D&D Next

I don’t need to rehash the WotC schemes of the past few years, suffice to say long before Next was even announced I changed my email signature to put a halt to ‘my game or the highway’ thinking. I saw some folks at WotC work hard to recover from the disaster and watched as the last design team was all laid off. I listened intently to podcasts and read all the design blogs. Designers our age or older are looking back to D&D’s roots. To design a game where when you want to try something you don’t need to constantly hear “you can’t, you need a feat for that’. Recently longtime editor Kim Mohan retired from the business, and in his farewell said “If 3rd and 4th editions were cocoons, then Next is the butterfly, allowing a more free-form and creative play style, encompassing the best of all editions”. That’s a good start. Now one player recently prophesized the end of times and guaranteed that I’d “switch” editions and all sorts of stuff (which I rebuked fully of course). After a small debate it became apparent we were all at least curious about what they were planning, even if Pathfinder is our go-to game of choice. So last year I ran one Next playtest, and it was a lot of fun, super easy math, incredibly fast combats, and creative choice reigned supreme. It also handed the DM back a lot of the power that had been ‘ruled away’ in recent years. I tried another Next session recently with the latest changes and it, too, was a lot of fun. Now before we get into “the sky is falling” I need to be heard. This game is exactly what my recent Girls Game needed. By the time they got into double digit levels and in one combat I heard “I attack with a 39, another 39 from Rapid Shot, a 34, a 21, a 30 and a 24. Wait! I’m within 30 feet so add 1 to all of those because of Point Blank Shot. Oops, add 2 more for the bless spell! Ok, I do 42 points of regular damage, 13 sneak attack, 14 fire, 9 cold and 5 favored enemy. Wait, he’s immune to fire? Ok, what did I roll for that?” I realized that sometimes the numbers, as fun as they can be, can also be pretty encumbering to just telling a story. When 3rd edition first came along there were some who actually had some reservations. We were playing and these folks heard “you can’t do that you need a feat for that” way too often the first few games, which was declared silly because in previous editions if you thought of something creative you could at least try it.Now I know very well why the previous two editions were so codified and controlled. The designers didn’t trust us. And to be honest, why should they? I played with asshole DM’s who declared you couldn’t do something “because they said so” and dick players who took such unfair advantage of rules ambiguities it made other players miserable. Third Edition and Pathfinder helped level the field and took great strides to make the game more fun for all. But sometimes I like to describe mysteries that don’t need programmed rules to back them up. I do want to let a player get away with something because it was such a neat idea and would tell a great story. And mostly I already do this, even with Pathfinder, and I’m grateful for that trust. D&D Next seems to be a game that’s going to allow me to give a lot of that trust back. We don’t ‘need’ D&D Next but so far its proven fun and fresh. There’s space in the Mount Holly game room for both if they deliver a kick-ass game. I am going to at least give D&D Next a chance now and then. How about you?