What I think about D&D Next

Some of you may have heard that Wizards of the Coast is developing a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which they are calling D&D Next. For those out of the loop, there's a rundown of all the known information about the system over at EN World.

For those who don't want to read the above link, let me summarize it for you:

The goal for 5th edition is to make a version of D&D that encompasses everything that was good about all the prior editions, with heavy emphasis on the earliest editions. This appears to be a move to tap into the "Old School Roleplaying" movement without actually re-publishing OD&D and AD&D. For example, there is a lot of talk about classes being able to "replace" core class abilities learned at each level from a pool of alternate abilities, which sounds a lot like the class kits from AD&D. They also want to bring back Vancian magic.

I've not played the roughdraft system or seen any concrete mechanics come out, but based on what they have been saying I think 5th edition is going to be a mess. Here's why.

                        #1: Vancian magic has a fundamental problem; it forces interruptions in the flow of the game after every other battle, or at least every challenging battle. I've mentioned this before in an earlier article.

Abilities that require pausing the flow of the narrative to recharge are not something I'd consider to be wise design choices in a game that is intended for today's gamer audience. D&D was originally successful because it modeled the structure of pulp fiction and epic fantasy novels, but now D&D (or any tabletop game) needs to model the cinematic flow of films and videogames, because that is what the current generation of gamers is most familiar with.

And no matter how skillful Peter Jackson may be, you can't get around the fact the parts of the LOTR movies where Frodo and Sam are sitting around talking are the most boring parts of those movies, and had to be interrupted by removing half of the camping trip moments from the book and flip-flopping the narrative back and forth between following Frodo and Sam, and then following the vastly more interesting stuff the rest of the Fellowship was doing that involved directly fighting the forces of evil in Middle-Earth.

                       #2: Character kit design is inferior to talent tree design. World of Warcraft is about to switch from its talent system to this, "you can choose from ONE of these three abilities every x levels" design, which comes from AD&D. I do not believe the change will be for the better and predict Blizzard will move back to talent trees.

Here's why: character kits lack the freedom of talent trees. With a talent tree you can go back and select lower-tier abilities after you've reached the end of a branch and got whatever high-tier ability you were after. with a character kit, you can't choose all three options; just one.

For example, let's say Clerics have the option to exchange the level 1 ability Turn Undead for Turn Elemental or Turn Demon, but they cannot choose all three. Then at level 2 they have the option to exchange Smite Undead for Smite Elemental or Smite Demon.

That's character kit design. You can swap out a base ability for alternate ones, but you cannot have all those abilities.

By comparison, talent tree design would award you a talent point at character creation, and each talent costs 1 Talent point to buy. You get another talent point to spend every time you level up. It's a point buy system for abilities. To learn Smite Undead, you'd need to first learn Turn Undead, and the same for the other abilities of similar group. But as you level up, you are free to invest points into Turn Elemental, then learn Smite Elemental, and also invest points into Turn Demon to unlock Smite Demon.

The difference, for those who aren't immediately grasping it, is this

Character Kit = you can have Turn Undead and Smite Elemental, or any other combo of Turn and Smite, but you may only have one Turn and one Smite. Which two you have is decided by level 2.Your character can only Turn one race and Smite one race.

Talent Tree = You can learn them all by level 6, in any order you like, so long as you first learn to Turn the race before you learn how to Smite it.Your character can, if you so wish, learn to Turn and Smite all three races.

So in conclusion, Character Kits are significantly more limiting than Talent Trees are. Talent trees are superior because they offer the player more customization, or at least the feeling of being able to customize their character (in a well designed game featuring talent trees, the designer has already figured out the best ways to build characters using the trees and has designed the game accordingly).

Gameplay is ultimately what choices a player makes during play. When the player feels like they are making their own choices, they feel good about the game. They tend to dislike the feeling they are forced to make choices, especially when the choice doesn't result in something they actually want.

Character kits seem attractive to designers because the system is less complex, but there is a fine line between too complex and too simple. Character kits fall on the "too simple" side of the fence for my taste. Talent trees CAN be too complex, but only when poorly designed to not make it obvious to the player which choices they should make-- this is usually because there are lots of worthless talents (those lacking clear synergy with other abilities, or those which can only work when the player has very specific, not easy to obtain items) in the trees that shouldn't be there in the first place.

                       #3 Magic items are no longer part of the essential progression mathematics.
I suspect this is an attempt to hitch a ride on the latest fantasy bandwagon, Game of Thrones on HBO, which is based on the Song of Ice and Fire novels, which have a low magic fantasy setting.

Now, trying to tap into the Game of Thrones fanbase is all well and good, but most people wanting to play Game of Thrones in a tabletop RPG are going to play Green Ronin's officially licensed version which has been optimized for play in the Song of Ice and Fire setting. They are not going to play Dungeons & Dragons, where the first image that comes to the general public's mind are fireball throwing wizards dressed like Gandalf -- because, let's face it, that's basically who Elminster (the most publicly visible character in D&D's most popular campaign setting, Forgotten Realms) is.   

I also don't see how any version of D&D that doesn't assume player characters have access to magic items is going to co-exist in existing D&D settings players have come to love, like The Forgotten Realms and Ebberon, where magic is as common as candy.

Basically, I have a strong suspicion the 5th edition of D&D is being designed to target an audience that is already satisfied by niche self-published OSR systems; basically, people who have been playing RPGs for 40 something years and are only playing those OSR systems because it reminds them of the versions of D&D they played as children.

This is not to say the 'OSR movement' does not exist. But isn't a very large movement; a "popular" tabletop RPG these days moves only a few thousand books. It's true that Pathfinder (which is basically just D&D 3rd edition with some tweaks) has now outsold 4th Edition D&D but Pathfinder's success is largely due to tapping into disfranchised D&D players who didn't want to jump to 4th Edition five years ago (the moral of the story: support your older editions that still have market segments! Also, abandoning a system when it still had some life left in it wasn't such a grand idea).

Which is another point; they are going after a market of people who are basically in the last years of their lives. I don't say this to be morbid but because it is a fact. Most people who played AD&D were anywhere from 12 to 30 years old. It's been 38 years since AD&D came out. That means they are now anywhere from 50 to 68 years old. The average life expectancy in the US is 78. And it's not like everyone who played AD&D (or any version of D&D) is still playing it. Many have left the hobby due to lack of interest, time constraints or being better fulfilled by MMORPGs. 

Normally one does not target a shrinking niche audience, they try to make their product appeal to a younger, growing audience so the business can continue to thrive. This is why the American superhero comic book industry has been falling apart -- they keep writing Superman, Spider-Man and X-Men to appeal to people who have been reading those comics their entire lives, rather than make new comics intended to appeal to fresh audiences. If you want to get into an X-Men comic today you basically need to read several Wikipedia articles just to fully understand what the hell is going on (example: Why does Beast now look like a house cat wearing a business suit??), because the stories have been going on for decades and quite a lot of things have happened to these characters.



This is where the Japanese manga industry has been more intelligent; stories, even in long running shonen series like Dragon Ball (which is similar to the superhero genre), the stories eventually have a conclusion. Then new, fresh characters who go on new adventures get published. Oh, and when characters die they tend (overall) to stay dead, and when revived they do so for relevant plot reasons and not because the publisher decided they want to capitalize on the revival of the character with a new mini-series featuring that character.



Anyway, back to D&D.  There is talk of 5th edition being modular so you can add magic items by including a supplement. My question is does that also mean you have to use entirely different monsters with parameters designed to accommodate magic item progression, because the default, "core" rules don't assume magic items when players face monsters?

It doesn't seem that NPC design is going to be scalable either, (ex. monster abilities scale up or down, so you can make a Kobold fighter any level rather than Kobolds always being level 1 enemies), as there is talk about making level 1 monsters still fearsome in large numbers against level 8 players. Which is another thing I think is bad; monsters should scale to the level, rather than keep with this antiquated design philosophy that higher level monsters should be tougher and lower level monsters should be easier. That's not what players and GMs end up doing; GMs throw wave after wave of same level monsters at player parties, which burns them out quickly because same level NPCs are designed to be challenging to defeat. (In Radiant Fantasia NPC levels are designed to be adjusted to the same level as the player characters, and the difficulty depends on the 'rank' of the attributes the NPC has).

So this is what I think about D&D Next. I think they shouldn't do it. They should instead just re-publish OD&D, Basic D&D, AD&D, 3rd, etc as PDFs, along with all the modules for those versions. Then they should create some kind of platform similar to DriveThru RPG that allows people to submit their own modules and supplements as PDFs for sale in to Wizards official D&D shop, and take a small royalty on every sale like DriveThru RPG does. That will allow them to go after the older editions audience they obviously want to get without actually having to produce new material in-house. Then they should get to work on D&D 4.5, because this new version they are working on sounds like it's going to be more like AD&D 3rd edition than a 5th Edition. 

Edit: For those wanting more insight into the various editions of D&D and the differences between them, there is an article over at Geeks Dream Girl, "Hopes & Fears for D&D Next", that goes through all the editions and talks about various bad elements they had.