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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9777497" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yes--but my point is that there are (many) ways to get folks on board with the new thing.......and that that's actually one of the reasons to do the performative side of playtesting!Like...if they actually had a real expert on staff to help them design good, well-made surveys, and an actual statistician (or at least someone who's taken college-level statistics courses!) on staff to crunch the numbers for them, there's an enormous amount of data they could collect before even dreaming of starting a new edition. Once you have that data, you start asking probing questions about the design of D&D. You genuinely interrogate it, without disparaging it. Some things are what they are purely by coincidence, or by inertia, rather than because they need to be that way. Some things are what they are because we haven't considered different ways. And some things are what they are because tried and true really does matter some of the time.We cannot distinguish the difference without real, actual testing.And I'm very, very much of the opinion that, if you actually drill down to the fundamental design goals that players want out of D&D, there are elements and systems in it that are not doing the job they've been assigned, and thus should be revamped or replaced--or, in a few cases, just straight-up removed. Testing your current design is how you find those weak points. Testing your proposed design is how you avoid permitting weak points in your future products.And, naturally, there needs to be other data collection along the way. 4e @#$%ed up its presentation, that's simply an objective fact at this point. It probably needed another 6-12 months in the oven; even the developers themselves said they were pressured into publishing sooner than they would have liked, as I recall. And even then, even with all of that, there were still flawed areas that probably would have been preserved despite that extra work, because they were merely better than any previous edition for rigorous testing....which is just a bit like saying that the Chevy Corvair (the primary subject of Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed) was safer than the Model T because the Model T used pane glass and the Corvair did not. (Seriously, look up the Model T sometime, it was incredibly unsafe to drive.)I've previously given 5.5e a lifespan of 4-7 years. I stand by that statement.</blockquote>

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