If they had a free day...

[Savage Wombat]

Let's just all agree that, while certain books had a large effect on the feel of D&D, all forms of fantasy fiction are welcome at the party.

Except Twilight, of course.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

You know, I've never thought of it before, but an alternate magic class inspired by Harry Potter isn't a bad idea at all. It would be a class entirely based around at-will magic that requires no tracking to contrast the Wizard being a daily spell limit wizard with plenty of tracking.

I fully endorse this. Let's try it at once.

 

[Ahnehnois]

You know, I've never thought of it before, but an alternate magic class inspired by Harry Potter isn't a bad idea at all. It would be a class entirely based around at-will magic that requires no tracking to contrast the Wizard being a daily spell limit wizard with plenty of tracking.

I fully endorse this. Let's try it at once.

I believe that's called a warlock (albeit with different flavor!).

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I'm probably going to lose a lot of gamer cred by saying this, but until today I thought Appendix N was just part of a blog. So I googled it, and out of Gary's favorite two dozen authors, I've read five of them. I was only impressed by two of them.

Take that for what you will.

You know, I've never thought of it before, but an alternate magic class inspired by Harry Potter isn't a bad idea at all. It would be a class entirely based around at-will magic that requires no tracking to contrast the Wizard being a daily spell limit wizard with plenty of tracking.

I believe 3.5 has one of these. Of course, the warlock has a built-in angsty-evil-grimdark flavor.

 

[am181d]

Well, it's pretty clear that WotC wants 5e to be *more* inclusive, so I think this is a battle that's already been fought and won.

Folks who want D&D to be an exercise in nostalgia will have options that allow them to do that. Others will have the option to NOT do that.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Hey, if you people want to argue about the status of Appendix N, can you fork into another topic (Although I think Savage Wombat won that argument )?

Does anyone have suggestions on what the designers should consider doing in the name of research?

 

[Gargoyle]

I would challenge them to design a character sheet for 5E that fits on one page with a comfortable to read font and plenty of room. And then propose that those elements make up the core of the system and everything else becomes modular options.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Okay, back on topic.

The designers should be using stealth mode to sit in on groups playing different and watch out for things that don't work.

Sometimes an idea looks cool but doesn't work in execution. Designers have implemented a lot of ideas and methods in their games, some of which just failed. There's a valuable lesson to be learned from failures.

 

[delericho]

Okay, suppose the 5E team had a day where they nothing to do. Now I know that is improbable at best but just assume that they do! So they decided, "It's free research day! Do whatever you want, as long as it involves 5E somehow!" If you could decided what they would do, what would you have them do?

Play. Just play - for this one day they're not to discuss or dissect the rules, they're not to consider refinements, they're not to "kick the tyres". Just sit down at a table with the "books", character sheets, dice and pencils, beer and pretzels (or whatever), and play the game.