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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5765249" data-attributes="member: 54877">Modular options need not be as fine grained as Lego to work. I'm saying that if you try to make them that fine, you are essentially making a D&D clone of Hero or GURPS, and you will fail. The first part I think is on firm ground if you did an objective comparison of how such a system would work. The second part is obviously opinion, though I'd like to think an informed one, having run highly D&Dish stuff in Fantasy Hero for many years, and a homebrew, half Hero, half D&D after that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> This is why I keep saying that for D&D, the options need to be carefully chosen. Picking one thing to vary means that the other stuff around it needs to be structured. Ever seen one of those kid circuit board projects? They make them two ways--ones where you touch every little piece, and ones where you have components that you place on the board, but inside the component is fixed. With the latter, you can make a radio or a buzzer or any number of electronic projects, but you can't rewire a part to support more current.  Of course, with a table top game, neither analogy strictly holds. Nothing is truly "black box". Even if the "paladin" is presented as a black box class, you can tear it apart and rework it if you want to. What I am advocating, however, is that careful use of options will allow people to make the most common desired changes to the paladin without having to tear it apart and rebuild it. That's what "dials" do if designed properly. You just flip it, and it works, without you needing to understand all the nuances.  "Modular" D&D is a means toward allowing more flexibility to attract a wider audience, and give people a more satisfactory experience. It is not, in my view, an end of itself. I see Lego as modular as an end in itself, where a great deal of the point is pulling things apart and putting them back together. People that want the simple game do not want to have to put the game together themselves.   No, I meant that the handling time of such mechanics is unexpectedly prohibitive for what you get out of them. Cross-class skills are one of those ideas that seem so simple, and allow so much flexible detail. But as soon as you put in multiclassing, max ranks, etc., it is a pain in the behind. Widgets that cost different resources depending upon how and when a character buys them often have that property. I'm not saying that you can't ever use one. I am saying that I'd be highly skeptical about side effects and expect to check that during playtesting.</blockquote>

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