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They are behind schedule on the design front and need the extra time to actually write the new MM and DMG. They save face by framing it as a printing problem, not a product development problem.

There is tremendous room within audited public company financial statements and the statements of the CEO during earnings calls to define what constitute's D&D's overall revenue. Internally, WotC can classify a wide range of revenue as "D&D revenue" and report that figure without it being an...

Eternal gratitude to my AD&D DM for letting me play the Jester NPC class.

I don't think WotC's design team has played a lot of high-level 5e, so they don't know how to support it.

Never mind.

The weight doesn't make a difference - at least, not in the way you might want it to - since the carpet doesn't magically shrink or grow based on how much weight it's carrying. The weight is the carpet's maximum capacity. For your idea to work, the rules for a carpet of flying would be something...

This kept circling in my head and I finally figured out why it misses the point. If you read the rules for carpets of flying, you'll see that their speed (whether they speed up or slow down) isn't a function of how many people climb aboard. It's defined by the carpet's size. If the extra carpet...

I don't see it as creating the perfect heist either. I agree with you that the game designer probably wanted to create an interesting chase scene. But the game designer told me to use some game rules that don't quite line up with an interesting chase scene. He also told me to perhaps ignore some...

I don't maintain that a particular encounter needs to make logical sense. I want it to demonstrate good game design. EDIT: I'll clarify that. An encounter should make sense on its own terms, but that's not "logical" sense. It's more of a practical sense, an idea of "Does this situation or...

Ultimately, we both maintain different standards for game design. I'd like to see the quality of published scenarios improve and believe that drawing attention to substandard game design will do that. Yes, agreed. I took a few breaks when writing that comment and should have revised that first...

I'm gonna quote myself and refer specifically to my running example from Radiant Citadel to add more nuance to this. Once the actual flying carpet chase is underway, the rest of this section of the scenario has some game design stuff in it. It puts limits on how often either participant can...

I agree, but feel what you said just reinforces my point. Writing adventures is hard, harder than designing a game, IMO. It requires a different set of skills than game design. But there's no other game in TRPG history that has produced more published adventures than D&D, either first- or...

I am an experienced DM and I noticed right away. More generally, though, I see this idea a lot and I always marvel at what a gift this attitude is for D&D designers. Your best customers expect that you will produce mediocre work that they will need to improve.

It's funny that my analysis of this encounter from Radiant Citadel is characterized as a desire for a Platonic ideal (no small comparison from an Action Philosopher) or an overdeveloped need for optimization. All I did was read the environment that Justice Arman asked me to imagine and refer to...

I’m all for flying carpet chases. I think we can agree that this encounter isn’t the only way that a flying carpet chase might have been designed and implemented. My concern is that the professional game designers who work on the official D&D design team writing these encounters and scenarios...

Right, which is what gives me pause with Golden Vault. If I'm buying a book of heists, I want them to make clever use of the game's rules that push for creative uses of the rules to beat them. I want them to have thought it through so that I don't have to. It's a very difficult, peculiar sort of...

I don't quite follow you.

In Shadow of the Sun, the 11th level scenario written by Justice Arman, Senior Game Designer on the D&D design team, there's an encounter during which the scenario's McGuffin, a samovar, is stolen from a merchant's backroom. The text says that these two thieves "have squeezed through a window in...

Can't wait for the 11th-level heist to ignore the existence of spells like that Radiant Citadel scenario.

Never mind. Figured it out.