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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6928738" data-attributes="member: 37579">*shrug* I disagree. I have gotten use out of SCAG and will likely get use out of VGtM. And I'm not playing in the Realms. How many optional rules do you think the game needs? Is that really something they can just sit down and hammer out on a regular basis. I.e. annually? I agree that we could definitely use a book full of extra optional rules (it was the book I'd like to see most, the D&D Hacker's Guide I suggested). But it's not the kind of thing you need again and again. Seriously, what optional rules would you like to see? Give me a nice long list of this content that will fill 50 or 100 pages. How would you rate the balance in the PHB? Both subclasses and feats.  Fair? Perfect? Average?Now cut the team writing the book in half (Rodney Thompson left WotC and Perkins is working on the adventures). Now write the book in half as much time without a massive public playtest. Now do that every year for two or three years.Do you *really* think that they'll be able to avoid power creep and breaking the game?  I have a lot of respect for the design chops of the team at WotC... but that's a heck of a lot of content to get out. Even getting reasonable feedback on two or three subclasses every couple months (via Unearthed Arcana) is tricky. First off, false equivalency. A game system doesn't have to reach the same number of books at the end of 3e/4e/PF to fall apart. And arguably many "fell apart" well before the end. 3e was "long in the tooth" as early as 2006 when they were doing Dragon Magic. And the game continued to release books for eighteen months after that...(Oh, and including Essentials there were something like eighteen or nineteen player focused books for 4e. A far cry from 40 years.)How many books were released for 3e before the game started to fall apart? Possibly after they did the four Races of X books and four Complete X books. After that everything was unneeded. But, really, that's hard to say because those subjects could have been combined into one or two books with similar results. Pathfinder compiled things into two books: magic and combat. I'd argue everything after Ultimate Equipment or maybe the Advanced Race Guide was "bloat country". Which was five or six books. Magic, combat, races, equipment, campaign rules, and the Advanced Player's Guide. But the APG was a whole lot of new classes that was pretty unnecessary and you could combine magic & combat into just "player options". So you could hit "bloat" in as few as three to five large books. Game systems can get unwieldy pretty fast. And once things are broken and bloated, you can't undo it.</blockquote>

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