Spurred on by this ENWorld thread, I got to thinking about what my dream 5e would look like. And since I can't stand to miss a chance to pontificate, and this is way too long to break the board's formatting with, why not put it here. To start with, for those that don't know, I prefer 4th edition D&D, but I think all of the editions have done something right. And I frequently use inspiration, convert variant rules from older editions, or Pathfinder. With that in mind, let's take a look at what my dream edition of D&D would look like.
First, the biggest mechanical sticking point, the power/ability system. Overall, I think it was a positive change to codify large amounts of fuzzy "abilities" into a quick and dirty power card format. They're easier to use, easier to write, and are far easier to organize. That said, there is substantial room for improvement.
While I can see and sympathise with the design choices that went into greatly limiting PC options (Such as this), I think they went too far with limiting PC choices. They can apply the same sense of balance and still have more player power options.
One aspect of this is the ritual system from 4e. I loved what they were trying to do with it, but they nerfed it substantially by making it too expensive and corner-case reliant to actually make use of rituals. Most of the rituals, by definition, do not effect combat, they effect the wider world. You don't need as much of a fine system balance approach to things that effect the narrative. And the reagent cost, along with the aspect of using magic items to set the power curve (more on that later), means it's not a wise use of limited resources putting them into limited-use rituals.
They also added rituals and martial rituals for other power sources, but kept the feat requirement for them. For the reasons listed above, this just means they don't get used. It's a poor mechanical decision to take a feat for something arguably of limited utility, when you could pick up a combat perk that's better balanced.
There's also the "encounter", "daily", "at-will" divide. I don't like it too much, personally. Now, I think it's a step up from Vancian magic and "full attack", but again, still room for improvement. A system I've used in the past is a limited resource vaguely resembling power points based on spell-level and so on for casters, and a cooldown-esque system for martial classes. It worked quite well (the full system is way outside the scope of this article), but it did add a substantial amount of bookeeping. It wasn't an issue for computer-enabled gaming, but it would cause problems for pure pen and paper. But there needs to be more variety than "Once daily", and "once per encounter".
Now, personally, the way I'd fix it is this: First, more grabs from the power choice list, or more core abilities, like Grab, or Bull Rush. Change back to a more subtle system of power usage. I may not like x/day uses, but a halfway point may not be too bad. Have a pool of power/day uses, with differing abilities using different numbers of the "uses", and regain a few every milestone, and upon rest, only gain back 70-80% of your "max" uses. I think that'd help with the 15-minute workday, too.
Second, reworking rituals a bit. Right now, they seem a bit of a fringe addon, where they need to be closer to the core to be truly effective. Personally, I like the idea of every class having some variant of them, with gaining a class utility choice for rituals/practices/whathave you, in additon to the normal combat power choices, and being able to learn them from books.
I think, instead of the "arcane" ritual casting that has Primal, Arcana, and Religion rituals, and Martial Practices, it should be broken up into Naturalist, Arcane, and Divine rituals, as well as some variant of constitution-based toughness, and dexterity-based cleverness martial rituals, and psionic meditations, perhaps lumped in the "martial" group,. People with the appropriate power source get the ability to learn their source of rituals as they level up, and can learn rituals from their "school", through books. (So, Rituals for arcane-primal-divine characters, Practices and Meditations for martial-psionic-shadow? characters..), and link them to cross-class training kind of abilities, or give a non-combat-gimping option to learn cross-school rituals. (Or rituals targeting a trained skill)
As well as the structural changes, they need more relatively quick cantrips, or the ability to prepare them ahead of time. It'd give the measure of flexibility that casters had in older editions, while still keeping combat balanced, and give non-casters a piece of the fun, utility pie. For instance, you can make featherfall a preparable ritual that can be discharged quickly, instead of a utility power choice.
Second, the settings. I think this is one of the great strengths of D&D, because depending on how you look at it, it has 5 written campaign settings. Dark Sun, Ebberon, points-of-light-land, Forgotton Realms, and Gamma World (Yes, Gamma World.). Personally, I'd like to see points-of-light-land given a proper name and broken out into it's own setting. I like it, but it needs some extra care and attention, it's not defined all that well. And doing that would let D&D do something else neat, it could be completely setting-agnostic. It already is pretty close, but making it official would give the system as a whole a lot more flexibility, and make it a lot "cleaner". I'd also like to see a full-on "low-magic" setting in D&D. Dark Sun is close, but it's very... unique. D&D could really use a kind of hyperborean setting. It'd also serve as a venue to push the well-written and ill used system of inherant bonuses and boons to de-link the power curve from magic weapons.
Most 4e settings suffer from one trick of the math I've touched on a couple of times. The power curve for players is set by magic items the players get. They need them to be competitive, which leads to wishlists, treasure parcel rules, and from what I've read, a lot of old-school DM frustration. Hell, even I get a little frustrated when the rules set up a MMORPG-esque "Aww, that's not what I needed to drop!" when I try to give them something interesting, rather than broken. Personally, I'd like to see inherant, non-stacking bonuses made the default option. (In RAW, inherant bonuses provide fixed "Item Bonuses" to hit, damage, and defenses that don't stack with magic item bonuses.). It'd make things a bit simpler for new DMs, too, without having to worry about gimping the party or breaking the challenge curve by messing up loot.
The Monster Manuals are also far more focused on combat, seemingly to the exclusion of all else. I miss the older monster manuals that had as much about where to find the monster and what they acted like, than what they did if they attacked you. Now, I really like the shorter combat statblocks, but I think there's room for a combat quick-reference block, and a longer more detailed "world" statblock.
Third is far more a legal thing than anything else, but I'd really like to see a return to the OGL, Wizards not sending C&Ds to anything remotely percieved as useful, and more support for those of us who like extending the fiction of the world. I'd also like to see better writeups on how one could easily hand-make a character sheet. It's easy once you know how, but a royal and salty pain in the ass to dig up how. It's actually a little less complicated than making a character in 3.5 when you get down to it... but they made that as hard as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment