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: 9411499" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh, numerous things!It tells us about the three pillars, the things that are core gameplay experiences every character should be prepared to face (but which many characters are not, much to my frustration.)It tells us that it is a cooperative game, one about "heroic adventure" (fairly sure that's an exact quote, at least from the 5.0 PHB). Being a cooperative roleplaying game significantly narrows the design space--we don't need to worry about balancing PVP, because that's not something the game is supposed to do. If someone chooses to do that, more power to them, but nothing in the text supports doing so and indeed several parts instruct against it for various (IMO good) reasons.It tells us that players need to pick a race, a class, and a background in order to start playing. Some of these are, per designer commentary, more complex than others. That part is good; offering a range of complexity options is almost always beneficial for a game seeking a wide audience. The problem, of course, is that several of these options are simply not nearly as good as several others--in all three categories. Nothing is said about this being an intentional design goal, and given the designers do talk about wanting to make a balanced game, that would seem to be an issue.The above, plus a handful of other things, provide us with tons of information about the kind of game the books are telling us we're supposed to get. Whether or not the books actually deliver on that is a different question (and you already know that my answer is "frequently, they don't.")And that's not even touching the DM-facing side of things, which is significantly worse!</blockquote>

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