Dungeons & Dragons Next Playtest Released 213
New submitter thuf1rhawat writes "For a certain type of geek, nothing is more important than Dungeons & Dragons. In January, Wizards of the Coast announced that the next iteration of the game (referred to as D&D Next) was under development, and now they've released an open playtest. They hope to gather as much player feedback as possible to help refine the new rules."
Quick Summary (Score:5, Informative)
4th Edition Base - Limited Power System + New simplified math system for positive or negative modifications to circumstance + Vancian Casting (kinda)
If you're expecting a huge shift or one back to 3rd you're better off sticking with Pathfinder at this point.
Re:d3 (Score:2, Informative)
d6/2, round up. Turn in your geek card.
d2. Come on man, if you don't know the damage for blowguns and pixie bites what good are you?
There is a d3, it's not a d6 / 2 round up either. (Score:5, Informative)
There is no d3. The lowest die is d4.
As an ancient D&D player, I must say you are wrong. The Three Sided Die is shaped like a football with three ridges. The football shape keeps it from standing on either end, and you read the top ridge.
You can use: "d6 divided by two, rounding up" in a pinch, but prepare to be pointed and snort-chuckled at.
Re:So Many Good Alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
Re:D&D is a crappy FRP system. (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, your DM must be an asshole. And also your DM must be in 1985.
Every 5th level fighter has a wide variety of feats to select from. A 1st level human fighter has THREE feats to pick- you could specialize in archery, melee, reach weapons, combat maneuvers, or take defensive feats or mounted feats.
You also have skill points to determine non-combat things, such as how perceptive you are, whether you are good at sailing and/or cooking, or pretty much anything else.
The term "magic-user" hasn't been used since 1st edition, and of course, every caster's actual spells that he has access to make a wide difference- on top of the feats, he has.
And in practice, you have widely different magic items.
Dicing for stats, while certainly supported, is but one of many ways to assign character stats. Unarguably the most popular version is a point buy, which lets you build a character much closer to the one you want.
Your terminology and assumptions are out of date, but even way back THEN, you could point buy, and had other things to distinguish characters, even though we didn't see feats to represent areas of specialization until 3.0.
Re:Anything Else? (Score:5, Informative)
D&D and AD&D had several versions alongside each other (they were separate games developed in parallel by TSR). After Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, they merged them into a single line that was named D&D but was more like TSR's AD&D rules. Consequently there are 2 different things called D&D 3rd Edition, D&D 4th Edition--to avoid confusion, Wizards of the Coast refers to the old TSR-released ones as "D&D Version 3" and reserves the name "3rd Edition" for the post-WotC merged game. But historically the TSR one was also called D&D 3rd Edition.
The timeline was something like:
D&D 1st Edition/Chainmail rules
D&D 1st Edition/Greyhawk rules
D&D 2nd Edition
AD&D 1st Edition
D&D 3rd Edition
D&D 4th Edition
AD&D 2nd Edition
D&D 5th Edition
(Wizards of the Coast buys them out here)
D&D 3rd Edition
D&D 3.5th Edition
D&D 4th Edition
Wizard of the Coast's D&D 3rd Edition and later are evolutions of the AD&D rules more than of the D&D rules
Unofficially the later years of AD&D 2nd Edition are called the 2.5th edition sometimes.
The original 1st edition of D&D you had to have the Chainmail table-top game rules to resolve combat; that changed when the Greyhawk supplement was released, giving D&D its own combat rules. So a lot of people consider the change from Chainmail to Greyhawk rules to be as significant as an official new edition.
Re:d3 (Score:2, Informative)
Guess again, Bucky. Link [thinkgeek.com] to d3 and other less-common but nevertheless very real dice.
I've got a d2 right here that cost me only a quarter.
1e fans should check out OSRIC (Score:4, Informative)
You may be interested in OSRIC [wikipedia.org], which is a free PDF of 1e crunch, with all new fluff for copyright purposes. Basically, OSRIC is to 1e as Pathfinder is to 3e.
Re:Uh....May Fools Day? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't work for Paizo, and I largely agree with the grandparent. Yes, Pathfinder is very similar to D&D 3.5. People *liked* D&D 3.5 - Pathfinder fixes a few bits that didn't flow quite right, simplifies a few other extraneous bits, and repackages it. It's a straightforward fork of an open-licensed project, and a good one.