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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6491180" data-attributes="member: 2067">I wouldn't really retreat from that, but there's some nuance that you're losing. I said pushing people out of the game was the "worst possible" result, which isn't necessarily a commentary on the quality of design. If 4e's designers, by their choices, pushed people out of the game, they achieved the worst possible result of their design (that is, fewer people playing and enjoying RPGs -- opting instead to spend their entertainment time and money elsewhere). It could've been the most elegant and brilliant game in the universe, but if that was the result, it was the worst possible result. I think you'd find plenty of 4e fans who believed the system was unfairly maligned by an unappreciative fanbase -- the idea that 4e was awesome and unappreciated is one with some traction.The reality of 4e was more nuanced than that effect (it attracted some people, repulsed others), but I wouldn't retreat from the idea that 4e, by locking people into powers and non-vancian magic and telling players that this upset to "just deal with it" (by not including options that they should've been aware would be desired) absolutely made a decision that ultimately hurt 4e. It wasn't a system that was so inflexible that it couldn't handle these variations (as things like psionics and Essentials and Gamma World began to bare out) -- it was a system more flexible than even the people designing for it really allowed it to be most of the time. Given the possibility space there, designing a game that didn't support other (especially older) playstyles was a big mistake in my mind. I'd argue that the WotC of today seems to agree with that assessment, too. Part of the playtest was there as an audience study, trying to get a sense of what the public actually wanted out of D&D. One of the goals of 5e was to not lock in a playstyle like 4e did. The 5e marketing has not at all been about ridiculing 4e players (indeed, I believe Mearls or Crawford is on record as saying something like, "If 4e is your favorite edition, keep playing it."). The DMG is frickin' cavalier about the changes you can make to your game without harming the underlying system. 5e isn't about One True Way, pretty transparently.Which means that a character even MORE like the 4e warlord than the current battle master is certainly not out of the question. Core 5e is designed with big decisions and abstract combat in mind, but that doesn't remove the possibility of a "Skirmish" or "Tactics" or "Advanced" supplement (perhaps linked to a board game!) that lets you play 5e's fundamental system in a more grid-and-cards way. Not having that at launch is understandable (that's not what their data told them most D&D players wanted), but if it's something that there's significant demand for, there's no reason they can't make it in 5e. Also no reason a 3rd party couldn't publish it if 5e goes totally OGL like I think it should!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Which ultimately means that advice along the lines of "stop complaining and make due with what we've been given, just compromise" (aka, "suck it up") is not as useful as "what is still missing? what is the experience you can't have? what are you looking for that this doesn't offer?" That first response dead-ends, and often dead-ends at people just not playing D&D. The second response gives us some new design goals. If we were to meet these peoples' needs in 5e, what would we need to do? What might that look like? Is it worthwhile to do it? And such.The flaw here is in the indication that the person who wants to do X is flawed, inflexible, and unreasonable.That's not really the case, though.The person who wants to do X has a desire that they've had D&D meet before, and they expect D&D to continue to meet. And if D&D doesn't meet that desire, what reason do they have to continue to play D&D? It's not unreasonable to expect the next Batman movie to be a dark, brooding, atmospheric story about a wealthy playboy vigilante fighting the horrible people that terrorize his city. If it is instead <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_%26_Robin_%28film%29" target="_blank">a campy romp through cornball characters with eye-rolling one-liners with plenty of laffs and yuks</a> and maybe a catchphrase-spouting dog or something, then the people looking for the first film aren't going to like the second film. It's not because they're being unreasonable or inflexible, it's just because they're not looking for what that second film is offering. Their time and money won't be rewarded with the kind of fun they're looking for.Our useful question there is: what is it about X that you liked, and what is the reason that this doesn't happen when you play the game now?</blockquote>

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