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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eric V" data-source="post: 7759813" data-attributes="member: 6779717">As for need, well, nothing is really "needed," right?  Sales are still brisk, so it's not needed that way.  It IS needed to keep my own particular group interested; they are finding the mechanics of the game (which is what we buy, right?  That's what's exclusive to D&D, the particular mechanics of that edition; the rest is common to RPGs in general) to be uninteresting.  It's not a unique phenomenon to my group either, if I'm reading various other posters correctly, but with sales being what they are, WotC certainly doesn't care about losing those groups.  So, I'd say it's "needed" if WotC wants my group and I-don't-know-how-many-others to continue to spend money on their products.  Does that answer your question?To the rest of your post...partly it's a lack of time.  I'm a dad, a prof who brings a lot of work home, a DM who spends what free RPG time prepping sessions instead of coming up with rules, I play board games with people not in my gaming group...sigh.  For example, my absolute fav toon to play from an earlier edition was an Avenger, a class that sadly didn't make the cut for 5e (I know about the Vengeance Paladin, but despite the one mechanic staying the same, the play at the table is very different for a stealthy Assassin's Creed based Assassin to a zealous, heavily armoured spellcasting warrior).  I have a file on my computer that is almost 2 years old about how to properly bring the Avenger into 5e...and even though I would love it, it's still not done.Part of the reason it's not done is the reason I mentioned upthread about how people want "official" products only:  I'm not a professional game designer.  I actually believe that someone who gets paid to do this for a living will bring to bear certain expertise that I simply don't have.  I mean, doesn't that make sense?  All these people who do this in their spare time (unless they have a TON of that...) who think they can produce better work...man, I don't know.  Sounds like hubris to me, especially since WotC can bring more resources to bear on the idea than I can (playtesting, for example).So yeah, I'd like to pay experts to do what they are best at...and maybe that's as good a way as any to express my disappointment with some of these aspects of 5e.  Good companies give people what they want; great companies give people what they didn't realize they wanted.  Here's an article expressing better than me the ideas behind that statement: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2014/01/03/delight-your-customers-by-giving-them-what-they-didnt-ask-for/#79fd54b83ad5" target="_blank">https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2014/01/03/delight-your-customers-by-giving-them-what-they-didnt-ask-for/#79fd54b83ad5</a>From the early playtest packets, it seemed that was where 5e was headed.  Then the people spoke, and we ended up with a popular greatest hits edition.  That's not a pejorative; greatest hits albums sell really well!  Selling well has been good for the game!  I do wish I could have seen what could have been though...like I mentioned way upthread, every edition of D&D from 2e on gave me something I didn't even know I wanted from the RPG experience.  5e hasn't done that...but I suspect a "Game's really well-established, so go wild, you creative types" Advanced Player's Handbook (still with playtesting, and still done by people with decades of game design under their belt) would do the trick.That was overlong, but hopefully expresses the perspective well.  At the least, it's not about powergaming. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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