Dungeons and Dragons 5E - Introductions are in order

While  should have been posting a recap of the last round of our Friday Night I have instead been looking at the new material that has been released for the newest version of Dungeons and Dragons.

To start with there is a free PDF of the basic game rules (~100 pages) available here (including a printer-friendly version). Did I mention it was free? As I understand it the "basic" game version is the free one, and when the new books are released this fall they will be considered the "advanced" version.

The New DnD - Coming Soon

We all know it has been in the works for several years now, but earlier this past week Wizards finally announced the official release of the all the new game materials. As I had originally suspected the release all seems to be centered around Gencon in mid-August, so those of you making the trek to Indianapolis this year can expect to get an eyeful and an earful while you are down there. Apparently it will not be called "DnD 5E" and "DnD Next", but just Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder if that naming convention will stick or will the fan base settle on its own designation.

There has been a lot of playtest material over these past few years so while there have been a lot of hints as to what will be included I am not sure anybody really knows except for the writers. I suspect there will be much more printed on this as the summer passes.

Sooooooo ... What Is Going To Happen With Your DDI Subcription?

The DnD DDI subscription model has always been controversial. The idea of having to pay a monthly fee for content was something new. The original DnD 4E character builder was a downloadable tool, and then switched to an on-line version based on MS-Silverlight so there was no tablet compatible version when new platforms came available, promised tools such as the character visualizer never materialized, and the tabletop tool was put out for beta testing and then cancelled. With the new 5E getting ready to roll-out next year (likely, anyway) ... well, I guess it can't get any worse.

Early Observations: Pathfinder vs DnD

Now that I have four full sessions of Pathfinder play under my belt I feel fully qualified to offer wildly speculative opinions as I relate my Pathfinder experience to my 25 yeas of experience in playing various versions of DnD. I realize there is an aspect of "Version Wars" that still floats about the RPG world in regards to which game version players think is the best. There is a segment of the general RPG population that like and prefer DnD4E, there is a solid and growing Pathfinder contingent, and there remains a flourishing "Old School RPG" (OSR) camp that prefer their pre-DnD3.0 versions of the game as well.

Wizards News

I wanted to include several announcements and links in here this post will cover a couple of different areas. First of all the June DDI update was released last week. There wasn't a lot of new material to include, and the usual smattering of bug fixes was always interesting to peruse, so I guess overall there really wasn't much to report here.

DnDNext Playtest Play Observations (Updated)

Our Sunday Night DnD group took an opportunity to run through the DnDNext Playtest material this past weekend. We had two players missing this week, one being our current DM, so with a player available for each of the Pre-Gen characters and myself to DM we wandered into the Caves of Chaos. I am not going to provide a blow-by-blow description of the action as I have done in the past, but rather wanted to walk through our comments, thoughts, and questions as gathered from the game play this evening.

Welcome to the Caves of Chaos

Different countries, different races or tribes, all with with different languages, and even cultures as old as the ages all have made reference to the caves. The actual words or the titles applied to this location may be different, but their intent was all the same. This particular corner of the world, this little hell’s half acre, was a foul and odious place, a blight on the land around it and on the planet on which it resided.

We'll Be Playtesting

Over the past few weeks almost every DnD related blog has some sort of opinion on the DnDNext playtest package and/or some amount of feedback based on their play results. There are always naysayers of course, but the opinions do seem to be generally positive. The thing to remember is that this is a very early version of the game with a lot more yet to come, so chances are that the one thing you would like to see is probably still forthcoming. I don't like having character sheets without the spells detailed on them ... I get it ... it's not really a playtest issue. Patience - all you can really do is to playtest what you've got and provide feedback on that.

DnDNext Details (Updated)

This week's Legends and Lore by Mike Mearls at wizards.com does a really nice job of walking through the different pre-generated characters that come with the playtest package. Each of the characters gets a spotlight put on it and some of the newly tweaked mechanics gets a brief explanation as well. I also think this is a hint from the designers, essentially saying "these are the things we are really looking for feedback on."

DnDNext Playtest - First Impressions

I was able to get my copy of the DnDNext playtest material several days ago but because of circumstances just hadn't had the chance to sit down and read through the material until tonight. That circumstance was that my youngest had his high school graduation this weekend and with relatives in and out and what not it was kind of hectic around here. Things finally calmed down a little late this afternoon and I finally got a chance to read through the provided material, so I wanted to post a few first impressions.

DnDNext Update

The first set of official public playtest rules for DnDNext (or DnD 5E) are scheduled to be released on May 24, 2012 (sign up is here). There has certainly been a lot of nonspecific talk about what is in the works and I am certainly curious after all of this non-detailed discussion as to what the details really are. In that regard I am definitely looking forward to it. I expect to see a lot of on-line conversation as those who were seeing this for the first time finally get to catch up with those who were previously NDA'd from talking about it. This should be a very interesting summer in the DnD world.

DnDNext Details Anounced (And a Hoax Update)

Now that Wizards has finally provided a firm date (May 24th) for the release of the DnDNext playtest some official details have started to trickle out (here). Mostly the designers at Wizards are trying to set some expectations: the playtest will include a very basic rule set with a minimal set of races and classes, although the playtest material will include pre-generated characters. I am also assuming Wizards will provide some avenue for actually providing the feedback they are looking for.

DnD Encounters - Session 9 (04/25/2012)

This weeks Encounters session at The Gaming Goat was held as scheduled, but alas, without me in attendance. My work schedule required me to work the late shift this week, but I am supposed to be back to mid-shift after this week and - hopefully - should be able to attend the remaining sessions for this iteration of DnD Encounters. In lieu of me providing details of the nights adventure I have included a link to another summary from dungeonsmaster.com (Week 9).

Well, How About That!?! (Update: Hoax)

In a bit of surprising news Monte Cook announced he was leaving Wizards of the Coast and would no longer be participating the DnDNext effort. Monte has been in the RPG business for a long time and was actually employed by TSR in the halcyon days of ADnD and DnD3.0. He has been involved in other RPG projects in the years since then including the roll-out of Pathfinder. He was brought back in to the DnD fold to help build that bridge between the previous versions and it's current form, a stated goal of the DnDNext project.

Wizards News (Updated X 2)

A few weeks ago I had mentioned that I hadn't heard much DnDNext news, especially concerning this weekends big gaming convention in Boston MA, PAX East, It turns out there will be several DnDNext playtest sessions, but with the same rule set that was used at DDXP at the end of January (here). There was also a scheduled seminar to provide further DnDNext news. Wizards has been keeping their cards held pretty close to their vests in regards to any real DnDNext announcements so I am not expecting a lot of news here, but it would be nice if they were announce a target date for general release of the playtest rules.

DnDNext News - There is None

The big NDA'd DnDNext roll-out was two months ago (here). Since then there have been weekly articles on Wizards.com that include survey questions. It's nice to see that Wizards is taking this seriously and is doing their homework, but as far an announcements go, nothing.

Making Vancian Magic Work in 4E (Updated)

A few weeks ago I pointed to a wikipedia link for a description of "Vancian Magic." This week Monte Cook expanded on the idea of Vancian Magic a little more (here) and included his thoughts on it as it applied to the design process going forward into DnDNext. I have stated my preference for magic user types following a different path than, say, a fighter-type, but I would also prefer to avoid the "15 minute workday" problem prevalent in pre-4E versions where a magic user would expend all their known spells in the first encounter and were then essentially useless until they took a full rest.

Deities and DDI

I've been thinking about DnDNext and the DDI Character Builder (CB) tool and had started walking through some thoughts about choices in my previous post. I did want to expand that topic a little further but I decided to break it out as a separate post, specifically the use of the choice of a deity as part of the process of building a character. The option to choose a deity is available and the title of your chosen deity will be prominently displayed on the character sheet, but for the most part that is about as far as it goes.

More Choices (Electronic Version)

When 4E was released in 2008 Wizards promised an on-line character builder tool, a monster builder tool, adventure tools, and a video table component. There are still no adventure tools, the video table (VT) is still in beta, and after changing formats and several major overdue upgrades the character builder (CB) and monster tool (MT) are finally in pretty good shape. This was a classic case marketing disaster in the "over promise and under deliver" category.Wizards learned a hard lesson here, so one can understand why they are deliberately obtuse when it comes to providing firm dates for things in the future.

Choices, Choices, Choices

With the announcement and the pending release of the DnDNext playtest several of the blog sites I follow have put down their own wish list of what they would like to see as part of the next iteration of DnD. I've had some thoughts on this as well, but I wanted to think through them a little bit longer, plus I just didn't want to mimic what others had said.