D&D 5E Just One More Thing: The Power of "No" in Design (aka, My Fun, Your Fun, and BadWrongFun)

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[NotAYakk]

I think you need an editor; you meander on for paragraphs about not what you want to talk about, but something that inspires what you want to talk about, then talk about other people talking about something else saying things along a certain pattern, and then I honestly don't know what you said because I got tired of reading about what needs to be talked about and not saying it.

OTOH, at least you used sentences, unlike me.

But seriously, for gygax's sake, say something in the first 5 paragraphs of a post.

 

[pogre]

tldr: I largely agree.

Part of the issue is, partly because D&D is overwhelmingly the most popular RPG, people want it to do everything. 5e's strength, in part. is it's accessibility.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Oofta]

I think we've had this discussion before. If we were being intellectually honest there I think we all know there is one solution, one race, one class, one fighting style, one attribute. Gnomish paladin with dual rapier style with an attribute of awesome.

The only problem would be how to set up significant obstacles. How can you counter the ultimate in awesome?

P.S. I'll try to give a real response eventually. Just had to get that out of my system.

 

[Nutation]

I play and run Adventurer's League. So, if it's in the official game, I have to deal with it. Streamlined game design is not just prettier, it's easier from the consumer point of view.

 

[Undrave]

hmm... I feel that a Race is easier to implement than a Subclass. It's a small handful rules that don't change much as the character grow and Lore is basically the biggest obstacle, something that doesn't REALLY need playtesting in the same way crunch do, just a bit of brainstorming. But I think that ease is also a curse because then it becomes tempting to just bloat the game.

I think as long as consumers don't feel overwhelmed by additions to the game, we've not breached any sort of dangerous frontier in terms of additions and the PHB+1 rule is a good basis to avoid the insanity that could arise in 3e (plus, it excuses reprints).

I totally get your point about simplicity of design, but there is another force at play here: stagnation. I think the game needs to strike a balance between simplicity and avoiding the game become stale. If you only like 50% of the PHB subclasses and 30% of the Xanathar one, you risk running out of character concepts that interest you and be bored with the game.

 

[Garthanos]

I play and run Adventurer's League. So, if it's in the official game, I have to deal with it. Streamlined game design is not just prettier, it's easier from the consumer point of view.

A small narrow but real subset of consumers certainly not sure that is a super argument.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think you took too many pains to distance your post from what I feel like was probably the "another thread" & lost too much foundation for your post resulting in a lot of feel good statements that don't go anywhere. Since I too don't know what your looking for other than "um ok, maybe" I'll go with something from recent discussions on here that does touch on what you wrote.

For example your 3e "too much crunch" is both accurate & an oversimplification. In some areas that crunch was good, bad, & sometimes misapplied(recent thread about 3.5 skills). It's possible for 5e's skills to improve on & avoid every one of the 3.5 skill system's pitfalls and rough edges while simultaneously going too far & creating other problems in the process. The same can be said of fixing the golf bag of weapons & from 3.5 by making damage types virtually irrelevant & extending that simplification across weapons as well as armor. Those decisions all may have improved upon things & met design goals to objectively improve one area of the game, but they have effects on other areas that are objectively problematic to other areas of the game & there's a lot of discussion on those kind of things in the nobody is playing high level thread.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If the point of 5e were parsimony it could have delivered a broader range of possible characters with far fewer classes (as few as 3, I'd say), and the assumption of MCing instead of clumsily designing sub-classes & Backgrounds on the assumption that MCing wouldn't be used.

For that matter, classless works very well, and is much more efficient in delivering more meaningful choices with less page count.

The point of 5e, though, was to heal the rifts in the community, be inclusive of all past fans (but accessible to new ones), and allow them to evoke the feel of, and play the same sorts of characters they could in, each of those past editions. Among other virtually impossible goals. That meant making familiar class designs with familiar names, in spite of all the redundancies, inefficiencies and imbalances that entailed.

Given that, there's no slippery slope, no danger of infinite additions to the game, the finite set of past editions' offerings would be the maximum. And, even that'd be a gross exaggeration, as there was a tremendous amount of overlap among those editions. Every class that was ever in a PH1, even every /character type/ that was ever in a PH1, is doable with 2 more classes, the Psion(icist) & Warlord. Every class ever in a PH, would take it up to, what, a half-dozen, perhaps?

A potential, worst-case, 50% increase in player choice (further, gated behind DM opt-in, as with all supplements) is hardly devastating bloat. Really, the current proliferation of sub-classes is more worrisome, that way.

(Though, it is true that a literal PH2 would be against the current conventional wisdom, so it'd have to be another goofy "So-and-so's guide to things you're not interested in, newbie," format.)