Thanks, Umbran for not saying " You are wrong and I dont care what you think"
It is a logical inference. I could spend days running truth tables and
trying to represent the inference in analytical logical notation, but frankly it would be too much effort, and 99.9% would not be interested in puzzling out the notational language.. this is not appropriate for a casual board.
A claim such as :
1) At it’s base level, 5e needs a robust set of rules, that work for many different stories.
Can be tested via thought experiments.
If one wanted to run a Smurfs Campaign, such a campaign is more easily done in 5e, then in a system like Call of Cthulhu. A 5e smurf campaign, could be done by restricting players to a tiny race combining Gnomes and Halfling abilities. This is due to 5e being a system, that by design, can accommodate many types of themes.
Call of Cthulhu, by contrast, is a system designed to represent a very
particular type of game. As much as a Cthulhu Smurf game might appeal to me, a Smurf game using as a base the Call of Cthulhu system, would wind up excising out many of the rules, that are necessary for the flavor of Cthulhu.
To flip the example on it's head, a 5e D&D system, that had- as one of the system's core assumptions, that one can
only play a smurf, is going to have much lower general appeal then the current system.
By
definition I can have no factual evidence to support a
counterfactual argument, such as:
A Smurfquest game will sell less copies then D&D, ......
.............................................Outside, the logical inference that since Elfquest, and Call of Cthulhu have never matched D&D sales, the same conclusion for another Hypothetical, narrowly focused system, is likely true
.
We also have the history of 2e to guide us. Wizards of the Coast, through numerous statements, (that I am not going to track down and cite here), stated that a principle reason TSR failed was due to:
Too much product being produced, that could not be sold.
This was further, exacerbated by the fact that the D&D landscape had been fractured, (or silo'd), into fans of a particular setting...be it Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Spelljammer, Lankmar, The Land of Fate, Maztica, Ravenloft, Darksun, Mystara...etc, etc.
There had always been some cleavage in D&D rules form OD&D to Basic D&D to AD&D. Yet while there might have been a cleavage in mechanics,( in my opinion), the differences from, say Basic to AD&D did not extend to the type of
stories that could be told.
That type of story cleavage
did apply to 2e.
To me, the fact that people, (commonly and willingly), did divide themselves into fans that purchased products primarily for those settings that supported the type of themes they wanted to have in play.....
.....is
de facto evidence that players wanted something, other than the hard baked assumptions inherent in the base 2e rule set.
One of the most popular changes that 3e made, was to eliminate race/class combination restrictions.
Enworld, poster of yore, diaglo, may not have been happy at that....but most people were happy at dwarves being able to play wizards.
In a world of magic, the DM did not now have to contend with the issue of: "how does a non magical race, even survive, let alone thrive in a magical world?"
It was an invigorating, refreshing breath of fresh air into the design space of the game.
5e, kept this. The Bladesinger subclass, while having a racial restriction in the Forgotten Realms, explicitly states that this racial restriction is not universal, and need not apply to any other world, or more specifically,
your game world.
I hope this explains my reasoning, and gives one a basis of comparison to their own. Sorry for the length of the post, inference takes volume to explain.
