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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 9819917" data-attributes="member: 697">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.</blockquote>

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