For one week only, you can pick up a pdf copy of the original 1e version of Temple of Elemental Evil. This legendary dungeon complex taught me useful life lessons, such as "If you ever enter a place called 'The Fire Temple', and it's full of fiery symbolism and lit by flickering flames, and you're looking for someone called 'the Fire Priest', then it might be a good idea to cast Protection from Fire before triggering the inevitable ambush by fire elementals."This is a gesture of good will in support of the release of the latest (and possibly final) 5th Edition playtest for D&D. Major changes in this version are (inevitably) all things I don't much like:
- Proficiencies/skills now have a level-scaling bonus, shifting the game back toward the build-oriented end of the 'open stat-based vs closed build-constrained' continuum for player agency. Skills are now treated as a non-optional subsystem.
- Multiclassing has been added back in. It's essentially the low-commitment 3e buffet model, which means (1) it's silly for casters to take any non-caster class, and (2) melee classes will go on grabbing a level or two of <whatever> for min-maxing reasons. Granted, no edition has ever had a successful multiclass system, so my expectations were never high.
- Cleric melee abilities generally downgraded, and casting abilities upgraded. The class is back to being a healbot. You can't fight the expectations of 10 million MMO players, I guess.
- Mages have lost their iconic abilities to scribe scrolls and brew potions, which dated back to the 70s. Apparently there was no way to balance them properly?
- No sign of any OGL-like licensing arrangement as the clock runs down, which means that their chances of displacing Pathfinder as system-of-choice for third-party publishers will remain poor to negligible.
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