Sounds like this will very much be in the vein of “5.5” plus adding some digital tools that look pretty cool, though I have very little confidence in Hasbro getting it right.
Here’s a direct link to the first batch of playtest material for anyone curious. My initial takeaways are that it allows mixed racial backgrounds easily and there’s a much greater emphasis on feats than 5e.
I'm surprised its been eight years since 5e came out. I must be getting old.
I like that they moved ability score increases to backgrounds, but kept the fantastical elements on races. That seems like the best compromise to me because the critique of the old way of doing things was that it was kind of fucked to suggest that a certain race of people are just stronger or smarter or whatever, but taking away all of that Tolkien stuff would have made being an elf or a dwarf or whatever else a whole lot less interesting.
That said the fact that they want to include a "make your own background" out of the gate kind of makes the idea of having pre-packaged backgrounds obsolete - who would ever choose a package of abilities when they could instead choose exactly the abilities they want?
I also like that a couple races can choose to be medium or small based on their character concept - Mouse Guard Ardling here I come!
Feats seem like they're being made with exactly the same design goals as before, which is fine but I've come to prefer PF2e's way of doing it.
Not much else to comment on since there's not much else here. When they release some more playtest material (ie classes) I'll put up a recruitment thread on here and run it.
Tieing some stuff you want to scale to proficiency bonus is cool, but overall the feats as presented seem underwhelming right now. It seems like they want to get away from the GWF/PAM/TWF/CE supremacy that currently exists, but didn't have anything interesting to replace it with.
Great Weapon Fighting, Polearm Master, Two Weapon Fighting, Crossbow Expert. One or two of these feats is basically mandatory for every martial character in 5e, because they directly increase that character's damage.
The feat system naturally encourages everyone to take combat-related feats because it makes you choose between increasing your combat effectiveness or increasing your versatility out of combat - but combat is the place where your and your friends' characters are most likely to die so of course it makes the most sense to pick combat options whenever possible. This is one of the major design problems that was introduced in D&D 3 that was not fixed in D&D 5, though it was significantly reduced by reducing the number of feats so at least the players that need to pay the feat tax can move on to more interesting choices relatively quickly.
Pathfinder 2e fixes this problem by having multiple kinds of feats. There's skill feats (which are ONLY non-combat feats), general feats (which have some combat stuff but it's pretty minor), and class feats (which are almost all combat stuff). This gives breathing room to players to make choices that make their character more interesting, because the number of combat-related feats you can take is less than the total number of feats you get.
Interested to see where this goes. It kinda feels like D&D 5e was the best version of the game as a mass-market product, and I'm curious to see how they handle the problem of needing to change the game enough to justify selling a new book to people without fundamentally breaking the product & alienating everyone who already liked what they had.
They've pulled ability score bonuses out of races and moved them into character backgrounds, which is a good move, so I'm sure a bunch of people are going to whine about it. Also those Ardlings look like good news for furries
I knew it was promised to be DnD 5.5, but man, I'm really disappointed they haven't changed more about it; what's here really just feels like a collection of pretty minor house rules. Maybe when I actually see the classes I'll feel differently, but nothing in here makes me have any real desire to return to 5e, since I feel like the game is pretty not great as it is, at least in comparison to other DnD-like games.
Still, always have faint hope they'll do something interesting with a new edition, as even just doing something different could be cool to look at. I'm just disappointed it's only 5e with a small spit shine.
It is hard to overstate the value that the GM resources have. A subpar system can coast on setting books and prebuilt campaigns just because it makes it more approachable to the new and a huge time saver for the old
Well, I think DnD 5e is one of the worst systems for GM support. Sure, the settings books have some cool plot and fluff, but the prebuilt campaigns are widely panned for not having good GM resources, and the settings books similarly lack a lot of guidelines, and just overall 5e is regarded as pretty hard to run and to get into GMing.
Older editions of DnD, and most DnD rivals, have better guidance on how to actually run game, how to actually construct challenges and build encounters. I've heard it said that 5e is built to sell books to players, not to GMs, and I strongly agree.
The emphasis on Feats could mean a lot more customization with builds that would otherwise be similar. But we won't really see the meat of the changes until they show off the classes, I think.
Rip aasimar, you were never gonna get done right, so might as well drop them for something else. Not a fan of the animal theme though, give me :angel-biblical:
Class specific spell lists are gone. They didn't do anything interesting with them in 5e anyway, so seems like a good move.
But it looks like nothing was done to fix the swingy math, especially with skills. It really sucks to feel like you can't make any specialist since the d20 results matter way more than any bonuses you have. Don't think I or any of my players will get drawn back to 5e with this, but at least none of the changes seem to be in the wrong direction. Just too little.
It wasnt until played lancer that i realized just how fucking awful the target numbers and modifiers to rolls are in DND. Here I thought that I just fucking hated d20 systems when the reality was the math was all fucked up.
Hilarious that all of the tools are just fun flavour with no real mechanical use except for the thieve's tools and possibly the disguise kit. Gee, I wonder which ones 99% of players will take?
There is the niche jewelry crafting option of turning cheaper uncut diamonds into more expensive cut diamonds for spell components
Seems like nothing but improvements
I still wish they'd mechanically seperate the three pillars a bit, so that people could take social/exploration feats without sacrificing combat ability
As a matter of taste I think a single face character is boring. I like what ICON does
Theyre trying to help the difference between martials and casters then drop crit changes that hit rogue hardest
