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With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base
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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5977039" data-attributes="member: 54877"><p>There's also the question of complexity, and where it is needful. It will naturally vary by player and preference and playstyle. Or, you can look at it from the other end, where a game is too simple--this also varies by player and preference and playstyle.</p><p> </p><p>For example, I like a game that does a lot of different things, maybe not all at once but that I can tweak to get different playstyles. However, I mainly like heroic fantasy and some close cousins to it. Then from my perspective, the generic, movable bits of d20 are exactly wrong. They are all about playing a bunch of different genres in pretty much the same playstyle, when what I want it to play a tight group of genres in different playstyles. Obviously, a single game can only do so much.</p><p> </p><p>If you think about variants and popularity in D&D, this divide between what d20 is aiming at versus what I like has always been with us. Some people want to play D&D "in space" or "as horror" or such. Other people want to play D&D as focused on dungeon crawl or epic treks or such. (And that's only the tip of the iceberg, and probably not even the best examples of what I mean, when you get into different focuses on characterization, roleplaying, etc.) The tools for one group's variants are not the tools for the other group's variants.</p><p> </p><p>This hits hard right at Einstein's dictum, make things as simple as possible but no simpler. Added complexity is in your way--at the very least bloat that you must ignore. Missing complexity is a big hole you must navigate around. Well, as soon as you start appealing to a big audience, you've got a lot of big holes to fill that for other people do not even exist as holes. Why you piling all that system stuff up over there in that empty field? <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite8" alt=":D" title="Big grin :D" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":D" /></p><p> </p><p>Where I think any reasonable person can agree on design is that we'd like for a game to do what it sets out to do, and communicate that clearly to us--both the heart of the goal and its boundaries. If the design team has decided that niche X won't work very well because that will compromise A, B, and C too much--so be it. But don't be fuzzy about it. Either exclude X as much as necessary, or if that is unacceptable, revisit the wider design to make it work. Don't throw in a sop to X and pretend that it fits in, when you know darn well it doesn't. No illusionism in the design! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5977039, member: 54877"] There's also the question of complexity, and where it is needful. It will naturally vary by player and preference and playstyle. Or, you can look at it from the other end, where a game is too simple--this also varies by player and preference and playstyle. For example, I like a game that does a lot of different things, maybe not all at once but that I can tweak to get different playstyles. However, I mainly like heroic fantasy and some close cousins to it. Then from my perspective, the generic, movable bits of d20 are exactly wrong. They are all about playing a bunch of different genres in pretty much the same playstyle, when what I want it to play a tight group of genres in different playstyles. Obviously, a single game can only do so much. If you think about variants and popularity in D&D, this divide between what d20 is aiming at versus what I like has always been with us. Some people want to play D&D "in space" or "as horror" or such. Other people want to play D&D as focused on dungeon crawl or epic treks or such. (And that's only the tip of the iceberg, and probably not even the best examples of what I mean, when you get into different focuses on characterization, roleplaying, etc.) The tools for one group's variants are not the tools for the other group's variants. This hits hard right at Einstein's dictum, make things as simple as possible but no simpler. Added complexity is in your way--at the very least bloat that you must ignore. Missing complexity is a big hole you must navigate around. Well, as soon as you start appealing to a big audience, you've got a lot of big holes to fill that for other people do not even exist as holes. Why you piling all that system stuff up over there in that empty field? :D Where I think any reasonable person can agree on design is that we'd like for a game to do what it sets out to do, and communicate that clearly to us--both the heart of the goal and its boundaries. If the design team has decided that niche X won't work very well because that will compromise A, B, and C too much--so be it. But don't be fuzzy about it. Either exclude X as much as necessary, or if that is unacceptable, revisit the wider design to make it work. Don't throw in a sop to X and pretend that it fits in, when you know darn well it doesn't. No illusionism in the design! :hmm: [/QUOTE]
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