DnD Next: Is it any good? Part 4

This week's entry focuses on the rules that relate to what happens at 2nd level, as this is what came up the most often during our session.

Wizard Feat: Sculpt Spells

This one caused some confusion amongst our Wizards, but once we'd worked it out we thought it was a pretty good rule. How it works is this:

"When you cast a spell that affects other creatures, you can choose a number of creatures equal to the spell’s level + 1. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage from the spell."

Nice function but we struggled to find its application, since the whole point of casting spells that affect creatures is to do damage. Then we figured out that it's actually so that you can cast an Area-Of-Effect spell into a combat and avoid damaging your allies. This is a tactic I have seen employed in some coverage of video RPGs, where the player puts the Fighter forward to take on a horde of low-level monsters, and the Wizard casts an area-of-effect spell on the Fighter - who can take it - and kills the monsters surrounding him. It's not one I've ever seen put to use in a pen-and-paper RPG, and I've never been tempted to do it myself. I'm used to Warhammer and 40K where you can't usually deliberately target an attack of any kind at your own units, so it's never even occurred to me to try. Suddenly I'm now aware that it's a legitimate tactic to deliberately damage one of your allies for the greater good of further damaging the monsters surrounding him, and with this new rule Sculpt Spells, we might avoid even that. It's looking pretty good for Wizards!

Fighter Feat: Action Surge

I think this might have been a 4th Edition Feat at some point, where a fighter would get a bonus for burning an action point. As Action Points no longer exist in this edition of DnD, I guess Wizards had to come up with some way of making Fighters both interesting to play and having a reasonably large effect on Combat. I don't know about you, but when I've played Fighters in the past, they've rarely been the powerhouse of the party, instead taking the rather spongey role of soaking up as much damage as possible and keeping the heat of the Wizards and Rogues.

This new version of the feat Action Surge allows the players to take an additional action in one turn. There are a number of potential applications for this, not the least of them the notion that fighters can now attack twice in one turn. They can also use Hustle to close the distance between the enemies and follow it up with an attack, plus they can disengage if need be. I'm looking forward to seeing some creative use of this rule in future sessions!

Levelling up and Customisation

One problem that I have run into is that the beta rules as published don't allow for much customisation when it comes to levelling up. The players are on a track of feats and class features that they automatically get when levelling up, and there's no room for things like multiclassing and copying spell books (both were suggested to me during the session.)

I think this is more to do with the way the Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle adventure and rules were designed, rather than a flaw with the game, as I'm hoping the full game will allow you to do both of those things and much more. The problem is that this adventure was designed to be run at GenCon over a weekend, not an 8-week rotation at a roleplaying club. In terms of character design, taking a linear track in any kind of mid-long term environment is not going to entertain people for long.

It seems to me that what a lot of people are looking forward to seeing are the rules for character generation and the level-up progression. As they almost always take up the better part of just about every RPG rulebook I've ever read, I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to find that the part of the PDF that relates to the actual rules is about 10 pages long. What comes out of this remains to be seen but I can't imagine there won't be at least some space for customisation, given that this is what most people find the most interesting about their games - creating their own characters...

See you next time!