Dungeons and Dragons NEXT: First Playtest Kit

I was working on another post, which I'll probably have up soon, but the playtest kit for Dungeons & Dragon's NEXT (aka D&D 5e) was released a little while back and let's just say that I have... concerns.


There are certainly some interesting additions, like the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanics, but I'm slightly more concerned with the things they've been removing and the work that they are undoing.

Let me first openly acknowledge that I understand that this is a playtest. That the mechanics, ideas, and concepts outlined in this first open playtest packet could be entirely experimental and never make it past this stage. I get that.  Honestly. I'm not frothing at the mouth because I think D&D is ruined forever and that Wizards of the Coast will be holding a country wide book burning to purge the world of all older editions. We good? We good.

That said, what they have presented in this early version of the game does not inspire confidence. In fact, I'm quite afraid that Mearls and the rest of the crew over at WotC have lost their minds because they are trying to make D&D 3.5 over again, but with large chunks missing and other new chunks hastily sewn in like some sort of Frankenstein's Monster of game design.

Skills are out, replaced by backgrounds that give packages of specified bonuses and Themes that give specialized combat features. The 3 saves are gone, replaced with 6 saves, one for each of the standard 6 Abilities(Str, Int, Cha, etc). Hit points seem to scale slower to encourage a certain lethality, I suppose. Then the big bombshell is that Vancian magic is back, but so is at-will casting.

Wizards in 3.5 (artist:  http://sirmitchell.com  )

If you haven't played 3.5 or spent countless days arguing on the internet about these things (good for you!) then you may not know that D&D 3.5 had an issue called Caster Supremacy, and was often referred to as the "Caster Edition" of D&D because it favored classes like the Wizard so heavily, that it actually punished players who chose other classes by making them suck in subtle, but distinct ways. The idea was to reward system mastery by making anyone who chose the Wizard class unstoppably powerful, and limit everyone else to simple beginner mechanics, like basic attacks and full attacks, so they won't be overwhelmed by the rules. I bring all of this up because it looks like that is going to happen again in this 5th edition.

In short, Wizards get a few big spells that they can throw off as easily as basic attacks, with a wider variety of effects and mechanics. Once they run out of those, they still have 6 different at-will cantrips that they can fire off all day long without any drawback.

On its own, this all works just fine. It's a cool idea and some of those Cantrips even make wizards really awesome to have around in a group of adventurers. The issue arises when you realize that every other character class so far, minus the Cleric, doesn't get anything even vaguely similar. The full extent of playing a Fighter or Rogue seems to be scrambling to get Advantage and then making basic attacks. Rogue has a mechanic that lets them do an extra d6 if they were hidden, but it's still rather boring when compared to the Wizard's options to stun-lock groups of enemies or deal out damage in a large cone to several enemies.

A step in the right direction

All of this would bother me so much less if they hadn't done all of this before. They have been making this damned game for decades. In previous editions they created numerous interesting ways for Melee characters to act in battle that made them just as fun and interesting to play as any other class. Hell, in 3.5, they created an entire book dedicated to making awesome and dynamic martial characters who weren't outclassed by any given caster.. Then again, not too many people remember that book too fondly, but those people were probably heavily invested in the bass-ackwards idea that casters should get all the toys and everyone else should shut up and respect the will of the Mighty Gygax who fought and died to secure Caster Supremacy for all the scruffy little neckbeards ( and who actually hated 3.5, from what I've been told).

Maybe the next version of the playtest will include more mechanics for the Fighter and Rogue, like interesting maneuvers and strategies for them to use. Like I said, this is only a real issue for me because it's such a huge step backwards from all the advancements they've been trying to make over the past decade. I'll admit that 4e had some pretty big issues, but I don't think it's the right decision to burn that bridge and just rewrite the horribly flawed 3.5 just to appease the overly sensitive fans who are probably all playing Pathfinder anyways.

Anyways, I've rambled long enough. There are a lot of variables to this particular issue, but luckily this is a very, very early in the design process, and we can hope that WotC listens to people who disagree with the decisions they've made, as much as they listen to the people who are telling them how great they think all these new old mechanics and rules are.

In either case, I can't say that D&D NEXT is a system I'd buy into if it even vaguely resembles what they've shown so far. It's just simply not a game that's good enough to get my group to give up Fantasy Craft, a game that's every bit as awesome as a game with a titanic legacy title like Dungeons & Dragons should be.