This month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Transitions”, and it’s particularly appropriate for my group in 2014.
One of our players just took a job out of state and another welcomed his third child into the world. We’ve just started a Savage Worlds playtest, which might lead to our first non-d20 campaign … ever. Dungeons & Drgaons 5th Edition is looming over August, and I expect we’ll at least do a playtest once it’s released.
After braving the rings of fire, the digital quicksand, and the firewall of eternity, I managed to download a copy of the D&D Next playtest. Unpacking the zip file and looking over the files, I had to smile. There was the cleric of Pelor. And a cleric of Moradin. A high elf wizard. A dungeon called “Caves of Chaos”.
A strong wave of nostalgia hit me, bringing with it memories of cracking open an ancient Red Boxed set and finding a module called “B2 Keep of the Borderlands” inside. A thousand memories of my Greyhawk campaign came rushing forward, carrying names like Kalib, Scrappy, Merwyn, Tanevier, Obsidian Bay and the Cult of Death Undying.
And all that was without opening the PDFs.
Skills are a hot button subject for my gaming group. Most of the guys in my group loved D&D 3.x’s approach to skills, which allowed a high degree of granularity and focus in such mundane concerns as crafting and professions. When the D&D 4th Edition dismissed Craft and Profession as un-fun skills, half our group saw red. They still fume about that given time. Others liked 4th Edition’s condensed skill list, and focus on adventuring applications over crafting arrows or performing songs.
Naturally D&D Next is concerned about skills, and based on a recent blog post they are clearly looking to retain the customization options that 3.x offers, while making things more streamlined. First, they’re talking about making a lot of your day to day “skill checks” using the ability scores. So instead of making a “Climb check”, you’d presumably make a Strength check. Second, they also explicitly state they want to retain true skills so that they have a meaningful impact on the game and allow the sort of customization that we saw in 3E (and to a certain extent, 4E).
Mike Mearls talks about the concept of a one-hour D&D game in his latest Legends & Lore post. The goal here isn’t to boil all D&D games down to 1-hour, but rather to benchmark what you can actually do in an hour. No doubt inspired by his lunchtime D&D sessions, Mearls envisions a game in … Read more
Wizards of the Coast has announced D&D Next, the successor to D&D 4th Edition aimed squarely at unifying the game’s fractured fan base. My gaming group is practically a case study for 5th Edition — we played 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition (both flavors), and 4th Edition, but finally gave up on the game when the … Read more