The Next Phase
Mike Mearls

Last Thursday, we rolled out the final public playtest packet for D&D Next. It’s been a long journey to today from the first days of this project. It hasn’t been easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.

For the next few months, our work in R&D falls into two categories.

The editors and a team of designers will finalize work on the core game. This work consists of squashing bugs, simplifying things, and incorporating the final round of public feedback. The game’s foundation will be set in stone, as will the core options for the classes.

Meanwhile, a second design team will tackle a number of outstanding topics. These include the following elements.

    The underlying math of the game. We’ll run stress tests on the numbers, monster abilities, and so on to make sure that everything shakes out as we expect. This work is important to making adventure and encounter design fast and easy. It also ensures that the classes play fair.

    An optional tactical combat system, with rules for using miniatures, rules for combat that operate like 3rd Edition or 4th Edition in that they remove DM adjudication of things like cover, and expanded, basic combat options to allow for forced movement, tanking, and so forth, as options any character can attempt. This optional system will look a bit like AD&D’s Player’s Option: Combat and Tactics book with key lessons learned from 4th Edition. Its goal is to present combat as a challenging puzzle that pits the players against the DM, capturing the best parts of 4th Edition.

    An optional dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity. This system treads ground that D&D hasn’t formally embraced in the past. It casts a gaming group as collaborative storytellers, with the DM managing the action and everyone contributing events, plots twists, and sudden, dramatic turns.

    An optional system that cranks up character customization by allowing players to build their own subclasses. This system is really more of a set of guidelines that let you mix and match abilities pulled from subclasses within a class. You can approach it as a DM tool (“In my setting, the wizards of the Burning Isle combine illusion and necromancy”) or as a way for players to have more choice in building characters. We’re making this system optional because we know that some players want a lot of ways to customize their characters, but more customization invariably leads to broken combos. We can manage combinations and fairness at the subclass and feat level, but slicing things much finer than that goes beyond what we can reasonably expect to playtest.

    A campaign system that extends the action beyond the day-to-day adventures, focusing on what we’ve called downtime. This includes managing a domain, running a business, playing politics on a grand scale, and so on. Things like mass combat would naturally slot into this system.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, these systems are aimed at specific subsets of players. Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn’t aimed at giving us negative feedback. Thus, we’re showing these systems to groups that we know are in the target audience.

That’s where we stand today. With the last public packet out the door, there’s not much more to talk about today that you can’t see for yourself in the latest rules. Download, enjoy, and give us your feedback.

Good.

I like the look of a couple of these.
Campaign level stuff and sub-class building but as a DM tool only both appeal.

Sounds good , though I'm still wary when he references making sure the game runs "fair".

Optional is good!

Quote from: TristramEvans;693091Sounds good , though I'm still wary when he references making sure the game runs "fair".

I read that as

QuoteThe underlying math of the game... shakes out as we expect ... [and in that way] ensures that the classes play fair.

"Play fair" I take to mean "are designed in accordance with the parameters we've established for classes."

It's way easier for me to make classes as mathematically off kilter as I may want, than for most other gamers to make them as mathematically well balanced as they want! That's part of the reason many of them will be buying the product instead of making up their own wacky systems.

Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn't aimed at giving us negative feedback.

The gold line

Quote from: vytzka;693101Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn't aimed at giving us negative feedback.

The gold line

He is right though can you imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if a test packet had included a whole load of story-game rules, or tactical minis combat, or uber customisation ....

There are some parts of the hobby that are simply too contentious with too many entrenched positions for an open and frank dialogue between interested parties to proove very fruitful

Oh, I absolutely agree. It's just funny seeing them finally admit that in plain text.

People would lose their shit if they'd showed a full customization system in the last packet.
"They're ignoring the True Fans!"
"Does Mearls expect us to do all the work for him?"
"This just shows that it's just 3.75!"

It gets fuckin' tedious.

I think they ar wise not to do a general public playtest with the options. Their probably doing targeted pllaytesting with people who like those styles of play.

Quote from: JonWake;693109People would lose their shit if they'd showed a full customization system in the last packet.
"They're ignoring the True Fans!"
"Does Mearls expect us to do all the work for him?"
"This just shows that it's just 3.75!"

It gets fuckin' tedious.

No no, Pathfinder is 3.75

Next is... 3.875

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;693111Their probably doing targeted pllaytesting with people who like those styles of play.

Not having Pundit test the dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity, eh?

Quote from: Phillip;693116Not having Pundit test the dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity, eh?

They can get Ron Edwards to do that bit, and then put his name and Pundit's next to each other in the credits

Unsurprisingly, they look like they are trying to please everybody in a fractured and viciously balkanised hobby.

Unbelievably, the approach they are taking looks like it just might work.

Except for people like me of course, who wouldn't touch D&D with someone else's. Although if they had some good settings I could cannibalise I might be convinced to shell out a few yoyos.

Quote from: vytzka;693101Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn't aimed at giving us negative feedback.

The gold line

I knew there had to be a reason we weren't seeing the promised modularity in the playtest packets, and to be fair to Mearls, it turns out that it was a damn good reason. Soliciting feedback on these options in an open playtest, even if you said "please only comment if you think these are the sort of options you might want to use in your game", would just open the door to a lot of completely useless feedback from people who don't like or understand the styles of play those optional components are catering to. My interest in Next just shot up.

Quote from: Glazer;693117They can get Ron Edwards to do that bit, and then put his name and Pundit's next to each other in the credits

Ron wouldn't do it because he'd refuse to believe a single system could possibly cater to different people's needs.