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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7760275" data-attributes="member: 71699"><p>Exactly. Lower tier 5th characters have more they can do. A 3rd level Wizard in 5th for instance has twice as many casts (more if you count Arcane Recovery). A 3rd level Barbarian has twice as many rages, and a few extra abilities compared with the 3rd edition Barbarian's one rage and a couple of passives (one of which was trap sense!)</p><p></p><p></p><p>I definitely hear this from people. I think part of it is that 3rd edition was clunkier, without being fundamentally more complex. One example is the introduction of Dash. In 3rd you had an Action and a Move, or two Moves, or a Full-round Action, and you had these odd things like Swift and Immediate actions, and finally a Free action. 5th edition drops only <u>one</u> of these, but the rest are handled better. So two Moves is now a Dash and a Move. Swift is a Bonus action. Immediate is a Reaction. They gave fighters a break in 5th... not before time!</p><p></p><p>And then you have other things such as how 5th handles Surprise. For my money, 3rd handled Surprise in a cleaner way, that was much easier for players to understand. Once you throw in characters with more options in the meaningful tiers (1 and 2), you wind up with fights that are just as complicated. OTOH my group is veteran and it could just be that they make my life hard by how they use all those abilities!</p><p></p><p>You can even look at a system like Skills and see that it was much clunkier in 3rd than in 5th, but was it more complicated in play? I don't think so: in the end each character has one or two skills they excel at, and that's all they use. Getting to that is more complicated in third, but it's done off-line (or should be!) so it doesn't add to complexity <u>in play</u>.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 7760275, member: 71699"] Exactly. Lower tier 5th characters have more they can do. A 3rd level Wizard in 5th for instance has twice as many casts (more if you count Arcane Recovery). A 3rd level Barbarian has twice as many rages, and a few extra abilities compared with the 3rd edition Barbarian's one rage and a couple of passives (one of which was trap sense!) I definitely hear this from people. I think part of it is that 3rd edition was clunkier, without being fundamentally more complex. One example is the introduction of Dash. In 3rd you had an Action and a Move, or two Moves, or a Full-round Action, and you had these odd things like Swift and Immediate actions, and finally a Free action. 5th edition drops only [U]one[/U] of these, but the rest are handled better. So two Moves is now a Dash and a Move. Swift is a Bonus action. Immediate is a Reaction. They gave fighters a break in 5th... not before time! And then you have other things such as how 5th handles Surprise. For my money, 3rd handled Surprise in a cleaner way, that was much easier for players to understand. Once you throw in characters with more options in the meaningful tiers (1 and 2), you wind up with fights that are just as complicated. OTOH my group is veteran and it could just be that they make my life hard by how they use all those abilities! You can even look at a system like Skills and see that it was much clunkier in 3rd than in 5th, but was it more complicated in play? I don't think so: in the end each character has one or two skills they excel at, and that's all they use. Getting to that is more complicated in third, but it's done off-line (or should be!) so it doesn't add to complexity [U]in play[/U]. [/QUOTE]
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