I DM’d my second session of the Lost Mines adventure yesterday. I like the drama that can develop out of the dice rolls. At one point, the party was attacked from behind while the party was separated and partially incapacitated by a trap. A fun battle ensues while the party tries to overcome the tactical disadvantages of their starting situation (and overcome a hilariously failed two-easy-dex saves in a row from a high-dex monk). Later they party played out their own well-played ambush only to have things turn desperate when heavy reinforcements arrive.
That battle was pretty dramatic. After the first couple of rounds, things were going pretty well for the PCs, but then I rolled a few big hits and suddenly 3 of the fours were down at zero hitpoints, and the remaining one had only 4. He was facing two big enemies, but one of them was almost down. He connects with the weaker one, and rolls a 1 on the damage die, leaving the monster with one hitpoint. This is not looking good for our heroes. I decided that one of the NPC characters was made of sterner stuff than he had been written in the adventure and he provided a round of distraction before meeting an untimely demise. Then amazingly, one of the PCs rolled a 20 on the death save and manages to claw her way back to consciousness. The monsters swing and miss three times in a row and our revived hero takes the bigger one down in a max-damage shot. The PCs stand victorious! Except that just before she could get medical attention, one of the heroes managed to roll two fives on a death-save with inspiration. Of all the luck!
Then the surviving PCs make a desperate journey to Neverwinter, where they convince the highest-level priest there to raise the dead, at the cost of almost all of their accumulated treasure. Easy come, easy go, I guess!
I think I’ll be checking the encounters in the adventure against the encounter guidelines in the basic DM rules from now on.
That sounds cool at least. The last Pathfinder campaign I ran, I had some generic magic items, but every quest or two I’d try to throw in a random cool item that had a bit of a backstory and scaled with player level. I think one of the swords started off as a +1, +1d2 fire damage and ended up something like +5, +2d6 fire damage in a 5’ AOE, +15 fire resist, keen. Obviously that’s a pretty absurd item, but at level 18 or whatever at the end of the campaign they were basically the most powerful mortals alive and needed some serious weaponry :P
Actually I’d recommend a similar system to any DM who plays with a mixed group of number crunchers/min maxers and more casual/rp focused people. Cause once the min-maxers pull ahead noticeably in character power it’s pretty easy to just give the weaker player’s items better “level ups” without really ruffling any feathers. Everyone likes to feel useful, so it seemed like a good compromise. Little more work on the DM side, but worth it for both that situation and the fact that people actually get attached to their gear rather than just dropping off a bunch of +1 swords at the pawnshop after each quest.
Yeah, I feel the same way about high power/high magic and have always preferred the worlds simulation aspects that provide tools and objective mechanics to allow players the freedom to truly roleplay and do anything they want, go anywhere, at any time, in any way that seems plausible. No computer game can, or should try to, emulate that freedom and open roleplaying. I’ve always been heavily biased towards the low magic, grounded, settings of classic swords & sorcery and fantasy - magic and “superpowers” (special abilities) being too common just break immersion and feel too artificial and gamey.
I grew up on AD&D when there was only Greyhawk, which was never really well developed, but Forgotten Realms seems to be the only setting that is at least somewhat close to the AD&D settings I liked, even though it’s higher magic. I do find the pantheons and domains, ascension, etc. of forgotten realms to be a cool, unique aspect which I discovered and grew to like through Baldur’s Gate and other crpgs
There were no materials for any of those back when I played AD&D. That was all added later, although of course Arneson had established Blackmoor long before - info on it wasn’t published though. The only non-Greyhawk world back then was Dragonlance, which was relatively new.
My knowledge of 2nd Edition is solely through computer games, and by the time of 3rd Edition Greyhawk was back, and those were gone. Never played tabletop D&D since 1st Edition, but devoured a lot of 3rd and 3.5 materials, including a lot of the Forgotten Realms books on different regions. Could never get a group going to try it though.
Most of the other races get a +2, a +1 and a couple of special abilities. A +2 in the main stat for your class can be very valuable, and the abilities can be pretty handy. There are always going to be some stats that aren’t very important to you, so +1 to six abilities is a lot less powerful than say, +2 to three abilities.
Also, the + stats everyone gets is a function of the fact that you can’t start with over a 15 if using point buy or standard scores. You need to rely on bonuses to get you as high as 17. 18 is unattainable at level 1 (unless using randomly rolled stats). They’ve balanced the ability score buying with the bonuses.
I’m by no means finished my reading of the PHB. I’ve looked at a couple of classes in detail, read over a good bit of the spells, and skimmed some of the mechanics sections.
I am slightly underwhelmed so far. They’ve certainly made a simpler game than what we had in the previous two editions, and I applaud the desire to get way from the “moar-moar numbers” approach those systems had and to make something that is “OSR” like. I am still getting whiffs of wealth by level (albeit, scaled way downward from “moar-moar numbers”); I look forward to the DMG to see if I’m wrong about that. There seem to be a lot of arbitrary things in place precisely because of the way things worked in 3.5/4e. I’m not sure if those sorts of things are just going to feel contrived/boring/obnoxious in the long run or not. Also, the fact that it does lend itself to comparison with other OSR products is not doing it any favors. Unless the DMG has more to offer (e.g. fleshed out domain play mechanics), I’m not sure I would push for my group to play this over ACKS, DCC, or several other OSR/retro clone type games I have at home.
I think the thing that stands out to me in terms of improvements is the backgrounds, ideals, and flaws. The various class paths are also potentially interesting.
What will be interesting to see going forward is where exactly are the hooks for existing characters to care about new content? Is it only magic items, feats / spells, and monsters / adventures, plus a bunch of stuff you choose at character creation? If not, how can they keep from over-complicating all the rules the way prestige classes did?
New subclasses could be of interest to existing characters if they provide tempting multiclassing paths. Perhaps new rules about running a country or that sort of thing?
I found this escapist interview with Mike Mearls interesting to listen to. I like the idea of DM interpretation of the situation being the driving factor in a lot of tricky cases.
I think what feels confining about the system is that there’s very little to reflect your character’s history after the point of character creation. You level up, you get precanned abilities, you make a few choices here and there like spells to learn, ability increases, or feats, and you acquire items. Unless items are a huge portion of your power at higher levels, it seems like your fate is pretty much decided once you choose your subclass. Sure, you can multi-class, but that’s not that awesome an option - mix-matching all these different class levels feels really clunky and doesn’t get at the idea of “I’m a fighter with a unique personality / fighting style”. You can also develop your character through how you role play them, what you decide your style is for any given activity (fighting, socializing, interrogation, planning, etc), but the mechanics remain aloof from that - it becomes entirely self-imposed.
So I guess what I’d want to see is some form of mechanical support for carving out these styles, to act as both confirmation that you did you and a carrot to push people to think about them (without being a laundry list of perks you can choose between - though even that might be better than nothing). I have no idea how to do it, specifically, but it feels like there should be something there. Your character’s mechanical development should be a crazy branching tree that they can open new options for down the road (without the murky weirdness of prestige classes). The ideals, flaws, and bonds are a good start, but like I said, they seem to mostly stop at character creation (though I suppose it’s reasonable for there to be mechanics around changing them over time, through role-play).
Interesting stuff. Makes the system seem a lot cooler. He makes a cool point near the end that there’s no real radical, in-your-face new concept about how it works, but instead it focuses on making simple, easily interpreted/applied rules, and thus leaning more on the DM as arbiter instead of really fiddly minutely-spelled out rules. Like “you can start sneaking if no one can see you”.
Also really good to hear that they are going to be trying to avoid bloat and the “splat book a month” model.
Adventurers League tonight! Last week we rolled up characters, so tonight’s the first play session! I made a dragonborn paladin last week, and it seems like everyone made some sort of DPS/tank class. So my DM asked me to roll up a Cleric. Yay? Should be interesting, I hope!
5th edition is courting the oldschool D&D purist, and to a lot of their target (lapsed) audience all branching mechanical options for character customization lead to munchkinism. “You should pick your class and just roleplay all your character development, you shouldn’t need any mechanics for that if you’re not a munchkin rollplayer!” etc. Having multiclassing is already pushing it.
Maybe I’m missing something, but they seem like crappy wizards with more hit points and light armor. And not like sorta crappy wizards, like really crappy wizards. They don’t have anything that really stands out from the crowd to me. It used to be Eldritch Blast was their big thing, but now everyone basically has something similar in cantrips. In return for losing that special thing it’s like they got… nothing really. Invocations are alright, but mostly meh and the good ones require a long rest to use more than once which is fairly weak. At high levels they get one big spell per level - again on a long rest. I don’t get them.
Edit: They have a few unique spells I guess, but they aren’t really very good.
