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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9439437" data-attributes="member: 55680">Yes, I think 2030 is a good general guess for 6e.I've been playing a Blades in the Dark campaign and for the first time I'm having a game in which encumbrance is actually interesting. I've always liked the IDEA of encumbrance rules but have generally found them to be a real pain in the ass in practice. However, BitD is proving to me that they can be done well. Having them be slot based is absolutely essential and I even think the metagame aspect of the system ("I've decided right now what my character has had in his backpack all along!") could be a great mechanic for rogues to help make then more cunning and better at planning ahead than their players.Well another part of it is that the players had a much easier time wrapping their heads around Apollo than "Insert Fantasy Sun God Name Here" seeing them get terrified when some NPCs were planning an expedition to Hades and nope out of that was great fun.But a few bolts of divine intervention was fun, had a god get cranky early on when one PC stole some sacrificial goods from one god to give to Hades instead. Players never forgot that, and I think "terrified of pissing off gods" fits the vibe of Greek Myth a lot more than the weird Pseudo-Medieval Catholicism you get as default in D&D.With 3.5e, at least for me, the rules were often pretty unambiguous but there were so damn many of them that no DM I ever met even tried to follow all of them, so whenever I started a new campaign as a player I often had no idea how X, Y, or Z would actually be run at the table since each DM seemed to pick and choose different chunks of 3.5e rules to follow and different chunks to handwave. With 2e, 4e, or 5e I generally have a much better sense of how things will go down when I sit down to play while 3.5e was often a complete crapshoot.On the other hand, how easy is D&D to play if you have an experienced DM compared to other games. As a general rule, Indie games tend to take more of the weight off the DM's shoulders...but also put more on the shoulders of the players. For example, the basics of FATE are dead simple but ALL of the players have to have a good grasp of how the metagame fate point economy works in order to play, while in most D&D editions you can give a kid a simple "I hit it with my axe" character and be good to go. I've played 1e with kids in cases where I was strapped for time and I only gave  them a ten minute run-down of what was on their character sheet, didn't teach them any rules, and basically treated the whole system of D&D rules as:1. Player says what they are going to do.2. A mystery happens.3. DM tells them what the result is.And things worked fine. Harder to do that with a lot of other games.Also except for organizing the DMG better and tightening up some definitions, I'm not really seeing how 5.5e is supposed to be easier to DM. A big thrust of 5.5e design seems to be power creep and new abilities for players, which just gives the DM more things to keep track of. The main thrust of 5.5e marketing seems to be based around tempting players with fun new naughty word for their characters, not appealing to DMs.Mentoring matters a lot. I banged my hell into walls a lot during the 90's and kept on being confused as to why I wasn't able to make my games feel more like LotR, my son has struggled a lot less learning the ropes as he always asks me a lot of questions while prepping his sessions.I think 5e really needed a clearer default adventure structure. 1e had this:A. You start in a safe place.B. You begin to travel into a dangerous place.C. The dangerous place gets more dangerous the deeper into it you go, so you have to be careful.D. However, the deeper you go the more loot you can get but you'll be drained down by constant less rewarding danger on your way to that loot.E. Eventually the accumulating danger and attrition will overwhelm your greed to delve deeper and you turn around and try to figure out how the hell to get back home.F. You get back to the safe place at the end of the session and lick your wounds and count your loot.G. Repeat next session.1e can do more than this, but this is VERY much the default. The Westmarches series of blog posts explained this structure beautifully, even that that came much later and was made with 3.5e in mind, 5e really doesn't have anything comparable and suffers from it. Shadowrun, despite its incredibly baroque rules, benefited enormously from having a really clear and easy to follow default adventure structure ("first Mr. Johnson shows up and offers you a job, then..."). The same goes for games that you'd think would be more niche than they are like Paranoia and CoC which also both benefit from having a default adventure structure that makes it easy for everyone to get on the same page and gives newbie DMs a clear model to follow and more experienced DMs a base to riff off of and eventually depart from.But I don't think ANY edition of WotC-D&D has had the same kind of clear well laid out and easy to follow default adventure structure. The 4e community on rpg.net developed one (based on 1-2 big epic battles per session etc.) but that was bottom-up and developed years into 4e. It was a really fun way to play 4e but the 4e devs really didn't present a clear model of how to play 4e in a fun way right off the bat (Keep on the Shadowfell was famously bad for example).To make ANY version of D&D fun to run communicating a default adventure structure and pacing is paramount for both DMs and players. Once you get this down you can go off in other directions.I'm just not really seeing this from 5.5e when this should have been the absolute paramount priority for making 5.5e better for DMs.One thing I've noticed a lot in online discussions of 5e (although not my own bubble at all) is people bemoaning how they have to ALWAYS DM because nobody else wants to or how hard it is to find a good DM. This hasn't been my experience at all, our biggest problems is people trying to rush the current DM along so that other people can get their turn in the big chair but it seems pretty pervasive. Since I haven't run into it personally I was mostly chalking it up to a simple influx of newbies but now you've gotten me thinking more about how to make 5e easier to DM besides "mentor my son" (so far so good on that front, but hardly a universal solution).</blockquote>

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