is going to fare against the party. I want as full as control as possible over how tough I want that fight to be. Things like roles and monster CR values do nothing but help me do this and if the DMs guide wants to give me guidelines on how to build fights such as a series of fights in a given day will challenge but not kill my party, then I'm only happy to have such advice. I am under no requirements to follow those guidelines and I can easily have a dungeon with ten encounters while expecting the party to figure out among themselves when to turn back and rest and when to push forward.
I think you are going to be seriously disappionted then. They will print more classes after the main books are released. In fact, they might print more classes than usual now that Backgrounds and Themes are carrying much more weight than before. But the main reason why you are likely to be disappointed is that new classes sell books and selling books is important.
I will buy all 5e core books, and most/some optional books. Reading the playtest, I really like it's direction and relate to the material, as I come from AD&D 2e, OD&D, and some AD&D 1e.
Deal breakers for me: 1. Radical changes of fundamental rules - If the game rules change drastically and the product no longer has the D&D 'brand feeling'. (I really doubt this would occur.) 2. Money grab/quality - A deliberate money grab and also comprimises the quality of the prodct. E.g. there should only be several core books to play the game (PHB, DMG, MM1...), but there can be many many optional books to enhance the game (PHB2, DMG2, MM2-10+...).
