Kuunari

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D&D Next commentary continues to wow and amaze (with inspiration!)

D&DXP came and went, and now we even more speculation about what D&DNext will be.  And, we continue to have some excellent commentary.

Rob Donoghue over at Some Space to Think talks about typed damage, i.e. slashing, etc.  Typed damage comes from a great design idea, that of creating encounters where a player has a significant weakness.  The result of this though, is the golf bag syndrome, where the fighter just carries enough weapons to cover all the different types of damage.  Apparently there has been some designer talk about bringing that back in 5th edition.

Dave “The Game” Chalker at Critical Hits recaps D&D Next and D&DXP.  I thought this one was a pretty great insight into some of the design choices for D&D Next.

Once again, Sage LaTorra over at Syntax Error has a fabulously detailed look at how different editions play out in different indie games, inspired by Monte Cook’s Legends and Lore on the different editions of D&D.   I really enjoy reading his insight and end up enjoying his posts more than Monte Cook.  I mean, I loved Ptolus, but I haven’t been as impressed by Cook’s second coming to D&D.

Keith Davies at his blog talks about the situations in which certain characters have no hope in overcoming, and other characters have no hope in failing, focusing first on attack bonuses.  He calls them, “falling off the Random Number Generator”, i.e. it doesn’t matter what I roll on the die, I can’t pass/fail it.  He even includes his math!  Really interesting math about something I really dislike in a game.  No one should ever have nothing to do in a roleplaying game.

Anyways, that’s all the interesting posts I’ve found so far.  If you see any other ones, please drop me a line.

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5 responses to “D&D Next commentary continues to wow and amaze (with inspiration!)”

  1. Keith J Davies Avatar
    Keith J Davies

    Hi Matt,

    ‘Falling off the RNG’ wasn’t necessarily prompted by D&D 5e, especially since coNDAugh I can’t say I know anything about it. I was an epiphany I had while considering something else and thought I would share.

    However (shameless plug coming), part of that epiphany was realizing that Echelon d20 can, depending on what parameters you choose, probably provide a consistent framework that could meet many of the stated goals of 5e.

    I think. Depending on how you work level bonuses and training bonuses you can pretty trivially do D&D 3.x and D&D 4e progressions, and even flatter ones if you want (reduce ‘level bonus’ to ‘tier bonus’, so it tops out at +6 at Legendary tier — levels 21-24 — and use talents to differentiate from there). I haven’t much explored this topic in detail yet, but expect to soon.

    In the meantime I’m writing about a good way to replace touch attacks in D&D 3.x.

    Thanks for the link!

    Keith

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  2. Matt Kauko Avatar
    Matt Kauko

    I haven’t had a chance to check out echelon out before, but I will be this weekend. Thanks for the link.

    And you’re right, that it’s not technically a 5e post, but I felt like it was scratching the same itch, looking at prior editions, and seeing a place they all fell a little flat in, and figuring out how to improve them.

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    1. Keith J Davies Avatar
      Keith J Davies

      There’s where I thought you were coming from, and there’s some accuracy to that assessment. There are things about each edition that don’t set right with me… until I think about them differently.

      Explicitly recalibrating (saves, which I talked about three years ago, and AC to attack bonus, recently) goes a long way to fixing those aspects of D&D 3.x that bugged me. Go ahead and have a free pass to make the save automatically (because you’re awesomely tough/strong willed/agile and dodgy) or hit most of your targets (because You’re That Damn Good), that’s why you are ‘Good’ and not ‘Medium’.

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  3. Matt Kauko Avatar
    Matt Kauko

    Have you had a chance to read Trailblazer? I really enjoyed reading that and their rethinking of the mathematics that under pine 3.x. Sounds like they have a similar goal to yours in fixing some of the math that can bog down or lessen the fun of 3.x.

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    1. Keith J Davies Avatar
      Keith J Davies

      I am indeed familiar with Trailblazer, and found the Spine rather enlightening. I also included their Rest Mechanic in the OGC Library section of my site; it came up in the comments of On Hit Points and Healing.

      As I recall they’re taking a different approach than I am in Echelon, somewhat… but I did take away that you can probably graft ‘other abilities’ (such as clerical spell casting, as I recall) onto a monster or make minor changes such as increasing Hit Die size or Hit Dice with minimal effective change in CR. For instance, they took a giant and glued on a certain amount of clerical spell casting — enough to be useful and meaningful, but adding only a couple of CR rather than the 7 or 8 the RAW would have it add.

      This has had some effect on the design of Echelon, but I’m afraid I can’t summarize it right now. I’ll try to remember to do a post on it sometime, explaining the various design influences of Echelon.

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