Incredible Vehicle
(It's a blog.)
Hey, blog. Ever play those games where you and your companions take turns coming up with a list of things in alphabetical order? And then each person must of course recite all the ones that have come before. My wife and I did this one, and I was amused. You’ll see why it’s blog-appropriate after the jump. (Or if you see the tags.)
First impressions can be misleading. Here are a few ways that D&D 5e pleasantly surprised me.
Here’s another list of observations about 5E. These are just things that caught my attention when I read things through, either because of how it was different, because there was a technicality, or what have you.
I realized something else. Pick-up games for 5E are way easier.
This post refuses to come together, so I’m going to FORCE IT OUT.
As I intimated earlier, I thought 5E was going to read as a repudiation of 4E. While I was pleasantly surprised by how wrong I was, there are drastic differences. For instance, the 5E class system jettisons the idea of “spell lists” for every class. Classes accrue benefits and spell slots at predefined levels much like in 3E.
In some cases, however, the similarities with 3E are skin deep. Many mechanics are identical to, similar to, or even simpler than their 4E counterparts.
I thought I’d fallen out of love with roleplaying. But it’s not so simple, is it? I hadn’t given D&D Next a second thought, disappointed after hearing rumors about spell memorization being back, that it was a rejection of 4E.
My wife was still interested, so I didn’t reject it out of hand. I certainly didn’t show much enthusiasm until a friend of mine wrote about it. So what gives?
It’s time for a long post, blog.
In 5E, the highest you can start with, before racial bonuses, is 15. You can see this in the Basic Rules. There are two reasons.
The first reason is that 4E effectively gave you 32 points by giving you 22 and starting you out with 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 8. 5E gives you 27 points and six 8s.
The other reason is this:
Using this method, 15 is the highest ability score you can end up with, before applying racial increases.
To refresh your memory, in 4E you could go as high as 20 (+5!) if you went for a stat block with a leading 18. Or you could have two 18s if you had two 16s. Now the highest you can get is 17.
There are a few implications, some more obvious than others:
Humans make this interesting since they get +1 to all ability scores. The stat block 15, 13, 13, 11, 11, 10 becomes 16, 14, 14, 12, 12, 11.
A quick check suggests that this is very similar to 3E, just on the cusp of “tough hero.”
So what else is different?
Look at some of the magic items in the DMG basic rules. Gauntlets of Ogre Power set your Str to 19, which isn’t even that impressive. A spell like Bull’s Strength now “just” grants advantage on Str checks.
A fighter with chainmail (AC 16) can get to AC 19 if they use a shield and sacrifice a more interesting fighting style just to get +1 AC. For reference’s sake, a Stone Golem (CR 10), only gets +10 to hit. A troll (CR 5) gets +7.
Not only are stat bonuses small compared to 3E and 4E, as far as I can tell they stay relatively low. Attributes can’t exceed 20. Proficiency bonuses max out at six (6!), at level 17.
As far as I can tell, tagged bonuses (“enhancement bonus”) are gone entirely. That’s telling: the main reason it was necessary was because there were so many similar bonuses floating around.
All in all the numeric system strikes me as very, very clean. Stats matter more and they’re simultaneously lower. Instead of inflating numbers, you add more interesting mechanics. It’s the difference between telling and showing.
Somehow D&D 5E, née D&D Next, snuck up on me. Really, I hadn’t much intention of picking it up. Some of the rumors I’d heard put me off, and I’d more or less fallen out of love with roleplaying. (We grew apart, you see.)
Just as a note, if you’re curious, you can get most of the rules (“basic rules”) for free from Wizards’ site. The PHB has the most core of the core classes — fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard, with one archetype each — and the DMG contains information about encounters plus a long list of monsters. If you buy the PHB, this seems like it’s enough to play even though the DMG doesn’t come out until November, after the Monster Manual.
Man, just when I thought I’d started to understand macros, I stumble across Racket.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still enjoying my foray into Racket. But if, for instance, you started out trying to understand Lisp macros via On Lisp, you may be in for some trouble. Yes, as far as I can tell, the usual syntax like
`(foo ,bar ,@baz)
will work. But if you begin to read the section of the Racket Guide about macros, it becomes clear that there’s much, much more to the picture.
This is really just me thinking out loud as I work this out. I’m more sure of some things than others, and I’ll try to make clear which is which, but consider this a blanket caveat.
Recently I decided to give Common Lisp another shot. I like Clojure, but I want to look into Old Stuff like Lisp, and if I can add another scripting language to my toolkit, so much the better.
Except now I’m playing with Racket (Scheme). And, uh, how is it that Racket is this awesome and I hadn’t heard about it sooner? Whereas Common Lisp feels more like the product of its time, Racket feels profoundly modern, while retaining what makes Lisp special. These are of course subjective impressions from a relative Lisp neophyte. That said, I hope I’m not completely off the mark.