D&D 5E Mearl's Book Design Philosophy

[Demetrios1453]

Doctor Pepper. Luckily diet DP is this weird unicorn that I literally can't tell the difference. And neithe can anyone else I have served diet doctor pepper at my house. I just call list "doctor pepper " as a drink option, and don't mention it's diet, and no one can tell, and are shocked if they see the bottle after drinking it.

Diet Coke and Pepsi, though. Super different. I've preferred Diet Coke since I was a kid, but Diet Pepsi is gross. Like fake chocolate gross.

I go for Coke Zero myself. While still distinguishable from regular Coke, it's still pretty good tasting and it avoids that nasty typical diet drink aftertaste the other choices have.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Mearls' opinions, debating what is "bloat," food which led people to diabetes....

This is the weirdest thread.

 

[delericho]

Doctor Pepper. Luckily diet DP is this weird unicorn that I literally can't tell the difference. And neithe can anyone else I have served diet doctor pepper at my house.

The only downside being that it tastes like Doctor Pepper?

 

[Maxperson]

The only downside being that it tastes like Doctor Pepper?

Dr. Pepper is my second favorite soda. Mr. Pibb being my favorite.

 

[Parmandur]

Dr. Pepper is the best, and their diet version is strangely compelling. However, diet soda is also bad for the body: avoiding all soda is the wisest course.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Honey is basically sugar and it's not really natural. We normally provide chips and wife sometimes bakes or makes cheese balls with crackers.

Once chocolate goes above 75% it tastes like coffee to me. I can eat it up to 85%.

honey is diabetic friendly because it doesn't process like other sugars. Same with, say, apples, though for different reasons. Also, honey is good for you, and quite natural. Not sure where you get the idea it's not natural.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The only downside being that it tastes like Doctor Pepper?

Just when i thought we were cool... lol

 

[Jester David]

Was there a part of "general releases" that you didn't understand? Regardless of whether or not you use those two books, they are not general releases.

"General release" is an odd term to use. It sounds more like the scope of the release. Something released to general audiences (or the general public) rather than a limited release like a game store or web exclusive. I'd use "general release" to describe most of their products except stuff like the Elemental Evil Player Companion or Cloud Giant's Bargain, which are "limited release".


But your usage I've been assuming you're using "general release" to mean "setting neutral". Or something combination of "setting neutral" and "fluff light". But that's a personal usage limited to you, which inherently makes it awkward to understand.


However... few D&D releases are truly setting neutral. 4e assumed the Nerath/Nentir Vale setting while 3e has Greyhawk as the default setting. The Realms setting is a little more obvious in a product like SCAG, but that book did include advice on converting the provided subclass options to other setting.
And mechanics, by their very nature, are setting neutral. SCAG can say whatever it wants about the lore of bladesingers, but you can do what you want with the class. I adopted that subclass and made it an integral part of my world: an elite order of wizard-knights serving the Queen of the elven court. SCAG made my homebrew world richer and more interesting.

There are optional rules, races, classes, subclasses, magic items, spells, feats, equipment, creatures, planes, and more.

I asked for specifics. That's as general as you can get.


What type of optional rules would you like to see?
Could you give some examples?


Also, when you look at the amount of space optional rules take up in the DMG, it actually isn't a lot. There's not *that* many desirable or useful optional rules or subsystems. Like any other type of new rules content, you need a finite amount before additional content becomes superfluous.
Plus, optional rules are content that will always see limited use in campaigns. Because you only typically change optional rules at the start of a campaign. They're not something you can easily add halfway through a campaign.


Additionally… for players, how is having a book full of optional rules fundamentally different from a book full of flavour text? It's still content that is not usable.

The books don't have to be hundreds of pages. One a year with all of that to pick from is enough to go 10-15 years without focusing too much in any given area.

They'd be at least 160 pages. So just two of them would very much have "hundreds of pages".
The only way to avoid releasing "hundreds of pages" of new mechanics would be to limit the crunch content to a smaller number of pages and fill the rest with fluff. But that's the kind of book you sound like you're uninterested in.

They make a lot of money. Not having a few more people isn't an excuse, and they run private playtests with a number of groups. They can do the job if they have a mind to.

Money doesn't enter into it. You can't buy more hours in the week.
Besides, D&D has a set operational budget. They have a cap on the money they can spend. Because WotC is a business out to make money and not a charity doubling as a book publisher. They're not going to increase the operational budget without a significant increase in profits. Even just recouping those expenses isn't enough: they need to make *more* money.
A crunch heavy splatbook isn't necessarily going to sell significantly more copies that a crunch light splatbook. The last two books sold very, very well for WotC. Spending more money to hire more developers and freelancers for no related increase in profits is wasting money. And that's bad business.


As far as playtesting goes… not so secret fact: WotC IS running private playtests. The people in the 5e friends-and-family playtest are still testing new content. They're testing new subclasses and options right now. And have for over a year. Because playtesting takes time, you can only test so many classes at a time. You need to test the class in actual play situations across multiple levels.
And you can only test so many options at once. If your entire group is new subclasses you've invalidated the playtest as there are too many variables to provide decent feedback. Is a character dominating play because it's too strong or the other new subclasses are too weak or because the new spells and monsters are weak? You need a control group of base rules content.

Regardless of where 3e or 4e started to fall apart, they fell apart with many more books than I'm asking for.

Kinda. But they did so through smaller focused books that spread out the content. Rather than release "Complete Heroes" that covered all four major roles, they released the four books, likely with a significant amount of padding.


Do you think people will be happy if they released a class focused book every year? If arcane spellcasters had to wait three years for their book while WotC worked through the divine, roguish, and martial classes? (Would *you* be willing to wait those three or four years for any support for your class of preference?) Heck, just asking people to wait four months for all three core books almost caused rebellion. There's also the risk of priorities changing at WotC and those products being altered or restructured before completion; WotC has a terrible track record of changing or cancelling those types of product lines before completion. Or deciding that they want to "shake up the line" and do something different rather than release a book identical to what they've done two or three times prior but with different classes.


For those reasons, for annual products it's generally better to release an all-in-one books that appeal to all types of character. But that just means pushing things to "fall apart" amounts of content that much faster.

There was too much material there to combine into a book smaller than twice the size of the PHB. Nobody is asking for books that large.

It's not about books the same size as the PHB. Did you even READ what I wrote? Most of the PHB is classes, rules, and other content. A book 1/2 the size of the PHB could have close to the same level of options (subclasses, races, feats, spells, etc). A book just 160 page length could double the options available for most characters.
Even if you filled half the book with optional rulesets and half with crunch, that just delays the doubling by another year.

Sure. They can get unwieldy pretty fast when you release TONS of books. Nobody here is asking for tons of books.

BUT IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE A TON OF BOOKS!!!
*sigh* One last time…
It doesn't need to be forty books like 3e. Or twenty books like 4e. Or ten books like Pathfinder. It really only takes a ones or two large all-encompassing book. Two books aimed entirely at players.
That's it.
Just two 160 books that are 75% player crunch. At that point, once you have six or seven options for every single class in the game and all the most common character archetypes are covered, you have hit saturation. At that point you have more options that the game needs. You have all the content needed for multiple campaigns - more 5e campaigns than anyone will ever run. At that point you will hit diminishing returns for future content, as fewer people will feel the need for more content.
Everything after that is just bloat...

 

[Sacrosanct]

Money doesn't enter into it. You can't buy more hours in the week. ..

I've said this twice now, and it seems to be ignored. It's not just about money. Any time someone says something like that "They have the money, therefore they should churn out the material", it shows they don't understand project management.

I work in project management as my day job. Hopefully after this third time explaining, people will take it to heart as a factor worth considering.

Let's say WotC will release products that people want a lot faster than they are doing. They have to increase staffing significantly to do so. For sake of the argument, let's say they go from 20 people to 100 people, and release the following books within the first 2 years (like a lot of people are expressing, because they have said they want these by now):

PHB and PHB2
DMG
MM, and MM2
Ravenloft setting/campaign
Underdark setting/campaign
Grayhawk setting/campaign
Planescape setting/campaign
Spelljammer setting/campaign
Darksun setting/campaign
Ebberron setting/campaign
Dragonlance setting/campaign
FR setting/campaign

So what happens after that 2 year window? There's nothing left to create that would have the sales #s justifying the cost. I'll tell you what happens. All of that staff you just hired gets laid off and the D&D division becomes just a skeleton crew unless WoTC decides to make a 6th edition. And I for one would NOT want talk about a 6e only 2 years into 5e simply because they already burned through all the 5e products a majority of people will buy.

I've seen this happen before. It's a horrible way to run a business. Absolutely disastrous. Not only because you end up firing a bunch of people (which has a ton of related problems associated with this), but also because your quality will suffer. With a smaller team working on every project, it's easier to manage and you are ensured of getting consistent results and you know what to expect. With several different teams, you have inconsistency.

So yeah, as someone who's been doing project management for years, it seems to me WoTC is doing it just right.

 

[Tony Vargas]

However... few D&D releases are truly setting neutral. 4e assumed the Nerath/Nentir Vale setting while 3e has Greyhawk as the default setting.

Actually, Nerath was an historic fallen empire that might be dropped into any setting as background, and the Nentir Vale was just an example of a small heroic-tier area.
The whole 'points of light' thing was a philosophy, not a setting, even though it got called PoLland, and 4e was, indeed, setting neutral. So, really, in spite of having a supplement called Greyhawk, was 0D&D and AD&D. 3e defaulted to Greyhawk, 5e, apparently to FR, and the RPG did living Greyhawk and living FR that pushed those settings, respectively.

So it's not so much that D&D hasn't been setting neutral much of the time, it's that the fans don't accept it, and imagine a default or standard setting even when there isn't one. It looks like WotC has figured that out, with 5e, and settled on FR as the default. Given the popularity of the novels, it makes sense. I can't stand it, myself, but it doesn't matter, I've never been big on published settings, and it's easy enough to ignore.

The Realms setting is a little more obvious in a product like SCAG, but that book did include advice on converting the provided subclass options to other setting.

It's really so easy to genercise like that. Outside of FR, call a PDK a 'bannerette,' done.

Do you think people will be happy if they released a class focused book every year? If arcane spellcasters had to wait three years for their book while WotC worked through the divine, roguish, and martial classes?

Yes. Just start with the least-developed options first. So skipped PH1 classes (Warlord, Psion is you stretch the point), then under-served 5e PH classes (Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue, Sorcerer), then other skipped classes (Shaman, Artificer, Avenger, etc), then, 5+ years out, maybe, classes that are already very option-heavy, like the Cleric & Wizard.

And, the 5e PH /is/ the Arcane spell-casters' book. ;P

(Would *you* be willing to wait those three or four years for any support for your class of preference?)

I've waited over two, so far, and haven't started nerdraging or edition-warring yet.