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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8968166" data-attributes="member: 6790260">So it's not perfect then. Which your argument depends upon in order to actually be a rebuttal. Because if it isn't perfect, it is possible for 5e to have faults; and if it has faults, those faults had to come from somewhere. Hence, "well people like it" cannot actually be a rebuttal to "it has flaws, and a solid chunk of those flaws come from X" unless it is followed by "and they like it because there's nothing to dislike in it."No, it isn't. 4e was financially successful. Believe it or not: every single edition of WotC D&D has outsold the previous edition. 3.5e outsold 3e, 4e outsold 3.5e (indeed, it outsold both combined if I recall correctly), and 5e outsold 4e. The standard is irrelevant if every single edition has met it.I have no idea what you mean by this. "but not now"?No, it didn't. It has performed better in broadening the game's reach, but every WotC edition has outsold every previous WotC edition. What 4e did not do was meet Hasbro's expectations. But that's not at all the same as not being successful. It did succeed.Because I'm not the one claiming 5e is perfect and never needs to change!Uh...no? I literally gave three examples. But here, since you want them.[SPOILER="In full, since the previous apparently weren't adequate"]The Ranger: Wedded as it is to having to do everything for everyone, it fell into a hole. They had to try to please every single group, to keep up that so-called "traditional" ranger with spellcasting and pets and hunting and terrain and.... And it clearly didn't work. It took them until the Drakewarden to finally get a subclass that wasn't bad.The Sorcerer: Did you do the D&D Next playtest? This (and the Warlock) were some of the extremely few classes where they tried something new, distinct, different. The playtest Sorcerer was built around spell points (essentially, they only had what are now called "Sorcery Points"), and as they spent from their total SP for the day, they would slowly transform. The example was a Dragon Sorcerer, which would slowly gain defensive and melee bonuses until, if they were out of SP, they had become a fairly tough melee character. This implied a whole host of fascinating subclass ideas, where each would transform into a different kind of being as they spent SP. But this allegedly didn't poll well. According to inside sources (which are, of course, unverifiable), if an option didn't poll over 75% it would be discarded for something that did. And y'know what happened? They never playtested the Sorcerer again. As a result, the class we got is weak, even for a full spellcaster, and doesn't fit together well.The Warlock: Same deal, except here the idea was that the Warlock would actually make pacts...genuine exchanges, where they would give up some aspect of themselves in order to gain something else. The examples given were fey-related, creepy and yet understandable, and (again) implied a whole host of fascinating background concepts. But it didn't reach the arbitrary polling-approval threshold with the very first packet it appeared, so it was instantly erased, never to be seen again...until we got the Warlock we ended up with, which WotC itself has explicitly said, on more than one occasion, is weak and needs a review.The "Warlord Fighter": From almost the beginning, WotC promised that there would be support for this. Ignoring their crappy, edition-war rhetoric, they explicitly said that they recognized that this is a valid niche, but believed it was best served by the Fighter. Then, they developed the so-called "Specialties" system, which were (essentially) feat chains you bought into at character creation and which would be doled out to you over time. You could always build your own, but the idea was that this system would act as a second layer on top of subclasses. Subclass would loosely shape your playstyle in a specific direction, and Specialty would focus you in on the particular things you really wanted to do. They went all in for this, and unlike the previous things, they tried to keep it for several packets running...but it just never worked out. Unfortunately, at this point, they were only about a year out from 5e's actual release date, and no longer had the time to experiment with some kind of new replacement, so Specialties were relatively quietly dropped...even though 100% of the effort put into the "Warlord Fighter" had been switched to Specialties. And guess what? After that point, they never mentioned the "Warlord Fighter" nor martial healing again.Proficiency Dice: Something you may or may not know is that Mike Mearls really loves rolling dice. Lots of them. He just genuinely loves the feel of grabbing a fistful of dice and throwing them to find out what happens. The more dice you roll, the better. Have you ever wondered exactly why it is that Proficiency starts at +2 instead of +1? It's because, originally, it was a proficiency die, and the bonus you got from said die went up (more or less) as proficiency does now. It was just a random bonus instead of a static one (1d4=2.5, 1d6=3.5, 1d8=4.5, 1d10=5.5, 1d12=6.5.) But this didn't poll well with players. The swinginess of the "proficiency die" benefit was not to most players' liking. Yet...despite having been consistently not well-received...it remained the official rules until fairly late in the process, because it was Mearls' baby. They never even axed it completely--it remains as a "variant rule" in the DMG.The Fighter: As I mentioned before, Mearls explicitly said he regretted how the Fighter ended up. He understood that people wanted a lot of different things from it, but he wished he had been able to give the class more flavor, more distinctiveness, more of a "yes, that's what a Fighter should be." It ended up being an ultra-bland nothing specifically because they were actively courting the most traditionalist parts of D&D's fanbase, and because they were too preoccupied with never rocking the boat rather than producing something good in its own right.[/SPOILER]"Strawman" requires that I be inventing an argument completely unrelated to yours. You did say "successful." I was not tilting at a fake thing. I figured that's what you meant. Making accusations like that when they don't actually apply doesn't do your argument any favors.You need only look at the spoilered things above to see how WotC has been shackled to "do things the way 3e did it, with some 2e flourishes when possible to court those fans." There's a very good reason a number of people refer to 5e as "AD&D 3rd edition."See above. The pattern was set by the D&D Next playtest. They've only rarely deviated from it since. Psionics, for example, has had several cool ideas, but they never bother to iterate past the initial presentation, so those ideas can never get better.Also, now who's putting words in whose mouth? I never used the word "superior." If I were actually going to describe it, I would say that the ideas were fresh, exciting, and still in rough-draft form, and thus needing some polish. But because the concepts were too new, too different, they got canned.And hey, aren't we seeing exactly the same thing with the actual topic of the thread? People responded very negatively to the Druid wildshape limitations, even though those limitations are almost certainly necessary to make the class not super wonky and swerving unbalanced. Tradition (which, as usual, means "how 3e did it") preserved, damn the consequences.No, it doesn't. It's only very slightly better than 3e."Not an embarrassment"? Really? That's the standard we're using for "excellent class balance"? Absolutely not. "Excellence" should not mean "you avoided embarrassing yourself." Likewise, "it's playable" is the second-worst (sincere) defense of anything in game design ever, second only to its cousin, "you can have fun with it."If a piece of game design is so horrifically, awfully bad that it is physically impossible for anyone to enjoy it, then it is so far beyond the pale it has become an actual weapon of psychological warfare. "You can have fun with it" is not something worthy of praise; it is the absolute, rock-bottom, barest minimum for something to be potentially acceptable. "It's playable" is only a hair's breadth higher, since it at least doesn't imply that you've somehow hijacked the player's brain and denied them the ability to feel joy about something. But something legitimately unplayable should never see the light of play; that's what 3e's Truenamer was, and it gets roundly (and rightly) lambasted for being genuinely too mechanically unsound to function, a dubiously unique honor among 3(.5)e options.And yes, I already recognized Tasha's. It laid the groundwork for the actually-halfway-decent Drakewarden subclass.</blockquote>

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