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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Bring Out Your (Un)Dead!

Mike Mearls is looking at giving the Turn Undead ability of clerics a major reworking in D&D Next. I find myself still asking the question "Why"? in many forms...

Why make a fairly simple and easy to resolve power more complicated?

Why make a historically much maligned class even less desirable to play?

Why add an effect to each undead monster description that applies to an effect generated by only one class?

Why do we need two types of each undead monster ("natural" and "summoned")?

Why fix what isn't broken?

Why is Mike trying to make a Dawn of the Undead Dragons RPG? Why not use the acronym DUD? ;)

Why is it that designers that claim to understand Old School D&D are doing their damnedest to remove Old School D&D from D&D Next?

2 comments:

  1. Really, if there were going to be 2 types of undead, I'd rather see "mindless" and "not mindless". Zombies vs Vampires.

    Who cares if it was summoned... it either wants to eat your brain or it wants to torture you.

    And "natural" undead makes me LOL.

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  2. What he's doing is house ruling 'turn undead', and making his house rules official. This is exactly the wrong way to bring people together in a game. Keep it simple, so everyone has the same framework, and then build from there. But of course, if you don't add rules, you can't sell exceptions to those rules in the guise of splat books.

    ReplyDelete

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