Tabletop Tales: ‘Dungeons And Dragons’ Fifth Edition!
For the longest time it was fairly difficult to recommend an edition for newer players when it came to Dungeons and Dragons; there is simply something to complain about in all of them. The earliest second editions are notorious for their steep learning curve, third has power balancing issues, and fourth edition is better known as “Stuff To Complain About: The Game”. They all have two major issues in common: character creation needs an experienced player sitting beside you to explain it, and the books do very little to prepare the player for actual play. Fourth editions “player guides” are almost entirely filled with cards either detailing magic items or the classes abilities (“Power Cards”), leaving a tiny blurb at the back of the book telling players how to actually play the game. It’s no wonder your typical 4E session is fight after fight with a word or two of plot inbetween; far from Gary Gygax’s original vision of swords and sorcery.
Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition is Wizards of the Coast’s apology to the hobby at large, cutting out almost everything that convoluted the game and reworking it from the ground up. Power Cards are gone, magic items no longer litter the streets, and the setting itself has been toned back from a time of magical superheroes to a more appropriate swords and sorcery styled setting full of adventure and mystery. In general, many new rules and mechanics exist that give players many non-combat opportunities to further the story, where before most players just resorted to extreme violence. The pivotal new tool for roleplaying and combat is the concept of Advantage/Disadvantage, which benifits characters in situations where it’s very likely the character shall succeed/fail miserably. In either case two twenty sided dice are rolled instead of one, and either the higher or lower result is taken depending on the situation; flanking most notably provides advantage rather than an attack modifier now. It’s the ever present equalizer.
Characters now choose a background at character creation that sums up the general life experiences they have under their belt. With this experience comes a general idea of their personality as well as their backgrounds feature ability; a special rule that normally makes exploration or social niceties easier somehow. The nobleman paladin commands respect worthy of his title while the party’s rogue is a deadbeat charleton that fancies forging fake aliases to soak up his debts. This system often blends with Advantage and Disadvantage to create interesting scenarios such as: the Human Monk is a sailor at heart and spent most of his life at sea, he would have no problem keeping on his feet during a storm and would roll with advantage. The dwarf on the other hand hates water and everything that lives within it, rolling with disadvantage when the storm hits.
Character creation has been tidied up into a manageable step by step process that can be understood by players new and old alike. In past editions it was hard to pick a race because they all looked so interesting and powerful… except the basic humans. The earliest editions balanced the whole game around humans being “standard” and thus penalized the other races in their potential, this was written out edition by edition until the other races were just so much better that nobody wanted to be human. Let’s face it why be a weak ol’ humie when you could be Gnarmtar the Ogre House-Juggler. Humans now are gifted with naturally good statistics (+1 in all of em’) but no special rules OR you can go with the statistically weaker variant but get a tasty feat to play with. Either way 5E boasts a good lineup of stock player races.
The classes have also been scaled back into a traditional array of classes from Fighters, Monks, and Rogues; with thankfully no mention of 4th Edition’s contributions such as the Spellblade; who teleported around and hit you with his sword magic. Every class now features role playing abilities, such as the rangers terrain bonuses being switched out for travelling bonuses, and at higher levels monks can be understood by any creature that knows a language no matter what language they are speaking. It all comes back to the games rules being fleshed out to allow for richer storytelling, something the game has needed for years! Even monsters now have rules for pure roleplaying purposes now with lairs that influence the world in subtle ways around it.
Monsters are now uniformly angrier and less loaded with hitpoints and more loaded with stabby slicey bits. A fight that has been going well may quickly cascade into a series of botched rolls and knee-bites that can bring a party to its knees; players can’t just go on murder cruise-control anymore. I threw a trio of what were effectively great white sharks at the party and the party had a great ego about them until they realized that jumping into the water to fight them would be utter suicide from how hard they hit (even while shrunk by a spell one jumped out and nearly killed the rogue!)
On the other side of the table the game is nothing but fun to run as a GM. The Dungeon Master’s Guide is a beautifully written resource that does a perfect job sparking the imagination while teaching you how to run a game of 5E with a table or section for every situation. These sections of sage advice provide plenty of fuel for both the game and the game’s world and generally makes you worry less about making up rules regarding minutia. The DMG contains a section detailing areas of peculiar conditions such as areas of wild magic; places where every spell makes you roll for weird stuff going on like your hair turning greenish orange for a day. After one session in such a place the wild magic sorcerer went from wanting wild magic to always happen to being afraid it might happen.
The cosmology of DnD is extremely confusing: existence as we know it is called the material plane and from there is an ongoing matryoshka doll of different planes of existence that potentially go on forever. The description of the inner planes is the most poetic, describing the Plane of Water as an vast tropical ocean between the extremes of an icy abyss and a gigantic silt bog darted with various islands covered in ancient shipwrecks. A full read through the DMG arms you with not only the way to run 5E but the knowledge is just plain useful for any roleplaying game you attempt.
All in all I can’t stress enough how much I love this edition over any other I have played, and I’ve played most of them while owning the books for all of them. I’ve defaulted to advising new players to start with fifth, and generally hold it as a success. It’s been engineered to be accessible to new players, with the basic rules available on the website for free. Your local hobby shop more probably than not is holding a weekly DnD Encounters game designed to introduce new players to the system through an official story-line; As of writing it’s Elemental Evil (Which by the way is also a nifty book) that presents four different cults of elemental maniacs to fight with friends.
I give this edition five out of five giant sharks!
