Dungeons & Dragons 5e playtests

[Locke cole]

And if you did want to play 3.5+, there's been Pathfinder already.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

You won't find a bigger hater of 4th than me and I am a big 3.5 fan but I dont need a 3.5.5- we've got 3.5 and we play that and it beenlong enough that we modded it till our liking. If you're gong to make a new edition, make a new edition not 4+ or 3.5+ but 5.

[Ryong]

Yeah Tev, I was bummed out on the damage for fighters but come a playtest with my usual group I think I'll just parry all the time.

[Meister]

Another insightful post from somewhere else:

Well, as I'm understanding it, they're still trying to solve a problem with this edition, but that problem has nothing to do with the game, but with the audience they feel they lost over the last two editions. "The group we believe we should belong to doesn't like us, so what must we do to pander to them?"

In news, apparently a Future of D&D keynote speech happened. They want to make the entire back catalog of D&D products from all editions available in electronic format. As long as it's DRM-free and not bound to a specific software/account this is excellent news. As for Next, they anticipate two years of development and will add the sorcerer and warlock to the playtest today or tomorrow. Vagueness mine, timezones, you know.

Also something or other about Forgotten Realms, here is what I think about Forgotten Realms: t

e: mind you I'm not actually expecting DRM-free PDFs, more something like a subscription-based Silverlight interface that gives you 72 dpi black-and-white scans with fingers at the edges.

[Tev]

Originally Posted by Meister

e: mind you I'm not actually expecting DRM-free PDFs, more something like a subscription-based Silverlight interface that gives you 72 dpi black-and-white scans with fingers at the edges.

I'm not sure they can continue to use Silverlight much longer as Microsoft is supposedly giving up on it.

[Meister]

With their track record in tech supplements so far I'm not so sure that would keep them from doing it.

[Tev]

The latest Legends & Lore article talks about the fruits of "months" of work trying to develop Sorcerers and Warlocks for DDN. Highlights are as follows:

-Unlike what was asked for and hoped for by the player community, Sorcerers and Warlocks will not be just like Wizards but with different caster options other than Vancian casting.

-Sorcerers now have some kind of "second alien soul" flavor baked in that is made manifest in a Willpower Point system. Spend too many points casting spells and you become a horrid monster and some Wizard will come and steal your liver. (I'm not making this up.)

Evil wizards have no compunction with capturing sorcerers, experimenting on them, and eventually harvesting their organs for magical potions and other items.

-Warlocks start out innocent enough, until they go all Rain Man over a particular bit of lost lore and end up making deals with cosmic beings for power which is made manifest in some sort of Encounter Power system wherein you beseech your benefactor hourly for powers. I hope you made it happy last combat because it may just let you rot this time around. Also, Wizards think you smell funny.

Wizards regard warlocks as meddlers, thieves, and dangerous renegades. They practice magic without concern for the consequences their actions might bring about. Some wizardly academies go so far as to seek out and destroy the books that warlocks seek. There are some secrets, a wizard may tell you, that are better off kept secret.

This is the best write-up I've read about the classes all day:

So... A Sorcerer is a brilliant young man who never went to college yet is very successful in life due to his own natural abilities. The Warlock is the guy who earned an associate’s degree and went on to land a pretty sweet middle management job. The Wizard is the guy who went to University AND Graduate School but focused on some topic that has zero relevance to the business world. So instead of admitting he wasted 8 years of his life, the Wizard writes a blog about how "feral and chaotic" the Sorcerer is and how the Warlock "accepted deals with the Devil" to get to where he is. All the while, the Wizard is living in his mom's basement pulling down an unemployment check.

That is how I interpreted the clearly biased article.

But yeah, we wanted Sorcerers and Warlocks to be "Wizards without Vancian casting." What we got were bad trap options that don't play out as well as the Wizard. Using the playtest packet, someone on the WoTC forums did the math and it turns out that by the time you reach "high level" gaming, the Wizard has access to higher level spells, has higher Save DCs, and has far far less stupid baked in flavor issues preventing him from doing things.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Man I'm going back to Warhammer Quest- that shit was ace.

[Meister]

Oh boy, the only thing I like better than having bits in the rules that tell me how a player of one class has to treat one of the other is when it's "with hostility and contempt," and when the mechanics back him up.

[Tev]

Yeah, I'm still wracking my brain trying to sort out how the imperative to give the players casting options other than Vancian became "Here, have some spell points or something, except enjoy a smaller spell list, weaker power, and a horrible evil monster transformation when you run out of juice!" and "Here, pretend you're a Cleric, but your god is really a jerk instead of a god. Also those Wizards over there hate you and want to ruin everything you care about because while they had to study all day long, you got a tutor and some cliff-notes."

Would it have been so hard to just go "Hey some people like Vancian Wizards. Done. Now, lets build a AEDU caster and maybe a person that runs on Force of Will casting through hit-points or spell points or whatever." and be done with it? Did it really require months of work to come up with shitty ways to make Sorcerers and Warlock a worse option that Wizards?