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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9288160" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Just one of many reasons why I say 5e may have started with a lot of design ideas, but it had few to no actual design goals, and the further the design went along, the further it moved away from having them. Indeed, many of the design ideas it actually had ended up either not panning out, or getting aggressively eliminated before they could come into their own because of the ridiculous "if it doesn't please 70% of the fanbase immediately we can't use it" standard. (A standard, notably, they had to break once the playtest went private in the lead-up to publication, because they'd dithered for so long they no longer had the time to iterate anymore.) That's why they repeatedly went back to try to fix Ranger, because it wasn't up to par, and 5.5e is going back and addressing (IMO inadequately, but addressing nonetheless) other problematic elements like Berserkers and Champions, who have high usage rates but low satisfaction rates relative to the rest of the game.And more than once, they got caught putting all their eggs in one basket (e.g. Specialties), only to have that fall through and leave them scrambling for an alternative, quietly ditching elements they'd actually spoken positively of before (like martial healing, which Mearls at one point tweeted would be in the game, and DMs who didn't like that could simply tell players they weren't allowed to take that option.)I have often said things to the effect that calling the D&D Next surveys and polls low-quality would be insulting to low-quality statistics. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did absolutely nothing to check for whether the data they'd collected actually came from representative samples. (Given their "math is easy, feel is what's hard" attitude, I strongly suspect most WotC employees at the time viewed statistics as boring and pointless. It would help explain why several obvious mathematical issues--such as the ghoul surprise, where the issue with saving throws went unheeded by the designers up until it bit them in the ass, unexpectedly, during a live demonstration game--went completely overlooked until the designers literally couldn't look away.</blockquote>

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