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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7760563" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>Another reason many folks go "official only" or at least "WotC only" is that it helps broker peace at the table. In 3.X especially there was a lot of OP third party content (or even WotC published content) and more potentially broken combos. Even if the content wasn't broken it could be hard for the DM or other players to keep track of it all. "We're only using WotC-published material" just cuts all that short. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Maybe but in many cases a home designer isn't constrained the way the pros are. For example, the 2E designers were instructed to maintain as much backwards compatibility with 1E material. Thus there were aspects of the system they wanted to change---such as AC going down rather than up or evening out the stats and getting rid of percentile strength---but weren't allowed to by the business model. 5E clearly had a similar brief, insofar as there are things that weren't done that I suspect they'd have chosen to do but were afraid of provoking a backlash. </p><p></p><p>In other cases, designers make choices that they think will be simple for the median player but may have been done better other ways. IMO lots of mathematical mistakes that show up in games happen this way. 3.X's saving throw advancements was like that. I think the double proficiency bonus from Expertise in 5E is another example. It works OK at lower levels but it really starts to undermine bounded accuracy in higher levels.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7760563, member: 6873517"] Another reason many folks go "official only" or at least "WotC only" is that it helps broker peace at the table. In 3.X especially there was a lot of OP third party content (or even WotC published content) and more potentially broken combos. Even if the content wasn't broken it could be hard for the DM or other players to keep track of it all. "We're only using WotC-published material" just cuts all that short. Maybe but in many cases a home designer isn't constrained the way the pros are. For example, the 2E designers were instructed to maintain as much backwards compatibility with 1E material. Thus there were aspects of the system they wanted to change---such as AC going down rather than up or evening out the stats and getting rid of percentile strength---but weren't allowed to by the business model. 5E clearly had a similar brief, insofar as there are things that weren't done that I suspect they'd have chosen to do but were afraid of provoking a backlash. In other cases, designers make choices that they think will be simple for the median player but may have been done better other ways. IMO lots of mathematical mistakes that show up in games happen this way. 3.X's saving throw advancements was like that. I think the double proficiency bonus from Expertise in 5E is another example. It works OK at lower levels but it really starts to undermine bounded accuracy in higher levels. [/QUOTE]
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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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