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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5818239" data-attributes="member: 54877">Not exactly. My "defense" is that it was a team effort, and whatever failings the team had in their design and development (and success, too), they get as that team. This is true of any team effort towards design, but in this case I think it applies doubly do to how 3E was managed. Understand that here I'm somewhat reading between the lines (i.e. making educated guesses based on symptoms and what was said rather than any direct information or even insight): It is fairly clear to me that 3E was developed by a group that had at least two major competing "visions" of where the game was going, and possibly as many as four or five (depending on how you want to count "major" or "minor" when it comes to something as subjective as a vision). This meant that there was a certain amount of, err, "erratic" behavior in the design. No committee of designers and developers, no matter how talented, can navigate that environment without having things slip by them. It's impossible. Now, maybe it is on them to have raised objections to management that some of the design intent was mutually incompatible, and they didn't, but I have absolutely nothing in the way of even a guess as to how that played out. For all I know, it was anything from "clueless" to "raised bloody hell but got overridden anyway."  Furthermore, a lot of the relatively last minute shuffling of things like "paladins having alignment restrictions" and other such things that leaked out during and immediately after the playtest indicates to me that the early playtest did not explose some of the flaws that the later, wider playtest did. The big problem here was that they didn't playtest soon enough to go back and redesign around all the flaws. You'll note that whatever else they are doing this time, this should not be nearly so much of a problem. Finally, any team is going to have strengths and weaknesses. How well they do is part of that, but you also have to consider the environment they are working in. Do I have serious issues with 3E, especially at higher levels where it was not playtested much until very late? You betcha. But I'm not going to let me blind me to the systematic and thorough good job that team did in covering the scope of D&D into a cleaner product. It seems easy in hindsight, but that was a really tough job to do well while doing anything else. Plus, it was that excavation and foundation work that made 4E possible. You can't get to 4E directly from 2E (practically). Likewise, I'm fairly certain that some of the lessons learned and areas explored in 4E are going to make 5E a better game--even for people that end up liking 5E a lot who can't stand 4E.  So I'm sure this team will make some mistakes. And I'm sure the chemistry of the team is going to lead to some fairly nifty things that we'll be treasuring in our D&D from here on. When they do, both the mistakes and the treasures won't be because Monte was or was not on the team, but will certainly be because he and the rest of them are the team.</blockquote>

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