One of the stated design goals of 5e is that you can have a guy playing a 1st edition style fighter, with nothing more than his six stats, attack bonus, and other basics, and he can be playing alongside someone who has a 3.x or 4e style complex character, and both will work fine together and be balanced. Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea?
It's a wonderful idea. Like World Peace.
It's just impossible to achieve, is all.
One of the developers mentioned the idea that you could "trade in" the basic things fighters get like attack bonus for special maneuvers or other more complex options. The problem is, balancing these things is not easy to do. Look at the feats in 3rd and 4th editions, for example. All feats cost the same thing, and yet they were far from balanced with each other.
Nod. You also end up just sort of 'rearanging deck chairs' to customize such a character. Basic attacks only do so much, so balancing specials with them means the specials rarely hit, or do little damage, and still don't do all that much (trip, grab, etc).
In the meantime, that's supposed to be balancing with the fireball & lightning bolt (and Sleep and Wish) 1e-style vancian magic-user.
If the core game is extremely simple, like 1e simple,
From the little we've heard about DDXP, I don't think it's '1e simple,' exactly. For one thing, 1e /wasn't/ simple, it has varied sub-systems that gave it a lot of complexity. What often was simple was the way DMs worked around the inconsistency and holes in the system. The 'mother may I' style that the 5e playtest used is one of those work-arounds - the player (or caller) describes each action, the DM describes the results, calling for rolls and deciding if they succeed more or less at his whim. Ironically, it's functionally a lot like the 4e last-resort, the 'just say yes' style of 'p42' that we 4vengers are always wrapping ouselves in.
The main difference is you don't need it every round. Presumably, as you add modules, those modules will give you more options that work out of the box, without DM intervention.
and everything else is optional modules, how on earth do people design adventures, monsters, etc, taking all of those things into account?
Well, that, too, hinges on the more complex options and basic options being genuinely balanced. If they are, the DM can use simple or complex monsters, basic or involved tactics, long or short days, etc - and it won't matter.
Having too many options can also confuse and divide players. I'm not against having the occasional optional rule, but if the game really is going to be as modular as it sounds, people could be easily overwhelmed by all of the choices.
One of the dangers of complexity, yes. A modular system, by it's very nature, is even more complex than the sum of it's modules.
I can see all of this being a real headache for the DM as well, as he's not just going to have to learn one system, but every system being used by every player at the table and he's the one who has the headahce of makign sure they all work together and having to figure something out whenever they don't. One of the things I often hear people praise about 4e was how much easier it made life for the DM. Modular systems do just the opposite.
True. The basic system also sounds like one that leans heavily on the DM. Not so much on time and effort as on personality, experience and talent.
Really, it sounds like Core 5e is being designed as a system that will perform brilliantly under a brilliant DM. I has some company in that - every game ever published. You can't make a game so bad that a good enough DM can't make it rock, even if that means throwing it away and running freestyle with the odd die roll as a fig leaf.
The biggest concern I have, though, is that putting too much emphasis on trying to please everyone will just water the game down and discourage innovation. I want 5e to be a new game that stands on its own merits, with new ideas and improvements over older editions. I don't want a game that tries to be every edition in one.
I guess 'something for everyone' isn't for everyone... ;P
Seriously, though, a lot of game have innovated and surpassed D&D in various legitimate measures of quality, and they've mostly gone out of print. Being what D&D has been in the past obviously worked, then. 5e can't just be a re-print of 1e or anything, but it can aproximate, not the game 1e was, but the game more successful DMs turned it into in the process of working around its problems.
