Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zehnseiter" data-source="post: 9436023" data-attributes="member: 7030431">Essentials was an interesting case of of half edition because of the 4E rule system. All classes in 4E were self contained. Spells were part of the class powers and a huge number of Feats were class based as well. So as long as you didn't change the base rules you could change the game a lot by by inserting variant classes and still retain more backwards compatibility then 3.5 or 5.5 manage to. This was from a pure buiness perspective actually a mistake with 4.5E (More to that later)In both 3E and 5E The rule subsystems system are less contained. All spell casting classes for example have a lot of their effective in game rules not in their class chapter but in the spell lists. And a lot of spell are shared between different classes.That makes every small change in a spell often way more difficult to balance then changing a power in 4E.One of the hallmarks of a 0,5 / half edition / revised edition is to not do the hard work like trying to solve deeper issues with for example saving throws. (Just to use an issue that 3E/5E and even 4E despite feat patches have in common as example) but instead do a lot smaller stuff. The big stuff will get changed when they do a 6E after the product circle of 5E/5.5E runs its course.When it comes to the smaller stuff you follow a certain trend if you want to achieve your business goals of selling lots of books. You change only so much that you can still can claim backwards compatibility even if barely so to not anger a too large segment of your customer base.But you change enough to make using the X.0 edition annoying to use in game so that most people just go for the x.5 edition. A Ranger class rebalance (to name again an issue that 3E/5E have in common as example) won't fulfil that goal. A host of small changes in the spells list for example are way more likely to do it because having several spell casters at one game tables that use different versions of the same spells will drive a DM nuts enough that he most likely will force a decision on what version or the game will be used at his table. And that will most like be the X.5 edition as this well be the only currently buy able edition for all potential new players he intends to add to his group.This all sounds cynical but well I am totaly okay with is as long as the actual X.5 / half edition / revision is a well done improvement over the base version. Then it is worth my money. I usually don't begrudge a publisher if he tries to sell a lot of books and 5E had a long enough run to warrant an upgrade.I say usually because WotC made me very angry with their attempted OGL power grab. 5.5E must be really really good for me to contemplate buying it as I am not the biggest fan of 5E in the first place.</blockquote>

Verification