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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 4680749" data-attributes="member: 697">I think this goes a little too far. It's fun to have fire wizards, and druids that focus on a winter theme, or whatever, with mechanics that make that interesting. However, the push to simplify is smart.(What follows is a bit of a ramble about game design, but Ed's post struck close to home.)IME, it's easy to add more complexity to a game design, especially when you have a time constraint. Adding stuff feels productive, and you generally add mechanics to other mechanics that already seem to work. You're building on solid ground. The problems are clear, and your new mechanics are going to solve them.Simplifying is tougher because it forces you to make changes that are risky. It's hard to simplify an existing system while keeping its foundation. You usually have to junk that foundation and build something new, even if that something is largely based on the old foundation's intent.Yet, once you have that new foundation, you might find that you can never really understand what you saw in the original in the first place.(And now that I think about it, a generic elemental keyword could be interesting. You could build feats that let you do stuff like give a cold flavor to all your elemental powers, and so on. All the flavor and none of the complexity unless a player asks for it. I have a feeling that someone in this thread already suggested that idea...)</blockquote>