D&D 5th Edition

I don’t think the ult-cay is really much of a mystery for the players - if that was the intent, all of the marketing has caused it to fail.

We haven’t finished Phandelver yet. Spoilers for that adventure below:

[spoiler=]
My three PC’s got the location of the Druid in Thundertree immediately from the halfling pre-gen’s town connection. They proceeded to find him in the first building they entered, then just rode straight for the Castle, tackling it at 2nd level. That was too low level for the place, and they got demolished by some hobgoblins. The rogue fled for her life, and I had the others knocked unconscious and captured. I was worried, but it turned into a nice dual-escape adventure, which culminated in saving the dwarf, the escape of the doppleganger, and death of the Castle leader.

I then encouraged them to deal with the Redbrands, and will hopefully get them to 4th level on other tasks before they go to Wave Echo Cave. [/spoiler]

My thoughts so far are:

  1. It’s deadly at low levels! I’ve used the knock-out rule multiple times, and will have to be careful not to overuse it. I managed to kill my wife’s character in a different run through in the first cave/dungeon by having lethal damage done, and then everyone failed medicine checks and she bled out. It didn’t really feel like a fair death to me (it was fair dice-roll wise, but not fair in that she didn’t really do anything wrong - harsh for the first real mission in the Starter pack).

  2. Everyone I’ve run through it has enjoyed it. It feels like D&D to me, and my kids like it even though they are used to 3.5, Pathfinder or 4th edition.

  3. The pre-gens are great, particularly the plothooks provided. It gives the players who want to role play a head start at doing so.

I’ve been running the Starter with my kids, aged 10 and 13. They have experience before, but the 5e starter would be a really easy way to get into it with them (pre-generated characters make it really easy to start).

I think the reason they tend to steer away from spells is because of how much of a pain it can be for the DM. Enemy spellcasters are always a nightmare to get ready, so odds are MM “casters” will have abilities that replicate spell casting to make life easier. I would assume there is some way to make your own if you’re so inclined via maybe a template type situation, but you never know.

Yea, but there’s a lot less stacking spells on yourself now before a fight Shiva.

But without PDF’s, I won’t be bothering with 5e anyway, so… (sigh)

I pre-ordered the player’s handbook. SQUEE!!

I dig the red dragon. I really like the lair effects, they seem like a good complement to the dragon’s regular attacks.

I’ll be curious to see how Big Bad Encounters go in 5E. In 4E they were always anticlimactic. The party would pile on damage during their five turns, and the Big Bad wouldn’t do enough to save itself on its turn. It looks these legendary actions and lair actions are trying to help the solo monster.

Thanks for the replies. Looks like I will be checking this out for some family D&D nights.

I’m glad they are moving away from spellcasting for monsters. As a GM I find it easy to custom make a complex Big Bad when I want one by giving them spellcasting and other class abilities as required. But when just reaching for a monster out of the Monster Manual, I want it to have some iconic abilities, and otherwise just be easy to run.

Dragons can use innate spellcasting according to a variant rule

So I’m home, I didn’t get the Monster Manual, sadly… but I’m running Horde, and want to do a Skype/Mumble/Forum 5th edition game at some point.

Yah, my PHB shipped! Sadly, it won’t arrive until … Saturday. Sigh. Stupid free shipping. I couldn’t justify the extra $20 they wanted for next day shipping, but I won’t lie and say it was not tempting.

Bleed: Try to find a place that does the Wizard’s organized play program… they sell the books (for a lesser discount then Amazon) two weeks early, witih Wizard’s Ok.

What was the default campaign world for 4th edition?

I liked that Greyhawk got some love in 3rd edition, but it was really too late to revive that setting and the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms stuff added a lot of interesting stories and lore. Even though I grew up with Greyhawk, and was only exposed to Forgotten Realms through computer games, I’ve grown to associate it most with D&D so I’m glad it got the default campaign world for 5th Edition.

One of many things that turned me off of 4th Edition was that it skipped Forgotten Realms ahead 180 years and significantly changed things, in what seemed like a bit of a half-assed way - maybe they filled in details through novels. Has anything been announced about the state of the Forgotten Realms at the time of the 5th Edition? Is it far in the future from the timeline of the 4th?

Not sure on 5E yet–there are bits and pieces of lore from several settings scattered through the PHB that I’ve seen, but I dunno if there’s definitive stuff yet (people w/ the current adventure lines probably know better)–but in 4E, the “default” setting was a vague, ill-defined thing called “Points of Light.” There was the Shadowfell (evil fey) and Feywild (not as evil fey), and then everything in between was basically a mortal world overrun by monsters, but for small “points of light” representing the march of civilization against the darkness or whatever. THey released setting books for other stuff, including a surprising amount of Dark Sun content, but that all came a little later.

There is a line of books that details things (The Sundering), I’m pretty far removed from the timeline of FR, so I have no idea how much time has passed or anything like that.

Up to 3E, FR was your basic high-power fantasy setting, including a time where the Gods were banished to walk Faerun (several gods attempted to plot against the Overgod, Ao, by stealing the Tablets of Fate.). At the end of it, a couple major gods died (including Bane, the deity of Strife) and Mystara (the goddess of Magic). Three mortals ascended to be deities. Cyric (who took the position of God of Strife, Treachery and Murder), Midnight (who replaced Mystara as the Goddess of Magic), and Kelemvor (who took the position of the god of the dead).

In fourth edition, shit went down. the timeline had advanced roughly 100 years. The Goddess of Magic had been killed (yes, again), and this time her death caused the Weave of Magic that gave wizards and Sorcerers their power to fray (and in some places snap), causing the Spellplague, areas where Magic was unpredictable and creatures caught inside those areas could be warped. Between that and a couple of new things (A Shadow Weave popped up, for those serving Shar the goddess of darkness to do magic). Ancient Kingdoms burst out of the sand in a mystic ritual to try to gain power in the current day, new races suddenly appeared… (I will freely admit I hated fourth edition FR, because A) I severely disliked 4E to start, it didn’t match what I considered D&D to be), and then in my opinion they tried to shoehorn all of 4E into FR, and it didn’t turn out well.

Fifth Edition is set after this time, and is a psuedo-retcon… Elminster has helped to reincarnate Midnight/Mystra as the Goddess of Magic… Bane has returned (he apparently installed a seed of himself inside his son, and when the time was right, with the help of a summoning, Bane burst out of the body of his son, instantly killing him… the Spellplague is over…so now we have a new threat, the Tyranny of Dragons…

Man, reading the synopsis for 4th and 5th edition settings make me really glad I haven’t played in a core D&D setting since I was a teen. I kind of loathe super high-power, high-magic settings in the first place (wtf is magic about a +2 sword when every dark elf has one?) but the writing literally sounds about as high quality as Eragon.

SirFozzie - Yea, they did the same thing to Athas, shoehorning in i.e. the 4E cosmology and races

Probably, but I remember really enjoying the books as a kid.

Going to a local comic shop tomorrow night for the Horde of the Dragon Queen Adventurer’s League kick-off. Excited!!

4E was all about getting new items, to the point of it being Diablo-esque, but in 5E magical items are much, much more rare. Because of the bounded accuracy system, a +1 sword is going to be as awesome at level 2 as it is at level 12. Your party may even spend part of their campaign just searching for magical items so everyone can be stronger.