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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Carlsen" data-source="post: 5851214" data-attributes="member: 61749">The regular comments of "Make it a module!" reminds me of "Make it an option!" in software design. Excuse me while I make an extended comparison.Before Mozilla launched Firefox, they had the Mozilla Browser. It had a huge feature set, including mail, IRC chat, and news-feed subscriptions. It also provided a plethora of options to its users. But it didn't have the capacity to succeed in the larger browser market because it was too complex, slow, and difficult to understand.Firefox came about as an answer to that. The people in charge of designing Firefox had two large guiding principles:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Be able to say no. Firefox was to have extensions. The core program had to be agile and avoid confusing features, so the lead designers had to be able to say no to new features that didn't fit the core design.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Make decisions about default settings. For most people to be able to use the program, hard decisions had to be made as to what the default was going to be, and exactly which options would be made visible to the user.</li> </ol>But those two principles were backed up through extensibility. Extensions were a major part of the Firefox design from the very beginning, and how they would interact with the browser was considered as each piece was built.The reason Firefox is such a great comparison is that it made these difficult decisions, and yet remained the most extensible browser in existence. Basic users got a simple but well designed browser, and advanced users could alter and extend the browser in any way they wanted.This is the model that D&D Next needs to follow. There needs to be a core game playable out of the box. It needs to be very well designed and it needs to make decisions about what will make the best experience for the most players. It also needs extensibility to be built in from the beginning. It sounds like this is the plan, so, cool.But it also means that our discussions, as much as they matter, should focus on what will make for the best core experience for most people and what is really best as an extension to the game.</blockquote>

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