Sage Genesis
First Post
So you're saying that Mearls "slaps" you in the face with is words? That seems rather extreme. I'm curious: how has he slapped you in the face?
No, that is not what I'm saying. I was using hyperbole to show how your words came across to me. Like, holding up a mirror to you. If you then criticize me for showing you something "rather extreme", well...that's kinda what I saw. That is the point.
So the main difference in our views is that you see Mearls as catering to (anti-4E?) edition warriors, and I do not. I fully realize that I could be wrong--and I certainly haven't read every L&L--but I just haven't seen it. What I see is him looking critically at previous editions of D&D, perhaps especially 4E as the most recent and divergent style from the traditional approach, with the intention of creating the best, and most embracing, possible version of D&D yet. Hopefully he's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though.
It isn't about me or what I want, but looking at the larger community - what the general response and feeling is, which seems more towards the idea of 4E games serving the rules more often than they should. The weight of evidence, even if it is anecdotal, is that there wasn't as much meshing going on with 4E as there should have been.
There are lots of people that love 4E, lots that like it or are indifferent, and lots that dislike or even hate it. This is always going to be the case with any edition, but I think the point from a design perspective is to tip the scales more towards the "love-to-like" side of the spectrum than the "dislike-to-hate" side. In a thread a few weeks ago I was taking to task by a couple people for saying that 4E "failed" in this regard, but I do not mean to say that it failed as a game, as a fun version of D&D, but that it failed in that the scale was tipped too much towards collective dislike-to-hate. This has nothing to do with how good of a game 4E was (or wasn't), but how much it inspired and was embraced by the community as a whole. That might not matter to you or I in our respective gaming circles, but it does matter to Wizards of the Coast.
OK, I hear that you want Mearls to "show you the money." But the problem is that if you have a strongly skeptical, even pessimistic attitude, going into it, you're likely to be setting yourself up for disappointment.
One thing that WotC won't be able to do is please everyone. But what I think they're trying to do is incorporate the "best of" various editions into 5E, perhaps with its own unique flavorings. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen, but I think we can safely say that for some it will be viewed as a success, for others as a failure - but the question is how many, and to what degree, of either spectrum. I simply advocate for an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, which allows for some degree of openness. But if you're expecting a snake and a snake-like form appears before you, you're going to see a snake even if its actually a rope (to use an old Hindu analogy). My impression from our brief interaction here is that you are expecting a snake.
I have read every Next-related L&L, as well as watched every livestream of the devs, read their other articles, etc. I have also run several playtest sessions, using the playtest rules in different stages of the process. In short, I have been following this very closely for the past two years.
You make it sound like I walked into this expecting snakes. I would like to correct you on that account: I have consistently found snakes over the past two years, even where I expected to find none. Now I'm pointing at the forest and telling you, "dude there's totally snakes in there", and you think that I am only saying so because of some kind of prejudice. It's experience. For example Mearls dismissed Warlord healing because it can't cause a severed hand to grow back on, a classic piece of edition war rhetoric. (Conveniently ignoring that normal sleep can't cause limb regeneration either, yet it's still allowed to restore hp.) They also dismissed the people who clamored for tighter math like 4e had, and then found themselves flabbergasted that a throwaway encounter with a few ghouls could so savagely annihilate their party on a livestream.
This is all stuff you possibly didn't or couldn't know, and I don't begrudge you for it. But my opinions are colored by my past experiences with this process. And my past experiences are not very good. Yes, I want him to "show me the money" by this stage. It's been a long, strange trip and we have way too little to show for it. If the final game is really good I will happily play it, I have zero judgment on the final product yet. It's just at this point where I think, "come on man, stop telling me how great your modularity is and start showing me some modularity". The ability to make up my own backgrounds hardly qualifies.
All this is somewhat besides the point though. The original issue was whether or not 3e/4e makes players serve them or vice versa. I'm still unconvinced.
If you think the lead designer is an active edition warrior who doesn't like 4e (a game he also helped design by the way), why are you still posting to 5e threads, given it would likely mean you gave up on 5e a while ago?
Because I like to think ENWorld is not an echo chamber and I am allowed to discuss an article even if I don't like the state of Next as it currently stands.