Monthly Archives: August 2013

Top 3 rules questions from Dungeons & Dragons Next dungeon masters

Leave a reply

Update: I’ve posted an updated version of this based on the final, fifth-edition rules.

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons Next before, but Gen Con 2013 gave my first chance to run it. At the start of the convention, Jeremy Crawford and Greg Bilsland met with the D&D Next convention judges to answer questions about the rules. Later, I talked rules with other judges and, briefly, with D&D kingpin Mike Mearls. This post answers the top 3 questions dungeon masters asked about the D&D Next rules. Even if you’ve read the rules, the ready action probably works differently than you think.

Lloth, Demon Queen of Spiders

Lloth, Demon Queen of Spiders

1. What happens when a character is reduced to 0 hit points?

“When damage reduces you to 0 hit points and there is damage remaining, you die if the remaining damage equals or exceeds your hit point maximum.”

Notice that this rule avoids any talk of negative numbers. In D&D Next, negative hit points no longer exist.

Once you reach 0 hit points, you fall unconscious and must spend your turns making death saving throws, a DC 10 Constitution check.

  • If you fail three saves, you die.
  • If you succeed at three saves, you stabilize at 0 hit points and stop making saves.
  • The saves do not offset each other, so if you have two successes and two failures, you lie poised between life and death.
  • Anything that damages you while you have 0 hit points counts as a failed death save and, if you were stable, destabilizes you, restarting once-a-turn death saves from 0 successes and the 1 new failure.
  • A natural 20 on a save lifts you to 1 hit point.
  • A natural 1 on a save counts as two failed saves.

This system dispenses with the complexity of running totals of negative hit points and lets characters heal from 0, as in fourth edition. Short of a coupe de grace or massive damage, this makes characters hard to kill. I like the way these rules allow characters to fall in battle while avoiding the likelihood of permanent death.

2. Can players delay?

The rules include nothing about delaying, but not because the designers aimed to disallow the option. In the spirit of giving players the flexibility to do any reasonable action, I allow players to delay.

Mike Mearls said the designers probably deleted the delay option when they experimented with initiative by side. Early editions of D&D granted initiative to everyone on a side of a fight, so all the players go together and all the monsters go together. Side initiative brings some advantages:

  • It encourages teamwork by allowing all the players to act together.
  • Slow and indecisive players do not hold back the players who are ready to act.
  • Experienced players can more easily help newer players.

Mike said that in fourth edition, at low levels, you can house-rule side initiative and it works well because characters and monsters have enough hit points to sustain an entire round of enemy attacks. But at higher levels, once combatants gain the ability to lock down enemies with status effects, side initiative turns battles into one-sided romps.

In D&D Next, low-level combatants have too few hit points for side initiative. Playtesting showed that at low levels, if one side gets to attack first, then enemies on the other side may fall before they ever get a chance to act.

Expect to see the delay action return to the written rules.

3. How does readying an action work?

You can still set aside an action to trigger in response to an event, but many details work differently.

  • You remain at the same place in the initiative order.
  • The readied action replaces the one reaction you can use per turn. After you ready an action, you can still choose to use your reaction to do something like take an opportunity attack instead, but you may no longer take your readied action. Also, once you use your readied action, you no longer have a reaction available for things like opportunity attacks.
  • You can only ready actions to attack, grapple, hustle, knock down, or use an item. This means you cannot ready spells.

I’m unaware of any game-balance problems that might come from allowing characters to ready spells. Perhaps the designers simply feel that in the world of D&D, spell casting takes too long to be performed suddenly as a reaction.

Next lacks rules for disrupting spell casters, so don’t bother readying an attack to interrupt a casting.

Top 4 rules questions from new Dungeons & Dragons Next players

Leave a reply

Update: I’ve posted an updated version using the final, fifth-edition rules.

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons Next before, but Gen Con 2013 gave my first chance to run it. I served as dungeon master for five tables. Virtually all my players brought experience with past D&D versions or with Pathfinder, but none had played the next iteration of D&D. This post answers the top 4 questions these players asked about the D&D Next rules. Even if you’ve read the rules, the disengage action probably works differently than you think.

1. Are there opportunity attacks?

Yes, but you only provoke opportunity attacks when you leave a creature’s melee reach. This means you can circle an enemy without provoking so long as you stay within the enemy’s reach. If a creature’s reach exceeds 5 feet, then you can even move 5 feet away without provoking.

If you want to leave a enemy’s reach without provoking, use the disengage action, which lets you move half your regular movement. Because disengaging takes your action, you cannot disengage and also attack or cast a spell—a harsh price for breaking away from the melee. At least you can disengage across more squares than you can shift.

I suspect disengage exists as an action rather than a type of move because the designers elected not to add the complexity of different types of moves, each with different rules. Notice the absence of another type of move with different rules: the run. I think the overall simplification of a move loses more than it gains.

Unlike fourth edition, you only get one opportunity attack per round, because you only get one reaction per round. Due to this limit, and because withdraw allows you to move half your speed, D&D Next encourages more fluid, dynamic combats. I favor this trend.

As the system stands now, you can freely cast spells and use ranged weapons without provoking. For spells, I see no mechanical problems with this change. Wizards will still avoid melee because they’re fragile. I’m happy to see clerics wade into the fray, casting and bashing.

Ranged attacks absolutely need to provoke, because otherwise ranged fighters gain unmatched advantages over melee specialists. Without fear of opportunity attacks, ranged specialists can operate both from a distance and in melee without penalty. Melee specialists enjoy no offsetting advantages.

Update: In the D&D Next Q&A: 12/13/13, designer Rodney Thompson writes, “Though exact details are ongoing, we think it’s likely that there will be some consequence for making a ranged attack while engaged in melee. We do not intend to use opportunity attacks here because we want to keep opportunity attacks as streamlined as possible.”

Update: If you make a ranged attack from melee, you suffer disadvantage on your attack roll.

2. Is there flanking?

No, but the rogue can sneak attack when an ally stands next to their target. During the convention, I briefly talked rules with D&D tzar Mike Mearls. He said that some players find flanking difficult to grasp—not so much with figures that occupy a single square, but with large figures where flanking positions aren’t completely obvious. I expect we will see flanking, and possibly facing, in tactical combat rules.

3. What spells can I cast?

In D&D Next, everyone casts like a third-edition sorcerer. Wizards and clerics prepare a certain number of spells for their day. And then wizards and clerics both get a certain number of castings at each level. You can expend a casting to cast any prepared spell of the same level or lower. Unlike the classic, Vancian system, you can cast a prepared spell more than once as long as you can spend another casting of the proper level or higher. This system grants casters an extra measure of flexibility, while avoiding the risk of preparing a roster of spells that proves useless, resulting in a bad day in the dungeon. There should be no bad days in the dungeon.

4. Does a diagonal move cost one square or one and a half?

D&D Next offers no advice on resolving movement on a grid. Instead the system cites all distances in feet rather than squares. Avid miniature gamers like Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax would surely approve. This leaves dungeon masters and players to choose between the more accurate process of counting 1.5 squares per diagonal move or the simplification of counting 1 square for a diagonal. I went with the accurate 1.5 method, so I could avoid troubling the spirits of Dave, Gary, and Euclid.

During the convention, someone suggested the mental shortcut of counting every second diagonal move as 2 squares. I like that approach and marvel that I’ve never learned it before.

Next: The top 3 rules questions from new D&D next dungeon masters

Gen Con 2013 recap and the D&D Championship visits the Lost City

3 Replies

I’m back from Gen Con and four days of terrific gaming.

For this year, Wizards of the Coast elected to focus its attention on exposing as many as possible to Dungeons & Dragons Next, and so they dropped all Living Forgotten Realms events from the convention. Pushing D&D Next seemed to work. Players new to D&D Next filled my tables and I met a lot of Pathfinder devotees willing to sample the new D&D system.

The lack of LFR disappointed some players and judges, but I appreciated the chance to run D&D Next for the first time. The absence of LFR at this convention doesn’t signal the end of fourth edition or of Living Forgotten Realms. New LFR adventures are coming. The Winter Fantasy convention will feature a slate of LFR events, including a new, paragon-level battle interactive.

2013 D&D Championship - battling Zargon in the lost city

2013 D&D Championship – battling Zargon in the lost city

Although I dungeon mastered the Crisis in Candlekeep delve twice, my DM highlights came from running the Murder in Baldur’s Gate launch adventure three times. Murder in Baldur’s Gate forced me to develop an aspect of my DM skills that I’ve rarely exercised in the past. I’ll write about that in an upcoming post.

As usual, playing the 2013 Dungeons & Dragons Championship delivered as much fun as I ever have playing D&D. The Championship features a lethal adventure intended to test even the best teams of players. The unforgiving challenge brings a sense of peril that you never see in typical adventures, because in typical adventures the odds always favor the players. The event’s time pressure amps up the urgency and demands fast play.

The Lost City (1982) by Tom Moldvay

The Lost City (1982) by Tom Moldvay

This year the author of the championship adventure, M. Sean Molley, created a tribute to the 1982 Lost City adventure by Tom Moldvay. The first round dared teams to recover three staffs from locations in the lost city. Earlier fourth edition championships played solely as tactical miniature battles, but this year’s adventure added puzzles to the mix—a welcome nod to the old tournament classics. The final round required characters to use the staffs in a fight to destroy past and present versions of Zargon, the evil demigod of the lost city. I marvel at how skillfully a battle with so many variables was balanced on the narrow line between difficult and impossible.

As a dungeon master, I admire the DMs in the championship, who must play fast, fair, and show total command of the rules. They do enjoy some perks: Where else can a DM coupe de grace a fallen character without straining D&D’s social contract? Even among this elite crew, our DMs Brian and Sean stood out as exceptional. Plus, our DM for the finals happened to be the adventure’s author.

I played on the team that claimed second place—for the third year in a row. We’re like the 1990-1993 Buffalo Bills of the D&D Championship. Still, I’m thrilled to do well.

Will next year’s Championship be the first to feature the next iteration of the D&D rules?

Multiple attacks, ability checks, and keyed illustrations revisited

Leave a reply
Murder In Baldur's Gate Launch Weekend

Murder In Baldur’s Gate Launch Weekend

At Gen Con 2013, I’ll be running the Dungeons & Dragons Next adventure Murder in Baldur’s Gate most mornings and afternoons. If you attend Gen Con, check my photo in my About section, and then find me and say hello. In real life, I’m less grainy and less out of focus.

I have yet to run D&D Next, so I’m studying the latest rules packet. After the convention, I plan to write some posts discussing aspects of the design. Until then, I want to revisit a few topics.

In “Changing the balance of power,” I told how D&D Next’s flattened to-hit bonuses weakened high-level fighters against low-level enemies. “Fighter-types should hew through the rabble like grass until, bloodied and battle worn, they stand triumphant. Instead, they wind up muffing to-hit rolls against one mook.” I mentioned that restoring multiple attacks would restore the balance. Perhaps the designers reached the same conclusion, because the latest playtest packet grants multiple attacks to fighters and to some other classes.

The playtest package’s DM Guidlines advise skipping ability checks when a character uses a high ability score: “Take into account the ability score associated with the intended action. It’s easy for someone with a Strength score of 18 to flip over a table, though not easy for someone with a Strength score of 9.” As I explained in “In D&D Next, ability modifiers are too small for the ability check mechanic,” the current D&D Next rules practically require this sort of DM intervention because the system fails to give someone with Strength 18 a significant edge over a Strength 9 character. The result of the d20 roll swamps the puny +4 bonus. In practice, the system math makes flipping the table only sightly easier at strength 18.

Ulder Ravengard card from Murder in Baldur's Gate

Ulder Ravengard card from Murder in Baldur’s Gate

In “It’s Mathemagical!,” Mike Mearls discusses plans to introduce escalating ability-check bonuses of up to +12. This may finally give exceptional characters a chance to stand out from ordinary characters—at least at higher levels. Still, the game screams for a system where abilities grant bigger bonuses to ability checks. If a +1 bonus per ability point worked for Moldvay in 1981, then it works in Next. Why not adopt the steeper bonuses? I assume that the designers feel wedded to using the same ability bonuses for ability checks as for attacks and saves.

Way back in “Picturing the dungeon – Other publishers revive keyed illustrations,” I praised the face cards Paizo produces to accompany their adventure paths, so I’m delighted to see similar cards packaged with the Murder in Baldur’s Gate launch adventure.

Pyramid of Shadows - View of the Bridge

Pyramid of Shadows – View of the Bridge

In “Picturing the dungeon – keyed illustrations,” I shared my love of the keyed illustrations included in some early adventures. I lamented how TSR and Wizards seemed to have abandoned this enhancement. Recently, a clearance sale prompted me to buy most of the 9 original adventures shipped for fourth edition. To my surprise, many of these adventures include keyed illustrations. In Pyramid of Shadows, a dungeon with a classic feel, the illustrations seem to hold clues to the adventures or show complicated scenes too difficult to describe, so the pictures compliment the adventure perfectly. In some of the other adventures, the illustrations simply add flavor.