D&D 5E (2024) In Interview with GamesRadar, Chris Perkins Discusses New Books

[Parmandur]

I doubt that would have been the case if they'd completed development on the class.

Yeah, I think that different subclasses of that Sorcerer probably would have been pretty wild.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay? That's genuinely almost nothing like the 3e Bard, which was mostly the "do-nothing" class, as it was a dabbler of all trades, jack of none. Unless you played sillybuggers with the multiclass and PrC systems and cheesed the hell out of Dragonfire Inspiration.

Sure. I'm just saying that the popularity of the bard is not just because they're different. They are, arguably overpowered in their versatility.

 

[Oofta]

If it has nothing to do with "I'm right and you're wrong," why on earth are you constantly making appeals to popularity?

I don't know what you're getting at. I enjoy the game. I've played at this point with dozens of people that play and enjoy the game. You want something the game doesn't offer and ... I keep trying to empathize with that. It really does suck that the game isn't what you want. But in my experience plenty of people are happy with the game and millions of people seem to enjoy it.

There's no "I'm right your wrong" about it. It's simply a fact of life that the game won't work for everyone. Just like 4E ultimately didn't work for me. If you enjoyed it, more power to you but it wasn't for me. I'm not appealing to popularity in the sense of justifying why I think I'm right, I'm just stating the fact that the goal of the game is to sell to as many people as possible and 5E does that better than 4E, or 3E for that matter. It should be self evident wouldn't buy it, we wouldn't see a decade of growth if people didn't like it.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

Will it though? The playtest Monk didn't seem like it could be build as a tank any more than the current 5E Monk can be. Likewise the playtest Barbarian. In fact, the latter seemed to be less capable of as a tank than a 2014 Bear Barb. On what basis do you make these assumptions?

Live play. Also, I've seen others run numbers on how long a monk lasts against enemies. It rivals the other "tanks." Deflect Attacks is huge for damage mitigation. Being able to Dodge and Attack on the same round is crazy good (Patient Defense). They can't be pinned down if they get into trouble (Step of the Wind). At level 10, they get crazy good. They can move allies and enemies to control the battlefield, by separating enemies from allies and being the only decent target to go after (Step of the Wind), which they are good at mitigating. They can keep themselves going pretty well (Uncanny Metabolism and Heightened Patient Defense). There's still Stunning Strike to shut the enemy down for a round.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

They never were to begin with.

Sorry for not clarifying, I'm referring to older editions that such expectations were set. 5E has broadened roles for classes, and the UA revisions seem to be making that clearer and easier.

 

[Hussar]

Live play.

Thank you for this.

I keep harping on the fact that all the theory crafting in the world can't hold a candle to actual, live play. There are just so many variables that theory crafting doesn't cover.

And you'll notice that pretty much all the hue and cry over "this is bad" is almost never backed up by actual play experience.

There's a reason to playtest. Theory crafting is great for identifying potential problems, but it is by no means proof of an actual problem.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And you'll notice that pretty much all the hue and cry over "this is bad" is almost never backed up by actual play experience.

Nah. That's not true.

"This is bad" is usually (say, 65% of the time) completely backed up by actual play experience. It's much rarer when it's not. The problematic issue that some people will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever admit some element of a game they like is actually bad unless it's so satanically bad it basically ruins the entire game, and instead of wanting to "improve the game somewhat", will defend to the death anything, not matter how terrible, so long as it doesn't completely sink the game. At best they'll equivocate about how some people might see X as bad but they see X as pretty okay or the like.

Luckily game designers tend to be a bit more sensible than that, and generally do attempt to get rid of minor, moderate and serious flaws as well as the killer ones no-one can ignore. It's always funny when they do remove something a bunch of people decided to defend as "X is okay, actually", because usually 9 in 10 of those people suddenly agree with the game designer that it wasn't great. Hmmmm. Such is human life.

Play-testing is vitally important because it turns up a ton of issues theorycrafting never will spot, not because it "DISPROVES!!!!!!" theorycrafting - it rarely does. But theorycrafting misses so many real issues that turn up in real games - or sometimes a small number of people might realize they're an issue, but not many, and then playtesting will show they're a big issue.

One particular place play-testing is vital is flow - it's very rare that you're able to really get how something flows, gameplay-wise, from reading the rules. Play-testing is pretty bad at spotting anything but gross balance issues, however, without the assistance of actual analysis, because player skill, specific situations/adventures, DM habits and so on can easily obscure significant balance issues unless what we're calling theorycraft has prepared the ground.

TLDR: They're both vital to making a complex RPG like 5E work, and neglecting one or the other is a mistake, as is focusing on the rather silly idea of "disproving" stuff through play-testing, rather than using theorycraft to inform play-testing, and play-testing to inform future analysis.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sorry for not clarifying, I'm referring to older editions that such expectations were set. 5E has broadened roles for classes, and the UA revisions seem to be making that clearer and easier.

No, I'm saying that for older editions, there never were. It was never the case that, as you claimed, "Classes are not reduced to only one role anymore." It's quite a common claim, but it's simply false, and always has been.

 

[Hussar]

Nah. That's not true.

"This is bad" is usually (say, 65% of the time) completely backed up by actual play experience.

Naw, it is true.

Virtually all the theorycrafting is based on someone's very limited experience with their particular group and has then massaged the numbers to "prove" that this should be a problem at everyone's table and then will dig in and absolutely refuse to accept that the problems that they've "identified" through "math" are actually just self-justification and confirmation bias.

The fact that people will 100% argue that other people's actual play experience don't actually matter and then refuse to actually test their own math shows how entrenched the idea that you can simply mathematically model something as complex as an RPG and reduce it down to a couple of simple calculations.

Theorycrafting, like I said, can identify potential problems, but, is not proof of anything other than people's inbuilt, internalized biases..

 

[Demetrios1453]

Naw, it is true.

Virtually all the theorycrafting is based on someone's very limited experience with their particular group and has then massaged the numbers to "prove" that this should be a problem at everyone's table and then will dig in and absolutely refuse to accept that the problems that they've "identified" through "math" are actually just self-justification and confirmation bias.

The fact that people will 100% argue that other people's actual play experience don't actually matter and then refuse to actually test their own math shows how entrenched the idea that you can simply mathematically model something as complex as an RPG and reduce it down to a couple of simple calculations.

Theorycrafting, like I said, can identify potential problems, but, is not proof of anything other than people's inbuilt, internalized biases..

I think if a genie suddenly appeared and granted me three wishes, I'd use one to wish confirmation bias to be utterly gone from the world.