pretre wrote:

What now?

I can use Cleave once per encounter

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:

I am also interested to hear that 5th might be more similar to AD&D in some regards.

 Manchu wrote:
I think that's a nice summary, Vaktathi.

Chongara, I also answered your questions for pretre on the last page. To summarize, the key is to ask what the point of the game is. When you do a licensed game, the point is to simulate the license in one way or another.

 Chongara wrote:
I just took issue with the assertion that it is somehow more opposed to telling a cohesive "D&D" story than other approaches at modeling the actions of characters.

 Manchu wrote:
TBH, AD&D is a mess. It's a mish mash avalanche of more or less helpful tools and options, like a huge panel of hundreds of switches and buttons when all you really need most of the time is a joystick. With experience and fine-tuning to taste, AD&D is super playable. I think what WotC wants out of 5E is something like a coherent version of (3E-flavored) AD&D with Basic as its beating heart.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Chongara wrote:
I just took issue with the assertion that it is somehow more opposed to telling a cohesive "D&D" story than other approaches at modeling the actions of characters.

Sure, I think we are on the same page there. To clarify, I don't mean to exclude D&D from the logic of license games. The interesting part is, D&D is both the license and the simulation. Now with 5E, perhaps more than ever, D&D is trying very hard to simulate D&D. This is what WotC wants so baldy: to recover the phenomenological truth of D&D.

 Manchu wrote:
Can you elaborate?

 Manchu wrote:
The idea that a rule set can simulate anything is exactly as true of any edition of D&D as it is of chess.

A lot of heartache over/criticism about D&D comes from the faulty assumption that it is or should be all things to all people.

In truth, D&D has a delimited scope. It is a game about people who don't fit into the normal pattern of fantasy world day-to-day life. Instead of farming or joining the watch, they creep into dangerous underground nests of terrible monsters to look for treasure. Eventually, they become embroiled with politics and perhaps even cosmological crises but usually in such a way so that their same, albeit developed skill sets still apply.

Over the past week, we've shared a lot of exciting news with you about D&D's future. We've rolled out the details for our epic Tyranny of Dragons story, shared release dates for the core rulebooks and Starter Set, and spilled the beans on Basic D&D.

As we gear up for previews of the upcoming D&D products, I wanted to take a moment to address a common question we receive about the Open Gaming License and what it means for the future of D&D. Since the start of the fifth edition process in early 2012, we've committed ourselves to taking the time to getting things right. We passed the game through numerous playtests, painstakingly reviewed survey data and feedback, and reworked the game again and again. We held off on announcing anything until the time was right, until we knew that we were going to deliver a game that lived up to the standards that you set for us.

We followed a similar path with Basic D&D. We listened and we took notes. We looked at what people wanted from D&D, how they play the game, and what they value about it the most. Just as we took the time to get the rules right, we spent time making sure the core of the game would be delivered to you in the best way possible.

When it comes to the mechanism by which we want to empower D&D fans to create their own material and make their mark on the many, exciting worlds of D&D, we're taking the same approach. While we are not ready to announce anything at this time, I do want to share with you some of our goals.

To start with, we want to ensure that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible. The Dungeon Master's Guide will contain the guidelines for creating many elements of the game, from adventures to monsters. While Basic D&D will cover the basics that DMs need to create and run campaigns, it won't go into details on the thinking behind the rules and the consequences of tinkering with them. Basic D&D is aimed at new players or people who aren't looking for a lot of mechanical complexity or depth. It's enough to create adventures for use at your table, but not for material that you want to share broadly. For that reason, we don't want to launch anything at least until the Dungeon Master's Guide has been released in November.

Moreover, it's not enough simply to launch anything the day the DMG hits shelves. It'll take time for everyone to absorb the rules and how they all interact. The R&D team can also share what we've learned while working on the game and the traps and challenges to avoid in design.

Therefore, we want to share the timeline we're working with. While the details are still in flux, we can say that we plan to announce the details of our plans sometime this fall. After that announcement, we plan on launching our program in early 2015.

Until then, we hope you will familiarize yourself with the new edition as the products are released, learn how and why it differs from past editions of the game, and dive into your first campaign. There's no better way to learn the game's intricacies than by digging into it through play. Once the community has some experience with the game, both we and you will be ready to creating the next wave of material for it.

Hopefully, that's enough information to make our intentions clear. As with both the playtest of the fifth edition and the other projects we've worked on over the past few years, we're taking our time to make sure we get things right.

From here.

This summer's Dungeons & Dragons relaunch includes a set of adventures focused on the rise of the dragon goddess Tiamat, designed by Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter of Kobold Press. In this interview, they told us about adventure design and the joys of writing for a game system while it's still in development.

io9: Could you describe the nature of your license with Wizards of the Coast? Does it extend beyond these two adventures, and does it affect your future slate of Pathfinder and 13th Age material?

Wolfgang Baur: Wizards of the Coast commissioned Kobold Press to create an adventure set in the Forgotten Realms. We're the designers, editors and crew on that adventure, which will be published by Wizards of the Coast.

That agreement doesn't extend beyond these two adventures, and it doesn't affect our future slate of Pathfinder RPG and 13th Age material. We just shipped our biggest Pathfinder RPG release ever, the 376-page Deep Magic tome of spells and the arcane, and the Midgard Bestiary 13th Age Compatible Edition is just the first book of our 13th Age support. We expect to release many more Pathfinder RPG and 13th Age books in the future.

The Kobold Press slate of fantasy game material will remain weighted toward what people want, and what we can deliver. The dragons are a great start!

io9: What can you tell us about the adventures themselves? Is there a lot of intrigue, a focus on dungeon crawls, or a mystery to solve?

Steve Winter: In an adventure this huge, there's plenty of room for all three. The next edition of D&D emphasizes the three pillars of tabletop RPGs: combat, exploration/discovery, and interactive roleplaying.

The adventure starts by dropping characters into the middle of a major raid against a town by the Cult of the Dragon. That's a long night of battling raiders, sneaking through sewers, rescuing hostages, plugging breakthroughs in the defenses, and even squaring off against a dragon—albeit briefly, since the characters are only 1st level.

From there, they go into some espionage and infiltration of the cult, then a dungeon crawl, then a long road trip with all sorts of oddball encounters, more skullduggery, some "Heart of Darkness"-type action in a swamp, negotiations with a traitor, and a huge, dynamic finish that people will remember for a long time. And that's just Hoard of the Dragon Queen. There's much more in The Rise of Tiamat with just as much variety.

Wolfgang: If your readers are curious about the Kobold Press style of adventure design, there's several adventures at half-price right now, including the forest adventures of Tales of the Old Margreve and my own The Raven's Call and To the Edge of the World. The latter two of those are about $4 each, so you'll see how the Kobold adventures tick. The focus is on letting players make their own decisions, and opening up a lot of possibilities. The Raven's Call is a pretty straightforward introduction that works great with new players—and I've run it for 10 and 12 year-olds—while To the Edge of the World is fairly over-the-top and epic.

io9: Are these adventures tailored to less experienced DMs and players? Are there elements you created specifically to make these good introductory adventures?

Steve: The action starts out simple, with short, basic fights against raiders in the town. But after that, the adventure becomes pretty free-ranging. There are specific tasks characters should undertake and a sequence in which they happen, but we don't hand the DM a script.

This adventure lays out what's going on, then relies on the DM to use that information dynamically while interacting with the players. There's very little "This is Tuesday, so this must be Belgium" about these adventures. I suppose some people consider running a game that way to be 'advanced' DMing, but I don't. It's a natural form of play, with lots of give-and-take between players and DM and also between the DM and the adventure itself.

I suppose that's tougher than reading a script, but it's also a lot more enjoyable.

Wolfgang: There's an introductory adventure in the D&D Starter Set, which is out in July, but that's really geared entirely at new players. Tyranny of Dragons starts out fairly basic, but advances quickly to higher complexity, for both players and Dungeon Masters.

io9: I imagine the rules were still in flux as these were being written. What kinds of challenges did that present?

Steve: We received frequent rules updates from Wizard of the Coast, and my stomach lurched a little bit every time one arrived out of fear that some enormous change would throw a big chunk of our work out the window. Happily, most of the changes were fine-tuning that was easy to incorporate, or adjustments to character classes that had little effect on what we were doing.

The exception to this was changes to monsters. Monster descriptions, monster toughness, and even the list of monsters available changed many times, and some of those changes impacted our work significantly. But this is a process, and we've been through it before. You make adjustments and keep going.

There was one incident with the monsters, however, that turned out to be rather funny—to me, anyway. I'm sure some playtesters found it horribly frustrating. We wrote the early encounters using a lot of Human Warriors because they were suitable low-level NPCs for 1st-level characters to tangle with. Before the manuscript was sent to playtesters, Wizards R&D re-statted the Human Warrior as a 5th-level foe, and no one alerted us. Playtesters reported massive TPKs from 1st-level characters being overwhelmed by waves of 5th-level warriors. They must have thought we were the biggest idiots in D&D. But it was just a communication breakdown.

Wolfgang: For the most part, Steve's right, it was the monster changes that were hardest to deal with. Several times, though, spell changes required section rewrites as well. As with any new edition, it's dangerous to assume you know how a spell works just because you know how it used to work. That tripped me up two or three times with simple things like alarm and with more complex things like Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion.

io9: To the extent that it's possible to describe an entire RPG rule set in a few sentences, how would you describe this new edition of D&D?

Steve: I'd call it streamlined, at least compared to the previous two editions. Every new edition of the game veers toward expanding the rules, formalizing and codifying more and more of the experience. But an enormous part of the magic of D&D is that it's wide open. That's what makes it different from any other type of game. Every time you narrow that window, you lose something. The new edition of D&D seems to be veering in the opposite direction, toward more open-endedness and greater freedom for DMs and players.

I think that RPG designers have learned some critical lessons during the last two decades of ever-increasing structure. It's not that structure is bad, because it isn't, but there are ways to have structure and still have flexibility. The D&D designers seem to have put a lot of effort into building with flexible material rather than just setting everything in stone.

Wolfgang: I agree entirely that the looser structure makes it easy for the new edition to accommodate some playstyles that we haven't seen as often recently, focused on player smarts rather than character power. Related to that, the power curve for magic is changing as well. I'm used to thinking of the Forgotten Realms as a very high-magic, high fantasy sort of place, but the new edition of the rules dials things back a bit from the 3rd edition and Pathfinder tradition of "PC Christmas trees", or the characters with a magic item to fill every slot.

Magic is more wondrous and more difficult to find in the new edition—but I think that makes players value it a little more than the days of "oh, a +1 sword, toss it on the pile." The emphasis is squarely on what characters can do, not what their items do.

io9: Did the new rules open up some adventure writing possibilities that Pathfinder or 4th edition made difficult?

Steve: Absolutely. Because you're not overwhelmed by the minutiae of the rules, you can put your energy into devising a complex, fascinating plot and villains whose appeal comes from their motivation (or their psychosis) instead from a menu of intricate combat abilities. We didn't choreograph any of the major combat encounters of Tyranny of Dragons the way they would have been in 3rd or 4th edition.

Instead, we just laid out the situation, described what the villain hoped to accomplish, probably included some variables or conditions under which he'd run away, and then left it in the DM's hands to conduct that battle as he or she thinks best. DMs are smart, and they know their players better than we ever could.

Wolfgang: I enjoyed having the extra wordcount that we got back by removing the need for 500-word stat blocks every few pages. Tyranny of Dragons has a lot more encounters per chapter, because the emphasis is on the adventure flow, not on presenting stats.

io9: Can you describe the actual logistical process of writing an RPG adventure? It's such a strange blend of storytelling and mechanics — how does it all come together?

Steve: That question always reminds me of the conversation in Shakespeare In Love in which the jaded producer tries to calm the nervous financier. "The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. What do we do? Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. How? I don't know. It's a mystery."

Once you get past that, there are a few rules. In a project this big, everything revolves around an outline. We spent more than a week pounding out and refining a multi-page outline for the adventures, starting from the story bible provided by Wizards of the Coast. Their document covered an enormous plot with far more going on than we could hope to include. We chose the elements we wanted to focus on, expanded them with many embellishments of our own, and spun it all together into a story.

With a detailed outline in place, it's just a matter of putting words on the screen. Day after day. More words. Thousands upon thousands of the damned things. Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, with no end in sight.

That's all there is to it!

Wolfgang: Steve makes it sound easier than it actually is. But I'm happy to say that our toil and suffering have generated something pretty cool. And that one of the instructions we did get from Wizards was one I was incredibly happy to embrace. I remember it as Mike Mearls saying "Make sure to include ALL the dragons." Oh, they're in there!

 Alpharius wrote:
There are already 5th edition adventures available?

I thought that was a typo, and he meant to say 4th up there!

Bolding: Because of the staggered release schedule there have been some concerns over both home and organized play, and whether or not people will have enough material to start playing their weekly campaign right off in the new edition and carry them all the way through release. What would you say to people concerned about that?

Mearls: I would say that's definitely where Basic D&D comes in. When the Starter Set launches it's going to cover character creation. Once the Player's Handbook launches we'll update it. [Basic D&D] is going to be a updated a few times when it first launches. With basic D&D you'll have the core monsters, magic items, all the rules for creating adventures, for Dungeon Master guidelines, for balancing encounters, for treasure, treasure tables, encounter tables. This is literally the process I used to outline it: I took the old basic set from 1981 and just the rules in there, the magic items, if it's in there it's in the basic set - except a few things that people don't see as iconic anymore. For monsters, we just went through and said "What are the typical fantasy monsters like Orc, or Ogre?" with a few adjustments for power level in there so there's a nice curve. In theory, with basic D&D, you could run an entire campaign. The core rulebooks could be expansions to that. The core rulebooks are like Advanced D&D.

Bolding: Is there any plan to put Basic D&D into print?

Mearls: Not right now. We know that a number of people have asked about that, either as print on demand or as a print book. I think what we'll most likely do is go through the launch and see where we are and how much demand there is. If we're seeing demand then we'll go ahead and do it. I'm a little nervous about that because it is a free product and I don't want people to go to the game store and want to get into D&D, and get that book, and find out the book is free online. So there's a balancing act. The key would be letting people know if they're buying it that they could get it for free. I don't want the first thing people to feel about the new D&D is that they got tricked into buying it.

Bolding: Of the three books, most people seem confused about what the Dungeon Master's Guide is going to do for them. Can you give us a basic overview?

Mearls: The DMG is, well - going back to Basic D&D as a starting point - if you think of the Player's Handbook as for the player who is looking at character classes and played a couple of them and wants more options or wants to fine-tune what their character is, or who says "I want to play a paladin." The DMG serves the same role for the DM. Basic D&D hits core fantasy, it's stereotypical fantasy adventuring. If you're the DM and you want to do something more exotic, you say "I want to add technology to my game" or "I want to have more detailed rules for a grim and grittier game, more of a horror game." That's where the DMG comes in, it's for really fine-tuning your campaign, and creating a different type of experience than your standard fantasy campaign. It's also for expanding the scope of the game. So we've talked about things like ruling a domain or things like that. The more detailed rules for that would be in the DMG. We've talked about having some basic rules for things like that in Basic D&D but we're not 100% into it either way - is it confusing to new players or is it nice that it gives them a clear progression? We're still not quite decided on that yet. It's for if you want more depth on specific topics.

The DMG also has a lot of utilities in it, like for dungeon creation, adventure creation, creating monsters, creating spells, even if you wanted to create a character class. It's not quite the point-buy system from 2nd Edition, but it does say things like "Well if you want to create a class for your campaign then here's a good way to approach it."

So it's really for getting under the hood of how the system works and building up your campaign.

 kronk wrote:
If you like tables, Sinful Hero, check out HackMaster 4.0. the critical hit chart is a d10,000 on the Y axis, and a severity range of 1-24 on the X axis. A severity 1 blow to the head might be an extra d4 damage. A severity 24 is "Brain Goo" Instant Death.

 Sinful Hero wrote:

 kronk wrote:
If you like tables, Sinful Hero, check out HackMaster 4.0. the critical hit chart is a d10,000 on the Y axis, and a severity range of 1-24 on the X axis. A severity 1 blow to the head might be an extra d4 damage. A severity 24 is "Brain Goo" Instant Death.

Sounds like my kinda game. Of course, it's cyberpunk though right? Never been a fan of cyber- or steampunk. They just offend me for some reason.

 kronk wrote:
Sorry for the OT, Manchu.