I do too. It's just that I'm worried they'll somehow won't let the overall craziness of a Battle Master taking options alongside with this Background/feats to be the ultimate Combat Maneuver master like it's supposed to be.
I really like this change. I was a bit disappointed that feats were optional to begin with and tying a bonus feat or two to backgrounds is a great way to give those backgrounds greater meaning and influence in the game.
Most of the optional DMG rules that people are calling modules are just optional rules that we saw in 3e as well. I think it's more modular than 3e was, but significantly less so than they were aiming for in the Cook's quote. I also think that achieving what Cook wanted was probably a pipe dream. They could have gone further, though, and that's what I'm most disappointed with.
Well, on that front, they tend to overpower UA options and pate back in internal playtesting as needed. On the other hand, they are not worried about Level 20 characters being awesome.
I actually hate Feats, and would have preferred no Feats in the PHB at all. However, this Background schene is fantastic, and might bring together people from across that spectrum.
What I'm saying is, they made the modular structure they intended to. What changed is that after Cook wrote that article they teally began the surveying process that discovered how people were playing and wanted to play, and that is what changed their goalposts for what constituted the big tent.
Do you have statements from them to that effect? I think it could just as easily been that it was too much trouble to go through, rather than catering to the playtesters.
Back when they were actively talking about survey results, in the Wild west days, they said that their standard for putting stuff I'm the core rules was 90% approval from the playtesters. The only sources I could find on a quick search were the Sage Advice interviews from a few years back where Crawford talked about lowering thst standard to 70% so they could get any options published for Xanathar's Guide, but the 90% threshold was what they did for the D&D Next playtest. So, any option that wasn't in the 90th percentile was outside of the big tent.
I took that to mean specific options, like Module X, Y or Z, not an over concept like classes, races or modules.
Yeah, I remember it being said at one point that you’d be able to have each player playing a character built like it was from a different edition, and even at the time that sounded like a pretty absurd claim. But, I gave WotC the benefit of the doubt that they were trying to build an edition that would be highly customizable, and I don’t think that ever really came to fruition.
