What would it take to make 6e not garbage?

[Hiram McDaniels]

Amusingly they haven't figured out every single thing in 5e was built in opposition to 4e.

I haven't seen it anywhere else.

I don't see that. From my perspective, 5E has more in common with 4E than any other edition if you exclude the legacy stuff.

To wit:

*Proficiency bonus works largely the same way that 4E's half-level bonus did, only on a smaller scale.

*Binary skill proficiencies. No ranks - you either have the skill or you don't.

*Action economy is largely the same, with bonus actions replacing minor actions.

*Hit Dice in 5E work like 4E's healing surges.

*There are at-will, encounter and daily powers only instead of outright saying it, the verbiage reads "you can't use this ability again until you complete a short rest".

*Races are handled the same - only net benefits with no penalties.

*Budget based encounter building.

*Legendary monsters function much the same way as 4E solo monsters.

To me, 5E is about wrapping up 4E mechanical concepts in the language of older editions.

[maglag]

3e also had at-will, encounter and daily powers, simply not standardized across all classes, and neither does 5e.

5e multiclassing is also closer to 3e than any other edition, where you can dip levels from any other classes and even mix as many classes as you have levels.

And 5e monsters also went back to using the same base stats as PCs like 3e, which was one of the main complains about 4e.

Binary skill proficiencies started with 2e with non-weapon proficiencies.

[LR]

And the fact that Mearls immediate stopped talking to him as soon as the book hit the shelves tells you everything you need to know about how sincere that was and how much the cares of the OSR movement actually matter to the people left working at WotC.

Whihc is only like six people and a dog, but still.

-Username17

Well, their D&D department. They haven't quite been able to replace MTG R&D with RoboRosewater yet. Maybe some day.

[Eikre]

[...]explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes.

"You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work[...]

In AD&D 1E, the tables for wizards and clerics ran to level 29. Thieves, rangers, and monks ran to level 17.

You could use procedural values to keep going, but monks, assassins, and druids had hard-caps that very explicitly prevented them from exceeding their tables in any way.

Telling a marital character who is only 33% of the way through the game's modeled range that his class is over and to get the fuck outta it is a genuine old-school option.

[Emerald]

[...]explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes.

"You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work[...]

In AD&D 1E, the tables for wizards and clerics ran to level 29. Thieves, rangers, and monks ran to level 17.

You could use procedural values to keep going, but monks, assassins, and druids had hard-caps that very explicitly prevented them from exceeding their tables in any way.

Telling a marital character who is only 33% of the way through the game's modeled range that his class is over and to get the fuck outta it is a genuine old-school option.

This is true. Of course, it was also an old-school option that 2e gave us 20th-level thieves, hierophant druids up to 20th level, and variant rules that let you exceed level limits with high prime requisite scores because people didn't like arbitrarily stopping at certain levels, and the "core four" fighter/thief/magic-user/cleric could all hit the maximum level cap (sometimes just procedurally, but still) while only subclasses had a lower minimum level, so they could point to those precedents just as easily.

The idea isn't to give people old-school options for the sake of old-school options; that way lies 5e and the OSR. It's to come up with something that works on its own--a better skill system, tiered classes, whatever--and tie it to part of old-school D&D that people liked to make it feel more like a bit of love for prior editions and less like a newfangled change from a newfangled edition.

Just speaking anecdotally, I've had grognard-y players balk at trying out a houserule or some online homebrew or the like if it seemed too not-D&D, unless it was framed in terms of "It's not really new, it's just sort of porting X to this edition," even if it was only superficially similar. Even just having callbacks is good too; the Seeker of the Lost Wizard Traditions PrC in the Dungeonomicon went a long way toward convincing several players that the Tomes were written by people who knew and appreciated D&D and not people who hated it and wanted to change everything.

[Username17]

WotC has said explicitly in channels I am inclined to believe that over twenty million people have played D&D at some point, while 4th Edition D&D sold just hundreds of thousands of books in all of its titles combined. Now I think that WotC is chasing the grognards too hard, but considering that the pool of old edition players is about two orders of magnitude larger than the pool of 4th edition players, you can see why they do.

Obviously there are people who played D&D in the past who would not play D&D again. There are people who played D&D in the past who wouldn't buy your new edition of D&D no matter what it did, regardless of whether they would play the game or not. You can also get new customers, D&D is a game for teenagers and most people who are teenagers now weren't even born yet when 3e came out in 2000.

Examples of franchises where one example did much better or worse than the ones before or after it are of course a dime a dozen. Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift had a world wide box office of 157 million dollars, while Furious 7 had a worldwide box office of 1.5 billion dollars, taking in nearly ten times as much moneys. And 4e D&D is truly an outlier in the opposite direction, selling less than one tenth as many units as its immediate predecessor.

Ultimately I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect a D&D edition to get in there on shock and awe. 4th edition was the most pre-ordered edition ever and is also the worst performing edition overall. First day sales just don't matter very much in RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons is a cooperative storytelling game, and by definition every person who plays the game does so because there are other people who also play. Word of mouth is absolutely key, and the expectation should be that every person who buys it is going to share with 5 others. You don't get sales from any of those people unless and until you win them over through them actually reading and/or playing your game.

So it's important to have hooks. It's important to have good art and engaging prose. These are things that get people to buy it off the shelf in the first place - to share it with their friends. But at the end of the day you're still getting the vast majority of your sales from word of mouth. People have to tell their friends how good your game is for any significant sales to happen.

Financially it seems that the way forward is to convince people that they want to subscribe to an online magazine. Which honestly doesn't seem very hard, given how little content D&D Insider was offering in the waning days of 4e and how many millions of dollars in subscription fees they picked up. But the edition still lives or dies based on people actually liking the fucking thing. There's no way to fake that. Your product has to be better than some rando's 3.5 house rules with pretty good art.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Lootboxes

[Covent]

Lootboxes

/sarcasm on

This is brilliant!

D&D 6th, where the books only contain system rules!

All monsters, spells, feats, powers, classes, etc are printed only on cards from randomized packs!

This way you have to buy boxes and boxes of cards for everyone to play!

Hunt for the rare cards to be “awesome”.

Don’t forget legendary cards that you have to destroy to use so you have to hunt those down over and over again!

Or, even better just a mandatory app which you have to buy digital packs for as all things have only limited charges and to use anything you have to buy more packs until you get what you need!

/sarcasm off

“Sob”

Please no, please god no.

MGuy I know you were just kidding, I can just see WOTC being greedy enough to try this to see if they can take advantage of the MTG/Skinner box-whale model.

[Ferret]

Aside from mechanics questions which you all have covered, I'd like to circle back around to the question of digital tools / etc.

D&D Beyond is evolving into a thing that I think you could reasonably build a game around; it handles many of the follies that modern gamers have - character generation, rules wiki, forum for locating other players to create a game. It needs two things, both of which I think are on the current Beyond roadmap:

Integration with or subsumation of a realtime play engine like Roll20 or FantasyGrounds

Streaming Video (or Voice-only at minimum) comms for players and GM with option to livestream to a wide audience or record for upload to Youtube or both.

Charge a small fee for premium access, put scratch-off codes into the books to unlock content.

I think it could work almost irrespective of the mechanical questions of the actual game.

[K]

For DnD to transition to the 21st century, it needs a system that streamlines content creation with a vigorous and adaptable set of rules for the creation of that content.

Since every edition of DnD has been based on "well, my DM just eyeballs it" for content creation, I don't have faith in the powers that be doing that.

[Eikre]

[...]explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes.

"You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work[...]

In AD&D 1E, the tables for wizards and clerics ran to level 29. Thieves, rangers, and monks ran to level 17.

You could use procedural values to keep going, but monks, assassins, and druids had hard-caps that very explicitly prevented them from exceeding their tables in any way.

Telling a marital character who is only 33% of the way through the game's modeled range that his class is over and to get the fuck outta it is a genuine old-school option.

This is true. Of course, it was also an old-school option that 2e gave us 20th-level thieves, hierophant druids up to 20th level, and variant rules that let you exceed level limits with high prime requisite scores because people didn't like arbitrarily stopping at certain levels, and the "core four" fighter/thief/magic-user/cleric could all hit the maximum level cap (sometimes just procedurally, but still) while only subclasses had a lower minimum level, so they could point to those precedents just as easily.

The idea isn't to give people old-school options for the sake of old-school options; that way lies 5e and the OSR. It's to come up with something that works on its own--a better skill system, tiered classes, whatever--and tie it to part of old-school D&D that people liked to make it feel more like a bit of love for prior editions and less like a newfangled change from a newfangled edition.

Just speaking anecdotally, I've had grognard-y players balk at trying out a houserule or some online homebrew or the like if it seemed too not-D&D, unless it was framed in terms of "It's not really new, it's just sort of porting X to this edition," even if it was only superficially similar. Even just having callbacks is good too; the Seeker of the Lost Wizard Traditions PrC in the Dungeonomicon went a long way toward convincing several players that the Tomes were written by people who knew and appreciated D&D and not people who hated it and wanted to change everything.

I don't understand. This post reads in a contradictory tone, yet all of its assertions lead to the conclusion "Thus, we should do exactly like Eikre said and end the Fighting Man class twelve levels earlier than the Magic User class, because it is productive to stop pretending that the Fighting Man concept on its own can extend as far as the Wizard does, and because we can justify this decision to pearl-clutching grognards by citing it as very similar to how Grandpa Gygax used to do it."

[CapnTthePirateG]

I literally asked Gygax's son (at a con) what high level fighters were supposed to do and his answer was that they didn't play at high level.

I don't think we need to be bound by tradition here.

[Voss]

@Covent - well, Mearls unearthed arcana articles often feel like loot boxes. You Know they're worthless pieces of shit, but you still feel ripped off when you open them up.

[Emerald]

I don't understand. This post reads in a contradictory tone, yet all of its assertions lead to the conclusion "Thus, we should do exactly like Eikre said and end the Fighting Man class twelve levels earlier than the Magic User class, because it is productive to stop pretending that the Fighting Man concept on its own can extend as far as the Wizard does, and because we can justify this decision to pearl-clutching grognards by citing it as very similar to how Grandpa Gygax used to do it."

What I'm trying to get at is that there's two ways you can approach the issue: you can either tell fighter players "Your class is bad and you should feel bad, it's 10th level, time to get a real class," or you can tell all players "Everyone needs magic or superhuman powers past a certain point, it's 10th level, time for everyone to move up to the next tier."

The former approach has an old-school pedigree, but not a positive one (2e relaxed level limits in several different ways by player demand and level limits in retroclones are unpopular), while the latter has strong 4e associations (as in the post of Frank's I was initially responding to) so grognards are likely to reject that too.

So neither approach will appeal to old-school fans, unless you make a big deal about the latter approach being inspired by OD&D, both fighters and wizards need to change as the game does, blah blah blah, since everyone loved planning for their character to ascend to godhood/transform into an Avangion/become an Immortal/etc. and that should outweight the bad 4e associations. You have to thread the needle of appealing to nostalgia while not actually doing things just for the nostalgia factor.

Of course, as the hypothetical 6e brand manager, deciding "screw old-school players, the fighter isn't a real class and stops at 10th level" is also a valid choice, it just won't address the fractured fanbase problem mentioned in the OP.

[Eikre]

The only thing repellent about OD&D level caps is that your character stops advancing when your class does. If you have multiclassing or prestige classes to jump into, then you're set. You refrain from hyper-conforming every power schedule to include the "paragon" development at the same time (or even necessarily at all) and then you avoid the odor of 4E.

I'm calling bullshit that good design vs nostalgia is any kind of balancing act, though. If the two are in opposition you just take that first option every single fucking time. If it occurs that you can make the good design decision and connote nostalgia at the same time, like you absolutely can with this issue, then obviously you just go ahead with that shit. Maybe nostalgia is the tie-breaker between two equally good options. But this isn't a "needle to thread." The old-school market segment is not some vastly profitable multitude of fiercely edition-loyal pedants; the majority of nostalgia sells are going to be dispassionate dads who just want to swing back around and see what their childhood hobby looks like thirty years later. The overwhelmingly greatest consideration for what edition players are loyal to is whether it is available for purchase, new, right this goddamned second. The second greatest consideration is whether they have been informed of a consensus that this edition is absolute unfun tedious horseshit. Nostalgia for any particular specific game function is just an advertising theme, like Santa drinking Coca-Cola, or a montage of a guy riding horses and surfing and shit prior to holding up a pill that makes his penis work better. It's the trade packaging, not the product.

[ArmorClassZero]

Some Ideas:

1) DON'T encourage or support the GM rail-roading the game. What's the point of role-playing when all of my choices take me to exactly the same spot (minus the occasional loss of limb or life)? If the game session or 'module' is going to have the same outcome regardless of whether I was there or the choices I would make, why bother playing at all beyond the socializing aspect? A rail-roaded RP session is called a script, and scripts are for movies, so I'm watching the movie happen but every couple of scenes I've got to role a D20 to determine whether I see the next scene or whether the movie stays paused for another half-dozen rolls.

2) DO give the players more narrative power beyond announcing their actions like "I cast Magic Missile!" or "I'm gonna investigate the thing!" and then rolling a single die which tells them had badly they suck at what their character is suppose to be good at?

3) DON'T have the GM narrate everything. Why is it that the GM gets to describe how my character fucked up, but not ME? That character's PLAYER?

4) DO get rid of the ridiculous 3-18 (which is really 3-25???) scale... which is used to determine what bonuses we get? So not only are the numbers unintuitive, the primary number is used to get a secondary number which is the actual relevant number for gameplay...

5) DO scale down the power-level of mages and spells so that they're more useful at low levels, and fighters are useful at all levels. Mages should be OP when they're in their metaphorical element - within their tower or particular domain, a place they've had ample time to setup and prepare. As cool as it is to cast Time Stop on-the-fly... why the fuck is that allowed? I get that the power fantasy is a thing, but there are many ways to enable the power fantasy. Rogues are powerful when they're stealthy and have the element of surprise, Fighters are powerful in 1v1 CQC, Rangers are powerful at a distance and in the wild, Wizards are powerful when allowed time and preparation. Not saying you shouldn't be able to throw Fire Balls... but it better take you more than one turns worth of a combat action...

6) DO bring back THAC0 because it's undeniably cooler sounding than AC10. /s

[Koumei]

6) DO bring back THAC0 because it's undeniably cooler sounding than AC10. /s

If you had just started with that one it would have been a lot easier to ignore everything else you said, asshole.

[Blicero]

6) DO bring back THAC0 because it's undeniably cooler sounding than AC10. /s

If you had just started with that one it would have been a lot easier to ignore everything else you said, asshole.

Emphasis in ACZ's quote added by me.

[Eikre]

4) DO get rid of the ridiculous 3-18 (which is really 3-25???) scale... which is used to determine what bonuses we get? So not only are the numbers unintuitive, the primary number is used to get a secondary number which is the actual relevant number for gameplay...

This is one of those signature elements that does nothing to make the game any better but doesn't really do anything to make the game worse, either. The range of bonus values doesn't do bad shit to the RNG and the disjoint adds no extraneous math to any play-session because you record the value of your bonus directly to your character sheet. This is, in fact, on the very short list of frivolities that you absolutely keep around just to retain aesthetic continuity between editions.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm with Eikre there. There are games that start out from 0 or 1 as the PC baseline, but it creates wonkiness when you have a DEX 1 PC get hit by a dex-draining poison or a rogue arm-wrestling a child.

If your RNG is based on dicepools, the wonkiness is worth the convenience, but if your RNG is, say, based on a d20 the extra convenience you get from having an 'average' humanoid PC baseline being all 1s or 2s is meaningless.

[Username17]

What the "correct" range of stats to use depends on a lot of things. The concept of reducing the stat range from 3-20 to -4 to +5 makes sense if you want to continue the 3e unified modifier chart as-is. I don't think that's a given.

First of all, negative modifiers are kind of a pain in the ass when you have advantages that let you add your stat bonus to things. Even a zero modifier is kinda shit. People should have modifiers that are positive all the time so that adding your modifier is always an advantage. Also because adding negative numbers is a pain in the ass compared to adding positive numbers.

Secondly, while the bonus range of Dexterity and Wisdom gives pretty acceptable bonus ranges for spot and hide checks for 1st level characters, it's not real great for stuff like kicking open doors and bending bars. It's super bullshit that the Wizard with a Strength of 10 straight up gets a higher Strength check than the 20 Strength Orc 30% of the time. So I could definitely see the need for splitting things into stuff you add the bonus to and things you add the entire stat to. That would neatly keep Halflings from randomly winning arm wrestling competitions against hill giants while still keeping the stealth mini-game from getting completely out of control.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

First of all, negative modifiers are kind of a pain in the ass when you have advantages that let you add your stat bonus to things. Even a zero modifier is kinda shit. People should have modifiers that are positive all the time so that adding your modifier is always an advantage. Also because adding negative numbers is a pain in the ass compared to adding positive numbers... keep Halflings from randomly winning arm wrestling competitions against hill giants while still keeping the stealth mini-game from getting completely out of control.

-Username17

I agree that - of all things - Palladium has basically the correct approach, in which your weird-acronym stats are "capable like a normal guy"-unless-noticeably-better.

But in addition to player characters such as halflings and magical winged talking cats needing less than normal-guy-strength, the game needs to support critters which have qualitatively sub-human capabilities, some of those need to be negative modifiers on die rolls, and some should be options for PCs as well. Clumsy needs to be a thing, although it probably wouldn't be a thing any PC would want (and, indeed, looking through people's D&D characters the absence of Dex < 12 is really striking.)

[erik]

I agree that - of all things - Palladium has basically the correct approach, in which your weird-acronym stats are "capable like a normal guy"-unless-noticeably-better.

A sentence that starts with Palladium has the correct approach is almost never true. Your representation of them is not accurate here either.

Like all things in Palladium books, nothing is straightforward. True, there aren't any listed penalties for low attributes inverted from the bonuses for high attributes in the attribute modifier table, but oh boy, there are penalties.

If anything the penalties are worse than a mere minus to whatever the bonuses were boosting. I think they didn't write in the penalties because the table would be a clusterfuck because the penalties are far more wide ranging and hit you right in the asshole hard. You just cannot make a functional table that encapsulates how bad low stats are in Palladium. I'll have to gloss over a lot just to summarize them even.

For low attributes in Palladium (referencing Rifts Ultimate, since it's the only PDF I had available and I am not home):
• Strength has severely limited carrying capacity, no bonuses from combat skills, and deals pretty much no damage with weapons.
• Speed has severely limited movement rate, also penalty to dodge and initiative
• IQ you get less skills and cut skill bonuses, and the skills that you do get are limited.
• ME you get screwed hard on horror checks.
• MA you get penalties that basically make things like disguise, bartering, seduction etc, impossible.
• PP tanks your physical skills, your attack modifiers, your initiative, your dodge, and you get a bad fumble rate
• PE you get screwed hard on diseases, drugs, magic saves, oh and maybe take an insanity or two.
• PB penalizes a few social checks, but if you have a 1 or 2 you can actually have a Horror Factor of 15 (1d6+9)! That's fucking amazing. That's the same as Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of darkness. (was that just the first god listed in the deities conversion book becaused you couldn't be fucked to look further erik? yes. yes it was.)


[edit:
OH, something for consideration in D&D. Why the fuck do we need granularity down to 5% for skills? I'd be happier if the skill system were divorced from d20 RNG. Dice pools for skills, d20 for combat.

Upside: people aren't tempted to do stupid crap like combat altering abilities based upon the d20 skill system like Iajutsu bullshit or UMD or Diplomancy.

[Dogbert]

As cool as it is to cast Time Stop on-the-fly... why the fuck is that allowed?

Because it's a thing that happens in d&d land, and the moment the GM starts saying "Oh no, casting Time Stop on the fly is only for my penis-extension NPCs" that's when we enter into 4E territory where PCs were handled with one set of rules and the rest of the world and the NPCs with a different, incompatible, mutually exclusive set of rules, and next thing we know we have Mick Mearls saying "there's no point in adding rules for lvls 10+ because games never get there anyway" and that's when you know you just went full retard.

As long as a game's rules are the world's physics/the fiction's conventions, what's good for the goose must be good for the gander. If something exists, the right class will get it at a specific level. If PCs cannot get it, it cannot exist. And then, while it would be easy for some to say "then let nothing exist and downgrade from high fantasy to low fantasy/sword&sorcery," we all know only 4rries liked the post Mearlsing Faerun.

[OgreBattle]

Palladium also has different strength charts for robot strength, cyborg strength, and supernatural strength...

If you're removing negative modifiers in a d20 D&D game then what kind of critter has Str +1, and where does the average medieval peasant lie? how about a horse.