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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8416676" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While I appreciate that this is said with humor...yeah. Good luck with that. As I said before, there's a lot to learn from the design of early editions. It's unfortunate that, due to the opaque presentation and abysmal organization, those things are harder to learn than they should be. But there are absolutely very good design elements in early D&D, ones that deserve to be reviewed and tested for use in modern games.Absolute rejection of point buy is not one of them. Even the character funnel, which saves a ton of time and is IMO a very smart piece of design, is not gonna be particularly popular with the gaming community at large. While I have been speaking out for a group of people whose interests differ a lot from mine--those who see PB or 4d6-drop-lowest or whatever as "born lucky" etc.--I am under no illusions that that group is anywhere near the bulk of players. Most players want to get their class fantasy sooner rather than later; they generally decide what to play first and then figure out how to make that happen; and they generally want to have useful numbers that benefit them in the areas they're interested in pursuing. That's been very clearly the more popular approach basically ever since D&D escaped from the Lake Geneva area, being played by people who weren't acculturated to the perspective of Gygax, Arneson, and the wargaming founders of the genre.I mean, I'd rather not get too deep into the weeds of sarcasm (nor of "empower[ing] player choice"). That way madness lies.But, yeah, players generally want to be able to bring a fantasy to life, not wait for an indeterminate amount of sessions before racking up enough stories and events that they feel like they've grown a fantasy into life. There are, of course, plenty of players who do only want to step back and let grow whatever seeds happen to blow in. But they aren't the majority, and haven't been for a very long time. Changing the underlying system so that it only permits the latter method rather than the former isn't going to make the latter method more overall popular. It's just going to do as it did in the past, and make more people deviate from those rules because, by and large, they aren't as popular as the "I wanna play an elf bard who <backstory>" or "I wanna play a tiefling paladin pursuing a beauty contest victory in order to help protect threatened animals!" or whatever.</blockquote>

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