FlyingChihuahua
Hero
God, if only.Or for WotC to spring for some much-needed therapy for its fan base.
Then we could have people stop getting upset when someone else uses a demonstrateable measure of success. :V
God, if only.Or for WotC to spring for some much-needed therapy for its fan base.
13th Age did that. The term used in that game is "staggered."You might not be able to get water from a stone, but you can get blood - if you do it right.
More seriously, all it'd take would be to change the name of the mechanic to something more generic (if less evocative) such as "damaged", and poof - this issue goes away.
Of those: bloodied is great and has a viable place in any edition, limited healing wasn't all that relevant as you still got all your hit points back overnight, skill challenges are a good idea in principle but seem too often to be used by adventure writers as a quickie way of solving what should have been much more in-depth exploration or roleplaying challenges, damage on a miss was a bad idea*, and minions (along with the whole idea of a monster's stats being malleable depending on which PCs it happens to be facing) sacrifices far too much setting consistency on the altar of gamism.There's a handful of 4e-isms that were rejected out of turn immediately by some people that I find it amusing when they come back later and go "huh, you know, actually, that wasn't a bad idea".
Bloodied, damage on a miss (there was a huge and almost violent group of people posting about this one during the Next playtest saying "it didn't make sense"), limited healing, skill challenges (overused in 4e, IMO, but occasionally useful), or minions.
WotC in general haven't ever really supported any kitbashing of their versions of the game. TSR didn't either, but at least it was acknowledged and accepted as a Thing People Did.I've had a second thought regarding 5e's modularity. I wonder if the "rulings not rules" approach came out of early discussions of "plug and play" rules modules. For example, the Stealth rules they claimed they had made in-house but didn't launch with the final product.
Perhaps what they landed on was the idea to leave the game open enough that DM's could easily replace large sections of the rules with their own preferences, since I can't think of anything off hand that would cause 5e to collapse like a house of cards if you were to change it.
Even bounded accuracy could be done away with, if you gave some thought to what DC's and AC's you wanted to see.
The only problem I've ever had with this approach is there's little guidance to let you know how to go about this, and, well, there does reach a point where you feel like you're doing the developer's work for them- the effort required makes you wonder why you didn't save some money and make your own game, lol.
I can only assume that when they made 5e, they were like "ok, we don't want to force people to play a Cleric, so all our healers have be equally good casters at a baseline", so the Bard turned into a strange fusion of his 3e and 4e versions.
THe lack of guidance is crucial to the problem at hand.There's a handful of 4e-isms that were rejected out of turn immediately by some people that I find it amusing when they come back later and go "huh, you know, actually, that wasn't a bad idea".
Bloodied, damage on a miss (there was a huge and almost violent group of people posting about this one during the Next playtest saying "it didn't make sense"), limited healing, skill challenges (overused in 4e, IMO, but occasionally useful), or minions.
It's as if there was a curse on the whole edition, and people wanted to avoid the lot of it like a plague!
I've had a second thought regarding 5e's modularity. I wonder if the "rulings not rules" approach came out of early discussions of "plug and play" rules modules. For example, the Stealth rules they claimed they had made in-house but didn't launch with the final product.
Perhaps what they landed on was the idea to leave the game open enough that DM's could easily replace large sections of the rules with their own preferences, since I can't think of anything off hand that would cause 5e to collapse like a house of cards if you were to change it.
Even bounded accuracy could be done away with, if you gave some thought to what DC's and AC's you wanted to see.
The only problem I've ever had with this approach is there's little guidance to let you know how to go about this, and, well, there does reach a point where you feel like you're doing the developer's work for them- the effort required makes you wonder why you didn't save some money and make your own game, lol.
I don't think this is mutually exclusive. I think you start with the shard play experience, but leave your design open so, after a few years, you can begin to bring in fun modules to really expand the game. Its what they are trying to do with settings, and it would work a lot better if they had designed their open game faithful to this possibility.I was really intrigued by the idea of modularity for 5e. However, it probably worked out best for WOTC/HasBro that it did not work out that way.
Shared play experience and new player introduction would be much harder with a truly modular system.
Goodness I was worried about the Lunar Sorcerer with the initial Krynn playtest. Glad it survived. I am now totally worried on what will be the fate of the Squire/Knight of Solamnia background/feats.They let the playtest surveys dictate too much and handcuff them