Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
There is no mechanism for spending movement outside your own turn. Save Readying movement, which is also not the Dash action for precisely this reason.
D&D 5E (2024) Is 5E better because of Crawford and Perkins leaving?
- Thread starter ECMO3
- Start date
I've never seen people outside of Wizards really understand how work on a project breaks down. It's an opaque process at times even inside the building, as some of the best-received ideas come about through the alchemy of putting creative people in a room and giving them space to build stuff. Trying to pin an idea or design on one person is impossible.
Compounding things, serving as a talking head for the brand is a wholly different set of abilities. They don't pick the best, most impactful designers to stand on stage and talk about stuff. They pick folks who are engaging and can stay on message. Looking for some sort of sea change in the design because one or two people left, or because a designer joined the team, is an exercise in futility.
Regarding the Dash action - it resolves as a bonus to speed because that's the language the game uses to make you faster or slower. Want to go faster? Give someone a speed bonus. Want to slow them down? Give them a speed penalty. You can allow someone to move when they otherwise cannot by firing off their movement, but firing that twice leads to some potentially weird interactions in the system.
The big one - let's say my speed is 25 and I am standing in difficult terrain. I burn 20 feet of speed to move 10 feet, but I need to move more. Let's look at two structures:
The Movement as Action Approach: I move again. OK, what happens to that 5 feet of left over speed? Does firing another move action add to my current move budget? If I then get a movement bonus what happens? What if I get that bonus after I've expended my budget from my first move? Does it apply retroactively?
The key shortcoming (IMO) of the action approach is that firing it multiple times creates these separate movement buckets, and the interactions between them get weird as you throw on stuff the system wants to do to movement.
The budget approach makes this all cleaner to process. Everything that touches speed does the same thing - it alters your overall budget for movement. Fundamentally that's what the action approach does, so we're skipping a step and getting closer to the bare metal.
Compounding things, serving as a talking head for the brand is a wholly different set of abilities. They don't pick the best, most impactful designers to stand on stage and talk about stuff. They pick folks who are engaging and can stay on message. Looking for some sort of sea change in the design because one or two people left, or because a designer joined the team, is an exercise in futility.
Regarding the Dash action - it resolves as a bonus to speed because that's the language the game uses to make you faster or slower. Want to go faster? Give someone a speed bonus. Want to slow them down? Give them a speed penalty. You can allow someone to move when they otherwise cannot by firing off their movement, but firing that twice leads to some potentially weird interactions in the system.
The big one - let's say my speed is 25 and I am standing in difficult terrain. I burn 20 feet of speed to move 10 feet, but I need to move more. Let's look at two structures:
The Movement as Action Approach: I move again. OK, what happens to that 5 feet of left over speed? Does firing another move action add to my current move budget? If I then get a movement bonus what happens? What if I get that bonus after I've expended my budget from my first move? Does it apply retroactively?
The key shortcoming (IMO) of the action approach is that firing it multiple times creates these separate movement buckets, and the interactions between them get weird as you throw on stuff the system wants to do to movement.
The budget approach makes this all cleaner to process. Everything that touches speed does the same thing - it alters your overall budget for movement. Fundamentally that's what the action approach does, so we're skipping a step and getting closer to the bare metal.
To pull an example of the opacity in how thing work - a lot of folks think of D&D Essentials as my baby, a project I created for reasons that range from the mostly correct (4e sales were in a freefall and the company was desperate) to the frankly hilarious (D&D 4e was massively successful, and I cooked up Essentials to sabotage it and manufacture my opportunity to create 5e).
Essentials was handed to me with all of the design direction set into place. The product specs - form factor stuff like soft cover, page count, the tokens in the various boxes, the fact that there were boxes - was all decided ahead of time. I was told that I was to take 4e and make something that was completely compatible with it but that could convince fans of earlier editions to give it a try. I was also told that this would be the new design direction for 4e because sales couldn't get worse, so why not? I think even the list of classes was handed to me based on market research or something, along with the mandate to not use the unified power progression.
(Amusingly enough, the unified power progression was a decision handed to the designers by management. Time is a flat circle.)
I'm also pretty sure I was the one stuck on stage to talk about it because no one else wanted to. It's not like it was fun to get in front of D&D fans in the time period.
Big picture, it's rare that designers on D&D set the direction for products. When I worked on the game, product pitches had to run an extensive gauntlet of folks. If the president of WotC said that we had to put five-eyed frogs from Mars in a product, that's what we did. When 5e was firing on all cylinders that process was pretty smooth. I have no idea what it looked like after I took a job working on Magic.
(As an aside Essentials sold well relative to the 4e line at that time. The folks who worked on the Essentials Starter Set, the one inspired by the Red Box, did a great job. That set sold a ton of copies, but it wasn't anywhere near enough to turn things around or at least slow down the endless parade of layoffs.)
Essentials was handed to me with all of the design direction set into place. The product specs - form factor stuff like soft cover, page count, the tokens in the various boxes, the fact that there were boxes - was all decided ahead of time. I was told that I was to take 4e and make something that was completely compatible with it but that could convince fans of earlier editions to give it a try. I was also told that this would be the new design direction for 4e because sales couldn't get worse, so why not? I think even the list of classes was handed to me based on market research or something, along with the mandate to not use the unified power progression.
(Amusingly enough, the unified power progression was a decision handed to the designers by management. Time is a flat circle.)
I'm also pretty sure I was the one stuck on stage to talk about it because no one else wanted to. It's not like it was fun to get in front of D&D fans in the time period.
Big picture, it's rare that designers on D&D set the direction for products. When I worked on the game, product pitches had to run an extensive gauntlet of folks. If the president of WotC said that we had to put five-eyed frogs from Mars in a product, that's what we did. When 5e was firing on all cylinders that process was pretty smooth. I have no idea what it looked like after I took a job working on Magic.
(As an aside Essentials sold well relative to the 4e line at that time. The folks who worked on the Essentials Starter Set, the one inspired by the Red Box, did a great job. That set sold a ton of copies, but it wasn't anywhere near enough to turn things around or at least slow down the endless parade of layoffs.)
Zardnaar
Legend
Most of us here dont blame you personally.
Few who do are more attack the source if it conflicts with their preconceived notions.
I do blame you for playing AD&D and Basic line again due to an old interview. Late 3.5 i was wondering things line "this wasnt a problem in 2E".
Generally theres something good in every edition imho. The simple/complex desires are diametrically opposed. DM I lean towards simple. Player I like more complex. Go figure.
Some poor bastard (SPB) has to run this should always be a consideration.
#blameMikeMearls a thing?
