Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I will be honest, this is one of my single favorite elements of 5.24 - and while others here might think it is a letdown, I cannot think of a better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary than (hopefully) killing the worst element of D&D - edition changes.
The 2024 model of doing revisions and tweaking, which there have been some hints might be the model moving forward in place of edition changes, is far more consumer friendly than this game’s history. No more real splits of the community (there are some divisions, but, overall, a 5.14 and 5.24 player easily could switch between iterations and carry on conversations without any real ambiguity). No more sudden changes requiring you to choose between hundreds of dollars of purchases and the new hotness. No more trying to hack together homebrew ports to run an old adventure in a new system.
And, perhaps more importantly, players actually can playtest their content - with a new edition, you can’t get valid playtest data, since you’re throwing people in the deep end. With this system, we were able to have a pretty intensive playtest period - players already knew the basics, so were able to skip all that and move right to helping create the game itself.
I, for one, think it was a great way to celebrate the 50th anniversary by releasing the first iteration playtested by tens of thousands of players.
So, for OP’s benefit, if they are still following this thread, there is a little bit of love for you.
I never said anyone's experience is invalid. As highlighted above, I encourage people to seek out their own experiences instead.
It's an interesting premise, is D&D better if it stops evolving and stabilizes into a sort of commoditization of the product?
There is some evidence in the market that supports the idea of this sort of evergreen approach to game design/franchise, Castles and Crusades is a pretty good example. It's remained basically the same system over I think like 8 or 9 printings at this point and while it doesn't have a huge market share, it has an audience.
I would argue however that edition warring and the edition changes have been ultimately good not bad for the franchise. The internet arguing aside, it has created a wide range of products (offshoots) of various editions, each taking some component, structure or design core and evolving it further and/or creating entire communities time stamped in a particular era of play.
The OSR for example loves its 1st and 2nd edition games, there are tons of products, support and evolutions taking place there, but had TSR simply stopped evolving or Wizards of the Coast taken over the product and not decided to create 3rd edition we wouldn't have Paizo-Pathfinder and all the evolutions based on that product. Even 4th edition despite any absence of longevity triggered a wide range of successful games like 13th age.
Design evolution is progress and while there are examples of successful evergreen products, new editions with modernization and evolution of mechanics by a market leader like the D&D franchise is almost a tradition and in a way the source of inspiration for the countless offshoots and unique products that are born from the different eras of D&D.
If D&D is now entering a kind of settled, evergreen period where 5th edition is effectively everything D&D will ever be, I suspect inevitably someone will come along and create the evolution that D&D should have. I mean its kind of happening already, there are a lot of games like DC20, Draw Steal and Daggerheart just to name a few. Im not sure its so great for D&D that other franchises lead the evolutions of fantasy RPG's. In fact I would argue D&D's popularity is driven by the fact that it's always been the industry leader on the forefront of designing the modern iteration of fantasy RPG's.
We'll see over time I guess, but I would still bet on 2024 edition as being a kind of short-lived version of D&D and 6th edition is something we'll see in 4-5 years tops. Especially if these other system rise in popularity and start swallowing up market share.
The love is there, however based of this thread alone I'm starting to wonder if people are getting in their own ways yet pointing the finger at DnD
I don't hate D&D 2024 so much as I'm kind of disappointed with how they've decided to go all in on making the setting rules Agnostic; I understand that people like building their own worlds with their own lore and such (I've done this enough times) or changing the general lore of a given race but the results have been leaving it just... hollow.
Further, while I disagreed with seperating attributes from races I wasn't going to make a big issue out of it... until WotC decided to dump the changes they made in late 5th (where you could put either 3 +1s or a +2 and a+1 where you wanted) and instead decided to tie it to background so boo racism yay classism I guess?
With that having been said, I haven't written off D&D entirely; I feel like it's been mismanaged for a few years now but I'm hoping that the writers will be able to put forward some quality source material that prioritizes Rich lore over being as inoffensive and generic as possible.
For me, that's more of an issue with the implementation of DDB than D&D per se. In the game, in free to ignore it. The character builder makes it a pain.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
The basic concept of "your floating ASI's come from the life path you took prior to this" is fine, it's just the lack of a wildcard option in Beyond that failed to stick the landing. Having prebuilt models isn't an issue.
And the "classist" bit is just ridiculous- there's one all physical and one all mental background. Yes, performing religious services is not the kind of thing that lends itself to most forms of bodybuilding, nor is working as a foot soldier going to emphasize mental exercises over physical ones. And there's Guard for almost all the same flavor as Soldier with two mental stats. Now, you can't necessarily put together an optimized combination of attributes, skills, feat, etc. like this, and again it's unfortunate that they haven't included a custom '24 background tool on Beyond, but trying to aim any further accusations at D&D over the setup starts at patently ridiculous and ends at obvious bad faith muckraking.
What about religions that place an emphasis on physical prowess? What about soldiers who were scouts, standard bearers or quartermasters? What about Noblemen who's education involved dance, posture and other things that would emphasize agility over intelligence, strength or charisma?
I could keep going with examples but I think I've made my point: If they were going to decouple attributes from race choices then the best choice was to make them wholly free for the players to put in as they see fit.
Yeah, this has been talked about before. Decoupling ASIs from species in order to promote creativity and individuality....and then hard-coding them to backgrounds was certainly a choice.
A bad one, to be clear.
Which is what they didn’t want to do to avoid min/maxing
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I don't understand why they have this bump at all.
I mean you create your character, be it dice rolls, array or point buy. You re already making the choice for your ability scores. Why create a bump based on other selections which leads to min/maxing?
Never understood that, not in any edition. Just leave it be. You make your stats and you're done with stats.. now my background, species and class choices based on aesthetics, playstyle and preferences.
It's like this rock we keep beating ourselves over the head with that has absolutely no upside.
What about all those other backgrounds you could pick from? A noble who specialized in dancing sounds a lot like an Entertainer. A scout sounds a lot like a Guide or Wayfarer. A quartermaster sounds a lot like an Artisan or Merchant. I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
Yes, you can come up with special exceptions to the general characterization associated with a background, but the point of the listed ones is to give people looking for a quickie background a "here's some stats that fit the general vibe of this career path". Particularly with the dropping of the soft features and little custom trinkets, there's no reason you can't sketch together your own custom background if you absolutely must have everything just so. The only flaw in the implementation of the concept here is that they didn't include build-a-background tools in the Beyond creator. And yes, that's a somewhat notable flaw, but that's an issue with Beyond not the '24 update.
In early editions it was because they were running with the tropes/stereotypes associated with the races: dwarves are strong and tough, elves are lithe and clever, etc. It hung around as an artifact of the system, but recently the push for flexibility of character design and the impetus to move the game away from rules that can look bad in the right light got it changed. As for why they didn't do a more thorough change of character creation, probably because the artifact is still there to some degree plus it's just easier to keep the basic system and move where the bonuses come from than revise the system, and the mechanics themselves are sound enough.
Min/maxing is a player mentality and a choice on their part rather then something game influenced. So personally consider it a player issues to solve rather then a game/mechanic issues that requires something changing.
The options: (I can think of)
So regardless of where the Asi comes from the same complaints will arise until players mentality changes away from min/maxing. At least in my opinion
Anywho unsure if we're drifting off topic but does anyone else start singing the "where is the love" song when they open the thread??
But the weird thing is they had already moved to "ASI via players' want" with Tasha's - only to take it back and hard-code ASIs to backgrounds in 2024.
A very bad choice.
If they were redesigning 5e from the ground up in 2024 it would probably be gone, but "if you create your character with these rules it will be strictly worse than creating the character with the 2014 rules" is, unfortunately, quite likely to cause people to not use the new rules.
I think this is the root of the issue, it's not really the 24 ruleset, it is DDB that is driving the polarization on this issue. I think Wizards really underestimated the effect of upsetting people's interaction on this site would have on the new rules online reception. Pencil & paper and 24 rule games (full or hybrid) are the only ones not overly affected, the rest being the large majority have had significant disruption due to choices made that have negativity impacted the experience on DDB. Until the site issues are fixed, or the people unhappy abandon DDB, this debate will continue. I don't think Wizards will address this until it is too late, once people are frustrated enough to dump DDB getting them back is going to be tough especially those that walk away from purchases made here. Those will be the people steering players away from DDB where it matters, at the table. You don't need this site to play, convenience is what DDB sells, and there is nothing convenient about things not working, and sabotaging the user experience in the name of marketing while rolling out unfinished tools. It is a choice that underscores they don't understand what they sell on this site. The 24 ruleset is just a confused kid suffering through a nasty divorce. It is a shame really.
I mean, do we have statistics that people using Beyond for their sheets are a majority? You'll certainly see a lot of them in the forums for obvious reasons, but is the hard data there that this is how most of the player population does things anymore?
And frankly I wouldn't expect a mass walkout over this; if it was going to happen, it would have already.
It's true they'd already set them to floating, but it's easier to make the point that they're actively moving away from the baggage people can try to saddle racial ASIs with if they can point and say "we completely removed the concept of racial ASIs in our big update". The new DMG explicitly spells out the components of a background for DIY, so the concept is expressly a part of '24. The only issue with the concept is that Beyond doesn't support the custom ones yet afaik.
Shuffling baggage from a Horse to a Zebra doesn't fix the issue that the baggage still exists and is just as stupid and ugly as it was before.
It's especially stupid because as has been pointed out: this is a problem that has been solved for 4 and a half years as an optional rule and then in 2022 it was made functionally the law of the land.