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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5709744" data-attributes="member: 2067">To pick up on this idea that a few people are mentioning, I think, in part, it's necessary because the current game has set up walls for itself.Take, for instance, the ADEU powers system. At a certain level, that makes designing outside of that structure a big taboo. The envelope has been pushed with Essentials and with Psionics, but each time there is howls of fury from fans who abhor the very idea of the sacred ADEU structure being violated. This makes designing any class that, say, uses only Daily powers in a system reminiscent of an earlier-edition wizard automatically a controversial class, let alone how that class would interact with multiclassing and hybridization.Or take the fact that within the ADEU system, 3/4 of those powers are attacks, and 4/4 of those powers are possibly combat-oriented in some way (though you can take some noncombat utilities, you can also take combat utilities, making it a choice between being a good fighter and being good at something else). This makes designing a class that sucks at combat but is better at sneaking -- like the old Thief -- nearly impossible. They tried that to a certain extent with the Shade, and again, howls of nerdrage at the -1 Surge. Similarly, the system of healing surges and short rests means that making an adventure that isn't just effectively a "series of encounters" is tremendously difficult, too. The focus is on the encounter. It's hard to take it off of that and expand the focus to the adventure.There's also difficulties in trying to shoehorn the current system into a cinematic combat system, or into a combat system that isn't minis-based, without effectively re-inventing the wheel (and throwing off the careful balance of 4e). Or even less dramatically, take the "different fluff" that 4e has staked out: Archons are elementals and Angels are just servants of every god and dryads are creepy tree monsters. The current game won't reconsider those choices, but they invalidate a lot of what Monte's main point in the article is: preserving the past is a good idea. The game has set up walls for itself, design-wise, and these walls need to be knocked down hard before they can be raised up again. The foundation might be solid (though the existence of expertise feats and revised monster damage and grindy combat might speak to flaws in that foundation, too), but it's going to have to be some pretty intense restructuring. 4e is not, at its fundamental level, a "game for everyone." It can't support everything. It knows what it wants, and it is pretty good at getting what it wants to get, but what it wants to get isn't always what people playing it want. That's why I think that a 5e is...eventually...necessary. It'll probably retain a HUGE chunk of 4e in it, but I think it will mostly be running in the background.</blockquote>

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