I love 5th Edition, and I'm eager and excited to play with the revised rules in 2024. I suspect that it will continue to be my default RPG system I use at my table.
But I think, like some others, that while I appreciate the motivations for keeping "One D&D" compatible with pre-existing 5E content - indeed, I think it's the right choice and will be happy that the many books I've picked up over the years will remain usable - there's another part of me that is looking for something new.
MCDM's as-yet-unnamed RPG system is being pitched as explicitly trying not to worry about the legacy of older RPGs and to rethink and rebuild systems to work at their most fun.
Today they launched a crowdfunding effort, and got their initial funding in less than two hours. And I've signed on (not something I often do) to essentially pre-order the pdfs of the two core rulebooks - Heroes and Monsters.
Now, I'm not here to do advertising for them. If you want to see Matt Colville's pitch for it, he released an hour-long video talking about the crowdfunding campaign and the ideas that they're working on for the game.
But here are what I've gotten as key takeaways:
Not a Game of Attrition:
D&D owes a lot to its dungeon-crawling roots, and one of the ways that the gritty, deadly vibe was established is by making character resources all limited. Your job, essentially, is to survive until your next long rest.
And this works quite well in the kind of gritty fantasy story where you're a bunch of treasure-motivated scoundrels treading often in dangerous places that were wisely abandoned years ago. But in my experience, D&D is more often run with stories that emphasize doing good and saving the world.
So, MCDM's system is meant to encourage players to press on from fight to fight. Some classes gain their resources as they fight, so that combat will build up to the most climactic abilities rather than having every player "nova" at the start and then hope the villain goes down before they run out of resources.
One of the systems that they've talked about is Victories - as you defeat monsters, you'll get a building resource over the course of the day that will give you some bonus in the next fight - one example given was that the Talent (like their 5E version) is limited by the Strain that their powers can put on them, but they might also get to reduce their Strain by an amount equal to their Victory when a fight begins. Victory, then, at the end of the day, becomes Experience, and that's how you level up.
Nothing Misses:
One of the most revolutionary ideas here is that there's no attack roll. When you attack an enemy, you roll damage. I believe monsters (and when a monster attacks you, player characters) can have defensive abilities that reduce that incoming damage or otherwise mitigate it, but the intent here is that you never arrive at your turn and fail an attack and then feel you've done nothing.
Ten Levels:
While I've found that, with some adjustment, I've gotten pretty comfortable running stuff for a 16th level party, there is a general impression that D&D barely ever goes to high levels, and almost never to level 20. So, MCDM is going to only have ten levels, with an estimate of the power level of a 1st level character being around 3 if they were in 5E and a 10th level character being the equivalent of a 20th level 5E character, but with fewer steps in between and thus a higher likelihood that you'll actually hit that level.
I'm curious to see how well they pull this off - on one hand, I've had players who felt overwhelmed by a new class if we didn't start at 1st level or if we leveled up too quickly, but on the other hand, I might not feel a need to level players up so much if there are only 10 levels to worry about.
Initiative is Looser:
One idea that I'm... not entirely sold on but curious about is the way that initiative turn order works. Here, the party and the monsters will alternate turns, but the players can take their turns in any order. The intention here is to let players thing tactically about how they can set one another up to do impressive things.
This will of course require a bit of adjustment on how to track turns and make sure no one is getting skipped. I'm eager to see it in action.
No d20:
The system will be using 2d6 as its primary dice. You'll notice that A: this is going to have a smaller range of possible results, being 2-12, and B: it's also going to be less swingy, with a higher likelihood to roll near the average. They haven't detailed how Critical rolls are going to work, but they are supposed to be more likely, as the Rogue equivalent, the Shadow, will rely on them to gain a resource. (If it's just rolling a 6 on either die, that's a roughly 30% chance - which seems to me high enough that you'll see it often while still making it exciting when it happens).
We Shall See:
The chance that a game can dislodge D&D as the most popular TTRPG is low - Pathfinder might have briefly done so during D&D's 4th Edition (through the very anecdotal evidence of my own experience) - but this is of course coming up as a scrappy new project amid a number of similar efforts that have resulted from the earlier OGL debacle from the beginning of this year.
Given that there are so many coming out - between Kobold Press' efforts, Critical Role/Darrington Press' Daggerheart, Paizo's remastering of Pathfinder 2E to excise any and all D&D-related elements, and of course this, it's unlikely any one of them is going to overtake the soon-to-be 50-year-old beast that is D&D.
But it's almost certainly a good thing to have more options, and I hope each and every one of those systems becomes popular in its own right, with tables across the world trying the ones that appeal to them.
Personally, I think that the storytelling aspects of RPGs feel like they work best when the rules system melts into the background, and as a result, I'm a little more concerned with whether the gameplay mechanics can reinforce the story that we're trying to tell. But when it comes to tactical gameplay, a lot of the ideas that MCDM is presenting are really getting me excited. So, I've chucked 65 of my dollars at the project and will try to sell my usual players on trying out a brand-new system when it comes out. Wish me luck!
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