I haven't been keeping up with the D&D Next playtests all that closely. Mostly it's because I have precious little game time, and I've been using that to play 13th Age and Edge of the Empire. It's also partially that I lost interest early on when I disliked a lot of the updates, and class selection proceeded slow (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's tough to get excited when a lot of your favorite classes haven't been released yet).
Well, I figure with 3 shiny new classes (two of which, the Druid and Ranger, are among my favorites) it's time I examined the material more closely. I'll be writing a series of posts, each on a different class or rules element, and this will be the table of contents so links to everything are in one place. For now it will just be a rough outline, subject to change, and as I write each post I'll edit this one with its links.
Barbarian
Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Monk
Paladin
Ranger
Rogue
Wizard
Exploration Rules
Feats
Skills
Monsters
Concluding Thoughts
Thank you for reviewing this. I enjoyed your review of Combat in Motion and various aspects of 13th Age, and look forward to your D&D Next write-ups. Like you, I didn't find enough in the several playtests that my group played through to keep my interest in DDN. But I *want* to like DDN. I appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI too WANT to like D&D Next. Hopefully once I have a big compilation of posts it'll be of use to the designers.
DeleteI started the series with my thoughts on the Druid. Fortunately it looks good for a first try, as it's my favorite class. I'm not sure how the math shakes out, but there's time later to adjust if it's over or underpowered. At first glance it seems on the strong side, but still within a tolerable range on the power curve.
What I'm mostly looking at is the implementation, and personal preference aside (Daily Wild Shape, I'm looking at you) the design work seems solid.
I can tell you right now that I'll be much more critical in some of my later posts, though (Paladin and Feats, I'm looking at both of you!).
Rogue's up. Funny how actually sitting down to write about that class is what made me realize how many problems I have with it. Because it looked mostly fine on my first skim-through.
ReplyDelete