NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6326181" data-attributes="member: 37579">No, it's what we as a community are doing. (Me as a person and fine with the blog post and solidly agree with him.)But it's not just disagreeing. It's dismissing his entire post because of a couple choice sentences. And I've seen more than one poster saying he shouldn't have written the blog, or that Mistwell shouldn't have posted it here. His intentions have been questions and his ability to design D&D5 has been called into doubt. He's been insulted for what he wrote: here, on WotC, in the blog's comments, and more directly (Facebook, Twitter).He's very likely going to second guess posting anything again, or being much more cautious with his language. We've limited his self expression. That sounds like censorship to me. Or, in other words, it would have been a better piece had he not said anything critical of 3e or 4e. Because that's what matters. He cannot criticize because that's all we'll see. We'll all blow what he says out of proportion, exaggerate his claims, read between the lines because he had the balls not to like something in 3e/4e. He either writes what we want him to write how we want him to write it or we won't read what he says. It doesn't matter if he's right. It doesn't matter if he's addressing an actual problem in the game. He cannot criticize the last two editions. That's taboo. I've seen more than one poster come down on the blog for perpetuating the old stereotype that you cannot roleplay if you optimize. Even though nothing in the blog is about roleplaying. We're so familiar with some of the arguments he's making that we mentally fill in the gaps, and insert the arguments we expect. Except that's such a small part of the post, and is only slightly related to his point. And yet that's all we want to talk about here. And that's not even *really* what he says. He's pointing out that creative thinkers are overshadowed in the game by optimizers, and that the best way to win is not to be creative but to crunch the numbers. He never says that you can't be clever, he says that the game doesn't reward that. Which is true. DM's reward clevering thinking. Or rather, good DMs reward clever thinking. The game however does not have rules for clever thinking. Rewarding clevering thinking is pretty much a house rule. There's no "Creative Solutions" forum on the WotC Community, but there is a "Character Optimization" forum. 4e does more to encourage creativity in combat with Page 42 but, by design, those solutions are mechanically inferior to Encounter powers. The game incentivizes you to prioritize your own powers. And it's been well documented that the power cards of 4e can focus some people's attention: by giving them a series of explicit choices people choose from them rather than considering other solutions. And 3e was even worse with its rules for everything and reality shaping spells. One the wizard was high enough level creative thinking went out the window, as the wiz can just reshape reality.</blockquote>

Verification