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It is very strange that 5e seemingly continues to be allergic to content expansions. I sort of understand that as a differentiating factor early on the in the line's release, but a decade on it's definitely starting to look shabby.

This is very helpful and concise, I just wanted to point out that Lin Codega uses they/them pronouns.

I put this down as historic evidence that generic systems define mundane classes. Fighters arguably did get magical powers, delivered through a specific carve out in a system that ever character could theoretically interact with.

Yeah, from a 10,000 mile design view, 4e was very clarifying about what the "mundane" aesthetic means in D&D to a chunk of players. You can't just take feedback like "it's not realistic" or "I just want to be an average guy who picked up a sword" or "they gave fighters spells" on their face, and...

For the initial goal of the license overall. If the logic runs "it's too expensive/unprofitable to support a huge variety of adventures/certain kinds of supplement, but the presence of those supplements is positive for the overall growth/profitability of the line" then the OGL creating the...

I'm trying to answer the judicial question "why did people respond in this specific, negative way" not making a case for how the world could or should be.

While I'm sure you could make a case that it's further secondary advertising to an audience that might not play tabletop D&D, that's not actually the point. If it produced a third party adventure/monster book market and also a random video game, that's still a success.

I've got a theory it can be narrowed down to two points of design aesthetic that 4e didn't account for: Mundane prowess must be modeled through general systems for it to feel mundane. D&D magic must be at least partially universalized to be recognizable as D&D magic. That is, if you want your...

So he actually touches on this exact point in the interview, and notes that has always been the trend, that the RPG market contacts whenever D&D is on the downswing, and grows when D&D is rising. His argument here is that this is the first time that relationship seems to have broken, and he...

This all seems to be missing the point on how different modes of play work in those other games. I don't think we're comparing similar elements across different kinds of games here. All of the Magic variants are primarily driven by restrictions on how you build a deck. Drafting is selecting...

I think you may have mixed me and @pemerton up. I haven't had anything to say about this topic before.

Yeah, fundamentally I think PF is a pretty good argument that general existing player sentiment at the time wasn't calling for big changes or a relaunch, which led to 4e's level of change being perceived more like an imposition by WotC than a natural evolution. That being said, I was pretty...

This is before my time, so I'm really just guessing, but I wonder if that wasn't partially down to the lack of alternative, combined with the inverse effect of the OGL? The narrative felt a lot more like TSR was dying and WotC was stepping in to save the game, than WotC yanking support for a...

I don't think it would have helped as much as we might like. Presumably we'd have better early adventures, better tool support, probably wouldn't have awkwardly mixed attribute classes and we'd have snappier monsters out the gate. The Paizo split probably still happens, because that's driven by...

Oh, I don't think that follows at all, and I don't agree with your characterization of Bulmahn's argument. No one has actually done any real iterative update on the 3e framework. PF1 is the closest, and it was hampered by needing to very literally compatible with existing 3e material. A cleanup...

Yeah, this line still has traction today because Pathfinder ensured dissidents had somewhere to go. Really, I think this is more a knock-on effect of the OGL, and the attempt to claw things back via the GSL.

Is that particularly interesting? I feel like that's just recreating the healing problem, where it's nearly always correct not to heal, unless you'd lose more total actions thereby. It's never going to be correct to skip your turn, (if that d6 might put you down, another monster hit would also...

That's a reasonable thing to model, but it still seems better served by simply adjusting the DC. If it's rare to know the actual treatment for cockatrice petrification, then just set the DC to know it higher and assign a "missed by X" misinformation result. Is the concern that the player will...

That game is a good example of the broader knock-on effects of 4e's unique status. You get hit both for being not 4e enough or for drawing from it as a design well at all.

Really, what is character death but missing a whole bunch of turns?