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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9837884" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Personally, I think any 6e approach needs to start from declaring certain things that will be part of it, both in the near-term and in the long-term, even if that might mean some people say "okay then that's not for me", because one of the bigger stumbling blocks of 5e's design has been its need to try to please absolutely everyone all the time, and thus ending up being pretty middling on a bunch of things, or defaulting to what was merely familiar, regardless of whether it was good. Familiarity wins surveys, but doesn't win design. I'm specifically thinking of stuff like psionics--and the need to stake a flag rather than trying to let a fractious and squabbling community determine which of the 7 different paths will be taken.Once a core ethos has been established, it then needs a clear timetable. TONS of time got wasted during the D&D Next playtest. There need to be limits for how much time gets invested into various things. E.g. the Fighter cannot take a year and a half bouncing around between six ideas before it finally settles on something--if you want to test lots of ideas, awesome, but be ready to WORK HARD to test that much, because design time is VERY VERY finite, and a bunch of the stuff 5.5e had to fix was almost directly because of classes or subclasses getting rushed out the door because they ran out of time. Experimental stuff, really wild out-there ideas, can be saved for a supplemental book later--the focus has to be hard, sharp, continuous, and always moving forward.Finally, hire a statistician and a survey designer. If you're going to be using surveys and doing statistics-based game design, have people on staff whose expertise is surveys, and separately, statistics. (Don't try to make one person do both, it won't go well.) I'm not saying either person needs to have some kind of technocratic veto power or whatever. I just think that you need someone on staff whose training and experience is in these two things, because they are essential for getting the task done and NOBODY on the Wizards staff is trained in this stuff. I genuinely went looking, long ago, into the educational history of WotC's employees. Of the ones I could find, three quarters were some variation of Communications, Journalism, Literature, etc.--and all BA, never BS. The closest I got to "math" was that I think one person had a BA in Philosophy, which should've included some classes in things like set theory and logic. Point being, if you're gonna design something that depends on a mathematical, and specifically statistical, structure...it's probably a good idea to at least have ONE person who knows how statistics work.</blockquote>

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