D&D 5E Is there beef between Mearls and Cook?

[Tony Vargas]

Maybe. But thanks to the journey through 3e and 4e, I think 5e does have some better defined elements than 1e/2e did. For example, exactly how far can you move and still get multiple attacks in 1e or 2e? It's not that easy a question to answer.

1e, your full movement of 120,* 90 or 60' depending on armor/encumbrance, and you could intersperse attacks among your movement if you had 'em. It was a full one-minute round, afterall. (There were different movement rates per turn in different environments or circumstances, but i don't recall if there was a run or 'double move' or anything you could do in combat /instead/ of attacking....)

But it is in 5e and I'm sure it's partly because 3e took the effort to define it far more carefully than previous editions did.

In 3e, if you moved more than 5' you lost your extra attacks, in 5e you can spread them out amongst your movement, or Dash and make no attack, at all. Feels more like a compromise between the two than an evolution from one, through the other, to something new.










* I vaguely recall 10*DEX as a base move instead of 120 (which'd be a DEX 12, pretty average), but I suspect that was a variant someone shared with me.

 

[Mercule]

Can't say I ever noticed that. Yes, 3e was very player-focused in terms of the sheer resources marketed to them (it had worked for 2e for a while, and Battletech and WoD had been very successful with publishing vast quantities of 'splatbooks'), and there was the RAW-uber-alles zietgiest that built up around that. Players were able to uncover lavish rewards for system mastery and were unwilling to lose them to an off-hand DM ruling.
But that only made running 3.x that much more of a challenge, and a good (indeed excellent) DM that much more needful. I suppose that 'protected' you from an inexperienced DM, as they'd either give up in short order, and painfully gain the needed experience...

Yeah. Since I tend to prefer a little more ad hoc ruling and free flow of things, it wasn't something that I, personally, wanted done with the game and is the reason why I'll never play 3.5 again and have no interest in trying Pathfinder. I still curse the mindset change that 3E ushered in.

My personal feelings on whether they should have done that is irrelevant to the question of whether they did it well because that was their intent.

 

[Satyrn]

Monte was a big name in 3e but 5e owes as much to older editions and simpler play as it does to 3e. . . . Or he wanted a crunchier more complex game and less simplicity.

If it was one of those things you suggested, my money would be on this one

 

[Tony Vargas]

Monte was a big name in 3e but 5e owes as much to older editions

If he can hold on for another 10 or 15 years, the come-back cycle should get around to 3e.

Yeah. Since I tend to prefer a little more ad hoc ruling and free flow of things, it wasn't something that I, personally, wanted done with the game and is the reason why I'll never play 3.5 again and have no interest in trying Pathfinder. I still curse the mindset change that 3E ushered in.

It was not a terrible time to be a player with a fair bit of system mastery. But, yeah, I very much appreciate 5e shifting back to a more ad-hoc, DM-centric feel. I'm not entirely disenchanted with 3.x, I'd play it, especially 3.0 actually, given a chance to use a character I built but never got to play, but yeah, I wouldn't want to ever run it again.

My personal feelings on whether they should have done that is irrelevant to the question of whether they did it well because that was their intent.

The quote from Williams doesn't sound like 'protecting players from bad DMs' so much as 'creating a more coherent ruleset' which it was, (compared to 1e, certainly!) maybe even 'making the game easier to run,' though 3.x clearly fails at the latter, IMHO.

 

[Uchawi]

You can only have so many cooks in the kitchen. That applies when developing the new recipe for 5E. Overall, both kitchens, i.e. respective rule systems are a little too simple for my tastes.

 

[billd91]

1e, your full movement of 120,* 90 or 60' depending on armor/encumbrance, and you could intersperse attacks among your movement if you had 'em. It was a full one-minute round, afterall. (There were different movement rates per turn in different environments or circumstances, but i don't recall if there was a run or 'double move' or anything you could do in combat /instead/ of attacking....)

Not as far as I can tell (and I've looked extensively in recent years). There's actually no indication you can intersperse attacks among movement in 1e or 2e. There's no indication you can move your full movement rate and get multiple attacks anywhere. It's actually a bit of a mess.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Not as far as I can tell (and I've looked extensively in recent years). There's actually no indication you can intersperse attacks among movement in 1e or 2e. There's no indication you can move your full movement rate and get multiple attacks anywhere. It's actually a bit of a mess.

Is there some indication you can't in 2e?
I mean, yes, 1e was a mess - a glorious mess - but it wasn't always hard to come to a conclusion or ruling. Just hard to figure out which one Gygax had in mind as he was typing...

And, 5e does return to that 'requires DM interpretation' philosophy, if to a less maddening degree...
... if it were 'evolution' progressing naturally from 2e to 3e to 4e it probably wouldn't look much like it does.

 

[dave2008]

I had already forgotten that Cook has started out as lead on 5E.

I didn't think he was the lead designer, but a lead/major consultant. I could easily be remembering incorrectly, but I always thought Mearls was the lead.

 

[SkidAce]

Sure. I wasn't knocking 3e there, railroading games into the DM's scripted storyline was a much bigger thing in the '90s. 3e's stronger player empowerment was a necessary corrective.

I don't agree with this.

However, it's likely do to different localities and player bases, so I cant say that you are wrong.

Those DM that railroaded and scripted their stories didn't last long, so I think it was pretty self correcting on its own, and not a part of 3E development.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Supposedly in 3.x, as it attempted to have a rule for everything. I believe Monte Cook even stated early on that one of the design philosophies was that 3rd Edition would protect players from bad GMs, by reducing the areas where GMs needed to make judgment calls.

I think it did a brilliant job with it. 3e was the first edition of D&D that felt like it had consistent, understandable rules. Rules with an actual system behind it that you could understand the application of rather than, "find the chart that tells you how to resolve it," being the answer for everything with a million little independent systems all of which were mechanically unique for no good reason.

Prior to 3e's release, AD&D had a significant cultural problem that the DM could make arbitrary and even capricious rulings, and the players just had to accept that. That's... not a fun way to play if you don't have a good DM, and the early game did very little to teach you how to DM well. I played under a couple DMs that ascribed to the "DM vs player" way of thinking, or with a, "it's my job to make it unfair for the PCs," line of thinking. Those can be fine when taken reasonably, but some DMs genuinely seemed to feel like it was their job to make the game as miserable as possible. Whether it's because everybody was a teenager at the time or whether it was because people took Tomb of Horrors to be a model rather than understanding the module to be an intentionally unfair challenge for tournament play I can't really say. If you played during the 1e/2e era, I wouldn't be surprised if you never played with one of these types of DMs, but I would be very skeptical if you said you had no idea that culture existed unless you were under 10 when 3e released.

In a historical sense, I think 1e mechanical morass, 2e's unhealthy DM culture and fluff bloat, 3e's standardized rules and balance problems, 3.5e's splat-mania, 4e's unhealthy player culture (which has it's origins in 3.5e) and misguided balance obsession all led to what 5e is today. You can see how the culture of D&D has evolved as the different editions came out. When it was released, each edition had the salient features that the community felt were important. Each iteration gets a little better, though each edition (even 5e) has introduced new problems.