D&D 5E, the Nentir Vale, and Other Assorted D&D Stuff

After more than two years of waiting, D&D 5E is finally about to be published. The Starter Set is coming out soon, and after that comes the Player's Handbook and the free Basic D&D PDF. Everything I've just said sounds absolutely awesome as far as I'm concerned. I love D&D 4E, but I'm currently having fun with the 5E playtest rules and I can't wait to see the full rules.

Picture from ENWorld.

I'm considering buying the Starter Set. Normally, I wouldn't, since I've been playing the playtest and I've been playing D&D for well over a decade now, but I'm trying to get an offline gaming group together, and at least one of them is a complete newbie to tabletop RPGs. The Starter Set, with its pregenerated characters and short rulebook, is going to be way less intimidating than Basic D&D or a full Player's Handbook would be. On the other hand, I may just stick with 4E Essentials and make my own pregenerated characters for the group. I'm not quite sure yet.

Whatever the case, I'll certainly be downloading Basic D&D. It's free, it's got everything necessary to play to level 20, and it should be just about perfect for anyone who doesn't want to buy the game yet, but still wants to play. I'm really curious to see what they do with it as far as aesthetics go - if it'll be bare bones with no art or anything like the playtest packets, or if it'll have a few pieces of art and the same kind of aesthetics the Starter Set previews are showing. I'm hoping it's the latter, of course.

In any case, 5E is still heavily on my mind as I'm running a Play-by-Post game using the 5E playtest rules from October of last year. It took a while, but I finally got a game together to try out 5E, which brings me to my next point: I'm not using the Forgotten Realms as the setting. I'm not a huge fan of the Realms, so I stuck with the Nentir Vale, which is easily my second favorite setting after Eberron. And my group went nuts with it. I've got a Paladin of Sehanine, two devotees of the Raven Queen (one Fighter, one Rogue), a Cleric of Zehir, and possibly a religiously-undecided Mage. The party's a curious mix of alignments ranging from Neutral Good to Neutral Evil. So far, I'm digging it.

But back to the Nentir Vale. I'm considering going through all my 4E books and putting together as much information as I can on the Vale. I'm aware of this Wikidot site that does pretty much the same thing, but that group's taken a bit of a different look at the setting than I plan to, particularly with their assertions about the deities. Obviously, this is a big undertaking and will probably take a fairly long time, but if I do it, I'll be able to use it as a player handout and a DM aid in any future games I run in the Vale. Plus, I'll be able to keep two copies - one for players and one for all my secret DM notes. I'll almost certainly post the full thing here, of course.

Last, I'd like to address that it's been a while since I posted here. I've been working on offline stuff, hanging out with friends and doing quite a bit completely unrelated to tabletop gaming. I didn't have as much time to devote to gaming, so I ended up dropping from all PbP games for a while. I'm back now, though, and I plan on adding quite a bit to the blog - some header images or something at the very least. Thanks for sticking around, and if you're new, take a look at what I've got. Might be something that catches your eye.

What I Want Out of D&D Next

I've been following the D&D Next playtest lately, and while I've been prepping for a Play-by-post D&D Next game, I've been thinking quite a bit on what I want out of D&D Next.

First off, I want a boxed set to make it easy for new players to get started. Whenever I've introduced new people to the game, I've always had problems explaining that, if they wanted to be able to run the game like I did, they'd have to drop nearly a hundred bucks on the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. A boxed set would fix that nicely. Essentially, I want a beginner's set that supports play from level 1-5 and includes everything needed to play. Dice, monster/player tokens, at least one adventure included (though I'd prefer two or three, to take players up to level 5), and DM/player guides. Ideally, this boxed set would only cost around $30, to make it cheap enough for new players to pick it up without worrying too much about cost.

Some of this...

For the boxed set, I also want it to be completely compatible with the full core game. Players should be able to build identical characters with the boxed set and full game (though I would expect the core game to have more options). This was my big problem with the 4^th Edition Red Box: if you wanted to go from the Red Box to full 4E, you had to rebuild the characters from the ground up. That, to my mind, is a mistake.

For the full game, I like the standard format of the three core books. Ideally, I'd like to see some content that was either cut from or not included in the playtest packets, most notably the Warlock and Sorcerer classes. Given D&D Next's promise of modularity, I'd really like to see some sidebars with house rules or optional rules included, similar to how the playtest packet includes point-buy for ability scores as an optional rule.

I really want to see the tier system from 4E come back. I wouldn't mind having the core books only go to 20^th level, but I really would like to see an expansion that takes the game all the way up to 30^th, with all the epic-level adventures that 4E had.

Art-wise, I want to see a wide variety. I love the 3.5 aesthetic, but I also like a lot of the classic art from previous editions. Honestly, I'd like to see different art styles for different supplements: more classic, old-school illustrations for books that support that style of play, and more of the modern style art from the 3.5/4E aesthetics for books like the tactical rules expansion. Similarly, I'd like to see unique art styles for whichever different settings Wizards ends up publishing.

That brings me to my next point. I want to see more settings. Wizards seems to really be pushing the Forgotten Realms as the flagship D&D setting. While I occasionally enjoy a Forgotten Realms novel, it is far from my favorite setting, and I've honestly never been super interested in playing a game set there. So for D&D Next, I want official support for a wide variety of settings: Eberron, Dark Sun, the Realms, the Nentir Vale/Points of Light setting, Dragonlance, and possibly a new setting or two.

...and some of this.

Along with settings, I want high-quality adventures for D&D Next. I want adventures that are like The Sunless Citadel, The Forge of Fury, Keep on the Borderlands, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. D&D Next has to compete with Pathfinder's Adventure Paths, and those are, for the most part, very high quality.

So, here's what I want, in list form:

1. A boxed set compatible with the full game.

2. Core rules that go to at least level 20, with expansions going to 30.

3. A lot of setting support.

4. Good adventures.

I don't think that's too much to ask, right?

D&D Next - Rolling Up a Character

So in addition to my Swords & Wizardry game (which, sadly, may not happen because of scheduling conflicts) and my Dark Dungeons play-by-post game, I'm also prepping to run a D&D Next play-by-post game on the RPG.net forums, running the Mines of Madness adventure that's included.

I'm using the last playtest (October 2013 version) packet, that you can pick up here. I've flipped through most of the files in the playtest, but I'm holding off on a full review until I can get some actual playtime in. However, I created a character so I'd know what my players were getting into and so that I'd have a better idea of what these characters can do.

I really hope my players end up fighting this dwarf-golem thing.
Picture from the podcast page on Wizards.com

First up, here's some of what I like about character creation:

• Feats are optional. I love that there's no massive feat list to comb through at first level and that it's very easy for a DM to just say "nope, no feats in this particular game."
• Ability scores can either be rolled, bought with points, or chosen with a standard array. I like 4E's tight balance, but it required a point-buy or standard array for ability scores. The default of rolling for scores makes D&D Next feel a little more old-school (though we'll see if actual play changes that).
• It's fast and simple. Even being mostly unfamiliar with D&D Next, I still was able to create a character in about fifteen or twenty minutes.

Now, some stuff that was not quite so good:

• The more traditional races (dwarves, elves, and halflings) have more diversity than the "unusual races." Most of the unusual races (drow, half-elves, half-orcs, kender, tieflings, and warforged) don't have any subrace or similar choices. Dragonborn and gnomes have some choices (draconic ancestry and gnomish subraces), but the other races, for whatever reason, do not.
• I couldn't find any concrete rules on tool proficiency overlaps. For example, the paladin I created got proficiency in Mounts (Land) from both his background (Soldier) and the paladin class, but I couldn't find any rules on how that would work in-game. I assume it would be similar to skill proficiencies where you can choose an extra tool to have proficiency in, but if the rules are in the playtest packet, I can't find them.

I'll have a more comprehensive post (or more probably, a series of posts) once I the game gets going for a while. It's a play-by-post game, so it won't be a particularly fast game, but once I get through a few encounters, I'll have some more information to post. Setting-wise, I'm going with the Nentir Vale for simplicity's sake (as I've already got that info for the S&W game I'm trying to get rolling), but I'm throwing the party in at the dungeon, rather than have a long, drawn-out "everyone meets up at a tavern" style scene (since that takes a long time in forum games).

So, how does my experience so far with D&D Next stack up with yours?