Kuunari

As always, enworld continues with their excellent coverage of D&D Next (as they call  it), this time with a review of the MTV’s interview with Mike Mearls, aka, the magic man at the forefront of this 5th edition.

Oh hey, did you hear there is going to be a 1st edition reprint this  april for the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund?

Seems like everyone, from the OSR to the 4th edition gamers are excited about this announcement.  And how can they not be, AD&D 1st edition IS D&D for many people, even if they’ve drifted away from that game over the decades.  Some people are even predicting these will sell out quickly at your FLGS, although I think that might be more of wishful thinking (and I think even they would admit that) within some of the community who would like to see WOTC reprint the whole back catalog.

Back to the more 5e-centric posts.

Ryan at Save Vs. Poison is hopeful that the next iteration of D&D can be this unifying game that they are talking about, but has his  doubts.  He’s mostly hopeful for the PDFs.  I have to admit, I don’t totally get this love of the back catalog PDFs.  Can someone clarify to me why people would like them back?  I guess I would have thought most people who wanted them would already own the titles they wanted, but maybe I’m wrong.  Please, prove me wrong.

In any case, I love reading PDFs on my iPhone for the convenience, so if that’s the reason you want them back, I get that.

Vanir at Critical-Hits talks about the need for a much better digital offering with the next iteration of D&D.  I agree wholeheartedly.  One of my favorite aspects of 4e is the character builder and the compendium, but they much to be desired, the most important that I can’t use the character builder on this  laptop, because it’s running linux.   However, with power2ool, it definitely improves the capabilities of the compendium for me at least.  Of course, when I found out about the fact that one of the lead developers on the digital initiative was murdered by her husband it made the whole mixed messages, lack of progress on the digital initiatives and poor features sadly understandable.

David Guyll at Points of Light talks about his love of the 4e power  model, but his dislike of the power bloat.   He has some interesting ideas, but some of his suggestions seems like they would have the opposite effect.  He suggests the way to prevent power bloat is by giving us the mathematics behind each power, allowing  us to create our own powers.  I don’t really see that solving the power bloat problem, but rather exacerbating the problem.  His point buy system would likely be very complicated, and even more impregnable than the current system with 10 powers to choose from at each level.  Nonetheless, I like where he is going with it.  I’d love to see the powers saved, or at least offered as an option in the next D&D.

Paul at Blog of Holding writes the kind of post I love.  It’s short, its specific and  it’s well thought out.  In it, he talks about 5th edition clerics, and ways to make healing optional in the next version, based on some comments by the designers.  Interesting read!

Sage Latorra at Syntax Error delves into the concept of modularity, as suggested by 5th edition.  He gets into the nitty gritty of what exactly is modularity, using computer programming as an example of modularity that works, and suggests that 5th edition won’t really be modular, but rather customizable.  I think he has a good point that it will be hard to just take things out and replace them with another system in 5th edition without affecting the rest of the system, but I think the designers still think it can be done.  We will see!

Sage Latorra at Syntax Error comes back with another great post about 5th edition, this time analyzing the legends and lore and talking about the three options as he sees it for 5th edition.  Very interesting analysis about the directions that 5th edition can go in.  This post builds off his previous one.

The Chatty DM at Critical Hits talks about what he remembers from 1st edition D&D.

David Guyll at Points of Light talks about the need to do away with the +1 needed to hit mechanic.

And finally, Christopher Heckler at Gaming Tonic has a great post about how 5th edition has killed the edition wars in his very divided gaming group.  I wonder if some of that is the newness factor (and the fact that his group is getting to playtest already! Lucky!) but it is a great start for the new edition.  Much better than the start for 4th edition.

Well, that’s all I have for now!  Great gaming!