

Inside The Making Of The New “Dungeons and Dragons” - santaclaus
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3034062/designing-the-new-dungeons-dragons

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e12e
"Let's assume since you're reading this, you are, or plan to be, a Dungeon
Master. By now, you should be familiar with the rules in the _Player 's
Handbook_. You've probably already noticed things you like or things you would
have done differently. If you have, congratulations. You've got the spirit
every Dungeon Master Needs. Curiosity and the desire to make changes, to do
things differently because your idea is better than the other guy's -- these
are the most important things a Dungeon Master needs. As you go through this
rule book, I encourage you to continue to make these choices.

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

(...)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[http://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/DnDBasicRul...](http://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/DnDBasicRules%28No%20Background-
PrinterFriendly%29_0.pdf)

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

This is not new. It seems strange, but each and every edition of D&D so far
has been released this way, one core book a month for three months.

It's a time-honoured tradition, but yes, a strange one. I just don't know the
full details about _why_.

~~~
roedog
I think Mearls said somewhere that the staggered release was because their
copy editing pipeline couldn't handle three releases at once.

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

~~~
Retric
This 1000 times this. You can condense the rules for a fun RPG game down to a
single piece of paper. These companies only make money selling rule books so
they want something more complex which does not necessarily mean fun.

~~~
tormeh
Well, they could always sell monster manuals and pre-canned stories. City maps
and politics. Those are the exciting parts, anyway.

~~~
Retric
Option A, monsters use the players class system. Option B, monsters use a
separate system, need to be balanced externally and become part of a large
rule system...

City maps and politics might work, but pre canned campaigns never seem to sell
well because building that stuff is generally considered a fun part of being a
DM.

That said, I actually found D&D/white wolf source books and monster manuals
etc a fun read on their own.

~~~
tormeh
I was more thinking pictures of the monsters - the concepts of what the
monster is. Probably just with given stats of the "a thief is a thief is a
thief" type.

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

~~~
lnanek2
Yes, that happened to me several times as well until I figured out there was
content down there once.

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

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

~~~
njharman
You should try gridless 5e, it discards a lot of the Math and time suck.

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ja27
Is it just me or does the title seem like it has an extra level of 'meta' to
it?

~~~
wlievens
Inside The Making Of The Documentary About How Movies About Film Studios Are
Made

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

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

~~~
Pamar
I have been playing the contrarian to this idea since... 1998 I believe? (that
was on the Italian usenet RPG group).

My point: unless you want to play an RPG _exclusively_ as a miniatures
tactical game, the GM has to be able to "cheat" sometimes in order to adjust
things. If you accept this premise, "automated bookeeping systems" like
Surface or any other kind of computer assisted combat processor risk becoming
a burden: as soon as you decide that the killing blow from (or to) an NPC has
to be changed in order not to spoil the fun of your players the system will go
out of synch with the shared narrative, and you either have to manually
realign it, or accept that yeah, the death really happened, no matter how
detrimental to the rest of the adventure.

Also, it tends to negate any attempt at being creative in using spells or even
just inventing novel tactics: if the computing model hasn't it hardcoded,
there is literally no way to use a decorative mirror on the other side of the
room to hit your enemy in the back with your beam weapon, for example.

So, Surface is great for wargames, a complicated and ultimately limiting
system for RPGs.

~~~
bsaul
That's just a matter of fine tuning. You may very well imagine an inteface
which lets the gm adjusts computed bonus or even cheat the dices. But imagine
having precise maps of every places your characters go into. How many times
have you heard a player say "but he can't hit me, because i said was behind
that wall ! But the wall isn't there, it can't cover you, etc.."

Or the GM drawing shite last minute maps...

With a table, you have unlimited possibilites for in-game accessories,
drawings, sound effects, automation, etc. Then buying a scenario would
actually mean something ! You would buy tons of assets, that you could later
reuse, etc..

Your concerns ar valid, but seing the table as a helper rather than a
simulator would avoid many pitfalls i suppose.

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

~~~
ijk
Oddly, there are many more video games that use the 3.5 rules (D&D Online,
Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.) and only one that uses the 4th Edition rules
(Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale).

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

