D&D 5E Are DMs the Swing Vote?

[Jester David]

Apples and oranges comparison. Shouting wounds closed is a battlecry in the edition wars.

It's a battlecry because it's a controversial bit of the game. It's divisive. The have to discuss it. They can't label it "off limits" for debate just because it's caused some fights on the forums.

Third, claiming that discussions about warlords are edition-irrelevant is meaningless when Warlords as a class have appeared in only one edition. And more to the point are iconic for that edition. The equivalent anti-3e approach wouldn't have been to talk about Marshalls, printed in a relatively obscure splatbook. It would have been to pick out 3e's multiclassing and say how ridiculous it is that a fighter can become a wizard just by killing a few orcs when an actual wizard needed to serve an apprenticeship. Because 3e's multiclassing is both unique to 3e and iconic to 3e.

Multiclassing and is actually a good example. Better than mine. As would be grapple. Both are things edition warriors complaint about regarding 3e, but are actually problematic mechanics that have to be addressed. Pathfinder changed both to some extent (one more than the other).
Even many ardent 3e fans hate those mechanics and almost everyone acknowledges the inherent problems. That doesn't mean just mentioning them or making a grapple joke is edition warring.

Fourthly, if a Warlord can't pick people back up onto their feet and get people to keep fighting they can not do their job I've been through this in detail on other threads. The ability to get people to keep fighting is a fundamental ability of the warlord and may be quite literally the only ability two warlords share beyond the basics all characters have and the ability to wear leather and hide armour and wield simple and martial melee weapons.

Which is circular logic.
The edition says the leader's job is to get people back on their feet. The warlord is a leader. Therefore, the warlord must get people back on their feet.
But if you broaded the definition of "leader' to not just be "healer" but also "buffer" or "ally control" then the warlord doesn't need to heal. But this is completely off topic. Moreso...

Fortunately he appears to have changed his mind on his previous position.

At the end of the day, he's the manager not the man making the game.

 

[Mistwell]

People projected a lot of exaggerated assumptions onto innocent things on the run-up to 4e (like all the complaints about the gnome cartoon), and now people are doing the same on the run-up to 5e.

Mearls saying people are not, in general, edition warriors is an innocent statement not intended to cause offense and not offensive in itself. You have to read things into it, that are likely not there, to get anything more from it. Same with his off-hand comment during a conference panel about a particular class power from 4e.

Is it a slow news day or something?

 

[Dwimmerlied]

People projected a lot of exaggerated assumptions onto innocent things on the run-up to 4e (like all the complaints about the gnome cartoon), and now people are doing the same on the run-up to 5e.

Mearls saying people are not, in general, edition warriors is an innocent statement not intended to cause offense and not offensive in itself. You have to read things into it, that are likely not there, to get anything more from it. Same with his off-hand comment during a conference panel about a particular class power from 4e.

Is it a slow news day or something?

This proposition is reasonable, and is AT LEAST worth considering

 

[Iosue]

It's a battlecry because it's a controversial bit of the game. It's divisive. The have to discuss it. They can't label it "off limits" for debate just because it's caused some fights on the forums.

Agreed. I floated this idea a while back, but more and more I'm starting to believe it. I don't think Mearls was pouring his heart out during that podcast. I think he was intentionally taking a contrary position to Rodney's, so they could thrash out the issues.

And far from being an edition warrior, Mearls strikes me as a guy who just doesn't care about editions. Other than 5e, of course. Looking at his Twitter account, people will throw edition war bait at him and he plays dumb. In the GenCon seminar, one guy, supposedly speaking for "old school players" continually gave Mearls a hard time because the fighter had Second Wind, but Mearls continued to note that a lot of players liked the idea, and that it would be easy for people who didn't like it to just not have it in their game.

At the end of the day, he's the manager not the man making the game.

Again, agreed. The new thing is apparently to say that Mearls "flip-flopped" on Warlords. And it's like, we're in the middle of the design process. Someone asked him about warlords. He said, "Right now, they're like X." There was a lot of discussion had. They put out a tentative version in a playtest. They got feedback on it. They changed the design in response to feedback. That's the system working as intended!

When challenged on the stridentness of their rhetoric, 5e's harshest critics have always replied, "It's a playtest. We're supposed to tell them when we're not happy." But when the design team responds to that criticism, it becomes "WTF? They flip-flopped!" Or, "Mearls changed his mind," as if Mearls is just making decisions from on-high, and the design team is not trying out different directions, debating and arguing said directions, and using internal and public playtest feedback to inform their directions. In the infamous "shouting hands back on" podcast, Rodney Thompson explicitly said, "I think fans of the 4e Warlord should be able to play that in Next." How come nobody (aside from me) brought that up as an indication of possible design direction?

 

[Mark CMG]

I think the biggest differences we see in who calls the game has to do with the size of the player pool.

 

[haakon1]

DMs drive the hobby despite being outnumbered 4:1. But they're the ones that have to actually run the games ...

The lore changes hurt DMs the most, by altering worlds. Any DM who had an established campaign world - either homebrew or published - suddenly had to revise everything to account for the new races, classes, planes, monsters, and the like.

In my experience, the DM decides the rules, the setting, and the adventures. So yes, the edition is the DM's choice.

As for players v. DM's preferring different editions, I've been involved in 3 groups since 4e came out, and here's how it broke down:

-- DM likes 3.5e, play 3.5e. 7 players: 1 (also a DM of his own campaign) strongly pro-3.5. 2 (one of them also a DM) asked around Pathfinder eventually, but are fine with 3.5e. 4 haven't expressed a preference.

-- DM likes 3.5e, play 3.5e. 4 players: 1 prefers AD&D 1st Edition. The other 3 have only ever played 3.5e and have no interest in trying different rules.

-- DM likes 4e, play 4e. 6 players: 2 (one of them a DM) prefer 3.5e, also OK with Pathfinder or AD&D 1st Edition. 1 (also a DM) prefers 4e. 1 liked his 3.5e character better, but doesn't express it as an edition thing (though with the character having the same name and role, do the math). 1 has only played 4e. 1 has no preference.

So yes, in my experience, the DM decides. And while the DM HAS TO take a side on editions, and not every player picks a side, it's also not true that all players lack a preference. Also, sometimes people hide their dislike of an edition from the DM, out of not offending the host. One of the guys in the 4e game really hates 4e, but hasn't said so in front of the DM.

 

[Warbringer]

When I want to DM it's "Hey guys, here's an idea I want to run; it's this system, with these changes. Who's in?"

When I play it's "Sure, what are we playing" ...