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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8831274" data-attributes="member: 6801845">The only reference I could find was a one time quote from Mike Mearls early on in the development cycle. Having been on the development of many [software] projects from their inception, people have a lot of ideas and hopes for what can be done and then reality sets in.  You can't always do everything you want, and modularity in D&D is always going to be a sliding scale.  I do think 5E is reasonably modular and flexible, it's just never going to be enough for some people. Play with minis or theater of the mind? Your choice.  Magic items, feats, what subclasses and options are allowed?  Alternate rules like the gritty rest rules that I use or lingering injuries? Up to the DM and group. As a foundation for other games, the OGL supports 3PP add-ons like Esper Genesis that support an entirely different genre and level up that just modifies and tweaks the core game to make it "crunchier" for those that want it.  There are likely hundreds of other 3PP modules that can be tacked on.  Those modules exist as well, WOTC just decided it wasn't profitable for them to develop them in house.  Which is part of why this rumor just doesn't pass the smell test for me.  There's a whole ecosystem of supporting products that are developed with no risk to their core product at no risk to them.  It may, in theory, eat into their sales a bitYou can read the article <a href="https://critical-hits.com/blog/2012/06/29/interview-mike-mearls-on-the-playtesting-process-of-dd-next/" target="_blank">here</a>.  He's talking about rulings over rules and some of the options we were delivered. Obviously there could be more, that's where 3PP comes in.If you don't want to follow the link, I've included the relevant paragraphs.  It's really more about ToTM vs grid combat and rulings over rules than anything.[SPOILER="Modularity interview response"]CH: When you receive conflicting responses on the survey- half the people are positive and half the people are negative about one thing- how do you handle it? Do you have any examples of rules people are split on?MM: I think one example is pretty obvious: we’ve seen it with minis and the grid. A good chunk of the audience says “those should be required.” And there’s a bigger but not decisively bigger chunk that says “no, those should be optional.” Not to make this a cop-out – people have said that modularity is just an excuse to say “play with whatever!” and that the game is nothing- it really is about saying that people have different views in what D&D should be, and what is important about D&D.I think there are some things everybody agrees on. D&D is a roleplaying game. There’s going to be a game master/DM who is in charge of the rules and the world, then there’s people playing characters. But some people would say- oh, here’s one example. I was reading somewhere, probably <a href="http://enworld.org/" target="_blank">EN World</a>, where someone was really unhappy with the playtest. He was a 4th edition player, and I was thinking “oh, that makes sense, he really likes tactical combat.” And what he said was what he really likes about 4th edition is that he and his friends are just sitting on couches, and his friends describe what they want to do. He makes up a DC, and they roll a die, and if he rolls high enough, they succeed. And so I was like “huh?” and the theory in the office is that the only book he bought is the DMG and that’s the only book he owns.. But for that guy, that’s D&D for him, and not only that, that’s 4th edition for him.When you have that approach, where the game is very idiosyncratic in deciding what is important to you, modularity is hugely important. Here’s one example: I have this old Livejournal post that people have been pointing to. I don’t know what people think it means, so I can only say what I thought when I wrote it. The idea is that if you really like combat you want tactical problems to solve, and you’re happier when the DM is making fewer judgment calls and more just applying the rules. So the player knows that if he wants cover from the Orc, he knows exactly where to move. He doesn’t want the DM to say “well, that tree is really thin, so you really can’t hide behind it.” They don’t want to run into stuff like that. They want more predictability. So if the rules are predictable, the tactical challenge is what ability do I want to use, where do I want my character to go, where do we want to force the monsters to go, stuff like that.If you’re a guy who really wants to just play his character, to play the story, to explore the world, you might think “I want combat to be 5 minutes long” and you’re fine with the DM making calls, and you don’t want to move a guy around the grid: you just don’t care. You just want to say I attack the orc, I cast fireball, and so on. Both kinds of players would describe themselves as hardcore D&D fans, and they want polar opposites in the system.So that’s really where modularity can come in. We can make the core for the guy who really doesn’t care about combat and is pretty happy because the rules are straightforward. Then the guy who wants rich, tactical combat in battles, he can say “I want complexity.” That way, a game defaults to being simple all around, and you can pick which parts you want to add rules to. I just drop in the depth I want as I go.[/SPOILER]EDIT: typos</blockquote>

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