D&D Next: Is it any good? Part 2

Hi there.

A bit late with the blog this week, sorry about that, but I'm here now and I've got one or two new rules to discuss that came up in last week's session. But before we do that, here's a few contextual qualifications:

• This week we actually had 7 people playing. If you've read the adventure then you know that there are only 6 pre-gen characters, and might be wondering how I've managed it: I let the 7th player have the NPC with strict instructions on how that NPC was supposed to be run. I did that because of the context of the club: It's a social club and there are around 30 of us; the 7th player hadn't got a game for this rotation and between having an NPC and not playing, he was grateful for the opportunity to get involved!
• We're up to the 'Dungeon Crawl' part of the adventure so a lot of the new rules I'm going to discuss relates to what happens in combat.
• I tend to contrast the rules to Pathfinder and 4e because those are the systems that I am a) most used to and b) consider the most relevant to the discussion, Pathfinder being DnD's closest rival and 4e being the system that 5e is replacing.

So here's the first new rule for this week:

Critical Hits

Of course, this is nothing new. Pretty much every game system I have played so far has used some form of Critical Hit system, or at least a better than average result if a certain set of conditions are met (usually to do with the dice.)

This one functions well enough: You get a critical hit if you roll an unmodified, or 'natural' 20 on a D20. You then add one more of the same kind of dice you would normally roll when rolling for damage, add the numbers together and the result is the amount of damage you do. For example, if you were attacking with a short sword, you would normally roll 1D6 for damage. If you get a critical hit, you roll 2D6 and add them together.

Is this a good system? In principle, yes it is. Taking the 'bell curve' mechanics of dice into consideration, the average score on any number of dice other that 1 (provided you're rolling the same kind of dice) is this: n*s/2+n-1, where 'n' is the number of dice you're rolling and 's' is the number of sides of the dice. This means that you can expect to roll a slightly higher number on two of the same kind of dice than the maximum possible score on one of that kind of dice.

Or, taking the super-nerdyness out of it, it basically means that at Level 1 you can expect to do a little bit more damage off a critical hit than you would have done if you'd rolled the highest possible score off a regular hit. Which works well enough for me.

It's certainly a lot more straightforward than Pathfinder's system of critical hits, which is comprehensive to the point of being convoluted. To be fair, it has to be; there is a huge range of weapons involved with this game and it needed a system that could accommodate the nuances of all of them. But it's still a long-winded process. For a start, some of the weapons have a 'critical threat range,' meaning that some of them will score a critical hit on a roll of 19, and if I remember rightly I think one of them will even do this on a roll of 18. You write this down on your character sheet, but you've still got to remember to do it. And then there's the 'threat' system. Because you see, rolling a critical hit is not enough. Rolling a natural 20 or whatever you need only threatens a critical hit; you still need to confirm it by rolling to hit again. Thankfully, if you miss, you've still hit, just not with a critical.

This makes critical hits very hard to get off in Pathfinder, because you've effectively got to roll to hit twice. I understand why this needs to happen though: the effect of the critical hit is that the damage doubles, and sometimes even trebles depending on the weapon. Given the range of hit points you usually have to work with in Pathfinder, and the damage potential of some of the weapons and especially magic weapons, this should not happen lightly. But it still makes for a complicated procedure.

On the other hand, DnD 4th goes perhaps a little too far the other way. With that system, if you get a critical hit, you automatically do the maximum possible amount of damage. This might not seem like much, but combine this with some of the powers and you've got a potentially horrific amount of damage that can be applied. It has to happen this way because of the range of hit points that monsters etc tend to have in 4th; in order for critical hits to mean anything you have to be reasonably certain of a large amount of damage if they hit. But it does take some of the fun out of rolling the dice to see what happens when you score a critical hit. It works for the system, but nothing more.

So what we have here with Next is a nice kind of middle ground that works well enough at lower levels and I'm assuming will scale up well with upper levels of play, Or at least it would work well if the players hadn't rolled appallingly badly for damage both times it came up during the game.

Movement

Movement could cover all sorts of things really but there was one particular part of the process that caught our eye during the game: You can move both before and after your attack.

This is a rule that took me somewhat by surprise as it dispenses with the usual combination of Standard Action/Move Action/Minor Action or however they're articulated in the various games. Instead of that, you are allowed to move a certain distance and, as long as you don't go over it, it doesn't matter when in the turn you do it. You can do it before your action, after your action or even both. This effectively means that you can move, attack and then move again.

I didn't expect this to be deployed all that much because to do this would provoke an attack of opportunity, but we actually found it surprisingly useful for repositioning yourself if you manage to kill whatever you were attacking. Now that we're aware of this I expect to see it used a lot more!

Flanking (or lack thereof)

This seems an odd thing not to put in the game given how long we've all spent working it out before, but there is currently no provision in the rules for flanking. I expected this to be a part of the advantage system mentioned last week, but I have yet to find a rule that says so.

This is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it takes a lot out of the clever flanking tactics used in previous editions. On the other hand, we're not slowing the game down to a crawl as we try to work out whether our position gives rise to flanking or not. It's a peculiar change but one that I would welcome, since all it would usually do is give you a +2 bonus to hit. Rogues still have their sneak attack, but this applies when attacking any enemy adjacent to an ally, and when you have advantage.

The only way flanking would come in to it that I can see is by what the game is calling situational modifiers at the DM's discretion, where the DM might decide you have a better or worse chance to hit due to a situation beyond the player's control. But this applies to things like applying cover, and it never mentions flanking.

We will see where this takes us!

D&D Next: Is it any good? Part 1

It's been a while since I've had anything to say on the subject of gaming, hence the lack of posts in the last few months, but I'm currently running a game of Dungeons and Dragons at the Roleplaying club in Blackheath, and we're using the new rules set whose title flows between "Next" and "5th Edition." What I'm going to do here is give a commentary on the rules I have experienced and whether or not I think they're any good. I'll try to be as balanced as I possibly can.

A few things to keep in mind from this session:

• We had fewer than the expected number of players because of some confusion over when the game was supposed to start, so we were running with 3 people rather than 6.
• The rules we were working to are currently in closed Beta. I should imagine that the rules are pretty much as they're going to be in the final edit; currently they (Wizards of the Coast) are working through stat blocks of monsters etc to make sure everything is balanced. Or at least, as balanced as it ever gets in DnD.
• Currently the rules make no provision for character generation. It is important to recognise this, particularly in the section that relates to ability checks, as some of the characters have Class Features that affect the ability checks and I have no idea how these are going to work when generating characters.

So without further ado, here is the first thing I want to comment on:

The Advantage System.

I like this. This is a system that innovates rather than iterates, by which I mean it brings something new to the game rather than tweaks a rule from the previous edition of the game.

The way it works is easy enough: Sometimes, the rules say that you have an advantage, or a disadvantage. Either way, you roll 2D20 rather than the usual 1D20. If you have an advantage, the higher of the two dice is used, if you have a disadvantage, the lower dice is used.

This is something I've been aware of for some time due to some naughty videos on YouTube posted during the early stages of the open Beta (you weren't supposed to put anything about the new content of the game on social media,) but what I didn't appreciate at the time was just how many situations this would affect. Hidden attacks, Aiding another, Dodge, Unseen Opponents all give rise to use of the advantage system, and that's just the core combat rules; I haven't even started on Spell effects yet!

But what's great is that this is a catch-all system that almost completely replaces adding or subtracting to your D20s when you make attack rolls or ability checks. That doesn't mean you don't do it any more - your D20 roll is still modified by the relevant ability modifier - but apart from a very small number of occasions that appear to be at the Dungeon Master's discretion, that's about it. How many times have you played previous editions, or Pathfinder, and found yourself saying something like: "OK, I got 12 on the D20, plus 3 for my Strength, plus 1 for the magic weapon, minus 2 'cause he's in cover, but plus 2 because he's my preferred enemy..." And when you get your final figure, the DM tells you you've missed anyway? With the advantage system, you either have an advantage (or disadvantage!) or you don't, and the only other thing that modifies the number on the dice is your attribute modifier. It's quicker, cleaner, and saves a lot of less-than-necessary hassle, so I'm pleased with this change to the rules.

The one situation in combat that isn't covered by this new advantage system is cover. I think this is because there is no way they were going to make it work across different levels of cover. The cover system now adds to the target creature's Armour Class and any saving throws based on Dexterity, depending on how much cover the creature is in. I won't go in to too much detail about this since it didn't come up in the game, but again I'm glad to see that this affects the target creature rather than the attacker, as this reduces the amount of adding/subtracting they have to do during the attack roll.

Ability Checks

This came up a few times during the game. It seems to have completely replaced the skill system from previous editions. From what I can see, what was previously covered by skills is now a list of things you might do based on your abilities. For example, where Climb was previously a skill, now it is a Strength test. Where Sneak was previously a skill, now it is a test on Dexterity, and so on. They still exist in name, but together with abilities, rather than separately as skills.

This is somewhat similar to 4th edition in that all characters can at least attempt all skills, and don't have to be trained in them in order to do so. However it has almost completely dispensed with training skills (where a character would, at the start of the game, be better at certain skills depending on his class,) or putting ranks in to skills (where a higher modifier would be added to the skill during the level-up process.)

Do I like this? Well it's hard to say at this point. I'm pleased with the fact that they're no longer pretending Skill Checks are anything more than a test on the appropriate attribute, as they did in 4th edition. It saves a lot of tedious mucking about with levelling up, as the only time it now makes a difference is if the attribute itself increases to the point where the modifier also increases. Skills increasing with your level was pretty much pointless anyway because all it meant was that the DM would increase the difficulty of the skill checks, just to keep them challenging.

For Pathfinder players, the fact that you're no longer putting ranks in to skills may be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's not shutting you out of the game if it requires a check for a skill you either don't have, or don't have enough ranks in it to have much of a chance of succeeding. On the other hand, there's less scope for individual character customisation. For example, you may want your Rogue to be good at picking pockets, so you'd give him a higher DEX score when rolling up your character, but in reality he'd be no better at picking pockets than a Wizard who happened to put the same score into DEX. This particular example is fixed with class features at higher levels, but the point remains across the board - if you're good at a particular skill, chances are someone else in your party is every bit as good, if not better.

At least, that's my theory, because to be perfectly honest I never played either DnD 4th or Pathfinder at a high enough level to see how the skills affect the dynamic of the game at upper levels. Personally, I like this new system. It didn't affect the game at level 1 because currently all the players are doing that's different is looking at a different bit of the character sheet for the same information. But I think it will be significantly better than Pathfinder, because it will stop or at least reduce situations where the adventure is de-railed because it required a skill check in order to proceed and the one character who had the relevant skill messed up the roll; now all the characters can have a go and be in with a reasonable chance of success. It is just about better than DnD 4th because the only time you were ever really in control of what skills you had was during character creation when you added an extra 5 to four or five different skills, which would mean less and less in upper levels of play because the rest of your skills increased as you levelled up.

Exploration

This is something I wasn't so fond of. This is the first time I've come across a set of core rules that gives a specific section to exploration. It basically tells you how to move, hide and look for things outside of combat, which is fine, as it promotes the idea that yes, you are supposed to be doing these things.

In previous editions, most of this was actually covered by the adventures themselves, by saying what was in a particular area if the players happened to search it. In 4th edition, they also had Skill Challenges, which was a system by which you were supposed to make skill checks and get a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures. This could be used for exploration. In my opinion it felt a bit clumsy to use, as it was hard to balance the significance of success with an appropriate penalty for failure. However, it did at least get all the characters involved in the exploration process, and was clear about what was needed for success.

In the adventure I was running, the characters had to explore to find an ancient temple where a Dragon was currently residing. The problem was this: at no point during the adventure or the rules did it give any indication of how this exploration was supposed to play out. I knew, for example, that I was supposed to roll a D20 for every hour they explored and spring a random encounter on them if a certain range of numbers came up, but I had no idea what they were supposed to be doing in the hours they spent exploring. In the end, the players told me they were following an NPC who was acting as a guide, and I gauged the speed they were moving with the time they ought to have taken to find what the guide was leading them to, which made matters a lot more straightforward - if they hadn't have done this, how was I supposed to run the exploration?

This might have more to do with the way the adventure was written than the rules, and it may be addressed in a Dungeon Master's Guide. But that is the only thing I'm not happy with at this point - we needed a better set of rules for wilderness exploration.

So, that's the new rules as it has affected us so far. What do you guys think?