Inside The Making Of The New “Dungeons and Dragons”

"Let's assume since you're reading this, you are, or plan to be, a Dungeon Master. By now, you should be familiar with the rules in the Player's Handbook. You've probably already noticed things you like or things you would have done differently. If you have, congratulations. You've got the spirit every Dungeon Master Needs. Curiosity and the desire to make changes, to do things differently because your idea is better than the other guy's -- these are the most important things a Dungeon Master needs. As you go through this rule book, I encourage you to continue to make these choices.

Choice is what the AD&D(r) 2nd Edition game is all about. We've tried to offer you what we think are the best choices for your AD&D campaign, but each of us has different likes and dislikes. The game that I enjoy may be quite different from your own campaign. But it is not for me to say what is right or wrong for your game.

(...)

Take the time to have fun with the AD&D rules. Add, create, expand and extrapolate. Don't just let the game sit there, and don't become a rules lawyer worrying about each piddly little detail. If you can't figure out the answer, MAKE IT UP! And whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of believing these rules are complete. They are not. You cannot sit back and let the rule book do everything for you. Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM , but a brilliant one."

-- Foreword to AD&D 2nd edition's "Dungeon Masters's Guide", David "Zeb" Cook, 2/9/89

Sadly, very few people paid any attention to that foreword (players because the book was off limits, of course ;-).

It's a shame WotC/TSR didn't go forward with the idea of an open rule set, rather than going back to the more traditional model. It is nice to see them borrow some ideas from White Wolf though -- to this day, if I were to recommend a [edit: single] rule set for role playing, it would be something between the old and new World of Darkness rules (aka the Storytelling System).

So I've been playing a Pathfinder game for the last year, but a lot of are pretty interested in the "5e" changes. Basically, they simplified a lot of the tedious bits of 3.5 and removed the weird role concepts. The Basic rules, which come as a PDF, are now available[1]. In general it looks closer to 3 than 4, but is still attempts to remove lots of the table calculation from the game.

What this article somewhat mentions and what seems really weird for people that like Pen and Paper and want to play this new edition is that they are releasing the CORE books over the span of a few months. It's kind of weird for players. Sure we get the Player's handbook this Tuesday, but without a DM book and a Monster Manual it makes things a little limited for a few months.

A decent portion of the core audience moved on to Pathfinder and feel pretty comfortable there. It'll be interesting to see if this push can sway us back.

The key part of course is you don't NEED to change. A lot of people still stick to old versions. I play once a month with a group of 5 others. It'll take us a couple years just to get through our current campaign in Pathfinder. Moving to 5E right now will just be a curiosity.

http://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/DnDBasicRul...

Pen and paper can never beat computer games at combat mechanics because the rules have to be human-friendly to compute. Pen and paper lives and dies with storytelling, which is why I prefer simple rules a la World of Darkness (apparently mages are really complicated, though).

Somewhat off-topic, but every time I visit a FastCo page the only thing I see immediately is the slideshow at the top of the page. I often don't even bother scrolling down, because it doesn't seem that there's anything more to the link. This seems like a usability problem to me. I would imagine that it would result in a lot of articles that go unread. Depending how they count pageviews, though, it's probably quite effective at generating ad revenue.

I started playing D&D when 4e came out in high school. I switched over to Pathfinder after two years or so when I went off to college. Pathfinder was ditched for GURPS the last year in college and I've been using it ever since, and am now dropping that (and miniature grid-combat entirely) for the Fate system.

I bring this up because, in hindsight, if I had managed to come into 3.5e instead of 4e I feel I wouldn't have become so disgusted with roll-playing (especially in combat). Even Pathfinder's combat seemed to be dominant time-wise, even if combat is comparatively scarcer. I realize this depends entirely on the campaign and players involved and is just my anecdote, but I really do believe that my first experiences being with 4e shaped my perception of grid-combat negatively and is a constant bias. I'm curious if anyone else had their first experiences with tabletop RPGs using D&D 4e, and what kind of experiences they came out of it with?

Is it just me or does the title seem like it has an extra level of 'meta' to it?

The most promising evolution of rpg i've seen was the microsoft surface table ( the big tables, not the tablet) prototype some guys did. It seemed to be built as a helper for combats and not much more. Obviously you don't want humans to compute bonuses or damages, because that's what computers are for, but you want to keep the freedom and imagination of paper rpgs.

I don't know what the whole thing has become though.

I DM'ed 3rd edition and 4th edition campaigns. The author of this article said that 4th edition made combat much longer and that's not true. Once my players got up to speed with the new system, our combat encounters ran about twice as fast as 3.5 did. I also had the impression that 4.0 had been designed with writing computer games in mind (whereas 3.5 would have been a nightmare to code into a game).

These rule problems can be a distraction from actual role playing. Might be a good time to try the White Box rules.