Unearthed Arcana An Unearthed Arcana I would like to see - mechanical fixes

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, but they are also the creators of the rules you all think are bad and need editing.

Apparently they aren't as good as you think they should be if you don't like the rules they've already made for you.

And besides... what happens when these experts decide that okay, they agree that there's a "bug" in a particular rule they need to fix...

...and their fix is one you don't like either? All that waiting around being unhappy only to remain unhappy because the professionals didn't read your mind on what you thought the solution should be.

Best of luck hoping that Mike and Co. guess at your solutions just so you can say "the rules I use were written by professional game designers!"

So much animosity over such an innocuous thing! lol

No one in this thread, so far as I can tell from their posts in this thread, thinks DnD 5e is a bad game. What is it with the strawmen in this discussion? It begins to get cluttered!

Who is unhappy, other than apparently you and max with the fact this discussion is happening?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

"Of course it matters. For people who have multiple groups for which they DM. It's 100% reasonable to not want to track a whole set of houserules for every group/game. "

As a response to how much the broad applicabily of a ruke matters "when it comes to my table" this is a baffling response.

Another strawman? Is it a seasonal thing? I thought that was fall?

Where did I say "at my table"?

What I did say is, at many tables I know, because a given "table" isn't necessarily a static thing, and many DMs have multiple groups, and/or a group with a rotating roster, and/or multiple games with the same group that need to run along different assumptions (like rare magic vs common magic), or who challenge the way the game runs in different ways. Btw, it also matters for people who simply don't feel as confident as some of us do in their ability to predict the outcomes of a rules change.

As for GMs with multiple tables,they can choose to play them all with one ruleset if they wish whether that be RAW or house rules -as long as it meets their needs.

Who said otherwise?

As for the difficulty in "tracking a whole set" of rules, uhh... How many house rukes do you imagine there would be? If WotC publishes this article of myth fixes, how many do you think it would be and that would flawlessly fix the problems you imagine were needing houserules *to your standards?

I think you failed to read my post.

My house rules doc for my homebrew including setting is about 2 pages or one front and back. Its posted online on our group site.

Good for you?

Now, if your reference was about a GM who chooses different house rules for each of his games, thats perhsps a good call if his settings, gsmes, etc need to be different. Obviously he only needs to carry one to each.

Obviously, how you would handle their situation is irrelevant.

 

[DEFCON 1]

So much animosity over such an innocuous thing! lol

No one in this thread, so far as I can tell from their posts in this thread, thinks DnD 5e is a bad game. What is it with the strawmen in this discussion? It begins to get cluttered!

Who is unhappy, other than apparently you and max with the fact this discussion is happening?

Heh... you'd love it if there was animosity on our parts, so that you could feel as though you were "above it", wouldn't you?

Sorry... I have no animosity towards you or clearstream... I just enjoy pointing out the pointlessness of desires by people who should know better by this point.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Heh... you'd love it if there was animosity on our parts, so that you could feel as though you were "above it", wouldn't you?

Sorry... I have no animosity towards you or clearstream... I just enjoy pointing out the pointlessness of desires by people who should know better by this point.

Sure, bud.

 

[Mistwell]

So much animosity over such an innocuous thing! lol

Good for you?

Sure, bud.

If you could just bottle the passive aggressive and sell it as a cologne to disaffected tech workers, you'd make a fortune!

 

[clearstream]

If nothing else, I'd love to see a collated list of what are generally considered to be "proud nails" within the system, and the response rate of the community's desire to see them addressed.

Good idea. Something like that could very well advance the conversation. I'll take a pause and then come back with a new thread for collating "proud nails", matched by one on reddit to cast a wider net. With then perhaps a survey for the community to rank them.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Examples for me include druid nature skill (intelligence? expertise in nature based on Druid levels could make sense)

Druids already get better at Nature as their Druid level increases. That's what your Proficiency bonus represents.

Why would you think that your capacity to learn and remember details should be irrelevant to how much you know about a topic?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If you could just bottle the passive aggressive and sell it as a cologne to disaffected tech workers, you'd make a fortune!

Is eye rolling snark really “passive aggressive”? I’d say not so much, especially in a forum wherein any snark more caustic than what I’ve displayed here leads to me wasting time in arguments with mods, when I’ve particular interest in flouting the forum rules in the first place.

In case it isn’t clear, I find smug condescension toward groups and DMs who like seeing wotc content, and would enjoy a UA with optional fixes for problems that many groups have with how certain parts of the game works, to be sad and weird, at best.

 

[clearstream]

But the case of the shield master feat is also quite interesting.
This fall M Mearls made a tweet about the bonus action timing for this feat.
There is a thread in this forum about it, a passionate debate where some poster simply say that Mearls was wrong and they will not change their actual application of the rules,

What you ask is a pandora box, and the dev team is wise enough to not open it.

I think that is a good question: would it be a Pandora's box where no one could agree on anything? Do they need to?

We'd get to hear what the designers' identify as issues with the rules. They hear more sides to the story, and have more data available, than individual DMs do. So we'd gain the benefit of their time and expertise, and hear how they might fix those issues. For me that would have more value than another set of character options. I'd possibly ignore both, but I feel more likely to use the bug fixes. Thus, this wouldn't be about changing any individual DM's application of the rules: individual DMs would continue to shape the game as they like to their table. I think we are still safe from the hobnailed boot of the WotC rules-police kicking down our doors. Rather, it would be about the designers looking back with a critical eye, and offering bug fixes for what they can identify as common system issues. Things they'd have done differently, given the hindsight they now have.

The vision of multiple tables with multiple expectations is only partly true: they all play D&D. They recognisably do so by drawing from a common set of rules. If it really is DIY all the way down, why is anyone using the commercially published rules? The fact a conversation can even be had on this forum about a class, say paladin, or something as narrow as a category of weapon, is testament to the profound influence of those common rules over the hobby. Ultimately, they are constitutive: D&D exists because of the common rules. It's possible that the objection is really something else... something expressed extremely opaquely. I'd be interested to know what that is?

 

[Maxperson]

So much animosity over such an innocuous thing! lol

No one in this thread, so far as I can tell from their posts in this thread, thinks DnD 5e is a bad game. What is it with the strawmen in this discussion? It begins to get cluttered!

Who is unhappy, other than apparently you and max with the fact this discussion is happening?

Once again, responses aren't Strawmen. A Strawman has requirements that aren't being met when you label responses "Strawman."

And I'm not unhappy with the discussion. I just don't think the designers need to spend time coming up with house rules when the DMs are better able to come up with house rules for their table.