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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9299818" data-attributes="member: 18">What terminology would you suggest to improve this? I'm not being a prat when I ask this (I mean aside from in the sense that I perhaps just am one!), I genuinely wonder. Because I wasn't seeing any appropriate words to hand - maybe my vocabulary is simply lacking?I guess we could add words and use a phrase like "overly cautious" but it's not the same thing - I mean we're looking at a situation, where, seemingly (and we'll never know the exact truth), WotC was on one track with the DND Next test, and looked to be doing something pretty popular, then inexplicably reverted to 3E-style designs for multiple classes, even though they made no sense for the general approach DND Next was taking. IIRC, some of the classes they didn't even playtest (please correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while), they just dropped in basically 3E takes on them. This was particularly bad because some of the 3E classes were themselves throwbacks*.I don't know what could have inspired that, whilst leaving the rather risky designs like Bard and Warlock (and arguably Paladin) completely intact, except a bout of the design equivalent of having a panic attack or something. Maybe cowardice is thus too harsh, because panic attacks happen to people? But I dunno man, I'm not sure how else to express it. There's a real sense of desperation, to me, in the pullback from the Sorcerer's design in 5E. It was so sudden and unexplained, and the design were proposing was no more shocking than other class designs they had. Combine that with the weirdly 3E-esque designs for other classes, and it's like, what was even going on?I know back then strange things could happen at WotC. We all probably remember that it's been said that (and not contradicted by anyone at WotC), that the entire reason 4E's "monster math" was messed up was literally because a senior individual at WotC, unbeknownst to the rest of the D&D team, went in and changed the values for the HP for all the monsters upwards just before it went off to print. Maybe someone senior at WotC just put their foot down and said "You can have the Bard and Warlock, but I'll be damned if I'm letting you modernise Sorcerer, Ranger or Monk!, or something. God knows.I feel like "OH CRAP HAVE WE GONE TOO FAR! PANIC!" is a more likely explanation though.* = Monk, for example, was seemingly an intentional throwback to the 1970s, and the 1970s Monk was basically based solely and entirely on Remo Williams (as a remarkable thread here demonstrated a while back). Which is wild, it's like if 2nd edition added a class based entirely on Goku from Dragonball Z, or 3E added a class based entirely on Dante from Devil May Cry or something.</blockquote>

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