Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6575194" data-attributes="member: 6680772">After the announcement of 5th Edition in early January, 2012, our first chance to really get juicy information came later that month at the D&D Experience.  There were three panels regarding Next, and an NDA-bound open playtest.  The three panels were Charting the Course, with Mike Mearls, Monte Cook, and Jeremy Crawford; Class Design, with Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, and Robert Schwalb; and Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores, with Cook, Cordell, and Schwalb again.Here are the EN World transcripts at the time:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317318-Seminar-Transcript-Charting-the-Course-An-Edition-for-all-Editions" target="_blank">Charting the Course</a><a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317373-Seminar-Transcript-Class-Design-From-Assassins-to-Wizards" target="_blank">Class Design</a><a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317494-Seminar-Transcript-Reimagining-Skills-and-Ability-Scores" target="_blank">Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores</a>Here's a page with <a href="http://blog.obsidianportal.com/ddxp2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ddxp2012" target="_blank">videos</a> of the last two panels -- the first one was not recorded.I think the last two panels are especially interesting, in that all three men left WotC before 5e was complete.  They were initially the Design Team -- the guys who set the overall direction of the game, in contrast to the Development Team, whose job it was to come up with the mechanical elements to fulfill that design direction.  When 5e was finally released, though, Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford had become the lead designers.Looking at the Class Design seminar, I was struck by the prevalence of feats.  The big chunky feats of 5e date back to the playtests of late 2013 -- I'd forgotten that they'd been smaller and more varied before that.  And it would appear that feats were at the forefront of the Design Team's minds as a way of delivering different options.Personally, sometimes the things they said seemed very familiar, but other times it felt like they were talking about an entirely different game.  It's kind of like, "Oh yeah, that's right.  Proficiency bonus is such an integral part of the game right now, but originally there was nothing like it."  And there's a part where they talk about DMs just looking at an ability score and deciding that a PC succeeded at something without requiring a roll.  At one time that was a Big Thing in D&D Next.  Nowadays it's still there, but with backgrounds (and skills) moving from an optional element to a default element, resolution with the ability (skill) check has come to greater prominence.</blockquote>

Verification