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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DDNFan" data-source="post: 6313197" data-attributes="member: 6776483">My quote wasn't editing warring, please. Just because I criticized a city's poor defenses in the Fey campaign book that happened to be written for 4th edition?It would be like visiting a city of giants and seeing the doorways were only 5 feet high. Total design failure. I wouldn't expect to see any torches lit in a drow city either.All of which have little to do with rules, except in a tangential way, the fact that the adventures must be written with copious stat blocks in mind is actually one of the criticisms of earlier editions listed in the interview, which makes adventure design easier and therefore better. The less system speak and stats you have to worry about when designing an adventure, the more time you can spend thinking about design implications and making it have a coherent vision and story that fit well together.This is just as much a criticism of 3rd edition, if you think about it. 3rd was hard to DM as it required a lot of prep time and a lot of work. 4th reduced that but 5th takes it even further with bounded accuracy and the fact that adventures only refer to Basic D&D content, and whatever they chose to include, instead of making them do all kinds of balancing acts that in practice end up being not very balanced anyway. (Example, Mark of X feats from Forgotten realms).Wizards making adventure designers focus on Basic D&D as Core, is a conscious design decision to allow them to focus on what they do best, which is write good adventures and settings that draw in the player, instead of this and that combo interaction with such and such feats or magic item properties. When you can design a game that doesn't cater directly do the players being there, but rather treats them as inherently no different than any other creature in the land, that sets a tone of realism that results in greater immersion and therefore consequently more fun.Watch this video if you care to learn more in depth about this facet of open world gaming and is quite relevant to the interview from which this thread was forked:<a href="http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-why-watch-dogs-world-doesn-t-feel-real/2300-6419045/" target="_blank">http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-why-watch-dogs-world-doesn-t-feel-real/2300-6419045/</a>Like the video says, if you can see the puppet strings or the breadcrumbs laid out for you, you are more likely to lose interest due to your immersion being lost. A fantasy world that feels believable, even despite it having flying elves or dragons in it, is not impossible, but you have to have that as a design goal and the system mechanics of 5th edition, being simpler and more streamlined with less rigid structure, leads to a more rewarding game experience. At least for me. As I said, everyone at my table quit from that Eladrin city, it was just too obvious that everything was just a carboard hollywood set and laid out for the players amusement, as if they're the center of the world. It's part of the design conceit of many adventures, that after a few years, got old and we simply lost interest in playing the game entirely. I looked at my character sheet and saw mostly powers and algebra and no real character development, and this in turn made me less attached to my character, even further exaggerating the highly unbelievably contrived adventure we decided to pursue at Paragon levels. Then we all just said nearly unanimously, you know what? This isn't working, we're done.</blockquote>

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