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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9274481" data-attributes="member: 6790260">All I can say is, I fundamentally disagree that 5.0 had a strong vision to it. It had what I would call strong pet projects, as with your example of Mearls pushing really really hard for Proficiency Dice (seriously, they stuck around for like...nearly a year despite being consistently unpopular).Early on, however, 5.0 DID have a pretty strong vision. It imagined classes that were dripping with flavor, that were perhaps a bit quirky but tying mechanics and theme closely together, with different classes having truly distinct ways of accessing their power, even if the powers themselves were not necessarily distinct. Then, when this failed to meet their arbitrary 70% popularity threshold, these really quite excellent concepts were completely eliminated, never to be seen again. In fact, they were eliminated so hard that the classes themselves (Warlock and Sorcerer, if you're curious) never got further public playtesting. That's how thoroughly they dropped any vision they had as soon as it encountered even the slightest resistance from anyone....unless it was someone's personal project.Your example of the new origin for dragonborn, for example, I think is quite telling. They actually tried to hold out on that one, albeit for a lot less time than Mearls had with his proficiency dice. (IIRC, it was in for only two packets, which is about as little as you can say something could be "kept in.") But it also illustrates the kind of pushback required to overcome those "this is my baby" tendencies; it created rather a furor during the playtest because it was rather egregiously cavalier about the implications of developmental disorders (making the entire dragonborn race into actual dragons who suffered a divinely-inflicted developmental disability because their parents failed to ask God if it was okay to have kids!)Other great examples: Early on, the designers were in fact explicitly in favor of "martial healing," and Mearls himself tweeted that if folks didn't like martial healing, they could just choose not to play that type of Fighter (or choose not to permit it in their games, for DMs.) But because they were so adamantly against including an actual Warlord class (even though the Warlord was, by their own polls, more popular than Druid!), they had to find a way to squeeze all of that into the Fighter class. Since their Fighter designs were going pretty much nowhere (it took them until nearly the very end of the public playtest to figure out how they wanted Fighter to work...despite it being one of the first classes they offered!), they chose to go all-in for their "Specialties" subsystem. If you're unfamiliar with that, the TL;DR is that they were themed sets of feats that you would lock into at an early level, and then earn as your character progressed. One of the Specialties was meant to make a character a competent secondary healer, and the idea was that the "Warlord Fighter" would be an offense-heavy Fighter with maneuvers who had invested her Specialty into Healer.Except that that system never worked the way they wanted, despite IIRC three different attempts to make it work over the course of more than six months. Eventually, they ended up scrapping the whole thing and going with the more familiar "take whatever you qualify for" thing for feats. Except....they had already put ALL of their "Warlord Fighter" eggs into the Specialties basket. So when that basket was gone...they had nowhere left to go. It was too late to do a meaningful redesign of the Fighter class, since IIRC they were less than six months from ending the public playtest at that point, and the existing Fighter was far too damage-focused to be able to squeeze an actual Warlrod in there as well. So you know what they did? They just straight-up stopped talking about the Warlord. Within mere months of that aforementioned tweet (sadly, I can't find it now), Mearls and the rest of the staff literally stopped talking about the "Warlord Fighter" at all, in any way--and they maintained that silence all the way to publication.And we can even see how post-production comments from the designers themselves reflect that there was a lack of vision in a lot of ways. Mearls explicitly said that one of his only regrets about 5e was that the Fighter came out bland and flavorless--that he felt he had let the community down by producing something bordering on dull, when it's both one of the most popular classes and the one that connects so well to epic fantasy fiction.So...yeah. I fundamentally disagree that 5e had a "clear vision." The only "clear vision" it had was "desperately scramble to appease." As others have said on this forum, 5e is the apology edition. And I'm far from the only person who sees it that way.</blockquote>

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