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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9502512" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I don't consider spells to be at all an example of &quot;exception-based design.&quot; Mostly because I don't think 5e spells are particularly well designed at all. Each individual spell is almost always ad hoc. There is no baseline from which to make exceptions, which is a requirement for you to have something being &quot;exceptional&quot; in the first place. A design rule that is broken more often than it is followed isn't a rule.That's actually a very good way of separating the two ideas for me: spells can barely be said to have any design system whatsoever, thus making nearly all of them unique one-off things, often with capricious and unexplained deviations (a problem only made worse by 5e's repeated efforts to port as many class features as it can into the spells system.) Some of this is legacy design exerting its oft-infuriating influence, e.g. fireball, but a lot of it is not, e.g. silvery barbs.By comparison, exception-based design has to start from an otherwise universal rule, and then make exceptions only as needed. This of course comes with the great benefit that you aren't beholden to unforeseen weaknesses of someone else's design choices, but that great power comes with the great responsibility to use it sparingly--because if you really do have far more exceptions than regularities, &quot;regular&quot; no longer has any meaning, there is no system at all.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9502512, member: 6790260"] I don't consider spells to be at all an example of "exception-based design." Mostly because I don't think 5e spells are particularly well designed [I]at all[/I]. Each individual spell is almost always ad hoc. There is no baseline from which to make exceptions, which is a requirement for you to have something being "exceptional" in the first place. A design rule that is broken more often than it is followed isn't a rule. That's actually a very good way of separating the two ideas for me: spells can barely be said to have any design system whatsoever, thus making nearly all of them unique one-off things, often with capricious and unexplained deviations (a problem only made worse by 5e's repeated efforts to port as many class features as it can into the spells system.) Some of this is legacy design exerting its oft-infuriating influence, e.g. [I]fireball[/I], but a lot of it is not, e.g. [I]silvery barbs[/I]. By comparison, exception-based design has to start from an otherwise universal rule, and then make exceptions only as needed. This of course comes with the great benefit that you aren't beholden to unforeseen weaknesses of someone else's design choices, but that great power comes with the great responsibility to use it [I]sparingly[/I]--because if you really do have far more exceptions than regularities, "regular" no longer has any meaning, there is no system at all. [/QUOTE]

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