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.