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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5877374" data-attributes="member: 54877">Sure you can argue. None of us have seen 5E yet. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> (Well, the ones that have can't talk about it in this manner, thanks to the NDAs.)  Note that I don't think what you are advocating is impossible to do as a version of D&D. That people have done it with GURPS and Hero System pretty much proves that you can. Given the financial troubles of Hero, if nothing else they could buy that, and use it for a base. Also, given where early 3.5 was going, it is fairly clear to me that there was some support for this direction in the 3E team. One "3E" guy even said as much. However, I think that there are problems with that approach when it comes to supporting multiple play styles. Moreover, I've read enough of their design musing to suspect that Mike and Monte don't approach design that way. They both seem more geared to the "play experience" than anything else. If you wanted to make, for example, a "3E-ish" system that you could tweak to simulate, sort of, a lot of disparate fantasy worlds, then you could do worse than go with a framework. If, however, you want to let people play in 1E dungeon crawl, or 1E sandbox exploration, or 2E storyteller, or 3E adventure path, or 4E tactical/epic story mishmash--all with the same system, then your moving parts are different. I think their attempt to square the circle will be more of a relatively, coarse "gray box" design. It's not, say, BECMI/RC optional "skills" white box design, where the skills are kind of eyeballed by the designer for what you might want. If you want to vary them, you can see their guts hanging out, because they really don't do much. There are a handful of interactions with the rest of the system (e.g. magic), and those are carefully spelled out. But it is also not a "framework" black box design, where every possible skill is carefully spelled out, and are used like Lego blocks--you don't have to use them all, but you are limited to the set at hand, and don't really have the means to easily mess with the interior.  Instead, there is a core bit of logic running through the whole set of skills--tied to ability scores. That's not meant to be touched, but it isn't a "black box" but a scaffold that happens to have fully working contents due to the ability scores. Or, a "gray box". You leave the scaffolding alone, but you can replace or supplement the major working pieces with other options. The key question, of course, is with all the different pieces, does this work out more like, say, an electric plug, where you can plug any appliance of the correct amperage in, without danger, and a responsible child can do it. Or is it more like a vehicle motor, where technically any number of separate and different motors could replace the current one, but it is not something that most people would attempt. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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