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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8804587" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I think it's an absolutely terrible design choice for D&D. It seemingly confuses overall design simplicity with simpicity of actual use. It taxonomically simple at the cost of being much less accessible to anyone who hasn't already thoroughly digested the spell system. A new player is confronted with a much larger more unwieldy list of options to digest. WotC, and some commentators, seem to think a suggested list for a quick-roll-up character is a panacea for this problem, but this misunderstands new player psychology. Many new players are drawn in by the promise of creating a custom character, and a pre-gen spell loadout is no more appealing than a pre-gen character.It is "simpler" for veterans who have semi-memorized the spells. It will be easier to go from playing a Wizard to playing a Warlock. But there will be less reason to go from playing one to the other because there will be less thematic difference in spells. It seems like a system designed to let people live out all sorts of powergamey fantasies, and then get bored because the possibilities of the system can be used up on fewer characters (especially if they follow through with making everyone a prepared caster). At the same time it will also encourage people who have found a playstyle that works for them to just recreate that on every character, which I think most will find a recipe for medium-term comfort at the cost of incurring long-term boredom.In summary it favors veterans over new players and perhaps ultimately lets the veterans down as well. Perhaps, if I am overstating the latter problem, it would be suitable for a project like LevelUp, that is explicitly aimed at veterans of the existing game, but for the flagship gateway game for the hobby it is an absolutely terrible design choice that is so wrongheaded it makes me doubt the design sensibilities of the current WotC team as a whole.</blockquote>

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