Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition Player's Handbook Reviewed

So, I just spent a whole blog explaining my history with Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and what I thought of each of the previous editions. You can see that in this blog, Prelude to 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, if you need a history lesson on the game from my perspective. Now, the reason I posted all of that, I got a copy of the 5th Edition Player's Handbook from a game store that was favored with one of the advance releases before the official release date of August 19. Here is what I think of the game in two words based on this book alone: BUY IT.

I'll explain why, but first I want to say one other thing. I had a friend post about being worried about the schism that Fifth Edition may cause in the gaming community due to the existence of Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder (you can see some information on what that is in the blog listed above). Personally, Paizo started and caused any schism that will be created, so if blame should be placed for this, it should be placed on them. However, they made a good business decision, they took something they had legally and they improved it to compete directly with Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the producers of the Dungeons and Dragons game. That competition, I have no doubt, is what led WotC to go back to the drawing board as quickly as they did from Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons to produce the new Fifth Edition of the game. Competition is good, it has produced a much better product from WotC to bring back the fans of D&D. Let's see what Paizo can do now considering most of what they started with came from WotC and what WotC has now is better in every way and not an open to Paizo under an open gaming license agreement.

A few notes for short hand I am going to use:
1E = First Edition Dungeons and Dragons (including the original little paper books, Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and all of its optional rules through the reprints of the original hardbacked copies of the three core books)
2E = Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons
3E = Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons, its half-step iteration 3.5, and its red-headed step-child produced by Paizo Publishing, Pathfinder (3.75)
4E = Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons
5E = Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons

Now, the real meat and why you should go buy the Fifth Edition of the grandfather of all role-playing games.

If you played previous versions of D&D or read my blog above, you have an idea of what was wrong with the game in all previous editions no matter what company produced the version. I'm going to start with the basics of the fixes. The rules are codified as they were under 3E, but the rules have been greatly reduced and streamlined to a much more compact game that allows for role-playing to once again freely enter the game as the game judge or Dungeon Master (DM) once again gains a some of the need for officiating back and some more free-form to which type of check should be applied in various circumstances. Healing issues have been resolved in a fabulous method - no more characters with so much healing there is no fear of death or too little healing that they cannot recover from a fight in a reasonable amount of game time. Spellcaster lack of combat options at low levels have been resolved using the spell system that existed under all previous editions of the game before 4E. Feats have been redone and balanced in as well as the former paragon and epic tier character options. Skills are "gone" but not completely. Combat has been simplified and streamlined, but not at the rejection of codification of combat. The game is better by returning to its roots with modern twists from lessons learned over the years and editions.

Healing went from "how in the world do we keep fighting after taking that much damage when our cleric has blown all his spells" (1E/2E/3E) to "you can't kill us even if we don't have a cleric" (4E). Now, we get, "this encounter is rough, but we can survive it if we play well as a team and use our resources wisely." The second winds that pretty much spelled no-death in 4E is gone under 5E. However, the fighter still has an ability called second wind, which lets the character heal once in each combat similar to the way Second Wind worked under 4E, but it's depleted after one use in a fight. All other healing comes from the same sources it has always come from under the first 3 editions of the game - the cleric, the paladin, etc. This lets the character that is normally taking the brunt of the damage take care of himself at least to a degree without the cleric having to blow all of his healing on the fighter's injuries in the first couple of rounds. In addition to the magical healing of some classes and the fighter's single use ability, every character can heal herself during short rests, so no more eight hour rest required after each combat, but also no need to blow every healing spell and potion the party can afford during and after the first fight. It's a good balance between the party knowing they could have a character die in any given combat, but they are not completely screwed by a bad roll, a DM mistake, or other things they may have no control over. Yes, a party with no idea of tactics may still end up totally annihilated by an unforgiving DM, but that could happen under most editions, though I saw parties with a complete lack of tactics survive where they should not have under 4E due to its over the top healing system.

Spellcasters cannot blast with their spells through a whole combat, in a way. The 5E creators took the spell system as it has always existed since 1E and through 3E and used mechanics that already existed to allow this with slight modification. The cantrip is now an at-will spell for most spellcasters. Cantrips that do damage, now do real damage for low-level characters, and by real damage, I mean it does the same amount of damage as a shortsword or mace (1d6). These are the go-to weapons of the rogue and the cleric, so wizards are now on par with those two classes when their true spells (1st level spells and up) are gone for combat. To make sure, everyone understands the value of this, every traditional pure spellcasting class (bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, and wizard) has cantrips. Only the paladin and ranger do not have cantrips, and they have normal weapons to rely on at any time anyway. I know you don't believe me, but here's a simple list - bards have the vicious mockery cantrip (the worst at 1d4, but it gains as level increases and bards generally have decent weapons anyway), clerics have the sacred flame cantrip (1d8), druids have the thorn whip cantrip (1d6), sorcerers and wizards have the acid splash cantrip (1d6), and that is not an exhaustive list of choices. Each caster knows a minimum of 2 cantrips at first level, so she will even have some choices and most have 3 with one having 4. The rest of the spellcasting ability is much like what we are used to from 1E/2E/3E except at the higher levels. At higher levels for those massive damage spells, the mechanics have been changed slightly again to compensate for the high level caster's ability to devastate because she gets to roll 20 damage dice or 10 damage dice or whatever her spellcasting level is at the time. Damage dice for most of those high damage spells like fireball is now tied to its spell level and not the spellcaster's level. "Wait? What? I only get to do 3 dice of damage now with my most devastating spells?" you ask. No, yes, those spells are third or fourth level spells or whatever, but you can cast them as higher level spells by using higher level spell slots, so you can cast your 3rd level fireball as a 9th level fireball, but that's one less prismatic wall you get to cast today. This leaves the casters not just tossing fireballs out with no consideration at the higher levels as they may be sacrificing another more important spell for later for that massive damage output. Wizards and clerics now have to play smart with their choices of what to cast at any given time.

Feats have been integrated to the classes in some cases and made optional in others. Many of the commonly taken feats have been integrated in as class abilities for each class, like the meta-magic feats for example for wizards, which are now class features that they can take at certain levels. The rules have also made the combining of meta-magic a little more restrictive so no more double empowered, heightened, widened, miss my friends and only hit my enemies fireball changed to an ice ball, but you can still do most of that singularly and some of them can be combined. Also, every class does not get the same meta-magic since they have been made class abilities for example. The number of feats is also greatly reduced, for now at least - I'm sure we'll get more as time goes by. Each feat has been re-defined to work under the new mechanics of 5E though, which is much more balancing than all previous editions; more on that later. The feats that remained as feats, are, also, now optional for use, and if you think your character will be imbalanced because your friend used the optional feats and you didn't, you should also know that to get any feat, you have to give up something. Each class has gotten little ability bumps as they went up in level at 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20th level for a while now. This still exists, you get a +2 to a single ability or +1 to two abilities at those levels unless you want a feat, then you trade out your ability point bump for a feat. That's a balance that I can appreciate, what's more important to you, what that feat gives you or +1 to what an ability score bump will give you. Feats done right and balanced from all I can see and from the friends I know who are trying to break the game still right now.

Paragon level class options from 3E are now integrated into the classes from the beginning. Epic level options are gone because we do not have epic level play at this time (the game only takes us to 20th level). All of the paragon options aren't here, but many of the more popular ones are, and where classes do not have their old paragon options integrated it's because something else was integrated into the class instead. Here's a brief rundown of examples, which will also tell you the classes that exist in the Player's Handbook to start (most choose at third level; cleric, sorcerer, warlock (all at 1st) and wizard (2nd) being the exceptions):

Barbarians choose from 2 primal paths (Path of the Berserker, Path of the Totem Warrior)
Bards choose from 2 Bardic colleges (College of Lore, College of Valor)
Clerics choose from 7 domains (Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Tempest, Trickery, War)
Druids choose from 2 Druidic circles (Circle of the Land, Circle of the Moon)
Fighters choose from 3 martial archetypes (Champion, Battle Master, Eldritch Knight)
Monks choose from 3 monastic traditions (Way of the Open Hand, Way of Shadow, Way of the Four Elements)
Paladins choose from 3 sacred oaths (Oath of Devotion, Oath of the Ancients, Oath of Vengeance)
Rangers choose from 2 archetypes (Hunter, Beast Master)
Rogues choose from 3 archetypes (Thief, Assassin, Arcane Trickster)
Sorcerers choose from 2 origins (Draconic Bloodline, Wild Magic)
Warlocks choose from 3 otherworldly patrons (the Archfey, The Fiend, The Great Old One)
Wizards choose from 8 arcane traditions (abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, transmutation)

There is some room for expansion here from what we've seen of the paragon paths in 3E, but plenty of the favorites are here to start.

Skills are still a part of the game, but not like they were. Skills are no longer based on your class, instead each character chooses a background like acolyte, criminal, or entertainer to name a few. Each background gives a character proficiency in two skills, proficiency in at least one tool (used with some skills) and some other features as well as some basic background suggestions and characteristics for role-playing. Backgrounds are where you get the skills you are proficient in (I'll explain the proficiency mechanic shortly). It should also be noted that there is a list of backgrounds and what they provide in the Player's Handbook, but they are examples, and backgrounds can be built by DM and players to reflect the nature of what a player wants for his character to be or the nature of the campaign as long as they follow the basic rules laid out in the book. As I said, the game reintroduced the need for the DM to once again take an active role in the game besides just running the bad guys for combat. I remember how in 2E this was how you determined skills that your character might have before the rules were codified - now, the rules are still codified, but backgrounds have importance again if the players and DM want them to.

Some mechanics changes that are definitely for the better:

The bonuses to hit based on class are gone for the most part. All classes have the same to hit bonuses at equal character levels, so a fighter is no better with his weapons than a wizard. The fighter does have a better choice of weapons that he is proficient with, but if a fighter and a wizard both pick up a dagger and have equivalent strength, they both have the same chance of hitting. The weapons that each class is proficient with are much the same as they have always been since that class's introduction to the game. This is where the other big mechanics change occurs, there is a new mechanic that goes with proficiency. If you are proficient with something, you gain a bonus to the use of that item, and what I just called to hit bonuses are actually proficiency bonuses. So, for example, at first level all classes have a +2 to checks with their class's weapons and with the two skills they are proficient at as well as the set of tools they are proficient with. When you make an attack or a skill check, you add your proficiency bonus to the roll (if you're proficient at it) and ability score modifier that applies and adjustments for other factors like advantage/disadvantage (more on this later), cover, etc. Everyone has the same number of skills, everyone has the same proficiency bonus at the same level - the only variation is now ability score or proficiency and other external modifiers. It should be noted that you can never add proficiency to a roll more than once even if it's from other sources; certain things can augment your proficiency bonus, but for example, you do not get to add your skill proficiency and your tool proficiency to a skill check to craft a new shield. It's a good system that balances all of the classes for probably the first time ever.

Remember how when a character would get knocked prone in 3E, they were pretty much screwed if a bad guy was standing next to them. That is over, and you do not lose all of your movement for it either. Standing from prone costs half of your movement basically, and you can still use the other half to move if you choose. Moving away from an enemy still allows for an opportunity attack, but you're standing up at least for it.

Advantage/disadvantage are the major bonus/penalty mechanics. Certain effects can cause you to be at a disadvantage or advantage over an adversary or just in a situation. What this means in both cases is that you roll two dice when required to roll and take the best/worst of the two. For example:
 Sarai the rogue is fighting an orc, and the orc trips and falls to the ground prone; Sarai now has advantage over the orc, while the orc has a disadvantage to attack Sarai. Sarai tries to stab the orc with her shortsword; she rolls 2 d20's to hit..one is a 14 and one is a 10, she gets to use the 14 because she has an advantage. If the orc had been attacking her, and rolled the same dice with the same rolls, the orc would have to use the 10 to determine if he hit Sarai. Not a perfect system, but better than the flat bonus of old.

Conditions have changed in how they work in most cases and are not as brutal as they were under 3E. Prone being a good example of the changes.

All told, from the Player's Handbook, Fifth Edition D&D is an awesome game and the game we should have gotten instead of 4E, but at least WotC seems to have learned from the experience of 3E and 4E and given us what seems on par to be a great new edition of an old classic.

I wasn't going to play D&D anymore after my experiences with 4E and Pathfinder. This book has made me change my mind, so as long as the Monster Manual doesn't give us orcs that can destroy my first level character in one hit, I need to find a group that wants to play some old school home campaign style D&D. If you were set against D&D because of 3E or 4E or even if you went over to Pathfinder, this game deserves a look from you. It's got what you're looking for, and it is the game you want to be playing.

See you at a convention somewhere in the future I hope.

Prelude to 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

Let me start this by saying that there is not an edition of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) that I have not played, that includes Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) and the more recent Neverwinter (two free to play MMOs). When I left California at the end of 2011, I also left role-playing at the time. 4th Edition D&D was quickly going in a downward spiral for me, and 5th Edition had already been announced. I was disillusioned with the game because of 4th Edition, which is saying a lot, considering I had been playing this game for 30 years give or take by that point. I had no intention of going back to the game. I also had tried Pathfinder once, so I will admit that I had never given it a real chance, but some of the problems that had been seen with D&D 3.5 (3rd Edition with some changes) were still present with Paizo's so-called D&D 3.75 known as Pathfinder. I will also say that what the people who have created these games over the decades have done should be lauded, their talent and desire to make a game for us all to enjoy far surpasses what most of us could have done on our own. I met and even got to game with Dave Arneson before he died, and he was a creative genius from all I could tell. I can say I saw E. Gary Gygax once, but never got to game with him. I got to game with the founder of Wizards of the Coast as well, and he struck me as someone with a love for the game and a mind for rules mechanics. I am doing this blog because I bought the 5th Edition D&D Player's Handbook, and I am going to review it in another blog after this one, but for those who are unfamiliar with the different editions or have not played them all, I wanted to give a bit of my perspective on each of them.

First Edition (1E) was a start with lots of problems, but the fact that it left many rules largely undefined meant that if you needed the rules to define your game, you were left with lots of problems while if you were more of a role-player who did not care about the numbers and mechanics as much as the fun, the game could work - if the whole group was playing the same way. It got us moving though, the first of all role-playing games (no, I did not do the research, so maybe there was some game before this, but this was the one that put role-playing games on the map) it moved us in a direction for gaming we had never ventured into before. It was a time when nerds, jocks, cheerleaders, and others who had a creative streak could come together and be something they only dreamed of in real life. Okay, maybe we were all nerds in the beginning looking for a way to experience something more with our friends, but it offered it to everyone non-discriminately. As evidenced by the fact that even Vin Diesel has admitted to playing D&D as a youth and even today on occasion.

Second Edition (2E) did little more for the game than make some optional rules from 1E official rules, and add some horrible terms to the game that everyone is still trying to wash out of their hair. To-Hit AC 0 (THAC0) for example, which was a different codification of to-hit rolls to make them simpler in reality, but was a horrible term. It made some minor rules tweaks and changes, but nothing major to the game. Both of these editions were crafted by the company that E. Gary Gygax (one of the co-creators together with Dave Arneson - both of whom passed from this world a few years back) started in the early years of the game (Tactical Simulations in Reality or TSR as it came to be known).

Third Edition (3E) brought huge changes to the game. Produced by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) who had bought TSR when it went through bankruptcy. 3E codified many things and added mechanics previously unseen and possibly not even needed to the game in some cases, but most were welcome changes when 3E was introduced. The rules lawyers and numbers guys were finally happy, the game had what seemed to be well-thought out rules and mechanics, so everyone could be held to the same standard of the game. In my opinion, this cost us some of the role-playing as number crunchers started working the numbers to maximize potential in every character they created, while those of us who just wanted to have a good time playing a fantasy warrior or wizard in a world of magic struggled to keep up with these number crunchers and make our characters viable as more than just window dressing to others. The glut of rules that came with expansions eventually began to cripple the game as more and more rules created more and more "cheats" like video games or more and more over the top abilities. The game began to destroy itself...and then came 3.5 the rules adjustment that was not minor enough to allow you to keep playing with 3E's books, but required whole new purchases, so it was a new edition in essence.

3.5 corrected many of the problems that had become inherent in the rules expansions of 3E, but it left the inherent problem of expansions that were released afterwards with no regard to the hard work the original 3.5 crafters had put into fixing the rules. And, some of the major problems were still present with the game that had always been there from the days of 1E.

Those inherent problems included the fact that wizards and other spellcasting classes were left with nothing to do for a whole "day" of in-game time once they had cast their two spells for the day. They were left to resort to weapons which they could only poorly use and which did very little damage to the monsters of the world compared to the martial classes. In addition, clerics were left as little more than band-aids for everyone else, especially at early levels of play, where there couple of spells were usually quickly used up in healing the martial classes, so the group could survive the first couple fights if not the very first fight. The game was very much a game of fight, sleep 8 hours (when all spells and abilities would reset) and press on to the next fight down the hall. Kind of silly from a mechanical standpoint of any kind of assumed reality within the fantasy, but we all learned to deal with it because we loved the game. At higher levels, wizards and other spellcasting characters began to dominate and martial characters were kind of left standing there holding their swords while whole groups of characters were decimated by powerful spells cast across the field of battle while the fighter was still trying to get to the bad guys to engage. 3E/3.5 thought it had the fix to this, but in the end just created a case of arms race between player (characters) and dungeon master (DM - controller of all bad guys) as those who wrote adventures or ran adventures tried to find a way to have their monsters survive the devastating effects that players brought to the table.

Into this mix came a new generation of role-players as the popularity was at one of its high levels of interest and play with 3E/3.5. This new generation had been raised on Everquest, World of Warcraft (WoW), and any of a hundred other video games that had brought D&D into a computer age. They had attention spans for the game that went with their love for video games; they wanted fast paced, heroic actions and combat. This led to Fourth Edition (4E) Dungeons and Dragons, the first of the editions to undergo any sort of true public play testing, and even that was relatively small for what was being done with the game. Maybe we all should have taken note of how little playtests for video games fixed those problems in the six month betas that took place for them and known we were going to have problems. The problems with D&D of course is that it was a table top, pen and paper game, so patches could not be pushed in to fix the inherent problems like with a video game.

4E arrived after roughly six months of playtesting by various groups across the world. I was one of those playtesters, and I can tell you some of our concerns were listened to, but others were not. We never got feedback during the playtests other than we would get rules changes for each new round of playtests and could see if something we suggested had been implemented at that time or not. 4E was a table top game that played like a video game. The role-playing was all but gone in theory, it lived on in spirit for those who enjoyed it, but everything was quantified as in 3E/3.5 as much as possible and if you did not have miniatures as with 3E/3.5, you were going to have problems. The ability to survive and heal through fights was fixed from all previous editions as each class gained an ability to heal during fights. Spellcasting classes were no longer limited in their use of spells per day as previously so their most basic combat spells were available for every fight without an 8 hour rest for the characters. Combat played like a video game. Each class had abilities called by many different names depending on if the class was martial, spellcasting, or something else. Each ability was broken into different categories, the basics of which were Any time, Once per combat, or once without a character sleeping for 8 hours of game time. These basically transmitted to video game recharge times for abilities. We all used little cards and markers to keep track of whether we had used our abilities or not and we looked like a bunch of Magic, the Gathering players (the funny thing is that that card game is what allowed WotC to have the money to buy TSR). I should also mention that by this time WotC had sold out to a well known company, Hasbro. WotC was left to operate semi-independently, but the fact that what started as a game made by two people who had very little to do with the toy and game industry when they started had been bought by a major company in the industry meant a lot to how things ran. 4E in my opinion sucked the soul out of the game in my opinion. We all could have sat at our houses and played Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games like WoW for as much as we were role-playing by this point. Yes, there were exceptions to the rules, and I participated in some awesome 4E games, but it just was not the same anymore.

Paizo's Pathfinder spun out of the open license for D&D 3.5. Paizo had once been a small publishing arm of TSR and WotC which was spun off at some point and became Paizo Publishing (I was living and working in Saudi Arabia when this happened, so I may have some of that wrong). Anyway, when WotC announced 4E, they shut Paizo out of the ability to continue in the relationship they had enjoyed under the open licensing agreements of 3.5. Paizo was none too happy about this I imagine, and the results were that Paizo took the 3.5 rules and refined them on their own to create what was initially dubbed D&D 3.75 and ultimately became known as the Pathfinder system. Paizo took the rules of 3.5 and refined them and fixed the major rules problems with the balance of the game. The problem is that some of the other inherent problems remained, like how to heal a character during a fight or even after a fight without "sleep" for your character, which made no sense. The one game I participated in using Pathfinder was horrible, a DM mistake and unwillingness to relent in the mistake he made led to the entire group of characters being slaughtered with no hope of escape. It was brutal and led to me never giving the game a chance past that. As far as I was concerned, it still had the worst of the problems that 3.0/3.5 had, and it did. Although I know many people who have enjoyed the game and still do.

WotC took up the gauntlet though this time around, Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons has been playtested for the past two years. Groups have been given feedback and seen their critiques taken into serious consideration as WotC showed no rush to push what was originally dubbed as D&D Next out the door. And now, the time is here, those of us who did not participate in the playtests get to see the results. A simplified version of the rules was released on July 15, so even more people could see what had been done and August 19 is the official release date of the 5th Edition Player's Handbook. The most important book to the game since it has always contained 80% of the rules needed to play. All we need to play other than the Player's Handbook is the statistics for monsters, which normally comes in a book called the Monster Manual. The third core book for the group as long time players know is the Dungeon Master's Guide, which helps the game judge run the game and officiate, mainly though, it details magic items and treasure for us to collect for our characters. Be ready, Fifth Edition goes back to the roots of the game while moving forward to today.