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="rounser" data-source="post: 4442829" data-attributes="member: 1106">Well, my Big Idea is to up the customisation and improvisation aspects of the game, to really pile on the worldbuilding creative self-actualisation thing that D&D is so good at, and people have been doing since it's inception....and to make the game really friendly to running on the fly.  Cutting prep time is a must for competing with other media, though I don't know how.What I mean is, an edition that takes the DM by the hand and says, "here's the Knight, now here's how to make Knightly Orders for your world", or "here's the wizard, and here's how to customise your own schools out of the spell list to suit your world."  "Here's an elf.  Here's how you can carve elven subraces out of this basic template for your elven kingdoms, and give them names."This is a MUCH bigger hook than "here's something we named an eladrin.  Here's our ideas for eladrin.  Go play with the eladrin."  If you stat, name, and decide on the flavour for a "jungle elf", perhaps taking example names from some lists and building solid balanced stats from some tables, then you're invested in the game, hook, line and sinker.  They're not just anyone's elf....they're your Jungle Elves, complete with green skin, +2 to dex and wis, shuriken proficiency, leaf armour, and wacky background flavour, all because you made them that way.  Ask any 13 year old, and they'd say that's pretty damn cool.  Pretty tricky to balance, though.  Hard enough to balance rules...balancing metarules, even moreso.That sort of thing is a huge draw for the kind of people who are drawn to a game like D&D in the first place, IMO.  It's a real headscratcher that there aren't already rules for making rules, like this, to a greater degree.  Monster creation rules count, I guess.Back that up with a system in the DMG that supports improvisation and on-the-fly gaming, and you have a game which is working to D&D's strengths.  It came as a "duh" moment to me to work out that the game within the game which really attracts people to D&D is the chance to make a world of your own.  The other pillar of D&D's power over people and other games is the possibility offered by playing with improvisation, which a computer cannot do.So yeah, that'd be my dream edition - a D&D with rules keyed to improvisation and world construction.  A D&D of customisation, and on-the-fly convenience.  A solid generic baseline to depart from, and a whole heap of rules to customise that.  A DMG which is all about helping you run a campaign with little or no prep - which takes the wandering monster table as the incredibly primitive ancestor of something incredibly useful and adaptable to running the game on the fly, and stats, traps, treasures and monsters keyed towards running the game that way.  A hugely tall order, to be sure, but that's my Holy Grail for the game.</blockquote>

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