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Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition
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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5965871" data-attributes="member: 54877"><p>This relates to that comment several weeks ago, I believe from Mearls, that a good rules should be one that if you need to look it up, makes sense as soon as you read it. It is a rule that you can honestly say, "I didn't know that before, but I'm not surprised that it is this way." That's not really good design, per se, but I think the intersection of good design with elegance--which implies a certain amount of engineering mixed with art. It's often at the boundaries of disciplines like this that we get things really good or definitely "off" somehow.</p><p> </p><p>Strictly speaking (which I certainly don't always do), I wouldn't say something is "bad design" until one found a better design to replace it with. As soon as you find that better design, the other one is worse--and if worse "enough" was always "bad design"--whether we suspected it earlier or not. Of course, what most people mean by "bad design" (including me) is something like, "This things follows a pattern that I've seen before. The pattern has characteristic flaws. There is a better pattern to replace it."</p><p> </p><p>So, for example, you can intuit from the pattern, if you've got related experience elsewhere, that "better AC goes down" while "better attack numbers go up" is "bad design." That's entirely true by pattern--but comes with the big caveat, often unstated, that we can have a way to make them consistent that will be, on the whole, better than having them go opposite. 3E's "better design" reinforces the pattern by finding that way.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5965871, member: 54877"] This relates to that comment several weeks ago, I believe from Mearls, that a good rules should be one that if you need to look it up, makes sense as soon as you read it. It is a rule that you can honestly say, "I didn't know that before, but I'm not surprised that it is this way." That's not really good design, per se, but I think the intersection of good design with elegance--which implies a certain amount of engineering mixed with art. It's often at the boundaries of disciplines like this that we get things really good or definitely "off" somehow. Strictly speaking (which I certainly don't always do), I wouldn't say something is "bad design" until one found a better design to replace it with. As soon as you find that better design, the other one is worse--and if worse "enough" was always "bad design"--whether we suspected it earlier or not. Of course, what most people mean by "bad design" (including me) is something like, "This things follows a pattern that I've seen before. The pattern has characteristic flaws. There is a better pattern to replace it." So, for example, you can intuit from the pattern, if you've got related experience elsewhere, that "better AC goes down" while "better attack numbers go up" is "bad design." That's entirely true by pattern--but comes with the big caveat, often unstated, that we can have a way to make them consistent that will be, on the whole, better than having them go opposite. 3E's "better design" reinforces the pattern by finding that way. [/QUOTE]
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