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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="occam" data-source="post: 6320998" data-attributes="member: 39815">I see all these as different.Weapon vs. armor type: This was a "bad" rule because, even if you wanted to emphasize the particularities of weapon/armor interaction, it was still a pain in the ass to use. Thus, hardly anyone used it, which made it ineffective for its intended use. The intent was OK, but the implementation wasn't, even for those who appreciated the intent.Gender-specific ability score differences: This was an easy enough rule to use; as a rule, it worked. The problem was with the intent.Hmm, how do I address this next part without upsetting Thaumaturge...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Let's just say that you can have a rule that satisfies a certain intent and is easy to use, but that in a small number of cases might be seen as a problem in actual play. (And I believe that WotC has a good handle on that number, from data gathered early in the playtest when they were gauging how to balance resource usage across encounters and adventures, a key early issue.) In response, presumably the designers could:1) Modify the rule, which may come at a cost of simplicity, usability, and/or flexibility; or2) Leave it alone, and allow it to be accepted or modified in those outlier cases.The point of this thread is that WotC has decided, as a matter of design philosophy, to do the latter. They aren't going to try to write rules that are balanced in 100% of games; we've already seen what D&D looks like when the designers try that. (It's a fool's errand, anyway. Arguments over rules interpretations certainly didn't come to an end in 3rd and 4th Editions; if anything, my experience was that the more detailed rules provided additional fodder for arguments.) They're going to write rules that work for 90%, 95% of games (or whatever their target is), and let players and DMs work out the rest. They aren't going to try to fix that last 5% or 10% of corner cases; their standpoint is that you have DMs and players who can do that. Nailing down that target was, I believe, the main purpose of the extended playtest.So theorycrafters will be able to find "holes", and some small percentage of gamers might actually fall into them. But the benefit is a rules set that's easier to use and more flexible than one that tries (and fails) to cover them all up. And hopefully we can avoid long-drawn rules elements like this:I much prefer this:Can you stun an ooze, or an undead? The rule here is silent, and I think that's OK. Either it's covered somewhere else (the stun condition, or an undead monster's description; in the playtest, it isn't AFAICT), or it's a DM call that you can't stun an ooze. Personally, I prefer that to dealing with all the extra text in the rule.</blockquote>

Verification