The future of Dungeons & Dragons

Ok, this is going to be a nerdy/technical column. So if you aren't a gamer, you may want to skip this one.

Ok, so currently Wizards of the Coast are Playtesting their new system "D&D Next". It's usual NDA stuff, so I can't discuss specifics, but what I can do is talk about what went wrong with D&D 4.0 and what should have been done to fix it.

Ok, firstly, let me state that D&D 4.0 was a combination of the last version of 3.5 (commonly referred to as 3.75) and World of Warcraft. Some things were great changes, others were terrible.

1. Stop with the power creep in every additional book they release. Happened in 3.5 and 4rth. If you didn't own all of the latest books there was absolutely no way to compete with those who did. The Core books should be all you need to play, the splat books should be for additional flavor, NOT increased power.

2. @will and Encounter abilities were a good idea. Run with those. Daily abilities of any kind are a terrible idea. We hated them in 3.5, we hated them in 4rth. Just stop it already. We want our characters to go to sleep when we start getting to exhaustion penalties, Not when we run out of Daily spells or heals. Healing surges were a great idea, but just give a per-encounter limit, not a per-day limit. Daily limits break the logical flow of the experience are insanely frustrating. Most parties just pump out their daily abilities as quick as possible, then go to sleep to recharge them. It's stupid.

3. Make utility powers @will rather than encounter or daily. It makes zero sense for a party to go searching for random squirrels to kill so they can get more uses of their encounter powers.

4. Make the Paragon & Epic paths more significant. They were useful, but there should be a significant power jump when a character reaches level 10 and 20. Those are significant numbers, make the upgrades significant.

5. Make fewer magic items, make them scale automatically, and make them more generalized. The Adventurer's vaults contained entire books filled with multiple versions of the exact same item but scaled for different levels and worded differently for each class. That's stupid, just make them generalized and make them scale.

6. Make @will attacks scale faster. There is a large number of levels in 4rth where you absolutely only use your @will powers when you are completely out of encounter or daily spells. Make them a more viable option.

7. Give more and more interesting utility powers. 3.5 got this right. There were a million utility powers and most of them were awesome. They made you feel much more super-hero-like when you used them. In 4rth damn near every power was combat-only, which meant that when you were outside of combat your character was basically a normal guy. Which is not the image you want for high-fantasy roleplaying.

8. Get rid of racial bonus stats. In 3.5 & 4rth the large majority of players picked the race that gave them the statistical advantage. That's not how you should be encouraging your players to play. Their race should be for RP reasons, not stats.

9. Shift the combat focus away from encounter/daily abilities and more towards @will abilities. 3.5 made the great decision of allowing characters like Warblades and Warlocks access to their primary attacks for the majority of the combat. 4rth made the @will abilities mostly worthless and focused on abilities with long cooldowns. This is a bad game design. Players want to always be able to do their primary attacks, they don't want to have to wait to be effective.

10. Ongoing condition saves. This is a stupid system, it added a weird random factor to every battle. Just give the conditions a set duration, not "lasts until a successful check". It drags out combat entirely too long.

11. Loosen the range and movement restrictions. 3.5 could be played entirely without a battle map. 4rth required a battle map for all combats. Find a happy middle ground. You shouldn't need a battle map to fight one opponent. You just need to remember how far away from them everyone is.

12. Fix the invisibility rules. Any opponent that could become invisible became a huge pain in the ass.

13. Reduce the number and complexity of all abilities that players have. Part of why combat took so long was because it took forever to pick the right ability, set up the placement, and then roll out all of the attacks and effects. Make it more streamlined so that combat doesn't last for three hours.

Things that worked in 4rth that the should keep or alter slightly.

1. Half level skill progressions. This gave everyone atleast some ability in every skill. But get rid of the trained only skills. It makes perfect sense for an adventurer to pick up minor ability in things they deal with every day. For a fighter to be unable to identify that zombie despite having killed hundreds of them before because they aren't trained in Knowledge Religion is just stupid.

2. 1 hit point minions. Low hit point minions make combat more interesting. But get rid of the rule where they are immune to AOE. AOE was designed for taking out low level mooks. Let them do their job.

3. Rituals. These were a great idea. It helps to add distance to the game for the party to require ten minutes to set up the teleport spell before teleporting. Plus it makes teleporting away from combat impossible.