January 27, 2012

5E Friday

1) So the 5E playtest seems to have gone out to several people last week from various blog posts made. Of particular interest to me is that thus far it looks like it has predominantly been going to "old-school" sites. This makes sense to me, as the concepts behind 5E seem to be geared toward the "old-school" crowd. However, I have to hope they do not forgo the 4E or 3E (Pathfinder) bloggers. I know this is the second wave of public playtest (with the initial one being geared toward media and did include some 4E bloggers) but if WoTC wants to not alienate anyone they need to take an even handed approach. There are many good 4E and 3E sites out there (certainly better than this one) so they should have plenty to choose from.

2) Hit Points. The high amount of hit points seen in 4E has been cited as a cause of long combats and on some level they are right. However, I do not to go back to starting level 1 characters with 2 hit points. I firmly believe having a larger hp pool allows for more wiggle room for building encounters (can throw in a wider range of monsters) and adding in optional character perks (a feat that grants +5 hp is significant if a starting character only has 2, but not as significant if a starting character has 20). But at the same time I understand large hp pools can/will create hp slog fights. Instead, I would like a large-ish starting hp pool (around 10-20) and then smaller increases as the character levels (around 1-3 per level gain).

1 comment:

Victor Von Dave said...

My partner was rolling up a new 1st level Pathfinder character last weekend (after getting acclimatized to the hp totals in 4e), and she couldn't believe how few hit points she had. She's convinced the whole party is going to die the first fight they get in (and 3e is a lot more forgiving than earlier editions) - so yes, I agree with your stance on hit points. I don't want to return to the days where falling off your horse was certain death for most 1st level characters.