V5 in Development

[Ebon Hearted Soul]

How are things going on the Monster & Treasure V5 and Delving & Exploration V5 document development Ways? I am liking the Gamma version of Heroes & Magic V5.

[waysoftheearth]

Hey Ebon, thanks for your interest in V5.

Well it's fair to say that active development has been on an unplanned hiatus for some months owing to my being ridiculously overloaded at work. That minor inconvenience aside, the major parts of D&E/book 2 (pretty much all bar the seafaring and aerial exploration sections) have been drafted up and annotated. There remains some decision making to do around what to include or exclude, but I would reeeeally like to see that puppy moving forward.

M&T/book 3, as it stands, is just an incomplete bunch of notes, so still a long road ahead on that one. However, it may be worth noting that I'm already aware that the (so called) "monster ecology" of V5 will have a few quirks/deviations from the original for various reasons, but which will ultimately contribute to something like a "DD flavor". Time will tell...

[Ebon Hearted Soul]

Very nice update Ways, I am looking forward to what you come up with as Delving deeper is brilliant. I'll be running my future campaigns using Delving Deeper with a few tweaks depending on the needs of my campaign setting & i'll likely print out V5 Gamma of D&D so I can compare it with V4 easier.

[soner du]

As said on G+, I'm willing to translate the game in French, starting with v5.

I'm currently busy with another translation project (ZeFRS in French with some additional contents), I don'ty have that much spare time, but I will be more available at the end of 2016 !

Finally, I'm abandonning this project... I'll try to focus on other projects (RPG and others).

[The Red Baron]

Revisiting this topic... a miscellaneous grab bag of comments:

• DDv5 seems like more of a "true clone" of the 3LBBs than v4. v4 had a lot of fun "Delving Deeper"y flavor, like giant crocodiles on the encounter tables.
• I'm not sure what "animals", "giant animals", and "insects" indicate on the v5 dungeon tables. Will there be subtables for these?
• The magic jar spell in Men & Magic implies to me that a magic jar can be carried around by the magic-user as a failsafe to protect vs death. If a magic-user is about to be killed, their life force may travel to the magic jar. The only way to destroy them is to destroy their jar. The jar is like a lich's phylactery or a horcrux from harry potter.
• I like the control water. Lower water and part water never sat well with me, but "control water" is a nice corollary to "control weather" and "move earth" filling out a triumverate of 6th level elemental spells
• DDv5 seems to have short bows, long bows, horse bows, and composite bows. I thought it was a sound editorial choice in DD to limit bow options to short bows and long bows. My understanding is that historically short bows were super-ceded by composite bows by late antiquity. The eastern romans would have certainly used them. Longbows were far cheaper, simpler, and more robust than composite bows, but longbows required absurdly huge back muscles for a worse all-around bow. Horse bow and composite bow are redundant.
• Medieval sources talk about one-foot crossbows and two-foot crossbows, indicating the method by which they were loaded. A one foot bow was light enough to span by stepping on the stirrup with a foot. A two-foot crossbow required attaching a belt loop to the string, and pushing with the force of both feet/legs to span the thing. A cool replacement for "crossbow" and "crossbow, heavy" would be "crossbow, one foot" and" crossbow, two-foot". My ideal equipment list for bows would look like

    Code:

  Longbow 5
  Composite bow 50
  Crossbow, one-foot 15
  Crossbow, two-foot 25
  

• The gelatinous cube appears on the v4 list. Have you thought about some of the monsters from greyahwk or holmes? Shriekers, stirges, carrion crawlers, and rust monsters feel very d&d to me! I don't know if any of these are legally precluded, but shriekers could be called "screamers", carrion crawlers "creepy crawlies", etc. Giant skeletons are also cool.

[waysoftheearth]

Thanks redbaron.

The answer to almost all of these dot-points is, largely, in your first one. Yes, DD5 intends to be a nearer closer emulation of the original.
In some cases this involves reverting some of V4's embellishments or cuts. Most of these changes can, I hope, be summarised as an appendix for V4 backward compatibility. A couple of areas V5 will continue to elaborate will, I think, be the specifics of combat (largely omitted from the LBBs), and some details of the presumed monster ecology. We'll see...

[Intrepid]

Hi!

A relatively long time Delving Deeper fan here! Glad to see some V5 developments! I had a few questions regarding the humble Fighting-Man:

In DDv4 the level 4 Fighter "will not be targeted by normal-types while there are normal targets available."

DDv5 (Gamma 20180723) omits the part above and says that he's unaffected by fewer than four normal hits in a combat encounter.


-Where did the first rule originate from and why was it dropped? Just curious. If I recall correctly the second one is from the Chainmail Heroes.

-Am I right thinking that the second rule should benefit a third-level Fighter (as he could fight as a Hero-1)?

-How would that rule be applied? No hit point loss for the first three hits in a fight?




EDIT: I see now that redbaron asked similar questions on page 1. I'm still interested in some elaboration on how it would apply though. On another note, I can apparently approve my own first post, which is probably not how it should work. Just a heads up @waysoftheearth.

[waysoftheearth]

Hi @Intrepid and thanks for your interest in DD (and DD5!).

DD4 is a long way back in my memory, so I had to go re-read about DD4 Fighters.
Broadly speaking, V4 is just not as mature as (I hope) V5 will be, and this is precisely why a V5 was required.

V4's <<will not be targeted by normal-types while there are normal targets available>> is a direct transposition of CM's <<They are the last figure in a unit that will be killed by regular missile fire of melee>>. Good pickup that it is missing from V5. I couldn't remember intentionally removing it, so I went back and checked my notes. It's in the notes, yet missing from the public PDFs. I'll have to look into that, but my initial sense is it's an unintentional omission; most likely resulting from copious amounts of copying the text around between various files.

Yes, V5's <<unaffected by fewer than four normal hits in a combat encounter>> is a transposition of CM's <<When meleed
by regular troops, and combat takes place on the non-Fantasy Combat Tables, four simultaneous kills must be scored against Heroes (or Anti-heroes) to eliminate them. Otherwise, there is no effect upon them>>.


Re applying the ignore hits rule to 3rd level fighters: Short answer is: it's your game, so you should play around and find what works for you and your players. That said, here are a couple of observations:

1) "scaling" the rule up and/or down might imply that 1st level fighter ignore 1 normal hit (which would really help low level fighters and parties go further!) and/or that a 10th level fighter ignores 10 normal hits, which might be less desirable. The printed rules are not explicit, so it's up to you how to implement it in your game.

2) While Fighting Capability of hero-1 does make a 3rd level fighter "heroic" in the binary normal/heroic sense, "Fights As" is not the same as "Is". This is evident when, for example, a hobgoblin King "fights as" an ogre, or when a 14th level fighter "fights as" a demigod. Despite their fighting prowess, the hobgoblin King is not an ogre, and the fighter doesn't actually have Zeus as a father.

Hope that helps

[Intrepid]

Interesting. It didn't cross my mind to think about part two that way, but it's obvious now when you mention it. The 'Fighters ignoring hits' even at first level is intriguing. I guess it could take away some of the suspense though. It might make sense to house rule that it only applies

a) when the Fighter isn't surprised,
b) able to defend himself
c) and against frontal attacks only.

Or something. Anyway, thanks for the clarification, and best of luck with V5!

[waysoftheearth]

Thanks @Intrepid

Thinking about the <<will not be targeted by normal-types while there are normal targets available>> phrase some more, I now recall that, at some point, I was tossing up whether to move this into the combat section. So that is probably how it was omitted from the fighter text.

The issue at play is then its inclusion in the combat text. This happens to be the least explicit part of the 3LBBs, so requires the most editorial license. There has already been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in this space; when I left it to lie fallow a couple of years back, I was heading toward an abstract "theater of the mind"-type explanation of combat in the main rules, with a fuller, more CM-like, explanation as an appendix.

Since then I have done more research, playing around, and perhaps drawn a few pragmatic conclusions. While it does omit a few details, the rendering of combat in the recent Ref's Quickstarter is a decent window in the current thinking.