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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7760781" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>If it was limited to just that, of course not, but the hand of DC creep is in other areas of the game, too. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I wouldn't do this with everything, it's just an example. But what doing something like this would provide is a way to make a lot of the non-combat (exploration, social) aspects more interesting than you can do with just a binary success/fail system where the only boost to a character is by making their numbers higher. </p><p></p><p>4E had that with skill challenges, but the way the designers built it they tried to force all players to participate. Or at least that's how they were often interpreted. I found it led to absurdities such as the barbarian doing pushups to impress the king in a social encounter. </p><p></p><p>So basically I'm suggesting (a) keeping numbers lower to respect bounded accuracy and (b) make more use of things that function in a way similar to the good aspects of skill challenges (i.e., requiring X successes before Y failures) without the bad aspects. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Sure. As I've said before and this isn't something we need to rehash, I wasn't a giant fan of the "let's throw out the cosmology, abandon the alignment system as weird as the old one was, change most of the names, introduce all sorts of weird races, etc." that happened with 4E. 4E had a lot of good ideas that I think went too far and drifted into the uncanny valley/dungeon of game design. I'm <em>not</em> saying other people were wrong to like 4E but I think uncanniness combined with D&D generally being the only game in town go a long way to explaining why many people had the reaction they did. </p><p></p><p>But with regards to the heavy hand of the designer, IMO one of the worst aspects of the 5E design is precisely the rest system and the degree to which different characters are dependent on it, so I'm with you there. </p><p></p><p>The main thing is that I feel more free in 5E to move things around, switch out abilities or powers, and I generally have a much better intuitive feel for it than I ever did with 4E. It feels and runs much more like prior versions of D&D. A 4E class is pretty intricately constructed and a 4E monster, as you noted elsewhere, requires a good bit of pre-planning. A 5E class is generally a fairly well laid out chassis with some customization. In addition, 5E is much less level banded than 4E was due to bounded accuracy. You can still viably use much lower CR threats.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7760781, member: 6873517"] If it was limited to just that, of course not, but the hand of DC creep is in other areas of the game, too. I wouldn't do this with everything, it's just an example. But what doing something like this would provide is a way to make a lot of the non-combat (exploration, social) aspects more interesting than you can do with just a binary success/fail system where the only boost to a character is by making their numbers higher. 4E had that with skill challenges, but the way the designers built it they tried to force all players to participate. Or at least that's how they were often interpreted. I found it led to absurdities such as the barbarian doing pushups to impress the king in a social encounter. So basically I'm suggesting (a) keeping numbers lower to respect bounded accuracy and (b) make more use of things that function in a way similar to the good aspects of skill challenges (i.e., requiring X successes before Y failures) without the bad aspects. Sure. As I've said before and this isn't something we need to rehash, I wasn't a giant fan of the "let's throw out the cosmology, abandon the alignment system as weird as the old one was, change most of the names, introduce all sorts of weird races, etc." that happened with 4E. 4E had a lot of good ideas that I think went too far and drifted into the uncanny valley/dungeon of game design. I'm [I]not[/I] saying other people were wrong to like 4E but I think uncanniness combined with D&D generally being the only game in town go a long way to explaining why many people had the reaction they did. But with regards to the heavy hand of the designer, IMO one of the worst aspects of the 5E design is precisely the rest system and the degree to which different characters are dependent on it, so I'm with you there. The main thing is that I feel more free in 5E to move things around, switch out abilities or powers, and I generally have a much better intuitive feel for it than I ever did with 4E. It feels and runs much more like prior versions of D&D. A 4E class is pretty intricately constructed and a 4E monster, as you noted elsewhere, requires a good bit of pre-planning. A 5E class is generally a fairly well laid out chassis with some customization. In addition, 5E is much less level banded than 4E was due to bounded accuracy. You can still viably use much lower CR threats. [/QUOTE]
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