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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Monte At Home" data-source="post: 2402574" data-attributes="member: 1335">It was certainly never my intention to do that. My hands were not tied. In fact, I <a href="http://www.montecook.com/arch_lineos1.html" target="_blank">wrote about it </a> being just the opposite way back when, assuming that my hands would be tied, but in fact we were given far more freedom to make changes than I ever thought possible. In a way, it scared me--I expected that some of the "old guard" would be there to put the kibosh on some wacky idea I might put forth. A safety net, so to speak. I can remember, for example, saying that I thought we should add the barbarian back in, expecting Skip to explain why we couldn't do that. Instead, he said, "good idea." Right then and there, I saw that the sky really was the limit, in a way, and I had to learn to self edit rather than count on someone else to reel me in. It made me a better designer.I certainly have, however, talked about things that we could have done better. Harm and blade barrier, for example, weren't thought completely through enough. Not tested enough. There's no place, however, that I could shift the blame to for things like that, even if I wanted to. Things like that were our fault, many specifically my fault, and not the fault of someone tying our hands (and both those spells were fixed nicely in 3.5). The CR system does need some work, but usually I find myself defending it, not attacking it. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else on that one?3.5 was planned from the beginning, but not by the designers. By the people managing the business. In fact, I don't believe I'm speaking out of turn when I say that Skip, Jonathan and I were a bit put off by the idea--maybe even a little offended. If you think about it, how could we not be, after working on something for almost three years, doing our best to make the best game we could, and then at the end be told that people were already planning on updating the material before it was even released? But that wasn't our call. Maybe that's what you're referring to when I talked about our hands being tied. I can't think of any writer or designer that would purposefully not put his all into a project specifically so that it can be revised later. (And for what it's worth, I still stand firmly behind AU, and I'm very happy with it. Most of the AE changes are format changes, not content changes, or just brand new stuff.) Similarly, AU/AE doesn't exist because of any kind of disatisfaction with D&D on my part. I love D&D. I'm back up to playing twice a week now (for the last two years, it had only been once a week).I apologize for the tangent. Mostly, I just wanted to make it clear how very, very proud and pleased I am of D&D 3E. I don't know when I did, but if I have ever given the impression otherwise, I apologize (mostly, that apology would go out to Jonathan and Skip). To bring it back to the topic at hand, in many ways, Ptolus is a kind of love letter to the game that has occupied my creative energy since I was 10 years old.Edit: Added link.</blockquote>

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