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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Honorable Intent" data-source="post: 9551956" data-attributes="member: 7049161">Interesting! I'll have to look into Level Up: A5e.Yes, it was! Alongside the decision to change attributes to be their bonuses. It was an attempt to use occam's razor to find the simplest (ergo laziest) solution. Would it have been better to find a way to use the non-bonus increasing stats (11, 13, 15, etc) rather than axe them entirely? I don't know. Perhaps they attempted to. But by axing them, they chose the "path of least design", which I shorthand to lazy here.You seem to attribute greater malice to my use of lazy here. As I state above, it is lazy because it is the "path of least design", the path where they were required to put the least effort into it possible to design a feature/naming convention. Changing a name without changing the actual feature much to fit the name (after all, species are known for having distinctly different musculatures, capacities for intellect (dolphins versus snails), and other distinguishing factors that one might call "ability score modifiers", so the primary change to Species versus the prior was not in line with the implicit meaning of "species" versus the explicit meaning. When you pick a word, that word carries implicit meaning with it. That means you should pick words with specific implicit meaning for a rules function.Another good example of poor naming convention in 5e (both 2014 and 2024) was "action" versus "bonus action". Originally, bonus actions were intended to be less common, evidently, but given their actual usage in the final version of the game, a different name would have been significantly less confusing to new players. I cannot tell you how many new players I've taught have thought they could use every single bonus action available to them because, after all, it was a bonus action.See above.I would like to unequivocally state also that I do not condemn the devs and their work; I don't think the end result of certain aspects of the design being lazy (read also: underdesigned, minimally designed, however you particularly want to phrase it) is their fault. I believe the fault lies higher up in the hands of WotC's administration and management, given their history of trying to make as much money as possible while investing minimally into it. I think the dev team was instructed to keep such changes simple, even when creating 5e, because they wanted to make something with broad appeal rather than deep appeal to maximize profit margins.The choice to continue doing so and making some fairly significant rules changes while claiming that 2014 and 2024 are "both 5e" (despite 2024 being effectively 5.5e; yes, you can use 3e material in 3.5e most of the time and nothing changes, but that doesn't make it not a revised edition) and saying you can keep your things from 2014, so long as they haven't been reprinted, as well as their goals of profiting from external work (3rd party supplements on DriveThruRPG and DM's Guild, the attempt to change the OGL to harvest the profits of others) indicates that their top goal as a company is to make money, not to make a good, well-thought out, well-designed product. Those two often coincide, but where they don't, WotC will choose profit every time.</blockquote>

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