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Thanks for the heads up t-dice!

Malcadon wrote:One thing I have to say about D&D Basic...


"It reads like stereo instructions."

So about as well as any retroclone?

chiisu81 wrote:

Malcadon wrote:One thing I have to say about D&D Basic...


"It reads like stereo instructions."

So about as well as any retroclone?

Opinions vary. I don't agree.

Blood axe wrote:

chiisu81 wrote:

Malcadon wrote:One thing I have to say about D&D Basic...


"It reads like stereo instructions."

So about as well as any retroclone?

Opinions vary. I don't agree.

When I first got into D&D, the AD&D core books were thick on the wording. Gygax was once an educator, and really throw the Dictionary into his works. I kinda liked that, and missed it, as it really took a hammer to my dyslexia. Although, I do not miss the organization of the Advanced books. The old DMG alone was a labyrinth of obscure and hard to find rules and tidbits. And yet, that made it as cool and mysterious as an old wizard's tome.

The download copy felt simplified and repetitive. Or should I say "A feature of the features is to feature 'feature' a lot, as a new feature." (they really love that word)

Anybody got their hands on the new PHB yet?

tumblingdice wrote:Anybody got their hands on the new PHB yet?

A friend of mine did and said we could change our characters to use the new material. 5th edition is almost exactly like Labyrinth Lord and the AEC. The only differences are the XP points needed are much less, you get more hit points, you have to track more stuff on the character sheet, you have to make a roll for everything...no matter how simply you may think it is, and they got rid of the plain boring races and made a bunch of sub-races because they are so different from each other. The bright side is that combat is very relaxed. There were me and 4 other players at the table. I did my attack, drove downtown to pick up pizzas for everyone, stopped by my house to pick something up for my wife, dropped the item off to my wife, and still made it back to the game before it was my turn to attack again.

Wizardawn wrote:The bright side is that combat is very relaxed. There were me and 4 other players at the table. I did my attack, drove downtown to pick up pizzas for everyone, stopped by my house to pick something up for my wife, dropped the item off to my wife, and still made it back to the game before it was my turn to attack again.

Yikes.

I managed to sneak a peak at it in the book store last night. Rules and discussions pertaining to them are widely available elsewhere, so I won't go into them here. The book itself looks and feels nice: seems solidly constructed, high quality paper. The layout and style is a blend between that of 3rd and 4th ed. Ditto the artwork. Some of it's nice, some not so. There's a halfling who looks like a DC-follies caricature of Hillary Clinton playing the lute. There's a picture of a half-orc paladin, which just seems wrong. There's a fighter with dreadlocks. For some reason there's a picture of a cake with strawberry frosting.

There are lists of deities with their alignments and spheres of influence for Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Krynn. There are also some lists of deities from real-world mythologies. There are no descriptions for said deities, but let's face it, those descriptions are just a few keyboard strokes and mouse clicks away. The D&D cosmology is mostly the same as 1e, but it has some 4e elements thrown in, which doesn't bother me. There are the 4 elemental planes we all know and love, but they're surrounded by the Elemental Chaos a la 4e. There's also the Feywild. I don't remember if the Ethereal plane made it in there or not.

I was pleased to see that the book ends with a reading list, prefaced by a quote from the original 1979 DMG on the virtues of inspirational reading. That last part made me glad that I still have one of those old DMGs. Even if I do embrace this new system, I'm still hanging on to those old AD&D books for sure.

While it lacks the simplicity of B/X D&D / Labyrinth Lord, it also lacks the complexity of 3rd & 4th editions.

It's a nice happy medium with some VERY interesting design choices that I really like.

I'll be finally closing down my 3.x games and switching those to 5e. I'll also be keeping my B/X games.

There's always room for B/X, no matter what system one uses.

I'm not a big fan of Dragonborn and Tieflings, however. They seem so outside the realm of traditional D&D. Besides, there's something unsettling about PCs with tails.