Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Kobold Boots · Sep 23, 2018

clearstream said:
The 3rd edition Players Handbook was 304 pages of mostly rules.
The 4th edition Players Handbook was 320 pages of mostly rules.
The 5th edition Players Handbook is 320 pages of mostly rules.

For me, a reasonable definition of "not as rules heavy" would involve having noticeably fewer rules.

I agree, but a page count of a book is not directly correlated to the number of rules in it. If you'd like to do the lift and actually count all of the source books for the editions and figure out how many rules there are for your comparison, power to you. But I think the level of abstraction necessary to make a point is simply the number of books in the edition.

3 and 3.5 had 12 core rulebooks and about 60 WoTC published supplemental works.
4 had 8 core rulebooks and about 26 WoTC published supplemental works.
5 has three official core rulebooks and 8 supplemental rulebooks.

"Noticeably fewer rules"

Thanks,
KB

Kobold Boots · Sep 23, 2018

lowkey13 said:
Some horses do not stay dead no matter how much you beat then. And by "horse," I mean gnome.

.. and with strange eons even gnomes may die?

Oofta · Sep 23, 2018

Eric V said:
Yeah...I made sure not to call the designers themselves lazy (don't see how anyone can know that, just like I can't know if they're extremely hard-working), but since this seems to be where the 5e megafans want to take the narrative, I'll just bid y'all adieu. 5e is as perfect as D&D can get!

Nobody has ever said 5E is perfect on this thread that I am aware of. It can't be, or at least not for everyone.

But saying you never called the designers lazy may make you eligible for the "splitting hairs in a forum post" award.

Have a good one.

5ekyu · Sep 23, 2018

Jay Verkuilen said:
Well people on the internet would but I think if they'd added say 12-15 pages helping provide solid guidance (not requirements) on how to use skills and setting DCs, it would help quite a bit.

Maybe, but the DMG provided some IMO very solid basis for setting DCs that i use as a consistent core to difficulty in my games (it just happens to sync with decision tree i used in other campaigns systems for years). Whether its the same as another gm at another table is irrelevant. They can have another assignment scheme in mind for their setting - hopefully as consistent.

Now, that said, for AL where play across games is supposed to be more identical, they I think (??) Make much more use of canned asventures with more DCs defined pre-set DCs.

But to your point of 12 to 15 more pages... Which 12 to 15 pages should be cut for the added skills section?

Should feats and multi-classing be cut by those pages? How many spells gone is that if we cut there?

Bawylie · Sep 23, 2018

5ekyu said:
Maybe, but the DMG provided some IMO very solid basis for setting DCs that i use as a consistent core to difficulty in my games (it just happens to sync with decision tree i used in other campaigns systems for years). Whether its the same as another gm at another table is irrelevant. They can have another assignment scheme in mind for their setting - hopefully as consistent.

Now, that said, for AL where play across games is supposed to be more identical, they I think (??) Make much more use of canned asventures with more DCs defined pre-set DCs.

But to your point of 12 to 15 more pages... Which 12 to 15 pages should be cut for the added skills section?

Should feats and multi-classing be cut by those pages? How many spells gone is that if we cut there?

You could definitely cut about half the spells, easily.

But you don’t need 12 pages to explain how to set DCs.

Should probably cut half the spells anyway though.

Satyrn · Sep 23, 2018

Oofta said:
Nobody has ever said 5E is perfect on this thread that I am aware of.

I'm pretty sure I did.

I mean, WotC paid me to, so if, like, I forgot to, you'd really be helping me out if you said I said it.

Eric V · Sep 23, 2018

Oofta said:
Nobody has ever said 5E is perfect on this thread that I am aware of. It can't be, or at least not for everyone.

But saying you never called the designers lazy may make you eligible for the "splitting hairs in a forum post" award.

Have a good one.

Shove your award, Oofta.

I never said the designers were lazy people, no matter what you and your ilk try to frame it as. They might work very hard in a great many areas (not that you or I would know), but some of the design in the game is lazy, in that it either defaults to a much older edition's framework, or remains ambiguous with few good examples of how to run it for the DM. That's lazy design.

As for 5e being perfect...it's true that no one has said it is, to the best of my knowledge.

It's also true that virtually every single time people try to point out a criticism of it, the criticism goes mostly unacknowledged and the critic gets personally attacked, like what happened with the poster above who had the misfortune of being insulted by Defcon.

So...maybe it's not perfect, but the defenders here sure act like it.

Parmandur · Sep 23, 2018

clearstream said:
The 3rd edition Players Handbook was 304 pages of mostly rules.
The 4th edition Players Handbook was 320 pages of mostly rules.
The 5th edition Players Handbook is 320 pages of mostly rules.

For me, a reasonable definition of "not as rules heavy" would involve having noticeably fewer rules.

Page count is not always an accurate comparison: 5E has larger font than 3E, so fewer words per page, and much, much more is spent on flavor and fluff.

(Which, to be clear, is a good thing in my book: flavor and fluff are very important, and pages of pure rules are boooooooooring)

doctorbadwolf · Sep 23, 2018

Bawylie said:
You could definitely cut about half the spells, easily.

But you don’t need 12 pages to explain how to set DCs.

Should probably cut half the spells anyway though.

Um...no?

No.

Youd have ave to give me warlord and artificer as fully playtested phb classes to get me on board with that.

Satyrn · Sep 23, 2018

Parmandur said:
Page count is not always an accurate comparison: 5E has larger font than 3E, so fewdr words per page, and much, much more is spent on flavor and fluff.

It's a good thing WotC's paying me to call 5e perfect, else I'd be feeling mightily ripped off.