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="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9704031" data-attributes="member: 7006">At least in this last point the answer (at least to me) seems rather straight-forward... narrative and story-based gaming do not need rules.  It's improv.  The more story-based you play, the less you worry or care about the "board game" aspect of RPGs and more about inventing and playing through character and drama.  And thus if the new 5E24 books were going to go in that direction, the playtest would have been about removing parts of the game altogether and not "fixing" them.  "Rulings, not Rules" would have gone even further forward by taking out all the extraneous rules that a story-based DM could just improv around rather than needing a fair and balanced set of systems to use for the game.But the thing is... as we all saw during the response to the One D&D playtest... most players couldn't have given a rat's ass about the narrative aspects of the game, it was ALL about the different abilities and features every class was getting and whether they were balanced or not.  Heck, you couldn't go a day or two without there being a new thread jumping up 5 pages full of people complaining about the design of the Ranger (and its use of Hunter's Mark) again and again and again.  Indicating that while the streaming and adventure books might seem to lean towards narrative... the actual game itself and the players who cared about it was still about the "board game".  What are the rules they are using for their character?  Do those rules let them do cool stuff (as opposed to just "doing cool stuff" via narrating what kind of cool things they want their character to do)?  Is what their character can do balanced and do an equal share of the events of the game (in combat or otherwise) with other players and their characters?It's D&D.  At its heart it is still a tactical miniatures combat game.  And that seems to be how most players still see it and play it... despite that part of it being much less interesting to watch in an Actual Play format (where the streamers usually skip over that part when they can and just stick with the performative improv.)</blockquote>

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