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Message: <blockquote data-quote="procproc" data-source="post: 6872603" data-attributes="member: 6791328">Right, but the situation Spectacle points out is certainly non-intuitive and weird. That's pretty much the definition of a "stumble", IMO.re: handedness more generally, it's mostly the uncertainty. It's clear that a caster can use a 2h weapon or a 1h weapon with nothing in the offhand. The 1h+shield caster is enough of a common use-case that they really should've had a few lines explaining how it worked, or that it didn't. I mean, that's the default behavior for half of the Cleric class; if my War cleric isn't supposed to be able to cast Bless (V,S,M) while holding a mace and a shield in combat, they should add some kind of note to that effect. And to be clear, it's mostly a "stumble" in the context of the rest of the rules, which they've cleaned up and clarified nicely.I agree that people pick classes because they like the idea of the archetype, but disagree stridently that complexity isn't a factor. I've definitely had players interested in casters who looked at the extra several hundred pages devoted to magic and spells, and decided to play a rogue or fighter -- one of the limited options, given 5e's expansion of magic to most classes.I think it's easy to frame one's views based on one's own anecdotal evidence. The people I mostly played 2e and 3e with were, like me, geeks with an interest in D&D system mastery. Every character that got played was, to some degree, "min/maxed" -- not that everyone only played primary casters, but the characters were often an unintuitive mishmash of feats and prestige classes to squeeze out extra combat bonuses. In contrast, the people I play with nowadays are much more... casual-intensity, I guess, is a good way to put it. People often don't realize their spells (Healing Word, Shield) can be cast as bonus actions; I've seen a rogue forget that they had sneak attack, and a caster forget they'd gotten 3rd level spells; re-calculation of combat bonuses with every attack roll; and basically a lot of stuff that would've made my old group's eyes bug out.That's not to criticize my current group, but to point out that those of us who post on internet D&D forums are probably the "1%" of game rules competence. D&D has a lot more casual appeal now than it has probably at any other point in history, and I suspect the caster complexity issue is a much larger deterrent than might be obvious at first blush.</blockquote>

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