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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Labelling as much as possible "optional"
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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6244205" data-attributes="member: 1465"><p>"Everything you say can be used against you in court", IE, everything the game allows by default and happens to have some flaw will be used as derogatory against the edition as a whole.</p><p></p><p>It doesn't take much to prevent this, just a label that says "OPTIONAL" at the beginning of a paragraph or chapter. In the latest Q&A article, they just said that they are <em>likely</em> to label <strong>feats</strong> and <strong>multiclassing</strong> as optional. If you hate feats or multiclassing, you can't blame 5e for making room for them in the game, once they tell you it's your choice to use them (provided the game is designed to still work without them, of course). </p><p>Since the whole edition is supposed to be "inclusive", and that means also avoiding to have debatable features mandatory, why not at least trying to see what <em>already</em> is effectively optional, because the rest of the game material still holds without it?</p><p></p><p>So what else do you think can be labelled as "optional" without adjustments, or for which only <em>very minor </em>adjustments would be needed for them to be possibly optional?</p><p></p><p>Some stuff is easy to say it can be, and probably already is:</p><p></p><p>- dungeon adventuring rules and exploration tasks</p><p>- wilderness adventuring rules and exploration tasks</p><p>- interaction rules</p><p>- alignment</p><p>- magic items</p><p></p><p>Other parts that could be quite easily optional (some of which they'll never make optional tho):</p><p></p><p>- coup de grace</p><p>- readying actions</p><p>- death rolls</p><p>- short resting and HD-based healing rules</p><p></p><p>And some more controversial proposal (which also won't ever be optional):</p><p></p><p>- races</p><p></p><p>Well how do you make races optional, you ask? You can turn the current Humans (which are very generic) into a default placeholder race, so you demote the choice of race as purely cosmetic and remove some complexity without changing balance between players choosing this option and players picking race as usual.</p><p></p><p>...what else?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 6244205, member: 1465"] "Everything you say can be used against you in court", IE, everything the game allows by default and happens to have some flaw will be used as derogatory against the edition as a whole. It doesn't take much to prevent this, just a label that says "OPTIONAL" at the beginning of a paragraph or chapter. In the latest Q&A article, they just said that they are [I]likely[/I] to label [B]feats[/B] and [B]multiclassing[/B] as optional. If you hate feats or multiclassing, you can't blame 5e for making room for them in the game, once they tell you it's your choice to use them (provided the game is designed to still work without them, of course). Since the whole edition is supposed to be "inclusive", and that means also avoiding to have debatable features mandatory, why not at least trying to see what [I]already[/I] is effectively optional, because the rest of the game material still holds without it? So what else do you think can be labelled as "optional" without adjustments, or for which only [I]very minor [/I]adjustments would be needed for them to be possibly optional? Some stuff is easy to say it can be, and probably already is: - dungeon adventuring rules and exploration tasks - wilderness adventuring rules and exploration tasks - interaction rules - alignment - magic items Other parts that could be quite easily optional (some of which they'll never make optional tho): - coup de grace - readying actions - death rolls - short resting and HD-based healing rules And some more controversial proposal (which also won't ever be optional): - races Well how do you make races optional, you ask? You can turn the current Humans (which are very generic) into a default placeholder race, so you demote the choice of race as purely cosmetic and remove some complexity without changing balance between players choosing this option and players picking race as usual. ...what else? [/QUOTE]
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