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="DeviousQuail" data-source="post: 8637994" data-attributes="member: 7025431">I voted Meh, whatever and others have already posted my reasoning. So instead of cluttering this thread with things you've already heard I'm going to tell a story about "power creep" that means a lot to me.[SPOILER="In case you don't want me taking up your screen space more than I already have"]My senior thesis for my econ degree was about alumni donations to schools based on how well the school's football and men's basketball teams performed. As you might have guessed, a school that performed really well saw an uptick in alumni giving for roughly 1-3 years if their school made a deep run in March Madness (single elimination basketball playoff) or had a great football season (10+ wins and/or a major bowl game appearance). Not really shocking if you've ever followed these sports and are aware of how rabid fanbases can be. One of the interesting finds during my research* was that schools not only saw more alumni donations, they also got better students. Do well in a basketball tournament and the average GPA, SAT, and ACT scores of next years incoming class would increase. That feels stupid but also totally in line with a teenager's decision making process.Schools gets many times more applications than spots available in a given year. Those applications follow a standard bell curve of scores and schools are incentivized to pick students on the higher end of that bell curve. Students higher on the bell curve are more likely to have better grades, earn academic prestige for the school, and graduate. All good things for the school's image and bottom line. The interesting part for me was that these schools weren't getting better applicants due to their sporting success. They were just getting a bigger pool of applicants. With the number of applicants increasing and the pool of positions available staying the same the school could be more picky with it's selections, which leads to better incoming classes.Circling back around to the topic of power creep, my thesis taught me a lot. The first thing it taught me is that Stanford's alumni give a ridiculous amount of money to their school. Back in the late 90s and 2000s they regularly received 2 to 3 times the amount of alumni donations as the next highest schools. It was unreal and kinda upsetting. The second thing it taught me was that power creep can happen even if you don't add better options. The act of increasing your options is enough. It can happen with incoming classes at universities and it can happen with D&D. This assumes your new options are not bland variations on the Chef feat or Four Elements Monk of course. And third, if we want to tackle the issue of power creep we've got to increase our positions available instead of options available. That's right. This has secretly been a lead up to what we really need. No backwards compatibility. No more splat books. No more third party content. No more wishy-washy 'will it be 5.37e or 5.38e' speculation posts. End the power creep. Begin the new age of 6e! *From other already published papers which my analysis aligned with. /SPOILER][/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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