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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6170150" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't think I agree. I think they were listening quite closely to the criticisms of 3e, and envisioned a bold new way of addressing those issues. Christmas trees, wonky CR's, dominating save-or-suck spellcasters, bland non-magical characters, twink-friendly mutliclassing, knotty lore, deep DM prep time...all totally legit concerns that 4e absolutely blasted out of the water, with a lot of outside-the-box thinking. I think one of the missteps with 4e was in what Mearls referred to as "telling you that this is the best way to play guitar" (or something like that), or what we might call Badwrongfun-ing, or what is demonstrated nicely in James Wyatt's infamous DMG quote about what D&D is "about," or a GSL that didn't let you redefine your game. It tried to be THE solution. The only one. There was One True Way, and deviation was unthinkable. Of course everyone wanted to play an action-packed game of goblin-slaying with minis and a grid and who actually cared about the mating habits of the boggle anyway, and why not enable DM flexibility by having free-form rules outside of combat and this is clearly an improvement in all ways?The other factor at work seemed to be a vastly unreasonable time constraint that meant that the feedback for their proposal had to wait until the books were published to be heard. There wasn't TIME to question or second-guess or do much market research (4e's playtest was infamously short and pretty un-responsive). There was no going back to the drawing board. I think they're doing a much better job of identifying what people like and giving breathing room for rules to be tested this time around. And I think it shows that they realize that these were missteps in 4e's run-up. Because they are good at responding to criticisms. As long as they become experts at identifying the value that is already in their product, and delivering a game that capitalizes on those values, they might do OK, or at least release a fairly "non-controversial" edition of D&D. Which would be a step up.So I think they're interested in the conversation, and they were then, too. The missteps to me seem to have more to do with false confidence and a tight deadline and a lack of understanding of the non-critics. Seems like they heard the critics loud and clear to me!</blockquote>

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