Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9739710" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't want to be mean to designers here, but it is striking that certain aspects of D&D, especially in 3E and 5E (4E was pretty wild) seem like they do reflect the limitations of imagination and relevance on the part of the designers pretty harshly.3E had LFQW, which was absolutely both intentional and a terrible reflection of the limited thinking of the designers (especially Tweet). It was particularly bad because they managed to make LFQW, which was present but rarely-seen in 1E & 2E into a real front-and-center issue that could become obvious from like, as low as 5th level.5E it's expressed in the design of specific classes (Sorcerer, Monk, Ranger - no coincidence either that in 2014 these were also the worst-performing classes mechanically, ignoring MC dip shenanigans) and subclasses for all classes, which are absolutely locked into a dated mindset. Some of that was intentional because of the "apology edition" nature of 5E 2014, but I also think a lot of it was just down to not having enough of a vision of the future of D&D at that time, especially not after 4E essentially failed (by WotC's measurements, it had to make $50m/year, something even 3.XE at its height had not IIRC), and I think there was a huge misperception that the more gonzo nature of 4E's classes was the problem, when in fact it was a ton of other factors, not least insulting your own fans and the awful GSL (and frankly 4E was just too early - people weren't "done" with 3.5E - they should have given it another 2-4 years).It's almost like no-one on the 5E team was even familiar with where fantasy was in 2014 but... that can't have been true, because some of them were involved with 2008's 4E, which had a much more modern vision of fantasy than 5E 2014! So we have to assume intentionality.And maybe that means it's not so much "personal biases" (though I think they do factor in, especially a lot of decisions re: Rangers/Rogues seem impossible to explain otherwise) as it is misperceptions.</blockquote>

Verification