Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Hidden rules in D&D Next

I am largely happy with the current D&D next rules, despite criticizing and critiquing them. They need more spells and races and classes and such, and the math needs to be fixed a bit, and things interact in strange ways. But one other problem I'm seeing is a strange set of "hidden rules" that require some reading between the lines, when things could be explicitly pointed out. Here's the main examples that come to mind right now:

  • Rogues sneak attack by giving up advantage, and each rogue scheme has a way to get advantage fairly easily. So the two features are really quite intertwined, but you need to read between the lines a bit to link them. This one is fairly obvious, but could be easily overlooked, especially when playing a pre-generated rogue.

  • Monks get a hidden "flurry of blows" power because martial arts lets them "dual wield" their unarmed attacks. This isn't really any different from other characters, but its there. Monks don't necessarily need a multiattacking power, but people playing a monk sort of expect that they'll be making lots of attacks and it takes some reading of the Martial Arts feat and weapon properties and such to put this together.

  • All rogues can open locks and disarm traps. This is hidden away in one line that says: Tool proficiency: thieves' tools. I can hardly believe it took me this long to figure out that proficiency in thieves' tools did this, and it made me much more likely to play a rogue since I didn't need to waste two feats to open locks and disarm traps.

  • On a similar note, Open Locks and Disarm Traps are secretly skills. To get them, you need to take the feat though, and you can only use them if you're proficient with thieves' tools. This presents one from taking skill focus or mastery for these non-skills. It would be nice to list this in the skills part, essentially saying that they're skills that can only be obtained with proficiency in thieves' tools and that they're not eligible for the skill-boosting feats.

  • Scholarly wizards can cast any ritual in their book, not just ritual versions of prepared spells like clerics, druids, and other wizards.  I thought that was a copy-paste error or leftovers from a previous version of the scholarly wizard. Adding "Unlike other wizards, ..." would really help call attention to the difference.
This problem is just part of the writing style and presentation, I suppose. The prose and presentations for these individual parts are actually quite clear. But especially for a playtest, I'd think you might want to point out some of the rules interactions and maybe even the intentions behind a particular cluster of rules. I feel like these are obvious in retrospect and clearly the intended readings for these rules, but it is a little unsettling that these sorts of things aren't explicitly pointed out. In many cases, one sentence or less would really clarify the rule.

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