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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6074836" data-attributes="member: 3192">Two more things:1. The Temple of Elemental Evil is a great mega-adventure. Perhaps the first of all time. Its weakness is it gets grindy in the lower levels once you really dig into the temple. But even the Return To version had this issue though the designers tried to avoid it by creating a variety of monster types to deal with. I think one thing we can skip from Gygax era D&D is his predilection for publishing extraordinarily difficult, high level adventures as the starting adventures for a game line. Both S1 Tomb of Horrors and Necropolis are inspiring works, but 3rd edition really did do it right with The Standing Stone. Even better in my opinion is B1 In Search of the Unknown, which gives half of a finished adventure, but then advises enables the DM to create the second half in their own way. That included example rooms, monsters, and treasures. Now I don't want to discourage Wizards from publishing mega-adventures or a shared adventure line to start this next version of D&D, but I think that a Starter Core game set should include a Starter adventure module that not only gives DMs an adventure to run out of the box, but also the tools for how to create those adventures.2. Game complexity increasing through the advancement of class levels is iconic to D&D. But it had to do with increasing Difficulty for the players over that time, not necessarily the idea of more predetermined options under the players noses on their PC sheets. The idea in D&D is: you can attempt to do anything you can imagine, so if complexity is the number of options they have then we're already at every players maximum.I understand the designers believe a group of people can each play their own game at the same table and that can allow for higher and lower complexity / difficulty for each. I don't necessarily disagree, but it's because of the faulty notion of "equality through equal effectiveness" that not only do we get a game where the players expect equal effectiveness for any game action taken, but also leads players into the illusion that game balance means player-to-player balance when that's a relatively recent (90's) idea. This illusion often leads to the belief by players that the effectiveness measure, in this case damage output, is the single most important element of the game. Higher damage output then becomes the focus and goal for players who seek to play well. The conventional wisdom is this baked in balance allows the character optimization mini-game (the primary game for some) to be included, but only in such a way as to allow the simplest starting characters to be on par in numerical effectiveness with even the most optimized char-op constructions. Not only does that disenfranchise those who play the char-op game to, you know, actually optimize their characters, but also entrenches the overriding beliefs that equal effectiveness is a "balanced" game, and damage output is the primary point of it. D&D doesn't have to be that way nor has it always been that way.</blockquote>

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