Tomb of Horrors was on of those legacy modules that hasn't really had a home in Dungeons & Dragons since 3e. Once chargen got any more complicted than "roll 3 dice six times, pick some equipment." Part of its charm was that it was so lethal and bullshit. It's a comedy of errors, really. Also, schadenfreude. Much like Paranoia you're playing for laughs, not for rich character-driven drama. It's those same elements that make it utterly incompatible with 4e. I really wish they hadn't updated it for 4e. Just leave it in the past and for fan conversions to retro clones.
I'd be game for an update to the original "Castle Ravenloft". I really miss the Ravenloft campaign setting. I used to pull from it a lot when I was DMing, though I wouldn't tell my players I was doing so. They had an abject fear of Ravenloft, and anything possibly resembling mist.
I really enjoyed the Ravenloft setting in 3rd! So many books devoted to lore that took it away from the week-end in hell type of scenario. The DM Guide has pretty good info on how to DM a horror game or build a horror story and how to enhance the horror aspects. Pretty good section on how to roleplay NPCs and there's a section called "I just can't do voices" where it explains how you can convey the personnality of different NPCs just by changing your posture or the volume of your speech.
There is still a community for Ravenloft called the Fraternity of Shadows that publishes fan-made stuff for free. Hopefully it'll make a comeback one day!
One of my favorite Ravenloft adventures was an adventure published in Dungeon magazine that was based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You were in a tiny farming village, and gradually the village was being overtaken by pod people. It was a race to find the evil plant before the village and the party became consumed.
Crossbow Expert is great, and Swift Quiver is great, but they can't be combined to make crossbows get more attacks than bows. Crossbow expert lets you use your bonus action to make a 2nd attack when you attack. Swift Quiver lets you use your bonus action to fire 2 extra shots. You only get one bonus action per round. And since Crossbow expert only works with hand crossbows, you're only getting to use a 1d6 weapon.
If you're just comparing feats, I guess you can argue that Crossbow expert is explicitly superior to Sharpshooter, but I'm not really sure. Sharpshooter lets you shoot a longbow from 600 feet without disadvantage, ignore half and 3/4 cover, and gives you -5/+10 power attack with bows. If you have archery fighting style then you're essentially taking -3 to hit for +10 damage and you can use that as many times per round as you have attacks, unlike crossbow expert which only ever gives you the 1 extra attack. Plus Sharpshooter doesn't need a bonus action so using the aforementioned Swift Quiver lets the person use the -5/+10 on not just their regular attacks per round but also the 2 extras from the spell.
I would eventually want them both for a specialized archer, more for the "no disadvantage with an enemy within five feet" than the offhand crossbow feature
I would totally build a murder-dungeon and be like, "alright roll essentials characters and get ready to roll new ones..."
Yeah, I think this is how you do it. "Come to the table with 3 characters ready to go." You'd also need a group larger than 4, to make sure you don't end up with situations where you are like all striker.
I would totally build a murder-dungeon and be like, "alright roll essentials characters and get ready to roll new ones..."
Yeah, I think this is how you do it. "Come to the table with 3 characters ready to go." You'd also need a group larger than 4, to make sure you don't end up with situations where you are like all striker.
Yeah we had 7 people in our group so that was rarely a problem. Oddly the problem tended to be we lacked a striker, and were too heavy on leaders. This absolutely made combat drag.
I suppose you could but there's an awful lot of mean-spirited instant death traps that don't even appear to be traps. Just seems like there would be better systems for that sort of thing.
Then there are the mean-spirited death traps that look exactly like mean-spirited death traps. I don't know how many times I've put a random trapped hole on the wall, only to invariably have a party member stick some body part in there. They can't stand not knowing.
You could put a big red button in a room with a sign that says "Pressing this button will kill you. This is not a trick. That is exactly what will happen. Seriously." and a PC will still press it because they'll think it's a trick and something else will happen.
You could put a big red button in a room with a sign that says "Pressing this button will kill you. This is not a trick. That is exactly what will happen. Seriously." and a PC will still press it because they'll think it's a trick and something else will happen.
And then the next player goes, "Well maybe the 1st death is a trick and the treasure shows up on the second push!"
You could put a big red button in a room with a sign that says "Pressing this button will kill you. This is not a trick. That is exactly what will happen. Seriously." and a PC will still press it because they'll think it's a trick and something else will happen.
And then the next player goes, "Well maybe the 1st death is a trick and the treasure shows up on the second push!"
Have you ever heard the story about the Head of Vecna...
When I was a PAX I played in a game where there we were in some manner of necromantic lab, and there was a note left behind on the table saying to DEFINITELY not drink the liquid in the cauldron. A stranger I was playing with indeed drank some. His level 1 character wound up taking enough damage our DM declared him to have exploded all over the room. I made sure to snag a bit of it in a bottle for later.
Could someone explain this "bounded accuracy" problem?
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
3DS: 2466-2307-8384 PSN: bssteph Steam:bsstephanTwitch:bsstephan Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e Occasional words about games:my site
One of the traps is a sphere of annihilate, shaped to fit a door frame. The DM is encourage to describe it as magical darkness. That would TPK whole parties at the cons.
Could someone explain this "bounded accuracy" problem?
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
Could someone explain this "bounded accuracy" problem?
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
As far as I can discern, the "open playtest" was 100% a publicity campaign, and no play tester feedback was ever seriously considered. Especially not feedback that would lead them to go back to the drawing board with the core system.
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MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
Could someone explain this "bounded accuracy" problem?
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
Yeah. Rather than rely entirely on HP to be the balancing point, I would have preferred something that incorporated tiers of play. Like if you are one tier above the monster, they are 2-hit minions, if you are two or more tiers above them they are 1-hit minions.
Could someone explain this "bounded accuracy" problem?
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
As far as I can discern, the "open playtest" was 100% a publicity campaign, and no play tester feedback was ever seriously considered. Especially not feedback that would lead them to go back to the drawing board with the core system.
Yeah, unfortunately there's a lot we don't know. The results suggest that "open" playtest either had overwhelmingly reaffirming feedback despite those who questioned stuff openly, or they ignored feedback questioning some core design pieces, or they never intended to use any of the open playtest feedback for anything other than a rough gauge of interest and publicity hype. And certainly if you were in a (presumably run) closed playtest, you were NDAed to high hell. But these issues weren't exactly surprises when the final playtest and/or Basic rules were launched, people across the internet had worked them out since the first open playtest --- the feedback was either ignored or never being collected in the first place.
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I'm not normally bothered by arguments about hard-to-predict encounters, because most games are exactly that way and I'm just as fond of Call of Cthulhu without some kind of "balance" system, but that's a horror game, it doesn't need to be fair. D&D is an adventure game, about overcoming obstacles, and you do need to be able to figure out what will be challenging rather than impossible or trivial.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited November 2014
Honestly, outside of the basic numbers about XP budgets, I no longer use any of the encounter design rules (even the force multiplication stuff, I ignore that now as well). If there is something I can say that is extremely damning about 5e and their encounter design rules, it is that ignoring it entirely and just doing whatever I feel like seems to be working much better.
As for the playtests, during the previous threads we often commented on Wizards surveys in particular, which often asked hilarious variations of "How awesome is 5e"
A1: Awesome
A2: So awesome
A3: pretty damn great
And you would then need to write in there "Well actually...", but inevitably their legends and lore would be all "Overwhelming feedback on playtest is that it's awesome". Well no shit Wizards, your surveys were designed to get that answer.
Edit: Like, let me make it clear that just about every problem in this thread that has been discussed was discussed at length over a year ago in some capacity. None of these things are huge out of nowhere surprises that nobody anticipated. I have been critical of the idea of bounded accuracy for a long time and seeing wizards admit in their rules "enemies of too low a cr don't contribute to force multiplication" is vindication. It was never ever going to work well and frankly, cr1/4 skeletons are not worth their initiative and time at the table above say, 5th level.
Slowing down fights that are already becoming 4e slow at high levels (I shall talk about this more when this little mini-campaign is done) is not a good thing.
Edit2: And listing spells that NPCs have and not what their stats and raw damage/effects are is incredibly obnoxious. It's like someone at Wizards sat down and thought "How can I make this edition as fucking obnoxious as possible to DM? I know! We'll put in NPC spellcasters and then give them lists of spells with no details how these things work, so the DM has to constantly look it up to figure it out!"
BRILLIANT WORK WIZARDS.
Edit3: Seriously. I just built a 9th level spellcaster using the Mage as a template from the basic rules and I hate myself so much for even attempting it right now. So much.
Edit4: Do I even add the spellcasters proficiency and stat bonus to the damage their spells do? Do they just do the raw XdY? Who knows.
Honestly, outside of the basic numbers about XP budgets, I no longer use any of the encounter design rules (even the force multiplication stuff, I ignore that now as well). If there is something I can say that is extremely damning about 5e and their encounter design rules, it is that ignoring it entirely and just doing whatever I feel like seems to be working much better.
As for the playtests, during the previous threads we often commented on Wizards surveys in particular, which often asked hilarious variations of "How awesome is 5e"
A1: Awesome
A2: So awesome
A3: pretty damn great
And you would then need to write in there "Well actually...", but inevitably their legends and lore would be all "Overwhelming feedback on playtest is that it's awesome". Well no shit Wizards, your surveys were designed to get that answer.
Edit: Like, let me make it clear that just about every problem in this thread that has been discussed was discussed at length over a year ago in some capacity. None of these things are huge out of nowhere surprises that nobody anticipated. I have been critical of the idea of bounded accuracy for a long time and seeing wizards admit in their rules "enemies of too low a cr don't contribute to force multiplication" is vindication. It was never ever going to work well and frankly, cr1/4 skeletons are not worth their initiative and time at the table above say, 5th level.
Slowing down fights that are already becoming 4e slow at high levels (I shall talk about this more when this little mini-campaign is done) is not a good thing.
Edit2: And listing spells that NPCs have and not what their stats and raw damage/effects are is incredibly obnoxious. It's like someone at Wizards sat down and thought "How can I make this edition as fucking obnoxious as possible to DM? I know! We'll put in NPC spellcasters and then give them lists of spells with no details how these things work, so the DM has to constantly look it up to figure it out!"
BRILLIANT WORK WIZARDS.
Edit3: Seriously. I just built a 9th level spellcaster using the Mage as a template from the basic rules and I hate myself so much for even attempting it right now. So much.
Edit4: Do I even add the spellcasters proficiency and stat bonus to the damage their spells do? Do they just do the raw XdY? Who knows.
We're level 6 and slow isn't a problem we're having, so far. In fact, it's a race to get to kill something. We have 5 "real" Pcs and a kind of bot cleric (cleric of life with heavy armor tank who "takes a vow of pacifism" when his frequently absentee player isn't around)
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They also recruited testers to test DURING normal business hours, instead of weekends.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They also recruited testers to test DURING normal business hours, instead of weekends.
This horribly skews who can actually playtest.
They ignored them too, or did they ever actually fix the interaction of prone and reach weapons?
Tri-Optimum reminds you that there are only one-hundred-sixty-three shopping days until Christmas. Just 1 extra work cycle twice a week will give you the spending money you need to make this holiday a very special one.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that the opinion of customers is worthy of dismissing in its entirety, because customers are infrequently engineers, mechanics, designers, developers, or whatever? Seems spurious at best.
For me purchase always comes at a time-cost equation. If it costs me too much time to do something myself (gold farming in MMOs is an excellent example of this) then I hire someone else to do it for me. Similarly, if there's a large up front investment in things I'll probably never use again, I'll hire someone else to do it for me.
Which is why when I purchase an RPG -- which requires no tools I currently do not possess, or skills I do not have -- and it then says "now all you need to do is invest hours of your time to get all of this working properly, which will probably vaguely resemble what we sold you!" that I am irate. It took me about eight hours to write an RPG engine. Another eight to edit it into readable form for non-me persons. If I have to spend more than sixteen hours fixing your game, I really ought to be billing you at my consulting rate.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They're not supposed to be.
Playtesting means really get things tested by real people. You can break it down into several stages too, e.g. Play testing with someone knowledgeable from the company DMing vs just passing people the finished product and watching. Professional playtesters vs volunteers vs paid amateurs. Lots of ways, lots of juicy feedback.
I want to say, being all egalitarian-like, that if 5e annoys the crap out of me and sells well and makes a lot of people happy then they must have playtested well, and I must be just a design snob with a suspicious nature.
But the thing is we know they didn't do full playtesting, because the finished product didn't exist when they released the first products. They said themselves they wanted to tweak the DMG based on what they were seeing with the PHB. Which may well be a lie - I can well imagine them writing furiously to catch up - but it definitely shows that they have NEVER had the game they are publishing properly playtested.
Playtesting is starting around about now, I think.
I figure I could take a bear.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Honestly, outside of the basic numbers about XP budgets, I no longer use any of the encounter design rules (even the force multiplication stuff, I ignore that now as well). If there is something I can say that is extremely damning about 5e and their encounter design rules, it is that ignoring it entirely and just doing whatever I feel like seems to be working much better.
As for the playtests, during the previous threads we often commented on Wizards surveys in particular, which often asked hilarious variations of "How awesome is 5e"
A1: Awesome
A2: So awesome
A3: pretty damn great
And you would then need to write in there "Well actually...", but inevitably their legends and lore would be all "Overwhelming feedback on playtest is that it's awesome". Well no shit Wizards, your surveys were designed to get that answer.
Edit: Like, let me make it clear that just about every problem in this thread that has been discussed was discussed at length over a year ago in some capacity. None of these things are huge out of nowhere surprises that nobody anticipated. I have been critical of the idea of bounded accuracy for a long time and seeing wizards admit in their rules "enemies of too low a cr don't contribute to force multiplication" is vindication. It was never ever going to work well and frankly, cr1/4 skeletons are not worth their initiative and time at the table above say, 5th level.
Slowing down fights that are already becoming 4e slow at high levels (I shall talk about this more when this little mini-campaign is done) is not a good thing.
Edit2: And listing spells that NPCs have and not what their stats and raw damage/effects are is incredibly obnoxious. It's like someone at Wizards sat down and thought "How can I make this edition as fucking obnoxious as possible to DM? I know! We'll put in NPC spellcasters and then give them lists of spells with no details how these things work, so the DM has to constantly look it up to figure it out!"
BRILLIANT WORK WIZARDS.
Edit3: Seriously. I just built a 9th level spellcaster using the Mage as a template from the basic rules and I hate myself so much for even attempting it right now. So much.
Edit4: Do I even add the spellcasters proficiency and stat bonus to the damage their spells do? Do they just do the raw XdY? Who knows.
We're level 6 and slow isn't a problem we're having, so far. In fact, it's a race to get to kill something. We have 5 "real" Pcs and a kind of bot cleric (cleric of life with heavy armor tank who "takes a vow of pacifism" when his frequently absentee player isn't around)
This is at level 14 and the game is getting incredibly bogged down. Badly. For one thing, spellcasters are constantly looking up wording on various shit (it's a very very familiar feeling) and summons are dragging the game screaming into billion hour - reasonably ineffective turns. Yes, I get why you summon an army of wolves every encounter to generate advantage on all of your allies attacks, but god damn does managing all of this shit drag everything down. Once again fight guy has a turn that lasts about two seconds and doesn't accomplish much, while casters are really starting to feel like they dominate the game again. We are back into hour long combats, of which the entire actual fight was only 2 rounds. So you can imagine the frustration.
Additionally, due to the incredibly poor encounter building guidelines I have not really found anything other than extreme obsessive engineering (ala 3.x) that makes for an interesting or entertaining combat encounter whatsoever. I am absolutely hoping that the updated rules in the basic rules are not complete and that there is something better in there. Also definitely going to have to harshly fix summons: They are a ridiculous time sink.
Edit: And yes, 5e feels like it is actually undergoing proper playtesting now. Especially with the clear mess their encounter building guidelines are.
One of the traps is a sphere of annihilate, shaped to fit a door frame. The DM is encourage to describe it as magical darkness. That would TPK whole parties at the cons.
Really? That is weird considering that most players, I assume, would avoid areas of magical darkness on principle without some way to counter the effect (plenty of dangerous monsters have dark vision).
Hitting the broken computer does not fix the broken computer. Fixing the broken computer, fixes the broken computer.
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MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They're not supposed to be.
Playtesting means really get things tested by real people. You can break it down into several stages too, e.g. Play testing with someone knowledgeable from the company DMing vs just passing people the finished product and watching. Professional playtesters vs volunteers vs paid amateurs. Lots of ways, lots of juicy feedback.
I want to say, being all egalitarian-like, that if 5e annoys the crap out of me and sells well and makes a lot of people happy then they must have playtested well, and I must be just a design snob with a suspicious nature.
But the thing is we know they didn't do full playtesting, because the finished product didn't exist when they released the first products. They said themselves they wanted to tweak the DMG based on what they were seeing with the PHB. Which may well be a lie - I can well imagine them writing furiously to catch up - but it definitely shows that they have NEVER had the game they are publishing properly playtested.
Playtesting is starting around about now, I think.
Having been a volunteer playtester on a few games this is spot on. During a play test--ime at any rate--great designers really want to know how to improve their game and make changes when issues are brought to their attention. Comparing the draft documents vs the eventual release (or hell just the eventual release alone) its easy to see that little if any playtest feedback made it into the game. It's sad, really--whether its due to poor game-line management at WotC or pressure applied by Hasbro to get a new edition out pushed quickly.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They're not supposed to be.
Playtesting means really get things tested by real people. You can break it down into several stages too, e.g. Play testing with someone knowledgeable from the company DMing vs just passing people the finished product and watching. Professional playtesters vs volunteers vs paid amateurs. Lots of ways, lots of juicy feedback.
I want to say, being all egalitarian-like, that if 5e annoys the crap out of me and sells well and makes a lot of people happy then they must have playtested well, and I must be just a design snob with a suspicious nature.
But the thing is we know they didn't do full playtesting, because the finished product didn't exist when they released the first products. They said themselves they wanted to tweak the DMG based on what they were seeing with the PHB. Which may well be a lie - I can well imagine them writing furiously to catch up - but it definitely shows that they have NEVER had the game they are publishing properly playtested.
Playtesting is starting around about now, I think.
Having been a volunteer playtester on a few games this is spot on. During a play test--ime at any rate--great designers really want to know how to improve their game and make changes when issues are brought to their attention. Comparing the draft documents vs the eventual release (or hell just the eventual release alone) its easy to see that little if any playtest feedback made it into the game. It's sad, really--whether its due to poor game-line management at WotC or pressure applied by Hasbro to get a new edition out pushed quickly.
I agree completely. And it's really in contrast to games like 13th Age, which actually have sidebars talking about changes made during playtesting.
I literally know of no changes made due to playtesting that have been discussed by WOTC.
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that the opinion of customers is worthy of dismissing in its entirety, because customers are infrequently engineers, mechanics, designers, developers, or whatever? Seems spurious at best.
For me purchase always comes at a time-cost equation. If it costs me too much time to do something myself (gold farming in MMOs is an excellent example of this) then I hire someone else to do it for me. Similarly, if there's a large up front investment in things I'll probably never use again, I'll hire someone else to do it for me.
Which is why when I purchase an RPG -- which requires no tools I currently do not possess, or skills I do not have -- and it then says "now all you need to do is invest hours of your time to get all of this working properly, which will probably vaguely resemble what we sold you!" that I am irate. It took me about eight hours to write an RPG engine. Another eight to edit it into readable form for non-me persons. If I have to spend more than sixteen hours fixing your game, I really ought to be billing you at my consulting rate.
I know I flattened all the nuance out of this and it isn't particularly fair as the subject is complex. In any field that involves specialist/obscure knowledge you'll find that a general person's feedback from some areas is completely unhelpful. They don't want it so confusing but there should be more options. They really care about fuel economy and also it needs to accelerate fast. So on and so on where people ask for more of diametrically opposed design goals. To this end there is a certain point where the technical(/artistic) lead has to make decisions despite this. The best they can do is use their judgement to try and fulfill the [intentions[/i] of their customers.
Moreover, people are often bad at identifying what is actually working for them. Back when Bungie was in the bosom of MS they set up a little game monitoring booth for people to playtest games and often what they said and how they actually reacted conflicted. Under study they found a lot of surprising results that were counter intuitive.
Anyways, I think the kind of playtest that was done does have a place as part of a larger panel of playtesting. Though because of the thoroughly unrigorous way it was conducted I doubt it was a representative sample of the play populace. Self selection pulls in people who are dissatisfied with the status quo much more strongly than those who think the current way is excellent. It leads to options that have the most vociferous advocates being enhanced while those that do not have such advocates being ignored.
Some highlights from yesterday's game. I was DMing, and the party were all at 3rd level.
After being abandoned by his colleagues, a bugbear wound up helping the party's dwarf paladin cross a rushing, underground river while hauling a chain, which would help the rest of the group (and people in general) cross. They were both tied off and anchored by the halfling rogue, who, for some reason, had an 18 strength. Anyway, as soon as they made the other side, the bugbear shoved the dwarf back into the water and made a run for it, trying to untie the rope as he went. The halfling, though, expected this, beat his initiative, hauled him into the river, and cut the rope. The dwarf then cast thunderous smite, rolled max damage, and hit for 13 with his fist, sending the bugbear sprawling into the river, which promptly carried him away. Highlighted here were the shoving rules, which worked very well, I felt. I had to fudge them a bit for the halfling jerking the bugbear backward with the rope, but my shitty roll helped everything go more entertainingly. I suspect the 13 damage punch will be mentioned frequently.
Later, the party were fighting a mixed group of hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears, next to a giant cliff. I was hoping the earlier shenanigans would prompt them to shove some people off the cliff, but there were no takers, unfortunately. The sorcerer, however, decided to make frequent use of his tides of chaos ability, and I decided to make him roll on the wild magic surge chart as often as I could. His first roll turned everyone within 30 feet invisible, which turned a fairly ordinary melee into a comedy of errors as the dwarf and some bugbears swung at the air. Shortly thereafter, a gang of goblins closed in on the sorcerer, who tried to hit their leader with witch bold. He missed, even with advantage, but his wild magic surge cast greaseon his location, knocking him and all of the goblins on their asses. Finally, as the fight was reaching its conclusion and two bugbears were moving in to clobber the rogue and ranger who'd been shooting at them all the while, the sorcerer fired off a final witch bolt. This time wild magic hit everyone--friend or foe--within 30 feet for a d10 necrotic, and healed the sorcerer for the total. It cleared the field and took the sorcerer from 1 hp to fully healed. I imagine the paladin will have some stern words about the wailing specters stealing everyone's lifeforce and carrying it back to the mage, who he mistrusts anyway. At any rate, as everyone started asking me about XP and treasure all at once, I reminded the sorcerer that he needed to do a dex save, since he ended the turn in grease's effect. He promptly failed and fell on his ass, which was a great end to both the fight and the day's shenanigans.
Oh, and somewhere in there he also got hit with the one that makes pink bubbles come out of his mouth whenever he tries to speak, but he had the metamagic thing that lets him burn sorcery points to negate verbal components, and a lot of his go-to spells don't have verbals anyway. Funny, nonetheless.
The wild magic table was a big hit with the players. I don't think I'll keep using it every single chance I get, since I don't want his character and that breed of silliness to dominate the table, but I'll definitely be keeping it in mind.
The goblin boss's ability to grab other goblins and shove them in the way of incoming attacks was a major hit, which is good because I've been looking forward to using it for weeks. I may be easily amused.
The players seemed to be having a really good time with 5e. We have two 3.5 veterans and two more or less newbies in the group; none of us ever played much 4e, if any. It was our first big test of 5e's combat, since our last couple sessions have been very roleplay-heavy. Both the paladin and rogue players were fully engaged and having a blast positioning themselves for advantage, and the rogue was making fantastic use of cunning action to keep out of danger and hide himself after firing.
On my end, I felt that my encounters were, on the whole, a little weak, which is to be expected; I'd been reading so much about the lethality of low levels that I probably undergunned them. I did use the basic rules for xp budgets and force multipliers, but my terrain choices weren't great, and I didn't play the monsters intelligently enough in a couple cases. I did notice a lot of book-thumbing, but how much of it was people looking up rules they needed to know right then I don't know, since on at least one occasion I thought the rogue was looking up a rule when he was picking feats for later. The index was commented upon disparagingly on at least one occasion.
In addition to the good questions about the sample used, self-selection, levels of expertise, and so on, part of the open playtesting issue, in my opinionservation, is that much of the prompts Wizards provided to the open playtesters and L&Ls were more like "did you play the game and have fun?" rather than what I'd consider a true playtest. Much like how that problem comes up in these threads, looking at the system vs. looking at the table experience, I wonder how many of the playtest reports went beyond a surface "I liked it/I didn't like it".
I also vaguely recall some "what would you change?" loosey goosey style questions. I don't remember if they ever asked for explicit, focused feedback on any of the systems they changed.
Relatedly, anyone remember how many different open playtest cycles there were? I want to say three or four, which seems really, really low.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited November 2014
I think it was four and part of the trouble with the playtests were the absolutely god awfully dreadful playtest modules they gave out. Caves of Chaos was a dumb, grindy and really bad dungeon crawl. Mud Sorcerers Tomb was a gigantic "Fuck you" to anyone who wasn't a spellcaster and I didn't hear good things about the other playtest modules either. I can't honestly recall if they did much in the way of providing encounter building guidelines or ideas either, but it has been a while. I do know that watching certain bloggers who were extremely pro-4E change their opinions practically overnight to "Everything about 4E was bad, 5E is totally giving us back the DM power!" while no longer being critical of things they were praising 4E to fix was hilarious.
It was about that time I was done with DnD blogging altogether.
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I honestly don't enjoy that style of play, but a book with those types of monsters would still be interesting.
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
There is still a community for Ravenloft called the Fraternity of Shadows that publishes fan-made stuff for free. Hopefully it'll make a comeback one day!
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
I like the style for kind of kitchy one-shots, but in general, yeah, I agree. I do like me some dumb monsters appropriately labeled as dumb monsters.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
I would eventually want them both for a specialized archer, more for the "no disadvantage with an enemy within five feet" than the offhand crossbow feature
I host a podcast about movies.
Yeah, I think this is how you do it. "Come to the table with 3 characters ready to go." You'd also need a group larger than 4, to make sure you don't end up with situations where you are like all striker.
Yeah we had 7 people in our group so that was rarely a problem. Oddly the problem tended to be we lacked a striker, and were too heavy on leaders. This absolutely made combat drag.
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
And then the next player goes, "Well maybe the 1st death is a trick and the treasure shows up on the second push!"
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
Have you ever heard the story about the Head of Vecna...
One of the 5e design goals was presented as bounded accuracy, which attempted to alleviate some assumptions about PC ability and progression by dropping many d20 (attack, skill, etc.) bonuses. Increasing bonuses on rolls would not be a part of character growth. (Similarly, a low ceiling was put on ability score.) Where 4e had an assumption of magical items and/or inherent bonuses and a math patch feat because the system basically assumed a certain to-hit bonus at certain points in the character progression (but got the PC advancement side kind of wrong, hence the feats), 5e would be built with a reduced array of bonuses and no assumption that a PC have any of them.
This "flattening of the math" solved the problem observed in 4e, but it was too blunt an instrument compared to just fixing the game's math in inherent bonuses and the math patch. Along with bounded accuracy's implementation came different baggage --- challenges (in particular, monsters) now had their difficulty math flattened as well, and they were made to be reusable for longer in a campaign. The balancing factor was supposed to be that your standard monster was as easy/difficult to hit as it was levels ago, but it being "more easy" was encoded into its hit points not keeping pace with PC damage, and vice versa. If a DM wanted to reuse low-level orcs in a mid-level encounter, the solution was simply to just throw a lot of them in.
Unfortunately, the scaling is hard to predict (see: the kinds of encounters in 5e that are PC murderfests if too many monsters win initiative, the instability of CR in general), and there are a number of indicators that they got the damage vs. HP vs. threat matrix all sorts of wrong --- many low-CR monsters seem to skew too tough early on in a PC's adventuring life and are merely a waste of time once they're past their prime, and higher CR monsters seem to be underpowered relative to more capable PCs. Flattening the math further reduces room for mathematical nuance --- an orc that is "a little tougher than normal" because its AC is 1 higher is a bigger deal now than it was before, as that +1 is harder for the PCs to overcome.
I don't like it. At all. In my opinion they would have been better served to just take the math they'd fixed by the end of 4e, and not introduce a new system so heavily untested. Ideally rigorous playtesting would have caught the math issues (especially beyond the first couple levels), but we all know how well their playtesting went.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
Is there an article you can reference as to how they playtested 5e? I had thought they had taken so long to develop 5e because of extensive play testing...
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
As far as I can discern, the "open playtest" was 100% a publicity campaign, and no play tester feedback was ever seriously considered. Especially not feedback that would lead them to go back to the drawing board with the core system.
Yeah. Rather than rely entirely on HP to be the balancing point, I would have preferred something that incorporated tiers of play. Like if you are one tier above the monster, they are 2-hit minions, if you are two or more tiers above them they are 1-hit minions.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
Yeah, unfortunately there's a lot we don't know. The results suggest that "open" playtest either had overwhelmingly reaffirming feedback despite those who questioned stuff openly, or they ignored feedback questioning some core design pieces, or they never intended to use any of the open playtest feedback for anything other than a rough gauge of interest and publicity hype. And certainly if you were in a (presumably run) closed playtest, you were NDAed to high hell. But these issues weren't exactly surprises when the final playtest and/or Basic rules were launched, people across the internet had worked them out since the first open playtest --- the feedback was either ignored or never being collected in the first place.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
I'm not normally bothered by arguments about hard-to-predict encounters, because most games are exactly that way and I'm just as fond of Call of Cthulhu without some kind of "balance" system, but that's a horror game, it doesn't need to be fair. D&D is an adventure game, about overcoming obstacles, and you do need to be able to figure out what will be challenging rather than impossible or trivial.
As for the playtests, during the previous threads we often commented on Wizards surveys in particular, which often asked hilarious variations of "How awesome is 5e"
A1: Awesome
A2: So awesome
A3: pretty damn great
And you would then need to write in there "Well actually...", but inevitably their legends and lore would be all "Overwhelming feedback on playtest is that it's awesome". Well no shit Wizards, your surveys were designed to get that answer.
Edit: Like, let me make it clear that just about every problem in this thread that has been discussed was discussed at length over a year ago in some capacity. None of these things are huge out of nowhere surprises that nobody anticipated. I have been critical of the idea of bounded accuracy for a long time and seeing wizards admit in their rules "enemies of too low a cr don't contribute to force multiplication" is vindication. It was never ever going to work well and frankly, cr1/4 skeletons are not worth their initiative and time at the table above say, 5th level.
Slowing down fights that are already becoming 4e slow at high levels (I shall talk about this more when this little mini-campaign is done) is not a good thing.
Edit2: And listing spells that NPCs have and not what their stats and raw damage/effects are is incredibly obnoxious. It's like someone at Wizards sat down and thought "How can I make this edition as fucking obnoxious as possible to DM? I know! We'll put in NPC spellcasters and then give them lists of spells with no details how these things work, so the DM has to constantly look it up to figure it out!"
BRILLIANT WORK WIZARDS.
Edit3: Seriously. I just built a 9th level spellcaster using the Mage as a template from the basic rules and I hate myself so much for even attempting it right now. So much.
Edit4: Do I even add the spellcasters proficiency and stat bonus to the damage their spells do? Do they just do the raw XdY? Who knows.
We're level 6 and slow isn't a problem we're having, so far. In fact, it's a race to get to kill something. We have 5 "real" Pcs and a kind of bot cleric (cleric of life with heavy armor tank who "takes a vow of pacifism" when his frequently absentee player isn't around)
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Nothing adds proficiency bonus to damage.
The issue is that the gaming public are not playtesters nor are they professional game designers. 90% of the D&D playing people would look at the conversation above about "bounded accuracy" and be bored. Just like my eyes glaze over when somebody starts talking about gear ratios for their new car. I just know I want my car to go when I press the gas pedal.
Happily, Honda doesn't ask me what gear ratio should be nor do they pay any respect to the fact I have fond memories of a twenty year old car.
They also recruited testers to test DURING normal business hours, instead of weekends.
This horribly skews who can actually playtest.
They ignored them too, or did they ever actually fix the interaction of prone and reach weapons?
For me purchase always comes at a time-cost equation. If it costs me too much time to do something myself (gold farming in MMOs is an excellent example of this) then I hire someone else to do it for me. Similarly, if there's a large up front investment in things I'll probably never use again, I'll hire someone else to do it for me.
Which is why when I purchase an RPG -- which requires no tools I currently do not possess, or skills I do not have -- and it then says "now all you need to do is invest hours of your time to get all of this working properly, which will probably vaguely resemble what we sold you!" that I am irate. It took me about eight hours to write an RPG engine. Another eight to edit it into readable form for non-me persons. If I have to spend more than sixteen hours fixing your game, I really ought to be billing you at my consulting rate.
They're not supposed to be.
Playtesting means really get things tested by real people. You can break it down into several stages too, e.g. Play testing with someone knowledgeable from the company DMing vs just passing people the finished product and watching. Professional playtesters vs volunteers vs paid amateurs. Lots of ways, lots of juicy feedback.
I want to say, being all egalitarian-like, that if 5e annoys the crap out of me and sells well and makes a lot of people happy then they must have playtested well, and I must be just a design snob with a suspicious nature.
But the thing is we know they didn't do full playtesting, because the finished product didn't exist when they released the first products. They said themselves they wanted to tweak the DMG based on what they were seeing with the PHB. Which may well be a lie - I can well imagine them writing furiously to catch up - but it definitely shows that they have NEVER had the game they are publishing properly playtested.
Playtesting is starting around about now, I think.
This is at level 14 and the game is getting incredibly bogged down. Badly. For one thing, spellcasters are constantly looking up wording on various shit (it's a very very familiar feeling) and summons are dragging the game screaming into billion hour - reasonably ineffective turns. Yes, I get why you summon an army of wolves every encounter to generate advantage on all of your allies attacks, but god damn does managing all of this shit drag everything down. Once again fight guy has a turn that lasts about two seconds and doesn't accomplish much, while casters are really starting to feel like they dominate the game again. We are back into hour long combats, of which the entire actual fight was only 2 rounds. So you can imagine the frustration.
Additionally, due to the incredibly poor encounter building guidelines I have not really found anything other than extreme obsessive engineering (ala 3.x) that makes for an interesting or entertaining combat encounter whatsoever. I am absolutely hoping that the updated rules in the basic rules are not complete and that there is something better in there. Also definitely going to have to harshly fix summons: They are a ridiculous time sink.
Edit: And yes, 5e feels like it is actually undergoing proper playtesting now. Especially with the clear mess their encounter building guidelines are.
Really? That is weird considering that most players, I assume, would avoid areas of magical darkness on principle without some way to counter the effect (plenty of dangerous monsters have dark vision).
Having been a volunteer playtester on a few games this is spot on. During a play test--ime at any rate--great designers really want to know how to improve their game and make changes when issues are brought to their attention. Comparing the draft documents vs the eventual release (or hell just the eventual release alone) its easy to see that little if any playtest feedback made it into the game. It's sad, really--whether its due to poor game-line management at WotC or pressure applied by Hasbro to get a new edition out pushed quickly.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
I agree completely. And it's really in contrast to games like 13th Age, which actually have sidebars talking about changes made during playtesting.
I literally know of no changes made due to playtesting that have been discussed by WOTC.
I know I flattened all the nuance out of this and it isn't particularly fair as the subject is complex. In any field that involves specialist/obscure knowledge you'll find that a general person's feedback from some areas is completely unhelpful. They don't want it so confusing but there should be more options. They really care about fuel economy and also it needs to accelerate fast. So on and so on where people ask for more of diametrically opposed design goals. To this end there is a certain point where the technical(/artistic) lead has to make decisions despite this. The best they can do is use their judgement to try and fulfill the [intentions[/i] of their customers.
Moreover, people are often bad at identifying what is actually working for them. Back when Bungie was in the bosom of MS they set up a little game monitoring booth for people to playtest games and often what they said and how they actually reacted conflicted. Under study they found a lot of surprising results that were counter intuitive.
Anyways, I think the kind of playtest that was done does have a place as part of a larger panel of playtesting. Though because of the thoroughly unrigorous way it was conducted I doubt it was a representative sample of the play populace. Self selection pulls in people who are dissatisfied with the status quo much more strongly than those who think the current way is excellent. It leads to options that have the most vociferous advocates being enhanced while those that do not have such advocates being ignored.
- After being abandoned by his colleagues, a bugbear wound up helping the party's dwarf paladin cross a rushing, underground river while hauling a chain, which would help the rest of the group (and people in general) cross. They were both tied off and anchored by the halfling rogue, who, for some reason, had an 18 strength. Anyway, as soon as they made the other side, the bugbear shoved the dwarf back into the water and made a run for it, trying to untie the rope as he went. The halfling, though, expected this, beat his initiative, hauled him into the river, and cut the rope. The dwarf then cast thunderous smite, rolled max damage, and hit for 13 with his fist, sending the bugbear sprawling into the river, which promptly carried him away. Highlighted here were the shoving rules, which worked very well, I felt. I had to fudge them a bit for the halfling jerking the bugbear backward with the rope, but my shitty roll helped everything go more entertainingly. I suspect the 13 damage punch will be mentioned frequently.
- Later, the party were fighting a mixed group of hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears, next to a giant cliff. I was hoping the earlier shenanigans would prompt them to shove some people off the cliff, but there were no takers, unfortunately. The sorcerer, however, decided to make frequent use of his tides of chaos ability, and I decided to make him roll on the wild magic surge chart as often as I could. His first roll turned everyone within 30 feet invisible, which turned a fairly ordinary melee into a comedy of errors as the dwarf and some bugbears swung at the air. Shortly thereafter, a gang of goblins closed in on the sorcerer, who tried to hit their leader with witch bold. He missed, even with advantage, but his wild magic surge cast greaseon his location, knocking him and all of the goblins on their asses. Finally, as the fight was reaching its conclusion and two bugbears were moving in to clobber the rogue and ranger who'd been shooting at them all the while, the sorcerer fired off a final witch bolt. This time wild magic hit everyone--friend or foe--within 30 feet for a d10 necrotic, and healed the sorcerer for the total. It cleared the field and took the sorcerer from 1 hp to fully healed. I imagine the paladin will have some stern words about the wailing specters stealing everyone's lifeforce and carrying it back to the mage, who he mistrusts anyway. At any rate, as everyone started asking me about XP and treasure all at once, I reminded the sorcerer that he needed to do a dex save, since he ended the turn in grease's effect. He promptly failed and fell on his ass, which was a great end to both the fight and the day's shenanigans.
- The goblin boss's ability to grab other goblins and shove them in the way of incoming attacks was a major hit, which is good because I've been looking forward to using it for weeks. I may be easily amused.
The players seemed to be having a really good time with 5e. We have two 3.5 veterans and two more or less newbies in the group; none of us ever played much 4e, if any. It was our first big test of 5e's combat, since our last couple sessions have been very roleplay-heavy. Both the paladin and rogue players were fully engaged and having a blast positioning themselves for advantage, and the rogue was making fantastic use of cunning action to keep out of danger and hide himself after firing.Oh, and somewhere in there he also got hit with the one that makes pink bubbles come out of his mouth whenever he tries to speak, but he had the metamagic thing that lets him burn sorcery points to negate verbal components, and a lot of his go-to spells don't have verbals anyway. Funny, nonetheless.
The wild magic table was a big hit with the players. I don't think I'll keep using it every single chance I get, since I don't want his character and that breed of silliness to dominate the table, but I'll definitely be keeping it in mind.
On my end, I felt that my encounters were, on the whole, a little weak, which is to be expected; I'd been reading so much about the lethality of low levels that I probably undergunned them. I did use the basic rules for xp budgets and force multipliers, but my terrain choices weren't great, and I didn't play the monsters intelligently enough in a couple cases. I did notice a lot of book-thumbing, but how much of it was people looking up rules they needed to know right then I don't know, since on at least one occasion I thought the rogue was looking up a rule when he was picking feats for later. The index was commented upon disparagingly on at least one occasion.
Overall, a blast was had.
I also vaguely recall some "what would you change?" loosey goosey style questions. I don't remember if they ever asked for explicit, focused feedback on any of the systems they changed.
Relatedly, anyone remember how many different open playtest cycles there were? I want to say three or four, which seems really, really low.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
It was about that time I was done with DnD blogging altogether.