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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5495531" data-attributes="member: 2067">Mearls <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20110315" target="_blank">calls us all geniuses and then asks us how complex we like things</a>.I'm getting the impression that Mearls has a bias. Mearls likes complexity. Mearls likes options. Mearls would love to give everyone 20 options of things to do on their turn. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less" target="_blank">I am not so on board</a>.I do dispute the conclusion that complexity is a tendency of a gaming community.He compares the controller for the Atari 2600 to the controller for the Xbox 360, and makes the case that there is a "tendency toward complexity."He neglects the system that won the most recent console wars (the Wii) and the newest control scheme that fascinates players (the Kinect) and the expanding market for touchscreen games and devices for gaming. All these things have a feature in common: They are simpler. In the case of the Kinect, we don't have 16 buttons, we have ZERO. Complexity is not a tendency. The fact is, all those buttons were trying to do one thing: give you a way to better control your character. It turns out, the most efficient way to do that is not to add more buttons, but to take away buttons. Give people a more direct path to what they want to do. Streamline the experience.If we were to apply that discovery to D&D, we would see that the most efficient way to design the game is to design it so that you give people a direct path to the "D&D experience." Which is, broadly speaking, rolling dice and pretending to be a fantasy hero. Options are only useful as much as they enable that experience, and the best control scheme isn't the one with the most things you can tweak, it's the one where everything you can tweak, you want to tweak.Anyway, lets hear your opinions! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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