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Irondrake
January 7th, 2014, 02:03
With more and more 5E(Next) products coming out at D&D Classics this year, I was wondering how close we were to having an official ruleset for play with these products? I know we have some great extensions and parsers from community members, I was just wondering about something from the Fantasy Grounds team here :) Oh, and if its anything close, do you need playtesters? I have a group that plays D&D Next weekly that I'm sure would love to be involved ;)

Zeus
January 15th, 2014, 18:54
Hopefully moon_wizard won't mind me chirping in. There is an ** unofficial ** 5E ruleset currently in development. moon_wizard and I have been working on it (in between other projects) for a few months now. I say ** unofficial ** as until such a time that 5E is formally announced along with the proposed licensing model (determined by the publisher WotC) its not clear if an official ruleset will ever materialise. I guess it will come down to whether WotC release 5E under an OGL (as per 3.5E), if so an official ruleset will follow. If on the other hand WoTC opt for a more restrictive license (as per 4E), then it will come down to whether WotC are open to allowing third parties to develop supporting software tools (such as VTTs). In the latter case, it will come down to how well negotiations go between Smiteworks and WotC.

In any case a bare-bones 5E ruleset is being developed (akin to 4E) which will implement the full game mechanics but will omit any functional data or IP. Functional data will need to be created/applied by the user community manually or using one of the various bulk loading/parsing tools that will be available. If an official ruleset materialises in the future, rest assured there will be strong support for official adventure modules and sourcebooks.

Timescales wise, hard to say exactly when 5E will land. Developing 5E has been quite challenging requiring (in some cases) extensive re-writes of functionality ported from 3.5E and 4E. FG3.0 and CoreRPG support has also been worked in, I'd say its close to being completed but there is still some areas which need finishing + extensive play testing. I don't want to spoil its release but the ruleset is shaping up to being functionally very rich. Here's a slightly older screenshot of the ruleset and a few of the window classes as a teaser. The char sheets in 5E use an exploded model whereby all PC sheets are no longer bound to a single window. 5E will also include some intelligent drop handlers for complex drop handling e.g. Reference Class sheets dropped to PC sheet which result in Wizard driven dialogs guiding the player through Skill, Ability and Feature choices. The ruleset also includes the new Advantage/Disadvantage functionality (although the screenshot below is missing the new modifier box for some reason - must remember to talk to moon about that) as well as new Proficiency mechanics.

More to com, stay tuned.

5879

Acroyear
January 15th, 2014, 21:23
awesome!! can't wait to test!! :)

Irondrake
January 16th, 2014, 02:48
That is looking amazing! My offer to assist in playtesting stands. We have a group of 5 playing a Next campaign now and they are used to me changing things up on them. :)