From the WotC Boards: Mearls on 'Aggro'

[Baby Samurai]

The ideal is an intelligent DM who's intelligent enough to separate his intelligence from the intelligence of his monsters.

Yeah, ideally, but I'm sometimes guilty of this, and play monsters too intelligently, tactically for their Int.

 

[Driddle]

The uninformed MMORPG bashing ...

That's a broad stroke that's insulting to the many MMO(RP)G-bashing people who are informed. Probably need to be careful with that.

Eight pages of thread so far. Goodness -- this topic certainly has a lot of aggro!

 

[D.Shaffer]

*shrug* It seems like it might be an obvious bad idea, but that doesnt mean it shouldnt be tested. How many times have people posted an idea that they thought was great but wouldnt work in your campaign for one reason or another? How many times have you tried out an idea that seems like it'd work out, on paper, but failed abysmally in practice?

Heck, even if it IS an obviously bad idea, it might be worth it to SHOW why it's a bad idea in case anyone wants to try it. I'm not seeing why people are getting all upset because they wanted to see if it'd work.

 

[Jedi_Solo]

I'm glad they tested it. I'm glad they ditched it, but I'm glad they tested it. I'd be very surprised if they didn't get something that worked well out of this; such as a new feat/ability, spell or a skill use.

And that is exactly why I'm glad they tried it. It didn't work but now they know why it didn't work (besides the "it's stupid" answer). They know that it has problems at locations A, B and C. It's possible that they thought it would have problems at point D but that D worked well and might be included. Maybe they thought it would work well at point E but it didn't... at all and so now they know to avoid E in the future.

Sometimes knowing why something doesn't work is more valuable than simply knowing it doesn't. New information can bring the designers to look at new directions they didn't look at before or even consider before. If Mearls and Noonan (and the rest) hadn't tried aggro now because it was "obviously" a bad idea we may not have a half-dozen cool fighter feats in the new edition. And even worse, whoever replaces them at some point in the future may add aggro since there wouldn't be the documentation as to why it didn't work in the first place.

So WotC, please - go try new things no matter if the idea comes from TV, movies, literature (both recent and not-so-recent), comic books, anime or video games! Discover why they do and do not work and make D&D even better than it is now!

 

[Driddle]

... I'm not seeing why people are getting all upset because they wanted to see if it'd work.

There's concern over how much from WoW (MMOGs in general) that *did* make it into the redesign, for no reason other than it's profitable-trendy.

 

[Fifth Element]

The aggro system is not easy to remove, at least none of the examples I've seen.

That one of the points here. No one has seen the system they tried to implement, so any gnashing of teeth about it is based on pure speculation. They didn't provide any specific examples, presumably since they decided it was a bad idea and moved on.

That, and they already dropped it. Yet some are up in arms that they even experimented with it.

 

[Baby Samurai]

Yet some are up in arms that they even experimented with it.

There's no pleasing some people…

 

[Cadfan]

Today, for the first time, I put an EnWorlder on Ignore.

 

[Driddle]

Today, for the first time, I put an EnWorlder on Ignore.

Announcing it makes you appear petulant. Taking the "high road" requires silence and stealth ... like a ninja -- no one should even know the deed has been done.

 

[Goobermunch]

There's concern over how much from WoW (MMOGs in general) that *did* make it into the redesign, for no reason other than it's profitable-trendy.

List please?

Then support for claim that it's "for no other reason than it's profitable-trendy."

--G