MichaelSomething
Legend
Would you pay money for WOTC to not produce any more editions or splat??
D&D 5E A viable game and the vicious edition cycle
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
Some sort of reverse kickstarter you mean? If we raise 10k we will not release a Truenamer Class: hit our first streach goal and the Soulknife will never see development!
That makes more sense, but weren't some of the "broken" elements of UA really retrospective balancing of non-casters?
Which bits are you thinking of as broken?
Hussar
Legend
Off the top of my head
- New character generation rules for humans (as was mentioned.)
- Drow
- Lifting a number of level restrictions for multi class characters
- Weapon specialisation was insane - because yes, my 1st level fighter (or ranger) needs a +3 to hit and damage at 1st level plus multiple attacks.
- Paladins gaining all the benefits of the cavalier class plus all the benefits of the paladin class. Now that was a sweet deal.
I'm sure there were more. The UA wasn't just a power creep, it was a power hop, skip and jump.
- New character generation rules for humans (as was mentioned.)
- Drow
- Lifting a number of level restrictions for multi class characters
- Weapon specialisation was insane - because yes, my 1st level fighter (or ranger) needs a +3 to hit and damage at 1st level plus multiple attacks.
- Paladins gaining all the benefits of the cavalier class plus all the benefits of the paladin class. Now that was a sweet deal.
I'm sure there were more. The UA wasn't just a power creep, it was a power hop, skip and jump.
I agree it involved a power-up. I'm not sure it was all broken, though. Weapon specialisation seemed to be a way of trying to balance fighters. (Though double-specialisation probably could have been delayed to (say) 7th level.)
Yes.
Splat books create a player expectation -- "Wizards wrote this and I paid good money for it and it sounds fun to me, so it should be allowed, right?" Unfortunately this creates a huge burden on the DM, who needs to understand all that material and judge it for balance problems and other issues. So I'd pay good money to avoid that player expectation.
And according to Mearls, the people have spoken and they want a simplified core rules. Endless splat books defeats that.
There is a win-win solution: make it blindingly obvious that supplements are not core. The easiest way to do that is to make the supplements things that clearly are not appropriate to every table. This eliminates "big book of fighter options" because fighters are part of every D&D game and players always want more options. "Guide to Samurai" would be OK though, because many games won't be expected to include them.
How is this a win for WotC? It means they sell less material, and as a commercial publisher they want to sell stuff.
BryonD
Hero
WotC sells a lot more material than just RPG content.
I suspect based on recent comments from them that if they position themselves so that the brand value of D&D is enhanced through reestablishing it as the #1 RPG, then the value of being able to sell the brand goes up so much that any increase or decrease of actual RPG content sales becomes just rounding error.
They also want piles of money to fall from heaven directly into their laps, but sometimes success comes a little harder than that.
...by win-win, I meant a win for people who want a simplified core + a win for people who want lots of supplements to buy. If the fans are getting what they want, then in the long term Wizards wins too. Pumping out splat books is a short-term strategy that's alienated fans and accelerated edition turnover.
