Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook Released

New submitter GammaKitsune writes: "The Player's Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, formerly known as "D&D Next," released today to major bookstores and online retailers across the U.S. The Player's Handbook, which contains core rules for gameplay and character creation, is one of thee core rulebooks that developer Wizards of the Coast plans to release in 2014. The Monster Manual is scheduled to release in late September, and the Dungeon Master's Guide will release in mid November. Also out today is the first of two adventure modules in which players team up to battle against the dragon goddess Tiamat.

Fifth edition has a lot to prove following the highly-controversial fourth edition, the rise of competing roleplaying game Pathfinder, and two years of public playtesting. Initial reviews posted on Amazon appear overwhelmingly positive at the time of writing, but more skeptical gamers may wish to take a look at the free "Basic Rules" posted on the official D&D website. The basic rules contain all the bare essentials needed to create a character or run your own adventure, and will serve both as a free introduction for new players and as a holdover for long time players until the remaining two rulebooks are released.

Comments

Flaws?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Characters have to have Flaws?

I'll stick with 2nd edition, and let all of the people that have to have flaws keep wasting cash.

Re:Flaws?

[Rakhar]

I've played in several systems with perks/flaws and they're normally fun. It encourages people to take personality traits that they otherwise wouldn't bother with, and also gives it a solid spot on their sheet to remind them.

That said, I stopped buying D&D stuff after 3.5 was announced and I realized WotC was going to just keep changing the game every few years. 3.5 was still mostly compatible, but I saw the writing on the wall. Nowadays I just make my own systems for fun, keeping die rolls to a minimum and trying to avoid encouraging min/maxing.

Re:Flaws?

[lgw]

Min/maxing is half the fun of the game, unless it leaves the PCs woefully unbalanced between one another. What you want is a system where min/maxing produces reasonable character concepts, and reasonable character concepts produce well-optimized characters. That was the huge flaw in 3.5 - it was impossible for the new player to figure out what worked mechanically and what didn't. When I play an RPG, I want to play a hero, dammit. I can play the flawed loser in real life, thank you very much.. But I shouldn't have to know or care that if my idea of a hero is a martial monk that I'll bee all but useless in any encounter, while if it's a pure caster that I'll have an "I win" button if I do it right.

That's the problem. Not the idea that if I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be the smartest guy around, or if I'm going to hit people in the face with my axe, then I'm going to be the biggest, toughest guy around. Those are totally viable character ideas, especially your first time playing before you've grown bored of the shallow archetypes. And yet, that's min-maxing. Bah, min-maxing is fine. It's a broken system where in order to be an non-cliche character you have to be disadvantaged mechanically, because the game is build on archetype enforcement, that's the problem.

OK, it's worse still if you buy what you thought was an RPG and it turns out to just be miniatures combat rules. 4E got combat right, but the game had little else. At least in 3.5 with a veteran DM guiding new players to make effective characters, or any previous D&D version, there was a deep game there that only occasionally focused on combat.

Re:Flaws?

[Inconexo]

This discussion is reaching higher levels of rhetoric.

Re:Flaws?

[VikingNation]

They must have gained enough XP to gain access to a new rhetoric feat.

Re:Flaws?

[Dr. Evil]

Your style of RPG was perfected a few years ago: http://progressquest.com/

Re:Flaws?

[Culture20]

GURPS strongly suggests a limit on disadvantages, and there are "disadvantages" like truthfulness, sense of duty, code of honor, etc. that restrict actions but are heroic in nature. Of course a friend of mine has a pirate campaign where there is no disad limit and players usually start as physically disfigured outlaws with psychological issues, some who owe allegiance to captains of other ships. But that's pretty normal for pirates.

Re:Flaws?

[Mike Buddha]

IMO 5e is better than 0e, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, and 4e. It's a culmination of the best elements of all these editions, with none of the crap. It's a svelte paragon of the D&D genre that puts the gameplay back into the rolling of dice to determine success, without the irritating paperwork involved in 2e-3.5e. Most of 4e was pitched :)

Re:Flaws?

[lgw]

The problem with 4e is it dropped everything else. The fixes to combat make it much more accessible to a new generation, and that's great, but a D&D session shouldn't play like an MMO. You need just as much richness in the setting, in open-ended exploration, in diplomacy, in absurdly over-engineered traps, and so on. 4E got some pieces very right, but it's too tightly wound IMO - too much focus on combat, and especially on well-balanced combats. It's a poor system to accommodate cleverness and tactical elements not captured by player abilities.

4E adventures tend to be a set of very-well-balanced encounters all very level appropriate for a party, but that loses much of the charm of D&D. 4E is poorly suited mechanically for "crazy plans that just might work" to take on foes far out of the party's level range (unless they're scripted into the module). E.g., the party wants to kills a group of foes far more powerful than they, so they gather intelligence by diplomacy, intrigue, and seduction, discover a good time and place for an ambush, arrange to blow up a cliff face to drop an avalanche on the foes as they walk past on a marrow path, then attack before the dust settles. Pre-4E, it's fairly natural for a good DM to figure out how that all works and run a fun session around it in a way the players find fair. In 4E you have so little to work with for any of that, unless it was part of the script.

5e: Best D&D, MHO

[seebs]

I have basically liked all the D&Ds, so I'm a little biased. I even liked 4e, although I recognize that it was a very different kind of game in a lot of ways from the others.

But basically, if you liked D&D pre-4e, and hated 4e, 5e may be what you were looking for. It's a much cleaner system than 3e/3.5e/PF; simpler and clearer. It's not as complicated in some ways. It doesn't have nearly as much detail in the rules, it doesn't have as many formal definitions. But it's clearer and easier to read. And before you dismiss "easier to read" as unimportant, consider: I spent about 10 years on an ISO language standards committee. I assure you, I'm not afraid of formal language. But I like 5e's system better.

Most of the bonus stacking rules are gone, replaced by a mechanic called "advantage/disadvantage". If you have advantage or disadvantage on a roll, you roll 2d20 and take the higher or lower respectively. If you have neither or both, you roll normally. Most things that used to be +2-+4 bonuses of various types are now "advantage", and most things that used to be penalties are now "disadvantage". In practice, you get similar results with a lot less addition, and without having to check the bonus types of 8 different modifiers to figure out which ones stack.

Everyone I know who's played it has been really happy with it so far. The system is much less focused on trying to resolve every possible question; instead, the assumption is that the DM is not an idiot and is not playing maliciously. If you tend towards adversarial player/DM relationships, avoid 5e; it's not designed for that, and it would be horrible. But if you are playing with people who are basically clear on the idea that games are meant to be fun, and who can cooperate without epic rules battles, this is probably the best D&D ever.

The anon coward's "MMO Crap" comment is well past "baseless" into "completely incoherent". 4e had a few traits that sort of, if you squinted just right, looked like it was MMO-oriented, but mostly it was more like wargames than like any MMO I've ever seen. 5e is pretty much like a cross between 3e and Rules Cyclopedia D&D, with a much cleaner and simpler rules set, and a lot more interesting flavor to things.

Other things:

Lots of the "missing" complexity is rumored to be in the DMG as optional rules.

Casters as a whole are significantly nerfed compared to 3e, or for that matter compared to any previous edition. (Max-level caster? You get a ninth level spell per day. Use it carefully.)

There's some really crazy Internet drama about some of the consultants, which is best ignored, and has no basis in reality.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[wisnoskij]

Thanks for the change summery, but I have one question. Never played any DnD-like, except Doom the boardgame, which I think is wildly different but at least had a DM. So how does stacking resolve then? You never seem to mention that. They got rid of math by having a generic advantage/disadvantage system. But does that mean that nothing stacks, or everything stacks? Can you have a double advantage? IMHO, stacking is a pretty important part of RPGs. RPGs that do not allow anything to stack tend to be shallow. And I am not sure how they end up making a generic bonus work. Some bonuses need to be better than others, right? And some need huge advantages offset by medium disadvantaged, to have an interesting game. I think I am just confused because I am not imagining what the bonus system is correctly.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[LordLucless]

To offer a counter-opinion:

I played 2E in high school, missed most of 3E (except for the computer games loosely based on that ruleset, which I love and still play today) and these days play 4E. I've played a couple of encounters with the 5E playtest bundle.

My group play D&D more as a tactical skirmish game than as an RPG. We play RPGs too, but we tend to use indie or White Wolf (does White Wolf count as indie these days) systems for that. D&D 4E as a tactical skirmish game, is awesome. I'm not sure if you'd consider my style to be "adversarial" DMing. I'm certainly deliberately trying to bring the team down in combat, but I'm not trying to "beat" them - I'm the DM, if I want to "beat" them, rocks just fall.

A perfect encounter, for me, is when the party beats the monsters with no deaths, but feels like they only just pulled it off. A perfect adventuring day is when the whole party finishes the last encounter for the day with no surges, and dailies used. If I've killed one of them, I've failed; if they haven't been challenged, I've failed. If they've felt like they were on the edge of disaster the whole time, but pulled through by the seat of their pants, I've succeeded.

5E is not the edition for us. Like you said, it's clear and simple, streamlined, and without as much math, but we enjoy the complexities. We like the billions of permutations 4E offers for characters, despite the balance and function issues such an array of options present. For me, 5E doesn't have the in-depth combat complexities that 4E offered as a skirmish game, but neither does it have the narrative elements that support role-playing that systems like Fate, or Storyteller do.

That aside, I still wouldn't be buying 5E, simply because I no longer trust Wizards management of the brand. I avoided the 3/3.5E debacle, but 4E was just as poorly managed. There are whole classes that are practically unplayable (Seeker, Runepriest, etc) because WotC decided to switch to Essentials mid-stream; others were neglected ever since they were printed (Assassin, Artificer, etc). Martial characters got two hard-cover Power books; every other power source got one - classes that were printed after their power book got zero. Dragonborn and Tielfling were the only races to receive dedicated books, giving them far more options than other races. And that's aside from stuff like expertise math-fixes due to insufficient QA in the first place.

TL;DR: I'll keep 4E for a skirmish game, and keep using indie systems for role-playing. 5E fills neither niche.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not easier to read, many people are left scratching their heads over what something is supposed to mean leading to many flame wars and even the designers showing their ignorance when asked on Twitter.

Many of the things people hated about 4E are there in 5E with very gameist mechanics that completely destroy any sense of immersion, making you feel like you're playing a video game rather than a role-playing game. Powers recharging on short rests, abilities that only work during combat etc.

Character customization is very very low. You basically get a feat at 4rth level and the option to multi-class and that is it, otherwise pretty much every character is a cookie cutter of every other one, leading to lousy re-playability.

Despite the lack of options they someone threw balance out the window and it is easily the least balanced edition. Combat is very swingy, monsters for the most part uninteresting and not at all balanced with each other with their challenge level number. Their claim of larger but fewer feats making it easier to balance has just lead to fewer choices but the really good and really bad are still there so players without system mastery can easily fall into trap options and end up with dramatically weaker characters than someone that multi-classes wisely and takes synergistic feats and spells.

And you need to buy a dead tree. Despite people wanting to throw money at WotC for a PDF, they won't release one. I guess they haven't heard of tablets yet.

If you have a previous edition you like, keep liking it, this is not the game you're looking for. Move along.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[seebs]

Doesn't matter how many advantage/disadvantage you have. If you have both, you have neither. If you have only one of those two, then you roll two dice, no matter how many things are giving you advantage or disadvantage.

There are still numeric bonuses, but a lot fewer of them. I think the ones that survive all stack.

But for an example, monks and mage armor. In 3e, the monk got to add their wisdom modifier to AC when unarmored, and mage armor gave a +4 armor bonus, so they stacked. In 5e, mage armor sets your armor class when unarmored to 13+dex, and being a monk sets it to 10+wis+dex, and you can take whichever one you want, but neither is "a bonus" so there's no stacking to resolve.

In general, the net effect is slightly "shallower", but the flip side of that is that you don't have parties where one player has +42 on a check and another player has +3. So you can set DCs that are actually meaningful and interesting.

In epic-level Pathfinder, it takes our party samurai 5 minutes or so to finish a round of full attacks, which can do ~1350 damage. Also lots of die rolls. In 5e, so far as I can tell, nothing takes close to that long.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[SCPRedMage]

The bonus doesn't come from armor, it comes from a magical force effect, that just happens to have a bonus type of "armor".

To be a little clearer, the monk's AC bonus class feature states that they get the bonus so long as they aren't wearing armor, and even though it grants an "armor" bonus, you still aren't "wearing" armor.

Re:5e: Best D&D, MHO

[Saint Fnordius]

I started playing AD&D back in 1980, where the only systems available without a class system were the more obscure The Fantasy Trip and Champions. Tunnels and Trolls, RoleMaster, Arduin's Grimoire, Palladium, they all had classes, and Traveller had careers to generate your skill sets (and most famously, no rules for improving skills during play). GURPS didn't come out until 1986 or thereabouts, long after AD&D had been the FRPG of choice.

So I don't think you really know what you're talking about.

Re:MMO Crap

[nsuccorso]

Wizards of the Coast Agents have been dispatched to your location. Please wait quietly.

Re:Pathfinder?

[nsuccorso]

It's true. DnD players are a myth. Do not believe in such childish fantasies.

It all comes down to the OGL

[Sasayaki]

Long time d20 (and variants) player here. Not as long as some, but long enough to have played 2nd Edition when it was still current.

IMHO, 5th Edition's success will come down to their acceptance of the OGL (Open Gaming Licence), which we will discover in the coming days. All signs point to no, but Wizards might surprise us yet.

For those who don't know, the OGL was introduced in the 3rd edition (and continued its minor update, v3.5) of D&D. It was truly revolutionary. The OGL not only permitted players to redistribute the base rule system as they wished, including publishing it online for free almost in its entirety, but empowered players, writers, and campaign masters to edit, change and adapt the rules as they saw fit -- and publish those changes, as long as they too were under the OGL. It's open source for gaming systems.

One of the leading benefits of this was the publication of "Adventure Paths". As the OGL did not cover game worlds, only the mechanics and rules of the game, any writer or publishing company with a solid working knowledge of the game could create, publish, and distribute (freely or for profit) their own adventures, rules variations, optional mechanics, and thousands of various changes. One of the leading companies was Paizo, who specialized in publishing these so-called Adventure Paths. They were not the only ones. For example, I personally published a Pathfinder flavoured novel about a kobold, "Ren of Atikala", set in the original world of Drathari (oblig. plug: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EZ...). Using the OGL, I am able to legally use, alter, and draw inspiration from the rules and mechanics of OGL-licensed publications and create original works.

As I said earlier, it's open-source for gaming systems.

Between 3rd edition and v3.5, this was the state of D&D for almost 8 years, until June of 2008, when D&D 4th Edition was released. Unfortunately, D&D 4th Edition used a different version of the OGL, which was much more restrictive in what it permitted players, authors, and creators to edit, change, and redistribute (IIRC, it was essentially, "you may only reprint the *name* of the rule, and then reference the Player's Handbook", which meant if you were playing Star Wars you had to look up Power Attack in the D&D Player's Handbook... ugh).

Because of this change, and the simplifications made to the rules system which were often disfavourably compared to a video game, many players took a distinct, sight-unseen dislike to 4th Edition.

This restrictive change to the OGL also strongly disinsentivised Paizo from publishing Adventure Paths. After some internal discussion, it was decided that 4th Edition was not for them, and released a revised version of v3.5 of Dungeons and Dragons, known as the Pathfinder RPG (sometimes informally referred to by the player base as D&D v3.75), specifically intended to be backwards compatible with v3.5 of Dungeons and Dragons material. It was published shortly after 4th Edition's debut.

For many reasons -- a feeling that v3.5 was "good enough", Paizo's open-beta policy and staunch support of the OGL even for expansion books, and for viewing companies such as Green Ronin as allies rather than competitors -- Pathfinder has flourished in the wake of the relatively-poorly received 4th edition and is now a common staple at Roleplaying conventions and tabletop gaming communities, where previously only Dungeons and Dragons was played.

D&D Next seems, to me, to be squarely aimed directly at bringing Pathfinder converts back into the fold, promising to address some of the issues in both 4th Edition and Pathfinder, by providing a linearly scaling advancement, reducing preparation time for Game Masters, and simplifying many poorly thought out and complicated legacy rules which most players will admit probably need to go.

For me, though, D&D Next will live or die the same death 4th Edition did, based on its acceptance of

My assessment

[mark-t]

3e turned the game into something resembling a video game, being quite rules heavy, lots of bean counting that gets pretty tedious to track after a while, and the dungeonmaster is relegated a role that could almost be replaced by an automaton. I never cared for the way 2e handled specialization wizards, because most of them felt way too similar to eachother to be distinctive. The problem was even worse for clerics. In part this is because they didn't really try to consider that spells in different spheres or when cast by different specialists, should actually be set at a different level, and it's possible with some rather large changes to the class system and spell lists available to the appropriate classes, a good system could be created, but I never had the energy to devote to trying to do that. The psionics system in 2e was so overpowered as to be absurd, and the psionics system in 3e and beyond just feels like another magic spell list instead of anything particularly special.

The best edition of D&D was the first edition of AD&D, and I'm sticking to it.

Re:Bring back THAC0 or GTHO

[mrmagos]

No...just, no. THAC0 is wacko.

Re:MMO Crap

[Travis Mansbridge]

A simple troll of the dice!

Re:Can a little guy publish successful PNP RPG tod

[Sasayaki]

Are you kidding? Today is the absolutely best time to be an indie game system developer, ever.

Back in the day, the only way you could get your stuff into the hands of the players was brick-and-mortar stores, word of mouth, or occasionally mail-order systems in magazines and stuff. That was it.

These days, there's so many online distribution points like DriveThruRPG, Amazon's KDP, iTunes, Google Play, etc that getting your game out there is easy. Just write your game system, publish it on any/all of the above, and bam. There you have it -- distribution, complete. Almost all these retailers allow discounting, promotions, bundling, etc. The amount of promotion tools available is staggering.

You can set your price, including as low as $0.99 for most retailers. If your idea is really good (and you're good at marketing) you can use Kickstarter or Indie GoGo or any other service to bootstrap a little funding. You can create and publish video promotions for free on YouTube. You can get a website for free, or very minimal cost, and run ads on it to bring in a little extra income.

You have total control over the distribution process. You might choose, for example, to make your core rules set available for free, and then charge for supplements. You can make it OGL if you want, or licence it how you want. You can write and publish electronic tools to help run games. You can even create your own game worlds, adventures, or whatever.

And the best thing is? All the tools you need are available for free or for staggeringly low cost. LibreOffice is your free word processing suite, although I recommend you drop $40 on Scrivener (it's like sex, except I'm having it). GIMP can do covers and basic image work well enough, but again, I'd suggest dropping $40 on Photoshop Elements. On DriveThruRPG you can get gaming stock art, templates, images and all kinds of art beautification your heart could desire, all extremely cheaply. When that fails you, there's ShutterStock, iStockphoto, or any number of stock image websites. Failing that: ask artists on DeviantArt to draw exactly what you want. $200-$500 will get you a sweet digital painting from an awesome artist, which is a good investment for something like your Core Rule Book.

We are living in the publishing future.

Re:MMO Crap

[MrKaos]

no thanks

It should be pointed out that you have limited hit points, no magic, crap armor and, your short sword is useless. These are the pitfalls of being a pointless troll.

I'll just point out...

[MrKaos]

That this actually *is* news for nerds!

Re:Pathfinder?

[Sasayaki]

It is my experience, locally, that everyone and their dog has moved to Pathfinder.

My local university gaming club, and almost all major conventions in Australia, were 100% Living Greyhawk (which is D&D) until the end of that campaign. These days, they are almost all 100% Pathfinder.

At GenCon...

[Chas]

Pathfinder kicked the living crap out of D&D5 in terms of sales.

For a good chunk of people now, Pathfinder IS D&D. Congrats to the guys and gals at Paizo.

Monsters/encounters are bland

[abies]

Biggest issue I see with 5e so far (compared to 4e) is how bland monsters and encounters are. (please don't tell me that I can change it if I wish, I'm talking about D&D as presented by WotC and official adventures). Gone is interesting terrain setup, with 3 types of goblins working together, each having distinct abilities. We are now back to 2nd edition style of
15. Storage room. 1d3+1 orcs. Orc: 20hp, AC 15, sword +5 to hit, 1d8+3 dmg
16. Bedroom. 1 giant bedbug. Giant bedbug: 25hp, AC 16, bite +4 to hit, 1d8+2 dmg

I suppose that part of it is because they removed board as required part of the game, so it is a harder to come up with big number of distinct abilities. Still, as far as 'tactical game', 5e seems to be a complete failure to me so far.

Of course, if somebody hated 4e because of the combat, he will feel different... but if you don't like combat, I don't think that D&D variants are best system out there for you...

Re:MMO Crap

[meerling]

No, this is Tabletop or PnP (Pen and Paper). You know, that precursor that MMOs are loosely based on.
But trying to explain this to an obvious troll is pointless, but I'm doing it anyhow. :P

Flaws?

[dainbug]

I memorized the 1st edition book. Too old to learn anymore or look things up.

Re:MMO Crap

[DuckDodgers]

I played all of the earlier editions and preferred 4th. Yes, it took ideas from MMOs. It took good ideas, like giving more people than the spellcasters a selection of cool powers they could use a few times per day. In older versions of Dungeons and Dragons, at low levels the Fighters and Thieves outshined everyone else because "I whack it with a sword" and "I stole 10 gp." trumped "I can do something that's like shooting a bow accurately, but only once a day!" And "I can be like a super fast first aid kit, but only twice a day!". But ten levels later the spellcasters were shooting gouts of flame and mind-controlling enemies to fight each other and teleporting and bringing back the dead while the Fighter can now say, "I whack it with my sword, only harder!" and the Thief can say "I stole 100gp!"

So fourth edition discarded a lot of what was quintessential to earlier editions, but in my view it was a useful step forward. Fifth edition is a regression. Fifth may well end up better than 1 through 3.5, but it will take work to convince me it's better than Fourth when you exclude nostalgia from the metrics.

Re:MMO Crap

[DuckDodgers]

I disagree. For a novel, that's fine. For a cooperative game, it sucks - do you really expect to tell players, "Okay, you two are going to play guys that are useful for the next six months. Then they'll suck. On the other hand you two are going to play guys that are going to suck for the next six months. Then they'll kick ass, and they'll kick ass way better than these guys ever did." (Change time periods depending upon how often gaming group meets, rate of experience, etc...)

In RPG discussion forums I've heard this referred to as Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard - with linear and quadratic as the metaphor for the rate of growth of power. Now again, this fits fantasy literature, it makes for great stories, etc... But it fails for a group because it means there's a completely uneven distribution of 'spotlight' time once the game lasts long enough. The people playing non-casters might as well not show up, they can be replaced by hirelings and a few summoning spells.

Re:MMO Crap

[mcvos]

But how do you explain that the fighter can do that only once per day? With magic, the "it's magic" explanation always works. With mundane stuff, sure, you might be too tired to try it every round, but surely after some rest, you're ready again?

And don't fighters get plenty of cool with their special dice that get increasingly better and can be used on an increasing number of abilities?

And one of the big complaints about 4e was that by giving every character exactly the same amount of similar abilities, they all start to feel the same. Have magic and non-magic feel different. Give each class different kinds of cool stuff to do.