NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shardstone" data-source="post: 9091866" data-attributes="member: 6807784">I'm upset and here's why.I think that the new, experimental ideas shown in 1D&D created a healthier game in terms of being able to edit and design new stuff for it. Spell lists, standardized subclasses, and class groups made creating new spells, subclasses, and classes way easier. Furthermore, the focus on feats in character creation, the new character creation method, and the injection of feats over ASI's into class tables really showed you that D&D is meant to be customized to your taste, not your taste customized to D&D.By reverting everything back, we're going straight into old-school 5E where designing new content, be it homebrew or third party, is hard and baroque. As a third party designer, I cannot stress how hard it is to make content that's perfectly balanced with WotC 5E (which itself is rarely balanced from a traditional viewpoint), and that makes it harder for customers OR just people overall to want to support third party or homebrew content.Once again, 5E feels jank to me. Instead of streamlining characters and giving us more visible levers to manipulate the game, we're back to the intensive char creation process of before, filled with constant references all across the book, subclasses of wildly different qualities and powers, unintuitive class design that is hard to manipulate, add on to, or remove. I understand this is the result of surveys, but I've never thought the game should be built off of surveys either. It helps for feedback, I agree, but using percentages to gauge joy (even with qualitative feedback) doesn't seem sound to me. I've taken graduate level research classes so, while I'm not a professional, this is not a wholly uninformed opinion.First off, WotC hasn't ever really honored the surveys. We know that things like the old Elemental Sorcerers tested better than their Shadow Sorcerer, yet only SHadow Sorcerers made it into Xanathars. We know that Hexblade failed to reach a true 70% but Mearls had it put in the game anyway. We also know that their responses to surveys aren't to reitterate on content, but to cut content or to change it into something that already exists. For example, the Strixxhaven classes were turned into backgrounds, which while it works, ended up sacrificing a lot of what the subclasses could do.But really, I just feel that 5E's conservative design ethos is strengthened by a conservative voice in the surveys, which is a voice that says don't change things too much, and if you do change it, it has to be perfect in the first draft or I'll never like the idea. This kind of design ethos is good for keeping a lucrative product afloat but fails to reach potentially new heights of both game design and commerce. After all, if they never expected 5E to blow up the way they did, then that means they could make a 6E and it still blow up and they have no idea how. There's little true understanding of the product because the product changes form at every table. As a result, surveying millions of different tables who play the game radically different can be good to identify problem points, but not to make solutions, and is def not a reason to hold back on innovative new designs. Oh well. Is what it is. I'll miss you, 1D&D. You really did have some great ideas in there.</blockquote>

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