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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9778217" data-attributes="member: 93670">It's complicated and I think blizzard has done a good job of both succinctly summarizing why as well as growing from a verbal faux pas with the well known blizzcon  interaction"You don't want that.  You think you do but you don't. Remember when you had to spam cities 'need a tank, need a tank, need a tank' during TBC days? You don't remember that because you now push a button to go to the dungeon. You don't want to do that".  Wanting "[this]" in regards to specific mechanics and design ethos doesn't always mean that the specific element in question is solely responsible for accomplishing the goal absent supporting elements that are removed or modified for the [this] that someone else wanted[Spoiler]Yo think you do but you don't interaction[MEDIA=youtube]A07H99yNm9c[/MEDIA]Evolution of it as a gag up to "you think you want this and I think maybe that you do"[MEDIA=youtube]ghnLIc8EFIM[/MEDIA][/Spoiler]A lot of 5e's biggest problems being discussed over and over in this thread and others like it over the last decade or so can often be traced back to that design by committee in isolation process where too often the results were shaped by "management said give the players what they want and the players wanted these at the time".  Following that up with "now they want more of those plus these" is where the complicated hairline cracks start really breaking down because of two reasons.Firstly ttrpgs are a 3 legged stool (players/cohesive ruleset/gm).  When the design ethosvputs too much weight on using awful polling practices to "give the players what they want" it shots out that third leg from the process and completely strips away the cohesive bit for all but the loudest most numerous subset of players.  When there is a critical minority at nearly every table who is not part of "the players",  when it comes to needs and wants whil their presence is required for the game to work at all (the gm) polling needs to recognize up front they because GM's are going to be an absolute minority in polling & have an internal gm advocate on the team with significant pull when it comes to saying no while overriding what the players wanted. Even if the self selected survey nature of  the polling leaves them somewhat overrepresented, that whole cohesive ruleset leg of the stool is critical to the GM's and not particularly important to players who can just rely on the gm to kinda fix it while blaming said gm instead of cold unfeeling rules for the results of trying to fix areas where rules cohesion fell down. The 6-8 encounter per long rest target juxtaposed with giving players near guaranteed successful resting under almost any circumstances under the harsh light of what 13.33 encounters once represented is a great example of how "give the players what they want" directly undermines the other two legs of the stool and blames the gm both for running too few encounters per rest to allow the PC's to roflstomp everything as well as throwing blame for the boredom of running so many sessions of nothing but combat should they actually try to railroad in so many sessions of nothing but combat.  Secondly is where the complicated really comes into play. There needs to be serious consideration for "why [that] worked" between "the players say they want [this]" and the gm advocate needs to have extreme authority in almost unilaterally deciding both the supporting reasons and which conflicting wants/reasons the players said they wanted and simply antithetical to each other a cohesive ruleset and GM needs/wants. The 5.0024 play test saw some of this where Crawford told us they saw people vote high overall on a class but low on individual features§ao they decided respondents forgot and chose to help by assigning the higher value to both.  They choice was the kind of thing a GM/rules advocate SHOULD be empowered to do, but it was done backwards to further empower the majority (players) in service of ignoring anyone who was voting for rules cohesion or GM needs/wants.Tl<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />r: design needs to consider that the game is a three legged stool & "Give the players what they want" makes a mess when there is noone advocating for the other two legs of the stool or that person actively exacerbates it by advocating for the players if even the players start noticing problems they don't want in large enough numbers to be statistically noted.§ or vice versa, I don't recallEdit: Blizzard relevance for those who don't get the blizzard/wow reference, they got asked to provide servers with world state as it was in the day and after saying no while scoffing at the idea they gave it much thought and implemented servers that pretty much give that with some changes to support the why behind why what was wanted worked.</blockquote>

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