Why the hate for complexity?

ParanoydStyle said:

There is something I like to call "bounce rate", which is the percent chance someone will try their first RPG, decide it's not for them, and never play an RPG again. 5E has the lowest "bounce rate" of any edition of D&D ever.

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Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.

Wow am I ever mortified to have prefaced my rant with "okay, here's some real talk from a professional game developer and publisher" and having my rant followed by Jonathan )ING) Tweet. I never realized there was such a thing as a tough act to precede!

Edit: new forum rule Jonathan Tweet can post as many times consecutively as he wants.

Jonathan Tweet said:

Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.

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Oh, I imagine (I sometimes forget the sheer amount of content 2E had because I was 14 in 2000 when 3E came out). As far as I know, your team were the guys who got rid of THAC0, though and for that alone you are golden. IMO, the death of THAC0 was the most important single step ever made towards improving the playability of Dungeons & Dragons​. Seriously you made my favorite edition of D&D, it is surreal just to be talking to you.

Jonathan Tweet said:

Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.

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Mind me asking about design decision s to power up 2E spells going to 3.0? We played 2E again in 2012 and noticed to lower power level on the spells straight away. Similar things on saving throws in 2E the got better, technically true in 3.0 in practice saves got worse. A good save you could make 95% of the time, 3.0 you could blow a good save 95% of the time with enough min/maxing. Even on a casual level bad saves were terribad relative to 2E.

+1 on the good job on THACO that's really hard for new players now to get. We use BAB in 2E now.

I think the "barrier to entry" idea is on point. At the same time, some of us want that barrier to entry, not to keep new players from gaming but as a form of gate keeping to discourage players whose interest level or playstyle would not be welcome in a group from trying to join that group.

ParanoydStyle said:

Wow am I ever mortified to have prefaced my rant with "okay, here's some real talk from a professional game developer and publisher" and having my rant followed by Jonathan )ING) Tweet.

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You were telling it like it is.

Zardnaar said:

Mind me asking about design decision s to power up 2E spells going to 3.0?

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The spells were overwhelming, and we didn't have a great handle on them. We up-gunned lots of spells because there were a few really good spells plus lots of mediocre ones. We did not successfully suppress the best spells (eg, haste).

Funny to watch the younger professionals fan boying over the older professionals, though I will second [MENTION=6984451]ParanoydStyle[/MENTION]'s comment and say that 3e D&D was and is my favorite RPG game system ever.

D&D spells are in and of themselves what takes a D&D game from more rules medium to rules heavy (though the introduction of feats goes a long way toward that as well). By page count half of a given players guide will be spells in any edition of the game, and over the long run spells tend to cause the most bloat and the most opportunities for breaking the games balance.

In 1e Haste was really good, but technically had to put up with it aging you by 2 years every time you cast it. If I had to make any criticism of the work the 3e team did, it was failing to appreciate how many spells in 1e were good, but had horrific side effects to balance them sometimes hidden away in the text of the DMG, or which were good but tactically suppressed because spells like Fireball and Lightning bolt were so over powered in 1e/2e. I think the team did an excellent job of balancing direct damage, which had been such a go to thing for M-U's in earlier editions, but failed to recognize just how much they were opening up alternatives like save or suck and buffing strategies (particularly around shapechanging spells). I think it's the sort of thing that would have likely escaped play testing, in part because groups of experienced gamers would have tended to glom onto existing known spells, spell selections, and strategies.

But what I've learned in going on 40 years of playing RPGs, is that the weakness of an enduring system is often the same as its strengths. Systems that try to systematize magic or fit it into some other neat box tend to produce colorless magic compared to the esoteric and often weirdness that is each distinctive D&D spell. They also tend to produce casters that have single knacks and largely stick to just a few big hammers that they use to solve every problem, where as the structure of fire and forget spell slots holding highly distinctive spells tends to force variety on the caster. Ars Magicka is extremely evocative, but I'm not sure that actually outdoes D&D in terms of capacity for making magic odd. And to the extent that it does, it would do so through the same sort of bloat that you'd find in a long list of D&D spells, as the abstract mechanics and creative ideas were reified into specific effects. (I guess while I'm at it, I'll say Ars Magicka is really great work as well.)

Jonathan Tweet said:

The spells were overwhelming, and we didn't have a great handle on them. We up-gunned lots of spells because there were a few really good spells plus lots of mediocre ones. We did not successfully suppress the best spells (eg, haste).

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Thanks for the reply. The unified xp tables and faster progression also meant PCs would use the spells.

D&D spells are in and of themselves what takes a D&D game from more rules medium to rules heavy (though the introduction of feats goes a long way toward that as well). By page count half of a given players guide will be spells in any edition of the game, and over the long run spells tend to cause the most bloat and the most opportunities for breaking the games balance.

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One of the things I like the most about 5E is that "only" around 30% of the PHB (28% actually, by my calculations) is spells. Obviously that's still a HUGE chunk but in 3.5 (and yeah, now that I think about it, any PHB I've ever really looked through) LITERALLY HALF (at least) of the PHB was spells. Collapsing "sleep, sleep harder, and sleep hardest" into one spell called sleep that scales with level was a great move (collapsing vertical spell trees). Collapsing horizontal spell trees (changing six second level spells named after animals into one second level spell called enhance ability) in addition really gave us the most reasonably sized spell section I think we're ever gonna get.

While I'm singing its praises anyway, 5E feats are implemented so much better than 3.5 feats, which especially after all of the splats came out were just crawling with way too many underwhelming choices and outright trap options (and I don't just mean the ones everyone knows about like toughness) while you would find the occasional diamond while dumpster diving (while there were many, many broken character builds you could make by combining feats that were never meant to be combined, the most obvious 'feat to rule them all' from the core of that edition is probably Improved Initiative, of which the 5E version of is pretty damn good too). Grammar is hard.

ParanoydStyle said:

One of the things I like the most about 5E is that "only" around 30% of the PHB (28% actually, by my calculations) is spells. Obviously that's still a HUGE chunk but in 3.5 (and yeah, now that I think about it, any PHB I've ever really looked through) LITERALLY HALF (at least) of the PHB was spells. Collapsing "sleep, sleep harder, and sleep hardest" into one spell called sleep that scales with level was a great move (collapsing vertical spell trees). Collapsing horizontal spell trees (changing six second level spells named after animals into one second level spell called enhance ability) in addition really gave us the most reasonably sized spell section I think we're ever gonna get.

While I'm singing its praises anyway, 5E feats are implemented so much better than 3.5 feats, which especially after all of the splats came out were just crawling with way too many underwhelming choices and outright trap options (and I don't just mean the ones everyone knows about like toughness) while you would find the occasional diamond while dumpster diving (while there were many, many broken character builds you could make by combining feats that were never meant to be combined, the most obvious 'feat to rule them all' from the core of that edition is probably Improved Initiative, of which the 5E version of is pretty damn good too). Grammar is hard.

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Unless in mistaken feats evolved out if late 2E splat. A modern take on micro feats could be good just need to learn the lessons of 3.x.

To get to 5E you kind if needed the hindsight of 3E and 4E. They started designing 1997 iirc.