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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9796452" data-attributes="member: 907">This reminds me of a quote from the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy that goes something like this (can't be bothered to look up the exact wording): "Humans believed they were more intelligent than dolphins, because humans had made so many great inventions like fire, or New York, or the atomic bomb, while all the dolphins had done was swim around in the ocean having fun. Dolphins believed they were more intelligent than humans, for exactly the same reason."In other words, people enjoy different things. Those things you dislike about 5e are generally what people who like it actually like.There's another Douglas Adams quote that goes something like: "Things that exists when you are born are considered old, established, and boring. Things that come into being when you are growing up are new and exciting. Things that come into being when you're an adult are unproven dangerous things that will ruin society as we know it."IIRC, he was mostly talking about technology, but the sentiment applies to other things as well.I think that while D&D is by no means video game-like, the developers have probably learned some lessons from video game development. The one that comes to mind are subclasses and how they affect character development.Looking at World of Warcraft, you initially just had classes as the main choice, with specialization done via detailed talent trees. These trees often had important defining abilities buried fairly deep into the tree, because that's how you made sure they were exclusive to that specialization. Usually you had moderately defining talents at rank 21+ and a capstone talent at 31, so if you wanted the capstone talent you couldn't get the defining talents from the other trees. But note that this gates defining talents at rank 21+, which in classic WoW means level 30 of 60. No Ice Block or Blast Wave for you until level 30. And that kind of sucks. In addition, the talent trees were often "solved" by the community, at least for players who wanted to do raiding and/or PvP. You had guides online saying "take this, this, and that talent" for each tree (albeit usually with different specs for raiding and for PvP), so the system that in theory granted a lot of freedom boiled down to fixed choices with maybe 5 out of 51 choices being "take whatever I guess" because the really useful talents had already been picked.So eventually what they did was to just give you a choice at level 10 about which spec to play, and gave you the defining tools for it. Some stuff was still delayed until higher levels, but a level 10 Fire mage definitely felt different than a level 10 Frost mage, whereas under the old system the difference was that the Fire mage-to-be had a 0.1 seconds shorter casting time on Fireball and the Frost mage had the reduction on Frost Bolt. They kept talents as a concept, but instead of having talent trees you got a choice of three abilities every so often that usually had a common theme but did it in different ways (e.g. all level 30 mage talents being some flavor of defensive ability).This is, I think, the lesson that was learned with 5e: don't hide the goodies. If someone wants to play an evoker, don't make them wait until 10th level before they can get the tools that make them feel like one. Give them the tools right away. Maybe not all the tools, but enough to feel like a ________. It's not done in the same way as it was in WoW, but I believe it was a lesson learned from it.</blockquote>

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