Legends & Lore: The Loyal Opposition

[DEFCON 1]

From what I interpreted in what he was saying, Mearls wasn't suggesting getting rid of all skills... he seemed to say that those part of our current skills that can be used untrained would instead become default parts of ability checks. Implying then that those parts of our current skills that require a PC to be Trained in the skill in order to use it, would become the "skills" that characters could pick up.

So for instance, Balancing and Escaping a Grab (things you currently can do untrained with Acrobatics) would become just part of the Dexterity check (with all the acoutrement Mearls added.) However, the Reducing Falling Damage (Trained only) part of Acrobatics would then become its own skill that a character could then take. Now whether these would become 'Feats', or they did decide to create the idea of 'Traits' (which many of us suggested they should do that moves all current skill-related or non-combat feats into its own separate category away from combat feats), that I don't know.

 

[Gentlegamer]

More and more, it seems Mearls is describing Castles & Crusades . . .

 

[M.L. Martin]

More and more, it seems Mearls is describing Castles & Crusades . . .

Feels to me like a hybrid of D&D/C&C/the old SAGA System (training levels in ability scores, for example). I'd really like to see where this goes, but I think it's better as a variant of D&D rather than a uniform way. Then again, I think D&D is too big for 'one uniform' game at this point.

 

[TerraDave]

I liked were he was going with skills before this (the climb example from sometime back). Now, I am starting to think I might just want this to go away.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I wonder if these R&D guys in the industry even keep a finger on the pulse of the fans who buy their stuff. They seem to be detached from what the RPG Community really wants to see changed, added, or removed from the rules/genres/settings.

 

[vagabundo]

I wonder if these R&D guys in the industry even keep a finger on the pulse of the fans who buy their stuff. They seem to be detached from what the RPG Community really wants to see changed, added, or removed from the rules/genres/settings.

How so? These articles seem, generally, well received by the fans. The poll ratings are usually positive.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

By the token that people seem to generally be moving away from the newer editions/settings and going back to the older stuff by preference to how things used to be ran. I just feel they don't really ask gamers what they want to see done, they just jump into something and then wait for the reactions. I'm not sure if they even take samples of the gamers out there from the community to play-test things or not. I'm in no way trying to start any kind of edition war, but it just seems they do more of a reactionary approach to new stuff rather than taking the comments of the community as a whole, sampling their opinions, listening to their feedback, and implementing a polished product that most people like (we all know you can't make everyone happy) and then putting it out. Heck I don't even know if they read the forums (WOTC, EnWorld, and the others) before they start to come out with new ideas, I feel that'd be a great way to get a good core of what should happen, what is wrong with current system mechanics, and what we as a community of gamers would like to see in future releases.

 

[Bluenose]

we as a community of gamers would like to see in future releases.

We as a community of gamers can't agree on what's good and/or bad in current versions. Listening to us is likely to lead to a very confused game.

 

[Mark CMG]

I think they are happy, at least initially, getting a generally positive reaction on their own site from people they know will purchase what they put out. I'm not sure they should be but that's another story.

Whatever they do with 5E needs to be different enough from the current edition and past editions to warrant fans not only purchasing a new core but also purchasing enough follow up supplements to justify the change to a new edition. They cannot afford to put something out and just have simply decent sales numbers on the core and especially cannot be satisfied with selling low numbers of their new core books and have people utilize their older supplements instead of purchasing the new follow ups. That reasoning and reclaiming their IP territory from the third party marketplace is, I suspect, a large part of why the current edition is so different from previous editions. During the dev of 3E they had a whole different landscape (and different staff) with no corporate overlord, no direct competition, no extensive secondary market with easy access through the Internet to thirty-five years of OOP material, etc.

They have no choice but to make things very different. That is not to say that making something different cannot also mean making something very good. While they have gutted their institutional memory through layoffs, they still do have a lot of young talent, many of whom now have the experience of putting out a major edition and its revision. At the very least, what they finally produce is going to be innovative and interesting. I think we can count on that.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I have very little interest in buying a game that was designed and written by people who didn't really believe in it. If you do market surveys about what people want, and then ask your in-house staff to do that, you'll probably have some amount of unhappiness with the parameters of the design, which will make itself felt in the quality.

About the only way that I can see that working is if you did the market survey, published the results, and then announced to the world that you were going to do a new edition to meet those parameters starting in 20NN and ending in 20NN+3. Then you hire mostly experienced designers and writers excited about those parameters.

Even then you will fail as often as not. That is why licensed products are such a risk. (Well, one reason why, the other big one being the money that goes into the license not being used to make the product.)