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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9640448" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You...don't. That's the whole point.If you don't want to use them, don't. Nobody is making you.That's why 5e as it exists does not have novice levels. It has mandatory levels at which characters are extremely fragile and have very few choices or resources--your ONLY choices are either to play fewer actual levels, or go through playing levels you don't want to play.Actual "novice level" rules are separate from the regular levelling progression. They're opt-in, not opt-out. That's why I keep emphasizing that, despite being opt-in, they are not in any way deprecated, derided, or concealed. They're front-and-center, but optional; fully-supported, but in no way mandatory; usable and indeed quite useful, but not enforced.It's...it's not a matter of "transforming" anything into anything else. It's a matter of creating a system which actively supports a wide variety of preferences. Of necessity, having active and enthusiastic support for many different preferences means that there will be rules--perhaps lots of rules!--that any given user has no interest in. But D&D is, and has been for some time, positioning itself as the big-tent TTRPG, the RPG that can embrace a wide variety of styles and processes. Some of this comes from its history, as "D&D" has been many different things across five decades, but some of it simply comes from the necessities of a product appealing to a diverse audience. That is, "Prego" is no longer one, singular recipe: it is a whole family of recipes with different focuses, from ultra-classic minimalist "classic" flavor to "extra chunky" to "robust" to "parmesan" to (etc., etc.) For D&D to survive as the kind of product it's being sold as, it must follow that same lead, and offer many different flavors under the one umbrella.Your position seems, fundamentally, to be that the game cannot be anything other than one singular thing, and thus any rules proposals must be ones that somehow trick players into playing things they don't like. That is false. The game can, in fact, be multiple distinct things despite all living under a single metaphorical roof. You just have to have well-supported opt-in rule structures that facilitate different approaches, weaving in, around, and through a common core. We can, in fact, actually have one single system, which gives real, and more importantly well-made, support to the old-school player who wants gritty zero-to-slightly-more-than-zero-to-a-modicum-more-than-zero-to-[insert many variations on 'slight growth' here]-to-maybe-possibly-hero-ish, AND giving just as much support to the new-school player who wants satisfying narrative arcs and exploration of the story of a specific group of characters and the way they interact with each other, AND giving just as much support to the mid-school player who loves nothing more than setting the world running and seeing what drops out while having their character naturalistically and procedurally grow in the ways that make the most sense for them.It isn't a zero-sum game. It's eminently achievable, we just have to reach for it.Anyone "upset" by having useful rules that aren't for them in the book, isn't welcome in any D&D I would want to design. "All of the rules must be made for me and my preferences" is not an acceptable negotiating position.Sometimes. But in the designing of an RPG's rules, exclusion is rarely actually required. That's my whole point here. Your "sometimes" absolutely is not "always", and my "perfectly possible" is a lot more achievable than you give credit for.</blockquote>

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