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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9060922" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure you can. It just requires time and effort, which WotC has rarely been willing to put forth. They literally didn't even bother testing 3e past the first handful of levels. That's why E6 works the way it does. They actually did test those levels, and lo and behold, those levels actually work! But the balance breaks down rather conspicuously within just a few levels. Because they simply weren't tested.Good thing I didn't then. 4e cracked it, by actual testing. 1e (and thus mostly 2e as well) also did well, but because of the awful organization, intentional obfuscation, and simple inexperience (the hobby was brand-new after all, we can't expect perfection), it fell short in some key ways. For the time, it was actually a surprisingly well-balanced game.Nah. D&D is much more limited than several other games that are in fact better balanced than it. The issue is not, and never has been, the potential range of actions players can attempt. It is, and always has been, issues with furnishing certain archetypes with nearly absolute power, while chaining other archetypes to a sharply limited range that is actually smaller than what real flesh and blood people can achieve because "realism" or the like.I don't understand what you mean here. What are the three advantages of mine that you mention? 3e did not have "never-ending cantrips," though believe it or not I'm perfectly fine with those, it's other things I take issue with (mostly, but not exclusively, things like spellcasters getting to literally rewrite or lock down reality itself, while Fighters and Barbarians...hit slightly harder, slightly more often.)You have made an incorrect assumption. I don't, strictly speaking, want magic to be any specific way (though I do believe that between-edition power creep has made magic excessively powerful and people are much too precious about it.) What I want is for the designers to stop wasting 2+ years just figuring out the absolute baseline parts of their systems, as actually did happen with 5e (remember D&D Next's "specialties"? Or the "proficiency die"? Or how Fighters got redesigned every other packet until just before the public playtest ended?) Because they absolutely COULD have done plenty of testing at higher levels if they hadn't dithered about for almost two years before finally settling on their core design.Nah. The lethality of 1e is not a good fit for the modern gaming audience, for exactly the same reason that original EverQuest, despite having provably been one of the best-selling MMOs ever, would absolutely be a monumental failure if you tried to launch it today. The form and pattern of difficulty presented by 1e is a problem for D&D players today, who either are older and thus have less time to dedicate to gaming, or are younger and thus have competition for their interest from other, newer things that give similar levels of satisfaction and rewarding experiences with far less onerous requirements.I haven't played PF2e, but it has been recommended to me for unrelated reasons (that is, regarding the tactical experience, not the power level, whether generally or magic specifically.) I have been leery because it makes some design decisions I'm not super keen on, but in fairness, I do believe that some design can play better than it looks like it would. But I don't really have any interest in "magic [being] relegated to support and nothing else." The fact that you think I DO want that is part of the problem: you are forcing an unjustified binary, either magic must be absolutely phenomenal cosmic power with practically no limitations, OR it's been "relegated" to a tiny almost insignificant role. There are other options here.And what if you have the conclusion backwards? What if people don't play high level because the rules suck and there's no adventure content, rather than because nobody has any interest in doing so?That would make your claim completely circular.If you wish to accuse me of falsehoods or fictions, do so. Otherwise, I will simply ignore blanket aspersion-casting like this.</blockquote>

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