Basic D&D Next

This post from Mike Mearls has me once again quite excited about D&D Next. The recent play test packets for D&D Next have struck me as overly complicated, and I had thought maybe the game would move in a direction I wasn’t too keen on. I quite enjoyed the early play test rules for their simplicity. Those rules were easy to grasp, with the game mechanics really stripped down to a minimum. The more recent play test packets have added more rules to the game and a lot of extra complexity.

One thing I dislike about 4th Edition is the amount of stuff a new player needs to know right from the get go. A 1st level character in 4th Edition has lots of powers and needs to understand fairly complicated rules about how combat works. Character creation is a very slow process, so complicated you really need to use an online tool to create characters. This all makes teaching someone how to play D&D using the 4th Edition rules a pain. It was starting to look like D&D Next was moving in this direction.

Mearl’s makes it sound like one of the goals for D&D Next is to have a basic version of the game that’s stripped down and simple to understand and play. What he’s describing sounds pretty great to me, and much more inline with what we saw in the initial play test rules. In terms of past rule sets, it sounds like they are hoping to put out something similar to Basic / Expert D&D from the 80s. That’s what i’m talking about.

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