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General Tabletop Discussion
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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 7759676" data-attributes="member: 6801845"><p>I did some quick counts over at DnDBeyond because I was curious. There are</p><p>37 races</p><p>12 classes</p><p>80 sub-classes</p><p>34 backgrounds</p><p>60 feats</p><p></p><p>So mathematically, there are thousands of options depending on how you calculate it. I know ... you'll tell me that 99.9% of those are not "valid" options because it wouldn't make sense to run a <insert race> <insert class> and that <insert feat, background, whatever> wouldn't make sense. It's not that there aren't more options than you could play, it seems that most options are eliminated out of the gate or that playing a combination that isn't "optimal" isn't valid.</p><p></p><p>Even if there were more options, a lot of people would still gravitate to a handful of optimal options. It would be the same complaint or the complaint would be that there are so many options that build X is broken. Personally I'd be happy running my dwarven rogue or gnome barbarian because I don't care all that much about eaking out numerical supremacy, it's just not that important.</p><p></p><p>If they had more options, it would just lead to a game of grognard character building that they were trying to avoid. I also think it wouldn't really solve anything because there will always be a handful of builds that on a spreadsheet look best.</p><p></p><p>As far as decisions being front-loaded, that is a good point. Not sure that it's really all that different though from previous editions. I always had a general idea of where my PC was going to go, and you had to have certain prerequisites to qualify for prestige classes so it was more of an illusion of choice than anything. In 5E you have the option of multi-classing which you can do at any time, much more flexible than early editions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Oofta, post: 7759676, member: 6801845"] I did some quick counts over at DnDBeyond because I was curious. There are 37 races 12 classes 80 sub-classes 34 backgrounds 60 feats So mathematically, there are thousands of options depending on how you calculate it. I know ... you'll tell me that 99.9% of those are not "valid" options because it wouldn't make sense to run a <insert race> <insert class> and that <insert feat, background, whatever> wouldn't make sense. It's not that there aren't more options than you could play, it seems that most options are eliminated out of the gate or that playing a combination that isn't "optimal" isn't valid. Even if there were more options, a lot of people would still gravitate to a handful of optimal options. It would be the same complaint or the complaint would be that there are so many options that build X is broken. Personally I'd be happy running my dwarven rogue or gnome barbarian because I don't care all that much about eaking out numerical supremacy, it's just not that important. If they had more options, it would just lead to a game of grognard character building that they were trying to avoid. I also think it wouldn't really solve anything because there will always be a handful of builds that on a spreadsheet look best. As far as decisions being front-loaded, that is a good point. Not sure that it's really all that different though from previous editions. I always had a general idea of where my PC was going to go, and you had to have certain prerequisites to qualify for prestige classes so it was more of an illusion of choice than anything. In 5E you have the option of multi-classing which you can do at any time, much more flexible than early editions. [/QUOTE]
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