NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8112469" data-attributes="member: 72555">Use of Keywords make the text less inviting.Use of Keywords make the rules more clear.They are in conflict right there.There is almost always conflict between one way to make things better and another way to make things better, because resources are fungible, and only so much can be done. Bad games that people will play is the goal.Great games that people will play is a waste of money on the maker of the game.Ok games that people will play is probably the hot spot.Of course, the issue here is that your metric -- "great ok bad" -- is centered on the experience of someone who has played the game and mastered much of the system and is running into jagged corners.  This makes sense, that is often what I am as well.But the real metric for a social game is "can I find fun people to play with".  A "bad" (full of rules that aren't clear), yet popular RPG is way, way better for finding fun people to play with than a mechanically tight game that isn't popular.Do the rules get in the way of having fun playing the game?  If not, then the rules are good.  Do the rules make it inviting to get more people to play?  Then the rules are good.Do the rules have issues where someone casting magic missile multiclassed with hexblade cause instant death to an elder dragon?  Actually not that important to if the rules are good, by this metric.Sure.  So throw that out.I'm just saying that you should embrace that gamesNo, it being playable and being able to have fun is the primary important criteria that matters to the gameplay of the rules.The other criteria is if it is inviting and enticing to play.Everything else is fancy decoration on that foundation.It really doesn't matter if the rules have a fundamental ambiguity about unarmed strikes and paladin smites.  By the time you are having that argument, you are already a player of the game having fun.The goal shouldn't be "an ideal blissful play experience", because that isn't (a) something the rules can actually do, (b) as important as getting people to start playing the game.People making D&D want plenty of groups playing D&D to form.When a group forms and lasts 10 sessions, the players in that group are reasonably likely to buy some D&D material.The game lasting longer has a marginal increase in the amount of D&D material sold."Whale" players, who buy every D&D supplement, are relatively rare.  Converting a D&D player into a Whale has value (say, by getting them into a 4 year epic storyline and the like), but getting more players has more value.If you double the number of new players and halve the chance each player becomes a whale, you win hard.  You get the same number of Whales and you get far more "casual" players, each with a decent chance to buy a PHB or something like it.What more, the large number of "casual" players increases the brand value more than the number of whales does.  A D&D movie will have an audience base based more on how many "casual" players of D&D than it will on the number of Whales, for example.5e is a game aimed not at Whales, but at mass recruiting players.  View the rules through that light.Now, as it happens, mass recruiting players also improves my gameplay experience.  Right now it is far easier to find a D&D game with fun people than it has basically ever in any time in the past.  And that has more value than almost any other feature of the game rules.</blockquote>

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