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[Jimmy]

My group has stuck with Pathfinder 1st edition, and has no interest in swapping to D&D 5th edition or Pathfinder 2nd edition for the fact that they simply remove too much player agency in quirky stuff you can do with rules.

Tonight, my players get their final session against the halfling bard that's been trying to steal their solid gold sarcophagus they've been guarding. I wonder if they'll see through his cunning disguise before he steals it from under their noses?

[Kagus]

As an aside, one of my favorite DM trick traps has always been the Invisibility spell.

I'm assuming 90% of players have only ever looked at the spell as a means of stealth to bypass enemies. But there's actually a big bag of tricks that you can use with casting it on objects.

One of my all time best was a sheet of invisible iron halfway across a pit trap, hanging down from the ceiling. The player tries to jump across the 10 ft. wide pit? Bang! Straight into the iron, then splat! Down the hole.

https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/asimo/grimtooths-traps/

Inform the delvers that they sense magic coming from the corridor ahead of them. A detection spell will reveal a pit beneath the floor, hidden from view by an illusion spell. The delvers, not wishing to be surprised by whatever lurks in the pit below, will probably cast some sort of magic to dispel the illusion. Lurking inside the pit is a gorgon...

Most of them are outlandishly silly or handwave-y, but I like the hidden gorgon.

[Culise]

Oh, wow, this is where that's from.  That's one of my favorite floor traps besides the "10'x10' pit filled with gelatinous cube" and "dispel magic dispels the conjured floor" stunts.

[Sirus]

Since when did dungeon design become a Kaizo Mario game? That sort of instant-death-lolz might get a few guffaws out of the DM but it'd just piss off most players.

[NullForceOmega]

It's always been that way for some groups, all the way back to first ed.  Serious dungeon crawlers are pretty into surviving mega-dungeons that are laid out with the most lethal possible traps for them to overcome.

Personally, while I can enjoy the occasional crawl, I'm vastly more invested in stories and characters than semi-plausible deathtrap dungeons built by deranged wizards with entirely too much xp to burn and far too much time on their hands.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Traps in particular are way over-used in dungeons and mostly boring to deal with. Oh man, an electrified door knob. Pendulum blade in the ceiling. There goes my HP. Sooooo scary, I'm getting so much investment out of this interaction.

The single best trap experience I've ever had was trying to get the party over a ten-foot deep pit in a narrow hallway, and that was only because we all fucked up and mostly did damage to each other, which was hilarious.

[Kagus]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oglaf has the best traps... And for being a nominally NSFW comic, that word has a bizarrely tame meaning in this case.

[Sirus]

"nominally"

Many of Oglaf's pages (especially the early ones) are basically porn. It's NSFW with the occasional non-NSFW thrown in for flavor.

[Kagus]

"nominally"

Many of Oglaf's pages (especially the early ones) are basically porn. It's NSFW with the occasional non-NSFW thrown in for flavor.

It was, yes, but then they got kinda distracted by the jokes and now they need to remember to include the nudity on occasion.

[scriver]

So it seems possible DnD 6th Edition might end up being 4th Edition 2: Electric Boogaloo.

For those of you who hasn't followed BG3 interviews, another thing that Swen thinks is bad about DnD is to hit rolls, because missing is boring.

[Cruxador]

“In some ways – especially in tabletop, because we have 45 years of history – it’s kinda fun to have someone smart who’s not you say: ‘you should consider changing this’.”

He's aware that roleplaying games are actually played and iterated on by a substantial a community of people some of whom are smart and all of whom aren't him, right? Wasn't getting these people's feedback half the point of the big open playtest? Do D&D team members not swing by major gaming forums to test the waters occasionally?

Mearls acknowledges there were “a lot of unchallenged assumptions” made during the design of fifth edition, which “we just implemented. But this is why it’s fun to be extending out to the gaming audience, growing our audience, getting more perspectives, and new channels of feedback. It’s been pretty exciting.”

Then what the hell was the point of the playtest at all?

So it seems possible DnD 6th Edition might end up being 4th Edition 2: Electric Boogaloo.

For those of you who hasn't followed BG3 interviews, another thing that Swen thinks is bad about DnD is to hit rolls, because missing is boring.

I'm not really getting what you're getting n this, I don't think 4e's design philosophy will ever again grace a major D&D game - at most it might be a white wolf type thing where they do a 4e anniversary edition.

But I do agree missing is boring. The thing is, everything about basic attacks is a bit boring, and that's sort of an unavoidable problem because every basic attack is something you do all the time in the game, even if you modify it somehow. I do think scrapping to-hit rolls, making armor provide damage reduction, and (taking a page from games like Riddle of Steel and Song of Swords) adding focus to feints and counters or result in a substantially better game. I don't really agree that 5e's version of spell slots is all that hard to understand though, it's just the legacy terminology that makes it less clear to new players.

It would be cool if they experimented a little further with different classes having different class mechanics. For example, a sorcerer might lack a spell slot system and have unlimited casts but roll a random effect, modified by charisma, spell level, and I guess character level, with one possible outcome being that your highest currently available spell level is no longer available until a long rest.

[scriver]

Well, for me, 4th edition very much has a "let's take things that's working for all these fresh and new and super popular MMORPGames and make that the basis for this edition" philosophy.

The linked interview is basically Mearls going "let's take things that's working for [this new and popular computer game developer] and make that the basis for the next edition".

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's strange that they'd want to deviate from 5e radically. It's had its criticisms but it unquestionably elevated both DnD and tabletop gaming in general to a whole new level of mainstream popularity. When people hear about me playing DnD now they most tell me they want to play too, but never took the plunge, which is not at all what the dominant attitude used to be.

I'm not against trying something new - god knows 5e is often a meatpoint +Infinity fest, but it's not the attitude I expected. Hopefully they'll be more novel than trying the 4e formula again.

Everybody keeps on playing "their" edition of DnD, either officially or through clones. We've still got 4e groups, 3e groups, 2e groups, and even 1e groups. Undoubtedly there will be a huge glut of 5e groups even in the 6e era with how the population's boosted.

[Persus13]

The main thing I got from that interview is that 6e is at least another 2-3 years away. Most of the stuff talked about seemed hypothetical, aside from BGIII being considered canon for the Forgotten Realms. Considering their goal is to hype interest for a game that comes out in a year, its not too surprised they're talking so glowingly about Larian (although they definitely seem to enjoy working with them).

Also, isn't Mearls the guy in charge of lore/fluff for 5e and its Crawford who is in charge of mechanical stuff like spell slots?

[Cruxador]

Also, isn't Mearls the guy in charge of lore/fluff for 5e and its Crawford who is in charge of mechanical stuff like spell slots?

Unless something has changed, he's still the big boss. He may focus more on the fluff on a day to day basis, but something as significant as replacing the spell slot mechanic would definitely involve him heavily in the decision making.