Looking at this discussion there seems to be quite a bit of negativity towards the idea of more options in general when they're for the player, with some outright stating that this is one of the biggest ways to impact tables in a bad way. Why is that?
Every time you add a new option that players can take, there's a chance it has an unexpected/excessive synergy with some other pre-existing option. The more options you add, the more potential cross-interactions, and the more fragile, complex, and prone to 'breaking' (mainly in terms of balance, but even in terms of functionality) the game becomes. It's a consequence of the /kind/ of design D&D traditionally uses, in which each new option is to some extent mechanically novel (otherwise, why have it, right?) and is just added to the existing list (a 'list based system').
One alternative to that is an 'effects based' system, that has a fixed number of mechanics that model end results of actions or abilities, rather than having many different sub-systems that bring about the same results in conceptually different ways. In an effects based system, an arrow, bullet, magic missile or death ray would all be 'the same' (in that they'd all be attacks that kill, though some might be a lot more potent examples), adding a 'fire bolt' to that system would be something the player could do by using those same mechanics to an appropriate power-level (number of points in a build system, for instance) and re-skinning them. That's not hypothetical, that's how Hero System worked going back to the first ed of Champions! c1981. (And, no, I'm not shilling for Hero System - it's last edition lost me, and I haven't played or run it this decade.)
I'm primarily a player myself, and don't really understand the hostility. I love making characters, mechanically and through narrative, and every time Wizards releases an expansion to character options my field of possible characters and experiences in 5E gets bigger and better. What's wrong with that? Has it always been this way?
It most certainly has not always been this way. It was arguably this way 20 or 30 (or 40!) years ago, but it's precisely because the last two edition offered many player options, and whether under the rubric of 'system mastery' or 'RAW' or 'balance' or 'Everything is Core' fostered this idea that players were /entitled/ to those options (thus 'player entitlement'). The current hostility to out of control expansion of player options is a reaction to those years.
2e is a funky beast.
It had a lot of splatbooks early on, but the big hardcovers were not very PC focused: Book of Artifacts, Legends & Lore, and such. There was pretty much only Tome of Magic for players.
Bloat is bloat, whichever side of the screen it happens on. And there was more to the 'players option' series than Tome of Magic.
Bloat is what drove me away from 2e about half-way through it's run. It had too much going on, and the system wasn't robust enough to handle it (compared, say, to 3e). Maybe playing Storyteller in the mean time acclimated me to faster paces of publication, so I was better able to tolerate 3e & 4e in spite of that, but 2e definitely suffered from the issue, quite dramatically. In that sense, for me, 5e really harkens back to early 1e and a book-a-year pace.
At the risk of edition warring
That was the 'land mine' in my analogy, yes.
But, why take that risk?
We're getting close with fighters, yeah. There's a lot of UA options. They might need a little tweaking in terms of power, but there's a goodly amount of options there. But UA's a good place for that content since they can churn it out safely
It's all opt-in, yes, so pretty safe. The 'official'/core fighter options remain the original three. They've also been neatly designed to avoid any sort of cross-pollination - several UA fighter sub-classes get CS dice, but what they can do with them doesn't rub off on the BM, for instance. That'd bode well for 5e's robustness in the face of bloat if the same held true for other sub-classes, like the Bladesinger, but it doesn't. :shrug:
But D&D can't do that and needs to keep it's products always in stock. So building too many books becomes an issue.
I think, with the 5e paradigm, they could afford to keep just the core 3 books 'evergreen,' and let supplements have a more limited life - go out of print, be legal in AL for a season or year or two, then gone. Something like that has been working for their CCG lines, I believe (I don't follow them closely, so I could be mistaken).
