D&D 5E (2024) A critical analysis of 2024's revised classes

[FitzTheRuke]

I think calling design "lazy" is a fairly lazy criticism. The critic is looking at something they thought needed more time and work than it got (or was able to get) and then jumping to a pejorative comment on the nature of the design - which naturally falls on the designers/developers themselves as well.
A non-pejorative way to point this out would be to say that you felt the designed needed more iterations, more work, more resources devoted to it. Calling it lazy is pretty much just being a dick.

You've nailed how I've felt about it and put it into words, thanks!

I'd have taken no issue with "needed more work".

I certainly agree on that point when it comes to @EzekielRaiden's version of the discussion regarding NEXT to 2014. Apparently, so does @mearls! (The "needed more time" part, not the "lazy" characterization).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Specialities had 2 iterations. Maybe 3. And they were transformed to feats.

I am glad proficiency bonus does not start at 1. Actually I think they should have rounded up instead of down and have it start at +3 and going up to +7.

Er...no, feats predated Specialties. Specialties definitely got at least three iterations, and as part of that the entire "Warlord Fighter" concept got offloaded into the...Medic or Healer Specialty, can't remember which. So when Specialties died, it took out that core which they'd been promising for ages. And yes, it really was "promising", because they very specifically talked about there being "martial healing" and that if folks didn't like that they could just tell players it wasn't allowed at their table.

I could not care less about whether it would be better rounded up instead of down. The point was simply to show where the setup came from and how the result we got was driven less by intentional design and more by the designers (and in this I mostly mean Mearls) being forced to eventually accept that their darling baby wasn't acceptable to the community. That, that very specific thing, is playing favorites with ideas all while pretending that you really care about the audience's opinions.

Some ideas that got mixed feedback were abandoned instantly with zero effort. Other ideas were clung to for six or eight months through packet after packet before finally, begrudgingly abandoned. That's pretty clearly capricious, upholding a standard when you aren't that invested in a particular mechanic and ignoring it when you really really want people to change their minds.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Er...no, feats predated Specialties. Specialties definitely got at least three iterations, and as part of that the entire "Warlord Fighter" concept got offloaded into the...Medic or Healer Specialty, can't remember which. So when Specialties died, it took out that core which they'd been promising for ages. And yes, it really was "promising", because they very specifically talked about there being "martial healing" and that if folks didn't like that they could just tell players it wasn't allowed at their table.

Still specialities ended up being consumed by feats.
I am really sad, that specialities did not make it through the playtest.

I could not care less about whether it would be better rounded up instead of down. The point was simply to show where the setup came from and how the result we got was driven less by intentional design and more by the designers (and in this I mostly mean Mearls) being forced to eventually accept that their darling baby wasn't acceptable to the community. That, that very specific thing, is playing favorites with ideas all while pretending that you really care about the audience's opinions.

Some ideas that got mixed feedback were abandoned instantly with zero effort. Other ideas were clung to for six or eight months through packet after packet before finally, begrudgingly abandoned. That's pretty clearly capricious, upholding a standard when you aren't that invested in a particular mechanic and ignoring it when you really really want people to change their minds.

 

[mearls]

But the difference, I think, is in how directly insulting to people you're being (collective 'you') when you use something like 'lazy' to describe poor time management or poor decisions.

I read recently something where Mike Mearls admitted that he wasn't happy with the 2014 sorcerer. I don't remember the full details of what he said, but it was something along the lines of "we ran out of time [on iterating the NEXT version] so we used an updated 3.5 version of the class".

I bet there were a ton of behind-the-scenes typical BS/SNAFU reasons for why that happened, but I doubt that anyone there would agree or appreciate that the word 'lazy' had anything to do with it.

There's a maxim of game design I have learned the hard way over the years:

Good ideas and bad ideas only sort themselves out after a month or so of development.

Almost every case of 5e falling short comes down to time, because we inevitably had to go through somewhere between three to six concepts for a thing (class, species, whatever) before we landed on something really good. The rogue's signature mechanic started out as part a subclass!

Looking back at 5e, it would have been a stronger game if we had the option to release a smaller scope game in 2014, say the core four classes, core species (elf, dwarf, halfling, human), and about 100 or so monsters. The game could've grown more organically. If people had put in a year with the 5e wizard, they might be more open to a sorcerer that was more distinct and the design team would have had more time to try out different concepts.

The original concept was to use UA to slowly guide changes to the core. It was meant to be a tool to guide the game forward and make any future core rulebook revisions look obvious and pre-approved by the community. That was the path the ranger was on until the process was hijacked.

The biggest disparity I see between game design culture and online discussion culture comes down to this:

Online discussion tends to seek fundamental, absolute, and defining explanations for things. This is X because of fact Y. There's comfort in having something etched in stone and decided forever.

Game designers see things in context. This is X because of fact Y at time Z. That third factor explains a lot. Z could be anything from "We had two days before we had to ship" to "The CEO was dragon-lusted so everything had to have a dragon in it" to "The concept of card advantage had not yet been discovered."

Very, very few systems stay in stasis forever. On a long enough time line, even the sun sputters out.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

Bureaucracy headbutts with art and scientific process pretty hard .

 

[mearls]

Some ideas that got mixed feedback were abandoned instantly with zero effort. Other ideas were clung to for six or eight months through packet after packet before finally, begrudgingly abandoned. That's pretty clearly capricious, upholding a standard when you aren't that invested in a particular mechanic and ignoring it when you really really want people to change their minds.

That's a relic of the design process. We started with the things with the lowest rating and worked our way up between packets. If something stuck around and was kind of mid, it stuck around precisely because it was mid. It wasn't bad enough that it needed immediate triage, so it took time to get to it.

The process also relied on relative approval. Let's say a mechanic had a 50/50 split, but a bunch of other stuff had to be fixed because it was even worse. That 50/50 mechanic never escaped the "fix this" list. It just kept getting pushed further to the back of the repair queue. I can't think of anything that transformed from bad to good given enough time. If people disliked something once, they continued to dislike it.

Mechanics or content that looked like 3e tended to score relatively well, so you saw us shift back to those approaches as a short cut as our deadlines bore down on us.

 

[zakael19]

That's a relic of the design process. We started with the things with the lowest rating and worked our way up between packets. If something stuck around and was kind of mid, it stuck around precisely because it was mid. It wasn't bad enough that it needed immediate triage, so it took time to get to it.

The process also relied on relative approval. Let's say a mechanic had a 50/50 split, but a bunch of other stuff had to be fixed because it was even worse. That 50/50 mechanic never escaped the "fix this" list. It just kept getting pushed further to the back of the repair queue. I can't think of anything that transformed from bad to good given enough time. If people disliked something once, they continued to dislike it.

Mechanics or content that looked like 3e tended to score relatively well, so you saw us shift back to those approaches as a short cut as our deadlines bore down on us.

When you say 50/50 split, do you mean like "half the feedback is we really like/love this and half is dear god get this out of my D&D?" That's actually really interesting insight into the design process if so.

 

[mearls]

When you say 50/50 split, do you mean like "half the feedback is we really like/love this and half is dear god get this out of my D&D?" That's actually really interesting insight into the design process if so.

Yes! There were some interesting areas that had heavy splits, usually around randomness. There is definitely a segment of TTRPGers who love dice, and a segment who are OK with them in controlled amounts. Randomness is a polarizing thing.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's a relic of the design process. We started with the things with the lowest rating and worked our way up between packets. If something stuck around and was kind of mid, it stuck around precisely because it was mid. It wasn't bad enough that it needed immediate triage, so it took time to get to it.

The process also relied on relative approval. Let's say a mechanic had a 50/50 split, but a bunch of other stuff had to be fixed because it was even worse. That 50/50 mechanic never escaped the "fix this" list. It just kept getting pushed further to the back of the repair queue. I can't think of anything that transformed from bad to good given enough time. If people disliked something once, they continued to dislike it.

Mechanics or content that looked like 3e tended to score relatively well, so you saw us shift back to those approaches as a short cut as our deadlines bore down on us.

This is really interesting insight! Certainly explains the skill list, I remember the shift from open-ended proficiencies, to suggested skills but you can still make up your own, to literally the 3e skill list (which over a couple packets got very slightly more streamlined) being pretty surprising. Felt like a total 180, but it makes sense if stuff that looked like 3e was tending to get better ratings.

 

[Charlaquin]

The original concept was to use UA to slowly guide changes to the core. It was meant to be a tool to guide the game forward and make any future core rulebook revisions look obvious and pre-approved by the community. That was the path the ranger was on until the process was hijacked.

This is fascinating. Are you able to talk about what that process got hijacked by and why?