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Kate Welch on Leaving WotC
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8079190" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Well, the theme was about the 'User Experience' and I think the general tone of the discussion has been about how it is too fiddly for a lot of new players, and how it is difficult to 'start cold' and play. I feel that this sort of complexity is a big part of the reason for that. I can't address, and don't really want to address, your aesthetic preferences, they don't really bear weight on the topic at hand, do they? </p><p></p><p>As a game designer, I think that there is only so much you can load up into people's minds. So introducing these extra layers of distinctions and subtleties is burning part of your 'budget'. So the question is twofold. Is 5e 'over budget'? And did this feature haul its weight? </p><p></p><p>My own experiments and experience with extending and reworking the 4e approach tells me that it can be even more drastically simplified in some respects. It also tells me it can be quite thematic and interesting, when the narrative weight of the game is bound onto other game processes. </p><p></p><p>I think, personally, that 'classic' D&D, and 5e, put too much weight on using spells as a key part of narrative generation. This approach suffers from a few weaknesses, and one of its consequences is a desire to make elaborate and thus often confusing and certainly complicated to understand, spells. This also leads to difficulty in terms of having non-casting PCs. 4e didn't really solve these issues, it adopted a different power system, and it became amenable to more elaboration and flexibility in terms of narrative subsystems, but didn't really try very hard to include them and make them work well. I find it a bit sad that we didn't cross all the way over this bridge, and instead retreated and kind of burned it. It is hard to see where you go with 5e from here. It is kind of just stuck being what it is, which is OK, but I wonder if it will grow increasingly stale over time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8079190, member: 82106"] Well, the theme was about the 'User Experience' and I think the general tone of the discussion has been about how it is too fiddly for a lot of new players, and how it is difficult to 'start cold' and play. I feel that this sort of complexity is a big part of the reason for that. I can't address, and don't really want to address, your aesthetic preferences, they don't really bear weight on the topic at hand, do they? As a game designer, I think that there is only so much you can load up into people's minds. So introducing these extra layers of distinctions and subtleties is burning part of your 'budget'. So the question is twofold. Is 5e 'over budget'? And did this feature haul its weight? My own experiments and experience with extending and reworking the 4e approach tells me that it can be even more drastically simplified in some respects. It also tells me it can be quite thematic and interesting, when the narrative weight of the game is bound onto other game processes. I think, personally, that 'classic' D&D, and 5e, put too much weight on using spells as a key part of narrative generation. This approach suffers from a few weaknesses, and one of its consequences is a desire to make elaborate and thus often confusing and certainly complicated to understand, spells. This also leads to difficulty in terms of having non-casting PCs. 4e didn't really solve these issues, it adopted a different power system, and it became amenable to more elaboration and flexibility in terms of narrative subsystems, but didn't really try very hard to include them and make them work well. I find it a bit sad that we didn't cross all the way over this bridge, and instead retreated and kind of burned it. It is hard to see where you go with 5e from here. It is kind of just stuck being what it is, which is OK, but I wonder if it will grow increasingly stale over time. [/QUOTE]
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