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Nov 23, 2012 -- 5:54AM, powerroleplayer wrote:

There are a few other sacred cows I'd be happy to slaughter and grill, but that's not really the point.  The point is that D&D as a franchise is weighted down by four decades of bad design.  So many of the decisions made back in the day were just plain bad decisions, and we've been slowly winnowing them out as we learned and the hobby as a whole developed.  But by now, many of them have the weight of tradition behind them and cannot be changed without a backlash.  Now, the fanbase is torn between people who want to move forward and people who want to move back, and those two things cannot be made compatible.  Anyone who thinks 4e fans can be satisfied by a tactical rules model doesn't understand 4e.  For all its flaws - and believe me, I can and have gone on for pages about its flaws - it was so much more than that.  It was about an attempt to balance classes in combat and across levels, about math that worked, hit points as an encounter resource, ending the 5mwd swing (at least the class disparity part of it, failed to fix the other half but not the point), about reducing trap options, ending dead levels, ...  And avowedly taking as your starting point an an attempt to distill the essential traditions of D&D (aka, the most sacred of its antiquated cows) doesn't inspire the new generation with hope for the future.

People put a lot of stock in modules, but even as a concept they have limits - as a practical matter they are unlikely to even stretch those limits.  People who like their first level fighter to be one-shottable cannot play at the same table as people who don't.  People who like hit points as an encounter resource cannot play at the same table as people who don't.  It does in fact affect the rest of the table's experience and potentially enjoyment when a vancian wizard trounces what was meant to be a tough encounter by blowing his save or suck spells, then asks to rest because let's face it, spamming ray of frost is not a fun or helpful way of getting through even a 4th level encounter when the fighter's doing more damage than that on a miss.  Or when a rogue completely shuts everyone else out of 2/3s of the game because anything you can do, he can do better.  Or when a fighter trivializes a climactic encounter with a BBEG fire giant because he can, with relatively low rolls, at-will, disarm him (mighty exhertion).  You can't fix an 8x1 fighter/wizard durability gap with a module without either super-powering the wizard or nerfing the fighter (although perhaps the fighter deserves to be nerfed, it still doesn't help the unnerfed fighter and the nerfed fighter play at the same table because "modules").  Nor can you fix fighters being useless in the interaction pillar or rogues being useless in the combat pillar without completely reworking the entire PHB, or just letting fighters rule the world with the same iron fist wizards used to.  

But even beyond the limits of what modules can do to unite players at a given table, there are practical limits to what they can do across tables.  A module that allows one to play an at-will or encounter-based wizard (and I don't mean non-scaling at-wills plus one encounter spell from your tradition) would have to rewrite fair chunks of the spell list to remain interesting and balanced (especially if the core wizard is maxing out at 2 spells/spell level).  A tactical module that doesn't come with a whole suite of powers designed to interact with positioning the way 4e did is going to be a waste of everyone's time (we don't just want to push people around the grid because we like fondling minis, we want those pushes to have tactically meaningful consequences, and flanking isn't half way to being enough).  A module that actually allows clerics to be something other than a healbot without ruining a party's long term durability (and no, HD don't fix that, you need at the very least to have cure spells pulling from a different resource pool than offensive spells) is also going to require a pretty serious reworking (you don't want to just cut their spell pool in half, since the whole point is to actually give them more spell slots that don't have to be spent on healing, and making a change like this to what is effectively a party resource as opposed to a player resource can have far reaching repercussions on the whole table).  And then there's the problem that any time you come within 10' of something that even smells like 4e, certain subsets of the fanbase throw a fit and run away without even giving serious consideration to whether it's a good thing, it's just "not D&D" or "too WoW" (I'm not accusing anyone in particular, and there are people who turn their noses up at 4e style mechanics for legitimate playstyle reasons so feel free to assume I put you in that category, but I have seen this).  So I don't have high hopes that even if a module comes out that does what I want it to do, that does it well, and that does it in a way that lets me play my way while the guy next to me plays his way without interfering with one another, that modules will actually succeed at uniting fans of different editions.  Add to all these difficulties the fact that, since the announcement of Next, the designers have never once hinted that they even understand what 4e fans wanted out of next (hint, it's not just a handful of fighter maneuvers and some at-will spells that become useless two levels in), and I'm seeing next to zero chance that 5e will be a game I want to play.  I'll keep looking, and giving feedback, and hoping they'll listen, but I'm not optimistic.

But more than that, they're already killing what chance they had of uniting the editions.  "It's only a playtest" only gets you so far as an excuse.  I keep coming here in ever dwindling hope, but the sand is trickling out of the hourglass.  I know at least 20 people who play D&D/OGL games regularly.  Not one of them is at all interested in the playtest, because not one of them thinks it has anything to offer them in its current format.  Maybe this is short sighted of them, but that's not the point.  The point is, they aren't playtesting.  That means WotC isn't getting their feedback, so WotC isn't hearing what they want out of the game, and therefore isn't going to give it to them.  And even if WotC did give it to them it would be too late because they've already given up on Next.  I recognize what a monumental undertaking the public playtest is, I really do.  But by the time they've hammered out the core, even if it is a good one and even if it is possible to add modules to achieve any play style, they'll have already chased away a good chunk of their potential customers.

+1

Nov 23, 2012 -- 7:21AM, Chris24601 wrote:

I know our group has been completely driven off from Next. I couldn't get anyone to give the latest iteration a try. Instead we're now focusing on house rules to fix what we feel are the holes in 4E to make it fit our playstyle better. We aren't interested in going back to previous versions of D&D. We abandoned each of the previous editions for other game systems for a reason and we came back to new editions of D&D because of the advancements in design that had been made. The fact is the rest of our group has decided that starting a Rifts campaign is a better use of their free time than testing Next. When you're losing your potential audience to RIFTS then you have a real problem.

I started in this hobby with Palladium, and I couldn't agree with your last statement any more.

Nov 23, 2012 -- 5:39AM, vegetakiller wrote:

Nov 23, 2012 -- 1:06AM, Vic_Ferrari wrote:

Nov 22, 2012 -- 6:17PM, MeCorva wrote:

Why not have a easy wizard?

That would be the one in the 1st playtest packet (the best packet so far), as of the last packet the classes are a tad scattered  (the wizard is a mess, IMO).

Uh, no the first Wizard was still a vancian mess.

Uh (hate when people type things like "uh", so lame and transparent...), yes, how was it a mess?

Pretty clear to me, not this shrouded AEDU business in the latest incarnation.

Seems they are folding... 

Nov 23, 2012 -- 7:58AM, Xrylene wrote:

Nov 23, 2012 -- 7:40AM, professordaddy wrote:

Yes, you could dump many of D&D's essential concepts and design a new game, from scratch. It wouldn't be D&D any more, by definition. And since other companies are already doing that, you'd be throwing away the one thing D&D has over its competitors in the marketplace: brand recognition. So no.

Oh look, it's you.

If you're so hung up on D&D looking and feeling exactly as it has for decades, why do you even post here, seriously? I thought the whole point of D&D Next was to make it better, not stagnate. With people like you around, this edition would be better named D&D Old, because you don't seem to at all understand what innovation or growth mean. If all you can ever say is you "like how it was, change it back", then I'd suggest you stay out of my threads, for both our sake, because you'll get none of that, and I've grown tired of your "tradition is best" arguments.

The last time DnD did that, it splintered the fanbase and caused the massive cluster**** that spawned Pathfinder. The entire point of 5e is that they're trying to reunify the fanbase.