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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 5428700" data-attributes="member: 9225">The choice to design a new edition is not a game design directive. It's a business management directive. So the time between editions has nothing to do with "design lessons learned" or anything else. 5th edition's primary challenge will be to make its game systems engaging from a narrative and story world perspective. 4th was notably careless in the way it brought systems, traits and powers into the world. Disdain for the game as something straddling game and fiction reached its zenith in the form of innovative systems that were difficult for many gamers to bring into the fiction and thus, give a damn about. (HINT: When you decide that all soft content creation sucks as a basic corporate dictum, you lose the ability to understand subtle, interstitial things about what you're doing.)4e makes your fighter really nifty, but it doesn't make you care about your fighter. I look at iconic fighters and I just don't care who they are. They're anonymous martial arts experts. In earlier editions, you just might be a local boy done good -- y'know, that thing fantasy novels do -- or a general, pulpy badass -- that thing *other* fantasy novels do -- but not here. Who are you? You're a guy best understood by referring to other types of games, and that constitutes an argument to play those games. While I do think there;s no problem with taking concepts from MMOs and JRPGs, those need to be more than shallow images and crunch concepts.Now I love 4e, but this is a real problem. The descriptions and supporting fiction, even the format of power writeups need to satisfy the need to situate them in fiction. Play and DMing advice need to deal with this head on.To support this, 5e needs a world -- a real one, not vague descriptions of lost Nerath. It needs all the trimmings that last decade told you sucked, because it turns out that these were the only things keeping D&D from descending into dumb ruminations on how awesome it was when you were a kid, which is no help at all. It needs a history, important NPCs we all know -- a world all D&D players know well, even if they don't choose to play in it.Lastly, 5e needs cross-platform electronic support that lets players choose which tools they'll use, use them on any device, and which have significant advantages over fan-built alternatives.</blockquote>

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