EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
And yet they got rid of plenty of things that were popular (see: the playtest Sorcerer), while also refusing to get rid of things that were very unpopular (it took them forever to get rid of the "fistful of dice" mechanic that preceded Proficiency Bonus; I and others at the time suspected this was simply because Mearls loves slinging dice) and failed to back down from positions that were, at the very least, highly controversial (e.g. excluding Warlord as a class, even though there was an incredibly inconvenient poll that showed that Druid was less-popular than Warlord, because they actually deigned to include Warlord as an option. Druid was dead last, and not by a particularly narrow margin either.)They stated that at the start of a large public playtest. They entire point of the public playtest is to see if players like your design goals and rules. Changing your goals and rules is the entire point of the playtest. If they talk about something at the start of the playtest and don't end up including it in the final game, it is probably something that most players didn't want.
The playtest was a marketing ploy, and had very little to do with actually adjusting their preconceived notions or overall design intent.
They actually did give a fair amount of detail, but you'd have to go through the Internet Archive to dig up the originals. They've deleted their website not once but twice since the D&D Next playtest began. The second deletion, for example, got rid of the aforementioned incredibly inconvenient poll.I also think you are reading way to much into the original statement. I can play a simple champion fighter with no feats, where you just do a basic attack every round, or I can play a battlemaster fighter with lots of feats and have a character with lots of tactical options. They seem like a rules-lite OSR character and a 4e style character to me.
It's not like they gave a lot of detail when they first talked about it. It was litterally a couple of sentences in an interview before the playtest even started.
And it was, very specifically, said that the intent of "modularity" was that one group could play with the 4e "tactical combat module" enabled and get a strongly 4e-like experience, while another group could have a different set of "modules" enabled and get a very much "old-school" game, and both would be strongly supported.
One of those statements came out kinda-sorta true. It's hard to play truly old-school style because of how ubiquitous magic is, and how much of it can easily destroy the logistics-and-attrition gameplay that many fans thereof desire. But you can cobble together something kinda-sorta workable. The other? They quietly stopped talking about modularity and the "tactical combat module" during the last 8-10 months of the playtest and pretty clearly hoped everyone would just forget about it. Much like how they quietly stopped talking about the "Warlord Fighter" after they had gone all-in for supporting it via Specialties, only to scrap the entire Specialties concept and thus leave nothing for the Warlord Fighter to hang on.