I fully expect the honeymoon period of 5th edition to come to an end at some point, but I do not think the Achilles heel of the Tarrasque will be the beginning of the end. I think you’re engaging in a bit of theorizing, which is fine, but in the ‘real world’ of a DM at a game table telling a cool story, using the Tarresque to threaten the world, the players are going to have a lot of other things to deal with at the same time (evil wizards, cults, gods, demons) such that they never get a chance to kite the Tarresque to death over 130 rounds. I’d burn my DMG before I ran a combat lasting 130 rounds. That’s something only 11 year olds would actually do. Awesome, patient, insane 11 year olds.
So just give the Tarrasque some regeneration. If thats an example of 5th editions “flaws” then its going to be a pretty damn awesome system.
Fuck it, I’m burning my PHB tonight! That Tarrasque entry clearly ruins the game. I mean if all you need to do is endure a 130 round combat to beat it, clearly the game is garbage.
We best grab the torches and pitchforks and head to Renton, WA! Time to march on Wizards HQ! Heads will Roll!
That made me laugh, thank you.
It’s not a condemnation of the rules set or anything, but it is extremely odd that they changed it for no real reason and then gave it an insane CR after making it weaker that it used to be.
I’ll be running it starting it next weekend. I’ve been running Phandelver and have really been enjoying it. I’m a bit concerned that the first section of Dragon Queen seems a bit… abstract for the beginning, but we’ll see.
Did you finish Phandelver? How did you enjoy it overall?
I’m curious about Dragon Queen because it was created by the Kobold Press team, and I generally like their stuff. I’ve listened to some podcasts with Wolfgang, and it seems like the first couple of adventures might be a bit spoiled, because they set up a mystery that is too easy to solve. Who is terrorizing the Sword Coast? Wizards can’t shut up about the answer: agon-dray ult-cay.
So I got to play a total of 12 hours of 5E D&D at GenCon this weekend. I am absolutely in love with this edition and here are some of my thoughts. For reference I played a Warlock that I got up to 3rd level by the end of the second adventure. The third adventure was a special interactive thing.
General:
- The simplicity of Proficiency Bonus (or not) + stat modifier for nearly everything is really a thing of beauty. Totaling a roll for anything is a simple (and small) modifier to figure out if you beat a target. No more situational modifiers for anything. At most, something like a Bless would give me an extra dice to add in to my roll. Or at times, I may roll 2 d20 for advantage or disadvantage.
- Because of the above, combat rounds are extremely quick. The DM would give us the AC we need to hit and we quickly went through rounds with “I hit, and uh… 9 damage”. All we really had to worry about was attacks of opportunity when trying to move away from someone, and being disadvantaged if we tried to do something while in melee (heal someone else, ranged attack, etc).
- I got to play with 3 different DMs. 2 used miniatures and a grid while the third just did everything with a map and general descriptions. All worked equally well with some minor notations for the latter.
- The only thing that slows down the speed of combat at all (at least so far) are saving throws and damage reduction. Even these are minor. I don’t see combats ever taking the multiple hours that they did in 4th, even for large scale/epic conflicts.
- I only know the Warlock well and what I’ve seen of others I’ve played with, but even at first level - people are contributing to combat. Even unlimited use cantrips (eldritch blast, ray of frost, sacred flame) does decent damage and keeps spellcasters feeling like spellcasters instead of ever having to fall back to the classic slings/darts.
- The spell slot system seems to work well especially for things like a Cleric’s Cure Wounds. Instead of having to bother with Cure Light, Cure Serious, etc. It’s all the same spell, you just pick what level to cast it at and the healing scales.
- Inspiration points weren’t used much in my games, but I really like the work you go through during character creation for personality traits, bonds, etc. Great story hooks and an opportunity for the DM to reward good role playing.
Organized Play:
- The faction stuff was pretty neat. You might get extra side missions depending on your faction along side the primary story. They are going to keep doing this for organized play and I like what it brings.
- Between adventures you earn downtime to do extra things (create items, earn money) etc in exchange for ‘days’. A good way of allowing you some customization between organized adventures.
Epic Event - Corruption in Kryptgarden
- Setup: There were about 90 tables all playing the same adventure. The adventure was about a plot to stop a green dragon from working with a dragon cult (employing hobgoblins) and had 3 different tracks. One was to go after the leaders of the cult. One was to go after some necromancers. And the other was about getting some help from elves or something like that. We did the leader track so I don’t know the details of the other two.
- Game: Depending on how well tables did on their overall/faction specific goals determined how the actual official story played out.
- End: Before the final battle, we had to nominate a player from each table to be a ‘champion’. These were selected at random to be pulled out to play the final encounter with Mike Mearls DMing. My friend at my table got picked and ended up dying soon after. Mike Mearls signed his book “I admit it, I enjoyed killing you.”
- Afterward, they totaled up the results and we had defeated the adventure. Overall a cool event if a little chaotic in everyone having to report to captains how things were going.
- There’ll be a more detailed writeup about this online soon I’m sure. (Probably even on the main D&D site).
Overall: Very fun GenCon playing the new edition - can’t wait to play more. Plus, I got Mearls to sign my book too.
Great write up Vesper. The faster combat sounds very appealing to me.
What he said! Thanks, Vesper.
Been trying to get back into D&D with the past two iterations but they just didn’t gel with me as a very old school D&D’er. I think I’ll give 5E a shot…
Or, go play any one of the awesome OSR titles (Old-School Rennaissance). There’s some amazing stuff. I’m a huge fan of Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (ACKS), which staples some phenomenal realm-management rules onto B/X, but other people prefer, say, Labyrinth Lord (a more straight-up remake) or Dark Dungeons (a re-edit of the Rules Cyclopedia). Then there’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess, a darker, more adult, low-fantasy B/X variant, plus Swords & Wizardry, and OSRIC. . .
Point is there are a ton of awesome systems that replicate the feel from OD&D / B/X / BECMI / AD&D1E / 2nd Ed pretty well, if you’re really hankering for it.
All of which is to take nothing away from 5E, which I absolutely love :-D
I like 5th edition, but my main complaint is I feel they dumbed down the weapons. I wish they would’ve borrowed more from third edition in that regard.
Okay, so I have never touched anything D&D except some of the PC games. However, after listening to the recent Gamers with Jobs CC in which they discussed this, I thought it might be something fun to try with some of my kids. They certainly seem intrigued and have a great ability to be creative, and I would love to encourage that while also spending some time with them.
That being said, is this something that is reasonable to play with kids aged 15, 11, and 9? If so, recommendations on where to start?
Absolutely. While I can’t give tons of ideas I can say that I learned D&D at my daycare. I must’ve been 9 or 10. Every day during the summer we would have a three hour quiet time while the real little ones napped. One of our teachers took four or five to the back of the place every nap time to play. I will never forget my adventures as a Ranger in those days.
The D&D Starter Edition contains an adventure that’s meant as an “intro adventure” for 5th edition that can be played using either the included pre-generated characters or characters built using the Basic D&D rules available free online.
Technically, you could also start playing using nothing but the Basic D&D rules there (since there’s a GM’s guide with some monsters, spells, and magic items), but given that you’ve never played the tabletop version, I’d strongly recommend starting out w/ a pre-written adventure to ease you into things like encounter design (how many and what sort of monsters are appropriate for characters of Level X), adventure design (how to “hook” the party and lead them along), dungeon design (including a few nifty traps), etc. Once you feel comfortable with that, you can easily continue along from there.
Similar starter sets are available for Pathfinder (a little more “crunchy” and detailed than D&D 5E; they also put their entire ruleset–minus “setting” fluff–up online, although it’s better as a resource once you know how to play rather than a thing to learn from, considering just how much content is available) and D&D 4th Ed (significantly more tactical and mathy; also out of print, so it’s pricey, to boot), but unless you have a strong preference, I’d just go for whichever is cheapest and easiest to acquire. Until you’ve played one live, it’s hard to know whether or not the differences between Edition A and Edition B are large enough to be worth concerning yourself over.
Heck, you can even go digital and oldschool if you really feel cheap. Labyrinth Lord’s basic rules are completely free online, and you can find some free adventures like The Gibbering Tower and the Tomb of Sigyfel. This harkens back to a simpler time and may frustrate some younger gamers–it’s very easy to die or just wind up with a weak-looking character in the early editions, but that was part of the point: you’re everyday Joes who get caught up in God knows what kind of adventure; if you live, you become heroes. Otherwise, you’re just a few more skeletons in the Demilich’s dungeon ;)
Mike Mearls was incredibly friendly, well spoke, and patient - we were his last interview for the day and he was probably exhausted, but he took the time to answer our questions fully. We did not ask him petty questions about cheesing it against a monster.
We DID ask about pdfs, and his answer was the first (I think) I heard that was straight forward - he said that they were NOT going to be released anytime soon because Dungeonscape (previously named Codename: Morningstar) was going to allow players access to all the rules and content that a PDF would offer. It seemed like rather than release now and lose possible subs to Dungeonscape, they’ll had that be a first option then (possibly) release PDfs later. The interview will be going up next Monday on The Tome Show’s website (it’ll be called Round Table 31, I think).
Also Dungeonscape is REALLY cool. It was VERY VERY polished for the Alpha demo that was shown to us and could have very well been the initial release. The character builder was very clean and streamlined and it allows you to search pretty much every piece of material you’ve purchased. The rumor is that it’s going to release soon as well.
Is the implication there that you must purchase splatbooks virtually to access them in Dungeonscape? Just something about the “search pretty much every piece of material you’ve purchased” wording there makes it sound akin to the Hero Lab-Pathfinder data files racket (in order to access classes/feats/etc. from given Splatbook Z, you must purchase “data package” Y from Hero Lab, regardless of whether or not you own the physical or PDF copy of Z already). But I could be reading you wrong.
Aside from that, thanks a lot for asking about PDFs! I’m disappointed by the answer (really hoped they were past that kind of thinking), but given that I’m unlikely to heavily invest in 5E books for now, I guess it doesn’t matter as such :)
Wizards was tight-lipped on how Dungeonscape will be sold, but the hints I got out of my alpha demo were that it will have varying levels of subscription, and no requirement of owning anything other than the subscription itself. The app was extremely cool and clicking on anything jumped directly to the relevant rules in the book.
I’m not sure how it works - it definitely seems like every sub will get access to the core books, but when the woman demo’ing it to us showed us some of the stuff for one of the adventures, I asked if all the party would be able to see it (a map) simultaneously and she said something to the effect of “sure, assuming they own it.” Perhaps adventures or modules might be separate, in-app purchases?
Red Dragon reveal album.
Not going to lie, I was pretty disappointed to see spells go! While the Lair actions sound pretty cool, and even a Wyrmling is very deadly to a party that doesn’t spread out properly, all the “big bad” monsters I’ve seen so far are starting to feel like piles of HP attached to beatsticks. I hope that stuff like Liches and Vampires bring more in the way of “creative” abilities, spells, etc.
You can read the entry for Vampires in one of the free downloads (either the dragon adventure supplement or the basic DMG). They seemed pretty scary from what I remember of their abilities, but not a lot of spells. Nothing keeping the DM from adding spell-casting levels to monsters though.