Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition

Yeah, I've been a bit lax on posting, my apologies to any reader or readers I might have. The basic thing is that I want to talk a bit about the coming 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't a matter of cheering that 4th edition is gone or getting angry that we have yet another edition or that we don't or do need one. What I want to do is a bit more nuanced, ask a question that I think needs to be asked whenever an edition change is occurring, the question is this "What did we learn?" This is a bigger question than a lot of people might think, it's the question of what successes and failures came from not just the previous edition but all those that came before. It's more than how well things sold, it's also what seemed more popular and why, as well as maybe what things turned out to be better ideas than anticipated or worse than assumed.

I'm not a developer at Wizards of the Coast or any gaming company but I could offer a few ideas that at I and people I've talked to discovered in 4th edition and others, and maybe could help in the creation of the new 5th edition. One thing my group learned is that in design you need to make sure that threats scale properly. In 4th edition a tribe of goblins was a greater threat than a dragon of the same encounter level, that's a bit worrisome. The reason was this, the goblins had an ability where if they flanked they did extra damage, and you could get a lot of minions plus some bigger ones and the players could get carved up. A dragon, a single monster, might do a bit more damage than the flanking goblins, but it was only one thing, and it could be focus fired. The dragon was actually less threatening than a goblin tribe and that kind of kills the majesty of the dragon and also makes the scale feel off, since in fantasy dragons are generally big threats, legendary beasts.

The second thing I'd reccomend is that they do keep the HP buffer at low levels. It was actually a big improvement when you won't get knocked over by an errant wind. The HP amounts should probably be lower at high levels, or monsters need to be able to take bigger bites, but in general the larger HP at base was a nice addition, if only because it provided a way for players to survive a mistake and learn from it rather than having to go through a bunch of characters starting off. This was one of the areas that 4th edition got right in my view, and a lot of people I've talked to have agreed that the higher survival rating starting off helps remarkably.

I think the biggest thing though is that the new edition needs to have enough innovation to be willing to experiment during the games run. 3rd edition put out some great material, and in my view a lot of their best stuff was the more experimental. While incarnum was a bit of a failure it was still fascinating, as I mentioned in an earlier post I called it a beautiful failure. Tome of magic as well as the book of nine swords were probably my favorite releases, along with stuff like the warlock which was a full class of spell like abilities. These were things that tried out new mechanical options, variant casting systems and new power options for martial characters. Options that, surprisingly, meshed well with the existing system and were fairly balanced. 4th on the other hand...while there were new power sources by the time my group quit (PH3) things were getting repetitive, and I chanced to pick up one of the last releases and it did not fill me with hope for the game. It looked like the designers had essentially hit a wall, running out of mechanical options due to the constraints of the system itself and were afraid to try engineering outside of it.

Anyone out there that's reading, what do you think is important for 5th edition, and is there anything you think would be cool to add in? Feel free to share.