Making dnd 6e

Wotc saw your posts on Veeky Forums complaining about 5e and have given you a team and a budget to make a new and better edition.
What do you keep what do you change etc

Introduce a Factotum class. Other than that, just print the literal same thing again since 5e is great.

I bet you love semolina

Make the numbers smaller. I know I'm going to get some shit for this, but I'm going to use a video game as an example of what I'm talking about

The first two Paper Mario games had very small numbers. Your hp maxes out at 50, and the final boss has 99 hp

I kneecap wizard. Also, kneecap people who designed wizard and keep giving him shit.

Every class pulls from the same base spell list but every class only has access to a portion of the spell list and certain classes will get access to class specific spells to compensate, similarly to how Paladins get Smite Spells.

Wizards would get access to the most spells from the list but their overall spell slot totals will be sliced in half (minimum: 1) to compensate, so while they can do everything, they can only do it once or twice per day.

Short rests give back one spell slot between levels 1-3. Long rests restore all spell slots that a class has.

Shit like GWM or Sharpshooter is an assumed ability that all martials have, because giving yourself a -5 penalty for a potential +10 damage boost is something that everyone should have access to when their whole kit revolves around damage.

And now I'm certain that I've pissed off everyone on the board. I expect butthurt in less than an hour.

>Best strategy is to have as little health as possible
>Bonetail has 200 HP
0/10

Literally doesn't matter when Danger Mario deals enough damage to chump that HP and there are ways of stacking badges so that you almost never get hit (plus you have partners like Vivian or items like the Boo paste that make you invulnerable to damage for a turn).

I nerf player power scaling overall, blast moon druid, and make sure the Encounter Creation system and NPC creation can be done on the fly this time around, and works past 5th level.
Also I introduce a series of combat maneuvers available to all martial characters that gives every martial better variety of options in combat.
Also I make a goddamn Warlord class.

Don't concentrate utility in certain ability scores (dex is the worst offender here, but wis also influences too much). If we are keeping initiative squarely in dex, then just merge con and str and find some way to buff the other scores in general so that "dumping" isn't a safe/easy option (int and str coming to mind in particular).

5e is balanced in-combat, but not out of combat. Caster utility needs to be scaled back, especially bard, which has a wizard's utility plus a rogue's, essentially. Bard does too much. If they want full utility spellcasting, then they shouldn't also get a bunch of skill buffs.
Exploration exists just to give rangers and rogues things to do (in the wilderness or cities, respectively). Stop that shit. Either remove it as a "pillar" or don't make the entirety of resource management in these environments dependent on 1-2 classes.
Remove battlemaster and give all fighters maneuvers. Or just make playing a martial generally more interesting than taking the attack action every round. Fighter is a balanced class but it doesn't get actual features, and that's a shame because I love the class' versatility in terms of the character concepts you can play with it.

D&D needs more versatile classes like fighter. Force specialization (analogous to fighting styles). Make different classes fulfill entirely different character archetypes (cleric and paladin are the worst offenders- they're almost identical thematically these days, especially without the need for actual worship in either case).

Random tables to determine gender. Anything less than 2d20 and you're bigots!

>Roll performance dice to climb a wall
>Roll performance dice to swim against a river's current
>Roll performance dice to track a wild animal's foot prints
>Roll performance dice to resist a disease

? ? ? ? ?

Is there some ability damage in 5ed?
In 3rd or before could made sense have higher number because of, say, monsters like Shadow.

Yeah. Also qualifying for things like feats is based on odd numbers, whereas even numbers increase your die rolls.

I think that there is, but I feel like to a new player it would be easier to understand "Your strength is decreased by half a point," than it would be to understand "Okay, so a 10 is +0, but a 12 is +1, but an 11 is still +0, but a 9 is a -1..."

>I don't know why they still use this. Is there a reason?
The reason back then was that ability scores were meant to only give you a bonus if you rolled incredibly high (IIRC, 16+).

Then 3.PF made it so that you got a modifer equal to [stat value-10/2] (rounded down) so that each stat had a modifier to them, which made sense to a degree but ultimately fell flat once you stop to consider that the game assumes that you have a 16+ in your class' primary stat anyways.

>half a point
how?

The problem was less the homogenization/continuation of the bonus, and more the fact that you need STAT13 or more for many, many feats.

You mean the optional boss that stands out as being particularly difficult and appears in the dedicated challenge area?

No user, you are the 0/10.

Resisting a disease isn't a skill. And bards are expressly magical, aren't they?

No new player I've ever met is confused by this, so I can only conclude that you play with some truly dumb shits.

Opposed schools suck

I'd like feats to be more varied and not have so many tied to stats.

Your mom sucks. Opposed schools, on the other hand, are the best way to balance wizards without turning everything into a wizard (i.e., the 4e solution).

I give them a mediocre rehash of 5e.

Any improvement to D&D would result in a "new coke" backlash. D&D players don't want an improved system. They want their hobby to be supported by new players buying the same books so that none of the enfranchised players have to relearn anything.

>Make classes less frontloaded but increase overall exp gain so that campaigns last above lvl 10
>Give good guidelines on how to scale creatures
>Increase high CR monsters
>Remove some of the ridiculously powerful lvl 8/9 spells from the base list and make them epic post-lvl 20 things that are suggested to be epic final quests
>Remove Sorcerer as a whole
>give better tools for social interactions and RP to the GM and players (for example, choose the personality and typical behavior of your character, then stick to it, having to roll a check if a situation comes where you want to act outside of your character's normal perimeters. Obviously this is a crude example but thats the direction I would like to see them thinking in)
>make PCs in general a bit weaker so that 6-8 encounters per long rest is not the prescribed number in order to keep them challenged. This either clutters sessions with too much combat if you follow it, or players go full NOVA on everything if you don't
>other obvious tweaks like addressing class/subclass balance as well as increasing character building diversity

sure

Can we have Warlord back

If 3.5e was Diablo 2, 5e is Diablo 3 and Pathfinder is Path of Exile. 5e is popular, and drew in a large crowd, but it is extremely simplistic and barebones compared to other things on the market so itsl ikely it won;t retain an audience for that long. With Pathfinder 2e coming, I wouldn't be surprised if some fundamental things need to be changed in 5e.

Throw the whole thing out, make 4E 2.0 or steal Mutants & Masterminds' rules.

>but increase overall exp gain so that campaigns last above lvl 10

This is a shitty no-things-to-no-people solution. People who don't like smacking rats still have to smack rats, people who like smacking rats have to change the rules so they smack rats for longer.

The real answer is to make it very clear in the PHB and DMG alike that starting at level 1 is not the assumed default, but rather a campaign genre choice.

New players coming into the game are often used to vidya and will start at lvl 1 as this is the assumed starting point. Unfortunately, the time it takes to reach higher levels often results in the campaign not lasting long enough for that to happen because a ton of things can happen to at least 1 player IRL over the period of several months that causes them to be unable to continue playing. What happens afterwards is WotC start collecting data and see that most players do not reach higher levels, so when they develop monsters and spells for the game, they do not put much time and resources into improving high level play - you can clearly see that in the low amount of high-CR stuff in the recent books. This in turn causes less people to be interested in high level play, and so things spiral down and down. You could flatten the level curve a bit more so the differences in exp between levels are not as high, and adjust EXP gains accordingly, but the typical way a new group will play with the current 5e system constantly produces short campaigns.

You are mistaken.
People don't play high levels because high level play is SHIT
Wow I sure love problems that are solved with a well placed spell instead of actually having the group collectively think of a solution.
Low level play:
>How do we convince this guy to tell us what we want to know
High level play:
>I'll just cast dominate person lol

Either use a d10, or revert numbers/scaling to 4e/SW SAGA values.

Use SotdL boon/bane mechanics for adv/disadv.

Release all the 4e shit converted to this streamlined system.

4e played best between about 8-18, and the only reason that isn't 8-28 is that they realized nobody was playing epic and put out very sparse epic support for the later-published class options.

Bring back a lot of the playtest stuff. Give us martial damage dice. Make warlocks Intelligence-based. Make sorcerers distinctive and relevant.

I doubt you have any data that proves the assertion that players were aware that high-level play would be poor so this is why they avoided it, I don't have the data to disprove it so arguing that point is kind of pointless. While I agree it's bad I think most people just don't get there. As I already stated in the very first post - a lot of these spells need to get removed or turned into some post-lvl 20 super difficult quest reward.

Because of the way hitpoint abstraction works, I think a person should only be able to put a knife to your throat if you already have low hit points, or the act of putting a knife to your throat brings you down to low hit points. Otherwise, you should abstract that you have enough wiggle room to make a knife to the throat nonthreatening.

I once had a player that would calculate their modifier from their score, then add their modifier to their score, then recalculate their modifier, then add their modifier again, then repeat ad infinium. This turned out to be useless because he never remembered to add his modifier to any of his rolls or class features, so you'd have this PC with infinite abilities miss every attack and fail all his rolls.

>Remove Gnomes, Dragonborn, and Tieflings from the core race options
.Introduce Race Templates as a feature in the race race selection section
>Make half human a template, remove Half Orc and Half Elf
>Bring back 3.5e God Domains and God's Favored Weapons
>Make bonus languages int based again
>Make every non-magical humanoid have a character creation option, no level adjustment though, just features and ability stat changes

fpbp

>rehash of 5e with personal houserules
You're the same as the PFags. The same!

Any game that requires a house rule is fundamentally broken and should not be played.

t. only plays board games

>thinks boardgames never require, or can't be improved by houserules

I bring back 4th edition, with all of the official errata for monster design etc incorporated into the rules, excise the Essentials classes, make the Nentir Vale setting the default setting again. Done.

>martial magic
Only 1/2 of the classes are supposed to be good, user.

>Assuming thoughts

I remake 4e and force it down your ungrateful fucking throats

Opposed schools were stupid, although I admit that with the new subclass mechanics, at least they wouldn't be AS stupid as they were before.

Check that; I might also consider reworking the PHB race line-up to:
>Human
>Eladrin/Elf/Drow
>Dwarf
>Dragonborn
>Gnome with 4e Feywild fluff
>Orc
>Goblin
>Gnoll
>Minotaur
>Tiefling

Specialist casters existed in 3.% and were squarely in mid tier, but that does diddly for (non-ToB) martials uniformly being stuck at t4-5.

Make Ranger a fighter archetype

Delete Cleric, Fighter, and Wizard. Core 4 classes are now Rogue, Bard, Paladin, and Ranger.

Delete Rogue, Cleric, Paladin, and Ranger.
You have Fight Guy, Skill Guy, and Magic Guy as classes.

Delete fight guy, skill guy, and magic guy, we're using pointbuy.

Delete character sheets. We're going freeform.

Unironically best.

What are you rolling to get that 'three' dexterity? A d5?

>rolling

jokes aside, if you wanted to keep the rolling method, you could, you'd then just immediately convert it to bonus.

Rolled 6, 4 = 10 (2d6)

Honestly, I'd just make it simple, use a 2d6t1 and make the highest modifier you can get at character creation a +6.

For example

Rolled 5, 4, 4, 3, 4, 5, 5, 3, 1, 4 = 38 (10d6)

I rolled a [4] and a [6] and now I'd get to choose one to represent my STR. Moving along...

So if I were to roll 2d6t1 down the line, my stats would look like this (assuming I took the higher number)
STR: 6
Dex: 5
CON: 4
INT: 5
WIS: 5
CHA: 4
Hmm, actually yeah, the system would need some tweaking to make sure that characters don't just start off with 4's, 5's, and 6's.

Any ideas?

Only six abilities, wtf? Stop that stupidity, we are going to have ten. Yes, TEN. And the ones that are not related to skills will be used to calculate how many points have the character per level to buy stuff.

Because yes, we are going to go point buy on this thing guys. We are keeping classes and levels, but classes now determine the cost of what you buy. You can be a warrior and buy a level 1 slot spell if you want, but it's going to cost you all your points on that level.

Vancian magic is gone, and no one will cry for its demise. Now spell casters are going to have PP (power points) to use to cast spells. Cost of spell is same as its level, and you can pick domains (kinda like lists) and develop spells from each list as you spend points on them. That will give casters more options.

And they are going to need them, because combat is going to get way more lethal now. We are talking criticals hits here, which range from stun to bleeding per turn to straight maiming or instant death. Players will learn to fear the expression "critical hit, grade E"

Rearranging the books, nothing of that Player's Handbook/GM Guide/Monster Manual Nonsense. From now on is Character Law, Arms Law, Spell Law.

And finally on the release day, pulling the fake cover to reveal that Rolemaster is back, motherfuckers

I used to have a DM that used as initiative the sum of DEX and IN, arguing that it was the combination on how fast could your brain react to the situation (INT) plus how fast could your body follow suit.

Nuke HP bloat / remove HD per level completely.
Divide game into 3 power levels, you should select which one you are interest in at the start (still can transition up letter, for your 1-20, 2 year long campaign).
Give everyone access to majority of the spells and abilities in their tier at the start, but you have to chose only few.
Grow sideways instead of up.
Weaboo fightan magic
Meaningful meta-currency or none.
Rules for things that aren't combat or spellcasting.
Launch with mutiple XP rewards systems, have to pick one to enforce desired play style: XP for killing shit / Gold for XP / Post session roleplaying XP trigger review.
Better skill system. Maybe some sort of lifepath system.
Don't design with grid combat in mind (movement and ranges in 5 feet increments), move to abstract combat zones as default, keep tactical grid as secondary option.
Leave d20 behind, transition to dice pools / roll and keep

Wisdom can also be construed as wits. I'd use dex and wis

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 6th edition will be compatible with TSR era products. Basically a cleaned up 2e.

Lower the number ranges, since you use Attribute bonuses and not the attributes themselves. Finish the job 4e started, slaughter sacred cows. Get rid of Classes in favor of Power Source and Archetype/Role. Do something similar for races. Bring back 4e tactical combat, though maybe streamline for ease of use. Balance the fucking classes against each other. Scale down power levels. Get rid of Vancian casting, maybe use some sort of mana system. Kill the skill list. put out more setting books that aren't just fucking Forgotten Realms. Make the mechanics and design goals more transparent for easier customization and monster design.

Basically make a 4e that is hampered with D&D sacred cows.

Also, more focus on exploration.

1d4 down the line, can -1 a stat to +1 other stat. No stat may be modified more than once.

1e's level progression and HP values
2e's rules for exploration
4e's rules for combat + it's DMG for improvising sessions.

Rolled 4, 4, 3, 1, 3, 3 = 18 (6d4)

Okay, let's test this.

STR: 5 (+1 from another stat)
DEX: 4
CON: 4 (+1 from another stat)
INT: 0 (-1 to boost another stat)
WIS: 2 (-1 to boost another stat)
CHA: 3
Eh, this could work. Then again I also got lucky with my rolls.

Higher minimum requirements for multi-classing. Maybe each class requires a 14 in two stats as an entry requirement.
Maybe make it so there's less of a reason to MC into warlock? As it stands there's almost never a reason not to go into it.
A few of the level 20 features seem underwhelming compared to the benefit of going into another class. You've just gained complete and utter mastery in a profession, you should get more than just a couple of free 3rd level spells after a nap.
I don't understand why Rangers have their own spell list, or why they're casters by default. Also, I really don't like favored enemy - but I have no idea how to fix it.
Strength needs to be able to compete with dexterity. With a few exceptions I see people view it as a non-option.

That's it. I look forward to you calling me an idiot.

Part of the warlock multiclass problem is that them sharing spellcasting with paladins + bards means they get way too much power and don't need to waste any stats

Brand new edition is actually a 'spin-off edition" with 12 new "core" classes instead of the normal core set.

Classes are Warblade, Crusader, Swordsage, Factotum, Incarnate, Beguiler, Binder, Truenamer, Psion, Gunslinger, Alchemist, and Psychic Warrior.

Default setting is a new lower-magic higher-tech world in a renaissance/age of exploration.

Core mechanics are changed only slightly from "Basic 5e".
>Skills have degrees of success and failure for every 5 above or below.
>Extensive list of Improvised Actions for combat and clarifying what class- or feat-specific actions can be attempted without that feat by requiring a skill check or a reduced effect
>Reintroduce flanking and attacks of opportunity
>Backgrounds now add an additional minor mechanic to your character as well as a ribbon feature
>Expand ritual casting to include more utility spells that new classes can't learn.
>Short rests take 10 minutes instead of an hour with each successive rest taking 10 more than the last until Long rested. Long rests take a full day in the wild or 8 hours in a proper shelter.
Optional new core mechanic change
>Spell slots no longer required to cast spells but material components are more expensive and need to be restocked in towns so long rests don't recover spells and makes casters treasure dependent.

Not frontloading all of a class' special stuff in their early levels, because it's the biggest reason to multiclass. Give classes better later level to higher level because for the most part high level features pale in comparison to low level stuff, and so multiclassing out of classes at lower levels to get other class' lower level features because they so much better than high level features

Slower non-magical healing to encourage downtime and a mindset to combat that isn't "let's just run in and attack"

A better way to design encounters because Challenge Rating is terrible and doesn't work half of the time

Either return to older Vancian system of preparing X number of a spells or find a different system because 5e basically has a half-baked sort of vancian but not really vancian magic

Rules and guidelines in the DMG about rules for "failing forward" or examples of punishments beyond death

Better crafting guidelines, because currently X GP and Y days = item is boring as fuck

An addition to the bonds/traits/flaws - Goals

Dropping Forgotten Realms as *the* setting. Dropping ALL settings from lore and having the player's handbook/MM be 100% setting neutral

It will never happen as wotc has to design to the lowest common denominator now but I'd want them to increase crunch, add more actual rules to cover different situations rather than leaving the game half finished , reduce hit point bloat and increase lethality , expand the skill system so skills actually have appreciable in-game effects, get rid of the 5 minute adventuring day and generally redesign things with a more old school mindset so the game resembles d&d.

No bards. Boom, all problems solved

FATE dice

Rolled 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, 1, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1, 1 = 47 (24d3)

Got to try that. 4d3-8 per stat, here I go.

STR -1, DEX -1, CON -1, INT +2, WIS +2, CHA -2.

Neat.

>Basically make a 4e that is hampered with D&D sacred cows.

This is basically the concept behind Strike!, but it admittedly went a bit too far.

>Not frontloading all of a class' special stuff in their early levels, because it's the biggest reason to multiclass

How about killing level-by-level multiclassing instead? It's fucking cancerous anyway, just bring back 4e-style multiclass with Hybrid support in core and slightly less pricy feat MC.

I don't need a new better edition. I already have 4e. Maybe an errata/FAQ pdf that undoes some of the active sabotage on Mearl's part during essentials, a PDF that gives a little support to the seeker and runepriest, and a few hundred more MM3 math monsters.

After two "edition wars," much like many other people who started with 2e, I settled on 4e as my home-edition, and don't really see a reason to run a different edition, or obsess over whether a game is currently printing books.

Maybe, even though I likely wouldn't myself play it, I'd just move the game as far away fro 3.PF's design philosophy, just to help undo the damage it continues to do to the new playerbase, instead of just making 3.50001 like 5e did.

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