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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7400897" data-attributes="member: 996">Unfortunately that problem is, itself, their chosen solution to the problem of making the game inaccessible to new players due to bloat* or shelf-shock.  To put it another way, if 'optional' additions to the game are to remain truly optional, then they shouldn't be assumed in any future products. That's just how it had to be, based on the fighter's designs in those editions.  The 5e fighter design is similar, it's locked into specific functions within a party, a specific (im)balance across the pillars, and 'martial' ability, in general, is modeled in comparatively inflexible ways that don't lend themselves to adding options without adding sub-classes with new mechanics, if not whole new classes. Sorry to be a quibbler, but monster design moved /back/ away from PC design in 4e - really, only in 3.x/PF/d20 did the game move towards unifying PC and monster design. Because it could use 'monster' mechanics and make no more than oblique cosmetic & mechanical references to the SCAG bladesinger.[sblock="* If you're sick of me going on about 'list based' systems, don't click"]Bloat is a very real danger for games like 5e that add new options to cover new concepts by adding to long lists of different, sometimes only subtly different, mechanics & sub-systems (like sub-classes, classes, spells, magic items, skills, weapons, monsters, etc).  The more you add options to such a 'list based' game, the more those options can cross-pollenate and synergize in unintended ways that can have corrosive effects on the quality of the overall system.  5e's defense against this is both a very slow pace of release, so options accumulate only very slowly, and the policy of presenting said options, and prettymuch just forgetting about them, never again factoring them into future adventures or designs, so that anyone not opting into them isn't impacted.(The alternative to 'list based' being 'effects based' in which new mechanics are only introduce to enable new results (effects) to be obtained, so new concepts can be added by re-arranging and re-skinning existing mechanics rather than adding new ones.  Hero System is the poster boy for effects-based, D&D has rarely strayed in that direction, 5e quite pointedly eschews it.) [/sblock]</blockquote>

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