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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9844031" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I find the enormous problem is that "works with a herd of cats" means teamwork is functionally irrelevant--every group can succeed without it, so why bother going to all that work when it makes no functional difference? Which is precisely my problem. D&D is and has always been a team game. I believe it should be designed as such.Now, that doesn't mean D&D should be designed so that flawless interlocking machine-like teamwork is required 24/7. That's foolish and unproductive. But I genuinely do believe that if the group is behaving, as you say, like "a herd of cats", then they should pay a price for that. It should be hard to succeed under such conditions. Not impossible, but you're leaving your success mostly up to luck and brute force when you're that dysfunctional. Conversely, a well-oiled machine of teamwork might be able to punch above their weight or otherwise achieve unusual success, but is susceptible to having holes poked in it, allowing for a more dynamic back-and-forth.Like, if "herd of cats" is 10% teamwork and "well-oiled machine" is 100% teamwork, I would expect the game to be balanced for a point roughly around 40%-50% teamwork. Call it "fire-forged friends" type teamwork; just because they're friends doesn't mean they always get along or have rigid discipline. Dropping down all the way to 10% teamwork is a major risk, but it's also a lot more casual. Perhaps the DMG can have advice for how to account for varying degrees of teamwork in the group. Seems like that would be right at home with the "player personalities" stuff that was present in the 4e DMG.I would argue that that is not quite true, with an illustrative example: Marking. Marking cannot be adjudicated by a computer nor a flowchart. It is not autonomous. It requires a values-judgment. It is genuinely indispensable to have a human mind deciding what is worth doing, and what is worth avoiding.This is where I find many analyses of 4e fall flat. They mistake the smoothing of one problem for the total elimination of something, when that isn't true. Specifically, 4e worked very hard (as I know you know) to remove balance concerns. It did not eliminate them...but they got farther than I'd ever have expected. By eliminating the need for the GM to worry much about balance, their goal was for the GM to pick up all of that cognitive load and shunt it right back into all of the other--and let's face it, much more fun--parts of being a GM. Throw together a wild and raucous fight, is it still +/- 4 levels of the characters? Then it'll most likely be a fun and engaging time. And all the time you would've spent worrying about balance, you can instead spend on the zillion other things that a GM needs to be paying attention to.Of course, that's not how folks saw it...but perception and reality are not as closely allied as any of us would like, I suspect.On this you will never hear argument from me. Attempting to kill the OGL was the single stupidest thing 4e's creators ever did. Had they not done so--had they instead collaborated and tried to reinforce the OGL--a great many things would have gone differently.I'm....not really sure what "dependent on the official products" means in this context. That makes it hard to respond to your thought here, but I feel like if we can get to that, this is a fruitful discussion to have.Given it's been nearly 20 years since 4e came out, I'm pretty sure we'd be playing 5e by now. But it would've been a 5e launched much more recently. But I do agree that keeping the OGL and letting 4e cook for like one extra year? Massive, massive differences.Personally, I don't think 5e kept any amount of "balancing player options" from 4e. Like I personally think it actively went out of its way to piss on balancing player options, and 5.5e came about in part because players were unhappy that they did that. (It came out for a lot of reasons, this was just one of them IMO.)Gith maybe, they're still pretty fringe. I mean, Planescape: Torment was phenomenally successful in its day, and it didn't suddenly lead to a huge influx of tiefling interest despite prominently featuring a tiefling and an outright baatezu (Fall-from-Grace). I could see Dhampir being implemented as feats in a PHB though; that's the kind of layer-on-top feature that folks love, and which would provide a clear differentiation point from 5e, which sharply limits the amount of customization any character gets, but especially a 1st-level character. (Again, an area where 5.5e has slightly shifted away, but you'll frankly need a new edition to actually change that.)</blockquote>

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