D&D Next Playtest: Mixed Emotions

Last week­end we did a quick­start and played a ses­sion of D&D Next. I even made the unlikely choice to play the elven wiz­ard, which was maybe the third time in my over 10 years of rp gam­ing that I ever played a wiz­ard or sor­cerer. And what can I say? I was a great fun! Let me sum up my pros and cons about D&D Next. To give you some con­text to read this infor­ma­tion right: I love to play and gm 4e and I also love to play 3e or Pathfinder, but won’t gm it. And I don’t like to play or gm AD&D. I haven’t played any edi­tions before that and I’m not into OSR.

Yay!

First of all, it was fun. And that’s the most impor­tant thing. The fun came to sig­nif­i­cant degree from the back­grounds, that really helped inte­grat­ing your char­ac­ter into the world. That gave a good start­ing point of how to act out your char­ac­ter. Goal reached, Wiz­ards. The wiz­ard did also prove to have some tac­ti­cal options. They were not that big, but they did exist. I hope this point will be addressed by later mod­ules. Mov­ing around before and after your attack did prove absolutely nec­es­sary for my char­ac­ter due to his extremely low AC. And since heal­ing is quite lim­ited, even with two cler­ics, stay­ing out of the way is vital for many characters.

Also descrip­tions of spells and spe­cial abil­i­ties do spark cre­ativ­ity, which was the ini­tial rea­son to choose the wiz­ard for me. I really wanted to see some­one drop of a lad­der that I cast grease upon. Unfor­tu­nately it hasn’t hap­pened yet. The com­bat also was fast most of the time and advan­tage seems and inter­est­ing mechanic to me, though I don’t see that much of saved time com­pared to numeric bonuses.

Boo!

The advan­tage mechanic has a draw­back, too. Elves will have a good chance to be the best scouts due to their keen senses, whereas a char­ac­ter in medium or heavy armor will prob­a­bly never sneak suc­cess­fully past any­one once. The effect of advan­tage and dis­ad­van­tage is quite strong, maybe too strong. This should be left a mechanic that can be eas­ily house­ruled and be replaced by a +/-2. Also cast­ing burn­ing hands into a group of zom­bies resulted in a 2 min­utes dis­cus­sion fol­lowed by a 2 min­utes pause. The dis­cus­sion due to the dif­fi­cult shape of the cone and the pause was caused by the gm rolling the saves for his 5 or so mon­sters and not­ing down their HP. That was bor­ing. In 4e, where play­ers roled attacks this was much more fun and not a bit boring.

The gm side is he biggest tar­get for my crit­i­cism. Despite the state­ments before the playtest that the 4e improve­ments on the dm side will be used in Next, they are nowhere to be seen. Rolling saves instead of hav­ing a defense value bores the play­ers, the descrip­tion of the mon­sters is much text and the spell descrip­tions are not even part of it. Min­ions are miss­ing, too, though I don’t think this is a “must have”. So where are the neat and really quick to grasp stat­blocks of 4e? Why do not use the power nota­tion to attach spells to the mon­ster text? Maybe mimic some well known abil­i­ties in an eas­ier to use way. This implies a lit­tle dif­fer­ence in rules for mon­sters than those for play­ers. But if the dm shall not be over­whelmed with work (in most cases he already is with­out the rules) I don’t see any other way. And there can be mon­sters that have the same descrip­tion as player char­ac­ters, but those should be few and only the major npcs. If you play a 15th level wiz­ard with a descrip­tion like a pc among sev­eral other mon­sters every few com­bats, it will drive you nutts.

Summed up

All in all my expe­ri­ence as a player was really good. I just want to have more pos­si­bil­i­ties of what to do, but I don’t expect this to be in the core rules mod­ule. But I surely expect a mod­ule for more tac­ti­cal options and deci­sions for the play­ers. The dm side was a bit of shock for me. All those improve­ments that where promised to be in D&D Next have van­ished. If it stays this way, Next will be the next sys­tem after 3e/PF that I won’t gm. In that case I’ll rather stick to 4e though it lacks quite an amount story aspects in the char­ac­ters. Gming shouldn’t be made harder than absolutely nec­es­sary, the rules should cause the fewest work pos­si­ble for the gm. 4e did that really well and Next should strive to get closer to that.

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