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="pemerton" data-source="post: 9486976" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of course popularity can measure whether certain design goals were achieved, at least in general terms. (There's always the possibility that they could have been done better, and hence that popularity might have been even greater. And conversely, design goals might be achieved and yet sales drop for some other reason - eg a general recession, a competitor innovating, etc.)I think the design goals of 5e are pretty clear - though they are also quite intricate, in the sense that the design seeks to satisfy a variety of desideratum that aren't easy to simultaneously satisfy.I've posted about this already, upthread. And re-posted those posts in reply to you!Of course, popularity is not the only marker of having achieved those goals. If it was, then it would be impossible to make reasoned inferences about what worked and what didn't; about what might reasonably be improved; etc. Doing those things requires identifying what aspects of the design generate popularity, and why.I think the 2024 changes help us see what WotC regards as some of the strengths in the 5e design, as well as areas of improvement. I'm sure you can see most of them, and so I'm not going to try and go through them all. I'll just fasten on one: the change of stat bonuses from race/species to background. I read a review somewhere on these boards that suggested that this is a "nothing" change, as it just relocates the decision/optimisation point for choosing a stat package to suit one's class. But that remark is obviously wrong: races/species are frequent objects of contention, and it is non-trivial both at the table level and the publisher level to introduce endless new species. Whereas backgrounds - serving no purpose and having no real heritage in the game beyond being little packages of PC build customisation - are trivial to vary, add to, etc. And so putting stat bonuses in backgrounds rather than species clears the field for unlimited variation in stat bonuses (and optimisation, for those who want it). It's a clever design choice, that shows a nuanced understanding of the historical legacies and contemporary debates that accompany different components of PC build.You might think there is some weakness or incompleteness or even error in my analysis; but it's hardly the case that my analysis is nothing but subjective opinion, such that it is no more amenable to reason than my preference for one flavour of ice cream over another.Which is a good part of my point. (The other part of my point is about quality.)</blockquote>

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