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I think part of what I refer to as backloading are things that let the core DND experience shine through, by moving away from the upfront tactical presentation of 4e they made players less likely to see it as a complex tactics game for nerds, you can more or less ignore magic items and...

From the 4th edition Wandering Swordmage Paragon Path, it really sold me on the idea of a wandering swordsman/ magic user, and sold the whole fantasy of them as a lightly armored traveler with an eclectic martial arts style that includes magic--I can just imagine her teleporting around to strike...

Heh, I'm more cynical, I think that the narrative can complexify, people do have brand loyalty to DND, but the 'new coke' branding of 4e actually triggered a backlash due to that sense of loyalty, 'fixing the problems of 3.5' was understood as an attack on people who enjoyed 3.5. I actually...

The whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that 5e is the 'blue ocean' game, which means that it's creating new TTRPGs players, which further complicates things because most of the people playing it didn't have a point of comparison until they try something else. But that naturally means that 5e...

In practice, your big bang spells are pretty effective in boss fights, but it's a small ball approach because you're getting 'success' effects on your spells more often than martials can hit, which is usually half damage. So you get a lot of 'runs on the board' and a high overall DPR, until the...

I think the issue is, nothing is universal, there are people who swear by every edition of DND-- so the presence of people who either don't have, don't notice, or don't mind the problems is neither here nor there if you do have issues with it, and their issues with it are neither here nor there...

In 2008 I think everyone would have been enraged by 5e in a "they ended 3.5 for this?" Kind of way. A lot of the initial affection for it was a 'return' to pre 4e mechanics after all, its very much linked into that cultural context of a romanticized return to form.

Actually that was deliberate usually by power source-- The class had a designated role, but each power source had a role it was associated with that made every class in it have a little of that capability tucked into its powers and mechanics. For example, Arcane was associated with the...

The first thing is actually recommended by the rulebook, because having the opposition make steady progress is just easier and the difficulty of the chase is meant to be derived from the objectives-- it makes progress easier to track, it also just has this positive side effect. Paizo stumbled...

I personally liked 4e's class design, but I imagine lots of people would tell you its a spectrum where 4e just wasn't in the sweet spot of balanced asymmetry due to its starting point of symetrical feature and power structure and that similar balance could have still been achieved while creating...

PF2e is also a good comparison point in this respect, because if you read it as a close permutation of DND more or less in line with differences between editions (which in a design context, as opposed to a branding context, is appropriate) it sort of confirms that the problem of encounter...

Neither do I, I'll be honest, I think other factors are more important to 5e's success than whether it holds up under the kind of pressure that I'm discussing. In terms of what makes 5e special, I would say that it came out at the perfect time, it sanded away a lot of the tactical complexity...

So, I tried a lot of things, and none of it worked very well, the meaning of back loading is that you don't notice the problems until you've already been playing for a while. So its not prohibitive to get new players, it would mainly manifest from invested players getting progressively more...

yeah of course! I'm glad for the people that do enjoy 5e too, incidentally.

As I recall, the massive smite bombs were actually one of the few ways martials could keep up-- it's been a few years, so I don't have the calcs on hand, we started realizing it when we also realized that fireball was excellent single target damage due to them beefing it up due to its iconic...

Encounter building is pretty good in the game we play now, I can design 5e encounters in the way you're talking about... but it was a lot more legwork for less payoff.

The sad part? It wasn't even the elaborate builds, it was something as simple as fireball too, we just kind of came to the conclusion that there wasn't really much of a reason to play a martial beside literally "I want to play a martial" because the spell casters out damage everything. GWM and...

Basically, my experience boiled down to that last thing you mentioned being more of a put out for me. In principle we like getting to use feats, multiclassing, powerful magic items. So while the system works somewhat at the low end of those things, or with players who are comfortable not pushing...

Chess actually requires more study, between it and WH, its absurd depth is why its still being innovated on. But my group found pf2e largely easier to pick up than 5e-- a big part of that is that the conditions and tags make the system easier to reference because they reappear consistently...

I already posted the progression of a fighter from 3 to 6 up thread, right out of my pathbuilder.