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5 New D&D Books Coming in 2023 -- Including Planescape!
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8868237" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Yeah, fair I'll lay off the dumb, and stick to objective failure!</p><p></p><p>Now, I would say 2E actually deserves much a much harsher critique for <em>keeping</em> level limits than 1E did for introducing them. 1E was a highly experimental game, trying out a lot of new ideas, some good, some... not so sound. So fair enough to 1E on this.</p><p></p><p>By the time 2E rolled around, there'd been a decade to see the issues with the design, and it was obvious that it didn't achieve the goal. There'd been a decade of gradually increasingly rational/logical RPG design. Other designers, in other games, had solved the human/non-human problem in various ways.</p><p></p><p>What's particularly weird is, 2E did change them - pretty profoundly, but it mostly seems to be a mitigation. Like, they know they're not achieving the goal, but instead of say, removing them and giving humans a 10 or 20% XP bonus or something, they just made them high enough to be unlikely to matter. All the fundamental conceptual flaws were retained, though (power rewarded etc.).</p><p></p><p>Why? I mean, unless we cross-question 2E designers somehow we'll probably never know, but I think it's got to basically be sacred cow stuff. They didn't want to change too much too fast, so they arguably changed too little, which is part of why D&D's popularity stalled in the early '90s, and part of why 3E was nigh-universally praised for getting rid of level limits (and race restrictions, actually).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8868237, member: 18"] Yeah, fair I'll lay off the dumb, and stick to objective failure! Now, I would say 2E actually deserves much a much harsher critique for [I]keeping[/I] level limits than 1E did for introducing them. 1E was a highly experimental game, trying out a lot of new ideas, some good, some... not so sound. So fair enough to 1E on this. By the time 2E rolled around, there'd been a decade to see the issues with the design, and it was obvious that it didn't achieve the goal. There'd been a decade of gradually increasingly rational/logical RPG design. Other designers, in other games, had solved the human/non-human problem in various ways. What's particularly weird is, 2E did change them - pretty profoundly, but it mostly seems to be a mitigation. Like, they know they're not achieving the goal, but instead of say, removing them and giving humans a 10 or 20% XP bonus or something, they just made them high enough to be unlikely to matter. All the fundamental conceptual flaws were retained, though (power rewarded etc.). Why? I mean, unless we cross-question 2E designers somehow we'll probably never know, but I think it's got to basically be sacred cow stuff. They didn't want to change too much too fast, so they arguably changed too little, which is part of why D&D's popularity stalled in the early '90s, and part of why 3E was nigh-universally praised for getting rid of level limits (and race restrictions, actually). [/QUOTE]
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