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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751829" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Yes, that's true. "Action-genre RPG" is what I think I felt when I've said "minis game" in the past. The encounters as written generally seemed to be set-piece scenarios. A lot of this is driven by the impetus of having a board but many of the early modules really felt very much like "here's my cool setup" regardless of how illogical it was.    OK, so it wasn't just me.     That makes sense. I thought it was in the Dark Sun book, which was a few years on, but I'm not sure. I liked Inherent Bonuses quite a bit, actually. Don't misunderstand me: I don't mind the idea of either. What I dislike is the implementation. 4E's implementation of concentration was IMO much better than 5E's. Some spells cost you your minor action. Others cost you your action. If you had two things that worked on minor actions, well, goodbye to your action. It depended on what you were doing and wasn't just some kind of hard "because I said so!" limit. Yes, I agree, and the fact that rarity was next to illogical with little rhyme or reason didn't help.   See for me I'd have accomplished it in a way that reinforced themes via imposing a cost rather than by a hard game mechanical limit. For instance, if you want to attune, have it start costing you healing surges or hit dice (or something). That keeps it inside the world. Another would be to have the item do one thing with attunement and do less without it. I'm writing up some items to post to DMsguild and put in a bunch that had that kind of thing. If you use it it does X but if you attune it does X+Y. (In some cases it activates curses, so attuning isn't necessarily so nice.) Milestone was just... weird. It's much the same reason I don't like the "escalation die" from 13A, even though I totally get the genre effect it simulates. It does it in a fashion that feels like it breaks the fourth wall to me. I know why they did it and I support the reasoning, but as I said, it was done in a crassly game mechanical way that really throws me out of the secondary reality of the game world. It had a goal of reinforcing something but didn't do it in a way that was inherent to the character in the world. So for me, it's not good design. I totally get the fact that things like spell slots and the general action economy fall into that territory too, but for some reason those don't bug me nearly as much as "oh well, the universe just says you can only attune three items and that's it." I really don't like my face rubbed in game mechanics regardless of whether they have a good effect.</blockquote>

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