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Aug 18, 2012 -- 10:59PM, Brightmantle wrote:

I like this idea. I am a grids for battles or mapping exploration guy myself. I have all kinds of pillars, furniture, objects, firepits, pit traps, real swinging doors, and wells, and I made my grids for mapping by cutting to size synthetic flooring from my local outlets remnants, it even does well with Dry erase markers, I use a black table cloth to put them on for anawesome 3d effect. i also have 300+ painter lead as well as pewter mini's some from way back. I've got Ral parthas, and Grenedires as well as The Chaimail minis from the early 200's, I have tons of Reaper mini's and all types of monsters. I can even Mold them. There's guides for that on Dragonsfoot.org with pictures These guys there are awesome- Hi everybody- and I love that site. If you want to make a leather bound book it will teach you how. I also love to play in the theater of the mind. I want grids to be totally optional for Next but far from an after thought. I get how you 4e. players love Mini's and the grid. I do not dig the plastic chinsey (IMO) figures for your game but I know not everyone's a painter.

Easy solution for the plastic cheap minis is to look at reaper minis*. I'm cool with getting my minis from someone other than WoTC. Also, the new dungeon command minis are better quality pre-painted than what we used to see from WoTC, imo.

I'm hoping that 3d printing makes it's way into the world of minis soon, and it becomes easier to order custom minis.



*Pewter, not painted.

Wowsa! 60 something pages this thread is monsta!  To be bried what I like about 4E (and for the record I started playing DnD with the release of 2E and 4E is my favorite version of the game).  So without ado:

1) Class Roles:  For too long it took basically a suspension of disbelieve for the DM not to have monsters ignore more physically viable characters and attack more physically squishy characters like Wizards and Rogues and then focus fire on the stronger characters.  4E was the first DnD system to acknowledge this failure and instill mechanics as regards certain roles therefore things like a fighter's combat superiority and a paladin's divine sanction etc gave an in-game incentive and mechanic for the party monsters to target the tanks (defenders) and punish them to some degree if they did not.

2) Class Balance:  The only edition to really do this.

3) Healing I love the fact that in 4E clerics were not heal bots but instead their attacks fulfilled their role as being healers and their more substantive healing did not take their full action to perform so a cleric could do other things besides heal.

4) Mobile, dynamic combats.   I love the fact that in 4E combats are not static.  The battlefield is constantly changing as players and monsters are slid, pushed, pulled, etc around the board.  It makes the game tactically interesting even more so when condition modifiers are thrown into the mix.

5) Resource Mgmt: 4E pretty much corrected the problem of the one fight workday.

6) less randomization in general.  You didn't have to roll for HP and be faced with getting a crappy roll for HP as the fighter, the same with ability scores.

7) The removal of Vancian Casting and the A/E/D/U system.  To me I don't see what is so great about being able to make basic attacks that people in Essentials and such love.  An at-will power is a basic attack with benefits so why would I want a basic attack without benefits?

These are just a few of the things I like about 4E.  So far I am not sold on DnD Next because honestly I don't see enough 4E in it and supposedly the 4E mechancis would be a modular option but so far I haven't seen it.  In my 20 something years of gaming I can say this is the first time I am not too excited about a new edition.  If I wanted to play DnD 3.5 or Pathfinder or 2E I would do so, and unfortunately that seems (from what I have seen) to be the core of DnD Next.  I am not giving up on the system and I greatly respect all the designers involved and for sure I will pick up DnD Next when it is released, but in the two gaming groups I am involved in our decision is pretty much in consensus that we aren't sold on it DnD Next so far.

It's kind of funny and weird and it's like I'm a grognard for not wanting to go backwards which is something usually assocatiated with Grognardism!  Still, it's all good I guess and I hope DnD succeeds even if myself and a lot of other 4E fans get left behind....I guess we will play 13th Age or just stick with 4E unless Next really surprises me which I'm hoping for).

Fallstorm

Aug 20, 2012 -- 12:35PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

In some theoretical sense it would be nice if DDN could be 'complete in a few tomes' but its hard to see how that can really be... I mean 4e is complete in 3 core books, you can play it and it covers as much ground as the 1e core books did when released (plus some). Clearly 'complete' nowadays covers a LOT of ground, so I don't see any way that the game can possibly manage it in a couple books, especially since it is going to have to be effectively around 3 different games in one if people are going to get something close to what they all want...

HERO system gives an example of how an RPG can be complete in a few tomes:
The entire game system is included in one large volume for most editions, two volumes in the latest edition. (They split character generation into a seperate book from everything else, though char gen has a lot of power explainations that you might need to look up at table until you've memorized how all your stuff works.)
All of the other books in the system (and there are actually kind of a lot) are full of example builds, mostly for use as NPCs. Though since PCs and NPCs use the same rules, you could also use them as examples/starting points. For example, if you want a vampire NPC (or PC) you could look up a vampire in one of the books, and use it either as is or as a starting point.

The requirement to do this with enough flexibility to appeal to a modern RPG audience is that you make everything into a billion 'legos' and let players assemble them, probably with enough flexibility that DM oversight is a requirement. HERO uses a generic character point system, though it's possible to silo things a little more than that.

I really don't think that's quite what the D&D audience wants though. When Players' Supplement XIII comes out, we want it to have brand new options in there that we didn't have before, rather than new combinations of the existing options that we maybe hadn't thought about.