D&D Next Playtest: Round 2, Fight!

After sev­eral hours of grind­ing through evil cultists, we finally con­cluded our sec­ond playtest ses­sion of D&D Next. Here is a short list of what we liked and dis­liked, along with some ideas for hacks of the sys­tem. Some of them I already included into the pre­vi­ous post, but some are new. This time I was behind the screen.

For ref­er­ence, I favor 4th edi­tion, but I also like 3rd and Pathfinder, but mostly as a player. Gming is too com­pli­cated (unnecessarily).

Like

- Themes & Back­ground that tie your char­ac­ter to the world

- Quickess of combat

- Char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion that mat­ters (com­pared to “what power do I wanna have?” or “do I take the feat with +1 to a or b?”)

- Sim­ple action economy

- Free adven­ture setting

- XP awards seem to be okay. Grind­ing makes you level pretty quick with the easy mon­sters, though the dif­fi­cult ones will kill you.

- EDIT: Cantrips and orisons at will.

Dis­like

- Accord­ing to the pre­vi­ous point mon­ster bal­ance doesn’t seem to good.

- Sneak attacks are few and far between

- Advantage/disadvantage is def­i­nitely to strong

- The depen­dency on cler­ics is still sig­nif­i­cant. Surely it’s always bet­ter with a cler­ics and that is part of the prob­lem. But in-combat heal­ing sim­ple is not avail­able with­out them. Only through potions which in this case are cre­ated by the cleric and are not cheap.

- NPCs should have defenses instead of saves to make life for the dm eas­ier. And hav­ing the play­ers role is much more fun for them. If the asym­met­ric mechanic is a prob­lem rein­tro­duce defenses as in 4th edi­tion. Please!

- The con shape is strange. A close blast 15ft would do fine for burn­ing hands. Would that really be that bad to fans of the edi­tions before 4th? A 20ft cir­cle would also work fine as Are 15 ft (cones are cen­tered on a grid­line, areas include their ori­gin square, so –5 ft).

- Hit Dice are too few on level one, and if I take a look at the pro­gres­sion of HP and HD you can heal much more on level 10 for exam­ple. There­fore I’d use another for­mula. You get 2 HD on level 1 and should progress slowlier from there on. A pos­si­ble for­mula, which takes into account the “always round down” rule is: 2+ level/2. With round­ing up it might fit more nicely: 1 + level/2 (round down).

- The deci­sions for play­ers have no tac­ti­cal depth at all. Dear Wiz­ards of the Coast, do you want to release a tac­ti­cal mod­ule in the future? Is this cer­tain? Because for a basic mod­ule the tac­ti­cal depth is okay. I can live with that, though play­ing the npcs as dm war totally bor­ing. I as gm and player want to have more tac­ti­cal depth. Much more. For the sim­plest char­ac­ters the same as the wiz­ard now has and from that more. But if that comes later as a mod­ule it is okay. But I’m not sure whether there will be one.

- The adven­ture is a dun­geon crawl at its best. Okay, but a sys­tem that is designed to include com­bat, explo­ration and role­play­ing it’s bad. There is no explo­ration. Was that inten­tional and explo­ration is left out for now? Okay. But I would have expected some of it at least. And the Medusa didn’t work out well, though was not much of an issue.

- EDIT: The rule for some effects to be based on the cur­rent HP total didn’t work that well. The pcs or npcs are unable to deter­mine the HP of a mon­ster, often not even roughly, so it’s just a mat­ter of luck how this works out. If it comes in later for other spells and works with larger num­bers (say below 40 at level 5 or so), it might work bet­ter since that is eas­ier to deter­mine. But for now you just have a chance of wast­ing a good spell.

- EDIT: Some kind of “chal­lenge rat­ing” needs t obe added later so the dm gets a grasp of how strong a mon­ster is. And it seems to be prone to lucky rolls. One time chew­ing through 10 undeads (with two cler­ics) is hard, the other 3 undead and 9 gnolls didn’t score than three hits on the party.

That’s it for this time. Any though from you, dear reader? I’d like to dis­cuss what rules in spe­cific you liked or disliked.

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