NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9411419" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You will note that I did not use the word "lazy." I referred to it as bad design, because that's exactly what it is, and I explained why it is bad, without simply declaring it so.Game design is a technology and a technique. As a result, wholly apart from the aesthetic interests, it can be evaluated on at least two different measures: (a) Does the design achieve the play-goals for which it was designed? AKA: Does the system do the thing it tells you it's supposed to do?(b) Does the design make thrifty and/or wise use of the tools it employs? AKA: Are the parts executed well, regardless of whether they do what they're supposed to do?Shoehorning the vast, vast majority of supernatural things into spells--for God's sake, they tried to make WARLOCK PACTS into spells!!!--fails on both of these measures. In blindly shoving everything into a single box allegedly with the goal of making the system easier to approach, it actually makes the system harder to approach, because now, new players need to have reasonably deep knowledge of the spells system in order to make effective characters in the VAST majority of situations. Stuffing so many things into one ill-fitting basket does not make them easier to learn, particularly given how ludicrously diverse "spells" are as a category. And as for "thrift," the only thrift is in slimming down every chapter that isn't the spells chapter...which, by the way, the chapters dedicated to spells (how they work, and then the list thereof) are the lion's share of the PHB. It's neither thrifty nor wise, doubly so when (at least prior to the last couple years) they didn't even print creatures with the text of the spells they know, just the names. Cue continuous book-flipping, or digital lookup (or, I guess, pre-printed text the DM had to prepare for herself), just to run a single combat.As both an exercise in the technology of designing games, and as a demonstration of game design technique, the absolute kindest thing you can say about 5e is that it is a hot mess, and the fact that they try to shove nearly everything into "spells" is one of the greater errors the design team has committed to.</blockquote>

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