D&D playtest

[Bill Whitmore]

I tried playing this a couple Fridays ago and the biggest thing I took away from playing it is they seriously need better movement mechanics.

There are 2 movement mechanics. of which I am not fond individually, that, when taken together, becomes utterly ridiculous.

The first is the ability to break up your movement between before and after your action.  The second is the complete lack of area control around your character (no attacks of opportunity, no movement hindrance adjacent to enemies, give a guy a few hundred feet of movement and he can run a few laps around you before running away and attacking your party wizard).

I am playing the fighter, the result of randomly assigning characters.  To test the rules, our GM runs us through a good old fashion basic dungeon crawl.  The first few fights were pretty weak, but I quickly discovered that I couldn't really form a battle line or battle wall to protect the weaker party members since things could run around me freely.  If I couldn't find a 5 foot corridor to park my ass in, the monsters were free to attack anyone they wanted.

Then we kicked in a door and there were 8 goblins.  Realizing the problems they could cause my hit point challenged party members, I parked my soon-to-be-carcass in front of the door to keep them from pouring through.  So, instead of each of them flooding into the room, all 8 of them proceed to attack and beat the shit out of me.  You see, I made the mistake of thinking they would only be able to attack me 1 at a time, possible 2 others through cover granted by the door frame.  But I was wrong.  Each goblin in turn moved to the door, attacked me then moved away to make room for the next goblin.

After taking 8 attacks in 1 round all originating from the same 5 foot square I came to realize that tactical movement and positioning were pretty much non-existent.  My choices, after kicking down the door, were to either grab my ankles and brace myself for the incoming goblin raping or step aside and give them free reign to the rest of my party, including my crap-AC, low-HP wizard.

Luckily, I blissfully died the following battle when an Ogre dropped me and a goblin coup-de-graced me, giving me a chance to gracefully bow out of the game for the foreseeable future.  I included similar information in their survey but that is pretty much the last time I am playing that game so long as the movement rules remain that way.

[Sletchman]

While reading your summary, my first thought for the movement mechanics was "that's cool, no more AoO (good thing) and acting while moving is very cool - you could shoot on the run and do rideby attacks and stuff, I like it".

By the time I got to the word "battle wall" all I could picture was a conga line of mooks moving up and down, attacking you as they passed.  While a hilarious mental image, it isn't even remotely heroic.  I'm kind of glad I haven't paid any real attention to 5E now.

[Mister Andersen]