This group started playing with edition 3.5 and prefers that edition to 4th.
The first hour of the session was devoted mostly to role-playing and plot exposition. The player’s received their quest from the priest’s of the temple of the night star and found their way to the ruins of the cursed city of Ravoo, a.k.a. the Caves of Chaos. Their mission retrieve the pieces of the Circle of Anathamatoc, one of which is in the hands of a den of kobolds.
For anyone who is reading this and isn’t a D&D player, a "check" is used to determine whether a character succeeds or fails at some action. It’s made by rolling a twenty sided die (1d20) and adding any relevant "modifiers" to it. If the result is equal to or higher than some number set by the dungeon master, called a difficulty class or DC, the check succeeds. For example, a strength based intimidation check would be expressed by the following short hand:
1d20 + strength modifier + intimidate training bonus vs. DC
The thing that I noticed at once was how nice and flexible the skill system is. Really it is almost a little reminiscent of White Wolf's "Story Telling" system. Basically, everything that would be a skill check is now an ability check. Each character has training in some number of skills which grant a +3 bonus to ability checks that involve that skill. Hence, you are free to associate any skill with any ability. Sweet! For example you can make an intimidate check in any of the following ways charisma + intimidate for presence based intimidation, intelligence + intimidation for logical intimidation, or simply strength + intimidation for just actually being physically scary.
One rule that I didn’t like, however, is that characters can automatically jump their strength scores in feet. Since the average character has a strength score of 10, they can jump over a ten foot wide pit all day, in combat, in a cave only lit by torch light, which the system designers apparently think is totally reasonable. Frankly, as a dungeon master, if I put a ten foot wide pit in a passageway, I want the players to have a chance of falling into it or else there is no point in bothering with such traps in the first place. Also, that rule is redundant: if the DM thinks a character should be able to jump over something automatically, we don't need a rule for it.
Another nice thing this system has going for it are advantage and disadvantage. These cover situations where something significantly helps or hinders the character making the check. The rule for advantage is simply roll two twenty sided dice and use the higher for your check. Disadvantage, similarly, is roll two twenty sided dice and use the lower. This is a potent rule. Advantage makes low rolls very unlikely and significantly increases your chances of getting a critical hit while making it a 1 in 400 chance to get a critical failure. Disadvantage, of course, does the opposite. The thing I like about this, as a dungeon master, is that I can just use these rules rather than having to come up with some numerical modifier for a check. This results in a time savings of about 5-20 seconds each time I use it.
The party finally reaches the city of Ravoo. Thanks to a natural twenty, they are able to tail some kobold schmuck back to the kobolds’ lair. The rogue goes and stealthily scouts ahead. The rogue is good at stealth, but has low wisdom and no training in perception. The same goes for the kobolds. One of the party clerics, watching from a safe distance, succeeds in seeing the rogue and a kobold hiding nearly back to back, neither one noticing the other. This was funny the first time but the situation repeated itself several more times throughout the session. Lesson learned: scouts need to have perception trained, otherwise things get silly.
Here is another thing that became apparent around this point: as written, the melee fighter is completely useless. I mean, really useless. As written, the rules don't include charging and attacks of opportunity. Moreover, being a dwarf, the fighter can’t move all that fast. The logical result? Anyone faster than the melee character can just move further out than the fighter can move in a turn without sacrificing his standard action, and then they just pelt the fighter with range attacks. The fighter can never close. Even if the fighter does have equal or slightly greater speed up to having twice the speed of the ranged combatant, the ranged combatant can just spend its turn double moving, forcing the melee fighter to do the same. Obviously, at this point a competent DM will eventually take pity and give the melee fighter a chance to attack, but if there is a second range combatant, it will get several turns to pick off the poor melee fighter before this happens. Furthermore, without attacks of opportunity, it is a simple matter to run past the fighter and clobber the wizard, which further reduces the value of having a fighter in the party.
Conclusion: In order for this version of D&D to be viable, melee type characters need to have the ability to charge and make attacks of opportunity (or some mechanic to make it more difficult to pass/ignore the fighter). I ended up giving charges and attacks of opportunity to the fighter and defender cleric as 1st level class features, which seems to patch the problem.
The group liked the defender cleric’s ability to give disadvantage to an attack against an adjacent ally. They also liked the fact that casters get some basic spells at will. As one of my players put it, "the wizard is actually useful after the first fight!" Surprisingly, the rogue didn’t seem to suffer much for the loss of flanking, though this was partly because the dungeon got filled with smoke from the party starting an oil fire, setting the kobolds' barricade alight, and then detonating a bag of flour. Really pretty typical stuff for this group.
Another thing we liked was how much faster combat went. In fact we estimated that it when about 4 times faster than in 4th edition. I attribute this to each character having fewer abilities to choose from. In 4th edition, each character has a dozen or more powers to choose from, each power a player can choose to use in a turn takes a couple extra seconds to evaluate, and this cost is paid each time the player gets to take a turn. Not only that, in 4th edition, each turn a character gets three actions in which to use powers: standard, move, and minor. So, in order to make full use of one's turn, a player has to find an optimal combination of three such actions. This results in an exponential increase in the time needed to take a turn. In 5th edition, by contrast, you get a standard and a move action and about all you can do with the move action is move.
One thing that the players didn’t like was the lack of healing surges and second winds, which in 4th edition were a way to self-heal. They also didn’t like needing a healer's kit to heal inbetween fights. They felt that it was an unnecessary gold sink and only amounted to extra book keeping. Personally, I’ve always felt that healing is a little too easy in 4th edition; it makes the players a little too invincible. I also think I like the healer’s kit as it adds some flavor and realism to the game. I want the players to have to manage their supplies during expeditions to the Caves of Chaos area and have to periodically return to the city at the other end of the valley to resupply and get plot updates. However, I have to say that 50gp for a box with some bandages, and maybe some herbs, seems a little much. Given how cheap most mundane goods are in this game, 10gp sounds reasonable and perhaps 5gp to refill an exhausted kit.
The one thing I would like to see, however, is for magical healing to make use of the players hit die. For instance, the spell "Cure Light Wounds" heals 1d8 + caster’s modifier, when it would make more sense for it to heal target’s hit die + caster’s modifier. That way the fighter types don’t heal slower than the wizard for a proportional injury. There’s also the problem that low level healing spells are less effective on a higher level character. For instance a "Cure Light Wound" spell would hardly help a high level fighter that’s lost half his or her hit points but it would be very potent on a lower level fighter with similar wounds. This makes little sense to me and could be fixed by having the amount a single hit die heals increase with level.
After destroying the better part of the kobolds with fire, the party noticed about 22 orcs marching up to the kobolds' lair. The orcs were there to seize the same artifact piece that the players were after. It seems that the orc chief’s brother, the chief of the other orc tribe in the area, had been boasting about having a part of the artifact and this chief wants his own piece. (Hook for next adventure!) At this point the players decided to hide in the trash pile while the orcs and the kobolds fought things out. While that was going on, the rogue made it to the kobold chief’s room, looted it, and wraithed his way out with the artifact, at one point crawling between the orc chiefs legs. I gave the rogue disadvantage but it turns out orcs are even worse at noticing things than kobolds.
Conclusion: Because of its simplicity, I think I’m going to prefer this new edition to 4th edition. While there are some problems, it’s doing more things right than wrong. I also appreciate that the authors, through these play tests, are empirically learning what elements they can take out and which elements are necessary for the game. Ultimately, what will determine if this system becomes a favorite at my gaming table is whether it keeps its simplicity through development as well as how much freedom the rules for character generation end up having, though we haven’t seen those yet.
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