Kuunari

 Well, much like most of you, I heard about the new edition from WOTC today. An interesting development.  Couple of thoughts.

#1 Will it end divisiveness?

I’m really tired of reading enworld and seeing only edition wars.  Hopefully, a lot of the players who left because of 4e come back.  I’m just not sure it’ll ever happen again.

#2 Will it allow you to play without feats?

This is my number one pet peeve with 3E.  I just don’t want to search through 10 books for the perfect feat.  At least with 4e I can use DDI, but still.

I’m of the opinion that a character sheet should contain every rule needed to play the character effectively.  Apocalypse World is the ideal in my book for this style of character design and format, with the playbooks.

#3 What is the focus on the story?  Will they replace some of the focus on combat?

As I read about 4e, they talked about siloing.  There would be combat powers, and non-combat powers, and a player couldn’t forgo one to gain strength in the other.  Yeah, that didn’t happen.  First, they didn’t silo feats, and utility powers came in both combat and non-combat powers.  And so most people just took combat powers, because no one ever died because of a social encounter.

I’m a big fan of simplicity.  When I game, I much prefer to spend my time on story, and less on tweaking either the monsters and NPCs when I’m behind the screen, or my PC when I’m in front of the screen.

We’ll see.  I’m signed up for the playtest, are you?

Update: I knew I read about someone else hatred of feats today in all the 5E posts in my google reader feed but I couldn’t remember where I’d read that.  Well, here he is posting in my comments, so I might as well point you to his very interesting and informative write up of his 5e experience.