Great Article: ‘D&D BEYOND’...

Check this out:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/inside-dungeons-and-dragons-beyond/

This is an article about the new digital tools suite for D&D 5 and it looks pretty slick. I have HeroLab for Pathfinder, and that program has become the only way to play for us. I want to check this software suite out and see what it can do for my group - so, nicely done and written - thank you!

Now, my thoughts and feelings. The problem I have with both Pathfinder and D&D is the character generation time, even in the article, they mention it took a GM and seven players three hours to create a party of characters. Even the author says it takes him 30 to 45 minutes to create a character by himself, and that is with proficient rules knowledge.

And here I was thinking Pathfinder was the one that took a lot of time, and that D&D 5 was actually faster. I guess as time goes on, those 'critical path' choices become clear and the game's balance and mechanics push players more towards 'good choices' for combat and critical game activities. It is like hard drive space in a way, you always find a way to use it all up no matter how much you have. In pen-and-paper games, character generation time seems to go up to an hour no matter how hard the designers try to streamline.

I have been through those 'where did the three hours go' character generation sessions way too many times, and it is hard to get players to go through that and come back the next week. In my feeling, it throws a huge wet blanket over that first, magical 'getting started' session that should be about adventure and having fun, not filling out a character sheet the length of a tax form and then having to come back the next week to see if you made the right choices.

Yes, pre-generated characters help - but they take the critical 'player creative input' out of the game. We are in an age of 64-bit smartphones that do amazing things and connect the world, how hard could it be to design a rules system that gets you started in 5 minutes?

In a perfect world, I would never use a computer program to wrangle complex character creation systems, and it could all be done as we did it when the game started. Throw 3d6 in six scores, pick a race, pick a class, grab some gear, and go.

The simplicity of the retro-clones calls to me, I know.

But the new games allow so much customization!

True, but unlimited choice is not always a good thing in games nor in life. It can paralyze and cause people to not choose anything rather than make a choice and go with it. I would rather have my complexity creep in after level one (in character advancement) than force it on players before they get started with the game.

Just my feelings of course, and I still appreciate robust character design systems - but there is a point where I feel complexity starts hurting the 'new player experience' and also play-ability.

It is why my shelf still holds a nice collection of retro-clones and they continue to inspire me to this day. Sometimes the original ways we did things need some respect and study, and that those simple times had a merit of their own.