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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9103409" data-attributes="member: 18">God wasn't it?The system they came up with just worked tremendously well in my experience, and I really didn't anticipate it before playing it. I'm glad people talked me into it.I don't think that's right actually. I think you can fairly objectively talk about it - sometimes it's as simple as having a goal, knowing what it is, and finding the right way to meet it - a lot of RPG design doesn't even manage that, and I think it's fair to call that design, bad design. Or even non-design in some cases.If you think I'm talking about A5E, btw, you're mistaken. A5E is, in my book, relatively well-designed. The goal is coherent, there's a vision as to how to reach it, and it's informed by actual creative and rational ideas (not necessarily novel ones but that's fine!), not just endless poorly-written surveys of literally 0.01% of players. It's also different to the rather incoherent bumbling that Kobold Press seem to be engaging in.Further, you really don't like the term lazy design, and probably cowardly design even less, but I think both can be pretty apposite re: both RPG and videogame design at times. Particularly when companies stop having their own ideas, and start just being informed by the fear of failure, rather than genuinely having a goal, a vision beyond "don't fail".Maybe large-scale success becomes the enemy of good or daring or clever or original design? (all potentially different things, of course) I don't know. But I don't think it's a friend, that's for sure.The problem I see with the polls is that they seem fairly aimless and incoherent themselves, and from WotC's own description of the process, they're basically just reacting to these incoherent polls, and completely inconsistent about whether they even put stuff to polling - not everything gets a poll question, I note - c.f. absolutely tons of last-minute changes in DND Next, many of them spectacularly ill-advised (like moving to the 6-8 easy encounters from 3-4 medium ones, and just renaming easy to medium, and medium to hard). And on the very rare occasions when they do genuinely believe in something, it's clear they're going to do it regardless of polls (c.f. removing half-races, however well-guided or misguided that ultimately turns out to be). I just wish they had more of a belief and interest in the core system and classes! And a better vision for the material they do put forth for the polls - some of it has been bizarre "nobody asked for that" stuff, other bits have been so little modified that it's kind of surprising they're even being polled on, and it's not like they're offering an array of competing visions to see which is vibes. I mean, there's some wisdom in that, because you don't want people forever mourning a path not taken (c.f. people still annoyed by the loss of the DND Next Sorcerer), but equally, a lot of this stuff has been both milquetoast and unasked-for, which is just not a great combo. Bard at this point is necessarily not even going to vaguely resemble what they polled on, because they've changed fundamentals about the system. Will they poll on every class they've changed the fundamentals about again before it goes to final edits? My guess, based on DND Next is very much "no". They simply won't have time for further changes, because just like in 2013/14, they've stuck themselves with a deadline short enough that their own process doesn't even fully make sense.</blockquote>

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